Those Jews can even play hockey!

Somehow, I missed this: Having won the last two games with team Greece 26-2 and team Turkey 9-1, Israel National ice Hockey team was ranked first in the World Ice Hockey Championship III division in South Africa, received Champion’s gold medals and a ticket to the IIHF second division (IIB).Goals in Israel team scored:Israel – Greece 26:2: Kniter x3, x6 Mazur, Lebedev X 2, Sherbatov x 6, Frenkel

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn - Greek crisis; Obamacare

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care "summit," thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.

Mark Steyn - 2-27-10

What to expect from an Obama regime; ancient Greece; Will Durant

Numerous commentators have speculated on the effect of a Democrat landslide in this year's elections. They have identified many programs that will be created or expanded with Democrats in the White House and enjoying a filibuster proof majority in Congress. Commentators usually conclude these remarks by stating that this scenario will be bad "from a conservative standpoint."

But these commentators, even conservative commentators, miss the real point. The leftist agenda is not simply bad "for conservatives." We are not watching some sporting event where only Republicans and Democrats have a stake in the outcome. The consequences of a Democrat takeover would affect everyone - and for a very long time.

The Democrats have pledged to restrict free speech and expand existing programs that would accelerate the bankruptcy of the United States, all the while robbing us of the means to defend ourselves, protect our borders and choose our own medical providers. The Democrats have attempted to investigate, prosecute and censor innocent political opponents. The Democrats have shown no reluctance to commit violence and voter fraud in this election and the elections of 2004 - thus foreshadowing the ultimate end to free elections should these thugs ever obtain real power over the executive branch of the federal government. The Democrats have used class warfare as a political weapon - pitting rich versus poor - for decades.

All of the elements exist for the type of near civil war that marked the collapse of the ancient Greek civilization in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C.:

Some governments nationalized certain industries . . . . but the governments paid as low wages as the private employer, and squeezed all possible profit from the labor of their slaves . . . the class war became bitterer than before. Every city, young or old, echoed with the hatred of class for class, with uprisings, massacres, suppressions, banishments, and the destruction of property and life. When one faction won it exiled the other and confiscated its goods; when the exiles returned to power they revenged themselves in kind, and slaughtered their enemies; imagine the stability of an economic system subject to such decerebrations and disturbances. Some ancient Greek cities were so devastated by class strife that industry and men fled from them, grass grew in the streets, cattle came there to graze.

Durant, Life of Greece, p. 564 [1939 edition]

See these quotations for a comparison with 4th century B.C. Greece and 1st century B.C. Rome.

If Obama and the Democrats seize as much power as the rest of us fear, this election may be the last national election that carries even a pretext of legitimacy. Those who would rig and steal the election will not allow free elections once they seize power. Acorn and its allies cannot continue to submit thousands of frauduent registrations every year. Cheating on such a massive scale is difficult to coordinate and organize. They don't plan to cheat forever. They plan to win once in a big way, after which there will be no need to cheat. In the future, two scenarios are possible - (1) local election officials will have learned to be submissive to the Acorn/Obama controlled federal government and remain silent while election totals are rigged or (2) certain elections will simply not take place.

I do not believe all of this will happen immediately upon the inauguration of Obama. Cattle will not be grazing in the streets of Manhattan in Janaury 2009. Obama will allow a certain "healing" period where he speaks of unity and the MSM/DNC presents "feel good" images of children, puppies and general calm. We will be allowed to get comfortable. But soon, our taxes will go up, our doctors will become government bureaucrats, class warfare will resume as it has never existed before and the country will change forever.

Athens (4th Century); Will Durant; Plato; Aristotle; Dionysus; Philip of Macedon; parallels to 21st Century U.S.

I have recently read portions of Will Durant's Life of Greece, written in 1939. I was struck by common themes appearing in the book and our own era. These excerpts contain dire warnings for our own time. Remember two things as you read these passages:


(1) Will Durant wrote these words before our current political, economic and moral problems had fully taken shape. He was not taking sides in our current battles. He had never heard of George W. Bush. He might have anticipated, but had not experienced, the modern state of the 21st Century Democrat party. He had no axe to grind in our modern day political wars. If anything, Durant was a liberal, having left the Catholic Church due to his atheism and having adopted socialism in his youth (he had also affiliated with many of the leftist icons of the early 20th Century such as Margaret Sanger and John Dewey). Durant described the decline of ancient Athens from a purely historical perspective without anticipating how this description could be used in our century.

(2) This story ends badly.

In the 4th Century B.C., the Golden Age of Athens had recently ended. Athens had entered into a period of decline. Athens was beset by many problems that will sound familiar to those of us that must endure the 21st Century A.D.

First of all, decades of class warfare incited by demagogues finally took their effect on government policy [including tax policy]:

In this conflict more and more of the intellectual classes took the side of the poor. They disdained the merchants and the bankers whose wealth seemed to be in inverse proportion to their culture and taste; even rich men among them, like Plato, began to flirt with communistic ideas...finally the poorer citizens captured the Assembly, and began to vote the property of the rich into the coffers of the state for redistribution among the needy and the voters through state enterprises and fees. The politicians strained their ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue. They doubled the indirect taxes...they resorted
every now and then to confiscations and expropriations; and they broadened the field of the property-income tax to include lower levels of wealth...the result of these imposts was a wholesale hiding of wealth and income. Evasion became universal, and as ingenious as taxation. In 355 Androtion was appointed to head a squad of police empowered to search for hidden income, collect arrears, and inprison tax invaders. Houses were entered, goods were seized, men were thrown into jail. But the wealth still hid itself, or melted away...the middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, and the poor began to distrust it as a sham equality of votes staultified by a gaping inequality of wealth. The increasing bitterness of the class war left Greece internally as well as internationally divided when Philip [Macedonian King] pounced down upon it...

