Posts Tagged → western civilization
The day after
The day after Netanyahu’s historic speech before the US Congress, people who care about real things, for good or for bad, are doing 180-degree analyses of its impact, the merits of the policy he advocated, the audiences he addressed, the politics behind, surrounding, and in front of him, and implications of a nuclear Iran for America.
Shocking was the news blackout by the major TV networks and NPR/PBS.
While Netanyahu was speaking, I dialed into WITF, the local NPR affiliate here in Harrisburg. Instead of listening to Netanyahu speak, as any listener would normally expect if any other head of state were addressing Congress, I was treated to a sarcastic discussion about health care by advocates for ObamaCare.
NPR is already an especially egregious mis-use of taxpayer money, and this one latest example serves to illustrate how corrupt and intellectually bankrupt NPR, PBS, and their affiliate stations are, despite couching themselves as sources of real debate and substance.
NPR’s news blackout of Netanyahu is done for one reason: To serve the interests of the Obama Administration, which itself not only did not attend the speech, but also issued empty, juvenile statements immediately after Netanyahu finished.
If you are NPR and you are blacking out Netanyahu’s speech, then you are not a real news organization. Rather, you are a political activist, an advocate, far from some kind of fair-minded arbiter of plain fact that you represent yourself to be.
Likewise, here in Harrisburg, the staff of the Patriot News has fallen all over themselves to protect Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse from the legal fallout of his decision to hold onto illegal anti-gun ordinances.
I am a plaintiff in a suit against the city over these illegal ordinances. Yesterday our attorney Josh Prince scored a default judgment against Harrisburg City.
When people like Mayor Papenfuse engage in official lawless behavior, it’s not some sort of hip civil disobedience, it’s tyranny. Government must absolutely live by its laws. Papenfuse believes he is above the law, and that deserves a broadside by newspapers everywhere. But like NPR and the mainstream media’s blackout treatment of Netanyahu, the Patriot News serves a different master – liberals at war with the foundations of Western Civilization. So Papenfuse gets away with legal murder. Iran readies to commit nuclear genocide.
That is a hell of a thing to confront first thing in the day.
Obama: We are all ISIS, so give Iran the bomb
Nearly every time some more interesting subject begs to be written about, say, Pennsylvania’s farmland preservation program, Mr Obama inserts himself and requires an essay.
So last week, Obama had two known African murderers at his national prayer breakfast, but because they are Muslim leaders they are exonerated.
Then Obama gave a speech equating Christianity and people of all faiths today with the sadistic cruelties of ISIS, the muslim terror group of Syria and Iraq. Plenty of moral equivalence, no leadership. No criticism of Islam is allowed by Obama.
Then it turned out that the Obama administration is doing everything possible to appease Iran and enable it to manufacture its own nuclear bomb. Secret meetings with Iranian leaders, including some who are known to rape, torture, and then murder female political prisoners.
Then it turned out the Obama administration is spending American taxpayer money to fund V15, an electioneering effort to get Israel’s Netanyahu voted out of power.
Netanyahu is one of the few leaders strong enough to stand up to Obama’s appeasement policies, because he knows that Iran is not just a threat to America, it is a threat to Israel.
Now, for many years people claimed that Obama was and is a Christian. Why is that important? Because we don’t like being lied to, and we deserve to know who our leaders are. And it was important that Obama at least appear to be a Christian, to get the votes necessary to become president.
Six years later, we see a man determined to criticize Christianity, criticize Western Civilization, block all fair criticism of Islam, install the Muslim Brotherhood in powerful positions throughout American government, dramatically weaken Israel, dramatically weaken America, and facilitate Iran getting nuclear bombs which without question will be used against America and Israel.
And people wondered why so many not only didn’t trust Obama in 2008, but utterly hate him today…My God, our government has been taken over by a determined destroyer.
An outdoor lifestyle, halfway through the season (to hunt is human)
Most of the readers who visit this blog are not outdoors folk. Feats, exploits, and the inevitable tales of woe, cold, and misery from the field would naturally bore, or at best morbidly fascinate, the non-hunter.
Nevertheless, here we go, for the first time here, on a midway retrospective of a singular hunting season still unfolding.
Hunting for most hunters is a way of life literally built into our genes. We do what humans have done since the rise of Homo Sapiens upon Planet Earth: Hunt animals that we eat, wear, and admire. While the Pleistocene ended only 20,000 years ago, it is marked by the full arrival of adept hunter-gatherers who had spent tens of thousands of previous years perfecting their lifestyle.
