A Roman Catholic perspective …

The Destruction of The Temple of Jerusalem (La distruzione del tempio di Gerusalemme) by Francesco Hayez (1867)

Is Judaism the ultimate source of Western civilisation? Such views have seen a revival in 2026: the Levant is supposed to have been the Cradle of Civilisation (12,000 BC) and the Hebrews gave the West its foundations, that is, “ethical monotheism”, human dignity (for those made in the image of God), an objective moral law, justice for the weak, and linear and redemptive history. Since Israel has lost support among the Western youth, chief scholars from the Tikvah Fund and others have been out in force to remind the West how much it owes to Judaism (e.g. here). I assumed this would spark a debate about the nature and heritage of Western civilisation, but there has been silence. Why?

We are individuals adrift, no crew or course, overboard with memory loss; the erosion of our grounding in Greece, the withering of our Roman roots, and our distraction from the divine have ensured it. In short, we have forgotten our own story, the one about our shared Romanitas, about who and what we truly are in the world. Not knowing our past, we are at risk of having our future written for us, even with us typecast as the villain. Click here for the Roman version of our story, the one we must tell again.

A dissenting voice: Hanseatic Nordlandia has nothing in common with the invading Judeo-Latin collusion. We go back to our Solar Polytheist Roots. More on www.Nordlandia.nl … Andre-Hans von Bremen.

The Metaphysics of Power in the Digital Age

The World After Television:
We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. — John Culkin, paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan

For most of the twentieth century, a nation could be addressed all at once. At a fixed hour, the citizen sat before a single glowing rectangle and received, along with millions of strangers he would never meet, the same images, the same voices, the same authorised account of what had happened that day. The evening news was a civic liturgy. It not only reported on the world, but it also manufactured the very surface on which a shared world could exist. Whatever one thought of the men who spoke from that rectangle, one thought it together. Disagreement itself had a common object.

That world is ending now, and the manner of its ending is the subject of this essay. This essay attempts an answer in ten movements. It begins with the long history of persuasion, because almost nothing about the present is unprecedented, except for its speed and scale. It ends with the suggestion that we are circling back, by the most modern means imaginable, towards something very old — The future will awaken the ancient.

Read the essay …

Excerpt: The influencer was a political actor who had not yet found a politics, a loaded instrument waiting for a hand.

And the hands arrived. The migration happened along a path so gradual that each step seemed unremarkable. A fitness creator begins to speak about discipline, then about the kind of society that rewards or punishes discipline. A gaming streamer, holding the attention of millions of young men for hours at a stretch, drifts from commentary on games to commentary on the world. A podcaster who began by interviewing comedians finds that the same long, intimate, unedited format is extraordinarily well suited to political persuasion, and that audiences trust the voice in their ears far more than they trust the institutions that voice increasingly mocks. Somewhere along this path the content creator quietly becomes a narrative authority: a person whose following turns to them for an account of what is true, who is friend and who is enemy, and what is to be done.

The structural fact is what matters here: the medium has produced a new kind of political actor who needs no party to nominate him, no broadcaster to platform him, and no institution to vouch for him. He is authorised directly by an audience, and he can be deplatformed by the institutions only at the cost of confirming, to that audience, the very story he has been telling them about those institutions all along. This is a genuinely novel position in the architecture of power, and the broadcast-era state has no settled idea what to do about it.

The internet reorganises people tribally, and then it keeps the tribes warm.

This video provides a different view of what it’s like to live in China from a Canadian ex-pat who does.

Over ten years ago I turned the American flag on the pole on our farm upside down to indicate the nation in distress. Then I took it down entirely. I used to sing the Star Spangled Banner at the top of my lungs at football games and felt that tingle of pride run up my spine. Then I gave up football games and singing the Anthem.

As the waste, fraud, corruption, the endless and meaningless wars of aggression became ever more visible, I lost all pride in the United States. As it became apparent that We the People were actually considered the enemy by our own government, that our freedoms were being abused and the Constitution ignored, voting an exercise in futility, I came to despise that government. Last year I attended a community celebration and sang a patriotic song. This year, a year that should be momentous, I’m not in the mood to celebrate. And won’t.

It’s not that I’m not patriotic, it’s that that thing that should attract my patriotism is dead and has been replaced by something that’s un-American.

On the Patience of a People Who Have Never Been Finally Defeated

Here is the first thing to understand about the Saxon: he does not hate quickly, and he does not hate easily. But when he has been brought to the place where strength diminishes and he still advances—that is not the heat of a moment. That is something that was decided long before the battle began. Something cold. Something final.

The historians of other traditions have often mistaken Saxon patience for Saxon weakness. This is an error that has been made repeatedly, by peoples who did not live long enough to understand what they had provoked. We Saxons have outlived every empire that has ever been. Such only the empire we built remains.

The common law followed the flag. Wherever the English settled—in Virginia, in Massachusetts, in New South Wales, in New Zealand, in Canada, in Natal, in the Punjab—they brought with them the assumption that law was not the will of the ruler but the evolved inheritance of the community, and that no man, however powerful, stood above it. This was not an imperial imposition. It was an export of the thing the English valued most: the principle that power is bounded, that the individual has rights that the state cannot extinguish, and that those rights are defended not by the goodwill of rulers but by the structure of law itself.

