Was Muhammed the Antichrist?

 The case can be made....

A Word on Feminism

 

Betty Friedan

Having lived abroad for some years, I have perhaps some distance, some objectivity. I can say that feminism has ruined North American women. 

It has set up any relationship for them as a struggle for power—“the personal is political.” No room for mutual support; no room for affection. Men are the ancestral enemy. They must be made to submit. They must submit to the woman in all situations.

This is seen as well in the “Karen” phenomenon. This is an assumption of power: each woman considers herself the ultimate authority on everything, and everyone else must defer to her.

This certainly does not work for men. A relationship with a woman means surrendering his freedom entirely to her leadership—and freedom is far more important for men than for women. And what does he get in return? A mother for his children? She’s not interested. Pregnancy and childrearing are oppressive—“barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.” Therefore children are resented. She will abandon them to strangers for the sake of her career, if she does not abort them.

So, he loses freedom, gets no affection or respect, does not get a stable home life, and she may leave him at any time, and take the house and kids. He has invited an enemy into his life, into his home, into his bedroom.

But interestingly, this does not work for women either. Surveys suggest women are less happy than they used to be in pre-feminine societies. Women do not naturally crave independence and leadership—these are male values. They naturally crave security, affection, and human contact: the things feminism has turned them away from. 

This itself illustrates why women should not lead in the home: they lack a natural sense of direction, literally, figuratively, and in all spheres. They are hard-wired instead to be flexible, and to follow the leader. Feminism has become the leader, and they are following it, against their better interests, right off a cliff. And, as they have assumed leadership in the family, they are dragging men, children, and society as a whole off that cliff with them.

Pray for Pope Leo

 But for what, exactly?

How Pope Francis Subverted the Church

 The death of the death penalty--on our SubStack feed.

Information Wants to be Free

 And it produces freedom. See our SubStack post.

Few Are Chosen

 The meaning of the parable of the wedding feast.

What Hypocrisy Is Not

 Read it in our Substack feed.

Why I Dislike Catcher in the Rye

 Read it on Substack.

J.D. Salinger

Synodality: A Primer

 As compared with the older, now obsolete, gospel traditions.

On SubStack.

Heaven Is for Real

 My reaction to first viewing the famous "Christian" movie from  few years back.

On the "Cultural Genocide" of Canada's "First Nations"

Apparently, European-Canadians are guilty of suppressing Indian culture, if only by their mere presence for the past 400 years or so.

Ah yes, Indian culture. 

How extensive could that culture have been, given that the local tribes had never come up with the wheel, or metals, or the domestication of animals? The early French explorers described the Indians they met, including the relatively advanced Huron and Iroquois, as “Sans loi, sans foi, sans roi.” Without law, without religion, without government.

What then did they have?

It is hard to get far as a culture with no writing system. Some things can be passed on orally, but oral witness is unreliable. Beyond the length of one lifetime, it is hearsay. What is passed on orally must also depend on a body of people able to grasp its meaning and significance, for it to be memorized and preserved. A written record, by contrast, can sit for some time ignored and forgotten, and then be rediscovered by some solitary keen mind able to receive it.

And was there any great body of oral record-keepers available? Each tribe, even each language group, was quite small, and not in much communication with their neighbours. Supposedly, wisdom was passed on by the few elders—distinguished only by being old.

Other than on the West Coast, these tribes were nomadic. They followed the game. They had no beasts of burden nor vehicles. They could not, as a practical matter, carry anyone who could not keep up. On top of that, many starved every winter, young and especially old. Often they could not afford to feed someone who could not hunt. Elders were eventually left to die. 

This tended to limit the number of elders available for cultural transmission.

And that’s not all. On top of the sparse population, it seems there were epidemics about every two generations that killed most of the tribe. Whenever the Europeans came to a new area, from the 16th through the 19th centuries, from Champlain through Lewis and Clarke, they found abandoned villages and clearings, the majority of the local population recently wiped out. How is it possible that this could all be due to first contact with European diseases, even three centuries later? By then, they should have developed natural immunity, even if they had none in 1492.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, trading with the Indians in the Northwest for several centuries, actually witnessed local tribes being devastated by repeated epidemics about every forty years.

Which is to demonstrate that the story that the Europeans wiped out the native people by disease, even inadvertently, seems to be another myth. 

There is an epidemiological advantage to a relatively high population density. It allows a virus to abide in a population and in its cattle, spreading at low levels, naturally inoculating and preserving herd immunity. When your population density is too low, as in nomadic hunter-gatherers, the virus can die out in that population in a generation or two, leaving everyone once again with no immunity. Within about two generations. 

This had probably been going on for thousands of years, with or without Europeans.

Now, what does it mean for a culture when almost all its members die off every forty years? How much gets passed on orally? 

So it is not as if contact with the Europeans could have wiped out Indian culture. After all, if learning something new wipes out your culture, if your culture is preserved only by ignorance of any other, what does that say about your culture? 

Anything of value will naturally be, and has been, preserved—the canoe, lacrosse, toboggans, moccasins, snowshoes, parkas, and so forth. If some cultural element was not preserved, it is because people found it was not useful. Culture is for man, not man for the culture.

