Essays in Idleness

Would Marie Antoinette have had a personal videographer? It is a question for the ages.

While I might be a personal fan of Marie Antoinette (as long as she stays off Facebook), I’d be happy to concede the point. But in practice, she probably would not have had a personal videographer. I can’t imagine the “reality show,” in which she tells the peasants how to make good, nutritious cake, should they be short on bread. To start, the very line (“let them eat cake”) was not uttered by Her Majesty, but by some leftist scum — the way they wrote the lines that sank Sarah Palin. For another thing, I can’t imagine the Queen of France cavorting for a camera. Surely, sitting for a portrait would be the limit. Moreover, even when she was Dauphine, or an Archduchess of Austria, she wouldn’t have messed about in a kitchen. I doubt she’d care how her servants baked the cake, so long as it was decorated nicely.

But what do I know? I’m more the peasant myself, and truth to tell, I had tea at Versailles much too late to meet her. According to a sign, she’d already been carted off.

On the other hand, the wife of the Mayor of New York (the communist, Bill de Blasio) has a personal videographer, who recently filmed her baking cookies. Apparently, people are complaining about how much the videographer gets paid, along with more than a dozen other personal staff. (Americans do whine so.) But when your husband can slash $1 billion out of the police budget on a whim, I’m sure he can afford them.

New York taxpayers should hardly mind; they re-elected him handsomely. That they are mentally enfeebled, is not for me to say.

I suppose it is perfectly natural that my friends and heroes (sometimes they are both) should now be dying off like flies. This morning I note the passing of Marvin Creamer, at the tender age of one hundred and four. He was and is one of several in the class, “circumnavigators.” This includes a few technically failed, because they didn’t get home; usually because they were slain by natives. The intelligent circumnavigator makes ports of call, and does prefer the safe ones, but when exploring in exotic parts, you take your chances. It’s not just the natives; also tricky harbours and shoals.

The contemporary yachtsman has GPS and electronic sounding equipment, along with computer updated charts. For Magellan, this would have been cheating. I would like to credit Juan Sebastián Elcano, the Basque navigator, as I am slighting the Portuguese this week. The natives of the Philippines remain somewhat restive, and after they had caused Magellan’s demise, Elcano took the carrick Victoria, diagonally across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and up the Atlantic, to the quaint old town of Sanlúcar. But first the restive crews of the shrinking expedition (which soon included a few impressed Timorese) had killed off two more captains, and abandoned another. Elcano was able to focus who was left on a fine cargo of nutmeg and cloves from the Moluccas. You see: trade helps pacify people.

But skipping forward four-and-a-half centuries or so, Mr Creamer did the rounding journey in a 36-foot yacht, with only such crew as would fit aboard. (Two, I think.) An American geography and oceanography perfesser, nearing retirement, he was a man of great backwardness after my own heart. Rejecting such newfangled contrivances as the mediaeval compass and renaissance sextant, along with wristwatches, radios, and other recent gizmos, he decided to do it by skill alone. He navigated by sun, moon, and stars, and when they were occluded, took hints from birds, natural flotsam, even the colour and temperature of the waters. He was never lost.

His belief, from careful study, was that the mariners of the later Middle Ages knew what they were doing, and apart from design of their ships, didn’t need technology to find their way around. By the late 15th century — the time of beloved Columbus — they were entirely comfortable with oceans, far beyond sight of land, and often, too, from land in places Europeans had never visited. They had got the hang of it, as it were, and while the best way to become a sailor was involuntarily, as a prisoner of some Crown (hence a recurring mutiny problem), the officers were masters of the sea. Having once hit a coast, they could fill in the charts a bit more, and soon the mapamonde was their oyster.

Upon returning to his (surprisingly unanxious) wife in 1984 — an unusual modern woman, she had confidence in him — Creamer declared, “One small step backwards for mankind.”

We walk to heaven backwards, as Saint Newman says, and I daresay Creamer is in sight of it now.

Flattery is a useful resort for those who lack charm. Or they think it is. Apart from the thing itself, there is nothing wrong with flattery. In combination with charm it is lethal. One is at risk of becoming a “friend for life,” or forming other involuntary adorations. But the machine flattery that is a currency today, and probably was in previous generations, marks a man as a public nuisance. Even if he doesn’t want something, it is assumed that he is paying in advance for something we don’t want to sell. And we will sometimes part with it, just to shake him off.

