Essays in Idleness

Do you have any rights, gentle reader? Perhaps not. Up here in the Canadas we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, granted by the charity of Pierre Trudeau (late father of the child now governing us). It spells out what we are allowed to do, “subject to such limits” as may occur to our government from time to time. I viscerally opposed it, whenas it was being written over our inherited constitution, four decades ago.

Animals have rights, under the law of the jungle. I approve of these, insofar as I approve of life on this planet. Hunters have rights, because they are animals. The state has rights, thanks to soldiers and police, for as long as they are willing to obey. What a lot of rights exist!

In the old Roman Fora, the Christian had the right, to be eaten by a lion. He had no other rights, however. As the Marxists say, the capitalist has his right, to become extinct. In their time, the passenger pigeons were as free as any bird; and the eagles, who used them as a foodstuff, had the right to harry their vast flocks. Our own right, to squab, tipped the balance until the last ones found the right to die naturally.

Rights are not conferred. They are taken. They exist for as long as they can’t be taken back.

Under the fabulous and mythical Natted States Constitution, these truths are self-evident. Though still young, it contains many mediaeval features. Federal, State, and Municipal governments are allowed to exercise certain prerogatives, under specified conditions; but there is another level of government. “The People” have all the rights that remain. This includes the ancient right to overthrow a tyrant. In the theory, they have not been granted these rights by the government, but by God — the Same who granted the rights of the Lion.

As Loyalists, not Patriots, my ancestors opposed the innovative Yankee legal arrangement; though as fellow Americans, they were just as feisty. Since I mentioned hunters above, let me consider gun rights. Our “right to bear arms,” up here in the Loyal Canadas, wasn’t encapsulated in any constitutional arrangement because it was among the oldest and most obvious rights. A man has a right to defend himself, and if he has the means, he will be respected. In his recent “Covid-related” (i.e. characteristically fraudulent) ban on 1,500 brands of firearms, the Trudeau child has been revising this. It is hardly the first outrage he has attempted — avoiding Parliament whenever he can.

To my shame, as a Canadian, he was not overthrown — even when we had a chance to do this peacefully.

Today, we have (not only in the Canadas but through much of the West) the sort of people to whom I’d have to explain that I am not advocating disorder. Rather, I propose to restore it. We were once free countries, to an extraordinary degree — thanks explicitly to our Christian traditions, through which were established conditions of trust. We have still, however, such rights as we are willing and capable of defending.

Unless we are willing to defend them — violently, when push comes to shove — we proceed to conditions like those in Red China. We will be allowed what most people seem to want: a “progressive,” consumerist, high-tech megacity. But it will be one in which we have agreed that, because we can’t be trusted, we must wear the equivalent of GPS bracelets.

My policy, up here in the High Doganate, my ivory tower, is to maintain an attitude towards the world, down there, that is consistently sceptical and pessimistic. It is a policy that has been tested by events, and has seldom failed, if ever. There are, let me admit, moments when I have indulged a mushy sentimentality, relaxing my guard; when I have entertained the rather liberal thought, “things are getting better.” And I have been duly punished for each of these phantasias. For no, things are terrible, often getting worse, and anyone who thinks human life will end well, hasn’t been shoved into a ventilator yet. It is the one positive thing we might say about the Batflu; that it serves as a much overdue reminder — that if we are not dead yet, we will be, soon enough. In my view, it is the fate of optimists to be routinely suckered.

But this does not mean I am not hopeful. Or that, while I tend to be generous in my criticisms, things aren’t passable as they are.

Now, if gentle reader thinks I am going to blather on about Heaven, in the manner of a Born Again Happyface, he has guessed correctly. I don’t actually know anything about that place, except what I have glimpsed in fleeting moments; or have construed from my religion. From both I gather that our hope, when it is genuine, lifts us out of worldly conditions, disconnects us from our prospects down here. Moreover, these moments link or knit to each other, not to anything we might trade. As the saints have discerned, or so I speculate, futurity is now.

Hope is indicated, and to be cheerfully expressed in our works, as a lawyer might say. An optimist expects things to turn out well; a pessimist merely hopes to be wrong, for a change. But being right as usual needn’t disappoint him. We know that we will fail, in the end, but we do not hope for failure. Rather we hope for a good resolution, leaving this to the divine.

