The Fix Is Coming

 

Reports are that the Liberals and NDP are working on a bill to alter the Canadian election laws.

They want to expand voting by mail, and extend voting to three days.

These resemble the US voting practices that have caused people to doubt the validity of recent elections.

The fact that the Liberals and NDP would want to push this, despite the controversy in the US, suggests strongly that the purpose is to steal an election. And they very much believe that it can work for them.

For otherwise, why would they risk stirring up this hornet’s nest, of doubts about the security of the voting process? The payoff must be significant and certain. They must have backdoor information that it has worked to manipulate elections in the US.

Until now, the election law has taken pains to avoid people knowing any numbers until all voting is in; because this might influence later votes. Extend it for three days, and it becomes easy for some to find out—and stuff boxes strategically, or tinker with the count.

The excuse for this trickery in the US was the historic experience that blacks were, generations ago, prevented from voting by electoral trickery blocking them from the polls. This is no longer the case, but it provides cover for making the process more open, and less secure. And they could claim in the last presidential election, Covid made it more difficult for people to vote in person. And never get around to changing the law back after that.

In Canada, there is no history of any group being prevented from casting ballots by any manipulation of the rules.

If the Liberals and NDP agree on this, they will be able to get it through. 

The people who work for Elections Canada, although nominally neutral, are civil servants. The civil service heavily favours the Liberals and NDP politically. The left can count on their fix, given these new rules, being permanent.

The New University

 

Canada's most photographed building

Jordan Peterson, who should know, has joined a chorus saying that our current university system is unsalvageable, and needs replacing. This is true even purely on technological grounds.

Here is what we need:

First, no funding from any government for the social sciences. If fortune telling is illegal, the social sciences should also be illegal, for the same reason: fraud.

No legal recognition should be given, and no public money spent, for academic qualifications in education, journalism, or art. These degrees do harm and no good.

All universities must have a charter of first principles, and be required to adhere to them in all courses. Without such principles, the humanities, based on deductive reasoning, are impossible. This indeed used to be the case: St. Michael’s was Catholic, McMaster was Baptist, Queen’s was Presbyterian. These charters need not be religious; the US Declaration of Independence, for example, would work. These charters must vary to ensure diversity and justify the existence of different institutions. No two institutions with the same or very similar charter in the same state or province.

Professors cannot be selected by existing faculty, as now happens. Once the existing faculty is corrupted, this system cannot work. Instead, professors establish their credentials as was originally the case, by attracting students. They offer video lectures, and see how many students sign up.

Students must therefore be allowed their choice of professors and lecturers online, from anywhere in the world, given that they are approved as doctrinally sound by the given institution.

To prevent corruption, we need to separate the job of teaching from the job of evaluation. Marking can be done by AI, which can plausibly now create challenge tests by auditing the lectures and the course materials, together with the university’s charter. 

Sitting for an evaluation will have to be done in person at the institution—so that the students cannot, for their part, resort to AI. The institution can also offer “study pods” and tutors, including residence if desired, so that students studying the same field can discuss matters and socialize.

And it would all be much cheaper than what we are doing now. And it would be far easier to upgrade and learn throughout one’s career, necessary when technology is changing so fast.

Tell All the Truth

 

“I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kin,
and will put my words into his mouth;
he shall tell them all that I command him.
Whoever will not listen to my words which he speaks in my name,
I myself will make him answer for it.
But if a prophet presumes to speak in my name
an oracle that I have not commanded him to speak,
or speaks in the name of other gods, he shall die.” 

Deuteronomy 18:17-20

Deuteronomy 18: 15-20 was the first reading at today’s mass. It is God’s promise to always send prophets to guide his people.

We should assume prophecy continues in our time. God would not abandon us. Nor do we have God’s wishes all down by law. There must be prophets among us now.

The task of a prophet is to express God’s concerns regarding current human actions. Prophets warn and admonish. They do not tell the future. This is necessarily so, since there is free will. The entire point is to allow us to repent.

Where are the modern prophets, then?

These are our writers and artists. If we no longer have the job and title of prophet among us, the ancient Israelites did not have an artist class. What we call “art” is simply the melding of craft, craftsmanship, with inspiration.

Prophets speak by inspiration; artists speak by inspiration. It is the same: inspiration speaks.

Why do modern prophets, unlike Moses, speak indirectly? For the same reason Jesus spoke in parables. The mighty will persecute a prophet. Ask Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. They were presecuted in the Old Testament. Those of swinish disposition will trample their insights underfoot. It is wise to half-conceal the point, so that “those who have ears to hear, will hear.”

So, as Emily Dickenson said, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” 

This too is the tradition of the court jester.

However, this is not to say that all art is from God. We see that some current offerings seem positively Satanic. There are more ambient spirits than one. Inspiration can come from God. It can also come from demons.

But if it does, Moses warns, the prophet will be truck dead.

Should a prophet speak for demons, God has an urgent need to silence him. He raises prophets to guide his people; a false prophet does the opposite with equal force. He must be silenced as the Canaanites had to be extirpated, the cities of the plain immolated: they misled souls into Hell.

The 27 Club is a celebrated list of pop musicians who died at the age of 27. An odd coincidence, if it is coincidence. The first member of the Club was actually Robert Johnson. Robert Johnson reputedly went in a short time from being an adequate to an uncannily good guitarist, because one day he met the Devil at a crossroads and sold his soul.

He died gruesomely within two years of that encounter.

Jim Morrison is another member of the club. His family never knew him to be musical or able to sing, and were amazed when he became a pop star. He actually claimed to be possessed by some ambient spirit that entered him at the scene of a traffic accident in the desert.

Other members of the club: Brian Jones, who reputedly was into Satanism; Amy Winehouse; Kurt Cobain; Jimi Hendrix; Janis Joplin.

This can explain why artists have a reputation for dying young; some are wrestling with devils. If the Devil doesn’t kill them, to take their soul, God must.

It’s a risky business, channelling spirit voices.

Those artists who defy the Romantic stereotype and live to a ripe age seem to turn to religion. I think, for example, of the Byrds. Of the original five, two survive: Roger (Jim) McGuinn and Chris Hillman. Both are openly Christian, unlike their bandmates; and have been spreading subtly Christian messages since “Turn1 Turn! Turn!” Of the Beatles, the public atheist, John Lennon, was the first to go, in an unnatural way. There are rumours he sold his soul to the Devil, like Robert Johnson, to become a rock star. Two survive, and they are the two Christians. Ringo Starr is open about it; Paul McCartney as been spreading Christian messages in his lyrics at least since “Let It Be” and “Long and Winding Road.”

For ordinary people, the contrary principle that “the good die young” logically applies. God wants to give the merely wicked a long leash in this life to have the opportunity to repent. The good deserve their reward. 

But the math reverses in the case of prophecy. The longer a true prophet lives, the more souls he can save. The longer a false prophet lives, the more he condemns.

What about George Orwell? Despite his political interests, he seem to have been on the side of the angels. Yet he died young.

But he had already said everything good he had to say. 1984 simply repeats the same lesson as Animal Farm. His spirituality was tenuous; he might have had no more in him. 

What about Keith Richards? If he is a prophet, is he really on the side of God? I mean—the Rolling Stones? Yet they seem to just keep on going.

First, Richards writes the music for the Stones, not the lyrics. If there is a satanic message in the lyrics, that’s down to Mick Jagger. Silencing Richards would not silence Jagger, but silencing Jagger would be sufficient without silencing Richards. Richards may be a bad man personally; but he is being given all the time he needs to repent.

But there is no satanic message in the Stones lyrics. Despite the hype, if you listen to them, Jagger’s lyrics are never advocating immorality, and are sometimes obviously Christian.

It just doesn’t pay to say it straight. Success in circuit lies.

What We Look Like from Abroad

 

And a lot of Americans watch Tucker Carlson.

Canada's Hope

 

The recent ruling by a federal court that the Trudeau government acted illegally in imposing the Emergency Act in 2022 gives a glimmer of hope that some human rights and some limits on the powers of the government of the day still exist in Canada. But it is only a glimmer—this ruling will be appealed to a higher court, and there is no reason for confidence that they will uphold it. Canadian courts have a bad reputation when it comes to defending human rights.

Jordan Peterson is right that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is no more substantial than the lofty guarantees of human rights in the Chinese constitution, or the old constitution of the USSR. Documents can say anything. By themselves they have no force. One needs to look at what governments actually do.

