Renewing the National Covenant

Whatever distant relationship I have to Andrew Jackson of Tennessee is one I am proud to hold. Jackson once held a ball at his home, prior to which someone, as a joke of some kind, sent an invitation to the town's only mother/daughter prostitute team, thinking the ladies would be insulted and the sender could tell the joke later. When the ladies showed up at the appointed hour with invitations in hand, Jackson invited them in as guests, and he waltzed with them as couretously as any gentleman would waltz with any lady invited to his party. When the ladies left they still had no idea that someone had tried to embarass them.

When some South Carolinians threatened to cede from the Union, Jackson was asked if he had any message for them. "Yes, I have. Please give my compliments to my friends in your state, and say to them that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hands on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach."

Gentlemen, we request your presence at the Vancouver Public Library this Thursday evening in the atrium from 7-9:00 pm where you will find us outside Blenz Coffee bar. We wear Israeli flags on our hats and we don blue scarves in solidarity with our fellows struggling against barbarism and dhimmitude in France. If you provide the gentlemanly manners I will provide the old hickory. Please join us to discuss the nature of our politic in this united Canadian nation.

Parkh and Phorrest

Some deep thinker at a meeting got upset with me for spoiling his presentation about, I guess, personality types or some damned thing, when he proposed a scenario of a half dozen people as the last survivors on Earth, only some of whom could get in a space ship and go to a survivable planet. Who should go, he asked: the homosexual, the armed policeman, the retarded girl, the ancient genius, and so on. His exercize was painful to endure. I wrecked it for him, it seems, by pointing out the obvious, that those one chooses tells about the person choosing rather than anything about who should go somewhere or what they should do. When it comes to this kind of exercise I prefer the painting of the gladiator standing over the one fallen, both looking to the crowd for judgement. Who would you want to be? Most people say they'd want to be the one on top. I'd rather be the painter. Regardless, it's a game that tells us how we see our world and people in it. Today I think about park people and forest people.

Foris is the Latin word meaning outside. Not surpring is that parc is a French word for enclosed.

Many of the worst sissies I've ever encountered are so-called and self-proclaimed "environmentalists." They are too often those who won't set foot outside the Range Rover unless their Gortex clothing is color co-ordinated with the titanium-frame mountain bike. Mention to one of them one of my favorite authors, a man who by far outstrips Hemingway, Roderick Haig-Brown, trout-fishing hero, and the sissies go livid. Want to see one go apoplectic, which is kind of fun, then recommend donating money to Ducks Unlimited, true wildlife conservationists and decent people who not only care about but fight for the preservation of wet-lands. Yes, duck hunters. But the environmentalists are worse than simply being sissies: they are anti-Humanist at the core, selfish and evil people who should, if I may be so bold, be hanged from lamp posts. That doesn't need an explanation but I'll explain anyway.

People who go on about saving the whales or preserving the rainforests are not saying anything sensible about whales or rainforests; they speak only about their own view of the meaning of life. It's a cheap parlor game that shows us who people are and what they value, but it says not a thing about global warming itself, nothing about spotted owls or evn nature itself as a whole. Mother Earth is a metaphor for crypto-fascists who can't quite figure out just how deeply ugly they are and who don't want to expose themselves in public by examining their postions openly. So one looks at them obliquely to see who and what they are, and the positon of environmentalism is a give-way that tells all, sees all, knows all.

When environmentalists speak of nature they say nothing about nature itself; they speak of power, they speak of control, they speak of Will.

Nature is power, and one must confront ones relationship with it, either accepting it as supreme or challenging it and overcoming it, harnassing it and controlling it as well as we may. How we decide our relationship to nature tells much about us aws individuals and even as cultures. Man began in some remote places about 5,000 years ago to defy nature as a supreme force in his life. Man revolted against nature and began the Agricultural Revolution. To this day, most people still don't get it. No longer was Man a scavenger relying solely on what he could find in a day and forced to find more the next day simply to survive if he could. With the Agricultural Revolution Mother Nature got ripped and poked and raped. All that is to the good. Man took control for himself. Until roughly 250 years ago Man practiced irrational subsistence agriculture, the slight surpluses going to the ruling classes who squandered most of it on wars and luxuries. Then Man began to take control of irrational agriculture and turned it into scientific agriculture, into industry, into technologies, into high science; and all of this gives rise to individual freedom from the ruling classes of privileged nobodies. Guess who doesn't like the way things stand now in our beautiful modern world? It has nothing to do with spotted owls or melting icebergs. It's not about allocation of scare resources. It's about the concept of the legitimacy of control: should Man control his own destiny or should that be left to those who commune with the spirits of Nature?

