Catholic comments on the passing parade.
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One possible explanation for the strangely destructive behaviour of elites over the last few years is that they have calculated, rightly or wrongly, that with AI emerging, they simply do not need people any longer to do their bidding. The vast mass of humanity becomes excess baggage. Why not kill them off and have a better view from the cottage?
There is an obvious oxymoron in Donald Trump appearing as the “people’s champion,” defender of the little guy against the establishment. He is a famously rich man, the son of a rich man, a TV celebrity. Surely if anyone is part of the establishment, it is Donald Trump?
The anomaly is yet more dramatic in the case of Elon Musk: the world’s richest man has supposedly become our saviour against the forces of government and corporate censorship.
Or RFK Jr. Kennedy is a maverick bucking the establishment? He is, after all, the American equivalent of royalty.
Surely we are being played? Surely this is all a sham, controlled opposition? How can we trust these guys to go against their class interest?
No; there is reason here. These are the only people who can stand against the machine.
Jefferson, the inventor of American democracy, argued that it relied on the bulk of Americans being freeholders, “yeoman farmers.” That meant they were not too dependent on the system; they were relatively able to resist authority without losing their livelihood. They could bar their front gate and still feed and shelter their family.
Especially if armed. It has been cogently argued that democracy emerged first in England because of the invention of the English longbow. It meant every English yeoman had a weapon that could pierce a suit of armour. The local nobleman could not run roughshod over his hearth. He needed to negotiate consent.
It has been observed that nations generally become functioning democracies at about the point when the GDP per capita reaches 10,000 USD. At that level, a bourgeoisie has usually developed with enough independent resources to go to the mattresses against an authoritarian government, and stand a better than even chance of winning.
In present days we have an elite, an essentially fascist coalition of government and big business, trying to hold power and extent their control through the new technologies. They can and will destroy the career and livelihood of anyone who breaks ranks and opposes them. They can and will “deplatform,” revoke licenses, refuse to graduate, prosecute capriciously or selectively, get you fired, attack your marriage, seize your children, take your house, send for “reeducation,” seize or freeze your assets, for dissent.
As Jefferson foresaw, but with raised stakes, the only people who can stand up against this are those so wealthy, so popular, or, in the case of women, so beautiful, that they can’t be crushed: the Joe Rogans, the Scott Adamses, the J.K. Rowlings, the Tulsi Gabbards, the Kennedys, the Trumps, the Musks.
Even they are taking a great risk. They may miscalculate. The powers were able to take out Conrad Black. They took out John McAfee. They may have taken out Alex Jones. They are trying to assassinate Donald Trump.
This shows how high the stakes are.
And this is a reason we must reject governments and political parties determined to go after “the rich”; just as we must fear governments and political parties that go after religion and the church. Whatever their faults, we actually need the richest among us to protect our freedoms.
At about the same time he is promoting the heresy of indifferentism, Pope Francis has also said that he cannot choose between the evils of Trump’s platform and that of Harris in the current US presidential election.
“Who is the lesser evil? That lady, or that gentleman? I don't know. Both are against life, be it the one that kicks out migrants, or the one that kills children."
This is a clear example of false moral equivalence. Francis is saying that to expel an intruder from your home is morally equivalent to murder.
This is obviously wrong; it amounts to an attempt to justify abortion.
Is it even wrong in the slightest to resist illegal immigration or to deport migrants?
Acts 17: 26 says it is God’s plan that nations and peoples have borders:
“From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.”
One doesn’t have the right to immigrate any more than one has the right to live in another man’s home.
It is not plausible that Francis does not know this.
It is increasingly obvious that in our times we are fighting a war of good versus evil. The masks are off, and it is no longer a matter of people of good will coming to different conclusions.
And Pope Francis is on the side of evil.
Pope Francis just said the following to the children in Singapore:
“All religions are paths to reach God. They are—to make a comparison—like different languages, different dialects, to get there. But God is God for everyone. If you start to fight saying 'my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn't', where will this lead us? There is only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christians; they are different ways to God."
This is, straight up, the heresy of indifferentism. It is not plausible that the Pope does not understand this. The Pope is a heretic.