In Canada, we have no property rights. The government freezing of bank accounts under the arbitrarily imposed Emergency Act demonstrated this. And, of course, if it suits them, they do not recognize land title. Leaving aside seemingly endless “environmentalist” constraints on land use, they reserve the right to declare any property aboriginal land.

We have no mobility rights. The lockdowns demonstrated this. You could not board a plane or a bus without proof of vaccination; or at times at all. There are also endless restraints on the right to live and work in another province, due to arbitrary and onerous licensing requirements.

We have no freedom of speech. This has been true since the “Hate Laws” went on the books. The restrictions have become more aggressive almost monthly, up to and including compelled speech. 

We have no free press; we even have government censorship, like China, of the internet.

We have no right to peaceful assembly or to petition the government. This is what the Emergency Act was invoked to suppress. And participants are being prosecuted for the vague crime of “mischief.” Which could surely be construed to punish, Chinese Communist style, any act the government decided retroactively it did not like. The excuse that vital transportation corridors were being blocked by the protest is simply not true.

We have no freedom of religion. Merely quoting passages from the Bible may now be illegal. Any suggestion that homosexual sex is sinful, as all major religions teach, is a criminal offense. Churches are being burned down, with little reaction from authorities—or even with muted signs of approval.

We have no freedom of conscience. Doctors and nurses, for example, who have a moral objection to abortion or to assisted suicide, are legally required either to submit to patient wishes or at least to refer, making them accomplices in what they may consider grave sin.

We have no freedom of association. Various “affirmative action” programmes, for example, legislate whom we must hire or serve. And the lockdown and various government blacklists determine whom we must not associate with.

We have no equality. Aboriginal rights, for example, now being aggressively promoted, are in direct contravention of human equality. As are racial or gender quotas, and other such government initiatives. Like government programmes targeted specifically at funding “black” businesses. The “Gladue rule” is an unambiguous violation of equal protection under the law.

We have no right to life. Abortion is unrestricted and government funded in Canada. And now MAiD has been unleashed. Consent, granted, is still nominally required for the latter, but it is a perilously slippery slope. You can almost see the future. Homelessness has become an epidemic, governments seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Those who do not simply freeze to death are offered the friendlier option of assistance in dying. As we slide along this slippery toboggan run, one can foresee governments progressively cutting supports for the poor, distraught, or chronically ill, compelling them to “voluntarily” ask to be killed. 

This decision by the courts, if upheld may be our last chance to save Canadian from both tyranny and endemic poverty. 

Te alternative being a friendly invasion by the US, and no doubt the loss of Canadian independence, for whatever it is worth. Tucker Carlson, at least, is now openly calling for this.

And being cheered by huge crowds in Canada.

What Is Real?

 

"Everything you can imagine is real”—Picasso

This quote appears on the cover of the latest issue of Verse Afire, a Canadian poetry journal.

The observation is self-evidently true. 

If you imagine a unicorn, for example, said unicorn is necessarily real, or you could not imagine it. The only question is whether it exists as a physical entity, or a spiritual entity: sensed, or imagined.

This is also the fastest and simplest proof of God: if he did not exist, you could not formulate the statement “Does God exist?” The question automatically answers itself.

You may object that by “exist,” you mean, does the thing exist independent of me thinking about it? Is its existence purely subjective?

Yes, God exists apart from your thinking about him, and unicorns exist apart from your thinking about them. Otherwise, when you say “God” or “unicorn,” your listeners would not know what you mean. Yet they immediately do. Moreover, you can stop thinking about unicorns, or God, and then, the next time you think of them, there they are again. It is just the same as with that chestnut tree down the street: you know that it exists objectively because others also see it, and because you can turn and look away, then look back, and it is still there. So too with unicorns.

In sum, the idea that things you imagine are not real is a primitive materialist superstition

This Confirms My Suspicions

 

... of how things work in Washington. It's Eyes Wide Shut.

There's video.

Tucker Carlson Speaks to Canada

 

Proud Tories

Recent polls seem to have been accurate—for example, the polls for the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. This after some years during which political polls seemed to get less and less reliable.

Have the polling firms found a way to improve their methods? Maybe; but I have not heard of any such innovation. It is also curious that, in the past, the polls were always wrong in the same direction, underrepresenting the right. And it is curious that all the polling firms seem to have found their groove again at the same time. This argues against some clever innovation; any pollster who had worked something out would want to keep it to themselves.

One theory was that the polling firms were previously in the tank for the left. Maybe they have shifted their political views. But I doubt this; political polling is rarely their main business, only an advertisement for their wares, and it is not in their interest to establish a reputation for unreliable polling.

Instead, I think this may be more evidence that the social tide is turning against the left. I think we are seeing the end of what, in the UK, was called “shy Tory syndrome.” People are no longer intimidated by the woke mob.

In the past, according to this theory, people were reluctant to say to a stranger on the phone that they intended to vote right. People want to say what they think will make the listener happy and think well of them. And they assumed the average stranger would be offended if they admitted they liked Trump, disliked Brussels, or supported the Thatcherites. One knew one was not supposed to express such views in polite company.

Now perhaps the moral high ground has shifted. People are no longer assuming this. The seal of censorship has been broken.

From the River to the Earth's Bounds

 

The tide is turning against high immigration levels, in Canada and in the rest of the developed world. Back in 2019, I recall a PPC candidate suggesting at a local public meeting that the housing shortage could be addressed at least in part by lowering immigration levels. She faced immediate catcalls, demanding she get off the stage if she had such opinions.

Now that opinion is shared by a majority. According to Nanos Research, a year ago, 61 percent of Canadians were in favour of the current high immigration levels. But by last December, 61 percent felt they should be reduced. Such a rapid turnaround in public opinion is almost unprecedented.

Part of the general snapback against the left agenda; which is now visible, and proceeding apace.

I suspect it is more than the housing shortage. We already had a housing crisis in 2019. Instead, people are waking up to the fact that people from different cultures are not just about colourful dances and new ethnic restaurants, but that they can actually have fundamentally different basic values, which can be antithetical to Canadian values, and cause civil conflict.

I suspect the many “From the River to the Sea” protests, in Canada and elsewhere, since October 7, have played a large part in this turnaround. It has now also become permissible to point out other problems, like immigrant students improperly exploiting food banks.

It is unfortunate if the focus remains on immigration per se. Immigration itself is not the problem. The problem is multiculturalism. It is madness to bring in large groups of people from radically different cultures without an aggressive program of assimilation and equal treatment.

New Hampshire Prediction

 

New Hampshire is voting today. Lets me get my prediction in just in time to be proven wrong.

I predict Donald Trump gets over 55% in the Republican contest. I have seen a series of major last-minute endorsements; he has lots of media from the Iowa caucuses; and there have been a lot of vicious pundit attacks on Nikki Haley in the last few days. That looks like momentum in Trump’s direction. I don’t see a lot of Democrats crossing over to vote against Trump in the Republican primary, because him winning the nomination now looks like a foregone conclusion. So why waste your vote? And, strategically, would you rather run against Nikki Haley? Why? The same logic should dampen Hailey’s turnout among dissatisfied Republicans. So I expect Trump to outperform the most recent polls, which have him at 52.2%.

Rather than cross over, despite there being no delegates at stake, I can see Democrats wanting to vote in the Democratic poll in order to show their anger at the DNC for cancelling their first-in-the-nation primary and denying them a voice. And the way to do that is to vote, but to vote anybody but Biden. Biden’s campaign has also crippled itself by not having his name on the ballot; they are running a low-budget write-in campaign. So I think Biden will do worse in the Democratic poll than Trump does in the Republican.

Those will be the news stories: Trump triumph, Biden embarrassment.

Now go ahead and prove me wrong, Fates.

Why It Might be Ramaswamy

 

Trump says he has already chosen his VP.

I had thought it might be Ron DeSantis; or Tucker Carlson. But here are some reasons it might be Vivek Ramaswamy.

1. Glenn Beck reports that Trump phoned him for advice, and Beck suggested Ramaswamy. What sounds significant is Trump’s response: “That’s what everyone is telling me.” So Trump wanted advice, and this is the advice he’s been getting.

2. Trump has said his choice will not be a big surprise. Since everyone has been telling him Ramaswamy, and there were chants of “VP” at the rally where Ramaswamy endorsed him, this points to Ramaswamy. 

