To Still My Beating Mind.

"The cutting room is a cruel place, where writing that may have cost blood to commit to paper is kneaded and pummelled like so much insensate clay."

Jasper Rees, "Blood and ink on the floor," Independent, April 13, 1997

I began this blog in May, 2005, with the intention of creating a working manuscript of the history of left dhimmi fascism. I finished that first draft long ago, and now I think it's time to let this effort rest in peace at last. I have much editing and revision to do on this and two other manuscripts that have lain in the dust too long. If ever they are to come to life, then I must work to make them live.

As the new year begins this blog ends. I wish to thank all of you who contributed so much to my understanding of the problems we face and the solutions we might gainfully employ to make our nations and our lives more worthwhile than they will be should we continue languishing in self-hating dhimmitude and Left fascism as a matter of unconsidered course. I am optimistic, and I am enthused about the coming year. I'll meet you there. Meanwhile, I have friends to join for the celebrations of our lives.

Thank you all very much for your efforts and concern.

Prospero:
You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Best regards, Dag.

It's the Jooooos!

We constantly hear how the biggest enemy of Christianity and America are Muslims.

The truth is that although Muslims do not share all Christian beliefs, Islam is far closer to Christianity than Judaism. I already quoted the obscene attacks made on Jesus Christ by the Jewish Talmud. How many American Christians even realize that the Holy Qur'an of Islam actually defends Jesus Christ and His mother Mary from the hateful slanders of Judaism? As I pointed out earlier, the Talmud claims that the Gospels lie about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The Talmud actually boasts that the Jews and not the Romans were the ones who actually nailed Jesus to the Cross. These Talmudic Jews hate Jesus so much that they want to take all the credit for his murder. Amazingly, the Islamic holy book, the Qur'an disputes this Jewish lie and actually defends the truth of the gospel.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/12/134969.php

Melbourne Indymedia is a website produced by grassroots media makers offering non-corporate coverage of struggles, actions and celebrations. Everyone is a witness. Everyone is a journalist.
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Dr. David Duke, author of that fine piece of journalism above, is a contributor to indymedia. Who'd have thought it? Well, we here think that fairly often, like when we post indistinguishable snippets of David Duke and Ken Livingstone as one piece. There is no dichotomy, Left and Right. There are fascists and primitives on the one side, neo-feudalists, philobarbarists, and dhimmis; and there are those who are mostly afraid to speak out against the Left dhimmi fascist conformity that rules our pubic discourse, those being the people I refer to perhaps idiosyncratically as Revolutionary Modernists. I know I'm not like David Duke. I'm not like Ken Livingstone. But they are like each other. The Klansman and the Trotskyite. Iranian hate-fest and indymedia. Me. Maybe you.

Have Pen, Will Travel

Recently our Ethiopian cousins have taken it upon themselves to invade their neighbours, the Somalis, in a large-scale and dynamic war. They didn't wait for months to get U.N. approval that would have meant limiting terms of engagement to meaninglessness, didn't wait for Russian and Chinese vetos, and didn't bring along CNN to monitor each and every outrage committed by national soldiers. The Ethiopian government had and interest in local affairs and took military action to correct what they saw as a threat to their nation and its people. In their case I applaud their decision. I wish I were there to cover the action as a first-hand reporter, in spite of my limited abilities as an objective reporter and my opaque writing style. As bloggers and private citizens we have unique opportunites to present to the larger world our views as untainted by conformities as they might be.

We might not compete as ably with major news producers who give us such brilliance as the copy on a South African mercenary in the early 1970s who was eating a piece of beef jerky when a reporter asked him what it was, to which the mercenary replied: "It's a baby's arm." Yes, the reporter panicked and wretched. We might not be able as bloggers to compete with that kind of reportorial genius. But we might do something else, almost as worthy: we might be able to report the facts as they are without ideological white-washes and flights of morally outraged dramatic fancy. But only if we are there, wherever 'there" is next time.

