North Western Winds

Interesting things. Shulamite English does not have a word in common usage that means what "soul" used to mean. If it did, then Atheists, Scientists, Catholics, and everyone ease would not be disputing over whether the soul exists, but what the soul is . The word "soul" used to mean "that by which living things live", but over time, the word came to mean "a spiritual substance" or "the ghost of a man". With this new imposition, the "soul" was by no means a self- evident thing, but a rightly disputable thing. We lost the root meaning of the word, and were left powerless to take that root meaning and expand its notion to include the particular truth that the human soul is immortal I also like his " Architectonic Syllogisms " very much. Thesis: Political rights require God. Patum Pepperium channels the late Horatio Nelson Considering that the England I gave my arm, my eye and my life for can't commemorate my sa...

What military aircraft are you? EA-6B Prowler You are an EA-6B. You are sinister, preferring not to get into confrontations, but extract revenge through mind games and technological interference. You also love to make noise and couldn't care less about pollution. Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Godspy: Interview with Matthew Lickona, author of Swimming with Scapulars I do still consider myself to be on a break from blogging, but that doesn't mean I can't post now and again. Here is a bit of an interview with one of the so called New Faithful . Lickona is a thirty year old dad, and a writer for an alternative paper, whose book is called Swimming with Scapulars, True Confessions of a Young Catholic . Yes, there's some debate about whether the "New Faithful" Catholic revival is real or not, and whether there are hard numbers that confirm the trend. What do you think? I don't know if there are hard numbers to confirm the trend. It seems to me like it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough stories run about how people are returning to Eucharistic Adoration, people might start to pay more attention, they might ask what it's about, and they might find the answer appealing. I've used the image of poking around in the Church's dusty b...

You scored as Cultural Creative . Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. Cultural Creative 81% Fundamentalist 56% Idealist 50% Postmodernist 38% Existentialist 31% Romanticist 31% Modernist 25% Materialist 6% What is Your World View? (corrected...again) created with QuizFarm.com

Problem Solution A Solution B Heck, use 'em both. There's lots to go around. Maybe the best thing about the Problem reported above is that it makes me feel thoroughly vindicated in calling Barbie a whore. There had been this twinge of remorse and it's all gone now.

Occam's biography of Mr. Dithers is sweet. Mark Steyn weighs in the the fiasco of the past week: In the forthcoming Western Standard , I make the point that “the big flaw at the heart of the Westminster system is that in order to function as intended – by codes and conventions – it depends on a certain modesty and circumspection from the political class.” Perhaps it was always a long shot to expect a man as hollow as Paul Martin to understand that. When a fellow’s spent his entire adult life wanting to be Prime Minister without giving a single thought to what he wants to do in the job, it’s hardly likely he’d go quietly into the dignified losers’ club with Clark, Turner and Campbell. But the fact remains: by any understanding of our system of government, if the effect of “an extra week’s delay” is to maintain themselves in power by one vote they otherwise would not have had, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a constitutional coup. Like Robert Mugabe, Paul Martin has s...

It's not my creation but I'm happy to link to... Turncoat Barbie . Maybe I'm not quite finished throwing paint at a backstabbing ******* just yet. Oh, and those 'hypocrite' charges? Everything I've said about Barbie is nothing I haven't quietly kept to myself since about... day one of her leadership campaign. Tell me you've never overlooked faults in someone who professes to be a friend. Yeah, I thought so. I had a big laugh over a headline in The Vancouver Sun today (it's a rag but it's also the biggest paper in the city). Did you know that being critical of the way Barbie handled this affair - the sex part, anyway- makes you a "knuckledragging" so and so? Gaia and 'those who speak for women' have spoken. Orthodoxy is just so... like inefficient and yesterday, man. The most shocking thing is that, apparently, all of the women I spoke to and quoted the other day... they're not women . This reminds me of the whole Condi Ric...

