Why Mr Trump would propose adding Canada as a fifty-first state, I've no idea. Of course, he'd like unfettered access to our natural resources, but he knows it's not as simple as that. Canada and the U.S.A. are very different places, constitutionally. And if we were to "merge," as he puts it—does he think of countries as mere corporations?—we would presumably have a California-sized share of electoral college votes; which, given the leftward drift of our culture, would secure a perpetual Democrat dominance. As one colleague at Touchstone put it to me: "A 51st Canadian state might mean just enough new American voters to assure that no one to the right of Kamala Harris is ever elected again. Canada wouldn't become the 51st state; politically speaking, the United States would become the 11th province."
So maybe Mr Trump just wants the perverse pleasure of saying to Canadians, when he tacks on the promised tariffs, "Don't forget that I offered you an alternative." Or maybe he thinks we are so sick of Trudeau and his kind, including Mr Singh, that we'll sell our birthright for a mess of pottage. He might be onto something there, but I think we'll try Mr Poilievre first.
Anyway, I've just returned from California, and if the people who ran it were sane, I'd regard California itself as an excellent alternative. I might not even wait for Poilievre. Unfortunately they're not, and the trend is to move out rather than to move in. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Who knows? Perhaps Californians will wake up one morning, like Nebuchadnezzar, and realize they've been grazing, politically speaking, on sagebrush and tumbleweed.
Speaking of Artemesia californica, one thing I like about California is that one can go riding there even in January. Mind you, if one heads into the mountains, as I like to do, it can get rather brisk at this time of year. Riding Palomar and the Sunrise, on the rented steeds pictured above, reminded me of a much colder ride half a century ago, when with a couple of buddies I passed the Devil's Gate one October, heading north into Nevada, and was greeted in Carson City by a couple inches of falling snow. Though teenaged at the time, I found it a little difficult to pry myself off the bike. First I had to unlock my frozen fingers from the Mach III's throttle, then persuade unresponsive muscles to lift my right leg off the peg and over the seat. Hobbling into a heated restaurant for some hot chocolate was the reward; that, and burning a few more miles off our route back to the 49th parallel.
The ride last Saturday was very much sunnier and in every way more pleasant than that, as our picture shows, yet chilly nonetheless when the sun began to sink. I certainly missed my leather jacket. But the late afternoon chill encouraged a thought I've had recently, which is to found a new motorcycle club. Not a club devoted to theology and the art of motorcycle maintenance, though there would have to be some of that to get a proper fix on things, but a club called Bikers for Global Warming (BGW). A rise of just a degree or two would make for a longer riding season, and with the polar ice building again, why not root for that? There's something to be said for a green planet rather than a white one.
Now I suppose, if you've bought into the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) ruse, you will think BGW quite perverse. And rather insensitive, too, given that Los Angeles is still burning. I don't mean to be insensitive, I assure you. Indeed, I met folk while I was down that way whose friends or family were at that very hour losing homes to the fires. I’ve not forgotten them. I sincerely hope they will find a way to start over and that some good is already emerging from that evil. But L.A., as others have observed, is not smouldering from AGW. It is smouldering because California is run by the sort of people who purport to venerate nature (albeit not in matters sexual, wherein any reference to nature is considered uncouth) but have no grasp of nature or the cycles of nature. And by another sort as well, the sort that want us to believe in AGW, though they themselves don't, because they can manipulate that belief to their own profit.
Such people, alas, run most Western jurisdictions now, and are doing them immense harm. They've all but destroyed Germany and Great Britain, for example, both of which make California appear quite sane by comparison. I see, by the way, that Mr Carney, who helped with the destruction of Britain, would like to have a go at what's left of Canada. Good luck to him and his fellow WEF agents in the Liberal Party as they rearrange the deck chairs. But where was I? O yes, I was about to say something about their war against oil, a war the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, is currently discussing with Donald Trump. (Perhaps Alberta will go it alone as the 51st state? If so, I'll be tempted to move there first, and think about California again later.)
