Politics and Spirituality

I study the peaceful warrior path, the gentle soul journey, I am a lover not a fighter. Give peace a chance. I was a hippy with love painted on my forehead in San Francisco dancing in the streets with flowers in my hair. I was with the most beautiful woman in the world. We were beautiful people. We marched for peace.  Later I’d get a sliver of the Nobel Prize as a member of Physicians against Nuclear War.

Today I’m older. 

I still meditate. I still believe it’s good to be slow to anger and I know that anger is really fear. There is only fear and love, love and fear.  I’m a lover still but I’ve been a fighter. 

 Jesus taught, Love God and Love your neighbour as yourself.  Christianity is the religion of Love. The church is connection. Spirituality is God made. Religion is man made. Religion must bow to the war state and spirituality does not need to.  The spiritual can be martyrs but the religious make better administrators. 

It’s all okay to dance in the streets and camp in tents and love one another but what next. The longest running ‘commune’ out of the 60’s has degenerated into a scolding paranoid community after years of seeing slackers, psychopaths and sociopaths steal and not return.  The socialism of the Apostle with the awe inspiring presence of Jesus aincarnate floundered immediately with members withholding and stealing communal funds. 

 It was funny listening to a documentary of commune by BBC and considering how they sounded just like the towns, islands,   villages and aboriginal reserves where I’d worked as a family physician and psychiatrist.  Well intentioned but quickly Balkanized.

Politics.

I admire my friend Aim who is a professor of politics. One of the most diplomatic people I know. Buddhist upbringing. Gentle old soul. earth mother. 

I met the Dalai Lama.  Nice man. Peaceful.  Calm.  Intelligent.

When the Chinese invaded Tibet the greatest peaceniks of all time sat cross legged in the path of Chinese tanks and troops and meditated.  Like John Lennon and ,wealthy beyond our wildest dreams, Yoko Ono sitting in a 5star hotel with maid service on a bed made for them, the sheets washed by laundry women, except in the front lines.  All the stupidest greatest ideas of delusional leadership come from the farthest from the front.

“OM...Give Peace a Chance”.  The Chinese, todays modern equivalent of the Vorgon of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Communist Binary Marxist mind being the stupidest lowest common denominator, so attractive to the thug, and lizard, fundamentally the ‘paranoid position of psychiatry’. Us and them.  Tribal. Kill them before they kill us. You’re either with us or agin us. 

The Chinese Aetheist communist socialists mowed down all the Buddhist priests and avatars and hippies.  Just like they’re doing today in Hong Kong. Just like the Russian Communists did in the USSR where they killed a hundred million in as many years.  Hitler and Fascism were just National Socialism. Communism was international socialism. Godless loveless Aetheist constructs, powerful and powerless. The re-enactment of the God emperor and peasant construct under facetious language and pseudoscience and pseudo intellectualism.

After the leaders of the Tibetan peace community were killed en mass in the beginning of the genocide which continues today, the second class monks, the ‘B’ students,  remembered the British Enfields and grabbed those and shot back at the Chinese with their tanks and machine guns. They died too.

My friend, a Buddhist psychiatrist, used to forget to ask about suicide. “It’s a personal intimate matter,” he said. “Easier for a Buddhist to ask a woman about her masturbation and sexual fantasies than to ask her about her suicidal ideation.”

The Buddhist monks had a ‘good death’ creating delays to allow the child Dalai Lama, the incarnation of God, to escape to India who gave the Dalai Lama asylum while the Chinese communists continued to do their boorish stupid uncivilized rape and pillage of Tibet where they have planted countless Chinese Colonies. The Chinese make the European Imperialists look like saints and choir boys. The Chinese Communists are the ‘running dog Imperialists’. Thugs ,thieves and pigs. Xi Jinpeng is this generations Hitler or Lenin, whichever mass murderer you prefer from history.

The Communists are todays Nazi. Marx was an aetheist Jew, a kafetch, with an Inferiority Complex and grandiose delusions.  Lenin was a lover of murder and bank robbery and with Stalin, Molotov and Trotsky began the Bolsheviks with murder assasination and bank robbery, destroying the Parliamentary Democracy of Russia, killing off and threatening the Mensheviks and re writing history to obscure the Patricide of the day. At least the French Revolutionaris were more transparent as Robespierre indulged in patricide with his guilotines. The Enfant Terribles of history.  Matricidal and Patricidal revolutionaries. Politics. 

Mohammed’s Muslim religion, the Hadith and Koran,  like the Torah of the Jews is a tribal religion.  God is ‘my god’. And the People are ‘my people’.  The Muslim lie is that Islam is a religion of peace. It’s only killing competitor is the aetheist communist religion.  The Catholics hardly killed so many. Ghengis Khan and Alexander certainly did but they were fighting armies and overtly conquering nations. Mohammed and his Warrior Priests did that, killing all the Jews and Zoroastrians and Christians of the Middle East who wouldn’t convert until the Crusades stopped his progress.

 The Muslim hoards were turned back in Spain and at Venice.  We know the names of Patton and Monty, Constantine, Eisenhower but we’re not reminded in history of the Battle of Tours 732 when Christian  Charles Martel,  precursor of King/Pope/Emperor Charlemagne,  defeated the Muslim invasion of Western Europe or the Battle of Vienna 1683 King John III Sobieski defeated the last Muslim invasion of Europe. These are events as significant as the Berlin airlift defence against godless aggressive communism or finally the fall of the Berlin Wall and the freeing of hundreds of millions from Aetheist communist tyranny.

 We’re now in the midst of a ‘migration war’ which was the normal precursor of the great wars of history.  Before the muslim poor of Europe are clothed and fed their countries are providing resources for Mosques and other such staging areas if history is to be recalled.  The Nazis invaded Austria in defence of the Germans there who were the fifth column of WWII. Politics.

Love your neighbour as yourself.

Love your enemy. Spirituality.

Justin Trudeau, our pot head leader whose intellect has been described as the ‘depth of a puddle’ actually said, “If you kill your enemy he wins.”  No. Idiot.

Love your enemy doesn’t mean let him kill you. That turns him into a murderer and you into a suicidal. Better to defend yourself from the dangerously insane. 

