
I’m Grateful It’s Cold
I’m grateful it’s so cold outside. Not just bitterly cold, but skin-numbing cold. Frostbite cold. Not to mention windy, making the weather even more unpleasant, maybe dangerous. (Much warmer though, than what the exiles face in the novel Quantum Cannibals)
I’m Grateful for Wood
Maybe I should go chop some firewood. On a cold day like this you can go through a stack of wood pretty damned quick. It’s supposed to cool down later this week, so even a full cord might not be enough. Need to split a lot of pine to keep warm in this weather.
I’m getting old for that, though. The usual ailments of age prevent me from swinging an axe like I used to, carrying armfuls of logs over to the fire. Besides which, it’s cold out there. Chopping wood warms you up, but it’s still damned cold. Not only that, my city has banned fireplaces and wood stoves, unless they are some damned high-tech device that burn clean, that don’t emit carbon. Hell, wood is carbon. I’m carbon, everything alive is carbon.
I’m Grateful For Oil
Yes, keeping the wood fire burning is going to be a problem. Maybe instead I’ll just phone the oil company to come fill up my tank. But it’s not really necessary. They have a formula that tells them when I need oil, and then they come on their own. It’s real convenient, and I’m grateful for it. I don’t have to pay the driver; the company just puts it on my credit card, and emails me about it.
Sure is a lot easier than sharpening my axe, standing outside and splitting pine, then carrying the whole damned thing inside. My neighbors would be pissed at me anyways if I cut down the trees around my backyard. Would also be in violation of municipal bylaws. Be a hell of a chore to have a sweet-smelling
fire, to keep warm naturally. I sure am grateful to the oil company that makes the delivery. I’m grateful for the rail companies, the shipping lines that bring the oil from the refineries. Would be grateful to the pipeline companies that transported the oil, but the damned environmentalists blocked them. So the heating oil in my tank comes from places like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Those self-righteous “progressives” are forcing me to send money to some of the meanest places on earth.
I’m grateful, but those railways aren’t safe. Ask the people of Lac Megantic, where an oil train that was parked for the night killed forty-seven people. My town
is surrounded by railroad tracks, and I got to tell you, I don’t feel that comfortable when those oil cars go rumbling by.
I’m grateful for my electricity. If it wasn’t so cold, my heat pump would be warming my house, wringing heat out of the cold outside air and stashing it inside. I’m grateful for the dependable power that runs it, and for the ingenious people who thought of using winter cold to heat a home.
I’m Grateful I’m Not Progressive
Got to tell you, when I was younger I was one of those self-righteous “progressives” trying to get in the way of energy. The government wanted to build a bunch of dams up north; the Indians and Eskimos didn’t want them to. I was part of the team collecting proof that the natives could use in court. To make a long story short, the dams got built, but the Cree and the Inuit got really good deals that made their lives a lot better. Hey, a community of four hundred people has its own five-million dollar airstrip, long enough to handle jets.
When I was living in a tipi with a Cree family, I didn’t get too bothered when the temperature hit forty below at night. The head of the family, not me, was the one who got up before sunrise to bring in wood and get the fire started, as I stayed snug in my sleeping bag. I was grateful not to get up till the place warmed up.
I’m the head of the family now (okay, my wife is). It’s my job to warm up the house in the morning. So I trudge down to the thermostat, press a button a couple of times, and let the furnace do its job. I could program the thermostat, but I like doing things manually. It’s how I ‘rough it’ these days.
I don’t want to be an ingrate, so I ‘like’ and ‘share’ Facebook posts promoting rational oil development. Yeah, I’m a real activist. I write letters to my Member of Parliament, to my newspaper (digital edition). I talk to people about oil, about electricity. I listen too, when my Indian friends tell me of the risks of a pipeline, the treaties that were ignored, the people who were harmed.
Everything has its dangers, everything has its risks. I’d be grateful if everybody bitching about oil thought about how much better it’s made our lives, about the dangers of having to live without it. I don’t want to go outside now to split wood. I’m too old, it’s too damned cold, and anyways I got rid of my axe a long time ago.

