Be Here Now

Baba Ram Dass

Friend Xerxes has turned his thoughts to mysticism, if only to reject it. He writes, “Mystics of all kinds invite us to ‘live in the present.’ Quit grinding yourself down by rehashing the past or fearing the future, they say. Live in this moment. Live right now!”

Which he rejects as dangerous, for it implies living for the moment and no impulse control.

He is right that it is bad advice; but he is burdened here by a common misconception of mysticism we were all sold in the 1960s or 70s. This sounds like the title of Ram Dass’s 1971 book, Be Here Now.

 But Ram Dass was not a real mystic. He was a Harvard psychology professor, Richard Alpert, who had gotten into LSD and taken a trip to India. He was a New Age spiritual tourist.

I am aware of one Buddhist parable that seems to advocate this notion of living only in the present. But no more; I think it is an aberration.

The doctrine Xerxes takes from this, to “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die,” to a true monastic, which is to say a Western mystic, would be the deadly sin of acedia. They are busy instead in meditation on “memento mori”: on the inevitable future.

“Be here now” works if and only if “here” is heaven and “now” is eternity. But that is quite a stretch, making the Alpert slogan seem deliberately subversive and misleading. Works for a modern hedonist. 

“Now” in common speech means the “present” world: and note the double meaning of that word, “present.” It means the sensory world around us. This is the opposite of the mystic goal. There is a reason why the monk in meditation closes his eyes. “Mystic” means “secret” or “hidden,” what is not visible. 

The Sanskrit word we translate as “mindfulness,” commonly used to refer to meditation on the Eastern or Buddhist model, is actually closer to “memory.” “Remember,” not “Be here now.” Plotinus, a if not the seminal figure in Western mysticism, the founder of Neoplatonism, seeks the eternal forms found in memory. Saint Theresa of Avila speaks of mystic prayer as “recollection.” 

Indeed, to be fair to Alpert, the full title of his 1970 book was “Remember: Be Here Now.” 

An utterly mixed message; perhaps so that anyone could take from it whatever they wanted. But that makes it useless as any kind of spiritual advice. Just a good hustle for a charlatan.

Depopulation Solutions

Things are getting ugly with mass immigration, legal and illegal. Natives are beginning to push back. People begin to feel their own governments are against them. Are they trying to replace their own population? Will Britain or France cease to exist?

The chief reason governments are doing this is, apparently, the growing crisis of depopulation. Government pension schemes are projected to go bankrupt without an infusion of younger workers to support the old. Depopulation means a shrinking economy. Mass immigration was meant to solve this. 

Now it seems to have been a mistake.

So what can governments do?

It may turn out to be a chimera. Elon Musk warns that within the near future, most jobs will be replaced by robotics and AI. We will not need a large population to keep the gears turning. And he predicts enough natural abundance that everyone will be able to live well without working. So no need for more people. No need to worry about social security.

Other scientists predict that, within the foreseeable future, we will find a cure for old age itself. People living longer will mean fewer children are needed to keep the population stable or growing. And these are healthy extra years, not needing to be pensioned.

Government interventions based on projected future crises usually make matters worse. When I was graduating high school, our biology teacher insisted we all read The Population Bomb, which warned us that by the 1980s the world would be starving due to overpopulation. Not underpopulation. Governments like China’s wheeled into action with draconian measures making our current crisis worse.

 The one thing we should not do is spend a lot of taxpayer money on proposed solutions that expand the role of government. Yet the usual suggestions are things like free day care, longer parental leave, or paying people to have children. Making post-secondary education free might look like a useful suggestion—it would reduce the cost of having children. But this has been tried, for example in Germany, and does not seem to make a difference.

Here are some cost-free steps we could take.

First, recriminalize abortion. This seems obvious. Were it not urgently needed for moral reasons, the last thing we should be doing in the circumstances is killing babies.

Second, ban or at least restrict contraceptives. This would of course be unpopular, but would cost nothing and obviously address the problem. 

Third, limit the division of assets at divorce, alimony and child support. A woman ending her marriage ought not to get paid more than another women for the same work, only because her partner earned more. Equal pay for equal work. This would reduce the risk of marriage for successful and wealthy men (or women), the sort who could otherwise afford to have more children.

Fourth, when a marriage breaks up, or a child is born, whoever pays child support gets custody of the child. This seems a no-brainer, and requires the minimum of state intervention. Without this stipulation, any man who marries or even has sex risks slavery. A huge disincentive.

Fifth, ban all programs requiring equal pay for women. Men traditionally got paid more than women not because of discrimination, but because they were assumed to be supporting a family. Nor was this philanthropy for the employer: a married breadwinner was going to be more stable and committed to their job. But this also promoted marriage and the ability to have and raise more children. This would cost the government nothing, and boost the economy at the same time.

Finally, a less practical suggestion; but perhaps the most effective. I think of an old Bob Dylan song, in which President Kennedy asks Bob, “What does it take to make the country grow?” And Dylan answers, “My friend John, Brigitte Bardot. Anita Ekberg. Sophia Loren.” 

Conversely, Scott Adams notes recent surveys report that American are having less sex. And he asks, could this be related to the obesity epidemic?

Sex makes babies. Being sexually attractive promotes sex.

The problem may resolve itself with new treatments for obesity, like Ozempic. 

But beyond this, how about restricting immigration to young, attractive foreign women? This would be an obvious enticement for MGTOW to change their minds. It is women who produce babies. And this way, each baby would at least be half-native, and a mixed family would preserve the local traditions. So much for the fear of becoming extinct as a culture.

If it’s a population emergency, we’re going to have to do it. We men are going to have to suck it up and take one for the team.

Or maybe two or three.

The Minneapolis Church Shootings

You have no doubt heard, read, and seen, about another mass shooting; at a church in Minneapolis. The shooter was “trans.”

There is some dispute, as there always is with statistics. Some are saying transvestites are disproportionately likely to engage in such mass shootings. Others insist this is a myth. I submit that they are, and it is predictable that they will be.

Let me explain why.

First, anyone declaring themselves “trans” is a narcissist. It is an ego claiming the right and the ability to overrule the physical world: to decide its own sex in defiance of biology. This is equivalent to declaring yourself God—extreme hubris. Acting as the other sex also attracts attention, which the narcissist craves.

This is why there are suddenly so many transgenders, when the tendency was almost unheard of in North America or Europe a hundred years ago. It is because our childrearing has shifted to “unconditional love” and building “self-esteem,” encouraging narcissism.

Inevitably, this narcissism involves a desire to dominate those around you. You will insist on others submitting to your imposed reality; they are not to be left alone, but must be made to assent publicly to your claimed reality. They must not, for example, “dead-name” you. They must use your preferred pronouns, even when you are not present. This also establishes your command over the English language.