Humans have been hunters and gatherers for 100,000 years, or 60,000 years, depending upon how long one believes Homo Sapiens has been human.
We have been agrarian for what…10,000 years at the most generous definition of the sedentary lifestyle, but closer to 5,000 years for most humans.
After that, the most modern, most technologically advanced, most “civilized” humans have lived through the Industrial Revolution (400 years), the Technological Revolution (150 years), the Information Revolution (50 years and ongoing). Combined, that’s a total of 600 years out of a total of 60,000 years.
At our core we are all hunter-gatherers. Scratch our civilized surface, and right underneath we are all spear-toting, skin-clad hunters.
To hunt is innately human. Hunting makes us human.
In other words, although many people today look at our current effete, energy-intensive Western lifestyle and think of it as being the peak of human civilization, some of us see this civilization as becoming complacent, detached from the reality of natural resource management necessary to support this modern lifestyle, hypocritical.
When someone believes it is morally superior to have an assassin kill their meat for them than to kill it themselves, you’ve got an unsustainable logical break. Similarly, people want “the government” to protect them, and they want to prevent citizens from protecting themselves, and those same citizens cannot hold the same government accountable when it fails.
Western civilization is full of this weak thinking. In my opinion, Western society is becoming hollow, a shell, full of contradictions.
The hunting lifestyle is a powerful antidote. It is a dose of reality inserted into a cloudy drugged up dream.
So far, this season has been marked by time afield in the most beautiful places in several states with long time friends, new friends, my young son, other kids, and by myself. Like our Pleistocene ancestors, the feeling of the pack on my back and the game-getter in my right hand is about the most natural and satisfying feeling possible.
A number of deer have fallen to various firearms, a Fall turkey, a colorful pheasant; there’s a bunch of photos commemorating the times for the results-oriented. My best moment was late at night, checking a trap with my boy, and finding a large bobcat. There for about four hours, it had really no taste for humans and represented the wilderness in all its wildness.
Catching a bobcat is a real achievement in the world of hunting and trapping, and I confess it was with great mixed emotions that we dispatched it and brought it to Butch at Blue Mountain Taxidermy. Even if a bobcat is again in one of our traps during the short bobcat season, we will release it. One is enough for a lifetime.
One bobcat trophy represents a lifetime of time afield, or 60,000 years.
Complaining about Obama’s treason makes me aggravated, but what else can you do?
Obama rewards a violent dictator who oppresses his citizens with an iron grip and enriches himself personally at their expense. But he wants to sanction Israel for building homes. This guy is at war with everything that Western Civilization stands for. Sorry, Cuban people.
Time for a Muslim Peace Movement, Now
Muslims are not victims*.
However, the victims of Islam are many, and continuing, and today yet another was unveiled.
British peace activist David Haines was beheaded by a Muslim activist on video, which I watched both in horror and in solidarity with him. David Haines knew what was happening, was absolutely composed, cocked his eyebrow and muttered some inaudible phrase to himself as his chin was lifted and the knife sliced into his neck.
David Haines died on his knees, his hands cuffed behind him, utterly vulnerable, not a threat to anyone. This is pure sadism.
Whether Muslims will admit it, or not, this sadistic evil violence has become the face of Islam to Westerners.
In the absence of massive Muslim marches supporting Western civilization and individual liberties, one can only conclude that Muslims everywhere agree with this Koranic behavior.
Oh sure, there are some bland Takiya (religiously permitted deception) statements by Muslim infiltrators, but there are zero public demonstrations by reformers who wish to indicate their break with the parts of the Koran that proscribe this exact form of murder and mayhem for non-Muslims.
It is time for a Muslim Peace Movement. A movement that supports Western civilization, that supports the rights of minorities such as Christians, Yazidis, and Jews, that will re-write the Koran to represent a Western mindset.
It is time.
* The Koran forbids any criticism of Islam or its founder, Muhammad, and yet the Koran is full of hate and vilification of every other religion around the Arabian Peninsula in the year 670 CE. Christians, Jews, and Hindus are specifically called cows, monkeys, pigs, and so on. If this is not “hate speech,” I don’t know what is. This double standard must end. You are not a victim if you are victimizing everyone else and they are calling you out on it.
9-11 happened 13 years ago; are we any wiser?
America’s toughest enemies attacked us September 11, 2001.
It appears that the subsequent 13 years have been spent trying to cover up who those enemies were, and pretend they are actually peaceful, despite that they remain to this very moment committed to the destruction of America and Western civilization.
No American policy, foreign or domestic, can change the mind of someone who has been raised, nurtured, and trained all his life to want to kill you. The problem is on his side, not on ours.
