Mark your calendar: Free speech in the EU ends Sept. 11

The mayor of Brussels has banned a demonstration outside the EU headquarters against the Islamization of Europe. According to Paul Belien at the Brussels Journal:

Mayor Thielemans is worried that the demonstration will upset the large immigrant population of Brussels. Over half the inhabitants of the Brussels region are of foreign origin, many of them from Morocco. According to the mayor there is a real danger of violence between demonstrators and Muslims living in the neighbourhood. The latter might not tolerate native Europeans protesting against their continent becoming Eurabia.

So, as of September 11 — the day planned for the demonstration — it will be illegal for people to gather for a peaceful protest (peaceful as far as the protesters are concerned) because the non-natives are restless.

The arrogance of the EU masters has finally reached escape velocity from the hard-won right of citizens to express their views without fear. The EUrocrats no longer even feel compelled to cover up their suppression of free speech; all they need to do is point to the danger of a tribal mob making trouble because it won't like what it hears.

It will be a historic day, this September 11: the official beginning of a post-democratic, post-European Europe. The new Jacobins, mad daddies of a radical leftist-Islamic ruling class, have taken over the palace.

The protest sponsors haven't given up; they're looking for ways to circumvent the EU rulers, including showing up with blank signs. This is getting interesting. It coincides with other evidence that Europeans are waking up from their coma and even starting to take action to reverse the sinking of their culture into dhimmitude.

By the way, did your mainstream newspaper/TV station/radio station report this story? I'd be surprised. Not nearly as important as "30 Years After His Death, Elvis Lives on in the Digital Age," the page 1 head of the bubble-gum chewing USA Today.

UPDATE 8/15
I've had a look at the proposed Free Europe Constitution as suggested by my good friend Anonymous, and am not impressed. What do they mean by "Free Europe means human development in its richest diversity and is therefore good"? (Italics in the original.) "Human development" is bureaucratic babble that is either meaningless or signifies social engineering. "Richest diversity"? More bureaucratese, but I inherently distrust anything with the word "diversity" in it.

Also: "Decisions in the EU should be made by agreements between governments. Delegation of national legislative power to EU institutions is possible; withdrawal of such powers, both in specific cases and generally is equally possible." Agreements between governments have been happening for thousands of years: they're called treaties. Who needs the EU? The next sentence says that national governments can delegate their powers to the EU (but also withdraw the delegation) — but why give away power at all? The citizens of a country should retain all power over legislation that will affect them, not only on the national level but on the regional and local level as appropriate.

Finally, I see no mention here of uncontrolled immigration, the most disastrous result of the current EU setup.

In which the author converts to Pyrrhonism

Pyrrhonism, you will recall -- especially if you are very odd -- was an ancient philosophical system that carried skepticism to the limit.

It is said, in fact, that Pyrrhonists doubted their own existence. Descartes had to sit down and have a think about that. It led to his famous conclusion, "I think, therefore I am."

Well, maybe. But what was good enough for Descartes is not good enough for me. I was flirting with Pyrrhonism before, but several of today's news items have pushed me over the edge.

Bloggers are wont to introduce a link to a story with the line, "You can't make this stuff up." But some things are more absurd than that. Not only could no one make them up -- nobody could even imagine them. Nobody could imagine imagining them. Ergo, when I come across certain reports, I feel fairly certain that I do not exist, because they are beyond mortal capacity to conceive.

Take this:

A pensioner has been told she must stop tending a public flower bed unless she agrees to wear a fluorescent jacket, put up warning signs and use a lookout.

June Turnbull, 79, of Urchfront near Devizes, has nurtured the blooms on the plot for six years. But now she is being told to obey health and safety rules after being spotted by a county council official. ... Urchfont Parish Council has recently applied for a licence and has had a meeting with the county council.

"We need to get a licence from the Highways Authority to enable work on this bed to be done, people must wear a fluorescent jacket, have warning signs and have two people working there," Peter Newell, chairman of Urchfont Parish Council, told BBC News.

An old lady is beautifying a traffic island which the authorities, if left to themselves, would probably ignore till it declined into a weed patch. She gets socked by The State for taking some initiative to improve the quality of life in her village. Imagine the sheer bloody mindedness of it! Tending plants without the necessary petition, hearing, permit, and being kitted out in a fluorescent jacket while a "lookout" stands by.

