AI and I

 

Image of cat and fiddle, with cow jumping over moon, by Dall-E

I’m a bit of a techie. I was developing educational software for the Ontario Ministry of Education back in the early eighties, and taught desktop publishing at George Brown College. I’ve only recently let that side of me take a rest. So I’m naturally fascinated by AI. 

The reality is that it is coming at the speed of a freight train on the main line whether we want it or not. We need to figure out what this means. 

It is going to make a lot of things cheaper. It is a dirty secret that AI can already diagnose illnesses more accurately, let alone more quickly, than an MD. So much for the doctor shortage. So much for the spiralling costs of Medicare. The vast majority of legal work can be replaced by AI: most of it is drawing up contracts and looking up cases in the law books. Perfect for computerization. Accounting too should be easy for AI to take over. So the most expensive things in the economy may soon be available to everyone for pennies.

Just yesterday, for the first time, I used AI to prepare my monthly student assessments. Saved a lot of time, and with only a little tweaking, it was perfectly accurate and acceptable. I’ve started to use AI instead of Google for online search, and this is again much more efficient.

Elon Musk and other high tech honchos predict that soon, with AI, there will be essentially no need for anyone to work, and we will nevertheless have a high standard of living. There will be little need for money. So that’s all good.

There are certainly also dangers from AI. 

First off, if AI can take over all the white collar jobs, and robots can take over all the blue collar jobs, things may be cheaper, but there seems to be no way left for us to generate any income.

My fantasy has been that, with AI taking over all the soulless occupations, we will be freed for purely creative work, for the arts.

But in its latest iterations, AI can produce quite competent art, and poetry, and stories, and videos. So is there any market left for humans even here?

I argue elsewhere that the human element here remains conceptually irreplaceable; just as a robot girlfriend would never be a legitimate alternative.

Whoever programs AI can also program it with their own political biases; can program it for totalitarian purposes, or in their own favour. In theory, we can always pull the plug; but if done well, especially over time, this could become impossible to detect. A matrix.

This is why it is important that it become and remain open source.

Still, Why Poetry?

 

Emily Dickenson

I have argued that we need poetry to restore meaning to our lives; to address and evoke truth, good, and beauty.

Still, poetry is hard. Why can’t truths just be spoken as simple declarative sentences?

Firstly, we can really only speak declaratively about material things. Anything beyond that requires metaphor. For example, the word “spirit” actually means breath or wind. “Psyche” actually means butterfly. “Anger” means pain. We have difficulty understanding abstract concepts, spiritual experiences, or emotions, because of this; because we have no way to objectively verify that we mean the same thing by the words we use.

This, without poetry, shuts us off from all the meaning of life, and all meaningful communication with others.

Poetry and the arts, but especially poetry, is necessary to express anything really important clearly. 

There is a second reason why we cannot speak plainly. Some people are invested in lies. They have something to hide. Truth terrifies them.

Jesus says in the New Testament, explaining why he speaks in parables instead of saying thing directly:

“Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.”

People who are purely materialist and bestial in their concerns will crucify you.

Therefore one speaks in parables.

Emily Dickinson:

“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies.” 

The Buddha gives a somewhat similar warning in the Fire Sermon. 

Your house is on fire. Your children are in the house. You cannot simply shout that the house is on fire. They will panic. They will not know what to do. Instead, you lure them out with toys.

Countering Population Collapse

 

Almost without missing a beat, the world has gone from a supposed emergency of overpopulation to an emergency of population decline. Nobody seems to have stopped to point out that all the experts were wrong. Calamitous population decline projections are the justification for all the mass migration. But even if it is a good idea, it is not a long-term solution. Populations are due to collapse everywhere: we will run out of immigrants in the rich countries.

Governments like that of France and Hungary are trying to reverse the trend with cash payments and tax breaks for women who have children. This is expensive, and not likely to be enough.

The underlying problem, I believe, is feminism. The entire idea of feminism was that women were to abandon their traditional role as mothers and go out and make money instead. This was always a matter of robbing the future for the present. It was always going to hurt us a generation or two down the line, as child-bearing and child-raising was devalued.

But what non-draconian practical measures could be taken now?

First, the current immigration policies are insane. Most of those flooding in, legally or illegally, are young men. We do not need men if we are to keep our population up: men do not bear children. We need young women.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan:

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop,

It's President Kennedy callin' me up.

He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"

I said, "My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot,

Anita Ekberg,

Sophia Loren."

Country'll grow.

Second, instead of demanding equal pay for equal work, we need to encourage extra pay for sole breadwinners with children. This was the old system: it was why men were paid more than women. It made it possible for mothers to stay home and have babies. It was also more profitable for the employer: a sole breadwinner is more stable, less likely to leave for another job, and can devote more time and energy to his work.

We might also do something about the need for and high cost of post-secondary education. This is intuitively a big incentive not to have children: they are too expensive. Trump has proposed a national on-line free university with degrees certified by the federal government. This may help. We could do the same in Canada.

On the other hand, free post-secondary education has done nothing to prevent birth rates from plummeting in Germany or Scandinavia. 

We must do something about no-fault divorce and child support. The current system is a major disincentive for men to marry and have children. Do so, and they have put a financial noose around their necks. Any woman can pull out at any time, and take all the children, half his income and assets with no responsibilities on her part.

It is perhaps to prevent such situations that, in Islam, a wife cannot divorce a husband; only the husband can initiate a divorce.

We might cap child support, and give whoever makes the larger income in the marriage, sole discretion whether to pay it, or take custody of the children. Otherwise we have slavery.

Unless both parties consent, we should require proof of abuse, adultery, or abandonment in order to get a divorce. Without this, marriage is a uniquely unenforceable contract. Either party can leave the moment it is to their advantage to do so. This is not an atmosphere in which it is safe to raise children.

A no-brainer: abortion should be illegal.