The Phorest people see control as being legitimately outside the realm of Man, power being in the forest and in the weather and in the spirit of Nature itself, they being its mediators. Parkh people see control as something each and every individual has some of, and rightly so. Control within some limited space of ones life is inside, inside ones abilities. Those who claim to care about nature are telling us they hate the idea of Man in control of his own life, as owner of his own life. The nature mystics hate privacy and love publicity, of which they are arbiters-- in their own minds, hence the exagerated moralisms of their postions.

I being a person who favors privacy over publicity am one who favors hanging environmentalists from lamp posts. It's just the kind of guy I am. I seek counselling sometimes but often I skip it for a day of fishing instead. I'm very much in favor of saving trout and the lakes and rivers they live in, partly because if everything is wrecked I won't be able to go fishing anymore, but perhaps moreso because I like my relationship with trout, something one must experience personally to make sense of. Not all us are parkh people, some prefering to be triumphant gladiators. Me, I'm a parkh person who paints my own reality within the bounds of the possible.

The Auto People

Mt grandparents were of the "Lost Generation," those who came of age after the First World War, a time of expat Yanks living the artistic life in Paris, of the Jazz Age, of the Blues, of a time when the values of the Victorians came apart and fell to dust in the aftermath of the devastation of Europe after the most meaningless and destructive war to date in our history. The Lost Generation, Hemingway calls it.

I saw a pregnant woman today. I could hardly believe my eyes. I looked around me and I don't see the lost generation of my unborn children. I have trouble conjuring the faces of the children of my comtemporaries, 'cause they are so few and so seldom seen -- if they live at all. And of them, those few who didn't go out due to abortion, birth control, or adoption at best, the children of my friends are mostly childless themselves now in their early 30s.

What devastating epiphany kept our own from having children?

If anyone wants my stuff when I die it'll be a race to grab it before it ends up in the land-fill. Stuff? One would have hoped life was something more than accumulating it just for the sake of a few years of comfort and cheap thrills at the mall.

There's an empty space, and there is the lost generation.

No Paine, No Gain

"If you can keep you head when those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you've misunderstood the situation."

Gyles Brandreth, The Joy of Lex.

"These are times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but the man who stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we all have this consolation with us: that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we attain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives every thing its value...."

Thomas Paine, The Crisis.

I read an uncritical biography of Paine earlier today, one that I feel does the man a disservice by edging toward hagiography rather than toward honest reporting. I can admire and respect people I don't like. I admire and respect Cromwell, warts and all, even though he is, to my mind, a mostly repulsive person. Maybe it's the Puritain in me that makes me think that my fellows and I are not perfect, that we are indeed not very good, and highly unlikely to be much better than we are even if we improve ourselves throughout our lives. I expect that people will examine their lives and try to do at least better if not good. I don't expect perfection. I get nervous when I encounter the highest of utopian visions of Man. I like people, and very much so, but I don't hold out hopes of perfection. I admire Thomas Paine, but the man is not perfect.

I live for now at least in a foreign nation. It's foreign in more ways than are many other nations, this being a nation of dhimmi Left fascists who drive me nuts. But the average normal Canadian is slowly changing from a 60's utopian phantasy view of Humanity to something more reasonable and settled in reality. Recently one of the local political leaders here claimed that some people are "mentally ill." A month ago that man might well have been arrested for hate speech if he'd made that statement in public. Now things are changing, and rapidly so. People are starting to shed the idiocies of decades of social engineering for common sense. Crazy people are mentally ill now, and again. At last. Perhaps the time has come to finally bury the long dead R.D. Laing. Nutters are not sane people living in an insane society. they are nuts. Common sense, regardless of Karl Menninger's opinions and ph. d. Canada becomes less foreign as the days go by.

