Brian Pallister Removes All Doubt

There is an old saw that goes “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”.   It has been attributed to pretty much everyone with a reputation for folksy wisdom of this sort from the last millennium or so, and is sometimes ascribed to sources of ancient wisdom such as Confucius.   Indeed, it could be taken as a rough paraphrase of Proverbs 17:28.    Homer, when confronted with it in an early episode of The Simpsons, promptly set about illustrating it.  Internally, he asked himself “What does that mean?  Better say something or they’ll think you’re stupid”, and then blurted out “Takes one to know one”, after which his inner voice applauds this supposedly witty comeback.  Brian Pallister, premier of my province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, is either unfamiliar with the adage or he has decided to follow in the footsteps of Homer Simpson.

 

On Tuesday, the day his public health mandarin Roussin informed us that he would finally be lifting the vile and absurd requirement that we gag and muzzle ourselves with face diapers in indoor public places which tyrannical order ought never to have been imposed on us in the first place, Pallister ensured that this news would be overshadowed by issuing a poorly worded apology for his remarks of the seventh of July. 

 

In those remarks for which he apologized, he had not said anything bad about anyone – except the Marxist terrorist mob that had vandalized the statues of Canada’s founding and reigning monarchs on Dominion Day and who deserved his rebuke.   Nor had he said anything that could be reasonably interpreted as justifying historical wrongs that had been done to anyone.   Note the adverb “reasonably”.   The interpretations of the nitwits and nincompoops whose thinking has been perverted and corrupted by being infected with the academic Marxist virus of Critical Race Theory, a pathogen far more deadly and dangerous than the bat flu, don’t count.   His comments were entirely positive and affirming, but because they were positive and affirming about the people who settled and built Canada, that is to say the very people whom the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoists wish to erase from history, they were met with outrage and outcry on the part of the same.

 

In other words he had said nothing for which he owed anyone an apology.   Indeed, he owed it to Canada and to all patriotic Canadians regardless of their racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, not to apologize for his remarks.   This is because to give in to the demand that he apologize for his remarks of the seventh of July is apologize for the very existence of Canada.    Canada owes nobody an apology for her existence.   Academic Marxists who think otherwise, and the far too many who speak for them in government and in the media, need to be slapped down hard, not coddled with apologies intended to appease.

 

Astonishingly, for someone who gives the impression of being a man who is quite proud of the fact that his only ethics are those acquired in the schoolyard, Pallister would appear to have forgotten one of the most basic lessons of the same – bullies cannot be appeased.   Bullies feed off of the weakness of their prey.  By appeasing them, people merely announce their own weakness and let the bullies know where their next meal can be found.  

 

Surely Pallister must realize that those who have been demanding that he grovel and eat his innocuous words spoken in defence of the people who built this country are bullies.   What other word could better describe those who make such irrational demands knowing that they can count on the Crown broadcaster, the “paper of record”, and most of the other public opinion-generating media to back them up, with nary a word of dissent?

 

Therefore, Pallister should have known that there was no apology that he could make that would have satisfied these wolves.   The fact that he has spent the last year and a half throwing his weight around, telling Manitobans they cannot meet with their friends in either public places or their own homes, blaming Manitobans for when his own draconian policies failed to produce the desired effect of a drop in bat flu cases, berating and insulting the few of us who dared stand up for our constitutional rights and freedoms, and trying to blackmail us all into agreeing to take a hastily prepared, experimental new medical treatment, might help explain why he failed to grasp this.   Having enjoyed playing the bully himself for so long he forgot what to do when on the receiving end of bullying.  

 

In this situation, offering an apology of any sort, was the worst thing Pallister could have done.     The people demanding that he apologize are not interested in receiving an apology from him, sincere or otherwise.   They want to remove him from office and replace him with the one man in Manitoba who would have handled the situation of the last year and a half worse than he.    Whereas the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is supposed to be to hold the government accountable to the elected assembly for its actions and to speak out when the government abuses its power, Wab Kinew, the leader of the provincial socialists, has spent the pandemic, not calling Pallister out for how his actions have trampled the most basic constitutional rights and freedoms of Manitobans, destroyed businesses and livelihoods, and done tremendous harm to our mental, social, and overall wellbeing, but saying that he should have locked us down harder, faster, and kept us in lockdown longer.   When groups who have been speaking out about how our rights and especially our religious freedoms were endangered by the lockdown measures met with one of Pallister’s minister’s to express their concerns, Kinew condemned the government for agreeing to meet with them and hear their point of view.    Those who want this man to become our next premier, either can see nothing wrong with a government strategy of closing all businesses and paying people to stay home for the duration of a pandemic, or don’t care about his policies and want him in power for no reason other than his race, while accusing those of us who do very much see something wrong with his political philosophy and strategy of being racists for opposing him.

 

If we limit the options to those of which Pallister is capable, the best thing he could have done would have been to follow the advice of the old saying with which we opened this essay.   That was more or less what he had been doing for the previous few weeks and it had been working fairly well.   The media was running out of things to say about his remarks and would eventually have moved on to something new, whereas Manitobans were given a respite from having to see his face on the news every day.    It was a win for everybody!

 

If, however, we expand our options to include what Pallister might have done had he been a different person with a better character, the best thing he could have done would have been the following.   

 

He would have held another press conference in which he flat out refused to apologize for his comments.   He would have said that his words had been directed towards the mob of Maoist radicals who attacked Canada, her constitution and institutions, and her founders and history in their criminal and terrorist acts on her national holiday.   He would have then pointed out, correctly, that throughout history, any time a mob like this has been allowed to get its way it has turned out very, very, bad for everybody, and that therefore this sort of thing must not be tolerated but rather nipped in the bud.    He would then have reiterated his comments and insisted, quite rightly, that Canada owes nobody an apology for her founding, history, and very existence as a country.