Of course one is Catholic because one is convinced that Catholicism has more of the truth than other religions. Otherwise what is the point of having a Church? What is the point of having a Pope? What is the point of Christianity? Why didn’t we all remain pagans or Jews? Were the martyrs just bigoted fools to die for the faith?
Yes, all religions are paths to God, and all major religions are largely true. Given a good God, it must be so. It must be possible to get there as a Hindu or a Jew, with sincerity and effort. That is the doctrine of invincible ignorance. But consider the different religions as paths up a mountain. Not all paths up a mountain are equally straight. Not all paths get you all the way, even if they go in the same general direction. Some paths will prove to be impasssible higher up.
The analogy of language, which Francis uses, suggests all paths are equally serviceable; for that is the general view among linguists about languages. Thery all do the job. No one dares say English is a better language than French.
Moreover, the teaching of the Church has always been, “no salvation outside (or without) the Church.” And Jesus said “no one comes to the father except through me.” Francis must reconcile his claims with these doctrines, and I do not believe he can. He cannot be indifferent to truth claims.
So now what do we do?
Nobody understands rhetoric.
Donald Trump’s great talent as a politician and a leader is that he does. It is like magic. Pierre Poilievre does too.
Lots of people have criticized Trump for saying, during the recent debate, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats, dogs, and family pets. Kamala Harris laughed at him in split screen as he said it. The moderator stepped in to deny it was happening. Warren Kinsella and Ben Shapiro and many others saw this as a serious misstep by Trump. Kinsella said it made Trump look ridiculous.
I think we see, even just a couple of days later, how smart the reference was. It is all over the Internet, in song, meme, and dance.
The best way to make a point is with an image. The best image to make a point is a dramatic one; a shocking one or a ridiculous one. Trump knows this.
People who do not understand rhetoric, repelled by the shocking image, object to it instinctively. It makes them uncomfortable. Hence the blowback from the moderator, Shapiro, or Kinsella. “You can’t say that!”
It is not the rhetorician’s job to make anyone feel comfortable. Comfortable is boring and forgettable. It is to get his point across.
The image of foreign-looking people eating family pets is perfect because it makes people very uncomfortable. The more so because it has a strong emotional pull. People love their pets, usually more than other people. Good writers know that the perfect way to make a reader sympathize with their character forever is to show them being kind to a cat or dog in the opening pages. Or to make the reader hate a character, show them kicking a dog.
Trump may also have, at a blow, won back all the childless cat ladies.
And we have the video, in split screen, of Harris laughing at the claim. She’s laughing at cats and dogs being killed and eaten? She has identified herself in many minds as the villain.
And the name of the town is Springfield? The same as in The Simpsons—a name chosen because every state in the union has a town named Springfield. It is perfectly generic. And Ohio? It is everyone’s home town.
This could happen you, member of the audience, any day now. Your dear pet Mittens or Snoopy is not safe.
True or not, it is a perfect image to express the growing general alarm over high levels of immigration and lack of assimilation. It crystallizes it and fixes it in the mind.
Along with all the memes and TikTok videos, It has also set off a general investigation all over the internet to find out if the claim is true—making the issue of mass immigration the focus of discussion for days or weeks to come.
And pulling up lots of evidence that it is indeed true.
As the evidence piles up that it is true, the image of Harris laughing at it looks like callousness. She doesn’t care. She’s fine with people killing Fido. And the moderators too are shown to be the bad guys.
Trump is great at this. His image of a wall across the southern border was similar. Give people a concrete image: a wall. Build the wall.
So is the story of his showing the leader of the Taliban a photo of his own house. Make it concrete, make it visual, make it dramatic. Trump understand this. People think and especially people feel in images.
Trump also knows enough to repeat basic points, rather than getting bogged down in details. Political wonks object to this; to lack of details. But rhetoricians and ad men know the way to convince is to stress one point—the “unique selling proposition.” Too much detail, too many reasons, loses the sale.
We ought to use the wisdom of rhetoric the classroom as well. We deliberately reject it there, and in doing so we are missing completely the essence of educating, which is to make the lesson memorable. What you do not remember, you have not learned. Teachers and educational bureaucrats instead instictively reject anything that might make a lesson memorable. They keep everything as bland and forgettable as possible.