3. Reports were that in 2016, Trump wanted Newt Gingrich. He took Pence to satisfy party bigwigs. So he prefers someone like Newt Gingrich, and this time, owning the party, he has a free hand. Gingrich himself is too old; but who is most like Gingrich? The striking thing about Gingrich is that he was, like Trump, a bulldog with hostile questioners. Ramaswamy wrestles biased interviewers to the mat the same way Gingrich did. Being a master rhetorician –that is, salesman—Trump no doubt values the art and understands its power. Ramaswamy has the gift.

4. Business execs have a tendency to groom younger men who remind them of themselves. Trump is of that culture and probably fond of the mentorship role—remember The Apprentice. Ramaswamy fills that bill better than any other high-profile contender: a fellow salesman, a fellow entrepreneur. He is, conveniently, not as rich as Trump.

5. Limited legally to one term, Trump will be thinking of someone to carry on his programme after he leaves. Ramaswamy has run on being 100% MAGA. Other obvious names might turn out to be a cuckoo’s egg in his nest by comparison.

6. Indeed, Trump had a problem with appointees turning against him or subverting him in his first term. Most notably, his last VP pick, Pence. He logically ought, as a result, to put a high premium on loyalty and ideological compatibility.

7. It fits his brand, and his pledge to drain the swamp, to choose a non-politician. Choosing a businessman instead reduces the risk that they are compromised by the deep state and the beltway.

8. Trump said he’d made his pick about at the same time  Ramaswamy dropped out and endorsed him. Suggesting that event may have allowed him to make his pick. It was at that point that Ramaswamy became available.

What do you think? There’s a comment option. Use it.

A Tale of Two Democracies

 

History is destiny

The fundamental difference between the American and Canadian character can be summed up in this way: both are classless societies, breaking from Europe and the Old World with their ideas of privilege by birth. But this means different things in the two places. In America, everyone is upper class. In Canada, everyone is lower class.

This is an artefact of the two countries’ histories. 

America overthrew their king. So now, every man is king. Canada did not, but banned any aristocracy locally: so their king and ruling class always lived abroad. Everyone in Canada is a peasant.

This explains why Americans are, by comparison, more boisterous and difficult to herd; Canadians instinctively deferential to authority. They know their place. Americans, being royals, look down on most foreigners as mere commoners. Canadians look up to anyone or anything coming from abroad, and move to London or Los Angeles to “make it.”

DeSantis Just Folded His Tent

 

And in a backhanded way endorsed Trump. He needed to go now, before Trump had it all sewn up, so he could get some credit for putting him over the top. 

Hard to believe Trump won't smoke Nikki Hailey in New Hampshire now. 

Hard to believe Hailey will want to hang on now to be humiliated in her home state. I expect her too to drop out once the NH results are in.

Trump will have his nomination secured now. But Biden may look shaky after New Hampshire.

Call the Midwife

 

St. Hubert, staggered.

One might expect a TV series based on a convent and its charitable work, like the BBC’s “Call the Midwife,” to be favourable to religion. But that is a naïve thought. The world is not like that. One ought not to be surprised that, instead, it undermines religion.

Most people, after all, fear religion, at least in the modern day. That probably includes the writers on such a programme, and the bulk of their audience. I imagine they would lose their audience if they got too preachy and all. Just as most people show such great hostility to evangelical missionaries at their door.

Why? Whether they are deluded or not, a fair-minded person must realize that they are knocking at your door out of love, concern for your welfare. So why the anger?

One obvious tactic, if one fears religion, is to pretend to be religious, but debase it from within. This is the safest way, as an author, to approach a series set in a convent. 

This is the tendency Jesus rails against in the New Testament. This is his main opposition, pharisaism. “Hypocrisy”: a New Testament Greek word. It means to wear a mask. It means to feign religion without being religious.

I have seen this in academic departments of religion. It is held there to be clever to mock the faith of the faithful, the traditional codes and creeds, and those who take the Bible seriously. Those who do are simply unenlightened, not deep thinkers. I have seen this too in the upper reaches of the United Church. We have seen it in high Catholic prelates like Theodore McCarrick. We seem to see it now in the Vatican. 

One tactic of the hypocrites is to object to religious “extremism.” You see this in the media all the time. Which is to say, it is fine to give religion lip service, to maybe attend a Sunday service now and then, as long as you don’t really believe it, and don’t actually apply it in daily life. As long, in short, as you don’t follow the moral codes. Just keep it on the level of a reassuring bedtime story. Hallmark religiousity. Happy happy joy joy religiousity. Hell is empty and everyone gets to heaven religiousity.

A similar, although superficially opposite, tactic, is to exaggerate or falsify the demands of religion to make being truly religious seem unreasonable. Atheists love to demand, for example, that Christians turn the other cheek as they beat them up. 

Jesus said “my burden is light.” In contrast to the Pharisees, who pile unreasonable demands on the faithful.

A common gambit currently is to declare oneself “spiritual, but not religious.” What exactly does this mean?

Religion means “binding”: “binding back.” It is a commitment to a path of life, with obligations, like marriage. This is why people fear religion: it makes demands. It requires obedience to a higher power than self and selfish drives.

“Spiritual” people want numinous experiences, sure; we all want numinous experiences. We are born with a need for God, a craving for meaning. If we do not get it from religion, we will get it from somewhere: scientism, environmentalism and the worship of “nature,” millenarian cults like Marxism promising heaven on earth, aestheticism, alcohol, drugs, worshipping sex or another person or our animal desires. “Spiritual”

 people are simply acknowledging that craving in themselves that we all have.

But they don’t want any effort or commitment. They want it to just happen. If Song of Songs describes the quest of the soul for God, they are into hookup culture, one-night stands; thrillseekers. 

It is not, in the end, an honourable or a good path. God and holy things are not to be treated as a mere object for our pleasure.

In “Call the Midwife,” the elderly and senile Sister Monica Joan, inspired by the legend of St. Hubert and his vision of Christ as a stag, steals convent funds to buy a train ticket to the Outer Hebrides, thinking God will reveal himself to her there.

And she does encounter a magnificent stag, as she wanders through a small forest of dolmens.

What are the implicit lessons here?

First, to take religion seriously, one must be senile; senility gives her the excuse for such “childish” thinking.

Second, religious experience is not found in the convent, but in nature, and in a pagan setting—the megaliths.

Third, spiritual experience comes not from observing one’s commitments day by day, but by breaking them, and committing sins.

It is like advocating that full sexual pleasure can only be achieved by committing adultery.

The series has the Mother Superior refuse to publicly advocate legalization of abortion because, “when the interests of my patients conflict with my faith, I must go with my faith.” Suggesting that religion stands opposed to mankind, and against true morality. Christopher Hitchens could not have said it better.

The visit to the Hebrides is made an occasion to paint Free Church Presbyterians as pitiless legalists. A boatman refuses to ferry a doctor and nurses to where a lighthouse keeper’s wife is giving birth, on the grounds that it is the Sabbath.

This is of course in direct contradiction to Jesus’s teaching in the Bible. 

Matthew 12:

“9 After departing from that place, he went into their synagogue, 10  and there was a man with a withered hand. So they asked him, “Is it lawful to cure on the Sabbath?” so that they might accuse him. 11  He said to them: “If you have one sheep and that sheep falls into a pit on the Sabbath, is there a man among you who will not grab hold of it and lift it out? 12  How much more valuable is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do a fine thing on the Sabbath.” 13  Then he said to the man: “Stretch out your hand.” And he stretched it out, and it was restored sound like the other hand.”

The sabbath is for man, not man for the sabbath.

Any devout Presbyterian would know this. A prime example of falsifying, indeed, as often as not reversing, religious demands to make them seem unreasonable.

When a Catholic priest appears back in London, he is of course an unctuous hypocrite engaged in an affair with his housekeeper, whom he abandons once she becomes pregnant. No question, there are Catholic priests who are like this, but when you feature only one Catholic priest in ten years, and this is the one, it is fair to suspect an intended message about Catholicism.

A nurse trainee forwarded to the convent from a Catholic orphanage suggests that a Catholic woman might resort to abortion as a way to avoid birth control. Another example of reversing religious doctrine to make it seem unreasonable. Catholic nurse trainee Corrigan, admitting a secret child born out of wedlock, explains that “The Catholic church is good at hiding things. Mistakes.”

The real problem with Catholics is, of course, that like Free Church Presbyterians, they tend to take their religion too seriously. Especially that bit about having moral obligations.

Another nurse, beaten up on the streets, spirals into depression, and is taken off to an asylum. 