I was in the peace movement and often irritated by the girls who had never fought and been protected all their lives by their fathers and boyfriends and thought like any Huffington Post Bimbo that sentimentalism is going to rule. These are the all style no substance hoard of the Kardasian reality tv slut world. These girls and boys get their ethics and morality off pornhub. 

 History tells us that Homo Sapiens were the successful Human species because they wiped out their sometimes peaceful neighbours..  They killed their neighbours, destroyed any men who where a threat, turned the women into sex slaves and made the children slaves warriors. This continued till a few hundred years ago as the Muslim mode of conquer.  The Muslims in India killed 250,000 Sikhs in one day. They infiltrated the Hindu south and then with treachery and war invaded and took doing just that. The British Empire with superior naval resources established a more economic colonialism like China is doing now in Africa but leaving some autonomy over social affairs with the locals. Politics.

The Spanish won the war against the Aztec of Mexico and South America not by sheer forth. Columbus had a few hundred men and his followers who went on to conquer and steal all the gold of central and South America despite being up against against millions of  armed natives.  They won because a whole lot of people were angry at the rulers stealing their virgin daughters and killing them en mass. They welcomed the Spanish and made an unholy alliance which overthrew the rulers of the day, a blood thirsty lot who favoured ripping the heart out of the chest of living victims just for starts. Politics.

Aboriginal Plains Indians didn’t introduce scalping as Hollywood history and misinformation propaganda declared, Whites introduced scalping, but the plains Indias did favour castrating their enemies and burying them in ant hills. The native women were the best of histories’ torturers only competing in the torture Olympics with Count Vlad who spiked his victims on his lawn leaving them to die over days as their bowel acids destroyed them from with in. With the stake up their anus and gravity they dies slowly impaled ever more as they flailed about.

Not a happy history. Politics.

Not many years ago Communist Pol Pot murdered half the nation of Cambodia killing millions. His concentration camps were very effective providing food only for work and starvation resulting for any slackards. The Gulags were also an educational enterprise like Neo Pagan Nazi socialists’s  Auswitch

In the Hindu Bible, the Bhagad Gita, sometimes shortened to the Gita, Arjuna, the boy king says to Krishna the god, ‘the war is going on but the combatants are all my family.’  Krishna replied, ‘that is always the way, “so the only decision is ‘whether you participate or not’.  

In India, the Brahman, meditators, peace nicks , merchants, all had a class of body guards, the caste of warriors.  CS Lewis, the great Christian teacher writer had the British Empire and army.  Trudeau who talks shit (reminds me of my self when I taught drama, did sports, and chased women other than my wife and talked swank, but I was in my 20’s,  not nearly 50 like he is, but nonetheless very similiar to my own youthful stupidity and cupidity so very mirroringly repugnant) has a half dozen body guards.  I never had body guards. The trust fund babies always had adult baby sitters. He still has today so can talk gun control for everyone but his fraternity/sorority bro’s. The elite always have weapons, or body guards or armies.

Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.

The reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo. 

The principle protection from attack of the monk, like St. Francis, is that they had nothing to steal. The Vikings raided the Irish monasteries for the gold crosses but the individual monks were little more than target practice.  The good looking women were always raped first whether they wore a nun habit or a princess’s robes.

Jesus ‘s disciple chopped off the ear of one of his attackers who came to take Jesus. Jesus restored the ear and went with his capturer,  the established church of the day , whose coffers were being affected by his new brand teachings. 

 Religion is a brand and an industry.  Marx said ‘religion was the opiate of the masses’.  The tribe is divided into a war faction and a religious healing faction. The “hearts and minds’ approach of the war machine is to use religion and health care and economic benefits to get the people on the side of the ‘war machine’. 

 Jesus wasn’t so pacifistic as obedient and was following his father’s orders.  He was to die and besides if the authorities wanted to kill him anytime they could.

 Herod , the Jewish king had killed thousands of babies when he felt threatened, and the Romans introduced the term ‘decimate’. If anyone resisted their invasion they killed every tenth man, woman or child in the village from which the ‘terrorist/freedom fighter’ came from.  The Italians continued this into WWII.  

Jesus was not an advocate of gun control.  Stalin, Mao, Trudeau and Hitler are gun control advocates.  Jesus’ people had knives and swords otherwise the women would be raped and the children stolen. Today’s Christians prefer Colt’s Smith and Weston’s.  A really pious Christian pastor has an AR-15. 

The key o Jesus’s teaching was to be ‘slow to anger’. Forgive ‘70 x 70’ not indefinitely but a lot, a limited amount, but a lot. That said, the Quakers and Mennonites, the original hippy Christians escaped to America, served in all the most dangerous jobs in the war, as stretcher bearers and now that earth remains hostile will en mass be the first to man space ships to Mars to escape the murderous and godless.

An eye for an eye is the first law of Mercy.  If you hurt the Hay family of Scotland the whole clan hunted down every member of your tribe and killed you centuries thereafter. Today we cry ‘wipe out the enemy’s genes strain and see ourselves in defence as arbiters of the Worlds Darwin Awards. The Stuart’s are little better and the Irish collectively are as vengeful as Scottish clan individually. To this day most Scots are still suspicious of Campbells because they killed the Macdonald’s, their allies in their sleep.  Dastardly Campbells.  Cowards and whores. Politics. 

Tribes are about revenge.  

Most tribes called themselves ‘the people’. Inuit means the ‘people’.  Eskimo is the southern forest aboriginal’s name for theie northern neighbours - Eskimo means ‘fish eater’.  When the anthropologists were in Samoa they asked the tribe they encountered what they called themselves and they said ‘the people’ so they asked what they called the others who weren’t the people. “The edible ones’ they replied. Cannibals are alive and well and live among us. They are generally held in bad taste. 

Mathus said world population was controlled by starvation, war and disease.

The Modern Era has been the greatest time of history with the greatest developments, prolongation of life, reduction almost completely of starvation, disease prevention and control with greater longevity and reduced infant mortality. War continues but it’s limited.  

Thanks to the British Empire and then the AMerican Empire , Canada is relatively unique in that it has not had war on its soil for hundreds of years.  