The hope is in Eternity, of course, but into our mundane life, it will frequently spill over. The beauty that is rejected (as “irrelevant” and unprofitable) in contemporary practical living, will be visible to the hopeful at the strangest times. It will appear in the most ridiculous situations. We must do our best to be prepared for them.

This is why I find dark humour so encouraging. It invites us to cease hoping for the wrong things.

Long before the Batflu, there were plagues, as I’ve been hinting lately. Perhaps I should thank the shut-in, for an opportunity to revisit Marcus Aurelius, and the physician Galen, too. Roman soldiers campaigning in the Persianist Near East had often returned with nasty infections, in that ancient globalizing world, when the West was first trading with India and Han China; and disease was among the first things they traded in.

But the Antonine Plague of the later 160s AD, with its spectacular fevers, inflammations, and skin eruptions (possibly smallpox), visited millions of deaths upon the people everywhere from sober civilized Africa, far north into the German heart of darkness, making previous spot outbreaks seem tame. The later Plague of Cyprian (possibly our first adventure with the measles) also paradoxically helped to keep the Huns at bay, by substantially reducing the pressure on land.

Our estimates of the death tolls from these contagions are even less reliable than those from Italy or New York today. Hospitalizations were zero, however, because hospitals hadn’t been invented yet. Perhaps a quarter of the population was eliminated in each of these plagues; but it could have been half in either. Large rural areas were completely depopulated, from disease and the subsequent famines and disorders. The economy could be a problem, even then.

Yet the thoughtful Marcus Aurelius, who may himself have died from plague complications (he’d had co-morbidities all his life), did not think it was the worst thing that could happen, even when it was at its most raging in Metro Rome.  He thought the spread of falsehood and of charlatanry was worse — the way deceit circulated, as it were, like a virus.

Saint Paul of beloved memory had already issued his “Guidance” to the longsuffering citizens of this world. He did not (check it out) specify social distancing, sheltering in place, or any other method to stay safe. Rather his advice to its inhabitants was, “Be ye not conformed to the world.” This would work for all occasions.

In this generation of deChristianization, when the cads and monsters of surveillance are increasing their control, it is worth remembering our one defence against them. Even if gentle reader has been gaoled, for congregational singing, or for being a clergyman over the age of sixty-five (I cite two of the many banned items in a provincial instruction on church re-openings), he may remain inwardly free. For stone walls do not a prison make, &c.

Of course, if it were up to me, I would have the Knights of Columbus form armed militias to prevent the cops from busting in during Mass, but I doubt this idea would appeal to our present church leaders. Other, more pacific suggestions, such as sending a few Christians with flowers to a nearby abortion clinic, to keep the cops busy while others pray in church, would probably also be ignored. From the pope, performing pagan rites in Rome again this week, while continuing to sell out the Catholics in Red China, down to every smarmy liberal bishop and priest, our Church has herself been active in the deChristianizing process.

But it wasn’t just Saint Paul preaching non-conformity. Jesus of Nazareth had already warned us to expect stuff like this.

Veritas liberabit vos, as it says in the Bible, or if gentle reader prefers, ἡ ἀλήθεια ἐλευθερώσει ὑμᾶς. In our casual English rendering, “The truth will set you free.” My own habit is to put a “shall” in that instead, but forgive me, I can be a hothead sometimes.

The truth leads to Jesus; verily, it is Jesus, as Western men were among the first to discover. But we have also gratuitously applied this saying to a wide range of things, including many with no obvious religious significance. Being backward and reactionary, as well as a hothead, I am often inclined to use it for our general inheritance of common sense: things learnt from experience through the centuries, and not to be abandoned without cause. Most such “truths” are now being abandoned, however, at least in our universities and other asylums, because few of them are politically correct.

The ancestral experience of mankind is that epidemics are not defeated by the human will. Rather, they are endured. True, they can be more or less intelligently endured; we may take elementary precautions. But if we think we might defeat them with these, we are, as it were, batty. That a vaccine, or equivalent, may eventually drive a virus into extinction, has been part of that olden experience. It did not occur to our ancestors, however, to shut down the economy after polio was first identified, about thirty-six centuries ago, until Jonathan Salk invented his vaccine in 1955.

And this was because they were not drooling morons. A man cannot live on bread alone, but he does need some form of nutrition. That this hasn’t been proved by epidemiologists in double blind tests does not phase me in the least.