Therefore, allow me to humbly suggest that we start a travel fund for intrepid bloggers who are willing and able to write clear and unironic prose that anyone can understand at a glance. As a pool of contributors we could perhaps support one blogger's efforts in a place of our mutual choosing. Next year we could send someone immediately to a hot-spot to get what we would like: more or less what we might consider the truth as known to our own trusted colleagues. That might be worth $10.00 from each of us.

We likely pay as much for our local papers, only to be outraged rightly by them. personally I would love to see Pastorius's copy appearing hourly from the heated front. With some co-ordinated effort on the part of many of us if not all, we should easily be able to send someone somewhere to cover our own interests, even if it is without the approval of the U.N. and the French elite.

Our Boxing Day Present

We have our personal lives to tend to on a second by second basis every day of our lives, and it often doesn't leave a lot of time for reflection on the greater world or its people; thus, we rely for the most part on our public intellectuals to give us a broad view of the nature of things as we live in the details. The rotten bastards lie to us as a matter of course. Our universities are filled with ideologues and hate-mongering mediocrities who teach chanting and cliches and deliberate ignorance to teenage sociology students who go through too many years actually thinking they know something more than those who live life in situ. Bushitler, the world's greatest terrorist? Oh, spare me.

Here, from the Chicago Sun Times is the opening of a piece of real insight, and of common knowledge among those who live their own lives in the details without the benefits of a modern Western university education telling them they are exploiter capitalists raping Mother Earth and that they should quit having children and just die. No, here is some real truth spoken to the powerful and influential who won't for a moment let up their diatribes of hatred against Humanity. So here it is:

Lebanese refugee filled with gratitude for America

December 25, 2006

BY MARY LANEY

There is such serendipity in life. Such was the case recently when I stopped into a shop on the North Shore. Inside, I met Jackie, a beautiful, tall, thin, welcoming woman. As we began talking and doing business, I learned that she is from Lebanon, a Christian and married to a Christian from Syria.

I told her I thought her country was beautiful, and her face lit up.

"Oh, yes, it is very beautiful, thank you," she said.

"Why did you come here?" I asked.

"We had to come. They, the Muslims, would have killed us. We had to leave."

"Just for being Christian?" I asked.

"Just for being Christian," she replied.

Then Jackie said the thing that seemed, and was, so serendipitous. She said: "I hope America keeps the pressure on, keeps helping Lebanon. If America forgets Lebanon, then forget it. Lebanon will be lost." Her comment came just moments after I had been in my car, listening to a news report on the radio in which pundits were discussing what would happen if America pulled out of Iraq now.

Jackie told me that the Muslim extremists who have moved into Lebanon and its government push their weight around like members of the Nazi Party. She said they've multiplied their numbers by having multiple wives and many children -- and that they use the media to make certain the world knows that they distribute food to the needy, but hide the fact that they kill Christians and use them as human shields in any battles.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/laney/185297,CST-EDT-LANEY25.article

Read the whole thing at the link above. Not everyone lies to us. The reporter above lets one woman tell the truth. It's something we seldom are allowed to do in the presence of our elites. Who needs 'em! HAMAS is a criminal gang of primitive scum bags, and Palestinians are animal savages. Yeah, and do you get a chance to read that in the daily rag?

Didn't think so.

A Scot went walkin'

A Scot went walkin', and when he walked back no one believed he'd seen what he said.

