Cell Vesicles Coats and Irreducible Complexity

Living cells contain vesicles, sacs that transport water and substances like proteins and lipids among different compartments of the cell, including between the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and the Golgi apparatus, or between the outside and the interior of the cell.

The formation of such trafficking vesicles is among the most fundamental processes taking place in the cell.

A team of scientists of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) at Heidelberg has produced - using low-temperature cryo-electron tomography - the most detailed pictures ever obtained of the coats surrounding transport vesicles, images that have revealed a thus-far unimagined complexity.

This is the first time that a model of a complete assembled vesicle coat has been realised. The study, published in Science earlier this month, contradicts the current “adaptor-and-cage” view of coated vesicle formation.

The way these highly interconnected coats, made of proteins, function has been compared to a self-driving car which, when you walk out of your front door, assembles around you, rises from the ground, takes you to your destination levitating in the air, then disassembles, ready to pick up another passenger. Something very similar does happen in biological cells.

Progress in science constantly shows that life is much more intricated, sophisticated and complex than we suppose.

There are three types of known transport vesicles, each with its specific type of coat which is composed of different proteins and assembles onto a membrane surrounding the vesicle: Clathrin-coated vesicle (CCV), Coat Protein 1 (COPI), Coat Protein 2 (COPII).

While it was believed that the assembled COPI coat was similar to Clathrin and COPII, it was found instead that it is more complicated, having seven proteins coming together simultaneously and forming complexes with triangular symmetry that allow the complex to attach to the vesicle membrane. The "triads" forming the coat are called "coatomers":

[A]ssembled coatomer can adopt different conformations to interact with different numbers of neighbors. By regulating the relative frequencies of different triad patterns in the COPI coat during assembly -- for example, by stabilizing particular coatomer conformations -- the cell would have a mechanism to adapt vesicle size and shape to cargoes of different sizes.[Emphasis added]

Evolution News website comments:

The complexity of these coats, and the accessory proteins that build them, attach them to vesicles and disassemble them, defy unguided evolutionary explanations. They exhibit irreducible complexity; they don't work unless all the protein parts are present simultaneously.

An irreducibly complex mechanism is such that it cannot work unless all its components are present at the same time.

Many machines exhibit this property. But so do many biological mechanisms and organs.

University of Illinois biologist Tom Frazzetta, in his 1975 classic Complex Adaptations in Evolving Populations (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , wrote:

When modifying the design of a machine, an engineer is not bound by the need to maintain a real continuity between the first machine and the next modification .. But in evolution, transitions from one type to the next presumably involve a greater continuity by means of a vast number of intermediate types. Not only must the end product - the final machine - be feasible, but so must be all the intermediates. The evolutionary problem is, in a real sense, the gradual improvement of a machine while it is running.

Frazzetta, an expert in functional biomechanics (the study of how animals work) had for many years studied and dissected the skulls of the bolyerine snakes, rare snakes of the Island of Mauritius. These animals, similar to boas, have a unique anatomical specialisation: their upper jaw is made up of two segments joined together and requiring many specialised tendons, bones, ligaments, muscles, nerves and other tissues.

This characteristic allows the bolyerine snakes to bend the front half of their divided upper jaw backwards when attacking a prey, resulting in a wider opening of the mouth.

How could this system of interconnected tendons, ligaments, muscles, bones and nerves have evolved gradually, as neo-Darwinism contends? It's an all-or-nothing situation.

No intermediate condition could have worked and consented the viability of this species.

As evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould put it in "The Return of Hopeful Monsters": “How can a jawbone be half broken?”

After Chattanooga, Franklin Graham Says: "Shut Borders to Muslims"

On 16 July 2015 Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, a Muslim man, opened fire at two different military centres six miles apart (the first a military recruitment station and the second a Navy and Marines reserve facility) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, wounding two service members and a police officer and killing four other service members immediately. One of the wounded servicemen died from his injuries two days later. The gunman was killed by police at the site of the second shooting.

The killer was a 24-year-old Muslim immigrant from Kuwait granted US citizenship, a college graduate with a degree in electrical engineering.

The authorities' head scratching in search of a motive for the killing is slightly ridiculous, if the situation were not tragic.

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez is dead now but has left vital clues in a blog he ran on his Islamic beliefs. The blog has only two posts, both posted just three days before his horrific crime. The Daily Mail reports:

The first post was entitled 'A Prison Called Dunya,' Abdulazeez refers to prisoner who is told he would be given a test that would either take him out of his earthly prison - or send him into a more restrictive environment.

According to the website [The Daily Beast], he wrote: 'I would imagine that any sane person would devote their time to mastering the information on the study guide and stay patient with their studies, only giving time for the other things around to keep themselves focused on passing the exam.

He added: 'This life is that test, designed to separate the inhabitants of Paradise from the inhabitants of Hellfire.'

The second post is called 'Understanding Islam: The Story of the Three Blind Men.' It suggests Abdulazeez felt his fellow Muslims had a 'certain understanding of Islam and keep a tunnel vision of what we think Islam is.

He also wrote:

Brothers and sisters don't be fooled by your desires, this life is short and bitter and the opportunity to submit to Allah may pass you by.

As measures of terrorism prevention, six different governors of US states have authorised their respective National Guard soldiers to be armed for both deterrence and self-protection, while the Pentagon recommends "closing the blinds" ("that won't stop bullets, but may help cut down on the air conditioning bill", is The Examiner's sarcastic comment) and other "new security measures" such as increased surveillance.

These are not real, effective preventative measures, and nobody genuinely believes they are.

Much more sense makes what the American evangelist Franklin Graham proposed on his Facebook page, namely completely closing the US borders to Islam:

Four innocent Marines (United States Marine Corps) killed and three others wounded in ‪#‎Chattanooga‬ yesterday including a policeman and another Marine--all by a radical Muslim whose family was allowed to immigrate to this country from Kuwait. We are under attack by Muslims at home and abroad. We should stop all immigration of Muslims to the U.S. until this threat with Islam has been settled. Every Muslim that comes into this country has the potential to be radicalized--and they do their killing to honor their religion and Muhammad. During World War 2, we didn't allow Japanese to immigrate to America, nor did we allow Germans. Why are we allowing Muslims now? Do you agree? Let your Congressman know that we've got to put a stop to this and close the flood gates. Pray for the men and women who serve this nation in uniform, that God would protect them.

Islam divides the world into two parts: Dar al-Islam (Arabic for "house of Islam") and Dar al-Harb (in Arabic, "house of war"). The latter is the whole part of the world where Islam has not yet triumphed and Islamic law is not in force. For Islam, there must be war initiated by Muslims against all those peoples and in all those countries who have not yet submitted to Islam until they have done so.

What about all those peaceful and law-abiding Muslims living in the West? They cannot do anything to stop their extreme co-religionists, who not only are more determined but also have the Quran and Islamic jurisprudence on their side.

As Theodore Dalrymple put it, a minority can have much more power than a majority, on which it can exercise tyranny:

[A] handful of fanatics can easily have a much more significant social effect than a large number of peaceful citizens. There is more to fear in one terrorist than to celebrate in 99 well-integrated immigrants.

Yes, and there are many more reasons to stop Muslim immigration than to allow it.

Organ-on-a-Chip Breakthrough to Replace Lab Animals

Researchers are developing miniature models of human organs on plastic chips, which will replace lab animals. Big pharmaceutical companies have started using these in vitro systems in drug development.

The science journal Nature reported that earlier this month at the Organ-on-a-Chip World Congress in Boston, Massachusetts, Big Pharma showed great and immediate interest in the latest advances in miniature model organs exhibited there that respond to drugs and diseases in the same way as do human organs such as the heart and liver:

“We’re surprised at how rapidly the technology has come along,” says Dashyant Dhanak, global head of discovery sciences at Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey, which announced last month that it would use a thrombosis-on-chip model from Massachusetts biotechnology firm Emulate to test whether experimental and already approved drugs could cause blood clots.