 

He would then have directly addressed the media and the phoniness of their manufactured moral outrage.   He would have pointed out that they themselves carried the lion’s share of the blame for stirring up the Marxist mob whose actions he had rightly condemned.   They had completely abandoned even the pretense of journalistic ethics, integrity, and responsibility when they spun the discovery of graves on the sites of the Indian Residential Schools into a web of exaggerations and outright lies about murdered children (1) which has incited not only the aforementioned mob actions but the largest wave of hate crimes this country has ever seen.

 

Finally, he would have addressed the Indian chiefs who took offense at his remarks – note the distinction the late Sir Roger Scruton liked to make between “taking” and “giving” offense – and issued rude and arrogant demands for his resignation in which they insulted and demonized other Canadians in a most racist manner.   He would have told them that if they persist in their crummy attitude then they can take it and their “reconciliation” and stick these where the sun don’t shine, to which location he would be happy to provide directions.

 

Of course, the Brian Pallister who would have done this would have had to have been a very different and very better Brian Pallister than the one we actually have.   The same would have to be true of the Brian Pallister who would sincerely apologize to those whom he actually owes an apology – all Manitobans, of all races, cultures, and creeds – for the way he has bullied us all with his lockdowns, masks and other such draconian nonsense.

 

(1)   That thousands of graves could be found on these sites has never been a secret.   The Truth and Reconciliation Commission discussed these at length in the fourth volume of its final report.  They are not “mass graves” – the media falsely labelled them such and the bands that had announced the finding of the graves corrected them and while the media  eventually switched to talking about “unmarked graves” they issued no retractions.   “Unmarked” refers to their present condition, it does not mean they were always unmarked.   The TRC Report says that graves in the Residential School cemeteries were usually marked with wooden crosses.   Students were not the only ones buried in these cemeteries – school staff were buried there as well, and often the school shared the cemetery of the church to which it was related and the nearest community.   There is no reason to think that the graves contain murdered children.   No bodies have been exhumed, no autopsies conducted, and the TRC Report itself indicates that disease was the cause of most of the deaths of children buried in the school cemeteries, tuberculosis alone accounting for almost half.   The huge gulf between what the actual known facts are and the narrative imposed over the facts by the media, arises entirely out of the anti-Canada, anti-Christian, hatred and malice of the latter. 

The Great Stereopticon - Enemy of Freedom

In 1946, the Reverend Dr. Carl McIntire, a fundamentalist Presbyterian minister from Collingwood, New Jersey, editor of The Christian Beacon newspaper, radio preacher on The 20^th Century Reformation Hour, and a pioneer of sorts in the field of Christian ecumenism – he tried to build an orthodox, Protestant, alternative to the mainstream, liberal, ecumenical movement, although his separatism and his personality both frequently got in the way of his efforts – published a book entitled The Author of Liberty.   Through his entire ministry, McIntire combined his fiery, fundamentalist version of Scottish Calvinism with American political conservatism and was, most admirably, a fervent opponent of totalitarianism, in both its Nazi and Communist forms.   I disagree, of course, with his tendency to equate freedom with American democracy and republicanism, holding instead to the views of John Farthing, son of the Anglican Bishop of Montreal of the same name (1), expressed in his posthumously published work Freedom Wears a Crown.   Nevertheless, I do very much agree with McIntire’s having identified God as the author of liberty or freedom.   God created man in His own image, as a rational being with moral agency, and initially the only limit placed on that agency, outside of those built into the very structure and order of the universe itself, was a single negative command (the positive command to multiply and fill the earth can hardly be said to constitute a limitation).   When man’s disobedience enslaved him to his own sinfulness, further commandments were added out of necessity, but the entire plan of salvation revealed in the Scriptures and centred in the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is about setting men free from slavery to sin.    That is why the term redemption – literally, purchasing the freedom of a slave – is so frequently used to describe the saving work of Jesus Christ.

 

If God is the author of liberty, and He is, then obviously the ultimate enemy of freedom is Satan.   It is worth noting, in this regards, that the traditional theological explanation of Satan’s origin is of an angel who got too full of himself and tried to usurp the place of God.   The ancient term for the opposite of freedom, tyranny, is a term that originally had strong connotations of usurpation.   Satan is traditionally and Scripturally depicted as a tyrant who holds men in bondage through his lies and their own sins.   

 

All that having been said, it is not Satan himself that I wish to focus on in this essay, since I have already basically covered that topic in a previous and quite recent one. (2)   I shall instead be looking at what is most evidently his chief means of deceiving people and attacking their freedom in the day in which we live.  

 

This instrument, like the sinister being whose purposes it presently serves, goes by many names.   Earlier this year, I used one of its oldest names, the fourth estate, in making the observation that while, under this label, it presents itself as the watchdog policing the powerful on behalf of our rights and freedoms, the answer to Juvenal’s famous question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes in its usual broader application (3), the question, in fact, needs to be asked of it as much as of any other watcher.    Here in this context, however, I prefer the term “The Great Stereopticon” used by Richard M. Weaver in his Ideas Have Consequences (1948), because it emphasizes the inhuman, mechanical nature of that which is most often simply called the media.

 

The Great Stereopticon is both the title and the subject matter of the fifth chapter of Weaver’s book.    This chapter ought to be read in the context of the work at a whole by anyone who really wants a grasp on the nature and purpose of this perception-generating machine.    Weaver’s book, originally written as a contemplative response to the invention and use of the atomic bomb, traces the decline and decay of Western civilization over the course of centuries starting with the abandonment of the unifying, integrated, worldview of the ancients and Medievals in which the temporal world and the passing things of it were perceived as subordinate to the greater and permanent reality of an eternal order.    The decay of civilization is the result of a process of literal disintegration that removes the individual from his place in the larger order which gave him meaning and purpose and throws him onto his own resources to invent these for himself.   While he is told that this is liberating, it in fact makes his existence less human and more mechanical, and thus less free rather than more.   Weaver’s insights closely harmonize with the parallel observations of other Anglican Christian Platonists such as C. S. Lewis and George Grant about the way in which Modern thinking has reversed the ancient concept of liberty, both personal and political.   Whereas to the ancients, personal liberty consisted in mastering the inner appetites which strive to dominate us, to the Moderns personal liberty consisted of the emancipation of such desires and thus, by the standards of the ancients, our own enslavement.    Furthermore, in Modern thinking political liberty is when the laws of the civil order assist in the cause of the emancipation of desire even from the constraints placed upon it by the order of reality itself.   To obtain such “liberty”, Grant frequently warned, required a technological mastery of nature which, ironically, in turn required an increased degree of social control, that would have been recognized as tyranny by the ancients.   Political liberty in the older and traditional sense, of laws that secure to each person his life and his property, would be lessened rather than increased.

