Essays in Idleness

In an unusual moment of optimism, this morning, I was reminded of the first Canadian Thanksgiving, celebrated by Martin Frobisher in what has been officially called the Qiliqtaaluk region of Nunavut since 2021. Or, Frobisher Bay off Baffin Island, in Meta Cognita, as the Canadian arctic was called from the XVIth century.

Frobisher and his men, audacious privateers, had regathered after being scattered by a formidable storm in the Davis Strait. They were offering thanks to Our Lord for their safety, and successful crossing of the North Atlantic, a most dangerous passage. Ice floes seemed to be blocking their voyage farther into the Northwest Passage to the interior of Cathay. But hell, they had salt beef, biscuit, and mushy peas (the ideal Canadian Thanksgiving repast), and the sailors of the expedition — at least those who had not already perished — were treated to a sermon by an Elizabethan divine, before the Sacrifice of the Mass.

Moreover, today is Christopher Columbus Day, or was, throughout the Americas. This holiday, which Ms Kamala Harris proposed to cancel before changing all her “most deeply held” opinions recently, may nevertheless survive in the hearts of all civilized men, even as DNA investigators opine that Columbus was not from Genoa, but from a family of Sephardic silk-spinners in Valencia. Then as now, the Jews were persecuted; and then as now they were persistently over-achieving.

If you aren’t Catholic, you can at least pretend to be.

Glenn Reynolds quotes Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Samuel Eliot Morison’s incomparable Life of Columbus:

“At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavouring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. …”

The saintly Instapundit, who joins me in calling fashionable Woke Marxists “worthless” and “garbage people,” recalls a scene just before the pioneering “colonialist” landed in the New World. The Aztecs sacrificed 84,000 men, women, and children at the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, in 1487. He wishes us a Happy Indigenous People’s Day.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum.” … No Roman adaptation of an adage in Plato has caused such vexation among the vegetarian types. “If you want peace, prepare for war.” It is directly in conflict with their instinct to the plausible, the glib. (That’s why I call them “vegetarians.”) Peace through being nice, and arranging ceasefires, has a track record like all the other glib, plausible ideas. And the sort of people who would ban guns are responsible for the high murder rates in all the progressive, Democrat towns. This comes to the same thing: that nature does not reward stupid.

Instead, “Peace through strength.” I get sick of explaining this.

Hezbollah has asked for a ceasefire; and while Israel is unlikely to grant it, the Americans who can be relied upon for “stupid” think, “Hooo! Ceasefire! Whoopee, peace, peace!” They will then advocate for a “two-state solution,” for a region which contains fifty-eight states, fifty-seven of which are Muslim. “Peace, peace” is what they recommend, using the expression ridiculed in the Bible. For even the Arabs understand that “Palestinians” are, and have long been, trouble. After half a century of brainwashing by terrorists, they have not improved.

If you want peace, prepare for war; but if you are in a war already, through no (or very little) fault of your own, the way to prepare for peace is through Victory. Ceasefires are merely tactical, as any well-informed Islamic scholar could tell you. They are useful for a loser, to avoid defeat. “Hudna” they call it, and recommend it to jihadists, when their pips are about to be squeaked.

As the BBC, and other malicious, but low-intelligence observers, proclaim, “the Middle East is threatened by a wider war.” They were all-in for Oslo Accords, and very sentimental about the late, alas replaceable (Egyptian) psychopath, Yasser Arafat. Indeed, granting him a visa was among the stupidest things Israel ever did.

The entire war machine of “Palestine” is due for annihilation. Verily, the Israelis are working on this, against Hezbollah and the several other Iranian proxies. And their sponsors, in Shia Islamic Persia, are also nearing “the cusp of history” on the exit side. Peace can come to the Middle East, along with excellent prospects for liberty and trade, when they are ushered through the gate into non-existence.

For those who have an interest in politics, who also wish to have some knowledge of this subject, I can recommend a book published in 1944. It is by Friedrich Hayek, and is dedicated “To the socialists of all parties.” The title is, “The Road to Serfdom.”

It is extraordinarily well-written, for an academic whose native language wasn’t English, in less than two hundred exhilarating pages. The book predicts, correctly, that while they will lose the War, German ideological notions that began to prevail before the War in e.g. Germany, Russia, Italy, and throughout the West, would continue to do so, in Britain and America. They were plausible and were thought to have been proved in wartime. In the coming peacetime, all the intellectuals would be on board.