Back in the Seventies, the US government funded a massive survey to find which teaching techniques might improve results in the public schools. I think twenty different approaches were approved, and tested against each other and against a control group, in classrooms all over the US. All but one of the new techniques came from the Ed Schools, the educational experts. And all of them failed—all actually did worse than the control group. They were positively harmful. The one that turned out to be better, “ Direct Instruction,” was developed not by an Ed School, but by an advertising man.
But this was ignored. The results of the massive study were buried. The ed schools and the ed establishment were too powerful. We went with the methods proven to fail.
I hear Direct Instruction is currently being introduced in the Philippines, however. I have had my own students in Qatar, who have experienced it, demand it. I suspect it is being used elsewhere in Asia.
Another example of the value of rhetoric in education: you may have heard of Khan Academy. Short videos online that explain concepts in the school curriculum. It started with math, but now includes a variety of subjects. Everyone now seems to be using it.
Salman Khan, who created it, is an advertising man. He knows how to present.
While the usual public school classroom just has students break into small groups and stare at one another.
Nobody understands rhetoric.
Today is 9-11. Everyone remembers where they were on this day in 2001. It is one of the great inflection points in modern history, a day on which the world changed. Before 9-11, Muslim terrorism was not a thing. There was no Department of Homeland Security. Boarding a plane or crossing the US border was a relatively simple process. There were not metal detectors everywhere.
I have seen the argument recently that 9 – 11 inspired the new aggressive atheism. It gave many the ides that religion, or “extremism,” or believing in anything, was the root of all evil.
It also threw globalism in to reverse. Opening all doors to foreign influence and foreign cultures turned out to mean something more than a wider selection of restaurants and colourful ethnic dances in the multiculturalism festival.
And of course it led to a generation of war, in Afghainstan and Iraq.
I noticed that before 9-11, everyone was opposed to honouring soldiers and the military. After 9-11, soldiers were heroes.
What other such inflection points have there been in my own lifetime?
The first one has to be the Kennedy assassination. That seemed like the death of an era in which America was universally admired. Europe had messed up badly, but America was the great hope. The war was won, we had defeated the dragon. Sure, there was the Soviet Union, and the overhanging threat of nuclear war. But we at least had confidence in who the angels were, and who the devils were, and some evidence that angels win in the end.
The Kennedy assassination ended all that. Evil had won after all.
One almost immediate result was the death of the folk boom. Folk music was too innocent, optimistic, and socially engaged. In came the angrier and more self-centred electric music, the Beatles and the Stones and Blonde on Blonde. In came the drugs and the idea of turning on and dropping out: we gave up on “the system” and trusting authorities.
The other great inflection point was the fall of the Berlin Wall; 1989. Although this was mostly a symbol for the more drawn-out collapse of the Eastern Bloc. The bipolar world we had taken for granted was suddenly gone. People rather absurdly declared the “end of history.”
Lesser inflection points are perhaps the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1980, corresponding with the release of the Iran hostages; that is certainly an event burned into my memory. Perhaps by the same token the election of Trump in 2016. Perhaps the election of Pope Francis in 2013; perhaps that of John Paul II in 1978. Perhaps the War in the Falklands, which established Margaret Thatcher as the Iron Lady and signalled the returned vitality of Britain.
And perhaps too, although it was a couple of years instead of a day, the Covid pandemic. People any more tend to date things pre-Covid or post-Covid, the way they used to date things either pre-9/11 or post-9/11.
Everybody is expecting Donald Trump to win he big debate this evening. I think this is dangerous for Trump. Expectations for him ae too high. Harris will have to be really awful to be seen to have lost.
To begin with, this debate will naturally automatically be compared with the last one, against Biden. So if Harris can avoid actually drooling on stage, she will look good by comparison.
Harris has a reputation as a bad debater, because of her epic failure against Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. This low expectation is automatically to her advantage: success in these debates is usually about exceeding expectations. And the low expectations may be unwarranted. Harris did well enough in a VP debate against Mike Pence in 2020; there is no reason to think ger skills have declined since then. And she is a lawyer and experienced prosecutor: the skills needed for that are debating skills.
