The Manchurian Candidate

Biden His Time?

A big point of having a democracy is that the leaders are beholden to the people. The problem with letting Biden become president is that he apparently is not. He is beholden so some unknown person or persons who engineered his nomination and election.

We do not know who they are; we do not know what they want. But they will have their demands, it must be something important, it must be something they cannot afford to let the rest of us know about,  and he will have to accede.

A Poetry Slam

 

A recent example of the growing racism in Canada: I recently received a Facebook announcement for a Poetry Slam. Poets were invited to sign up, to be chosen by lottery. However, just below this was the note, in large print, “60% of slam spots reserved for Black and Indigenous poets.”

Couldn’t be more blatant than that. 

The invitation was illustrated by a photo of a woman wearing a black t-shirt reading “NOT TODAY COLONIZER.”

Segregation, racial quotas, and hate speech, too. Lynchings next. I would be concerned about attending such an event while white, Jewish, or Asian. Poetry slams can get emotional.

The event is free for blacks and indigenous; $14 for all others, explicitly as a form of “redistribution/reparations.” (Although they say nobody will be turned away for lack of funds.)

Interesting that this is one post Facebook neither flags nor bans. Just to see what would happen, I reported it, and they quickly assured me that it violated none of their "community standards."

Welcome to the Weimar Republic.

War Drums Along the Potomac

 

The revelations from Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell may not be enough to prompt the Supreme Court or Congress to overturn the election. But they are already enough to convince just about everyone on the right that the election results are not legitimate.

The great strength of democracy is that, having voted, everyone feels they have a stake in the government, and this prompts most of us to comply with the laws and the rules. This is suddenly no longer so in the USA.

We now have the worst possible scenario. If Biden is allowed to take office, the right will not accept it, Even commentators who scoffed at it until a few weeks ago, are now talking revolution, martial law, or civil war. If Trump is left in office, the left will erupt in new violence. And there will be demands from his supporters for a clampdown. These people, after all, have been shown now to be treasonous.

We have been dumb lucky so far that only the left has been trying to impose their will by violence. It is going to get far messier if now there are two sides.

The Threat from Danish Mink

 

There is a possibility they may spread coronavirus to a reservoir in nature.

The Mask of Authoritarianism

 

Icarus asserts his liberty.

My friend Xerxes, the left-leaning columnist, has recently made the Orwellian assertion that anyone who resists wearing a mask is an authoritarian.

No doubt he is sincere; Project Veritas recently released recordings of internal conversations at CNN, and they too sound absolutely sincere. This is the Devil’s work. The Devil, the Accuser, predisposes us, once we go off the moral rails, to begin to assert the very opposite of the truth. Xerxes, I can deduce, wants a nice authoritarian government, and he wants to blame someone else for it.

His logic is this:

1. people who resist masks do so because the experts keep changing their advice.

3. it is authoritarian to expect truth to be objective and unchanging.

To be clear on how wrong this is, Merriam-Webster gives its first definition of “authoritarianism" as “of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority.” Oxford defines "authoritarian" as “A person who favours obedience to authority as opposed to personal liberty; an authoritarian person.”

But that would not matter to Xerxes; in the same column, he objects to dictionary definitions as “authoritarian.”

Xerxes acknowledges that the experts have indeed kept changing their advice. Although it would be more accurate to say that different experts have expressed different opinions all along, and it is government that have been changing their advice.

But, he points out, that is how science operates.

“Initially, masks were considered useless. Immediately, experimenters began testing that hypothesis. They measured aerosol transmission indoors and outdoors. Medical recommendations changed to reflect those findings. That’s the scientific mindset.” For science, “any advice that doesn’t change will be suspect.”

So those who resist current government authority fail to understand science. They want “An absolute, unimpeachable, forever and ever, authority. Which is the opposite of the scientific approach.”

Here he gets the scientific enterprise backwards. Science is and has always been the quest for natural laws: that is, for maxims about nature that are always true: the Law of Gravity, the Law of Inertia, and so forth. It is true, by the nature of things, that any such established law of nature might be overturned tomorrow by a “black swan” event; natural laws do not have the certainty of the laws of reason. But that is not considered by science the goal; rather, it would represent a failure of the science.

It is also true that science progresses by disproving things, never by proving things. However, the likelihood that a given model or theory is true is measured in science by the fact that it has been tested over a long period and not been disproven. That is the scientific method. If you find theories and models being rapidly overturned or changed, this means science has, in this case, clearly been failing to approach truth. To see the change itself as evidence science is getting closer to truth is like seeing pollution as proof that a factory is working efficiently, or fever as evidence of good health.