We face some major house-cleaning in our nations. We have to begin with our minds, washing them clean of decades of encrustation and ideology dropped down upon us from above. The layers of crud are starting to peal off already; but there is much to do yet. We can start by admitting that not only are crazy people mentally ill, we can say too that Islam is a dangerous poligion, a violence-driven pseudo-religion from the early Middle Ages that is unreformed and repuslive without redemption. And we can turn to our equally disgusting Left dhimmi fascists and see them as they objectively are-- and call them such as they are. No more advertising slogans to describe our world. Reality is far preferable, even if it's not as pretty as the lies we put up with for so long. The nation seems to be coming clean at last.

Some things are crazy, not just people but whole societies. Our local politician got away with calling nutters mental patients-- in public. We can follow his lead. This is one very scary idea, one I find myself shocked by, that we can follow the honest speech of a local politician. Yes, we can be as honest in public as a local politician!

Muslims are dangerous because they follow an evil poligion. If we're not in a panic, we must be crazy.

My personal life sucks, if the truth be known. It's not because I lack civil rights. I'm not no victim of society. Tax-payers in this nation are victims of society, but I mean something different. None of us really lacks civil rights here. No, not even Muslims. Civil rights suck. What we need and should be demanding from our governors is a restoration of our personal rights. My personal life sucks, not because of society or even because of my restricted personal rights. My personal life sucks because I don't have a free society of free fellows to live among. If you live in fear of jihadis and the p.c. thought police, then of course my life sucks because you're not able to be the person you truly are, and I can't meet you as you are, less than perfect thing you might be. I wouldn't like you at all if you were perfect. Civil rights are messing up my life by attempting to perfect society and the people who live within it. It's time to say this is mental.

We face a long and bloody war against an out-of-control world of savages who are emboldened by our timidity and "self-inflicted wounds." There's a real chance that now and for long years to come we will have to wage ruthless war on primitives who are out of their minds and violent. We in the modern West let it happen. It's probably not the fault of the average savage that we must soon destroy him and his rotten society. The only worthwhile question now is which side we will take in the coming struggle for common sense and common Human decency. We face a great struggle, one filled with the potential for heroism and glory. It won't be easy to win. Most people will try to avoid anything to do with it. But some of you will take your rightful part. I ask you to join us in our discusssions at the library on Thursday evenings so we can try to catch up with a local politician's honesty. You don't have to be a perfect person to join us, and we aren't expecting to come up with perfect solutions to our struggle. Just come and join us in our discussion of the possible. There's a price to pay for this, and perhaps a dear one; but if you won't consider paying it, then your children will have to pay it for you, and they might have to pay with their lives. That would be what we here in Vancouver, Canada now refer to as mental illness.

Thursday, VPL, 7-9:00 pm, atrium near Blenz Coffee bar. See you there.

Citizens and Individuals

Even as words evolve over the course of centuries or even over the course of thousands of years they often retain within some part of their original meanings. It is that way with the words "politics" and "idiots." One who is politic is a citizen of a polis, a city. One who is outside the community, who is private, who has no mind that extends beyond himself, is idiote.

When we as citizens give up our right to inform our community members of our wishes and our insights into the nature of life in our communities, then we abandon politics and become, in that classic sense, idiots. When we defer to managers and experts, then we are idiots. When we flee into our private pursuits of hedonism or even simple privacies, then we are idiotic. To be politic we do not have to involve ourselves in the minutea of each and all issues concerning our civic lives; but when we do nothing at all about our lives as citizens, then we are idiotic.

Eric Hoffer writes in The True Believer that if one has no business of ones own, one is very likely to mind your business instead. That too is idiotic, that minder mindedness. A responsible citizen, I think, is one who manages a personal balance between privacy and publicity. We all have not just the right to express ourselves in public regarding public policies, we have some responsibility to do so. Even if we don't care to, we must have some responsibility to inform our fellows of our stupid ideas so they have more to work with than if we remain silent. We have a duty to contribute to the intellectual commonwealth of our communities. I think.

