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Monday, December 31, 2018

Happy New Year!

(For politics, please scroll down)


There is nothing magical about crossing the threshold from the old year into the new year. Nevertheless, acknowledging the crossing of that threshold has a long tradition of offering a new start, particularly a time of looking forward with hope.  

We on the blogging team here at Always On Watch wish our readers a happy and healthy new year.  

May 2019 be kind to us all!

Angel Merkel Spills The Beans

From Zero Hedge (hat tip to Infidel Bloggers Alliance):
Nation states must today be prepared to give up their sovereignty”, according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who told an audience in Berlin that sovereign nation states must not listen to the will of their citizens when it comes to questions of immigration, borders, or even sovereignty.

No this wasn’t something Adolf Hitler said many decades ago, this is what German Chancellor Angela Merkel told attendants at an event by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin.....
Read the rest HERE at Zero Hedge.

WC, my co-host back in the days of Blog Talk Radio's The Gathering Storm, comments as follows to the above:
So the mask has fallen off. They are brazenly declaring their intent. It's as if the doors to the loony bins have been opened wide and the globalist elitists are running amok.
Weigh in....What will 2019 bring for the future of globalism, yet one more manifestation of utopianism?

Additional reading regarding certain borders for certain elites...John Kerry Fights to Keep Migrants Off His Private Beach.

Sunday, December 30, 2018

Musical Interlude

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Enjoy these selections from back in the day, when easy listening was in vogue and many local spots, even small ones, offered live music performed by small combos on Friday and Saturday nights:

Thursday, December 27, 2018

Purple Prose

2018 Christmas Portrait

Anti-Trump Derangement Syndrome in the extreme (emphases mine)....
Trump portrait: you couldn’t create a creepier Yuletide scene if you tried

The formal smartness of the US president and the first lady adds to the emotional numbness of the scene

The absence of intimacy in the Trumps’ official Christmas portrait freezes the heart. Can it be that hard to create a cosy image of the presidential couple, perhaps in front of a roaring hearth, maybe in seasonal knitwear? Or is this quasi-dictatorial image exactly what the president wants to project? Look on my Christmas trees, ye mighty, and despair! If so, it fuels suspicions that it is only the checks and balances of a 230-year-old constitution that are keeping America from the darkest of political fates.

You couldn’t create a creepier Yuletide scene if you tried. Multiple Christmas trees are currently a status symbol for the wealthy, but this picture shows the risks. Instead of a homely symbol of midwinter cheer, these disciplined arboreal ranks with their uniform decorations are arrayed like massed soldiers or colossal columns designed by Albert Speer. The setting is the Cross Hall in the White House and, while the incumbent president cannot be held responsible for its architecture, why heighten its severity with such rigid, heartless seasonal trappings?

Everything here communicates cold, empty magnificence. Tree lights that are as frigid as icicles are mirrored in a cold polished floor. Equally frosty illuminations are projected on the ceiling. Instead of twinkling fairy magic, this lifeless lighting creates a sterile, inhuman atmosphere. You can’t imagine kids playing among these trees or any conceivable fun being had by anyone. It suggests the micromanaged, corporate Christmas of a Citizen Kane who has long since lost touch with the ordinary, warm pleasures of real life.

In the centre of this disturbing piece of conceptual art stand Donald and Melania Trump. He’s in a tuxedo, she’s wearing white – and not a woolly hat in sight. Their formal smartness adds to the emotional numbness of the scene.

Trump’s shark-like grin has nothing generous or friendly about it. He seems to want to show off his beautiful wife and his fantastic home rather than any of the cuddly holiday spirit a conventional politician might strive to share at this time. It begs a question: how can a man who so glaringly lacks anything like a common touch be such a successful “populist”? What can a midwestern voter find in this image to connect with?

Perhaps that’s the point. After more than two centuries of democracy, Trump is offering the US people a king, or emperor. In this picture, he gives full vent to his inner tyrant. If this portrait contains any truth about the state of America and the world, may Santa help us all.
Can you imagine the howls of outrage if such things had been written about the Obamas, particularly in a major newspaper?