Eight hundred years ago King Lalibela created a marvelous gift to the world. Often called the Eighth Wonder of the World, Lalibela contains towering churches that were carved from the soft, volcanic tuff in which they stand. Some lie almost completely hidden in deep trenches, and others stand in open quarried caves. A complex and bewildering labyrinth of tunnels and narrow passageways with crypts, grottoes, and galleries connects them all. Within this mystical world, priests go about their daily tasks, seemingly oblivious of the outside world. Standing 38 feet tall with seventy-two pillars, Medhane Alem is not only the largest in Lalibela, it is the largest monolithic rock-hewn church in the world. The oldest of the churches, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, Bet Maryam is the only Lalibela monolith with a porch. The remains of exquisite early frescoes can be seen on the ceiling and upper walls, and there are many elaborately carved details on the piers, capitals, and arches.
www.farhorizon.com/Africa/ethiopia.htm
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Those who wish to practice their Gaelic can turn to the following link for more details of Ethiopian Christianity.
www.s4c.co.uk/nefoedd/nefoedd/prog3.htm
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Some people build up churches by cutting things into pieces and stacking them atop each other, and others dig a hole and leave the core to carve away. Some people write about Ethiopia in Gaelic. And some bloggers don't have a copy of Alan Moorehead, The Blue Nile, but they have two copies of his The White Nile. Some people come across as strange, and others one should just shoot. Our best friend didn't realize till just now he doesn't have the right book, and now can't quote the story of the Scottish explorer who walked to Ethiopia in the 18th century. But I did find a brief reference to James Bruce at amazon.com.:

In the 18th century James Bruce declared that he had been to the source of the Blue Nile. He was brave and determined and a dedicated amateur. Bruce thought the Blue Nile was the main stream and the White Nile was a tributary. Affairs in Ethiopia were nightmarish. The Ethiopian warriors were impressed by the power of his rifle. His book appeared in 1790, seventeen years after his expedition.
Reviewer:Mary E. Sibley
http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Nile-Alan-Moorehead/dp/0060956402
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And more from Wikipedia:

James Bruce, (December 14, 1730 – April 27, 1794) was a Scottish traveller and travel writer who spent more than a dozen years in North Africa and Abyssinia (Ethiopia) where he traced the Blue Nile.

On the outbreak of war with Spain in 1762 he submitted to the British government a plan for an attack on Ferrol. His suggestion was not adopted, but it led to his selection by the 2nd Earl of Halifax for the post of British consul at Algiers, with a commission to study the ancient ruins in that country, in which interest had been excited by the descriptions sent home by Thomas Shaw (1694–1751), who was consular chaplain at Algiers. Having spent six months in Italy studying antiquities, Bruce reached Algiers in March 1763. The whole of his time was taken up with his consular duties at the piratical court of the dey, and he was kept without the assistance promised. But in August 1765, a successor in the consulate having arrived, Bruce began his exploration of the Roman ruins in Barbary. Having examined many ruins in eastern Algeria, he travelled by land from Tunis to Tripoli, and at Ptolemeta took passage for Candia; but was shipwrecked near Bengazi and had to swim ashore. He eventually reached Crete, and sailing thence to Sidon, travelled through Syria, visiting Palmyra and Baalbek. Throughout his journeyings in Barbary and the Levant, Bruce made careful drawings of the many ruins he examined. He also acquired a sufficient knowledge of medicine to enable him to pass in the East as a physician.

In June 1768 he arrived at Alexandria, having resolved to endeavour to discover the source of the Nile, which he believed to rise in Ethiopia. At Cairo he gained the support of the Mameluke ruler, Ali Bey; after visiting Thebes (where here entered the tomb of Ramesses III, KV11) he crossed the desert to Kosseir, where he embarked in the dress of a Turkish sailor. He reached Jidda in May 1769, and after a stay in Arabia he recrossed the Red Sea and landed at Massawa, then in possession of the Turks, on September 19. He reached Gondar, then the capital of Ethiopia, on February 14, 1770, where he was well received by the nəgusä nägäst Tekle Haymanot II, by Ras Mikael Sehul, the real ruler of the country, by Ozoro Esther, wife of the Ras, and by the Ethiopians generally. His fine presence (he was 6 ft. 4 in.. high), his knowledge of Geez, his excellence in sports, his courage, resource and self-esteem, all told in his favor among a people who were in general distrustful of all foreigners. He stayed in Ethiopia for two years, gaining knowledge which enabled him subsequently to present a perfect picture of Ethiopian life. On November 14, 1770 he reached Lake Tana, the long-sought source of the Blue Nile. Though admitting that the White Nile was the larger stream, Bruce claimed that the Blue Nile was the Nile of the ancients and that he was thus the discoverer of its source. The Jesuit missionary Pedro Paez is widely regarded by historians as having been the first European to reach the site; Bruce, however, disputed his claim and suggested that the relevant passage in Paez's memoirs had been fabricated by Athanasius Kircher.