We must also go back to respecting the family as a self-governing unit. We have also overburdened parents by not allowing them to discipline their children—for example, anti-spanking laws—while at the same time holding them legally responsible for the actions of their children. Parents have lost custody for not agreeing to having their child transition to a different sex. Schools ask kids to spy on their parents; and reserve the right not to advise parents of what their children do at school. A woman was recently arrested for allowing her ten-year-old to walk to the store alone. 

This is a tough one: I know only too well that families can be abusive.

But there is a solution to this, which does not discourage adults from having children. Bring back the orphanages. Bring back the residential schools. End child labour laws. End minimum wage laws. Open the monasteries and convents. All of these were paths for children to escape from abusive families; and for adults, too, who wanted to escape parenthood. They have been systematically closed off. We need to open them again. This would dramatically lower the risk of bearing children.

Are orphanages or residential schools cruel? Is child labour for low pay cruel? What if we compare them to the alternative: an abusive family, never being born, or resorting to crime or child prostitution? 

No doubt many children suffered in orphanages and residential schools: but when one trained economist did a comparative study, he actually found that life outcomes for kids raised in orphanages in the US were actually better on just about all measures than for the general population.

Of course, doing all this will require about a 180 degree pivot in our thinking. We are always too slow to change our course. But then, look how quickly we pivoted from alarm at overpopulation to alarm at underpopulation. Look how quickly we pivoted from mass immigration being beyond criticism to alarm at mass immigration. Or from alarm at global cooling to alarm at global warming. 

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

Why Poetry?

 

John Keats.

Up into the 1960s, poetry sold better than prose fiction in Canada. Now nobody buys poetry books. What happened?

To be fair, all the other arts are also moribund. Yes, a kind of prose fiction and a kind of movie and a kind of pop music sells, but it is all entertainment, not art.

Meantime, we have seen spiraling rates of depression, homelessness, drug use, suicide.

These two trends are related.

Poetry, and the other arts, bring meaning. Man needs meaning. He does not live by bread alone. Poetry takes the brute events of life and makes them meaningful. 

Beauty is the perception of meaning.

By beauty, I do not mean mere prettiness. I mean what can produce the aesthetic experience, the OMG moment.

True beauty requires the sublime. It must convey some deep truth. 

It must also be in line with moral goodness; it must be just.

The three transcendentals are the irreducible source of all value: truth, goodness or justice, and beauty. This is what poetry, and art, expresses; and leads the reader to, like a torch held high, like a lighthouse on a hill.

The existence of each transcendental implies the other two. You can’t ever have just one. Beauty requires truth; truth is always beautiful. “Truth is beauty, beauty truth: that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.” Similarly, an injustice or evil act cannot be beautiful. 

This is what life is for. We are created to seek the transcendentals, and to create art.

In recent generations, we no longer produce or appreciate poetry because we have given up the search for truth. Worse: we are in full flight from truth. Modernism was a cry of despair, that we had lost access to truth and beauty somehow; all the old verities were gone. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” We kept waiting for Godot, and he did not come.

Postmodernism is something else: it is a declaration that there is no truth, no beauty, and anyone asserting such a thing should be condemned and hounded out of polite company.

This view is the death of art. It is giving up on meaning.

And suicide, drug addiction, depression, mental illness, and a war of all against all are the inevitable consequence. If there is no meaning, everyone just grabs what they want for the moment.

This is why I write: to try to shine a beacon through this wasteland of relativism and despair. To set off a flare.

Democracy Has Come

 

Leonard Cohen died November 7, 2016, the day before Donald Trump was first elected. Cohen’s son Adam says his father predicted Trump would win. Everyone thought Clinton would. Why did he think so?

Like any great poet, Cohen was a prophet. He saw deeply into the zeitgeist; he could see which way things were heading. In 1992, he put out an explicitly prophetic album, “The Future.” In in he traced two possible paths: a dark one: “I’ve seen the future, baby. It is murder”; and a hopeful one: “Democracy is coming—to the USA.” It was, clearly, a warning.

It does seem America and the world has been going down the dark path traced in “The Future”:

Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby
That's an order
Give me crack and anal sex…

This sounds like the obsession with power relationships and self-indulgence that underlies woke culture.

Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby
It is murder

That hardly needs comment, does it?

On the other hand, surely Trump’s election was and is the second path, the path of light. Cohen saw that the US was, as of 1992, not truly democratic. That new truer democracy is the “populism” Trump and Elon Musk’s X represents.

It's coming from the silence
On the dock of the bay
From the brave, the bold, the battered
Heart of Chevrolet

This predicts a return from multicultural idolatries to traditional American culture. Make America great again!

It's coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin'
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat.

The holy places—sounds like a predicted religious revival. The more so since he also says it comes “From the staggering account/In the Sermon on the Mount.” In “The Future,” he laments, “Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima!” 

And this stanza also sounds like a rejection of feminism and sexual politics, the great example of the woke power dynamics.

He also says true democracy is coming from “the ashes of the gay.” This might mean gay martyrdom. Or it might mean gay politics become a spent force.

Democracy is, Cohen says, coming to America first partly because of America’s cultural dominance, partly because the US system is flexible. It has “the machinery for change.” And partly because “It’s here the family’s broken.” This sounds like a need to return to “family values.”

I wonder if Cohen died in peace, seeing clearly that the US and the world was going to choose the better path after all.

The Truth about Religious Extremism

 

Religious extremist

Friend Xerxes has just put out a column based on an old headline: “Half of Canadians consider religion damaging.”

He agrees. Religion is a source of harm; religious certainty is a bad thing.

So how did almost half of us arrive at such a novel and wrongheaded idea?

I trace it to 9/11 in particular, and to a lesser degree the troubles in Northern Ireland. As he notes, accusing Buddhism or Judaism or Quakerism of being harmful seems ridiculous. But surely Islam, with the terrorism? And then, we cannot cite only Islam, we’d be accused of racism; so we think as well of the Irish troubles, and generalize, and say “religion.”

The misperception is exacerbated by the press constantly pushing the notion that Islamist  terrorists are “extremists”: the problem is supposedly that they believe their religion too fervently. They are too sure of things.