This is necessarily a spiritual or psychic dead end. In the end, reality around you will not bend to your will. This causes built up anger, frustration, despair: the symptoms classified by current psychiatry as “depression.” 

Unfortunately, psychiatry and any therapist you go to will not recognize the problem, will not give any advice, but just prescribe you pills for the reported symptoms: SSRIs to dull the despair and anxiety.

SSRIs, like alcohol, deaden emotions, and this includes empathy. They reduce anxiety by silencing the voice of conscience. So, while arguably helpful for true depressives, they exacerbate narcissism.

So you are more likely to act out your anger and frustration on those around you. You will want to punish the world for not submitting to you. You will especially want to influence and to harm children, because they seem most innocent and vulnerable—the domination is most complete. But you will also want to lash out at God, as he is your obvious rival for complete dominance.

It is all perfectly predictable, and we are seeing it again and again.

It is a criminal misdirection to call for a ban on guns. And it is a well-meaning but disastrous error to call instead for more funding for “mental health.” The mental-health complex is causing the problem. The problem is not transgenderism, as such, but narcissism, which may or may not be expressed in transgenderism; and the problem is prescribing SSRIs for narcissists.

A more religious society is the ultimate solution.

The Too-Fantastic Four

 

I have now watched the new Fantastic Four movie for myself. 

The Fantastic Four mean a lot to me. They were my entrance to the Marvel Universe back in the “Silver Age.” I might have had FF#3. I was immediately addicted. 

The secret to the great success of Marvel is that Stan Lee understood the rules of the genre in which he was working: the hero legend. DC never did. I credit this to a proper Jewish education.

These heroes were real people with problems. There were references to real places.

The film fails because it does not understand the genre.

It is not just that they tinkered with the FF we knew and loved, by giving Reed Richards a different build and a moustache, or by swapping sexes on the Silver Surfer. Although that was bad enough. They also, gratuitously, had The Thing grow a beard halfway through the film. Another example of messing with the iconography. Heroes are semi-divine beings, and the iconography is important. You do not make Paul Bunyan’s ox pink. You do not make Santa Claus wear blue.

But more fundamentally, the plot line messed with the form.

The plot of the FF movie had spontaneous female emotion, on the part of The Invisible Girl and the Silver Surfer, triumph over both male reason (Reed Richards) and male strength (Galactus). This subverts the genre. It might work in a fairy tale, but this is a hero legend. In a hero legend, the hero triumphs by either strength or strategy. Not by stomping his foot and looking cross.

But to be honest, this is a bit beside the point. The film had lost me well before that, by about halfway through. Because special effects are now a dime a dozen, they are boring and destroy the willing suspension of disbelief. Every movie looks the same, and who cares? I am reminded of some solid writing advice from Mark Twain: “If you thunder and lightning too much, the reader stops hiding under the bed by and by.”

The movie lost my interest immediately when it blasted off into space. I felt insulted. It was not “superhero fatigue,” but special effects fatigue. It would still be wonderful to see a good movie made of the Fantastic Four. One that dealt with the characters, as the original comics did, or as the Joaquin Phoenix “Joker” movie did. This is what made the Fantastic Four special, and is the secret of the hero legend: when you can almost believe they exist in your own real world.

Whites Never Invented Anything?

 

Joy Reid has recently claimed online that white people never invent anything. 

This is obviously wrong in terms of engineering or science. Does she mean culture?

No, still obviously wrong: Beethoven, Da Vinci, Shakespeare—which one was black? Andy Warhol?

Perhaps she is thinking only about pop culture? It is true that pop culture has always been a pathway to success for minorities and the poor—since it relies, more than other fields, on pure merit, on talent. 

But here too, it is not clear that non-whites have made the bigger mark. Not in comic books, or advertising, or popular literature, or comedy, or film. Here, it is the Jews who stand out.

But perhaps in popular music, at least? Reid cites rock and roll.

The one striking contribution by blacks to American culture is the sense of spontaneity in music. Contrast jazz with classical music, with its emphasis on practice and precision. This is where American music, and American culture, most obviously differs from European, and it is reasonable to assume this is from African influence.

I suspect this is what Reid is thinking of, and she is wrongly conflating “spontaneity” with “creativity.”

Beyond music, this spontaneity has also spread into other aspects of American culture—into Beat poetry in the fifties, for example. Although the Beat poets were almost all white.

For rock and roll, Reid has a case. Although sometime credited to country music through “roackabilly,” I too think rock and roll emerges mostly from gospel music: Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The idea of spontaneity in art seems to emerge naturally from the idea of spontaneity in worship—letting the spirit move you. 

That said, this spontaneous style of worship did not begin in black congregations. It flows from the theology of various “white” Protestant denominations emerging first in Europe, like the Quakers, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Pentecostals.  Emotional, spontaneous worship is particularly characteristic of many Scots-Irish congregations in the Appalachians—like the snake-handlers. In which direction did the influence really run?

Many of the early Gospel composers were white.

Speaking of the Appalachians, Scots and Irish musical traditions are at least as strong in the American vernacular as anything that can be traced to Africa. Country music, bluegrass, tap dancing, folk music, are all easily identifiable as Irish and Scottish in origin. 

These all no doubt mixed in with black congregations, and black traditions, in the local area--in the South.

And the people mixed too. 

Over one third of African-Americans have Irish ancestry. Beyonce, Billie Holiday, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Rhiannon Giddens, may identify as “African American,” but they certainly have Irish ancestors as well, and much of their musicality and musical heritage may come from that line.

The spontaneity goes with the Protestant heritage of the United States, and the fact that it is, uniquely, a classless society. And it is deceptive and divisive to speak of “black culture” as opposed to American culture.

Elbows Down, Idiots!

Those aren't Mounties in the red coats.

Canadians, like most countries, live with various shared delusions. Perhaps it is their shared delusions that hold most countries together. But a particularly troublesome and dangerous one in the case of Canada is its anti-Americanism. 

This has my attention just now because I recently sat through a rant from a fellow Canadian irate at New York State for “stealing” the beaver as their official state mammal. “Those Americans want to take everything.”

Canada does not, of course, own the world’s beavers. New York State has as much right to the beaver as its mascot as does Canada.

Canada also did not, contrary to what every Canadian believes, defeat the USA in the War of 1812. Canada did not burn down the White House. 

The War of 1812 was a fight between the United States, on the one side, and Great Britain and Tecumseh’s Indian Confederacy on the other. Canadian militia units, “fencibles,” did participate, as British subjects, in a relatively minor role. But it is safe to say that no Canadians were involved in the burning of the White House by the British Navy.

Britain ended the war in possession of everything they had at the start. As did the US. Tecumseh’s Confederacy collapsed. On balance, then, I’d say the US came out ahead. They did not conquer Canada; but that was not a war aim.

