My Early Days Corona-Conclusion

I was discussing the Coronavirus with a group of people at its very early stages, when statistics were just coming in, and when we were all trying to figure out how to behave to avoid infection.

This is, by the way, standard behavior for the annual flus we get.

[Discussion in mid-March]

I think this virus is a big nothing, and all we should do is take extra precautions, as we would the flu virus.

[...]

Trudeau and his team have chosen to make the Canadian population suffer through business closures and restrictions (on a virus which barely makes it on the epidemiological scale, as I said - a big nothing). We are still trying to figure out their agenda, but I believe it is to re-orient Canada, and Canadian society. Don't think multiculturalism will get part of the pie, either. At Walmart, those struggling with shopping carts and dozens of bags are not white Canadians, who can order online and get deliveries through expensive FedEx packages, but Indians, Chinese (yes, they are poor here), Arabs, etc.

And here is my Council of European Canadians article, after a couple of weeks of research and assessment, where I write:

[...] a lockdown of dutiful, and guilt-ridden, Canadians became the reality. Across the country, dutiful citizens closed their shops, left jobs, shuttered schools and daycare centres, and stayed home, waiting for Tam’s daily updates, to urge them to participate in the next battle tactic against their invisible enemy, who could be lurking anywhere.

And they all obliged. Tam’s draconian “Stay Home/ Restez a la Maison” ordinance could be the beginning of much stricter enforcements to come, based on her premise that “anyone could be infected,” which means that we could all be infected

And here below is one of a series of photographs I took of parking lots around Mississauga's city centre, where the Civic Centre, which is across from the large Square One shopping centre/mall, is located. These lots (they stretch as far back as the building block at the very far end) are usually full capacity, starting early in the morning (by around 8am). These photographs were taken a little later, around 9:30am. I posted them on April 9th under City Centre Lockdown, although I started to take them in late March.

Sunshine Tulip

Star Tulip
(Tulip Tarda)
Photo By: KPA -
Port Credit, Mississauga

This early species tulip stays low to the ground, and tolerates a root-filled space on a slope in my dry, sandy garden – albeit in one of its sunniest spots. The bulbs seem to increase, and always look incorrigibly cheerful in their sunnyside-up, fried-egg colours, each opening to a six-pointed star in the sunlight.
[Text source: Toronto Botanical Gardens Blog]

Brimelow and the Christophobes and Dooming America

Available on eBay

I wrote about this on my Camera Lucida blog in 2009, around the same time as my other posts on Mercer and Derbyshire. Brimelow's lingerie blog is below, my commentary is below that, also found here.

Peter Brimelow
Victoria's Secret—A Christmas Victory!
VDare
10/29/2009

We can always find bad news to write about at VDARE.COM, so here's some good news: Victoria's Secret, which sells, well, everyone knows about Victoria's Secret, has just come out with a CHRISTMAS 2009 CATALOG! With "CHRISTMAS 2009" RIGHT ON THE FRONT COVER! (Inspect here).

Not only that, but the model on the cover has BLUE EYES and BLONDE HAIR! Isn't that a Hate Crime, now that Obama has indeed signed the Matthew Shepard Free Speech Suppression Act?

Thank Victoria's Secret. Seriously—the Christophobe crazies will be complaining.

Fortunately, I got the gist of the "immigration" "patriots" and just left them to their space soon after. Of course, though, who said that immigration patriotism doesn't pay dividens.

-------------------------------------------------

Why Can't Conservatives Get It Together?
Some passing thoughts
Camera Lucida
Friday, October 30, 2009

Peter Brimelow, founder and editor of Vdare.com, has written a blog on his website about a lingerie company using the word Christmas on their catalog. Not only that, Brimelow graces his blog post with a photo of a woman in Christmas-red underwear.

A group of conservatives (I hate to use that word, because I'm convinced that many of them are variations of libertarians) are attending the The HL Mencken Club 2009 conference. And the conference is titled..."We are Doomed!" with an exclamation mark, no less. It is of course after John Derbyshire new book (with exclamation mark in tact): "We are Doomed! Rediscovering Conservative Pessimism."