America Derangement Syndrome

 

A week or so ago, YouTuber JJ McCullough posted a video arguing that Mark Carney’s drive for “associate membership” in the EU made no sense. He almost immediately took it down, unable to stand all the hostile comments it elicited.

Canadians have America Derangement Syndrome, which is strikingly similar to Trump Derangement Syndrome. It may be the same underlying disease. But it has endured much longer in Canada.

To begin with, McCullough is obviously right. Carney’s initiative makes no economic sense. Canada already has free trade with the EU. So the only point of the exercise seems to be to annoy the Americans, our biggest trading partner. Like his recent cozying up to China. It is all reminiscent of the early days of Castro’s Cuba. Not a wise strategy.

McCullough is also obviously right that English Canada has far more in common culturally with the US than with the 27 members of the EU. Language, history, geography, customs, sports, music, legal traditions, blood ties. We are Americans—America Derangement Syndrome is a form of self-hate.

And maybe that explains Trump Derangement Syndrome too. Trump is not just too pro-American, but too stereotypically American, for self-hating Americans. A billionaire who has carefully crafted his persona as an incarnation of success in the free market—the American Dream. He is offensively blond—even making a display of his hair. He is, God forbid, a salesman, and actually proud of it: an occupation beneath the contempt of any proper European aristocrat. He is brash and straightforward in the way Europeans have always found Americans to be brash. He is impolite, undiplomatic. 

On becoming president in 1801, Thomas Jefferson made a point of not following protocol in entertaining the British ambassador. This was the new American way; Thomas Wolfe has described it as “the birth of the American idea.” European concerns with manners merely served the interests of a ruling class. 

Is there a cure for America Derangement Syndrome? It seems impervious to either evidence or reason.

Turtles All the Way Down

A Hindu traditional image of the cosmos

I was upset, unreasonably, by a recent bit by the National Post on “Turtle Island.”  Because they were saying what I’d been saying for years. And no one has been listening. I want credit!

It was about “Turtle Island” supposedly being the traditional name for North America among the native peoples, the “First Nations.” There are problems with that idea.

First, the native people would have had no idea what a continent was, let alone having a name for the one they were supposedly on. Micmac living in Nova Scotia, say, would have had no idea there was a vast ocean five thousand kilometers to their West, nor one as distant to their North, or to their South. Nor would they have imagined this was of any significance. Continents are a fairly arbitrary Western idea, a cultural construct. Why, for example, are North and South America separate continents? More or less because Teddy Roosevelt dug the Panama Canal. In much of Europe, the Americas are still not considered two continents, but one. And what is the sense of seeing Europe and Asia as two continents instead of one? Why do the Urals split continents, but not the Himalayas or the Andes? 

When some ancient culture refers to living on a large island –as they all do -- they are conceiving of all creation, the ordered cosmos, as an island, not this or that body of land. And surrounded not by physical seawater but by the “sea” of chaos. Ancient Greece conceived it so, Ancient Mesopotamia conceived it so, and so did the Old Testament’s seven days of creation. “Turtle Island” is not North America, or even planet Earth, but the cosmos, the material world.

And according to the native people, there ain’t necessarily no turtle, either. There were thousands of different ethnicities wandering about Canada, each with their different creation myths. Perhaps one or two involved a turtle; perhaps none.

The “Turtle Island” concept as supposed native name for North America comes from Gary Snyder, West Coast Beat poet and environmental activist, who used it as the title of a poetry collection in 1974. He claimed without evidence that it was from Native American culture. He really got it from India, and from the Western philosophical tradition. It is an old Hindu idea that the world is supported on the backs of elephants who stand on a turtle. This image, misunderstood to be literal, has been preserved since the 19th century by European/American philosophers to be mocked as an example of primitive thinking and of infinite regression: “it’s turtles all the way down.”

Probably most people today claiming to be “First Nations” genuinely believe this was their own ancestral belief. How would they know? They got that idea from the TV, like the rest of us. They grew up in the same culture as the rest of us. “Native wisdom” is all a childish fantasy from the hippie movement of the 60s.

Felix Culpa

 You really need to read this. The return to nature is a bad move. The original sin is not what you think. Read it on our SubStack.

Life Is Not a Box of Chocolates

 Is it too late to write a review of Forrest Gump?

Here Comes the Cybercab

We have been promised self-driving cars for some time. Now, it seems, thanks to AI, it is actually happening. Tesla is rolling out its Cybercab, joining Waymo, already operating in ten US cities. According to the stats I have seen, operating costs are only 25 cents US a mile. Even that price might come down as we develop cheaper sources of electricity, nuclear reactors or solar power. And the self-driving cars are seven times less likely than human drivers to cause accidents—a figure that can only stand to go down as the AI improves.

This will lower the cost of insurance. It will also lower the large number of people killed or injured in traffic accidents, and not that incidentally, as a knock-on, the costs of medical care.

A century or so ago, the private automobile drastically changed the landscape. Highways, malls, drive-in everything, large areas set aside for parking. We are about to see a similar dramatic change now.

Nobody will need any longer to own a private car—a major living expense. It will make more sense to pay ride for ride; or, if you own a car, you will rent it out when you are not using it, auto-Uber, making it pay for itself. 

