Stephen Roney's Blog, page 126

In Memoriam

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

An Economic Forecast

I know nothing of economics, and have never presumed to make any such forecasts before. But then again, why not? The experts are always wrong anyway.

Let's see how well I do...

The price of housing in Canada, and no doubt also in the US, must go down. If things cannot go on forever, they won’t. If housing costs so much that people cannot afford it, they stop buying houses, and the price must go down. Currently, the ratio of housing cost to average income is at a historic high.

A mere fall in housing prices response to higher interest rates is not going to change this by itself, because the mortgage costs remain the same, and so the housing is no more affordable. But pushing housing prices down will have a snowball effect.

That costs have gone so much higher in proportion to income suggests that there is a lot of speculation in the market. Why not mortgage to the max, if mortgages are cheap, while housing prices keep climbing? The instant it becomes clear that housing prices will not inevitably rise, and mortgages are not such a great deal, there should be an exodus of much speculative money from the market, forcing prices further down. And each drop has a snowballing effect on speculation.

A lesser and sadder factor is that some people will no longer be able to afford the houses they are in. The rise in mortgage rates is liable to hurt here. In Canada, even fixed rate mortgages last only five years. Some proportion will find they can no longer cover it. Granted that they still will need a place to live, and will still be in the market for some kind of housing, there will be a lot of distress sales, when people cannot afford to hold out for the best price. 

Canadian, and American, demographics is tilting older. That means proportionately fewer new buyers, and more retirees looking to downsize, or dying and leaving their houses empty and up for sale.

Perhaps we are not building enough new houses; CMHC says so. But this is an odd problem, and can only be due to government overregulation. Canada obviously has no shortage of land on which to build. It of all countries has no shortage of building materials. The actions of government are sadly unpredictable, but there is a 50/50 chance things will get better here instead of worse.

So I say home prices in Canada generally should go down for the next few years. And the fall should be rather dramatic.

In other economic news, Kevin O’Leary notes that the figures were are seeing are unprecedented: inflation coupled with recession, coupled with low unemployment figures. These are three things that are not supposed to happen together.

The obvious explanation is that we are in a highly artificial situation, caused by the pandemic and the lockdowns. There seems a good chance things will snap back once these distortions are removed.

Albeit governments, notably the Canadian government, actually seem to be doing their best to prevent a return to normal.

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Judith Durham, Rest in Peace

 

One of the truly great female voices. Can almost bring tears to my eyes.

I have an oddly vivid memory of listening to "Mortningtown Ride" over some store PA system in NDG long ago. 

I hope Judith is in Morningtown this morning.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Hellfire Club

 

Scuttlebutt is that Amber Heard ran a prostitution ring in Hollywood. She also videotaped, and blackmailed; and this supposedly explains her hold over Elon Musk, or her own sister.

It sounds fantastic; yet we have heard similar things. What about Jeffrey Epstein—whose clients have never been revealed? What about what we know from his laptop of the life of Hunter Biden?

I suspected that Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was actually an expose. Now I really think so. And wonder whether Kubrick died of natural causes, so soon after filming.

I think we know from Epstein’s untimely and probably imposed suicide that the people involved in these sex and blackmail rings are prepared to kill to keep their secrets, and able to kill with impunity.

The possibility that a large proportion of the rich and powerful are bound together by participation in sex cults, and vulnerability to blackmail as a result, could explain much: the way the Democratic Party seemed able to fix the nomination for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then Biden in 2020. The way Jagmeet Singh formed a coalition with Justin Trudeau, just as Trudeau looked vulnerable to a no-confidence vote, and apparently against the interests of the NDP. The way the Canadian or Dutch governments are so committed to the goals of the WEF that they will act against the interests of their own electorate—and their own re-election. The way the social media companies are so aggressive about censoring content, although it is sure to harm their bottom line. The list goes on.

Francis Dashwood, founder of one of history's "Hellfire Clubs."

It is a conspiracy theory; but experience has informed us that some conspiracies are real.

And really, why wouldn’t it be so? In better times, ruling elites are held back only by their own code of ethics. We know that any sense of ethics or honour has been publicly eroding now for generations. There is no longer, we are told openly by those at the top, any right or wrong. It is just what you can get away with.