But if a too-devout belief in Islam is the problem, why was the Muslim world not generating terror until relatively recently? Why were Muslim states relatively sanguine under European/Christian rule, French, English, and Italian, during the 19th and early 20th centuries? Why were significant Jewish, Christian, Yazidi, and Parsi minorities able to live in peace and harmony in Muslim-dominated areas for centuries, until just recently? The Muslim Brotherhood was formed only in 1928; Al Qaeda in 1988; ISIS in 2006. Even the Palestinian resistance to Israel was not Islam-based until recently: the PLO was Marxist; the more radical PFLP was led by a Christian. Is it plausible that the Muslim world has recently become more certain of their faith? What dynamic would have caused this?

It is obviously the opposite: increasing globalization and increasing secularism in the dominant West has caused Muslims to doubt, to lose certainty. This has caused the growing violence.

When one looks at the background of actual Muslim terrorists, one discovers they do not come from a religious background. Childhood friends or older acquaintances always remark that they were never devout, nor from a religious family; they were recently “radicalized.” They are commonly Westernized, often educated in the West. Bin Ladin himself was an engineer. Al Qaeda ran houses of prostitution for their fighters.

Living and teaching in the Arabian Gulf, I found I could count on goodwill from any student or fellow faculty member with a full beard; this showed they were a committed Muslim. Any hostility to the foreigner or non-Muslim or Westerner that there was came from the clean-shaven secularized locals.

People similarly overlook, when considering the Irish Troubles, that Sinn Fein and the IRA were Marxist organizations, hostile to and generally condemned by the Catholic Church. The association with religion may have seemed clearer on the Protestant side; but anyone can declare himself a Protestant minister and form his own denomination, stealing the prestige of religion for his political agenda. 

This is a simple trick, used by Jim Jones, purely a Marxist, for his “People’s Temple,” or by Fred Phelps for his “Westboro Baptist Church.”

Islam has the same problem, as, like Protestantism, it lacks a recognized central authority. Any fraud can declare himself an Imam.

Nor, historically, can religion explain the longstanding tensions in Ireland. The English were just as determined to colonize Ireland and suppress its culture before the English Reformation. Religious difference was never more than an excuse.

What does religious extremism actually produce?

Those most committed to their religion, most convinced they know the truth with certainty, become friars and monks. Catholic, Orthodox, Hindu or Buddhist. Not a lot of violence coming from that cloister. Among Protestants, the most devout would be the Amish and the Mennonites. Not a lot of blood in the streets. Also, in their way, the Salvation Army.

It is only when you have doubts about your world view that you feel threatened by the mere existence of opposing views. Only then are you likely to resort to violence to impose your views. Relativism, not conviction, is the problem.

The poets, who see most deeply into the zeitgeist, rightly saw this at the outset the 20th century. Many of them lamented the rise of relativism and the decline of religious conviction. Kipling wrote: 

For heathen heart that puts her trust
  In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
  And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard;
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord

In 1897, he saw the growing reliance on scientism instead of religion inevitably leading to dark places. His prediction came true in 1914, and in 1917, and in 1939, and in China, Cambodia, Korea, and too many other places since.

Yeats wrote, in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Who is the falconer, the centre, but God? What is the ceremony of innocence, but conventional religion with its rituals?

And the harm is not limited only to violence. I blame relativism, the notion that there is no ultimate meaning to life, for the growing epidemic of drug use, suicide, depression, and mental illness. 

The media and the clerisy have done humanity untold harm with their propaganda campaign against “religious extremism.” Religious extremism is just what the world most desperately needs.

Drawing the Line

 

I believe that postmodernism is genuinely satanic. So is transgenderism; so is New Age. So is Pope Francis, who seems always to make things less clear.

They are all relativists: all insist there is no solid truth, and no clear distinctions should be made. 

God, by contrast, is the ultimate, the absolute. Relativism is his opposite and his negation.

Relativists want distinctions to be vague. God and monotheism require firm hard lines, judgements: between good and evil, truth and falsehood, self and other, God and creature, male and female, I and Thou. 

Relativists want everything to remain murky. Jesus wants clarity. He says that he is the light; that we must seek the light; that we must let our light shine.

News from Hell

 

I do not trust Father Chad Ripperger. Just an instinct; I feel what he says does not cohere. Rather like Jordan Peterson: everything must be taken on his personal authority.

But I am interested to hear him claim that exorcisms take less time recently. In the Sixties, he says, a typical exorcism took a couple of days. Five years ago, a typical exorcism took years. Now the times are declining rapidly: currently about a month or so.

This sounds right to me. We are entering a period of general disillusionment.

MSNBC or Not to Be?

 

Much buzz now about Elon Musk buying MSNBC. I hope he doesn’t.

I think Fox is highly vulnerable to a competitor on the right side of the spectrum. I think they have too much power, and the US and US right would be well served to have someone else in that space—so that Fox could not suddenly dump extremely popular presenters, or inordinately influence Republican candidate selection. 

However, or Musk’s sake, I think it would be a bad investment. Cable news is on its way out; it cannot compete with vloggers, who have no restrictions on their speech and much lower overheads. There are big names dumped by Fox whom Musk could scoop up and put on his revamped MSNBC: Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, and on and on . But if they have an audience, they are now well-established on podcast. Would they want to go back to the restrictions of being an employee?

And I think it is time to be concerned about concentration of ownership by Musk. It is troubling for one man to be in control of so much of the media landscape, and indeed the economy.

If, however, someone were to buy MSNBC and turn it into a competitor to Fox… they could so some nice things with it. There is a general tiresome sameness about both Fox and MSNBC now: all just talking heads making the same political points on every issue. What is the point of watching Hannity, then Ingraham, then Pirro all say the same thing?

I’d like to see a show like the old Hannity and Combs, or Point-Counterpoint. Have competent spokespeople for left and right sound off on the issues of the day. This is the way to know both sides of the issue, and we are losing that. We do get panels with a single embattled spokesperson for the other side, but that is still not balanced. 

I’d also like to see a formal debate program, on the lines of Oxford Union, addressing wider and deeper questions. 