The kneejerk anti-Americanism among Canadians is a prejudice. Like all prejudices, it is immoral. Substitute “Jews” for “Americans” in all the standard complaints, and perhaps you can see where this is tending. “Those Jews want to take everything.”

Like antisemitism, it is based on envy of American relative success. This is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the worst next to pride. It is unworthy of a grown-up country.

It is doubly absurd since English Canadians and Americans are ethnically identical: the same language, the same accent, the same shared history, the same waves of immigration from the same countries, the same religion, the same geography, the same governmental and legal traditions. How can there be a sane basis for prejudice, even if prejudice were ever legitimate?

It is probably true that Canada owes its existence as a nation, and its relative freedom, to the United States. The American Revolution, the American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, and the US Bill of Rights, were the model and test case on which modern liberal democracy in general has been built, here as everywhere else. While Britain had its own liberal traditions, the American experiment pushed them further faster than would likely otherwise have been the case. The American example certainly led directly to the French Revolution, and then its many echoes throughout Europe. It forced Britain, over the next decades, to extend responsible government to their remaining North American colonies. The US Constitution also became the model for the federal system that defines Canada—for confederation.

The US further serves as the model for Canada as a non-ethnic state, America being the first nation based purely on human equality and human rights. As Laurier put it, “Canada is free, and freedom is its nationality.” If and as Canada is based on freedom, it is based on the example of the United States. The United States is the mother country.

Canada moreover could not ask for a better neighbour. The United States is ten times our size. They could easily conquer Canada in a week or two. Yet since 1815, they have made no attempt. Where else has peace between neighbours lasted so long? It has not even lasted that long internally in the United States. They have offered us free access to their markets—because the US market is so much larger, any free trade deal benefits Canada more than the US. Through NATO and NORAD, they have taken upon themselves responsibility for our defense—we could never secure our vast northlands by ourselves. We boast of our rich resources, as if we had somehow earned them. In a sense, we owe these too to the USA.

It is time we acknowledged this.

The Underlying Problem at Cracker Barrel

Everybody is making a big fuss about the re-branding of Cracker Barrel. I had never heard of Cracker Barrel before, but apparently it is huge in the US. It obviously matters deeply to people. It makes sense that I have never encountered it in Canada, the Philippines, Korea, or the Middle East—the whole point of it is American nostalgia.

And that is why people hate the re-branding. It is an attempt to give it a sleek, clean, modern look. This is obviously wrong for a company based on nostalgia. It is suicide. How could the executives have gotten it so wrong?

This calamitous mis-step is reminiscent of the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco at Bud Light, and the deterioration of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars. The problem in each case seems the same: losing touch with the essential market and mission of the company. To an almost unaccountable degree. 

And these three corporate collapses have something else in common: the executive in charge of the change was a woman. I do not know if this was also true of Target’s similar debacle, or Jaguar’s. But marketing departments these days are dominated by women.

Here’s where I take the flak: this illustrates of the eternal truth that women think differently from men. Women are detail oriented. Men are anchored to goals; get it done and don’t sweat the small stuff. Men see the forest: women see trees. Men act on principles; women act on likes and dislikes. Men will keep the market in mind. Women do not think that abstractly. They will want to please themselves and those they see every day.

This means men are better suited for top decision-making positions in any large enterprise, and women are better at handling the details: “help-meets,” secretaries, assistants. Girl Friday will keep things tidy, well-ordered, properly filed and aesthetically pleasing.

This was the wisdom of the ages. 

Of course there are exceptions; but as a general principle, it is about as reliable as assuming the average man will be more formidable at tackle football than the average woman.

We have been ignoring this reality for a couple of generations. The worst of it is not the billions lost by shareholders, the thousands of jobs lost by employees, the long traditions lost. On this path, we are headed for civilizational collapse.

 

Straight Talk on Annexation to the US

Reading local history makes clear how artificial the international border between Canada and the US is. Everyone had and has relatives in the States. A good number of men buried in the local cemetery fought for the Union in the American Civil War. American history is our history.

We are, by all accepted standards, the same people, culturally and ethnically, with the exception of Francophone Quebec. Not only do we speak the same language: we speak it with the same accent, so that I usually cannot tell, when I meet someone abroad, if they are Canadian or American. The same cannot be said of two Englishmen meeting abroad: they will know immediately by accent if someone is from Yorkshire as opposed to Cornwall. The same is true for France, or Italy, or Germany. They are far more regionally ethnically diverse than English Canada and the US.

The reason for Canada to exist as an independent entity was that some Americans at the time of the Revolution wanted to retain ties to Britain and to the royal family. That raison d’etre disappeared in about the 1930s. Canada now really has no more ties to Britain than does the US. The royal family is purely symbolic; just a face on the coins and stamps.

By all logic, English Canada should join the United States.

It is, in the first case, a matter of efficiency. It is costly to duplicate services. If Canadian Confederation was a good idea, joining the US is just an extension of the same good idea.

In the second case, it makes economic sense. A perfect common market would increase the prosperity of both sides by dropping significant barriers to trade and commerce. But it would especially increase the prosperity of Canadians, with greater access to the United States’ lager market.

But the strongest reason to unite is the Canadian Constitution. The passage of the Constitution Act in 1982 was a fatal mistake. It has turned Canada into a dictatorship by the unelected judiciary, it has enshrined gross inequalities, and it is virtually impossible to legally amend. The simplest course to change it would seem to be to join the US and come under the US constitution instead.

Unlike the US Constitution, or the prior Canadian Bill of Rights, the Canadian Constitution actually limits human rights. Citizens have rights “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” 

This vague phrase leaves it all up to judges. Who cannot be trusted—power corrupts.

The vagueness of the Charter generally gives the judiciary too much opportunity to interpret. The contrast to the clarity of the Canadian or the American Bill of Rights is striking.

Equality rights are denied by the phrase: “[this] does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

Any particular group can be declared disadvantaged, and thereby given preference. Indeed, this is the usual trick. Hitler argued that ethnic Germans were disadvantaged by the Jews. South African Boers considered themselves disadvantaged after the Boer War. Mussolini declared Italians disadvantaged after Versailles. The whites of the US South considered themselves disadvantaged by the carpetbaggers after the Civil War.

It stands to reason that any group given preferential treatment by government is not disadvantaged by definition. For “disadvantaged,” read “advantaged,” and the matter is clear. Discrimination is enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. It is not in the American one.

Equality rights are also violated in clause 25: “The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall not be construed so as to abrogate or derogate from any aboriginal, treaty or other rights or freedoms that pertain to the aboriginal peoples of Canada.”

This means there will forever be at least two classes of Canadian citizenship, and never equality. Aboriginals have special extra rights and freedoms according to the constitution.

And the gross mistake of “multiculturalism” is also enshrined in the Constitution, so that it cannot be corrected. “This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.”