That we must love our enemies, including the drooling morons, I accept as Christian Truth. Loving them, I think, involves trying to understand them — an effort for which patience may be required. In an emergency, such as a threat to our freedom, we must confront them, sometimes in a truly decisive, badass way. But this is finally for their own good, too.

I have decided to demote the Red Chinese Batflu, from a pandemic to an epidemic — this in the cause of injecting cool reason into it. All mass media please copy. And should you hesitate, remember that by following my instructions, you are not following Donald Trump’s.

That this Batflu has spread internationally, I have been informed. That it originated in Wuhan, China, and almost certainly by an accident at the Communist Party’s big virology lab in that town, I take for known. That the totalitarian authorities deny this, I accept. For as Bismarck said of other arbitrary statesmen, “Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.”

But a plague is a plague is a plague, and always has been. It is something that happens, and once it is happening, except for mostly ineffectual precautions, the human race is defenceless against it. The first wave of the Batflu followed the same pattern in sensible Sweden, as it did in hysterical Italy. We are gradually realizing, as we could have from ancient experience, that spectacular theatrics do no good. Specifically, we can already know that our lockdowns have been a waste of time and spirit. So are all of our proposed theatrics, going forward.

For instance, the present explosion of virtue signalling, from behind facemasks. Many, many previous studies of influenza virus transmission showed them to be useless, except in places like surgical theatres. They could catch viral sneezes, but so could your elbow. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence (summarized here) that healthy people wearing facemasks are sickening themselves, and reducing their immunities. That might seem counter-intuitive to some, but the truth is often counter-intuitive, and therefore requires reason.

Once again, hard-earned, “tried and true” medical knowledge is too easily replaced, among the panicking, by the untried and false. Soon it is imposed by ignorant politicians.

Those who have faith in statistics (I don’t, because my faith is in God) should note that more than two-thirds of hospital cases in such a place as New York came from lockdown locations, where the infected had been diligently following the public health orders. Moreover, 97 percent of cases were generated indoors where, thanks to political idiocy — real, manslaughtering idiocy like Governor Cuomo’s — most of the population has been trapped. “The peeple” are discouraged, or actually prevented, from seeking safety outdoors, where it was instinctively sought by plague-threatened people since time out of mind.

That the sun and fresh air are cleansing, should be known to every child, approximately from birth. They should also be taught that the truth will make them free.

A lot of things happened, more than half a century ago; suddenly I’m among the shrinking number who recall this. For today’s Idlepost, I will remember an article I read in a popular science magazine, back then. I’ve forgotten both the title of the publication, and the date of the number. I can, however, say that I was in high school at the time; my fact-checkers may take it from there.

According to this article, the worth of a human being was 98 cents. The authors showed how their figure was arrived at. They had combined current market prices for the materials in an average human frame of 130 pounds. (Details like this I remember.) A sceptic, even then, I recall noting that they excluded hat, mid-season clothing, and shoes, from their total; and that they didn’t mention whether they were citing wholesale or retail values on the flesh and chemicals. Most pointedly, while accompanying my mother to a supermarket, I checked the prices for beef, pork, and broiler chicken, choosing the lowest grades. All were over 10 cents a pound; and so I concluded that the price of the meat alone, per human, would exceed their total estimate.

Given background inflation rates, I think the total value in 2020 may approach twenty dollars, or even twenty-five. I’d have to recheck chemical prices, to be sure. Though perhaps the total might be reduced, closer to one dollar again, for babies.

Now, I hate complicated statistical calculations, so here is an alternative approach.

Once, passing a second-hand bookstore, I spotted in its window a book I very much wanted to acquire. Knowing the bookseller, I dashed into his shop, grabbed the book in question and, clutching it tightly while advancing towards his counter, exclaimed that I had been willing to kill for it.

“How much?” I asked, catching my breath.

“Eighty dollars,” he replied, nonchalantly.

I told him I could not possibly pay that, and sadly released the book from my grip.

“Well,” the bookseller observed. “Thanks to this exercise, we know the value you place on a human life. Less than eighty dollars.”

In those days, I think I would have drawn the line at thirty. But to his moral credit and mine, the bookseller and I were finally able to agree on fifty-five dollars (plus sales tax).

This week, there is a “Virtual March for Life,” from and to virtual Parliament Hill, in virtual Ottawa. Owing to the Communist Chinese Batflu, the actual walk was cancelled — by far the largest annual protest march in the country, although for some obscure reason our progressive media always bury it on an inside page, in the rare instances when they cover it at all. To them, I suppose, the value of a human life is whatever it costs to typeset a paragraph, divided by 20,000 or so.