Were it not near the root of what foreigners detect as “English perfidy” — once confined to the English themselves, until they settled America — it would not be a source of their despication. The genius of British imperialism was to offer things, such as flattery, to the natives of Elsewhere, until they figured out who was strongest, and formed an alliance against the lesser tribes. But the alliance would end with toppling their friends — as a learned Bengali once explained to me. They’d then show their old allies the back of their hand. (“Divide and conquer,” as the Romans called it.) Having dispensed with any other possible ally, he was now at their mercy. The flattery would now cease.

But the amateurs of flattery are naïve; only the professionals know how to use it. For them, it must be employed “diplomatically” — which is to say, cynically. It can be a means to power; to get the upper hand. Charm, in such cases, is unnecessary. One employs that only when one is able.

The history of slavery is a cynical one. However, the taking of slaves is not the most cynical part. Rather, it is the alliances formed. You get native tribes to do the dirty work for you; tribes you have noticed are already into “dirty,” such as slaving raids. It is a transaction, after all.

The history of slaving in West Africa, is a history of free trade, as any leftist would correctly point out. So far as I can see, this pertains generally, and the English don’t have an enforceable monopoly on perfidious behaviour. They just do it so well, that they are generally resented. No one much complains about Portuguese perfidy, for instance.

Let me further observe, the non-existence of racism, in trading relationships. It would get in the way. Or rather it appears to exist, but only derivatively. It is something that arises after the fact (of enslavement), rather than before. Flattery is more effective in the investment stage.

Perhaps it will appear that I abhor the English, but I love them, with all their flaws. As for any nation, one should cultivate stereotypes, in order to be alert to their tricks. Using “English,” now, in reference to all the natural-born English-speaking people (“Anglos” as the French say), I would suggest a more subtle narrative for Black Lives Matter; certainly more subtle than gentle reader will find in the nasty, racist, “1619” fairy tale.

It was a world in which slavery was common (as it still is, in many regions). By reversing the order of the motives by which these Anglos came to be adept in slavery, they make a hash of the story. They omit, for example, that these Anglos were generally nicer to their slaves than lazier masters who cared less for productive efficiency.

And they do not provide the inspiring bits, when men — especially English — decided to place morality above trading advantage. This is always possible, and is my primary argument against “free trade,” when made into an ideology.

For we should all be free traders, but let us be Christians, first.

Those who live in our big cities become, invariably, a little disturbed. (Take me, for example.) But some go shrieking mad, and with the prolongation of Batflu Orders, the number is increasing.

As I was just reporting to a priest, I’ve learnt to wear a mask for up to nine minutes, continuously: long enough for a quick dash into a grocery store, or a solemn Pater Noster. The public hygiene regs will allow me to go maskless, if I think that I have an excuse; but in that case, I must expect some disordered person at least to “comment,” and possibly to dose me with her Pepper Spray. For “Karens” at their best provide due process imperfectly.

Time and again my right ear is filled with lamentations, about the number being harmed by the Batflu, without coming into contact with the thing itself. I gather, from the usual suspects, that there are appalling losses by family violence, suicide, small businesses destroyed — before adding the number who have died untreated from coronaries, cancer, and various other ills.

By careful, and wisely suspicious attention to the meejah, one may learn that the death count from the actual virus continues to drop. By this, I don’t just mean that fewer are dying, but that the official, cumulative, death tolls are shrinking. They are lowered, retrospectively; with zero publicity, of course. This is because, in their eagerness for funding, the officials were counting “creatively.”

Having achieved their purpose, they quietly trim former deceits. In England, for instance, the health authority has quietly subtracted more than 5,000, who had died “after testing positive,” but also after fully recovering. Very large numbers, everywhere, were merely assumed to be Batflu deaths, in old folks’ homes and places of that sort. Governor Cuomo of New York may well have murdered a few thousand less than were observed to die, after he forced the sick and contagious into these homes. He just needed to pad the numbers for his federal subsidies. That’s what politicians do.

It is very hard for the modern, progressive mind, to understand that old people just die. This has been happening for some millenmia now, and we used to understand “natural causes,” but that was before we all became modern, progressive, and woke. “Science” tells us there must always be a cause; and if “science” can’t find it, something must be blamed. That is where politics comes in. Its task is to change a “something” into a “someone.”

