Photos ♥

Diposting oleh alexandria joseph | 07.15


































Shopping Day ♥ ;)

Diposting oleh alexandria joseph | 05.20


Shopping day with Iris today :)

We went to Harbour Town this morning and Surfers Paradise for 'brunch' this afternoon :D!

Bought a lot of things today!

YAY! :]

Bought my xiiao huang (Little Yellow) - Nike ^^

3 pairs of socks from Adidas
(I thought is Grey, but mana tahu ... It's baby blue @@"!)

The other sneaker from Rubi

and a fleece from FILA.


-Picture will be updated next post :D!-








The Boyce Thompson Arboretum

Diposting oleh alexandria joseph | 02.00



It's been a pleasure writing about this place and I hope many of you get to go and visit.  Right now it can be hot, so bring a hat and some water with you.  Also bring sunscreen as there are parts of the trail that are sunny and exposed to our intense desert sun. 

 First off, some of you may wonder what an Arboretum is....

The dictionary definition: a place where trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants are cultivated for scientific and educational purposes. The short answer is always "it's like a museum for trees." Arboreta and Gardens collect plants as a museum collects artifacts, not only to study them but to preserve them. Each tree, shrub and herbaceous plant chosen for BTA gardens and grounds is the museum equivalent of a work of art.  In our region of fractured ecosystems and declining genetic diversity, the soul of BTA is an educational and research station for desert crops and how they'll be integrated into sustainable crops for future generations. You will really see the fractured ecosystem if you come to the Arboretum from Tucson to Globe.  Mining has scarred some of the towns around the areas of Globe and Superior.  Ironically, William Boyce Thompson, the man who founded the Arboretum, was a miner himself.


There are many trails at the Arboretum and ALL are lovely.  They are easy to maneuver and I rate them as a 1 or 2 level for difficulty.   The "High Trail" is a bit more challenging as you have to climb rocky stairs, but it's quiet with a breeze.  Perfection for you birders:)  Pack a lunch and sit under the many ramadas/trees at their plentiful picnic tables.


Another thing that I like about this place is that you can bring your dogs.  I don't have a dog, but it was fun seeing everyone walking them.  Just make sure you clean up after them and remember that they must be on a leash no longer than 6 feet and under the physical control of the owner.  No smoking is allowed inside the Arboretum, but if you do smoke, you may do so in the parking lot.  If you have to smoke, please don't throw your cig butts on the grounds as you can spark a grass fire faster than you can say, "HOLY #$@&!" And then you'll probably end up in jail on top of it.  My advice and opinion...stop smoking and wasting your money:)

Remember to not take anything off the grounds, but DO bring your camera for A LOT of fantastic shots.  Here is what I will say about the water situation.  There isn't any AT ALL around the park so bring your own.  They do sell small bottles of water in the gift shop at around 75 cents.  If you are 6'2" like I am, you'll need to buy at least 3-4 to get around the park comfortably during this time of year.

One of the many types of ice plants you'll see at the entrance of the park.


I took many of these pics in March when the plants were coming back from a difficult winter.  The prickly pear is extra purple after a cold winter.  Every month the Arboretum hosts themed events.  This month, May, they had sessions related to Migratory Birds.  For summer, the Arboretum offers specialty guided walks and tours.  They offer walks, tours, classes, and lectures free with admission which was around 8 dollars.

   The Boyce Thompson Arboretum
37615 U.S. Hwy 60, Superior, AZ 85173

                                                                  Phone (520)689-2723
                                                                http://ag.arizona.edu/bta/

The above information is there to help you. I'm not going to lie. This place should not have been so difficult to find. The first time we passed it while the second, I had doubts that I was driving in the right direction. However, I'm a guy who didn't bring the directions and just started driving eating a breakfast burrito from a place in Florence. Until next time, happy adventures!!!













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Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/30/2011

Diposting oleh alexandria joseph | 20.49


Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/30/2011After months of mass protests in their major cities, Syria and Yemen have pushed their crackdowns on demonstrators to a new level. In both countries the army was ordered to quell the protests using all necessary means, including firing into the crowds massing into central urban areas. Yemeni government jets also bombed Al Qaeda strongholds in the coastal city of Zinjibar.

In other news, a 19-year-old beauty contestant in the Crimea was stoned to death by several young Muslim men for violating sharia law with her salacious behavior.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to Andy Bostom, C. Cantoni, Egghead, Fjordman, Gaia, Insubria, JD, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.






Migration, Invasion, or Settlement?

Diposting oleh alexandria joseph | 19.07


In recent years, European advocates for mass immigration have taken up the euphemism “migration” to describe the process they champion. The abbreviated version of the word is less freighted with negative connotations, and serves to anesthetize the general public by evoking images of people who move from place to place occasionally — maybe seasonal farm workers or pastoral nomads — but certainly not a massive influx of hostile aliens.

In other words, nothing like the reality of 21st-century Europe.

Frequent arguments may be heard within Counterjihad circles about what term best describes what is going on now in Europe, since “immigration” hardly covers it. Other suggestions include “invasion” and “colonization”, and I would add “settlement” to the list. But none of these quite captures the essence of what is happening.

Invasion implies an armed incursion, and at least a token resistance by the population that is being invaded. None of that is in evidence in Europe — the target population is largely passive, thanks to generous amounts of soma provided by the welfare state, and the invaders have actually been invited in by the political leaders of the invaded countries.

Colonization also implies a coordinated effort by a militarily superior armed power to overcome the target population. Colonizing a foreign country is similar to invading it, except that any resistance offered by the colony is asymmetric and ineffective. Colonists are not invited in and welcomed by the leaders of the colonized country, unless the latter have already lost the battle and are accepting a fait accompli.

Settlement comes slightly closer, because it implies migration to a land that is open for occupation and exploitation. Yet such a land should be sparsely-populated or uninhabited. Iceland was settled. North America was settled. Europe is not being settled; it is being willingly ceded to an alien population.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

For a change of pace, we’ll take a breather from the Jihad and look at what’s happening today in the United States.

Islamization is the larger threat in the long term, but the immediate danger here in the U.S.A. is Mexicanization. Last night I happened to stumble across the following map, which I adapted from an article published by the Migration Policy Institute:

Map: Mexican immigration in the USA

As we all know, California and Texas are the most Mexicanized states. But Illinois? What brings all those Mexicans to Chicago…?