This commits the government to working against the shared Canadian culture—just the opposite of what a government is there to do. For “multicultural heritage” read “ethnic ghettos.”

The fundamental problem is that those who drafted the Canadian Constitution had no vision nor principles other than the partisan considerations of their day: keeping various special interest groups happy. 

It leaves us no way out but either revolution, or annexation to the US. Of those who choices, annexation is vastly preferable.

Why Rylie Is Unattractive

 

There is a lot of chatter online about Rylie, a girl whom no men were interested in on a reality-TV Mormon dating show. Women are all shocked and offended that no man was interested in her. Men are all in agreement that she was showing all sorts of red flags.

The clip is apparently from at least five years ago. That the discussion comes up now is a sign of current female alarm at men checking out of the courtship and dating scene: MGTOW. 

The fact that female commentators cannot see why Rylie is unattractive shows how alienated the sexes are.

It is not that Rylie is physically unattractive. The sexes are separated by a curtain on the show—they are choosing based on her short self-introduction, not on looks.

The first red flag is that Ryan volunteers to go first. She wants to take the lead. That is unfeminine. She will expect a husband to take the back sea.

The second red flag is that she talks only about herself and her interests. She sounds self-centred and unempathic. 

The third red flag is that her future plans seem to rule out settling down. She is interested in adventure and looking forward to a trip to Australia. The point of courtship is to start a family, not a fling. Especially for a religious guy.

The fourth red flag is that she has expensive hobbies: travel across the globe, scuba diving, sky diving, hosting parties. Is she expecting her husband or boyfriend to fund this?

The fifth red flag is that she likes to party—a party girl. She likes to meet new people. A man marries to have a home and a woman who is always there.

The sixth red flag is that she makes demands right up front: “someone I can trust in and is going to be there for me”; without saying anything about what she offers in return. It is all take and no give. 

The seventh red flag is that she speaks with the feminist lilt: a rising intonation at the end of many sentences. This is a signal that one is not finished speaking: women who use it use it to dominate the conversation and not allow others to speak.

Remarkably, the women commentators see nothing wrong with her pitch or her attitude, and blame the men for not wanting to put their necks in her noose.

And none of them note that one of the men on the reality show was also rejected by all the women. None of them feel sorry for him, or feel he was treated badly. Showing an utter lack of empathy for men.

It all shows why so many men in the developed world are giving up on women. And why nobody is having children any more.

Why Fantastic Four Is Flopping

 

Pable Pascal as Mr. Fantastic

The new Fantastic Four movie is dying at the box office. It is a bit of a mystery.

Some say it is because of “superhero fatigue.” People have had enough of superhero movies; the excitement has worn off.

But this does not tally: the first weekend, the Fantastic Four receipts were good. People wanted to see a superhero movie. There must have been some problem with this particular superhero movie, which turned those initial audiences off.

According to most critics, the movie was a decent production: good acting, good plot. If we can trust them, the problem was not quality.

That leaves wokeness. Although the movie was not aggressively woke, Pablo Pascal did not look like the Reed Richards of the comic book. He was presumably cast because he was Latino: current Oscar rules require DEI casting to qualify for an award. And they sex-changed the Silver Surfer.

I think the cultural climate has changed fast enough that the audiences are no longer willing to sit down for this nonsense even on a moderate level.

Why would they? The appeal of watching a live-action superhero movie is in seeing the familiar comic book characters come to life. You want them to be as close as possible to those you cherish in your memory. This was a big problem with the earlier Fantastic Four films—they could not get The Thing looking right. This one succeeds, then throws it all away by getting Reed Richards and the Silver Surfer wrong. 

The same thing, of course, applies to race-swapping and sex-swapping in live-action remakes of the classic fairy tales. The principle is so simple, and so simple to understand, and yet they keep deliberately getting it wrong. This shows contempt for the original creation, like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. By extension, it shows contempt for the audience, the fan base. 

What did they think would happen?

Sane Canada

 

I first understood Canada had gone completely off the rails when Henry Morgentaler, the abortion doctor, was awarded the Order of Canada in 2008. And this was actually under a Conservative government. This was a declaration of war against morality, religion, and human rights. 

I will not believe that Canada has returned to sanity and freedom until I see:

• That Morgentaler Order of Canada posthumously revoked.
• All the statues of Sir John A Macdonald restored.
• Bill C-11, Bill C-18, and Bill C-63 or its successors, which censor free speech, repealed.
• Government funding pulled from the “legacy” media, restoring a free press.
• Tamara Lich and Chris Barbour cleared of all charges; with some form of reparations. Perhaps an Order of Canada for each.
• The Emergencies Act amended in such a way as to prevent a repeat of the Trudeau government’s actions in suppressing lawful and peaceful protest from ever happening again. One thought is that if invoking the act, a government must also fall, an election called in three months, with any members of the current cabinet not eligible for re-election.

Currently, we are still rushing in the wrong direction. But this poisonous red tide can turn--as it turned in China after the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. As it seems to be decisively turning now in the US.

Mad Canada

I don’t know if you’ve noticed it yet, but most Canadians are mad.

You might object. Who am I to make such a judgement? Isn’t it more likely, if everyone else thinks differently, that I am the insane one? Orwell said, “Madness is a minority of one.” 

And this is indeed how modern psychiatry tends to frame it.

An example of the current madness: this is the ad populum fallacy. Reality is not determined by popular vote. We cannot vote to make the earth flat. 

I believe I have some perspective on this, from studying philosophy, comparative religions, and history, and from living abroad in diverse cultures: China, Korea, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, not to mention across Canada and in the US. I also married into a Pakistani family. 

Surely this allows me to see beyond the common consensus, and judge it.

Canadians are mostly mad.

To be fair, not just Canadians. Koreans are also mad. Americans are mad. Brits are mad. Japanese are mad. Filipinos are sane. Arabs are mostly sane, if you step away from mentioning Jews or Israel. 

What makes the difference? Wealth seems to be part of it: rich people go crazy. And we have always known this: large manor homes are always haunted. There are skeleton closets.

But that, I think, is not the key. Wealth drives you crazy because, as the Gospel warns, wealth drives you away from God. It turns your focus towards the world.

And belief in God, the necessary first premise, is required for sanity. 

In Filipino or in Arab culture, the existence of God is taken as a given.

In Canada, Korea, America, Britain, Japan, even when nominally acknowledged, God is mostly ignored. He seems at most an abstract concept.

You will object that in America there is a distinct and lively evangelical element. There is indeed; that is why there is hope for America. But even in America, this is a counterculture. In the Philippines or Saudi Arabia, monotheism is the mainstream.

In the New Testament, Jesus and the apostles spend most of their time casting out demons. This is their initial mission. In the early church, exorcist was a common ecclesial rank. It was assumed that any pagan converts needed to be exorcised. The rapid spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire, the rest of Europe, and today across Africa, was due to its famed ability to cast out demons.

