An Honest Land Acknowlegement

Spanish and Portuguese possessions according to the Treaty of Tordesillas

In May of this year, Catherine Kronas, an elected member of the school council at Ancaster Secondary School in the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB), was suspended from her position by the school board because she lodged a formal objection, following proper parliamentary procedure, to the board’s requirement to make a “land acknowledgement” at every council meeting. Her concern was that this was a political statement, and compelled speech.

This was equivalent to a coup by the bureaucracy overthrowing the elected government. The school board is supposed to be subject to the elected parents’ councils, not the other way around. It is also an extreme violation of human rights: of freedom of speech, of the right to petition the government, of parental rights over their children’s education.

Why would the school board act in such a dictatorial fashion over this particular issue?

In part, this is a sign of desperation. The various bureaucracies are aware they are losing control. The natural reaction is to lash out in narcissistic rage; just as Islamic terrorism is a symptom of the collapse of Muslim confidence. We have seen blatant attempts by the “deep state” to subvert democracy in the US, in France, in the UK, in Germany, recently. Canada is probably no worse.

The reason the school board is enforcing this “land acknowledgement” in the first place is, of course, that it is a lie. Forcing people to repeat a lie is an exercise in control for its own sake.

Nobody feels the need to enforce a truth. Truth can look after itself.

The various “land acknowledgements” are also violations of the principle of human equality; they imply that some citizens have, by birth, some claim to the land above that of other citizens. 

One might counter that they are meant merely as a matter of historical interest. However, if so, they are still discriminatory in mentioning only approved “First Nations” groups who fought over this land, and not also historic claims to the land by the French, the British, and, by Treaty of Tordesillas, the  Spanish.

Especially obnoxious is the common claims that some part of Canada is “the unceded territory” of this or that tribe. This is a plain lie. Sovereignty was expressly ceded by treaty across the Prairies and the north, throughout Ontario, and in the Peace and Friendship treaties in the Atlantic Provinces. Note, for example, this text from the “Articles of Submission,” 1725: “We, the … delegates from the … tribes inhabiting within His Majesty's said territories of Nova Scotia or Acadia and New England, do, in the name and behalf of the said tribes we represent, acknowledge His said Majesty King George's jurisdiction and dominion over the territories of the said Province of Nova Scotia or Acadia, and make our submission to His said Majesty in as ample a manner as we have formerly done to the Most Christian King.” 

This is a clear surrender of sovereignty. Their land was ceded, in the same sense the French Acadian lands were ceded to Britain in 1713, or the North-West Territories were ceded to Canada by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870. This does not, of course, directly address the matter of individual ownership of given plots of land. That would be subject to the laws of England: “We Submitting ourselves to be ruled and governed by His Majesty's Laws and desiring to have the benefit of the same.”

Interestingly, by contrast, Spain actually never has formally ceded sovereignty over North America. So that “land acknowledgement” is the only one that might be vaguely legitimate. For what it might be worth.

Conclave

My feeling after watching “Conclave” is that it is not truly anti-Catholic. After all, it shows the cardinals genuinely, in the end, electing the candidate they believe to be the holiest among them. Despite the temptations to simony and lust and ambition, they are on the whole sincere—a realistic, even an optimistic, appraisal. And there is an interesting question in the end. Spoiler alert. Stop reading now if you have not seen the film. 

Given that Cardinal Benitez’s medical condition is just barely possible, what are the moral issues it involves? What should Benitez or Lawrence, in good conscience, do or have do?

For what it is worth, I think the conclusion the movie offers is correct. At this point, it is an irrelevant technicality. 

My sense is more that the screenwriters have been lazy. They show a shocking lack of knowledge of the Catholic faith, and have not taken the trouble to get it right. Having spent so much, and such care, on the cinematography, it is shameful that they did not put in the effort to get the theology right. Even had the intent been to criticize the Catholic church, they have been mostly punching at straw men. I feel as though my intelligence, as audience, has been insulted.

It is not a legitimate criticism of Catholic, or any, traditionalism, for example, to associate it with racism, as they do by having Cardinal Tedesco worry about one of “those people” (sub-Saharan Africans) becoming pope. Even outside the Church, there is no reason to associate traditionalism with racism. But certainly not inside the church, where the most traditionalist cardinals are usually found in Africa and Asia. If the screenwriters want to object to traditionalism, they have to offer some genuine reason it is bad.

