I remember as a young man I asked my father whether they ever turned off the taps on a dying patient. “All the time” was his reply.

Like a car in its last year of life, the expenditure curve goes sharply upward as your brakes, alternator, steering, transmission and finaly your engine fails. You will go through several cars in your life, and you can see a pattern emerge. You can prepare for the termination of your relationship to your car. You cannot do this in relation to your parents. Generally we have only two of them, two data points, and it is difficult to realize they will die, and so will we. So please, no heroic measures.

I once read of a doctor who said there was “no use dying with money in your pocket”, meaning that medecine should be resorted to in all situations. Nothing could be further from the truth; his was just the ideology of a salesman.

The more sensible point of view, from Ken Murray, author of “How Doctors Die”, is this:

It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.

1. Stay out of hospitals
2. Exercize and have sex frequently
3. Enjoy your life
4. Be socially embedded
5. Prepare to die

6. Die at home

You will hear more about racialized persons, because the word acts like a dumptruck, transporting a host of grievance-mongering from one site of public discourse to another, without the bother of thought. Sort of like the German High Command sending Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, to get the bacillus out of Geneva and into the prostrate body of Tsarist Russia, where it could really do some damage. (I digress)

Wikipedia says:

Racialization refers to processes of the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of dehumanizing and racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. Put simply, a group of people is seen as a “race”, when it was not before.

This led me to the fascinating entry by the University of Guelph on the subject, Understanding Racialization:

In the past, race was defined as a natural or biological division of the human species based on physical distinctions including skin colour and other bodily features. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white. It was used to establish a classification of peoples. Some of the greatest atrocities in human history have been associated with notions of racial superiority.

There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them. It is now recognized that notions of race are primarily centered on social processes that seek to construct differences among groups with the effect of marginalizing some in society.

While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society. The process of social construction of race is termed racialization.

I would say that these three paragraphs contain the essence of the leftist falsehoods that dominate public discourse.

Read the following and inform yourselves:

1. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white.

False. All people at all times have been conscious of racial differences, and “race” did not emerge in post-16th century Europeas an intellectual construct any more than height or weight did. Race, ethnicity, tribehood: each and all have been observed facts of life since before conscious thought, just as rabbits differ from hares, or both from deer. The intellectuals of Enlightenent Europe may have systematized the classifications, but they systematized classifications of everything: taxonomy and species collecting was the fashion of the time, viz. Linnaeus and the modern biological classification system.

The 4,000 year old pictographs of ancient Egypt show Africans and caucasians as recognizable races. The Romans pondered the origin of races as they looked upon the red-haired Scythians and the Negroid Nubians, and considered the origin of races as related to available sunlight in their native lands.

2. There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification.

False. Humans have evolved. (Darwin is apparently a new idea in some quarters). They are evolving still, at an accelerating rate. Races emerged as Africans left the African continent and colonized the rest of the world in a process starting about 50,000 years ago, settling areas where neanderthals had been before them.

• The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, by Spencer Wells
• Race: The Reality of Human Differences, by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele
• Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade
• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
• Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, by Philippe Rushton

Racial differences are real, genetic, unfolding in time, and evidenced by both organic processes and statistically-validated behavioral differences. I noted that the list of books above range in political acceptability from The Journey of Man, which has a PBS television series attached to it, to Philippe Rushton’s, which you can only get from non-Amazon booksellers. But they all say the same thing in different ways.

All humans who left Africa in ancient times are the products of adaptation to new environments, and various genetic compromizes have occurred over time to allow us to live in Asia, Polynesia, Europe, and the Americas.

3. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them.

False. Stephen Jay Gould’s Marxist beliefs led him to to emphasize the commonlaity of our species-hood over the fuzzy distinctions of race. He has been debunked elsewhere. See readings above, but more particularly, see Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, for the more general attack on Gould’s bioogical ideas.

4. While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society

“The social construction of race”. Of all the untruths taught in universities, perhaps none is more pernicious for the long-term than the denial of the biological. It has the effect of placing racial tolerance on the false premise that there are no races. Since there are no races, in this view, race is a social construct. Hence “racialized ethical vegans” can become a race – a category of people able to suffer “racialization.” You do not have to be a race to suffer discrimination. People will and do discriminate about anything, frequently for the benefit of human society. (e.g. the fridge is filthy- clean it. Pick up your mess. Get a job. Change the oil in your car) Trillions of discriminations keep civilization working.