As New Scientist explains:

With the help of a 3D printer mini human organs can come in all shapes and sizes. In this video, a cluster of tiny hearts – shown on the right – beat in sync, and another pulsing heart is fused with a spherical, darker-coloured liver.

Developed by Anthony Atala and his team at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the mini-organs represent the first step in developing an entire human body on a chip.

The hearts were created by reprogramming human skin cells into heart cells, which were then clumped together in a cell culture. A 3D printer was then used to give them the desired shape and size – in this case, a diameter of 0.25 millimetres.

Organs-on-chips are more realistic – and more reliable for drug discovery and testing – models of the human body than both human cell cultures and the very expensive lab animals, that belonging to other species frequently give dangerously misleading results.

Although any new drug must first be tested in healthy humans for safety, says James Hickman, a bioengineer at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, using an in vitro organ might help to eliminate or shorten this step.

The chips could also help companies to pinpoint the dose of a drug that is both effective and safe, says Matthew Wagoner, a drug-safety scientist at AstraZeneca in Waltham, Massachusetts. If regulators accept such data, the method might eventually allow companies to skip the portion of a clinical trial that tests a wide range of drug doses on patients.

The scaled-down organs mimic the function of the real life-size organs. The next step, in order to reproduce the complexity of a human body, is to integrate these different model organs and systems together and reproduce a whole organ system, to test new treatments and drugs or examine the effects of chemicals and viruses.

[M]any pharmaceutical companies say that organs-on-chips are now sufficiently advanced to justify investment in their use and refinement. “We think it’s important to be involved,” says Michelle Browner, senior director of platform innovation at Johnson & Johnson. Only that way can the technology be developed in line with what the company needs, she says.

Government regulators are also participating. In autumn the US National Center on Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will organise a meeting of drug companies, scientists and regulators on the Organ-on-a-Chip’s use. And NCATS is financing 11 research teams, each of which working on a different organ or system that, when developed, will be connected to form a whole ‘body-on-a-chip’.

UK Minimum Wage Rise Will Hurt the Poorest

The UK government has just increased the national minimum wage, as part of the new Budget.

The idea that governments can change the way markets operate is entirely illusory.

With this rise in what has been re-branded as the "National Living Wage", what will happen?

If a worker A's skills don't have enough value for an employer B to pay A the minimum wage the government forces him to pay, B will not hire A. And this outcome will be repeated with many other employers, so A - who might have been recruited before this restrictive measure was introduced - will end up unemployed.

Raising the minimum wage means that the competition for jobs will be harder, and all those job-seekers who were barely employable at the previous wages but don't possess the qualities that justify the higher cost now required for their work will simply be left out of the economy without any prospect for employment.

Another consequence of the new minimum wage will be that employers and companies of all kinds will pass on the increased expenditure for their workforce to their customers by increasing their prices.

In the end, this will make the cost of living higher, which results in the reduction of real income, including wages and salaries.

What will be clear once again is that the market cannot be forced into a straitjacket.

The right way for a worker or job seeker to get a higher salary is different. He should make himself more valuable, more worthy of being hired at a greater cost for his employer by studying hard, getting sought-after skills, refining his talents and working hard. In short, by making himself useful to his boss or company to such a point that his use compensates for or is even greater than his cost.

This is a real, genuine, economically sound method to increment wages, one that applies and plays along the laws of economics rather than trying to fight them and go against them.

A government's diktat, instead, is an artificial method, and as such it backfires.

There are no shortcuts in the economy, no free lunch in business.

Countries with command economies learnt this lesson the hardest way, by impoverishing themselves and their peoples. But even in the so-called capitalist, or free-market economies, when governments succumb to the temptation to meddle with the marketplace, they practically introduce small elements of socialism, which unbalance the market and cause grave damage to the very people they pretend to help.

Is Using Food Banks a Sign of Real Poverty?

Food banks are very much in the news in Britain, with figures showing that over one million people in the country are using them, while organisations and campaigners ask for more funds for the purpose.

To cater for the persons using them, lots of food banks are all over the UK, run by churches and voluntary groups, providing food for people who are said to struggle to make ends meet.

After all the indigestion (pun unintended) of talk about food banks during the last campaign for the election of the UK Parliament in May, I wished to find out more about these monsters, the symbol of Conservative "austerity" policy.

I may seem unkind, but my prediction was that food banks would be frequented by fat people who wanted to save their money to spend it on fags and booze, and sometimes drugs.

After all, the food problem that most people - and especially those belonging to lower social classes - have is a problem of eating too much, not too little.

Wasn't I right!

Most photos of food banks only show those who work for them and not the people who use them, and the reason for this is that, when you do see the food bank clients, many look clearly fat, and even obese.

Ah, but that demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that they are poor, as fatness and obesity are, in our society, the hallmark of poverty.

Columnist Brendan O'Neill wrote a rather scathing article on the subject some time ago, that created controversy. Entitled "What's fuelling the food-bank frenzy? The hunger for publicity of anti-poverty activists", it started:

Something about the food-bank frenzy doesn't add up. Reading the Dickens-tinged coverage of food banks, of which there are now 400, you could be forgiven for thinking that Britain has done a timewarp back to the Victorian era of emaciated urchins begging for scraps of bread on foggy bridges. Britons are "hungrier than ever", says the Independent. "Starving Britain", says one newspaper headline. There is clearly enormous "destitution, hardship and hunger" in Britain, says Oxfam. Even the International Red Cross has got involved, promising to help tackle Britain's "food poverty". What next – a charity single along the lines of "Do They Know It's Christmas?", only aimed at getting emergency food to allegedly starving Brits rather than actually starving Africans?

We're going back in time to Dickens and in space to starving Africa. But we still have an obesity crisis, especially among the "poor".

What kind of poor can they be, if they have too much food? Enter the "new poor", who have too much rather than too little.

Yes, goes the answer, but it's not quantity but quality that makes poverty these days. So, the "poor" eat the wrong stuff.

Why not open "healthy food banks", then? That's an idea. For, you see, it's difficult to believe that large numbers of people in Britain are actually starving because unable to spare 25p (pence, pennies) for a can of baked beans and 40p for a loaf of sliced bread from Tesco or other supermarket chains.

In fact for a long time the complaint has been that food was too cheap. Food poverty = inability to have a healthy diet.

The problem here, which creates so much confusion, is semantic: the word "poverty" has been redefined for ideological and political reasons and that makes the term almost useless, at least in the affluent Western world.

The real meaning of the word "poverty", in the genuine sense of not having what one objectively needs, has now been restricted to the expression "absolute poverty", while "relative poverty" is what is applied to people who generally are not poor at all, but are poor only compared to the society's average. Therefore, if they live in a rich society, it simply means that they are not as wealthy as they would like to be, not enough to "keep up with the Joneses".

Worst Ever Migrant Crisis as 10 Million British Holidaymakers Head for Calais

Published on The Latest News

by Enza Ferreri


It won’t surprise people who have long been aware that unregulated, unrestricted immigration from the Third World to Western countries, far from being the much-trumpeted solution to global poverty or – according to what source you’re hearing – the panacea for rich, ageing countries in need of new workforce, is in fact the recipe for cultural and social chaos.

UK newspapers are announcing that British holidaymakers must prepare for the “worst ever Calais migrant crisis” this summer, and that one Calais immigrant every three minutes is caught trying to sneak into Britain illegally.

While police reported a spike in the number of illegal immigrants found in the UK in the wake of the Calais crisis, it’s been discovered that migrants evade “100 per cent” of government's security checks on lorries at the UK border.

I don’t want to dazzle you with statistics and superlatives, but there’s more to come: the illegal immigrants caught at the UK border more than doubled last year; 11,300 stowaways were captured in France in a three-week period from June 21; during June and the first week of July Kent Police found 405 illegal immigrants who had reached the UK hiding in vehicles or trains (81 a week on average), compared with just 26 (one a week) during the first five months of this year; 35,000 illegal immigrants were discovered trying to breach security measures at Calais to reach Britain in the last six months; the UK government’s existing security budget for the Calais migrant crisis is £12 million, on top of which a new secure zone in the port, announced yesterday by Theresa May, will cost £1.4 million; over a three-week period during French ferry workers’ strikes, numbers rocketed to at least 540 a day (23 an hour) attempting to break through fences or stow away in lorries.
Finally, the chief constable of Kent warned there has been an 80-fold increase in the number of illegal immigrants actually reaching British soil, adding that the French government should put more resources on the ground: if not the police, then the military.