Call me reckless, but I’m willing to go higher.

Be afraid, be very afraid, gentle reader. Of volatile organic compounds! They’re gonna get your mama. Some scientist in Germany named Brasseur has done studies. So did another called Stavrakou somewhere else. And they have colleagues! At least one of those courageous people has spoken to the press. And while what they said may sound innocent enough, grab hold of your whisky. It is time to be terrified by another Unknown.

Since nitrogen dioxide, and all the tonnes of fine particulate matter, began falling out of our atmosphere (thanks to the the lockdowns that followed the Xi Batflu), surface pollutants have been piling up. Atmospheric gases have been interacting with those volatile compounds down below. And do you know what that means, my poor frightened soul?

It means that Ozone Levels — right here at the surface of our planet — have increased. And you know what Ozone did, in Antarctica. Remember that Ozone Hole? There’s hardly anything living in Antarctica today, but penguins. The Ozone must have fallen, and killed everything else. Now, down here on the surface of the planet, this Ozone may have grown by 2 percent. Or 200 percent: whichever is higher.

And worse, the summer is coming. As the sunshine increases — and it will, mark my words — there will be more and more complex reactions. You can count on it. Bwahaha!

Yes, our enemy is the clear skies! It is the invisible enemy, as Trump might say.

Call the United Nations! Demand action! Re-animate the corpus of Al Gore! We must educate the public. Only world government can save us! We need emergency task forces right away!

But while we’re waiting for the task forces to arrive, there are things that we can do. (“We’re all in this together!”) All of our household appliances are at fault. The fridge, the aircon, the coffee grinder, everything. Stovetops and ovens; hotplates too! Laptops, cellphones, personal computers: all contribute to this crisis. Cars, of course; trucks, trains, and aeroplanes: we must disable them all! Turn off all your lights, while you’re at it. Everything must be extinguished, now! And that includes candles. They’re emitting those volatile compounds for sure, snuff them out! Pour water over them!

We must shut everything down until we find a vaccine! Or forever, because we have to be safe!

Meanwhile, we must burn as much coal as possible, to restore the atmosphere’s particulate supply. This dust was what was keeping our Ozone Levels steady. Open pit mining is only a start.

It will all be worth it, if we save just one life!

*

Everything written above is scientific. (“We must listen to the science!”) Note that it is also batshit insane. You may forget all about it now, for you might never hear about it again, for the rest of your life. Just concentrate on your whisky. Light another cigarette.

Alternatively, you might hear about it eighty times a day, for the next five decades.

I was, truth to tell, performing a mental exercise: trying to guess what the rats in labcoats could come up with next, together with their friends in the meejah and acadeemjah — when the trillions you are willing to pay for their advice shrinks to mere hundred billions.

For that would be a real environmental crisis, for them.

Among the more interesting human perversions is the desire to be lied to. The opposite is the desire to be told the truth, but this, to my mind, is not a perversion. I have met at least one fellow human, in possession of a philosophy degree, who speculated that there might be a third, “middle way,” between these extremes. He is dead now, but while he lived, he described himself as an “Antinomian.” (As an “Antediluvian,” I was on the other side.)

Let me stick with the perversion with which I started. There are many circumstances when even a “normal” person, if we could find such a being, wants to be told untruth. He does not want to believe it an untruth, however. I remember when my Antinomian friend died. I did not want to believe it, although the evidence conflicted with my fact preference. I could not imagine him not being alive because, theretofore, he had always seemed to be alive, even when absent. Perhaps it was a small thing, in the context of the whole world, but to me the world had radically changed, by his death. By dying, my Antinomian (who could be quite charming) had refuted his own philosophy, and my first instinct was to call him, and point this out. He was no longer taking calls, however.

Gentle reader will, if he has reached mature years, be aware of “the stages of grief,” whatever they are. This is because he will have experienced them. Let me suggest that, to some degree, these accompany all corrections. They may be inverted, or proceed very quickly, but consciousness itself has a pattern in the creature who must deal with the true/false dichotomy. For all I know other animals share it in their respective ways; I seem to have observed it in pets. There is a moment of transition in the more sentient animals — now I am thinking of cats — when they rearrange themselves, and seem to choose which instinct to favour. They don’t look happy.

