"If we could convince the Chinese that Jihadists’ testicles are an aphrodisiac, in 10 years they could be extinct."

*.*

Looking back on my childhood, I'm really thankful that Lincoln Logs were not invented by M.C. Escher.

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Veterans Threaten Michael Moore Over Cartoon Depicting Chris Kyle

FLINT, Mich. — Veterans are threatening violence and murder over a satirical cartoon of American Sniper author Chris Kyle drawn by film director Michael Moore, according to chatter on veteran message boards.
Moore’s illustration, which he released on Twitter, displays Chris Kyle shooting a crippled Iraqi girl in the back as he gives Uncle Sam a handjob on a pile of dollar bills.
“You just can’t question a war hero like Chris Kyle, or the book he wrote to glorify himself, or the movie made by a Hollywood star interpreting that book,” said former Navy SEAL Tom Lancer in one of several hundred “open letters” to Michael Moore. “You have no right to voice an opinion against any of us who defend the Constitution and its immutable freedoms.”
Comments by other veterans range from, “I will beat your ass, Michael Moore,” to “Watch ur back, I’m a sniper.”
Michael Moore, who is currently teaching a military history class on Rules of Engagement at the University of Michigan, said that he never intended to insult Kyle.
“What I posted was a drawing of the sniper that killed my grandfather,” tweeted Moore. Snipers have joined the long list of Moore’s enemies, as his other grandfather was killed by a nutritionist, and his childhood border collie was run over by a logician.
Actor Seth Rogen added thoughtfully to the dialogue. “Michael Moore’s cartoon reminded me of the time your mom gave me and Chris Kyle a handjob,” tweeted Rogen. When thousands responded angrily to his comments, Rogen was surprised. “I said it reminded me of your mom’s handjob, not that it was an accurate depiction. Sheesh,” he replied.
A group of concerned locals from Dearborn, Michigan have already foiled a veteran extremist plot to execute Moore and his colleagues. In response, the citizens of Nigeria gathered by the millions to support the cause of American freedoms and the sanctity of life, as well as sending relief money and armed security guards.
Moore seemed pleased by the threats. “I’m glad I can incite so much anger from people who claim not to care what I think, especially after I have been irrelevant for almost a decade.”

*.*

Oneliners:

A million quarters is a quarter million

After looking at the 1.5 billion pixel image of the Andromeda Galaxy, I realized that we can take a picture of something so big that our minds cannot comprehend it and save it on something so small our minds cannot comprehend it.

If my eyes could see 5 years into the future I would have 2020 vision.

What do centaurs do with their arms when they run.

Somewhere in the bowels of that stadium, Lenny Kravitz is fucking a backup dancer in a foam shark costume.

A "human being" who has died is technically a "human has been"

When my iPhone says "Siri not available" it should be in a voice other than Siri's.

*.*

A completely inebriated man walked into a bar and, after staring for some time at the only woman seated at the bar, walked over to her, placed his hand up her skirt and began fondling her.

She jumped up and slapped him silly. He immediately apologized and explained, "I'm sorry. I thought you were my wife. You look exactly like her."

"Why you drunken, worthless, insufferable asshole!" she screamed.

Funny," he muttered, "you even sound exactly like her."

Issue of the Times;
Redemption Through Cruelty by Theodore Dalrymple

One little phrase in Le Monde’s report of an incident in Nice—in which a man aged 30 called Moussa Coulibaly attacked with a knife three soldiers guarding a Jewish community center—caught my attention: rien de bien méchant, nothing very bad.

It was used in describing his prior record: Coulibaly had been found guilty six times between 2003 and 2012 by French courts of “theft, use of drugs, insulting policemen,” and had received either fines or suspended prison sentences for his rien de bien méchant. Given the percentage of offenses that are actually elucidated in France (as elsewhere), the chances are that he had committed at least ten times as much as he had ever been charged with, and it is also very likely that some of what he had done was a good deal more serious than anything that has come to light. At the very least delinquency was his way of life; and the total amount of harm he did, the misery caused to or inflicted on others, considerable. Rien de bien méchant doesn’t quite capture it, and could only have been written by someone inhabiting so utterly different a social world that he has no idea of the nature of Coulibaly’s.

The trajectory followed by Coulibaly is by now depressingly familiar: so familiar, indeed, that I could have written the outlines of his biography myself merely by having read what he did in Nice. As with many others of his type, his delinquency was followed by religious radicalization that gave to his criminal impulses a patina of moral justification. It not only gave him permission to do bad things, but made them morally obligatory. Could there be any greater pleasure in life than making others suffer for righteousness’s sake? For such as he, and those worse than he, sadism is next to godliness, or even the thing itself.

Coulibaly’s action was probably an instance of the Werther effect that has been known for a long time to those who study suicide. When there is a well-publicized case of suicide there is often a brief increase in the number of suicides afterwards. The effect was first noticed after the publication of Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the young hero killed himself for the sake of forlorn love; and all over Europe young men, who fancied themselves forlorn, followed suit. There is no underestimating the weakness of the human mind.

Coulibaly’s efforts were preceded by those of a Burundian convert to Islam, Bertrand Nzohabonayo, who not long ago entered a police station in a suburb of Tours and stabbed three policemen before being shot dead by a fourth. He, it seems, was responding to a call by a video by ISIS calling on Muslims in France to kill officials of the state by whatever means possible.

The Werther effect is not confined to Muslim converts or radicals, though no doubt such conversion adds to the weak-mindedness of which the effect is a manifestation. Not long ago in the city in which I worked, there were three attacks in quick succession on crowded places by men wielding machetes, the latter two presumably imitating the first. What was also interesting to me was that machetes should be so easily obtained in the city, though it was hardly famous for its sugar cane fields or jungle undergrowth (literal, not metaphorical) where such implements might be genuinely useful or necessary. This reminds me of the interesting fact that in England, where baseball is not played, the sale of baseball bats far exceeds the sale of baseball balls, the bats used for purposes which it does not require much effort of the imagination to guess.