America’s president says that no religion condones the killing of innocents. Wrong again. This particular totalitarian ideology poses as a religion, and it is all about death and destruction. Submit (‘Islam’), or die. We see it over and over again.
Perhaps why our Apologist In Chief keeps saying “ISIS is not Islam” is that, as the world’s greatest promoter and defender of Islam, he realizes the images of Steve Sotloff and James Foley having their heads sawed off, helpless on their knees, have had a profound impact on the Western psyche. So Obama needs to challenge ISIS now, in a country he lost after America won it, before the cat is fully out of the bag and people see the truth we are facing.
Let’s wise up, recognize our own greatness, and stop beating up on ourselves for things we do not do and did not do. Otherwise, the victims of the 9-11 attacks died in vain, and the huge memorials in Shanksville, New York, and Virginia will not be signifying 9-11, but America’s willful blindness, instead.
See more with her amazing speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MwqVmoXPbc
And if you REALLY want to watch her kick ass, watch her respond powerfully to foolish propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry3NzkAOo3s
The war on Christianity, at home and abroad
With all these “wars” going on, you know, against poverty, drugs, Liberalism’s war on individual rights and liberty, Hillary Clinton’s war on women, it is hard to find room for one more.
But yes, there is another war going on, and it is purposefully un-reported by the mainstream media, for evident political reasons.
That war is the war on Christianity, in America, Europe, and across the Middle East.
Despite being the bedrock of American values and institutions, American Christianity in all its variations somehow turned into a target, somewhere in the 1960s. Those versions of Christianity offered as an acceptable alternative were far-left politicized versions with no basis in Christian texts, with Jim Wallis a good example. The modern day Quakers are another good example, as they are as America-hating, pro-tyranny, pro-totalitarian as any far-Leftist could ever hope for. These became the “good Christians.”
It is practically illegal to be a professing, witnessing, practicing Christian today in America. If you stand up for your religious rights, as guaranteed by the US Constitution, you are immediately labeled as a racist, a bigot, a mean person, a threat to others, and so on. You might even get sued for refusing to violate your own rights.
A wedding cake, wedding photography is somehow more important than religious beliefs.
Somehow, being opposed to the PUBLIC SUBSIDY of private birth control became another reason to hate Christians. Do you recall Sandra Fluke, the young lady who demanded that the public taxpayer pay for her to avoid pregnancy? Why Sandra Fluke just could not engage in abstinence, engage in behavior that would not lead to pregnancy, or pay for her own birth control were all public policy questions to which lots of Christians had the common-sense answers.
But because they are Christians, their common-sense views were somehow unacceptable, an establishment of religion…yeah, right. Christians founded America and wrote the laws that protect minorities. It is the Biblically-inspired US Constitution that was designed to protect minorities. The worst faults of America’s Christians pale, pale, pale in comparison to the depredation, cruelties, mass murder and sadism practiced by “liberated” minds in Fascist and Communist countries, which is to say, most of the world.
Across the Middle East Christian refugees are increasingly fleeing their ancient homelands in the face of Islamic supremacism. To its credit, the mainstream media is slowly reporting an increasing number of insane incidents of “convert-or-die” experiences these believers face at the hands of their Muslim abusers. There are many more Christian refugees from Muslim lands than there were “Palestinian” refugees seventy years ago, but who do you hear about day-in, day-out?
In Europe, Christianity is all but dead, having been relegated to the shadows of cultural and political life, its own leaders having embraced their own demise as the ultimate symbol of self-sacrifice. Britain is home to Anglican leaders who openly endorse the use of Muslim Sharia Law in lieu of British law in some areas. That is, the supplanting of British law by Sharia law. Bizarrely, when Christians object to the removal of Christian-based law, in favor of Islamic law, they are accused of being bigots. Said another way, British Christians are being forced by their own leaders to accept the imposition of another religion, or face accusations of sticking up for their religion…
This is the “logic” of the Left, and it is utterly illogical. At best it is morally relative, if not morally bankrupt. For to give up equal protection under the law in favor of Sharia-approved brutal family honor killings of young women, even little girls, by fathers and family members, is to turn Western Civilization upside down.
This is why American Christians must rediscover their roots, rediscover their original texts, rediscover their traditional prayers, and simple values, and re-assert themselves politically. America is depending on Christians.
Western civilization was primarily built by Christians, and if they abandon it, the whole enterprise will come crumbling down.
Onward, Christian soldier.
Out of all proportion
If there is one core element to the “new thinking” taking America down, it is victimology.
