New York Post Blows the Whistle

 

The truth is coming out on residential schools.

National Post at Last Breaks Silence on the Residential Schools

 

But you might have been expecting a different take.

The truth is out there, and I think it is starting to come out.

Killing off the Depressed and Mentally Ill

 

The Nazification of Canada continues apace.

Trudeau Booed in Surrey

 

Justin Trudeau faced protesters in Tuesday in Surrey, B.C, and chose as a result to give his dinner speech by Zoom instead of the planned in-person event. All the media claimed that this was because of “racist slurs” by the protesters; many of those attending apparently being Sikh. The mainstream media reported someone in attendance anonymously saying he was mocked for wearing a turban.

If there were racial slurs, one can understand why the media would not show them. However, we are left having to take the media’s word for this. I find no video online of the actual event featuring any racial slurs.

Unfortunately, we know the media have lied before. And we know they are bought and paid for by the government. They lied in claiming there were racial slurs on Parliament Hill during the Freedom Convoy. They lied that there were physical threats against Jagmeet Singh in Peterborough recently. The default assumption has to be that they are lying here. Nothing can be believed any longer without evidence.

Why, after all, would the protesters choose this particular occasion to protest against the Sikhs of Surrey? They are there every other day of the year. What was special about this day was the presence of Justin Trudeau. Surely it is more plausible that they came out to protest against him?

Brian Lilley of the Toronto Sun says he watched a livestream of the event, and heard and saw no racial slurs.

How evil is it to shut down dissent by falsely claiming everyone who opposes you is racist? Isn’t this sacrificing the country itself to your own ambitions?

Update on Those Mass Burials at Indian Residential Schools

 

From a Manitoba judge, an Alberta professor, and an independent researcher.

How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?

 

Another illustration from Amber Heard of how the narcissist scapegoats: early in her testimony, she described an incident in which Johnny Depp held his small dog out the car window while the car was moving.

This has not been corroborated by anyone else in the cart.

Now someone has found an image of Heard holding her dog out a car window.https://www.theartsofentertainment.com/breaking-video-emerges-of-amber-heard-holding-dog-out-car-window/

Some claim that narcissists have no conscience. This is not true. They know they are doing wrong, Otherwise they would not scapegoat. 

Some Facts on the Residential Schools

 

Note that attendance was never mandatory.

It follows that,m if treatment was bad, students would have been pulled from the schools by their parents.

There are apparently no or almost no "missing children" either. The records are available.

It was all urban legend.

\

Forever Amber

On the stand, Amber Heard neatly illustrates many of the tendencies of the narcissist. It is a great public service Johnny Depp has done to get her before the general public. 

One is to say the opposite of the truth. 

This is instinctive. If you are going to lie, it feels safest to say truth’s exact opposite. That feels like it keeps you away from danger. But in fact, this means the narcissist often gives themselves away, if you are paying attention. Just reverse valences.

An example is Heard’s claim that she concealed bruises on her face using makeup. At one point, she called this makeup a “bruise kit,” then quickly corrected herself. She had to, because there is such a thing as a “bruise kit.” Actors use it to fake bruises.

Faking bruises is far easier than concealing real ones, and any actor would be familiar with how to do so. Not so much with how to cover them. She was giving herself away.

Narcissists cannot accept blame for anything. Many have noticed this about Heard: as she tells it, she never did anything wrong throughout the relationship. Even when faced with blatant evidence to the contrary. Compare Depp, who admits to various addictions.

An inevitable further tendency of the narcissist, related to both of these, is to scapegoat. They will project their own sins onto someone else, usually a victim designated in their mind for the purpose.

Heard accuses Depp of everything she has done herself. She was abusing him, so she insists he was abusing her. She grievously injured him with a bottle, so she insists that he injured her with a bottle—and in a way she can imagine was worse. She has a reputation for destroying phones in fits of anger; so she accuses Depp of injuring himself destroying a phone.  Heard was at least as addicted a drug user as Depp; yet she insists that only he had the problem, and her constant concern was to get him off them.

I hope the public is learning. Heard is a predictable type. Too many of us are familiar with it personally.

Thar She Blows!