I’d like to see something on the upstream culture, beyond mere politics, featuring those right-wing artists and creators who have been blacklisted for so many years. This could be a late-night talk show like the old Carson Tonight Show; but featuring the counter-culture. Huckabee has been doing something like this. 

Do a soft interview show, like Rogan, Larry King. One guest, one hour. We could have two shows like this, one for more political figures, one for cultural figures.

Do a regular town hall show, with different guests answering questions from a live audience—to hear the real concerns of the people. The intention would be to break through the screen of a professional journalism class setting the agenda.

I’d like to see a “Libs of TikTok,” showcasing the most absurd expressions of the woke. This or a separate show could also do Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder, or Candid Camera-style intrusions into woke spaces.

And how about a program on the DOGE theme, just investigating examples of supposed government waste, and arguments for and against the expenditure?

These are among the TV shows I would still be interested in watching.

Disillusionment

 At mass a couple of Sundays ago, the sermon lamented a general sense of “disillusionment” in society. All the drug use; the rising rate of suicide; of mental illness; of cynicism; crime. He might have mentioned bad art.

But if people are generally disillusioned, the next question is: what was the illusion? And the question after that: Is it better to live in an illusion, or to be disillusioned and see things as they are? Surely disillusionment, if painful, is better than illusionment, and is a step toward the light.

It also occurs to me that “disillusionment” might be the better formulation for what we call “depression.” The depressed generally have a better grip on reality than the rest of us.

Most people most of the time live their delusions. They believe what seems most pleasing to them, and ignore the real situation.

The broad general illusion of our time, I would say, is materialism. I don’t mean the pursuit of wealth: I mean the philosophical position that only the physical is real. And with this as a cosmology and religion comes scientism, the notion that science explains the universe, and anything labelled “the science” must be true.

Eyes are opening, and further revelations may come.

The Lost Promised Land

 

I saw him once in a subway station.

There was a wonderful flowering of Canadian culture in Montreal when I was young. It was a magic time. There was Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, Hugh MacLennan. There was Aislin. There was the NFB.

And that flowering wilted and died. 

I believe it was killed, first, by Quebec separatism, which made life difficult for Anglophones, and caused many of the best and brightest to head for Ontario. So the centre in Montreal was broken up.

But why couldn’t it have simply re-formed in Toronto? Toronto has never been able to match Montreal’s creative ferment of the forties to sixties.

I believe this is due to the dogma of multiculturalism, which suppresses the development of Canadian culture. Toronto is the centre of the multicult. The multicult will not publish Canadians; only writers celebrating their alienation from Canadian culture.

But there seems to be another factor. See how many of those Montreal names are Jewish. Montreal in those years had the largest concentration of Jews in Canada. Toronto, it is true, now has more, but as part of a much larger population—not as concentrated.

And some of the brightest lights of Toronto culture are also Jewish: Wayne and Schuster; Sharon, Lois and Bram; Lorne Michaels.

For Jews really are a light unto the nations, a leaven commissioned by God to spread culture wherever they go.

Any nation that wants a rich culture should encourage Jews to immigrate and to stay.

As immigrants, Canada should give absolute priority to Jews. This would vastly enrich Canada, and at the same time, reduce tensions in the Middle East, where Jews are apparently not welcome. The more fools they. It’s a win-win situation.

Of course, many resent the success of Jews. This is the sin of envy, and should be condemned whenever encountered. It is obviously to the benefit of all that the best rise to the top.

If the Jewish population of Canada were large enough, it would be that much harder for other ethnic groups to oppress them. It would be a protection for them.

I think even now, they would be safer in Canada than in Israel.

It Comes in a Bottle

 

I keep getting blasted on Facebook by an inane ad for “Jublia,” apparently a medicine for foot fungus. It’s a song, with dancers and the lyrics “Jublia. It comes in a bottle. Jublia. Not a person, it’s a medication. Jublia. Your doctor has more information. Saying what it does-- that would be too much!”

This seems at first glance a ridiculous waste of money. I have no foot fungus; I can’t imagine I have done any searches that might make it seem as though I have. They have targeted their customer universe terribly, then. What are the odds that a random person watching YouTube would have any use for this medicine? And yet they’re pounding it into the ground. I seem to see this ad more often than anything else.

And how can it sell the product without saying what it does? Advertising is to give the potential customer information. Further, an ad should concentrate not on the product, but on the benefit to the customer. So what is the point of an ad that deliberately withholds how the product might benefit the consumer? And instead boasts that it comes in a bottle?!?

I can think of a few reasons why this ad campaign might make sense.

First, it piques the curiosity. How, after all, do I know that it is for foot fungus? Already at a computer, I just had to google and find out. I imagine others would too. So, in this day and age, advertising online, there is really no need to say it. Better yet, Jublia has doubled its advertising dollar or better, getting the viewer to encounter it twice and in greater detail than a quick ad could manage. It has at the same time certainly caught my attention. It made the product interesting; this is not just one more spam ad that passes by the eyes and is not remembered. Not incidentally, by prompting a Google search, it has made the viewer listen carefully for the product name, and type it out. Perfect for memorization.

This still does not explain why it is worth broadcasting this particular product to random viewers, instead of targeting those most likely to have foot fungus.

Part of the programme might be to drop huge amounts of advertising in the media on something, anything, simply to ensure that the media, needing the revenue, doesn’t report critically on this pharmaceutical company, or the industry as a whole. Especially now, when “Big Pharma” is under siege in the media, and terrible things are coming out about the Covid vaccines. In the case of YouTube, to encourage the platform’s algorithms to censor such content.

In other words, it is a payoff, explicitly or implicitly to ensure favourable coverage.

Improbable? That’s exactly what the Kamala Harris campaign did: indirect payoffs to Oprah Winfrey, Al Sharpton, Call Her Daddy, and other news and affairs outlets for favourable coverage.

