A TRAIN on the Norfolk Southern line that was carrying large quantities of hazardous chemicals, including vinyl chloride, derailed a week ago in East Palestine, Ohio and some say the extent of the disaster is being covered up. The chemicals apparently were drained from the trains and then set on fire for disposal, causing toxic clouds for hundreds of miles. Whether calling it a “Chernobyl-like” catastrophe (see video) is alarmism, I cannot say, but caution against rushing to conclusions or dismissing the seriousness of the story.

A comment found here:

So, ya. I can confirm the massive budget cuts at Norfolk Southern being a likely cause of this. My brother worked for them as the railroad equivalent of a mechanic and got laid off about three years ago due to the railroad adopting a “precision railroading” policy. To very quickly simplify the policy, the idea is to cut jobs within the company by the thousands, removing mechanics, track repairmen, general maintenance, and even engineers who ran the trains, while also adding too many cars to the trains and simply not working on engines or cars when they needed repairs and simply doing the absolute bare minimum to maintain a “functional” railroad. Read More »

THE Tin Pan Alley Composer Joe Burke (1884–1950) wrote this love song, “Dear One.” It was performed and recorded by Henry Burr in 1925.

It’s a pleasant, sentimental Valentine’s Day tune.

Recording courtesy of Library of Congress

Pair of Lovers, 1480

SOME St. Valentine’s Day wisdom from Dawn Eden, author of The Thrill of the Chaste:

Human beings are created for bonding, and we attain our individual empowerment — I would prefer to say flourishing — to the extent that we are able to actualize our full potential in society. For that reason, the sexual revolution has disempowered women, because it has fed them the lie that they will gain power to the extent that they are atomized — removed from the so-called dependence of husband and children.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bashi-Bazouk,” 1868

THE METROPOLITAN Museum of Art in New York City is a magnificent temple to art. Its immense galleries celebrate through painstaking preservation and exhibition the best of cultures around the world, offering the chance to explore and gain understanding of Ancient Egypt, Africa, Asia, Islam, Ancient Greece and Rome, and, of course, various ages of European civilization. You will not find anywhere in the non-Western world more sensitivity to and respect for the artistic efforts of distant strangers and races. The artworks in the museum’s collections also include many great works by Europeans depicting and often valorizing foreign cultures, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bashi-Bazouk,” shown above.

However, a new exhibit at the museum condemns the culture that produced such a museum and its rich diversity. Heather Mac Donald writes at City Journal:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit whose curatorial philosophy, were it widely adopted, would spell the end of art and of art museums. The art press greeted the show ecstatically, as a sign of the Met’s new direction. This prognosis is undoubtedly correct.

Fictions of Emancipation (on view through March 5, 2023) is built around an 1873 sculpture by the brilliant French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The marble bust, titled Why Born Enslaved!, portrays a black woman, bound by a rope, looking over her left shoulder with a piercing expression of defiance, incredulity, and contempt.

Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.

I highly recommend Mac Donald’s excellent article in its entirety.

This kind of exhibit, nothing more really than bitterly ugly, Communist-style agitprop, is not surprising of course, but still it’s depressing. The great museums of this country are destined for erasure. They will be obliterated in the flames of resentment and envy. Where truth is not, beauty cannot long survive. Read More »

IN HONOR of black history month, I recommend another essay by the late Elizabeth Wright, who wrote profiles of many successful black businessmen of the pre-civil rights era:

Like so many men of his era, Charles Henry Douglass seized opportunities when they came, and created them when they didn’t. Confident, enterprising and imaginative, he was perfectly matched for the world of business.

His career as a businessman, in Macon, Georgia, spanned 1898 to 1940, as he successfully weathered even the stock market crash of 1929. In the course of those years, he owned or leased close to 100 properties, along with restaurants, saloons, two movie theaters and a hotel.

He was president of the Middle Georgia Savings & Investment Co. for eight years, afterward serving as a director. Early in his career, he had bought shares in this bank (when it was the Georgia Loan & Savings Co.). It is also the place where he met the bank’s cashier, Fannie Appling, who was to become his wife. Respected as one of the black community’s most prosperous and influential citizens, he was credited with helping the city of Macon enlarge its business life.

Who was Douglass? He was a man whose mother and father died when he was barely out of his teens, leaving him to figure out how to support his two younger sisters. With only a rural elementary school education, he became an agricultural laborer. He held his next job, as a carriage driver for a doctor, while also working at a candy manufacturing plant. He managed to support the family until the mid-1890s, when both sisters married. Douglass then left Macon for more profitable work in another city. There, he saved money and returned to Macon in 1898, with $24 to spare.

