"Our Elites Are Insane"

Sorry I didn't post any for the past few days, "Meatspace got hold of me.  I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas.

 I have noticed the words "Merry Christmas vanishing from the American Lexicon, to the politically correct Happy Holidays, for fear of "offending" some group.  Jeez, it has gotten really bad, not as bad here as in Europe where "The Adherents of the Religion of Pieces" keep either harassing people at the Christmas markets in Europe, or driving vehicles through the markets.  And for some reason the PTB keep bringing in more of them.  Definition of Insanity I suppose.

  I shamelessly "Clipped This", 

AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File

Ed mentioned this story in his Wednesday Final Word. Still, I have to assume that at least a few of you were sharing some Christmas Eve cheer with friends and family instead of doing what every normal person in the world was doing, which was checking in on what the geniuses at Hot Air had to say. 

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This story encapsulates what is so wrong with the transnational elite, who are so divorced not just from the ordinary Westerner, but from the foundations of Western society itself. 

How insane are our elites? This insane:

The folks over at POLITICOEurope are scandalized by the fact that the "extreme" right wing are casting Christmas as a Christian holiday, weaponizing the idea that this clearly secular and multicultural state holiday is being tied to a religion that throws gays off of roofs, promotes child marriage, takes over streets for evening prayer, and has adherents who seem to get it in their mind that raping young girls and occasionally murdering civilians for religious reasons. 

Oh, wait, that is a different religion. 

As usual, The Babylon Bee predicted this. 

Christians wanting to practice Christianity on Christmas is a threat to the proper order of the world. 

ROME — Christmas is becoming a new front line in Europe’s culture wars.

Far-right parties are claiming the festive season as their own, recasting Christmas as a marker of Christian civilization that is under threat and positioning themselves as its last line of defense against a supposedly hostile, secular left.

The trope echoes a familiar refrain across the Atlantic that was first propagated by Fox News, where hosts have inveighed against a purported “War on Christmas” for years. U.S. President Donald Trump claims to have “brought back” the phrase “Merry Christmas” in the United States, framing it as defiance against political correctness. Now, European far-right parties more usually focused on immigration or law-and-order concerns have adopted similar language, recasting Christmas as the latest battleground in a broader struggle over culture.

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Is it perhaps true that there is an elite hostility to Christianity, and that it is getting a far different treatment than religions that are actually alien to Western culture?

In Great Britain there are cities that put up trees, but explicitly make them "multicultural" in order to avoid offending their Muslim citizens. Muslims have been invading Christmas markets and even attacking them, with several terrorist attacks barely avoided. 

Ironically enough, Emirates Airlines is more in the Christmas spirit than European airlines, which have been carefully avoiding the use of the word "Christmas." 

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POLITICO wants you to know that the Islamification of Europe and the growing Muslim presence in other Western countries is a myth. All those bollards protecting Christmas markets are perfectly normal, and it is only crazy right wingers who think that Christianity is being driven out of the public square as Islam replaces it. 

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has made the defense of Christmas traditions central to her political identity. She has repeatedly framed the holiday as part of the nation’s endangered heritage, railing against what she calls “ideological” attempts to dilute it.

“How can my culture offend you?” Meloni has asked in the past, defending nativity scenes in public spaces. She has argued that children should learn the values of the Nativity — rather than just associating Christmas with food and presents — and rejected the idea that long-standing traditions should be altered. This year, Meloni said she was abstaining from alcohol until Christmas, portraying herself as a practitioner of spirituality and tradition.  

France’s National Rally and Spain’s Vox have similarly opposed secularist or “woke” efforts to replace religious imagery with neutral seasonal language, and advocated for nativity scenes in town halls. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has warned that Christmas markets are losing their “German character,” amplifying disinformation about Muslim traditions edging out Christian ones.

It's pure gaslighting. 

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A number of Gulf countries are trying to Westernize, banning the Muslim Brotherhood, and ensuring that Christians actually feel more welcome there than in some places in the West. While no Muslim country will ever truly Westernize, the leaders in many are working to modernize and integrate more fully with the West. 