Take that view, and this is the inevitable result. What’s the point of having so much money and power if you can’t use it to get yourself sexual pleasures unavailable to the hoi polloi? And why wouldn't some take advantage of the possibilities for blackmail and control? For more of the money and power they have always coveted?

The good thing about conspiracies, though, is that they are vulnerable to collapse. People are not good at keeping secrets. The bigger the cabal is, and the more damaging, the more likely it is that somebody talks. If my suspicions are warranted, it is only a matter of time before it all comes out. Indeed, it is all coming out, despite obvious attempts by the legacy media and authorities to bury it. Probably soon people will hear and realize what they are hearing.

Then there can be no more blackmail. Then everybody talks. Then Jeffrey Epstein, or Stanley Kubrick, will not have died in vain.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Through the Looking Glass

 

Carl Jung hypothesized a “collective unconscious” of shared memories. And he had compelling evidence for it: certain recognizable figures appear in cultures world-wide, as well as spontaneously in our dreams, or in the delusions of the mad. Every culture has the notion of the dragon, a large winged serpent. It generally figures large in their legends. Yet there are no dragons in nature. Every culture has witches. Every lake of any size hosts a lake monster. East and West both know of unicorns, not just as shy beasts with a single horn that appear out of the forests, but as creatures with an unrelenting sense of right and wrong. When they went about conquering the known world, the Greeks and then the Romans had no problem identifying their own gods one by one with those of Egypt, or India, or Germany, or Carthage.

This begs explanation. Yet a “collective unconscious” of shared memories does not work. Nobody has a memory of actually seeing a dragon—let alone all of us. How can we have memories of things that never happened?

Being a pseudo-scientist, Jung explained it all as springing from the physiology of the brain. But that does not work. Why should any synapse express itself as a unicorn? 

There is a simpler explanation: that the imagination is not random, but is an organ which gives us glimpses of a real, objectively existing, realm. 

Moderns have trouble accepting this, because our religion of “scientism” is uncompromisingly materialistic. It insists, a priori, that only what is apparent to the physical senses is “real.” But this is an arbitrary, and ultimately nonsensical, position. A thing is real if it exists independent of any individual perception of it; and “perception” is a much broader category than sense perception. If not, then truth or justice are not real either, are they?

Just as truth or justice exist, then, a realm exists that we perceive with our imagination. We do not create what is there; we perceive it. 

Any serious artist knows this is so. Michelangelo, for example, claimed he did not design his sculptures. He started chipping away to discover what was hidden in the marble. Stephen King explains that he never outlines before he begins to write. He writes to find out what happens. He compares it to excavating dinosaur bones. The story already exists; his hope is to get it all intact. Leonard Cohen speaks of keeping “the equipment” in working order, in case something comes.

Fairyland is a real place. This is why all fairy tales are broadly similar: you are not allowed to make anything up. Shakespeare, moreover, presents it as where all mortal problems are solved; it is his “green world.” 

Plato proposes it as where all ideas come from. We would never be able to organize our random sense impressions into the concept “giraffe” or “morning” had these concepts not already existed in our minds. They indeed come to us like memories. 

This fairyland / collective unconscious / realm of ideal forms is, then, more perfect than and prior to the physical world. We see it in our dreams, and in art.

It is here that we find heaven and hell. And there is every reason to suppose that we will continue to exist in it after the carnival big top we call life has folded and moved on.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Republican Stakes for 2024

 

The Republicans have a problem for 2024: two obvious candidates. Trump gives every sign of intending to run again, and many will feel he deserves the chance. But many also worry that he is too old or too divisive, and want to rally around Ron DeSantis.

It would be best for the party if the two could make some deal. Yet a backroom deal is anathema to a populist movement. Ideally, they both go after the nomination, but obeying Reagan’s eleventh commandment: speak no ill of a fellow Republican. The party members and the public could decide. Yet the brand would not be tarnished. A contested nomination increases public interest, and, should one stumble, the other would be available. Once the matter is decided, as reward for sticking to the bargain, the loser would be chosen for the VP position. Either ticket would be awesome.

The problem is, this works better for DeSantis than Trump. For Trump, VP would probably still feel like a comedown. Rather than taking the VP position for himself, the deal might be that it goes to one of his children. 

Trump is also better with the bare knuckles than DeSantis is likely to be; because he is better than anyone. That, ironically, makes him a perfect VP candidate. But it means that a deal to be gentlemanly costs him more than it does DeSantis.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Turning?