The greatest damage is done not directly to the slandered, but to the human psyche at large. For there can be no estimate for the effect of lies. Yet there can be no civilization, when trust becomes impossible, and the trusting are invariably set up and used.

Even the New York Times runs “Corrections” (selectively), and in honour of a venerable, nearly lapsed meejah tradition, I would like to take something back. In a recent Idlepost I wrote that one may put a cat into a bag twice, but the second time it has to be dead. This might be true enough, empirically, but apparently gentle readers took an implication, that if our progressive masters ordered a second Batflu lockdown, people wouldn’t obey. News from Auckland, New Zealand, and a hundred other places, now indicates that this is false.

The citizen of a modern Western democracy will, indeed, do whatever he is told to do, no matter how stupid or repugnant. (Here in Canada, they will even vote for the idjits again.) If you can scare him enough, with unending speculative nonsense, he will get right back into the bag.

A further implication of my assertion was that humans are at least as intelligent as cats. Let me admit I was going out on a limb there. The evidence goes decisively the other way. Arguably, there are some cats who could be fooled twice, on a range of minor issues. But on something so important as being stuffed into a bag, I’ve never met a cat who would countenance a repetition. At the risk of annoying some reader in Auckland, I must now say unambiguously, that cats are smarter. It would seem to follow, moreover, that they are better-informed.

Not having a cat at the moment, up here in the High Doganate (and please, nobody send me one), I am unable to administer a simple quiz. But by now I should think any human who knows anything, knows that lockdowns, social distancing, and the wearing of sub-medical masks, have no effect whatever on the transmission of microscopic particles. Smarter, apparently, than cats or people, the Batflu goes where it wants to go, and infects whom it pleases.

This has always been the way in epidemics, and they have never answered to the wishes of our political masters, even in those rare moments when their wishes were benign. There are ways to help a disease spread, and our politicians have discovered a few of these, but as T. S. Eliot said of Rum Tum Tugger, “He will do / As he do do / And there’s no doing anything about it.”

There is evidence that in the past, populations subject to a plague knew this. They went about their lives, unless they happened to be dead; and while some who could afford it fled to the countryside (carrying the plague with them), it was a voluntary act. Instinctively, even in the face of death, they prized their freedom, just as much as cats.

Well, more than one reader has accused me of “living in the past.” And as one particularly noted, I look back on the Black Death as to the good old days. But now, I fear, they will never come again.

My Chief Leaside Correspondent quotes some wag in Twitter: “It’s going to be wild when the Arab Street becomes friendlier to Israel than the Western Left.”

But with my Chief Texas Correspondent I have been discussing some other strategic subtleties.

It will be wild, too, when Trump wins the in-person vote 63:37, but Biden wins the unprecedented mail-in vote 96:4, putting him slightly ahead in the aggregate. When Trump challenges the result, USA slides into civil war; and in the chaos, China takes Taiwan, Iran takes Iraq, and Russia invades Ukraine and the Baltics. Turkey then reclaims Greece, in the name of a reconstituted Ottoman Empire, and Spain (unsuccessfully) attacks Gibraltar. The European Union, of course, collapses, as Germany threatens England in return. Hezbollah will be pre-occupied by the ayatollahs’ proxy wars in Syria and Arabia; and Hamas busy with the terror-Islamization of Egypt. (I’m leaving out the many lesser tribal conflicts, including the nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan.)

That will leave Israel as the only place in the world enjoying a bit of peace and quiet. Gentle reader will want to make his bookings, now.

Angelo Codevilla takes an eagle flight over the Black Lives Matter riots, in his latest essay for the Claremont Review (here). Of course the cause I mention is only the one that is currently newsworthy; Codevilla looks back upon great riots of the past. And, while it was often a component, “racism,” as the slovenly define it, was never previously the banner. Were it defined more strictly, it would not be the cause even of slave revolts, for the idea of racial solidarity is historically recent. (I think the English invented it.)

“Us versus Them” is, however, a conflict that can be packaged in many different ways, which may seem ludicrous in retrospect, but when fresh could inspire riot, rapine, and murder. There has never been reasoning in a mob, as there has never been reticence in a tornado, though it tracks according to rules of a kind. One tornado is rather like another, and while none is sustainable, a tremendous carnage will be done while it lasts.

Later, when the sun comes out again, the victims pick up the pieces, often in despair. But they have nothing else to do. The wreckage might have permanently altered a landscape, once peacefully inhabited; whole cities have been altered, as if by a Great Fire. But with the sun again shining, the ruin seems unaccountable. It is time, as Christ says, for the dead to bury their dead.