As this suggests, more broadly, truth is stable and unchanging by its nature. It is not the truth that keeps changing; it is theories that keep changing if they fail to correspond with reality. Were this no so, there would be no grounds but whim on which to change our theories. To say that science now thinks relativity is more accurate, and Newtonian physics inadequate, is not to say that the cosmos changed between Newton and Einstein.

Nor is it some sort of infringement on personal liberty to seek the truth, or to act in conformity with it. It is nonsense to argue that acknowledging gravity is authoritarian because it denies us our freedom to fly at will.

But that is where the political left now is: that is the sort of thing they now assert. That is what we see now, for example, in “gender studies.”

The League of Democracies

An earlier failed experiment,

The current problems with the US election are disturbing. What happens if elections can no longer be trusted even in the world’s leading democracy? Could the US now descend into anarchy or dictatorship? Where would that leave the rest of us?

This brings to mind something I suggested here some time ago: a League of Democratic Nations. One important function of such an international group would be to ensure the legitimacy of one another’s elections.

We cannot rely on the UN for this: the UN includes nations that are not themselves democratic. Just as we cannot rely on the UN to protect human rights.

If, however, we had a consortium of democratic nations, teams of observers could be sent whenever a member was holding elections, and they could certify that the process did or did not meet established standards. As foreigners, they would not have any vested interest, as everybody charged with managing and with counting votes in the US currently does. Or even if the observer from New Zealand did have some partisan interest, in seeing one party and not another winning an American election, said partisan interest would be unlikely to also align with the interests of the observer from Norway.

If the election was declared fraudulent, and the host country did not invalidate it, the obvious sanction would be to eject that nation from the alliance, presumably losing some important advantages.

Among said important advantages might be this: should any member government be overthrown by undemocratic processes, a coup, say, or a revolution, the other member states would be bound to intervene jointly to re-establish the lawful government.

As an additional incentive, other members of the alliance could be bound to grant sanctuary for any electorally-defeated leader who seeks it, without possibility of extradition. This makes it personally worthwhile for leaders to sign on, and guarantees continuing democracy at the same time. Too many fledgling democracies fall into the folly of prosecuting former leaders for crimes while in office. Doing so gives leaders a powerful incentive to refuse to hand over power. Their punishment, at worst, becomes exile.

To join the alliance might require one’s elections to be observed and certified legitimate a set number of times—perhaps three election cycles. A certain standard of human rights should also be required.

The alliance should also be a military one: member states come to one another’s aid in case of attack from any outside power.

If such an association were set up, I suspect it would go a long way towards expanding democracy around the world.

Trudeau's Biggest Scandal

Brian Lilley, on the right, and Warren Kinsella, on the left, at last agree on something: Trudeau's government has seriously screwed up on the COVID vaccine.

Let's hope Kinsella is wrong in his prediction that Canadians will not get a vaccine for another six months.

 

A Midrash

While he was yet speaking with them, Rachel came with her father’s sheep, for she kept them. When Jacob saw Rachel the daughter of Laban, his mother’s brother, and the sheep of Laban, his mother’s brother, Jacob went near, and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and watered the flock of Laban his mother’s brother. Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice, and wept. Jacob told Rachel that he was her father’s relative, and that he was Rebekah’s son. She ran and told her father. 

--Genesis 29:9-11, WEB. 

 

Jacob treated Rachel at once as his cousin, which caused significant whispering among the by-standers. They censured Jacob for his demeanor toward her, for since God had sent the deluge upon the world, on account of the immoral life led by men, great chastity had prevailed, especially among the people of the east. The talk of the men reduced Jacob to tears. Scarcely had he kissed Rachel when he began to weep, for he repented of having done it.

There was reason enough for tears. Jacob could not but remember sadly that Eliezer, his grandfather's slave, had brought ten camels laden with presents with him to Haran, when he came to sue for a bride for Isaac, while he had not even a ring to give to Rachel. Moreover, he foresaw that his favorite wife Rachel would not lie beside him in the grave, and this, too, made him weep.

--Midrash (Ginsberg, Legends of the Jews).

“Then Jacob kissed Rachel. and he raised his voice and wept.” Bereishis 29: 11

Rashi explains that he cried because he came empty-handed. He said, “My father’s servant came with ten camels laden with gifts and finery, and I come with empty hands.”