 

Several observers have pointed out that at one point during the Depp-Heard defamation trial, it looks as though Amber Heard takes a snort of cocaine while on the stand. She buries her nose only partially in a handkerchief, holds one nostril closed, then removes the handkerchief and wipes her nose with her hand. 

I think it is just what it looks like.

Heard also, one day, after testifying, and instructed by the judge to return to her seat with her lawyers, instead walked out of the courtroom. 

Some narcissists will deliberately engage in “reckless behavior.” We see here an example. This is to show their contempt for those around them. It declares their superiority.

This may be a sign Heard expects to lose the case. So she must show her contempt. Narcissists tend to do this only when they feel vulnerable.

Why did Heard torture Depp?

First, out of envy. In order to be the centre of attention, the narcissist must pull down anyone else getting attention. They must destroy all that is noble, fine, and beautiful.

Second, Heard also tortured Depp for enjoyment. Narcissists like making people feel bad, and feed, vampire-like, off the emotion. It is an exercise in power and control.

The Triel of the Century?

 

Apparently, everyone is glued to the Depp-Heard defamation trial. Polls show more interest in it than in COVID, or inflation, or Ukraine.

Normally, I do not follow celebrity gossip. I believe celebrities have the same right to privacy as the rest of us. Gossip is gossip.

But this is different; this has overwhelming redeeming social importance. Amber Heard is a textbook narcissist, as all true narcissists are textbook narcissists, almost interchangeable in their behaviour. I have hopes that now, for the first time, the general public will have clear idea of what a narcissist is like. And it looks like a large majority of the public gets it now, as they see it unfold on the stand.

 We may be past nonsense notions like calling Donald Trump a narcissist. Narcissism is not mere self-confidence.

We will perhaps also be past the destructive and madly prejudiced notion that only men abuse, or that we should “believe all women.”

We see that Heard has no morals whatsoever. There are, it seems to me, no degrees of narcissism, or, to use its proper name, viciousness. That is a switch set either on or off. You can’t get worse than no morals.  If an individual turns the switch, which they do willfully, there is nothing any longer to appeal to in them; there is no spark left of humanity.

This is why there must be a hell. 

How to Improve Health Care

 

My remarks from a recent all-candidates meeting in Beaches-East York.

The question was what I and New Blue would do for health care in the province.

First and immediately, we need to rehire all the health care professionals laid off because of their vaccination status. It is not a good idea to fire doctors and nurses in the middle of a pandemic. 

And it is not following science to insist that health professionals are not qualified to make their own health decisions. We should be listening to them, not firing them.

We have known since at least September that vaccines do not prevent people from getting COVID. They only reduce symptoms. We cannot achieve herd immunity through vaccination. 

There are only two possibilities here. If vaccines work, there is no need to care whether someone else get vaccinated. You’re vaccinated, and you’re safe.

But if vaccines do not work, there is no case for forcing others to get one.

Vaccination is a personal choice.

New Blue wants an end to all vaccine mandates. It wants to prevent vaccine passports. Both are violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Brian Peckford, one of the authors of the charter, is suing the government now over this.

There are other steps we could take to ease the shortage of workers in health care and in long term care. 

There are many dedicated, well-trained nurses and medical technicians in the Philippines. They all speak good English. Back in Saudi Arabia, Filipino nurses and medical staff saved my life when I came down with encephalomyelitis. Something most people my age do not survive.

But they all wanted to come to Canada. 

We need to actively recruit them, and make that easier, by more readily accepting foreign credentials and qualifications.

This is a general problem for immigrants. We bring them in, then won’t let them make a living. 

Again, the problem is red tape. The arbitrary restrictions we now have on foreign professionals is a cartel in restraint of trade.

You asked specifically about mental health. Everyone is alarmed by the opioid crisis.

Mental health is a special concern of mine. 

I once served as the assistant director of The Gathering Spot at Walmer Road Baptist Church, a multifaith outreach to discharged psychiatric patients. 

I was on the Board of Directors of Poverello Charities, which ran a drop-in centre and safe group homes for the mentally ill. 

I was Toronto organizer for Grow International, a faith-based community mental health movement.