In my view, it is true that the Trumps are not cuddly teddy bears around whom the American people can wrap themselves.  Is it really a necessary Presidential quality to ooze warmth, particularly in the magnificent Cross Hall of the White House?

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

The Real Seats Of Power In America

Worth your time and consideration (hat tip to Common Cents):


Can we ever get out from under these tyrannical boots?

I wonder if Americans have snoozed for too long.


Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Monday, December 17, 2018

When Bullies Attack

In what world is this type of bullying allowed? What life "lessons" did this boy learn as a result of what happened and how the problem was handled?


Article HERE, commentary HERE.

Sunday, December 16, 2018

Advent 2018

(For politics, please scroll down)

For this third Sunday in Advent 2018...

Many years ago during a series of summer concerts, I had the privilege of working under the directing baton of organist, composer, and director Richard Wayne Dirksen at the Washington National Cathedral. Below is one of his choral pieces, a glorious celebration of the birth of Christ the Lord. Ever since I obtained a recording of "Welcome All Wonders," I never let a Christmas go by without listening to that recording of this glorious musical celebration of the birth of Christ the Lord. Enjoy:


Lyrics:
Welcome all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span.
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
That He, the old Eternal Word, should be a Child and weep.
Each of us his lamb will bring, each his pair of silver doves,
Till burnt at last in fire of thy fair eyes, ourselves become our own best sacrifice.
Welcome all wonders in one sight!

Friday, December 14, 2018

Creep, Creep, Creep...

Under the surface of all the political roiling, we have this (hat tip to Infidel Bloggers Alliance for the link below):
Google Approves App For Muslims To Report People Who Commit Blasphemy

A new Android app has launched with the focus of allowing Muslims to report individuals who commit blasphemy, or insult Islam.

No, this is not a joke. The app, “Smart Pakem”, which launched in Indonesia last month at the request of the Indonesian government, will allow users and government officials to uphold Sharia law and target and report people who hold “misguided” beliefs in violation of Islamic law, which forbids insults of Islam, insults against the Prophet Mohammed, or the recognition of any other religion besides Islam....
Only in Indonesia or another Islamic nation, right?

Not exactly.  Technology transcends borders, and criticizing Islam can get an American muzzled, too:
On November 29, 2018, investigative journalist Laura Loomer handcuffed herself to Twitter HQ in NYC after she was banned from Twitter for criticizing Sharia law. While handcuffed, Loomer argued “Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google, Instagram, they are essentially upholding Sharia. Silicon Valley is essentially upholding Sharia when they decide to ban me for posting facts about Islam, when they decide to ban me for posting facts about Sharia law and criticizing an anti-Jewish Muslim Congresswoman.”
Read the rest HERE.

More creep: TIME names Muslim Brotherhood pal of Osama bin Laden their Person of the Year 2018. Brief excerpt:
In high school, Jamal Khashoggi had a good friend. His name was Osama bin Laden.

“We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” Khashoggi reminisced about their time together in the Muslim Brotherhood. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”
Read the rest HERE.

Monday, December 10, 2018

PeTA: Mind-Boggling Absurdity

As if the animals give a damn...



Forewarned is forearmed: don't trigger a PeTA-perxxx.

Rich comment from Weasel Zippers:
Ruth Brown

The folks at PETA are literally "sheep in wolves clothes" if you ask me. They make me "mad as a hornet" when they say these stupid things. They need to get their "ducks in a row" and "hold their horses" cuz "I'll be a monkey's uncle" if I let them make me into a "guinea pig" for this stupid experiment. My advice to them is "hold your horses"; just let "sleeping dogs lie" cuz you "can't teach an old dog new tricks". I guess they will have an "eagle's eye" out looking for those of us who aren't PC correct in our speech. In this "dog eat dog world", they might give a person "butterflies in their stomach", but truthfully, their "bark is worse than their bite". So everyone, please, just calm down, don't act like a "bull in a china shop". "A little bird told me" I can say anything I want.