This will be a big reduction in the cost of living for the average family. It will be a bigger advantage to the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.

With everyone doubling up on vehicles, we will need fewer roads per capita. Nor will a self-driving cab need parking space at the destination. It can move on to the next customer, and reappear when needed.

This will free up a huge amount of prime real estate for development. Downtowns should regain advantage over malls. The cost of housing should go down, without the need to sacrifice so much to parking for residents.

In smaller cities, public transit will probably no longer be required. Taking a cybercab will be cheaper and more convenient. But we may also have cyber buses, driving costs down even lower. It may make sense for municipalities to offer the rides for free.

If you are in a larger city, and have a long commute—now you can be working as you ride. 

And as for long-distance transport—we will no doubt also have cyber semis. This will draw down the cost of transportation, making all manner of goods cheaper to the consumer. Notably food. 

And this is all about to unfold.

The Obligation to Forgive

Read it on SubStack.

The Pagan Gods Are Real

 

And you need to pay attention to what they are doing. Check it out on SubStack.

Hopeful News for Canadian Consumers

Interviewed just now during his visit to Ireland, Trump seems to make the Canadian “supply management” restriction on imports of dairy, chicken, and eggs the critical sticking point holding up a trade deal. This seems plausible. And hopeful. Carney perhaps did not want to drop supply management, so popular in Quebec, just before critical byelections and a critical provincial election in Quebec. He is a canny politician.

Trump also seems sanguine on the matter, expressing confidence that Canada will come to a deal soon. Perhaps Trump has been signalled that, once the elections are over, the Canadians will cut that deal. Kevin O’Leary has recently said the same. O’Leary has argued that a deal is inevitable, as neither side can afford the current high tariffs for long. It has to be all play acting for politics.

If they are both in on it, I expect a new deal sometime between October 5, the date of the Quebec election, and November 3, the date of the American midterms—giving the Republicans a bit of good news just before voting day.

I am hoping for cheaper cheese and eggs soon. And peace and amity with our American neighbours.

If I Were King of the Forest

 

Here are a few examples of how those in charge in the world today are screwing up:

1. Most importantly, just as so many in our culture are yearning for tradition and religious conviction, just as there is a general collapse in meaning leading to skyrocketing suicide, drug addiction, and mental illness, the powers that be in the Catholic Church are aggressively rejecting tradition, abandoning the field. We should be in a renaissance of faith, and the Vatican and the hierarchy seem to be doing whatever they can to prevent it. It makes no sense that mass is licit in any language except Latin, and in any number of liturgical forms is permitted—except the traditional form of the Latin mass. The Vatican has become the sworn enemy of tradition, when tradition is its raison d’etre and what the world now most especially needs and craves.

2. There is no coherent reason for Canada to be fighting a trade war with the US. There is no coherent reason Canada needs to be a political jurisdiction distinct from the United States. If the US wants us, we should be happy to join. If the US has demands in order to trade, we should turn the other cheek. The last thing we can afford to do is pick fights with the US, ten times our size and considerably more than ten times wealthier. This is suicidal.

3. The pursuit of mass immigration by Western governments is also suicidal. It is not just that the immigrants in such large numbers are likely to terminally change the cultures. It is not just that they cause the collapse of social cohesion and make life difficult for everyone. The initial premise for mass migration itself is folly. The claim is that an influx of new workers is needed to fund the retirements of older workers. At best, this only delays the problem and makes it larger—it is a Ponzi scheme. These new workers will retire in turn, and the taps will have to be opened wider until it all collapses horribly. Yet robotics seem likely soon to replace much human labour. The imported labour is likely itself to soon be unemployed and a burden on the state—if it is not, on balance, already.

4. Carbon taxes, subsidies for alternative energy, and such green measures make no sense, because the atmosphere knows no borders. All such measures in one jurisdiction simply drive industry to another, impoverishing us and worsening the environment due to greater transportation needs and worse environmental regulation. The solution, if there is one, is to allow market forces and engineering advances to develop “clean” energy sources that are cheaper than oil and gas. Only when the alternative sources are intrinsically cheaper can we expect world-wide compliance.

Catcher in the Rye

 

I have the privilege currently of teaching the novel Catcher in the Rye. A friend from college never recovered from reading it. He identified completely with Holden Caulfield. I can see how easy that is to do; many have.

For me, more the opposite; I was appalled by Caulfield. I would have cuffed him upside the head.

He shows no guilt for letting down his parents, his history teacher, his fencing teammates. He is perfectly amoral.

He does not credit Pency Prep with having good intentions, or his history teacher with good intentions, only with salving his own conscience. He shows no gratitude to his older brother who is looking after him, only seeing him as a sellout for writing for the movies.

He lies to his history teacher.

And all this in just the first four chapters.

Caulfield is right, of course, to see everyone else as a phony. But he fails to take the next step, of seeing that he is a phony too.

And we need to ask the next question: if all of this is phony, compared to what? What is real?

For Holden, it seems to be his own impulses. Therefore he is justified in not studying ancient Egypt; it does not interest him. Therefore he suddenly puts his roommate in a headlock while he is shaving. He simply felt like it. On impulse, he buys a hunting cap.

