Economy and finance
As this blog expands, due attention will be given to the current crisis. For those wishing some original and useful thoughts on the matter, Spengler is the man to go to, a fixture on Asia Times Online, and now an associate of First Things.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Dr King
Recently, references to Dr Michael King (Martin Luther) raised some curiosity in this writer. Why was/is King so heartily revered by everyone? His penchant for the ladies is well known, his association with and tolerance of avowed Marxists is common knowledge, and his trajectory towards a kind of Jeremiah Wright type of social-justice gospel is visible in his later speeches and writings.
The spark of all this is tributes to Father Richard John Neuhaus, which I have been reading belatedly. Father Neuhaus claims "Martin" as a friend of his, and this somewhat naturally leads to doubts about the good Father's perceptual faculties. Not that one's friends are anyone else's business, but it seems strange that a man of Father Neuhaus's abilities would not have seen the Dr as either a cynical politician or a naive man of the cloth, culpably naive in being co-opted by fellow travellers and demagogues.
Is it just one's own personal distaste for people who go about blocking traffic and raising hell that makes one unable to laud the Dr and his memory?
To begin with, there should be doubts about the extent to which Dr King was actually a Christian, in the strict sense of the word. His doctrines would seem to have more in common with those of liberation theology than with orthodox protestant tradition. And, as a Christian, by what tradition or scriptural basis did he see fit to take up arms, so to speak, against injustice? Surely the right work of a minister is ministering. Did he bring more people to the Lord by his social demonstrations and speeches? Did he succeed in converting people to the gospel and did he, by his example, encourage others in Christian life? There are few testimonies to his spirituality, and he seems revered more as a kind of social leader than as a Christian minister.
The fact that he died may have something to do with it -- after all, one does not speak ill of the dead. However, many people have died, some violently, without being honoured as was the Dr.
The late, great Senator Helms attempted to obstruct the Dr's canonisation by the House and Senate, and failed. The FBI files were sealed, and the Dr's widow claimed that opening his papers and the related files would be devastating to the Dr's memory. So what kind of memory is this that must be shored up by legal barriers to getting at the facts?
The question of civil rights must be addressed -- was the Dr really the agent of change, or was desegregation in fact bound to happen sooner or later?
So is it one's own mean spiritedness that prevents one from joining in with the other adorants in the majority, or is there, on the other hand, something false about the whole hagiographic exercise and memory of the Dr?
Sadly, most blogs and websites claiming to tell the truth about the Dr are written by people with an agenda, and are thus not to be trusted any more than those written by liberals -- which of course we would never trust, a priori. We wait upon events. In 2033 the files will be opened, the boomers will be too old to care, and it may be possible to read or write the truth.
Recently, references to Dr Michael King (Martin Luther) raised some curiosity in this writer. Why was/is King so heartily revered by everyone? His penchant for the ladies is well known, his association with and tolerance of avowed Marxists is common knowledge, and his trajectory towards a kind of Jeremiah Wright type of social-justice gospel is visible in his later speeches and writings.
The spark of all this is tributes to Father Richard John Neuhaus, which I have been reading belatedly. Father Neuhaus claims "Martin" as a friend of his, and this somewhat naturally leads to doubts about the good Father's perceptual faculties. Not that one's friends are anyone else's business, but it seems strange that a man of Father Neuhaus's abilities would not have seen the Dr as either a cynical politician or a naive man of the cloth, culpably naive in being co-opted by fellow travellers and demagogues.
Is it just one's own personal distaste for people who go about blocking traffic and raising hell that makes one unable to laud the Dr and his memory?
To begin with, there should be doubts about the extent to which Dr King was actually a Christian, in the strict sense of the word. His doctrines would seem to have more in common with those of liberation theology than with orthodox protestant tradition. And, as a Christian, by what tradition or scriptural basis did he see fit to take up arms, so to speak, against injustice? Surely the right work of a minister is ministering. Did he bring more people to the Lord by his social demonstrations and speeches? Did he succeed in converting people to the gospel and did he, by his example, encourage others in Christian life? There are few testimonies to his spirituality, and he seems revered more as a kind of social leader than as a Christian minister.
