As the title suggests, here is the making of a chair from a log to the finished item. The section of log comes from a tree felled only hours before. You will see various different traditional methods used from cleaving with a froe, trimming with an axe, shaping with a drawknife & carving knife. The back legs and slats are steambent into shape and all the component parts are them assembled. The Chair is then finished with a seagrass seat.
When we burn a sunwheel and urge the sun to return at Yule, exactly what are we doing? Are we trying to lend the sun some of our might so that it can come back to us, or are we celebrating something that we know for certain will happen in any case?
We are not childish enough to think that our ritual actions will make the sun return. The sun presumably turned in the heavens before there were humans to witness the fact, and should we annihilate ourselves in a nuclear war tomorrow morning the sun will continue in its course, unseen by human eyes, through the silent centuries. To think otherwise would be to deny the very attributes we recognize in the sun - dependability, predictability, rhythm, the essence of the rune Raido. This extrapolation from past events demonstrates the fundamentally scientific instincts of our ancestors.
Notwithstanding, there is another dimension to our actions, and it may best be summarized as "participation." The logical process described in the paragraph above applies to the normal world of human experience, but beyond cause and effect there is a level on which we participate in, or become one with, the act of the sun's return. We do not cause the return but we do more than merely observe and celebrate; we become a part of it. It is in this spirit that we burn sunwheels, pour libations, and make invocations - that we may transcend who and what we normally are, and partake of eternity.
So light your candle, and think on Loyalty - including, but not limited to, our loyalty to ourselves and to the highest, God-like potential that is within us.
I just finished reading the French translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together (2003) on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772 in two volumes (still no English translation available… "are we powerful or what?").Swamp Yankee weighs in over at IncogMan :
It’s both a quick and fascinating read; among other things, we learn that not only the October 1917 Revolution (really a just a well-organized, well-carried out Jewish coup) was dominated by Jewish agitators (a documented fact) but so was the 1905 Revolution (something I didn’t know).
We also learn from the grand old man the awe-inspiring extent of the Jewish domination of the Soviet Union during its first two decades of existence, including its ruthless and murderous internal security system: Tcheka, OGPU, NKGB, and NKVD. A Russian in the hands of the Tcheka, etc. was almost certain to be in the hands of Jewish torturers and executioners.
The litany of Jewish crimes committed against the long-suffering Russians (and other Slavic peoples: Ukrainians and Belarussians) and coldly listed by the author is simply nauseating and one should approach both volumes on an empty stomach.
To this day there has been no acknowledgment on the part of international Jewry of Jews’ overwhelming support of the Bolshevik dictatorship during its first two decades. No asking for forgiveness. No reparations paid out to Russians. No chest-beating. No calls for repentance. No nothing…how un-Jewish that would be! Those few, rare Jewish voices who dared to speak out about the Jewish role in the establishment of the communist terror machine in Russia were inevitably greeted with hostility and enmity by other Jews and told to shut their “self-hating” mouths.
It must also be remembered that it was Russian Jewry that saved the Bolshevik “experiment” in the early days when the old order civil servants went on a general strike to protest Bolshevik methods and measures. When that happened, educated and sympathetic Russian Jews were able to step in and literally save the nascent Bolshevik administration.
Another interesting aspect brought up by the author concerns the so-called era of “National Bolshevism” (a real misnomer) allegedly inaugurated by Stalin. Solzhenitsyn points out that Stalin was as much hostile to Russian interests as rest of review & reader comments >>
Kaganovich, the most powerful Jew in the Soviet Union, supervised the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, beginning in 1929. To break the spirit of the farmers, Ukraine was subjected to an artificial famine. Jewish NKVD (secret police) officals went from farm to farm, directing the Red Army’s confiscation of crops and livestock. None was left for the farmers. And in 1933 and 1934 seven to ten million Ukrainians died of starvation, while Kaganovich and his fellow Jews watched and gloated from the Kremlin.Matthew Johnson, writing about two other of Solzhenitsyn's novels, writes about the spirit of the madness created by the Soviets :
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To sum it up, Lazar Kaganovich was a Jew raised in the Jewish tradition, a yeshiva boy taught to guide himself on the basis of doing always what is best for the Jews, and this precept actually is cited explicitly several times in the book. He attended his first Communist Party meeting in 1911, when he was 18, to hear the Jewish communist Trotsky give a speech in a synagogue in Kiev; that’s right: in a synagogue. He rose rapidly in the inner circle of the Communist Party, which contained many more Jews than Gentiles. His success was due primarily to his aggressiveness and his ruthlessness. In his communist activity he held back from nothing, no matter how brutal or bloody.