The data used for this map and the rest of the article are from 2006. We’ll assume that the number of Mexican-born residents of the United States has only increased in the meantime, even if the current depression has induced some of the illegals to return home. The 2006 figures should suffice for the sake of analysis.

I made the following graphs from the tabular data in the accompanying article. The first is a chart showing the increase since 1960 in foreign-born residents of the U.S.A., Mexican and otherwise. As you can see, the overall increase in immigration is accelerating, and the number of Mexicans is increasing more rapidly than all the other nationalities:

Mexican immigration: chart #1

The second graph shows the overall trend more clearly, charting the number of Mexican-born residents as a percentage of all the foreign-born:

Mexican immigration: chart #2

When I was a kid — at the leftmost position on these graphs — Mexicans were an anomaly in America, unless you happened to live in Texas or California. Even there they were generally migrant laborers, the “exploited” workers whose rights were championed by Cesar Chavez just a few years later.

All that has changed in the last forty years. Southern California and parts of Texas have become virtual extensions of Mexico, and the “migrants” have become permanent fixtures in most major cities and many rural areas. We have our fair share of them here in Central Virginia, working on the tobacco farms, in construction, doing highway maintenance, operating equipment, and laboring in various other low-to-medium-skill occupations, including the stereotypical lawn-care services. All grocery stores now have large “Hispanic foods” sections.

So the Mexicanization of America is a very real and ongoing process.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

In Anestos Canelides’ post last night, a commenter objected to the description of ethnicities in the San Fernando Valley as “white and Hispanic”, saying that the phrase should be “Anglo and Hispanic”.

He has a point. However, both distinctions are inaccurate, because the vast majority of Mexicans in the current wave of settlers are not white. Yes, they are “Hispanic” in the sense that they speak a dialect of Castilian Spanish, and share at least some genetic material with the Iberians who colonized Mexico.

But they are not like Asturians or Catalonians. They are mestizos, or persons of mixed Iberian and American Indian descent. Many of them have more Indian blood than Spanish — some of those I see in our area look like pure-blooded Aztecs or Mayans, with faces straight out of the 16th-century codices illustrating temple rituals or human sacrifice in Tenochtitlan.

Large areas of our country are rapidly being converted to de facto mestizo territory. Like most Americans, this is not something I want to see. I like Mexicans just fine — but in Mexico. If I want to, I can book a flight to Acapulco or Mexico City, enjoy the local culture, and then return home to live amongst Americans. What’s wrong with that?

There was a time not so long ago when such sentiments were considered normal. Less than two generations back, mass illegal immigration from south of the border would have provoked outrage and condemnation, but today anyone who objects to it is considered “racist” and “bigoted”. We are enjoined to accept bilingual schools and government institutions, with the various dysfunctional behaviors that accompany the Mexican underclass as a byproduct. All this is billed as an enrichment of our culture.

Yet, funnily enough, the Mexicanization of America is deeply unpopular, and is opposed by a large majority of Americans who were here before the current surge of mestizos began arriving. We don’t want it, but very few national politicians of either party who oppose it ever make it to the ballot where we could vote for them — our only choices are to vote for “amnesty” or “more amnesty”.

To make matters worse, the federal government is working hard to ensure that the states cannot make or enforce laws that are simply locally-enacted versions of federal immigration laws.

We must have the Mexicans whether we want them or not.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

When you examine matters closely, it appears that the importation of Mexicans into the United States is occurring for the same reasons that Muslims are being settled in Europe.

The original motive seems to have been the need for cheap labor to make profits for large corporations and fill out the workforce of an aging population. But over the past forty years that intention morphed into something entirely different, as the socialist parties (in our case, the Democrats) realized that bringing in ignorant and unskilled masses of welfare-dependent immigrants could create a permanent electoral majority for socialism as soon as sufficient numbers of the new arrivals became eligible to vote. The widespread ideology of Multiculturalism simply provided moral justification for a cynical political calculus.

Recent revelations in the UK about the Labour Party’s machinations have confirmed this process in British politics, and it’s easy to see the same imperative at work elsewhere in the West. Socialists need illiterate foreigners to cement their hold on power. They also need to erode national feeling among the natives to help destroy any lingering urge to resist.

Muslims fill the bill by colonizing Europe. Mexicans do the same by invading the U.S.A.

Muslim settlers are the more efficient destroyers of Western Civilization, but the end result is the same.






Highlights from the Phoenix Comicon 2011

Diposting oleh alexandria joseph | 14.48


Leonard Nimoy
This is one of several pics that will show up in a series in September that I took during the convention.
Pics taken by Chris Rohrer.  Please do not use without permission.  
We had a lot of fun this weekend.  I've got detailed reports on Nasa projects amongst other things in a couple months.  But for now, I thought I'd give you a taste of the Phoenix ComicCon 2011.  It was a blast meeting everyone and I look forward to going to next years convention.  The highlights this year were George Takei, Leonard Nimoy, Stan Lee and many many others.  My shaky recordings are a nod to Battlestar Galactica fans;)


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The EDL Demonstration in Blackpool

Diposting oleh alexandria joseph | 11.50


Below are two TV news reports about last Saturday’s English Defence League demonstration in Blackpool:


The TV reporters fail to mention a particularly grisly aspect of the Charlene Downes case: investigators believe that the murderers of the 14-year-old cut up her body and mixed it with kebab meat in a restaurant operated by one of the suspects.

Hat tip: Gaia.






Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland

Diposting oleh alexandria joseph | 10.17


Our Muslim Troubles

Part V: A Discredited State


“As the slow motion train crash that is Europe’s experiment with Muslim immigration moves on to its inevitable conclusion, we continue to see a sharp polarization between those Europeans who wish, for whatever reason, to continue the experiment and those who wish to bring it to an end. As each European country collapses into its own Muslim Troubles, there will be no cover, politically speaking, for those politicians and public figures who span us tall tales all along about the wonders of the multi-faith Shangri-las we were building.”

This is the conclusion of a five-part series by El Inglés comparing and contrasting the Troubles in Northern Ireland with the coming Muslim Troubles in Britain. Previously: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

All five parts are now available as a single document in pdf format (thanks to Vlad).


Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland


by El Inglés

X. Political Implications


So far we have limited our consideration of matters political to the assumption that the state will vacillate its way into and through at least the initial stages of the conflict. However, there is a little more to say on the subject of the mainstream political response to the conflict we predict and explore in this document.