Christians in Western countries should not go out of their way to make Muslims afraid to practice their religion. We believe in freedom of religion. But if your religion requires suppressing the practice of others, such as Christianity, then too bad. Christianity is integral to Western culture. 

Even Richard Dawkins, the most famous atheist in the world who has long been dismissive of Christianity, has come around to the truth that Christian values are integral to our culture and should be celebrated, not suppressed. When Dawkins is worried that the West is losing its Christian roots, perhaps extremist right-wingers have a point, POLITICO. 

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There is a reason why, until recently, the West was often referred to as Christendom. Roughly speaking, the West could until recently be defined as those countries that overlapped with the extent of the Roman Empire at its height, although Western values spread after the Enlightenment. That a very rough and ready definition, but for my purposes it works in this context. 

Transnationalists obviously are hostile to Christianity. That is obviously their right as individuals and even a legitimate political argument to make, but to pretend that there is not a transnationalist hostility to Christianity and that it is "extreme" to fight back against this is pure gaslighting. 

It's as ridiculous as the lefties claiming that JD Vance was exaggerating that for many years white people have been asked or even forced to apologize for being white. The entire ideology of "decolonization" is based on hostility to whiteness, and they say so openly. 

The folks at POLITICO may think it is a good idea that Christianity is being pushed out of the public square. Fair enough. Make your case. 

Monday Music "Give it Up" By KC and the Sunshine Band

 This was KC and the Sunshine band entry in the 80's, I thought it was a pretty cool song, As talented as they were, the backlash against Disco caught them pretty hard, not as bad as the "BeeGee's" got it, but near as bad due to the extravagant show aspect of their act.  This song was on my cassette on my Mustang

  Looked like this car, same Mustang type, same color, not this car(Wish it was) means that I have it:)

 And I would drive around Stuttgart and other places with this song, the moody blues, AC/DC, Don Henley, the Eagles...Heck I had an eclectic selection of "burn tapes", well anyway.   This was one of the songs.

"Give It Up" was a hit song for KC and the Sunshine Band, although it was simply credited as KC in many countries, including the US. Following the backlash against many disco artists on the charts at the beginning of the 1980s, the song was a comeback hit for the act in the US, where it peaked at No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1984. The song had been an even bigger hit in the UK several months earlier, where it had hit No. 1 for three weeks in August 1983. It went on to become the 18th best-selling single of the year in the UK. It was the last of the act's hits in the US and UK, and the most successful of its 10 UK hits.

I used to catch the video on MTV and of course "Night Tracks" on NBC, I always thought the video and the song was cool and catchy and I always thought KC and the Sunshine Band was a neat band and they represented the 70's well and they were trying to get past the Disco backlash that was prevalent at the time.

"Fortified, Yet defenseless, The West Suicidal Response to Terrorism.

 I tend to agree, the people of old from the West, would have just eradicated the scrounge from their country, but now they refuse to mention for fear that they might "offend" or be called a "racist" or an islamophobe"...Oh the horror.....the shame.   When regular people are fighting back like that 12 year old girl did in scotland did because she was tired of her and her sister being harassed by "Migrants" and nobody in power would do anything about it, they would turn a blind eye, unless you made a mean tweet or some other social media post, then the full weight of the British judicial system would fall on you.  Me personally, I have concerns about travelling to the former Great Britain because they would lock me up because of my social media post

   The same thing is going on in the rest of Western Europe, the Europeans are afraid to call out the Muslim invaders for what they are, and the common people know but the people in power don't listen to the "Riff-Raff", and any deprevations done by the "refugees" are not experienced by the power class so the S-A's continue, the r*apes continue, in england they have the pakistani grooming gangs and nobody does anything about it...."we can't appear intolerant...mind you".  In a couple of generations, the conquest of Western Europe will be complete, and the people in Eastern Europe will have a hard time stopping the flow of refugees from the west.  I won't live to see it.  The people that built the Sistine Chapel and other great works are being replaced by people that can't build mud huts effectively.