Rashi goes on to explain to us why he didn’t bring a gift for Rachel. When Jacob found out that Esau was plotting to kill him, he fled from his father’s home. Esau sent his son Alifaz to chase down Jacob. Alifaz was a Tzaddik, and when he approached Jacob he said, “I can’t kill you because you are an innocent man. On the other hand, what will be with the command of my father?” Jacob said to him, “A poor man has the halachic status of a dead man. Take my money, and it will be considered as if you killed me, so on some level you will have fulfilled your father’s words.” As a result, Jacob came to the well empty-handed. When it was time to propose to Rachel, he didn’t have the gifts that would be expected, and so, he raised his voice and cried.

--Rabbinic commentary.

The theme that runs through this is the need to respect the proprieties. And this is the solution to the problem that sometimes moral demands will conflict: as in the case of Alifaz. Following tradition and set laws, even if in a “legalistic” manner, protects us in such moments.

Alifaz’s dilemma speaks to the children of dysfunctional families, as he was, who are torn between the requirement for “filial piety,” on the one hand, the demands of the family, and the fact that a narcissistic parent is often seeking their harm or demanding that they behave immorally towards others. The answer is apparently to give the parent their strict literal due, no more. Observe the proprieties. Confucius makes the same point.

In order to do this, it is essential to have an established moral code, the meaning of which is precise and clear. This is why we need the Ten Commandments, despite the fact that the principles of true morality are embedded in the conscience of each of us. This is why we need the Bible, and organized religion.

And this is also why people who act on their immediate desires without minding the requirements of propriety, are so damaging.

The situation of Jacob and Rachel is in turn a warning against the mirage of “true love,” which so often misleads the abused. It is not enough that two people are “in love.” A love that does not follow the proprieties is not true love, for this is ultimately disrespectful of the other party. This is putting the emotion or the urge above their human dignity.

Clear traditions and requirements protect us from giving another either too much or too little recognition. Too much, and you are feeding their possible narcissism. Too little, and you are driving them towards depression and anxiety. For this, it is essential to have a Book, a Law, a tradition.

And it is dangerous too for the once-abused to go about seeking excessive recognition—looking for the “unconditional love” they are told by some therapists they always deserved. Because this will lead that poor fly into the lair of the next narcissistic spider, who recognizes the need.

Premier Ford Gently Blames Trudeau for Delays in Vaccination

 

The Kraken Prepares Its Breakfast

 

State government control

Several commentators are now pointing out a plausible path for Trump to be re-elected.

1. The Giuliani, Powell, and other legal initiatives make a convincing case in the public mind that the election was fraudulent. They meanwhile pursue legal channels.

2. If it goes all the way, the Supreme Court may rule that the results were indeed fraudulent. The right has a 5-3 majority there, with Roberts as a swing vote. If they are given a reasonable argument, the benefit of the doubt is likely to go Trump’s way.

3. Trump wins. 

But even if they do not:

4. By the Constitution, state legislatures have sole discretion to appoint electors. The critical states that are in dispute mostly have Republican majorities in their legislatures: Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona. These legislatures can refuse to recognize the vote tally as legitimate and either send no electors or send their own.

If there is a strong public impression that the vote was fraudulent, they might have the political will to do so. At a certain point, if they do not, they risk being “primaried” by irate members of their own party. All they need is plausible justification. This the Giuliani and Powell initiatives may have already given them.

5. With legislature-approved slates of electors from any three of the disputed states, including Pennsylvania, the Electoral College votes for Trump.

 Trump wins.

6. If three legislatures simply fail to certify the vote, or if their action in doing this is disputed, the Electoral College is deadlocked—or its vote is disputed.

7. Congress therefore may act. By the Constitution, it votes for president directly.  Each state delegation to congress gets one vote. The Republicans control more state delegations than the Democrats.

8. Trump wins.

A current Spectator article makes a strong case that the results of the popular vote are indeed fraudulent. 

Of course, there will be violence in the streets if this happens. It would all be an alarming precedent. On the other hand, we seem to have no options at this point that do not involve provoking violence in the streets and alarming precedents. We already have violence in the streets from the left; let Biden in, and the right joins them. Let one fraudulent election get by, and you cannot expect any future elections to be clean

Slightly Later in Canada

This blog has been relatively quiescent recently. For one thing, your humble correspondent has been busy with other work. For another, things have been so insane that comment seems superfluous. “Oh My God!” seems more or less sufficient. On Trump’s court challenges, I do not have the expertise: that’s for lawyers. The world is full of lawyers, and I’m not one of them.

Mad as things are south of 49, it is easy to forget about matters right here in Canada. It looks to me as though the Trudeau government is in serious trouble on the vaccine front. Canadians are about to watch as the US and the UK, most of Europe, India, Brazil, Russia, China, the Middle East get vaccinated, while Canada stays in shutdown, and Canadians continue to die of COVID. The effects on the Canadian economy may also be devastating. 

