Binks and May, and the choice of death or life

Did you know the great web elf Binks is a priest? In his latest he tells a story of having a conversation with a severely paralyzed stroke victim, while doing pastoral service in a hospital. It seems everyone has left her for dead, mentally as well as physically, but Binks discovers she is fully conscious and talks with her. Tears flow. This only wins Binks fury from those who want to hurry her death. Mbrandon from Freedom Through Truth has reproduced Binks' story, out from the longer original post.

We Canadians are in more than one way an aging society; will this also entail our spiritual death? Binks' story is a severe warning. But his post also links David Warren who argues

The forces sustaining civilization are always less visible, and more powerful, than the forces of barbarism can understand. And the greatest of these defences is truth itself: the truth that was written from the beginning into the human heart, and will persist to the end. For every human being is endowed with a conscience, whether he wishes to have it or not. He may use various kinds of painkiller to suppress feelings of guilt, for crimes that really are crimes in the sight of God and nature; but the cause of that pain will never go away.

Hence, what we see in the streets around us every day: disinterested acts by people who believe only in self-interest; acts of decency, from people who hardly know what they are doing. Why, this past week, I even witnessed a gratuitous act of kindness towards a man, by a hardened feminist! (Can you believe it?)

Proud to be Canadian!

CBC: The citation called Canada "the absolute worst country at the talks." (HT: Scaramouche)

I think David Warren's latest column is right on. (I was amazed to see it in print in the Vancouver Sun today, given our local rag's history of David Suzuki worship - they let the man, whom blogs are now calling "Scarezuki", take over editorship of a recent special greenmail edition). Warren:

...The parties are already working on "acidification of the oceans"; there were loose ends from Rio '92 on "biological diversity"; and there will always be fresh water supply issues to play with. The threat from asteroids was briefly considered, then dismissed: too hard to blame that on the free market. But the activists will come up with something, for their livelihoods depend upon it. And as the world's climate is constantly changing, and has been doing for the past 4.54 billion years, "climate change" itself will provide new opportunities.

For this reason, I think we need, after thorough public inquiries, to bring criminal prosecutions against some of the major scientific players exposed by the recent release of e-mails and papers at the centre of the "global warming" scam. The more any percipient reader pours through those "hacked" documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseuses in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting "the right results." This is by its nature an issue for the criminal courts.
[...]
Even before examining, objectively, details of the claims environmentalists are making, the public needs to be put on its guard. A successful representative democracy requires an electorate armed against politicians of any stripe or kind (elected or otherwise) who make claims to personal sanctity: for this is an infallible mark of grave hypocrisy. Genuinely good people do not advertise their goodness; genuinely humble people do not advertise their humility; genuinely truthful people do not claim to be messengers of "settled science," when there is no such thing.
[...]
There are real cultural failures here -- running right through our postmodern societies -- that allow the scare tacticians to flourish. In a sense it is an environmental catastrophe, although the environment in question is a psychic, rather than a physical, landscape. People have become unattuned to the most basic warning signals our ancestors used, to protect themselves against human predators. We are anyway removed by modern technology from the possibility of looking them straight in the eye. (What comes through a television screen is in no way intimate; it is instead a form of "virtual reality.")
[...]
The real environmental problems are solved by inculcating supple cultural traits in the people themselves -- which the State cannot do. It can only be done from parents to children. Individual human beings must be raised to eschew waste, luxury, and personal display. They must be raised to prefer good to evil, truth to falsehood, beauty to ugliness. There are no quick fixes.

Good line

David Warren:

This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern "liberal" mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.

Gorbachev seemed to assume, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then beyond it, that his Communist Party would recover from any temporary setbacks, and that the long-term effects of his glasnost and perestroika could only be to make it bigger and stronger.

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

With an incredible rapidity, America's status as the world's pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the "new physics" of hope and change.

Lament for a nation

Did someone here mention this before?

davidwarrenonline.com - ESSAYS ON OUR TIMES

I had suspected before that people do not retain what they read on computer screens as well as what they read in print. After my five-week experiment, I am quite sure of this. Partly for the wealth of physical associations in print reading, and partly from other causes, our memories favour the tangible. We confirm this point instinctively, every time we print out a long article.