And this is a convenient point to reflect upon the culture—I use the word culture in its anthropological sense—which produced Moussa Coulibaly. Though Le Monde did not mention it, I should be very surprised if he had never evinced an interest in rap music or had never worn the slum costume whose style—another word I use in its anthropological sense—originates in the black ghettos of America. Two of the fashions at least appear to have a carceral origin: the baseball cap worn backwards and the trousers worn at half-mast, as it were. The former was first employed by visitors to prison, who wanted to get nearer to the prisoner whom they were visiting, and the peak of whose cap prevented this so that the cap had to be reversed. The latter was in imitation of prisoners who were allowed no belts in case they were used for suicide (or hanging others), and whose nether garments therefore hung low. I add two caveats: the first that the origin of these two fashions is conjectural, and second that such as Moussa Coulibaly are not necessarily interested in tracing the historical origins of their own tastes, tending to live as they do in an eternal present moment.

Anyway, what is more or less certain is that Coulibaly would have emerged from a swamp of discontent, of thwarted entitlement, or more accurately of a thwarted sense of entitlement. Hardly a day would have gone by without him being told, or hearing somehow or other, that he inhabited the land of les droits de l’homme, of human rights, of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But what would his experience of daily life have been? Armed at huge public expense with the worst education which could possibly be provided over the prolonged period of his childhood and adolescence (an adolescence from which he would never emerge into adulthood), made aware neither of the possibility or necessity of personal effort, his mind filled with ideas and values derived from debased products for consumption by proletarians manufactured by a cynical culture industry, neither obliged or able to earn a living, and aware of the disdain and contempt with which he would be viewed by anyone minimally successful, his mind a bubbling cauldron of inchoate resentment; how wonderful for him to have found a providential—and enjoyable—role and purpose in the world, namely to kill or injure people!

“I’ll give them liberty, equality, and fraternity!” he would have thought (or felt). Because of his sense of entitlement, it would never have occurred to him that he had been fed, watered, housed, schooled, doctored all his life for nothing in return. What is given as an entitlement is not received with gratitude.

So in thinking about our home-grown Islamists, it is not enough to fume at the sheer idiocy and wickedness of their ideas; we should turn our attention inward as well, to our own societies.

Quote of the Times;
“You have the body of a hunter-gatherer but you may well inhabit the environment of a zoo. Which is maybe why you don’t feel brilliant 100% of the time.” – Bate

Link of the Times;
http://www.naturalnews.com/048467_vaccine_industry_intelligent_questions_scientific_principles.html

Onliners:

Bear Grylls should take the spoiled rich kids from MTV's My Super Sweet 16 to live in the wild and name the show "Grylls Scouts"

If a pizza has radius 'z' and a thickness of 'a', then its volume can be defined as Pi(z*z)a

Starbucks employees have to work at a business where 100% of the customers have not yet had their cup of morning coffee. Sounds like the most hostile work environment ever. Hats off to those baristas.

If there's ever an X-men movie solely about Mystique, a mirror would make a great movie poster.

There is no difference between counterfeit money and real money until someone realizes it's counterfeit.

I pay every month to get my hair cut, a subscription fee for my hairstyle.

I'm really good at solving Rubik's cubes in reverse.

'Hotness' is the speed limit of soup-eating

I wish I could google smells.

If you took two GoPros, a drone, an Oculus rift, and some programming, you could watch yourself in 3rd-person in real time and control yourself like a Grand Theft Auto character.

*.*

The teacher noticed that Johnny had been daydreaming for a long time. She decided to get his attention. "Johnny," she said, "If the world is 25,000 miles around and eggs are sixty cents a dozen, how old am I?

"Thirty-four," Johnny answered unhesitatingly.

The teacher replied "Well, that's not far from my actual age. Tell me...how did you guess?"

Oh, there's nothing to it," Johnny said. "My big sister is seventeen and she's only half-crazy."

*.*

Fred was telling his friend how his uncle tried to make a new car for himself..."so he took wheels from a Cadillac, a radiator from a Ford, some tires and fenders from a Plymouth..."

"Holy Cow," interrupted his friend, "What did he end up with?"

Fred replied, "Four years with time off for good behavior."

*.*

A man is sitting on his front stoop staring morosely at the ground when his neighbor strolls over.

The neighbor tries to start a conversation several times, but the older man barely responds. Finally, the neighbor asks what the problem is.

"Well," the man says, "I ran afoul of one of those questions women ask. Now I'm in the doghouse."

"What kind of question?" the neighbor asks.

"My wife asked me if I would still love her when she was old, fat and ugly."

"That's easy," says the neighbor. "You just say, 'Of course I will'".

"Yeah," says the other man, "that's what I meant to say. But what came out was, 'Of course I do.'"

*.*

Are you interested in making $$$$ fast?

Try it now!

1) Hold down the shift key.

2) Hit the 4 key four times very quickly

Issue of the Times;
7 Myths About the Crusades by Adam N. Crawford

The Crusades were never referred to as such by their participants.

The original crusaders were known by various terms, including fideles Sancti Petri (the faithful of Saint Peter) or milites Christi (knights of Christ). The word “Crusade” is a relatively modern term, from the French croisade and Spanish cruzada. The French form of the word first appears in the L’Histoire des Croisades written by A. de Clermont and published in 1638. It wasn’t until 1750 that the various forms of the word “Crusade” had established themselves in English, French, and German. The origin of the word may be traced to the cross (crux) made of (typically) red cloth and sewn as a badge onto the outer garment of those who took part in these enterprises. This “taking of the cross”, eventually became associated with the entire journey. The crusaders saw themselves as undertaking a journey, or a peregrinate – an armed pilgrimage. Additionally, before the 16th century the words “Muslim” and “Islam” were very rarely used by Europeans. During the Crusades the term widely used for Muslim was Saracen. In Greek and Latin this term had a longer evolution from the beginning of the first millennia where it referred to a people who lived in desert areas around the Roman province of Arabia and who were distinguished from Arabs. The Crusades took place under the direction of the Popes and were all announced by preaching. After pronouncing a solemn vow, each warrior received a cross from the hands of the Pope or his legates, and was thenceforth considered a soldier of the Church. The Crusades were wars undertaken in the name of Christendom, but not primarily for religious reasons.