The Pew Centre has a new report out on how the political landscape is shaped in the US. You can take the test yourself and see where you fall. Me? I'm an Enterpriser. A description of all of the groups is here . There are all kinds of interesting factoids here, including this: The U.S. remains a majority-Protestant nation (56% overall say they belong to the Protestant tradition), and this includes a majority among all groups except the younger, more secular Bystanders (49%) and Liberals (36%). Among other groups, Protestants range from 55% among the Upbeats up to 68% among the Social Conservatives. White evangelical Protestants, a core constituency for President Bush, are a significant plurality group among Social Conservatives (43%), Pro-Government Conservatives (37%), and Enterprisers (34%). White evangelicals constitute no more than 22% of any other group in the typology, and include only 5% of the Liberals. In contrast with the great variability of evangelical representation...

I'm stunned an disappointed about the vote in the house of commons today, and I'm tired of writing invective, so I'm passing on that subject - for the moment. I do have other interests and here are a few links about them. Micheal Ruse is a Darwinist that I have a soft spot for. He's no Christian but he does the good thing by picking nits with people who use Darwin to advance their political agenda / neo religion. Get Religion has a number of links, as Ruse has a new book out on the subject: “This is not just a fight about dinosaurs or gaps in the fossil record,” says Ruse, speaking from his home in Florida. “This is a fight about different worldviews.” . . .Virtually every prominent Darwinian in recent decades has eschewed social Darwinism, and most believe that evolution itself, while responsible for the increased complexity of organic forms over time, cannot be regarded as a linear process driving toward a particular endpoint. But Ruse asserts that popu...

Perhaps I'm unkind when I write about the shenanigans of our beloved Federal Liberal party. Perhaps I just loose my mind at the thought of the word 'liberal.' Perhaps I'm being -the horror! - unchristian . Then again, maybe not. Mrs. P at Patum Peperium makes the case for a critical Christendom in a post about Jane Austen : Jane Austen is thought to be one of the world's best novelists. She is also known to have been a serious Christian. Her Christian morality shaped her novels and brought her characters to life. The two are inseparable. Yet Jane wrote some highly critical even inflammatory descriptions of characters like the one for Dick Musgrove. She described characters and their actions in a manner today (2005) that many wearing purple shirts and pointy hats on Sunday would say were "unChristian". Christians today are not allowed to judge people or their actions. But Jane Austen certainly judged and those judgements did not impinge on her Christian re...

Belmont Club , one of the finer blogs going, chimes in on Canada's most messed up government in a generation: The survival of Paul Martin's government, shaken by scandal after scandal, has been bought at the price of violating the spirit of the Westminister system by ignoring what was effectively a vote of no-confidence until they could bribe someone to cross the aisle to square the count. Martin survived but only by bending the rulebook. A Canadian conservative victory without Martin's shennanigans would have been an unremarkable and narrow electoral triumph. But the Liberal Party of Canada's actions now mean that the issues dividing political factions in the Great White North are fundamental. By demonstrating a determination to hold on to power at all costs Martin is increasing the likelihood of a radical, rather than an incremental solution to the Canadian crisis. ... This survey of events suggests (and it just my opinion) that the real strategic danger to the cause...

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country. G. K. Chesterton, Flying Inn (1914) I'll start with Chesterton because while the sex issue in this story of Belinda's latest stroll is all over the web, the class issue is going untouched. And by class, I don't just mean the fact that Paul Martin and Barbie have none. the musk of gender, I'm afraid, lingers in the nose across the whole thread. I'm not going to engage in hand-wringing about it; male politicians are quite routinely, not to say incessantly, called "whores". Like anyone else born in 1971 I would have an instinctive fear of calling a female politician a "whore", but in truth we only suffer this fear here precisely because we are talking about a politician whose looks are the substantive, universally professed basis for her status and renown. It seems strange to cut her extra slack precisely because she has no identifiable record of achievement, is a jet-setting serial monogamist w...

If everybody just plays along I've wasted too much of my time on this... but it was fun.

