It is generally accepted that time flows in a forward direction, an acceptance that is a construct of our perceptions. But for many thousands of years man thought that the sun revolved around the Earth, for that is what it appeared to do. We now accept that the Earth revolves around the sun, even though appearances have not changed. The sun still rises in the East and sets in the West, just as before. Why is it not entirely possible that our perception of time is incorrect, just as the earlier perception of the sun circling the Earth has been shown to be incorrect? For all we know, time may well be flowing backward, not forward, or even not flowing at all. The dreaming brain has no perception of time, calling up events and faces from what we perceive as the past. Do newborn babies dream, and if so, of what do they dream? And how is it a five year old has as many memories as a fifty year old? Is entropy running forward or backwards? Or maybe not running at all?

Flow backward, O Time In Thy Flyte
And maketh the dawn follow night
The rolling stone gathers no moss
The burning coal suffers no loss
Impermanence triumphs it seems
For are we not young in our dreams?
Dreamed faces that often appear
Suggest that those gone are still here
Why should we believe that time flows
On pace with the blossoming rose?
The rivers, like time, do not know
Or care which direction they flow
Time’s arrow cares not that it’s flight
Has dawn coming first or the night
Time is but perception, and we
Know not what it is that we see

There will always be an England, so long as they refrain from absorbing Muslim invaders from the Middle East. This differs England from the rest of Europe, who have, out of misplaced humanity, enthusiastically embraced the idea of national suicide. Bearded, military trained young Muslim men are flooding unimpeded into Europe, and once there are free to move about at will, selecting which country offers the most hospitality. These Muslim invaders will not wait for votes to take power, but will use force and intimidation against a supine European leadership and populace. And once Europe has been Muslimized, how much longer will there always be an England?

Kings and Queens forever reign
The Saxon to the tidal Dane
The Henrys stopped at number eight
Down to Elizabeth to date
The redcoats formed into a square
Brown Bess and bayonets to dare
From men of iron and ships of wood
For England they have always stood
But what of history you say
For that was then and not today
Where heroes are in short supply
No longer not to reason why
With apathy they sit and wait
Accepting the new Caliphate

John Boehner tearfully offered his resignation as Speaker of the House of Representatives, effective at the end of October, and most observers believe, that despite vigorous attempts by the Tea Party members to elect a true conservative who will fight Obama, the successor to Boehner will be a Boehner guy, an institutional Republican, who will cheerfully work with Obama in the interests of maintaining civility and decorum. The institutional Congressional Republicans are not the loyal op-position, they are the loyal assume the position.

I hate to sound like one of those complainers
But why do we elect all those John Boehners
Who promise to defund the Left agenda
And then turn red red rage to pale magenta
The Senate leader has as his own credo
A horror of a presidential veto
I have no problem with a man who’s crying
Except that when he cries you know he’s lying
He should be whipping guys and get to bossing
But every time the center aisle he’s crossing
The GOP has leadership pretending
To fight and to oppose with no knee bending
But every time Obama’s frosty staring
Sends shivers down their spines he is so scaring
John Boehner acted just before his firing
But then so what the caucus will be hiring
Another Lefty leaning House floor leader
And cleaning up the House leaves it no neater

It is disturbing to know that after more than six years of Barack Obama there are still those who think of him as God. Fred Kaplan at Slate writes that Obama has brilliantly backed Putin into a corner, and George Stephanopoulos recently badgered Donald Trump relentlessly, demanding to know why Trump did not defend the Deity when at a  Town Hall political meeting a questioner said President Obama was a Muslim. It is unclear why Kaplan would think Obama was winning, hands down, or why Stephanopoulos was offended by the suggestion that Obama was Muslim, for did not Obama Himself, in one of His ghost-written autobiographies, remark proudly upon His Muslim faith? What will future generations think of the reign of the God King, Barack the First? Will they be astonished to learn that many millions of people thought that it was He, Barack Obama, who had walked upon the waters?

If we survive, when we look back
We’ll wonder how it was Barack
Was ever thought to be a god
Whose every random blink and nod
Was thought to mark some brilliant thought
That peace on Earth is what he’s brought
So godlike that he fairly shown
In brilliance we had never known
He cast no shadow when he walked
And birds sang sweetly when he talked
The nearest thing to God on Earth
While lacking only virgin birth

The history of Man is one of pestilence and war, destruction and death, music and art, beauty and wonder. For every Nero there is a Cicero, for every death there is a birth. The history of Man is a tale of a succession of such wonders that fill the mind and heart with suffocating joy. Mozart, El Greco, the Parthenon and the Wright Flyer. The history of Man is the history of the mind of Man, shaped by the struggle to simply survive in a world that cared not if he lived or died. It is not our death that defines us, but what we do with our lives. And what Man has done with his life has led to wonders beyond compare, with more wonders to come, until the stars wink out and the universe is no more, for Man himself is the wonder.

Were the heavens filled with diamonds
Gleaming in the night-dark sky
And the sun a flaming orb of molten gold
And the moon and Venus beckoning
So close to touch the eye
Would the story of mankind be differed told?
Would our gods be of a different name
Our courses different laid
The hunters leave behind the bitter cold
And history a different tale
With endings torn and frayed
New faces on the statues or the old?
Suppose the oceans purest wine
And bread grew on each tree
Would man have worked and fought for substance sold
Had all been given food and drink
Without the asking, free
Would science, art and wonders then unfold?
The hunter and the gatherer
Who roamed the ice to live
Survived the saber-tooth by being bold
And handed down to us, his child
His finest gift to give
A brain composed of finest flaming gold

We all remember the Sudetenland, don’t we? Of course we don’t. Unless you’re old enough to remember Hitler and Chamberlain and the rest of the Western democracies watching helplessly as Hitler took what he wanted. The same thing is happening now. In 1938 Britain and France gave in and signed the Munich agreement that gave Hitler what he wanted and confirmed him in his belief that Britain and France would not fight, a belief that made WW2 inevitable. We are in a similar process now, with Obama meeting with Putin, the result of which will be another Munich agreement, with Putin and Russia being given permission to do and take whatever it is they want. The question is not what is it Putin wants, but will somebody have to fight him? If somebody does, that somebody will not be Obama. Because, really – what is the Sudetenland to us?