Now Alcoholics Anonymous was said to be a ‘spiritual program’ but it’s been highly effective in the military and Americans in AA stayed sober while killing Germans and Italians inthe WWII campaigns. They weren’t into gun control or being Peace nicks back then because they’d not had television propaganda or been protected from reality by a variety of addictions offered to ‘useful idiots’ todays - tv, internet, sex of every sort, shopping,  gluttonous delight with take out and phone in, avarice wealth with stock market gambling and casino gambling. These are the best and worst of times.

Cappadoecia with it’s underground churches in the middle of Turkey and Meteora with it’s Monasteries on the tops of Greek flutes , both were over run in time. Tibet was the last escape and the Chinese Aetheist Communists wouldn’t let anyone alone. They’ve developed surveillance systems the likes of which the KGB, CIA and Staci all are envious.  Obama and Homeland Security infiltrated even the leaders of their allies. Zuckerberg is the great angriest traitor to the world of all times when it comes to confidentiality and his promises. He’s watching me right now. Everyone is under surveillance. There is nowhere to run. That’s the real message of Bin Laden. 

Steal a little and they put you in jail. Steal a lot and they make you king.  Dr. Johnson

Everything is now stolen and the carbon tax is the taxing the air we breathe. Big government is huge. Big Brother and Big Sister are the Vorg. They are ‘one world government’.  A few hundred elite billionaires in the west and as many trillionairs in the Muslim dictatorships and communist aetheist dictatorships.

When I am “political’ on Facebook or in ‘debate’ I’m actually in a kind of ‘sophisticated’ ‘war game’.  I’m using language and gesture and ‘rhetoric’ and ‘logic’.  Animals have ‘mock displays’. This causes lesser beasts to back down without engaging. It’s a peaceful technique. All this ‘anti hate speech’ in fact increases war because it removes this ‘dance ‘ and ‘drama’ that causes the majority of actual encounters to be less.  Verbal warfare restricted, leads to actual warfare. The government is always into ‘divide and conquer’ increasing civil strife so that more government is  ‘necessary’.  Normal dominance hierarchies are established without bringing in the state. The whole death of Jesus is an interesting lesson in the ‘offended’s’ use of authority.  The child fighting with the sibling goes to the parents and lies. The parent engages and favouritism increases warfare.

Sports and debate are stylized warfare without carnage. Competition is central to evolution but increasingly denial looms among educational cretans confirming the old adage, ‘if you can’t do, teach’. Let’s give every kid a ribbon. Let’s reward the loser. That was Hitler’s ploy elevating the Brownshirts, todays low brow masked Antifid’s.

But the Security Council, France, Britain, China, Russia and America, the leadership of the UN is there purely to sell weapons and compete with arms and keep the others down.  The Desert STorm Arms Bazaar was a war weapon competition and the American capitalism and reward of the creative and ingenious beat out the Russian dictatorship weapons. Russians and Chinese have depended on mostly stealing technology.  The Desert Story Arms Bazzarrd beat the aetheists.  Constantine made his empire Christian because Christians were the greatest warriors and told the truth and kept secrets best. Aetheists are the worst and Muslims aren’t much better.  Corruption thrives where there is no God or where the dictator, king or committee is an autocrat. Fear drives dictatorships.  Patriotism drives democracy.

Patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.  Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Spiritually, to love my enemy, I’m to think that Hitler was ‘sicker’ not evil. I’m supposed to ‘pray’ for my enemies’.  Mostly this relieves me of obsessing about them and the genetically tried and prove trait of creative vengefulness. 

On Facebook I should be kind and nice to devious elite sociopaths like Greta Thurnberg a chip off Trudeau’s shoulder. Yet I know Climate Change as a political economic lie to create more government power and to tax Canadian middle class more for the elite wasted life style of Trudeau and his ilk.

Or do I engage in ‘verbal warfare’ , debate and the dance of ‘court room’ ‘rhetoric and media rhetoric and logic much like the idea that politics is the sport of the intellectual. These are irrational times and marketting knows that 19th century reason doesn’t sell consumer good. A picture is with a thousand words. 

Or do I withdraw for my peace of mind. The monk or villagers. 

I went to sea and had 25 days away from people, alone with my dog and cat, a luxury of all time. I had a ham radio but no telepone, tv, internet. I used my satellite phone only for strict emergency communication.  I used it once to get assistance with equipment failure repair. 

I visited monasteries and saw as Thomas Merton did that they were’ communities’ .  None of this ‘fool on a hill’ thing. The last Hermit in Canada was killed by the RCMP for isolating.  You can’t get away from the state. On land I’ve been able to build my own road back into the wilderness and get a week before others followed my off road trail. I’ve hiked into the mountains and had a week or so isolation before a ‘curious’ person appears..  It’s hard to ‘retreat’. Our backs are against the wall.

Especially since China, Obama and Zuckerberg began to spy on everyone.  Effectively. 

The Canadian Supreme Court Judge wanted Transparency for the courts but the courts want everything behind closed doors.  That was the British way, a public face and a private action.  Mr. Trump promises to drain the swamp but WW2 was won as much by gay Turing as straight Patton. Vegetarian drug addict Hitler never had a chance.

We don’t even know the richest of the richest people.  Fame and Fortune. Fame and poverty can go together but Fortune can and does buy anonymity and even some degree of isolation.  The king and queen have an inner sanctum. The people are out on the street. They even closed the asylums so on the rich had their personal lunatic wards and modern dungeons. 

Spirituality and politics.  

If I am a monk I can withdraw from the politics of this world but then I am stuck still in the politics of family and monastery. I’ve been reading a bout a monk who was expelled from his monastery.

If I am a part of the world then I can engage in ‘verbal war’ but not ‘physical war’ but my country under Trudeau is using every means possible to establish a dictatorship in Canada and suing comedians and denying confidentiality to everyone is all part of a move that’s terrifying.

Jesus said ‘Do not be afraid’.

The rule is the dictator always win if freemen remain silent. Need I be afraid? A slow painful death of agin or a bad day on the cross or a bad few day with Count Vlad. The sixties series, The Prisoner, like One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest is the modern torture, the isolation chambers of jails, Quntanamo Bay detention camp, forced to listen to Canadian music day and night. 

Perhaps the war will come after I die.  I was hoping people could talk instead of fight but the Islam is a religion of peace which demands everyone be Muslim and Sharia law rule so everyone can have peace. Aetheist communism is a religion of world peace which demands that everyone be communist so there can be world peace.  