Addendum 2020:

Brimelow's point is of course that these Victoria's Secret soft porn lingerie models are blond and blue-eyed. What's showing a little flesh if one advertises those blue eyes?



These people have a knack for picking those perfect - self-destructive - imagery. I already covered that with Ms. Mercer, and, of course, the Derb.

Mercer and Derbyshire have found each other: Dialogue Between Two Atheists

John Derbyshire, writing as Bradlaugh at Secular Right, commenting on Ilana Mercer's Your Godless Government At Work.

This got me thinking about theology. What’s it for ? It’s obviously tribal in essence, though you have to extend the meaning of “tribal” to include “fictive tribes” like Christianity and Islam. (Well, I think you do.) Any given theology is of zero interest to anyone outside the tribe. If someone tells you he’s making a deep study of Rabbinic Literature, you can be 99 percent sure he’s Orthodox-Jewish; if deep in Thomism, he’s Roman Catholic; etc. 

[...]

It’s all just tribal chanting.

[...]

I don’t really have a conclusion here. I’m just thinking out loud. And trying to get Ilana’s attention.

Well that got Ilana M.'s attention alright:

Mercer rebuts:

As one of the few intellectually honest, brilliant, paleo-conservatives around, Derb, naturally, always has my attention. (There are quite a few brilliant paleos, but not all are intellectually honest.) 

[KPA: There is the indomitable Ilana tooting her own horn, at the slightest opportunity. Although I should be careful with that "indomitable" (= "impossible to subdue"].

Continues Mercer:

A couple of comments from one secular rightist (me) to another (Derb): Although not religious, I’m a defender of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition. I’m not hostile to religion...

And

I’m of a generation of secular Jews which knows and loves the Hebrew Bible as a tremendous literary, philosophical, and historical achievement.

I commented on this "conversation" in my Camera Lucida blog: Defence of the Judeo-Christian Tradition by Atheists:

It is unprecedented that people come outright and say "I am not religious." Previous generations wouldn't even know how to articulate these thoughts. What is even more irritating is the "but" that many of these people add. "Although not religious, I’m a defender of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition." What does that even mean? As in "I will abstain from participating in one important element of Western tradition, but I will support it anyway?"

People can be overwhelmed by the beauty and poetics of the Bible, just as one can admire the poetry of Shakespeare. But, how can they, if they are so drawn to this book, not feel the mystery and transcendence of it as well? Where does that "tremendous literary achievement" lead to? Just for us to feel its tremendous literary achievement? Isn't there just something a little more than that?

Such is the ways of our modern world, where atheists sit around talking about the literary achievements of the Bible, as though they are great connoisseurs, and yet not have an ounce of reaction to its bigger picture.

Mercer goes on to quote Paul Johnson, who says:

The Bible is essentially a historical work from start to finish. The Jews developed the power to write terse and dramatic historical narrative half a millennium before the Greeks.

Yes, like the literary achievement, there is no doubt about its historicity as well. But, as usual, these "reasoned" intellectuals go around in circles.

It reminds me of people who endlessly talk about the great champagne they had, or the wonderful cheese you can buy at that high scale market, and who are so engrossed in their ability to discern such wonderful foods.

The Bible seems like such an exercise.

The Old Testament is a historical book. But the New Testament has an odd sense of ahistoricity about it. It is almost as though history has come to an end, or has reached its conclusion. Which is of course what Christ's story is all about; the long line of Jewish history, miracles and prophecy, which produced the Son of God, who became the salvation of mankind.

If the Bible (Old and New) were simply a historical document, then what would they make of the New Testament section of that Bible?

(Here are my recent posts on both: 

Mercer: 1, 2

Derbyshier 1, 2, 3, 4)

Paris: Learning About Independence

Here, even then, in my juvenile amateurship, I seemed to know something about perspective. The view is from the steps of the Eglise de la Madeleine, and looks all the way down to Place de la Concorde.

Paris became a perfect training ground where I learned to rely on my wits to understand the often confusing and contradictory worlds I would inhabit for the rest of my life. I learned to be independent in Paris, and to understand my surroundings based on my own deductions, childish and simplistic at first, usually through quiet observation, and more sophisticated in my later years, and, up to this day, through additional support from books and study.