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When the Gentile communist Nikita Khruschev accused Kaganovich in 1957 at a Soviet Party Congress of having murdered 20 million Russians during his career, Kaganovich didn’t even deny it. He only accused Khruschev of being a murderer too. “Your hands are blood-stained too,” Kaganovich told him. Khruschev pointed out that the difference was that he, Khruschev, had merely followed Kaganovich’s orders, while it had been Kaganovich who had formulated the policies of mass murder and had given the orders for carrying out those policies.
It’s a fascinating book and if you really want to gain some insight into the Jewish mentality, into the way they justify themselves, into the way they view the non-Jewish world, you should read it for yourself. Kaganovich wants to boast about the power he once held, and at the same time he wants to evade responsibility for his crimes, and one can see this ambivalent attitude throughout the book.
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And we understand why the Germans back before the Second World War really wanted to get the Jews out of their country and off their backs. We understand why Stalin decided in 1953 that he would leave as his gift to the Russian people something that they would be eternally grateful for by getting rid of every Jew in the Soviet Union.
So, the question now is, what can we do to free ourselves from the Jews? What can we do to break their death-grip on our mass media of news and entertainment and on our political system? How can we bring about an end to their racket of using us to extort money from the rest of the world for them? more >>
Solzhenitsyn’s writings are not attacks, per se, on the USSR, but the absurdities of the system are merely an excuse for an attack on the Enlightenment and its open worship of Prometheus, the “light bearer,” that will permit the domination of nature in exchange for sacrifice, that is, the slavery and enserfment of labor, and of course, a huge grid of power that must come into existence in order to keep the wheels of industrial society running: a huge, regulatory state, foreign wars and colonies, maintenance of cheap fuel sources, the continuing battle between the state/employer complex and labor, and the continuing squeezing of labor for increased profit and market share. In addition, a Regime is formed (in the literal definition of the word), a System where private, state and quasi-private capital all create a authoritarian grid of thought and action that is put in the service of power. more >>Thomas Allen at sums it up in Solzhenitsyn, The National Question, Russia’s Revolution, and The Jews.
So far the MSM commentariat has failed to find some obvious connections between globalization and a relatively recent social experiment—the Russian Revolution. Apparently, it’s easier to speculate about the nascent internationalism of Alexander the Great, the Knights Templar(mentioned by the Economist as the earliest multinational company) or Genghis Khan than it is to try to explain critical events of 90 years ago.Das Buch auf Deutsch, Zweihundert Jahre zusammen. Die Juden in der Sowjetunion.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe imagined itself on the threshold of worldwide enlightenment. The growth of international socialism would end nationalism, it was widely believed. At most, “national questions” had become mere irritants to be swept aside on the road to the Great Enlightenment.
More recently, all this has been happening again. But this time the triumphalism is capitalist (at least Davos-style capitalism). Thus Wall Street Journal late editor Robert Bartley notoriously declared the nation-state dead. Bartley never explained, at least in public, what he thought would replace it. But I suspect he would have shared the Economist’s enthusiasm over the fact that General Electric "seems able to train … its recruits to think as GE people first and Indians, Chinese or Americans second."[Globalization’s Offspring, The Economist, April 7, 2007]
However, long before the editors of the Wall Street Journal and The Economist were acting as if the primacy of international commerce and consumerism had trumped the nation-state, the creators of the Soviet empire were insisting that all peoples would blend peaceably together into one. For the Bolsheviks too, there was no "national question" and no nation-state.
For instance, both Lenin and Stalin regarded Jews as a nation which existed on paper only. They predicted the 4,000 year-old people, along with all other nations, would soon become part of a new nationality-free human race. Trotsky, the supreme internationalist, ostentatiously disavowed his Jewish identity.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn addresses post-nationalism directly in his latest work 200 Years Together. (Volume 1, on pre-Revolutionary Russia, was published in Russia in 2001; Volume 2, covering the Revolution and the Soviet era, in 2002). In a remarkable cultural development, 200 Years Together has yet to find an English-language publisher, arguably because of its frank focus on Russian-Jewish relations, although the eminent Jewish scholar Richard Pipes, reviewing the first volume in the New Republic, concluded that Solzhenitsyn “absolves himself of the taint of anti-Semitism”.
Solzhenitsyn’s work, however, ranges far beyond Russians and Jews.
He observes that doubts about the validity of national identity tend to rise at various times when more >>
On the Seventh Day of Yuletide we lit a candle to Community. Today we light a candle to its apparent opposite, Individuality.
Contradictory? Paradoxical? No, just another fundamental trait of the Northern European psyche, one illustrating the need for a consciously-maintained, dynamic balance rather than the will-less absorption of the self into a featureless consistency.
Historically, the peoples of Europe are comfortable with cooperation and hierarchy - hence the value of Community. We are also the most ego-driven, self-assertive, and individualistic primates on the planet. Both these traits are perfectly capable of existing in the same human heart at the same moment.