And humans I have found, often, even more sentient than cats. Our responses may not be subtler, but they can be. The question, “How is this possible?” may be answered with impressive sophistication.

During this monotonous Batflu crisis, I have the luxury of observing contrary lies. In fact there is a range from, “Oh this is nothing, laugh it off,” to, “Omigod we’re all going to die.” Here I note an argument for something in the middle, however, and even for keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

But what (mostly pseudo) scientists call “confirmation bias” is powerfully at work, in everything we do. Were it not, we would not be able to function. That taking things for granted, such as “gravity is still working,” is a forgivable inference, I’d be the first to admit.

What feels new, though it certainly isn’t, is the degree to which the global village’s informers, acting under political but also commercial impulses, exploit perversion. They know most people will believe a lie, no matter how unlikely, once their political beliefs have frozen — to the point of not wanting to hear any contrary information.

As the sage, Iowahawk, observed: “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”

Find the people who want to be told lies — of commission or omission, it matters nought — and provide them with a regular supply. It is not the only way to get rich; but hooo, is it a good one.

This old Durkheim term emerged from that era, in the 19th century, when Europeans were discovering suicide statistics. They not only gathered suicide rates, but noticed that they were rapidly increasing wherever modern industrial life was extended — to all the backward places where pre-industrial life had hardly changed from one generation to another — suddenly, many times over.

Anomie the sociologists came to know as a product of conflict between belief systems. It is a breakdown, a disintegration, of long-established social bonds, which depended upon a common worldview (Christian, for instance). It is the disappearance of an ancient order, and its replacement with chaos. It is “fragmentation of social identity and rejection of values,” according to the Wicked Paedia.

“From normlessness to gormlessness” was one of my attempts to encapsulate this “progress”; from shifting to sinking sand, as it were.  I was first reading about this phenomenon in works by T. G. Masaryk, nearly fifty years ago. (The future Czech president anticipated all of Durkheim’s insights.) As our hut of norms begins to crack and splinter, people become deeply confused. As it subsides and is crushed, they give up on it entirely, but they have nowhere to run. The suicide rate is a measure of this, by a plausible statistical inference.

This has recently been accelerating, radically, once more, especially in boys and men. One might call it a great victory for feminism, or argue from the myriad of other dislocations. But while the male suicide rate is currently many times higher, women are learning how to kill themselves, too.

The majority remain survivors, however. The great mass of men (now in the sense of “people”) are not philosophers, and have not the luxury of listening to the podcasts of the philosophers. The sky that is falling on them is no intellectual construction, or rather deconstruction. It is from their little isolated worlds of work and leisure, that meaning is vacuumed, from family and prayer to steady jobs. Opiates take their place, like cheap goods from China. The great achievement of “progress” is a growing despair. (“Trumpism” interests me, as a resisting source of the positive; in this sense I think it is genuinely backward.)

Of course, most people adapt to our brave new world, in which no one can afford to be honest, and therefore no one can be trusted. There is a form of escape in becoming deeply cynicized. That the collapse of Western Civ could be good for the economy, I first noticed a few decades ago. It is one of the paradoxes of our time. Such material problems as famine, and disease, were apparently being solved. Now we discover this was also an illusion: the extremes of consumer comfort melt away. Those who had to work for a living (unlike public and private bureaucrats, who can prattle to each other from home) suddenly found themselves locked into a nightmare.

In the end, even the bureaucrats will starve, unless the economy reopens. My neat, conventional, mindless rightwing view is the glib-libertarian one, that this is what happens when the masses lose their freedom, and the progress that was wrought by capitalism is destroyed. There is some truth in this, but it is shallow.

The world that is reopening is normless. This it has in common with the world that went before. For a moment it seems to have improved, because we can walk outside again, and if it is still Spring, there are flowers and songbirds. Paycheques may also possibly resume.

But “normal life” cannot possibly resume, because “normal” (normed, normative) is gone. Even the distinction between a man and a woman has been eliminated; systems of reward and punishment are reversed; words have changed their meaning. Left-satanist utopian agendas are what animate our political minders, who have now learnt how easy they are to impose. While we were sleeping, through the induced coma of the Batflu crisis, we proved our extraordinary capacity for prostration.

We might observe that the Batflu works through our economy as it does through our nursing homes. The old and feeble companies are killed off. The young and ruthless inherit their empty lots. Technology now makes general surveillance possible, and has provided an immediate excuse for it.