 

The “Great Stereopticon”, Weaver told us, is a “wonderful machine” constructed by the “vested interests of our age”, the function of which is “to project selected pictures of life in the hope that what is seen will be imitated.”   The intent behind this is to fill the vacuum of an orderly, unifying, vision that was left by the disintegration of the ancient “metaphysical dream”.   “The Great Stereopticon”, Weaver wrote, “like most gadgets, has been progressively improved and added to until today it is a machine of three parts: the press, the motion picture, and the radio.”   Obviously, that is in need of an update.   Indeed, it arguably needed an update even as it went to press, for that was about the time that televisions were becoming standard household items.   Today, of course, computers and the worldwide web that connects them together are the dominant part of the latest model of the Great Stereopticon.  

 

Weaver proceeded to go part by part through the machine, eviscerating each piece in turn.  The newspaper, “a spawn of the machine” and “a mechanism itself” he wrote, “has ever been closely linked with the kind of exploitation, financial and political, which accompanies industrialism.”   It is evidence, he suggested, that Plato was on to something when, in the Phaedrus, he presented arguments that he invention of the written word led to the propagation of false knowledge, forgetfulness, and the fossilization of accounts of truth.   “Faith in the printed word”, he said, “has raised journalists to the rank of oracles”, but added that they were better described by Plato’s words “They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome, having the reputation of knowledge, without the reality”.

 

While Weaver’s negative appraisal of the Great Stereopticon went much further than the threat it posed to freedom, this threat was raised within his criticism.   The danger, as Weaver saw it, was that rather than facilitating the discussion and dialogue upon which freedom depend, as it presented itself as doing, the machine limited and minimized dialogue.   He wrote:

 

There is much to indicate that modern publication wishes to minimize discussion.  Despite many artful pretensions to the contrary, it does not want an exchange of views, save perhaps on academic measures.   Instead, it encourages men to read in the hope that they will absorb.   For one thing, there is the technique of display, with its implied evaluations.   This does more of the average man’s thinking for him than he suspects.   For another, there is the stereotyping of whole phrases.   These are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation.   Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as fairly treasonable, like refusal to salute the flag.  

 

Today we have gone far past that point.   Think of how everyone who has failed to make the stock response of shaking with fear, curling up in the fetal position, sucking one’s thumb, and hiding under one’s bed, waiting for some big pharmaceutical company to save them from the Bogeyman of the bat flu, that the newspapers and television news stations, aided and abetted by the social media companies, have been working so hard to evoke this year, has been treated.   They have indeed been treated as if they had committed a form of treason.  The message of the Great Stereopticon has been that everything that our governments have inflicted on us has been necessary for our own good and safety and that therefore “we are all in this together”.    By opposing the government measures, saying that it is not right to suspend everyone’s constitutional civil rights and basic freedoms just because a virus is circulating, and that the harm done by lockdowns has exceeded any harm the virus had potential of causing, those who dare to take this stand are putting the lie to the Great Stereopticon’s message by saying “we are not in this together with you.”     When faced with such contradiction, those saying “we are all in this together” show that despite their warm and fuzzy slogan, what they really mean is “dissent will not be tolerated, so put up and shut up.”

 

Sixteen years after Weaver wrote about the Great Stereopticon, Marshall McLuhan, a convert to Roman Catholicism who taught at the University of Toronto and had made communications theory his primary field of interest, published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.    This was not his first book, but it would become his best known work.    Indeed, a short five word meme that summarizes the thesis of the book, is what he is most remembered for today. (4)   That meme is “the medium is the message.”   What McLuhan was saying here was that communications media are not what the convention wisdom of his day took them to be, neutral means of transmitting information that did not matter as much as the content of the information they conveyed.   Against this conventional wisdom, he argued that the opposite was in fact the case, that the nature of the medium itself was what shaped what people heard and saw and thought and, therefore, shaped culture, society, and civilization.  By contrast, the content of what the media convey was relatively unimportant and almost irrelevant.  Thus, when new media replace old, as with the invention of the movable type printing press in the fifteenth century, and broadcasting technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the changes that were effected were largely the inevitable result of the new media and would have been more or less the same had the content of what was printed and broadcast been completely different..  

 

There are many parallels between McLuhan’s thesis and George Grant’s response to the idea that technology is morally neutral.  Indeed, since for McLuhan “the media” included not just the parts of the Great Stereopticon identified by Weaver, or even all the extra parts that we would recognize today, but “any new technology”, their arguments are even closer than what would be the case if McLuhan’s “media” were merely a subcategory of Grant’s “technology”.    While Grant dealt with this subject throughout his entire corpus of writing, it is his answer to the assertion made by a computer scientist that “the computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used” in his essay “Thinking About Theology” that I have in mind here. (5)    This sentence, Grant maintained, although it is incontrovertible at one level, the identification of the computer as an instrument that serves human ends, good or bad, is misleading, because it separates the computer from the paradigm of thought that produced it and that paradigm is a destiny which does indeed impose itself upon people.    Machines have been moving us towards universal homogeneity, both because there is a tendency for societies that use the same kind of machines to resemble each other (here Grant used the automobile as an example) and because of the additional homogenizing factor of the “vast corporate structures” needed to produce and maintain them.