I have too much to say about the matter for this brief meeting.

We can’t just throw money at mental health. What we are doing currently is not working. Current psychiatry essentially declares all mental health problems incurable. We’ll just give them safe injection sites, and let them kill themselves. Or we’ll actively kill them, through assisted suicide.

Two centuries ago, we had cure rates of 80 or 90 percent. High cure rates are still found in parts of the Third World.

We are not curing these people, perhaps, because there is no money in it. 

We need to get sufferers out of the city, to a place where they are not anonymous. Mental illness comes from a lack of social supports.

We need, frankly, to evangelize. What do you think that was all about in the New Testament, that healing of demoniacs and driving out devils? Mental illness comes from a lack of meaning in life.

The government can fund faith-based initiatives, so long as it does not play favourites. The Canadian constitution does not recognize any wall of separation between church and state.

And we need to encourage mutual aid and community, such as we see in AA. I am encouraged to have encountered an AA meeting in progress in this church basement.

Safe injection sites are not an answer. Would you treat alcoholism by giving out free booze?

Here again, Critical Theory or postmodernism or cultural Marxism is against us. It alienates us from our neighbours and strips our lives of meaning.

The way to prevent mental illness is to strengthen the family, strengthen religion, and strengthen community. 

Three Black Eyes

 

The makeup artist who prepared Amber Heard to appear on the James Cordon show testifies that she had no bruises. Nevertheless, after the taping, Heard turned to the makeup artist and remarked, “can you believe I did that show with two black eyes?”

This is what gaslighting looks like. This is a classic example of narcissism. Heard told a blatant lie, even though the only person she was speaking to had to know it was a lie.

Growing up with or living with a narcissist, one experiences this constantly, and the result is a growing inability to tell what is real from what is not, that leads to much of what we call mental illness. But in the end it is the narcissist who is truly mad; over time they drive others around them mad.

The narcissist is able to say such things with full evident sincerity, because they have no objective understanding of truth. This is why Fleiss called them “ambulatory psychotics.” What is true is whatever they want to be true. Other people are simply required to believe whatever they tell them.

Of course, they also know that they are lying. That is why Heard was obliged to make the absurd remark to the makeup artist. Their claims must be affirmed by those around them. Any possible dissent must be challenged.

 If they believed they were saying the truth, this would not matter.

It is a trick similar to the trick we all play on ourselves when watching a movie, or reading a book. We know that the story is fiction, but it is enjoyable to believe it, and so we willingly suspend disbelief. 

The narcissist does this with their own life, constantly, and with the world around them. Everything must be what they want it to be.

This is what one expects, being a god.

On Climate Change in Ontario

 

Breaking wind.

Following is a response to a question on climate change asked at the recent Beaches-East Yortk all-candidates meeting.

The best thing Ontario can do for the environment is to kill the carbon tax.

It is economic suicide to increase the price of everything at a time of rampant inflation and economic stagnation. It kills the post-Covid recovery. 

It also makes global warming worse.

The atmosphere does not respect provincial or national boundaries. 

If we increase the costs of doing business in Ontario, manufacturing moves to places like China or India or Russia or Brazil, where they must burn dirty coal for fuel, and have fewer environmental controls. The net effect is more greenhouse gases and faster climate change. 

Not to mention risks to the supply chain, and to our national defense.

So long as we do not have one world government, the only practical solution is improved technology. We must develop more efficient and less expensive ways to produce energy. 

Elon Musk seems to be showing the way. 

Not just by developing electric cars, but he has offered a $100 million US prize for new technologies for carbon capture. The Ontario government might sponsor a similar program.

Wind turbines are not improved technology. 

If wind was an economical and reliable source of energy, we would still see ships under sail. 

New Blue wants to end the wind turbines. Because they are uneconomical, they drive electricity costs up and industry away. And they are not so great for the environment. They kill birds, they cause noise pollution, they mar natural vistas. 

We need no charging after windmills.

You know the “dark satanic mills” in the hymn “Jerusalem?” Those were windmills south of London. Blake wrote before the age of steam.

We need to look at nuclear. 