This is the worship of self: the path we have wandered down. We must “be our true selves,” not be “repressed,” “do our own thing.”

This is infantilism; this is narcissism.

Holden Caulfield needed to find religion.

I do not know, but I think Salinger, author, did. I like his later stories, which do involve religious themes. I wonder if the fact that so many took Holden Caulfield as a model horrified Salinger. Might it have been why he stopped publishing?

Or perhaps he stopped because he did not find religion; and therefore fell into a permanent depression like Holden Caulfield has.

 

Gloria Steinem Is Dead

I have not commented much on feminism. It is too dangerous. But there are two problems with modern North American women, influenced by feminism:

1. They see themselves as in competition with men, not in partnership.

2. In any competition with men, they must be allowed to win, otherwise they are being oppressed.

This makes any healthy male-female relationship impossible; and this collapse of the family makes a healthy society impossible.

Feminism, through abortion, has also now killed more people than all human wars combined; more than all former genocides combined. Feminism is causing global depopulation, and the collapse and disappearance of ancient nations. The crimes of feminism are directly comparable to the crimes for which Canaan and Carthage were destroyed.

New Hope for the Stupid

 The average person of only average intelligence. And half of us are below it.

This is an abiding problem. Stupidity causes great suffering, many ruined lives, many deaths. The folly of the world has always troubled me, and in my old age I have grown reconciled to the reality that this will never change. Stupid people are not smart enough to recognize wisdom when they hear it. Like the Duning-Kruger effect, if you are not intelligent, you lack the very mental equipment to recognize intelligence.

To get a sense of how much it matters, compare life in Japan, where average IQ is slightly higher than the world average, with life in Sub-Saharan Africa, where it is lower. Japan: 106.4. Somalia: 67.7. You can see the result in GDP, in general social order, in quality of life.

Or compare how Jewish Americans have fared since the Holocaust, with how African Americans have fared since the Civil Rights Act, not to mention since slavery. The Jews came from a lower base line, attempted genocide, and rose quickly to a position of great wealth and social prominence. African-Americans are still in deficit. People avoid saying so, but the most probable reason is IQ.

Even without formal democracy, unfortunately, everything devolves towards the mean. This world is built for average people: there are so many of them.

It occurs to me that we may actually be about to break through this barrier, thanks to AI. Experts predict that within a few years, machine intelligence will greatly outpace human intelligence. Surely even stupid people are smart enough to take advantage of such advice? Even if they don’t understand it. They might resist listening to smarter people, out of envy and pride—the perennial cause of anti-semitism. But if the average person is getting the advice from their smartphone, this may not apply.  

At least there is hope. The world might quickly become better, and everyone’s life more livable.

Canadian Guilt

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that Canadians are misguided in feeling any guilt over slavery or the Indian residential schools.

Slavery was never recognized in Canada. In the lower 13 colonies, laws had to be passed permitting the institution. Common law does not recognize the right to own another person. In Canada, as in the UK, there were no such laws. This means slavery was, by default, always illegal. There was no reason or need to pass any specific law prohibiting it. Although Upper Canada, aka Ontario, did so in 1793.

All a supposed slave needed to do in Canada, was to run away. The government and the authorities would not support the slaveowner in any attempt to recover his property. If he went to court, the court would declare the enslaved man free. 

There was slavery, granted, everywhere else in the world. But not here, except among the “First Nations” beyond the reach of the law.

I also believe Canadians have nothing to apologize for regarding the Indian residential schools. There has even been an attempt to make that statement illegal and punishable by up to two years in prison. There would be no need were it not a true statement. I have read the Truth and Reconciliation Report. Despite it being their mandate to dig up all the possible dirt on the residential schools, they found nothing. And there were no mass graves.

No doubt there were some predatory individuals in the schools, as there are in any school. But the structure of the residential schools was designed to reduce this risk to a minimum. No doubt some children died in their care. Children often died young a century ago. No doubt some schools were short of funds, and cut corners. As happens with bureaucracies everywhere. The bottom line remains: the intention to educate was a noble and a charitable intention, and one called for by treaty and by the First Nation themselves. If getting educated is an attack on one’s culture, what does that say about your culture?

You may argue that the schools suppressed the native languages. After all, they forced everyone to speak English or French.

Just like any language school today. Immersion is the best way to learn a language.

What is the purpose of language? To communicate. On average, an aboriginal language in Canada has about one thousand speakers—and, having no written form, no literature. One thousand people with whom you can communicate. Compared to English the practical value of knowing that language is infinitesimal. Why spend class time on it, especially since, arriving at the age of six or above, the student is already fluent in it, more fluent than the teacher.

These schools took in students from a variety of tribes or “nations.” The students themselves could not communicate to one another in any language other than English or French.

Were the schools designed to suppress Indian culture and force assimilation to the mainstream? Perhaps they should have been, but they were not. Just the opposite. Were assimilation the intent, there would have been no Indian schools—the children would have been sent to the regular provincial schools with everyone else. Residential schools preserved some sort of Indian separateness, cultural distinctness. They trained for skills thought useful for a life on the reserve, not for success in the broader society.

Canadians will need to look harder for something to feel bad about. Might I suggest in this regard, for more suitable contemplation, our chronic anti-Americanism? Our turning away from religion? Our unrestricted abortion, and now euthanasia? Our arrogance on the world stage?