More wars have been started over religion than for any other reason.

Although this claim is oft repeated, and most often leveled against the Crusades of the Catholic Church, it is patently ridiculous. In their Encyclopedia of Wars, authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod attempt a comprehensive listing of wars in history. They document 1763 wars overall, of which an astonishingly low 123 (6.98%) have been classified to involve a religious conflict. However, when one subtracts out those waged in the name of Islam (66), the percentage is cut by more than half to 3.23%. William T. Cavanaugh in his Myth of Religious Violence (2009) argues that what is termed “religious wars” is a largely “Western dichotomy”, arguing that virtually all wars that are classified as “religious” have secular (economic or political) ramifications.

The Crusades were wars of unprovoked aggression against a peaceful Muslim world.

Again, this is patently ridiculous. Let’s look briefly at just the major Islamic invasions and conquests in the West which proceeded the Crusades:
630 – Muhammad conquers Mecca from his base in Medina.
632 – Muhammad dies in Medina. Islam controls the Hijaz.
636 – Muslims conquest of Syria, and the surrounding lands, all Christian – including Palestine and Iraq.
637 – Muslim Crusaders conquer Iraq (some date it in 635 or 636)
638 – Muslim Crusaders conquer and annex Jerusalem, taking it from the Byzantines.
638 – 650 Muslim Crusaders conquer Iran, except along Caspian Sea.
639 – 642 Muslim Crusaders conquer Egypt.
641 – Muslim Crusaders control Syria and Palestine.
643 – 707 Muslim Crusaders conquer North Africa.
644 – 650 Muslim Crusaders conquer Cyprus, Tripoli in North Africa, and establish Islamic rule in Iran, Afghanistan, and Sind.
673 – 678 Arabs besiege Constantinople, capital of Byzantine Empire
691 – Dome of the Rock is completed in Jerusalem, only six decades after Muhammad’s death.
710 – 713 Muslim Crusaders conquer the lower Indus Valley.
711 – 713 Muslim Crusaders conquer Spain and impose the kingdom of Andalus. The Muslim conquest moves into Europe.
718 – Conquest of Spain complete.
732 – Muslim invasion of France is stopped at the Battle of Poitiers / Battle of Tours. The Franks, under their leader Charles Martel (the grandfather of Charlemagne), defeat the Muslims and turn them back out of France.
762 – Foundation of Baghdad
785 – Foundation of the Great Mosque of Cordova
789 – Rise of Idrisid amirs (Muslim Crusaders) in Morocco; Christoforos, a Muslim who converted to Christianity, is executed.
800 – Autonomous Aghlabid dynasty (Muslim Crusaders) in Tunisia
807 – Caliph Harun al—Rashid orders the destruction of non-Muslim prayer houses & of the church of Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem
809 – Aghlabids (Muslim Crusaders) conquer Sardinia, Italy
813 – Christians in Palestine are attacked; many flee the country
831 – Muslim Crusaders capture Palermo, Italy; raids in Southern Italy
837 – 901 Aghlabids (Muslim Crusaders) conquer Sicily, raid Corsica, Italy, France
869 – 883 Revolt of black slaves in Iraq
909 – Rise of the Fatimid Caliphate in Tunisia; these Muslim Crusaders occupy Sicily, Sardinia
928 – 969 Byzantine military revival, they retake old territories, such as Cyprus (964) and Tarsus (969)
937 – The Church of the Resurrection (aka Church of Holy Sepulcher) is burned down by Muslims; more churches in Jerusalem are attacked
960 – Conversion of Qarakhanid Turks to Islam 969 – Fatimids (Muslim Crusaders) conquer Egypt and found Cairo
973 – Israel and southern Syria are again conquered by the Fatimids
1003 – First persecutions by al—Hakim; the Church of St. Mark in Fustat, Egypt, is destroyed
1009 – Destruction of the Church of the Resurrection by al—Hakim (see 937)
1012 – Beginning of al—Hakim’s oppressive decrees against Jews and Christians
1050 – Creation of Almoravid (Muslim Crusaders) movement in Mauretania; Almoravids (aka Murabitun) are coalition of western Saharan Berbers; followers of Islam, focusing on the Quran, the hadith, and Maliki law.
1071 – Battle of Manzikert, Seljuk Turks (Muslim Crusaders) defeat Byzantines and occupy much of Anatolia 1071 – Turks (Muslim Crusaders) invade Palestine
1073 – Conquest of Jerusalem by Turks (Muslim Crusaders)
1075 – Seljuks (Muslim Crusaders) capture Nicea (Iznik) and make it their capital in Anatolia
1076 – Almoravids (Muslim Crusaders) (see 1050) conquer western Ghana
1086 – Almoravids (Muslim Crusaders) (see 1050) send help to Andalus, Battle of Zallaca
1090 – 1091 Almoravids (Muslim Crusaders) occupy all of Andalus except Saragossa and Balearic Islands
1094 – Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus I asks western Christendom for help against Seljuk (Muslim Turks) invasions of his territory
1095 – Pope Urban II preaches first Crusade; they capture Jerusalem in 1099

In other words, by the end of the eleventh century the forces of Islam had captured fully two-thirds of the Christian world. And these were not merely areas at the periphery of the Christian world, but rather places which represented the very origin of the Christian communities – their heart and soul. Palestine, the home of Jesus Christ, where He was born, conducted His ministry, died and was resurrected; Egypt, the birthplace of Christian monasticism and home to countless Saints and theologians such as St. Anthony, St. Cyprian and St. Augustine; Asia Minor, where St. Paul planted the seeds of the first Christian communities.
Far from being unprovoked, then, the Crusades actually represent the first great western Christian counterattack against the Muslim attacks which had taken place continually from the inception of Islam until the eleventh century, and which continued on thereafter, mostly unabated. Three of Christianity’s five primary episcopal sees (Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria) had been captured in the seventh century; both of the others (Rome and Constantinople) had been attacked in the centuries before the crusades. (The latter would be captured in 1453, leaving only one of the five -Rome- in Christian hands by 1500.) At some point what was left of the Christian world would have to defend itself or simply succumb to Islamic conquest. St. Augustine has articulated a Christian approach to the concept of just war, one in which legitimate authorities could use violence to halt or avert a greater evil. It must be a defensive war, in reaction to an act of aggression. For Christians, therefore, violence was ethically neutral, since it could be employed either for evil or against it. When the First Crusade was called by Pope Urban II in 1095 in response to an urgent plea for help from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, it was Urban calling the knights of Christendom to come to the aid of their eastern brethren. It was to be an errand of mercy, liberating the Christians of the East from their Muslim conquerors. The Crusades all met the criteria for just wars, and it is largely due to this defense of Christendom and the Western world that you and I don’t speak Aramaic today and require our women to wear burqas.

Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them.

We’ve already dealt with the unprovoked assertion above, but some will respond that the Crusades rather than being defensive and just wars, were instead wars of retaliation and revenge. That the goal of the crusaders was to seize Muslim lands and forcibly convert them. To put the question in perspective, one need only consider how many times Christian forces have attacked either Mecca or Medina. The answer, of course, is never. It has however become common practice to equate the forcible conversions of the Islamic conquests with the Catholic Crusades, as if to suggest that there is a similarity between the coerced conversions of Islam and the activities of the crusaders. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that none of the Christian military orders fighting the Muslims sought to impose baptism by force. Certainly, the crusaders did not object to using military force to establish conditions conducive to the peaceful conversion of Muslims, but that is a different matter altogether.
We can see an example of how military conquest created the conditions conducive to peaceful conversion in an anonymous pamphlet from 1260 entitled De constructione castri Saphet, which argued that the building of a castle in conquered Muslim territory meant that “the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ can be preached freely in all the aforesaid places [in the region of Safed] and the blasphemy of Muhammad can be publicly refuted and demolished in sermons.” A perfect example of this is Pope Alexander III ’ s confirmation of the Order of Santiago, issued in 1175, which contains the injunction: “in their warfare they should devote themselves to this objective alone, namely either to protect Christians from their [the Saracens ’] attacks or to be in a position to induce them [the Saracens] to follow the Christian faith.” The latter clause, “be in a position to induce them to follow the Christian faith”, does not refer to forcible conversion, but rather an ideal situation in which Christian military dominance paves the way for peaceable evangelization by Christian missionaries. In contrast, the Islamic religion has always been advanced at the point of a sword. “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”5 Those who are conquered are given a simple choice. For those who are not People of the Book — in other words, those who are not Christians or Jews — the choice is convert to Islam or die. For those who are People of the Book, the choice is submit to Muslim rule and Islamic law or die. The expansion of Islam, therefore, was always directly linked to the military successes of jihad.
The Crusades however, were something very different. From its beginnings Christianity has always forbidden coerced conversion of any kind. Conversion by the sword, therefore, was not possible for Christianity. Unlike jihad, the purpose of the Crusades was neither to expand the Christian world nor to expand Christianity through forced conversions. In a nutshell, therefore, the major difference between Crusade and jihad is that the former was a defense against the latter, not an attempt to seize Muslim lands or acquire new converts.

The Crusaders were motivated by greed and the pursuit of Muslim lands and fortunes.

We’ve already dealt with the myth of Crusaders seeking to acquire Muslim lands, but during the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have verified that crusading knights were indeed generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap; even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade.
As Fred Cazel has noted, “Few crusaders had sufficient cash both to pay their obligations at home and to support themselves decently on a crusade.” From the very beginning, financial considerations played a major role in crusade planning. The early crusaders sold off so many of their possessions to finance their expeditions that they caused widespread inflation. Although later crusaders took this into account and began saving money long before they set out, the expense was still nearly prohibitive.
So why did these crusaders set out on these “armed pilgrimages?” Largely due to sermons which were preached in order to convince the crusaders to participate in these ventures. Crusade sermons were replete with warnings that crusading brought deprivation, suffering, and often death. As Jonathan Riley-Smith has noted, crusade preachers “had to persuade their listeners to commit themselves to enterprises that would disrupt their lives, possibly impoverish and even kill or maim them, and inconvenience their families, the support of which they would . . . need if they were to fulfill their promises.” The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam (Bampton Lectures in America)
In other words, they did so not because they expected to gain material wealth (which many of them already had), but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Far from being a materialistic enterprise, crusading was impractical in worldly terms, but valuable for one’s soul. I won’t take time here to explore the doctrine of penance as it developed in late antiquity and the medieval world, but suffice it to say that the willing acceptance of difficulty and suffering was viewed (and still is, in Catholic doctrine today) as a useful way to purify one’s soul.
Europe is littered with literally thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments – charters in which these men still speak to us today if we are willing to listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing plunder if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing. “Crusading,” as Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was also understood as an “an act of love”—in this case, the love of one’s neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, “You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, ‘Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.'”
Despite the fact that money did not yet play a major role in Western European economies in the eleventh century, there was “a heavy and persistent flow of money” from West to East as a result of the Crusades, and the financial demands of crusading caused “profound economic and monetary changes in both western Europe and the Levant.” In short: very few people became rich by crusading, and their numbers were dwarfed by those who were bankrupted.

When the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 they massacred every man, woman and child in the city until the streets ran ankle deep with the blood.