And I think I will. Ha! That was like "shooting fish in a barrel" and fun to boot. I have bigger things to worry about like, WHICH CAME FIRST, THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG? who cares? Both taste delish, although I am a meat & potatoes gal myself. (Had hamburgers for dinner, YUM!)
More HERE at Weasel Zippers.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Advent 2018

(For politics, please scroll down)

For this second Sunday in Advent 2018, enjoy this unique arrangement of "The Little Drummer Boy" (shamelessly lifted from Bunkerville):


[about "The Little Drummer Boy"]

Saturday, December 8, 2018

Christmas Caturday

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Our alpha kitty Minxy is all ready for her second Christmas:


Don't anyone dare to try to budge Minxy from the recliner! And don't dare to put up many enticing Christmas decorations, either!


Amber, on the other hand, is a sweet, compliant kitty:

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Destructive Destruction

Silverfiddle Rant!
Apologies to John Prine

Daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County,
Where good jobs are boomin' and men get good pay.
I'm sorry my son but you're too late in askin'
Mr. Jeff Bezos' website done hauled them away.




You can’t bring those Sears jobs Back

Is retail dead, destined for the obituaries along with the whale blubber industry that was replaced by kerosene lamps, which were replaced by the lightbulb?

What kind of new economy will give people meaningful work as technology ends up doing so much of what humans used to earn their living doing?

Is free money for everybody a solution? How would that work if nobody is working and paying taxes to fund it?

Will the world end up Silicon Valley’s vast domain, with the giants handing out monthly vouchers for us to shop at their company stores?

Bust the Trusts?

Monday, December 3, 2018

Camille Paglia v. The Hive

Silverfiddle Rant!
Nothing tingles my intellectual anticipation like a fresh Camille Paglia essay.

Camille Paglia is a brilliant professor who occupies that strange, abandoned no-man’s land of humanities, arts, literature and social criticism unencumbered by partisan ideology. 

She's an atheist who laments the destruction of our Judeo-Christian foundations and the concomitant rise of nihilistic nothingness. She is a lesbian who decries the passing of the classic macho, testosterone-driven manly gentleman, and she has told the #MeToos to grow up and stop infantilizing women. She has rightly pointed out that cultural vandals and moral panic peddlers have destroyed the sexual mystique that has driven male-female relationships in all cultures since the dawn of mankind.

Here are some excerpts from her latest essay. Her wisdom approaches the Talmudic...

“…secular humanism has failed. As an atheist, I have argued that if religion is erased, something must be put in its place. Belief systems are intrinsic to human intelligence and survival. They “frame” the flux of primary experience, which would otherwise flood the mind.”

“But politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life. As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature." 

"Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils, godlike avatars of Good versus Evil.”

“when art is reduced to politics, as has been programmatically done in academe for 40 years, its spiritual dimension is gone.”


“A society that respects neither religion nor art cannot be called a civilization.

“Their (#MeToo movement) elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote.”


“... #MeToo movement has gone seriously off track... No democracy can survive in such a paranoid climate of ambush and summary execution. This is Stalinism, a nadir of politics.”

“What I see in both the Women’s March and #MeToo is an atavistic rediscovery by Western women of the joy of their own mutually nurturing solidarity—a primary feature of daily life during 10,000 years of the agrarian era that has been lost over the past two centuries of industrialization. As I have often noted, the sexes throughout human history actually had very little to do with each other. There was the world of men and the world of women, each with its own spheres of influence and activity. Women didn’t take men that seriously, and vice versa. ”

“What I see spreading among professional middle-class women is a bitter resentment toward men that is in many cases unjust and misplaced. With divorce so easy since the sexual revolution, women find themselves competing with younger women in new and cruel ways. Agrarian women gained power as they aged: young women were brainless pawns whose marriages, pregnancies, childcare, cooking, and other chores were acerbically supervised and controlled by the dictatorial crones (forces of nature whom I fondly remember from childhood)."

In short, #MeToo from a historical perspective is a cri de coeur from women who are realizing that the sexual revolution that many of us had once ecstatically embraced has in key ways devalued women, confused their private relationships, and complicated their smooth functioning in the workplace. It’s time for a new map of the gender world.”

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Advent 2018

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For this first Sunday in Advent 2018, here is my favorite Advent hymn (from the 5th Century A.D.):

!--BLOCKING--