Rivers of blood

Soldier beheaded in London terror attack

A British soldier was beheaded Wednesday on a London street in a “sickening and barbaric” attack by a pair of cleaver-wielding jihadists, officials and witnesses said.

The brazen and heinous slaying occurred in broad daylight in front of stunned witnesses, who said the attackers screamed “Allah Akbar.” British Prime David Cameron Cameron said the atrocity appeared to be “terror-related.”

I am not sure what else is to be expected when the West invades barbarian lands and then invites the barbarians here. Cameron is a pathetic sissy calling this "terror-related." No, Prime Minister, it's far worse than anything you and the rest of the Cathedral's blank slate adherents can imagine. It's just the sort of thing that barbaric primitives in thrall to a hostile creed are going to do when placed in an unarmed, passive society. The immigrants are what they are; they do not belong and never should have been invited. If there's to be outrage, it should be directed to the people who dream up these awful social engineering schemes.

Enoch Powell was right, and there will be blood.

Apparently, the World's Most Beautiful Woman

Forty-year old Gwyneth Paltrow



How old is People Magazine's demographic? This is ridiculous. As admirable as Gwyneth Paltrow may be as an entrepeneur, wife and mother she is by no stretch the "world's most beautiful woman." Historically, people were grandparents by her age. I will spare Mrs. Paltrow the indignity of posting any number of women in their 20's more beautiful than her. There is a reason for this: women in their 20's have viable eggs in their ovaries; Gwyneth Paltrow does not.

Incidentally, I was motivated to write this post by seeing some old (in every sense) Sex In The City re-runs. I had never watched the show before, and didn't realize how heavily it was targeted toward middle-aged and geriatric women.

Here's a TED talk that made a lot of people in the linked comment thread uncomfortable: Why 30 is not the new 20.

By the way, 40 is not the new 30, nor is 50 (which I will be in six months) the new 40.

"It comes as a shock when the truth dawns that every young person is just an older person waiting to happen, and it happens a lot sooner than anyone ever thinks." - Ben Elton

Newsflash

Health care is for sick people.

New results from a landmark study, released on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, go a long way toward answering those questions. The study, called the Oregon Health Study, compares thousands of low-income people in Oregon who received access to Medicaid with an identical population that did not.

It found that those who gained Medicaid coverage spent more on health care, making more visits to doctors and trips to the hospital. But the study suggests that Medicaid coverage did not make those adults much healthier, at least within the two-year time frame of the research, judging by their blood pressure, blood sugar and other measures. It did, however, substantially reduce the incidence of depression, and it made them vastly more financially secure.

Via Marginal Revolution

In summary, a study of Medicaid recipients found that socialized medicine resulted in people using more socialized medicine without getting any healthier.

I could have told them this and I wouldn't even need a federal grant. Health care is for sick people. Wellness means eat a balanced diet, exercise, don’t smoke and drink in moderation if at all. Obamacare will be a money pit that does nothing to improve public health.

The Stranger

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk--
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control--
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf--
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

--Rudyard Kipling (1908).

England and Rome

The story of the Reformation needs reforming

For five centuries England has been in denial about the role of Roman Catholicism in shaping it. The coin in your pocket declares the monarch to be Defender of the Faith. Since 1558 that has meant the Protestant faith, but Henry VIII actually got the title from the Pope for defending Catholicism against Luther. Henry eventually broke with Rome because the Pope refused him a divorce, and along with the papacy went saints, pilgrimage, the monastic life, eventually even the Mass itself – the pillars of medieval Christianity.

To explain that revolution, the Protestant reformers told a story. Henry had rejected not the Catholic Church, but a corrupt pseudo-Christianity which had led the world astray. John Foxe embodied this story unforgettably in his Book of Martyrs, subsidised by the Elizabethan government as propaganda against Catholicism at home and abroad. For Foxe, Queen Elizabeth was her country’s saviour, and the Reformation itself the climax of an age-old struggle between God, represented by the monarch, and the devil, represented by the Pope...

But in multicultural England, the inherited Protestant certainties are fading. It is time to look again at the Reformation story. There was nothing inevitable about the Reformation. The heir to the throne is uneasy about swearing to uphold the Protestant faith, and it seems less obvious than it once did that the religion which gave us the Wilton Diptych and Westminster Abbey, or the music of Tallis, Byrd and Elgar, is intrinsically un-English. The destruction of the monasteries and most of the libraries, music and art of medieval England now looks what it always was – not a religious breakthrough, but a cultural calamity. The slaughtered Popish martyrs look less like an alien fifth column than the voices of a history England was not allowed to have.

A spiritual calamity as well. The Anglosphere will not recover.

What if, what if ... Orthodox ecclesiology: every nation gets its own Church. But Rome clings to empire and Henry really was just making it up as he went along.

Britain still has serious thinkers, and in conjunction with Peter Hitchens' acknowledgment that multiculturalism is really just anti-white Marxist hatred, perhaps they are fumbling their way back to see what went wrong.

Decline and death, I

1. Dog and Man. The ancient contract between our two species has been breached. Dog breeders are creating sociopathic killing machines and mutants incapable of natural birth. Alexander Fiske-Harrison at Taki's relates the account of a 14-year old girl mauled to death by four beasts. As one commenter at the OP notes, the girl was probably menstruating though eating a meat pie in front of four feral animals would suffice. Man in our scientific age no longer understands Nature.

2. "A king out of water, in a dry and kingless land." Lawrence Auster died this Good Friday on the Western calendar after a long fight with pancreatic cancer, and receiving Unction in the Roman Rite. God rest his brilliant, angry soul. Unqualified Reservations remembers. (Friends of Lawrence are maintaining his blog, A View From The Right.

3. The Last Psychiatrist gets drunk and posts about Social Security Disability. My line of work brings me a number of incidental contacts with this program. The taxpayer is being ripped off.

(Life is getting in the way of my favorite hobby, so I'm going to group more links and this seems a good category to post in seriatim. I've mentioned before about trying to strike a more upbeat tone, but the internet is where I go to be grumpy. Thankfully, I do have a life with positive people and much to enjoy.)

Dr. Pat

The diagnosis

What killed the New [Republican] Majority?

First, there was mass immigration, which brought in 40 to 50 million people, legal and illegal, poor and working class, and almost all from the Third World. The GOP agreed to the importation of a vast new constituency that is now kicking the GOP into an early grave...

Second came party acquiescence in dropping half the nation off the income tax rolls, while making half dependent on government for food assistance, income support, rent, health care and the education of their kids from Head Start through Pell Grants...

Third, to accommodate its K Street bundlers, the GOP embraced globalism, empowering Corporate America to shed its U.S. labor force, move its plants to Mexico, Asia and China, bring its foreign-made goods back to the USA free of charge and pocket the difference.

Fourth, rather than bringing the troops home after our Cold War triumph and telling our allies the free rides were over, Bush I and II went crusading for a “New World Order” to “end tyranny in our world”...

The good doctor can promise no cure.

Yet, one matter over which the GOP had no control is the triumph of the counterculture.

What might be called the old morality—that abortion is the killing of an unborn child, an abomination, that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral—has been relegated by scores of millions, especially among the young, to the dark ages of the 20th century.

Americans who adhere to this traditional morality, rooted in Christian tradition and Biblical truth, are culturally outgunned and may now be outnumbered. They may have lost America for good.

What can the GOP do about this? Nothing.

What will the GOP do? Probably what comes naturally—declare itself “tolerant” and respectful of all views, pro-life and pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage and pro-traditional marriage.

Maybe Mencius Moldbug has some ideas.