So, let’s be clear. Atrocities were committed during the Crusades. The Crusades were wars, and as the old saying goes, “War is hell.” But, let’s also be clear. The above quote is pure hyperbole. No historian accepts it as anything other than literary convention. Jerusalem is a big town, and the amount of blood necessary to fill the streets to a continuous and running three-inch depth would require many, many more people than those which lived in the region, let alone the city. Also, the cities defenders had resisted right up to the end. They calculated that the formidable walls of the city would keep the crusaders at bay until a relief force from Egypt could arrive. They were wrong. When the city fell, therefore, it was put to the sack. Many were killed, yet many others were ransomed or allowed to go free. It is worth noting that in those Muslim cities that surrendered to the crusaders the people were left unmolested, retained their property and were allowed to worship freely.
But, atrocities were committed. Let’s face it, mistakes were going to be made. Have you ever known of a war where they weren’t? How about seven wars over almost two hundred years? Of course there were things done which were reprehensible. But what is really shocking is just how relatively few horrific incidents can be pointed to over such a lengthy time frame involving multiple wars. However, in the interest of fairness here are a couple of prime examples.
During the First Crusade a large band of riffraff, not associated with the main army, descended on the towns of the Rhineland and decided to rob and kill the Jews they found there. In part this was pure greed. In part it also stemmed from the incorrect belief that the Jews, as the crucifiers of Christ, were legitimate targets of the war. Pope Urban II and subsequent popes strongly condemned these attacks on Jews. Local bishops and other clergy and laity attempted to defend the Jews, although with limited success. Similarly, during the opening phase of the Second Crusade a group of renegades killed many Jews in Germany before St. Bernard was able to catch up to them and put a stop to it.
The Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) was originally intended to conquer Muslim-controlled Jerusalem by means of an invasion through Egypt. Instead, in April 1204, the Crusaders of Western Europe invaded and sacked the Orthodox Christian city of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. This is seen as one of the final acts in the Great Schism between the Eastern Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic Church, and a key turning point in the decline of the empire and of Christianity in the Near East, leaving Pope Innocent III to lament, “How, indeed, will the church of the Greeks, no matter how severely she is beset with afflictions and persecutions, return into ecclesiastical union and to a devotion for the Apostolic See, when she has seen in the Latins only an example of perdition and the works of darkness, so that she now, and with reason, detests the Latins more than dogs? As for those who were supposed to be seeking the ends of Jesus Christ, not their own ends, who made their swords, which they were supposed to use against the pagans, drip with Christian blood, they have spared neither religion, nor age, nor sex. They have committed incest, adultery, and fornication before the eyes of men. They have exposed both matrons and virgins, even those dedicated to God, to the sordid lusts of boys. Not satisfied with breaking open the imperial treasury and plundering the goods of princes and lesser men, they also laid their hands on the treasures of the churches and, what is more serious, on their very possessions. They have even ripped silver plates from the altars and have hacked them to pieces among themselves. They violated the holy places and have carried off crosses and relics.”9
These relatively isolated incidents were universally condemned by the Popes and the Catholic Church and they should not be confused with the initial reasons for the Crusades – in the same way that individual atrocities committed by a small number of World War II soldiers didn’t change the necessary reasons for which the United States went to war in the first place.

Saint Pope John Paul II apologized for the Crusades.

John Paul II never actually apologized for the Crusades. The closest he came was on March 12, 2000, the “Day of Pardon.” During his homily he said: “We cannot fail to recognize the infidelities to the Gospel committed by some of our brethren, especially during the second millennium. Let us ask pardon for the divisions which have occurred among Christians, for the violence some have used in the service of the truth and for the distrustful and hostile attitudes sometimes taken toward the followers of other religions.” It is true that John Paul apologized to the Greeks for the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople in 1204, but even the Pope of that time, Innocent III, expressed similar regret as we have seen above.

Quote of the Times;
“Over the last twenty years, we have given in to a subterranean, dangerous, and uncontrolled infiltration, which not only resists adjusting to our laws and customs but which will, as the years pass, attempt to impose its own.” - Bardot

Link of the Times;
http://www.theartofselfhood.com/

Dear Lord," the preacher began with arms extended and a rapturous look on his upturned face, "without you we are but dust..."
He would have continued, but at that moment one very obedient little girl (who was listening carefully) leaned over to her mother and asked quite audibly in her shrill little girl voice, "Mommy, WHAT is butt dust..?"

Church was pretty much over at that point.

*.*

A first grade teacher had a small number of children gathered around a table for a reading group. After the story was read she gave the children a work sheet to do. She thought they may have some problems so wanted them to work on it there.

She heard a little girl say very softly "damn!".

The teacher leaned over and said quietly, "We don't say that in school."

The little girl looked at the teacher, her eyes got very big and she said, "Not even when things are all fucked up?!"

*.*

A couple was relating their vacation experiences to a friend. "It sounds as if you had a great time in Texas,"
the friend observed. "But didn't you tell me you were planning to visit Colorado?"

"Well," the husband said, "we changed our plans because, uh..."

His wife cut in, "Oh, tell the truth, Fred!" He fell silent and she continued, "You know, it's just ridiculous. Fred simply will not ask for directions."

*.*

Get back to grass roots......
fornicate on the lawn...

Roses are red, pansies are gay,
if it weren't for women we'd all be that way....

Oral sex is a taste of things to come...

Sex Appeal. Give generously.....

The best time to fake an orgasm is when a Rottweiler is humping your leg.....

*.*

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And,

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%

So, one can then conclude with mathematical certainty that While Hard work and knowledge will get you close, and, Attitude will get you there,

Bullshit and Ass kissing will put you over the top.