Naked To Advance Their Career
Note: this post contains images of nudity and hypocrisy

The Rape of Lucretia
Right-thinking people everywhere are shocked by the scandal of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein acting inappropriately with so many women. They’re scandalized by the likes of George Takei, Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton… The list just keeps on growing. People trying to get ahead, to advance their career, get taken advantage of by people with the power to propel them forward or hold them back.
Where did Weinstein get the idea that these women would grant him sexual favors in order to advance their careers? He groped them, demanded massages, exposed himself, forced sex… What did they say or do that he mistook for encouragement? They were probably being deferential, wanting to stay in his good graces. But that’s a far cry from acquiescing to sex. What’s the culture that made Weinstein think they would trade sex to advance their careers? Is it because most of them were willing to shed their clothes and have simulated (sometimes not simulated) sex with other performers as part of their career?
And what about all the politicians, journalists and others who use power to demand sex? Maybe we should also think of them as part of the entertainment industry. Or perhaps the problem is a culture which denigrates human dignity, such that sex is not primarily an expression of love, closeness and faithfulness, but rather an industrial commodity to be exploited and exchanged.
Naked hindsight
Harvey Weinstein, and all the other letches who harass and abuse women, men, even children deserve to lose the power that they hold over people who want to advance their career. But smug condemnation of harassment that took place one, ten, twenty years ago only shows how good hindsight is. If women don’t want people to think they’re willing to trade sexual favors to get ahead, they shouldn’t get naked on command, to rub against other bare-skinned performers. Movie-makers would then have to rely on interesting stories, well-written scripts, and good acting to attract an audience. A difficult challenge, indeed.
Weinstein’s accusers
These are many of the women who complained about Weinstein’s willingness to advance their career in exchange for sex. Most of them were willing to make sex part of their career:
Where did Weinstein get his lecherous ideas?

I Think Therefore I Really Am…
It’s time to modify Descartes’s famous line I think therefore I am. It should now read I think I am, therefore I am. The original is no longer relevant, because if thinking was a condition of existence, there would not be many people left in our part of the world.
Proof can be found on the front page of the National Post of October 24th, 2017. “Women’s prison left to cope after getting male inmate who identifies as female.” A fully functional, unaltered male, in a living unit with eleven (other) women. She thinks she is a woman, therefore she is a woman.
Another story on the same page of the newspaper discusses an acupuncturist who posed as a neurosurgeon. The article is vague on whether he actually thought he was a neurosurgeon, or was just pretending, like a cross-dressing man pretending to be a woman. One of the “doctor’s” victims reported him to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. “The (regulators) knew about it and did nothing,” he said. Perhaps the College felt it would be offensive to challenge the acupuncturist/ neurosurgeon’s identity.
Comparing the two articles it seems that the newspaper accepts the prisoner’s identity as a woman, but refuses the “doctor’s.” This is inconsistent, probably hypocritical. Gender is much more innate, more immutable than profession. If someone identifies as a surgeon, a lawyer, an accountant, why do they have less rights than someone who, through no fault of his/her own, was born with male DNA?
I Think Therefore I’m Not
It’s true that an untrained neurosurgeon can cause grievous harm. The article about the acupuncturist who worked as a surgeon discusses a three-hundred thousand dollar payment awarded to a victim. But is harm just a matter of scale? Is there harm in letting transgender men, “transitioning” women, into a ladies’ locker room? What about a white civil rights activist who thinks she’s black? Fake Indians? Or even smaller in scale, what happens when a former man takes part in a women’s athletic competition, overwhelming the competition with size, strength and speed? Women (from birth), who could be athletic stars lose out to the (former) men. Or what about women who just don’t like men gawking at them in the ladies’ room?
I Think Therefore I Clean
A man becoming a women isn’t limited to post-modern industrialized civilization. Among hunter-gatherer cultures, at the behest of the spirits a man could undergo a shamanic transformation and become a woman. Most often though, all this meant was wearing a woman’s hairstyle, sometimes even donning women’s clothes. Rarely, there were men who were considered fully transformed. These latter kept their male names and their male physique as they tended house, cleaning, carrying out all the domestic duties of a wife. In the novel Quantum Cannibals (remember, this website is about the novel ), a bellicose man is a rapist and a loving mother.