The empire was, at its best, the globalization of this principle. Its worst chapters—and they were real, and they were many—were the moments when the principle was violated by its own carriers. The slave trade. The famines. The Amritsar massacre. The Highland Clearances. These were not expressions of the Saxon character at its most characteristic; they were betrayals of it, recognized as betrayals at the time by the men within the tradition who opposed them—Wilberforce, Burke, Bright, the Clapham Sect, the anti-Corn Law campaigners. The empire’s capacity to reform itself again and again from within was itself an expression of the tradition: the tradition that holds that a wrong, once recognized, must be named and corrected, regardless of the cost to the powerful.

Read Burlingame’s entire essay … It’s quite good.

There were some comments to the original post which made the self-evident point that the United States was established as a Republic, not a democracy. Democracies devolve into situations where 50.1% of the population which are low IQ morons can win out over 49.9% geniuses. Again, self-evident. But the argument over republic versus democracy is not the point of the video.

Those who actually watch the video will notice that it pertains primarily to England and secondarily to Angloshere in general; and between good king, bad king, and democracy. It’s obvious democracies don’t work and the video attempts to argue that kings along the lines of those existing prior to 1066 were, again arguably, the best form of government because they don’t rule over the people, but for them (and could be de-throned if they failed the people). Examples and reasons are provided in the video. For the open minded, it’s well worth the small investment in time.

Comments were made that we were given ‘a Republic, if we can keep it.’ I suspect the Founders perfectly well knew how difficult that would be, hence Jeffersons admonition about watering the Tree of Liberty from time to time. Well, we failed to ‘water the tree’ and Republics always fail. Always. From the Roman Republic to the Weimar Republic, the same patterns emerge: erosion of civic virtue, consolidation of power, economic instability, and the decay of the rule of law. One can read the details here. We, in America, are finding ourselves at the end stage of our Republic as we’ve checked all the aforementioned boxes. One could convincingly argue our Republic is already gone.

And yes, we were all taught in school how kings are bad and republics and democracies are better. But we were taught a lot of things in school that weren’t necessarily accurate. Kings post Norman invasion of England were generally bad, but before? There’s a reason that kingdoms were the natural norm prior to modernity and that seems to be because they ruled with the consent of the population and before the divine right of kings doctrine emerged.

For those who watch the video, one point will become quite apparent. Kingdoms, with a ‘good king,’ require a homogeneous population; a Folk. The king has no divine right and can be de-throned if he fails the Folk. I leave it to the reader to develop their own opinion on how it might be possible to salvage any form of ‘good’ government in what is known as the United States of America that would truly represent the people.

I’ve always appreciated our Constitutional Republic as the best form of government yet devised, but it failed. On reflection and after studying history, my thinking is evolving. In my most hopeful moments, I envision a good king along the lines outlined in the video, with no divine right, ruling for a folkish population. One race, one culture, one soil. But that’s just a dream …

The true king … not what we’ve come to believe.

We’re taught that democracy is the end of history: the final, perfected form of government, the thing all of history was building toward. To question it is to step outside respectable discourse.

This video makes the case that we’ve forgotten what a king actually was. Not the tyrant of popular memory, but something older: a ruler as the vessel for the collective spirit of the people.

Watch the second video. The Jamaica musical one. Sometimes, when everything goes pear shaped and we want to cry, it’s good to laugh. Loosen up and enjoy this one. It’s the weekend!

Read ‘ONE SENTENCE’ at the bottom of the graphic.

The United States is protected from SUPPLY SHOCK, but not from PRICE SHOCK.

Larry Johnson writes, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the United States is producing more oil than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined. He has made this statement multiple times in 2026, often emphasizing it as a result of his “Drill, Baby, Drill” policies. Only one little problem… It ain’t exactly true.

Read the details at Sonar21 …

I was definitely surprised by The Economist publicly taking aim at the current refugee rights system:

Western attitudes are hardening. In Europe the views of social democrats and right-wing populists are converging.

The system is not working. Designed for post-war Europe, it cannot cope with a world of proliferating conflict, cheap travel and huge wage disparities. Roughly 900m people would like to migrate permanently. Since it is almost impossible for a citizen of a poor country to move legally to a rich one, many move without permission. In the past two decades many have discovered that asylum offers a back door. Instead of crossing a border stealthily, as in the past, they walk up to a border guard and request asylum, knowing that the claim will take years to adjudicate and, in the meantime, they can melt into the shadows and find work.

Voters are right to think the system has been gamed. Most asylum claims in the European Union are now rejected outright. Fear of border chaos has fuelled the rise of populism, from Brexit to Donald Trump, and poisoned the debate about legal migration. To create a system that offers safety for those who need it but also a reasonable flow of labour migration, policymakers need to separate one from the other.

Around 123m people have been displaced by conflict, disaster or persecution, three times more than in 2010, partly because wars are lasting longer. All these people have a right to seek safety. But “safety” need not mean access to a rich country’s labour market.

It’s obvious why they are alarmed. In Britain, the two mainstream parties have been destroyed. And the convergence of SOCIALIST democrats and right-wing NATIONAL populists is always going to terrify a media controlled by a small group of people who were not historically very popular with socialist nationalists.

And then I saw this:

Mr Trump’s policy of mass deportation is both cruel and expensive. Far better to let those who have put down roots stay, while securing the border and changing the incentives for future arrivals. If liberals do not build a better system, populists will build a worse one.

After their policies fail, they always try to move the goalposts in order to prevent those failures from being adequately addressed. At this point, they’re just trying to lock in their gains.

From Vox Popoli