The Stench of Fascism Is suffocating our democracy
The stench of fascism and betrayal is suffocating our democracy, but nobody wants to talk about it. We sanitize our language so that classified documents strewn over unsecured garages and centers of Chinese influence are talked about as though it’s a matter of carelessness and not design. The indisputable brute fact is this: our commander-in-chief and his family have made themselves wealthy by taking bribes from foreign powers, chief among them our mortal enemy Communist China. Nobody seems to be asking, but how exactly were the inexplicable decisions to turn Afghanistan over to China and the Taliban made, and what American interest was served by this?
In classic fascist fashion, the Biden administration has suborned the intelligence community and the Department of Justice to censor and harass its political opponents. These include school parents and Capitol trespassers whom it libels and imprisons as “domestic terrorists” and (unarmed) “insurrectionists.” In typical fascist moves, it has suborned corporate America into spying on its political opponents with the goal of cancelling them and silencing their opinions. Just this week AT&T shut down the fastest growing and fourth largest cable news network, Newsmax TV, depriving 13 million viewers of access to its reporting. This attack on the First Amendment came on the heels of Twitter’s exposure of the way the FBI had put its platform on the federal payroll and dictated its censorship of tweets that could have changed the results of the last presidential election. The same fascistic arrangement was made with other tech social media giants like Facebook.
The Democrats have targeted their chief political opponent Donald Trump, who received 74 million votes in the last election, with the longest, most determined, and most vicious campaign of character assassination in modern history, and possibly ever. They have warned other potential presidential contenders like Governor Ron DeSantis that they will get the same treatment. They have smeared Republicans as racists, white supremacists and white nationalists, and has done this in the service of rigged elections in its drive to establish a one-party state.
How to stop this juggernaut? First by standing up and calling their actions by their right names. In particular by calling out the treason of the Biden family and the military brass who have turned America’s armed forces into indoctrination centers of Woke racism. And who botched the Afghanistan withdrawal so badly that an arsenal of the most advanced weapons and billion-dollar airbases were delivered into the hands of our terrorist enemies, and their Chinese Communist friends.
Second by organizing and fighting back. Through his rallies, Trump has created the first mass movement of conservatives in American history. The revolt of America’s parents against the Left’s Nazi-like experiments on pubescent children – already a billion dollar industry – is another example of the entry of patriotic, religious and conservative forces onto the battlefield. Secure the polls, stop Democrat efforts to cheat in the elections, defend constitutional rights – enter the fray.
Distrust of government and love of freedom are ingrained in the American people. We can win this battle, but only if we fight it.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-stench-of-fascism/
*****************************************************How the British saved India’s classical history
In India, a generation has been brought up on the academic Edward Said’s unhistorical prejudices towards the British and what he called the ‘colonial gaze’. In his eyes, British Orientalists were guilty of what is now termed ‘cultural appropriation’.
To his followers it therefore may come as a surprise to learn that it was British Orientalists who in fact rediscovered India’s classical history and heritage and made it available to the rest of the world.
Sir William Jones, a brilliant polymath, contributed more than any other individual to India’s national renaissance. Alongside his day job as a judge in Calcutta, Jones mastered Sanskrit, translated Indian classics and used it to unlock the glories of India’s long forgotten Hindu and Buddhist past.
Indian neglect for antiquity extended not merely to the distant classical past, but also to far more recent Mughal monuments
Jones said he found Sanskrit: ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either…the warriors of the Mahabharata appear greater in my eyes than Ajax or Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad.’
Unlike ancient Greece and Rome, India’s classical past had left behind no written histories, so it had to be reconstructed from ruins and buried treasures. In 1784, with the patronage of the first British Governor-General, Warren Hastings, Jones founded the Asiatic Society to take on this giant task. It became the beacon for a huge volunteer army of amateur antiquarians across the subcontinent. They were enthusiastic British civil and military officers who scoured the mofussil (countryside) for ruins and artefacts, wrote articles about them and sent their findings to be studied in the cities.
When Jones returned to England a decade later, his health shattered by overwork, the Asiatic Society was taken over by his protégé, James Prinsep, another polymath, whose day job was at the East India Company’s Benares mint. Prinsep’s labours produced the biggest ever breakthrough in Indian historiography, deciphering the long-forgotten Brahmi script and through it discovering the Mauryan empire that had briefly united the subcontinent in the third century BCE.
