MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Nativity scene with shepherds, by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, a famous Spanish baroque painter (1618-1682).


Downeastblog wishes all its readers of good will a Merry Christmas. Take your time to save a prayer for someone who might need it.



MFBB.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: MOONLIGHT SONATA.

Delicate beauty.





One of several piano sonatas, the Mondscheinsonate, dedicated to one of Beethoven's numerous botched romances, Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. It's not so much that she turned him down, rather, one of her parents, possibly her father, forbade her to marry the then thirty year old piano virtuoso.

All in all a rather tragic life, actually. Despite this, a prodigious if intermittent output.


Dead White Male.



MFBB.

ON THAT GLOBAL WARMING THINGY...

A couple of years back, we had us this nice and sophisticated leftist commenter here, who posted under the creative moniker of "anon". Anon was very skeptical, to say the least, of the threat of islamization. On the other hand, he was very, very much concerned about GW, or rather, MMGW (Man Made Global Warming).

Anon was smart. At some point (about two years ago) he called it quits at DowneastBlog. Had he stayed on, he would by now be blushing fiercely red. Via American Thinker:

DEATH OF THE GLOBAL WARMING MYTH, by Peter Heck.

"... The disintegration of this political juggernaut known as global warming is as imminent now as it is remarkable. The heights from which these scientists' credibility has plunged is equaled only by the speed.


Consider that it was only last year when the scientific and political world was held spellbound by the deliberations of the U.N. Climate Change summit held in Copenhagen. Nearly 45,000 attendees anxiously anticipated a global climate agreement that could spare us all from the imminent planetary incineration about to befall us thanks to the unholy alliance of SUVs, deforestation, and belching cows. American taxpayers alone shelled out nearly $400,000 for Nancy Pelosi to lead a cadre of liberal congressmen and staffers to attend the Warmer deliberations.


Yet now, just one year later, political leaders are staying as far away from the annual climate summit (this year held in Cancun) as possible. Even the Congressional Warmer triumvirate of Henry Waxman, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer skipped the festivities. Remember, it was Boxer who proclaimed not so long ago that global warming was her "signature issue." Yet when it came time for this year's convention, Boxer merely murmured, "I'm sending a statement to Cancun."


Meanwhile, across the pond, things aren't much better for the global warming hysterics in the British Meteorological Office. As the Met geared up for Copenhagen in 2009, they were warning of the "warmest year on record." Fast-forward to this year, and as Britain is in the grip of yet another extraordinarily frigid winter, their admonitions are much more subdued. Even the Daily Mail noted why: "Buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications -- not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole ... for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped."


This most inconvenient truth is why, despite millions of dollars of propaganda and free marketing offered by a totally duped American media, Al Gore's climate heist machinery is dismantling itself before our eyes. The defeat of climate legislation in Congress has prompted Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection to whittle its resources from 25 states down to seven, acknowledging that "the situation in Congress has changed."


Indeed it has. As the Democratic Party's death grip on Congress dies in January, Nancy Pelosi's House Select Committee on Global Warming will be dying with it. Republicans have announced that they have no desire to continue wasting taxpayer dollars on a committee whose only contribution was a proposed energy tax that would have destroyed millions of jobs in an already stagnant economy.


For its swan song, the committee held a final hearing -- one so boring that according to the Washington Times, the chairman never returned from lunch break.


So how has this environmental Goliath collapsed so quickly and so painfully? Certainly the Climategate scandal that revealed the epic fraud and deceit upon which the movement was built didn't help. Al Gore admitting his willingness to fabricate dire consequences for the sake of getting people's attention didn't help.


But ultimately it comes down to this: given time, truth wins out. Eventually, rational people realize that groupthink and demonizing your opponents as "deniers" doesn't count for evidence. They realize that a movement so freely changing names -- from global cooling to global warming to climate change to global climate disruption -- might be more about a neo-Marxist pursuit of global governance than about saving polar bears."

As I'm writing this, Europe, western Europe in particular, is exeriencing yet another bout of unusually severe winter weather. The Telegraph on Monday:

SNOW: HEATHROW PARALYSED, RUNWAYS CLOSED.

By Stephen Adams 7:30AM GMT 03 Feb 2009

More than half of Monday's planned 1,350 flights were cancelled, including 361 arrivals and 430 departures, according to airport operator BAA.