Trump's Plan for Peace

 

How is it that Trump believes he can keep the peace worldwide, at least without sacrificing US vital interests? After all, broadcasting in advance that you are against war would seem to only give aggressors free license. But he really did keep the peace for the four years he was president before. Was this just luck? And, in anticipation of his coming to office, I notice that Qatar has announced they are expelling Hamas from their country.

I think we can see Trump’s technique. It is the same technique that works in making a business deal. He makes a dramatic threat; if it is ignored he hits swiftly and hits hard. The other side backs down, or, of necessary, as with ISIS, quickly gets wiped out. 

Why was ISIS wiped out so quickly and relatively painlessly? Because he unleashed his generals. No restraints on them. 

Contrast this with the usual American way of war, as we witness it in Ukraine, or what they are requiring of the Israelis in Gaza, or saw in Vietnam, or Korea. You send in men and armament in dribs and drabs, worrying about “escalation.” Certain vitally strategic areas on the other side are out of bounds and mustn’t be touched. 

That looks a lot like a cover story. It is the way to prolong war: feed in just as many troops and just enough materiel to keep the war going at a good pace, without resolution.

And it is responsible for millions dying unnecessarily, not just soldiers but all those women and children they pretend to be concerned about in Gaza.

Why do American governments do this? Are they really so stupid? Still, so long after Vietnam? They can never learn the simple lesson?

Surely it is more sinister. 

Just as the cynics have long said; as Eisenhower said in his farewell address way back in 1960.War is hugely profitable for certain large corporations. Politicians they fund have a huge incentive to encourage war and make it drag on.

This even explains the chaos of the Afghan withdrawal. The abandonment of all that materiel through a hurried withdrawal may have been a feature, not a bug. It would all have to be replaced in the American arsenal. Lots of new defense contracts.

Trump seems to show this suspicion to be true, with his successes. This is probably one big reason they were determined to keep him from office, by fair means or foul. And why their first thought was to try the “Russia collusion” hoax. He doesn’t want war? He is helping our enemies!

The other half of the Trump formula, of course, is not to poke and provoke foreign leaders, as the war hawks do. Not to threaten their interests. Trump will respect and appeal to the interests of the other leader.

This explains why Trump is actually rather popular with the Chinese, with Putin and the Russians, with North Korea, with both the Arabs and the Israelis. They understand the rules of the game, and know that if they follow them, they can say out of trouble. Weakness makes the boundaries unclear; they can easily miscalculate, and face disaster.

For Trump’s system to work, he must of course preserve a credible threat of force; if necessary full-scale war, few holds barred. That is why he needs a hawk at Secretary of State: Marco Rubio, not Tulsi Gabbard. He needs someone who can spit bullets, for a good cop/bad cop negotiating routine. And he needs someone who will build up the readiness of the American Armed Forces.

In Gaza, I expect him to unleash the Israelis to go in and end it quickly. In Ukraine, I expect him to force a deal leaving Russia with Crimea, the Donbas, and a pledge that Ukraine stay out of NATO. 

Born with the Gift of Laughter, and a Conviction that the World Was Mad

 

There is a saying: “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.” It is often useful to defuse one’s anger.

But is it true? 

It does seem to me that groups and nations pursue obviously bad policies, insist on obvious untruths, and seem impervious to explanations. One obvious example: the persistent insistence that there are mass graves of indigenous children murdered in the old residential schools. Another: that Trump claimed Nazis or white supremacists were “good people.”

Are they simply ignorant of the facts, only repeating what they have heard? No; if told the facts, they do not counter them; they just ignore or suppress them. They react in anger. Can it be that they don’t understand what is being said?

Let’s assume that people are this stupid. They just can’t make logical connections. Wouldn’t the obvious solution, then, be to select out those with the highest IQ’s, and have them run things? 

This is more or less what Plato proposed in the Republic. 

So should we turn things over to the “Experts,” presumably weeded and fostered based on their intelligence and knowledge by the universities?

No; these academics seem more prone to believe obvious nonsense than the general public. This has long been ovserved: the “ivory tower” syndrome. Academics is an echo chamber in which delusions can be mutually reinforced indefinitely without ever being tainted by reality.

How about selecting for raw IQ? 

And this is the premise on which Mensa, the high-IQ society, was founded.

And it did not work, does not work, either. On any given issue, you will never get a consensus among Mensans. They are about as likely to believe the latest obvious untruth as the general public. And hold to it with the same energy. A meeting of Mensans is like herding cats.

(Of course, I face my own logical problem here. How can I be sure it is the other guy who is clinging to an untruth despite evidence? Am I smarter than the Mensans? 

I recall this little poem by Albert Einstein: "A thought that often makes me hazy:/Is it them, or am I crazy?"

But all I can do is look at the evidence and arguments, and use my own judgement. I think it is conclusive if the other side does not counter. Although it might also be that they find the matter so obvious that arguing it is tiresome.)

It seems to me it cannot be incompetence, in most cases. It is deliberate self-delusion. Most people simply believe or try to believe what they want to believe. They believe whatever they find most comfortable or most in their interests to believe, and ignore both the truth and the general good.

I daresay women are more prone to do this than men… They will cover an ugly situation with a pretty word, and it will all be okay.

A case in point I noticed recently: a YouTube psychiatrist advising that you should cut all contact with any relative or spouse who voted for Trump, telling them “How could you vote against my livelihood?” (Sic: surely she meant interests). 

This presupposes that everyone should vote only for their own self-interest. (Given that it is also in one’s self-interest not to alienate one’s relative or spouse.)

And so, I arrive at an important truth about the world: most people are delusional, and people are morally responsible for their delusions.

Which explains why we do instinctively think insanity is not a disease, but a moral failing.

The Bible knows this. This is why, for example, it makes acceptance of the dominion of God the first commandment. Not to see this, to be atheist or agnostic or polytheist, is a deliberate delusion. 

And this, according to the Bible, is the litmus test for heaven: are you seeking truth, or not?

The Archaic Smile

 

The archaic smile: a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.

Had a discussion with the chief of catechesis for my diocese. He reported that Pope Francis is reorganizing the Catholic Charismatic Renewal to focus as one of its priorities on helping the poor. Apparently it was previously deficient in this regard, and said function is not sufficiently covered by the rest of the church and Catholic Charities. 