We are in the midst of a world war.  I love chess where everyone moves their peices about. I truly believe Hillary would have caused a world war because all women leaders have lead their countries to war, matriarchies historically most violent in history, but we’re doing well without world war but increasing impoverishment of the only sane class, the middle class. The destruction of the middle classs is the rule of Communism and Islam. Dictatorsships are binary with Elite and Peasants. The trinity of the three classes with a middle class of unions and professions and the elite white collar welfare and peasant blue collar welfare is being destroyed today.

But I don’t know. I really don’t know. Is it better for me to remove myself. I’m of a retirement age. Maybe let the war games begin and the alliance of England, France and China against Russia and America or even England France and China and Russia against AMerica take place. Trudeau has alligned Canada with godless communists and muderous dictators against America, our greatest ally, and today our protector.

Germany, Italy and Japan alliance of WW2 is like the Aetheist Communists, Muslims wahabees and Socialist/communist Europeans like Germany today and Brussels. America has Poland now and many other allies like other democracies though Canada under Trudeau no longer is voting for democracy but rather going for Climate change destruction of economy while China and India build more and more coal mines and use excess oil.  

How can I love my neighbour and talk with idiots. Should I hold my tongue and live in fear. Canadians are known for their apathy and servility which masquerades as polite society but appears more like the mannerisms of inmates of jails or asylums. 

Gandhi was highly destructive with passive aggressive strikes and aggressive civil disobedience. If you stand up you make yourself a target. 

Can spirituality and politics coexist.Can a spiritual person be a politician today? However does one do it? Spirituality is the opposite of cowardice but there is nowhere left to retreat. 

Please God guide me. Let me be true but not so true as to be a martyr. 

Mostly I want to say Beam me up Scotty.  Uhura, Spock, Bonhoeffer  St. Joan of Ark, Anyone?

Ethiopia - Addis Ababa - out and about and musings

I fell asleep at 7 and am now wide awake at midnight. I did a day of a three day city tour with Lesan Gold Hailu, tour operator ,whose now friends on Facebook. He shared pictures of us.  It’s always a surprise seeing oneself in a picture. I loved most Holy Trinity Cathedral but then I’d really loved seeing the bones of Lucy and all the art and learning in the National Ethiopian Museum.

I loved the donkey’s but I’ve been a burrofan forever, since seeing the burro races while living in Mexico.  They’re such characters, real personality, tough attitude, but timid about little strange things.  Their personality reminded me of my Scotty Terrier, Stuart.  The mules are character too. Floppy mutt ears.  Quite the competition for the road with mules, donkeys, women carrying great burdens on their heads and shoulders, regular pedestrians,  and all manner and age of cars as well as motorcycles.  The infrastructure for traffic is congested the same as Italy and Greece.  What sidewalks existed have become parking spaces.  Unlike Vancouver they don’t have politicians with bicycle lane fetishes. The road constructions going on are for vehicles and pedestrians without political favouritism. 

Most of the motorcycles I’ve seen here so far were being used for pizza delivery.  The guys have hot boxes they carry on the back.   Pizza delivery is as popular and evidence of modern era as anything.   There are so many restaurants here and all I’ve read speaks of  the exciting night life and vibrant music scene. Naomi, from Langley Canada presently spear heading a campaign to stop smoking (cigarettes and legal weed) in condos, texted me to say her friends who live here were performing a gig several nights a week.  What a small world.  I’m flying onto Gondar in the next day or two though would have loved to meet one of Naomi’s ball room dance friends.

I had a delicious chicken noodle soup and a couple of cafe au lait at the Best Western outdoor cafe.  I asked for injera, on the side. It was delicious.  It’s made from a local plant, a kind of rice tasting bread like creation.  The Best Western Hotel I’m staying in has this outdoor cafe off from the street so unbothered by passing beggars. They’re here but not nearly as intrusive as elsewhere. 

I ate, drank coffee and wrote on my iPad Pro “air dropping” pictures I’d taken from my iPhone. It’s really one of my joys in life.  When I was in Gr 3 or 4, Mrs. Glover gave our class the assignment in  geography of reading about a place, imagining we were travelling there, then  writing letters home to our family telling them what we were seeing and doing.  I got so into the assignment that Mrs. Glover told my mother she’d had no other student so enthusiastic. I wrote reams.  

Ruth Kozak, our resident  travel writer in Vancouver, author of Shadow of the Lion, who I met at a Canadian Authors Association dinner, is still going strong at 85.  She loves Greece and wrote a travel guide of Athens at one time.  By comparison I’m a ‘travel blogger’.  I love photography.  My father helped me set up a dark room when I was a teen. We used his plywood ice fishing shack, tar papering out the light and covering over the hole in the floor..  He loved photography too. My older brother  got awards for his pictures of birds, his predator photos in a museum in Italy. . Now my nephew Graeme following in the family tradition is a cinematographer with a engineers approach to the whole subject. I admire his stills and films. I recently told him about visiting Scotland in my youth and meeting my uncle then who was a professional  Seagull photographer.  

I like that a “picture says a thousand words” and enjoy the combination of writing with photography. It’s what I like myself and am not alone as the multimedia production is a going concern with the technical advances in the medium. .  Apple has done a fine job of interfacing their tools and formats.  I can’t say I enjoy the technical aspects as much as my nephews but I do enjoy finding solutions. “Air drop” and “blue tooth” are great tools. I’m also using a Panasonic Lumix, a sweet little pocket smart camera with Leica lens I picked up in New York a few years back when I dropped the little Nikon pocket camper and needed a replacement on that trip. Mostly I’m satisfied with the iPhone camera, my brother telling me us ‘iPhone camera folk had their own society and competitions.”   Right now I’m transferring Lumix pictures with a little chip card, not nearly as much fun as “blue tooth and air drop.”