Codevilla checks through an entertaining  list of revolutionists — “Pastoureaux, Flagellants, Cathars, Free Spirits, Ranters,” &c — none comprehensible until their causes are rewritten by the revisionists of another age. The targets of the time seemed plausible enough, once — enemies demonized by the devil, as it were — but are themselves transient features of history. For establishments change generationally, and who was up yesterday is down tomorrow. Families may endure, relatively, but members of a family don’t.

In most cases, we could see rebellion rising, but only after we had seen the result. In our own time, we can follow the rise of “virtue signalling,” from a long way off, but only now begin to realize its importance, as we see where it leads. But the “cosmic smugness” of the godless is nothing really new.

Millenarianism is Codevilla’s organizing principle — the sudden appearance of hordes demanding apocalyptic perfection, and naturally, claiming it for themselves. Plus, too, one needs a cynical political class, exclusively concerned with increasing their own power. The mobs, after all, don’t only need egging on. Oddly, they also need the cynics’ permission. Some will think of the rioters as their clients, until they find that they are first to go up against the wall. But they are not totalitarians, only cynics; whereas the successful revolutionary will be a totalitarian, en plein air, painting his canvas in blood and excrement.

An age which is capable of thinking that the Batflu could be stopped by political measures, is capable of thinking that political adjustments can prevent “the fire next time.” But we’ve had viciously evil mobs through history, as we have them now, and I do not doubt we will have them to come.

Curiously, the prescription of Stephen Leacock, the Canadian humourist — “mow them down to marmalade” — is the only police method with a chance of working. But as the French humourist, Louis Capet, observed, “pas d’argent, pas de Suisse.” Had he paid his Swiss Guards better, and given more intelligible orders, the French Revolution might never have happened. But then, had their wits been about them, the CCP’s virus would never have spread.

Our present worldview is that events are inevitable. We believe that, because we don’t believe in God. But if, for instance, Calvin had been beheaded, and Luther burnt at the stake, perhaps we wouldn’t have had a Reformation. By now it is too late to test this hypothesis, but when I think what chaos the Church had muddled through during the five previous centuries, I can’t see why she couldn’t have muddled through again. The same for the French monarchy, or conceivably, the Constitutional Republic to our south.

When you see mobs, it is time to put down your tea. For time is at a premium, and as Mrs Thatcher used to say, “this is no time to go wet.”

Am I the only person recommending that Joe Biden select Ghislaine Maxwell as his running mate?

That she’s a foreign national might present a legal obstacle (UK citizen the last I saw), but surely no one would raise such a petty objection. For after all, she’s a woman. A more significant criticism is that she seems to be a white person, but pharmaceuticals can take care of that. She has excellent connexions throughout the top elite in the Democrat Party, which should confer a kind of diversity by association; plus the street cred of being currently in prison.

Surely she has acquired a wide-ranging familiarity with foreign affairs and other policy-wonk topics from such clients as Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew. She’s in an excellent position to speak out on many hot-button issues, such as Me Too. And she has environmentalist cachet, from her recent withdrawal to remote New Hampshire, and several other past rural retreats, when she was eluding fussy legal “stings.” Too, much of her income has been derived from charitable, eco sources; some only recently defunct.

I know these various talking points could be made to sound bad, superficially, by those low-class, rightwing hick Republicans, but we have the late Jeffrey Epstein’s word for it that she never did anything wrong. Instead, she would claim the much-coveted victim status.

Connoisseurs of British politics, big business, and high society, would be able to contribute many other qualifications she has for the top job, once Mr Biden perishes. She is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, as I recently learnt from a press item. He was much more than a former Labour MP, with a distinguished (if obscure) underground war record.

Those who were present in the 1970s and ’80s, over there in Blighty — especially those who were reading the diverting periodical, Private Eye — could fill us in with numerous entertaining details. A family man, Maxwell named his principal yacht Lady Ghislaine, after this very daughter. Indeed, his very own body was found floating in the Atlantic, while it was anchored off the Canary Islands. (He’d been avoiding a meeting at the Bank of England, for defaulting on some very large loans.) But previously he’d been a captain of industry; an heroic raider of pension funds; a polymath of fraud; and by his own account, the future of journalism.