You know, the idea that everyone is a victim, and some people are special victims and some are especially victimized.
For someone to be a victim, there must be a perpetrator, and political correctness has created all sorts of creative solutions to real and perceived wounds which perpetrators can, or must!, endlessly do to atone. America has been afflicted with this, to the absurd point where illegal aliens crossing our borders in search of better work are “victims” and deserve our taxpayer money and the right to vote themselves a lot more of it.
It is a fair idea that people should be treated fairly. No arguing with that. But what happens when whatever apology, compensation, or other action worth remedying the problem has been completed, and the victim identity remains? This phenomenon is nowhere more clearly evident than in the Middle East, or technically the Near East, where “Palestinian” Arabs have wallowed in artificial and purposefully perpetuated victim status for five decades.
Even their refugee status is inherited, contrary to every other refugee situation around the world. The UN helps maintain this arrangement.
Although there were nearly twice as many refugee Jews ejected from Arab and Muslim nations at the same time, no one talks about them. Islamic imperialism and Arab colonialism are responsible for one of the largest and longest-standing occupations ever on planet Earth, where the farms, homes, and businesses that once belonged to Jews are now the property of supposedly well-intentioned Muslim Arabs. Billions of dollars worth of property and banks were stolen overnight, from one group of people and given to another group that had no claim on it other than they held the knife and gun, and the victim did not.
If someone were looking for victims to feel bad for, the Jews have had that victim experience in spades, not to mention the Armenians (Christians who suffered a none-too-gentle genocide and land-theft at the hands of the Muslim Turks from 1910-1915), Kurds, Tibetans, and, well, never mind that the iconic and fiercely warlike Oglala Sioux ejected the Mandan, Cheyenne, and Pawnee from millions of acres of their historic Happy Hunting Grounds and militarily occupied them for hundreds of years…after all, the American Indians who massacred, tortured, and occupied one another are considered to have engaged in acceptable behavior. Anyhow, I digress…..
The Jews now find themselves fighting for their lives with their backs to the wall, yet once again against Islamic supremacists, Islamic imperialists, and Arab colonists; and those same Jews are now presented with yet another double-standard: Proportionality.
This is the idea that, if someone hits you in the face with the intention of killing you, but fails to do so that first time and is winding up to hit you again and harder this next time, why, you are only supposed to hit them back once and only just as hard as you were first hit. You are not allowed to land a knockout punch, despite having survived an attempted knockout punch.
The EU demands that endless Arab rockets from Gaza onto indigenous Jews, living an unbroken 3,000-year presence in their homeland, be met with…thousands of random rockets from Israel? My God no! Unacceptable!
Obviously, the idea of proportionality is alien to every people that has fought a war, especially a defensive war. War is fought to be won, and dumbing-down and reducing the effectiveness of your response is a foolish and possibly suicidal thing to do.
But Europe and America cater first and foremost to artificial victims, and no matter what, those victims are due every gift, every extra opportunity, every kind gesture in the face of bloody hands, truckloads of taxpayer money despite tremendous waste by the recipients, and so on and so forth. Although this behavior seems suicidal, suicide seems to be the new definition of democracy, in the interest of appeasing the ‘victims’ among us, out of all proportion to whatever happened in the first place.
But to give the supposed victims their due, proportionality must be maintained, and in the Middle East today, Western civilization is expected to fight Islamic aggression, theft, murder, and occupation with both hands tied behind its back. It is apparently the new thing to do.
Weakness in the West has consequences
Adolf Hitler rose to power in a sea of pacifism and “peace-ism,” that euphoric act of sacrifice that kills all the innocent people and empowers the evil ones.
Hitler knew the West was weak, and therefore ripe for consumption. Pacifism empowered Hitler. Weakness invited his genocidal attacks.
In beating Nazi Germany and then confronting their sister, the Soviet Union, at huge costs, the West found again its spirit of liberty and survival instincts. During that time the West experienced incredible material success and unimaginable increases in the quality of life.
But you know how over time material success breeds creature comforts and disinclinations to do anything that might upset the comfortable lifestyle emanating from material success. So pacifism and peace-ism have risen again, among European countries and many Americans, even as war is carried to our doorsteps.
Andrew Tahmooressi is a Marine Corps sargeant who took a wrong turn in the wild, unmarked American desert with his legal guns, and has been imprisoned by Mexico for months ever since. America has done zero to get him back, but the Obama administration has done everything possible to open the border to terrorists, children, criminals, and assorted other illegal burdens on two legs.