I Think Therefore I’m Silent
One had to be a powerful shaman to fully (so to speak) change gender, so the ongoing ridicule was done in whispers. The threat of harm was too strong. If one wants to go against a transformed man in a contemporary post-modern high-tech Western society, it’s also best to speak in whispers, or not say anything at all. If word gets out that you think a man becoming a woman (or woman becoming a man) is perverse, that such transformations are absurd, you will be scorned as trans-phobic, perhaps as a racist or Nazi (though none of those appellations make sense). The spirits will apply their power through social media to attack you.
In California you can be prosecuted for using a male pronoun for someone who thinks they are female. “I think I am, therefore…” you better accept it, no matter how ludicrous it may be. The spirits, perhaps demons have subjugated reality. An acupuncturist does surgery. A computer scientist is an influential health and nutrition author, though her information is all wrong. A billionaire drama teacher is Prime Minister of Canada. A man walks into the women’s bathroom, and nobody says a word.
I Think Therefore I Speak
If we want reality to prevail over the spirits, maybe it’s time we start thinking.

Control of Cultural Achievements
There is no denying the great cultural achievements of western civilization, its technological brilliance. Virtually all modern innovation, and most of contemporary science comes from Europe and North America- a handful of countries representing a small fraction of the world’s population. Not coincidentally, these are the regions of the world where democracy and economic freedom have flourished. The German-American Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) put it this way:
“The poorer in cultural achievements, the greater the number of ingrained rules and proscriptions which work to determine every action.”
The corollary is that we can expect societies with fewer rules, with greater freedom to have greater cultural achievements, whether the steam engine or CRSPR gene editing technology.
Limits and Freedom
Every culture imposes limits on its members. Incest (however defined) or murder are pretty much universal. In many societies, the social structure tells people their obligations, rather than some authority figures. There is “cultural freedom” to do as you please within the bounds of acceptable behavior. A free person is in harmony with his culture.
There is also a concept of moral freedom, which is action in accord with the supreme reason (human, not godly reason) which governs the universe. It’s expressed in the general will of the members of a society.
“It’s to the general will that the individual must address himself to know how far he ought to be a man, a citizen, a subject, a father, a child, and when it is suitable to live or die.”
The philosopher Diderot explained that the general will was truth discovered through the power of reason. Once that truth had been discovered, whoever refused to accept it was “either insane or wicked and morally evil,” an enemy of humanity.
Cultural and moral freedom are not the same. The former changes over time. It responds to undirected shifts in circumstance, be they technological, economic or social. Moral freedom on the other hand presupposes a universal, timeless truth which transcends, or rather over-rides the individual’s ability to choose.
The Cultural Achievements of Political Correctness
Here we have the ideological basis for political correctness, for the moral fascism sweeping contemporary Western societies, condemning their cultural achievements, their science, their progress. The supreme reason governing the universe does not allow for deviance. In socialist countries, this reason is embodied in the State. In democratic nations, the intellectual elite, considering itself trained in advanced reason, considers itself as the personification of that supreme truth. The elite considers itself the West’s greatest cultural achievement.
In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early part of the twentieth century, the primary concern of Western democratic governments was the

The Reign of Terror
protection of individual rights. In the twenty-first century progressives encourage the state to embody the supreme reason which they have discerned. The concern of liberal governments is collective, rather than individual choice. Conformity to universal reason is necessary for the sake of humanity. Dissent can get you fired, or, as some would wish it, jailed. Language must use contrived jargon reflecting the reasoning of those who express the proper moral order of the universe. Violence becomes a political right in promoting the general will.
The Cultural Achievements of the Reign of Terror
It’s the same ideological foundation as failed Marxist totalitarianism. It’s the same foundation as the Reign of Terror which followed the French Revolution. To disagree with unfettered tolerance of aberrant behavior, abortion on demand, social housing, race / gender quotas or even gender-restricted washrooms, is to sin against reason, against morality.
The Cultural Achievements of Twenty-One Thousand Rules
During his years in office, President Obama’s administration imposed twenty-one thousand new rules and regulations upon American consumers and businesses. The progressives who supported him were just as industrious, attempting to regulate behavior, language, thought, and religion. The urge to regulate has been pervasive in Western democracies.