Yeah I shamelessly clipped this one also.

Michael Smith

13h ·

When terrorists strike, Western governments have perfected a predictable playbook: retreat, restrict, and reassure the public that their growing helplessness equals safety. This defensive surrender, while wrapped in the language of security, represents a catastrophic misunderstanding of how free societies survive existential threats. We’re building a modern Maginot Line—and pretending it’s victory.

The Maginot Line failed because France chose expensive static fortifications over adaptable strength. The Germans simply went around it. Today’s security theater follows the same doomed logic. Birmingham installs “hostile vehicle mitigation bollards and upgraded CCTV at strategic locations” to keep the city centre safe. The Australian Prime Minister responds to violence by demanding even tighter gun restrictions on law-abiding citizens. These aren’t solutions—they’re admissions of defeat dressed up as policy.

Consider what this approach actually accomplishes. Bollards protect one street while terrorists strike the next. CCTV cameras create perfect footage of atrocities for the evening news. Gun control ensures that when violence erupts, victims are guaranteed to be defenseless for the critical minutes before police arrive—if they arrive at all. We’re not making citizens safer; we’re making them more photogenic victims.

This is the bunker mentality in action: harden specific targets, disarm the public, expand surveillance, and hope terrorists don’t notice the obvious workarounds. But terrorism succeeds precisely by exploiting vulnerability and spreading fear. When governments respond by rendering citizens even more dependent on protection that cannot be everywhere at once, they validate the terrorist’s central message: you are helpless, your leaders cannot save you, and your way of life is indefensible.

The alternative requires acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: in a free society, security is a distributed responsibility, not a service governments can provide through concrete barriers and security cameras. This means empowering citizens to respond to threats rather than training them to cower and wait for rescue. It means recognizing that capable, trained civilians are force multipliers, not liabilities to be managed.

History demonstrates this clearly. Israel’s security model, forged through necessity, emphasizes armed citizens and immediate response over passive measures. Switzerland’s approach reflects similar wisdom: a prepared populace is itself the deterrent. These societies haven’t eliminated terrorism, but they’ve fundamentally changed the equation. An attacker facing potential resistance from multiple directions confronts a vastly different scenario than one assured several minutes of unopposed slaughter.

The standard objection—that armed civilians would cause chaos—reveals the bankruptcy of current thinking. This argument demands that citizens remain helpless while assuming they’re too incompetent for anything else. But proper training and clear legal frameworks address these concerns far better than policies guaranteeing that only criminals come armed. The real question is whether we trust free people with the responsibility of freedom, or whether we prefer the comforting illusion of safety through submission.

Each bollard installed, each surveillance camera mounted, each restriction imposed on law-abiding citizens represents a choice: are we free people capable of defending ourselves and our communities, or subjects to be managed and protected by an apparatus that demonstrably cannot be everywhere at once? The bunker mentality chooses the latter while pretending it’s the former.

True security in a free society doesn’t come from fortifying targets and disarming citizens. It comes from distributed resilience—the recognition that strength resides in the fabric of civil society itself, not in fixed defenses that can be bypassed or overwhelmed. When Birmingham installs more bollards—and inventing Orwellian names for them like Hostile Vehicle Mitigation barriers—and Canberra demands more gun restrictions on top of some of the strictest in the Western world, they’re not solving the problem. They’re building their own Maginot Line while congratulating themselves on their prudence.

The Maginot Line was expensive, impressive—and ultimately useless— because it was static and rigid. Our current response to terrorism follows the same failed playbook. Strategists bank on the enemy following their playbook.

The question is whether we’ll recognize this before the cost becomes unbearable, or whether we’ll continue fortifying while surrendering the very freedoms that make our societies worth defending.

"The Left's Cynicism Blinds Us to Real Threats."

 

I shamelessly clipped this from Farcebook while taking a "Microbreak" from work ;) . A guy named Michael Smith wrote this, I follow him on that blighted platform.