The Broad and Level Synodal Way

 

Read about it at our SubStack feed.

"Mars Attacks" Is True

 Read why at our SubStack.

Is Lindsay Clancy Guilty?

There is major controversy online over the case of Lindsay Clancy, the mother who murdered her three children. Feminists are insisting on her innocence, due to post partum psychosis. Men’s rights types are insisting that acquitting her would be a travesty, a blank cheque to any woman who wants to off her kids.

I think the concern in either case is misplaced. If she is found not guilty by reason of insanity, she will not walk. She will avoid the death penalty, but will be committed to an institution for the criminally insane. Whether that will mean better treatment or a shorter incarceration is not obvious. It strips her of her human dignity. Either way, little incentive for other women to try the same.

My general assumption is that the insanity defense is not legitimate. It is equivalent to the old claim that “the devil made me do it.” The devil has no such power; the voices in your head have no such power. If we intentionally harm others, we remain responsible for our acts. In the present case, were Lindsay Clancy genuinely feeling desperate, she could have put the children into temporary foster care, she could have turned to her husband and family for help, she could have checked herself in to a mental hospital. 

That said, I suspect the psychiatrists and the pharmaceuticals bear some responsibility here. She turned to them for help, and they did not help. So what else was she to do? Indeed, they fed her drugs that might have made it harder for her to control her impulses, as SSRIs are inclined to do.

"Lake America" Works for Me

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Say Cheese

 

The argument I hear in favour of defending Canada’s “supply management” cartel for dairy, chicken, and eggs, against American demands for a trade deal, is that American farm products are subsidized. So it is unfair of the Americans to object. Our government set up this cartel instead of a subsidy, saving us tax money. 

Wait a minute. If the Americans are prepared to subsidize the chicken, cheese, and eggs we buy from them, why would we object? Great!

Bad for Canadian farmers? Good for consumers, especially the poor. There are a lot more Canadian consumers than Canadian farmers. The greatest good to the greatest number.

The loss of a strategic industry? I am not concerned, so long as the loss is to the US. We are not going to war with the USA. We are bound to the US strategically; what’s good for them is good for us. Nor is there any possibility of some hostile power cutting our supply lines—we share the world’s longest land border.

It is not even clear to me that the cartel is to the benefit of Canadian agribusiness. By preventing competition, it prevents innovation and excellence. Canada used to be a major supplier of cheese to Europe. There used to be dairies near every small town in Quebec or Ontario. Supply management seems to have killed all that. We need artisanal dairies developing unique local cheeses that might command premium prices; like Oka cheese from Quebec. We need innovation; competition forces innovation.

Thucydides Missed the Real Trap

Thucydides

“Thucydides’ Trap” is not real. This is the thesis that an established power will generally go to war with a rising power that is on course to overtake it. History does not bear this out.

What history does bear out is that a power or government in decline will lash out as a last resort, a roll of the dice. For what then do they have to lose? It was declining and fracturing Austria-Hungary who forced the world into the First World War. It was a once-whipped Germany that started the Second, as the Nazi economic miracle was about to collapse. It was a Ponzi scheme, and Hitler told his generals that unless they could plunder Poland, they were going to face economic ruin. Similarly, Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in desperation, cut off from oil and about to see their forces in China collapse. Juntas in Argentina and Greece risked reckless foreign invasions, of the Falklands and of Cyprus, to forestall their collapse.

Islam has been troublesome in recent decades for the same reason: it faced collapse in the face of Christian success and the spread of secularism through improved communications.

Unfortunately, we are in such a situation. Putin in Russia looks desperate. China faces grave demographic decline. They are liable to calculate that they must use whatever power they have now, bad as that gamble might be, or lose it forever.

We are at a moment of great danger.

Dispatches from the War Front

 Mark Carney has idiotically actually declared war against the USA, claiming Canada has been “attacked.” The sense of privilege this implies is staggering: so the US is obliged to trade with Canada, and on terms Canada finds acceptable? And every prominent federal Canadian politician, and most at the provincial level, have echoed his call for war.

Trump has in response threatened to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” The best part of the gag is that so many Canadians are getting irate about it. If he actually did that, who would it harm? Nor could he—it would surely still remain “Lake Ontario” to Canadians. Just a great troll, exposing Canadian idiocy.

One accusation—the actual terms of the rejected deal are being withheld from Canadians by our government, which is sinister-- is that the Americans wanted to end the requirement for bilingual packaging on all imports to Canada. This might be politically impossible for a Carney government to agree to, but it is a legitimate concern for American producers. They must repackage everything for the Canadian market. In practice, it amounts to protectionism—and forces up prices for all Canadians. It would be fairer for everyone if it were left to the consumer whether they were prepared to buy an item not labelled in French. 

Another rumour is that the Americans were demanding control over any trade deals Canada made with other countries. This has been called an unacceptable violation of Canadian sovereignty. 

But this is logically necessary for any free trade zone. The countries of the EU have had to agree to the same deal to make that free trade zone possible. Without it, Canadian firms can cheat by bringing in cheap foreign products and reselling them into the US, avoiding US tariffs by the back door.