Lesan took me to the University of Addis Ababa.  They have a beautiful Kennedy Library from when JFK visited and left an endowment.  If I’d had time I would have loved to have  met  Abraham Tejera, MD PHD. He’s with the Department of Psychiatry at the Addis Ababa University. I first read about his incredible research when I came across of a paper of his on Khat addiction in the Horn of Africa. Reading Verghese’s , another great doctor’s, novel of Ethiopia, Cutting the Stone I noted that one of the characters, a doctor,  regularly used Khat, a mild stimulant.  I’ve had a couple of patients now in my addiction practice who have told me about using Khat so it’s making it’s way to Canada.  One day I’d love to hear Dr. Tejera present at the International Society of Addiction Medicine conferences as his work is both clinical and academic. He’s obviously a world authority and known by my former mentor Dr. Nady El Guebaly who recently got the Order of Canada for his work in addictions.  Dr. Tejera has had broad reaching interests and does really impressive scientific research. His most recent project is Neuropsychiatric Genetics of African Populations - Psychosis.  Ethiopia  produces great scientific researchers.

On my own, I took a walk from my Best Western Hotel and found I’m located on a major hotel ,restaurant and night club strip. Also all around are these vertical malls I first encountered in Hong Kong. They have a main entrance where there’s a guard who checks each person for weapons.  Maybe it’s not every person but me, because in my Tilly kkaki coloured jacket and poor imitation of  Steven Segall, one of my all time favourite martial arts movie stars, I get checked. One poor guard was shocked to feel my hard leather camera pouch, thinking I was packing. .  After that quick frisk part is over the Malls open into these  central atrium with the shops all around the 5 to 6 floors above.  In Hong Kong the buildings tended to focus on electronics or fashion but here the shops are everything, jeweller, next to high end fashion, next to computer store, then restaurant, and next a tattoo shop and a stationary store beside a liquor store. The organization is disturbing to Hudson Bay ordered Canadian mind.   

My brother, Ron,  who’d lived in Hong Kong and loved the Chinese culture and I, would talk about the different thinking that would put a bathroom supplies beside toys.  He’d noticed the same but loved the adventure of the search for things which made him think an afternoon at second hand stores or garage sale was fun.   I like a different types of mental organization.  I  see  this ‘messy’ treasure hunt experience as common too in Saipan.  

There really is such a variety in the stores here and the fashion reaches right to high end.   I had an Americano coffee  in one of these vertical malls watching the shoppers as well as the people below entering from the street.  Evening was coming on and the girls really were beginning to sparkle. It’s such a youth culture with so many in their 20’s. Lesan, my very bright guide, had studied hospitality and had his guide license and developed a tour business. I was surprised to learn he was only 22.  

There’s such an entrepreneurial atmosphere here with the evidence in the markets, business and trade everywhere. Reading the history of Ethiopia, it’s always been an agricultural power house.  The emperor saw Addis Ababa as a major trade centre. The Emperors in the past moved their residence around the country rather than having everyone come to a central location.  Lesan told me agriculture is still central to the economy of Ethiopia. Landowning and farming are so important. Ethiopian Coffee, sought after the world over, and one of my all time favourites, is a major export from Eastern Ethiopia. 

Ethiopia is also resource rich in minerals but  is vastly under developed if only because of the wars, Muslim Invasion and two Italian Invasions , Somalia invasions and the 20 year horror and disaster of the Communist take over by the DERG , followed by the civil war Liberation to ouste the  “Red Terror”. Aethest communist socialist have always  killed millions whenever they gain power. Now with a little space of peace these Christian Ethiopians are back to being a powerhouse of production. St. Paul was a tent maker and sales man and the Jews have always been admired for their business sense.  Ethiopia has always been on the trade route for Eastern spices and western guns. It once was along the Arab slave trade until Christians the world over began the move to outlaw slaves.  Ethiopians and the Coptic Church were early against it but the slave trade continued for sometime flowing north to the Arab nations out of sight. 

People talk of St. Paul 2000 years ago writing about slaves minding their places but everyone had slaves of all colours and races the world over especially aboriginals and pagans back then.  The great works of modern civilizations were often built with the aid of slave labour.   The movement against slavery began in 1823 with the first Anti Slavery Society in England followed by Royal Assent for the Abolition Act 10 years later. King Louis X of France had abolitioned slavery in France first in the 14th century.  America fought a Civil War over slavery, it’s abolitionist movement being inspired by enlightened Christians. Amazing Grace, that wondrous song was written by a former slave trader who converted . The American marines fought the slave trading Muslim pirates of North Africa to put a stop to their attacking American ships and selling off all the mostly whitecrews and passengers to slavery. .By contrast the Muslims and Arabs were a centre of slavery until very recently. It was only in 1948 that slavery was declared illegal under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania in Northwest Africa was the last country to abolish slavery in 1981.  Ironically the Democrats in the US forget their party was for slavery while the Republicans were the principal abolitionists through history. Today’s it’s ironically portrayed to often as a ‘racist’ when slavery was never solely racial but always economic.  The white European Christians were the first to outlaw it and the Arabs Muslims last. Mostly it had more to do with economics and politics.   Despite the outlawing of ‘chattel slavery’ much slavery persists today in African countries and countries around the world. The aetheist communist countries have been particularly central in the sex slavery industry.  

Being here I don’t think of myself as ‘white’ because I’m mostly among Christians.  I suspect others see me as such since when I pass a window I see my minority status but I think as Christians we  consider higher considerations of relationship. I think the Ethiopians think more of themselves as their land and geographical location like my aboriginal priest colleague Rev. Vivian Seegers who began the Urban Aboriginal Ministry in Canada.

I asked a Catholic Colleague how his mother had responded when he married his lovely but “different” wife.  He put me on the spot for a minute funning me as only the Irish would asking me seriously straight faced ‘what do you mean by different.” Fearing I’d made a major faux pas I was stammering for a while  before  saying “I mean your marriage is  ‘inter racial’, nothing wrong with it, just less common.” 

  “My mother didn’t see it as such,” he responded,”She’s catholic. That’s all that matters.’  

Reading Traditional Society by the famed anthropologist Diamond it’s important to see how any difference was a threat to people.  The stranger is as likely to be an enemy as a friend so caution has always been considered ‘healthy’.  Marx  divided the multi variate world into us and them fearing any differences.  Islam still a religion state not having experienced the Magna Carta of England or the Jeffersonian Principle of separation of religion and state promised a ‘religion of peace’ only when that had conquered or assimilated everyone to Islam.  The Ethiopian Coptic Christian Church by contrast has this interest inclusive nature of the New Testament of Jesus coupled with the Israeli exclusive old temperament nature.  