With this, he bought a partnership in a small bicycle repair and rental business. Thus began a brilliant business career, to which he applied his savvy and intelligence. About the bicycle business, he said, “I did fairly well until the automobile craze came, then I sold out and went into the hotel and real estate business, in which I prospered.” Read More »

LIKE most modern words, “Heresy” is used both vaguely and diversely. It is used vaguely because the modern mind is as averse to precision in ideas as it is enamored of precision in measurement. It is used diversely because, according to the man who uses it, it may represent any one of fifty things.

Today, with most people (of those who use the English language), the word “Heresy” connotes bygone and forgotten quarrels, an old prejudice against rational examination. Heresy is therefore thought to be of no contemporary interest. Interest in it is dead, because it deals with matter no one now takes seriously. It is understood that a man may interest himself in a heresy from archaeological curiosity, but if he affirm that it has been of great effect on history and still is, today, of living contemporary moment, he will be hardly understood.

Yet the subject of heresy in general is of the highest importance to the individual and to society, and heresy in its particular meaning (which is that of heresy in Christian doctrine) is of special interest for anyone who would understand Europe: the character of Europe and the story of Europe.

— Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (Sheed and Ward, 1938)

THE FATHER of 14-year-old Adriana Kuch, who killed herself after being attacked by black students in the hallway of a New Jersey high school, complains of protests by her peers.

His initial reaction was harsher:

Outraged by the school’s lack-luster response, Michael seethed to NBC New York – slamming the institution that his daughter attended.

‘A kid is assaulted with a weapon and their policy is not to call the police or file a report,’ he said to the broadcaster.

He then wrote about the vicious attack on his Facebook calling the attack ‘planned.’

‘These four girls planned and executed an attack. If you watch the videos I have, they are laughing while talking about what they are going to do at the start of the video,’ he wrote.

The tragic suicide of this young girl, who obviously had other problems but was reportedly kind and thoughtful, is emblematic of the moral suicide of the white race, which has surrendered itself to decadent guilt, political vanity and cultural self-erasure.

As for this school, I feel sorry for every single student. What a rotten place. It’s no wonder that non-white students pumped with vile racial hatred almost every day would attack a white girl with fists and racial slurs.

TROLLING through the archives, I found a 2015 post about Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois — food for thought this Black History Month. But I was especially drawn to the remarks of  commenter Renée from View from the Right:

I am a (mostly) black woman who has white relatives and grew up in a predominately white Midwestern town. I went east to a very liberal college. Nothing prepared me for white liberal students’ need to verify that I was a victim of racism at every turn, and that I felt blacks were being kept out. There were very few blacks at this school, most of them slightly conservative, and we all agreed on one thing: the reason there were so few blacks there was that a school practically in the wilderness with no business program could not attract a lot of blacks. The lack of blacks was not due to racism. No white liberal would believe me on this point. I was constantly asked what it was like to be a black at this school and whether I felt uncomfortable around so many whites. I quickly learned to avoid white people obsessed with the black experience. They were only interested in being entertained by me (they would compare the black students to each other and favor those who were the most ‘hood) or in finding in me an object for their paternalism. Many blacks did not see through this. Read More »

“AS science makes progress in any subject-matter, poetry recedes from it. The two cannot stand together; they belong respectively to two modes of viewing things, which are contradictory of each other. Reason investigates, analyzes, numbers, weighs, measures, ascertains, locates, the objects of its contemplation, and thus gains a scientific knowledge of them. Science results in system, which is complex unity; poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system. The aim of science is to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them; that is (to use the familiar term), to master them, or to be superior to them. Its success lies in being able to draw a line round them, and to tell where each of them is to be found within that circumference, and how each lies relatively to all the rest. Its mission is to destroy ignorance, doubt, surmise, suspense, illusions, fears, deceits, according to the “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas” of the Poet, whose whole passage, by the way, may be taken as drawing out the contrast between the poetical and the scientific. But as to the poetical, very different is the frame of mind which is necessary for its perception. It demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet; that we should feel them to be above and beyond us, that we should look up to them, and that, instead of fancying that we can comprehend them, we should take for granted that we are surrounded and comprehended by them ourselves. It implies that we understand them to be vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious; so that at best we are only forming conjectures about them, not conclusions, for the phenomena which they present admit of many explanations, and we cannot know the true one. Poetry does not address the reason, but the imagination and affections; it leads to admiration, enthusiasm, devotion, love. The vague, the uncertain, the irregular, the sudden, are among its attributes or sources. Hence it is that a child’s mind is so full of poetry, because he knows so little; and an old man of the world so devoid of poetry, because his experience of facts is so wide.”

— Cardinal John Henry Newman, The Mission of St. Benedict, 1858

Utopien 04, Makis E. Warlamis

THE UTOPIAN does not believe in the perfectibility of individuals. He is quite pessimistic about the individual. Instead, he believes in the perfectibility of society. The collective can — and must — evolve in order to ensure individual and universal happiness.