Anyway, this is all just numbers, and as we now know, math is patriarchal. The point is that, from childhood at Headington Hall in Oxfordshire (where Oscar Wilde once cut quite a figure, under a previous owner), Ghislaine Maxwell had been at home to the wealthy and progressive. (It is even suggested that she knew Donald Trump, back when he was a liberal.) She could find her way around Davos conferences.

As for the little matter of soliciting underage girls for prostitution — an antiquated charge if I ever heard one; underage girls hardly need soliciting today — it is one of those vapours, quickly dispersed by the meejah.

Time is of course of the essence, and only weeks remain until the Natted States election. Sticky red tape unspooled by federal prosecutors might tragically impair her release.

But in that case, Mr Epstein had another close associate, Nadia Marcinkova. A Slovak citizen, perhaps, but again, who cares? — with air-piloting skills, which can sometimes come in useful. But the important thing is, she’s a woman, too.

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I SEE from the news that Mr Biden has now chosen a vice-presidential candidate, much nastier than Ghislaine or Nadia, in my view. His handlers must have read the Idlepost above, and realized it was time to get cracking. I see that they printed out a script, in large type, for Mr Biden to read to Kamala Harris, over the telephone. (Who knows what honorific to place before the name of a girl like that?) So the story moves ahead. Now we can discuss whom Kamala Harris should choose for her VP.

Granted, my sources may not be up-to-date. I was, for instance, just consulting a book I acquired in high school, during the heyday of my enthusiasm for archaeology, more than half-a-century ago. I note it was printed in 1937, so about thirty years had already passed until it fell into my hands. Some Oxford perfesser wrote it — Lt. Col. Stanley Casson, born 1889.

I believe he is still in good odour, among classicists, archaeologists, and anthropologists of the eastern Mediterranean, for having died in 1944, his Tweets will never come to light. However, it may be discovered that he was a white man. A scholar, connoisseur, and adventurer, according to an obituary I just electronically exhumed; a “monument” in his own right to the British School at Athens. I suppose this might also count against him. Fortunately no statue to topple.

His semi-popular account of Ancient Cyprus is not the only book I have ever read, even on that topic, but it is memorable. If gentle reader has ever stood on the north shore of that island, and noticed that the coast of Asia Minor is in sight, he will begin to see my point. But first I have to make it.

We are shown, in schools and websites, the layers of ancient history, as if they were sharply compressed geological slices. We are told of lines of transmission, and evolution, as if they were inevitable. Well, if you have students you will understand the need to simplify some things, but it is important to remember that you are lying to them. The future may be unknowable, but the past is generally unknowable, too. We impose our own sense on it, using the same squirrelly methods by which we think ahead.

When did the Bronze Age end, and the Iron Age begin? The ages of plastic, silicon, and graphene may have succeeded even the latter, but I’m still not comfortable with iron. Neither were the Cypriots, nor the Egyptians, incidentally — some thirty-something centuries back. Before even that, iron was freely available in a globalized world. I once took a modified fishing boat from Cyprus to Mersin; I wouldn’t encourage swimming it. But the voyage is not far, and too quick with a motor. Even in a row boat, it would have been easy to smuggle ferrous materials, either way.

Yet for centuries, such “highly sophisticated” societies as those of Cyprus and Egypt, stuck with copper and bronze; with gold and silver adornments. The rest of the world might have been with the progressive agenda, but they were not. I speculate that they didn’t like the way iron rusts; there’s something cheap about it. But whatever the objection, they stood their ground. There are old iron objects to be found in both places, but few.

Much later, when the “lifestyle” advocates for the new fashionable metal had won out, and the tide of iron was flooding, it is interesting that the craftsmanship of objects is relaxed. Even ceramics become dull, boring, repetitious; skills are forgotten. We have craftsmen who obviously don’t give a damn any more, just like today. We have the encroaching realm of “productivity,” quantity. Soon these places are easy to knock over, by the conquering savages always lurking about.

We have conservative societies, overwhelmed by technology; and no longer trading on their own terms. In the larger Minoan sphere, we have barbarization. Dynastic Egypt will survive only in Coptic fragments. Greeks, Romans, and finally Arabs will be trashing the place. Ancient civilizations fall.

I regret “progress.” We should resist it heart and soul.

After twenty years of lockdown (or has it been more?) we feel less connected to the world and its institutions. The institutions are less connected with each other. Many have “atomized from within.” They continue to exist, but only nominally; reduced to some links on the Internet, perhaps.