Progress has made another astounding leap. And with this, the cause of anomie advances.

As my well-informed, gentle readers will know, the lady who invented Mother’s Day (this second Sunday in May) also campaigned for its abolition. Anna Jarvis (1864–1948), who had framed the original proposal for a holiday, inspired after the death of her own beloved mother, was appalled when she saw what she had encouraged. A sincere Methodist, and a fierce opponent of infant mortality, she had advocated for a devout, religious holiday — but saw it turned, almost instantly, into a crass commercial event.

As it remains to this day.

We are not against motherhood, incidentally, up here in the High Doganate. Nor are we necessarily against nursing and other “healthcare” vocations — although we are quite irritated by the daily clash of pots and pans, and the rest of the urban cacophony, including the flypast of the Snowbird aeroplanes that we just endured. All these disorders promote our socialist, ludicrously expensive, and largely counterproductive, hospital system.

There are good mothers and bad; good nurses and bad; I’m sure there are even a few good doctors. To celebrate them, or any tribe as a species, is too heavy a load of codswallop for me. I would go so far as to add that there are good florists and bad, and would insinuate that there are also bad flowers — not as God made them, but as they are bred, and arranged. Praise for certain classes of people, with the possible exception of the (biologically deceased) Saints, is an “identitarian” movement, whether superficially of the Left or Right. How often crass commercialism has “evolved” from vulgar and deceitful politics.

For some years now, I have honoured Anna Jarvis by ignoring Mother’s Day.

Instead, let us address our prayers to that most Holy Virgin, and present our flowers at her shrine. And if there is a mother whom we especially prize, let us lay them at her tomb where her arms are folded, or in the living arms that once enfolded us.

My title this morning is borrowed from an email by a dear friend. He’d ping’d along some meejah item on a firearms incident. Whatever. Perhaps we should praise the moderation of Judge Moye of Dallas County, for even though capital punishment is available in Texas, he did not order Shelley the hair salon owner to be shot. And this, although Shelley had ignored an order from the Health Gestapo to close her shop. (He is so liberal!)

Perhaps gentle reader will suspect I’m being “ironical” here. My email correspondent is one of several who forward items from across the continent about local officials, “dressed in a little authority,” over-enforcing lockdown orders when mere citizens show insufficient respect for them. Another item, that came in at the same time, showed a jogger on a California beach easily outrunning a fat, winded policeman, with background music from Chariots of Fire. I think it was the first time in my life that I cheered on a jogger.

Shelley Luther is the full name of that Texas beautician, now my latest heart-throb. I went out of my way to keystroke her release from prison by an Attorney-General — now as you might expect under criticism from various Texas Democrats and other unspeakable swamp-life.

Though a United Empire Loyalist myself, I was delighted to hear some of Shelley’s supporters singing: “Stand beside her, and guide her — Through the Night with a Light from Above.” (As I write, I am singing this to myself.)

Alas, my own beautician — who has been doing really cheap haircuts for me since my little sister gave up the practice — has not stood up to Ontario’s Health Nazis. Another of my heart-throbs (I have thousands of them), her shop in Toronto’s Chinatown is more closed than Wuhan. So is the ethnic supermarket nearby, full of tanks and flopping fish, where I’d go to pretend that I was in an Asiatic wet market.

We don’t have a world-class virology lab in Toronto, I’m sorry to say. That’s because we’re not really a world-class city, I fear. The best we could offer was a world-class loony bin, but that has been diminished since our Health Fascists started to apply euphemisms to it, and turned all the inmates into outpatients. They are the closest we still get to genuine diversity; though of course they all vote Liberal.

*

I was going to write about economics this morning, but got distracted somehow. I once read a paperback on this topic (along with a few hardcovers), and I’m curious about where the many trillions come from that our guvmints have been distributing as pogey.

Yairs: I vaguely remember someone named Bernanke, bailing the banks out during the financial crisis of ’08, explaining in an unguarded moment that the process is “less like borrowing and more like printing money.” Today it can all be done electronically, so they don’t have the fiendish printing costs they used to have in Weimar Germany.

From that paperback I learnt that money is only useful if you can buy stuff with it. And who would make anything to sell if, as a rude child on Edith Street once said, “you only get paid with farties.” Formerly, you could at least collect the old coins, after they had been “demonetized.” I used to have a little collection of these demonetized trinkets from Greece, Rome, Byzantium, ancient Japan and so forth, until a burglar cured me of the miserly habit of looking at them. But here in post-modernity, only the keystrokes remain, thanks to wonderful improvements in technology.