Understand this: tolerance has no meaning or moral worth if there are not real differences to be tolerated. Toleration is a political bargain to make society livable without the need for an established religion.

I once shot a family of squirrels who were living in my cottage; they were eating the wiring and shitting over everything. A real and present danger. I shot the mother and, to my surprise,  in succession her pups came out to take a look. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! I still feel badly about it. I don’t ever want to do that again. And those were squirrels.

Shooting fifty, sixty people in cold blood – that is evil. Can you be sane and do this? According the M’Naghten rule for criminal insanity, Breivik is sane: he knew the quality, nature and result of his actions. According to most people’s moral calculus, you cannot kill another child without being insane.

I once said to an old Prussian that I though Hitler was insane. “Was he?” he asked back, in a tone that conveyed to me he thought I was letting Hitler off easy for ascribing insanity to what was plainly evil.

What do you think?

Reports in South Korea indicated that the government in Pyongyang on Monday ordered all universities to cancel classes until April of next year. The only exemptions are for students who will be graduating in the next few months and foreign students.

The reports suggested that the students will be put to work on construction projects in major cities while there are also indications that repair work may be needed in agricultural regions that were affected by a major typhoon recently.

Thank you Center of the Party, Superior Person, Dear Leader, Respected Leader, Wise Leader, Brilliant Leader, Unique Leader, Dear Leader, who is a perfect incarnation of the appearance that a leader should have, Commander-in-Chief, Great Leader, Father of the People, Sun of the Communist Future, Shining Star of Paektu Mountain, Guiding Ray of Sun, Leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Guarantee of the Fatherland’s Unification, Symbol of the Fatherland’s Unification, Fate of the Nation, Beloved Father, Leader of the Party, of the country, and of the Army, Leader, General, Great Leader of our Party and of our Nation, Great General, Beloved and Respected General, Great Leader, Beloved and Respected Leader, Invincible and Iron-Willed Commander, Sun of Socialism, Sun of the Nation, The Great Sun of Life, Great Sun of The Nation, Father of the Nation, World’s Leader of The 21st Century, Peerless Leader, Bright Sun of the 21st Century, Great Sun of the 21st Century, Leader of the 21st Century, Amazing politician, Great Man Who Descended From Heaven, Glorious General Who Descended From Heaven, Supreme Leader of the Nation, Bright Sun of Juche, Leader of the Party and the People, Great Marshal, Invincible and All-triumphant General, Beloved and Respected Father, Guiding Star of the 21st Century, Great Man Who Is a Man of Deeds, Great Defender, Savior, Mastermind of the Revolution, Highest Incarnation of the Revolutionary Comradely Love, His Excellency.

At once entertaining, well-informed, and philosophical, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error does more to comfort, instruct, educate, and change the way you think – especially about your own life – than anything I have read since Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan. Schulz has produced a truly profound work, which goes down as easily as a fine wine with a good meal. It is about you, and me, in our constantly changing lives. Growth and sometimes painful change are the norm.

Both books deal with what goes wrong and what we can learn from being wrong, but Schulz’ deals with the way things go wrong in everyday life, rather than the wholly unpredictable events discussed in The Black Swan.

“If we conceive of the self as a consistent and knowable entity, it is hard to imagine how we could ever get ourselves wrong. In fact, hewing too closely to this model of the self can force us to dismiss both the possibility of ewrror and the possibility of change – even in cases where to an outside observer, both seem blatantly evident.”

Schulz talks of the transformative effects of error in our own lives.

“All of us have held ideas about ourselves that have either collapsed abuptly or fallen by the wayside over time. We thought we didn’t want kids, we thought we’d grow iup to be a doctor, we thought we couldn’t be happy living in L.A., we thought we’d never succumb to depression or develop an addiction or begin an affair. For all of us, our own provate history – like the history of science, like the history of humankind – is littered with discarded theories.”

“Though we all accept in the abstract that we don’t know ourselves perfectly, we reliably resist the suggestion that we are  wrong right now about some specific aspect of our self-understanding.”