Part of the problem is that, in typical Hollywood fashion, they have to portray one character as an absolute villain. They even use the tired and obvious trope of introducing Tedesco by immediately showing him being rude to an underling. Sophomoric.

Far better to give each character depth and motive. But they did not bother.

More cringeworthy is Cardinal Lawrence’s extempore soliloquy: 

“St Paul said that God’s gift to the Church is its variety. It is this variety, this diversity of people and views that gives our Church its strength. In the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that there is one sin I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. Let Him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness. And carries on.”

There’s just about everything wrong with that.

To begin with, St. Paul never said God’s gift to the church was variety or diversity. That’s some weird projection. My guess is that the intended justification for this claim is that St. Paul said there was neither Jew nor Greek in Christ. This is not a celebration of diversity, but a call to unity. In the Bible, the diversity of mankind is the result of sin—see the Tower of Babel. 

And necessarily no Church is about a diversity of views. People come together as a church because of shared views. If you are a Christian, you profess the Nicene Creed, and must commit to it at each mass. If you are a Catholic, you accept the Catechism of the Catholic Church, all 2865 paragraphs of it.

You are free to have diverse views on other topics; but that is not what religion is about.

Lawrence actually says certainty is a sin. Not just a sin, but the worst sin. 

If certainty is a sin, then the apostles and the prophets and all the martyrs were particularly sinful men. As are monks and nuns. They surrendered everything, even their lives, for their certainty. 

Moreover, certainty is not the enemy of tolerance—uncertainty is. This is not just an innocent error, but highly dangerous. If you are certain of the truth, you are untroubled by someone else denying it. Nobody gets agitated at hearing someone else say that the sun orbits the earth, or that the moon is made of cheese. We laugh; we condescend. 

Only if we are uncertain of truth, if we are plagued by our own doubts, do we need to plug our ears, or shout down or eliminate other views. 

You see this, for example, in the current plague of Muslim terrorism. Someone I read recently pointed out that, until rather recently, Muslims were relatively sanguine about the West and accepting Western political norms. The Middle East was mostly quiet, and cooperative, even with imperial powers like Britain and France trudging through and setting up their colonial administrations. After the formation of Israel, the PLO rose in opposition: but as a Marxist, not a Muslim, organization. There was no Muslim opposition to Israel then. The Middle East in general was secularizing, under nationalist leaders with no religious agenda: Nasser in Egypt; Assad; Saddam; all secular nationalists. In Iran, the monarchy was similarly secular.

Something happened. Something changed.

The Muslim terrorists who have risen to prominence since are almost always Western-educated.

What has changed is the internet. The Muslim world had been largely hived off. Remarkably few Western writings were ever translated into Arabic. With greater exposure to Western thought, Muslims are now commonly doubting their religion. And so they are less tolerant. They cannot any longer trust Allah to manage his own affairs.

“Let [God] grant us a pope who sins and asks for forgiveness” is also incoherent. It suggests sin itself is a good. Theologically it is incoherent, since we all sin. And incoherent since we all, as Catholics, ask for forgiveness.

And the movie, and Cardinal Lawrence, then contradict these words, when Lawrence insists that Cardinal Adeyemi can never be pope because of a sin he committed, and repents, years ago. This is heresy. Moses was a murderer. David was a murderer. The Good Thief went straight to heaven. St. Paul persecuted Christians. Redemption is what the Church is for. 

Cardinal Bellini, the “progressive,” objects to Adeyemi as pope because he “would send homosexuals to hell.” No Catholic cardinal would say that; nobody has the power to send someone to hell. Not even God himself does this. We choose hell. And this suggests that cardinals get to individually decide on faith or morals. Not even the pope can do that; not even an ecumenical council can. Should the Church be wrong in believing homosexual sex to be sinful, this error could not send any homosexual to hell; any more than not believing in gravity means you can fly.

After the bombing, which is more than a bit over the top, a cheap thrill, the screenplay has Cardinal Tedesco orate, “We need a leader who fights these animals.” No Catholic prelate is going to refer in public, among fellow cardinals, to another human being as an “animal.” That would mean rejecting basic Church teaching, not to mention Aristotle. 

And it would be so easy for the screenwriter to simply omit this word. Had Tedesco said “terrorist” instead, we would have had an interesting moral and philosophical issue to consider. Should we fight if attacked, or turn the other cheek? When is it right to fight back?

Perhaps the screenwriter inserted this word precisely to avoid an interesting moral question he did not want. But that is malpractice as a writer.

And Cardinal Benitez responds with his own howler, supposed by the screenplay to be deeply persuasive, the last word: “The church is not tradition. It is what we do next.”