Yet they were wrong, and had always been wrong. The professor, Hayek, shows why neither a little nor a lot of socialism will ever work; why it invariably makes everyone poorer, except for an ideological elite; and why it traps whole societies in the condition of serfdom. Oddly enough, almost no one wants to be a serf, but some wish to have power over serfs. Hence the popularity of socialism among the power-hungry.

Too, ambiguous and poorly understood political terms fool people. (My father explained this as the Triple-B principle: “Bullshit Baffles Brains.”)

The idle reader should still be captivated by this book, which hasn’t dated, even slightly. Re-reading it, as I have been doing since high school, I find the arguments irresistible and compelling. Other members of the “Austrian School” out of which Hayek sprang (it was originally a Catholic movement, incidentally) are also informative, but none are so articulate.

The “Chicago School,” of Milton Friedman et alia, was the nearest American equivalent. But that was based on numbers, more than upon the ironical ideas, which old Austro-Hungaria had the leisure to mull.

For we should realize that political principles are not mysterious and mathematically complex. Within the realm of human understanding, the universal truths of supply and demand are like the truths of everyday physics: simple and constant through time. Gravity doesn’t turn off and on; the sun doesn’t rise in the west, ever.

Thanks perhaps to his English disciple Margaret Thatcher, this Austrian candidate was once knighted by our Queen. While waiting backstage for the presentation, he was approached informally by Her Majesty herself, who had one question. It was a time when the Irish Republican Army was much in the news, and London was perhaps over-informed about its demands. Things were blowing up daily.

“How is your name pronounced?” the Queen whispered. It looked like it might be, HAY-eck, but you can never be sure with these foreign persons.

“HIGH-eck, ma’am,” the learned professor replied. … “As in, HAYEK-splosive.”

Today, and tomorrow the 8th, will be glorious anniversaries for the Jew-killers of Hamas and Hezbollah respectively; and for their admirers and conspirators all over the world, including many (mostly recent) immigrants to Canada, Britain, Europe, USA. I would rain on their bloody parade, to begin diluting the foetid gore, were it possible. But our progressive politicians, and other filth, stand in judgement whether the IDF response is “proportional,” or if they might be guilty of “genocide.”

I think it was Douglas Murray who suggested that a “proportional” response would be for Israel to commit exactly the same number of rapes, butcheries, murders, and hostage-takings on Palestinian civilians as Hamas/Hezbollah has performed on Israeli civilians (in thousands), and I would suggest hurling a matching throw-weight of randomly-targeted missiles into Gazan and Lebanese neighbourhoods — say, just a few hundred thousand.

A sane person would not suggest this, as Murray implies. But in their bottomless stupidity and malice, it is impossible to calculate whether our loud “liberals” and narcissists are sane.

My own conception of a “proportional” retaliation would be a response that is unrestrained. War is war, after all, once it has started. Israel has been unambiguously and repeatedly attacked. Let the Israelis, however, proceed by wantonly destroying all of their mortal enemies (including the Houthis of Yemen, and mad mullahs of Iran); until all have declared unconditional surrender. This should satisfy the Geneva Conventions.

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LEPANTO. — The 7th of October is also the Feast of Blessed Virgin Mary of the Rosary, instituted by Pope St Pius V to keep alive in memory the naval battle by the Christians against a massive force of Ottoman Turks. By this action, western Europe was saved (quite miraculously, and not for the first time) from Islamic invasion. It was a frightfully close-run thing; go read Chesterton’s “Lepanto” immediately!

In the face of a disaster, that has proved worse than “Katrina” — upon which the media have obsessed for almost twenty years — we are reminded how things work. If there is a way to politicize a natural disaster — and there will always be a way — it will be used for political purposes. But if the party that is the darling of the media happens to be in power, the mess must be cleaned up by the locals. The bringing of supplies and voluntary help will happen, mostly without government assistance. For governments only serve themselves.

One may learn from a variety of sources that FEMA, the “Federal Emergency Management Agency,” proved its essential uselessness in New Orleans, together with the rest of the “Department of Homeland Security.” It is, of course, failing again in Asheville. It has been swamped by the Democrat Party’s scheme to bring many million new Democrat voters into the United States, in defiance of American immigration law, and had few resources left over, anyway. For it is an incredibly expensive business, when illegals from all over the world are given priority over U.S. citizens. They must, after all, be given food, shelter, and every other sort of government gift, with a path to voter registration.

