President Obama has made a deal with the Turks. For the privilege of using the Turkish airbase at Incirlik against ISIS, Obama has agreed that the Turks will be allowed to bomb our only ally in the fight, the Kurds. The Ottoman Turks terrorized Christian Europe for centuries, killing and enslaving, burning and pillaging, and while the Turks profess friendship with the West, they remain the Muslim Ottomans at heart, slaughtering millions of Armenians and now busily engaged in an ongoing surreptitious genocide against the Kurds. And so we must ask the question.

You say the Turk is not our friend?
That Muslim terror will not end?
That corsairs still slip in the bay?
The shore-side villagers to slay?
And chain the men as galley slaves?
Then leave as silent as the waves?
You say they use now other means?
They kill with Yankee F-16s?
That is their way, have you not heard?
Armenians and now the Kurd

Barack Obama is not entirely responsible for the hundreds of thousands of dead and the millions of displaced homeless refugees in the Middle East nightmare, but he shares a lot of the blame by his policy toward Iran, his abrupt removal of US troops from Iraq, and the overthrow of Qaddafi and a subsequent turning of a stable Libya into an arms bazaar and recruiting center for ISIS. Leadership has never been infallible, and in fact has been responsible for catastrophe far more often than for victory. Obama may or may not be incompetent, may or may not have brilliantly orchestrated the current catastrophe to his own ends, but either way the Fates smile at those who think they can control the affairs of men and the rising of the oceans and smite him with the bitter ends of his own self-bestowed laurel wreaths.

The legions were no match for wild steppe horsemen
The fierce Comanche died from Texans’ guns
Two hundred years all Europe feared the Norsemen
And Emperors and Kings bequeathed to sons
The consequences of the foolish actions
That led to sorrow, misery and woe
As kingdoms set upon by warring factions
Succumbed to the relentless nomad foe
Decisions made in haste throughout the ages
Have turned upon their authors to declaim
That all the savants, soothsayers and sages
Know not that future rests on bowman’s aim
Justinian who set about to rescue
The West from horse-borne fearsome Hunnish hordes
Sent legions who found death among the fescue
And evergreen lay still beside their swords
Napoleon and onion domes in season
And Chamberlain who said Peace in our time
Decisions made with at the time good reason
Turn on its head the standing paradigm
And so it is with troubles in the present
They seem outside the boundaries of the norm
But through the ages things have not been pleasant
And what we live through now is true to form

During the French Revolution a young Napoleon was stationed near the palace with some cannon loaded with grapeshot, musket balls enclosed in a can, which when shot from the cannon acted like a giant shotgun. The revolutionary mob advanced upon the soldiers and Napoleon ordered his gunners to give the threatening mob a whiff of grape, which instantly dispersed the mob. Muslim migrants fleeing the hell of the Middle East demand that Europe take them in, and we are bombarded with horrific pictures of small children dead in the attempt. We react with pity, and Europe reacts with pity and acceptance of the morality and legality of the claim by the Muslims that Europe must take them in. But there is no moral or legal basis for the demand of the Muslims to be allowed into Europe if Europe does not want them. Can strangers break into your house and demand you let them live there and not only demand that you take care of them but that you must change your culture to accommodate them? The proper response is to send five or six armored divisions to Syria and clean it up, thus allowing the migrants to stay home, which they would prefer to do in the first place. But that will never happen, for Europe has forgotten the efficacy of a whiff of grape.

A Europe steeped in Marxist cant
Shakes in its boots as Muslims rant
Demanding that the Commandant
Open up the gates
They promise not to rape or loot
They promise Christians they’ll not shoot
They’ll be good Germans and to boot
They’ll leave behind their hates
They say your churches undefiled
Will never house our horses wild
Did not a manger house a child
So let us be good mates
And so it was that Europe fell
No longer heard the Sunday bell
With few survivors left to tell
How sometimes it’s the fates

Muslim refugees from the savage killing and fighting in Syria are swarming into Europe, threatening to overturn thousands of years of European history and culture, and the Europeans, locked in Marxist thinking, theory and practice, don’t know what to do about it. These people have no right to invade your house and demand you take them in, yet that is exactly what Europe is allowing to happen. Europe is living in a Marxist fantasy land, and it may very well be the death of them. Standing quietly on the quilted border between fantasy and reality, I was struck by how the land of fantasy shimmered gloriously in the morning sun, how beautiful the gently rolling hills, how peaceful the clean-swept villages. Standing just over the border was an elderly bearded man in a black frock coat, hands behind his back, staring out across the foul and fetid land of reality.