The task began with the mystery of enormous, polished granite pillars that had been popping up all over northern India. The most famous is the pillar a British official unearthed with its triple lion capitol that’s now the official emblem of the government of India.
Prinsep, aided by local British officials in places as diverse as Nepal, Punjab, Rajasthan and Bihar, spent many years painstakingly transcribing hundreds of coins and inscriptions and then collating them with the writing on the pillars, before he finally broke the code and discovered the Brahmi script, from which modern India’s Devanagari script has evolved.
The stick figures on the pillars were found to be edicts of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka. Prinsep announced his discoveries in a paper to the Asiatic, then suffered a physical and mental breakdown brought on by overwork and had to be shipped home to England in 1838, where he died soon after.
The Ashokan edicts announced the emperor’s conversion to Buddhism, but little was yet known about this then obscure religion and the man who had founded it. There were rumours that he had been Egyptian or perhaps even Ethiopian.
The discovery of the Buddha’s Indian roots was again the work of dedicated British explorers. In the late 1790s, a British naturalist heard reports that the Buddha was a Bihari from India, explored Bihar and discovered the Bodh Gaya Buddhist ruins.
In later decades, the Buddha’s Indian roots were confirmed by the excavation of a series of stupas or reliquary temples. First came the discovery in 1819 of the great stupas at Sanchi by a Captain Fell. Bemused by their dome-like shapes, never seen before, he wrote in a Calcutta journal that he felt unable to give ‘even a very faint idea of the magnificence of such stupendous structures and exquisitely finished sculpture’.
Sanchi had long lain buried in forests, thus escaping destruction by either Hindu Brahmins or Muslim invaders. The stupas became the focus for further excavations by the man regarded as the father of Indian archaeology, Lieutenant Alexander Cunningham. Like many British Indian officers, he came from a modest Scottish family. He arrived in India in 1833, served the Royal Engineers in various military campaigns and used his military travels to remote places to collect antiques.
In 1834, Cunningham used his engineering skills to drill deep down into the main stupa at Sanchi, where he discovered evidence that Buddhism had been widespread for several centuries from the Mauryan period onwards. He went on to excavate a large collection of Buddhist sculptures at Sarnath in Bihar, the best of which he shipped off to Calcutta.
On a later visit, Cunningham was dismayed to find that many of the sculptures he had left behind were being used to dam a nearby river. It was typical of the constant battle British archaeologists fought to rescue their finds from the Indian habit of using old stones for new buildings. Forty years later, when Cunningham discovered the 2,000-year-old Indus Valley ruins at Harappa, he found bricks from the site being used nearby to lay a new railway line. Much later, in the 1920s, it was British archaeologists who linked Harappa to Mohenjodaro in the Sind desert and identified both as belonging to a pre-Aryan civilisation.
After retiring from the army, Cunningham spent the rest of his long life leading the newly established Archaeological Survey of India, which still administers the country’s artistic heritage. His last major discovery was the Bharhut stupa, full of Mauryan Buddhist treasures which he sent off to the Calcutta museum, to be beautifully restored by the enthusiastic antiquarian Viceroy, Lord Curzon.
Cunningham was struck by the fact that the large crowds of locals who watched his excavation at Bharhut were deeply disappointed that he unearthed no buried treasure. He grumbled in his diary ‘…few natives of India have any belief in disinterested excavations for the discovery of ancient buildings… Their only idea of such excavations is that they are really intended as a search for hidden treasure…’ As at Sarnath, when he returned three years later, every remaining stone of the Bharhut stupa had been cannibalised by locals to build their own homes.
Indian neglect for antiquity extended not merely to the distant classical past, but also to far more recent Mughal monuments. Emperor Aurangzeb’s mosque in the Delhi Red Fort, still under Mughal rule, was found dilapidated with foliage growing through it in the early 1800s. It was restored by the British Resident, as was Emperor Humayun’s crumbling tomb and the imperial Jama Masjid. British visitors to the later Mughals at the Red Fort were appalled to find the imperial halls of audience turned into slums, their semi-precious, inlaid stones stolen from their marble friezes.