Short haul flights were cancelled first to make way for long haul arrivals.

All British Airways flights were cancelled until 5pm, passengers were told in the morning.

Heavy snow kept the northern runway closed for the whole day while the southern runway was closed for at least an hour mid-morning.

The Met Office said Heathrow had less than four inches (9cm) of snow by lunchtime, and was expecting another inch or two (2-5cm) overnight.

A BAA spokesman described the snow as "the heaviest in decades".

He said: "Heathrow's full snow operation - consisting of 58 snow cutters, ploughs, and de-icers have been working around the clock since 3pm [on Sunday] on double shift to clear the snow and ice."

I do have to admit lefties are great marketeers though, and that they saw the sign on the wall years ago already. In the nick of time, they rather succesfully managed to shelve the notion MMGW, and replace it with Climate Change. And if you, raw uncouth rightwinger peasant, were hoping they'd see the light now and and shift their attention towards combating the Real Danger, islamic terrorism and islamization, you are again mistaken. As commenter Leo Norekens informs us, Department of Homeland Security Boss Janet Napolitano has formed a Task Force to combat the effects of Climate Change on domestic security operations (!):





Can you f*cking believe it.



MFBB.

DADT REPEALED: A BLACK DAY FOR THE US MILITARY.

As all of you probably know by now, the outgoing Congress, more precisely the Senate, voted for repealing DADT


There are several good takes on this piece of legislation. I will list a few. First Error Theory:

"How badly will the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell damage our military? Just read today's Strategy Page report on our military's suppression of heterosexual behavior in combat theaters ("No Sex Please, We're American Soldiers"). Heterosexuals in the military have always known that their sex lives are liable to be put on hold for long periods of time, but for soldiers off fighting in Muslim countries, the deprivation is extreme. The only outlet is relationships with other soldiers:
Troops are forbidden from establishing relationships with local women in Iraq, and warned against buying booze and drugs from Iraqis. In Iraq, few women cover their faces, or wear any head covering at all. Many of them are quite attractive, and frequently cast admiring glances at U.S. troops (who often do foot patrols in public areas). But there are not supposed to be any marriages. This is a particular problem in Islamic countries, where non-Moslem husbands are expected to convert and elopement often leads to the bride being murdered by her angry family. ...

Troops having sex with each other is generally tolerated, although that can cause trouble as well. Only about ten percent of the troops in combat zones are female, and not all are single or in the mood.

Heterosexual young men are willing to join the military and put their sex lives on hold because the manliness of fighting for their nation makes the lack of access to females bearable. That will change if a subculture of active homosexuality is allowed to burst out and grow amidst the suppressed heterosexuality of our military. Instead of a manly brotherhood, military service will become a chore and even a gauntlet of having to abide whatever in-your-face homosexuality the flamers want to throw up, and they will throw up plenty, as proven by every out-homosexual locale in the world. Flamboyant and even aggressive homosexuality is just what the end of DADT implies. No one is talking about replacing the DADT line with any other line. Full out homosexual flaming will not just be tolerated but will be legally protected, from overt homosexual behavior to every kind of homosexual come on. It will be a death sentence for heterosexual recruiting."

Then Bryan Fischer at Rightly Concerned:

"We are now stuck with sexual deviants serving openly in the U.S. military because of turncoat Republican senators.

(Dictionary definition of “deviant”: “departing from usual or accepted standards, esp. in social or sexual behavior.” “Deviant” is not name calling, it is truth-telling.)

The Saturday morning cloture vote on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was the critical vote. It needed 60 votes and got 63, because of Republican renegades Scott Brown, Mark Kirk, George Voinovich, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. If these traitors to national defense had voted in line with the Republican Party platform, the cloture motion would have received just 57 votes and would have failed.

The final vote on the bill itself, requiring just 51 votes, was a mere formality after the cloture vote. Had the cloture vote failed, we would still have sane moral and sexual standards governing military personnel policy. But sadly those days are gone, perhaps forever.