 

We have been living through a strange three years or so. Things have been going from mad to worse. Old ways may persist for some time out of sheer inertia, but it feels as though something fundamental has changed. We are floating off the edge of a cliff, and sooner or later, like Wil E. Coyote, we are going to look down. 

People no longer believe the authorities. They no longer trust the experts. The superstructure of our civilization is rotting away.

Is political revolution coming? In the developed world, I doubt it. Democracy is a good shock absorber. We are likely to see populists come to power: Trump, Poilievre, and the like.

But the disillusionment goes deeper than politics. What we might be seeing, it seems to me, is the death of the great god Science. It took a hit back in the Sixties; people struggled to see the benefits of nuclear holocaust and Mutually Assured Destruction. But the way science has become politicized during the pandemic, and to support extreme demands on the general public in the name of “climate change,” may be a real tipping point. On top of this, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the “peer review” process has not been working, and that many of the tenets of current science are based on irreproducible experimental results. In the end, we discover, there is nothing magical about science, and scientists are not holy men incapable of deceit.

This should come as a crisis of faith to many. Folks in the West have increasingly worshipped Science as their god since the Victorian era. Like all healthy religions, science—or scientism—was not seen as a religion, of course, but simply as “the truth.” So was Catholicism, in the Middle Ages. This has always been a harmful idolatry, harmful to science as much as to humanity; because Science is a lousy, limited religion.

Many intellectuals have been aware there was something wrong here for some time; first existentialism, later postmodernism, have expressed an awareness that science has failed to give us real meaning or knowledge. But they have failed, because they have had no ground of truth or meaning to replace it with. Marxism is no substitute, since Marxism itself is built on the myth of science.

The only visible option is that nagging thing we call religion.

One can hope it is the Christian message.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

A Fall Election?

 

A rumour is going round that there may be an election in the fall: called by the Liberals, not forced. Justin Trudeau almost seems to be campaigning this summer. 

This at first seems mad to me. Didn’t we have an indecisive election only a year ago, and wasn’t almost the biggest issue the frivolousness of calling an unnecessary election?

This fall we look likely to be suffering from rampant inflation, recession, supply problems, possibly a renewed pandemic, and, some warn, food shortages. Is this a good time for a government to call an election? People have been rioting against governments in Holland and Sri Lanka.

Nor can the Liberals claim, as they did last time, that their legislative program is being blocked. They have their informal coalition with the NDP.

It seems as though Trudeau may genuinely believe that his opposition is only a “fringe minority.” He anticipates Pierre Poilievre winning the Conservative leadership, thinks the general public will be appalled by his “far-right” ideas, and that he, Trudeau, can now grab a majority, freeing him from needing to cater to the NDP. The unrest among the unwashed can even be his issue: the need to put down this radical fringe of racists and misogynists and the supposed like.

This may be a measure of Liberal hubris. They may be out of touch with how ordinary Canadians feel. Or I am.

I’d put money on a big Liberal loss.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Blowing Turkey

 

Pope Francis and the assembled cardinals of Canada are under fire for participating in a pagan “smudging” ceremony during the Pope’s recent Canadian visit. Unless this was sprung on them without their foreknowledge, I agree.  The self-ordained shaman with his turkey bone is probably simply a fraud. If so, the pope and cardinals participating make themselves, and the church, look ridiculous. Sitting there in silent assent to New Age pseudo-profundity like “the heart is like a talking stick.”

But if he is not a fraud, he is summoning demons: calling on the “Western grandmother” to gather the “circle of spirits.”

There is a vital distinction here between monotheistic religions and paganism. Muslims, Jews, or devotional Hindus all worship the same one true God. All other “gods” are demons. The Bible, either Old Testament or New Testament, is clear that Christians must not participate in their worship. 

If Francis and the cardinals do not understand this, they cannot represent the Christian religion.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Fairy Tales

Snow White

W.C. Fields used to say “you can’t cheat an honest man.” I always took this for an alibi: an attempt by the con artist to deflect blame. Indeed, a clear case of blaming the victim.