So light that candle for Individuality, hold it high, and defy any attempt by the group to blow it out!
NEWARK, N.J. – An investigation into the sale of black-market kidneys and fake Gucci handbags evolved into a sweeping probe of political corruption in New Jersey, ensnaring more than 40 people Thursday, including three mayors, two state lawmakers and several rabbis.Ya, right. I suppose next they'll be telling us they are going to audit the Fed banksters/oligarchs and find out where the missing trillion$ went and send the thieves to prison. Like Bernie Madoff, only the super-careless are getting caught, the vast majority going on pillaging and raping, raping and pillaging.
Even for a state with a rich history of graft, the scale of wrongdoing alleged was breathtaking. An FBI official called corruption "a cancer that is destroying the core values of this state."
Federal prosecutors said the investigation initially focused on a money laundering network that operated between Brooklyn, N.Y.; Deal, N.J.; and Israel. The network is alleged to have laundered tens of millions of dollars through Jewish charities controlled by rabbis in New York and New Jersey.
Prosecutors then used an informant in that investigation to help them go after corrupt politicians. The informant — a real estate developer charged with bank fraud three years ago — posed as a crooked businessman and paid a string of public officials tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to get approvals for buildings and other projects in New Jersey, authorities said.
Among the 44 people arrested were the mayors of Hoboken, Ridgefield and Secaucus, Jersey City's deputy mayor, and two state assemblymen. A member of the governor's cabinet resigned after agents searched his home, though he was not arrested. All but one of the officeholders are Democrats.
Also, five rabbis from New York and New Jersey — two of whom lead congregations in Deal — were accused of laundering millions of dollars, some of it from the sale of counterfeit goods and bankruptcy fraud, authorities said.
In rounding up the defendants, FBI and IRS agents raided a synagogue Thursday morning in Deal, a wealthy oceanfront city of Mediterranean-style mansions, with a large population of Syrian Jews.
Those arrested included Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, who was charged with conspiring to arrange the sale of an Israeli citizen's kidney for $160,000 for a transplant for the informant's fictitious uncle. Rosenbaum was quoted as saying he had been arranging the sale of kidneys for 10 years.
The politicians arrested were not accused of any involvement in the money laundering or the trafficking in human organs and counterfeit handbags.
The number of arrests was remarkable even for New Jersey, where more than 130 public officials have pleaded guilty or have been convicted of corruption since 2001.
"New Jersey's corruption problem is one of the worst, if not the worst, in the nation," said Ed Kahrer, who heads the FBI's white-collar and public corruption division. "Corruption is a cancer that is destroying the core values of this state."
Gov. Jon Corzine said: "The scale of corruption we're seeing as this unfolds is simply outrageous and cannot be tolerated." more >>
I hope your service, if you go to one, was better than ours. Our pastor brought in a "fourth generation Jewish Christian" to entertain us on this holiest of Christian holy days. 
The same arduous type of challenge, without compulsion but with all its difficulty, was given to one of the most distinguished of American educators, Mr. Abraham Flexner. His adviser, Professor Morris of Johns Hopkins, told him that if he wanted to master Greek, he should get a compact little shelf of Greek books and read nothing but Greek for five years. "Read the daily papers to keep up with the world," he said, "but don't read books in any other language. Read Greek only." The ambitious young student took this hard advice, and, like the pupils of Agassiz, he gazed at the intricate subject until he really felt at home in it. Just as they could take a new specimen and see a thousand things which would escape the untrained eye, so he could pick up a book (an immortal book, a permanently valuable book) in Greek, and read it through with ease and pleasure. Such efforts are painful; but without effort there is no reward.I have not mastered Greek or Latin yet, but I am to the point now where I recognize the truth of the above paragraph.
Christianity and Liberalism, indeed. As a friend of mine says, rape, drowning in lye, grisly torture, dismemberment, brutal murder, and disposal in trash bags is too great a cost after allowing Negroes to drink from our water fountains. And if you don’t understand that simple fact, you’re not a human being, much less a Christian.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was eager to enter the war in Europe. He wanted this strongly following the fall of France (June 1940)—when he came to believe that without American intervention the Nazis would conquer the Old Continent—and desperately after Germany attacked the Soviet Union a year later. In this desire he was supported by the old East Coast elite which was traditionally Anglophile, by the increasingly influential Jewish lobby and—after June 22, 1941—by Moscow’s sympathizers within his entourage and in the country at large.Article complete with timeline and documentation.
Belief in the rabbinic dogma of the "Shoah" is the Vatican's new criterion for qualifying as a shepherd of Christ's flock ... Casting doubt on execution gas chambers in Auschwitz is now a de facto heresy in the eyes of the Catholic ChurchClearly, questioning this new chapter of the Jewish holy book is a sin. Id est, if you "deny" the Holocaust(TM), you are beyond salvation. And you can take that as official. "Let not your heart be troubled," as Sean Insanity always likes to say.