The GOP platform is plain and unambiguous:



“Esprit and cohesion are necessary for military effectiveness and success on the battlefield. To protect our servicemen and women and ensure that America's Armed Forces remain the best in the world, we affirm the timelessness of those values, the benefits of traditional military culture, and the incompatibility of homosexuality with military service.” (emphasis mine)



For those who say the Republican Party does not need a litmus test for its candidates, you just lost the argument and frittered away the strength of the U.S. military at the same time.

The armies of other nations have allowed gays to serve openly in the military. The reason they could afford to do this is simple: they could allow homosexuals to serve in their military because we didn’t allow them to serve in ours.

They knew they could count on the strength, might, power, and cohesion of the U.S. military to intervene whenever and wherever necessary to pull their fannies out of the fire and squash the forces of tyranny wherever they raised their ugly heads around the world.

Those days are now gone. We will no longer be able to bail out these other emasculated armies because ours will now be feminized and neutered beyond repair, and there is no one left to bail us out. We have been permanently weakened as a military and as a nation by these misguided and treasonous Republican senators, and the world is now a more dangerous place for us all.

It’s past time for a litmus test for Republican candidates. This debacle shows what happens when party leaders are careless about the allegiance of candidates to the fundamental conservative principles expressed in the party’s own platform.

Character-driven officers and chaplains will eventually be forced out of the military en masse, potential recruits will stay away in droves, and re-enlistments will eventually drop like a rock.

The draft will return with a vengeance and out of necessity. What young man wants to voluntarily join an outfit that will force him to shower naked with males who have a sexual interest in him and just might molest him while he sleeps in his bunk?

This isn’t a game, and the military should never be used, as is now being done, for massive social re-engineering. The new Marine motto: “The Few, the Proud, the Sexually Twisted.” Good luck selling that to strong young males who would otherwise love to defend their country. What virile young man wants to serve in a military like that?

If the president and the Democrats wanted to purposely weaken and eventually destroy the United States of America, they could not have picked a more efficient strategy to make it happen.

Rarely can you point to a moment in time when a nation consigned itself to the scrap heap of history. Today, when the Senate normalized sexual perversion in the military, was that moment for the United States. If historians want a fixed marker pointing to the instant the United States sealed its own demise, they just found it.

It won’t happen overnight, but happen it will.

And Republicans did not just stand around and watch as our military was shredded before their very eyes, they helped it happen. Shame on them all.

The one hope America has left is to elect Republican leaders at all levels, including the presidency, who will be determined to reinstate the ban on homosexuals in the military in 2013. That is now question number one for every Republican wannabe president, every Republican wannabe senator, every Republican wannabe congressman in the next election cycle: will you support a plan to reinstate the ban on homosexual military service? If not, every conservative must say you can forget about my support, my dollars, and my vote."

And don't miss this video with Senator McCain expressing his disgust - rightly so:





Senator McCain nails it. The line that most struck me was that he observes that the American people, after a 2-year stint of socialism (you could actually argue four, taking into account the GOP's loss of Congress in 2006), have given the current leadership a VERY CLEAR signal, a REPUDIATION, of this government's policies. A decent loser would take the hint, and lie low.

Not so democrats. In a last (or one of the last) gesture of giving the finger to the American public, the democrats in the Senate forced a repeal of DADT thru. They did it now, knowing that it wouldn't pass after January 5. Basically the outgoing democratic senators said "FUCK YOU AMERICA", we will pass it anyway.

There is a strategy behind this, and one that has been applied time and again, unfortunately with success, in Europe. Leftists KNOW that, like Margaret Thatcher said, "The basic facts of life are conservative". But they also know that once a piece of legislation has passed, it becomes near impossible to dislodge it. In my own country, or rather in Flanders, voters have for over twenty years indicated they would like to see a center-right government. But they keep getting a leftist one, or a supposedly center-right that behaves like a center left. Socialists know that even if they are punished for pushing legislation through against the people's will, they will get another chance four years hence, since the public's memories are so short. They also know that this tactic does an effective job of, in the end, permeating the general mindset and rightwing ideology with their dadas to the point that, after a couple of years, it becomes part of the general pensée; and people shrug and accept the fait accompli. And so you end up with David Camerons, Fredrik Reinfeldts and a huge mob of voters who are deep inside vaguely aware they have been nailed, but cannot remember anymore when or what it was about.


This is a black, black day not only for the US military, not only for the US, but for the whole of the West.



MFBB.