Ethiopians, reading their history don’t seem to care about colour or race having fought off blacks and white, muslims and aetheists.  Some of that has to do with their highland identity which after the fall of the Axum empire had them separate and apart in the highlands and often without a seaport to join them more forcefully with the rest of the world.  This has contributed to their distinct identity which they obviously hold highly.  Also they have a strong sense of morality.. 

Seeing the beautiful young Ethiopian women dressed up to kill heading out to the night clubs I was confident for the future of the country. All day long I’d seen pretty and sometimes stunningly beautiful women  in the attractive blue and grey cammo uniforms casually holding Ak 103, the favoured assault rifles of the Ethiopian defence forces.  Older even more beautiful and stylish women walked with their husbands and well dressed and well behaved children as proud family units.  Such strength,  resilience and obvious love of men, women , children and family. 

 Knowing I’m trying to look like Steven Segal to ward off pick pockets and con artists I’m still surprised to see looks of female appreciation of my being a man as catch a glance in a crowd.  By contrast I’m not even shocked  by the ladies strutting their stuff in the latest fashion, short skirts and high heels,  wearing war paint,  obviously intent on taking no prisoners.The young men, like young men the world over seem ready and willing to sacrifice and take a fall for their country. Marriage with family and all the ritual is a tremendous orthodox affair here.    

I feel  I’m relaxing again after the experince of Canada where so many are  “offended”  by sex and family.  The war on men is such that Hoff Summers, wrote the  seminal  book called War on Boys white a whole political party in the US, the Democrats,  celebrate the murder of unborn babies in their last trimester. Here Ethiopian and the Church celebrate life whereas in the US while the President speaks out against third trimester abortion a Democrat politician already  promoting euthanasia for Children.  The Trudeau family have always been pro abortion and euthanasia except of course for themselves, as the  privileged elite so often are. As always the dead don’t get a vote.

I love the Chinese respect and so often loving care of the elderly. On the plane I watched the hilarious comedy, Crazy Rich Asians emphasing family and relationships.  Here I’ve seen the young caring for the elderly and couldn’t help noticing how Lesan the guide was pacing himself and caring about me as  we climbed a little hill.  As only a man can have I had mixed feelings about his solicitiousness, regarding my age.  He offered  to carry my pack as we climbed stairs in the museums, I believe that’s the care for young and old is connected and leads to a multidimensional respect so different from the narcissists. Narcissists focus solely on power and believe like paranoids that others think like and feel like they do but are disguising it to gain advantage.  I’m thankful for the choice that has allowed me to travel whereas my friend prefers their house though it’s left them like farmers whose properties are worth so much, land rich,  money poor,  It also ties them to  their work. I’m more of a sailor.  

Travelling  we really see ourselves as much as that which is foreign.  Transference and Countertransference become more apparent at the group levels.  Lesan showed me a peculiar board game favoured through history by the herders and traders. “Once you start playing it it takes hours to finish” It was perfect for people watching their herds or waiting for deals. Having nothing to do for long periods they played it to pass the time.   

Enough musings. I’m actually feeling like a nap before breakfast and church. This hotel has 24 hour room service but I think I can wait for the great spread again I encountered this morning which comes with the room. 

Board game of herders that takes hours to place one round and bong.

Best Western Addis Ababa outdoor cafe with view of the street

Injerah , Ethiopian Rice like bread, and delicious chicken soup

Great leather stores




Atrium of Vertical Malls

Nearby Coptic Church I walked to the had a coffee on the second floor 

outdoor cafe of the vertical mall

I am wearing long sleeves for mosquitos (I saw one fly all day, no other bugs,

 and definitely no mosquitoes)..I’m also wearing a jacket for pockets. 

Asked about weather I saw it as warm but see here the locals in short sleeves

 and the children in shorts.  Warm.

I think this is the only motorcyclist I saw wearing a helmet.