Issue of the Times;
Venezuelan woman earns her entire living standing in line to buy toilet paper by Simon Black
At two in the morning, Krisbell quietly slips out of bed so as to not wake the two small children curled up next to her. She grabs her phone and quickly dials her friends’ numbers as she’s already headed out the door to get the day’s intelligence report. Most importantly—where is milk, sugar, and toilet paper being sold today?
From the moment price controls were levied in the country, there were shortages of everything in Venezuela. Each month, it’s become increasingly difficult to get basic goods. And the lines are growing longer and longer. Not everyone can afford to wait in line half the day just to get a few supplies. And since you can’t even get everything in one store, it takes the second half of the day to get the rest of what you need—if there’s even anything left by then. Friends and neighbors had started coming to Krisbell, asking her if she could help them get things from the grocery store. They all have to work just to be able to afford the food in the first place, and they can’t spare the time to stand in line.
So (as reported by Bloomberg) Krisbell started taking on clients. Now she has enough that she’s earning her entire living from waiting in line. Imagine—an entire cottage industry (absurd as it may be) now exists in Venezuela because of destructive government polices. Everyone in the country has to pay extra for their basic goods, while others dedicate their professional lives to the unproductive task of standing in line. (If this seems far-fetched, consider that the US tax preparation industry takes in $6 billion annually for dedicating itself to the unproductive task of filling out Byzantine tax forms…)
There’s no limit to the stupidity and destructiveness of people in power, and Venezuela’s President Maduro is a prime example. This man (and his predecessor) took the country with the largest oil reserves in the world and crippled it to the point that Venezuela now imports oil. And that was before oil prices plummeted. Now the country is even weaker. Venezuela’s government is now on the brink of defaulting on its financial obligations... just as it has already defaulted on its obligations to its citizens.
It’s a sad example of what governments do when they go bankrupt. Almost invariably they manipulate the currency and print money. This eventually causes inflation to get out of hand and prices to soar. They try to control it by imposing price controls. And because it becomes unprofitable for businesses to produce at artificially low prices, shortages ensue. Then they institute capital controls to trap money inside the country. This movie has played out so many times before. And yet people rarely learn.
The consequences of terrible decisions creep up gradually, and then suddenly. Most people don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late. The resulting economic hardship often leads to extremism, or dangerous populism. Just look at what’s happening across Europe (and especially Greece with its new radical left Prime Minister). But it all starts with a bankrupt government and decades of destructive policies.
We’ve all seen what’s happened with Venezuela. If you’re in a bankrupt nation, make sure this doesn't affect you. Make sure you always have a Plan B.
Quote of the Times;
If by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son.

Link of the Times;
http://www.collegetimes.com/

An Addict's Story

Don't let this happen to you!!!

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then - to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

I began to think alone -- "to relax," I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself.

I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me a lot to think about.

I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."

"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently. She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama.

"I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors ... They didn't open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye, "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster.

Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.

I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.

I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

*.*

Never hit a man when he's down . . .

Kick him, it's easier.

*.*

What interesting property do these words have in common:

body

day

how

one

place

thing

time

what

where?

Each forms a new word when appended to the word "some."

*.*

"Say," said the smooth operator in a confidential tone to the host of the party, "there's a lot of hot babes at this party. If I find one that's ready to grab a quick one, would you mind if I used your extra bedroom?"

"What about your wife?"

"Oh, I won't be gone that long. She'll never miss me."

"No, I'm sure she won't miss you, she borrowed the extra bedroom."

*.*

Definitions and cool meanings

Cigarette: A pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other.

Conference: The confusion of one man multiplied by the number present.

Conference Room: A place where everybody talks, nobody listens & everybody disagrees on later.

Compromise: The art of dividing a cake in such a way that each person believes he got the biggest piece.

Office: A place where you can relax after your strenuous home life.

Yawn: The only time some married men ever get to open their mouths.

Etc.: A sign to make others believe that you know more than you actually do.

Philosopher: A fool who torments himself during life, to be spoken of when dead.

Opportunist: A person who starts taking a bath if he accidentally falls into a river.

Optimist: A person who, while falling from the Eiffel Tower, says midway, "See? I am not injured yet."

Pessimist: A person who says that O is the last letter in ZERO, instead of the first letter in OPPORTUNITY.

Boss: Someone who is early when you are late and late when you are early.

Politician: One who shakes your hand before elections and your confidence afterwards.

Issue of the Times;
Philip K. Dick On Fine-Tuning Your B.S.-Meter To Spot "Pseudo-Realities" by Charlie Jane Anders

How can you tell what's real, in a world where huge industries, governments and religions are all trying to force-feed you manufactured realities? Philip K. Dick sums up the challenges of detecting reality in a world that resembles Disneyland, in this great 1978 quote:

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

Quote of the Times;
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” – Voltaire

Link of the Times;
http://elitedaily.com/

A new survey found that 27 percent of airline passengers don't like making small talk with the person sitting next to them.

Or so the guy in the seat next to me brought up three times...

*.*

After welcoming his replacement and showing the usual courtesies that protocol decreed, the retiring colonel said, "You must meet my Adjutant, Captain Smithers. He's my right-hand man; he's really the strength of this office. His talent is simply boundless."

Smithers was summoned and introduced to the new CO, who was surprised to meet a humpbacked, one eyed, toothless, hairless, scabbed and pockmarked specimen of humanity, a particularly unattractive man less than three feet tall. "Smithers, old man, tell your new CO about yourself."

"Well, sir, I graduated with honors from Sandhurst, joined the regiment and won the Military Cross and Bar after three expeditions behind enemy lines. I've represented Great Britain in equestrian events, and won a Silver Medal in the middleweight division of the Olympics. I have researched the history of....."

Here the colonel interrupted, "Yes, yes, never mind those Smithers, he can find all that in your file. Tell him about the day you told the witch doctor to fuck off."

*.*

This Friday was "Take your Dog to Work Day.”

This of course, makes Monday "Apologize to the boss for what your dog did in his office on Friday" Day.

*.*

Doug goes to a doctor and says:

"Doctor, my wife recently has lost her voice. What should I do to help her get it back?"

The doctor replies, "Try coming home at 3 in the morning!"

*.*


Starbucks has announced that they're raising prices on some of their drinks.

I haven't been this shocked since the last time.

I guess they just wanted to get back into the habit.


Issue of the Times;
Defining Civilization: Women and Children First by John C. Wright

A civilization whose citizens have lost the ability to admire its virtues, beauties, benefits and strengths is one whose citizens are losing the ability to defend that civilization. Before we pull stone from stone to dismantle the wall that separates civilized life from the chaotic bloodshed, cruelty, and misery of barbarism outside, it behooves us to examine the wall, and ask three questions of it: What is Civilization? How is it maintained? What can undo it?

To define civilization is like defining an elephant: the thing is too big to take it at a glance. Nonetheless, by imagining its absence (for example by watching a Mad Max movie) we can see what it provides.