One thinks of the Catholic Church, for instance. Once a robust presence, whose tentacles extended through every department of human life, it is now contracted, like a spider under threat. One may poke it, but it will not move, except to shrink a little more. Since long before the lockdown, it had stopped catching flies. Its web is in tatters, blown about by the Zeitgeist. Perhaps it has finished making apologies for itself, and is simply resigned to extinction. (I would call the Church, “she,” were it not for her current fear of gendered pronouns.)

Gentle reader may ask: Am I speaking of the last score of years, or of the next? I’d rather not commit myself. In either case, I hope I am exaggerating.

Reading accounts in “official,” or long-established Catholic media, I am often saddened. They depict congregations that are aged, and dying. Worse, they put a “happyface” on this. A piece last week, by Edward Pentin, describing a trip to churches through the Alpine spine of Europe (here), increased my misery; for Pentin is that rare thing, an honest journalist. Likewise, here in Christendom’s former suburb of Canada, I recognize all the features of decay. What could possibly have caused it?

In particular, I am struck by how Catholics — our hierarchical guardians even more than the laity — are so obsequious, going beyond the Batflu restrictions commanded by Nanny State. We do not even try to get away with anything. That “safety is our first priority” is repeated ad nauseam, by Church authorities without the slightest remembrance that this is the opposite of the Christian teaching, from our Master on the Cross.

Contrast, if you will, the more catholic behaviour of “Evangelicals for Trump,” in Nevada. They have taken to holding big packed prayer sessions in Las Vegas casinos, so that they can pray with minimal restrictions, unlike in a church. Better yet would be to do this before a real altar. Force the state to arrest us, if they have the nerve. Fill the gaols with our penitents, until they have to release us under Batflu regulations.

Politicians in the West are terrified of offending Muslims. Yet Catholics are probably still more numerous than they. The strategy of our leaders should be to make the politicians even more terrified of offending us. Instead, they compete for who can be most compliant.

To which end — Catholic emancipation — we need not even loot stores, toss Molotovs into police cars, and firebomb courthouses, as our Left likes to do. Just be Catholic, in the old-fashioned ways.

And shriek: when our own clergy refuse to acknowledge the demonic, all around us. Who won’t even mention Hell, and like our current pope, and actually a couple before him, flirt with such nonsense as the “Dare We Hope?” heresy, which holds that if Hell is not empty, it soon will be. (This is on a level with the advertisements I remember for the Pepsi Generation.)

Indeed, a first step might be to make errant clergy afraid, very afraid, of their parishioners. For what if, very suddenly, we ceased to be the milquetoasts everyone takes us for?

Please, no one read the aphorisms (or should I call them epigrams?) that I transcribe, below. They are not fit for publication. One contains some dirty words, and there are other examples of gratuitous rudeness. I have copied them from recent pages of a defunct pocket notebook (“bloc-notes” as we say in Urdu). They are “politically incorrect.” The whole notebook ought to be shredded, or burnt, before the Thought Police arrive.

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“If only one life can be saved!” … The gull-cry of a charlatan.

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“Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies.” [George Orwell?] … “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”

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The replacement, everywhere, of evidence-based science with theory-based scientism, and with this, the triumph of charlatanry.

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Fidentia. “Confidence.” But not in the sense of an insurance policy.

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The slapped tomato. The slices should be violently slapped against a paper towel, when making bacon sandwiches for the picnic. Slight, thin lettuce-leaf “endpapers,” also to fight wetness & mush.

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The Church ought to provide Catholic Speakeasies, where her members can speak openly about things, and those who “have a problem with that” can be openly rebuked. While drinking & smoking, of course.

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The Whiskey Rebellion, 1791–94; during the regime of that slaveholder, George Washington. The rebels failed. They should have made the Income Tax unthinkable, for the next three hundred years.

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Perhaps half of the electorate (or is it nine-tenths?) are no longer capable of grasping that a governor who closes churches, & keeps abortuaries open as an “essential service,” is an emissary from Hell.

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Nothing is as much fun as causing excruciating pain in the part of a liberal that is most sensitive — his ego.

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Valerie, Lady Meux. I don’t own a car, but it hardly matters, as I would rather ride about in a zebra carriage.

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Horse trot, 10 mph. Canter, 15 mph. At the racecourse, around 50 mph. But what is the trotting speed of a zebra?