Another accusation is that the US is demanding priority access to Canadian strategic minerals. How outrageous is that?

But they should, in their self-interest, and Canada should be eager to agree. America defends Canada; American security is Canadian security. We should be as concerned as they are that they have full and first access to our strategic minerals. Not long ago, the UK had similar priority access to Canadian strategic minerals as a matter of course. And for the same reason: they defended Canada if necessary.

Then, of course, there is dairy. The Canadian government is prepared to let the country die on that hill. But agreeing to American demands to allow in more dairy products would be of immediate benefit to the poorest Canadians. The free market is the best distribution mechanism.

No Deal Is a Bad Deal

If I am a prophet, the trade war our government has committed to with the US spells disaster for Canada.

A nation can decline quickly. In 1950, the Philippines were the richest country in Asia. Detroit was the richest city in America. Argentina was part of the First World.

Bad government can destroy. Any country is vulnerable.

Canada has had recklessly bad government since 2015.

I think Carney walked away from the trade deal his government had negotiated, because he was starting to get negative feedback. A lot of Canadians were irate at the harsh terms. The bad trade deal is largely if not entirely due to his “elbows up” tactics. 

Carney saw the Canadian public were going to blame him, notably in Quebec, and he was unlikely as a result to stay in office.

Walking away and having no deal is worse for Canada, but better for Carney. Now he can blame Trump instead of taking the blame, and stir up anti-Americanism.

Like Castro, or Maduro, or the mullahs in Iran. This never bodes well for the general public. 

God help Canada.

Why Your Priest Never Mentions Sin

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Of War and Remembrance

 Why I am a neo-con.

Non-Jews Are Dogs

 Don't shoot the messenger. Jesus says so.

AI: Threat or Menace

Take a Valium, guys.

Ned Ludd

Who Killed Jason Arday?

 

Spoiler alert: it was suicide.

How Religion Causes Wars

 It may not be what you think...

Alberta Should Separate

 

No consent!

Were I an Albertan, I would definitely vote for separation. If they do vote for it I will move to Alberta in hopes of getting citizenship.

The rest of Canada has this contemptible attitude: they think of Alberta as a colony, and a colony of inferiors. Meanwhile, Alberta’s oil wealth is subsidizing the rest of the country through federally mandated “transfer payments.” And at the same time, the feds are even doing what they can to hobble the Alberta energy sector, the very hand that feeds them. It is as if the prime objective is to show contempt towards Alberta. Uppity peasants.

But woe unto the rest of Canada if Alberta does pull out. We will be much worse off without its oil and the money and leverage with the US it brings. I would expect Saskatchewan and Quebec to follow—Saskatchewan because it faces the same issues, and Quebec because it stays in largely for access to Alberta money. With these three gone, it is hard to see an isolated BC or isolated Atlantic provinces staying around. BC needs its hinterland. Atlantic Canada needs its markets and someone to provide financial support. With Alberta gone, that would probably mean the US.

I keep hearing that polls only show 20-30% support for independence in Alberta, though. So probably not going to happen.

If it happens, I’m hoping that the USA will flex its muscle and intervene if the Canadian federal government threatens violence.

The quoted disgruntled Albertan is wrong on one point. He insists that there is no such thing as race, and the only issue is culture. We want to believe this is true, and we are obliged to say it is true or be called racist, but it is not  true. IQ testing shows there is a significant difference in IQ between Africans and Europeans, much less between Asians and Europeans. IQ testing is pretty reliable. 

It makes no sense to imagine skin colour is the only difference. Of course it isn’t. Africans, Europeans, and Asians have mostly developed in isolation from one another, under different environmental and social conditions. It just makes biological sense that, like Darwin’s finches, like  the different dog breeds, like the famous moths of Northern England industrial towns, they would have evolved different abilities and temperaments in order to succeed and breed. Race is not a social construct.

We deny this because of a fatal atheist misunderstanding of the doctrine that “All men are created equal.” This does not mean equal in their abilities or their appearance or their character. This means equal in their moral worth in the eyes of God.

The quoted Albertan is also wrong to complain that heretofore, integration has been considered “completely optional” by the Canadian government.  It has been actively discouraged, with government-funded “multiculturalism” actively suppressing any shared culture. Integration is “white supremacy,” after all. It is colonialism. And for whites mutual assimilation is “cultural appropriation.” “Multiculturalism” is actually enshrined in the Canadian constitution: “This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.” And the Canadian constitution is harder to amend than the US constitution—probably for all practical purposes impossible to amend.

Given this, the breakup of Canada, or revolution, or a US takeover, actually seem like the only viable ways to prevent a downward spiral into Third World status. As has happened, after all, often enough to other nations in the past.

What Exactly Is the "Synodal Way"?

 Spoiler alert: It's postmodernism.

A Continentalist Manifesto

I have recently been teaching my students W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. The novel reads like a long love letter to American culture, ideal for foreign students hoping to enter university in the US. 

But it is written by a Canadian.

At the same time, I see a reference to The Band as the originators back in the 1970s of a new musical genre, “Americana.” Their albums are a celebration of everything American: “Up on Cripple Creek.” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

Yet four of the five, including their two chief songwriters, are from London, Ontario.