Mr. Putin is a very charming fellow
He smiles while shooting rapids killing bears
He seems a friendly chap, so warm and mellow
Despite his fearsome scowls and icy stares
His reasonable actions are no threat to
The peace in any form or any way
And if I were a betting man I’d bet you
That Putin would defend your right to say
That Syria is well within his right to
See that Assad remains upon his throne
And while he swears to God he will not fight you
He will of course shoot down the errant drone
Crimea is and always has been Russian
The Light Brigade made music, failed at war
While Eastern lands that once might well been Prussian
Since ‘45 were Russian evermore
The Baltic States were needed as a buffer
For no one trusts the Germans to be still
And be good friends, not make their neighbors suffer
With nonsense like the triumph of the will
So if Sudetenland must be invaded
The Russian army peacefully engaged
With good Sudetens cheerful and elated
We know it’s only peace that’s being waged

The longstanding risk that true democratization will lead to takeover by radical Islamists remains real; our ideals do not require us to commit suicide in this manner.-Francis Fukuyama. Well, at least Fukuyama got one thing right.

Democracy does not come from above, like manna, nor does it come from outside, either by persuasion or by guns. Democracy comes from inside, one man at a time, one tiny step at a time. Not even Pericles could turn Sparta into a democracy. Third World countries are Third World countries because the people are Third World people. Imposed democracy worked, at least so far, in post WW2 Germany and Japan because the people were First World people. It is not Sharia that keeps Muslim countries from becoming First World democracies, it is the Third World culture. Until that culture is changed there is no possibility of Muslim democracy.

The culture of the Muslim is derivative
The numbers we call Arabic they stole
From Hindoos at the height of Arab conquest
New slaves and gold and jewels their only goal
Recall for me the latest in inventions
That sprang from fertile, brilliant Arab minds
We cannot blame the people that they conquered
For living lives of Muslim melon rinds
To think that we could change them was so foolish
Our dead and wounded gave their all in vain
Just let them kill each other if they choose to
And if they cross the line inflict great pain

The world looks pretty good right about now to the president. All is working according to plan. And so it goes in the best damn administration and the smartest damn president the country has ever seen. Of course, I speak of President Putin of the Soviet Union, er – Russia. Can we protect the Baltic States? The Kaiser was once asked by a British diplomat what he would do if Britain landed two infantry divisions on the Baltic coast, and the Kaiser said he would arrest them. Does the United States still have two full strength divisions to send to Latvia or Estonia? We do not. Obama has reduced the combat readiness of the Army to two brigades, or less than one division, and he has enough time to fill those two brigades with lesbians and transgendered women. Just as well that we don’t get involved. I don’t want them arrested.

A Hyper-power, hyper-nation
Entered a deep hibernation
Until Putin dragged them out
Blinking in the snow
Down went Near Abroad and Georgia
Putin crafty as a Borgia
Then to West, a turnabout
Crimea with one blow
Ukraine now with fighter bases
Syria, he’s going places
What he does there is no doubt
The man does surely know
Obama is a weakling she-man
Putin knows when scowled at he ran
Circles with a scream and shout
His fierce face all for show
His army now LGBTs
With which he’s fine, and much at ease
Obama claims he still has clout
Because he’s Putin’s ho

Ad astra! To the stars! One day, perhaps sooner than we think, man will escape Earth and colonize the inner planets, and after that we shall explore what is beyond the stars. When our ancestors looked at the night sky they saw gods. When Cortez stood upon that peak in Darien and looked at the stars he saw the unreachable. Today, we look upon the darkness of the deep night sky and see beyond the spheres, to the farthest edges of the farthest beyond.

Within the spheres the glowing stars
Sang sweetly in the mind
Of Earth-bound man and showed the way
To shed the chains that bind
Him to the tiny blue-green Earth
That danced around the sun
As bound as he to stay the course
Until all time is done
Then came the science of the West
The moon was conquered first
And then the inner planets fell
To sudden fevered burst
We gathered then to catch our breath
Ad astra! was the cry
And silver ships and iron-hard men
Now pierce the star-filled sky

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy said that all happy families are happy in the same way, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Pace Tolstoy, there may very well be individual happy families, and individual unhappy families, but collectively, the human race has always been one big unhappy family, as a cursory glance at any non-progressive history book will tell you. When the anthropologists dig up an ancient grave and find the sword cuts on the bones and the jagged hole in the skull, that should tell you that we are very far from being one big happy family.

Why do they hurt us? the little boy cried
Why do we run from them, why do we hide?
His mother then hushed him, Be silent, my son
For we are but Christian, he Arian Hun
But that means he’s Christian, the boy softly said
Why would a Christian want Christians be dead?
He’s heretic, dear, only Christian in guise
While we are the heretic, son, in his eyes
The moon and the sun and the heavens all shine
On those who are hungry and those who well dine
For all are not equal nor thought to belong
We run and we hide because he is strong
He takes what he will from people like us
Who fill up the derelict wayfaring bus
That stops not for you nor it stops not for me
For such is the lot of the poor family