Hollywood royalty

The difference between good royalty and bad royalty is accountability. The senior members of the British royal family quietly go about doing countless deeds of service to their country. The cost of maintaining the royals - or maybe it was just the Queen - has been calculated as amounting to as little as 53 pence per citizen per year. At the other end you have royalty that takes and takes and does not give back. This was how France's last King, Louis XVI, was perceived, and his young Austrian wife Marie Antoinette, before they were both executed in 1793. This is the kind of royalty that says: 'let them eat cake' in response to the populace starving for lack of bread. Marie Antoinette most probably never said that, but it encapsulates an attitude and so it lives on. To this bad kind of royalty we must now add Hollywood royalty. For several years now they have been openly contemptuous of the plebs who pay to see their products and hence make their inflated salaries possible. The other night at the Oscars, their attitude could not have been clearer. Privileged celebrity after privileged celebrity derided the concerns of the common man. They portrayed themselves as essential (the once brilliant Viola Davis, now overblown with fame and adulation) or as 'migrant workers' (Mexican Gael Garcia Bernal) who, by implication, feel the pain of the working man. 'Let them have no walls or borders' said the diminutive Bernal, in response (presumably) to the genuine concerns about immigration, sovereignty and security that were partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, their great figure of hate, the Louis XVI of the chattering classes.  And then there was the disgusting stunt with the plebs themselves, a carefully orchestrated 'impromptu' moment when a group of forelock-tugging - sorry, I mean smart phone-wielding - tourists from flyover country were ushered into the super-privileged gathering of movie stars to gawp and marvel, and to be marvelled at in turn by the celebrities as if they were dear little creatures from a travelling zoo. There was no difference between this stunt and Marie Antoinette's 'Petit Trianon', her theme park replica of peasant life on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles: a pastiche of 'real life' for those who no longer know - or have never known - what that is, contrived and tightly controlled so it poses no threat whatsoever, as real life so often does. Marie Antoinette had the grace to grow in stature and understanding during her harsh imprisonment before execution. Hollywood royals, who unlike their 18th century predecessors, have access to all the means of modern communication, could be afforded the same redemptive opportunity by a simple expedient: us plebs boycotting their products. Viewing figures for this year's Oscars suggest there might already be a trend in that direction.

The limits of atheism

Dave Cullen, one of my favourite alternative media voices posted this video the other day. It was partly in response to another favourite, Black Pigeon Speaks, who was answering a question from a viewer about the 'holographic universe' espoused by some tech people who have finally reached the all-too obvious limits of materialism and are now making up their own Creation stories. This is an excellent video, well reasoned and genuinely tolerant. It's also an encouraging indication that the self-righteous fad of 'New Atheism' may have run its course; that the hatred of Christianity which has afflicted the West for generations has perhaps peaked and also reached its natural limit. To deny the spiritual reality of life is so illogical and unobservant it cannot possibly stand for very long. Yet by now it's stood long enough to imperil the whole of Western civilisation. For those who now realise that Western civilisation has left itself wide open to being overtaken by, and subsumed under, militant Islam please note there is no secularism on earth that can resist such a force. Spiritually speaking, only Christ can stand against Islam. That is why Islam all over the world proclaims that Jesus is not the Son of God and the Saviour five times a day, day in day out, week in week out, month after month, year after year, century after century. For the West to proclaim the virtues of hedonistic secularism, let alone identity politics and the SJW mentality, against a foreign religious ideology that is on the war path is like holding up bits of straw to fend off a tsunami. Civilisation emerges out of religion. Civilisation cannot survive without religion, of one kind or another. Western atheists need to wake up to this fact. The more they kick against Christ the more, inadvertently or purposefully, they open the door to Mohamed.