It’s not an excessive request. Richard Burnett, head of the Road Haulage Association, said that British lorry drivers face “civil war” conditions as they try to pass through Calais.

20-strong gangs of migrants are threatening drivers with bars and knives, and in one case with a gun. The French ferry workers’ strike caused miles-long queues, giving migrants opportunities to break into the stationary lorries trapped in the endless queues. And dock workers have threatened further industrial action over the summer.

There are now 5,000 migrants who have set up camp near the port in Calais, up from 3,000 last month and around 600 at the beginning of the year. That increase is continuing apace.

As if this were not enough, the school holidays start this weekend, and 10 million British people heading for Europe will go through the port of Calais. The Foreign Office has warned holidaymakers to “keep vehicle doors locked in slow moving traffic and secure your vehicle when unattended”.

Eurotunnel fears migrants could now start targeting ordinary vehicles as well. And the slower the traffic, the more opportunity for migrants to jump on to vehicles. It’s already happened that car owners found illegal immigrants hidden in their vehicles.

Meanwhile, the British government unrealistically tried to reassure the public that chaotic scenes in Calais would not lead to a flood of illegal immigrants on this side of the Channel.

Is that likely? Illegal immigrants have found an easy way to get in and, even if arrested, they can claim asylum and remain in the UK indefinitely.

Home Secretary Theresa May promised the creation of a new migrant-exclusion zone at the port of Calais for UK-bound lorries, providing a secure waiting area for 230 vehicles, “removing them from the open road where they can become targets for migrants attempting to board their vehicles."

Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, for once was right when he warned that this measure was “not going to solve the problem” because hundreds more migrants are arriving at Calais every week. He said: “The migrants do not see a fence and say, ‘Oh, here is a fence’. They try to get into the vehicles before they get into the fenced area. The problem is just moved somewhere else.”

John Keefe of Eurotunnel commented: “We have never seen numbers like this before and we have not in the past seen the degree of organisation that goes with the numbers either. It is an absolutely unprecedented situation in international transport.” He raised doubts about the potential impact of the announcement of a new secure area, saying: "As soon as you remove one opportunity, the organised criminals managing the migrant attacks are moving to the next weak spot."

He added that many of those arrested were repeat offenders, as French police release them after each arrest, so it’s regularly the same people coming back again and again and again, sometimes several times in a night. It’s the 5,000 population simply rotating around.

It’s not just a question of numbers, though. Who are these illegal immigrants whose very first act in coming to Britain is the perpetration of a crime? What kind of people are going to live among us, in our streets?

If we look at those who are smuggled on boats across the Mediterranean into Italy, from where they travel all over Europe, we see the Muslim migrants who in April threw 12 Christians overboard to their deaths because, when asking God for help when their dinghy suffered a puncture, these Christians refused to pray to Allah.

Among the migrants are the terrorists and militants that the Islamic State controlling the Libyan coast on the other side of the Mediterranean smuggles into Europe.

And, judging from the behaviour of three Sudanese men who arrived at a Holiday Inn hotel in Flore, Northants, on Wednesday asking to claim asylum, they don’t appear to be very bright either.

While police talk about more personnel, sniffer dog teams, extra fences, Steven Woolfe, UKIP's migration spokesman, said in response to the Home Secretary’s statement in the House of Commons: “At last the government seems to be waking up to the crisis in the Port of Calais that is affecting not only food imports into the UK but also major road arteries in Kent and beyond.”

But, he continued:

“the government needs to negotiate with the French authorities a scheme to ensure the immediate return of illegals to France when they are found on UK Lorries coming from there once in the UK. This one prioritised step will send the word out to those waiting to make their attempts in Jungle camps in Calais that even if you make it to the UK your illegal efforts will not be rewarded. In addition the UK government should not accept any political asylum cases of those who illegally enter the UK from Calais as those cases should have been dealt with in France or in the first European country in which they landed.

“The people of the UK want timely action not mere words. The Home Secretary has taken far too long to recognise this worsening crisis in one of the most important entry points to the UK and is now offering so-called solutions which will make little difference to attempts to enter our country illegally.”
To the depressing figures of this whole disaster we have to add £1 billion, the annual cost of loads of products being written off because of contamination fears when migrants hide on lorries. Full loads are being destroyed.

As an apt conclusion, a British lorry driver in Calais said: “I question whether it is worth doing this job.”

Atheist Tweets with No Arguments but Lots of Intimidation

I knew that Twitter can be a great medium for harassment, but I had not experienced it until last night.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a tweet to an article about Peter Hitchens, who converted to Christianity after being for a great part of his life an atheist full of The Rage Against God (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) that is the title of his autobiographic book on the subject.

I am reading this book, which is fascinating as it shows that he was not just a nonbeliever, but one who hated God and Christianity with a vengeance. His brother Christopher, who died of cancer a few years ago, remained until his death a well-known militant atheist of the same ilk as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.

A Twitter user going by the self-congratulatory misnomer of OpenMind replied to me: "[H]e [Peter Hitchens] was always a theist... claims he was atheist but 1. He was an angry theist 2. He claims to be fearful of being judged."

An exchange ensued, of which I'll spare you the details, but the crux of the matter, the gist of the dispute, is that OpenMind doesn't think it possible to be angry with something you don't believe in.

It seems very obvious that you can be angry at something you don't believe in. Even if an entity or object is not real for you, you can project on the concept you have of it characteristics that exist in real life and that you hate.

I understand that atheists generally haven't studied philosophy, but they also seem to be refractory to learning it, as I tried to explain this to OpenMind in vain.

There is a distinction to be made between the concept of something and its reality. You may very well have not only thoughts but also emotions of various types (including anger) towards something you imagine, visualise, conceptualise or think of, without necessarily believing that the object of your conceptualisation is real.

Many people, in watching horror films, experience genuine fear of the monsters which are characters depicted in the movie, although they don't believe that those monsters exist in reality.

To be quite honest, I wouldn't think that this is very difficult to grasp. It's high-school-level philosophy. But apparently it was difficult, for OpenMind and the pack of fellow atheists whom he unleashed on me and who bombarded me with tweets, all repeating the same pseudo-argument, until I was forced to block them. Twitter could be an all too easy means of harassment without this redeeming feature.

These atheist Twitter users were clearly trying to cause me aggravation and (albeit unsuccessfully) to scare me into never expressing criticisms of atheism again.

Another "reason", if we can call it that way, why, according to OpenMind, Peter Hitchens (who set fire to his Bible) could not have been an atheist is that "atheists tend not to burn books, even the bible or the quran."

The qualifier "tend to" renders such a pseudo-reason meaningless, because it leaves the door open to atheists doing it, sometimes.

Both this and the other motive explained above (an atheist cannot have anger for God) are self-serving, ad hoc definitions of the term "atheist", chosen arbitrarily to fit into a predetermined mould that can only contain good traits and positive qualities.

These atheists remind me of those homosexual activists who define "homosexuality" in such a way as to include in the definition only sexual attraction for adults and never for children. In this way, the "argument" becomes circular: a homosexual, by definition, can never be a paedophile.

Ah, if reality could be so easily manipulated as are words in the hands of liars!

Suspected Black Lives Matter Supporter Arrested for Murdering White Woman

A black man who, according to a tweet, is a Black Lives Matter supporter was arrested on Sunday for stabbing to death a white woman in Lansing, Michigan.

His name is Kenneth Dale Clark, and is 64 years old, the victim is 53-year-old Regina Marie Christensen.

Clark has been arraigned and is facing one count of homicide: open murder, which is a felony.

Clark was arrested at the scene. He and Christensen knew each other, although the nature of their relationship was unclear.

Who Decides and on What Basis that a Law Is Unjust and Must Be Disobeyed?