The fact that he died may have something to do with it -- after all, one does not speak ill of the dead. However, many people have died, some violently, without being honoured as was the Dr.
The late, great Senator Helms attempted to obstruct the Dr's canonisation by the House and Senate, and failed. The FBI files were sealed, and the Dr's widow claimed that opening his papers and the related files would be devastating to the Dr's memory. So what kind of memory is this that must be shored up by legal barriers to getting at the facts?
The question of civil rights must be addressed -- was the Dr really the agent of change, or was desegregation in fact bound to happen sooner or later?
So is it one's own mean spiritedness that prevents one from joining in with the other adorants in the majority, or is there, on the other hand, something false about the whole hagiographic exercise and memory of the Dr?
Sadly, most blogs and websites claiming to tell the truth about the Dr are written by people with an agenda, and are thus not to be trusted any more than those written by liberals -- which of course we would never trust, a priori. We wait upon events. In 2033 the files will be opened, the boomers will be too old to care, and it may be possible to read or write the truth.
News
Anne Rice returned to the church. Good for her. I read Witching Hour and a few of her other books many years ago, and was not particularly impressed by her writing, but she clearly has/had a powerful imagination.
Her interview on First Things http://www.firstthings.com/search.php?recherche=anne+rice&search_type_ft=ft&search_type_blog=blog suggests that she has left her old subjects behind, but indicates in an interesting way the reasons for her fascination with vampires.
Anne Rice returned to the church. Good for her. I read Witching Hour and a few of her other books many years ago, and was not particularly impressed by her writing, but she clearly has/had a powerful imagination.
Her interview on First Things http://www.firstthings.com/search.php?recherche=anne+rice&search_type_ft=ft&search_type_blog=blog suggests that she has left her old subjects behind, but indicates in an interesting way the reasons for her fascination with vampires.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Lost in Arabia
My detestation of Canada is the result of having been born and raised there. Escaping, more or less permanently, in 1984, I have lived most of my life in the Gulf -- the Middle Eastern Gulf, not the Gulf of Mexico.
On 25 July it will be 18 years to the day that I first climbed off the aircraft in Dhahran International to a heat so intense I thought it must be the back draft of the jet engines.
On 25 July it will be 18 years to the day that I first climbed off the aircraft in Dhahran International to a heat so intense I thought it must be the back draft of the jet engines.
First entry
New to the blogging sphere. In the office, where it is about 25 degrees centigrade. Outside, the night time temperature is about 50C.
Blogs are a sop to one's vanity, and give even the most pathetic of scribes the opportunity to vent online. This blog has been created in response to the news that Doctor Mengele/Morgenthaler was given the Order of Canada award recently. As I have said before, and here commit to print, "Canada is a nation where you are allowed to kill babies but you are not allowed to smoke or burn leaves in your back garden." Consider the dark background to this situation: burning leaves hurts the environment; smoking might damage your health and, according to liberal, government funded scientists or pseudo scientists, the health of people around you. Therefore, kill people before they can smoke or burn leaves. Have I read too much into this perverse triangle of darkness? Kill babies so that they do not grow up to become smokers or leaf burners?
Only in Canada could the murder of several thousand people per year, on the grounds that later on they might burn leaves (smoking is really just a kind of industrialised leaf burning), be justified with a straight face. It assumes, of course, that smoking is actually a bad thing. One wonders why, if we can kill people by letting them smoke, we bother to kill them before they are born. Think of all the millions that are lost in cigarette and cigar taxes by killing people before they start smoking.
Let's think about what else you can, and can't do in Canada. You can marry another man (if you are a man). If you are not yet a man, and want to be one, you can become one, presumably funded by the government for doing so. If you cannot afford the operating, you can probably sue somebody for denying your rights. Having become a man, you can then marry the man of your choice, in an Anglican church in Vancouver, probably presided over by a woman (possibly a woman who used to be a man). Of course your own parents and the parents of the woman priest performing the ceremony, and the parents of your male spouse, did not have abortions. One wonders if, knowing what you would turn out to be, they might have had them.