More broadly, he stressed Pope Francis’s belief that the key message of the church to Christians is joy.

Happy happy joy joy. Bobby McFadden stuff.

This is of a piece with the directive for those catechising children: that the sole message should be “God loves you.”

I have been brooding about this ever since. This is off the rails. We must have better from the church.

Helping the poor is of course good. This is uncontroversial, everyone agrees, and no reason to have a church, let alone a charismatic prayer group. Many secular authorities are on that case. 

“Feeding the hungry” is indeed one of the corporeal works of mercy. However, it does not seem to me to be within the charism of the Charismatic Renewal, which stresses the spiritual, not the corporeal. For them, it looks like a rod shoved in their spokes, a demand for them to turn to the material and away from the spiritual. Their proper concern is the spiritual works of mercy: comfort to the afflicted, forgiveness, prayer.

Ending poverty is not the business of the church, not possible, and not desirable. “Ending poverty” is an idolatry. “The poor will be with you always.” Are we to take pity on and send money to the Franciscans and Poor Clares, who have taken vows of poverty? “Blessed are the poor.” Being poor is, literally, a blessing. 

It is important to notice that what Jesus asks of us is not to give money or aid to “the poor” as such, but to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. The distinction is important. We do this not because they are poor, but because they need something we have far more than we do. Their survival is more important that our comfort.

We are equally obliged to visit those in prison, or in hospital or old age homes. To put sole emphasis on “the poor” smacks of Marxist materialism.

As for the key message of the church being joy—isn’t that callous, when you are also obviously aware there are people going hungry, without shelter, without clothes, sick, old, in prison? Is the essential Christian message “I’m all right, Jack!”?

Jesus said the reverse: “blessed are those who mourn.” Did he ever say “blessed are the joyful”? No, again, the reverse: “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.”

In Athens, I visited museums full of ancient sculpture, and another museum of early Christian icons. The striking difference between the two: the older pagan sculptures showed blank eyes and grins—the creepy “archaic smile.” The images of Christian saints showed faces that seemed sorrowful, eyes like dark wells that seemed grief-stricken at the world.

As one ought to be, once one realizes what should be.

The message of Christianity is not joy, but truth. Truth is harrowing. It is the mysterium termendum et fascinans. “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us, poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

Pope Francis is not Christian. He has not seen the world as it is.

Early Christian icon

Keeping it Under America's Hat

 

Trump’s win is moving the Overton window rapidly in the US. Some people are going to be caught with their pyjamas down. The NYT and The View have caught the smell in the wind, and are trying to shift their tone. Trumpism, is now demonstrably the mainstream, and they risk either bankruptcy or irrelevance. The woke will soon be laughing stocks.

What does this mean in Canada? For Canda, just as for the rest of the developed West, the US sets the tone—more now than ever before, because we are so interconnected. Pierre Poilievre, in particular, has a tricky path. He needs to make rapid policy changes to more closely conform to Trump’s agenda, or start to look stale and conventional. He needs to make some striking new policy proposals to keep people’s excitement. He can’t just talk about the carbon tax.

This is a revolutionary period, and the revolution eats its children. You must race to stay in front of the parade, or be trampled by it.

Is Poilievre, and are the Conservatives, up to it? If not, Maxime Bernier might steal his thunder.

Trump’s drive to cut taxes and regulations and unleash oil and gas is also going to force whomever is in government in Canada to do the same. Otherwise investment will flood out of Canada into he US; the results will be too obvious. Voters will not stand for it.

The Justice League of America

 

The times are bringing forth the heroes we need: the “Justice League” of superheroes that many are recognizing in Trump’s cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Trump himself, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, and the rest. Even Ron Paul has apparently signed on. 

What do they all have in common? That they bucked the consensus of those around them, in the various fields they are now about to be in charge of, and demonstrated moral courage.

The essence of the hero is moral courage. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, courage is the one essential virtue without which no other virtue is possible. Therefore, to be declared a saint in the Catholic church, one must have demonstrated “heroic virtue.” 

Only when the social and cultural consensus in some time and place is in serious error is heroism either possible or necessary. Bad times generate heroes. Heroes emerge as the social background recedes from them, recedes from obvious truth, need, or virtue, exposing them. 

The 1980s spontaneously generated heroes: Ronald Reagan in the US, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, John Paul II in the Church after years of confusion and managed decline. The Sixties and Seventies were pretty messed up.

Similarly, the crisis of the Second World War forced to the front Churchill, Tito, and De Gaulle.

We are at such a point, and quite evidently at a greater such inflection point than either of these former ones. The gravity of the situation is reflected I the fact of so many heroes emerging at once.

Not just in the US; the rot is everywhere. Milei in Argentina, Meloni in Italy, Wilders in the Netherlands. Farage in Britain; Poilievre in Canada; and so on. Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant, Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, Billboard Chris, Tommy Robinson, the pundits and risk-takers at the Daily Wire, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and on and on. The heroes are mustering everywhere.

We are living in a heroic age, and the dark night may be over.

Dracula as Feminist Icon

 

I am tutoring a high school student with his regular English literature course. They are studying Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They have been asked to interpret it using three lenses: a Marxist perspective, a feminist perspective, and a psychological perspective.

What is missing?

The obvious significance of Dracula is religious: it is all too heavy-handedly about the nature of evil and the nature of the human soul. This is not even touched on.

Stoker and his audience might have been familiar with Marx. Feminism or modern psychology would have been unknown to them.

I am told all texts in the course are subject to the same three analyses.

This is not knew. It was true when I was going through college and grad school in the 1970s. Religious or ethical concerns were never whispered at in English lit classes. Even though, as a historical fact, this would have been the primary concerns of any author up to at least the beginning of the 20th century.  I often wondered why the later work of so many authors was ignored. I assumed poets must burn out. Instead, it was because with age they all tended to get too obviously religions.