Nun

Gratitude for Canadian Judges

I have been fortunate to work in the courts in Canada and the United States. In both countries I have been very impressed with the knowledge and character of the judges who I have observed. There have been rare exceptions to this. Overall my experience has been exceedingly positive.
I had a moment to reflect on this when a middle eastern man reminded me that we are truly  fortunate in Canada to have judges who are experienced, trained, honest and just.
“In the middle east my business covered several countries and the nature of my business meant I was involved with the courts, legitimately, not criminally.   The courts and the judges there are are generally corrupt.  I’ve had a chance to compare. It’s a bit like hockey and soccer.  Soccer, you know the game is fixed.  Maybe not as bad as wrestling but fixed nonetheless. Alll those players falling down is just too convenient.  If hockey is fixed it’s not so apparent. Not with the players anyway. Maybe occasionally the refs."
He went on to say,"In the middle east, if you want to murder someone and you don’t involve the judge in your plan he’s likely to  consider it a personal affront. You see you’re supposed to speak to him first.  He’ll tell you how much he will need to get you off.  He’ll then say it’s okay to murder.  The police will catch you.  You will appear in court. But then the judge, if he’s been paid off properly, will find some way to let you go free.  If you don’t include him at the outset and just murder someone and show up in court, well, that’s just inconsiderate. You can still go free, if you pay the judge.  But the cost will be double or triple what it would have been.  That’s for disrespecting the judge.  Disrespect is the most serious crime. That’s what I mean when I say the middle east is corrupt."
I personally don't know if this is 'true'. It's certainly reflects what so many have told me.
I remember an experience when I was sailing along the coastal towns in Mexico.   I had to pay for a local license and visited the judge in his office.  The license was only a matter of a few hundred dollars but I’d brought a wad of pesos.  When I pulled it out of my jean pocket, the judge literally jumped out of his chair and began closing the blinds so no one could see in.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said, taking the money.”  “My predecessor was totally corrupt and wouldn’t do anything without his palm being greased. I took this position on the basis of cleaning up the corruption.  You can’t imagine how bad it would look for me if someone looked in and saw a gringo giving me this great wad of cash.  I’m sure you understand."
I thought him a brave man knowing how many people of integrity are killed in government position by drug and arms traffickers.
I laughed though and said I did understand. But really I didn’t.  Canada just never was that corrupt in my experience. Perhaps my concern is that when I was growing up we could leave our houses unlocked.  I lock everything in Canada today.
I knew that if I wanted anything to be done in Asia when I was there I had to give a little ‘incentive’ to the person serving me. It was like the hotel staff in New York City and Paris.  Hong Kong, Tokyo, and LA, this 'tip' thing may well be just 'big city' .  Hotel staff  stand  and wait clearing their throats until I pay them, leaving me feeling somehow 'unsophisticated' because I don't know the latest 'palm greasing percentage' or situations where this is warranted.  
A supervisor in provincial government services told me how frustrating it was these days constantly watching the new immigrant employees. “They simply can’t believe that we don’t get money on the side for every government transaction that we do. I’ve had to stop them repeatedly and even get them to give back money. They’ve actually complained that they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of getting a government job if they’d known how little it was going to pay. “In our country,” they say, "the salary is just the base pay. All the real money is made in the  extras"  I have to tell them over and over again that’s called ‘extortion’ in this country. Of course Trudeau’s ‘pay for access’ makes them not believe me.  They tell me that Canada is multi cultural and wink. It’s  becoming a problem but only for me."
A professor of political science explained to me that we don’t have ‘baksheesh’ in the west like they do in the east but “institutional backsheesh’ is alive and well.  Our taxations schemes and various other formulas are used to reward or punish industries or companies. That’s what all the ‘lobbies’ are for, regulations that favour their clients. It's the foundation of the corruption in Ottawa and Washington and all government cities in Europe. Brussels is the absolute ground zero of this explosion in corruption.
In Communist Countries  judges routinely convicted prisoners of conscience and sent them to the Gulag or the Psychiatric wards.  As a member of the Psychiatrists against Political Abuse of Psychiatry and Human Rights Associations it's always amazing to see the endemic corruption in communist countries that seem to glossed over or completely ignored by the our mainstream media.   The 'missing persons of Argentinia' were a fraction of the numbers that still go missing in China.
You are considered a criminal or psychotic if you question government or say anything against Marx.  As a godless political system it takes as much offence to any questioning of Marx as the Muslims do when you question Mohammed or state the simple truths about Islam.  The judges in communist countries were all corrupt, individually and collectively.  Communism, a committee dictatorship, was like other dictatorships, corrupt to the very core.
I did pro bono work with Mr. Dugald Christie, the amazing lawyer who set up the pro bono services in the British Columbia. We attended church together and he really was a hard man to say no to considering his impeccable character. Indeed I never did say no to him.   But all the pro bono work I’ve done has sure got me in a lot of hot water with government.  There’s usually an unspoken and often political reason for a person being without support.  Dugald Christie argued that the cost of legal matters in Canada was such that the middle and lower classes simply couldn’t afford the process.  This was outside the domain of the judges and more a reflection of the political system.
The judges in Canada, as I’ve already said, have all individually with rare exception been stirling characters.  We are very fortunate and I do hope that we can remain so with all the pressures on them these days from the Dark Side.  I don’t think we appreciate the judges as much as we deserve because Canadians compare them in general against some ‘idealized’ standard.
I’d not exchange our Canadian or the American judges I've known for any judges in other parts of the world even the little I do know of them.  Certainly I'd not want to face judges in dictatorships like most of the UN member countries or  the communist countries, or South  Americas, and definitely not most of Africa and  increasingly in more countries in Europe where corruption stories are rife.   Definitely I don't want to face judges in the middle east.  This may be in part because I've seen first hand and heard first hand the stories of rank abuse physically and sexually from patients who've had that misfortune.
We simply are very fortunate in Canada to have the judges we have.  We really should acknowledge it .