In organizations, the best way to fight error is to accept its inevitability, and take action to expose and learn from error, rather than suppress it.

The book reinforces my notion that belief is utterly different from knowledge, and that we need to accept the distinction as a basic aspect of political, religious and personal  tolerance. For example, if I drop a pen out of my hand, I do not believe it will fall to the earth, I know it. By contrast, if I say I believe in God, I do not know so.

Schulz writes:

“We want our beliefs to inhere in the world, not in our mind. The experience of realizing we were wrong represents frustration with this desire – the revelation that the self was there all along.”

“…the fact that our beliefs inhere in our minds   is a given, a gift – one whose benefits (humour, imagination, intelligence, individuality) are so manifestly worthwhile that we are willing to pay for them with our mistakes.”

If we can keep the distinction clear between belief and knowledge, we will be less inclined to view differences of opinion as heresies, more ready to climb down from untenable positions, and quicker to learn, because less invested in being right, even as , inevitably, we seek always to be right.

When the participants were asked what percentage of Americans today they believe are gay or lesbian, both men and women believe that about 25 percent are homosexual. And those with lower incomes, those less educated, women and young adults give the highest estimate.

The relentless propaganda about ten percent being gay – itself absurd – has generated more and more absurdity.

Origins of the ten percent myth:

• Ten Percent Homosexual Myth
• 1.7% report themselves gay and 1.8% report themselves bisexual in the USA.

More data here.

H/T National Review Online

There seems to be, in the life of many millenarian intellectuals, a sinister climacteric, a cerebral menopause, which might be termed the Flight of Reason.

After reading this article it is safe to say that Thomas Friedman has taken off.

Here are three of the manifestations currently at work:

1. Airport searches, of an increasingly intrusive nature,  are predicated on a terrorist threat the source and nature of which -Islam – is not faced, discussed,or allowed to be spoken about in public discourse.

2. Canada is letting in 250,000 immigrants a year for the purpose of keeping our population from shrinking and maintaining the tax base to save our pensions, yet each succeeding generation of immigrants is less well-intergrated and less well-paid than its predecessor. Each immigrant subsequently brings in a host of relatives, whose presence largely or wholly negates the economic value of the productive immigrant Canada originally allowed in. Immigrants are increasingly deriving from societies whose goals, mores and political cultures are antithetical to our own. (see point one above)

3. We are raising electricity prices to favour renewable energy, and shutting down efficient fossil-fuel generating plants,wrecking the landscape with enormous bird-killing windmills, on the basis of a (man-caused) global warming hypothesis whose foundations have been shown to be fraudulent.

Perhaps you have your own set of insanities. Why, for instance, were the police required to suspend the rule of law in Caledon, Ontario to allow rebel Indians to run amok terrorizing the white citizens of Caledon in the enforcement of Indian land-claims?

I will tell you. They are related phenomena. The doctrine of racial, social, religious equality has been pushed to the point where different racial, social, religious or other group outcomes has been ruled presumptively illegal and immoral. This, I submit, is the ruling insanity of Western society. It seems that only the collision with something as huge, implacable, intolerant, and intrusive as Islam will force us to wake up from this delusion. If only we wake up in time.

Some infinitesimal portion of the internet readership may read this, so pass it on to friends and relatives. It will save your backs, and theirs. They will be grateful to you after they have followed this advice.

Those of us with homes with lawns are aware of the muscle-hurting exercise we all go through every fall, raking tons of leaves into piles and then picking them up in various bags and carting them off to the mulch pit, which is more work and expense. (Those who live in high-rise towers have further reason to be happy with their choice).

This is how you get rid of the leaf problem and expand your carbon footprint at the same time!  (How can you refuse this?) Fire up the lawnmower. Yes! Take it out of premature winter storage. Put a little fresh gasoline in and run your mulching lawnmower over the leaves one last time. The leaves are reduced to bits a tenth or twentieth the size they were, the mulch blows away, your grass is saved from too much darkness under the leaves, your muscles will not scream in protest after the thousandth pull of the leaf rake, and you get to piss off David Suzuki and his loathsome ilk at the same time!