And the classical gods were demons, as the early Christians indeed identified them. Each was or represented an obsession that could possess the mind.

Broadly, what we now call mental illness.

Now that faith in Christianity is waning, the demons are returning.

God is not just the ground of being, but also the ground of reason; he is the necessary first premise from which anything else and everything else is deduced. This, I think, is evident in Descartes’ Meditations: our warrant that anything else is real is that God is real, and would not deceive us.

Pull that anchor, and we know nothing. We do not even know, contra Descartes, that we ourselves exist. Buddhism challenges this very premise.

This is why in Buddhist and Hindu Asia, without a strong tradition of ethical monotheism, everything is seen as illusion, a moving sea of dreams. Not just the physical universe, either; but chains of induction, systematic philosophy, do not form. Only gnomic aphorisms, bursts of insight.

And the rapid growth of insanity in the developed world is due to the collapse of faith in God. The demons are returning.

On a social level, to give an example of how we have come untethered—without the anchor of God, we no longer understand what human equality means.  Many—it seems most—now think it means people are the same, or even that they all deserve the same life outcomes. There is, for example, the feminist doctrine that men and women are the same and should perform all the same roles in equal proportions.

We can see this is obviously wrong, in athletics. Yet many deny it even here.

Human equality really means equal moral worth; equal worth in the eyes of God. And therefore equal treatment by the law. This is founded on Descartes’s reasoning: God exists; God is perfect goodness; God is just. It follows that God values us equally, in principle, judging us only on our own volitions. For this reason, for God’s sake, we must treat our neighbour as our equal.

Pull God from that equation, and it does not work. If we are not seeing it from God’s view, we are seeing it only from our own. Human worth, good and evil, is then based on our neighbour’s usefulness to us, or to the society as a whole.

One can immediately see how this has led to some of the worst mass murders and social upheavals of the last century and more; the worst cases of social madness.

Without the anchor of God, we similarly no longer understand freedom. Freedom is now just freedom to be selfish: self-indulgence, being able to do what we want, when we want.

Yet this is obviously wrong. The alcoholic wants to have another drink. Yet being an alcoholic is the opposite of freedom: it is enslavement to a want. 

So too with most other wants. There is a truth to the old joke, “everything I want to do is either immoral, illegal, or fattening.” Most wants are addictions that, indulged too often, soon enslave us and do us harm.

True freedom is freedom to do what God wants. It is freedom of conscience: the freedom to do what our conscience tells us we ought to do.

Because we no longer understand this, social policy has become warped. It has actually been suppressing freedom of conscience, for the sake of feeding addictions.

Without the anchor of God, we cannot even agree on what is real. “Once people stop believing in God, they will believe anything.” Science is breaking down, along with public morality and civil discourse.

America, at least, now looks as though it might be regaining lucidity. I credit this to that evangelical remnant in the culture.

The Myth of the Dying Indian

Hills and Angry Waters-- an old poem about Saint John, New Brunswick

Where bold the hills outjutting to the reef rough swept with spray,
And Whygoody's swirling water meets the tides of Fundy Bay,
An Indian Chieftain with his tribe had camped upon a day
By the coves and purling brooks of Managuashe.

Straight stood the chief outgazing o'er the billows flecked with foam,
Where the broken sunbeams wander and the shapeless shadows roam.
The south wind brought its message of the salmon speeding home,
To their river haunts beyond bold Managuashe.

 
Then blazed the bonfires brightly on the hills from bay to bay,
And the Indian braves and maidens danced and sang in wild array.
The Indian Chieftain and his tribe feasted 'till dawn of day,
On the old and loyal resorts of Managuashe.

Again gazed Panamseguis o'er the deep on rushing tide;
Now, his eyes were strained in wonder, low he bowed his head and sighed,
And to his people thus he spoke, humbled his voice and pride.
On the forest camping ground of Managuashe.

 
My brothers, braves and children of the noble Malicete,
Your hearts will burn with anger at the sight your eyes shall meet.
Behold! Upon you swelling flood the vanguard of a fleet
Which shall take from us our rugged Managuashe.

 
Many moons ago a vision by the great Manitou sent,
Appalled mine eyes and spirit, and I heard my tribe's lament.
I saw a wondrous great canoe with glistening wings intent,
On harbour making here at Managuashe.

 
Braves of some mighty nation strange, and of a feature white,
With thunderous magic weapons which blazed upon the night;
My people, like the falling leaves, sadly in hopeless plight,
Were scattered from the glens of Managuashe.

 
The vision changed and clearly I saw with wondering eyes,
Habitations, huge and strange, of a mighty race arise,
People of marvellous ways, and deft of hand, and wise,
Swarming great trails o'er Managuashe.

 
Then came to on the spirit of the "Hills and Angry Waves,"
His footfall like the trampling of swift and countless braves,
His voice like surging breakers in the deep and rocky caves.
Along the shore of lofty Managuashe.

 
His features stern, yet kindly, were wreathed in vapor cold,
His garment as pine needles, woven with ferns of gold,
He took my hand and sadly, and now our fate is told,
He led me from beloved Managuashe.

 
LH.W.

This poem is a nearly perfect expression of the myth of the Dying Indian. You’ve seen it many times in movies. Everyone thinks it is true. Indians are always dead or dying. It is like the similar myth of the Magic Negro.

The Indians are not dead and not gone. They are living in Saint John. I see them on the public transit and in the mall. And I, and many of the other riders or shoppers, probably have Indian blood, even if they do not know this, or look Indian or identify as Indian. There are many more Indians in Canada now than there were when the first modern Europeans were sighted.

They have not moved anywhere. The truth is more the reverse. Before the Europeans came, they were always moving. Now they generally stay in one place. Maliseet (Wolastoqay) Indians moved their village about every two years; the Cree every two weeks.

Their lands were never taken from them. Eighty percent of New Brunswick, and ninety percent of Canada, is still wild, unsettled, and available for hunting and foraging. The rest was sold by treaty. There are simply better ways for modern Indians to make a living, less vulnerable to famine and starvation in a bad season.

Their eyes did not burn with anger at the coming of the Europeans. The local Indians, here as in most other places, welcomed the Europeans and urged them to stay for the opportunity to trade, for access to their better technology and system of government, and for protection against their enemies. There were no “Indian wars” here—wars in which one side was Indian, and the other European. There were wars between European powers, and between Indian groups, and they might have intersected, but not Indian versus European wars. The political divide was not Indian versus European.

And there was no vanguard of a fleet here in Acadia or the Maritimes. Starting at or before Estevan Gomes in 1535, there were occasional visits by one or two ships at a time, fishermen or explorers, for a couple of centuries. Gradually there were trading posts, and a few French families came to farm the marshes. The French were not here for land; they were here for trade and to spread the gospel. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did you get the first fleet of Europeans seeking to settle—the Loyalist refugees (some of them Indians) driven out of the US.