Except, I’ve overlooked the pretty card my bank gave me, with a picture on it of the great outdoors. Once I’ve got into the grocery store (you have to line up), I just help myself to anything I want, and then tap this card on the way out. The machine makes a noise like, “jin-ping!” — and then I’m on my way.

At some point — but it is seldom a discrete moment in space or time — the weight of the anecdotal in science, or that of the circumstantial in law, becomes overwhelming. This is the opposite of a statistical fact, in part because there are no statistical facts. I am reminded of this whenever the “scientific” control freaks of statistics lay down some law, indifferent to the Law in nature. The difference between 999,999 and one million is, in any imaginable situation, not a difference at all. Where it is made the basis for a decision, that decision is arbitrary, and not infrequently, cruel. By contrast, such differences as those between pregnant and not pregnant, dead and not dead, are unchallengeably significant. They are in the realm of meaning.

I am reminded of this hourly or better, these days, when consulting the news. All readers of the mass media (accurately described by Trump as “fake news”) are being covered, constantly, by the vomit of statistics — few with any context, and many knowingly false. They “look scientific,” which is to say, they answer to the moron’s conception of science. In “disciplines” like economics, today, and throughout the other social sciences, the participants sleepwalk. Nobel prizes are given out for numerical sludge, presented to the purpose of selling one destructive “policy” or another, that will be imposed on real, live, particular human beings. The same is true of the “mathematical biology” that has disinformed all our public health “professionals.”

The Red Chinese Batflu, now transforming our world, is a spectacular case in point. Not only the epidemiological projections, but even the counts of dead and wounded, are taken on faith — from people who are characteristically faithless. Information on prevention and cures is hostage to the work of statisticians. “Double blind tests,” which would be absolutely immoral — wicked — on human subjects facing life or death — are demanded by our medical apes.

Let us consider Hydroxychloroquine, for one passing example. Administered promptly, it has “apparently” saved the lives of thousands, in nursing homes all over the world, and outside them. The doctors and nurses on our actual front lines are using it, on the strength of their actual experience. The dangers in its use are real, as they are in all drugs, and all food and drink for that matter; but in this case they are remarkably slight. Yet the drug has been put under a cloud by one, obviously politicized, statistical study — in which it was administered, or not administered, to patients already beyond hope of recovery. Surprise! Hydroxycholoquine didn’t work on them. The malicious idiots of the press then went to work on this, for an unambiguously political purpose.

No artist, not even the geometrically obsessed Piero della Francesca, or the over-domesticated Johannes Vermeer, ever painted by numbers. Both were fascinated by the patterns they had the genius to observe in nature, and both sought to reproduce these patterns within the structure of their paintings. Ratios have been contemplated, and applied, through the known histories of art, architecture, music, even poetry, since very ancient times. They are likewise of interest, and use, within the sciences. But these are never statistical, except where some mediocrity is trying to demonstrate some point that is irresistibly precise, by a means that is approximate. The Golden Section, the value of Pi — are true absolutely, not by the compilation of averages.

But modern, godless man, cannot cope with Absoluteness. (See here.)

Cause and effect may be masked, by many variables, but that great principle of our universe, that two and two make four, regardless of what some fool in the Vatican may proclaim, is at the root of all discovery. It makes the difference between truth and (let me try to be polite for a change:) error. We know by experience, and in moments we home in upon, what our Creator has Created. Or we babble, having dressed up as the Judge.

Gentlemen! A word of warning! “Carrying on” (i.e. fornicating) with a married woman other than your wife (i.e. adultery) could still cost you your job! For you might be in violation of social distancing rules.

Let’s make the disapproval stronger. You will certainly be in violation, and not only of her chastity. For there are some things that can’t be done by Zoom or Skype, as even progressives will admit, until they have reconsidered the matter, as they have with the distinction between female and male.

The man I think of as the father of our lockdowns — Professor Neil Ferguson, who persuaded the world that the Batflu would kill millions, with his computer model at Imperial College London — has now discovered that the revolution eats its own. His “squeeze,” a meejah environmentalist performer — who is “committed to an open marriage” — had been “visiting” him, as it were. By doing so she was leaving one house, and entering another. Someone must have snitched. So now we have a holiday from them both.