 

To bring what we have gleaned from Weaver, McLuhan and Grant together, the downside to the development of technology has frequently by described in terms of the mechanization of human life.    While we invent machines to serve us, a consequence of their invention is that our society itself is transformed into something resembling a large machine in which we are human parts.    Existence as a cog in a machine falls far short of what the ancients recognized as freedom.    The technological media pose a more specific threat to this kind of freedom because this freedom consists in the exercise of moral agency, which depends upon rational decision making, which requires information, and the technological media exist to control the flow of said information.    

 

The threat the media poses to liberty, therefore, goes much deeper than the mere “bias” which is the extent of the media criticism that you will hear from the average “conservative” and by which is meant a partisan slant on the part of those reporting the news.   Granted, the bias they are talking about exists, as has been even more evident this year than previously, especially in the coverage of the American election, but this is merely the surface problem.    Ironically, although they get practically everything else about the matter wrong, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, writing from the liberal-left in Manufacturing Consent (1988), displayed a better grasp on the fact that mass communications media itself is intrinsically subversive of freedom within liberal democracy.  Bias of a partisan nature is hardly the explanation of the media’s fomenting fear so that we would accept the curtailing of our basic constitutional and prescriptive freedoms of association, assembly and religion, and sacrifice the moral agency of making informed, rational, decisions including calculated risks with regards to the Wuhan bat flu.

 

Indeed, it is evident in what we have been seeing from the Great Stereopticon this year, not merely in the hysteria they have generated about the bat flu but in their treatment of other matters as well, especially the American presidential election and the anti-white hate fest that broke out into violent riots all over the Western world earlier this year, that the Great Stereopticon has undergone a complete overhaul, an upgrade in both hardware and software, that goes far beyond the mere addition of a few new components since the time Weaver penned his classic description of it seventy years ago.    The image the machine now projects is so disjointed from reality, things as they are, that it warrants comparison to the Matrix.   Astonishingly, this is true even in the detail of most people being unaware of the artificial nature of the image they mistake for reality.   I use the adverb astonishingly because unlike with the artificial world depicted in the motion picture franchise, the Great Stereopticon is not putting much effort into convincingly hiding the disconnect between its images and reality.    It has been telling us that the bat flu is a plague of apocalyptic proportions and that the rising numbers are “staggering” even though the absence of any significant amount of excess morality this year is not difficult to discover, it has labelled the violent riots of the racist anti-white hate fest “peaceful protests”, even using this deceptive description when describing police officers being assaulted and showing video of cities burning, and has told us that claims of voter fraud in the American election are without substantiating evidence as if hundreds of affidavits of eyewitness testimony did not constitute evidence.

The best “update” of Weaver’s account of the Great Stereopticon of which I am aware, actually an expansion upon McLuhan’s famous meme, is Dr. Bruce G. Charlton’s Addicted to Distraction (2014).    Since I have already reviewed this book at length (6), I shall simply say here that it explores the Matrix-like extent of the image projected by the machine which Dr. Charlton calls the Mass Media with capitals to distinguish it as a singular, integrated, system from the mere plural of medium, and demonstrates that it is not merely biased towards the Left in a partisan sense, but indistinguishable from the Left in the nihilistic sense of the ongoing revolution that seeks to tear down all that is good, if imperfect, in actual reality.      

 

Since freedom as the ancients knew it can only be found in submission to the actual reality of the order of things as they are under God, the media machine’s attacks on that reality and efforts to trap us in a fake one, constitute a double assault on our freedom.    This tells us, to return in conclusion to the point made in the second paragraph, in whose hands the Great Stereopticon is ultimately an instrument.

(1)   They had different middle names, albeit with the same initial letter, so this is not a case of a senior and junior.   The Right Reverend John C. Farthing’s middle name was Cragg.   His son, the Tory philosopher, was John Colborne Farthing.

(2)   Satan is the Author of the New Normal

(3)   Juvenal’s immediate application was to a guard hired by a jealous husband to ensure his wife’s fidelity.   See my How Juvenal! – The Fourth Estate.

(4)   Actually, it is one of two memes for which he is remembered.   The other is “global village”.   He would be appalled at much of the use to which the latter has been put.

(5)   This is the first essay in Technology and Justice, 1986.

(6)   A Cave of Our Own Construction

Has Captain Airhead Finally Learned to Count?

On Thursday evening, Captain Airhead, who sometimes goes by the nom de scène Justin Trudeau and whom we in the Dominion of Canada have, whether as a result of some voodoo spell by our enemies or as divine judgement for turning our backs on God, been cursed to have had as the Prime Minister of Her Majesty's government in Ottawa for the past five years, made a phone call to the provincial premiers.   Why they bothered to pick up remains a mystery.   Perhaps Caller-ID was temporarily down all over the country.

We know what Captain Airhead told the premiers because he himself broadcast it on Friday morning.   "One of the things that I did highlight is that our resources are not infinite at the federal government" he said.   We shall return to those words momentarily.  First, take note of the fact that this was in reference to the Chinese bat flu.   He gave as specific examples of the resources which he has newly discovered to be finite, support for contact tracing, PPE, military and the Red Cross.   The last mentioned seems odd in this context since, although the Red Cross has royal patronage here as in the United Kingdom and receives some government funding, it is, the last I checked, an international private charitable  organization and not a branch of government.   That is beside the point however.   Captain Airhead spoke of the Dominion government as being there to support the provinces in the pandemic but added "there is a threshold beyond which when the cases spike too much, we might have to make really difficult choices about where to deploy the limited resources we have."

That the resources available to the government are limited rather than infinite is a truth of which prior to this Captain Airhead has given no indication that he was aware.    

Does this mean that Captain Airhead has finally come to appreciate the austerity that he always denigrated and deplored in Stephen Harper's premiership?