What can't you do? You can't smoke in a public place, you can't say what you think, unless you are a woman, gay, an anti-smoker, a pro-abortionist, a native, a negro or some other kind of disenfranchised fringe type. You can't burn leaves, and you can't kill people -- unless those people happen to be babies. You can't be killed, unless you are a baby. If you kill someone else, nobody will kill you, unless you killed babies in large numbers and happened to be a doctor. In that case, they give you a prize.
Now what would happen if someone smoked 10 packs a day and thereby killed himself, sold cigarettes to thousands of children and thereby killed them? Would he or she be given the Order of Canada? I say this because, at least early in his career, Dr Mengele/Morgenthaler was actually breaking the law, as you would be if you smoked 10 packs a day -- because to consume that many cigarettes a day, you would have to smoke in public places.
But wait. It gets more complicated. Smokers do not have federal funding, so you would have to buy the cigarettes yourself. And, smokers do not have politicians supporting them, or the combined forces of thousands of virago feminists to storm campuses, hospitals and provincial and federal capitals on your behalf. So, if you are thinking of trying to bag the Order of Canada by smoking yourself to death, don't bother. Because, as all the politically correct elements in Canada will tell you, smoking is "not nice", but killing babies is "nice". If it were not "nice", we would not have given the Order of Canada to Dr Mengele/Morgenthaler.
Blogs are a sop to one's vanity, and give even the most pathetic of scribes the opportunity to vent online. This blog has been created in response to the news that Doctor Mengele/Morgenthaler was given the Order of Canada award recently. As I have said before, and here commit to print, "Canada is a nation where you are allowed to kill babies but you are not allowed to smoke or burn leaves in your back garden." Consider the dark background to this situation: burning leaves hurts the environment; smoking might damage your health and, according to liberal, government funded scientists or pseudo scientists, the health of people around you. Therefore, kill people before they can smoke or burn leaves. Have I read too much into this perverse triangle of darkness? Kill babies so that they do not grow up to become smokers or leaf burners?
Only in Canada could the murder of several thousand people per year, on the grounds that later on they might burn leaves (smoking is really just a kind of industrialised leaf burning), be justified with a straight face. It assumes, of course, that smoking is actually a bad thing. One wonders why, if we can kill people by letting them smoke, we bother to kill them before they are born. Think of all the millions that are lost in cigarette and cigar taxes by killing people before they start smoking.
Let's think about what else you can, and can't do in Canada. You can marry another man (if you are a man). If you are not yet a man, and want to be one, you can become one, presumably funded by the government for doing so. If you cannot afford the operating, you can probably sue somebody for denying your rights. Having become a man, you can then marry the man of your choice, in an Anglican church in Vancouver, probably presided over by a woman (possibly a woman who used to be a man). Of course your own parents and the parents of the woman priest performing the ceremony, and the parents of your male spouse, did not have abortions. One wonders if, knowing what you would turn out to be, they might have had them.
What can't you do? You can't smoke in a public place, you can't say what you think, unless you are a woman, gay, an anti-smoker, a pro-abortionist, a native, a negro or some other kind of disenfranchised fringe type. You can't burn leaves, and you can't kill people -- unless those people happen to be babies. You can't be killed, unless you are a baby. If you kill someone else, nobody will kill you, unless you killed babies in large numbers and happened to be a doctor. In that case, they give you a prize.
Now what would happen if someone smoked 10 packs a day and thereby killed himself, sold cigarettes to thousands of children and thereby killed them? Would he or she be given the Order of Canada? I say this because, at least early in his career, Dr Mengele/Morgenthaler was actually breaking the law, as you would be if you smoked 10 packs a day -- because to consume that many cigarettes a day, you would have to smoke in public places.
But wait. It gets more complicated. Smokers do not have federal funding, so you would have to buy the cigarettes yourself. And, smokers do not have politicians supporting them, or the combined forces of thousands of virago feminists to storm campuses, hospitals and provincial and federal capitals on your behalf. So, if you are thinking of trying to bag the Order of Canada by smoking yourself to death, don't bother. Because, as all the politically correct elements in Canada will tell you, smoking is "not nice", but killing babies is "nice". If it were not "nice", we would not have given the Order of Canada to Dr Mengele/Morgenthaler.
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