The Taj Mahal at Agra, described by Kipling as ‘the ivory gate through which all dreams pass’, was the Mughal monument most beloved of the British, who repaired it from the 1780s onwards. Lord Curzon restored its gateway, gardens and surrounding buildings and declared: ‘If I have never done anything else in India, I have written my name here, and the letters are a living joy.’ Curzon had a passion for Mughal gardens and also restored them at the Agra and Delhi forts and at Humayun’s and Akbar’s imperial tombs. He brought a British romantic sensibility for wild gardens to the more formal Mughal layout, producing the wonderful synthesis we see today.
Cunningham’s Buddhist excavations coincided with various British discoveries of important Hindu temple ruins, ranging from Mahabalipuram in the south to the Elephanta and Kanheri caves near Bombay, and Khajuraho, with its then shocking eroticism, in Central India. The most influential discovery was of the Ajanta caves, with their wonderful frescoes dating back to the first century BC.
A young British cavalry officer stumbled on Ajanta during a hunting expedition in the wilds of Berar. He braved fierce tigers and even fiercer Bhil tribals, then the main occupants, to explore the caves. In 1836, the Asiatic Society published his report on Ajanta’s wonders, and it provoked much debate as to whether the frescoes were Hindu or Buddhist and why sites like this had been abandoned in such remote places. Some even wondered if they were the work of Greek settlers left behind from Alexander’s invasion.
As the frescoes were deteriorating, it was decided to copy as well as conserve them. A Major Robert Gill, an artistic soldier, arrived at Ajanta and spent the next 27 years copying the paintings. His entire collection was sent off to be exhibited in London, but was tragically destroyed in the Crystal Palace fire of 1866. Gill returned to Ajanta undeterred and started all over again, but died a year later, an unsung hero of art conservation. His work was continued for the next 13 years by John Griffiths of Bombay’s British-led School of Art. The results were displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and, in an extraordinary run of bad luck, again destroyed by fire. But luckily this time they had been photographed first and went viral in London, with photo features in the Burlington Magazine and Illustrated London News and an Ajanta-style ballet at Covent Garden performed by the great Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova.
As important as archaeological finds was the emergence of an entirely new approach to Indian art, giving it equal status with its western counterparts. The pioneer here was the art historian Ernest Havell, who came to India in 1890 as principal of the Madras School of Art and left 20 years later as head of the Calcutta School of Art. He saw the Indian aesthetic as being conceptual, rather than representational, its images stylised, not naturalistic as in Greco-Roman art, its emphasis on anonymous spirituality, rather than the individuality of its subject or the identity of the artist.
In 1910, at a stormy meeting of the Royal Society of Art in London, Havell clashed with his opponents, who maintained that India only excelled at decorative rather than fine art. He argued that multi-limbed and many-headed Hindu deities, so alien to the Western eye, were allegorical representations of divine attributes and no more physiologically impossible than Christian angels. He emphasised the continuity from ancient Ajanta down to recent Mughal miniatures of a distinctively Indian aesthetic, crediting the Indian artist with the ability ‘to see with the mind, not merely with the eye, to bring out an essential quality, not just the common appearance of things; to give movement and character in a figure, not only the bone and muscle; to reveal some precious quality or effect in a landscape, not merely physiographical or botanical facts; and above all to identify himself with the inner consciousness of the nature he portrays…’
In recent times, the artistic discoveries of the Raj have raised questions of cultural ownership. The Indian equivalent of the Elgin Marbles demanded by Greece are the so-called Elliot marbles, also housed in the British Museum in London. The marbles are in fact pale limestone friezes from the Mauryan stupa at Amaravati in southern India, intricately carved with scenes from the life of the Buddha. A young Scottish surveyor, Colin Mackenzie, first stumbled on them in 1798. Half a century later, another Scotsman, Sir Walter Elliot, returned to excavate the site, rescued it from being pillaged by locals and carted off some of the finest sculptures to the Madras Museum, whence some later found their way to the British Museum. Elliot’s career was typical of many Orientalists. While serving for 40 years as a revenue official in Madras, he was also a linguist, naturalist, ethnologist and numismatist and wrote learned books on everything from cobras and exotic birds to rare coins.