2d ·

The left’s reflexive dismissal of conservative warnings creates a cognitive filter that obscures rising violence and extremism.

I stumbled upon something important over the weekend while writing an essay I called “A Review of a Review.” At the time, I thought my insight was about the subject matter itself—a book review by a leftist critic examining another leftist’s work, where the reviewer attempted to agree disagreeably with the original author’s premise. No matter how vigorously leftism engages in its internecine warfare, its practitioners somehow always unify around one core belief: they aren’t really the bad guys. Capitalists and capitalism are.

But the real discovery lay elsewhere. Both the book under review and the review itself expressed a foundational assumption of contemporary progressive thought: there are essentially no legitimate issues raised by the right. To the left, the real issue is the right itself. Political combat becomes purely a contest for power, waged through marketing, messaging, and advertising—a perpetual campaign to find an advantage lasting just long enough to survive the next election cycle.

This revelation returned to me this morning as I considered recent events: shootings at Brown University, the Bondi Beach attack in Sydney, Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the coordinated Transtifa attacks on churches and schools, and the virulent pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protests poisoning our campuses. Suddenly, the pattern clarified. The cynicism I identified in that book review doesn’t just describe progressive intellectual discourse—it actively obscures our ability to recognize and respond to genuine threats.

When the left treats conservative concerns as mere political theater, it creates a dangerous cognitive filter. If progressives—and this emphatically includes our media institutions—genuinely believe that issues only exist because the right amplifies them for electoral advantage, then those issues cannot be understood on their own terms. They become artifacts of political manipulation rather than problems demanding serious attention.

Consider the implications. Antisemitism isn’t evaluated as resurgent hatred with deep historical roots; it’s dismissed as a Republican talking point designed to divide Democratic constituencies. Radical Islamism isn’t examined as an ideology committed to violence against Western institutions; it’s reframed as blowback from American foreign policy. The phenomenon of troubled individuals claiming trans identity and committing acts of violence cannot be discussed candidly because doing so risks offending progressive pieties about gender ideology. Even discussions of untreated severe mental illness devolve into debates about healthcare access rather than confronting the reality of dangerous individuals circulating freely in our communities.

This isn’t merely an academic problem. When threats are systematically minimized or recontextualized as political opportunism, we lose the ability to assess risk accurately, allocate resources appropriately, or demand effective preventive action from our institutions.

If we truly understood the magnitude of these threats—if we could see past the obscuring lens of progressive cynicism—we would not be perpetually surprised by stabbings, immolations, acid attacks, assassinations, and ideologically motivated massacres. We would recognize the warning signs accumulating around us. We would demand that our educational institutions stop indoctrinating students in hatred of Israel and Western civilization. We would insist that our legal system stop releasing violent offenders and mentally unstable individuals back onto our streets. We would require our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to take seriously the networks of radicals operating openly in our midst.

The genius of this progressive epistemic closure is that it makes the left unfalsifiable. When crime rises, it’s because Republicans won’t fund social programs. When antisemitic violence surges on college campuses, it’s because Republicans weaponize accusations of antisemitism to silence legitimate criticism of Israel. When radical gender ideology produces troubled young people who commit violence, we’re told that the real danger comes from conservative refusal to affirm their identities. The actual evidence before our eyes—the patterns of violence, the networks of extremism, the institutional capture by dangerous ideologies—all of it dissolves into Republican scaremongering.

This dynamic creates a perverse situation where progressives can simultaneously claim moral authority for their “compassion” while enabling the very conditions that produce mass casualties. They can advocate for policies that predictably increase violence and disorder while blaming conservatives for noticing and objecting. They can dominate institutions that indoctrinate students in radical ideologies while insisting that the real threat comes from the political right’s rhetoric about these problems.