We had to fill our essays and theses with Marxist, or feminist, or Freudian, or Jungian, or structuralist, readings of each text, knowing that they could not possibly be correct, and that the underlying theories had usually been discredited. A complete waste of time, made bearable only by the excuse to read the texts themselves. Much sound and fury, signifying nothing. While all the time, the meaning we were searching for was perfectly clear by reference to Christian principles.

We are deliberately avoiding religion and ethics in our education system, as though it is the proverbial third rail. Our children and youth are being deliberately directed away from any spiritual or ethical concerns.

And this has spread throughout society.

I have for almost two years been trying to set up a group of “Poets of Faith,” “who believe their craft is in service to a Supreme Being.” Yet over these two years, whenever I get a group together, and start a meeting, someone begins by objecting to the mention of a Supreme Being. The meeting dissolves in chaos, and I must start all over. Sisyphus, move over. Despite the stated purpose of the group, the premise under which it was convened and under which people agreed to attend: “who believe their craft is in service to a Supreme Being.”

I think this is the same problem, the same cancer. Even allowing others to form a group acknowledging the existence of God and some responsibility to him is not to be tolerated. 

It is the same reason churches are being burned down across Canada, and priests assaulted at the altar. And black legends are spread about mass graves near residential schools.

This is no doubt why our arts are moribund and our civilization in decline. It is decadence.

Rubio for State

 

Bad cop

The rumour is that Trump will name Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. This has caused consternation in some MAGA circles. Rubio has a reputation as a hawk, a “neo-con.” What happened to Trump’s commitment to peace? Couldn’t he have picked Tulsi Gabbard, say?

This is faulty thinking. I love Tulsi Gabbard, but she would be wrong for Secretary of State. She is too closely identified with the anti-war position. The only way to keep the peace is through deterrence. Trump needs somebody threatening, a bulldog, someone ready to pull the trigger, and, more importantly, someone adversaries believe is ready to pull the trigger. He needs a good cop/bad cop team.

Note how Trump has handled things before when conflict loomed: not just by rattling sabres or making threats, but by firing missiles and dropping bombs. Once by dropping the mother of all bombs. Then he can make a deal.

It's the China Virus

 

All my Chinese students, surprisingly, and all my friends in the Philippines, seem to support Trump.

Why? Trump seems to want to be tougher on China than the Democrats.

One student today tried to explain. The bottom line is that they believe Trump means peace. He may fight China economically, but he does not want war. They appreciate that. Of course all American presidents are for America, not for China, But they don’t want chaos.

And, my correspondent says, although Trump is tough on China in trade talks, Trump’s economic sanctions against China do not really seem to have been a big problem. He forced them to buy a huge quantity of American soybeans. A year later, Covid hit, and China was lucky to have those soybeans. Okay, he kept Huawei out of the US market; Huawei is now bigger than ever. 

Perhaps these trade concessions were actually better for China. After all, what was lost by Chinese producers was generally gained by Chinese consumers.

As a Canadian, I had the same feelings about Trump’s renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was hoping the Americans would force the Canadian government to drop their egg and milk price-fixing. It would have been of great benefit to the Canadian consumer.

Beyond that, my student says, the Chinese find Trump humorous, and always interesting. They are accustomed to not taking anything at face value, and therefore do not get agitated by his rhetoric. They probably understand this, and get his sense of humour, better than Americans do: it is about face, about bargaining. You bargain for everything in China. You do not take it personally. Of course he is all about America first, but they think he is generally well-disposed enough towards China. And very funny.

This bodes well, I think, for Trump genuinely bringing about a period of peace and prosperity.

Good News for Stray Cats

 

It all began, not with the pill, but with the development of mod cons after the Second World War: washing machines, driers, refrigerators, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners. The automation of the household.

At this point women lost their traditional role. Before about the fifties, a woman’s work was a full-time job. A man could not get by alone. If he was not married, and not with his parents, he lived in a boarding house. 

Hugh Hefner capitalized on this change. A man could now manage his own “bachelor pad” and be a playboy. There was no need to marry. Women were just for sex.

At the same time, with automation, women were bored; there was not enough to fill their days. This was what Betty Friedan capitalized on: how boring life was in the suburbs. It is her actual complaint in The Feminine Mystique. 

First they experimented with just making themselves busy by having a lot of children—the Baby Boom. Not good—work had not changed for men. The added financial burden with nothing in it for them drove men further into the Playboy Philosophy. 

So, with Freidan's feminism, women used their free time instead for political agitation. And they demanded careers outside the home to fill their days. 

So why marry? 

The most common and obvious remaining reason, if the marriage .was not for love, was to guarantee regular sex Not a great incentive. 

At this point, women had an advantage over men. Men generally want sex more than women do. It’s genetically programmed. 

Exploiting this advantage, and their free time, feminism was able to run roughshod over men for a generation or two. 

But now that has changed--with the ready availability of porn on the Internet. Men no longer really need women for sex. No doubt live sex is still better, but throw in the draconian laws feminists have imposed making marriage, sex, or any contact with women risky for men.

Women have overplayed their hand.

Young men are beginning to ask, what does a woman bring to the table, making a relationship with them worth the risk?

If the relationship is transactional, it is hard to see an answer. 

For children? Yes, but women are programmed by nature to want children more than men do. They can physically have children with just a one-night stand, but it is hard to raise children on your own.

A man is also still valuable to a woman for protection, and for heavy lifting around the house. Women are simply not as physically strong as men. 

But what does a real woman bring to make a man’s life better anymore? What can she do that he can’t do for himself? What does she bring that is worth the expense and the risk?

Suddenly men have all the chips in this game.

Women do not seem to realize this yet. They have been raised to view themselves as immensely valuable. Just for existing.

The result will be a rapid increase in the number of angry cat ladies, who will wonder what happened.

Prices Will Go Up!

 

Since the call came down early this morning, I have encountered three leftists lamenting their loss to Trump. What most concerns them surprises me.

“Prices will go up,” one says. 

“Don’t those stupid people realize it is not China that pays the tariffs? It’s the consumer!” another says.