Tradition is exactly what the church is: the “deposit of faith.” “Holy, catholic, and apostolic. That third term means it must not deviate from tradition. On matters of faith and morals, anything it says must be demonstrated to be in full accord with what the apostles said two thousand years ago. Unmoor from this, and the Catholic Church has no reason to exist. It is just a social club. 

It is not, in the end, an evil movie. It is a bad movie.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

 

Fr. Calvin Robinson makes a compelling case in a recent blog post that feminism is the most destructive ideology of all time.

He does the math. 

“Add up all the wars throughout human history, and they amount to an estimated 1.5 billion deaths. That is inclusive of combatants, civilian casualties and those who died of the results of war (i.e. famine).”

For comparison, abortion, since widespread legalisation in the 1970s, “has amounted to 2.5-3.5 billion deaths.”

This is just since the 1970s, fifty years, against all of human history. And these are all innocent lives. It is, moreover, far worse to kill a child than to kill an elderly man, say, who has only a few years left to him. 

One can also consider that a good many of the deaths in war are not intended, collateral damage. Indeed, in principle, they are all unintended. Any general, any leader, tries to minimize casualties in achieving his objectives. But all abortions are deliberate, cold blooded, and certain to cause death. 

Again, perhaps fifty percent of combat deaths are legitimate self-defense: in the usual course of things, one side is in the right. No abortion deaths are legitimate self-defense. Not even in the case of rape or incest, which account for only 1.5% of abortions.

Father Robinson cites statistics showing abortions are overwhelmingly used by women simply as a form of birth control. Simply because they feel having a child did not fit into their current plans.  Saving the life of the mother? If it is done to save the mother’s life, it does not even show up in the abortion statistics.

Legally, the woman has the unilateral right to have an abortion. The father of the child has no say. This, therefore, must be placed entirely at the feet of women. Given that it is feminism that justifies this, feminism is the deadliest ideology known to mankind. And women,  given power, are far more violent than men.

Feminism is also responsible for the death of the family. This is by no accident: it was the family, per Betty Friedan, which was to be destroyed. Women were to accept no family responsibilities. That is “patriarchy.”

In North America, over 70% of divorces are initiated by the wife. No doubt following Ann Landers’ advice from as far back as the Seventies that the only standard should be, “Are you better off with him or without him?” No thought for the children. No thought for “For richer or for poorer, in sickness or in health.” No thought for the in-laws. No thought for the wider society. Just what seems best for her at the time.

Under feminism, women have turned against child care. They will farm their children, if they have them, out to strangers, even though we know this is worse for children. By neglecting the next generation, they are destroying the culture, the civilization itself. For family is the basic building block of society as a whole, and culture is whatever we pass on to the next generation.

And, predictably, women turning away from children and childbearing is causing a demographic collapse. The developed West has as a result seen a need to open the doors to unrestricted immigration. This causes its own problems, which are becoming increasingly apparent. Ultimately, social chaos.

It is vain to talk of legal solutions to this problem: the necessary laws cannot be passed until and unless we can change hearts and minds.

I believe that cultures worldwide had it right, before feminism threw everything off kilter. Girls were spoiled growing up, and allowed to expect a life free of responsibilities. In return, they were required to defer to men. Boys were held to a higher standard, and in return, should they pass that bar, given command.  It worked, everywhere, for all of recorded history.

Now girls are still spoiled growing up, and then put in command. Disastrous.

Trump Is Making Canada Great Again

 

As a Canadian, I support Donald Trump in the current trade negotiations with Canada. His chief complaints are, first, border security, second, the flood of drugs across the border, third, the Canadian egg, poultry, and dairy quotas, and fourth, the digital services tax. 

In each case, what Trump wants is in Canadians’ best interests. What the Canadian government wants harms Canada.

Border security: We should be just as worried about terrorist attacks as the US; why is this controversial? It is apparently fact that more terrorists are entering the US from the north than from the south. The Canadian government has been alarmingly lax about Chinese influence, Kalistani terrorism, and floods of supposed refugees from the Middle East. Canada has no land border with any nation but the US, and is separated from the rest of the world by oceans. We don’t need to build any wall, or turn back small craft at sea. It would be far easier to stop the flow of undocumented or undesirable aliens here than it is for the US, Britain, or any of the countries of Europe. Yet the Canadian government is making no effort, even opening the doors ever wider—as if they want chaos.