The cost of this cynicism is measured in bodies. Every time we’re told that concerns about radical Islam, revolutionary trans activism, or campus antisemitism are merely Republican electoral strategy, we lose an opportunity to prevent the next attack. Every time legitimate security concerns are dismissed as bigotry or fear-mongering, we allow the networks of radicalization to operate more freely.

We need a return to epistemic humility and honesty. We need institutions willing to acknowledge that threats can be real even when conservatives identify them. We need a media capable of investigating problems rather than reflexively defending progressive orthodoxy. And we need citizens courageous enough to trust their own observations over the comforting narrative that reduces all political conflict to a cynical game of electoral advantage.

Until then, we’ll continue to be surprised by the predictable consequences of threats we refused to take seriously.

"Who Ruined Europe"

 

I have blogged "A LOT ABOUT EUROPE" if y'all want to spend several hours going through 13+ years + worth of blog post, LOL, some have stood the test of time....others ...not soo much.  This article pertains mostly to the snide Eurowheenies in Western Europe.  The Eastern Europeans have their stuff together, especially Poland.

    I clipped this off "Farcebook"

Daniel Foubert

WHO ruined Europe?

Yes, EVERYONE did it:

1. Angela Merkel, the physicist who forgot Newton’s Third Law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. She looked at the European energy grid, decided nuclear power was "scary," and replaced it with a direct pipeline to the Kremlin. She basically invited the fox into the henhouse, handed him a napkin, and then retired to write a memoir about "stability." She effectively dismantled the continent’s borders with a single press conference, inviting a migration crisis that broke the social contract, all while muttering "Wir schaffen das" as the infrastructure crumbled under the weight of her moral vanity.

2. Emmanuel Macron, a man who thinks he is the reincarnation of a Roman deity but runs the country like a McKinsey consultant trying to downsize a bakery. He believes he can solve the war in Ukraine by talking Vladimir Putin into a coma with four-hour lectures on Enlightenment philosophy. He is currently auditing the concept of "French culture" to see if it can be streamlined.

3. Adolf Hitler, the failed watercolor enthusiast who took an art school rejection so personally he decided to redecorate the continent with high explosives. He single-handedly ruined the toothbrush mustache, the name "Adolf," and the concept of "German efficiency" for the next thousand years. He set the bar for "bad neighbors" so high that everyone else gets a participation trophy just for not invading Poland.

4. The Habsburgs, the ultimate proof that you should really branch out on Tinder. They treated the gene pool like a private VIP section and turned their family tree into a wreath. Their grand strategy for ruling Europe was "Let’s marry our cousins until our chins are so large they have their own zip codes." They spent 600 years acquiring half the planet through weddings, only to lose it all because their driver took a wrong turn in Sarajevo. They held an empire together with duct tape and aggressive waltzing until it collapsed under the weight of its own genetic defects.

5. Napoleon, who tried to turn Europe into a family franchise (Bonaparte Bros. & Co.) and accidentally invented "Nationalism" because people needed a specific word to describe exactly how much they wanted him to leave.

6. The English, who spent 500 years playing "Balance of Power" (read: sabotaging everyone else), then got drunk, and view the continent not as a cultural partner, but as a place to send stag parties to vomit in historic fountains, proving that while they lost the Empire, they kept the audacity.

7. The Germans, who believe that if you execute a terrible idea with sufficient efficiency, it becomes a stroke of genius. They don't have "individual opinions," they have "factory settings." They marched in perfect lockstep to shut down their nuclear plants in favor of burning brown coal, calling it a "Green Transition"—which is the intellectual equivalent of cutting off your own legs to lose weight, then praising the precision of the saw. They are convinced that running full speed into a brick wall is fine, provided the wall is DIN-certified and everyone does it together.

8. The Russians, who think "international borders" are just typos on a map that need correcting with tanks. They provide Europe with its two favorite historical exports: existential dread and freezing to death. They operate on a political philosophy of "If I can't have it, nobody can," which is why they are currently turning the East into a parking lot.