Western European nations have been implementing for several decades, more or less consistently, policies which have the inevitable consequence of turning once-homogeneous countries into much more heterogeneous ones, racially, religiously, culturally, and linguistically. We have been encouraged to believe that, not only has this been a good thing, it is bigoted and evil not to believe that it has been a good thing. Calamitous change has thus been justified by the gossamer banalities of multiculturalism, whose orthogonal relationship with reality is now dawning on the worried architects of the culturally-enriched states of modern Europe.

As the slow motion train crash that is Europe’s experiment with Muslim immigration moves on to its inevitable conclusion, we continue to see a sharp polarization between those Europeans who wish, for whatever reason, to continue the experiment and those who wish to bring it to an end. As each European country collapses into its own Muslim Troubles, there will be no cover, politically speaking, for those politicians and public figures who span us tall tales all along about the wonders of the multi-faith Shangri-las we were building.

To put it at its bluntest, one cannot present oneself as the person to save one’s country from the horrific tribal violence that it has recently descended into when one has spent the last however-many decades cramming as many people of the hostile, enemy tribe in question into that country and describing all opposition to those efforts as racist, bigoted, or worse. We will examine in a later section the way in which the Troubles only came to an end when key decision-makers in the paramilitary organizations on each side decided that they were prepared to lay down their arms to try and reach a negotiated peace. Here we will simply stress the significance of this point: if paramilitaries continue to fight, no government can force a peace. And it is utterly inconceivable that any British paramilitary organization would cease hostilities in this fashion if it believed that the political figures attempting to mediate that process were implicated in the mass immigration, multiculturalism, and Muslim appeasement that had led to the conflict in the first place. As such, any government or person so implicated will be utterly ineffective as a mediator.

In the Netherlands, there exists a politician, Geert Wilders, and a political party, the Dutch Freedom Party, committed to defending the Dutch people and their country from the disaster it has been plunging toward for the last several decades. Whatever unpleasant things some might believe of Mr. Wilders, few would doubt that he means what he says about defending his country and way of life. We are not interested here in trying to predict what will happen in the Netherlands, but we will suggest that any Dutch paramilitary that may emerge to defend the Dutch people as and when the state fails to do so will presumably consider Wilders to be a man worth doing business with, a man who might be worth listening to if he asks them to lay down their guns and let the state take over in meeting the Muslim threat.

One of the greatest dangers we in Britain face with respect to our forthcoming Muslim Troubles is the possibility that all such potential actors will already have discredited themselves in the eyes of British paramilitaries. This is one of the great evils of our electoral system. If we look at the populist right-wing parties throughout Europe that are espousing nationalism and opposing Islam, Islamization, and Muslim immigration, we observe that they are, overwhelmingly, new parties that have only been able to flourish because the electoral systems of their respective countries are based on proportional representation. To take the most obvious example, Wilders’ Freedom Party has attained the influence it currently enjoys because the re-tribalization of Dutch politics made inevitable by Muslim immigration is shunting large numbers of angry Dutch people (which is to say, Dutch-Dutch people) to his party. Even if everyone else in the country considers him to be Lucifer incarnate, his party can simply content itself with taking its share of the vote and seeing the whole of Dutch politics start to dance to its tune.

None of this can happen in the British system. The Dutch Freedom Party won about 16% of the vote in the 2010 election, which gives it a great deal of power. In contrast, winning 16% of the vote in a UK election renders one irrelevant apart from in those very rare cases where a hung parliament opens up the possibility of a coalition government. In the 2005 general election in the UK, the Liberal Democrats won 18.3% of the vote, which gave them 52 out of 646 seats and rendered them essentially impotent, as it did every party other than Labour, who won a significant majority. In other words, a party can win nearly a fifth of the vote in a general election and still attain neither outright power, nor a place in a governing coalition, nor even the slightest possibility of a place in a governing coalition for the simple reason that no such coalition is required.

This is an electoral system that could have been designed to kill off political innovation and ensure the mainstream parties are almost unassailable in the great big coin-toss that happens once every few years in the UK. UKIP, the closest equivalent to the Dutch Freedom Party in the UK, won 16% of the vote in the European election in 2009. Granted, the European elections are often used to register protest votes, so this result should not be taken as meaning that 16% of the British public considers UKIP its preferred party across the board. Nonetheless, despite their popularity clearly being far greater than their 3% of the vote in the 2010 general election would suggest, they have yet to win a single seat in the House of Commons. As a consequence of this lopsidedness in British elections, debates vis-à-vis Islam and Muslim immigration in mainstream British politics take place entirely within the confines of what the three main parties are comfortable with. No party can storm the pitch from the sidelines, breaking taboos the way Wilders does in the Netherlands, because those who do break taboos, like the BNP, simply do not have to be responded to by anyone with a chance of winning.

Of the three main parties, the only one that could reasonably be expected to start trying to turn the British ship of state around before it crashes onto the shores of our Muslim Troubles is the Conservative Party. Now, as by far the strongest party in a coalition government after thirteen years in the wilderness, it is starting to strut its stuff with respect to the terrible problems we face, and its stuff is not especially reassuring. To be sure, David Cameron has indicated that he will not be prepared to tolerate certain of the things that Labour turned a blind eye to, and the government has already started to make far-reaching changes to the immigration system, the single most crucial area of policy. But there is no public recognition from the Conservatives of the breadth or depth of the problems Islam and Muslims pose us in Britain, and this is what is crucial. Perhaps David Cameron is well aware of what we face, but does not feel he can talk about it. This may seem like a wise course of action to him at present, but can only discredit him and his party later on. One cannot feign ignorance of an iceberg, crash into it, and still insist that one is uniquely qualified to deal with the ensuing catastrophe, because, truth be told, one had seen it all along. This will not convince anyone of one’s qualifications for dealing with the problem, least of all those who have committed murderous acts of violence on behalf of paramilitary organizations.

In short, the Conservatives are in danger, not imminent danger, but danger nonetheless, of discrediting themselves as a party capable of understanding and dealing with the threat we face. We are, of course, obliged to take into account the fact that they are part of a coalition and are therefore somewhat constrained in what they do. Even so, it is far from obvious that they are up to the challenge of charting the dramatic change of course that would be required to put clear blue water between us and the ever-closer hulk of our Muslim Troubles, which lie directly ahead.