Nuclear sounds scary, but it is almost pollution-free, and much safer than it once was. There are recent breakthroughs in nuclear fusion.

In a country like France, they must build the nuclear plants relatively close to large population centres. Here in Ontario we have the luxury of wide open spaces. We can make nuclear safer still by building far from population densities, and running wires south, just as we do for Churchill or James Bay.

I’d like to voice support here for one plank of the Liberal platform. I think their plan to reduce transit fares for a couple of years makes sense, to encourage public transit as an alternative to driving. I would support that too. 

For that matter, the PCs deserve credit for improving public transit throughout the province. I look forward to the Eglinton line, if it is ever finished. I do not expect to live to see the Ontario line.

Buffaloed

 

According to the media, the mass shooter who just murdered at least ten people in Buffalo was a conservative Republican.

Unfortunately, his manifesto has been removed from Google Drive, and does not seem to be available anywhere else online.

Knowing that the media have lied in the past about similar matters (think Kyle Rittenhouse, Covington, or the Christchurch killer) we cannot assume this claim is true. The killer’s real motive remains unknown, and may forever be unknown, if the self-appointed gatekeepers do not let us see the document.

Update: Tim Poole seems to have found and read the manifesto:

The Joy of Learning

 

Further remarks from the Beaches-East York All-Candidates Meeting on May 12:

I have spent my life in and around education. You’d think by now I would have learned something.

More than that, I’m a father. Education matters to me deeply. 

Simply spending more money on schools is not much help.

As of 2022, Ontario spends $14,821 per pupil. That’s in line with other provinces, more than the US, more than Finland or Korea or Singapore, all of which do better on the OECD’s measures of student success. 

Yet the schools are in crisis.

Why do the rich send their children to private schools? Why do private schools consistently get better results with less money? Why do homeschoolers get better results?

The most urgent matter is to get Critical Theory out of the schools, and keep it out. 

New Blue has been the leader in alerting us to this issue. Every other party endorsed Bill 67 on second reading, and Bill 67 would actually mandate Critical Theory in our schools and colleges at every level.

Aside from destroying civil society, Critical Theory makes education itself meaningless. If you believe there is no objective truth, there is nothing to teach, and nothing to learn. Everyone just makes up whatever they want to believe, and tries to impose it on others. 

Or their students.

This is the emergency. But over the longer term, the way to improve education is to introduce competition.

New Blue wants tax credits to allow more parents to choose their children’s education. 

Since at least the early 20th century, our public schools have not been designed to produce excellence. They have been designed to produce workers for industry. The rich can sent their kids to private schools that teach leadership, and this perpetuates class divisions.

Most of the work of my own online academy is teaching students the skills the public schools will not teach.

We need to level this playing field. 

Could we not fix the public system? To some extent, no doubt; but this will take more time, tears, and sweat. The forces against this are entrenched and powerful. In the meantime, too many young minds will be wasted. 

And even if we can, school choice is needed in a pluralistic society. 

Our founders and our constitution understood this. Diversity is our strength. So we have the separate school system, originally one system for Catholics, and another for Protestants. 

But two systems are hardly adequate any longer. They are laughably inadequate. We need to extend equal rights to other faiths and life philosophies. Values are the core of education, and parents must be able to pass their values on to the next generation. This is what parenting is about.

Let’s bring the joy of true learning to the schools.

The Horrible Death Threats against Jagmeet Singh

 

A lot of the media are agitated over Jagmeet Singh having been heckled in Peterborough on Tuesday.

From the videos I can find on line, the small mob shouted “traitor,” “I have children and you will not touch them,” “You turned your back on the people,” “for our children,” “We will fight for this country,” ”Not welcome,” “Shame on you,” and “boo.” One male voice said ““get the f*** out of Peterborough,” then, as the car drove off, “stay the f*** out of Peterborough.” Presumably Singh never heard the second sentence.

It was hard to hear clearly. All the legacy outlets had someone talking over the clip so you could not hear what was actually said. This fact is in itself most interesting. You had to take their word for everything; deliberately.

