Quantum physics shows that time
And space do not exist
The real and the illusion are the same
But somehow little numbers
Shake their heads and do insist
That they are real and still can play the game
Max Planck discovered Quantum
And the world forever changed
What once seemed true became just ancient lore
The subatomic world revealed
That all was rearranged
Except that two plus two still equaled four

I spoke to Reality the other day, and he said, “I am, like you, an intelligent being, with a body to house myself, a brain to think, pellucid lenses to see, and appendages to push my body through the murk.” I agreed that pushing our bodies through the murk was the most we could hope for.

We push our bodies through the murk
Believing we are first in line
That we alone make all things work
And disregarding every sign
That universes come and go
Pellucid lenses dim with age
Synapses gradually slow
And every book has a last page
It matters not what lawyers write
Or mountain heights the techies stride
We’re born at dawn and leave at night
Along for life, a wondrous ride

I do not believe for a single moment that Angela Merkel and the EU made a risk/benefit assessment before allowing millions of military age Muslim men into their countries, given the prior violent history of Muslims invited into Europe, going back to early days when Indonesia gained independence as a result of civil war and the Dutch were expelled. On that occasion the Dutch offered asylum in the Netherlands to Indonesian Muslims who had worked for the Dutch and who feared retribution. Many Indonesian Muslims accepted the Dutch hospitality and when they were safely in Holland they demanded their rights as Muslims, holding an entire trainload of passengers as hostages until their demands were met. And we all remember Theo van Gogh being stabbed by a Muslim, who left him dead on the street with a knife and a note stuck to his chest. There was too much Muslim violence before the great wave of Muslim migration for anyone not to be aware of the grave danger unlimited Muslim immigration posed to the native peoples of Europe, yet the leftist political elites threw open the borders anyway. No, there was no risk assessment involved. I may be wrong, but I will risk a verse.

The Muslim be a cunning beast
Raised in the mur’drous Middle East
They have no sense of human rights
Since only they, by their own lights
Are human and the rest obscene
Unworthy to be even seen
With true believers of the Book
That says all others God forsook
And mandates infidels be slain
With no need even to explain
Barbarians are at the gate
They must be fought, it’s not too late
For Europe’s men from Thrace to Gaul
To stand and listen to the call
To die, with Horatius, ‘gainst all odds
For the ashes of your fathers and the temples of your gods

I have reached the age where I am often surrounded in memory with grandparents, parents, younger sisters and aunts, uncles and cousins without number. I even attempt on occasion to return to that time by taking the number 9 bus.

The bus rocked gently on the uneven blacktop, stopping every few blocks to let off or take on passengers. But that was all right. I didn’t mind the delays. I was going home, on the number 9 bus I took every night for all those years. I got off and walked the two blocks to my house. I stepped through the door into the living room and was instantly aware of a deep and intense silence, the only sound a fly somewhere at a window trying desperately to get out. I stood in the middle of the room, looking at but not seeing the furniture or the closed drapes. The kitchen chairs were perfectly arranged around the table, but I knew somehow that no one had sat at that table in a very long time. Filled with a foreboding sense of dread, I climbed the stair to the second floor, but that was empty as well, though all the beds were made and the bathroom had clean towels on the racks. There was no one home, and I knew, with utter finality, that everyone had gone, and I was the last. I closed the front door behind me and walked to the bus stop to wait for the number 9 bus, but I knew, again with utter finality, that the bus would never come. Yet as I stood on the corner, filled with deep despair, I knew that someone would be home the next time.

I awoke to streaming sunlight
Moving figures everywhere
Parents, sisters, aunts and uncles
And more coming  up the stair
Treasured voices rose in laughter
As I lay there all unseen
Watching loved and long gone faces
Moving in the misty scene
Slowly fading from my vision
As more sunlight filled the room
Deeply sad I felt them leaving
But I shook the dark-filled gloom
As I quickly dressed and hurried
In a laughing, joyful haze
Down the stairs to catch the 9 bus
Back to younger, happy days

For those of us who grew up when
The radio was king
The world is now a very different place
A place where saying love of country
Is the only thing
Now brings a sneer and laughter in our face
We lived in towns and cities where
The doors were never locked
And kids were free to roam the neighborhood
But nowadays those places are
Long gone and harshly mocked
By people who have never understood
That just because we grew up in
A world now in the past
That maybe we had something new to say
That maybe we know something new
About the play and cast
And see we’re not so far from yesterday
That things we saw as growing up
We’re seeing yet again
The world it changes not nor do the times
For history remains the same
Except for where and when
There’s no repeat as Twain said but it rhymes

Consider that the universe we see is an illusion, and we are, in fact, in a notional box with a transparent top on which the stars and moving planets wheel in concert, and on whose sides are revealed the images of the world around us. Inside this notional box we are surrounded by family, friends and work, light, dark and weather, as well as the illusion of the passage of time. The purpose of the experiment is not readily apparent to us, nor is the nature of the experimenter, though the answer to both may only begin to be understood with the realization by us that life is an experiment. We can call the experimenter God if we choose, as many have. This is not a new notion, but has occurred to many over the aeons the experiment appears to us to have been underway, and is predicated on the belief that there is and must be a Creator God. I am inclined not to dismiss the idea that we are an experiment because it seems to me to be just as valid an idea as that an infinite reality consisting of an infinite set of different realities exists outside a known set of rules.

