Middle Easterners in their millions are banging on the gates of Europe, demanding to be let in, and many in Europe are willing to comply, even knowing that to do so spells doom for their own Western society and culture. But they don’t care about Western culture and society, they believe that a Muslim Europe will simply imply the substitution of one religious mythological superstition for another, with nothing else changed. They are mistaken. In the waning days of the Roman Empire, with the Goths banging on the Hungarian Gate, an elderly Roman Senator was asked the reason for the collapse of a once great empire. The Senator thought for a moment, then said, “Carelessness.” And so it is today, though perhaps it is more ‘care less’ than’ careless’.

To some the world is like a drifting bubble
A child has formed with water and some soap
That carries off the cares and woes and trouble
That interferes with dreams of change and hope
They care not that their country is in danger
They think surrendering is just plain fair
Believing hate the friend and love the stranger
And if it ends not well they could not care

Some things are so and some things are not. We have learned, over the past six years, that what comes out of the White House is not necessarily so, that we must look not at what Obama says but what he does. When he says Iran will never have The Bomb, that is not necessarily so. When he says he has Israel’s back, that is not necessarily so. When he says victory is not an option, that one you can believe.

It ain’t necessarily so
That roses continue to grow
In the Mullahs’ soft hearts
As their hatred departs
No it ain’t necessarily so
Al Qaeda is finished, you know
And ISIS is done and laid low
Because tough Barack
Would cut them no slack
But it ain’t necessarily so
The Clintons all give him a glow
He loves Hill and not just for show
He wants her to win
And swears it’s not spin
But it ain’t necessarily so
Barack says when time’s up he’ll go
Give speeches, play golf and lay low
He won’t run again
He promised, but then
It ain’t necessarily so
Barack says the US his ho
He’ll stick it to her and then blow
There never was doubt
What he was about
And that IS necessarily so

In her journey from Goldwater girl to First Lady of Arkansas, from Whitewater to the White House, from Senator to Secretary of State to Deity, the country has not seen such drama since Stephen Decatur strode into a White House reception and to the cheers of the assembled guests lay the captured battle flag of HMS Macedonian at the feet of Dolly Madison. It is small wonder her acolytes adore her and a grateful nation demands she don the purple and reign as president forever.

Her acolytes adore her with such fervor
They do not care that she wiped clean her server
They care not that she took that Chinese money
Nor that she fondly calls her Huma honey
They shrug away her myriad disgraces
The odious and foul her life embraces
Incompetence to them a mark of favor
The whiff of criminality they savor
Flags laid before her speak of endless folly
As millions cheer and shout a Hello Dolly

We have for some time been in the grip of activists who insist we change how we speak because it is offensive to them. The University of Tennessee has agreed to the demands of a gay activist group and has issued instructions that students must no longer use personal pronouns like ‘him’ and ‘her’ and ‘she’ and ‘he’ because those pronouns are offensive to gays, lesbians and the transgendered. George Orwell, in his dystopian novel 1984, described how Newspeak worked to control people by making words mean something other than the truth. ‘Foetus’, for example, is the Latin word for ‘baby’, and was used by the medical profession as a convenient way of differentiating between a born and an unborn baby. The abortionists, however, succeeded in convincing a majority of the population that the word ‘foetus’ did not mean ‘baby’ at all, but that it meant ‘inert lump of non-living matter’. Language is always changing, and today the word ‘less’ is now used where ‘fewer’ is grammatically correct, and there are many other examples of the rules of grammar falling by the wayside, all of which makes it easier for Big Brother to introduce Newspeak words effortlessly into the public consciousness and for gay activists to determine that gender pronouns are offensive and must not be used. President Obama recently ordered the name of the Alaskan mountain Mount McKinley be changed to the native Inuit Indian name of Denali because the name of an American president was offensive to them, much to the surprise of the Inuits.

When is a name not a name?
When is a verb cause for shame?
A pronoun offensive to speak?
Renaming a native named peak?
The activist Left claims the right
To change what offends in their sight
The truth is now something to paint
In terms that will stifle complaint
We know in what way this will end
East Asia was always our friend

Ten billion years ago the oceans were covered with non-living, non-conscious algae, or so some would say. Some are inclined to believe that the algae, through uncounted and uncountable mutations, formed all subsequent life on Earth, while others scoff at the very idea. I spoke to some of those mutations the other day and most said that their ancestral algaeic DNA did indeed reside in all living things now inhabiting the Earth, while several skeptics said if that was the case then how come they never got mutated and were still algae.

The ancient seas were bloomin’
Knowing shortly they’d be human
And would climb the sandy beaches and breathe air
They looked forward to the time when
They would first be an enzyme then
Up the ladder step by step and they’d be there
God made first the salted oceans
But then algae had some notions
That syntheism is the farthest stage
Of the algaeic mutation
And that man had reached the station
Where he is at once pure nothing and a sage
Duty bound to have his pleasure
And his riches beyond measure
Even if those things are never really real
Just a shadow at the edges
The mutational mind dredges
And full circle doth the algae turn the wheel

Robert Frost wrote a poem in which he said that good fences make good neighbors. Several European countries are now building fences to keep the nearly all young male Muslim invaders out of Europe, fearing the worst. European Leftists cannot believe their view of the world is being upset by ragged and poorly educated Muslim peasants demanding to be let in to the land of the free meal, free housing and free paycheck, and have belatedly, against their will and better Leftist judgement of what is fair and honorable, begun the building of walls and fences. But we shall see if they carry through. Walled cities and walled castles were all the rage some time ago. We may yet see them again..

Fences and walls do the good neighbors make
Providing they’re stout and they’re high
With battlement towers not easy to take
And townsmen quite ready to die
For hearth and for home and the country they love
A moat filled with oil to inflame
A stoutly barred door with portcullis above
And lancers to close out the game
Castles are now back in favor at last
The horses replaced by the wheel
The knight’s chain link armor a thing of the past
Invaders trod by booted heel
The borders are open but only to those
With papers and proper ID
Or is all the talk of walled fences a pose
With Lefties in charge we shall see

One unintended result of social engineering is the imbuing of absolute certainty in the infallibility of technology to the point where one disregards his experience and training because a computer program has given a different answer than expected. On 18 January 1978 the roof of the newly built Hartford Civic Center collapsed, fortunately with no one in the building. A structural engineer friend was on the investigating committee, and told me that the iron workers erecting the steel roof trusses had told him that they could see that the trusses were underdesigned, and that they had vowed never to allow friends or family into the building. What happened was that the engineers used a structural design program and the computer designed the roof trusses for a much smaller span. The structural engineers had accepted the incorrect design because their computer said so. And so it is we accept all sorts of incorrect data and designs because we are conditioned to accept whatever authority we believe holds the truth in its hands. We no longer trust ourselves but place our faith in the witch doctors, the shamans, the soothsayers, who tell us what to think and why to think it. Most of us are sheep, going wherever the border collies think it best for us to go.

The bleating falls on deafened ears
We go where we are sent
And wonder how it is the years
Don’t tell us where we went
Or what we saw or what we heard
It’s all just misty blanks
We move as one to master’s word
Then bow and give him thanks
For all the things he does for us
The caring that he shows
We know it’s crowded on the bus
But thankful that it goes

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