The crime scene

But of course June Turnbull, being 79, was born about 1928, so she formed certain habits that pre-date the welfare state's bureaucratic apparatus and its settled principle that only the government can manage anything.

Or this:

A Peruvian national in the U.S. illegally and who was previously charged with raping a 5-year-old girl pleaded not guilty Friday in the execution-style slayings of three young college students, a day after he surrendered to the Newark mayor. ...

FOX News has learned Carranza, who has a fake Social Security number, had been arrested on charges of raping a 5-year-old girl and then threatening the child and her parents. In that case he faced a 31-count indictment. In another, he was arrested on assault charges stemming from a bar fight. Immigration officials apparently were aware of Carranza's illegal status since his prior arrests, according to Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura.

And this:

Portland-area police arrested Alejandro Emeterio "Alex" Rivera Gamboa four times on drunken driving charges over the past seven years, but he went unnoticed by immigration officials until this week, when he and a cousin were accused in the death of 15-year-old Dani Countryman in Milwaukie.

Both Rivera Gamboa and his cousin, Gilberto Javier "Gabe" Arellano Gamboa, recently admitted that they entered the country illegally from Mexico, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials confirmed Thursday. If Rivera Gamboa's illegal status had been discovered at the time of his earlier arrests, it is likely -- but not certain -- that he would have been deported, immigration officials said.

"I've never asked somebody if they're legal or illegal," said Lt. Jason Gates, spokesman for the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office. "It's none of my business."

A county sheriff officer says it's none of his business if someone is legal or illegal? Sorry, I was under the illusion that figuring out whether someone's actions are legal or illegal is part of what we pay these so-called civil servants for.

Silly me. Obviously, we dress them up in resplendent uniforms with knife-edge creases, give them shiny badges and all the latest telecommunications gear, so they can write up traffic tickets. (Or maybe stop old ladies from planting flowers without a permit.) Determining a drunken driver's citizenship status and possibly preventing a murder is above the lieutenant's pay grade, and would only get him into trouble with the "compassionate" dwellers in Oregon, who have made their state a legal sanctuary for illegals -- apparently, they have a taste for paradox.

I don't know about you, but these things are beyond my capacity to imagine, let alone believe. Clearly, I do not exist, and will insist on it as long as I'm around.

Getting over the blues

Despite my profound ignorance of HTML, I've been fiddling with the template of Reflecting Light.

It is with no small hesitation that I have changed the look of a world-renowned, historic institution. This design evolution (or, if you prefer, somewhat more intelligent design) was prompted by the First Law of Blogdom: Do not be boring.

The previous livery seemed to me over-saturated with blue, and characterized by a shortage of contrast. Well, I am now emerging from my Blue Period. In this redesign I tried quite a few colors and combinations, some very quiet, others an Elton John's nightmare. This is my temporary final vision, and wants living with for a while to determine whether further tweaking is called for.

Meanwhile, feel free to comment. This is only a survey and will take only a few minutes of your time. No salesman will call.

If you dote on quantification, you can rate it on a scale of 1 ("You've taken a reprehensible blog and made it worse") to 10 ("Can't take my eyes off it"). Have at it, vox populi.

Looking for a safe harbor beyond the Aztlantic Ocean

The blogger Tanstaafl (an abbreviation, I think, of Robert Heinlein's aphorism "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch") is fed up with the Mexification of southern California and its ignorant Anglo enablers. He holds out no hope that the trend can be reversed, and he's looking for a sanctuary to move his family and himself to. But even Tanstaafl reckons it will be hard to find, with the country's rulers doing everything possible to erase the nation's borders, history, culture, and traditional ethnicity.

If you are already feeling depressed today, you might want to save reading his posting for another time.

Visas for refugees from Britain

The Daily Express, which modestly describes itself as the world's greatest newspaper, reports that 4,000 souls are trying to kiss off the scepter'd isle every week.