Today Elliot’s Marbles are displayed in a climate-controlled gallery specially created for them at the British Museum, admired by millions from around the world. Back in India, the stupa at Amaravati is sadly neglected, while the Madras museum’s collection of its sculptures is one of its least visited rooms. That hasn’t stopped the Archaeological Survey of India from demanding the return of the BM’s collection, a request politely declined in 2010. It’s hard to imagine that they would really be better appreciated or conserved in the land of their birth. The cultural treasures the British took home with them are, after all, only a tiny fraction of what they salvaged, protected and left behind for us Indians.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/how-the-british-saved-indias-classical-history/
***********************************************Capitalism brings the diversity that people want
Are chain stores and chain restaurants wrecking the world and turning our colorful, quirky, diverse world into a uniformly bland, corporatized dystopia, where every place looks like every other place, leaving every place with no sense of place? Hardly. More chains might mean Minneapolis, Montgomery, Montreal, and Milan all resemble one another, but they resemble one another because they offer ever-expanding arrays of options for people looking to feed, clothe, entertain, and express themselves. They make us richer financially and culturally. First, they make our dollars go further. Second, they free up time and money for other pursuits. Is it so bad that chains make places look alike?
I don’t think so, at least to the extent that places start looking alike in their abundance of options. No visit to Canada is complete without a stop at Tim Hortons. Not content to simply be the iconic coffee and donut brand of the True North strong and free, Tim Hortons is expanding its footprint south of the border, beyond the northeast and parts of the midwest with “priority new markets,” including California, Texas, Illinois, and Florida. Would it be such a bad thing if people in Ontario, California could get coffee from Tim Horton’s as easily as people in London, Ontario? Or if people in London, Ontario could get In-N-Out Burger as easily as those in Ontario, California? If both chains expanded to London, England, and made money doing it, their profits would indicate they are making the world a better place.
In any case, it’s not for cultural and culinary critics to decide. The free market is a continuous real-time election, where every dollar at every moment is a vote on what to do. Entrepreneurs and managers are subject to a perpetual referendum. The dollars I’m not spending right now are votes for more goods and services later. The dollars we spent on groceries today are votes for the things we keep in our fridge and pantry. The dollars we spend at Chick-fil-A when we’re traveling are votes for chicken sandwiches, and the dollars we spend at fancy restaurants are votes for haute cuisine. When have the purveyors of these goods served consumers wisely and well? The proof is in the profits.
What if people make the wrong choices? First, “wrong choices” are in the eye of the beholder. “A choice I wouldn’t make” is not a “wrong choice.” There are exceptions. Responsible parents don’t let their kids eat yellow snow or play in the street during rush hour. But those are exceptions, and deciding to go to faceless, corporate McDonald’s instead of locally owned McDowell’s is hardly comparable to playing in traffic. Second, grown men and women are not pieces on a chessboard we can arrange as we see fit. If you’re free to choose only what professional busybodies know you should want, you’re not free.
Recently, I read that a Florida barbecue chain is looking to expand into Alabama. I confess I was frustrated. I love barbecue, but I would rather have more places to get Vietnamese noodles, Chinese dumplings, Korean fried chicken, and Ethiopian anything than another barbecue place. That’s not my decision to make, however. The “right” number of barbecue restaurants is like the right number of varieties of underarm deodorant. If there’s still money to be made, consumers are voting for more, and it is not my prerogative, nor yours, or Bernie Sanders’, or anyone else’s to suppress those votes.
Maybe we’re not being honest with ourselves. I attended a talk by Virginia Postrel based on her book The Substance of Style in graduate school. If I remember correctly, she said that when local officials and leaders turn their noses up at Starbucks and describe what they want in a local coffee shop, from the aesthetic to the ambiance to the variety, they describe Starbucks. In short, they want the Starbucks experience but not the Starbucks name.
Of course, intervention distorts retail markets. Local officials devote substantial time and energy (and dole out lots of goodies) to land “whales” like Walmart, Target, and other Big Box retailers that promise tantalizing tax revenue. Chains can take advantage of economies of scale that come with having executives and entire departments dedicated to regulatory compliance. Saying “stop doing this,” is like telling a lifelong heroin addict to “just say no,” but at least we can recognize the problem at its source. If we want more local flavor, getting governments out of entrepreneurs’ way is much better than banning chains.