In the absence of civilization, there is no law hence no property, ergo no man has any reason to check any craving for the land currently occupied by another, any fruitful plot or pleasant hunting ground, if he has strength enough to dispossess him. Personal chattel or cattle are even less secure, because a trespasser can carry them away without the effort of assaulting or, once in possession, holding the envied real estate.

Where there is no law hence no rights, any stranger has just as good a claim to lands and chattel as the first possessor, if his strength is the same; and if the stranger be weaker, it is prudent to destroy him ere he grow stronger. The inhuman calculus of prudence says that it improves one’s safety to have a reputation for strength and brutality, so that potential threats might seek elsewhere for prey, and so that indecisive neighbors become allies or clients.

Hence in this state of nature without manmade laws, your equals will invade to despoil you because they covet; the weaker because they fear you; the stronger because they do not fear you, for glory, or the mere pleasure of bloodshed.

In such a state, labor is vain, because whatever is built or made may be taken; cultivating the earth is vain, because an invader may harvest what you sow, and drink the wine of your grapes; there is no trade nor travel by sea, because there is nothing to transport; no machines for moving or removing great weights; no works of canals, bridges, walls, fortress, dams; no draining of swamps, nor clearing of forest; no knowledge of distant places; no reckoning of times and season; no lasting nor reliable record of years past, hence no accumulation of lore and learning between generations; no medicine, no letters, no arts; and, above all, men live wretched and impoverished lives, and brief.

Now, with all due respect to Thomas Hobbes, this description of perfect desolation in nature is inaccurate. The one thing missing from this picture is that real barbarians, past and present, enjoy the company, comradeship and protection of their family, clan and tribe. Real barbarians do not fear and mistrust every man as potential robbers and murderers, but only strangers outside their kin. For their mutual protection, the families have strong reason for brothers to gather with their fathers, uncles, nephews, and cousins in forming hunting parties and war bands, and, in tribes who live without letters or written law, oral lore, chants and epics, long-held customs, and the wisdom of grandfathers suffices to give the tribe the unity needed to survive against other tribes.

Such lore will stave off the perfect desolation of nature, as brother will respect the chattel and cattle, wives and wigwam of his brother, and in return will share as need and seniority dictates. And over time simple crafts and skills, rites and decorative arts will be learned and passed down.

There is no assurance, no invisible law of evolution, which says that tribal lore and custom must always accumulate and never lose these gradual, hard-won gains. There are peoples in Australia whom anthropologists believe once had knowledge of the bone needle, the art of sewing, the napping of flint and the making of spearheads, and lost them all.

Once a tribe learns the art of husbandry, and learns that in order to enjoy the fruit of their tillage, houses of stone, or, better yet, a wall to enclose a stronghold, can be erected, and smithies to smelt the gleaming bronze of sword and spear, wealth unimaginable heretofore pours into their coffers: sheep and oxen, donkeys and hunting dogs, gleaming arrowheads, slaves and wives, and all fashion of pottery and fabric. With this wealth, there is leisure, and specialization of labor. Where before all men in the tribe were at once warriors and hunters and herdsmen, slavers and tillermen, now emerges the figures we see already established when history first puts stylus to clay: the king and his fighting men, the priesthood, the merchant counting his coins, the peasant tilling the soil, the slave toiling in fields or mines or canals.

The priest can count the days and seasons, and watch the stars, and calculate the acreage of fields, and measure where boundary stones lie. Writing is theirs: not without reason that the word clerk means both man of the cloth and man of the pen.

The easy sharing of goods with brothers in need seen in tribal life is less because there is less need of it. The laws can be written, and, whenever the day comes when the priest tells the king that the king is also bound by the laws he enforces, then civilization exists.

This check on the lawlessness of the king is the last stone set in place to erect the wall of civilization; and since he is the force of law in the land, it must be a spiritual idea, a cult or faith or article of philosophy, and invisible and impalpable idea, which makes the king mortar that stone in place.

So to remove that last stone, first one must erode the mortar of the idea. This requires a treason of your clerks. Your priests have to undermine and undercut the legitimacy of the idea of civilization in the mind of your king to make that stone wobble and fall. This can best be done by having the priests outlaw from the public agora whatever gods support the city and uphold civilization, and instead introduce gods of irrationality, barbarism, and chaos. Such priests eliminate their own priesthood first of all.

If you don’t have priests, the treason can issue from whoever or whatever it is to whom you entrusted your common intellectual and spiritual heritage, such as your academics, media, singers of songs and tellers of tales, the press and philosophers.

The treason of the philosophers begins when they teach philosophy is pointless, truth is relative, and all words are meaningless.

The treason of the press is complete once journalism is dead, and instead of a fair, truthful or balanced version of world and local events, you hear nothing but lies, lies, lies and shameless and damnable lies. The press makes real the vision of the philosophers of a world without truth.

Likewise when the treason of the singers is complete, exchanging love songs for song about bitches and whores and shooting cops, for then all songs are ugly.

When the storytellers all tell tales wherein your civilization is always depicted as wicked, worthless, hypocritical, vile, they the imagination of the people is filled with a gray and murky disgust for the wall of civilization.

All that the lying academic need say at this point is that something better and brighter than civilization is on the other side of the wall, for example, the People’s Republic of Utopia, and that therefore the allegedly protective wall is instead prison wall.

If enough people and if the King believe it, then the first stone to go is the last one put in place. Everyone is told that the King must be granted a plethora of unlawful powers in the name of breaking down the wall blocking the way to Utopia. Once this first stone trembles, once it falls, civilization begins to crumble at an ever increasing rate.

Do not be deceived: a tyranny like that seen in Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China is as barbaric and wretched as Hobbes’ state of nature, despite that the state is totalitarian. A king with no check on his power is an anarchist, and he savages the people under his alleged protection no less than the dangerous strangers marauding through the bloody landscape of the Hobbes.

Hobbes and many enlightenment writers had the insight that civilization was a social contract. They did not literally mean that every soul before birth signed a bit of paper on which the mutually agreed terms defining civilization were written in black ink. The writers meant that there was an organic and mutual reciprocity between subject and sovereign. Hobbes thought that the king could violate this reciprocity with immunity; Locke and other writers, including those inspiring our Founding Fathers, held that a sufficiently damaging and permanent violation freed the other party to the deal, the people, from any continued obligation of fealty or allegiance.