Undiscovered Russia a free (public domain) book in .pdf format written by Steven Graham in 1912. It is an account of Mr. Graham's months of travels through 1912 Russia, explaining her holiness, prosperity and general sense of justice. This is a very rare book where Mr. Graham clearly shows how traditional economic and social patterns are superior to mechanized and modern ones. Graham also argues that the Russian peasant is a deeply moral person, happy, and truly the center of the nation.My favorite quote in the book so far, in the foreward, describing the difference between Russia and England:
Someone has said, "It is the folly of democracy that it wishes to make all lower orders upper orders" -- that may turn out to to be in international folly.Very prescient. We all know how that democratic experiment turned out just a few years later, don't we? And the international democratic experiment (workers of the world, reduce your carbon footprint!) is going swimmingly well, don't you think?
While researching the Illuminati, Freemasonry, the occult, and secret societies, one is frequently running into this kind of nonsense: This gesture is the Satanic salute, a sign of recognition between and allegiance of members of Satanism or other unholy groups.Well, not exactly. The sign at the right is the deaf sign for "I love you," a composite of the American Sign Letters (ASL) finger spellings "I," "L," and "Y."
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton issued the following statement today in response to Barack Obama's decision to nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court:Tanstaafl has commentary.
"Barack Obama is on record saying he favors judges who will let their 'empathy' or bias for certain individuals color their decision-making. If Judge Sotomayor shares Obama's activist judicial philosophy, U.S. Senators who want to protect the Constitution will have no choice but to oppose her nomination.
"Americans want the Supreme Court to make decisions based on the Constitution and not on some lawless standard that puts identity politics before the law. There is no room on the Supreme Court for someone who will put her feeling and politics above the rule of law."
.... the condition of mankind is such that one may well ask what it is that made the men of past generations so great and the men of the present generation so small. In the midst of all the material achievements of modern life, one may well ask the question whether in gaining the whole world we have not lost our own soul. Are we forever condemned to live the sordid life of utilitarianism? Or is there some lost secret which if rediscovered will restore to mankind something of the glories of the past?A promising beginning.
Such a secret the writer of this little book would discover in the Christian religion. But the Christian religion which is meant is certainly not the religion of the modern liberal Church, but a message of divine grace, almost forgotten now, as it was in the middle ages, but destined to burst forth once more in God's good time, in a new Reformation, and bring light and freedom to mankind. What that message is can be made clear, as is the case with all definition, only by way of exclusion, by way of contrast. In setting forth the current liberalism, now almost dominant in the Church, over against Christianity, we are animated, therefore, by no merely negative or polemic purpose; on the contrary, by showing what Christianity is not we hope to be able to show what Christianity is, in order that men may be led to turn from the weak and beggarly elements and have recourse again to the grace of God.
John McCain's top adviser from the presidential campaign urged fellow Republicans on Friday to warm up to gay rights and warned that the GOP risks becoming the "religious party" with its opposition to same-sex marriage.Will the RedTeam faithful listen? I wouldn't be surprised. Dr. Laura, Rick Warren, and eHarmony did. And most conservatives have capitulated on just about everything else of importance, including welfare; the hyper-growth of government; Patriot II, the Dept. of Homeland Security and the new police state; gays in the military; race-mixing and affirmative action; sex-ed and "alternative lifestyle" indoctrination in elementary grades; and gigantic, globalist, multiculti UNESCO education (No Child Left Behind).
Steve Schmidt, in his first political appearance since the election, spoke at the Washington, D.C., convention for the Log Cabin Republicans -- a grassroots group for gay and lesbian Republicans.
He urged Republicans, in the near-term, to endorse civil unions and stop using the Bible as rationale for gay-marriage opposition. more >>
By whatever name one celebrates the winter holiday in the West, the giving of gifts is a central part of the season. Sometimes this descends into rank commercialism, but the idea of gift-giving itself is a thoroughly spiritual one. The giver and the one given to are united through the medium of that which is given. We give, and in a spiritual law as true as Newton's physics, we must then receive - even if the reward is not a material one.
"The generous and bold have the best lives," the Havamal tells us - and note that the two traits are listed together. And is not the power of generosity the whole point of Dickens' marvelous tale, A Christmas Carol? Look closer at the story, and you will see a lesson how open-handedness gives a better life…not to mention an exact parallel between the three Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and To Come and the Norns that move behind the action in our own sagas and Eddas. Generosity is one of the tools we use to forge a good orlog, or "fate" for ourselves.
Light then, a candle for Generosity. Give the brightness of the flame to the world around you, and watch it reflect back on you as well.