Why are we determined to believe the Indians are gone?

Because Indians represent to us the innocence of our own childhood. We see a trace of this in the poem: as the Europeans appear, the Indians are dancing and singing—just having fun. And then the annoying adults show up, and tell them it is bedtime.

Since our childhood is irretrievably gone, we must also understand the happy carefree innocent Indians to be gone. Since we miss our childhood, we also lament the supposed disappearance of the Indians. It is ourselves we are feeling sorry for.

The pre-Columbian life of the native peoples was of course not at all the idyll we imagine.

And neither was our childhood.

We all need to grow up.

God in Everything

 

Ouroboros, the cosmic world-serpent 

Friend Xerxes seeks to embrace all the joys of life. He sees God in everything. Even he says, the rattlesnake coiled to strike. 

It sounds like a good, cheerful and magnanimous philosophy.

It is, however, not possible for a Christian to see God in everything. That is pantheism, or perhaps panentheism, not monotheism.

To worship everything would be a violation of the First (or Second, but who’s counting?)  Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” That is, you must not worship nature. God stands apart from anything in the physical universe, on land, or sea, or sky. “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

One thinks also of this passage from 1Kings: 

“Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.” 

There are evidently many things in nature God is not in. He is in the whispers, the inconspicuous or invisible, the mustard seed, the leaven. He is more present where the physical is more absent.

All of this is based on the Bible. Authoritative for Christians, but does pantheism perhaps make sense on its own merits? 

It does not. As the later philosophers of India have pointed out, if you assert “God is in all things,” the concept God simply loses all meaning; as there is nothing other than God against which to define it. You have said nothing but “the universe is the universe.” “Things are things.”

Moreover, Xerxes choice of the rattlesnake image is telling, in a Freudian sense. The serpent is the standard Christian image of evil. If you hold that God is in all things, he must also be in evil: not just in natural evil, like rattlesnakes, cancer viruses, aging, death, and pain in childbirth, but also in moral evil, in murder and rape and incest. And he is in the ugly and defective, in offal and pollution and decay. This cannot be, for God is by definition perfect: perfect good, perfect truth, and perfect beauty.

You have simply turned away from God.

Nature has fallen. The prince of "this world" is, after all, the Devil.

On the other hand, one’s daily life can and should be understood as a conversation with God. If one is alert, and prayerful, little miracles are happening all the time, as well as little corrective messages.

The Princess and the Pea

 Nobody gets the point of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Princess and the Pea.” When I Grok for the moral of the story, its search of the consensus on the Internet brings up “don’t judge by appearances.” 

That is, the princess does not look like a real princess, but she is.

This misses everything. In what sense is she a “real princess”?

Follow the text. The hero’s conflict is the inability to find a real princess. “He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted.”

Now, how hard is it to identify a real princess? A king will be the most prominent and well-known person in the country. His daughters will be princesses. Merriam-Webster: “princess: a female member of a royal family.” 

Finding a real princess is about as hard as asking one question to anyone in the next country over. If somehow you don’t already know.

Andersen is plainly telling us that “princess” here is meant metaphorically.

“Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.”

Would a king go out personally to open the city gate? No king would, for reasons of national security and his own safety from assassins, even before any other considerations. Let alone an elderly king, on a stormy night.

Andersen is telling us that “king” here is also metaphorical.

“It was a princess standing out there in front of the gate. But, good gracious! what a sight the rain and the wind had made her look. The water ran down from her hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real princess.”

Obviously, no princess in the dictionary meaning of the word would be out wandering in a foreign country alone with no place to go in a rainstorm.

Let alone “down at heel.” The rain is running into the toes of her shoes and out the heel. In other words, her shoes are worn out so that the heel is lower than the toe, and both have holes. She is literally not “well-heeled,” “down at the heel.” She is not someone accustomed to luxury.

So by what authority is she a princess? By her own. She says so.

Next, the elderly queen then puts a pea on her bed, and covers it with twenty mattresses and twenty coverlets. This odd old queen clearly has no maids nor ladies in waiting.

Were this not yet enough to make matters clear, how plausible is it for anyone, however sensitive and accustomed to luxury, to feel a pea under twenty mattresses?

“Princess” here means someone who demands to be treated like a princess; someone who will complain no matter what is done for her or given to her. A narcissist.

The next question is why on earth would any man want to marry such a woman? Yet the prince does exactly that, indeed searches far and wide for such a woman; with his mother assisting in the hunt.

And the clue is that his father is a “king,” and his mother a “queen.” They are both also narcissists. Andersen is showing to us why abused children come to be magnets for abusive partners. The “prince” has grown up with the experience of those he loves being constantly self-important and demanding. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, the family is the “school of love.” Seeking for love, the poor man will seek the same thing he knows in a mate. It will look like affection to him. He will feel unworthy of anything else.

And so he is trapped in a lifetime of abuse.

There, that is a true story.

The Really Stupid Party

 

Much can be explained by a simple premise: the left is stupid, and the right is smart.

This is more or less understood, at least by the right, in such sayings as “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.” 

Conservatives think the average leftist is naïve, not evil. Therefore, they tend to be more tolerant. The left thinks the right is not stupid, but evil. Therefore they will fight no holds barred.

One might object that the left is favoured by the expert class and by the professions. By the better educated. University faculties are all leftist. So surely this is the smarter side?

It does not follow. One cannot, after all, fail more than a relatively small number of students in any programme; especially when they are paying large amounts of money for the course. Necessarily,  therefore, academics are geared towards those of average intelligence. Granted that a somewhat higher level of intelligence will allow one to get through with less effort; but there is a ceiling. Too smart, and the plodding pace of instruction will, literally, drive one to distraction. The too-intelligent will lose interest, lose concentration, fail or drop out.

Education at all levels is essentially obedience school. Can you follow directions and submit to authority?

This might sound like sour grapes; but it is not. It is the observation of someone holding multiple certificates and degrees.

A better clue to who it smarter is who favours meritocracy. Obviously, the smartest will prefer meritocracy, on average, because it is in their self-interest.

That would be the right. The left wants equity. 

In a similar vein, quite visibly, really good-looking women tend to be conservative. Leftist women are rarely as attractive. It makes sense.

Successful politicians sometimes play dumb and folksy. Trump does; George W. Bush did. Reagan did. Ralph Klein did; Mike Harris did; Jean Chretien did. This is just good politics; it shows their intelligence. People often resent those more intelligent than they are. 

But notice that these supposedly dumb politicians are the very ones who manage to achieve a great deal of their agenda. The proof is in the pudding: they are smart.

By comparison, Democratic leaders seem genuinely dumb: Kamala Harris, the senile Joe Biden, John Fetterman. How is it they cannot put forward more impressive intellects?

Because intelligent people rarely join their party.

