The Year Britain Went Mad

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1936: Let us set the stage.

In defiance of treaty obligations, Nazi Germany is arming at a frantic pace. We know from captured documents that Hitler was already planning to unleash war in Europe. He has occupied the Rheinland demilitarized zone. Already he has more modern weapons than Britain and France. He has every intention of using them.

Now let us turn to Britain, whose survival is very much at stake.

In a speech before the House of Commons, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin admits he considers it more important to win elections than to defend the country. For this he earns not disgust and hatred, but a rousing cheer. He is encouraged in a policy of appeasement by his chancellor and soon-to-be successor, Neville Chamberlain: who views everything in terms of pounds and pence, and says that standing up to Hitler will hamper trade and cost money.

The new King of England, Edward VIII, refuses to abandon his affair with multiple divorcee Wallis Simpson, an American with strong pro-Nazi sympathies. This escalates into a constitutional crisis, only resolved at last by the king’s abdication.

Winston Churchill, who has for years been trying to persuade Parliament to see the German threat, and to re-arm before it’s too late, squanders his hard-won political support by obstinately defending the king. By now the king is universally unpopular.

Churchill, who is never drunk, now shows up drunk to give a singularly tactless and clueless speech to the House of Commons. It comes very near to ending, once and for all, the career of the one man who might be able to save Europe from the Nazis.

Ex-King Edward with his new bride honeymoons in Germany, where he is photographed giving a Nazi salute.

Baldwin and Chamberlain, having bested Churchill in the fight over the king, double down on their appeasement policy. This will culminate in the infamous Munich pact of 1938, in which Chamberlain signs away Czechoslovakia to Hitler. From that point on, War War II is inevitable.

The lesson?

Daft leaders and foolish policies make for disaster.

All those people killed in the London Blitz, cringing in the subways as the Luftwaffe bombed their city into rubble… all because of this.

All because of this.

Thou Shalt Not Reward Straight A’s

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Public educators can’t do anything right, even when they try.

Last week school officials at Eastern Middle School decided to reward straight-A students by throwing an exclusive party for them. Because the explicit purpose of the party was to recognize and reward straight-A students, students who didn’t get straight A’s were not invited.

What flabbergasted me was that this happened in ultra-lib Montgomery County, Maryland.

Well, the nooze media weren’t going to take that lying down. “Reporters” descended on the school to denounce the unfairness of it all. Oh, they asked sharp questions! Make those sixth-graders squirm! “Don’t you think this was unfair to the kids who weren’t invited to the party? Don’t you think it made them feel left out? Don’t you think it hurt them terribly?” There’s a Fox News clip floating around the Internet in which a “reporter” sticks her mike in the little kid’s face and asks, “Does this make you think you’re smart?”

So… if the “educators” reward kids for high achievement, they’re “promoting elitism”… and if they don’t, then they’re encouraging mediocrity. They can’t win.

But the answer to this problem is simple and obvious.

Just throw more parties.

One for kids with a B average, one for kids with a C average, another for Ds, and finally, a special party for kids who get straight F’s–parties for everyone. You’d think a party for the F Troop would be a natural for Montgomery County.

What lesson do you suppose this incident has taught the children at Eastern Middle School?

A Cautionary Tale (and a Cold One)

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In 1913, the American Museum of Natural History sent a scientific expedition to the Arctic to discover, map, and explore “Crocker Land,” dubbed “the Arctic Atlantis.” This was because Robert Peary, the great explorer who would be the first to reach the North Pole (if Frederick Cook’s claim is disallowed), said he saw it, from a distance, with binoculars. Peary named it Crocker Land and estimated it lay some 120 miles distant from where he stood on the mainland.

Speculation ran wild. Peary himself, inspired by Eskimo legends, thought Crocker Land might be an ice-free paradise. The folks at the museum thought he might be right.

And so for four years the expedition, led by Donald MacMillan, flailed around the ice and snow looking for this happy, sun-kissed hunting ground.

What they found was endless hardship and privation: because there was no such place as Crocker Land. Peary had seen a mirage. MacMillan’s second-in-command, Fitzhugh Green, went mad and murdered his Eskimo guide. What was left of the expedition returned to New York in 1917. It is recorded that the Museum Director, Henry Fairfield Osborne, was furious at the cost of the expedition–to say nothing of its total failure, and even less of the looming scandal of a murder.

All this on account of a mirage.

[My source: Dinosaurs in the Attic: an Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History by Douglas Preston, St. Martin’s Press, New York: 1986]

Well, it wasn’t the first time Big Science chased a mirage, and it won’t be the last. And Heaven help anyone caught standing in the way.

 

Oh, Look! Jesse James is in Charge of the Banks!

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First they confiscated the life savings of the people of Cyprus, to pay back a German bail-out.

Then the British banks tell their customers they can’t withdraw their money unless they have “a good reason.”