I became an avid reader in Paris. Almost all my books were in English, although I went through phases of reading some French classics, mostly because of my school requirements or my holiday French Language immersion classes during our summer vacations in Paris. These texts included Jean Racine's Iphigenie, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Emile Zola's Therese Ranquin, Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile.

I also visited museums with regularity, skillfully weaving my way around the Louvre. I was never attracted to the more modern galleries since they confused me. Much later on, while studying film and photography, I realized that confusion, or distortion of reality, was their very purpose. I used my instinct to include things which I felt benefited me and to mercilessly discard those that didn't. I understood that time was not on my side, and indolence or bad judgment would cost me dearly.

That is a strategy I have kept all my life.

"I don’t mind these people, or dislike them. I certainly don’t hate them..."

John Derbyshire, writer at VDare, is using the old and tired language of "I am not a racist...but" argument to defend hs "anti-immigration" stance.

He writes in a confused conundrum of superficial compassion and declared hard line.

In his recent post on the "caravan" that is approaching the southern American border, he writes:

...it’s plain that the biggest cohort of caravanners are unattached young men, a lot of them sporting tattoos.

I have nothing against young men, and not very much against tattoos. Looking at these faces and bodies, though, I do seriously doubt that any of this cohort, if permitted to settle among us, will take up brain surgery, theoretical physics, or the composing of symphonies.

Then later on in the article, he waves his white flag of "I'm not a racist":

I don’t mind these people, or dislike them. I certainly don’t hate them, as the infantile language of the Cultural Marxists would say. Some of them look like nice ordinary people. Check out, for example, William Castillo and his family from El Salvador in the Daily Mail montage. I’d guess Mr. Castillo is a hardworking guy who wants his best for the little boy. Heck, if I were an ordinary working Joe in El Salvador, I’d want to get out of there, too.

He has links to photos of nice family units, who do not very nice things like break sovereign laws and enter a foreign territory illegally. These nice people are criminals.

Of course he blames it on the country he's immigrated to (legally, I hope. Or is that where all his commentary stems form?).

That is another issue. And as with all clever pundits, Derbyshire knows that adding a (lesser, in this case) argument of imperfect American immigration policies will blur the main, important one, which is that this human caravan is composed solely of potential law-breakers. And they willingly joined this human flow in order to break these laws of the United States. Gangs or no gangs, poverty or no poverty, since when has such activity been given a free pass in a real house of law?

When will the immigrants cease to be those alien godheads, even for people such as Derbyshire who purport to do everything they can to prevent their traverse across a sanctified, sovereign border?

The Flowers Appear on the Earth

Song of Solomon 2: 12

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle [dove] is heard in our land

Magnolia Tree by the Lakeshore
[Photo By: KPA]

Influencers

Fascinating!

Derbyshire of Radio Derb has his own link at the VDare site, even getting the prime-space main page link.

- John Derbyshire's: VDare's Contract Man
- Where do Derbyshire's Expertise Lie?
- Letter to VDare

I wonder how Mercer didn't get the same with her "Youtube" "reporting?"

- Glib Stuff: The World According to Ilana Mercer
- The World According to Ilana Mercer: Part Deux

LOL!

China-Covid and Ethiopia

I think Abiy, the new Ethiopian PM, is doing his best othat he could since I think Europe and America abandoned Ethiopia for decades. He looked (or at least his Communist predecessors, ten years now) looked towards China, which Abiy is simply working with. He cannot destroy ten years of social politics. And Abiy's politics is cleverly undecipherable. He works independently. His goal is to help, build, Ethiopia. He is smart, and is extending his influences into Europe and North America, as more Ethiopians in the West are realizing what this all means. I think China-COVID is a Godsend for Ethiopia.

Here is PM Abiy's latest post on his Facebook page:

Through cluster farming of wheat we have great potential to begin import substitution. The experience of cluster farming 2800 hectares of land through irrigation in Jidda Woreda of the Oromia Region is quite encouraging. This shows us that we have the capacity to stop our dependence on wheat imports at a national level if we intensify our productivity in this manner.