The great Catholic author Patrick Buchanan has penned a brilliant article, in which he wonders whether an era of civil disobedience is coming to America, "where court orders are defied and laws ignored in the name of conscience and a higher law", similar to what happened in the 1960s, but with the rebellion this time coming from the Right.

The same people who were applauding and making heroes of the civil disobeyers when these upheld principles dear to the Left are now vilifying and demonising the current-day civil disobeyers who, following their conscience, act according to principles supported by the Right.

He starts with the following example:

The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, has ordered a monument of the Ten Commandments removed from the Capitol.

Calling the Commandments "religious in nature and an integral part of the Jewish and Christian faiths," the court said the monument must go.

Gov. Mary Fallin has refused. And Oklahoma lawmakers instead have filed legislation to let voters cut out of their constitution the specific article the justices invoked. Some legislators want the justices impeached. [All emphases added]

Buchanan then reminds us that U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been defied, and those who defied them have been lionised by modernity, taking us through American history:

Thomas Jefferson freed all imprisoned under the sedition act, including those convicted in court trials presided over by Supreme Court justices. Jefferson then declared the law dead.

Some Americans want to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, who, defying the Dred Scott decision and fugitive slave acts, led slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

New England abolitionists backed the anti-slavery fanatic John Brown, who conducted the raid on Harpers Ferry that got him hanged but helped to precipitate a Civil War. That war was fought over whether 11 Southern states had the same right to break free of Mr. Lincoln's Union as the 13 colonies did to break free of George III's England.

Millions of Americans, with untroubled consciences, defied the Volstead Act, imbibed alcohol and brought an end to Prohibition.

In the civil rights era, defying laws mandating segregation and ignoring court orders banning demonstrations became badges of honor.

Rosa Parks is a heroine because she refused to give up her seat on a Birmingham bus, despite the laws segregating public transit that relegated blacks to the "back of the bus."

In "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Dr. King, defending civil disobedience, cited Augustine—"an unjust law is no law at all"—and Aquinas who defined an unjust law as "a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."

Said King, "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

But this statement, rather than solving a moral issue, begs the ethical question: what is an "unjust law"?

If, for example, one believes that abortion is the killing of an unborn child and same-sex marriage is an abomination that violates "eternal law and natural law," [the very same words used by one of the Fathers of the Church, Saint Thomas Aquinas, that King invoked] do those who believe this not have a moral right if not a "moral responsibility to disobey such laws"?

Rosa Parks is celebrated. But the pizza lady who said her Christian beliefs would not permit her to cater a same-sex wedding was declared a bigot. And the LGBT crowd, crowing over its Supreme Court triumph, is writing legislation to make it a violation of federal civil rights law for that lady to refuse to cater that wedding.

But are people who celebrate the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village as the Mount Sinai moment of their movement really standing on solid ground to demand that we all respect the Obergefell decision as holy writ?

And if cities, states or Congress enact laws that make it a crime not to rent to homosexuals, or to refuse services at celebrations of their unions, would not dissenting Christians stand on the same moral ground as Dr. King if they disobeyed those laws?

Already, some businesses have refused to comply with the Obamacare mandate to provide contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs to their employees. Priests and pastors are going to refuse to perform same-sex marriages. Churches and chapels will refuse to host them. Christian colleges and universities will deny married-couple facilities to homosexuals.

Laws will be passed to outlaw such practices as discrimination, and those laws, which the Christians believe violate eternal law and natural law, will, as Dr. King instructed, be disobeyed.

And the removal of tax exemptions will then be on the table.

If a family disagreed as broadly as we Americans do on issues so fundamental as right and wrong, good and evil, the family would fall apart, the couple would divorce, and the children would go their separate ways.

Something like that is happening in the country.

A secession of the heart has already taken place in America, and a secession, not of states, but of people from one another, caused by divisions on social, moral, cultural, and political views and values, is taking place.

America is disuniting, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 25 years ago.

And for those who, when young, rejected the views, values and laws of Eisenhower's America, what makes them think that dissenting Americans in this post-Christian and anti-Christian era will accept their laws, beliefs, values?

Why should they? [All emphases added]

How Much Do Atheists Know about the Science and Evidence They always Appeal to?

I came across the above video by accident while researching the thorny issue of the origin of life on earth, and at first I wasn't sure who the "village1diot" of the name of this video's YouTube channel was. On the surface, it might have been referring to the Christians who are the intended victims of the hosts of what looks like a call-in TV show called The Atheist Experience, in this and many other videos. But watching them at work makes you seriously wonder whether the "village1diot" appellative doesn't refer to the show hosts themselves. I still haven't clarified that doubt to my satisfaction.

It starts badly and it gets worse.

There is a statement at the beginning about the word "atheist" supposedly deriving from the Greek goddess of wisdom. The latter is Athena, after whom the city of Athens is named. The Parthenon in Athens is named after Athena Parthenos ("Virgin"). All those in the video seem to have confused the similiarity between "atheist" and "Athena". But "atheist" stems from the Greek "atheos", meaning "without God" and composed of the privative alpha ("a") denying or lacking what follows, in this case "theos", or God.

On these premises, the Christian caller is right in spotting a contradicrion between atheism and worshipping a god, albeit female. His statement is welcome with sniggering and mockery by the hosts - one of whom for some unclear reason wears a large cross -, as if his stupidity had just been exposed, and not theirs.

But that's what he's there for, to be ridiculed.

The cross wearer, a declared atheist, then confesses his ignorance about the etymology of the word that expresses what he is. So much for choices supposedly made on a basis of rationality, science and knowledge. The other atheist doesn't seem to be any wiser either. If we consider that they run a TV show called The Atheist Experience and therefore atheism must be their specialist subject, it's particularly serious that they don't even know the derivation of the word and concept.

Then we move on to when the non-cross-wearing presenter claims that the laws of physics "can be proved or at least [pause] shown to be true in most senses." To demonstrate "the law of gravity", he performs a very neat experiment: he just drops his pen, which dutifully falls on the desk.

Pity nobody had told him that classical mechanics, of which Newton's theory of universal gravitation is part, far from being "proved or at least [pause] shown to be true in most senses", is now rejected by modern physics.

It has been superseded, and at best can be accepted only for a special set of circumstances. It has been replaced by Einstein's relativity theory and by quantum mechanics.

It can still have practical applications, but it's not considered by scientists to be "true" or "proved". Flat earth theory is also used while not regarded as true.

When a scientific theory like classical mechanics with his Newtonian universe, which had become the model for all scientific theories and the unshakeable pillar of science, was refuted - debuked, to use the common jargon - by Einstein and the quantum physicists in the early 20th century, it caused a profound crisis in the worlds of science and philosophy.

Such was the faith in science that developed in the 19th century, leading to a philosophy called "scientism", that it was considered impossible that a theory like classical physics could be refuted.

But it was. It should be a lesson that things are not as simple as some people think.

Our Moral Obligations to African Migrants and the BBC

I've just finished watching Question Time on the BBC, where one of the questions from the studio audience was whether we should help the people coming from Africa to Italy across the Mediterranean.

That question sparked a contest among the panellists for who shows most philanthropic generosity and heartfelt altruism in asserting that most definitely yes, we have an indisputable moral obligation to help them.

In their answers, the line was blurred between economic migrants and refugees in fear for their lives, escaping dangerous situations.

But hey, it was all for a good cause.

It was never mentioned that, even in the case of genuine refugees, there’s a general principle in the EU that asylum should be claimed in the first safe country that is reached, which is what so-called asylum seekers often don't do.

The UK has its own application of this principle. British charity The Refugee Council explains:

Safe third country

The Home Office deems certain countries to be places where a refugee is safe from persecution... If an asylum seeker travels through any of these states en route to the UK, he or she may be returned there on grounds of having travelled through a safe third country.

Unfortunately this is not a EU clear rule or legal requirement, giving rise to confusion.