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Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat. [“Whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad.”] … Dementia: loss of memory, history, & therefore of a future. That is our difficulty: we are all demented now.

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Stalin sincerely believed in his ideals. So did Hitler. Each had other foibles, to be sure; but if our standards will be sincerity & idealism, then Stalin & Hitler will be making a comeback.

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I’m not saying Liberal voters are stupid. I’m just saying that the Party specializes in policies that can only appeal to the ignorant, & terminally misinformed.

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Le Corbusier called the house, “a machine for living,” & by the same reasoning we might call the human being, “a machine for shitting.”

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I am trying to paddle my little canoe as fast as I can, in the direction opposite to the waterfall.

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Francis’s “developments” are in continuity with Tradition, “as a giraffe is in continuity with a sandwich.”

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Well, for his next act of idolatry, he can [the rest of this sentence has been redacted].

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Remedies for Growth. The human thing is gardening, pruning. Nature is shameless & profligate, our job is editorial.

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Lechery is easily mistaken for love.

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Small yappy dogs encourage sin, by tempting bystanders to kill them.

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I am not a Commie, a Nazi, or a Fascist. (Falangist would be getting warmer.) But keep turning the dial until you get to Distributist. It is Reaction, but in a positive form.

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Beware geeks bearing GIFs.

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Buy books by authors, not books about them. The latter are all out-of-date already; and they remain so, indefinitely.

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“Consolidation” is a dirty word. … Three more vile, filthy expressions: “relevant,” “meaningful,” & “accessible.”

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Sign at the staff entrance to an abandoned coal mine, at Glace Bay: “Your wife & children expect you home this evening. Don’t disappoint them.”

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“Gradgrinds & Teufelsdröckhs.” [Maureen Mullarkey]

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Hagamos una Iglesia tan hermosa y tan grandiosa que los que la vieren labrada nos tengan por locos. … A Spanish architect to his patron: “Let us build a church so beautiful & so grand that those who see it finished will take us for mad.”

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“As some Roman said, debauchery isn’t going into a whorehouse, it’s never coming out.” [Louis-Ferdinand Céline]

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“It is not the punishment but the cause that makes the martyr.” [Augustine]

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“The ugly claws & bared teeth of the pelvic left.” [Austin Ruse]

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The kind of drooling, slathering, chronological bigotry that modern education efficiently instils.

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William Baumol, the economist, discoverer of “cost disease.” Why worthless things become more and more expensive.

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Rapid onset gender dysphoria versus pre-digital folkways.

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Aristotle tells us that the Megarians make no distinction between potentiality & actuality. This is equivalent to the Eleatic denial, of motion or change of any kind. But that is mere idealism.

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Memoir of a pre-feminist. My sex life, as a wild atheist youth turned out among loose women, was constrained by a persistent thought. I could not get out of my head the relationship between copulation & pregnancy. I did not think of it as a statistical relationship, or something to be “fixed” by pharmaceuticals or gadgets. I did not look upon women as pleasure machines, or sex toys, inconveniently endowed with legal rights. I just sinned co-operatively.

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Totalitarianism begins with liberal parenting.

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The only objection to some theories, is that they are insane. Consider the death of the algebraist, George Boole — slain by his wife on the theory that pneumonia could be cured by wrapping in wet blankets.

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CO2 emissions: China is double USA, triple Europe, quadruple India, octuple Japan. Japan must be at least triple Canada. We’ve got to catch up.

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We have a growth economy, based on gambling & self-administered confidence tricks. No wonder we’re lagging.

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Bidh maighdeannan-mara nas spòrsail, as they say, in Scots Gaelic. Or, according to Google Translate: “Mermaids have more fun.”

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Exit strategies. Believe me, I empathize. The prospect of having to fix them later, takes so much of the fun out of busting things.

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Jojoba Oil. Something I must avoid learning about.

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“Inspired malevolence, or criminal stupidity?” … It’s not always an either/or.

Tomorrow we commemorate the dropping of the atom bomb “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, Japan, some seventy-five years ago. “It seems like just yesterday,” an elderly tenant in my building comments, remembering his childhood while struggling with his bat-mask. I was born too late, for a change, but seem to remember from ballistics in high school that it was the trinitrotoluene (TNT) equivalent of fifteen tons. (Or was it fifteen thousand?)