In Israel, three teenaged boys were abducted three weeks ago by Muslim supremacists, and then found today, dead, killed soon after they were taken. Half a dozen Israeli military and police officers have lost their jobs over the boys’ deaths, which were avoidable: One boy called the police and said they were being kidnapped. The policewoman called it a prank and did not act on it. Her Israeli military counterparts have been primed by overwhelming political correctness to look for Jewish kids with spray paint cans as their primary target, not murderous Arab terrorists, and they, too, ignored the phone call.
Europe is filled with Islamic institutions where hatred is preached and acted out every day, non-Muslims are gunned down in the streets, and the perpetrators and proponents are called “victims.”
The list goes on and on. The West is awash in enemies and insecurity, anarchy, but nothing is done.
Weakness breeds contempt and increased attempts to dethrone the boss. It is happening across Western Civilization: Our collective and individual weakness is being exploited by people who would take over our countries and change them into something else, something unrecognizable, something where liberty is unknown.
Will you choose to be weak? Or will you take action to preserve American liberties?
Appeasement is evil, because it allows evil to triumph, and other reflections of the past week
This has been both a rewarding and tough week for me.
Like many, I believe more in ideas than party allegiance. America stands for something, and the ideas at its foundation are a form of religious belief for me and many others; no surprise there, as America’s Judeo-Christian Biblical roots are well established. So, my loyalties lie with people who stand for something good, and I am opposed to people in public office who either stand for money alone, or for fluff. An elected official who will not roll up his sleeves and fight like a demon for my beliefs, for traditional American values, is not someone who is going to get my support.
The Eric Cantor self-destruction story in Virginia is all about this same thinking. It is what permeates the “Tea Party” movement. It is a basic gut-check of what is simply right, and what is obviously wrong. Politicians like Cantor do not have that same gut-check ability, or they long ago lost it. They then lost me and a lot of others, too. As painful as Cantor’s loss is, it is also very rewarding: The American People are not asleep, and David Brat’s win is hopefully the beginning of a grass-roots effort to establish control over American borders.
Obama has clearly abandoned border protection, and he is using fake, officially invited refugees to make the case for open borders, the dilution and end of American democracy, and the end of American capitalism. No elected Republicans seem capable of standing up to him.
On the foreign front, Appeasing evil people is aiding and abetting evil people. Thus, appeasement is evil.
Failing to confront evil, especially an evil that has its eye on you, is either due to mental disability, or to a self-hypnosis masquerading as superiority. Self-sacrifice trumps survival to appeasers, who casually disregard that many other people are then taken over the cliff, too.
Contemplating what drives Obama and his supporters has been dishearteneing, because I cannot fathom it, despite growing up surrounded by far-left liberals. His supporters are not asleep, and they also cannot explain to me what about him and his actions they like, on balance with those they dislike. When we discuss issues, liberals immediately fly into a rage, have fits, and if it is a Facebook debate, they “unfriend” someone they’ve known for thirty five years, a phenomenon I hear repeated by others. This is not a good sign.
For example, ObamaCare is overwhelmingly unpopular to Americans and it is failing across the board, but that hasn’t stopped his supporters from promoting it.
The Veterans Affairs scandal is an incredible indictment of the administration, but his supporters cannot concede on it.
The Benghazi cover-up is just a “political charade.” But Americans were abandoned to violently die there, while their cell phones and radio pleas for help were listened to by indifferent administration officials. In any nation this is either criminal or incompetent, and yet…no concessions.
The world is on fire, with Syria, Iraq, Russia, Ukraine, and large parts of Africa falling apart after huge, decades-long Western and American investments of money and dead. Or, in the alternative, these places are now re-assembling into sources of evil that we will eventually have to confront once again, under circumstances that at that time are disadvantageous and more costly to us.
Obama’s foreign policy, his “re-set,” is so obviously a catastrophe, that it makes one wonder if he really secretly wants this destruction. After all, the boundaries of the modern Middle Eastern and African nations were established by European powers, and we know how much hate Obama has for those Western democracies aka “colonial powers.”
Obama seems to be at war with America and Western civilization, and his supporters are either under some odd messianic spell, or they are in cognitive agreement with him.
Is America headed for a civil war over these differences? The current state of debate is not encouraging, where liberals espousing an all-controlling, all-knowing, all-seeing Big Brother Orwellian society seem to relish IRS and NSA abuses against fellow citizens. They do not realize or accept that to most Americans, this is a form of slavery, and no, they will not live under slavery.
I think I am going to go have a nice cold beer and work in the garden. In the rain. The David Brat win / Cantor loss is going to have to buoy my spirits for the coming days. Have a great weekend!