The implicit message is that the religious are emotionally fragile, naïve about the world, and when faced with its harsh realities, religion is of no use to help them. Modern science, and electroshock, must intervene.

When St. Hubert saw the stag, he also heard this message: "Hubert, unless you turn to the Lord and lead a holy life, you shall quickly go down into Hell." 

They leave that part out. I wonder why.

And the Spirit of the Lord Moves over the Waters

 

Javier Milei’s speech to the WEF makes me suspect something uncanny is happening. Why is it that we abruptly have such powerful rhetoricians emerging on the right? Aside from Milei, Meloni in Italy is, as far as I can judge in translation, a powerful and witty speaker. Trump is masterful, able to entertain a crowd extempore for hours. Ramaswamy has also now emerged as a great communicator. Poilievre in Canada is brilliant. The UK’s Farage is delightful. One might add RFK Jr. to this list.

Some of course worry that this is the rise of personality cults, the opening for dictatorships. “Trump will be a dictator.” But there are critical differences between these folks and a Hitler or a Mussolini. 

First, the fascist dictators, and demagogues generally, played to anger, worked their audiences up emotionally in sprays of spittle. These new Demosthenes’s of the right are strikingly calm, cool under fire, speaking, for example, while munching an apple, and rely on humour.

Second, William Shirer observed that Hitler’s speech was always tailored to his audience. He read the crowd and told them whatever they wanted to hear. Famously, he told Chamberlain whatever he wanted to hear. Milei just did the opposite: he chose the most hostile crowd for his speech. Ramaswamy, Farage, Trump, Meloni, are famous for doing the same thing. Farage rose to fame by haranguing the European Parliament on how awful they were. Poilievre, Trump, or Ramaswamy are celebrated for how they handle hostile questioners.

Third, the whole point of fascism was to concentrate power in the government and the leader. The actual programme these modern rhetoricians are calling for is the exact opposite, cutting the size and powers of the government. This is what Trump actually did, and Milei is actually doing, when in government.

Fascism or totalitarianism is not coming from this corner.

One might protest that we have also seen good communicators on the left, and recently. Obama is given credit for great oratorical ability. Bill Clinton was always convincing; he could charm himself out of any scandal. Justin Trudeau is credited with being a good campaigner. 

But there is a difference. Obama was tied to the teleprompter: he was simply good at reading a speech and giving it cadence; the tones of an evangelical preacher, actually. This is acting ability, not rhetorical ability. Trudeau, or Clinton, are also primarily actors, able to give an impression of the desired emotion, rather than rhetoricians. Strikingly, Trump, Poilievre, Ramaswamy, are instead at their best in speaking off the cuff, handling hecklers or hostile journalists. They write their own best lines, and are not rehearsed.

If I may point it out, the skills and approaches of a Clinton or a Trudeau are closer to demagoguery. Clinton echoes to his audience or questioner what they want to hear; Trudeau commonly resorts to feigned anger, whipping up the crowd against his opponents.

This is a general truth of the modern right versus the modern left: the left lacks humour and spontaneity. “The left can’t meme.” “NPCs.” The right seems to have a corner on both.

With perhaps the current exception of RFK Jr., who is still theoretically on the left. Although moving right, as so many are recently. Like Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and so many others, he seems to be getting “red-pilled” in real time.

This seems to me to be the working of the spirit: the spirit of prophecy. Just as in the Hebrew Bible, when governments or cities grew corrupt, a prophet would arise. God does not abandon his people. And we are still his people. He is not done with the US or the “West.”

The arts have grown moribund since the 1960s—since JFK or MLK or Diefenbaker spoke with the spirit of prophecy. Inspiration has abandoned us, as our societies have grown corrupt.

Now we see prophets arising. First in the desert; but now loudly in the public square. 

Interestingly, perhaps unexpectedly, they seem to be arising in the political realm sooner and stronger than in the arts. It upends Breitbart’s famous formula: “politics is downstream from culture.” But perhaps that was always wrong. Everything starts in God, then in religion and philosophy, and spreads next either to the culture or to politics, depending on the current circumstances. When government and politics become too intrusive, they strangle culture. That stranglehold must first be broken in the political arena in order to allow artistic voices to speak.

Milei's Historic Speech

 

This one is going to be remembered for a long time.

Midwives for Abortion

 

The BBC series “Call the Midwife” was the perfect premise for a life-affirming, faith-affirming show: about a convent running a midwife service in impoverished East London. And for the first few seasons, based on one midwife’s autobiography, it was.

Then it, improbably, swerved into fictional story lines about how homosexuality was innate and involuntary. Into tales of wifebeating; into the evils of slum landlords; into editorializing in favour of abortion, and against the moralistic sort of religion.

Odd that it should go about to trash its core appeal to its natural core audience.

The obvious reason is that, after the first half-dozen seasons, they began to run out of interesting complications in childbirth. The newer ailments were getting obscure, and sometimes trivial. “It is a very rare condition, and no, it will not harm the baby.”

A long-running show tends to run out of plot ideas. That’s where “jumping the shark” comes in, and that  lack of new ideas has infected Hollywood with their sequel mania. 

CTMW has a bit of an advantage, because they can bring in new characters. But they decided to bring in “ethnically diverse” characters. And ethnically diverse characters must not have any flaws or dark pasts or even interesting eccentricities. So they cannot inspire any good new plots. 

So what can you do? The temptation is to get political to keep interest up: find a news hook.

This is tiresome, and obvious; but wouldn’t be as bad if doing so these days always means a whiplash-inducing veer to the left. Particularly ill-suited to this show premise.

But then, they really haven’t had a choice. There’s the immigration issue. That’s in the news. Imagine if they were to feature an immigrant family that was not settling in, but resented the new country. The son was up for raping some girl, or staging a random knife attack. 

There’s the abortion issue; pretty natural for such a show. Of course, a religious order of midwives should be firmly opposed. Yet imagine if they had a sympathetic character point out with emotion that abortion kills babies?

Or that homosexuals can choose to stop having homosexual sex?

Imagine if they showed a wife abusing her husband, or blackmailing him with false charges?

The leftist cancel culture machine would wheel into action. Advertising would be pulled, they would be picketed, probably cancelled. The writers would be blacklisted, possibly thrown in prison, at a minimum lose their careers.

So the minute they raise a political controversy, they must show only the approved leftist narrative. And it’s a race to the farthest left possible, because what you said ten years ago, when the Overton window was different, can now be held against you. There are currently cries on the left and in the media to ban a local candidate from the next provincial election, because she objected to gay marriage in a book she wrote in 2008. A time when almost all of the developed world were also opposed to gay marriage, including, say, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. 

We have all been bullied in this way for years; creative types more than anyone. Which is why all we get from the arts and entertainment sector any more is predictable and perverse.

The good news is that the right has recently woken up to the strategy. They have started to do the same, and things are swinging back to sanity. Mass farmer protests in Germany. Bud Light, Disney, Harvard, Target; the boycott head count is growing.

The culture war has passed its Stalingrad moment.

Someone Else Is Noticing

 

What a disaster Trudeau has been in foreign relations.

The Obligatory Post about the Iowa Caucuses

 

Trump won the Iowa caucuses. It wasn’t close, and it all came out pretty much as the polls predicted. There was no race on the Democratic side. 

Pity the poor media, who have to make it sound exciting; for them, no news is bad news.

And now, already, both the Republican and the Democratic nomination races seem to be over. That leaves a big hole in the prospective news year. 

I am troubled by the bad blood evident among the Republicans: how everyone is sliming Nikki Haley, how Ron DeSantis is crying foul because the media called the race too soon. It’s dumb, now that the nomination is pretty much decided and nothing much is at stake. It starts to look like a circular firing squad. Nikki Haley is not a real threat to the MAGAnauts, she was a good governor; and DeSantis would never have won if the media had held off. Moreover, his platform and Trump’s are barely distinguishable.

I lament the lack of civility and decorum; it is one of the great problems with America today. It is profoundly unhealthy when politics becomes such a consuming passion.

And no, Trump is not to blame for this; populism is not to blame for this. Trump and populism are a reaction to this failure of civil discourse, not its cause.

Blowing Hot and Cold

 

The latest reports on “UAP,” which used to be called UFOs, seem to up the ante. There is a video circulating of a craft that is invisible to the eye, but emits a heat signature detectable in infrared. And it shifts from hot to cold—yet is still visible to infrared in its cold state. Which means it shifts not just from warmer than its surroundings to the ambient temperature, but from warmer to colder than its surroundings. Why? And there are reports of people entering an alien craft about forty feet square, and finding the interior “the size of a football field.”