Your lawn will thank you. Your shoulder muscles will stop screamng at you. Your wife will be happy to do something else on a cold November day, and after a good half hour walking behind the mulching lawnmower - and they all mulch these days- you can watch the game or get a beer, or do more satisfying work.

For the past ten years or so, I have been clearing a lawn about three quarters of an acre in size with two sessions of the lawnmower, and I wonder why on earth it took me so long to figure this out. You will too. As you ruefully curse your stupidity for raking  leaves for the past ten, twenty, thirty or forty years,  pretend that mulching them was your idea.

Please note:

It is important to note that both income and education, as well as childhood social class and parents’ education, are controlled in multiple regression analyses of these data from the US and the UK.  It means that it is not because more intelligent people occupy higher-paying, more important jobs that require them to socialize and drink with their business associates that they drink more alcohol.  It appears to be their intelligence itself, rather than correlates of intelligence, that inclines them to drink more.

Arran Gold, Oban, Dalwhinnie, Rebel Yell, Duggan’s Dew, Tobermory, Blair Atholl, and Glendronach wish to state that they had nothing to do with the sponsorship of this study. Honest!

This books achieves two things:

1. It looks athe entire history of our species from wandering bands on the plains of Africa until now as the progressive expansion of trade, as the cause of specialization of production, the elaboration of virtue, the improvement of the species, and the growth of wealth, and

2. a complete debunking of the constant pessimism that pervades society at the moment, and which has pervaded society since conversation was first recorded, according to Ridley: cancer, pesticides, AIDS, global warming, global cooling, genomic engineering, global famine, nuclear war: the list goes on and on of fashionable twaddle about inevitable catastrophes unless we de-industrialize, go back tothe land, and integrate ourselves with nature: the kind of stuff Prince Charles goes on about; the kind of society we existed in after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, called the Dark Ages.

I canot resist his  quote from John Stuart Mill, which prefaces his chapter “Turning Points: Pessimism after 1900″:

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

David Suzuki? Al Gore? Paul Ehrlich? Thomas Malthus?

Though I enjoyed his attack on the doomsayers at the end of the book, it is grounded in an interesting take on human social evolution, the core of his argument.

Ridley argues that changing habits, generation by generation, were made possible by exchange,

“the swapping of things and services between individuals. This gave the Species an external, collective intelligence far greater than anything it could hold in its admittedly capacious brain….In this way exchange enouraged specialization, which further increased the number of different habits the species could have, while shrinking the number of things each individual knew how to make.Consumption could grow more diversified, while production could grow more specialized.”

He sees farming, and the burning of fossil fuels especialy, as the further release of energy for the benefit of mankind. His excoriation of starving the poor to grow ”green” fuels rivals anything Jonathan Swift could have written about fashionable nonsense.

Ridley’s book is based on very extensive reading of everything important: Adam Smith, Hayek, information theorists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, historians, and economists. His vast erudition is painlessly laid out in a compelling narrative.

Buy this book. Read it. Then buy ten copies and give it to anyone, including leftists especially, who might possibly read it. It will comfirm and strengthen you in all your beliefs that things are in fact improving (Islam notwithstanding) and that the doomists are a tired and broken record, perpetually wrong, whose only contribution is bleating and obstruction.

This is a great work and deserves the broadest possible readership.

I wish he lives long enough to recant his errors and heresies. That should take at least another 35 years.

God bless you, Hitch.

I sat outside tonight smoking a cigar, which I recommend as a contemplative activity, seated on my deck, in the lee of my cabin.  I watched pine trees sway 15 degrees off-centre in a relentless ongoing blast of cold wind. The temperature, which had attained a freakish 30 degrees centigrade last weekend,  seven days ago (not seen since 1966), was officially 8 degrees tonight. I sat outside in a thick sweater, a windbreaker over it, with a toque (wool hat to Yanks) and gloves, wondering how any creature could live tonight. Every bird must be huddled in the woods, and any mammal must be in a burrow or a barn.

I once hear a Sudanese taxi driver describe what it was like to go home. Everyone slept outdoors on cots in the hot season (11 months of the year, I suppose), so that everyone was rather like in summer camp: the night was filled with the sound of people chatting amiably into the late hours. The night was a social and hospitable time.  Nor does the house in a hot climate  function  as it does in Canada. Here, one’s house is a heat conservation device. There, one’s house is a place to store property, or fend of an attack.  The kitchen is separated so that the house does not absorb the heat of cooking. Too hot inside? Take your bed out into the starry night, where everyone else is out on their cots  talking in low voices.