Trump has a reputation for being deadly in debate. But he can’t use his best weapons against Harris: the sharp put-downs. Because Harris is a woman, and a minority woman at that, she gets special privilege. You can’t punch a woman hard, or you look like a bully. This is the reason I thought the Democrats should have gone with Tulsi Gabbard in 2020: Trump is weakest against a woman. Granted, he was able to debate Hillary Clinton effectively; but nobody really believes Hillary Clinton is a woman.
So I expect Harris to at least hold her own.
Trump’s hope must be that she chokes under the pressure. There are signs she has trouble handling pressure. But they can dope her up, can’t they?
Jagmeet Singh just pulled the plug on the NDP-Liberal pseudo-coalition.
This is as I predicted: he had to cancel it a decent interval before the next scheduled election, in order to give voters any reason to vote NDP instead of Liberal. He will now, to prove his bona fides, need to vote against the Liberals now in any plausible no-confidence motions.
This need not bring down the Liberal government. They could be kept in power by the BQ without the NDP.
But given the current polling, it probably will. The latest seat projections show the BQ becoming the official opposition, and both they and the NDP picking up 16 seats. So everyone but the Liberals has an incentive to force an election now.
I predict an election before Christmas.
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I said some time ago that the only hope for America, and for the West, was a religious revival. It was for God to step in.
I think he’s doing it.
Apparently, according to recent polling, the proportion of Christians is growing again in the US, and the proportion of atheists declining. This reverses a trend since the 1960s.
We are seeing celebrity after celebrity publicly convert: Candace Owens, Joe Rogan (partly), Jordan Peterson, Stuart Brand, Ayan Hirsi Ali.
I think this is largely a reaction to Islamism. People are coming to realize that the values of liberal democracy and human rights have a specifically Christian foundation, and that secular humanism has no response to Islamism. Christianity is the only adequate response.
It is also a reaction to the New Atheism. Inadvertently, Dawkins and the horsemen reintroduced the arguments for the excistence of God by reviving the argument explicitly. Making more people aware that the arguments for God’s existence are philosophically stronger than the case for atheism. We have seen a renaissance in Christian apologetics.
At the same time, the msterialist attempt to discredit religion and replace it with the great god Science is collapsing. Darwinian evolution seems no longer tenable; it was with Darwin that the notion began that religion and science were opposed. Physics now argues for a beginning to the universe and a design. Life could not have happened by chance. The social sciences, most directly invented as a replacement for religion, are being discredited, partly by the scandal of unreproducible results, partly because of the growing problems of addiction and mental illness since we handed our souls over to this approach, partly because they are so obviously at variance now with common sense and the physical senses as, for example, to endorse transgenderism. The collapse of the Covid coverups adds further momentum to the retreat from the scientistic idol.
Also at the same time, it is increasingly evident, I think, to the conscience of the average man and woman, that the world is dividing into camps of good and evil; and religion is on the side of good, irreligion evil. That polarization is shown recently by the swing of honest leftists like Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Jimmy Dore, and RFK Jr. over to the right, where they find themselves hobnobbing with the religious.
That this all seems to be happening at once suggests the hand of the divine. Even before noticing that new and powerful evidence is coming out that the Shroud of Turin is authentic, and that its authenticity was deliberately suppressed by the secularists back in the 1980s. And eucharistic miracles are popping up all over, and uncorrupt corpses.
Not to mention Trump’s miraculous survival of an assassination attempt, eerily reminiscent of one Washington survived at the nation’s founding.
The change has come.
The latest theme among commentators is how Kamala Harris is now winning the US Presidential election. Right-wing commentators are alarmed, and are saying the Trump campaign is on the back foot.
I think this is largely driven by the need to have something new to talk about. And this is just the inevitable bump of excitement any candidate gets when they are nominated.
I expect the next story to be how the Harris campaign is crashing and burning. That should hit by election day.
People are not focused on Harris and Walz yet. There is so much material there for opp research and memes. And the Trump campaign has lots of money to put it out.