Similarly, cattle fattening endeavours by youth in Jidda Woreda is also promising. I encourage our small-holder farmers throughout the country to continue building on these capacities with the needed support.

Video on Theresa Tam

The Council of European Canadians have posted a video by Youtube video reporter Jill Colton, which discusses Theresa Tam, and which has my a screen shot of my CEC article. Colton also briefly discusses my article, which now has a record of 179 comments by concerned readers on the CEC website.

May Flowers

Magnolia Tree
Port Credit, Ontario
[Photo By: KPA]

Update: Empty Outlines and the Multi-Culti-COVID-Era

The article Empty Outlines and Multi-CUlti-COVID-Era has been slightly updated, with some extra commentary, especially near the end and in relation to art and artists in Canada.

Empty Outlines and the Multi-Culti-COVID Era

I wrote earlier about textile designer Chung-Im Kim, who teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design:

Kim's designs are a combination of these "deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.

As an artist, when I embarked on a new, and challenging, art discipline, I took time out from the normal in-class instructions and went out into the outside world to research, and understand, this new discipline.

I had just finished at Ryerson University, not graduating, but completing what I had set out to do: study, understand, and create films and photographs. My films (and videos) were exhibited in various galleries around Toronto, and including in exhibitions in France. And I had compiled a large collection of works based on a variety of photographic methods.

One method that intrigued me was silk screening, or more precisely, working on textiles. I did my first screen prints, which I titled Toronto Gables, in a small silk screen laboratory, with make-shift lights and printing boards, in one of the program's photography labs.

When I left Ryerson, I started looking for ways to advance this knowledge, including taking workshops in a downtown member-run centre Open Studio. And soon after, I started taking courses in the Ontario College of Art and Design's continuing studies program, for textile art, and specifically, repeat pattern techniques. I took the same course for four consecutive sessions, paying the $200/course fee. Kim was the instructor for all, as I describe here.

As I wrote here:

I wondered later why she [Kim] never introduced us to the endless list of "white" designers. All artists, however limited their education, at some point come across some textiles which are too breathtaking to ignore. I don't think she was intellectually limited. Nor can she use the "excuse" that she is an immigrant. She had lived in Canada by then too many years to not even have casually wandered across some of these works.

I believe it was (is) this inherent dislike of whites. Perhaps not individual whites, and certainly not the leftist whites which now make up Canada and America who hate "whites" or white civilization themselves, but the white people as a collective, the white civilization, the white mind.

Kim's designs are a combination of these "deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.

Kim did leave something behind, though, which became a source of investigation for me.

I had been to visit Kim's exhibition in Toronto, and saw a group of her textile works, including the two below.


'meditating'
1998
78" x 31"
industrial felt, silk dupioni,
fibre reactive dye,
silkscreen printing,
machine & hand stitching


'following tradition'
1999
78" x 23"
industrial felt, handmade felt, fibre reactive dye,
machine & hand stitching

I think the one that initially struck me was Meditating. It looked like the waxing and waning of a moon, but rather than depict an actual waxing and waning, Kim flattened this moon-like structure. And rather than flip the "reflective" image - the orange moon-structure, starting with the "flattened" first and ending with the full round one, to give the image a more interesting dynamic - Kim left each side of the "progression" of the structure the same.

The second image that struck me was Following Tradition. It looks like a take on the maple leaf, or some kind of leaf, once again with a mirror image that is not quite a mirror image, of shapes that are not quite leaves. Perhaps "tradition" means the Canadian "tradition" of maple leaves.

I thought seriously about why a skilled textile designer could not make clear and concrete images.

As I write here:

Their [Kim's] ethnic references are too far away, and they are too alienated from their current country [Canada], and all that is left is the "structure" of the image: its shape, its empty outline.

I think this population, responding to false and exaggerated reports on a virus that hardly can be called a pandemic, is the result of an incredible, alienated, "multicultural" legacy, where cultures have no language with which to speak to each other, to denounce falshoods, and attacks on their well-being.

And how do you dare say the government is a liar if your existence depends on the government, and did so prior to such a societal event? Even as they suffer, these good "Canadians" still believe the government WILL save them, and those that have any inklings of a doubt are told by everyone and everything around them to just keep quiet.