The stars and planets whirl apace
Inside the box that seems like space
While on its sides the box reveals
Illusions while the box conceals
The emptiness that is outside
That the experiment must hide
infinity is just a box
Infinity illusion mocks
What seems to us infinite years
Inside a box of finite tears
Is but a blink of God’s right eye
For time lives not, nor can it die
Nor measured, for it has no mass
So by illusion time doth pass
As in the box we simply wait
Elusive and illusive fate

The Pentagon announced recently that it was storing all its most sensitive data in the cloud. But what is a could but water vapor heated by the sun, its motions determined by the vagaries of the winds, far more substantial than any man-made invisible cloud of electrons. Putting all your most sensitive data in an electron cloud guarantees that someone will easily gain access and be in possession of your innermost thoughts. Cloud borne secrets are no secrets at all, any more secure than the top secret documents stored on Hillary’s server or Weiner’s laptop were secure. If you want to keep a secret, write it down on paper and put it in a locked file drawer. Leave the fleecy clouds to others. And while you’re at it, cancel your email account and write letters. On a manual typewriter. Do these simple things and you can sit back and watch the clouds roll by.

Great spies have been around since there were little babes to christen
Some hiding in the grass to see what’s up
While others stood by double doors real quiet so to listen
Or lurking by the king to fill his cup
George Smiley and the Circus and the lovely Mata Hari
Worked hard to ply their craft in secret style
They’d gather all the data and the secrets they could carry
And gain your confidence with just a smile
Those were the days when spying was a recognized profession
And tradecraft rules were written down in books
And spies when caught would die before consenting to confession
And sultry women spies got by on looks
But now the spying’s done by agencies with large computers
A terabyte is nothing to those chaps
Who scan the skies behaving like a pack of anxious suiters
Believing that their love’s untrue perhaps
The cloud now covers Earth and blocks the all transparent sunlight
Chock full of secrets there for all to see
While Smiley mutters grumpily, “There’s nothing now that’s done right”
And Mata Hari scoffs and pours some tea

The poet knows not of the wild neutrino
That travels at the stately speed of light
A datum that astounds the campesino
Who asks if light’s so fast how come there’s night
To sculptors marble marks their lives as lithic
The painter lives for pigments and for tints
While I who thinks my life has been terrific
Remembers long times past but nothing since

The wager has never been, Is there a God? The existence of God has always been a given, whether named Marduk, Zeus or Yahweh. No, the wager has always been, Is God on my side? For if God is on our side, then all is possible, but if God is not on our side then nothing is possible. When Christian Europe came out of the Dark Ages, they wagered that God was on their side, hence all was possible, and produced a civilization unmatched in the history of man for science, art, philosophy, music and law. They wagered on glory, and ruled the world. But the leftist ruling elites of Europe and the Anglosphere now wager that not only is God not on our side, but that there is no God, and consequently nothing is worth dying for or even living for, and they have turned their countries over to outsiders. Glory is gone, replaced by apology, indifference and defeatism. A people or a nation may experience a temporary spate of glory, whether of a thousand years or a thousand days, but when it is over it is over, and not likely to return, for glory, while exhilarating, is exhausting, and history is replete with the names of the exhausted husks of the once glorious and gloried.

The peak of glory passes, and is never to return
It passes all unnoticed as the rot begins to burn
The smart set still holds parties while the politicians sleep
The while the country trembles as it heads into the deep
When gone it’s gone forever, as of glories gone before
As Babylon and Britain found the glory is no more
So too do tribes and nation states fade slowly out of sight
For glory lasteth but a day, from dawn to darkest night
The mighty armies march no more, yet ghosts may still remain
The chariots of Hittites passing dimly in the rain
The billowed sails of Nelson driving ships of mighty oak
While on a hill in Darien the sea to Cortes spoke
Yes glory is ephemeral, and yet the stories live
For glory is its own reward, and is but God’s to give

Mad Gundar is my name
And thunder is my game
I sail the storm-tossed seas of ice and cold
I cross the ocean wide
Beyond the great divide
Once crossed by ancient mariners of old
To lands far in the west
Where once none would have guessed
That skraelings would have danced upon the shore
We landed in a bay
And gathered round to pray
And gave our thanks to god almighty Thor
We stayed for but a while
For thanks to skraeling guile
Those skraeling arrows did us greatly harm
We struggled to resist
And greatly did insist
We came thus not to conquer but to farm
The long trip home was tough
The sea was very rough
And many seamen took it quite unwell
With dragon ships awash
With pemmican and squash
The decks became aslick with every swell
When Norway we did reach
And stumbled up the beach
We loudly claimed discovery’s holy grail
We found the western lands
With glory in our hands
And history would praise our gallant sail
But history I cursed
Leif Erickson was first
According to the folks who were not there
The lies they told did hurt
My voice grew shrill and curt
But truth to tell most folks seemed not to care
Yes Gundar is my name
And thunder is my game
And though my crew and I are getting old
We sail toward setting sun
And till Leif’s fame is done
We sail the sea of ice and bitter cold
Yes, we shall sail the sea of ice and bitter cold