The government will insist that this is unavoidable, because we do not have our own production facilities. Perhaps this is true; even so, people will blame the government.

The government boasts that it has pre-ordered more vaccine per capita than any other country: nine times what is needed to vaccinate every single Canadian. But this is useless if every Canadian needs only one vaccination, and the pre-orders are fulfilled after all previous orders are filled. Apparently the Canadian government started late to make pre-orders, and overcompensated by over-ordering. Simply wasting a lot of money.

The present government seems spectacularly incompetent. Irresponsible children playing at being leaders. They have made an alarming hash of our foreign affairs, and they have been spending money recklessly. Yet they are still in power because we have also been saddled with an incompetent opposition. Both the Conservatives and the NDP seem to have been seized by sinister forces who have gotten rid of their most effective leaders (Mulcair and Bernier) in rigged leadership races. 

In our own quiet way, Canada seems to be in at least as much trouble as is the US right now. And the underlying cause is the same: a poison has infected our “elites.” It is, I think, the poison of postmodernism, the abandonment of all principle. 

COVID is at least helping to expose the problem.

Sky News Australia on Hydroxychloraquine

 

The Reckoning?

 

God gave Noah the rainbow sign ...

It seems unambiguous to me that what is going on in the US currently is a struggle of good and evil. With evil seemingly triumphant. Yes, the Democrats and the contemporary left are simply morally depraved. Their postmodern essence is the denial of the possibility of either good or evil; and a denial that there is such a thing as truth or reality. For them, it is only “the narrative.” And the only response to crime is to blame the police. Their spirit is the spirit of destruction.

This tips into an inexorable and accelerating downward spiral, and we are witnessing it. Things are falling apart in civil society now at breakneck speed: the censorship, the denial of free speech, the endemic racism, the open hatred of “whites” or “cisgender males,” the devolution into tribalism, the open corruption, the Hunter Bidens and the Jeffrey Epsteins and nobody seeming to care; the random destruction in the streets of the largest cities, and nobody seeming to care. Actual calls now for dissidents to be arrested—Republicans, anyone who worked for Trump. Against, of course, the relentless but unmentionable backdrop of unrestricted abortion, with the current governor of Virginia, or Whoopi Goldberg on TV, going so far as to openly endorse post-birth infanticide.

Joe Biden? A testament to the truth of Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil.” 

Already little is left of American democracy. If you do not have free speech or a free press, and you cannot trust your elections, democracy is not the correct term.

COVID-19 is of course a separate matter, an Act of God. But COVID-19 might be a judgement from God. Not just on the US; I do not imagine China will come out of this better than the USA. I read the waters are symbolically rising again behind the Three Gorges Dam.

Everywhere the cities are burning. What will be left?

Today, a friend taught me a Jewish tradition: you go to the Book of Psalms, and meditate daily on the Psalm one number beyond your current age. This is the psalm that best advises you for the year. Supposedly this is personal; but my psalm sounds as though it might apply for all of us:

Let God arise!

Let his enemies be scattered!

Let them who hate him also flee before him.

As smoke is driven away,

so drive them away.

As wax melts before the fire,

so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.

 … A father of the fatherless, and a defender of the widows,

is God in his holy habitation.

God sets the lonely in families.

He brings out the prisoners with singing,

but the rebellious dwell in a sun-scorched land.

… God is to us a God of deliverance.

To Yahweh, the Lord, belongs escape from death.

But God will strike through the head of his enemies,

the hairy scalp of such a one as still continues in his guiltiness.

The Lord said, “I will bring you again from Bashan,

I will bring you again from the depths of the sea,

that you may crush them, dipping your foot in blood,

that the tongues of your dogs may have their portion from your enemies.”

 

Forgive me for pointing out that this is one more example of how the Bible is not OK with "I'm OK, You're OK" morality.

Remember Hydroxychloraquine?

 

This is NOT a double-blind test with controls; it is a retrospective analysis. Nevertheless, it at least finally tests the actual regimen originally claimed to work. And it seems to show that, yes, itworks.

So how to explain the fact that we have not seen that gold-standard, double-blind test with controls that we need? How many have died who need not have?

People of the Lie

 

Some people wear masks. Some people seem to speak, not spontaneously, but on a sort of internal tape delay. Their faces tend to fix in one expression: as often as not, a permanent smile; sometimes a neutral expression. There often seems to be a strain around the jaw. They are consciously controlling their faces, and it takes some effort.