Canada’s Liberals do not have the same problem—but this is because they are the “Natural Governing Party.” They will attract top talent for purely cynical reasons: because they are the likeliest path to power. This is due to tribal rather than ideological voting, notably in Quebec. In the US, similarly, voting used to be more tribal, not ideological. In those days one did encounter more capable Democratic candidates.

The best proof that the left is dumb is that their basic ideological premise is dumb. They believe that government is protection from greedy and bullying capitalists, corporations and religious groups. It does not occur to them that governments or government bureaucrats could also be greedy or power-hungry.

And not even just as likely. We have a natural protection against greedy or power-hungry corporations: we can choose not to buy. We have no such protection from government. We cannot choose not to pay our taxes, or obey the law.

An amusing recent example: the NDP’s recent campaign blaming inflation on corporate greed. Their proof that Loblaw’s was price-gouging was that you could buy the same items for less in Dollarama. So why couldn’t they simply shop at Dollarama?

Even if the NDP leadership was smart enough to realize this, they were counting on their constituency not to see it.

What Faith Really Means

 

 

 

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for.

3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

4 By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead.

5 By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.”[a] For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. 6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

7 By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that is in keeping with faith.

8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. 11 And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she[b] considered him faithful who had made the promise. 12 And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. 14 People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. 15 If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

Faith is a commonly misunderstood concept. It is often presented as mere belief in the existence of God; or as mere assent to the proposition that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior. 

It has to do instead, as this passage seems to show us, with accepting the reality of the world we do not see—the spiritual world, the Kingdom of Heaven. This ties in with Jesus’s response to Thomas, who refused to believe in the resurrection until he saw and touched the wounds: “blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.”

Faith, according to the passage, is also “Confidence in what we hope for”; but we must distinguish it from the sister virtue of Hope: Faith, Hope, and Charity. The stress is on “confidence.” “Trust” seems like a rough cognate. Faith is prior, and the basis for hope.

It is not that we believe “without evidence.” It is a delusion to limit evidence to the physical senses. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in that philosophy. There is conscience, there are self-evident truths, there is reasoning from first principles, there are intimations, there are dreams, there are private revelations, there are emotional truths. You cannot see love, but it is real.

“What is seen was not made out of what was visible.” That is, the eternal, spiritual world, the Kingdom of Heaven—is prior to the physical world. See Plato on this: his “ideal forms.” Also see the modern scientific theory of the “Big Bang.”

“By faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead.” The physical world is mortal, and all things in it fade and die. The spiritual, on the other hand, is eternal. See Parmenides on this. Memories are evidence of this.

“By faith he [Abraham] made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.”

In other words, the “promised land” is not any part of the physical world, not Canaan or Judea, but the kingdom of heaven. So long as we are in this physical world, we are exiles.

“All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised.”

So did God fail to keep his promise? Were they foolish to keep faith? No—the point is that the promised world is not this physical world. “All these people were still living by faith when they died”—that is, they were still alive when they died, and continue to live, in the promise. Death exists only in the physical realm.

“They were longing for a better country.” This has been taken as the motto for the Order of Canada: “They sought a better country.” Supposedly meaning that recipients sought to make Canada a better country. But this interpretation is shown to be wrong by the very next phrase: “a heavenly one.” This falsification of the Biblical passage seems to make the point that earthly powers are in eternal opposition to heavenly ones.

“If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return.” 

This seems to open the door to the concept praying to saints. For “the country they had left,” in context, refers to the physical world, and “they” refers to a series of dead patriarchs. If they think of the physical world, they can return at any time. 

Of course they can. Heaven is prior to earth. Heaven is perfect happiness, and any unresolved wish would prevent heaven from being heaven. Therefore, it must be possible to return, to intervene, or to communicate with the living.

But not reincarnation. Not ghosts.

Having achieved the Beatific Vision, one naturally would not want to turn one’s thoughts back to the soil. One might do so, like a Bodhisattva, in self-sacrifice, to help someone you love below.

Why the Canadian Government Seems to Hate Canada

There is an old saying, “never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by simple incompetence.” And Justin Trudeau was certainly unqualified for his job as Canadian Prime Minister. Nevertheless, some pundit recently said that the destruction Justin Trudeau has wrought on Canada over the past ten years cannot be accounted for by mere incompetence. It must have been out of malice.

And Carney, boasted of being particularly well-qualified, seems to be continuing many of the same destructive policies. Notably the “elbows up” approach to negotiating with the US and Donald Trump: sheer suicide.

It sounds mad, of course: why would someone want to be Prime Minister in the first place, if they hate the country? Isn’t patriotism, love of country, the natural emotion? 

Yet we can see it is true, not only of Trudeau, or Carnet, but of the left generally. Not only in Canada, but across the developed world. The Canadian “woke” left show open contempt of Canada: its history, its customs, its values. It is the despised patriarchy, a “settler colonial state,” guilty of imagined genocide against First Nations, and of an imagined history of slavery. Statues of its founders must be pulled down, their names erased from public places. Trudeau asserts, “there is no Canadian mainstream.” If not evil, Canada is nothing at all.

Trudeau’s policies are the natural expression of this. Canada must be beaten down and suppressed. And the fact is, this is a sentiment shared by enough Canadians to keep him in power for ten years, then vote in his chosen successor. With similar leaders and electoral successes in other nations.

Where does this weird hatred for established institutions come from? Commentators commonly cite guilt over the past; but I dissent. There is actually little in our collective past to feel guilty about; the guilt is mostly falsified and manufactured. It cannot be the cause.

It is often also described as “self-hate.” I almost used the term myself, and balked. That is not so. Nobody can plausibly accuse Justin Trudeau of having too little ego. It is not a matter of hating oneself, but of scapegoating others, either whitey or men or one’s own ancestors, in order to make oneself seem more important, significant, and virtuous. 

 I think narcissism is again, as so often, the answer. Across the developed world, thanks to modern pop psychology, “building self-esteem,” “self-assertion,” and the doctrine of “unconditional love” in childrearing, we have deliberately bred several generations of narcissists.

If you put a narcissist in charge of anything he has not built himself, he or she will try to destroy it. Why? Because he did not build it. Destroying it makes it fully his, uniquely his possession, and ensures no one else can own it. 

This simple explanation can account for nearly everything that has gone wrong in the culture. It explains the seemingly self-destructive “woke” ad campaigns we have seen in recent years: executives and ad agencies seeming to deliberately alienate their consumers. Like Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney ads, or Jaguar’s bizarrely sexually ambiguous ads. It explains Hollywood movies going “woke” and alienating their audiences by deliberately tinkering with and altering the characters that built their “franchises.” It explains the many “legacy” comedy TV shows that seem to have stopped telling actual jokes and trying to be funny. It explains the outrageous media bias of recent years, grand old newspapers and news organizations destroying their credibility with the public. As David Burge put it, “The Left doesn’t create institutions. It infiltrates them, captures them, and then wears them like a skinsuit, demanding respect.”