Public participation probably doesn't have to be very much. It might be a matter of sitting at a town hall meeting and nodding and smiling. It might be a matter of expressing an opinion on the bus. I think it must be public to be meaningful. I think that involving oneself in another's personal affairs misses the point. That's mostly offensive. But to involve oneself in the affairs of ones greater community seems to be the voice of genius. I don't think it matters much how intelligent ones contribution to the debate is.

We meet each Thursday evening at the Vancouver Public Library in the atrium from 7-9:pm to discuss our public affairs. Join us, citizen.

I'm a Sowell man!

Mit der Dummeit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens.

Friedrich Schiller.

I dined out this evening with Jane. I heard nightmare tales of the lower east side of Vancover, Canada, of the poverty pimps who have destroyed the lives of countless people in their efforts to improve things, to make Heaven on Earth, and of the cynical ploys the poverty pimps use to enrich themselves at the expense of the tax-payers and at the cost of the lives of the poor.

Schimmbessurung: Worsening by improvement.

Plato calls these people Philosopher Kings; Eric Voegelin calls them gnostics; Sowell refers to them as the anointed; a local media man calls them "higher purpose people." Jane calls them poverty pimps. I refer to them as Left Dhimmi Fascists. Whatever we call them they are the same actors, the same dangerous and murderous people who have from time beginning caused harm and death to the unwary. It's time we rid ourselves of their influence in our societies.

We here in Vancouver are busy reading the works of Thomas Sowell. We hope to have others who are familiar with or curious about Sowell's works join us on thursday evening at Vancouver Public Library in the atrium for our regular Thursday evening meetings so we can discuss Sowell's writing and ideas, and perhaps we can formulate some plans to restore our societies to a more realistic state of affairs. We'll be at VPL from 7-9:00 pm.

If Schiller had any sense he would have just written in english in the first place: "Against stupidity even the Gods are helpless."

Let's get rid of the Left dhimmi fascists, end what Sowell calls our self-inflicted wounds.

So Far, Sowell

Sometime this afternoon I expect to find enough time to finish reading thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed. What a pleasure it has been to read Sowell's work. Ideas that I've struggled with for years to articulate from intuition and experience are plainly laid out by a sharp and funny writer. Until I met Truepeers and Charles I thought I was alone in the world with my ideas. Now I add Sowell to my group of mentors. This great awakening comes about due to our weekly Thursday evening meetings at the Vancouver Public Library in the atrium from 7-9:00 pm. You might well have much to contribute, too. If you can't join us here in Vancouver, then meet others in your area to discuss Sowell together.


Don't sit in agony agonizing, orginazize.

Curzon

I had a buddy on the road who said: "I don't travel to meet the locals, they're all peasants; I travel to meet other travellers, people who've been around and who know things and do things."

Is there a point to our vacuuous modern Western lives? God-obsessed flagellants living in terror of going to Hell 1000 years ago in the midst of the plague might well have been happier and better adjusted to their societies and their personal lives than many people living today in suburban America. The neurotic self-obsessions of the High Middle Ages had to have been more satisfying than ours today. They must have had it made, no pollution, no urban blight, no slums, no multinational oil companies making them go to war for no reason other than to allow the rich to get richer. And then there was the organic food they ate, natural spring water, sharing and caring communities. It's all a matter of emphasis, like the fellow who explained to me that Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, Hitler just had a lousy foreign policy. I've been so judgemental all these years. I'm not getting the hang of this relativist thing. In fact, I seem to be getting less accepting of craziness all the time. I really want to hang out with Lord Curzon. I don't care if I'm a maladjusted bigot duped by the capitalist system and so on. Curzon is my kind of guy. I'm just not keen on self-flagellation and the certainties of the gnostic Left. I like haughty snobbish English imperialists. I like their foreign policies in particular. I like the attitude. Yeah, I could whip myself and worry myself sick about being offensive so that I became certain that I was actually pleasing to the gods, but I prefer myself as I am. I do like nature and stuff. Some animals make great carpets. And health food? Totally. Curzon and I could hang out and be pals. I can't find any enthusiasm for hanging out with Muslims. Socialists don't even make good carpets. Peasants? No. Curzon? Now there's a guy.