Herr Marx, I said, my name is Walt
He shook his head, said, All my fault
Too many took my words with salt
Creating not the whole gestalt
Reality is still right here
With fantasy so very near
Unrealized and thus I fear
My words perhaps were not so clear
So close that I hear people sing
Hosannahs to eternal Spring
Where every man is queen or king
Allowed he is to do his thing
I cry a lot quite late at night
The fantasy I know is right
We must relieve the poor man’s plight
Replace reality’s sore blight
Around us Muslims marched in ranks
And crossed the border, center, flanks
Not stopped by rivers or steep banks
To fantasy with Allah’s thanks

He was Beli Tsar, White Knight, in the language of his birth, but in a Romanized world he was Belisarius. Is Donald Trump a Belisarius? A Cincinnatus? Byzantium lived because Belisarius lived. Rome lived because Cincinnatus lived. Will the United States live because Donald Trump lived? It is truly said that no one and nothing lives forever, and so it is with every state, large or small, powerful or powerless, mean or great. Is the United States poised to enter that great decline despite a President Donald Trump? Byzantium and Rome are no longer with us, and for all of us, man or state, the end will come, as surely as the sun will rise and the birds will sing.

They called the young man Beli Tsar
White Knight, they said, you will go far
Byzantium his rightful home
But still his eyes cast west to Rome
A Rome a shell of Rome before
Torn down the jointed gates of war
The city sacked of slaves and gold
A Rome once vibrant, sick and old
Byzantium though still stood fast
Another thousand years ‘twould last
Until at last the knee would bend
And by the sword would see the end
And so it is for every state
Howsoever mean or great
A Belisarius will come
And by his strength the world for some
Will seem much blessed in wondrous ways
With scent filled nights and golden days
And yet the days are numbered fast
And soon enough they will not last

Veni, vici: I came, I conquered. There are two kinds of migrants, those who want to leave and those who don’t. The United States is flooded with migrants who want to leave their ancestral homes, and Europe is flooded with migrants who reluctantly leave their ancestral homes by forces beyond their control. Mankind has always been in migration. DNA has traced the migration pattern of the pre-historic Gauls from Anatolia eastward to the center of the great Asian grasslands where they met the Scythians who drove them back west, to arrive, many generations later, in Spain. In historical times the Huns pushed the Goths out of their ancestral homes, whereupon Valens, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, invited them to settle in Thrace, and shortly thereafter Adrianople happened. Fortunately for the Eastern Empire (and the later Byzantium) the Goths eventually became good Byzantines, but it was too late for Valens. History is rife with accounts of unwelcome immigrants overwhelming the reluctant host country, which seems likely to be the inevitable end of both a passive Europe and a not quite as passive but ultimately just as doomed American Republic.

It matters not whose God you serve
And not to be too preachy
You will be graded on a curve
It’s veni and then vici
Your progeny will curse the day
You smiled and let in strangers
They’ll curse the simple minded way
You shrugged away the dangers
Oh yes the land will still be there
The rivers, lakes and mountains
But strangers now in charge won’t care
If water’s in the fountains
Or if the roads are still well paved
Your children strong and healthy
Or if endangered smelts are saved
Or you’re no longer wealthy
Invite them in or not invite
The time is short until you
Stand up and raise your fists and fight
For if you don’t they’ll kill you

Hillary looks to be in trouble, Joe Biden looks to be getting ready, Obama looks to be moving the pieces around on the big chessboard of his erratic mind. The Obama/Holder/Lynch Justice Department, including the FBI, would not be looking into Hillary’s emails any more than they were interested in Lois Lerner’s IRS emails, so obviously Obama wants Hillary destroyed. But why? The answer is ready to hand, and he has given hints in the recent past by saying if he ran again he would win. And he probably would, given the ultra-sophisticated fraud machine that worked so well in 2012. Obama is playing the game of setting them up and knocking them down in order to be the only one standing, at which point he will say he is reluctantly running for a third term in order to rescue the Democratic Party and to avoid a Constitutional crisis, knowing full well the 22^nd Amendment will not be a barrier.