That compares well with a terrorist IED, though poorly with some of the other great blasts of history. We tend to forget the Siege of Almeida (and a lot of other things about the Peninsular War); or even the explosion at Halifax, Nova Scotia, scarcely a century ago, when two ships collided in the harbour, and the one that was a French munitions ship took out the north half of the city. (Don’t get me started on the bureaucratic blunders.)

And then there was the blast at Fort York, here in Toronto, when the Americans landed during the War of 1812, and were a bit careless with the munitions they found stored there. (I think of it as the ancestor of our Lakeside firework displays.)

Yesterday’s explosion in Beirut has been variously estimated, to fluctuating powers of ten. I suppose it doesn’t matter whether the newsmen meant proper British tons (of 20 hundredweight, each eight times the 14-pound stone), or the rounded “short tons” of the Yankees, or those French-revolutionary “metric tonnes.” That can be their little secret. For we could all see what it looked like on the Internet. I watched it several times.

Of course, Hiroshima added the nuclear dimension. Thanks to our prejudice against nuclear fallout, we tend to overlook the more conventional explosions. During the Iraq War (which I do recall), the allies could drop “bunker-buster” bombs without excessive controversy, but just one modest nuke and there would have been a crisis at CNN. People are funny like that: they seem less bothered by death than about how they might die. Whereas, I find the former more consequential.

“They” (i.e. people unlike me) happily throw numbers about when body-counting, too. It was Stalin (or was it?) who observed, that one death is a tragedy, whereas more than a million Armenians slaughtered by the Turks was just “a statistic.” He lived in the age before CNN; but our meejah still like to juggle with statistics. No death is important to them, unless they have an axe to grind. But when they do, it is like TNT.

I didn’t know how to bring George Floyd into this, but now I see it. Police “body-cams,” only just released, show that his death was misrepresented. By sheer, characteristic malice, a police killing more easily explained, was tailored into a racial incident, in the megaton range. But had it not been Floyd’s, some other killing might have served Antifa equally well. The trick is to provide video, from which context has been omitted. Radicals are then free to supply their own. Our “social media” will latch on, right away.

The frustration of journalists, unable to attach blame for the Beirut explosion, that could link it back to Trump, was something I noticed as a former practitioner. This means the story has no “legs,” and must stand on body-count alone. But to my reasonably certain knowledge, higher body-counts can be had from a dozen obscure conflicts elsewhere in our world today, and the odd thrilling natural disaster. None of these stories have “legs,” however. They do not satisfy our lust for revenge.

“Scientists” (you know what I mean) have told “correspondents” for Rupert Murdoch’s Sun that “mysterious signals” have now been received from a source inside our Milky Way, just fourteen thousand light years distant. We had previously received them from farther afield. They last only a millisecond, but an “Italian astrophysicist” (I hope it wasn’t the one we employ at the Vatican) said that this latest could be traced to a “Magnetar.” This is the imaginative name for stars reputed to have powerful magnetic fields.

Perhaps we will send it a link to the pope’s Twitter account, in return. I’m for supplementing this with Doktor Fauxi, in case they have coronavirus issues. (Previously, I’d have been content to send him to Mars, with Elon Musk driving the Uber.) I gather that early instalments of I Love Lucy, launched by radio-wave in 1951, have yet to arrive.

And I fear they may never, owing to an amplification problem. For it seems the Magnetar in question had to explode with the power of a million Suns, to get that brief radio message out. Imagine what it would take to extend this longer than the millisecond to, say, the full audio track of a television skit, then add the visuals in black & white. Colour seems almost out of the question.

On second thought, why not keep Elon Musk? At only a few billion dollars of taxpayer subsidy, he’s probably an entertainment bargain. But Doktor Fauxi has cost at least a trillion, for a more boring show. There comes a point, according to a businessman I once met, when you have to cut your losses.

Thanks to my education in very backward, low-budget schools in Asia, I learnt to count. This puts me at an advantage over the average North American post-doctorate, who only knows that “black lives matter.” With arithmetic comes a certain apprehension of scale, though let me add, not always a happy one. In my morning tours of our planetary meejah (not a million Suns; at most a couple dozen) I am daily boggled. Do the people who write these things have any idea what they are saying? Or how long their logical leaps extend?

From a millisecond of incomprehensible starburst, to “intelligent” life elsewhere in our galaxy, is such a leap. I could wish that, like a motorcycle across the Grand Canyon, it had not even been attempted. But my wishes are not being consulted on this planet, and see where it has got you.