Trump is relatively restrained so far at attacking Harris. His tack is just that she is too radically left-wing. I think he is right. Because she is a woman and of darker skin tone, the minute he says anything mocking, as he does so well, he will be declared a racist, a sexist, and a bully. It is best to hold back and let her destroy herself. And let the independent commentators and meme makers do the rest.
I think she will manage to do it.
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| Older readers may get the reference,. |
This also seems to be the wisdom of the ages as reflected in myth. It is Eve, after all, who upsets the happy family situation in Eden. It is Delilah. It is Pandora in Greek myth who opens the box. Or Psyche who turns on the light.
This is also the common wisdom of fairy tales. The problem usually comes with the introduction to the family of a wicked mother, or stepmother—not a father or stepfather. Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel.
Women intrinsically have greater power in the family, because they are the ones in control of the premises: they are, in the traditional arrangement, always there. The father and husband is more in the role of a guest. They are also in more constant and intimate contact with the children. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. If they want to use this power, they can easily alienate the children from their partner.
It is also, broadly, feminism, the women’s movement, that is responsible for the current collapse of the North American family.
It follows, if there is a dysfunctional family, “cherchez la femme.” Most often it is because a mother plays favourites. Granted, there are cases of abusive husbands. But logic and the wisdom of the ages suggests that it is more often the wife and mother, even if this is covert, behind the scenes. Every Narcissus needs his Echo. Men are like dogs. They tend naturally to adore women and seek to make them happy.
Aristotle notes that tyrannies establish themselves when a government suppresses all centres of power or authority in a society other than itself. This allows the ruler to dictate without opposition.
Aside from governments that directly suppress opposition movements, we should, therefore, beware a government that is opposed to private enterprise or the wealthy. We should fear a government that is unfriendly to organized religion. We should beware a government that seems to be deliberately impoverishing its own people, for this gives them less time or resources to form opposition movements. We should fear governments bringing in large groups of foreigners. That reduces democratic controls and controls of social traditions and conventions on their actions. We should indeed fear any government hostile to local cultural traditions and conventions—these are checks on their power. We should suspect any government that begins to tinker with elections. We should beware a federal government that seeks to reduce or the powers of local authorities within a federation. We should beware a government that seems to want to control or suppress independent media.
And there you have the Trudeau Liberal platform; and that of the modern left generally.
Be aware; be afraid.
The stock markets are crashing today. People are talking major recession. To follow Covid lockdowns, rampant inflation, and war in Europe.
If they are right, this should be the final nail in the coffins of Kamala Harris and the Democrats in the US, and Justin Trudeau in Canada. They were set to lose anyway, but this could be historic, like RB Bennet or Herbert Hoover in their day. The left might be discredited for a generation. It may also be lucky for Farage in the UK and LePen in France that they were snookered, in part by political machinations, in the recent elections: that leaves the left holding this bag.
Meantime, in his most recent column, written before today’s news from the world’s stock markets, Xerxes the leftist columnist already comes out hard against “the system.” He quotes left-wing Anglo-Irish blogger Paul Kingsnorth: “We like to believe that we live in independent nation states run by leaders of our choosing, but this is a mirage designed to disguise the reality: The Machine is a giant, global, digitized web of commercial power and control, managed by transnational corporations and gatherings of elite powerbrokers, none of whom have very much interest in what ‘the people’ think.”
Strikingly, this is exactly what the right is saying. This is just what Trump and Farage and Poilievre have been saying. To be fair, it is not just the left that has shifted. A few years ago, the right would have resisted blaming transnational corporations. Not any more. Both left and right are now alarmed at elite powerbrokers and the trend to globalization.
Of course, in the recent past, as soon as some leftist raises this alarm, he is declared by the left to be “far right”—see RFK, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan. But even if this continues, if the shadowy elites sustain their control over the Democratic Party or the Liberals and NDP, the end result will be the same. The people are uniting against the powers that be.
Kingsworth and Xerxes think the problem is that things are getting more complicated due to technology, so that there is a greater distance between the elites and the common people. I think the exact opposite is happening: the new technology is levelling things, removing the need for an elite, and all its advantages. And making it easier for he people to seize control.
The online media have been lighting up about the blasphemous opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics, that featured what seemed to be a mockery of the Last Supper featuring a blue Dionysus as Christ, served up like the Eucharist, and a set of trans and obese apostles, one with his genitals dangling and visible.