But I believe a third group is the opportunistic ones, who have come to depend on grants and funds for their art projects which otherwise not see the light of day.

They cannot tell the truth, otherwise they incur the wrath of this government, which gives them the easy money they have become experts at acquiring, and are on various committees and organizations which look out for them, and for each other. These same people could "snitch" on them. Truth-telling becomes a dangerous sport (and art).

For all their fervent "anti-establishment" and "anti-[Canadian]tradition work," they are dependent on "government," and carefully glean what art will displease this government and what will not, and work accordingly.

It takes courage, and independent thinking, to go against this grain, including to say "I don't want your money."

Or, "I don't believe your story."

Welcome to the Multi-Culti-COVID-Era.


Steve Heinemann, Chung-Im Kim's "partner," contemplating eternity while self isolating,
from a post I wrote here

Chipmunk Canadiana

[Photo By: KPA]

The World According to Ilana Mercer: Part Deux

Ilana Mercer, in her biography on her website, writes:

Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank).

She is listed at the JIMS website "team" as a "Media Fellow."

The JIMS states its mission as:

...promot[ing] social progress in Israel through economic freedom and individual liberty.

What is Mercer doing writing for an organization with political roots in Israel?

Which leads me to the following biographical information (on her website):

Ilana was born in South Africa, which her father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, decided to leave pursuant to harassment by the South African security police on account of his anti-apartheid preaching and activism. (Ilana herself, on return, decades later, fought petty apartheid tirelessly.) The family departed in the 1960s for Israel, where Ilana spent her formative years. She returned to South-Africa in the 1980s, married and had a daughter. The family emigrated to Canada in 1995, and then went on to settle in the US.

And who is Rabbi Ben Isaccson?

Another courageous fighter [against Apartheid] was Rabbi Ben Isaacson. A graduate of Bnei Akiva and some of the finest yeshivot, he understood that the oppressive apartheid regime ran counter to Jewish values. As a rabbi, he felt compelled to condemn such injustices from his pulpit and he did so with gusto. Not all his congregants were sympathetic to these fiery sermons. As he berated successive communities for their compliance with apartheid, they responded by firing him. [Source]

Perhaps Mercer's conflicted cannibal imagery stems from her background as a fighter against Apartheid, which led to her post-Apartheid Apocalypse exposition. Perhaps what Mercer needed was a psychoanalyst!

The South African situation is tragic, and difficult to wrap around. The Boers/Dutch built that beautiful country, which is now reviving somewhat. But they did make an expeditionary risk, traveling hundreds of thousands of miles to find their Jerusalem on a Hill. The American nation is built on such adventurers. At some point, the natives might rebel.

Mercer, adamantly, writes "Yes I am a Jew" and continues on to vilify the author who questioned her, among other things, on the image she chose for her book cover Into the Cannibal's Pot.

Incidentally, double-barreled surnames are largely a feminist affection. “Mathis-Lilley” happens to be male. Or, rather, an excuse for a man. Real men don’t bully, berate and bitch baselessly.

(I forgot Mercer's knack for alliterations!)

Again, sloppy journalism and a little insight into Mercer's unremarkableness. She's not the world connoisseur she purports to be

In British tradition, a double surname is heritable, and mostly taken in order to preserve a family name which would have become extinct due to the absence of male descendants bearing the name, connected to the inheritance of a family estate. Examples include Harding-Rolls and Stopford Sackville.

There you have it, masculine and traditional.



Above: "Yes, I'm a Jew" Ilana Mercer with her Irish Catholic-South African husband Sean Mercer.

How will "Yes, I'm a Jew" Mercer bring up her mixed-marriage Irish-Catholic/Jewish daughter?



And below is Ms. Mercer with VDare's Peter Brimelow, at a Mencken Club conference, which hosted the "usual suspects." Brimelow and Mercer have likely met on many other occasions.

VDare has reviewed her cannibal's pot:

Not surprisingly, no mainstream publisher would have anything to do with this a stunning indictment of the state of affairs in Bantu-ruled South Africa...

There is a wiki-link for "Bantu," in case erudite VDare readers don't know that we're still in the same continent.