But I have recently heard the same thing from a more reliable source; I think Jordan Peterson. Con artists count on the mark consenting to the con. The mark wants to believe something; the con man just gives them what they want. Anyone with a commitment to reality would have seen through the con, and the mark probably does too. Drink this, and all your troubles will go away. Take this gamble, and you can win a million dollars. Rub this on your head, and your hair will grow back. They are buying a pleasant fantasy, if for a few hours or a few years.

The words of Dr. Martin Luther King also come to mind: that nobody can oppress you without your consent. That sounds harsh, but maybe it is true. Con black men into the notion that they are incapable of doing things for themselves, and need to be taken care of. That requires consent. George Orwell saw a large number of black men taking orders from a white overseer in colonial Africa, and wondered in print, “How are they being fooled? How long are these people going to accept this?” But it appeals to indolence. Don’t we all more or less wish we could be taken care of, like a child?

This is not to underestimate the great difficulty for any individual to buck an oppressive system. It never pays to be an “uppity nigger.” But the greatest resistance is likely to come from the fellow oppressed. A black man trying to get ahead is liable to be accused of “acting white.” He’s a sellout.

Or their fellows will turn kapo. It was his fellow black slaves who beat Uncle Tom to death in the famous novel, at the slavemaster’s bidding. (Yet, and tellingly, it is “Uncle Tom” who is remembered as a supposed sellout. Precisely because he wasn’t.)

The truth is, the black man we does right and works hard is making his neighbours look bad. They want their oppression. It absolves them from effort and from moral responsibility.

The same dynamic is at work among the aboriginals/”First Nations.”

Now apply this to mental illness. Because it is all most obvious, and most extreme, here. Early on, Freud realized that mental illness was the result of childhood abuse. However, he, and every analyst before or after who has realized this, found that the patients themselves would resist. They might not deny it, they might agree, they might even point it out, but they would stop coming to analysis. Not a paying proposition. Freud invented the “Oedipus complex” as a more marketable con. The patients did not want reality, and they did not want cure. Freud grew, on these grounds, to feel contempt for his patients. A con man must harden his heart.

Mental illness is in most cases the result of abuse by a narcissistic parent. But the critical form of abuse is not sexual, or physical, but moral. It is being conned into a false sense of reality and morality. The narcissist, by nature, sees themselves as their own god. By extension, they will set themselves up as their children’s god. They will con their children into embracing various falsehoods and immoralities, as con artists do. This is what gods are supposed to be able to do. This asserts their godhood. The children become accomplices, and idolaters.

If anyone tries to break out of this, they become the scapegoat of the others. Being accomplices in their own abuse, all in the family fear the cold light of the real. They cling to the fantasy—to the point of violence or self-harm if necessary.

Fairy tales are our best source on “mental illness”; they were created to advise children on life. Consider Snow White. She is the victim of abuse by a malicious parent. She escapes with her life. The dwarfs, her spiritual guides, warn her not to commune with “strangers.” Three times her abusive mother, “in disguise,” is able to abuse her again, by appealing to her vanity and her sense of being special. By conning her. This models the actions of an abusive parent; and the tendency of the abused child to keep returning to be abused again. Like a misguided moth, drawn back in to the initial fantasy, imagining the parent has “changed.”

Cinderella doesn’t immediately seem to be complicit in her abuse. But read carefully. When she goes to the prince’s ball, dressed to the nines, her sisters do not recognize her. Yet she does not reveal herself to them. Later, at home, she pretends she was not at the ball. Why? What is she hiding, and who is she protecting?

She is protecting the family fantasy, and her own abuse. She must remain Cinderwench, and they are the better daughters. She is more comfortable in this delusion, and so complicit in it. Only later does she gather the courage to reveal herself.

In Rapunzel, her state of abuse is symbolized by being locked in a tower. Yet she could actually leave at any time. The witch, and then the handsome prince, come and go by climbing her tresses. Why could she not escape herself, by cutting her hair, tying it to the windowsill, and climbing down? This is indeed just what the witch does later.

She is complicit in her own captivity, because to give it up she would have to give up the sesnse, cultivated by the witch, her narcissistic parent, that she is special.

Here we see both the cause of, and the cure for, “mental illness.” It must be a wholehearted embrace of objective truth and objective morality. This will require, as Alcoholics Anonymous rightly point out, an examination of conscience and a Frank confrontation with our own guilt.

Mental illness is ultimately a moral issue.

Psychiatry cannot help, because psychiatry rejects morality.

Rapunzel




'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.