Before this, it seemed to me—not following this closely—that all could be accounted for by someone somewhere figuring out time travel. And so the likeliest explanation was not aliens, but a visit from our own future.

But if these latest reports are legitimate, time travel does not seem sufficient to account for it all. That does not allow invisibility, or the distortion of space itself.

Neither does mass psychosis—we have video.

How about a government conspiracy? It makes sense: governments are currently in a low-intensity war with their own citizens everywhere. A good scare about a common enemy is a way to grab more power. Covid is no longer frightening enough; global warming may be losing its potency. The principalities of this world may need a new wolf.

Really large conspiracies, as this would have to be, are intrinsically unlikely, due to human frailty and incompetence. Yet, if we believe these UFO sightings are all real now, we must also believe there was a general conspiracy among governments to suppress UFO reports previously. If the first conspiracy was possible, so is the second. The simplest explanation is that there is only one conspiracy, and it is the second…

The fact that we have video is of no significance on the hypothesis of government conspiracy. Much can now be computer generated, and in the case of something alien, a fake becomes difficult to detect. What is it supposed to look like? What is it supposed to be able to do? If it can violate any of the laws of physics, how can a fake ever be discovered?

Indeed, the comment often heard is that these supposed craft “violate the laws of physics.” 

What does that actually tell us? 

Unless we somehow have the laws of physics all wrong, a thing that violates the laws of physics is not a physical object. 

So, it might all be a government invention.

The other possibility is that these are spiritual objects. “Violates the laws of physics”?  That defines a miracle. We know by deduction that God exists, God can necessarily produce miracles, can break the laws of physics. He may be sending us a message. 

The problem with this explanation is that, if so, it is hard to tell what that message is. Angels are heralds; they speak plainly, or they are not doing their job. Prophets speak plainly, “make the ways straight for the Lord. It is ungodly to be ambiguous.

Demons, on the other hand, love ambiguity. What demons love is to disorient, to sow doubt and confusion. Demons will also always want to mask their identity. 

And demons, too, reputedly can perform miracles. And, if I may say so, demons also typically work in tandem with and through governments, "the rulers, the authorities, the powers of this dark world "

Could there be any practical reason for alien explorers to create a craft that shifts quickly from very hot to very cold? 

Environnmental Panic

 

https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1746222929359323247?s=20

Impressive--Vivek is as good as Poilievre here.

Vice Presidential Picks

 

Trump says he has already chosen his VP candidate. This implies that it is not anyone currently running against him for the Republican nomination; and it implies he must have a big enough name on the hook that it is not worth waiting for some other possibility. 

This increases the odds that it is Tucker Carlson. Whom Melania Trump has already said she wants on the ticket.

Rumours are swirling that RFK’s running mate will be Tulsi Gabbard.

At first glance, both seem improbable. Carlson has just launched his own network; Gabbard just signed a deal to host a show on X. Were they really going to want to drop that now for a political run?

But that, I now realize, was old thinking. Gabbard and Carlson are both on X, not on some network. The “fairness doctrine,” which would have required a network to take them off the air, does not apply. They can go right on doing their programs, and their regular broadcasts might even be the ideal campaign medium. One-to-one with the voters, bypassing the biased media. Just as Trump did well when campaigning with his Twitter account, Poilievre is scoring with his political videos in Canada. 

This may be the new world of politics. 

I feel both Trump-Carlson and Kennedy-Gabbard would be extremely strong tickets. If this comes to pass, and the Democrats still run Biden-Harris, I expect Biden to come third.

Epstein Didn't Kill Himself. James Bond Did.

 

In 2008, state prosecutor Alexander Acosta cut an illegally generous plea deal with Jeffrey Epstein, later overturned, granting Epstein immunity from federal prosecution. Rather like Ray Epps. Asked why later, Acosta explained he was told by the relevant authorities, presumably meaning the CIA or FBI, that Epstein was an “intelligence asset.”

And that explains everything. It’s not complicated.

Of course Epstein was an intelligence asset. He was running a honey trap operation. He would tempt important individuals into having sex with minors. The girls had to be underage, to make the act sufficiently scandalous. This would open the marks—possibly willing marks, like those who undergo an initiation to join a secret society, a Hellfire Club-- to blackmail, and they were then under the agency’s control. 

The agency might also further their political or business career as well—now that they were initiated, and could be relied upon to toe the official line.

The unspecified agency is not out to prevent espionage by some foreign power. Of course not; to assume so is naïve. What’s in that for them? The agency is out to control the government of their own country or countries, apparently the US; although the UK also seems to be getting a lot of attention.

Only some conspiracy among the powerful, after all can explain how Epstein managed to “hang himself” with violence in his cell. With all the security cameras turned off, and the guards “asleep.” Caught and caged, he was no longer an asset: now he was a security risk. He might talk.

This explains why there is such resistance to Trump within the deep state; and specifically, one must notice, within the intelligence services. He was presumably never honey-trapped, for all his faults, and so he is, for them, a loose cannon.

This explains the strangeness of the last Democratic presidential race, how Bernie Sanders abruptly folded his tent and fell in line behind Biden—as, at almost the same time, did Buttigieg and Bloomberg. The word had come down; and the puppet masters had something on them.

Of course, it also makes sense to subvert the press.

How else explain the mysterious and sudden transformation of Matt Drudge from right-wing Trump supporter to just another mouthpiece for the left--killing most of his business. They must have something on him.

This explains the transformation, too, of Anne Coulter. She seemed to fall silent, and when she writes now, it is in defense of Ray Epps.

This might even explain why big companies like Google or Facebook have gone along so readily with government calls for censorship, even though it damaged their business. We know Bill Gates was involved with Epstein. Chief executives may have been compromised. This explains especially the case of Jack Dorsey, who actually seemed to welcome Musk’s acquisition of the platform. He seemed to endorse Musk’s goals, but was incapable himself of achieving them. Presumably because the invisible hands had something on him.

This perhaps even explains why democratic governments elsewhere—the UK, Canada, the EU—are doggedly pursuing unpopular policies. They are clearly answering to some master other than the people. A master who holds more power over them than the mere threat of losing office.

I wonder if Ted McCarrick’s operation within the Catholic Church, alternately bribing senior figures with large amounts of cash and holding sex parties, was only run on the same principles, or if it was an arm of the intelligence conspiracy. Might they want to control the Church, with its influence, for the same reason they would want to control the press? Where did McCarrick raise all the money that he was famous for being able to spread about? One suspects it was US taxpayers’ money, expropriated for some intelligence agency without oversight.

For that matter, where did Epstein’s money come from? He rose from nowhere.

Once you see it, it’s not subtle; it’s barely even hidden. The honey-trap is the time-honoured technique for turning foreign spies. It is an intelligence agency’s standard MO. 

Everybody knows J. Edgar Hoover kept files on important figures for possible blackmail. Why not his successors?

I suspect Stanley Kubrick was aware of it all, and was warning us with Eyes Wide Shut. He held off for many years, his wife tells us, on making this film, not feeling he was ready for it. Perhaps he waited until knew he was likely to die soon. So he had less to lose.

Or perhaps they got to him.

Keep your eyes open. Wide.

Has Pope Francis Excommunicated Himself?

 

Traditionalist commentators are claiming that Pope Francis actually automatically excommunicated himself back in 1999—by accepting life membership in the Rotary Club.

That got my attention. The Rotary Club? Isn’t that about as pedestrian and suburban-respectable an organization as you can imagine? My own father and grandfather were lifetime members. Heck, my parish priest was a member.

And yet, it seems that, although “automatic excommunication” is over the top, it is true that Catholics are not supposed to belong to the Rotary Cub. In 1950, the Vatican and Pope Pius XII declared that no Catholic priest was permitted to join or attend meetings. Lay Catholics were not explicitly prohibited, but reminded to observe the canon law that tells them to “guard against associations which are secret, condemned, seditious, suspect, or which try to escape legitimate church vigilance." Implying that Rotary arguably fell into one of these categories. 

According to Time magazine the Vatican made clear that the concern applied only to Rotary, not to other similar voluntary associations. “In answer to newsmen's questions, the Vatican last week indicated that the ban did not apply specifically to such other groups as Kiwanis, Lions, and Elks.”