Western civilization has a great record of cultural achievement, technological and scientific innovation. If our societies continue to increase “the number of ingrained rules and proscriptions which work to determine every action,” this record of achievements will be ended, to the detriment of all humanity. This indeed goes against morality, against reason.

We, the Accused
Holding the Victim to Blame
Whenever there is a terror attack against Israel, the world media finds some way to make Israel the accused, whether for provocation or retaliation, for people dying or failing to die, for killing the terrorists, or failing to kill them.

Yehuda Elberg, with rescued cousin now living in Israel
This is not a new phenomenon. Two thousand years ago, a significant Jew was murdered by non-Jews, and for two thousand years the Jews have been persecuted for his death. In the current era, Jews are being blamed by anti-Semites for provoking the holocaust. They have been blamed for its horrible death toll, with their accusers putting the blame on Jewish passivity, and failure to resist. It is this latter blame that my father Yehuda Elberg addressed in a lecture approximately forty years ago. He was a holocaust survivor, a member of the Jewish Underground in Poland, and part of the Ghetto uprising. Immediately following the war he worked on smuggling Jewish survivors to Israel (then known as Palestine). Below are excerpts from his lecture We, the Accused.
***
On the 35th anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, a great deal was written about this in Jewish newspapers the world over, especially in Israel. The influential Maariv carried an article by Chaim Baltsan entitled: “Yom Ha-Shoah 1978: Is it Different from Previous Years?” Among other things, Baltsan wrote: “Much has already been written and said about the heroism — and under the circumstances it was extraordinary — the heroism displayed by the Ghetto rebels and the organizers of the uprisings in the camps. We are proud of that heroism, we will always be proud of it. But not so with the Shoah, that dark and bitter phenomenon in which it is impossible to find even the tiniest spark of light. Yet we are compelled to couple it with the heroism and to utter words in the same breath. We have linked the Holocaust with the heroic uprising in order to conceal the unacceptability of the pain, more accurately the shame; when we recall how millions were led like sheep to the slaughter…”
In brief, they are ashamed of us, they are ashamed of the survivors as well as the fallen. We are guilty of having put on the yellow badge. Better we had all died than let ourselves be so degraded. We are guilty because we did not revolt against being locked up in ghettos; proud people do not allow themselves to be locked into cages like animals in a zoo. We are guilty because we let ourselves be herded into cattle-cars and did not counter-attack the Germans with our fists…
I want to tell you about the individuals and let the Chaim Baltsans be ashamed of their own ignorance, their own narrow mindedness, their own heartlessness, their owned blindness to the heroism of the Ghetto even when that the heroism was not as spectacular as in the Hollywood film.
An episode from 1940:

They made gallows just high enough for the feet to nearly touch the ground … and they burned the Indians alive.’
The Germans had given the Jews out of a shtetl in that part of Poland which had been annexed to the Reich. They packed in Jews into trucks. One young woman with a baby in her arms was having difficulty climbing up into the truck. A German soldier politely took the child from her and helped her into the vehicle. When she stretched other arms to take the child, he throw it to the ground. The woman jumped from the truck. The German pointed his rifle at her. She didn’t budge. He raved and raged and threaten to shoot her and the child. She still didn’t budge. He then raised the muzzle of his gun and threatened to shoot all the Jews in the truck. The woman dragged herself back into the truck. When they arrived in Warsaw, she was out of her mind.
Who can evaluate the greatness of that sacrifice? Who can measure the boundless love for her fellow Jews, that gave her the strength to make such a decision and incredible courage to carry it out? The knowledge of what was going to happen to her baby burned so fiercely in her brain that consumed it. Her nerves were strung so tautly that they snapped. Yet she still managed to weigh and measure. Her hands — a scale of destiny. In one hand the compulsive desire to remain with the child; in the other the lives of the few score Jews. She made her decision and even succeeded in carrying it out before her unbearable anguish destroyed her brain.
Hunger, fear and pain weaken a human being physically, and diminishes his mental strength. There’s no need here to recount what the Jews went through from the beginning of 1940 until the summer of 1942. In the proceedings of the Nuremberg trials you can find the testimony of one Herman Graebe, a German who was present during the slaughter of the Jews at Dubno. A group of naked Jews stood at the edge of a ditch. Behind them we Germans were loading their rifles. Among the Jews stood a woman with a child in her arms. The woman tickled the child, and began singing to it, so the child was laughing merrily when the German bullets cut down the mother and baby, and they both fell into the pit.