The Dublin Regulation from which the "first safe country" principle derives is a confusing piece of legislation, so it is desirable that the ambiguities in it be dispelled by declaring that asylum seekers are obliged to claim asylum in the first safe country they can reach in their vicinity, rather than picking which country they prefer for economic reasons, which is likely to be a nation in Europe.

In case of economic migrants, there is no legal obligation to accept them. In terms of moral obligation, let's remind ourselves that the population of Africa alone is over 1 billion, to which - for moral reasons - we should add all the rest of the Third World's population in similar economic need.

Do we have a moral obligation to let all the Third World billions of inhabitants come to our shores and welcome them to our lands? In short, are we morally obliged to let our countries be destroyed?

Something else which was never mentioned during the program is that in April Muslim migrants being carried on a boat across the Mediterranean threw 12 Christians overboard to their deaths because they were not praying to Allah when they asked God for help when their dinghy suffered a puncture:

[A] Nigerian Christian prayed for his life in an innocent act that would end in the deaths of 12 fellow migrants.

One of the Muslims on board the rickety craft ordered him to stop, saying: 'Here, we only pray to Allah.'

When he refused, a violent fight ensued and 12 Christians drowned when they were thrown overboard by the Muslim refugees.

This is the sort of people we may let into our countries, not to mention the various terrorists, militants and criminals that the Islamic State controlling the Libyan coast smuggles to Europe.

Our betters, the cream of our media pundits and politicians are so concerned about "moral obligations" that they are prepared to let murderers become our next-door neighbours.

What is particularly aberrant is that the people pontificating from the height of their ethical stance in this way are not the ones who are going to bear the burden of their haughty choice. Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, and his co-pannellists on the Question Time panel last night are not likely to live in the sort of areas where immigrants and refugees reside.

Incidentally, for all those who say that all religions are the same, how many Christians do they know of who have thrown overboard, raped, tortured, beheaded or otherwise massacred Muslims in huge numbers as Muslims have done to Christians over the last few years, and about which we read every day?

Is Universalism So Bad for Whites?

Published on The Occidental Observer

By Enza Ferreri


Our current disastrous situation is that the White race is rapidly declining in absolute numbers and the countries it built are being taken over by the Third World.

There are, clearly, two elements to this. The first is that Whites are disappearing of their own volition because they don't reproduce.

The second element is unrestricted immigration and multiculturalism.

It’s my argument that universalism in general and Christianity in particular didn't produce either (for simplicity I’m assuming that Christianity is universalist although there are exceptions). Their Leftist and Jewish distortions did.

The elephant in the room which nobody is too happy to mention is that the evident reason for the demographic suicide of White, Western peoples is that they have dissociated sex from reproduction, which Christianity teaches not to do. Here, far from Christianity being the cause of this White birth decrease, there is its opposite, the erosion and abandonment of Christianity, at the root of this trend.

There is a Jamie Kelso video in which he confronts young Whites about such an issue as well.

Whites have done this to themselves (I’m childless, so I’m not blaming others, just stating a fact). There is no amount of mass immigration, no number of people from alien races and foreign cultures that could have imposed sexual promiscuity, widespread use of contraception, abortion en masse and similar conducts on our populations.

There is, yes, an alien group with strong anti-Christian sentiments, the Jews, that has propagated the ideas behind these behaviours in the West – only for non-Jews though.

After Jesus, Judaism has taken, with the Talmud, a completely different path from its previous history and has become virulently anti-Christian - hence the deceitful ambiguity of the expressions "Judaeo-Christianity" and "Judaeo-Christian".

For major Jewish movements and organisations in the Diaspora, the weakening and erosion of
Christianity in Western societies has been a primary goal.

Christianity is what has made the West strong and united for a long time, and which Jews saw as a threat.

But it’s up to Whites not to fall into this trap.

Having fun (sex without children or "strings attached") and ambition to make money and get influence (pursuing a career) have become more important than family. This is the Christian priority of values turned upside down.

We can forever speculate about why Whites - women in particular - decided to stop having children or greatly reduced their number, but how they did it is beyond dispute.

We have all the possible empirical evidence in the world to assert that wide use of contraceptives and abortion, starting from the mid-60s, the time when Jewish influence on the minds of the young reached its full maturity, resulted in declining Western birthrates and populations.

Patrick Buchanan, in his book The Death of the West (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , is justifiably gloomy:

Only the mass reconversion of Western women to an idea that they seem to have given up – that the good life lies in bearing and raising children and sending them out into the world to continue the family and nation – can prevent the Death of the West.

Why are Western women having fewer children than their mothers or none at all? Why have so many enlisted in what Mother Theresa called “the war against the child”? Western women have long had access to the methods and means of birth control but chose not to use them to the extent they do today…

From studying the birth charts, we find that something happened in the mid-1960s, in the midst of the postwar prosperity, that changed the hearts and minds of Western women and killed in them the desire to live as their mothers had.

There is no usefulness coming from always blaming someone else. We have to accept our responsibilities and change our views and behaviour.

We have been brainwashed, yes. A commenter on a website once wrote: “Most of us are mentally trapped to think Jewish.” Virtually every mainstream media outlet is “nothing more than a screen to present chosen views.” The great battle over the last century has been a fight for the mind of the Western peoples, which the chosen won by acquiring control over practically the complete mainstream news, information, education and entertainment media and using that control to disseminate their message and the way they want us to think.

So the first thing is to fight the battle inside ourselves. We've got to stop thinking in a way that is still affected by Leftist (read "Jewish") influences, ways of thinking which we may have absorbed in our university years.

In the same way as the words "Nazi" or "Hitler" evoke in most people a classical, Pavlovian conditioned response of refusal of everything associated with them, developed through decades of careful conditioning, so that the conscious part of the brain is totally bypassed and - without the possibility of considering the merits of it - an automatic reaction, not dissimilar from a kneejerk, is established, so words like "God", "Christian doctrine" and "Catholic teaching" evoke conditioned negative responses, inculcated by the same sources, and similarly without the benefit of knowing or reflecting on what is being rejected.

We may have become thoroughly aware of the Jewish control of the education system and media and entertainment industries, but are we just as thoroughly capable of neutralising and rejecting their effects on the less conscious parts of our brains?

How many of us have refused Christianity only on the basis of the scantest, most superficial knowledge, mostly coming from the distortions of the mainstream media in Christian-hating Jewish hands?

Universalism and Christianity don't require suicide: this is a wrong, deformed view of their meaning.
The idea that someone should suffer or die so that others can prosper has a long history.

First the animal and human sacrifices of some ancient - and contemporary - religions, including paganism.

Then animal experimentation which, although clothed in pseudoscientific garb, is a revisitation of the ritual animal sacrifices of primitive religions.

While the latter were immoral and just useless, animal experiments are worse: they are dangerous and harmful to the human beings whose health they are supposed to protect, due to the extreme unreliability of their outcome, on which treatments for humans are based.

But then scientific activity is much more dogmatic than people think, and wrong but well-established theories are hard to die.

The most recent incarnation of the belief in sacrifice is the problem we're dealing with: the indigenous people of the West are supposed to sacrifice themselves, by allowing their countries to be flooded with populations from another day and age in the distant past (that's what the Third World is), which will set the clock back for Westerners as well, in order to help these destitute, primitive populations.

Like the other forms of sacrifice described above, it will not help the supposed beneficiaries.

For the result of this invasion of epic proportions will be the eventual destruction of Western civilisation.

Whites are declining fast and furiously in number; Arabs, Blacks and Browns are replacing them in White countries due to the rates of both their migration and their reproduction. What will happen is that, like during the barbaric invasions of Rome, the more primitive human elements will prevail on the more developed and replace them.

It's easier for a more advanced state to revert to a previous one than the other way around. It will be difficult for Third Worlders to absorb and adapt to a far more sophisticated society. But it will be relatively simple for them to destroy it from within, and that will become even more effortless as their numbers and percentage of the population increase.

There is a certain entropy in human affairs as well as in nature: disorder is easier than order, destruction is easier than construction, barbarism is easier than civilisation.

If we look long-term (rather than short), we see that in the end the West, the civilisation created by Whites, will be no more. All the world will be Third World, assuming that the same process will be repeated in every part of the West.