Setting out from Gondar in December 1771, Bruce made his way, in spite of enormous difficulties, by Sennar to Nubia, being the first to trace the Blue Nile to its confluence with the White Nile. On November 29, 1772 he reached Aswan, presently returning to the desert to recover his journals and his baggage, which had been abandoned in consequence of the death of all his camels. Cairo was reached in January 1773, and in March Bruce arrived in France, where he was welcomed by Buffon and other savants. He came to London in 1774, but, offended by the incredulity with which his story was received, retired to his home at Kinnaird. It was not until 1790 that, urged by his friend Daines Barrington, he published his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773, but was assailed by other travellers as being unworthy of credence. The substantial accuracy of his Abyssinian travels has since been demonstrated, and it is considered that he made a real addition to the geographical knowledge of his day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bruce
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Right about now most readers are probably saying: "?!"

Yes, it's Christmas, and most people in the Modern world are not likely dwelling on an eighteenth century explorer who walked to Ethiopia. Those of us who are, well, we chuckle, don't we? That's because we know that our fellows in Ethiopia are now at war with jihadis in Somalia, and that we too could be like our friend and mentor, James Bruce. Yes, this new year could see us going to Ethiopia to volunteer to help in the war against Islamic fascism. Cool, huh? You could surprise the kids no end. And your grandchildren would have a marvelous time at school during "Show and Tell" with stuff you send back from the front.

There's no good reason at all why we can't go to Ethiopia and fight with the locals against the jihadis.

All I need for Christmas is a round-trip ticket to Addis Ababa. We can go walk-about, and folks will never believe the tales we tell.

To Love Your Work

Throughout the course of a long life I have rarely held what most people would call a real job. I make the necessary amount of money to survive and to save for my further ridiculous adventures in swamp world, and then I put in my time reading, listening to the living, seeing the wonders of the world. What a great life it is. Often, even in the midst of terror and pain, it simply embraces me and makes me wonderful. I don't know what to make of it, but I sometimes, even often, laugh like an idiot, overwhelmed by the wonder and the mysteries of it all. I have to work at it sometimes, but the cold hard world seems to love me. I hope it's the same with you. Whatever your life's work, I hope it loves you too.

Filibuster for Universal Modernity (2)

In his book from 1971, The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth writes in passing of Executive Operations, a company known outside the closed world of mercenaries and their dodgy employers only to a handful of journalists and curious folks of some other sort. E.O. provides services for what one might call a niche market but a market that is often more real than most: private security for private businesses and low-rent governments at risk from serious criminal enterprises. In the business of the real world of the living one accepts that there is good and that there is dangerous. It's not a world for the delusional or the sentimental.

This is not a new story, nor is it one likely to go away any time soon or perhaps ever: Executive Outcomes (EO), a private military company (PMC), was founded in apartheid South Africa by Lt-Col. Eeben Barlow in 1989. Controlled by the South Africa-based Strategic Resource Corporation (SRC), EO's role was described by Barlow as offering: "A variety of services to legitimate governments, including infantry training, clandestine warfare, counter-intelligence programs, reconnaissance, escape and evasion, special forces selection and training, and parachuting."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes

In the archives here one will find numerous pieces on American filibustering and Manifest Destiny, the belief that America was given by God to settlers to expand as far as the oceans and beyond. There are many references to "school teachers with guns," the idea of Modernist filibusters going into the world at large as a project of free enterprise to colonize the world and create an America of of the mind in every place, school teachers living in foreign lands, marrying foreigners, raising children to be American in the world today, backed up with guns. In the face of cultural relativism here there are many posts on the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. This blog, my blog, is clear that men and women of the Modern West must go into the world and colonise it all, taking over lands in the same way colonists in early America took the land and moved on the Indians who were here before the Europeans and other world setters came. Life is tough, and it only gets better when Modernists introduce Modernity into lands even against the will of the locals, for whom I have little but contempt. Call me insensitive if you must. I can bear it. Better that than to stand by and excuse the primitivism that passes for culture in our world. So long as parents raise their children to be primitives I will continue to call on school teachers with guns to colonize the world to give children the chance to learn to think for themselves, come of it what may. Yes, I suggest, I exhort men and women to settle in foreign lands, that they raise children to be American in the mind, and that those who would preserve primitivism should be shot if they interfere in the teaching of, for example, germ theory.

Is it a cranky man's daydream? The post below is part one excerpted from Tech Central Station.
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Al Qaeda for the Good Guys: The Road to Anti-Qaeda
By Josh Manchester

Stateless warfighting organizations are all the rage these days. From Al Qaeda to Blackwater, they come in all shapes and sizes and pursue all varieties of ends. Consider: Al Qaeda is an organization funded by a Saudi tycoon's heir, and exists to pursue strategies that are wholly outside the realm of policies of any given state. Indeed, it seeks to topple the governments of many states in the Middle East, from which it draws many of its recruits and funding.

The Mahdi Army is a large, subnational Iraqi militia of something on the order of 30,000. It gives loyalty to a Shi'ite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, whose motives are suspect to say the least. Does he merely desire to defend Shi'ites, or does he wish to seize power in Iraq?

Now shift gears a bit and consider Blackwater, the world's foremost private security company. A recent article in the Weekly Standard described its capabilities:

*A burgeoning logistics operation that can deliver 100- or 200-ton self-contained humanitarian relief response packages faster than the Red Cross.

*A Florida aviation division with 26 different platforms, from helicopter gunships to a massive Boeing 767. The company even has a Zeppelin.

*The country's largest tactical driving track, with multi-surface, multi-elevation positive and negative cambered turns, a skid pad, and a ram pad for drivers learning how to escape ambushes.

*A 20-acre manmade lake with shipping containers that have been mocked up with ship rails and portholes, floating on pontoons, used to teach how to board a hostile ship.

*A K-9 training facility that currently has 80 dog teams deployed around the world. Ever wondered how to rappel down the side of nine stacked shipping containers with a bomb-sniffing German shepherd dog strapped to your chest? Blackwater can teach you.

What's the purpose of this organization? In a nutshell, the Standard article reports that it is "supporting humane democracy around the world."

What is the future of the relationship between states and such stateless warfighting organizations as those mentioned above? Why might states come to rely more and more upon stateless proxies? Here are a few reasons:

[....]

Aside from the interests of states, consider the future of private security and stateless warfighting organizations from the perspectives of those organizations themselves. Here are some considerations:

[....]

One of the biggest public relations problems for companies such as Blackwater is the recurring taint of being considered a firm full of mercenaries....

The world of stateless warfighting organizations - many of which will become state proxies - is here to stay. It will be fraught with controversy as the issues delineated above seep in and out of the news.

In the part two of this series, I'll look at what an al-Qaeda for the good guys would look like.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121606A
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Stephen Austin founded the Mexican state of Texas and went on to found the Republic of Texas before it became the American state of Texas. Austin didn't call forth settlers to change the world for the benefit of Mexicans in Texas. He called forth men and women to make money and to live better lives than they lived in Arkansas, for example; and to Texas people went to live and to be alive as individuals. People went to live and to work and to create. Many Mexicans resisted the American settlement of Texas. So what? Today they die trying to go to the America Texicans have made. Take America to the world. Make every place America. And in so doing, not one place will be anything more the same than is New York to Alaska. It takes men and women who want to build for themselves a new life in far away places for personal reasons. It's been done many times before, and it will be done again, in our world at large, in outer space and beyond. There will be those who don't like it. They can stay behind. If they try to prevent it, shoot the bastards.

Happy Chanukah

Shabbat Shalom.