Let us be clear about one thing: there is a war between LGBTQ ideology and the Catholic Church; and it is not the Catholic Church that started it. I first encountered it, to my shock, when I ran into a group of gay demonstrators dressed in mock nuns’ habits protesting near a Toronto community centre run by the Church. Until then, I, a practicing Catholic raised in catholic schools and educated at theological colleges, had thought we were all on the same side.
The Catholic catechism, it is true, says homosexual sex is sinful. It holds all sex not open to the conception of children disordered and sinful. This includes masturbation, sex outside marriage, and sex inside marriage if contraception is used. There is nothing special there about gay sex. To make an exception for gay sex and say it is okay would be allowing it some special privilege. Why?
Many prominent homosexuals in recent history have been Catholic, including converts. Oscar Wilde. Tennessee Williams. Milo Yiannopoulos. Andy Warhol. Pim Fortuyn. Evelyn Waugh. W.H. Auden (Anglo-Catholic). Nobody thought until recently this was somehow incompatible.
As for transvestitism: it has always been an accepted part of Filipino culture, and the Philippines is one of the most Catholic nations on Earth. The Catholic catechism has nothing to say about it. Why would that be a sin?
This is to be distinguished from the new doctrine of “transgenderism,” in which people go in for physical mutilation and insisting they are actually literally the opposite sex. Self-mutilation and denial of physical reality is of course sinful, in this as in any case.
So the supposed opposition of Catholicism to LGBTQetc. is an invention of the LGBTQ lobby, of the modern left. It is an invented premise, invented as an excuse to attack Catholicism. Not in the interests of gays either: in the interests of pride and lust.
Catholic morality sets a high bar, calling us to be “perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect.” Of course, none of us is. We cannot claim righteousness. To do so is the sin of pride, and an automatic ticket to the Other Place.
It is just this that the rainbow brigade demands: a celebration of pride, and pride in lust.
J.D. Vance, Trump’s VP pick, is being criticized in many quarters for a comment that the Democratic party is being run by “childless cat ladies who regret their life choices.” Some are demanding that Trump force him off the ticket as a result.
The reason everyone is so upset, of course, is the same reason they hate Trump. It is because he has hit the nail so squarely on the head. And the truth hurts.
I am sure everyone else knows, as I do, many older women without children who have begun to take in stray cats; whose lives seem to revolve around their furry children. It also seems self-evident that this is a compensation, that they would be happier with children of their own. A child is a much better companion than a cat.
Vance explicitly ruled out those who are childless through no choice of their own. But many women of recent generations, influenced by feminism, chose to put career over family, easy sex over commitment, and self over potential partner. They came to view men with suspicion, and repelled possible pairings. And now they are often alone, lacking purpose, and unfulfilled.
Having made such a bad fist of their own lives, should they be turned to for public leadership? Having displayed such selfishness in private life as not to put themselves out for partner or children, should they be entrusted with the public treasury? And shouldn’t we worry about Aesop’s principle of the fox who lost his tail? Misery loves company.
Of course the cat ladies shriek with anger. It is hurtful because it is true, and it forces them to admit they have destroyed their lives.
But there is a time to call out harmful delusions, for the sake of the next generations.
A measure of how materialist our society has become: every textbook I have had to use that teaches critical thinking distinguishes only between fact and opinion, which they correlate to “objective” and “subjective.” as though this is the only issue. The message is that only facts are certainly true.
There are many truths that are subjective, not facts.
The first obvious example:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ll men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Facts are provable truths, objective truths. These truths are not provable, but self-evident. We know they are true.
Another truth, the most certain of all, is that God exist. This is not a fact, even if there are mathematical proofs; it is a truth. Indeed, none of the truths of mathematics are facts. Facts are only probvisionally true; the truths of mathematics are absolute.
Then there are moral truths. Murder is wrong. You should do unto others as you would have them do to you. Truth is better than lies. These are not facts; but they are certain.
Beauty is better than ugliness. Also unprovable, but self-evident.