Liam Clifford, a former immigration control officer, set up globalvisas.com as a one-man band 12 years ago. He now employs 60 people and is in the process of opening new offices in both South Africa and Australia. Mr Clifford said: “It’s absolutely phenomenal. People are trying to get away to wherever they can, and most are successful.

“Ironically, one of the main reasons for leaving is the overstretch of services due to increasing immigration into the UK. People are looking for the better standard of living offered by other countries, as even the most idyllic villages in Britain are under pressure from rising populations."

In keeping with our current national theme, "Invade the World, Invite the World," we should set up a special visa category for Brits who are fleeing, in the article's words, "immigration … and the burden it is placing on their communities and local authorities. The dearth of good schools, spiralling house prices, rising crime and tax increases are also driving people away."

After all, we in these United States have no problems with immigration, crime, or state-run schools, and our house prices are mostly spiraling downward. A good chunk of those 4,000 Brits a month would be an answered prayer for real estate agents.

And we can hardly turn away our transatlantic cousins when our boundless compassion and welcoming skills extend even to Iraqis "identified as terrorists or supporters of terrorist groups." (Tip of the hat: Lawrence Auster.)

A large-scale visa program for British refugees would probably net this country some of the U.K.'s brighter, more far-seeing, skilled, and PC-averse inhabitants. Then let's offer the younger and more physically fit among them training and armaments to take back their former country.

Maitreya

Maitreya
China, 6th C. AD

To Buddhists, Maitreya is the Buddha who is to come.

There should be no need of another Buddha. The previous Enlightened One, some 2,500 years ago, told us what we need to know and do. His teaching remains pure and shining, so much that even Akbar -- one of the best, or least bad, of the Mughal Emperors -- could express its message succinctly: "The world is a bridge; pass over it but build no house upon it."

Non-attachment, freedom from desire, kindness to all creatures, and all else that flows from the Buddha's Four Great Truths and Eightfold Path have only the most precarious hold in this world of transitory appearances. Rather are we drearily enfolded in loss, pain, and threat. The signs have never looked worse in my lifetime. A militant, at time violent drive toward a single worldwide Muslim Caliphate; the breakup of nations into squabbling tribes carried by mass migration; ecological near-bankruptcy; and a Western civilization most of whose people are drugged on consumerism.

Perhaps things have always looked this bad. Serious reading of history tells us that things were always falling apart, the best in decline. Sometimes it was worse than that, like when the European unities of the Middle Ages were undone and Europe was torn to shreds in the 16th century by religious wars and persecutions.

I can understand the situation no further than that each of us must do what we can for goodness, and remember that we see only through the eyes of matter, not of Spirit -- except in rare circumstances. The Eastern traditions that we know principally as the Vedanta and Buddhism tell us that when humanity has thoroughly lost the way, a new Enlightened Master appears to relight the million candles that have burned themselves out.

Lama Govinda was meditating in a monastery when he had a vision arising from a stone wall that he identified with Maitreya, and which he described in The Way of the White Clouds:

I only felt that there was something about the surface of this wall that held my attention, as if it were a fascinating landscape. But no, it was far from suggesting a landscape. These apparently accidental forms were related to each other in some way; they grew more and more plastic and coherent. Their outlines became clearly defined and raised from the flat background ...

Before I knew how it all happened, a majestic human figure took shape before my eyes. It was seated upon a throne, with both feet on the ground, the head crowned with a diadem, the hands raised in a gesture, as if explaining the points of an intricate problem: it was the figure of Buddha Maitreya, the Coming One, who already now is on his way to Buddhahood, and who, like the sun before it rises over the horizon, sends his rays of love into this world of darkness, through which he has been wandering in innumerable forms, through innumerable births and deaths.

Not yet a Buddha, Maitreya is in this world now, perhaps confused as we are, fearful as we are, human as we are. Still, perhaps, trying to build on that bridge that exists only to cross from matter to Spirit. Many lives have passed, many more await in the womb of time.

You might be acquainted with this Maitreya: someone you have been with all your life, whose mind you think you know but of which you are ignorant of all but the tiniest, surface part. Maitreya is learning the lessons of the school of the physical plane, and finding it to be a hard school, but slowly realizing the glory of the Light and how to transmit it once again when the time comes. It could be Maitreya bears your name while on the short thread between this birth, this death.