Prof Ferguson, famed “mathematical biologist,” could, to my mind, have been classified as an infectious disease in his own right. The curious may find that he has been behind a succession of wildly exaggerated epidemiological prognostications: from Mad Cow, to Swine Flu, Ebola, Zika, Dengue, the last SARS. Check them out. I don’t mean a little on the high side, but consistently orders of magnitude over the top. He has cost British and foreign taxpayers many, many millions thereby, but would have cost much more had any previous government taken his advice more seriously. For he habitually recommends nationwide lockdowns.

At last they have listened! (Yes, that was sarcasm.) His thoughts on “global warming” are of a piece: simply close everything down.

But while incredibly influential, Prof Ferguson was never unique. Since January, my respect for epidemiologists may have dropped lower than my respect for leftwing journalists. If gentle reader is aware of one who ever failed to increase the sum of human misery, he may reach me by email.

Dr Fauci, on this side of Lake Atlantic, has my attention again since I learnt that he was instrumental within the Obama administration, in directing huge American grants to the Batflu incubator at Wuhan in Red China. That he now denies our pandemic could possibly have spread from there, thus strikes me as uninteresting. President Obama was the genius who shut down potentially lethal American “gain-of-function” research, which was then redoubled in China with American help.

It is hard to find this stuff in Google, because it is being actively censored. This is another feature of the progressive rhetorical approach. My Idleposts themselves would be banned, I suspect, if anyone ever read them. This is my principal advantage: so long as no one hears us, we have free speech. And my pleasure lately is to be the sort of paranoid schizophrenic dog, who was trained to smell out rats, in labcoats.

My interest in Mexican history is like the Mexican interest in Mexican history: very tame. That third federal republic, and its predecessors, has many interesting and even noble features. Mexico was once, more than the Natted States, a great world power — the original seat of the almighty dollar, and globalist trade — generations before the English-speaking were a credible presence on this continent. She was also a cultural superpower. To this day she is what remains of the still-beating heart of Catholicism in the Americas, and the papist who does not rise to the cry ¡Viva Cristo Rey! must be brain dead. For even under the oppression of the sick and perverted secular tyranny that impoverished Mexico, that heart throbbed.

Cinco de Mayo commemorates the First Battle of Puebla on the 5th of May, 1862, when a smaller Mexican force under the possibly brilliant General Zaragoza whipped an awkward French squad, that was a long way from home. It ignores the Second Battle of Puebla, when the French returned and pulverized the Mexicans. I should like to get into the history of the destruction of Mexico by secular progressives, some other day. We are being torn apart ourselves, now, by their triumphs. Satan invariably wins in those conflicts, but never for keeps.

As a cultural event, however, among Mexican exiles in places like California, that First Battle of Puebla was an occasion to remember, starting the next year. In Mexico itself it faded, but up here in the North of North America it has become Mexican Ethnic Day, when we like to drink lots of tequila. It became very popular thanks to beer and licker advertising campaigns in the 1980s, and as this year’s Batflu scenario is an indoor affair, the focus is on tequila-drinking while socially-spaced. Perhaps gentle reader has already obtained his bottle, in the time he has saved from having his church closed down. I understand the supply chain for this beverage is robust.

In the view of P. G. Wodehouse (not a Mexican), “It’s a funny old world.” Or it was Margaret Thatcher who said that (not a Mexican, either): I’ve never checked it out. Thanks to a globalized crass commercialism, I see that the holiday is finally catching on in Mexico itself; the way the celebration of Saint Patrick’s with green food dye has caught on in Ireland. I like fake things to look fake, so as not to spread confusion.

The self-celebration of an ethnicity has always been, as it were, authentically false. When, for instance, “Canada Day” replaced “Dominion Day” it was, arguably, a welcome acknowledgement that a genuine commemoration was being replaced by an expression of our vacuous national pride. Our fair Dominion need no longer be desecrated, for it was now entirely in the past. The kids as well as their elders could paint red maples all over their faces, and feel giddy good about themselves, while hopping up and down. Any deeper patriotism could be warned, to hide.

In the Old World, celebrations were directed away from the people, chiefly towards God. Historical events were commemorated for themselves, not as a reflection of “our niceness.” Ladies, gentlemen, or the civilized, generally, did not self-celebrate. That was for savages and barbarians, or so we assumed. This was unfair, however, for savages and barbarians have more dignity than that.