I do not criticize the various state National Guard units that have selflessly thrown themselves into action, and other voluntary citizen forces. Too, I should acknowledge that there is a formidable traffic jam in the air, that does need regulation to avoid collisions. Too, there are stories circulated by Republican hotheads. We need more weeks and months to sort them out.

But from the Internet (for instance updates from Elon Musk), we note that non-governmental charitable efforts are not merely “discouraged.” The government is alleged to be seizing and impounding desperately-needed local goods and services. The rest of the federal bureaucracy is also “chipping in,” to stifle relief efforts. The FAA, for instance, is restricting private aircraft with supplies, and making it almost impossible to fly in drones, demanding that flights be individually approved by their slothful trolls. Those who wish to bring help to the survivors have both the wreckage of the storm, and government agents to block them.

This is how things work in this world, and have worked, since the Reformation, when the state took over welfare, hospitals, schools, and all other eleemosynary institutions. Rather than allow inspiring expressions of Christian charity, they became the means for cynical political posturing and control. And with “democracy,” we have detailed laws and policies, to prevent the people from helping themselves — as they would do, by laws of nature.

If I were Satan (and I must assure my readers that I am not), I would go about my task of corrupting the human race by working on their supply of information.

First, I would practise on the animals, during the leisure time before the humans were created. I would observe their innocent trust, then teach the smarter ones how to exploit it, by leaping out of the shadows to slay them for food. Their appetites would, of course, have to be corrupted, too, so that they hungered for flesh. This is how I would scheme to subvert God’s plan, and bring death into the world. (How the world flourished, before the invention of death, I cannot remember. This happened too long before my time.)

By now, food ingestion through animal-eating is so well established, that in order to cut a figure, the apprentice devils are all vegetarians. (This is why they are so smug.)

But the question is, how to corrupt the human, who was designed, at least “in theory,” to be capable of conscious good, and endowed with smarts greater than a cat’s, although we have reflexes much slower. (Wisdom does not work at greater speed.) Where the animals could be fooled with simple conjuring tricks, people might see through these, and prepare to defeat them. But remember, if you are Satan, the “father of lies,” you are not a pathetic novice.

I gave my method away (misleadingly) at the start. It is “misinformation.” Genius requires that the main source of misinformation (or, lies) should be government programmes to correct misinformation. How better to launch the cleverest lies? But how to spread them? For after all, government can’t be everywhere, and do everything: not even Satan can rely on socialism.

Women, it is said, have the oldest profession, but this is not true. Rather it is “the media,” which began with malicious gossip in the ancestral cave. Women may have been the first “debate moderators,” but the significance of lying had already been demonstrated. The mass-media is merely its latest (and most effective) institutional framework. I think even the announcement of the End Time will begin, “This is the BBC News.”

Perhaps even more urgent and important than the destruction of our universities, is the destruction of each and every “faculty of education,” around the world. This was something that first occurred to me in high school, and led to the many benefits of dropping out.

We should begin by vacating the certification authority: that is how, not the majority, but every single teaching candidate receives an ideological bath, or drowning; although only most (perhaps 95 per cent) come out of this process mortally filled with water.

We should try to reduce the proportion of the brain-dead teaching in our schools, ideally, to less than half. But whether public or private, common or “elitist,” all have passed through the government-regulated teacher certification process. Until all these certifying institutions have been crushed like Hezbollah, and the grounds that lay beneath them have been salted and scraped, no prospect of improvement is conceivable. The absolute elimination of governments from any contact with, let alone influence upon, the schools, should be a matter of law, and would present an opportunity to imprison administrators and politicians in considerable numbers. Let them teach the polar bears on Ellesmere Island, and supplement the walrus as a source of protein.

I hope, from this, I have made my views on teacher certification fairly clear. I wouldn’t want to waste time explaining them in detail. Anyone who has been to school in Canada, or the other countries, should understand my meaning, unless they have themselves become victims of these teachers.

But I consider myself a true friend of “learning,” and even of universities, “in principle,” as they say. Let the schools that replace them hire whomever they want — let them even recruit from the land of muskoxen — as they wish. And may they grant whatever degrees they please, and to flourish or decline on personal tuitions and endowments, without the fondest scent of tax money.

The argument against this is that if “minimum” government standards were withdrawn, and schooling ceased to be mandatory, there would be a collapse of intellect in the general population. But let us look around: the collapse has already occurred.