It will come to be seen as a historic misfortune that the window of opportunity for dealing with the threat our Muslim population poses us without massive violence happened to coincide with a juncture at which our main centre-right party was busy trying to convince the UK electorate that it was no longer the ‘nasty party.’ However peripheral non-entities such as Baroness Warsi may be to the real power in the Conservative Party, the mere fact that Cameron has felt the need to parachute them into such prominent positions as party chairman shows how hard the Conservatives are trying to be all things to all people. Could we imagine Geert Wilders dragging some token Moroccan into his party to convince people that he was tight with the believers?

Is it a coincidence that the only European country to have seen the rise of a robust, successful, anti-Islamic street movement like the EDL is also the only country to have no mainstream political party that has woken up to the threat of Islam, not Islamism, not radical Islam, not extremist Islam, but Islam itself? We cannot say for sure, but it seems likely that opposition to Islam will emerge by hook or by crook, and that if it does not do so through electoral politics, it will have to do so some other way. Whether it likes it or not, the EDL is already on course to become the UDA of our Muslim Troubles. There are undoubtedly UVFs waiting to emerge as well. Is this what our political masters want?

There are presumably people in the Netherlands who believe that Wilders is a threat to their democracy. But this is a mistake. Wilders is the last hope of their democracy, as a democracy that destroys the possibility of peaceful, political self-correction, will make inevitable violent, apolitical self-correction, and kill democracy itself in the process. Wilders is the last chance the Netherlands will have to avoid blood on the streets. And the window of opportunity is closing even for him.

XI. The Two Insanities


We have already stated our core assumption that the British government will, by and large, be wholly ineffective in the face of the violent conflict that breaks out between British and Muslims and seek merely to contain it. However, there are crucial issues pertaining to the government response that must be considered beyond this assumption. The violent conflict that we predict in this document is not something that can be solved in any obvious sense by any government. But there are still certain potential courses of action that different parts of the apparatus of state can take within the constraints of our earlier assumption that are of relevance here.

Broadly speaking, the long-term objectives of British paramilitaries in the conflict will include at least the following:

  • to prohibit Muslim immigration
  • to prohibit the granting of citizenship/permanent residency to Muslims already in the UK and bring about the repatriation of, at the very least, those non-citizen Muslims in the country
  • to protect British people from Muslim violence and depredation
  • to ensure the deportation of Muslims deemed incompatible with British society, be they British citizens or not
  • to ensure that Muslims are no longer able to have their existences significantly subsidized by the British taxpayer

We have already discussed the permissible types of violence from the points of view of the different actors in the conflict. But this analysis was based on an assumption that the government of the day will not act in a manner which simply allows the Muslim colonization of the UK to continue. In other words, we are assuming that certain of the objectives of the British will be achieved very quickly, just as the NI and British governments moved quickly to address the core grievances of the Catholic population of NI when the Troubles broke out (though to little avail, at least in terms of pre-empting further violence). More specifically, we are assuming that the British government will not engage in either of what we will refer to here as the Two Insanities.

In the First Insanity, the British government treats the violence between British and Muslims as if were some strange bump in the road on the way to the creation of a multicultural paradise and keeps on allowing Muslim immigration to occur. Should the government actually be so imbecilic as to adopt this course of action, then it will become clear in short order to British paramilitaries that the key causal factor in the Islamization of Britain remains unchallenged. Furthermore, in the context of violent conflict, such immigration will legitimately be construed by these paramilitaries as the effective collusion of government in the reinforcement of the Muslim side. If even the outbreak of widespread violence as already described cannot jolt the British government from the suicidal stupidity of allowing Muslim immigration, then British paramilitaries may well conclude that they have no option but to take their violence to new levels to impress upon the government that its behaviour is unacceptable.

In the Second Insanity, the British government understands that a continuation of Muslim immigration makes utter disaster inevitable, and moves to shut it down completely. However, upon trying to do so, it discovers that, due to a combination of the actions of the judiciary, the EU and its various institutions, and international agreements of whatever sort, this action ‘cannot’ be taken. In this case too, we could expect new levels and types of violence from British paramilitaries.

With respect to the probability of either of the Two Insanities occurring, we suggest that the ability of government to make a clean break with the madness of the last several decades and recognize the brute incompatibility of Britain and Muslims can by no means be taken for granted. To be sure, there is a growing recognition right across Europe that something has gone very badly wrong as a result of Islamic immigration, and the causal relationship between admitting Muslims to one’s country and having those Muslims contaminate and destroy that country is too obvious to escape the attention of even the political class forever. Leaving to one side the hard leftists committed to revolution through the mass importation of Third World peoples of whatever provenance and Muslims in particular, there will be very few in this country who actively desire a descent into Balkan-style violence. Nevertheless, the record of the democratic systems of European countries to date in pre-emptively defusing the ticking time-bomb of Muslim immigration is so astonishingly poor that we should not take too much for granted in this regard, and must therefore consider the possibility that one or other of the Two Insanities will be indulged in by the respective actors with effects we will now consider in more detail.

Ultimately, Muslims can only be kept out of the UK by government, as government is entirely responsible for our borders. No amount of violence short of the absolutely genocidal could conceivable remove the threat of Islam as long as Muslims are allowed to pour into the country. Therefore, government has a crucial role to play in resolving matters to the satisfaction of British paramilitaries. If it will not play this role willingly, it will have to be forced to do so through violence of a type and on a scale so extreme as to threaten a collapse into utter chaos and outright civil war. Of course, violence of this type will be one of the few ways British paramilitaries have of persuading Muslims to simply leave Britain, and could eventually end up being resorted to for this reason alone. But only one of the Two Insanities will make it a virtual certainty. There is already a growing awareness across Europe that Muslim immigration could be better described as Muslim colonization. Once British paramilitaries and the British people in general are blooded by the violence involved in civil conflict, escalating the violence to the levels described here will not be considered nearly as outrageous as it seems at present, even if we ignore the likelihood of Muslim atrocities against similar targets on our side.

We have already discussed the types of bombing campaigns that British and Muslims are likely to be able to engage in, and have concluded that only British paramilitaries will be able to build and utilize large car and truck bombs in any significant numbers. As we have suggested, such devices will be deployed in the conflict we have thus far imagined even in the absence of the Two Insanities, but predominantly to cause damage and disruption to Muslim communities without causing mass casualties. The most obvious parallel here would be the PIRA bombing campaign in England in the 1990s, which aimed to cause economic damage and disruption without inflicting the civilian casualties of, for example, the Remembrance Day bombing at Enniskillen.