Now we learn that European Union bureaucrats plan to plunder the savings accounts of 500 million (!) customers ( http://beforeitsnews.com/opinion-conservative/2014/02/eurocrats-prepare-to-confiscate-savings-accounts-2806336.html ). The news was originally reported by Reuters, and no agency of the EU has denied it. (The link above provides a link to the original Reuters story).

So, while they scare you with Global Warming (while you’re freezing your kiester off), and distract you by demanding that you “celebrate” homosexuality, they’re getting ready to grab the savings of 500 million people. You won’t need to ask “What is that horrible great sucking sound?” when you hear it. It’s the socialist vacuum cleaner sucking up everybody’s money that they worked for.

They don’t use the word “confiscate.” Oh, no–they’re just going to “mobilize” everybody’s money and “invest” it. (Two-minute break for hysterical laughter.)

But, hey, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. If you twaddled away your money on beer and lottery tickets and junk you saw advertised on TV that fell to the pieces within minutes of taking it out of the box, and you have no savings at all–well, just think of how smart you’ll feel, compared to those poor devils who worked hard and put money aside for future needs.

And best of all, if you’re a drone and a parasite, you can be sure your angels in the government will see that you get a little bit of those other people’s hard-earned money. They’ll keep most of it for themselves, of course, and they’ll have a good laugh over their cocktails and caviar at Davos–but they’ll never let the dole dry up.

But I would like to see what happens when there’s no more money left to steal.

Why I Don’t Believe in Global Warming

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I was reading a piece yesterday in which the writer complained that Fox News had tricked a lot of people into being climate change deniers. This is boilerplate liberal bushwa. Like, if it wasn’t for Fox News messing with our minds, we’d just naturally be clamoring for Agenda 21, a carbon tax, Common Core, Obamacare, sodomite pseudomarriage, and all the rest. It can’t possibly be their wicked and idiotic ideas that are turning us off, so it must be Fox News.

Well, I don’t have television, I consider Fox News lukewarm and spineless when it comes to opposing statism, and I have other reasons for not buying into Global Warming. To wit:

1. I am freezing my kiester off. The whole country’s in the icebox. I look out my window and it’s snowing sideways. This is not caused by things getting warmer.

2. Global Warming is pushed by Democrats, and the truth is not in them. If a Democrat inadvertently tells the truth about anything, he has a blood pressure surge, foams at the mouth, and requires medical attention.

3. The agenda of the Warmists is flagrantly obvious. “Give us unheard-of powers over every aspect of your lives, pay colossally high taxes to us, obey us in everything–and we’ll save you from the Global Warming.” Yeah, yeah.

4. I am still freezing my kiester off.

5. If it’s really such a terrible crisis, then how come all the big, important GW alarmists are living in gigantic mansions, riding around in stretch limos, and zipping off to Davos in their private jets at the drop of a hat? Talk about a carbon footprint! If hypocrisy was bricks, these guys would be the Great Wall of China.

6. “Climate Change Scientists” and their auxiliaries have been caught lying and cheating so often, it becomes obvious that lying and cheating are their regular stock in trade.

7. Instead of openly debating the issue, they rely on name-calling, threats, intimidation, and scare tactics. This is not how honest men behave. This is how liars and cheaters behave when they’re afraid of getting found out.

8. I am freezing my kiester off.

9. Some of these mountebanks have admitted that they have exaggerated and told fibs in order to “emotionalize the issue” so that the public would listen to them and do as they say. Where I come from, that’s called lying.

10. There is nothing we can do on earth to nullify the action or inaction of the sun. If there is Global Warming, then the sun is doing it and it’s mere bullying and deception for our glorious leaders to tell us that they can put a stop to it by taking away our light bulbs and air conditioning.

I could go on, but it’s too cold to write any more.

The Wilderness of ‘Young Adult Fiction’

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I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, picking up a Valentine’s Day gift for my wife. This freeze-your-butt-off-every-cotton-pickin’-day Global Warming is getting her down. Maybe Hercule Poirot could cheer her up.

Naturally, I paused to look at the offerings in the Young Adults section. As usual, I wish I hadn’t.

For reasons which may be supernatural, for all I know, grown-up authors are frantically churning out books about sexual confusion, social pathologies, self-destructive fads like “cutting” yourself, seasoned with depictions of teens using “magic” to circumvent adult authority and get anything and everything they want. This is what they think youngsters should be reading. Why? All we get is a lot of half-baked twaddle about “you shouldn’t try to hide from kids what the world is like.”

So again we run head-on into the sophomoric credo that whatever is evil, ugly, or painful is “realistic,” and whatever is good, beautiful, or wholesome is just a delusion. This is how stupid people pretend they’re smart.

So what have you got for your children and grandchildren to read? And maybe more to the point, what are their “teachers” and school librarians urging them to read? You’d better look into that–you might get a rather nasty surprise.

There are books out there–and have always been, so far–that offer a positive vision: books that don’t seek to fill the teenage reader’s head with toxic garbage. You ought to be looking for them.

And when you find some, please let me know.