It is not just The Band or W.P. Kinsella, either. Neil Young, from Toronto via Winnipeg, is also deep Americana. Leonard Cohen has a love affair with American country music. The most hyper-patriotic American Youtubers and political commentators seem to be Canadian refugees: Gad Saad, Steven Crowder, Mark Steyn, Gavin MacInnis, David Freiberg (“Viva Frei”), David Frum, “Clyde Do Something,” Jordan Peterson. Joe Schuster created Superman, who fights for “truth, justice, and the American way.” Schuster was Canadian.

Which leads me to the obvious conclusion: within every Canadian, there is an American screaming to get out.

Most Canadians, to be sure, define their Canadianness by not being American. But that makes the point. It is a textbook case of denial. The only thing that makes us not American is the mere assertion that we are not. By any objective measure, we are the same people, the same culture, the same nation, founded on the same principles: the same language, leaving aside French Canada; a shared geography, a shared home; a shared history; a shared legal system, the English common law; a shared form of government, liberal representative democracy and federalism; a shared patrimony in the UK; exposure to virtually all the same influences in our childhoods, Dr. Seuss and Disney, Sesame Street and Pixar; a shared religion, Christianity, with more or less the same mix of Protestant denominations and Catholicism. We play and have always played the same sports, often across our shared border: baseball, basketball, football, hockey, lacrosse. All have deep roots in both countries--sports often unfamiliar in the rest of the world. Even our standard accents, let alone our language, are indistinguishable to outsiders and usually to ourselves. It is rare to find a Canadian, if not a recent immigrant, without known relatives in the US.

For Canadians, therefore, to criticize America or American culture amounts to self-hate. It is a poison that enfeebles us. Without our Americanness, we have no culture; for we are Americans.

For those brave few who embrace our Americanness, like Kinsella or The Bend, it is visibly exciting, dizzying. You can witness the enthusiasm. It is at last meeting our true selves, discovering our heritage, spreading our wings, and breathing free.

The best thing for Canadians is probably joining the US. Even without the economic benefits—we pay a premium in higher prices and lost opportunities by keeping our independence. Even without the security benefits—with the rise of China, it is reckless not to join forces. And Canada is too vast and underpopulated to defend itself.

For political reasons, the US would not want a full union. That would skew their electoral map leftward; Republicans would never agree.

Kevin O’Leary has the solution. Keep our pretty passports. Canadians do not vote in the US, and the Americans do not vote here. So the Americans can keep their electoral balance, and we can keep our Medicare. But full freedom of movement over the border, like going state to state or province to province. No tariffs, and the right to live and work in either country. Our militaries should be fully integrated, and so should tariffs on anything coming from abroad. We should have the same currency. 

We would be richer, our quality of life would be better, and we would be happier.

 

Solving the Insoluble Problems of the Day

A problem solver

The world seems faced right now with several insoluble problems.

I do not believe in complaining about insoluble problems. So instead, I propose to offer solutions.

The first problem is fairly local: Canada is in alarming shape. While France, the UK, the US, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and the like seem to have insurgent movements poised to take power and perhaps pull them out of their current death spiral, Canada does not. The Liberal party remains in power, after a dozen years, and worse, remains strong in the polls. Pierre Poilievre is not that distinct an alternative, and is not getting traction in any case. Although he is a brilliant rhetorician,  he does not evoke in the electorate a feeling of confidence in his competence or his ability to turn things around. 

Who else is there on the radar who might be our Trump, LePen, or Farage? Maxime Bernier is the man who has claimed that mantle, and he has good credentials, but he lacks the necessary charisma. 

The other guy who comes to mind is Kevin O’Leary. Full of charisma, likeable, and a highly successful businessman. His problem is that he does not speak French, so he is a non-starter in Quebec.

Here’s a solution: form a joint leadership of the People’s Party, Bernier and O’Leary. Who, if elected, would be joint prime ministers. 

There is Canadian precedent for this. The Green Party has had joint leaders. Quebec solidaire has had joint leaders. Canada has historically had joint premiers in Macdonald-Cartier, Baldwin-LaFontaine, and other governments of the United Provinces period.

The second insoluble problem is population. The governments of the developed world have been caught between a rock and a hard place: population collapse will make government finances unsustainable. To prevent this, governments have been opening the doors to a flood of immigrants. But this mass immigration has instead actually further taxed government services, while disrupting social harmony. And after all, can you really save Italy by replacing all the Italians and the Italian culture? What have you saved?

But just take your busy fingers off the panic button. This crisis, I think, will solve itself, if we can convince governments to stop tinkering.

Shut the doors to more immigrants. Technology will in the near future increase healthy lifespan so that people will no longer need to retire at 60 or 65. AI and robotics can replace many human hands; less population will be needed to generate the same level of wealth. The robots will pay for our retirements.

The third insoluble problem is the war in Iran. Trump needed to go in; Iran could not be allowed to get nuclear weapons. But they have turned out to be immune to Trump’s tactics. He hoped to frighten them to a deal; but they are a suicide cult, and so will not surrender no matter how bad he makes their situation. Which is, of course, the very reason they could not be allowed to get nuclear weapons. Destroying the world wouldn’t bother them.