The issue here is whether or not there is likely to come into existence a perceived necessity to use these devices against Muslims en masse, be it at a mosque, in a Muslim residential area, or a Muslim commercial area. Of course it is possible that intrinsic ruthlessness and indiscriminate Muslim suicide bombings of British targets will already have combined to create a willingness on the part of British paramilitaries to engage in such attacks. However, their relative scarcity in the three-decade conflict of the Troubles suggests that such total ruthlessness is somewhat more alien to the peoples of the British Isles than it is to Muslims in general. Whether or not such devices are used in such a manner by British paramilitaries therefore becomes a pivotal point, and one that will be critical in determining the nature of the conflict.

Earlier, we made reference to the Dublin and Monaghan bombings as being the single most ruthless act of the Troubles, as well as the single most lethal. Taken together, they killed 33 people, and these people were not killed by mistake, because a bomb went off too soon, or because a phone box was out of order. The bombs were intended to kill large numbers of civilians without warning, which is precisely what they did. The UVF, which carried them out, did not carry out similar bombings in the Republic of Ireland at any other time in the conflict. Why then did they carry out this one?

To understand the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, one must understand the backdrop against which they took place. In 1973, the British and Irish governments implemented what they hoped would be a political solution to the Troubles, which were going through their most violent years. Broadly speaking, the contours of this agreement, referred to as the Sunningdale Agreement for the English town where it was signed, were such that: a) a power-sharing agreement between nationalists and unionists would be introduced in Northern Ireland, and b) a Council of Ireland would be created to allow for consultation and cooperation between NI and the Republic of Ireland on matters pertaining to transport, trade, and the like. This was widely perceived by loyalists to be a step towards a united Ireland, and, though it had majority support from NI political parties at first, the support it enjoyed from unionists waned as 1974 wore on. Furthermore, it was bitterly opposed by the loyalist paramilitaries, and a massive strike was organized by the UDA in May 1974 to derail it.

As the UDA was bringing NI to its knees with strike action, the UVF was taking matters into its own hands slightly differently, via the bombings we have already mentioned. One must suppose that the UVF was trying to impress upon the Irish government that it considered its participation in the Council of Ireland under the Sunningdale Agreement to be an intrusion into the affairs of Northern Ireland. It is striking indeed to think of how the aborted Sunningdale Agreement and the successful Good Friday Agreement were so similar in so many ways that the Good Friday Agreement was referred to as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’ by the Deputy Leader of the SDLP at the time. Yet the former still evoked within loyalist paramilitaries the will to commit the worst single atrocity of the Troubles.

The perceived threat of Sunningdale led the UVF to engage in such extreme violence against civilians, despite the fact that, over twenty years later, it would acquiesce to something similar (albeit under different circumstances). This being the case, could anyone seriously imagine that British paramilitaries, seeing their country devoured from within by that part of the global ummah imported and subsidized by an idiot government, would refrain from eventually derailing that process of colonization through massive, indiscriminate acts of violence against a community they had come to consider an existential threat to Britain and its people?

On the basis of the foregoing considerations, we predict that the Two Insanities are virtually certain to persuade at least some British paramilitaries to escalate the violence in the manner we have described here. Indiscriminate bombings of Muslim civilian targets are a virtual certainty without the promptest and most effective action by government to shut Muslim immigration down completely in the early months of our Muslim Troubles.

XII. To the Broad Sunlit Uplands?


We have so far focused our attention on the nature of the early stages of the conflict into which we are doomed to be plunged thanks to the witlessness of our political class and the hostility of at least parts of it to the British nation. Now we turn our attention to the end of the conflict, and ask ourselves what it might look like.

Broadly speaking, there are only two ways in which a violent conflict can come to an end: a) a peace negotiated between two sides who consider themselves to be essentially undefeated but no longer interested in fighting a war, for whatever reason, or b) a peace whose terms are dictated by one side, the victor, to the other side, the defeated. Needless to say, this is a simplification, but it is one that is useful for our purposes here.

The best example of a negotiated peace for our purposes would be, of course, the Troubles. Arguably, the Troubles were not a two-sided conflict, but an unorthodox three-sided conflict in which two sides, the British state and loyalist paramilitaries, fought one, the PIRA, and all three had to agree to stop the fighting for it to come to an end. A good example of an imposed peace would be that which the Japanese were forced to accept at the hands of the U.S. during the Pacific War, which was an unconditional surrender and the military occupation of Japan.

If our government continues to implement immigration policies similar to those at present, and the British people are forced into a violent conflict with the Muslim population of the UK within the next twenty years, it is very difficult to see how they could possible lose it. The only advantage Muslims would have in this conflict, if advantage it be, is that they will start it with a greater willingness to inflict indiscriminate civilian casualties. However, atrocities of the sort that they will be so keen to inflict on us will very quickly result in counter-atrocities, as has been the case in every conflict in the history of the world, so this will quickly even out, for better or for worse. Bearing in mind our earlier conclusion, to wit, that British paramilitaries will be able to conduct a comprehensive bombing campaign while Muslims will be sorely restricted in this regard, it is difficult to see how Muslims could possibly prevail.

Assuming then that conflict is inevitable and that the British cannot lose it if they fight it in earnest, the question then becomes: will there be even the possibility of a Troubles-type conclusion to our Muslim Troubles, or will we have to aim for a Pacific War-type conclusion, which would entail the utter crushing of Muslims, their subsequent unconditional surrender, and our dictation of terms to them? We believe the answer to this question is that there can be no equivalent to the Good Friday Agreement this time around. As such, once they commence, our Muslim Troubles will have to be fought until, one way or another, by far the larger portion of the Muslim population of the UK has left and the relatively well-integrated remainder understands that it remains under the watchful eye of a government which will immediately act against troublemakers in the most draconian fashion. This is a bold predictive claim, and one we must now try to justify.

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Given the sheer violence of the Troubles, the depth and breadth of the sectarian hostility they evoked and reinforced, and the decades they lasted for, their most remarkable feature is, perhaps, that they ever came to an end at all. How did this happen?

The British and Irish governments had been trying to find a negotiated solution to the conflict for decades, which is precisely what they tried and failed to do in 1973—1974 with the Sunningdale Agreement. Though the IRA came close to defeat in 1976, its reorganization under a new leadership in 1977 gave it the structural robustness to wage a long-term, low-intensity war against British forces in Northern Ireland. Whether or not peace could be achieved was therefore a function of whether it and the other paramilitaries in the conflict could be persuaded to lay down their arms. We have made this point already, but reiterate it here: the paramilitaries were the key decision-makers. Without the ceasefires of the three main paramilitaries, the PIRA, the UVF, and the UDA, the killing would have continued, inviting retaliation and counter-retaliation. The paramilitaries that did not go on ceasefire until after the agreement passed, the INLA (which split from the OIRA in 1974) and the LVF (which split from the UVF in 1996), were deadly on occasion, but too small to derail the peace process. This is the only reason it succeeded.