Hardly.   It is a tactic to bully the provincial governments into imposing stricter, harsher, lockdowns.

"Controlling the virus now reduces the impossible decisions and choices we might have to make down the road" he went on to say.   The translation of this out of smooth, polished, political talk back into Airhead's native dialect is "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse.  Take away everyone's basic freedoms now or I will be cutting you off of federal support."

That Captain Airhead has not had some sort of epiphany about the limits of government resources or even taken a crash course in basic arithmetic from Count von Count is evident from the basic contradiction in his message.

The contradiction is simply this: the kind of lockdowns that Captain Airhead wants the premiers to impose will only use up the government's limited resources faster.

In the prairie provinces, including my own Manitoba, we are seeing the hospitals and intensive care units fill up with bat flu patients.   This is not typical of most places experiencing the so-called "second wave" which generally has seen numbers of positive cases going up without a significant spike in people getting seriously sick.  In Manitoba, at least, this can be attributed to this being the province's first real wave.   We did not see our hospitals and ICUs fill up when other places did back in March and April.  The desire of public health officials, both Dominion and provincial, to impose a second lockdown on us, if we charitably albeit, perhaps, naively, attribute to them the most benign possible of motivations, comes from a concern that the hospitals and ICUs will be overwhelmed and the system will crash.    This is the drain on public resources that they wish to avoid and it will be such a drain to be sure.   

One problem with their reasoning is that the addition to public expenses that will be produced by the lockdown measures themselves will exceed any possible reduction of the expenses due to the hospital overload.   Lockdowns are insanely expensive.   Far more so than crashing the health care system.   If people are not allowed to open their businesses or go to their jobs because of government orders, the government must compensate them.   The Dominion government already ran a record deficit doing this in the earlier lockdown this year, driving our national debt burden to the point where the federal debt alone will exceed a trillion dollars by the end of the year.    Whatever stress on the health care system new lockdowns might relieve, and it is doubtful that it will provide any significant relief at all, it will not sufficiently reduce the demand on our resources represented by the hospital/ICU crisis itself to offset that which will be created by the lockdowns.

The other problem with the "we need to lockdown or we won't have the resources to deal with the outbreak" reasoning is that lockdowns don't just add to the public expenses enormously themselves.   They also attack the other side of the ledger by severely reducing public revenue.   Public revenue is derived from taxes and it is the economy which generates the wealth that pays those taxes.   Lockdowns, however, are economy killers.   Businesses deemed "essential" are allowed to be open but at severely reduced capacities, currently 25% in Manitoba.   Retailers and restaurants classified as "non-essential" are allowed curbside and delivery service only.   Everybody else must close.   However, the distinction between "essential" and "non-essential" is not legitimate.   People cannot survive without food although they as individuals can get along without television sets but it is the production of goods such as television sets that pays for the production of goods such as food.   The so-called "non-essential" part of the economy is what pays for the so-called "essential" part and you cannot shut down the former without endangering the latter and severely reducing the source of public revenue causing the government to go further into debt (printing more money is merely a way of disguising the debt for the new inflated currency is now backed by wealth produced in the future, i.e., debt, rather than wealth that has already been produced). (1)

So no, Captain Airhead has not learned how to count.   He is simply doing what he always does, exercising his freedom-hating, totalitarian muscle, from behind his "sunny ways" mask.

(1) Should anyone object that it is a case of "lives" versus "the economy" I have shown many times in the past that this is a false dilemma.   Lockdowns kill.  While there has not been a whole lot of excess mortality this year compared to the immediately previous years, certainly not as much as one would expect from all the grims and alarmings and shockings the lying newsmedia use to describe the Chinese bat flu, there has been a lot of excess suicides, people drinking themselves to death, deaths by drug overdoses, and every other source of death one would expect to arise as the result of increased loneliness.   Lockdowns, not the virus, are the bigger killer this year. 

Hic et Ille VII

An Apology to My Readers

My posting has been light all year and it has now been over a month since my last post. I apologize for this. It is due to my writing time being tied up with projects external to this blog. One of these is quite a large project and is still not finished so posting may continue to be light for a few months to come – perhaps the remainder of this year.

So We Have a New Conservative Leader

In the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership convention last month, Maxime Bernier the most libertarian of the candidates was leading up until the thirteenth ballot, which gave the leadership to Andrew Scheer. This outcome has its positives and its negatives, as of course would have been the case with any of the alternatives as well. Among the positives, Scheer is a strong royalist – an absolute essential for a Tory leader – and has the reputation of being a social conservative if not as staunch a one as Brad Trost or Pierre Lemieux. Also impressive is Scheer’s promise that as Prime Minister he would withdraw federal funds from universities that allow Social Justice Warriors to get away with bullying, harassing, and silencing those who hold opinions contrary to theirs.

The down-side to Scheer is that he is very much a Stephen Harper man. Apart from the fact that this taints him by association with the man who made himself so unliked during his time as Prime Minister that the country was willing to hand the reins of power over to a shallow little empty-headed egomaniac, there is something in the Harper brand of neo-conservatism that puts a damper on the enthusiasm that would otherwise be inspired by each of the listed positive points.

Harper-style neo-conservatism blends elements from the traditions of both the old Conservative Party and the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance. The latter was a very pro-American tradition that believed in closer economic partnership with the United States – free trade, traditionally a plank of the Liberal Party platform – and in introducing democratic reforms to the upper house of Parliament to make it more like the American Senate. These aspects of the Reform tradition have survived into the neo-conservatism of the present Conservative Party even though they are the most difficult to harmonize with the elements, such as royalism, taken from the tradition of the old Conservative Party. Scheer himself is on the record as saying “I support an elected Senate with meaningful term limits.” Many royalists such as myself would say that to insist upon elections and term limits for the Senate weakens the foundation upon which you will need to stand in fighting for our hereditary monarchy should it come under republican attack. (1)

Neo-conservatives are convinced that fiscal conservatism wins elections but social conservatism loses elections. This is what the media, the academics, and the other parties tell them, but what it boils down to is the idea that people want balanced budgets, spending cuts, and tax breaks more than they want secure homes and communities, strong marriages and families, and a stable moral environment in which to raise their children. This is nonsense – but try convincing a neoconservative of that. This is why social conservatives know that while neo-conservatives will court their votes and tolerate them within the “big tent” – which is more than can be expected from the leadership of the other parties – they will do nothing to advance the causes dear to their hearts.