The very finiteness of the individual life offends the utopian. He demands immortality, not in another world, but in the right social system. He is zealously optimistic when it comes to what human beings can achieve under the enlightened rule of social engineers or “philosopher kings.”

Understanding the utopian mentality is very important because it is so common today and has strongly influenced all of our lives. The idea, for instance, of controlling the climate through social action, global no less, is utopian to the core.

Étienne Cabet, a 19th-century French philosopher, was one of many thinkers who envisioned utopia. In his Travels to Icaria, he described communities of complete human equality, group ownership and workers cooperatives:

Stables, hospitals, bakeries, factories and warehouses are all on the outskirts of the city, and the inhabitants live in the centre, where the streets are clean, broad and straight. The houses, clustered with balconies, are never more than four stories high … The government is communitarian. The Republic of Icaria is in charge of administration and public services, for instance, but the laws are made by the citizens according to the dictates of their needs and consciences. (Dictionary of Imaginary Places; Macmillan Publishing Co., 1980; p. 173)

Icarians established real communes in Missouri, Iowa and California before the experiment faded away.

In The Republic, his famous dialogue, Plato described the ideal city-state ruled by a philosopher king and where all human reproduction and child-rearing is regulated by the state, so that parents do not know their own children. But utopian thinking predates Plato. It has existed since the beginning of human society — and it will always exist, as Thomas Molnar says in his outstanding book Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. You might call Eve the very first utopian, for she was snared by the promise of a better world, in which she would “know good and evil.” The serpent did not offer riches or beautiful objects. He offered her abstractions. He offered her enlightenment. It is from the first human beings that we inherited “the utopian temptation.”

The utopian seeks political solutions to most human problems. He is willing to sacrifice freedom for the attainment of a long-term objectives. The end always justifies the means. Indeed, one finds very often that the utopian is willing to see his fellow citizens penalized, ostracized, imprisoned or even killed if they do not share the same vision and cooperate with the plan for the future, as is so common in Communist societies and as we recently saw around the world. There’s a fine line between utopia and dystopia — actually, no line at all. The utopian values equality, peace and brotherhood above all else. He does not like friction, but in order to achieve a friction-less society he is willing to create a great deal of friction. Read More »

“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”
— by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year. Read More »

FEMINISM and predatory economics have had their inevitable (and desired) result. The birthrate among Americans, especially among whites, has declined. The solution promoted by the government and mass media? More immigration. You’ve heard about it ad nauseam.

But leaving aside the immense cultural consequences, this idea of using “migrants” to make up for a loss of native workers does not make sense economically. About 50 percent of immigrants are on welfare and they overwhelmingly come from countries with weak economies. They were not able to transform their own countries into success stories so how can they transform ours? (It’s also uncharitable, draining other countries of motivated, hard-working citizens.) That’s not to say immigrants, even illegal immigrants, have not contributed immense labor and good to this country. They have. They definitely have.

But a better solution to population decline in Europe and America at this particular point would be to do the exact opposite: Send millions of recent immigrants home and restore families, offering economic incentives for marriage and for women to stay home. If women in Africa can afford to have five children, why can’t women here? I do not suggest cruelty or banishment.

Let’s do what Africans are doing and send our migrants home. Mass deportation, in a gradual and humane form, may seem impossible, but consider:

People act like mass deportations are impossible but Algeria kicked out a million Whites (~12% of the population) in a couple of years after they gained independence [1] [2].

Similarly, Tunisia and Morocco each kicked out a quarter of a million Whites (~7% and ~5 of their populations, respectively) [3] [4] [5] [6].

Huge demographic turnovers can occur in the blink of an eye. Europeans were in North Africa for over a century but most non-Whites haven’t even lived in the West for a single decade. They could be sent home as quickly as they arrived.

Peacefully deporting them would, theoretically, be easy and inexpensive. Simply banning them from accessing welfare and making them pay to use public services (e.g. healthcare in Europe) would cause many to immediately self-deport.

Since over 50% of immigrants are on welfare, the money saved could then be used to finance deportation logistics. Even paying them a lump sum to leave would be cheaper than keeping them here. (Thuletide)

The goal of deportation shouldn’t be a racially pure society with no diversity, but a much more homogenous one, where the incentive to “be fruitful and multiply” is not stifled. Deportation needn’t, and shouldn’t, be cruel. Immigrants can be offered economic incentives to create a better life back home. It’s a win/win situation. Who are we to say that other countries should lose major portions of their populations so that we can have more waiters and farm hands? Really, the arrogance and, well, racism is glaring.

This is a solution, however, you will not see in the news. Read More »