What this means is that the Good Friday Agreement not only had to convince at least 70% of the population of Northern Ireland to vote in favour,[12] but also had to convince the main paramilitaries to abandon violence. How does one craft a compromise between two sides to such a violent conflict, a compromise in which both feels it is getting more than it is giving up, when both sides feel themselves to be undefeated and still possess the means to wage war? What political alchemy made this possible?[13]

By the early 1990s, there was a growing recognition on the part of on both sides of the conflict that the only alternative to killing each other in perpetuity would be a political solution that, by its very nature, would require compromise. The Troubles had already lasted for about 25 years, and had blighted the lives of the people of Northern Ireland for all that time. There had long been a realization at leadership level in the PIRA that forcing a British withdrawal from NI by force of arms alone was not a realistic strategy. Violence in the province had peaked in 1972, drastically declined in 1977, and stayed more or less at that level ever since. By the early 1990s, preparations had been in the works for a long time to move the PIRA in the direction of constitutional politics, though news of this radical plan was not communicated to PIRA volunteers until it was well-developed and had real momentum behind it.

For their part, loyalist paramilitaries were also moving in the direction of politics, with senior figures in the UVF and UDA trying to determine if there was a way in which the killing could stop. However, it must also be acknowledged that loyalist paramilitaries went through a resurgence in the early 1990s that saw them kill relatively large numbers of Catholics, Sinn Fein politicians and their family members, and republican paramilitaries. Some years in the early 1990s, they out-killed the PIRA for the first time ever. They had effectively demonstrated that they could terrorize the Catholic community of NI just as effectively as the PIRA could terrorize the security forces and the Protestant community, and this is thought by some (including the loyalist paramilitaries in question) to have contributed to a sense on the part of the PIRA that the time had come to bring the conflict to an end.

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If we consider our Muslim Troubles in this light, we see more clearly than ever before what an unmitigated disaster Muslim immigration is dragging us towards. Every single one of the foundations of the Good Friday Agreement will be absent in our Muslim Troubles. As we put it in our previous document:

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which brought an end to the Troubles as commonly understood, essentially resulted in nationalists being granted a fairer share of political power, and unionists being provided with a guarantee that a united Ireland could only be brought about with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland. This is how these two different peoples of Northern Ireland have found a way, at least for the last twelve years, of living together in relative peace. But this cannot happen in the event of a conflict between the British and their Muslim fifth column. Indeed, every single part of this compromise in the Good Friday Agreement would be meaningless at best, absurd at worst, in the context of a possible violent conflict of this nature.

As we have already established, the Muslim community of Britain is parasitic with respect to both financial and social capital, criminal and subversive, aggressive and rapidly growing. Its characteristics in these regards are not things it could alter even if it wanted to. Moreover, we cannot grant Muslims the vote, because we have already given them the vote. We cannot give them a fair slice of the economic pie, because they already suck out far more than they put in, consuming wealth created by others with nary a word of thanks. We cannot guarantee them that they will not be incorporated by force into our country, as they are already trying to get every mother’s son in here themselves, by hook or by crook, with the express purpose of being incorporated into it, at least in some sense. And we cannot grant them political influence commensurate with the contributions they make to British society, as their contributions to British society are all severely negative, and the political influence they already have is entirely undeserved and increasingly resented by the indigenous population.

[…]

It will be clear to the British people in the case of tribal conflict between them and their Muslim fifth column that defeat will result in the disappearance of their civilization, their way of life, and their existence as a people. Accordingly, they will have to win it, which means they will have to do what needs to be done to win it, which means they will have to do a great many violent and unpleasant things, things that, though quite inconceivable to many at present, will seem right and obvious to most when the nature of the conflict has become sufficiently clear.

Let us expand upon this here. Firstly, though nationalists and unionists have reconciled themselves to the legitimacy of each other’s traditions in NI, it cannot be said of the UK that there are two traditions, the British tradition and the Muslim tradition, both equally valid in their own right. It can only be said that there is the British tradition, and the cultural psychopathy of the various Muslim peoples who, having escaped their own miserable countries, are now busy recreating them in microcosm in Britain. This latter is not a ‘tradition’ whose legitimacy we will have to, or even could, acknowledge. It is antimatter to our matter and, sooner or later, we will have to take steps to ensure that it cannot annihilate us. Enjoying a glass of beer at the village pub on a Sunday afternoon and kicking the daughter-in-law down the stairs because she burned the chapattis are not two facets of two equally valid traditions of the British Isles. They are behaviours of the British people and our Muslim fifth column respectively.

Secondly, it is observed across Europe that, among the main factors driving hostility between Europeans and Muslims is the overwhelming criminality of the latter. We will not revisit this matter in detail here; rather we will content ourselves with the observation that a peace that allowed degenerate Muslim peoples to continue to inflict the multitudinous costs of their crime on any given European people is a peace that would evaporate fairly quickly. In many countries, this appears to be the key driving force behind the rapidly escalating European-Muslim conflicts. Unfortunately, a criminal population cannot simply decide to stop being criminal in the way that a paramilitary organization can decide to stop shooting people. Muslim populations throughout Europe are characterized by contempt for us, contempt for our laws, contempt for the rigours of our prisons, low psychological barriers to the use of violence, and feeble, if not downright non-existent, educational and professional achievements. Such peoples cannot suddenly stop being what they are, and only an exceptionally draconian crackdown by the state could conceivably dampen their criminal ways. This crackdown would be far too one-sided for the Muslim side to accept it as part of a political solution to violent conflict. Reading about the sheer everyday thuggishness of Muslims in countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands, and Belgium, one sometimes gets the impression that every other young Muslim male would have to be locked up to restrain the pathologies of these communities as wholes. This would be internment, not a step towards peace.