This ban must have been announced at just about the time my father joined Rotary. And he must have known about it. I have the article from Time magazine, and both my father and grandfather subscribed to Time. The matter must have been under general discussion within Rotary.  Montreal’s Archbishop Paul-Emile Léger, Time reports, publicly forbade any priests from participation in any form.

My grandfather might well have been unconcerned. He was a Protestant, and had been a Freemason. The family story is that he left the Freemasons at marriage in deference to his Catholic wife. 

Yet he kept his Mason’s apron; I saw it in his belongings after his death. And Masons showed up at his funeral, identifying him as a “brother in the craft.” Would they do so if he had not been active, and not paying his dues, for over thirty years? One wonders.

Is Rotary somehow related to the Masons? They deny it. So why did the Vatican oppose Rotary?

The Time article includes their explanation. “Sometimes [in Rotary] there is undue devotion to monopolistic capitalism, and monopoly is condemnable, on both Christian and social grounds, as an offence against charity. The fact that non-members of Rotary Clubs are sometimes excluded from the benefits which Providence meant for all men . . . amounts to a condemnable monopoly."

Rotary allows only one member of each trade or profession to join each local chapter. The idea behind the club is then that other members will patronize their fellow Rotarians for all their needs. This founding concept is enshrined in the name, “Rotary”: benefits passed around the circle, greasing the gears of trade. 

This is arguably a cartel operating against the public interest: “monopolistic capitalism.” A similar collusion among those in the same business would be restraint of trade.  

Although not mentioned in the papal prohibition, I had always thought there was something else wrong with Rotary; something that ties them more directly to the Freemasons. It is their code of ethics, the “four way test,” supposed to guide each Rotarian’s words:

“1. Is it the truth?

2. Is it fair to all concerned?

3. Will it build goodwill and better friendships?

4. Will it be beneficial to all concerned?”

This might sound good, but it actually suppresses truth. It is a disguised vow of secrecy, the core issue with Freemasonry as well.

Proper ethics should begin and end with item 1. Truth itself is a transcendent value, divine; the Truth shall set you free. The truth is always of the greatest benefit to all concerned. The need for three more tests beyond this implies it is not.

Truth should apparently be concealed if it is not going to win friends and “benefit all concerned,” presumably in their own estimation.

The story given within the club on the origin of the Four-Way Test is that, by adopting it, an early Rotarian turned a failing business around. 

This makes clear that “benefit” here is material, not spiritual, benefit.

This vow of silence could support any sort of sin or criminality. If much muted here, such vows of secrecy have been used in other organizations for nefarious purposes, often for discrimination. The Freemasons, who used to prohibit black membership. The Orange Order; their contributions to anti-Catholic violence in Ireland are well known. Into the Sixties, nobody had ever been elected mayor of Toronto without being a member. More obviously, perhaps, the Ku Klux Klan, the Cosa Nostra, the Mafia.

Given all this, and the fact that the 1951 condemnation of Rotary has never been rescinded, how is it that we now have clergy and even popes active in the club?

It might be that Rotary has shown itself less sinister over the years. Or it might be symptomatic of a decline in the clergy—which many would argue has been evident since about 1960. Taylor Marshall makes the case that the Church has been heavily infiltrated since then by secret organizations: the Freemasons, the KGB, the so-called “Velvet mafia,” homosexual and pedophile rings, and the “St. Galen mafia.”

It is attractive to narcissists to do something like this. They enjoy feeling they are putting something over on others. It makes them feel superior.

Cry for Me, Argentina

 

Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, prefect of the dicastery for the faith, is currently a subject of controversy for a book he wrote in 1998, now suppressed, recently discovered: Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality. It is being condemned by traditional Catholics as pornographic. 

The matter is complicated, because romantic or erotic love has always been used as a metaphor for divine love. You see this in Song of Solomon, in the Bible: 

“I am a wall, and my breasts are like towers. Thus I have become in his eyes like one bringing contentment.”

“I” in this case being the soul seeking union with God. God seeks an intimate relationship with each of us, a relationship comparable to that between a man and woman in love. But note how obviously this is a metaphoric, not a literal, statement: breasts=towers; “Like one.”

Saint John of the Cross uses similar imagery in “The Dark Night of the Soul”: 

“O, night that hast united
The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into her love.”

Again, obviously metaphor: night is personified; the unnamed lover represents love itself. 

And there is the entire Medieval tradition of “romance.” Even if commonly misconstrued, the love of the knight for his maiden is always a metaphor for divine love. The unfortunate result of this has been that, in the West, erotic love has been falsely given some of the numinousness of divine love in the popular imagination, resulting in an unfortunate and unhealthy preoccupation with finding a perfect mate and deriving some profound satisfaction from the sex act.

In Hinduism, the same point is made in the beautiful Krishna-Radha cycle: the soul is attracted to God as young girls are attracted to a handsome boy.

So Fernandez’s book might only have been more of this. Literal-minded critics were perhaps merely misunderstanding this longstanding metaphor. I had to read it for myself.

But it is not so. Granted, Fernandez and his supporters draw on this tradition, as if they are doing the same thing. But it is Fernandez who is being literal-minded. When he speaks of “love,” he means physical orgasm. He seems unaware of any other sort of love, beyond physical pleasure.

He gets specific and clinical, for example, discussing the female sex organs and how they are stimulated. And he speaks of orgasm as a sacrament: 

“If God can be present at that level of our existence, he can also be present when two human beings love each other and reach orgasm; and that orgasm, experienced in the presence of God, can also be a sublime act of worship to God. … God loves man’s happiness, therefore, it is also an act of worship to God to experience a moment of happiness.”

Nor need those two human beings be married or of opposite sexes, for this to be true: “the person [experiencing grace] can do things that are objectively sinful, without being guilty, and without losing the grace of God or the experience of his love.”

It has to be alarming that someone with such views is not only a Catholic priest, but a Bishop, a Cardinal, and actually in charge of the Holy Office, vetting the faith of the Church. It illuminates the current drive by the Vatican to approve the blessing of divorced and same sex couples.

The Vatican is no longer Catholic; or religious in any sense.

The Voice of One Calling in the Wilderness

 

In a real sense, lying is the worst sin. It is a sin not just against man, but against God. It is direct defiance of God; for God is Truth: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Consistently lying to another under our control—gaslighting—causes the worst tortures known to man, the tortures we call depression and schizophrenia.

 I cannot stomach politicians like Erin O’Toole, who lie without evident shame. Or Richard Nixon, or Bill and Hilary Clinton, or Justin Trudeau. Not much better are those who are deliberately ambiguous, so they can play games with the truth: Pope Francis falls into this category.

I cannot stomach men who claim to be women, or women who claim to be men, or those who claim to be non-binary. It is at base a moral issue.

Give me those clean, straight lines. The clarity of a Ratzinger, a Trump, an Orwell, a Michelangelo.

Make the ways straight for the Lord.

The New Canada

 

(2) Rebel News Canada on X: "BREAKING: Rebel News reporter David Menzies (@TheMenzoid) was brutally arrested by police after he tried to ask Chrystia Freeland questions. Visit Rebel News for more on this story: https://t.co/mwCsdctCkJ https://t.co/PCV4y0AbFO" / X (twitter.com)

Looks more like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia every day.

How Do You Respond to Something Like This?

 

The Democrats assume the average American voter is a gullible idiot. What if they are right?

https://twitter.com/i/status/1743635357160145330

Hell Alley

 

There are suggestions in the Bible that few people make it to heaven.

“Narrow is the path that leads to life, and few find it.”

Many read the book of Revelations to say that only 144,000 all told make it to heaven.

The visionaries of Fatima saw multitudes falling into hell.

This is troubling.

I wonder, however, if this is literal. It sounds to me like the Buddha’s description of upaya in the Lotus Sutra: whatever is necessary to lure the children out of the burning building. It is perhaps not so much an accurate description of the population of Hell or the consequences of sin, as a strategic or rhetorical device to illustrate the right path.

The point may more accurately be, we cannot get to heaven by going along with the crowd; by doing what everyone else does.

This is necessarily true, because going along with the crowd, or with others around us, or the social consensus, avoids making moral decisions; so we cannot be earning merit even if the deed is objectively good. It is the easy way, and, if by chance also the moral way, as Jesus says, “you already have your reward.”