This is a serious matter, for as any competent pedagogue could assure us, what is not retained was never adequately processed in the first place. So while the Internet provides a festival of information, it also subverts the comprehension of all things humane.

And Justice for All

"I want justice for Mark Steyn. But I also want justice for all these little people, who have been crushed under the jackboot of "political correction." "

David Warren

I like this writer, David Warren at the Ottawa Citizen. Above is the last line from his opinion piece in today's paper. One must assume, in looking at the state of the nation, that the politicians who purport to reside there on our collective behalf, never read the local paper, or at least not Warren's copy. How could they? He's smart and to the point and honest. One seldom witnesses any such attitude or behavior from our politicians. I don't dare guess at where they get their opinions. I want David Warren to be a politician. No doubt he's too honest and decent a guy to do that. Canadians deserve better than what they have. It' all in the running, though. "I also want justice for all these little people." Who else writes that in public?

Jack Layton.

And that sums up the point to such a degree one might weep. Come on David Warren.

Covenant, or just Shut Up about my religion!

This is a time when even the Pope in Rome has to decline an invitation to speak at a university because a rabble of scientists can't bear to hear free speech on fundamental questions of human existence from a man who surely knows more about the anthropology that requires us to balance reason and faith, than do the dull-headed materialists whom, I find generally, don't give a moment's thought to why or how every word we speak transcends the merely material existence of grouped sounds or letters. So, I feel it is yet again our duty at this week's Covenant Zone meeting to discuss the secular left's current erosion of free speech in all Western countries. I hope some leftists will some day join us, since there is nothing more important at present, it seems to me, than that the left renew itself and its committment to productive debate and dialogue by covenanting with those whom, at present, the left only writes off as "reactionaries" and "fascists", ignoring entirely what conservatives are really about. No one's freedom can be preserved when rational debate and discussion has collapsed before a pervasive desire to appear the victimized group.

We meet every Thursday in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, central branch, in front of Blenz Coffee, wearing blue scarves. Please join us if you can.

In any case, there are a host of items in the blogosphere in regard to free speech fights. Here are a few that have come to my attention. Once again, I feel I must highlight Ezra Levant's fight. If you haven't seen his closing statement to the "Human Rights"/Wrongs Commission of Alberta, please don't miss his call for the Commission to find him guilty, that he may engage real courts in the need to reign in the abuses of our fundamental freedoms in these "Human Rights" Star Chambers.


Will the victim-baiting bureaucrats have the nerve to find Levant guilty, after he has professed his desire to be as offensive as possible to them, to assert a Canadian's right to be offensive in public speech? Will they risk a higher court, public opinion, and hopefully Canadian legislators, reigning them in, or will they admit Levant has a right to be offensive? Ezra has some advice for us on how to get more involved in the fight to protect each other's freedom, the responsibility of every covenanter.

At the least, consider signing this petition against the HRCs.
. The petition was initiated by John Pacheco whose blog is keeping abreast of our free speech fights.

Another good web site for material on the present fight that all Canadians need to engage is Free Mark Steyn!

Rex Murphy showed that he is one of the few journalists in the country who understands that the "Human Rights" Tribunals are not just a threat against those nasty conservatives, but against every and anyone who likes to open his mouth. The relative silence in the Main Stream Media on what is going on in this country's "Human Rights" Tribunals, their unwillingness to discuss the issue pro or con, shows that they have largely conceded any moral authority they once claimed to be free-minded informers of the Canadian public. They are cowards unwilling to fight for a right which while fundamental to everyone, arguably impacts more on their line of work, and the health of their business, than anyone's.

David Warren is one of the few other mainstream journalists who is committed to the fight for our shared freedom. Muslims Against Sharia is also taking a lead in defending Levant. I see their comments throughout the blogosphere.

If we don't all get involved in defending each other's freedom, fighting for the covenant that will make us complete human beings, we will be left with self-righteous busy - bodies to tell us what is and is not permissible speech

Come to the Covenant Zone and grow a little

On a day when we mourn more fallen Canadian soldiers, those brave souls struggling against great forces to make this a freer world, we need to rededicate ourselves to this shared cause.

Let us remind that the Covenant Zone bloggers and friends meet every Thursday, 7-9 pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library (in front of Blenz Coffee - look for the blue scarves). All those interested in renewing a national culture founded on citizen self-rule through a discipline conducive to freedom, and not through submission to any form of totalitarian political religion or phony expertise, are welcome and encouraged to join us. This week I will just give you a few links to help do that job of encouraging.