I don't have a menorah in my place at work, but I do have a picture of one of my heroes. He watches over me, as he is watched over too. My debt is unending, and I am grateful for it.

Derek: Mother of all Cartoonists

I was looking for something to go with Derek's graphic, [ http://thestudyofrevenge .] This amazon.com review seems appropriate.

" Londonistan" (Encounter Books), by London Daily Mail columnist Melanie Philips, is an eloquent warning of the dangers of "multicultural paralysis" and appeasing what Philips calls "clerical fascism." She sees Islamist demands for special cultural privileges as a threat to British democracy and documents the rise of anti-Semitism.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121406C
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On Tradition

Thomas Mann wrote in Munich in 1904:

Strange regions there are, strange minds, strange realms of the spirit…. At the edge of large cities, where streetlamps are scarce and policemen walk by twos, are houses where you mount until you can mount no further, up and up into attics under the roof, where pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood.
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Adrift on Denial National Review Online Blogs.

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In his novel Germinal, Zola calls him Stavrogin; in Crime and Punishment, Dostoyeskski calls him Raskolnikov; Conrad writes of him, as do Graham Greene and Hertzen and others. When people spit in disgust a t the idea of revolutionaries and Modernity, they do so with these characters in mind, these repulsive parodies of Humanity, these creatures of Romanticism gone worse. Ours in the Modern West is a Romantic culture, and we suffer from it. Our heroes are creeps.

Our words fail us. Che is not a revolutionary; he's a pretty-boy who killed people. A revolutionary in fact and deed is Francis Bacon. The huge and ever-growing pantheon of revolutionaries does not have room for Karl Marx. Gutenberg and Luther, yes. William Bullock, inventor of off-set printing; Salk, Banting and Best, Madam Curie; Charles Parke, who invented plastic in 1862, and Charles Goodyear who invented pliable rubber, these are people who were not revolutionary but who, like us, live as revolutionaries in the world because our forebearers were revolutionaries indeed. We are not revolutionaries among our own but within the world at large we are the menace that has no bounds. We are Modern. That is revolutionary. many of our own hate it, and they wish to return us to a pre-revolutionary time, one of fascist Romance, of a time when communalist man lived as a farm animal tended by his entitled and privileged superiours. We've had that revolution to free ourselves from feudalism, and there will be no neo-feudalism for us now, not again. Parke invented plastic, but Luther invented the world that made him able to do so. It's not the plastic, it's the ability to think inventively that counts. As important is the right not to have to think at all if one so chooses. One has a right to privacy. One must have the right to say so in public without fear of reprisal. It is revolutionary to be able to think for oneself, to have the freedom to think and to invent new things and ideas. That is Modernity.

The German reaction against t he French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution gives us the very word 'reaction' as a political term. Romance, an English reaction against the Industrial Revolution lead the Germans again to extremes that we today think of wrongly as revolutionary, as ecology, as identity politics, as moral relativism. These things are not revolutioinary, they are reactionary. Today's progressive Left is yeasterday's reactionary Right, and most people can't figure it out. We must, or we will find ourselves in a state of utter confusion about who we are and what we value. This is especially true of the concept of Tradition.

I wrote recently a parody of Revolutionary Modernity. The problem with that is that it's so commonly accepted as real that the parodic elements aren't, apparently, very funny. I wrote of tradition, and now i see that it is true to most people in the West that Tradition is seen as somethink akin to moral and intellectual fly-paper. Only what is new is interesting to them, all else being "so yesterday!" Comes to mind the reduction "DWM." Anything written or conceived by dead white men is seen to be bad, uncritically so, and unarguably so. God help us, we are swarmed by teenage fools with grey pony-tails. People have no better understanding of the term Tradition than they seem to of Revolution. Our most cherished are those who sweat in garrets brooding and smoking pot, dreaming up knew resentments and self-pitying programmes for grant applications. Some of these monsters kill people. We call them revolutionaries, but they are nothing of the kind. Ben Franklin, the man who saved the world from the Dark Ages with the invention of electricity, is a revolutionary. A Traditionalist.