So there will be no place where "desperate", as the media describe them, people from poor parts of the globe can go to.

The image of a lifeboat that can only take a certain number of victims of a shipwreck, sinking when that number is exceeded so that everybody on it drowns and not even the original number can survive, springs to mind.

Is this a rational strategy to pursue?

Of course not. It's not callousness, selfishness or particularism which make us realise that the West cannot take this unsustainable level of immigration and survive.

It's realism and rationality.

From an ethical, universalist viewpoint, it's essential, nay imperative, to preserve Western civilisation, which has established important moral principles to apply to humans and all other sentient beings. Without it, the world would - will? - be a much worse place.

Therefore, there is no contradiction between opposing mass immigration from the Third World and embracing universalism, no conflict between advocating a stop to this colonisation and believing in Christianity.

People quote Pope Francis and other representatives of the Church who say the opposite.

But we mustn't forget that this is the post-Vatican-II Church, which apologised to the Jews and totally changed its views on them.

This is the same Church that declared that the British Bishop Richard Williamson, “in order to claim admission to episcopal functions in the church, must distance himself in absolutely unequivocal and public fashion from his positions regarding the Shoah”. The Bishop had made remarks considered as “Holocaust denial” and refused to retract them.

Why should the Vatican impose specific views on a bishop concerning the Holocaust? How can a certain interpretation of a historical period which is not even connected with Christianity and has - one way or another - no bearing on it be regarded as such a fundamental article of faith as to justify ecclesiastical disciplinary measures?

This in itself shows that something else is at work here. The Church has for a long time been infiltrated by crypto-Jews.

But it has not always been like this. In fact, it has been only in the last few decades of its two millennia of history. We have to understand what happened to the Church, not just with Vatican II, but during decades and centuries before. TOO has explored this several times.

Those who see an affinity between Christianity and Judaism should consider that the Jews before and after Christ are not the same kind of people. Jews either sincerely converted to Christianity – in which case, by definition, they had to abandon their ethnocentrism - or became the worst enemies of Christ: they even killed him and continued their hatred through Talmudic Judaism.

To reject Christianity on the basis, as I have read sometimes, that it’s “not White”, it’s “Levantine” or of Jewish derivation is every bit as rational as if the Japanese, in an outburst of self-harming hypernationalism or racialism, had historically rejected Western technology because it hadn’t been created by Japanese or Orientals but Whites.

Finally, one has to ask oneself why, if Christianity were so bad for Whites as some people think, Jewish media, entertainment industry and intellectuals are constantly bashing and deriding it. Is it atheism or Christianity that anti-White Jews fear?

They don't attack and ridicule paganism or atheism. They actually promote and lionise atheism day in and day out. We don’t have Hollywood films making fun of atheism or criticising it.

In this regard, it’s rather uncanny how the chosen people are now imitating “Whitespeak”.

This is a comment someone left to one of my posts on Facebook:

Christianity is a Roman reworking of some sand demon kult…

They [Christians] have no place being here in the heartlands of the Celto-Germanics/Nordics. The west died when Rome/Catholics tried to destroy our real heritage.

It could sound like a fairly common – if not typical - observation from a White advocate. Except that there are several telltale signs that he’s in fact Jewish.

Typically European Genetic Traits

I must confess that, given the difficulty of establishing an evolutionary basis for even simple physical genetic traits separating the different races, like skin colour, it seems to me that an evolutionary basis for more complex psychological and moral characteristics like universalism is still more arduous to show.

In the attempt to shed a bit of light on this obscurity, I made a search on why Northern Europeans evolved differently from Eskimos ("Inuit" is the politically correct term in Canada but in Alaska it's the other way around and, anyway, "Eskimo" includes Inuit and other groups like Yupik and Iñupiat, so is more accurate in the context of this article).

I'll try to simplify here a theory which is more composite, but for our purposes can be reduced to this basic element. The hypothesis is that Whites developed individualism (as opposed to the collectivism of other races) and moral universalism (as opposed to the particularism of other races) because they inhabited a cold, harsh environment in North-West Europe, where these traits helped their survival and adaptation.

To test this theory I thought of a conceptual control group. Other populations lived near the Arctic and were subject to the same ecological conditions: the Eskimos for example. Did they develop the same traits? Hence my research.

So far I haven't found an affirmative answer to this question, and prima facie Eskimos don't appear very similar to Whites in cultural terms.

But I found plenty of information on another characteristic of Whites that Eskimos didn't develop and why, a physical one: light skin.

The following is the currently accepted explanation for this variance.

The habitat with little sunlight which ancestral Northern Europeans and Eskimos had in common is responsible for the pale skin of the former because the body needs sunlight to synthesise the necessary vitamin D, and a lighter skin helps in cloudy climates as it absorbs more sunlight.

This circumstance should have made Eskimos evolve a white skin too, but it didn't. The Eskimos' dark skin is thus explained with the fact that Inuit ate lots of fatty fish, a rich source of vitamin D, which made them less dependent on sunlight for this nutrient.

Northern Europeans also ate plenty of fatty fish:

As an example, Scottish, Welsh, Celtic, and Irish people have certain nutritional requirements which are just the opposite of the African Bantu. The ancestral diets of the Scots and Irish and related cultures have always been very high in fatty fish.

That, however, changed when an agricultural economy was brought into Europe from the Middle East, transforming the diet of Europeans in the direction of more grain and farm-animal meat and less fatty fish, with consequent reduction of vitamin D intake.

That could explain the difference between Whites and Eskimos with their darker skin.

But anthropologist Peter Frost doesn't believe in this theory, for various reasons, the main of which is that such an evolution would have required a much longer time frame than the period since human populations started inhabiting Europe:

If we pursue this line of reasoning, Europeans must have turned white almost at the dawn of history. We know that agriculture spread into southeastern Europe from the Middle East around 9,000 years ago. By 7500 BP [Before the Present] it had reached a line stretching from the Netherlands through Central Europe and to the Black Sea. Thus, the extreme skin depigmentation of northern Europeans would have occurred over the last seven millennia or so. Actually, the time frame is even narrower, since white-skinned Europeans appear in ancient Egyptian art from the second millennium B.C.

So we’re left with around 3,000 years, at most. Is this pace of phenotypic change consistent with selection due to weak sunlight? Not according to current opinion. Brace et al. (1999) studied how skin color varies among Amerindians, who have inhabited North and South America for 12,000-15,000 years, and among Aborigines, who have inhabited Australia for some 50,000 years. If latitudinal variation in skin color tracks natural selection due to the intensity of sunlight, calculations show that this kind of selection would have taken over 100,000 years to create the skin-color difference between black Africans and northern Chinese and ~ 200,000 years to create the one between black Africans and northern Europeans.

Frost thinks the reason Europeans developed white skin is the same for which they developed different eye and hair colours from the rest of human groups: sexual selection.

Sexual selection for hair and eye colour varieties is accepted by mainstream anthropology - albeit taking precaution to emphasise that it's not the case that blond hair, red hair, green eyes and blue eyes are more attractive per se, but just because they are rarer.

Sexual selection for skin colour is not accepted - hence the vitamin D/sunlight theory.

Put simply, it cannot be accepted that white skin is more attractive.

Frost concludes his article on the subject by saying that, if we were talking about any other animal species, sexual selection would be the accepted explanation for skin colour variation.

He may be right or not, and so could the other theories on the same topic or on universalism as a biologically evolved trait.

The moral is: evolutionary explanations tend to always be highly speculative and difficult, if not impossible, to test. As one of the greatest philosophers of science of our times, Sir Karl Popper, said, Darwin's theory is not scientific, but a "scientific metaphysics", due to its in-built impossibility to be refuted by empirical controls and evidence.

Moral Universalism, Christianity, Whites, the West

Prima facie, there is a number of observations that appear obvious.

Given that the part of the world inhabited by Whites - first Europe and then the West - is the only part to have embraced universalism, and one particular expression of it - Christianity -, and given that this is the part of the world that has made immensely greater progress in every aspect than the rest of the world, the first question to ask ourselves is whether and how the two phenomena - Christianity and progress - are in a causal relationship with each other.