That war is conducted at the behest of the globalist power-brokers who fund their campaigns, just as they fund the redshirts at Just Stop Oil, whose job is to make the politicians seem a bit more palatable. It differs from some of the other wars in which they are also engaged; the pandemic war, for example, or the immigration war, both of which are false flag wars in a more fundamental sense, since the power-brokers are not really against viral waves or waves of unassimilable foreigners. Indeed, they are very much for them in a calculating, or sometimes miscalculating, way. But it has in common with the others the fact that it is precisely a war on liberty. As such, it is also a war against privately owned vehicles, which—like the private persons who operate them—are put down as a threat to the planet.
Ground zero in this war is London, not L.A. The pretexts for fighting it are the same, congestion and smog, but the measures taken, which reduce neither, show that these are but pretexts. As a country boy originally, and one who detests congestion in particular—I'll not soon repeat the several hours spent just trying to get round L.A.—I am heartily sympathetic. But their solution is subterfuge. It amounts to congestion without the smog. They want to grow our cities and shrink our freedom of movement. They want to do away with private means of transport and with ready access to open places. Their counterparts here are talking about tripling the population of Canada's major cities, while they go about reducing their traffic flow to bicycle lanes. Winter snows be damned!
When they have us all cooped up in such cities, what then? I'll give you a clue, in case the covid measures weren't clue enough. Have you been keeping track of what they are doing lately on that other front, the pandemic front? They say it's to prevent H5N1 from spreading to humans; yet while they annihilate chickens and inoculate cattle, they are busying rounding up humans themselves into coops and corrals. Hmm.
The war against the car is also a war against the motorcycle, of course, though motorcycles create far less smog and congestion. Hence my club, Bikers for Global Warming, which is not just about rooting for a longer riding season. It is also about rooting for liberty, without which there will be no riding season at all. For the sake of liberty, club rules will even tolerate the lane-splitting that Californians practice, so long as it is sanely conducted, which too often it isn't; but again I digress, and you may be worried that I will digress still further. What I want to say in promotion of this club is that the motorcycle has always been a symbol of liberty and, in its fashion, of respect for nature. Those who don't respect nature, beginning with the weather and the forces of physics, don't last long. Call it natural selection, if you please, but I don't mean to be insensitive here either. I heard a couple of very sad stories when loitering with other bikers on the climb to Palomar. There are those who do, and those who do not, deserve their fate.
G. K. Chesterton, not Robert Pirsig, should be the club's chief patron, I think, though admittedly it is rather difficult to imagine the former on a motorcycle, especially in his later years. I did espy someone of his size flashing by me while we were out in the car: a very large man on a very large bike, splitting the lanes with aplomb. Anyway, I have some advice, cribbed from Chesterton, for prospective members (if that’s you, let me know in the comment section) and decided non-members alike. I was reminded of it when I began reading his autobiography while on vacation, though it is advice that can be found in any number of his innumerable works. It is found most pointedly, perhaps, in "The Oracle of the Dog." (That’s a Fr Brown detective story, I hasten to add, not a story about Harleys or Royal Enfields or my old Triumph flathead 500.)
Allowing for a modest aggiornamento, the advice goes something like this: Beware the sort of man whose skepticism has made him, not incredulous, but altogether credulous; credulous enough to believe neo-Malthusian nonsense about population bombs and inevitable pandemics and the planetary perils of the internal combustion engine. There are perils, of course, to industrialization and urban sprawl, as the people of L.A. have been reminded. Chesterton, for his part, generally preferred to walk, when he could, whether in the city or in the countryside. It can't be denied that walking is better for you, keeps you closer to nature, and is much safer on the whole. But the Malthusian's instinct is in every way against liberty, or against your liberty, at any rate; while Chesterton's instinct was in every way for liberty. The biker's instinct aligns with the latter, not the former.
On another occasion I'll explain, with Chesterton's help, why the Malthusian instinct is not scientific, but superstitious, and why its fear of free men is a fear of nature itself. At the moment, I will only marvel that politicians have blamed the L.A. disaster on climate change, rather than on Christians. That they have blamed it on climate change, rather than on their own lazy incompetence, is certainly no marvel, for that is how they play their game. But the AGW blow-torch must, in the end, be directed primarily against people of faith, especially Chestertonian faith, as it is already directed against the poor and those the powerful wish to make poor.