Singh claims he heard “death threats,” and both the Peterborough police and the RCMP claim they are investigating possible criminal behavior. The Peterborough chief went on the air to say to the protesters “your actions and belief systems are reprehensible, unconscionable, and, in some cases, criminal.”

A death threat would be criminal, but I need evidence of one. Otherwise, free speech. There was nothing even immoral in anything I could hear.  BlogTO had it right, if inadvertently, in calling the protest “inappropriate.” Exactly—it was simply rude.

If you are a good person, you should never condemn another for being rude. Only your upbringing tells you what is and is not proper in company. In a pluralistic society like Canada, indeed in any society, upbringings differ. A recent immigrant can have no idea what you consider rude, and vice versa. Even people from different regions. And, significantly, people from different social classes. 

If the police and the government want to criminalize “rudeness,” they are waging a pogrom on immigrants and the working class.

Which indeed they have been doing for some time, increasingly obviously. This is what is behind Trump Derangement Syndrome: he grew up in Queens, and so has the manners of Queens and the working class. It is his manners they find intolerable.

The ruling elite clearly both hate and fear the ruling class. They seem to know no scruples in harassing and wanting to subdue and control them. 

The fact that they make no distinction between bad manners and immorality is most telling. This is the sign of someone who has no conscience. They see ethics itself as no more than manners, and as easily dispensed with.

Also chilling—the Peterborough police chief is openly and unilaterally declaring the Orwellian crime of wrongthink: it is not just the protesters words, but their ‘belief systems” which he calls criminal.

So much for freedom of thought and freedom of conscience.

In any free society, this public statement by a public servant should result in immediate dismissal.

If the Peterborough police chief is not immediately cashiered, that will say all we need to know about our present governments.

Beaches-East York Candidates Debate

 

Solving the Housing Crisis

 

Further remarks from the Beaches-East York All-Candidates Meeting on May 12

When I first came to Toronto in the early 80’s, there was a housing crisis.

Forty years later, there is a housing crisis. But far worse.

It is time to try more than band-aid solutions.

I am a fan of co-operative housing. I used to live in the Oak Street Co-op, and in a student co-op when I went to Queen’s. I helped organize an abortive East End co-op. But public housing and social housing have never been enough to produce affordable housing, and are never going to be enough. The poor cannot forever hope and wait.

Tinkering with mortgage rates and down payments and savings plans does not work. Making it easier to buy a home only drives up prices. 

Imposing rent controls does not work. It reduces supply.

The problem is on the supply side.

The real problem is the Sargasso Sea of red tape which prevents either private or public builders from efficiently putting up the units that people need, want, and can afford. Such urban planning brought us the sprawling soulless suburbs that kill community, eat up green space, and force everyone to drive a car. 

We live in Beaches-East York to escape this. The Beach is so nice because it grew organically before urban planning.

Some regulation is needed, but the tendency of bureaucracy unchecked is always to overregulate to the point of strangulation. The great political philosopher Ibn Khaldun, back in the 14th century, explained that this is how civilizations die: overregulation. We are seeing it acted out in our time. 

Civilizations die of strangulation, from the top down.

Municipalities are the creatures of the provinces; the province can cut away some of this red tape and speed construction. In future, for every new zoning regulation, it should be a requirement that at least two old ones be scrapped.

One business owner on Queen Street complained to us that he could not allow dogs on his outdoor patio. Health regulations. But in the Beach, everyone owns a dog. His customers wanted their dogs. Why not let the consumer decide? 

I love dogs; if you don’t, another establishment will surely cater to you.

Owners may fear that fewer restrictions on development might harm the value of their property. But if land is opened to the highest and best use, all real estate becomes more valuable.

I’d love to see Toronto full of distinctive walkable neighbourhoods like the Beach.

But there is also the immediate crisis of homelessness. 

I have another suggestion.

There are aging motels in smaller towns falling into disuse. Many are being torn down. The days of motels are ending, with less tourism by car, and more AirBnBs. They are available, if we move quickly, for immediate low-cost conversion as shelter for the homeless, especially the mentally ill.

Why I Run

 

Last evening, at an all-candidates meeting, someone asked for the transcript of my opening speech. And so I reproduce it here. Not exactly as I spoke it, but as I meant to speak it; I had to abbreviate for time.