9. The EU, a retirement home for failed national politicians. It is a Kafkaesque labyrinth where 10,000 people in Brussels spend six months debating the legal definition of a carrot while the building is on fire. It is funded by your VAT, presided over by unelected bureaucrats with excellent dental plans, and produces more paper than a forestry company.

10. The WEF, the unelected board of directors for Planet Earth. They ruined Europe by promoting policies that hollowed out the middle class in the name of "stakeholder capitalism." They fly in on private jets to tell factory workers to lower their standard of living, effectively turning the continent into a feudal system where the serfs own nothing, eat bugs, and are told to be happy about it.

11. George Soros, the currency speculator masquerading as a secular saint. He ruined Europe by treating entire national economies as casino chips, famously breaking the Bank of England for profit and then using the winnings to fund the erosion of the nation-states. He operates the "Open Society" less like a philanthropy and more like a universal solvent, pouring billions into NGOs designed to dissolve borders, traditions, and social cohesion. He is the unelected architect of a post-national Europe, a man with a god complex who believes he can engineer civilization from a hedge fund desk, viewing distinct cultures as "obstacles" to be liquidated like a distressed asset.

12. Immigrationists, who looked at the fall of Rome and thought, "You know what the problem was? Not enough diversity." They believe borders are just social constructs, like manners or solvency, that stand in the way of a vibrant, chaotic utopia where everyone holds hands while the welfare state collapses under the weight of good intentions.

13. Ecologists, upper-middle-class art critics who think the best way to lower global temperatures is to throw pumpkin soup at a Van Gogh. They are fighting Big Oil by creating massive traffic jams on the M25, forcing thousands of cars to idle for four hours.

14. The Socialists, who think "economics" is just a vibe. They believe that if you tax the rich enough, money will magically appear from the ether to pay for free unicorn rides. They ran out of other people's money in 1989 but haven't checked their bank balance since, preferring to pay debts with IOUs and "solidarity."

15. The European Establishments, shadowy clubs of people who all went to the same three boarding schools where they majored in "Condescension" and "Failing Upwards." They decided that "competence" was an outdated concept that interfered with their lunch schedule and are professionally surprised by outcomes that everyone else saw coming five years ago.

16. Weak Men, who turned masculinity into a permanent apology tour. These are men who treat assertiveness as a microaggression and testosterone as a hazardous material. They are so terrified of offending a woman that they have evolved into a species of sentient doormats, viewing their own spine as an optional accessory that might upset the HR department. They smile through their own emasculation, nodding along to policies that erase them, and would rather watch their civilization burn than risk a slightly awkward conversation at a dinner party. They didn't just open the gates to the barbarians; they apologized for the lock being too oppressive and offered to carry their luggage.

17. Feminists, who proved equality is real by showing that women can be just as disastrously incompetent as men. They replaced "The Patriarchy" with "Girl-Bossing the economy into a ditch". They doubled the pool of eligible ruin-bringers, which is statistically impressive.

18. The Woke, the morality police who will cancel you for using the wrong pronoun for a hamster but don't know how to change a lightbulb. They are busy deconstructing the colonial implications of a cheese sandwich while the power grid fails and the industrial base crumbles into dust.

19. Darth Vader. He represents the ultimate bureaucratic dream: a faceless, unelected technocrat who can strangle dissent from across the room without ever raising his voice. He tried to federalize the galaxy through terror, proving that a centralized superstate works perfectly right up until a farm boy in a glorified crop duster exploits a regulatory loophole in your thermal exhaust port to blow up the whole economy.

20. Saruman, the patron saint of Heavy Industry and deforestation. He tried to modernize Central Europe with a sensible policy of "machines over trees" and was cancelled by a bunch of angry walking broccoli.

21. Sauron, the original advocate for a unified Europe under one (literal) eye. He was a visionary industrialist who favored heavy surveillance and deregulation of the orc labor market, but his foreign policy regarding Gondor was a bit aggressive for the UN Security Council.

22. Satan, who is actually in therapy for impostor syndrome. He looked at European politics and realized he simply couldn't compete with this level of self-destructive creativity.