And then there is the universe of emotional truths: that I love my wife, or my kids or country. These are truths, not opinions, although they will commonly appear in the texts wrongly as opinions. I can know with certainty that I love my wife, or my country.
Doesn’t this illustrate how limiting, how damaging, materialism is? It reduces us to lizards, zombies, or robots, without emotions, without conscience, and without meaning to our lives.
Welcome to hell.
I have heard both Vivek Ramaswamy and Jacob Rees-Mogg say recently that nobody is actually in control in Washington; there is nobody actually pulling the strings behind Joe Biden. Instead, it is a “mechanism,” according to Ramaswamy; Rees-Mogg says a “blob.”
How does tis mechanism work, though? How does a blob coordinate the actions of many on many levels?
I think behind it, there must be something like a Hellfire Club; of which we actually heard in the Jeffrey Epstein revelations. We even know what they’re up to: the main lure is sex, especially sex with minors. Once someone has been compromised by participating, there is really no further need for coordination. The need to protect all other members, and the secrets of the club, becomes automatic, and dictates the necessary actions at all levels.
And this must be why they are so determined to stop Trump: he is not compromised. He is not a member of the club. In power, he might blow the lid off. It is not about political ideology. Trump is only a moderate Republican. They are similarly afraid of RFK Jr. on the left; or Tulsi Gabbard.
I believe they killed Stanley Kubrick for obliquely revealing their existence in Eyes Wide Shut. Of course, they killed Jeffrey Epstein. They will try to kill any non0member who gets close to the highest levels of power, or anyone who, once a member, looks likely to reveal any secrets.
Surely this will all come out soon. It is getting too obvious that this is going on.
Can we all agree that, on average, women are more beautiful than men/
Even the question seems absurd. Obviously, yes.
And that women have a stronger understanding and appreciation for beauty?
And this is true even though some individual men can be strikingly handsome. This is true even though some individual male artists can produce unspeakable beauty in their works.
Even when this is so—take a visit to your local art gallery. Whom do you see there, admiring this art? Mostly women.
Since this is uncontroverslal, that women are more beautiful than men, it should also be uncontroversial that men on average have a stronger grip than women on what is true. There are three transcendent values, the good, the true, and the beautiful. Women guide men on the beautiful, men guide women on the truth.
Note that women traditionally can become hysterical, delusional. Even the word is subtly gendered. Among societies that believe in spirit possession, the most common victim is a young woman.
It has long been understood, and shown by proper scientific studies that men are better at navigating than women. Men navigate by compass direction, by absolute distance, and by map. Women navigate by familiar landmarks, number of steps, or by asking directions. Their understanding is highly situational.
I used to have fun in my classes by asking all the women, first, to point north. Almost none could. It looked random. Then I asked the men. Most could.
This suggests a broader difference: men seek and are aware of the absolute truth directly. Women in general rely on men to know what it is.
This is what makes male-female companionship both possible and necessary. The woman brings beauty to the home; and the man brings directional guidance. This is why two women in the same home find it much harder to get along.
Two men have less problem, since they can be expected to both see the same truths. But the home will be a mess.
It also means that a woman without a man is likely to go off the rails. A woman needs a man not like a fish needs a bicycle, but like bicycle needs a steering mechanism. Left alone, women are like a runaway garden hose, thrashing around for meaning.
This means that female CEOs are usually a bad idea. There are magnificent exceptions; one thinks of Margaret Thatcher. But more often, they are easily distracted from the mission by matters like DEI or what colour drapes the office needs. They can fuss about trees and let the forest burn. They can worry about putting agents on a sloped roof, and leave the candidate unprotected.
This is surely why Saint Paul said women should not speak at services; why he said their path of virtue was to obey their husbands. This is surely why Jesus chose all male apostles.
You think God did not know what he was doing?
Letting women take the lead is the first sin in the Book of Genesis; it led to all the catastrophes to follow. Contrast to Mary, who said instead, “behold the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word.”
The same motif appears in Greek myth: the story of Pandora’s box. I have seen it in North American Indian lore. In gnostic legend. And a Chinese student, commenting on Lady MacBeth, reports it is in the Chinese tradition as well.
It is inconceivable folly to ignore here the wisdom of our ancestors.