Finally, as welcome as are Scheer’s proposals for cutting off funds to schools that allow politically incorrect viewpoints to be silenced by the tyranny of well-organized cultural Marxist bullies, civil libertarians will remember that the Harper administration was no friend to freedom of speech. The private members bill that finally brought about the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act – the “hate speech” clause – during the Harper years had the support of the governing party, but not of the government itself. Worse, while it is the Trudeau wing of the Liberal Party that has demonstrated a propensity for passing absurd laws that punish people for saying things about women and racial, religious, and sexual minorities that egalitarians consider offensive, the Harper neo-conservatives have shown themselves to be fond of enhancing the government’s powers to monitor our private conversations in the name of national security. This is what Bill C-51, which made Harper so unpopular towards the end of his premiership, was all about. The response of both the American and Canadian versions of neo-conservatism to the increasing threat of Islamic terrorism has not been the sensible policy of keeping potential jihadists out of our countries while letting Muslims live in peace if they can in their own. Rather it is the exact opposite of this – allowing mass Islamic immigration into our countries while bombing the hell out of them in their own. When, as any thinking person could have predicted, this produces an increase in incidents of Islamic terrorism, they then introduce intrusive domestic surveillance and other police state measures to deal with it.

If there is an unmixed positive about Scheer, something that does not have a corresponding negative to diminish it, it is that he has said that he would scrap the carbon tax which, like so many other of the schemes of the Liberals/NDP/Greens is an evil wearing the mask of a good. The carbon tax raises the cost of living for all Canadians while reducing the funds they have available to meet their expenses, hurting the poor and the working class the most. The villains who have imposed it, however, like that soulless monster Justin Trudeau, go around bragging about how caring and compassionate they are, because they are doing something for the environment. In reality the environment is not helped in the least by this shameless money grab. Let us hope that if Scheer gets the opportunity to put this promise into practice that he will follow through.

Kudos to America’s Caesar

Liberals have, for decades, denied the obvious fact that the news media, in its editorializing and increasingly in its reporting, is heavily biased in their favour. How much longer, one wonders, can they maintain this façade? It is difficult to know which is more sickening – the way the Canadian media fawns over our grossly incompetent, arrogant, and idiotic Prime Minister or the way the American media pounces on the smallest flaws they can find in their President as grounds for terminating his term in office. “He starts on the wrong side of his mouth when brushing his teeth – impeach him!”

While there is much that President Trump deserves criticism for – among other things, the way he has moved away from the Buchananite rhetoric of his campaign towards a more typical neo-conservatism with regards to the Middle East – he deserves praise for the move for which the international media has sought to crucify him over the last two weeks. On June 1st he announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change a year and a half ago. This agreement was a fraud of the same type as the Trudeau Liberal carbon tax, just on a larger scale.

Let me explain it to you. The climate on this planet of ours has never been constant. It has been changing for as long as there has been an earth and will continue to change for as long as earth exists. The amount of that change which can be attributed to human activity, past, present, or future, is a fraction of a fraction of a percentage point. Even if the theory of anthropogenic climate change were true – and it is not – and the earth’s climate was changing in the way the theory says it is, for the reasons it says it is, and with the results the theory predicts, the actions that the governments of the world agreed to take in the Paris Accord would not have the slightest effect on it.

The Paris Accord is about one thing and one thing only - allowing the political leaders of the world to show off, pose as saviours of the world, and otherwise virtue signal for a scheme that does nothing – absolutely nothing – except take wealth from poor and middle class taxpayers in rich white countries and give it to wealthy kleptocrats in poor non-white countries.

Kudos to Donald Trump for pulling his country out of this farce.

Ontario To Rename Itself New Sodom?

If, unlike the residents of George Orwell’s Oceania that we are all starting to resemble, you can think back a couple of decades and remember the past as it actually happened, you will recall that at the time one of the hot issues on the agenda of what was then called the gay-rights movement was the question of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children or not. Those who supported the status quo, which prevented them from adopting, did so on the basis of a child’s need for both a father and a mother. That their reasoning was perfectly sound and legitimate did not prevent the other side from getting into a tizzy, shrieking hysterically and calling it bigotry and discrimination and all sorts of other nasty and unpleasant sounding things. That was basically all that their own argument amounted to and eventually some judge got so sick and tired of their whining that they won.

Now, in the current year, the Liberal government of the Province of Ontario, headed by a hatchet-faced lesbian with an axe to grind, has just passed a law, Bill 89, which allows – or, perhaps, requires – foster and adoption agencies to turn down couples who oppose the agenda of the alphabet soup gang. In practice, this means “Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditional Roman Catholics, and orthodox Christians in general, need not apply.” Worse, it gives Children’s Aid the right to take natural children away from such parents.

It is remarkable, is it not, how quickly those who start out by saying “we just want our rights” can move to taking away rights from other people once they attain power.

Christians, of course, are not the only ones who hold quaint, old-fashioned, antiquated ideas like that if you are born with a penis you are male, if you are born with a vagina you are female, that males should pair with females and vice-versa, and that male-female couples should raise their children together. All of these Muslims that Kathleen Wynne, like Justin Trudeau, is so enthusiastic about bringing into the country, think the same way. Do you think that now that under the provisions of Bill 89 the Children’s Aid of Ontario is going to start taking their children away?

Yeah right.