But the situation is worse than that. Any crowd or social environment will tend toward the evil. As the Bible says, the Devil is the prince of this world. Those guilty of sin will have a vested interest in promoting that sin, encouraging others to that sin, avoiding personal responsibility for it. Those who go along will go along, making the sin conventional. As happened in Sodom and Gomorrah; or the world before the flood; or among the Canaanites or Carthaginians, who practiced child sacrifice; or the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany; or slavery in so many countries; or abortion today. The worse the sin, the stronger the social pressure to condone it. So as not to cause a fuss.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

 

So going along with the crowd, a failure to take moral responsibility, is doubly culpable. It is doing objective evil, and refusing to take responsibility for it. Taken together, that looks like  turning away from God himself, the sin against the Holy Spirit.

But does this interpretation give us any greater hope? Surely, by definition, if going along with the crowd leads to hell, most people must therefore be destined for hell.

Not necessarily. It is actually possible that “the crowd” or “the social consensus” is not the majority. It could be only the largest single group, the one that speaks with one voice, even if most people approach issues individually—since, after all, those who think for themselves do not operate as a crowd.

It is the NPCs; joined in Hell, of course, by those who think for themselves but have chosen evil.

What proportion is that of the general population? Your guess is probably as good as mine.

There are suggestions in the Bible that few people make it to heaven.

“Narrow is the path that leads to life, and few find it.”

Many read the book of Revelations to say that only 144,000 all told make it to heaven.

The visionaries of Fatima saw multitudes falling into hell.

This is troubling.

I wonder, however, if this is literal. It sounds to me like the Buddha’s description of upaya in the Lotus Sutra: whatever is necessary to lure the children out of the burning building. It is perhaps not so much an accurate description of the population of Hell or the consequences of sin, as a strategic or rhetorical device to illustrate the right path.

The point may more accurately be, we cannot get to heaven by going along with the crowd; by doing what everyone else does. 

This is necessarily true, because going along with the crowd, or with others around us, or the social consensus, avoids making moral decisions; so we cannot be earning merit even if the deed is objectively good. It is the easy way, and, if by chance also the moral way, as Jesus says, “you already have your reward.”

But the situation is worse than that. Any crowd or social environment will tend toward the evil. As the Bible says, the Devil is the prince of this world. Those guilty of sin will have a vested interest in promoting that sin, encouraging others to that sin, avoiding personal responsibility for it. Those who go along will go along, making the sin conventional. As happened in Sodom and Gomorrah; or the world before the flood; or among the Canaanites or Carthaginians, who practiced child sacrifice; or the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany; or slavery in so many countries; or abortion today. The worse the sin, the stronger the social pressure to condone it. So as not to cause a fuss.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

So going along with the crowd, a failure to take moral responsibility, is doubly culpable. It is doing objective evil, and refusing to take responsibility for it. Taken together, that looks like  turning away from God himself, the sin against the Holy Spirit.

But does this interpretation give us any greater hope? Surely, by definition, if going along with the crowd leads to hell, most people must therefore be destined for hell.

Not necessarily. It is actually possible, if not probable, that “the crowd” or “the social consensus” is not the majority. It could be only the largest single group, the one that speaks with one voice, even if most people approach issues individually—since, after all, those who think for themselves do not operate as a crowd.

It is the NPCs; joined in Hell, of course, by those who think for themselves but have chosen evil.

What proportion is that of the general population? Your guess is probably as good as mine.

Why Are Pigs Sprouting Wings?

 

There is apocalypse in the air. Governments are doing unaccountable things, as though they know something we don’t. Snow falls in Mecca; lightning strikes the Vatican; maybe such things happen in normal times, but people are now in the mood to notice. And then there are the growing claims about UFOs. Tucker Carlson says he knows things about UFOs so dark he will not even tell his wife, and “there is a spiritual aspect to it.”

Which last comment gets me thinking: here’s one explanation for what is going on.

Christopher Hitchens, seeking to debunk Christianity, argued the improbability that God would let mankind subsist on Earth for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, right up until 1 AD, before revealing himself. What about all those previous generations? And why then did he do it in such a backwater, in Palestine?

Hitchens is exactly wrong. The early years of the Roman Empire were probably the first time in history that God could have sent a message to mankind, and expect it to reach from Britain in the West, to China in the East, and down to Ethiopia. The Roman Empire had, for the first time, secured those trade routes. And Christianity did quickly extend this far.

No doubt God was sending local revelations all along—which is why so many of the world’s myths seem to contain elements of the Gospel story, with avatars, virgin births, and the like. But until 1 AD, they inevitably stayed local. 

And Palestine was not a backwater. Jerusalem is actually, literally, the centre of the populated world, now as it was then—the one spot from which it is easiest to get everywhere else. This is why Middle Eastern airlines have been so successful: their headquarters and stopover point is most efficiently located for everywhere else.

And this is true not only by air. Palestine is a land bridge, a funnel, that joins three continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and their trade routes. It is at the crossroads of the three great ancient civilizations, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece-Rome.

And this is true by sea as well: it is roughly the meeting point of the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, the necessary point of portage to go by sea from Europe to East Asia and vice versa. All lines of communication and travel met here. This was God’s megaphone.

Now… if either God or perhaps some alien civilization wants to send all of mankind a further message, we have just now reached a similar, but greater, inflection point. Now, with the internet, with smart phones, is the first time in history he/they could appear to all of us, all at once, without filter by government or earthly authority with their own self-interests. 

We might now be getting the preparatory attention-getting signs; like the herald’s trumpet or the town crier’s bell. Or like John the Baptist in the New Testament. And the panic of Herod at the birth of a more legitimate ruler, or the mind-frame of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, may explain the current actions of governments. 

I don’t jump immediately to the idea that these are the End Times. Perhaps; perhaps the beginning of the thousand-year just reign predicted in Revelations. Yet, more simply, revelation is ongoing, as it is throughout the Bible: there are repeated calls from God to return to faith and fealty, reminders that he is there, new and renewed covenants. In more recent years, we have seen apparitions of Mary calling us back to faith. She has even appeared on Egyptian TV. Now may be the time for an emphatic reminder, a visit from the boss himself, perhaps a renewed covenant. 

Or, alternatively, now may be the opportunity for some more advanced civilization to make itself known and tell us what it feels we need to know.

I think, in the end, aliens are less likely. That hypothesis requires too many assumptions.

Counting Cats

 

Dancing the bhangra in catface

I wonder if, from the broad view of history. Justin Trudeau’s premiership will look like the Canadian Liberal Party’s dead cat bounce.

I think that the Liberal Party was actually destroyed by Jean Chretien.

Before Chretien, the Grits did not have principles in an ideological sense, but it was the party of the Canadian ruling class, a gentlemen’s club, and it ran on noblesse oblige. As the Natural Governing Party, its mandate was at least plausibly and in the public mind to do what it thought was best for Canada as a whole, in a more or less pragmatic way, with good will toward all. This made sense in a country that, like Canada, was naturally rent by internal divisions.

Chretien broke that mold with his bareknuckle politics within the party. Internally, the party became a dictatorship. Now it was all about power and loyalty to the leader. There was no more room for gentlemen.

Which sacrificed the long-term future of the party to Chretien’s interests. Being a Liberal was all about whether you liked the current leader. The party from then on, and given the structures Chretien created, would stand and fall on the charisma of the current leader. There was no principled reason to be a Liberal.

So they struggled and swapped leaders in and out, the opposite of the longstanding Liberal tradition: Martin, Graham, Dion, Ignatieff, Rae. There was nothing there until they turned, in what seemed desperation, to Justin Trudeau. Surely there was hereditary charisma there?

It worked better than it should have. Pretty decent dead cat bounce. But after his first election, the best JT could do were bare pluralities, while actually behind in the popular vote. Now the body politic’s reflex twitching, partly due to force of Liberal habit, seems to have subsided. Partly due, in turn, to the fact that Trudeau has not been governing in the old Liberal pragmatic way, but has been partisan and divisive. Fully and finally obliterating the Liberal centrist brand. And he has been more dictatorial than Chretien.

Now, as generally with dictators, there is a problem with the succession. The Liberal Party previously always had a leader of the loyal opposition inside the party, a John Turner, a Paul Martin, a Paul Martin Sr., because there was room for it. There was always a reason to be a Liberal above and beyond loyalty to the current leader, and an accommodation for that, with some degree of mutual deference, within the party. This is important to a party’s survival, because, if the current leader is no longer popular, the new leader must not be too closely identified with him, but suggest renewal.