Who’s that in the pillory
Sure looks like old friend Hillary
And golly, here’s a bummer
It looks like girlfriend Hummer
Whose mug shot’s next to Bill’s?
Why little Cheryl Mills
Obama says this stinks
While smiling like the sphinx
The plan is going well
It’s time to weave the spell
The empty sleigh now sits
Beside the turning spits
Where roasting on the coals
The creatures of the polls
Cry water, master, please
As Barack takes his ease
Obama aught sixteen
As all the wolves unseen
Return from whence they came
It’s how you play the game

Donald Trump is getting so much air time on the major cable and broadcast networks that none of the other Republican candidates can breathe, so much air is The Donald sucking out of the building, never mind the room. Huge, cheering crowds, huge television audiences, all to hear him say, in an entertaining way, what he has said before, that he will build a wall and that all illegal immigrants in the country will be sent home, a sure fire sign that the plank owners of the country want illegals to be stopped coming over the border in chartered bus convoys. Trump has found the message that will get him elected, and this has led to hand-wringing among Republican establishment types who just want to go along to get along. But the fire has been lit, it is getting plenty of oxygen to support combustion, and it will not burn out until it consumes all the fuel. It may be we are about to get our country back, not from the illegals but from the radical Left who wish to destroy what we have been in order to take us to a utopian leftist paradise like they have in Zimbabwe, with they, the Left, in power forever.

A vacuum is something abhorred
By nature or so it is said
But not when the voters are bored
And tired of the old talking head
The vacuum The Donald creates
In which only he fills his lungs
Results in an envy that grates
On the guys stranded on bottom rungs
The Donald has fired the crowd
By telling them truths unalloyed
He’s rude and he’s crude and he’s loud
And gets all the fogies annoyed
The race is now tortoise and hare
The tortoises slow and unsure
Their message falls flat on dead air
No longer will voters endure
The wishy washed words of the pols
Whom no one believes anymore
They try sticking pins into dolls
While Trump laughs and runs up the score

I have written at length of alternate universes and the infinity of infinite universes, but the closest of these are the universes next door, where ancient people who have shared the same stars and sun as we, have lived their lives, spoken their languages and practiced their religions, then disappeared, leaving only vague rumors and perhaps a drawer of grave goods in a museum to attest to their existence. But not all have disappeared without a trace, for there are some next door universes we have the knowing of. Such a universe is the universe of the Celts, a haunted people, who have left us ethereally haunting songs and beautiful raven haired maidens to sing them.

The children say at dusk in woodlands near
Is heard the sound of singing soft and clear
And dimly seen are maids of raven hair
All radiant of youth and beauty fair
The children say at times throughout the night
There dance the faeries under faerie light
And ghostly figures walk among the trees
As Eochaid Ollathair takes his ease
We do not know just how they may have felt
We know not what defined the ancient Celt
He was a warrior, artist, poet too
And fought with naked body painted blue
Tiberius had thrust them out of Gaul
And Claudius had pushed them to the wall
They found the fields of Ireland free of snow
And vowed this was as far as they would go
The land was green, as green as green could be
And there their ghosts still walk the valleys free
And to this day at dusk in woodlands near
Is heard the sound of singing, soft and clear
And seen are ghostly maids of raven hair
All radiant of youth and beauty fair

Our leaders and betters believe that what they think and what they do reflects the actual world, when in fact there are worlds where their actions would be completely wrong and thus counterfactual. I spoke to a man from a counterfactual world recently and asked what he thought about the war in the Middle East. He said, “What war is that? The Ottomans had it under control last I heard.” He then explained exactly what had happened.

A Hittite soldier killed by the Mizziri
A death that fate held to be counterfactual
Led to a world that differed much too clearly
From what you foolish people think is actual
The Hittite DNA that thus was missing
From future gene pools that produced your times
Resulted in some delicate moist kissing
Producing numbers that were all sub-primes
Thus many people were not born to  you here
And then of course were those who really were
Who weren’t born in my world which is quite near
As well some hims of yours to us were her
In short no Washington no revolution
We all remained under the British crown
You see it is explained by evolution
In 1914 no World War went down
We had no Hitler. Duce or Joe Stalin
So naturally our paths differed from yours
We had of course our creatures who went prowlin’
And guys who rode in on a snow white horse
The names were different but the history written
About the same when all is said and done
But we give thanks that you not us were smitten
With treasonously reptiles like The One