So, the first thing that can start the dissolution of civilization, and place our foot on the long, blood-soaked, sad path toward that aboriginal tribe that has forgotten how to make needles or sew, is the treason of the clerks.

One the king is convinced (or in these more degenerate and democratic times, the parliaments and congresscreatures who have kingly duties but no sense of a higher power to whom they are obligated) that he has authority to overrule the laws of civilization, perhaps to make the pathway clear to the alleged utopia that the priests said surely will arise once anarchy is unleashed, then the legitimacy of his state is gone, and he is merely a raving beast like a mad man-eating lion.

The first thing the lion eats is the sense of honor that keeps his fighting men in check. His fighting men includes what in the modern day is both the military and the police. The police are made more and more militaristic; they are cast as the enemy of the people; and the military is degenerated from its ancient precepts of honor and courage, and instead becomes sensitive and friendly to womenfolk or sodomites.

Now, to be clear, in a modern bureaucratic state, anyone who has the power to enforce the law and harass the people is, for all practical purposes, a policeman, a soldier, a fighting man of the king. We would call these bureaucrats, everyone from the tax man to the clerk on a planning and zoning board enforcing an irrational eco-nutbag regulation.

The sense of honor needed to keep soldiers and civil servants in check evaporates as the lawlessness of the anarchic King spreads down the wall to the next row, and the soldiers, police, and civil servants become young lions, red in tooth and claw.

Once the fighting men are corrupted, next oldest support of civilization vanishes: the burghers, the townsmen, the bourgeoisie, the merchants, the shopkeeper and tradesman, and middle class. Their corruption is far easier and far quicker, because trade and possession depends on a faith in objective law and evenhanded enforcement of contracts, not to mention the soundness of coin or currency. The middle class can be taxed out of existence, as they were in ancient Rome, which collapsed the Western Empire in one generation, and kept the Eastern Empire in a state of servitude and poverty for the remainder of its millennium.

The merchants who turn to the King to make a sweetheart deal create crony capitalism, which is also, more correctly, called fascism. The industries, such as are left, become organs of the state and are protected by increasingly one-sided and nakedly unfair taxations and regulations.

The important point to note is that the treason of the merchants undermines the unspoken social contract which allows trade and manufacture, or even guilds and small shops, to exist: that is, namely, the unspoken social contract provides that spoken contracts shall be upheld, and trade be fair and free. This idea is laughed into nonexistence, and the merchants are no longer merchants, but become jackals slinking and slouching in the shadows of the lions consuming the people, greedy for scraps.

But no civilization of this is possible without the brotherhood of family and clan. And that is not possible without marriage and an institution of paternity.

So the final course of stones to go is the social contract, the bargain, between fathers and mothers, between male and female. The deal is that, in return for the bearing the burden of bearing children, the womanfolk will be protected and cherished. When the barbarians attack, the women and children go first to the stronghold, and the men man the walls; the iceberg strikes, the women and children go into the lifeboats, and the men go to death in the icy water. In return, the women preserve and reproduce the race.

In barbaric ages and nations, this was done by polygamy, where the women were chattel, and in Christian civilization, by monogamy, where the women could not be divorced nor put aside except for fornication.

To prevent the menfolk from killing each other, or slaying the bastards fathered by other men on their wives, the women uphold modesty and chastity. Modesty deters unwanted extramarital or premarital sex; the chastity confirms the paternity of offspring, and expels a cold marriage of convenience in favor of a warm and romantic Christian marriage.

The first crack in this base course of the wall of civilization was the legalization of no-fault divorce, which was widened by contraception, and then a free-love sexual free-for-all which has, for all practical purposes abolished marriage among our urban poor.

The crack was widened again by feministic hypocrisy and insanity, which somehow demands all the burden of paternity be bourn by the father, even though he can be divorced at any time, and cast away; but that men take care not to offend women, no, not by so small a trifle as wearing a loud shirt or using the wrong pronoun; whereas women can do as they please, and whore around.

Such harlots seek to become the chattel of the strongest young lion or the richest sniveling jackal, and the idea of a modest matron raising children becomes as laughable to the corrupt harlot’s mind as an honorable soldier or an honest merchant.

Obviously no one believes that women can both be equal to men in facing all danger, and yet at the same time must be protected by trigger warnings lest they faint away. No one believes it, feminists least of all. This rampant hypocrisy has been clear ever since the days they rallied around Clinton, the Adulterer-in-Chief, and with their silence damned to hell all the women mutilated, enslaved, humiliated, falsely accused, and slain by Shariah Law.

In the same way the priests betray and eliminate the idea of the sacred, and the kings betray and eliminate the idea of legitimate authority, and fighting men and public servants betray and eliminate the idea of honor and duty and faithful executions of the laws, and the merchants destroy the idea of a fair deal, the feminists destroy the mystical concept of womanhood.

The feminists hatred for the feminine is accomplished, and their treason is complete, when motherhood is as purely despised as maidenhood, and women are once again possessions of the strongest.

It is noteworthy that, in the current day, all the courses of the stone wall, from lowest to highest, are cracking, creaking, and tumbling, and the loudest traitors cry that the stones are oppression, blocking and hindering us from skipping down the road of yellow bricks; they scream that the Emerald City of Oz is just outside the gate, which we must throw open to welcome the Wonderful Wizard who will grant all our contradictory and childish wishes.

And the bloodthirsty lions and jackals awaiting without are never mentioned.

Whether the traitors are blind but sincere, or merely suicidal and malign, makes no difference to the end result.

Quote of the Times;
“Show men endless images of beautiful models and actresses and singers, show them endless images of beautiful, slim, women engaging in sex with enthusiasm, tell them that a world of uncommitted and marriageless sex is the norm — then, for reasons they don’t understand, slam the door in their face. This is not a prescription for long term stability.” - The Possibility of an Island - Houellebecq

Link of the Times;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4GGAtLYppw