When Chretien left, even with a plausible successor available, the party spiralled into third party status because it lacked any underlying raison d’etre. Preserving a strong centrist party is always challenging, against the natural dichotomy of left and right. The process was not yet as far along at that point. Pulling it out of the death spiral with Trudeau seemed a very close shave then. 

It seems unlikely that the Libs will again come up with someone plausible out of the ether before the party mechanism dissolves, being held together only by a chance at patronage and power, and the country moves on. 

Shaken, Not Stirred

 

Stuff is happening. The videos of the January 6 events are coming out. Jeffrey Epstein’s client list is presumably coming out. X has broken the censorship. The polls are turning, and half the world is going into elections. You see a growing list of prominent people coming out as on the right, or moving from apostasy to faith. To cite one example, Dr. John Campbell, who seemed at the beginning of the pandemic such an establishment figure, has evolved into a radical, no longer trusting government. Or look at Elon Musk, previously the great champion of the left who was going to give us all electric cars.

I personally have found myself being contacted recently by old acquaintances who had previously informally written me off as a Catholic of intolerably “right-wing” opinions. And they’re acting like old friends.

I’ve been predicting it for ages; people are always slower on the uptake than I expect. But this year feels like the year. The wokery have lost the moral high ground, and have lost touch with reality to a point that is impossible not to mock. They are no longer cool. Soon no one will admit to ever having been on the left.

Someone has put together time-stamped video of the January 6 events, to show the overview. Of course, what they show is still selective, crafted to discredit the official “narrative.” But it seems clear that Trump had nothing to do with what went on at the Capitol, that it was organized and controlled by a few individuals, most obviously Ray Epps; that Epps and others orchestrating affairs were pretty obviously federal agents; that the police were undermanned and underequipped, either from incompetence or in order to create an incident. And the demonstrators, most not intending to do anything but demonstrate, but lacking their own leadership, look as though they just foolishly and impulsively fell into a trap. 

I suspect it was an insurrection, but an insurrection comparable to the Reichstag fire: an inside job, an insurrection by some party in the deep state exploited if not created to seize more power. 

As they have been doing since.

And the same, fairly obviously, could be said of the supposed “occupation” by the truckers in Canada. I cannot believe it was all organized by the government, but it was provoked, mischaracterized, and exploited to seize additional powers by those already in power. I mean, seriously: a slickly-produced Confederate flag at a Canadian truckers' rally? What significance would it have to a bunch of Canadian truckers? Southern pride? Yay slavery?

Or, indeed, the same looks suspiciously possible now of the Covid lockdowns; or even of Covid itself. No conspiracy theory seems too fanciful any longer. There are bad actors in government, and they want more power.

RFK Jr. suggests the real insurrection happened with the Kennedy assassination. The current upheavals are because they feel their power threatened by the common people. They fear Trump, because he is not their guy, not beholden to them and not susceptible to blackmail. They never expected him to win that election in 2016. Now they realize preserving the machinery of democracy is too dangerous. The people are no longer as easily led, and no longer to be trusted.

Scott Adams argues that, once you create an espionage organization within government, as the US did during WWII, and expanded for the Cold War, their seizure of power is inevitable. It is only a matter of time.

The default assumption is that it has already happened. Now we are seeing it, and it may be falling apart.

Madness and Civilization

 

A recent article somewhere listed famous people who were depressive or bipolar (‘manic depressive”). 

They could have saved time and energy by simply noting “all famous writers and artists, all famous war leaders, and all famous philosophers.” No mystery, no news: Aristotle pointed this out over two thousand years ago. Problemats XXX:  “Why is it that all those men who have become extraordinary in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are obviously melancholic?”

I fear, however, that moderns grab the stick at the wrong end. The assumption seems to be that they did great stuff despite being mentally ill. “High functioning depressives.” Which is absurd, when the highest functioning of us all turn out to be depressives.

“Considered by many to be the greatest English writer in history, Charles Dickens, like many great writers, battled depression for his entire life. It was said that he went through long periods of insomnia whenever he started a new novel.

“To deal with his sleeplessness, Dickens would wander aimlessly around London, once covering 30 miles (48 km) in a single night. On the bright side, it’s been reported that his spirits would lift bit by bit as he made more and more progress on his stories.”

The real story is that Dickens would be driven to write a new novel by the chronic anxiety that caused his insomnia. The act of writing soothed the anxiety and depression.

I am reminded too of Socrates’s comment: “By all means marry. If you marry well, you will have a happy life. If you marry poorly, you will become a philosopher.”

An intolerable home situation, being abused, causes what we call depression.

Depression is principally a sense of loss of purpose and meaning to one’s life. This is the permanently damaging effect of abuse. It can be expressed as sadness or as anxiety, but these are just symptoms: the problem is a lack of meaning and direction. “What is the point of me?”

Art, or philosophy, is an effort to create meaning. One is reaching for the transcendental values, the things that bestow meaning. The artist is reaching for beauty; the philosopher is reaching for truth. And the lawgiver or military leader is reaching for justice, the moral good. With desperation, in such a case, and so with the greatest concentration and energy.

This is salvation for the mentally ill: to stop being "mentally ill" and become an artist, or a teacher, or a shaman.

But don’t many artists end up losing the battle, and committing suicide? Don’t many philosophers?

They do; because art or philosophy is the path, and only the initial path, and not the goal. The quest for meaning begins to yield solid results once it generates and confirms a religious conviction.

Artists who become religious do not commit suicide. Instead, the depression eases and recedes. Religion happens when art or religion achieve their goal.

Thucydides, Shut Your Trap

 

It is fashionable these days to warn of Thucydides’ trap: that when a hegemonic power is threatened by a rising power, war usually ensues. This is especially supposed to predict an inevitable clash between the US and China.

One can be more specific: the existing hegemon will try to knock out the rising power. The US will declare war on China. For it makes no sense for the rising power to initiate hostilities: their situation is improving and their hegemony inevitable so long as nothing rocks the boat. This was the case for Thucydides’ own example, the Peloponnesian War: started by Sparta, he maintained, to check the rising power of Athens.

But the model does not fit the facts; it is actually hard to find modern examples. The current Gaza affair was started by Hamas, far from the regional hegemon. Russia did not attack Ukraine because Ukraine was on the verge of supplanting it as the regional power.

Conversely, Britain and the US did not go to war as world hegemony passed from the one to the other. It was all managed on fairly good terms.

Hegemonic powers do not generally fight hard to save their hegemony. Instead, hegemonies decline from within, experiencing a growing lack of commitment, not wanting the burden of being responsible for everything. Witness the British Empire. Witness the Soviet Union. They greet the end with a sense of relief. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Who fought hardest to preserve their overseas dominions? Portugal. The poorest and weakest of European powers.

In the real world of history, war seems most likely when a relatively minor, second-tier power is facing possible collapse, as a means of perhaps restoring its viability.

This makes sense: if your power is in obvious decline, and soon to go altogether, you want to use it before you lose it.

Hamas fits this model. The Palestinian cause was in obvious jeopardy due to the Abrahamic accords. The intifada had lost the backing of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states—all the obvious allies. Peace between Israel and the Arabs was spreading, leaving the Palestinians stranded. So their desperate attack.

Witness Russia in Ukraine. Russia’s population is shrinking. The economy has been held together by oil, but fracking and the move away from carbon-based fuels made the future look dim. 

Iraq invaded Kuwait because Saddam was in dire economic trouble. He owed Kuwait money, and he  tried to seize the Kuwaiti oil fields.

Graham Allison cites World War I as an example of Thucydides’ trap: the UK wanted to knock back rising Germany. Yet this does not fit the facts: the war was started by Austria-Hungary, the weakest of the major participants, and the UK was late and reluctant in. Austria-Hungary was on the verge of collapse; it had the least to lose on a roll of the dice.

I believe Hitler started the Second World War because the Nazi economic programme was a Ponzi scheme. In fact, Hitler said so, to his associates, as he invaded Poland. If he couldn’t grab the assets, land, and industry of Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then the Soviet Union, the whole thing would come down like a house of cards. As in the end it did.

Argentina invaded the Falklands when the regime risked imminent collapse. On the same principle, bankrupt Venezuela is now rattling sabres towards Guyana.

Militant Islamism has become a major factor recently not because Islam has become more dominant or intellectually vital in Muslim lands—but because growing exposure to Western ideas has threatened it.

The optimistic lesson from this is that whoever disturbs the peace is likely to lose the war. The bad news is, the next war is likely to come from some relatively unexpected quarter, not the adversary everyone has their eyes on.