Why is that? Partly because people of faith are also people of hope; hence people who still produce children, increasing, as the Malthusians suppose, the world's surplus population. And partly because they have something true against which to measure the lies propagated by politicians. Moreover, they have something to sustain them when their will to persevere is tested, even by the burning of their homes. They have the love of family and the joy of giving thanks to God in all circumstances—the very things Chesterton, as he tells us in his autobiography, found himself returning to more and more often as his life unfolded.
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My wife, I believe, gave thanks for the safe return of her husband and son from a challenging day's ride, who in turn gave thanks for her support and for the ride. Mexican food and Mexican beer brought the day to an end, with patio heaters to take off the chill. But I will shift gears now and mention something else to give thanks for, as a prelude to offering some advice of my own, this time to Mr. Trump, whose triumphant return to the White House takes place tomorrow.
The “something else” I have in mind is the fact that more and more people are resisting attempts to coop them up. That is one reason Americans voted decisively for the Republican ticket, which registered gains even in California. On our trip to and from that state, we offered a small token of resistance ourselves by politely declining to use the scanners with which we were confronted at every turn. I'm happy to report that airport agents were equally polite in permitting us to opt out. It seems our countries are not altogether Sinicized yet, and for that I am very thankful.
Opting in having already been replaced by opting out, however, we are approaching a tipping point. It would not be difficult, in the absence of resistance, to reduce our options to one only, or rather to none, unless you count not going anywhere as an option. So I want to encourage more people to do as we did, or do something like it. The pat-down takes a little longer than the body scanner, but declining the biometric devices is, if anything, faster than submitting to them. It certainly feels freer and sometimes leads to interesting conversations about Sinicization. It sends a signal, or perhaps we must say, a counter signal.
My advice for Mr Trump is to consider his own signals carefully, since they matter still more than ours. Talk of a 51st state may send a signal to Canada that times have changed and our country had best be ready to change with them. If so, I approve; as I approve of my bank exiting, with three others, the Net Zero Banking Alliance run by Mr Carney. Perhaps the times are a-changing. But what I'd really like to see is a sign that the Trump administration (including the mercurial Mr Musk, whose demon-slaying prowess, I understand, has been much exaggerated, like Trump's own) is fully committed, this time, to preserving the rights of persons from being trampled by the American state in its own alliances.
Who wants to see the American state made more efficient if it is still a bully state, directing its power, not to maintaining space for the citizen to pursue his own well-being and the well-being of his neighbour, but rather to effecting his submission and the submission of his neighbours, including the neighbour in a neighbouring state? Who wants to see it more efficient at the micro-management of our lives? Who wants to see it partnering with private companies like Fors Marsh to sound the bugle of fear that sets us off on a forced march to some disaster, pharmaceutical or otherwise, of the state’s own making?
That signal was sounded on Trump’s watch by DoD and HHS actors, then amplified throughout the entire American sphere of influence, bringing turmoil to many nations, including mine. The consequences were not “seriously human,” to use the Fors Marsh Group’s own language, but seriously inhuman. Yet neither from these actors, nor from Trump himself, have we heard any mea culpa. No plan to prevent such things from happening again has been announced.
The first reliable signal of change, then, would be an apology. If Mr Trump is incapable of apologizing to us, he is unworthy of our trust. After that, the signal that must be sent is that America, going forward, will be subservient to its own fundamental law, both at home and abroad; that it will be vigilant in exposing the lies, larceny, and lawlessness that have prevailed for so long and which became so brazen under the Biden regime.
That's a big ask, and I am not so foolish as to think that any one man, or any single administration, can deliver on it. I can think of a way to get started, however. Cut out the heart of darkness. Disband the CIA and dissolve its domestic partners such as CISA. Radically revise the parameters of the Pentagon and the mission of Homeland Security. While you’re at it, depoliticize NATO. Abandon the institutions of the globalists and their corporate partners. Withdraw from the WHO. What to do about the SES and the rest of the deep state, I don’t know, but surely there are those who do.
In short, put an end to imperial America and you will have an America worth joining. Its power will not decrease but increase if it is the power of law and lawfulness, if it prizes truth and exposes lies to the light of day. Even Communist China will not withstand it, for there will be a global warming of another and more salubrious sort.
To add some context you wrote the best defense using church teaching to resist covid vaxx shots and mandates and I have used it many times w fellow Catholics resistant to the shots and mandates. You have a great way with words.
This lifelong biker is certainly willing to join your club.