Nor can Trump consider a land invasion. The Iranian landscape and its large population makes that too costly. 

The solution is to get weapons to the Iranian people themselves, to allow them to overthrow the regime. What is needed is a large-scale smuggling operation. 

There; problems solved.

Spiritual, But Not Religious

This is not a tenable position. See our SubStack post.

Nature and the Great God Pan

 Nature worship is idol worship. Read about it on our SubStack.

Here's looking at you.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A True Story

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Yesterday--A Belated Review of the Film

 Full of spoilers, but you've already seen the movie, haven't you?

https://youtu.be/0ONU_H0EjIg?si=bHoc2FBtFEY8fAIe

Why the Excommunication of the SSPX Is Invalid

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Cardinal Fernandez

Those God Does Not Love

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The Folly of Excommunicating the SSPX

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Religious Funny Business

 Heaven? It is to laugh!

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Going to Hell

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Citizen Vigilante

I was able last night to watch “Civilian Vigilante,” the film that is causing a stir on the Internet—thanks, Elon!

I found it alarming.

The film is not anti-immigrant. Some of the malefactors in the film are immigrants; some are not. Surely we have a right to point out that there is a growing problem of immigrant crime. 

Nor is this the first vigilante movie. We have many films in which the audience is expected to cheer on a vigilante. Batman is a vigilante.

That is actually a bit of the problem: the audience is pre-conditioned to be sympathetic to a vigilante figure.

And he has a cool composure reminiscent of James Bond. We want to cheer him on.

However, there is a huge difference.

This vigilante does not just fight criminals. He also fights the government. In the film, he probably kills more figures of authority than criminals.

And not some historic or fictional government. This is not Sherwood Forest under King John. This is some unspecified government in Europe today. With references to the US and Canada included.

And the film allows the vigilante to make his case, forcefully, that our governments have betrayed us.

The protagonist, played by Armie Hammer, also plays fast and loose with morality. He doesn’t just bypass the law; he lies to his victims to suit his ends. He is shown having sex with a hooker.

It is, in the end, a call to revolution. And not just a call to revolution against the government, but also against conventional morality.

This is fundamentally a Nazi position. That is where this is going.

The film, and the stir it is causing, shows the bond of consent between government and governed is badly frayed. Where do we go from here?

Revolutions rarely end well. Anarchy is the worst possible form of government. Nazism is the next worse.

There is a heavy onus on those in charge to restore trust, before matters get much worse. 

True Believers

Ew, Canada!

I recently recorded a radio show for Canada Day, on historic patriotic poems. One participant said he would have to bow out unless we allowed him to read poems critical of Canada. Pressed, he was not prepared to say that Canada itself was a good thing; he was content to live here because there was no war.

It seems to me that we have come to a dangerous point when we cannot all agree on the essential idea of Canada. What then do we have in common? How can we function as a society?

Islam and the woke, neoMarxist left pose a grave and increasing danger to our democracies; and it is really in both cases the same problem. These two organized groups have substituted politics for religion. They have made their politics their religion, or vice versa.

Religion is at its core the assertion of supposed ultimate truth. Seeking truth is admirable; it is what we are here for. In response to these perceived truths, you bind yourself to a set of rules. They govern your actions. But the common sense of the matter, in liberal democracies, is that you do not impose these rules on others: religion must be entirely voluntary.

When politics is your religion, or your religion is political, that no longer holds. Politics is the exercise of power over others. So this means imposing your religion on others.

Can this actually ever be avoided? Since religion is definitionally the assertion of a perceived ultimate truth, mustn’t what is ultimately true automatically be the basis of all decisions, including all political decisions? Our current concept of religious liberty and the separation of church and state may be an illusion: it has been apparently possible because our true religion, over the past few centuries, has become liberal democracy rather than Christianity.

Granted that this is so, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism have found themselves capable of continuing within this liberal framework. They are at their core, perhaps for different reasons, “mystical” faiths. They do not expect to achieve a paradise in this world, and so they are generally content to leave this world to its own devices.

Political matters can therefore be discussed politely, in liberal terms. 

But Islam and woke neoMarxism, because they involve a specific political agenda, are not reconcilable with liberal principles.

This happens whenever a creed emerges that believes that heaven, a state of perfection, can be achieved by specific human political action here on earth; what might be called “millenial” movements. It then becomes a matter of ultimate importance to impose those specific political measures as soon as possible, a whatever possible cost.

Nazism is an obvious example: it believed it was creating a new species, the “superman.”

Marxism similarly believes that by following its precepts, we can achieve an Edenic state where there is no restriction on our natural desires, and we can all do whatever we want.

Islamism believes that we have an obligation to bring the entire world under the laws of Islam, which come from God himself.

Wokery, apart from Marx, is influenced by the postmodern idea that we create our own reality. Therefore the task of life is to force everyone else to accept our own reality.

I similarly fear Christian movements that focus on the “end times” and the apocalypse; at least as something dependent on any political action.

How to deal with such groups is an existential problem for a liberal democracy: for they reject the principles on which a liberal democracy functions. 

Such movements can be tolerated so long as there is no chance of them coming into power and ending liberal democracy. But I fear we are past that point, and the danger is clear and present.