Thirdly, there would have to be a drastic scaling back of the extent to which Muslims could have all the good things of this world provided for them by the British taxpayer. Saying, in effect, ‘you will continue to massively subsidize people you are currently at war with’ will be a good way to break off negotiations between the British government and British paramilitaries. But saying ‘you will no longer receive any significant transfers of wealth from the British taxpayer’ to Muslim paramilitaries will condemn their communities either to lives of the most appalling urban squalor or an undignified return whence they came. Northern Ireland is small enough that the entire population can be somewhat subsidized by the UK as a whole, which is something that already happens with Scotland, Wales, and parts of England. But there does not exist in Britain the financial wherewithal to throw money at millions of increasingly hated Muslims in perpetuity. Historically, the victor in a war receives an indemnity from the vanquished. It will be quite a thing if undefeated British paramilitaries are expected to see their communities pay one instead.

Fourthly, the rate of growth of the Muslim population is so rapid that any 'peace' between it and the British would have to act to curtail this growth very quickly and even, in all likelihood, partially reverse it. In the absence of the overwhelming paramilitary violence that is already ruled out through our stipulation that we refer here to a peace agreement, this latter would only be achievable through a large-scale repatriation program that put significant pressure on Muslims to return to their countries of origin. A peace that let the Muslim population continue to colonize the UK, more or less quickly, would be of no utility to British paramilitaries uninterested in allowing the enemy to rest, recuperate, reinforce, and then reinitiate hostilities when it was in a better position to do so. A peace that ends the conflict without addressing the demographic time-bomb of Islam is a peace that could only thrust one’s children’s generation into a far more desperate and destructive conflict. Who would accept this and why?

The only peace that British paramilitaries would be likely to accept in return for laying down their arms would be one that allowed them to resolve the four issues above to their satisfaction. In other words, this negotiated peace would have to curtail and at least partially reverse Muslim immigration, pull the rug of the welfare state out from under the feet of Muslims (despite the fact that, by and large, they cannot function without it), ruthlessly clamp down on their criminality, and acknowledge and reinforce the absolute cultural supremacy of the indigenous people of Britain, referred to in happier times simply as the British. But this is not a negotiated peace at all! Rather, it is the peace that would follow the crushing victory of the British paramilitaries and the defeat of their Muslim enemies, who will find themselves being promptly deported if they are lucky. Our attempts to sketch the outline of a negotiated peace have instead demonstrated why none could exist.

Any conceivable peace process mediated between British and Muslim paramilitaries will be about as fruitful as the Israel-Palestine peace process, which is to say it will be very heavy on process, but deliver decidedly little in the way of peace. There simply does not exist a negotiated end to the Israel-Palestine conflict that could satisfy a critical mass of the key actors on both sides of that conflict. The same will be true of our Muslim Troubles.

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In closing, the author begs the indulgence of his readers here as he inserts a personal anecdote into this document. Driving through Ireland not so very long ago, he picked up a hitch-hiker in County Donegal. This hitch-hiker, his Scottish accent notwithstanding, was an Irishman who was obviously a staunch member of what could be called the republican tradition. As we passed through the small town of Dunfanaghy, he told me that it had a large Protestant population. Indeed, his attitude seemed to be that it had virtually been taken over by Protestants during the Troubles, the Protestants in question coming across from the Six Counties, as my hitch-hiker would have put it, to get away from the violence for a while. Apparently they bought up holiday homes in the town, thereby spurring on a new wave of construction which had, in his opinion, ruined the place.

If one reflects upon it, this is quite a thing to them to have done. The nationalist people of Northern Ireland are, overwhelmingly, those members of the historic Irish nation who ended up north of the new border after the partition of Ireland. Though the reality of partition has undoubtedly fashioned in them a consciousness that their brethren in the Republic of Ireland cannot entirely share, it has hardly turned them into two unrelated peoples, unconcerned by each other’s woes or sufferings. On the contrary, it is precisely the continuing sense of shared nationhood that has led the push for a united Ireland. Yet, somehow, unionists engaged, at least in some sense, in a violent conflict with nationalists north of the border felt happy travelling south of it to buy up homes in a country populated entirely by those who were, historically speaking, more or less the same people they were in conflict with in Northern Ireland. Is this not indicative of the fundamental compatibility of the peoples in question, and, however much it might irk both sides to read it, their similarity?

Now, when a vast swathe of the urban UK descends into tribal violence, would any British person ever say, ‘Oh well, at least we will be able to get away from it for a while by buying a holiday home in Karachi’? Ignore for a moment the logistical difficulties involved in heading off to Karachi for the weekend and focus on the psychological implications. Not only is Karachi a truly horrendous-sounding place, but it is full of Pakistanis. Why, precisely, would any British person wish to escape our Muslim Troubles by fleeing to the country that is the single biggest source of those Muslims?

Not a single one of the good things that exists in Britain could possibly exist in Pakistan, and not a single one of them will survive in any area of the UK that comes to be dominated by Pakistanis. The spread of these people in the UK represents the complete obliteration of everything that the British people have built over their thousands of years of history. This is why there can be no political compromise to bring our Muslim Troubles to an end. All compromise will be an option worse than war. Compromise is precisely what we are engaged in at present, and it is the increasingly intolerable nature of this compromise that will drive us to war. Why then would we pull back from that war to re-establish a state of affairs already judged inferior, and that would simply result in a return to war, further down the line, with a Muslim population grown larger and stronger in the meantime? Anything short of outright victory will be pointless, and British paramilitaries will presumably be clearsighted enough to realize it.

XIII. Note on Sources


The factual claims made in this document are not considered controversial enough to warrant rigorous documentation, which would add little of value. To the extent that any of the content herein proves contentious, it is likely to be the interpretative and analytical claims based on those factual claims, and these, of course, are the author's own and must be assessed on their own merits.

Nonetheless, to point interested parties in the right direction, we make a note here of the sources we relied upon for such understanding of the Troubles as we have managed to obtain.

  • Big Boys’ Rules, Mark Urban
  • Brits, Peter Taylor
  • The Dirty War, Martin Dillon
  • Fifty Dead Men Walking, Martin McGartland
  • The Informer, Sean O’Callaghan
  • INLA: Deadly Divisions, Henry McDonald and Jack Holland
  • Killing Rage, Eamon Collins
  • Loyalists, Peter Taylor
  • Mad Dog, Johnny Adair
  • Mad Dog: The Rise and Fall of Johnny Adair and ‘C’ Company, David Lister and Hugh Jordan
  • The Operators: On the Streets with Britain’s Most Secret Service, James Rennie
  • Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein, Peter Taylor
  • A Secret History of the IRA, Ed Moloney
  • The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder, Martin Dillon
  • Stakeknife, Martin Ingram
  • Unsung Hero, Kevin Fulton
  • Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast, Kevin Myers
  • 25 Years of Terror: The IRA’s War Against the British, Martin Dillon


Those who wish to know more about explosives are invited to do their own research online.