Unaccustomed as I am to speaking to live people these days instead of on Zoom…

I watched the leaders’ debate from North Bay a couple of evenings ago.

Why did it remind me of professional wrestling?

Did anyone else see that? Was it just me?

Was any of that real?

Down to business.

Why is New Blue for you?

I expect some of you have never heard of it. 

New Blue is a broad coalition of conservatives and liberals; or libertarians, as they are sometimes called these days; but really, liberals.

Blue for conservatives, like the old Quebec Parti Bleu, 

Gold for liberals, like the Liberal Democrats in the UK.

We believe in equality and human rights. We believe in parliamentary democracy.

I hope at least some of you will be surprised. 

Don’t we all support that? 

Don’t all parties support that?

New Blue grew because a bunch of us think they no longer do. 

We think the PC party is no longer conservative. 

The Liberal party is no longer liberal. 

The NDP no longer cares about the working class. 

They have abandoned it all for a new idol, sometimes called Critical Theory, or postmodernism, or cultural Marxism. It is all the same, or each is a tentacle of the same thing.

It is what is behind all you hear these days about pulling down statues, renaming universities, calling Canada racist, and trying to silence open discussion and dissent.

Critical Theory makes three claims: 

that race is essential to a person’s identity;

that there is no objective truth; 

and that all social relations are about power.

Believing that race is the core of one’s identity is racism. 

Believing there is no objective truth is insanity.

Believing that all social interactions are about power ends in a war of all against all to the last person standing—who will be the most ruthless and most powerful. 

If there is no truth, the only way to deal with someone who disagrees with you is to silence them.

I did not especially want to run for public office. I’m busy as a college instructor, editor, and writer, now managing my own online academy. I’m a husband and a father. I wish I could spend time with my family. But these are not ordinary times. These are the times that try men’s souls, and in such times one has a civic duty.

 I run because no one else was running for New Blue here in Beaches-East York. If I did not run, there was no one to vote for.

I have lived in Toronto on and off since 1982, but also in other countries: the Philippines, South Korea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia---and in Wuhan China back in 1992. 

I swear I had nothing to do with the coronavirus. 

This has given me some perspective on what we have here in Ontario, and what we could lose. 

I am a past president of the Editors’ Association of Canada, a past director of the Book and Periodical Council of Canada, and advised on the establishment of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing.

More importantly, I have two kids, Francis and Maryanne. They and their mother are currently trapped in the Philippines by the pandemic and the mandates. They have been trapped there for three years. I am missing their adolescence, and they are missing their studies.

I run for them and for their future. And for all our children.

Here We Go

 

Civil war seems far from out of the question...

Where Heard's Testimony Comes From

 

Heard Testifies

 

When Amber Heard is expressing sorrow, or pretending sorrow, she grimaces. She looks angry, not sad. This is a giveaway for a narcissistic personality. When a narcissist feels bad, whatever the reason, they express it as anger instead of sorrow. They lash out. I suspect Heard cannot conceal this—although she is feigning any emotion, to her own mind, looking angry is looking sad.

Her testimony is also sentimental. “I can only hope…” That sort of thing. Some say she is a bad actor; what I hear is a bad screenwriter. Not just obviously rehearsed, but intended to manipulate, to jerk tears.

As Jung said, “sentimentality is a superstructure concealing brutality,” or words to that effect. 

Whatever general claims she makes about Depp are most likely true of Heard. Indeed, they do seem to mirror what he said about her, although by itself this shown only that one of them is a narcissist, not which one. The usual narcissistic M.O. is to accuse the victim of exactly what they have done themselves. It reveals, in a backhanded way, that they know what they are doing and know it is wrong.

I use the term “narcissism” for ease of understanding. The strictly proper term is “vicious.” “Bad person” would do.

What's Your Sign?

 

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's histrionic personality disorder!

At this point in the Depp-heard trial, we have learned from two psychiatrists and a nurse that Amber Heard has borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, anxiety, PTSD, and bipolar disorder. We have also heard that she does not have PTSD.

What do we learn from this?