The good news is that if CPC leader Stephen Harper should fail to form a government in the next election, we will not have to endure another leadership campaign from Frank Stronach's daughter. She was pathetic in the first one but it is conceivable that a demoralized CPC might have turned to someone like her if they were desperate (and maybe drunk). What really worries me is what this might do to Peter McKay, who was romantically linked to Stronach not too long ago, and whose principles are almost as plastic. He could be yet another rich dad's kid in the Liberal Party of Canada. (Martin and Stronach are both intellectual lightweights with mega rich dads). It'll be fun watching her try and stick the knife in Martin's back some time in the future. It's no wonder the Martin government is so inept either. He gave Stronach, who has what? One year of politics behind her? a cabinet seat. In doing so, he passed over people who have been in the party for many, many ye...

Here are two very different writers, on two very different subjects. Or are they? Christopher Hitchens , from Slate : This campaign of horror began before Baghdad fell, with the execution and mutilation of those who dared to greet American and British troops. It continued with the looting of the Baghdad museum and other sites, long before there could have been any complaint about the failure to restore power or security. It is an attempt to put Iraqi Arabs and Kurds, many of them still traumatized by decades of well-founded fear, back under the heel of the Baath Party or under a home-grown Taliban, or the combination of both that would also have been the Odai/Qusai final solution. Half-conceding the usefulness of chaos and misery in bringing this about, Bennet in his closing paragraph compares jihadism to 19th-century anarchism, which shows that he hasn't read Proudhon or Bakunin or Kropotkin either. In my ears, "insurgent" is a bit like "rebel" or even "...

An editorial in pictures Inside Paul Martin's brain. The reality. US readers can get up to speed here . A possible solution . Only an idiot would think that he has the right and the ability to spend the people's money and to (at his leisure) set the dates for votes after being defeated in the house. Martin appears to be so liberal he's liberated himself from all reality - truth, tradition, and common decency. Martin has power only dejure . Defacto , he's lost it. Most amusingly, he's never really had it. He's the PM only because he's riding on Chretien's legacy. It was Chretien who won the majority that Paul's tenuous right to govern rests on. Hey Paul? There's no divine right to be the Prime Minister. I don't care what your dad told you. And that BC election ? It's Tuesday, not Monday you moron.

How can I not support this rally ? I am almost as far away from Ottawa as I can get but I'd be there if I could. If you can, go. Maybe take some gear from these guys . I'd love to see it be a roaring success. Then again I hear Toronto is still something like 41% Grit . I don't understand that. At all.

Look! It's the team Martin election gurus working on their campaign for the summer election. Credit: Logical Meme

cuz its fun I'm still on holidays but I wanted to share this because this makes me ill : Well, I recall one Friday evening, a couple years ago, when I almost quit the Liberal Party of Canada. It was the night that the Martin cabal took over the riding association of former cabinet minister Herb Dhaliwal, knowing (a) Dhaliwal was out of the country and (b) his wife was dying of cancer. I had witnessed a lot political thuggery, to be sure, but I had never before seen anything as disgusting, and as inhuman, as that. It was only a friend in Ottawa who talked me out of quitting. Yeah, that's WK. And yes, I know who he is and how he plays it - this scores him points against the dastardly confederate Liberals (Martinites / doofuses). It also just happens to be true. Ps. I'm going to have a million links to do when I come back... unless I do some heavy culling.

There have been no posts on North Western Winds since Saturday morning about 3 days ago, give or take. I've been mulling this post over for a few days, wondering if I should do this or not. I wondered at first if it was just my aching body being angry at me for overdoing it on the weekend and washing the house (not the car, the house). Now that I'm recovering and still shying away from my blogging tools, I think it's more than that. Don't worry, I'm not pulling the plug on NWW. I am, however, facing a nasty blogging wall right now. I suspect that a hiatus will allow me to get back on track. I don't know how long I'll need, but I have had a personal webpage and kept it updated off and on for many years, long before there was anything like Blogger. I'm going to guess that two months might do it. If that isn't enough, I'd be very surprised if I wasn't blogging again by the end of the summer. It was not a coincidence that I started NWW in Au...