What's the difference between Lord Curzon and Maudidi? Emphasis. Maududi is a neo-feudalist; Curzon is a Modernist. In our Janus-like time we look both ways, to the past and to the future. We have to decide where we will place our faith, and then we need the attitude to carry us in one or the other direction. The peasants of the world have a say in this too. They have to decide for themselves which way they go. Left cultural imperialism leads many of the locals locked in a putrid system that exploits them as terribly as did Belgian colonialism. I say toss out the imperialists and bring in real leaders like Lord Curzon.

The English aren't going to return to restore the Raj. That ship has sailed. The Raj, nevertheless, needs resotoration, not the caliphate. And since the English aren't coming back, it will be up to the locals, the tedious and ignorant and venal creatures we don't much care for , to make their own Raj. Yes, they might be happy in the plague of this, our bifurcating time, or they could be very cool guys like Curzon, not really the happiest guy in history.

Peasants in Europe were likely happier 1,000 years ago than they are today. Muslims today are likely happier than most Westerners. I like to think of an unhappy world of peasants all with the attitude of Curzon. I would say, "Colonize thyself, and let's hang out."

Too Ugly for Cupcakes

A lady from New York writes to me frequently, and it's always a pleasure to get her letters, many of which concern her life as a suburban housewife. I do like it, especially since I spend so much of my life crawling around in third world hell-holes looking at how things are when things are bad for ordinary people. I like to find normal people living normal lives, those who are honest and decent and who aren't threatened by their governments with murder or worse. When I see infant mortality, which is to write when I see dead children on a daily basis, I see not the hand of captialism and the oil companies at work, I see government out of control. I like seeing mothers with healthy kids who behave socially, meaning not like feral beasts who threaten me, others and themselves. My friend from New York writes about cooking dinner for the family. Stew last night. Her kids won't die from filthy water or rotten meat or from visits from the local despot's death squads. Mom and daughter made cupcakes.

I have another lady who writes to me frequently. She asks if I'm really just a thug. That's hard to answer rightly. I know that because of some of what I do as a traveller I have a look about me that scares some people. All that I do and more would be acceptable and even admirable if I am part of a sytem of legitimate force; but if I'm simply a private citizen who lives and acts in accord with my own vision of right and wrong, then I might only be a thug. Maybe I'm small and shrinking. Were I a tourist I'd be welcome most places; but if I'm a mercenary, then I might not be welcome anywhere. Who's right and who's wrong? How can we tell the difference? Is it a good thing to decide we cannot tell the difference between right and wrong, and therefore do nothing in the face of what might well be evil? Or should we fall back on ideologies and gnostic insight to determine our vision of right and wrong? Maybe those with less power are right in all cases, victims of power they can't defeat, victims of capitalism, victims of Modernity and greed. I might be a thug for relying on common sense, intuition, and life experience. No doubt that jihadis and Leftists do the same. I so my thug stuff so that it's possible for mothers and daughters to bake cupcakes in the security of their suburban homes. I do my thug stuff so others now living in squalor might someday have the chance to do the same kind of banal things. The ladies who write to me would, if I were to show up at their doorsteps, burst into tears. They would not invite me in. And if you act for the good, then there is a good chance they wouldn't have you in their homes either. There's a price to pay for standing up to monsters. Sometimes you might well come across as a thug. How blessed by life are you to have such a chance! Rejoice that the very people you love for themselves as ordinary won't have you-- 'cause you're too ugly for cupcakes.

Conventicle Society for Progress and Democracy

I wake in the middle of the night due to images and ideas chasing me from dreamland. Recently I thought of a conventicle society. Other things wake me in the night. A conventicle meeting is a relief from the usual.

In a few days I'll return to this idea of meetings on the basis of those held in Roman catacombs.