People enjoy quirky, unique, and local places. I know I do. They also enjoy reliable, consistent, and predictable places, which is why chains succeed. As chains expand to new areas, those areas start to look alike. But they’re more alike in their diverse options for reliable, consistent, and predictable cuisine, clothing, car care, and other goods and services. If Bonchon, In-N-Out Burger, and Tim Hortons make their way to my neighborhood, I don’t think I’ll shed any tears, but if I do, they’ll be tears of joy at my new opportunities to get food and coffee I previously wouldn’t have been able to get without getting on a plane.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14406&omhide=true&trk=title
********************************************Interracial dating in Australia
This article seems to be largely anecdotal so it is a pity that statistics are not given. If the rate of interracial marriage is low, that would in part be explained by many migrant groups marrying within their ethnicity.
There are some statistics showing a lot of intermarriage between people of different national origin but most of those would be between Australian-born people and people from Britain and other Anglospheric countries.
The most striking type of interracial relationship I see about the place is between Chinese girls and tall Caucasian men, I do see a lot of Chinese young women as a part of couples and the partners concerned are rarely all Chinese. Chinese ladies overwhelmingly favour Caucasian men --- probably because they --like most women -- like their man to be tall. Chinese are Australia's largest minority -- at about 5% of the population
And the prevalence of those relationships is clear testimony to the low level of racism in Australia.
Australia’s leaders often say it is the most multicultural society on Earth, but when it comes to mixing those cultures in marriage, it seems Aussies stay in their lanes.
Sociologist Dr Zuleyka Zevallos says it’s “still the norm that most marry within their race”, despite more than 200 years of migration since colonisation.
“When you look at the out-marriage rates, very few second-generation migrants will marry outside their race.” If they do, she adds, people are more likely to marry a person from a similar ethnic or racial group.
“It’s not about exposure or education, but because of social forces and this sense of difference,” she says.
Of course, interracial relationships in Australia are not new, dating back to colonisation when racial intermixing was a way of ensuring whiteness prevailed. Migration, too, means that Australia’s demographic make-up is becoming increasingly diverse.
So, what about those who do couple up with someone outside their race?
‘We didn’t see interracial couples like us growing up’
Sue Kang, 28, and her boyfriend Midy Tiaga, 29, met in high school and have been best friends for 10 years. They became a couple three years ago. “We were both ready to settle down,” Kang says. Kang, who is Korean-Australian, and Tiaga, a Sri Lankan-Australian, say they didn’t see interracial couples like themselves growing up.
When Kang began modelling full-time during COVID, her agent asked her to bring along her partner to be in the shoot. From there, they continued to model together and Tiaga was eventually signed to her agency. The pair have modelled together for campaigns that include Tourism Australia and Commonwealth Bank.
Kang says it’s been great to see “authentic real couples” like themselves “rather than it being left up to the casting director”.
Both being from culturally diverse backgrounds, they say they share a common understanding. “There’s a cultural shorthand in the relationship where things don’t need to be explained,” says Tiaga. “We’re able to understand each other as we share similar intersections.”
Nigerian-American Valerie Weyland moved to Australia from the United States in her 20s. She settled in Perth, where she met her now husband Robert on Tinder. The couple has been together for more than eight years, and have a nine-month-old baby. She describes their relationship as “open and loving”.
She says that her experience of dating as a black woman in California was different to her experience in Perth, where it’s rare to see couples that look like them. “When I was dating [in California], of course there were racial tensions, but it was not the same as in Australia,” she says. ”I dated whoever I connected with in conversations and through passion, there was a whole rainbow of people.“
She notes that while Perth is becoming more diverse with pockets of migrants, she doesn’t always feel accepted in the community. The couple often encounters people who stare or openly voice their disapproval. “People don’t really have a healthy filter when they see a couple like us,” she says.
“Australians love to banter and crack jokes, but they don’t always have an understanding of what is appropriate or inappropriate.”
For Robert, being with Valerie has made him more aware of the discrimination many non-white people experience. “If you’ve never gone through it, it’s hard to understand,” Valerie sympathises, who says that it’s about “being patient with people’s process of understanding things”.
And she says Robert is always the first to defend her. “When I’ve been in situations where I’m being attacked for my race, he steps up. He will be the first to say something.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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