Why I Don’t Use Magic

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I’m always looking for new fantasy novels. Yesterday I was reading lists of “the top fantasies of 2013”–there are any number of them on the Internet–but I gave it up when I found a new series about a boy who goes to wizards’ school. No, the boy isn’t named “Barry Rotter” or anything like that. Couldn’t they have waited until after J.K. Rowling died? To rip her off while she’s still alive and still writing is the height of bad manners.

I was struck by an overall sense of un-originality among these fantasies. It came through the rave reviews like a whiff of mildew.

Dreariest aspect of it all, fantasy writers are still using “magic” to get things done. The real world functions without magic–and look at all the mischief we get into. A sane person believes the laws of nature hold throughout the universe; so where does “magic” fit in?

So I have ruled out “magic” in my Bell Mountain books. If my characters want to get something done, they actually have to do it–instead of just saying “Ooga-balooga-razzmatazz!” I do allow things that look like magic, but aren’t. The creation of such stunning illusions is still very much with us: see Global Warming.

But there is a more important reason why I’ve kept “real magic” out of my books.

The laws of nature are subservient to God, and we are under both God and the physical laws of our world that God created. “Magic” is a way of making the magician superior to those laws–an altogether wicked and impious concept.

Wicked and impious characters–at least in my books–will seek to acquire magic, will pretend to have it, and may even convince themselves that they do. But only God can say, “Let there be light.”

Proud and corrupt minds always seek to usurp God’s function. In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s what the whole “transgender” business is about. “Male and female created He them–oh, yeah? Well, watch us turn the males into females and the females into males! Now who’s the god? Hah!”

There is no way that kind of thinking leads to any end but evil.

Another Wacko Court, Another Wacko Ruling

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Who knew, when they signed the Declaration of Independence, that one day our new country would be ruled autocratically by judges who make it all up as they go along and view their courts as the irresistible instruments of radical social change?

On Jan. 30, the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine ruled, 5-1, that a teenage boy can use the girl’s bathroom at school because he really thinks he’s a girl, how could anyone be so narrow-minded as not to agree, blah-blah-blah. Wrote the culture vandal for the majority, “Decisions about how to address students’ legitimate gender identity issues are not to be taken lightly”. ( http://bangordailynews.com/2014/01/30/news-bangor-orono-supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-transgender-girl-in-orono-school-bathroom-case/ )

Just by way of translation, “transgender girl” means “intensely disturbed boy who wants to be a girl.”

Let’s see… “legitimate gender identity issues”–Uh, what is a legitimate gender identity issue? Who says there’s any such thing?

But liberal judges and politicians and bureaucrats et al, having denied God, pretend now to sit where God sits and function as gods themselves. If the judge says the boy’s a girl, then that’s that, the boy’s a girl.

Reality just ain’t very real anymore.

Spend a Fortune Getting Stuffed

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I’ve been reading reviews of a four-star French restaurant in New York where, if you’re stuck waiting in the lounge, they play French hip-hop “music” at you. That’s to soften you up for the prices.

When you’re finally seated, you can order a demi-tasse of soup–a little less than a shot-glass full–for beaucoup bucks; and if you and your wife want to spend $700 on a meal for two people, you can have them serve you a different kind of wine with every course. You can have lobster meat on mango slices for an appetizer. The magnifying glass is an extra $50. It’s $35 for this, $125 for that, and for all I know, you can get them to throw in clams on the half shell in maple syrup for another $75.

If they’re going to insult you, why not just call you rude names and punch you in the nose? Why be so subtle? Why charge you so much money for it?

Everything’s in French, so if you don’t speak the lingo, you won’t know what you’re getting. Well, I know what you’re getting… and it’s not a nice word.

Why a Devestated National Economy Is Good for You

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I knew it would be only a matter of time before our glorious national leaders told us that, even as Global Warming makes the weather cold, and wet wood burns the best, so their war against prosperity would enrich us.

So who cares that the Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obamacare will destroy 2.5 million full-time jobs in America? Why, it’s a blessing in disguise! Ask any leading Democrat.

Being out of work, the Senate Majority Leader tells us, is just a form of “free agency.” You know–like in baseball, when you’re a free agent, you get boxcar-loads of money to join up with a team.

Being out of work, the former Speaker of the House tells us, will give you time to “write poetry.”

And best of all–and they’re all saying this, all of a sudden–unemployment is so much better than “job-lock.”

Job-lock? What’s that?

Well, it’s having to work for a living, and not being able to stop and lie around on the couch and watch TV. Obamacare will free 2.5 million able-bodied Americans from job-lock. Or, as that other dimwit said a couple of weeks ago, it’s long past time we made “participation in the work-force truly voluntary.”

As long as you don’t need money, why work? It’s just not fair, that you should need money to live! Free stuff for all! Free living quarters, free food, free phones, free video games! Lemme at that goose-quill pen–I feel a major poem coming on!

All my stuff, it should be free:/ I oughta be paid for bein’ me.

Why should I have to go out and work,/ When I can just live off some other jerk?

How many of you out there are willing to keep on working so that I can keep on writing poetry?

Fight job-lock! Get unemployed today!