That psychiatry is not a science, and psychiatric diagnoses are of no practical value. One might as well speak of one’s astrological sign.

The real issue is simple: does a person behave ethically, or unethically? Do they treat others well, or badly? And are they experiencing spiritual or emotional anguish, and why?

On Cultural Appropriation

 

Friend Cyrus laments that Toronto lacks cultural traditions and seasonal rituals, unlike cities he knows in Europe, or like NYC “where there's so much that ‘everyone knows’ about the city, down to the level of individual city blocks, and so many experiences everyone rushes to repeat every year in its proper season.”

I know what he means about the city having so little lore. This has always bothered me about Canada in general. It is one reason I ran off to Asia. It is a big reason why I write poetry—to try to consecrate the ground and our shared life on it. It is why Canada is so notoriously dull.

Of course, Europe and Asia have had more history, and more time to accumulate cultural touchstones. But we do not do well, as he notes, in comparison to the US of A either, which is full of references by comparison. Back in Syracuse, I was in the middle of the burnt-over district. Not to mention homes of Mark Twain, Rod Serling, and L. Frank Baum.

I think it comes from having been colonized, in the true sense. We as Canadians have been conditioned to believe that anything of significance happens elsewhere. Previously in Europe, more recently in the USA, increasingly in Asia. The US, by comparison, threw off that sense of inferiority emphatically over two hundred years ago. They dumped it into Boston harbor. 

Multiculturalism is both a symptom and a cause of the disease: it assumes culture is, by its nature, foreign.

 I know what Cyrus means too about old neighbourhoods losing their character as new groups move in. He writes “Toronto lost many of its one-time customs and old neighbourhood identities through the years of immigration, population churn and transformation that followed the Second World War.” That is multiculturalism. There is almost no hint left of old Jewish Spadina and Kensington Market. There is no trace left of old Irish Cabbagetown and Corktown. I used to live at the end of King Street, almost at the point where the Battle of York was fought. There was no trace of a memorial. I had to do heavy research to figure out the spot. It is occupied by a monument to the Katyn Massacre.

In the US, it seems instead that each new wave of immigrants enriches the culture with the best of what they bring. This is the melting pot. Hot dogs and hamburgers from Germany; rock and roll from Africa; movies about Italian-American gangsters; and so on and on. But multiculturalism ghettoizes us in Canada instead, so that we ignore and do not learn from one another. Each new wave just paves over the last. Making Canada less like a home and more like a hotel.

The spring cherry blossoms in High Park are one example of a cultural tradition that has jumped the fence of prejudice and become pan-Canadian. It deserves celebration.

Cultural appropriation is the foundation of all civilization, and all culture.

Taking the Road More Travelled

 

Matthew 12: 31:

And so I tell you, every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. 32Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

What is the unforgivable sin? The question is of ultimate importance. For it seems this is the sin that sends you to hell—other sins can be forgiven, the passage implies, not just in this world, but if necessary in the next. They send you to purgatory, but not hell.

A widely-read Orthodox catechism explains clearly and simply:

“’Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit’ is conscious and hardened opposition to the truth, because the Spirit is truth (I John 5:6). Conscious and hardened resistance to the truth leads man away from humility and repentance, and without repentance there can be no forgiveness. That is why the sin of blasphemy against the Spirit cannot be forgiven, since one who does not acknowledge his sin does not seek to have it forgiven.” – Archpriest Alexivich Slobodskoy, The Christian Faith

The ultimate sin is denial. Without an admission of guilt, no forgiveness is possible, from either God or man.

Sadly, it is a common sin. Too many of us are too ready to deny good and evil, and avert our faces when we see evil done. It even seems the social norm.

Who cares if there are a lot of Jews being held in some distant camps?

Who cares if so many babies are aborted?

Why get involved in a war between Russia and Ukraine? No doubt they are both to blame.

More broadly, and less obviously, many of us seem to think we have a right to believe what we want to believe, instead of seeking truth. If we want to be a woman instead of a man, we can simply declare it so. If history does not suit our purposes, we can construct our own “narrative.”

And on it goes; on the high road to hell.

Life Not Worthy of Life

 

Look up the classical reference in the title. It's now in Canada.