(1) For a Senate Reform proposal that addresses the problems with the Senate as it stands, while remaining true to the principles the Fathers of Confederation had in mind when they made the upper chamber of our Parliament an appointed Senate, see my essay "Senate Reform": http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/08/senate-reform.html

Justin Trudeau Expands His Vocabulary

So it turns out the t word is part of Justin Trudeau’s vocabulary after all.

You would never have known it from his verbal responses to the countless acts of jihad that have been waged against Western countries since that ill-fated day when he became the Prime Minister of our country. We have heard him condemn the violence of these acts and use such banal adjectives as “senseless” to describe it, but we were stuck listening to the crickets chirp and counting the tumbleweeds rolling by as we sat around waiting for him to use the obvious word – “terrorism.” That he seemed to be allergic to this term was something that had been observed and commented on even before he won the right to lead Her Majesty’s Canadian government by winning the 2015 general election. In the fall of the year prior, two young Canadians who had become alienated from their own country, traditions and people and converted to Islam and pledged their loyalty to the Islamic State, launched their own personal jihads in our Dominion’s capital of Ottawa and in the Quebec city of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. Trudeau eventually conceded that these were acts of terrorism when they were labelled as such by the RCMP investigators but why was a statement of what was obvious treated as a concession?

Well that certainly changed this weekend when someone shot up a mosque in Quebec City. As the Prime Minister’s butt-kissing sycophants and toadies in the press set about scrubbing the early reports of the incident to eliminate details out of sync with the official narrative that somebody has obviously ordered them to push, Trudeau set a record in the speed with which he denounced the shooting as an act of terrorism, almost as if he had a speech prepared and ready for the occasion.

What is objectionable in this is not that the Prime Minister was quick to denounce the mosque shooting as an act of terrorism. Shooting up a place of worship and murdering the worshippers obviously falls into this category. The problem is all those other occasions when he dithered and dawdled and danced around the obvious. Trudeau was quick to call a spade a spade where terrorism is concerned when Muslims were the victims, but avoided doing so like the plague when Muslims were the perpetrators. Is the one kind of terrorism worse than the other in Trudeau’s eyes?

The official narrative being pushed by the propaganda arm of the Liberal Party, aka the Canadian media is that the shooting was the work of a lone gunman, a French Canadian named Alexandre Bissonnette. Details that came out in the first reports while the story was fresh but which do not support the official narrative have been either scrubbed or, when this was not possible, reinterpreted. Initially, eye-witnesses within the mosque testified to multiple shooters who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” This detail, which contradicts the Prime Minister’s narrative, was quickly scrubbed. That a second suspect, a Moroccan Muslim named Mohamed Belkhadir had been taken into custody by the police, was reinterpreted to fit the narrative. He is now identified as a “witness”, despite having been identified as a “suspect” in the initial police press conference. In the absence of any official confession or statement of motive on the part of Bissonnette the media has been cherry picking details from his Facebook page to support its narrative of his being motivated by what they call “far right”, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, nativism. Their evidence for this is that he “liked” Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen on Facebook. He also “liked” Jack Layton and the NDP. It would no doubt come as a great surprise to the late Jack Layton to learn that he and the socialist party he led have undergone a dramatic shift to the far right of the political spectrum six years after his death.

I suspect it will be decades, if ever, before we learn the full truth of what happened that night. The Prime Minister’s office has been leaning heavily on the media, Canadian and otherwise, to make sure that only their approved version of the incident gets reported. You can be sure that when the PMO gets this involved in the reporting of a news story it is not to ensure that the truth comes out. Trudeau is determined to exploit the deaths of these Quebec Muslims for the gratification of his own ego and the furtherance of his personal political agenda. If that strikes you as being a little harsh then you are clearly unfamiliar with the ice-cold, calculating, love and worship of power in the dead, soulless, vacuum that lies behind the pretty boy exterior of Justin Trudeau and the grating, superficial, personality that he seemingly plagiarized from Barney the purple dinosaur. Indeed, the incident could hardly have served his purposes better if he had planned and arranged it himself.

It came after several weeks of humiliation for the federal premier in which he toured Canada in a failed attempt to restore the lustre of his image after it had taken several devastating hits over his Clintonesque cash-for-access behaviour such as the scandal over the family vacation he had accepted on an island owned by the Aga Khan. In city after city, in townhall style meetings, he was subjected to difficult questions about matters such as why he was trying to make things even harder for people already struggling to make ends meet by jacking up the cost of living with a carbon tax. It did not help that he was caught speaking out of both sides of his mouth on the question of the oil sands. To an audience in Peterborough, Ontario, presumably one sympathetic to such tree hugging drivel, he said that the oil sands needed to be phased out. This left him trying to explain to an audience in Calgary that he did not really mean to drive even more Albertans out of work and inflict further damage on their province’s already struggling economy. He was in need of a sleight-of-hand to distract the public from their growing awareness of just how pathetic a disgrace to the office of Her Majesty’s first minister he is.

This shooting incident not only provided him with that distraction it came at just the appropriate time to allow him to grandstand and show off his supposed moral superiority over American President Donald Trump. Two days before the shooting Trump had enraged liberals around the world by daring to put the security and wellbeing of his country ahead of political correctness by issuing a four month halt to the admission of refugees and a three month temporary ban on entrance to the United States from seven countries that are significant sources of jihadi terrorism. The day after this and the day before the shooting Trudeau sent out a tweet that, while worded as a statement of non-discriminatory policy in the admission of refugees, was clearly intended to mean that those who were excluded from the United States by the Trump ban would be welcome in Canada. To deliberately throw out the welcome mat to those excluded from another country on the basis of the high level of security risk they present is to say that you place diversity, tolerance, and non-discrimination ahead of the security and wellbeing of your country and its citizens. To Trudeau and his international admirers this may be an indication of virtue but to any sensible person it is an indication of gross stupidity and utter villainy.