Below we see Charles Henry's take on Tradition.
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Tradition is like cooking, it's not automatically bad (unless it's my cooking!) and it's not automatically good; it's dependant on How it is what it is.

I view tradition as necessarily abstract, a thing existing in adaptable principle, not as absolute rule; tradition must possess a slight vagueness to it, so that there may be room for adaptation.
Your example of a man having to take off his hat to enter school, suggests that the tradition is having the humility to show respect for learning: it is the principle of the thing. It is not a Rule that one must wear a hat so that one may take it off upon entering a school, or that there must be schools built so that there be things to take one's hat off of upon entering, or that armless men must be given hat-doffing machines in order that they too may be made capable of showing respect, of participating in the tradition to do so.

Is it not the case, that the more meaningful the tradition, the more it is laid down in principle rather than rule. When Moses brings down the commandments, they are all outlined in principle, rather than explained in detail, requiring us to rise to the challenge of interpreting them. That's a respect for the student that any teacher can learn from.
"You shall not murder", as a principle, makes us have to reason when killing is not murder. "Honor your father and mother", as a principle, makes us esteem that which came before us, while being grateful for our existence, and makes us reason how that may be done: by simply repeating that which our parents did, or by adding to their experience… by progressing from their contribution, using it as the starting point. Sometimes the honor will come from repeating, and sometimes by departing, from the parents example. To tell which is which, we need to think of "honor" in principle, not rule.

"Having no other gods before me" is a great procedure for remaining humble, a necessary ingredient for learning (the moment that someone thinks there's no longer room for improvement, that corresponds to the moment they begin to decay); as well it helps us avoid the danger of idolizing fellow humans as somehow incorruptibly perfect… which is the height of human arrogance. It doesn't need to be taken literally, accepting the old-man-with-a-beard ritualized image of a heavenly father. It can be followed, as I sense you have followed it, in principle rather than as a rule, and remain a beneficial code to live by.

As humans engaged in a trade or craft or living off our skills in some way, there will always be someone more skilled than ourselves, either in our past or right alonside us in the present, or coming along unexpectedly in our future. We're all in some glorious "middle", because of the existence of progress. This we are wired as human beings to forget, yet nevertheless capable of remembering, courtesy of the invention of ritual.

By ritualizing a tradition, it supposedly makes the tradition's founding principle more attainable, as acting out a role in a play should make an actor sympathetic to the character being portrayed, whether hero or villain. Where ritual fails us is when the physical no longer stands in for non-corporeal ideas, and becomes the end in itself. It is meant as the means to an end, and when it becomes the end in itself it loses its purpose and fails us as human beings.

Tradition, I firmly believe, is necessary to humanity, in that it is part of the proof that we are human and not animal. For example: Tradition makes us dress in a way that ennobles the people with whom we are interacting, suits and ties being merely the present form of the ritual; the five senses that animals possess omits humanity's "sense of occasion".
Tradition is to eat food by raising it to your mouth and not lowering your mouth to the food, to not chew with your mouth open, siting up straigh yet leaving elbows off the table, actually having a table to eat at… all in accordance with our attempt to ennoble dining, by humanizing it, raising ourselves above the animal way of eating our daily sustenance.

Believing that there's something better to become, is our fundamental tradition as human beings, and we struggle generationally to remember that and to understand it's implications.

We can follow these traditions in principle, as you do, and be made better for them. The more they are taken as Principles, rather than Rules, the more universally beneficial they may become.
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Our Gnostic elites forage at the fringes of reality and they rule our discourse with their scrounged findings. We must see them for who they are, creatures of ugly dreams and evil delusions. New ways of expressing old hatreds is not revoluitionary. It is sentimentality, unfortunately another word commonly misunderstood. Tradition, as Charles points out, is not new, it is renewable. It is a stability in revolutions of our beautiful Modernity. Brooding Romantic haters are not worthy of our time, and we must actively stop paying attention to them. We could benefit from paying attention to some of our recently discarded traditions.