[pp. 465-466]

The class warfare, resulting welfare state, inevitable confiscatory taxation and widespread tax evasion amounted to only one aspect of Athenian decline.

Moral disorder accompanied the growth of luxury and the enlightenment of the mind. The masses cherished their superstitions and clung to their myths; the gods of Olympus were dying, but new ones were being born; exotic divinities like Isis and Ammon, Atys and Bendis, Cybele and Adonis were imported from Egypt or Asia, and the spread of Orphism brought fresh devotees to Dionysus every day. The rising and half-alien bourgeoisie of Athens, trained to practical calculation rather than to mystic feeling, had little use for the traditional faith; the patron gods of the city won from them only a formal reverence, and no longer inspired them with moral scruples or devotion to the state. Philosophy struggled to find in civic loyalty and a natural ethic some substitiute for divine commandments and surveillant deity;...as the state religion lost its hold upon the educated classes, the individual freed himself more and more from the old moral restraints-the son from parental authority, the male from marriage, the woman from motherhood, the citizen from political responsibility...[S]exual and political morality continued to decline. Bachelors and courtesans increased in fashionable co-operation, and free unions gained ground on legal marriage...the voluntary limitation of the family was the order of the day, whether by contraception, by abortion, or by infanticide...the old families were dying out; they existed, said Isocrates, only in their tombs;...

[pp. 467-468]

As religion and demographics declined, other aspects of Athenian life changed also:

Atheletics were professionalized; the citizens who in the sixth century had crowded the palaestra and the gymnasium were now content to exert themselves vicariously by witnessing professional exhibitions.

[p. 468]

Athenian ruins


In 4th Century B.C. Athens, there was little distinction between lawyers and politicians - and little apparent distinction from our own modern politicians:

...the rhetors or hired orators who in this century became professional lawyers and politicians. Some of these men, like Lycurgus, were reasonably honest; some of them, like Hypereides, were gallant; most of them were no better than they had to be. If we may take Aristotle's word for it, many of them specialized in invalidating wills. Several of them laid up great fortunes through political opportunism and reckless demagogy. The rhetors divided into parties and tore the air with their campaigns. Each party organized committees, invented catchwords, appointed agents, and raised funds; those who paid the expenses of all this frankly confessed that they expected to "reimburse themselves doubly." (Citation omitted.) As politics grew more intense, patriotism waned; the bitterness of faction absorbed public energy and devotion, and left little for the city.

[p. 469]

1939












Durant had a way of summing up diverse elements into a powerful conclusion:

As civilization develops, as customs, institutions, laws, and morals more and more restrict the operation of natural impulses, action gives way to thought, achievement to imagination, directness to subtly, expression to concealment, cruelty to sympathy, belief to doubt; the unity of character common to animals and primative man passes away; behavior becomes fragmentary and hesitant, conscious and calculating; the williness to fight subsides into a disposition to infinite argument. Few nations have been able to reach intellectual refinement and esthetic sensitivity without sacrificing so much in virility and unity that their wealth presents an irresistable temptation to impecunious barbarians. Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.

[p. 470]

And around the United States hover Islam, Mexico, etc.

The conditions about which Durant wrote ended when Athens was conquered by the Macedons later in that century. Athens could no longer resist foreign enemies. Its economy was weakened by taxation, its population depleted and demoralized by Athens' own sexual revolution and its civic life destroyed by political activity in which Athenians regarded each other with more hostility than any foreign enemy. Athens would disappear (and with it its contributions to art, science, literature, etc.) as it was absorbed into the Macedonian empire of Philip and Alexander. While the Macedonian empire would briefly rule the known world, it, too, ultimately ended as Greece, itself, would disappear from the world map for 2000 years.

Moral decay, high taxes, redistribution of wealth, government programs, class warfare, etc. have consequences. Those consequences last far beyond the temporary political advantage that one faction may gain in the present. Future archeologists may find names like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons or John Edwards in the ruins of our civilization. But those names and their "achievements" will pale in comparison to the story of our own decline and its consequences.

Winter of 2008; snowstorms and arctic temperatures in Greece

Global warming has been delayed not only in the U.S., China and Japan, but also in Greece:

A raging snow storm that blanketed most of Greece over the weekend also continued into the early morning hours on Monday, plunging the country into sub-zero temperatures. Public transport buses were at a standstill on Monday in the wider Athens area, while ships remained in ports, public services remained closed, and schools and courthouses in the more severely-stricken prefectures were also closed. Scores of villages, mainly on the island of Crete, and in the prefectures of Evia, Argolida, Arcadia, Lakonia, Viotia, and the Cyclades islands were snowed in.

For those of you whose publik skule teeches globul warmin insted of geeogrufee, this is Greece.

Greece