As the wind blasted outside tonight, I thought of the Dominican Republic, where we were a month ago.  There, you stick a cut wooden pole into the ground, and half the time it sprouts roots and turns into a tree.  And our trees! The weather invited them to sprout leaves last week, as if this place were the Dominican Republic. But the trees were too wise. They are programmed not to be deceived by warmth coming too early on the season, possibly because they work according to the warmth of the earth, not the sun.

And colour! Here every colour is found on a camouflage suit: grey-brown, grey, dark green, reddish-brown, and maybe black.  The northern eye longs for the yellows, blues, oranges and reds of flowers, and gets them for four months a year.

It seems I am always cutting wood, splitting, stacking and drying it for two years, so that when it meets its destiny in a cast-iron stove , it will burn well. So that, when I come in from the cold, I feel the palpable warmth of the cabin, and know that, though I live in an oven for three-quarters of the year, it is a safe place, where we can comfortably endure the dreadful climate we live in. Where the glass of wine is on the table, and great music on the horn.

I know this is no more than the adapted northen mind speaking, but life in the Canadian house-oven is quite comfortable. It has to be so. Everyplace else in post-glacial scrape is miserable. If you don’t believe me, just stand outside tonight in the wind.

Recently I saw a photograph I took of my two eldest children, as teenagers, beside my then living parents. The season was March, the day sunny, everyone in sweaters but no coats or hats, and the field behind them still covered in snow, which might have lasted another week. It was 1995. My father, still black-haired at 83, was to live until 2000, five years later. He would be healthy for another two years, until a gentle decline. My mother is still alive, somewhat frailer than in the picture, but mentally still sharp at 91.

It struck me that that photo was 15 years old! I would have been 45 years old when I took it. Forty five is full middle age.  Wait! The realization how old I am only gets  worse.

I recently spoke to a group of 22 year-olds in fourth year university. It means the average person in that class was born in the last year of Reagan. Their infancy was in the regime of George Herbert Walker Bush, their childhood under Bill Clinton, their teen-age under George W. Bush the Younger.

These young people do not remember the Cuban Missile Crisis or the fall of Communism any more than we remember the coronation of George VI, which my mother remembers well, she then in her 18th year, passing down sandwiches to the equally young Bud Drury, later Pierre Trudeau’s minister for everything,  from her hotel window in London before the parade was to pass by.

I suppose if we had the privilege of asking our forebears, some would have remembered Armistice Day in 1918, and others would have remembered bells ringing to mark Trafalgar in 1805, and Waterloo ten years later.  Or the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, which solidified the claim of Protestants to the throne of England.  Or how Bach the elder used to forget his frustrations with the Lepizig town council by going into the organ loft at Thomaskirche to improvize for hours on the organ, and communicate as directlyas a man can with God. Or what Akhnaton said to his priests when he established worship of the one true Sun-God against the polytheism of Egypt. Or how one of our forefathers worked out the bow and arrow, or one of our foremothers who first brewed beer. God bless you, madam!

The next miracle, if you will forgive the word, is how my contemporaries are so much younger than 60-year-olds in my parents’ day. Sure, there were healthy looking parents at sixty and well-preserved people at seventy forty years ago in the year 1970, but they were exceptional. 

If it were not for the face in the mirror, I would not know I was getting older, and even now I suspect some Dorian Gray portrait may exist somewhere, doing the ageing for me, because I feel great!

As in the Academy awards, my thanks to the following list of people and forces:

• my parents, or giving birth to me
• the healthsystem, for dealing with my ailments, few though they be
• for the victors of World War II, for making the world safe for liberal democracy
• for the Cold Warriors, for keeping Communism contained
• for my guardian angel, for looking out for me
• for my children, for confirming me in my life’s choices
• for those who have loved me, for upholding me
• to the Creator of this Universe, for giving us all a place to live
• to my Saviour, for keeping me in mind.

Thanks to you all! I could not have done it without you! Thank you!