Psychologists tell us that when a person stands face to face with death all the emotions are paralyzed. Terror, hope, anger, love, hate, all disappear at the moment when one looks death in the eye. Emotionally he is already on the other side of the fight.
Our martyrs, however, demonstrated that it is not necessarily so. Maybe fear has vanished, maybe all hope has died, maybe anger and hatred have been extinguished. But one thing in this woman continued to live—love. The emotion of love remained awake, strong, self-sacrificing. I do not know any poem more lofty. I’ve never heard any song more beautiful, never seen any deed more holy than the singing of that mother to her child in Dubno. The chuckle of her infant, on the edge of the grave, sent out into the world’s void a resounding testimony of Jewish love and self-sacrifice. The giggle of that child is the most exalted ode ever sung to the Jewish mother…
I come back to the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and I must begin with a prefatory observation.
Some years ago there was a fire in the movie theater where everyone pushed for the exits. People stepped on each other. More people died from the panic than from the fire. Similarly, on a sinking ship, everyone tries to get to the lifeboats. People grab the rope ladders out of each other’s hands. The result: nobody gets to the boats.
The Warsaw Ghetto was a flaming inferno, a sinking ship. But what happened with the people there?
On the day before the uprising began it was like Yom Kippur Eve in a pious Jewish household. People spoke quietly, walk softly. A kind of reverential air spread over the Ghetto streets, a trembling, but not out of fear. Out of exultation. A decision had been made, responsibility assumed. But it did not weigh onerously on the people. It hovered over their heads like an aura. A whole community of Jews went forth to meet the inevitable with the purposefulness, with a sense of mission, and one could feel the presence of the wings of history, the duty to future generations. Some sixty thousand Jews marched forth into greatness within the almost festive tread…
We, the Accused
It burns me when I hear someone say that the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto saved the honor and dignity of the Jewish people. No! Jewish honor stood high even when Jews were expiring with a quiet, unspectacular death. It was the honor of the entire humanity that was in mortal peril. And it was the greatness of the Jews in the ghettos, with their sanctified life and their heroic death that saved the honor of the human species, and gave flesh-end-blood mortals back their image of God.
I said that Jewish heroism did not begin with the uprising; it also did not end with the uprising. I need not describe the terror, the anguish, the scientific dehumanization system in the concentration camps. According to all experience in history, according to all the laws of psychology, the survivors should have emerged from the camps embittered destroyers, venomous killers and incendiaries, filled with hatred for a world that had led to all this and then permitted it to go on. Their physical health was destroyed. Their homes were destroyed. But the image of God within them was not.
Overnight, upon the liberation of the camps, a social life was created, with culture, with ideologies. The skeletal fingers did not yet have the strength to hold a pencil steadily, but they were already writing books, issuing newspapers.
I could tell you a great deal about the wonders and the miracles performed by the brands barely plucked out of the fire. Instead, let me quote from a letter by Professor Zelig Brodestski, the then head of Britain’s Jewish community, written to the survivors in Bergen- Belsen after he attended one at their congresses, immediately after the war.
“It was difficult for me to accept the task of coming here to you. I did not know what to expect, how beaten or wretched you would look But you presented me with e picture of a proud Jewish life, a picture which I shall use in order to instill more pride and more life into the Jews in England. I had thought that perhaps you had fallen in your own esteem. But I have never experienced a more dignified congress. I had thought you would look with anger upon the Jews from abroad, who were able to do so little to save you from the Nazi murderers: but you welcomed me with love and warmth, and you spoke to me candidly and earnestly. I was afraid you would only weep and lament but you combined your tears with the smile of the eternal Jew. I had feared your disillusionment and hopelessness, but you displayed a faith and a resolution which all the .Jews in the world would do well to learn from you.”
There is an old legend about the lack of Jewish faith and determination which has hoisted over the Holy Temple in Jerusalem after the victory of the Maccabees. Two hundred and thirty five years later, when the Romans set fire to the Temple and the flames reached the mast, a whirlwind lifted the flag, the legend tells us, and carried it off to a faraway place to keep it safe for a future generation of Jews will redeem the Maccabean flag with their faith and determination.