This is of paramount importance, as there are signs that the West and the Whites are on their way to abandon Christianity, and some among them are even considering the next step - abandoning moral universalism in general -, which shouldn't be surprising, as Christianity is the supreme embodiment of moral universalism.

This seems to confirm the idea held by many philosophers and thinkers: that renouncing God is the first step on a slippery slope towards renouncing morality.

Abandoning moral universalism seems prima face to defeat the object. This seems to be the reasoning: we Whites are the only universalist humans; our countries are the best in the world; the particularists, ie all other races, want to take advantage of our generous universalism, invade our lands, displace us; therefore we should become particularist too, in order to defend ourselves and stop them doing that.

It may defeat the object if embracing particularism will make us similar to other races. So, in the end, the West would become like the Third World, one way - by invasion from it - or the other - by our becoming like it. Is a White Third World a desirable objective?

I say no.

Those who think that Whites, universalist and Christian or not, would never create conditions like those of the Third World should be able to explain in concrete terms what are, if not universalism and Christianity, the characteristics of Whites throughout history that produced a civilisation so superior to any other on the globe.

The barbarians that invaded Rome were Whites. What was so good about them that could have produced Europe's subsequent glory?

Who saved Europe in the Dark Ages caused by the Slavic and Germanic hordes that destroyed the Roman civilisation?

It was the Christian Church.

Moral Universalism Is Needlessly Blamed

There used to be an article rather grandly entitled “The Contemporary use of Philosophy and Ideas” by a David Morris on the YourBNP website, but the site doesn't exist any more.

I've looked for his name but haven't found anything. Googling the site turns up "Brain Natriuretic Peptide (BNP) Test" and similar results.

How do I know about this article?

Because I've seen it discussed in an old post on The Occidental Observer on the pathology of moral universalism.

Here is a quotation in the latter from the YourBNP piece:

The [British] government planned drastic financial cuts for us, but increases in overseas aid! This perverse attitude grew from the Victorian middle class influenced by evangelical Christianity, which believed it had a duty to ‘save’ unchristian natives. It became a preference over the British working class which endures today. Characteristic of this is Mrs Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House, whose eyes ‘had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off, as if they could see nothing nearer than Africa’. Like the elites she neglected those around her, including notoriously her own children. Her thoughts were directed instead towards the fictitious African possession of Borrioboola Gha and her idealistic plans for its development.

This and other quotations show that Morris' article doesn't say anything that amounts to a rational criticism of universalism, but only of its wrong (non realistic, or non pragmatic) application. Or rather, of something which is not moral universalism but the incapability of seeing the link between cause and effect, an action and its consequences.

The "pathology" it attacks is the pathology of that inability, not of universalism.

That some universalists possess that inability is accidental.

I can easily imagine plenty of examples of particularists displaying it: one is that of barbarians descending on Rome and destroying the wealth of civilisation that could have been so useful for themselves.

Actually, that behaviour can be attributed to their particularism, their cultural short-sightedness and consequent inability to see their long-term interest (even in purely particularist terms).

Morris' example of a Dickensian character is not valid or persuasive either.

Here we have a person, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, acting in an irresponsible manner, who is also universalist: there is a correlation, but the causation has not been demonstrated or established.

The Dickensian character is a fallacy, a red herring. (Incidentally, Dickens was a universalist, and it's that universalism that made him campaign for better conditions for the British poor, which shows the absurdity of the YourBNP chap's claim.) A rational - namely, that takes into account the link between cause and effect - application of universalism gives priority to the next of kin, as the most directly affected by a moral agent's actions.

Let’s take a universalist, a Christian man, who has a family. He doesn’t think – and no other Christian expects him to think – that he has the same responsibility for his kids as for some children living on the other side of the earth with whom he has no genetic or cultural links. (In fact, the moral priority given to attention to one's children over strangers is one of the reasons for priest celibacy, as priests could not offer the same care to their flock if they had a family.)

Nobody, including a universalist, expects two parents to look after the children of others in the same way and degree they look after their own.

It's nonsensical. It makes far more sense to divide responsibilities, fragment them into much smaller units than to stipulate that everybody must be responsible for everybody else in equal measure. That applies to nations in the same manner as to families.

Procreation, biology and genetics are part of the universe created by God.

"Honour thy father and thy mother", says one of the commandments.

In the same way that a natural family has unique ties, so has a natural race, which can be seen as an extended family, sharing more DNA than the rest of humanity.

There is no reason why universalism needs to lead to racial suicide and multicultural absurdities, and it is not the cause of current Whites' sad predicament. Only the misunderstanding of universalism is.

Universalism is the basis of ethics. Most ethical theories are universalist, both Christian and secular.

Are we prepared to live without ethics?

Have people understood the consequences of what it means? Without an ethical system to govern a society, the weakest would easily be trampled. If there is no other source of right, might becomes it.

Do we want to become like the rest of the world, like the non-White countries?

Herein lies the contradiction.

People from other parts of the world want to come to the West because it's better. But it's better for us before it's better for them.

And, going back to the post by David Morris, one can hardly say that the current crop of British politicians are morally universalist, let alone a good example of moral universalism. Their moral universe starts and ends with their own self, and their only moral imperative is to get re-elected.

Rotherham to Ban Muslim Child Rape Protests

In late May the local Council of Rotherham, in Northern England, has asked the Government for special powers to have protest marches by "extremist groups" in the city outlawed.

Rotherham has been one of the places in England hit by Muslim paedophile gangs.

For 20 years, Muslim rings have been grooming White girls for sexual exploitation, totally undisturbed by police, social services, politicians and media. After the continuous cover-up became impossible, at one point there were at least 54 active investigations on as many grooming gangs in Britain. Assuming that each gang may have had dozens or hundreds of victims over the years, possibly thousands of White girls have been abused, raped and even murdered in all this time.

Just because they were White - as the abuse had a racial and religious motivation -, and because the authorities didn't dare lift a finger against a minority protected by political correctness.

The ongoing scandal has generated outrage among that part of the population that, due to its geographical or social proximity to these crimes and the multicultural environment from which they originate, feels particularly affected by them.

Several street demonstrations have been organised by the English Defence League (EDL), Britain First and other organisations. Now Rotherham Council wants to ban the protests.

These had intensified after the publication of the so-called "Jay Report" last August, which revealed that "South Yorkshire Police and Rotherham Council had failed at least 1,400 victims of child sexual exploitation over a 16-year-period, with many of the main offenders being men of Pakistani origin".

A group of EDL demonstrators set up camp outside Rotherham police station from 29 August to 13 September, calling for the resignation of police and crime commissioner Shaun Wright, who had been responsible for children’s services at Rotherham Council between 2005 and 2010.

The reason adduced by Rotherham Council for banning the legitimate protests is ostensibly economic: the great cost involved in policing both them and the Left's counter-demonstrations, and the "blighted" image of the city, with consequent loss of town centre shopping and business.

At the end of the local newspaper article reporting on this, someone left this comment:

Rotherham was blighted by the systematic abuse of hundreds of young girls over 16 years,demonstration are a symptom of that blight ,where do these idiots that are running Rotherham Council on huge inflated salaries paid for by the taxpayers come from.

Other comments echo similar feelings.

Only last week Bradford Police have charged "14 men and a 16-year-old male from Keighley with sex offences relating to rape and sexual abuse of a child under 16", alleged to have occurred in 2011-2012. The accused all have surnames like Hussain, Ali, Mahmood, Ziarab, Iqbal, Khan.

The local press has been alone in reporting this news, with the national media ignoring it.

Can banning protests deriving from a justified feeling of offence be the way forward?

And why is the cover-up, at least on the part of the media, apparently still going on?

Jewish Commenter Defends Neo-Paganism and Insults Christianity

Someone whom it is unChristian and uncharitable but realistic to call foolish (the fact that his Facebook page bears the appellative of Anarchophobopath under his name should immediately give some indication of his IQ), paradoxically named Paul Wiseman, has left a comment to a recent post to my Facebook page Save the West on a promise that Putin made some time ago to protect Christians from persecution worldwide.