Concluding a speech to a European audience, Gil Bailie notes (as he might well if he were in Canada):

The history of this century and beyond will be very largely determined by whether the West finds a way to reclaim and reaffirm its spiritual inheritance and thereby reenergize a culture that fosters the genuine flourishing of its people and to which others – whatever their race, creed, ethnicity, or background – will want to transfer their national allegiance, culturally assimilate, and contribute their part.

On Canada Day, David Warren gave a useful update of the "two nations" interpretation of Canadian history:

Canada today is “deux nations.” There are the people who speak and think in French; and the people who speak and think in English. Together they make up one nation, with a continuous history, of more than five centuries. And then there are the people who speak, effectively, no language; who are deracinated, who have no history. That is the other nation. There is very little communication between these two nations -- the “old” Canada, and the “new” Canada -- because little communication is possible between two such groups. The one is aging and shrinking, the other expanding while growing ever younger. (Yet all trends are reversible.)

Demographically, but also spiritually. Those who have no language, no culture, no religion, no sense of past, and therefore of destiny, remain ever young. Outwardly they may become old and wrinkly, but inwardly they retain the mind of the pre-school child, unformed and cloudless. Yet they fulfil the requirements for citizenship set out in John Lennon’s famous hymn to emptiness, “Imagine”:

“Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries: it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for; and no religion, too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace.”

This is the postmodern dream, of perfect vacuity -- of the serenity we imagine will sweep over us like sleep. All we need do is abandon everything of value in our heritage, everything for which so many of our ancestors actually fought and died. In this great zero, everyone will be equal, and no person will be better than another. The heroine and the harlot will be one and the same, great saints and great monsters indistinguishable. “Judgementalism” -- the aversion that one individual has behaved better than another -- is, among the vacuous today, the only crime remaining to be punished. And likewise, under the doctrine of “multiculturalism,” there is nothing to choose between one culture and another. They are all just fine, and so far as any particularity can still be distinguished, “everything is beautiful in its own way.”

But if you can't judge and discriminate, e.g. identify how Islam is different from all other "religions", you can never hope to grow up and truly become humble in service to a decent human cause or nation. The contemporary left, in denying our need to validate meaningful differences, around which a free human exchange of differences may be organized, makes all important human differences either into a scandal for some abstract notion of "equality", or occasion for a phony celebration. In either case, it becomes the responsibility of some bureaucrat to smooth over the differences, with whatever force necessary. The left today intends to impose a cult of victims and "equality" that will require a managerial priesthood constantly to determine who is a victim of a lack of proper equality of outcome, to seek redress (since any freedom generally permitted people will not lead to equal outcomes, at any one point in time), and hence to restrict the freedom that inevitably leads people to create, affirm, and exchange, differences.

It is in the affirmation of what makes us a new race of free Canadians - entirely unlike, say, those who take advantage of a chance to come to the West to become well-paid doctors, only to then attempt to kill as many Westerners as they can - that we discover the need to renew and recreate the old and new covenants of the West that can make this nation a true unity in diversity. It is time to decide whether you are on the side of freedom or of the totalitarian management of "diversity".

Only people with constitutional or covenantal guarantees that they, as free persons, can take the lead in negotiating and trading their differences, and not have to rely on expert bureaucrats (or thugs with religious books) to do more than what is the expert's proper job - to help us recognize and institutionalize, not initiate or control, the fruits of a free national discourse - can be considered mature, fully-realized, human beings. Those who best understand our common human origin are today rightly arguing that we are meant by the original events of human creation (or by our Creator, if you prefer) to negotiate and perform our history in freedom, to continually seek for the truth.

And if we don't encourage each other to become fully human, each in our own way, by meeting and talking on a regular basis to this end, how are we going to be able to negotiate with the aliens if they return? Must we again behave like children who only know how to dominate or be dominated? Or can we show the aliens we are up to the possibilities of a truly free political and economic exchange? Or, as the liberal mainstream would today seemingly have it, must we convince the humanoid aliens that we are all just the same, or that our differences are all equal in importance, which is to say nothing that distinguishes us from them is really important, and certainly not to be discussed in public? Just a friendly thought -:)