Then along comes the shooting, and an airbrushed media narrative which seems to be designed to justify forcing ordinary Canadians yet again to pay the price for Trudeau’s peacocking his “tolerance”, “understanding” and “compassion” to his global audience. The Liberal Party has a history of infringing upon the traditional rights of Canadians to think and speak freely, whenever they want to shove acceptance of their values down our throats and to chastise Canadians for this-or-that thought crime. The father of the present Prime Minister was notoriously bad for this and a Liberal MP has already placed a bill that would condemn Islamophobia before the House. The bill was introduced long before the shooting. You would almost think they knew in advance it was coming.

Pictures and Words

It is said that “a picture is worth a thousand words” and, like most familiar adages, there is much truth in this statement. A single picture is capable of conveying, instantly and powerfully, what it might take a long time and many words to get across verbally. Furthermore, pictures have the ability to speak to the emotions with a voice which drowns out that of the rational argument which speaks only to the intellect.

Pictures, therefore, are dangerous weapons in the wrong hands, for, like words, they can convey falsehoods as well as truths. Moreover, a lie spoken through a picture can have a lasting impact even after it has been exposed and that impact can be stronger than the words through which the truth is revealed.

The media recently treated us to an example of this as they splashed across our television and computer screens and the front pages of our newspapers the image of the body of a drowned, three year old boy, lying dead on a Turkish beach. Virtually every detail of the story that accompanied this image, even down to the name of the boy as initially reported, has subsequently been demonstrated to be at least partially false, yet its emotional impact continues to linger on, exerting a baleful influence on the Western world’s response to the flood of migration from the Middle East and Africa. Due to the sheer numbers involved, the situation calls for realism, cool heads, and long-term thinking, but instead, thanks to this picture, we are getting grandstanding gestures, reeking of sentimentality.

The death of a three year old is a terrible thing, of course, but it is not ordinarily world news, much less world changing news. The purpose of the highlighting of this story by the world media was to present a message, not about the boy himself, but about the wave of migration that is being called a refugee crisis. That message is that thousands of people, displaced by the war in Syria, will die like this young toddler, unless taken in by the countries of the West, as the victims both of the war and of Western heartlessness.

That is the message carried by the first stories that accompanied the image and which, due to the law of first impressions, is the message that endures, regardless of the countless subsequent retractions of the details of the initial reporting. This is a media technique that Professor Bruce Charlton calls “first-strike framing” in his recent book Addicted to Distraction.

There has been plenty the media have had to retract, or at the very least, redact, about this story. Whatever else Alan Kurdi might be a victim of, he is not a victim of either the war in Syria or Western heartlessness. His family had fled ISIS in Syria, yes, but they were already living in safety in Turkey. Nor, as it turns out, had they been turned away by the Canadian Ministry of Immigration, for, contrary to the initial claims of the father and aunt of the boy, the only application that had been filed had been for the boy’s uncle, Mohammed. Yet even if such an application had been filed and rejected, it could scarcely have contributed to the death of the boy, whose destination on this ill-fated boat trip was not Canada, but the Greek island of Kos. Indeed, from the testimony of the other survivors, it is apparent that the responsibility for the boy’s death falls squarely on his father, Abdullah, who has been using the soapbox the world media gave him to point fingers at everyone but himself. According to these other survivors he is a people smuggler and was driving the boat himself when it capsized.

Just as the story about the Kurdi family does not bear up under scrutiny, neither does the larger narrative about the so-called refugee crisis. While undoubtedly many genuine refugees have been created as people have been dispossessed and displaced by the war between the rebels and the Assad government in Syria, especially after the creation of ISIS and the wave of religious persecution that ensued, there is a world of difference between those who have fled to Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey to escape immediate danger and persecution, and the hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions, flooding into Europe across the Mediterranean. To accept these indiscriminately, as the media, humanitarian organizations, leftist politicians, and bleeding heart clergymen demand, without making the vital distinctions between a true refugee and a migrant, and between a migrant and an invader, could only destroy our own countries while doing no good for real refugees as we would be letting in the kind of people they are fleeing from along with them and potentially recreating the conditions from which they are trying to escape in our own countries.

According to statistics gathered by the European Union, only about a fifth of those pouring into Europe are actually from Syria. Even more significantly, almost three quarters of these are men. Whatever their country of origin, it is from safe locations to which they have already arrived that they are flooding into Europe. All the evidence points to the conclusion that, contrary to the media narrative, what we are seeing is not the kind of emergency situation that demands a humanitarian response of immediate and unconditional acceptance of any and all claiming asylum but an invasion that must be repelled if Western civilization is to survive.

If progressives in the West are loathe to accept this conclusion, others elsewhere clearly see this invasion for what it is. How else can we explain Saudi Arabia’s offer to pay for the construction of 200 mosques for the migrants in Germany? Refugees are people forced out of their homes, looking for temporary asylum until it is safe to return. This project tells us that in the eyes of the Saudi Arabians, who have not offered to take in their fellow Muslims themselves, this is something much more permanent.

Those who are unwilling to accept this conclusion, inevitable as it is to those with the proverbial eyes to see, hurl against those who bravely speak the forbidden truth, such words as “racist” and “xenophobic” or “inhumane” and “heartless”. These are among the few words in our language that have a power comparable to that of pictures because they too speak to the emotions in a way that the words of a rational argument cannot. It is a power that is abused every time these words are spoken, for they cannot be used in good faith being accusatory words that pronounce their verdict upon the heart, known only to God, while denying the accused what in our legal and judicial tradition is a basic right, that of the presumption of innocence.

These words are weapons in the arsenal of the invaders for this is not a force armed with horses and bowmen, swords and spears, tanks, aircraft, guns and bombs. No, it has much more effective weapons than all of those. It is an invasion force like that described in Jean Raspail’s prophetic novel The Camp of the Saints, armed with our own liberalism and humanitarianism. Its chief offensive weapons, the swords against which we must quickly develop shields or perish, are our self-accusations of racism, and the picture of a drowned three year old boy.