If they laugh, you can hear that it is feigned, something they are imitating, not something from within themselves.

If they are not necessarily bad people, they are obviously people who feel they have something to hide. They have some sense of guilt; this may be deserved or undeserved.

Technically, these are “hypocrites.” The word, New Testament Greek, literally means an actor, or one who is wearing a stage mask, as Greek actors did.

M. Scott Peck calls them “People of the Lie.”

The one certain thing is that you cannot trust them. 

A Journal of the Plague Year

 

The year 2020 is not getting any saner. Toronto is going back into lockdown for 28 days, which will wipe out the Christmas shopping season and probably assure that all the independent brick-and-mortar retailers go bankrupt. It is generally only during the Christmas season that they ever turn a profit, and that is gone now.

Winter kicked off yesterday, after an eerily warm fall, with a blizzard.

Today, also news that the Oxford-Astro-Zeneca vaccine is 70% effective, adding to the Moderna and Pfizer entries. We now seem poised for a mad race to get everybody vaccinated before everybody gets the virus and dies. Latest estimates are that we will all be living with this crisis for another year; still masking and distancing. Hope that is wrong, but the experience so far is that everything has taken much longer than predicted.

Things are wild on the US election front as well. Several states are set to certify their votes today; in the meantime, Sidney Powell has been fired from the Trump legal team. This looks grim for Trump because she was the one claiming she would “release the kraken.” If Trump is pulling away from her, it sounds as though there is no kraken.

Jordan Peterson, back from near-death due to tranquilizer addiction, has just announced a sequel to his Twelve Rules for Life. It is titled, ominously, Beyond Order.

We will long remember this year. But probably not fondly.

The End

 

It is snowing outside my window; the first snow in Toronto this year. This is also the Solemnity of Christ the King, the end of the liturgical year.

The readings reflect what Christians believe will happen at the end of time. 

They give no support for the common secular “I’m OK, you’re OK” attitude. They see good guys, and bad guys, and a war of good against evil.

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory,

and all the angels with him,

he will sit upon his glorious throne,

and all the nations will be assembled before him.

And he will separate them one from another,

as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the king will say to those on his right,

'Come, you who are blessed by my Father.

Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’

…

Then he will say to those on his left,

'Depart from me, you accursed,

into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’

…

And these will go off to eternal punishment,

but the righteous to eternal life."

And this repeats a motif in the Old Testament reading from Ezekiel:

Thus says the Lord GOD:

I myself will look after and tend my sheep. 

…

The lost I will seek out,

the strayed I will bring back,

the injured I will bind up,

the sick I will heal,

but the sleek and the strong I will destroy,

shepherding them rightly.

As for you, my sheep, says the Lord GOD,

I will judge between one sheep and another,

between rams and goats.”

The middle reading, from the Epistles, says that when Jesus comes again, he will 

“destroy every sovereignty and every authority and power. 

For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.”

You can’t be complacent or play both sides. Everyone can’t be your friend. You are either a sheep or a goat.

No Flies on William Golding

 

I had not read Lord of the Flies since high school. When William Golding won the Nobel Prize back in the Eighties, people generally thought it was for too slender a body of work, and I more or less agreed. I had read a couple of his other novels, and they came nowhere near LOTF. Was he really winning the Nobel Prize for one novel?

I just reread the book; I am teaching it. Golding absolutely deserved the Nobel. If one book says all that needs to be said, isn’t that the greatest accomplishment of all?

More of the Press Going Berserk

 

Trump's Second Term?

 

Red: state houses under Republican control.

In this insane year, what happens next with the US election? Whatever the courts decide, as I understand it, state legislatures have the option of refusing to certify that state’s results if they believe them fraudulent. The Republicans hold a majority of the state legislatures, including at least partial control of all the disputed states except Nevada.

If they refuse to certify results, the selection of the president goes to Congress: each state gets one vote. In Congress, too, the Republicans hold more states than the Democrats. So the presidency goes to Trump.

This would no doubt bring the left out into the streets claiming a coup. But it is the proper constitutional procedure; and the left is already out in the streets, and will probably remain in the streets, no matter what happens now. So the process might as well be followed; the alternative of approving a clearly fraudulent election might bring both sides out into the streets, and end in civil war.

I think the left sees this writing on the wall; for their behavior has become hysterical. Witness this piece from Vanity Fair; CNN refused to carry the Trump legal team’s press conference. It is like a childish tantrum.

The shock waves extend further: given the fraud the lawyers seem to have uncovered, without drastic and immediate steps, what elections in the US are secure? And what elections in other countries? Who is in office now due to fraud?