I have now deleted his comment which doesn't do anything to my page except corrupting it, but I'll paste it here to analyse it. He wrote:

Christianity is a Roman reworking of some sand demon kult.
Most 'Christians' don't even know what that book of dribble even says.

Quote from Jesus (Joshua - the most common name of the day),"Bring those who do not recognize me as messiah to me and kill them" that's in the book of John. I could go on.
We have our own much more ancient and respectable traditions that require men be men. Fuck all sand demon kults.

YHWH - mountain god of storms and war. Kills more than the so called bad guy of the book. Al Lah = a Moon God - to me they are all sand demons. They have no place being here in the heartlands of the Celto-Germanics/Nordics. The west died when Rome/Catholics tried to destroy our real heritage.

Rabid anti-Christians don't have any fear of writing the greatest absurdities in the vilest tone because they know that Christians are too polite and other people are in general too ignorant of Christianity to reply. Unfortunately Facebook is teeming with these types.

A few telltale signs

Let's start with the wrong quotation, which he says is from "the book of John". There is no book of John. There is the Gospel According to John (or the Gospel of John).

His usage is reminiscent of the Old Testament, which does have "Books of..." followed by a name. Another element that gives away his probable Jewish background, apart from the surname Wiseman, is when he says "Jesus (Joshua - the most common name of the day)".

Joshua is the Hebrew name of Jesus (or more precisely the Hebrew name is Yeshua, a common alternative form of Yehoshuah, and its English spelling is Joshua). The name Jesus is from the Latin Iesus and ultimately from the Greek Iēsous.

Even more damning is the reference to YHWH, for Jews the name by excellence, the proper, holiest name of God.

After Jesus, Judaism has become Talmudic Judaism, venomously anti-Christian. Today's Jews are generally either Talmudic or atheist: both groups are anti-Christian, although obviously there are always individual exceptions.

The meaning of "slay them before me"

The alleged quotation "Bring those who do not recognize me as messiah to me and kill them" is not in John or anywhere else in the Bible.

He may refer to Luke 19:27, which has been quoted many times by types who, like Mr Wiseman, are in search of cheap shots against Christianity.

Unfortunately for them, who may be accustomed to an age of information in sound bites and of bite-sized learning, we need to read more than a handful of words to understand the meaning of this passage.

Crude misunderstandings are what happens when someone who knows nothing or very little about Christianity takes a handful of words from Scripture and thinks he's understood the whole Christian theology.

Interestingly, the same verse is also quoted by Muslims who try (in vain) to establish a moral equivalence between their religion, Islam, and Christianity. But it's totally evident - in this extract as well - that Jesus, unlike Allah and his prophet Muhammad, are not inciting men to kill.

Here is the text of Luke 19:11-27, King James Version:

11 And as they heard these things, he added and spake a parable, because he was nigh to Jerusalem, and because they thought that the kingdom of God should immediately appear.

12 He said therefore, A certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return.

13 And he called his ten servants, and delivered them ten pounds, and said unto them, Occupy till I come.

14 But his citizens hated him, and sent a message after him, saying, We will not have this man to reign over us.

15 And it came to pass, that when he was returned, having received the kingdom, then he commanded these servants to be called unto him, to whom he had given the money, that he might know how much every man had gained by trading.

16 Then came the first, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained ten pounds.

17 And he said unto him, Well, thou good servant: because thou hast been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities.

18 And the second came, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained five pounds.

19 And he said likewise to him, Be thou also over five cities.

20 And another came, saying, Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which I have kept laid up in a napkin:

21 For I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow.

22 And he saith unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant. Thou knewest that I was an austere man, taking up that I laid not down, and reaping that I did not sow:

23 Wherefore then gavest not thou my money into the bank, that at my coming I might have required mine own with usury?

24 And he said unto them that stood by, Take from him the pound, and give it to him that hath ten pounds.

25 (And they said unto him, Lord, he hath ten pounds.)

26 For I say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him.

27 But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.

These, the "incriminated" words from verse 27 are indeed spoken by Jesus, but in a parable. We see immediately that they are not a command that he himself gave, but the nobleman of the parable.

Parables are symbolic. There is a meaning to this as to all Jesus' parables, but it's not literal.

The man who becomes king is Christ. His citizens who hate him are the Jews who rejected him. His servants are those who follow him and from him receive the power, that is the glory of God. The pounds are, as the talents in Matthew, the gifts we have received from God through Christ. Christ wants us to let our gifts bear fruits, not hide them. The reward for those who gained from their pounds is to share in the glory of God, for those who didn't is to be deprived of it.

The very forceful expression "slay them before me" means the damnation that these men brought upon themselves by choosing to reject God and therefore the possibility of salvation.

It's important to understand the significance. Jesus is talking about the future of those who have voluntarily rejected him as Lord and who trample on the gift of salvation that he still today offers to every man. That gift cost him the death on the cross; he, innocent who died for the guilty, has accepted to bear our condemnation. What would be left for a murderer who persistently refused to be pardoned, if not the right judgment for his crimes?

Here then Jesus solemnly warns about them: "bring them here", so that they can see the glory of Christ and the joy that they have despised, hated and persecuted, preferring to be "god" of themselves. "Bring them here," so that they realise whom they insulted and at whom they shook their fists - at the one who gave them life, and who offered them, despite their profanities, his love and the free gift of salvation until the last day of their lives.

The Saviour they rejected, who sacrificed himself for them on the cross, will then be their Judge and will not be able to intercede for them any more; having spurned grace, they will get what they wanted: the path they have chosen, that of destruction and contempt, will bear its fruit.

A world without justice

People often expect God to be simply an entity that dishes out all the things we desire and none of those we do not desire: after all, isn't he omnipotent? Why can't he make us all happy? He can, but not in the way we have devised for ourselves.

If somebody expects to be able to do whatever he wishes with his life, follow every desire, urge and impulse regardless of the consequences, and never have to be punished for it, then he is not a Christian.

We dislike Divine judgement and punishemnt, and may reject God for this. But think about it for a moment: when we see other people get away with something wrong they have committed, unpunished, we don't like it, do we? We don't deem that a world without justice would be an ideal, or even good, world.

We also don't appreciate the consequences for society of widespread disobedience to God's commandments: we abhor, for instance, the dramatic increase in crime due to the disintegration of the family.

A warning for White Nationalist "Neo-Pagans"

What should make those who identify themselves as White Nationalists reflect is how similar the utterances of this Jewish commenter are to their own defences of paganism and rejection of Christianity, with almost verbatim repetition: "We have our own much more ancient and respectable traditions that require men be men. Fuck all sand demon kults." Or even more: "They have no place being here in the heartlands of the Celto-Germanics/Nordics. The west died when Rome/Catholics tried to destroy our real heritage."

The latter assertion is so moronically ignorant that I sincerely hope I don't need to explain that it is the diametrically opposite of historical truth: the West was born out of Greece and Rome on one hand and Christianity on the other. Even the briefest look at any historical account (a book if its' not too much to ask, a pamphlet, a flyer, a TV show, a video, a computer game) should show Mr Wiseman and his peers that this is the case.

Our Jewish friend, in his agglomeration "Rome/Catholics" as if classical Rome and the Catholic Church were the same thing - probably in his mind he sees them as non-Nordic and that's sufficient reason to lump them together -, makes the umpteenth mistake of a very long, dense series of errors in a short writing.

Whether he believes this nonsense or just rehashed it from the many pagan sources - many of which belong to the White advocacy's movement - that inhabit the internet these days is irrelevant. He must have realised that such drivel is "good for the Jews". Once again the Jews score another point against us.

For anti-White Jews, it's much better if Whites are neo-pagan than Christian: this is easily confirmed by Jewish-owned Hollywood's practice of churning out a plethora of anti-Christian movies, but no anti-pagan ones.


"Radical Faeries 2010 London Pride" by Fæ - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.