To live and see this flag redeemed was my most ardent prayer and cherished dream since my childhood. My dream came true in a strange and traumatic way. It was decades ago, the Warsaw Ghetto rose to fight a formidable enemy, and I was there when the blue-white flag was hoisted over the tallest building in the Ghetto. It seemed to me that I had seen this flag before. The dreamy blue and stark white flag was soon consumed by red flames together with the fighters. It was then that I recognized the flag of my dreams.
Four years later in the Gulf of Lion, in the the harbor of Sete, over five thousand holocaust survivors boarded an old ship to fight the British blockade of the shore of Palestine, a ship later to be known as Exodus 1947. Again I was there, watching the lineups of boarding passengers. When I noticed the rolled-up banner under the arm of one of them, I immediately knew that this was the flag of my dreams.
I was not in the lines of battle during the Israeli War of Liberation and the subsequent wars of defense, but I knew that the Maccabean flag was there. The legendary heroism, the devotion and self-sacrifice of the fighters are proof positive that the flag of faith and resolution inspired them.
***
We shall often be the accused. But it no longer matters. The flag that was over the Temple, over the Warsaw Ghetto, over Sete, is over Israel: it’s a flag that shall not fall again.

You Have to Ask the Right Question
- Q: Was it morally wrong for the United States and Canada to imprison their citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II, and confiscate their
property?
- A: It was a horrible illegal act, discriminating against people solely because they looked different. Italians and Germans, whose ancestral homelands were also the enemy, were not locked up.
Let’s break that question into three:
- Q1: Would it be morally wrong for a country to lock up a population, many of whom were supportive of an enemy?
- A1: No.
- Q2: Was a significant portion of the Japanese population of Canada and the United States supportive of a Japanese victory during World War II?
- A2: No.
- Q3: If the Americans and Canadians of Japanese ancestry had been supportive of the enemy during the war, would it have been proper to put them in internment camps?
- A3: Yes.
By asking the right question we can see that it’s not internment in principle that was a mistake. It was mis-characterizing Japanese Canadians and Americans as enemy sympathizers.
Let’s try another one
- Q: Was it morally wrong for the United States and Canada to keep out Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis?
- A: Yes
Let’s also break that question into three:
- Q1: Is it wrong for a country to keep out a class of people, a great many of whom want to take over that country?
- A1: No.
- Q2: Did the Jews of Europe want to violently (if at all) take over Europe, the United States, or Canada?
- A2: No.
- Q3: If the Jews had wanted to violently take over Europe, the United States, or Canada, would it have been wrong to keep them out?
- A3: No.
This shows that we haven’t been asking the right question. We shudder at the idea of treating a particular group of people differently than anyone else. Given the horrible consequences of turning away refugees during the Holocaust, we want to welcome everyone today. But the mistake of the past wasn’t turning the enemy away from our shores. It’s not wrong to guard against enemies working from the inside. The mistake was considering the Jews and Japanese as the enemy, looking to take over or destroy the nations they wanted to be part of.
Bringing it all into the present, the right question is:
- Q4: If ________ want to violently take over Europe, the United States, or Canada, would it be wrong to keep them out?
- A4: No.
To fill in the blank, let’s look at the core belief of a particular group, as described by one of their leading scholars:
“Islam is not a religion like the other religions of the world, and Muslim nations are not like other nations. Muslim nations are very special because they have a command from Allah to rule the entire world and to be over every nation in the world. Islam is a revolutionary, totalitarian ideology that comes to destroy any government made by man. The goal of Islam is to rule the entire world and submit all of mankind to the ideology of Islam. Any nation or power that gets in the way of that goal, Islam will fight and destroy. In order to fulfill that goal, Islam can use every power available every way it can be used to bring worldwide revolution. This is Jihad.“
With the blank filled in, answer the following question: would it be wrong to keep them out? Clearly not.
This may contradict the accepted liberal “…values of liberty, and openness, and the respect of all people.” That’s not the right question. The primary value of any country must be the security of its citizens, rather than the security of an ideology.