If a narcissist has not created something--and narcissists are never creative--they will do their best to infiltrate, capture, destroy, and demand respect for themselves. Trudeau is a classic example. 

Not incidentally, this is also true of the family. If a narcissist has children, he or she will do their best, openly or secretly, to destroy them. Abortion is the most obvious example. It expresses their complete possession and dominance. They will also tend to destroy the legacy of their parents, as Justin has marred the memory of his father Pierre. Like the mobs pulling down statues of the founders. Like Kronos in Greek myth, to the extent they can, they first castrate their own fathers, then devour each of their children as they are born.

Can Canada escape collapse? Perhaps. There are signs of redemption south of the border, at least. Canada always wants to do whatever big brother is doing, with a lag of about seven years.

But it will take several generations to repair the damage.

It's Good to Be BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and Female

 Hollywood and advertising are not the only art forms that have lost their audience through DEI. The poetry world is probably worse, as a Vancouver poet has recently demonstrated.

The result, predictably, has been poetry nobody wants to read.

The Somali Experiment

 

The revolution is proceeding apace, at least south of the border. I was shocked recently to hear Matt Walsh call for the mass deportation of Somalis. Their culture, he says, is incompatible with American values.

I cannot imagine hearing this even two years ago. This goes sharply against the leftist dogma that all cultures are equal, and cannot be criticized, since good and evil are themselves culturally relative. And it goes against the leftist dogma that culture is racially determined, so that any criticism of another culture is racist.

If Walsh’s position becomes the American mainstream, everything changes. At least, if the logic is applied consistently—which rarely actually happens. Leftist “woke” thought has always been wildly inconsistent.

To begin with, of course, this makes mass immigration look far more dubious as a policy. And this seems to be becoming the consensus across the developed world. Ther have been mass demonstrations in England and Ireland, not just the US, and the governments have at least begun giving lip service to the idea that mass immigration is a bad thing. And for reasons of cultural incompatibility.

But more than this: if culture is not genetic, and cultures are not intrinsically equal, this kills multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is just holding people back and restricting them to ghettos. Obviously, everyone should gravitate to the best elements, the best solutions, the best culture; instead of living as an exhibit in a human zoo. Which is of course the idea the U.S.A. was based on: e pluribus unum, the melting pot.  And, of course, this is what Martin Luther King and the drive for desegregation was all about. We had lost our way.

This also kills accusations that teaching “First Nations” practical skills in the residential schools was “cultural genocide.” The reality is that “First Nations” cultures were, as we actually used to call them, “primitive.” The French explorers used to say, “sans loi, sans roi, sans foi”: without laws, without government, without religion or philosophy. They were less developed, and produced a less satisfactory life. A daily struggle for survival left no time to develop things like permanent structures, wheeled vehicles, writing, settled agriculture, and the like. Without writing, with the old usually dying of exposure or abandonment at a relatively young age, with epidemics wiping out most of the population about every two generations, any innovations discovered by solitary geniuses over the millennia were unlikely to be remembered and passed on.

This also makes the European enterprise of colonialism look less sinister. The argument at the time was that the European powers were tutoring less developed societies, introducing peace and prosperity, orderly systems of government, commerce, and accounting, building schools and railroads and hospitals, and keeping the peace. Was this altogether wrong? Was it really all about pushing other people around and stealing their resources? If so, how account for the fact that European colonies usually cost the present country money, rather than making them money? How account for the fact that most former colonies took a financial hit post-independence, and many sank into conflict?

Somalia being a case in point. Independence has not worked well for the former Italian Somalia and British Somaliland.

Lucifer the Freedom Fighter

At a writers’ meeting I attended recently, the challenge was to write some familiar story from the point of view of the villain. One did Wile Coyote. One did Voldemort. Someone did Pontius Pilate. Someone tried to write about the fallen angels from the Devil’s point of view. Nothing especially shocking about that; Milton did the same. I do not recall the details.

But then someone piped up, “That’s not the way it really happened.”

“What actually happened was that Lucifer was God’s first son. Before Jesus. He was God’s favorite. But he objected to angels not having free will. So God threw him out of heaven.”

Someone else across the table raised an objection: “No, that’s not right.”

And she responded firmly. “You can’t dispute that. It’s the real history.”

The meeting just moved on.

I too was in no mood to challenge something so mad. Especially since she was so adamant. But I was left wondering where this came from, and how she could possibly feel such certainty. 

Of course Lucifer’s fall from heaven is not “history.” No historical account is beyond dispute, saying something is history does not end an argument, but even so, history is based on written records from the relevant time. No one was present at the war in heaven, taking notes. It is supposed to have happened at the beginning of creation, before the first man.

Nor does this woman’s account of Lucifer’s motive make any sense. If angels lacked free will, how could Lucifer himself rebel against God?

The Bible says Lucifer rebelled seeking to “make himself like the Most High.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, para 392-3:

“This ‘fall’ consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign. We find a reflection of that rebellion in the tempter's words to our first parents: ‘You will be like God.’ …

It is the irrevocable character of their choice, and not a defect in the infinite divine mercy, that makes the angels' sin unforgivable. ‘There is no repentance for the angels after their fall, just as there is no repentance for men after death.’”

Lucifer and the fallen angels rejected God’s authority while in his presence. Just as the damned each individually and consciously choose hell at death, in the divine presence. This makes it unambiguous and irreversible. And for the reason Milton gives: “I would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.”

So, this strange idea does not come from history, as claimed. It is not from the Bible. It is not from Church tradition, and it is not a logical thought. Perhaps this woman was getting her “facts” from some gnostic tradition? But I can’t find anything like it in the gnostic texts. There do seem to be references to Satan as God's elder son in some Mormon scripture; but not the part about free will.

How can someone be so certain of something so strange and counter to traditional understanding, something she might have read somewhere once, that she would assert it adamantly to a room of perhaps twenty people?

Was I dealing with a madwoman? Yet some at the table knew her well, and nobody thought her insane. 

It seems to me a symptom of the present age. We have generally become untethered from any sense of truth or reality, so that anyone is free to believe anything, and impose it on those around them by strength of will. 

Thus men can decide to be women, or women men. People can continue to believe debunked claims like the mass graves hoax, or the January 6 insurrection hoax, or the Charlotte “fine people” hoax, or the Russia hoax. When you do not believe in God, you can believe in anything, and people believe what they want to believe. Or become paranoid.

This idea of Lucifer as the righteous rebel does sound like something someone might want to believe, if they wanted to deny sin, deny the authority of God, and claim the right to do what they will. 

Using Blogger's new AI tool to insert relevant links above. It appeared just today, and trying it out.