But remember: you are being watched…

Link to the complete paper in pdf format


Notes:

12.It also had to convince 70% of the population of the Republic of Ireland to do the same, but the outcome was never in doubt there, and 94% voted in favour.
13.It is important to remember that there is no guarantee whatsoever that the peace that today prevails in Northern Ireland will last. Though dissident Republican groups such as the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA are believed to lack the military muscle to engage in extended bombing campaigns, the recent murder of policeman Ronan Kerr with an undercar bomb shows that they are attempting to return to violence on a large scale.

Even if such groups are not capable of forcing a return to the war, this is not the long-term threat to peace in the province. The long-term threat to peace is the demographic reality that the Catholic population is steadily increasing as a fraction of the whole, and that this population is, of course, overwhelmingly nationalist. In the next twenty years or so, Catholics will come to outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time ever.

The principle of consent was one of the cornerstones of the Good Friday Agreement. Under this principle, all parties to the agreement recognized that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland could only change with the consent of a majority of the population. This was one matter entirely while Protestants were in the majority, but primary schools across the province are apparently already educating a generation that is majority Catholic, making the coming into being of a Catholic majority a matter of if, not when.

The inevitability of a Catholic majority is not some sort of unpredicted bug in the system. On the contrary, just as Michael Collins argued that the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed at the end of the Irish War of Independence would give Ireland not freedom, but the freedom to achieve freedom, republicans in Northern Ireland obviously calculated that the Good Friday Agreement would grant them not a united Ireland, but a sure-fire means to attain it. This goes some way towards explaining why republicans were, by and large, persuaded to vote in favour of the agreement. What unionists will do when faced with this reality cannot be predicted.

Previous posts by El Inglés:

2007 Nov 28 The Danish Civil War
2008 Apr 24 Surrender, Genocide… or What?
  May 17 Sliding Into Irrelevance
  Jul 5 A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 1
    6 A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 2
    8 A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 3
  Aug 25 Identity, Immigration, and Islam
  Oct 4 The Blackhoods of Antifa
    26 Racists ’R’ Us
  Nov 25 Surrender, Genocide… or What? — An Update
2009 Feb 16 Pick a Tribe, Any Tribe
  Apr 11 Pick A Tribe, Any Tribe — Part II
  May 18 To Push or to Squeeze?
  Nov 2 On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 1
  Dec 5 On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 2
    7 On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 3
2010 Mar 25 The Death of Democracy
    25 Some Fallacies On the Subject of Crime — Part 1
    28 Reflections on the Civil War in Britain
  Apr 1 A Consideration of the Criminal Investigation Process — Part One
    2 A Consideration of the Criminal Investigation Process — Part Two
    5 On Vigilantism — Part One
  Oct 29 Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 1
  Nov 1 Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 2
    4 Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 3
    2 Muslim Crime in the UK: Part 4
2011 Mar 10 Muslim Immigration into the UK: Part One
    11 Muslim Immigration into the UK: Part Two
    12 Muslim Immigration into the UK: Part Three
    13 Muslim Immigration into the UK: Part Four
  May 25 Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland — Part One: The Idiot Paradigm
    26 Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland — Part Two: The Chocolate Cake Diet
    27 Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland — Part Three: An Explosive Situation
    29 Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland — Part Four: The Military and the Paramilitaries






Cacti and Wildflowers

Diposting oleh alexandria joseph | 02.00


The pink wild tubular flowers of Parry's Penstemon let us know that spring has arrived in the desert southwest.  The background shows us a variety of the Cephalocereus senilis or Old Man Cactus. 

My favorite part about exploring the Boyce Thompson Arboretum has been the wild displays of cacti/succulent groupings along with the bright colors of the wildflowers.  They began in March and continue throughout April into May.  While our Tucson wildflower season here wasn't the best (because we didn't get the required amount of rain needed during our winter months), the Arboretum is situated in a different part of the desert that receives more rain. Here are some amazing plants that add punch to our landscape during the months of April and May.

This is Globemallow-genus Sphaeralcea in the mallow family (Malvaceae)-and one of my favorites.

As I was walking towards Ayer Lake, I couldn't help but stop and notice all the wonderful cacti displays.  It was incredible and it was apparent as there were many people studying how they were all grouped together.  Fantastic stuff!!

The bumpy ones are called the Totem Pole Cactus.

I started running out of water during this part of the trail as it was sunnier so bring several bottles with you before you begin the hike. 


The colors of many of our wildflowers attract pollinators like the hummingbird and butterfly to visit.  Notice the tubular shape that allows for long beaks:)

Barrel Cactus at its best!!!  I love when people use this cactus in a repeating form.

I LOVE barrel cactus.  Well I should say that I don't like a barrel cactus, but several placed together.  They add structure to a garden and there were two very large displays of these slow growing cacti together.  It was quite an impressive display.  The first grouping was under a mesquite tree in part shade although they can take full sun.



A pumphouse creates this artificial waterfall and the Ayer lake below.  What I found interesting was that there was a colony of prickly pear cactus on the top right next to the water.   Normally a cactus will rot with too much water, but this colony seems to thrive.

Ayer Lake in March.  The grasses are still brown but they will green up as it gets warmer.

There are a lot of breathtaking views off the main trail hike.  Rock formations are outstanding as are the cacti displays.  Together, they equal perfection.


My favorite pic is right below this writing.  The Saguaro is a healthy and older member of the garden.


You'll also see other fun trees around the various trails.  Below is a boojum tree. There were two.  One was younger and this one is much older.


This was definitely worth the hike.  My advice is to begin this part of the trail earlier so that you can enjoy these plants without the intense heat beating you down.  The other parts of the trail are shadier and breezier, but this particular route can be brutal during the late morning/afternoon hours....especially during this time of year.


I just love the look of a hairy cactus.  I have several at El Presidio and they remind me of my days in Cuzco, Peru.  Tomorrow, I'll unfortuneatly have to conclude my series on this fantastic voyage.  And yet a new voyage will begin.  I am currently working on yet another adventure that will be online in September.  My weekends are always full of fun and adventure with some exciting finds.  I look forward to sharing some info from a NASA presentation this past weekend in what looks to be an exciting two weeks of adventure and imagination in space PLUS my tropical month long Panama trip will follow.  So much to write and so little time to do it all.  Until then......


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