So they don’t fear some Trump Nazi dictatorship, or the supposed loss of abortion rights. Those were just a cover story for the rubes, I guess. Of course they were: those were absurd on their face.

It is tariffs.

But then, how can their concern really be that prices will go up? After all, prices held steady through Trump’s first term; they went up dramatically under Biden. Their guy.

It is not prices. It is tariffs.

And not just any tariffs either.

After all, not long ago, it was the left that was opposed to free trade. The Canadian Liberal Pary lost my support over just that issue. 

The only way I can see this making sense is that they fear tariffs will hurt China, and they are secretly rooting for China to defeat the evil capitalists to show that the Marxist system is best.

To be fair, not just China. They of course also want tariffs and trade barriers on Cuba dropped as well.

Trump does says he wants to impose more tariffs. It does seem common sense that this will raise prices. I have always been a free trader myself. But I am open to Trump’s arguments.

If it will raise prices, it will do other things as well. I was convinced by Trump’s argument for tariffs on steel: it is strategically important not to rely on some foreign source for essential materials. This makes you vulnerable to blockade in time of war. Or, as we have seen recently, times of epidemic.

It will further encourage more manufacturing, and more economic activity, at home. This is Trump’s current  argument. Things may cost more money, but more of the money stays in the USA, instead of being drained away to China or some other nation. When you look at it in those terms, of the economy as a whole, might tariffs actually conserve, i.e., save, money? Don’t you save money by keeping it in the household, making your own things, darning your own socks, growing your own garden, instead of spending it at the store?

And Trump has raised another issue. The extra money from tariffs goes to fund our government. Trump suggested this might even replace income tax.

The argument that tariffs are being paid by the consumer, not by China, is being made by the same people who keep selling or buying the idea that taxes on “big corporations,” or a raised minimum wage, is money taken from the corporation, and not the consumer. Same to same.

So the real question is whether it is better to pay your taxes as tariffs, or as income tax. The foreign goods actually remain the same price. 

Paying taxes on consumption rather than income  is more voluntary, and that seems a good thing. Taxing income naturally serves to suppress initiative or hard work, and takes money the individual might have better use for—such as investing it to improve their business, hence the economy. With a tax on consumption, you can reduce your tax burden by reducing your consumption of foreign goods. It encourages saving and investing rather than spending.

Granted, an economy needs consumers as well as producers. But on balance, surely someone who overproduces is more valuable to the economy and to the rest of us than someone who overconsumes. And if producers can be found abroad, as now, surely consumers can be too.

The idea is worth a look, and perhaps a trial.

Kamala Chameleon and the Big Lie

 

Look! The Moon is Green!

Kamala Harris has by come commentators been nicknamed “Kamala Chameleon,” because she seems to tell every interest group whatever they want to hear. She is against fracking; she is for fracking. She is against a border wall; she is for a border wall. She wants to confiscate guns; she is for the Second Amendment. 

This, since she herself raised the comparison, is something else she and the Democrats have in common with Hitler. This is why historians have trouble classifying Nazi ideology, have trouble defining what Nazism actually was. As William L. Shirer observed in following Hitler’s rise, he would simply promise every crowd whatever he thought they most wanted to hear.

This makes sense, because Nazism’s core value was simply power, ultimately power in the hands of one man. Like the modern left, it saw all of human society as a power struggle. The goal was (and is) to get more power for yourself, not to advance anyone else’s interests. So you make whatever promises will achieve this. Once in power, you then do as you like.

Another way in which the modern Democrats echo the Nazis is in their embrace of the propaganda technique of the “big lie”: that if you keep repeating something often enough, it comes to be, or be accepted as, truth. This is the fundamental ideology of postmodernism. It is why they can assert that men become women, and vice versa, by saying so, and it must then be illegal for anyone to say otherwise. They use the big lie on the hustings again and again, asserting the Russian collusion hoax, the fine people hoax, the Vance sofa hoax, the Liz Cheney firing squad hoax, the drink bleach hoax, and a dozen others, knowing they are debunked.

The Final Polls

 

The popularity of polls over fortnights

It is the eve of the US elections, and the polls are contradictory—Including polls from previously highly accurate pollsters. Just the other day, one highly reliable pollster showed Harris up by three in Iowa, and another that Trump will win by seven. That’s no margin of error.

I think polling is no longer a science; I guess because people no longer answer their phones or are prepared to tell a stranger how they will vote. It is hair-raising to hear a pollster talk about all the adjustments they make to the raw data. I also keep hearing them cite polls, even their own, and then say “but I can’t believe that’s right.” In the end, they are guessing.

We should have a clearer idea by this time tomorrow. 

A Storm in a Peanut

 

God seems to have intervened again in the US election, again in Trump’s favour. The issue of the day is, unexpectedly, the killing of Peanut the squirrel by the NY state government. This seems well timed and calculated to endorse Trump’s message of less government regulation. It should also remind everyone of his “they’re killing the dogs. They’re killing the cats!” comments at the Harris debate; and seems to reinforce them. Big government does not care about animals. And people generally care more about their pets than other people.

Incidentally, it irritates me that commentators, even those opposed to the government’s action, keep referring to Peanut and Fred the Raccoon being “euthanized.”  “Euthanasia” properly refers to mercy killing. This includes when it is done to animals—we do not refer to a chicken or a cow being “euthanized” at the abattoir, even though every effort is made to make their death painless. It counts as euthanasia if the likely alternative is suffering for the animal. Peanut and Fred were executed or killed by the state, not euthanized.

And since I mentioned it, about the phrase “they’re killing the dogs. They’re killing the cats!” Notice how often Trump’s comments are made into rap memes. It shows his profound talent as a rhetorician. His cadences are naturally musical. They are also naturally comic; timing is everything in comedy, and Trump has a perfect ear for rhythm and timing. This makes him always enjoyable and memorable to listen to. 

He is completely aware of this; he works at it. Talking to Joe Rogan, he demurred that “Communist Kamala” was not an ideal insult, because it is hard to say. The rhythm is not great. He knows what he is doing.