Drugs: Fentanyl is a major crisis in Canada as well as the US; we should want to stop the traffic just as they do. Granted that the “war on drugs” was a failure, and prohibition did not work. But the current Canadian governmental approach of legalization, turning a blind eye, and handing out free drugs to addicts, is clearly making matters worse. We ought to work with the Americans to try something else. The obvious thing is to try to cut off supply.

Cheese: the Canadian government seems far more concerned with the smuggling of cheese than the smuggling of fentanyl. The Canadian “supply management” system is an obvious violation of the free market. It is a perfect example of a cartel in restraint of trade, which should be illegal. It is the government’s job to prevent cartels from forming, not to impose them. The result of this cartel is that the very poorest among us are made poorer for the benefit of a handful of large producers. The cheapest sources of protein are made artificially expensive. It is pure evil, quite apart from its unfairness to American farmers, our neighbours. It is even bad for the Canadian dairy industry, which used to be able to compete internationally. 

Happily, the digital services tax is already suspended.  It would have made the cheapest forms of entertainment more expensive; and would have made Canadian high-tech start-ups less competitive.

I hope Trump will also go after Canadian content regulations, which cut us off from dialogue with the world.

Why Mainstream Protestantism Lists Left

Some notorious sinner who ignored the ethical concerns of his community.

 

Friend Xerxes is arguing that our sense of morality comes from the community.

This is the claim of “cultural relativism.” It is obviously false. If a given community decided murder was perfectly okay, would it be okay? Killing Jews was perfectly acceptable in Nazi Germany; do we have no right to object to the practice? Or to slavery, since it was socially condoned in most parts of the world until rather recently? To child sacrifice? 

Challenged on the point, Xerxes seemed confused. So where then did I suppose morality comes from? Where else could it come from

From the natural law. We are all born with a conscience, an innate sense of right and wrong. Kant showed that the moral law is the one thing we cannot possibly dispute, a “categorical imperative.” It can be summed up in the simple phrase, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Nobody truly believes that murder is right, or lying is right.

Since this is self-evident, why do people like Xerxes fail to see it?

Often, I’m sure, due to guilt. Many find it easier to deny the reality of right and wrong than to admit doing wrong.

But this may also be a mainstream Protestant problem, at least in Xerxes’s case. Denominations like the United Church of Canada, or the Anglican Church, really have no fixed doctrines; you pretty much believe what you want, and worship what you want. Anglicans have their rituals, but since they do not believe in transubstantiation, they amount to little more than aesthetics. So why do you go to church?

Perhaps all that is left is latitudinarianism: you go to learn how to behave better.

Hence they must cling to the doctrine that morality comes from the community you keep. It becomes their raison d’etre.

And we can perhaps go a step further. Since the basics of morality are self-evident, they have to come up with something new. They cannot simply preach “Do not lie.” 

This may explain why these churches seem to veer into weird wokery and left-wing politics. What we sometimes call “virtue-signalling” or “political correctness.” They must have some mock morality that is not self-evident. 

It cannot be anything that requires self-sacrifice, or great effort: not fasting, say or climbing mountains on your knees. Mainstream Protestant congregations are democracies, and even strive for consensus. Such strenuous requirements are sure to cause some backlash.

So it becomes a matter of using the correct language, voting the correct way, condemning the right things in others.

Who I Think Is on the Epstein List

 

BFF?

I have no business speculating on the Jeffrey Epstein list, but here’s my speculation.

I believe the most plausible reason the Epstein client list or its equivalent has not been released is that he was an intelligence agent. Exposing more would destroy some intelligence operation.

This would explain how he became rich despite no relevant background.

He was not, I speculate, Mossad, as some are suggesting. Seems to me the point of his Lolita Island was that it took him off the US coast; the CIA is not allowed to operate within the US. If he were with Mossad, there would not be this need. Mossad may come up only because of antisemitism. It fits with the eternal trope of an International Jewish Conspiracy.

And the Trump administration would not have great incentive to avoid blowing up an Israeli intelligence operation.

The names we hear of, supposedly among the Epstein clients, tend to be famous Americans. This suggests a deep state coup.

And the failure of the Trump administration to release the information suggests that the CIA has some means of controlling them as well.

The obvious explanation is that Trump too is on that client list. Allan Dershowitz says he has seen the list, and it includes some people pointing fingers at others for being Epstein clients. That could include Trump.

Countering this, it is said that Trump actually blew the whistle on Epstein originally, and cooperated with investigators when others would not. And the fierce opposition to Trump by the deep state and the media seems best explained by the thesis that they had nothing on him, that they felt they could not control him.

So we’re back to an intelligence operation.

It may be that the speculation centres around famous Americans only because of the natural local bias of the media. It is an old saw in journalism: you always want a local angle. Three locals dying in a car accident is more newsworthy than 300 people dying in a bus crash in Bangladesh. It may be that the bulk of Epstein’s actual clients were foreigners—like Prince Andrew, the one person actually identified so far.

Epstein visited Israel and was introduced by Dershowitz to government figures there? Don’t assume from that he was working for the Israelis. The simpler assumption, per Occam’s razor, is that he was working for the CIA to set honey traps for Israeli politicians.

I think the reason the Trump administration will not release the list is that it will include the names of prominent foreign allies. A Trudeau, a Macron, a Netanyahu, a Boris Johnson, or the like. 

How to Feel Good

 

A friend who is himself a therapist sent me a link to a brief summary by David D. Burns, promoting his book Feeling Good. Reading it, Burns himself acknowledges that no known form of psychotherapy actually can be shown to be effective. Including his own.

“For example, in one large, well-controlled outcome study, CBT [Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, essentially his own approach] was found to be comparable to the popular antidepressant medication paroxetine (Paxil) in the short-term, and slightly more effective in the long run, when patients were contacted a year or more after treatment (DeRubeis et al., 2005; Hollon et al., 2005). Most researchers and clinicians have concluded that if CBT is at least as good as treatment with antidepressants, then it must be effective.”

Wait. The problem is, the SSRI inhibitors have not been shown to be effective. So if CBT is no better, it does not work. I had thought it was at least one therapy that did have scientific backing.

Burns confirms this further on:

“if you examine the data closely, and understand the rating scales the investigators used, it becomes clear that neither CBT nor antidepressants (nor any form of psychotherapy) appears to be much better than treatment with placebos. In fact, many recent research studies indicate that the so-called ‘anti-depressant’ medications may have few or no significant anti-depressant effect above and beyond their placebo effects.” One study I saw found them no more effective against depression than sleeping pills. “In order for any treatment to be truly deemed ‘effective’ it must provide an effect significantly superior to placebo. Sadly, this is not the case for any of the currently prescribed antidepressant medications or any currently practiced forms of psychotherapy.”

There you go—little to no scientific backing for any form of psychotherapy. You might as well just put on a mask and do a rain dance.

Burns cites no stats for his own “TEAM” approach, only anecdotes. But he does make the following claim for using his book:

“Results indicate that bibliotherapy [meaning his book specifically] can be almost as good, if not better, than the results obtained with antidepressant medications or psychotherapy in controlled outcome studies (Ackerson, Scogin, Lyman, & Smith, 1998;…)”

In other words, his book too does just about as well as a sugar pill.

Now you might rightly ask, what are you supposed to do if you are a therapist, and someone comes to you with a problem? You want to help; you do not want to send them away; you must give them something. Isn’t it better to give them a placebo than to give them nothing?

Yes, so long as you are not charging more than the cost of a sugar pill for it.

And only if there are no alternative treatments available that do work. To say that no forms of psychotherapy work is not to say that nothing works for depression or mental illness or the problems of life. There is an obvious alternative treatment for the problems of life, or for those who struggle with meaning or the nature of reality; it is almost too obvious. That is what religion is about.

Psychotherapy and psychology began as an attempt to replace religion. This is plain in Freud. Jung admits this. It is a failed replacement. Religion works, and materialist psychotherapies do not.

You can see the rates of depression, mental illness, drug addiction and suicide rise as church attendance falls. Correlation does not prove causation, but it is a clear correlation. Looking further back, the reason Christianity spread so quickly across the Roman Empire, then Northern Europe, then the Americas, then Africa, according to the chroniclers of that day, was its ability to cast out demons—in modern terms, to cure severe mental illness. That’s a lot of empirical evidence that it works. 

In the Seventies, the World Health Organization did an international study, and found the recovery rate for mental illness was dramatically higher in the “Third World” than in the developed West. The obvious variable is that the developed West relies on scientific psychology, and the poor South relies more commonly on religion.

You might argue that there is in turn no proper scientific proof for the effectiveness of religion. I believe there is, but this is not that relevant. Science is a tool to study nature, not mankind; it does not work on subjects, only objects. Mankind is studied through history, philosophy, and the arts—the humanities. We deduce from first principles, from the lessons of history, and the advice of great minds.