The Godless and Soteriology

I listened to Rev. Flowers Soteriology 101 pod cast yesterday.  My commute time in Vancouver was doubled by the fog. Everywhere medical marijuana drivers had slowed their vehicles down so they could collectively stare and say, “Wow, Man!” It really was surreal and beautiful.
Vancouver is a bipolar city with moods fluctuating with the weather and commutes fluctuating due to poor administration of the road services from anywhere between a 1/2 hour and 2 hours daily.  The real money in the city comes from crime and government.  The criminals and the elite live in the city. The commuters like me are just the modern peasants.
Soteriology is the study of “Salvation”.  An end days prescription.  Like George Carlin, “What is this hand basket and where are we going anyway.”  Every day a person not on drugs or willing to forego the Starbucks coffee waiting in the city, gets up and drives their car either north or east, heading to the country or the prairies just to get away from the boredom of Vancouver in the darkness of ‘daylight saving’ and the rain of winter.
Snow and sunshine seem preferable to whiplash seeking pirates looking for ICBC insurance windfalls offered daily by the legal lottery that runs the province.  Meanwhile ,why work when the government taxes the workers while giving a pass to the criminals and speculators.  It’s the same with guns. Criminals have them. But the government taxes those who own them and pay taxes on them.  So the government simply does the same with workers, demonizing them, and punishing them with greater and greater taxes while leaving the criminals to prosper.
Salvation sounds like a lovely contrast to the media circus and the daily toil of hedonist smog producing bike laned city life especially as the government is taxing the air we breathe and water is now bought and sold.  Death has an appeal.  Euthanasia is marketed medically along with marijuana.
It pays to check out the tourist brochures of the various religions ultimate destination offers.
I once wrote a paper on Heaven and concluded that Christianity and Taoism had the best resorts in the after life. I didn’t really care to fight each day in pagan Valhalla.  Hanging with virgins didn’t seem nearly so appealing since the virgins I knew weren’t a particularly a attractive lot.
As a doctor I also know that the hymen restorative surgical industry is a thriving business.  The introduction of the birth control pill removed the whole need for virginity that leftover from  the agricultural and herding days of breeding, eugenics and  and thoroughbred children.  Today 50 % of the children of divorce are by DNA study, not those of the father.  Despite this, the  Jews continue to step on glasses at wedding.  Muslims kill people who look at their promiscuous sisters.  Myla Cyress, the penultimate Hollywood disease attacting slut, rides her ‘wrecking ball’.  New religions like feminism are sources of perpetual anger and ‘offence’ , like nation states in the empires building colonial days. New colonialists.  Different names, same old, same old , game.
Soteriology says each religion and each culture had some purpose and meaning.  Today the Godless simply lie and deny that they really want the most toys at the end but their agenda always is world dominance for purely hedonistic reasons. They don’t have an afterlife so can’t really care for their own children.  All must cease to exist when they, Gods of their own making,  no longer exist. No wonder there is an opioid epidemic.
The Buddhists by contrast are the most truthful.  Soteriology or salvation for them is ‘nirvana’ , ‘liberation from suffering’.  Life is ‘samsara” or the never ending cycle of misery.  All Buddhist humor is a kind of Vietnam black humor which makes their laughter so infectious.  Even Kierkegaard the great Christian theologian said ‘life is suffering unto death’.  Quite a contrast to the promises of politicians, whores, bankers, marketting agencies, and Hollywood.  Nothingness is the reward of life.
The Christian ‘salvation’ is saving the soul from ‘sin’.  Sin is a word used to describe the ‘missing of a mark’.  Christianity like Zen uses an analogy of the archer. The archer shoots an arrow and if ‘Good intentions didn’t pave the road to hell’ the arrow would always hit the mark. Christianity like Science asks the question of ‘outcome measure’.  The ‘deviance’ from the aim is called ‘sin’. In science we’d explain the ‘error’ as ‘windage’ , ‘arrow’ material’ , ad infinitude.  Christians say that sin follows from separation from God. Salvation is made possible in Christianity by the life and death and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, (God entered his creation, lived it, found it in error ,  corrected it, died and resurrected..  The cross of Christianity is the ‘cross road”. It’s all about choice and freedom of choice. Also I imagine God was just a tad cross as his creation when it killed his creatures killed him suggesting either a design error, a Robert Graves sacrifice of the king or downright naughtiness of children unattended. Apparently the computer reset didn’t take a Noah flood but the cosmic fix could be put in with ‘love’.
There is also however a pesky issue of ‘predestination’ and ‘grace’ .Soteriology addresses these ultimately Unchristian factors in Christianity.
A good Christian gets ‘mansions in heaven’ and time with God.  Virgins are apparently optional and singing replaces war. It sounds much more appealing as you get older.  You also get a new body while the Muslims must make due with the resurrection of the one they died in. This explains the mass exodus of male followers of Islam to Christianity after they have suffered castration by whatever means.
Only 1 in 1000 Muslims actually get to any kind of heaven so it’s a lottery system anyway with most ending up in fire and despair just like some Christian sects who feel the stick is far better than the carrot for managing the followers. Corruptions naturally goes along with either lottery system.
The Judaism Soteriological construct is as a collective not like Christianity which is individual. Jews are never individual tourists but must travel by the bus loads. The attraction of aetheism for the likes of Marx and other Godless Jews is that many Jews simply don’t believe in an afterlife “The dead know nothing. They have no reward.”  However other Jews do believe in an afterlife, though not nearly as attractive in terms of housing as the Jewish Christian sects believed.
In Hinduism Samedhi or Moksha is the escape from ‘samsara’ the cycle of death and rebirth.  This may mean like the Buddhists a loss of individuality but it might also mean a simple closing of this book before the opening of the other. This goes with the idea of this ‘caterpillar’ existence where enlightenment is a ‘butterfly’ existence. How can a caterpillar know as a butterfly. “I am the bubble make me the sea’.  There’s closure and possibility without the idea of a human ‘body’ or the anthropomorphism associated with the mystery religions.  The Sikh seed the ‘union with God’ as a drop of water joining the sea.
There’s a sense with the Godly that we’re all going in the same direction in a sense. Pesky pagans preparing to fight forever are as challenging to be around as those who truly believe that this is it and there are no consequences, except perhaps indigestion, for eating one’s neighbour.
Rev. Francis was challenging the Calvinist notion of preditermination, the idea that God’s chosen are already picked and the out come is ‘fixed’.  This has an anthropormorphic quality considering however we find that elections, soccer games and leadership positions are ‘rigged’.  Why not think that God has ‘rigged’ this life. The least taught book of the Bible, Job, certainly challenges the notion of Satan and dualism. Satan might well have been God’s companion creation or alter ego before the creation of more entertaining humans with delusions of free will.
Personally I’ve considered myself a ‘voice over’ on a ‘comic strip’ .  The question then is who is the writer. I’m writing my life or God or worse ‘the Borg Government of Canada’. And if the ending is ‘fixed’, as my dope smoking friend believes, “why worry, be happy.”
There’s a notion of ‘happy cabbages’ and I find when I ask people ‘why’ or ‘where are you going’ or ‘what do you want in the big picture’ they commonly simply shit themselves.  I know that beurocrats are the most disturbed by that question. They hide behind platitudes and swagger with confidence but the seed of doubt and the depth of fear is so readily apparent in their eyes.
Most who join armies have said simply, I don’t know I don’t care I just want to be a tool.  I’m here to pay for my family because that hedonistically feels good. Others believe the signs offering travel and education.
I am no more than an animal, they say. I mimic the words and motions of man but really no more. Everyone agrees with me. I represent everyone. I’m schizophrenic and leave me alone. Don’t ask me such questions!!!!
Soteriology. Thank you Rev. Flowers.

Abraham of Ur, Egypt and Exodus

I so enjoyed today listening to Dr. Maguire giving a lecture to the students at the Catholic Institute. I have this from ITunes U, finding it in the Off Campus Series of Lectures from Christendom College.
I love history and literature nearly as much as I do chemistry so was delighted by the brilliance of Dr. Maquire's lecture.  With the invasion of Islam under the guise of migration, or as 5th Column or as capitulation by western leadership or to replace the aborted babies in purgatory, or in exchange of cold cash to the likes of the Saudi Wahhabi creation or Dubai monetary influence or Packistani power grab, it does not really matter, the fact is suddenly Muslims are in everyone's face today.
I once thought that of the Jews.
Another time I thought that of the Hindi's.
Another time I thought that of the Indigenous native folks with their burning sage and  Creator talk.
Why can't people leave me alone with my comfortable Christianity.
So these people invariably have me questioning my religion, though probably not my faith. I often think that the godless or apostates or simply stupid person I'm talking wth does this unknowingly. They have shared some propaganda they've learned and won't question it but I'll now be required to go and clarify or refute or question what I'd believed till I heard what usually turns out as downright nonsense.
Being a scholar I delve into history to learn what I can about some question this 'outsider to me' has raised.  I loved my studies of Yoga and India and Hinduism and Buddhism as they helped me eventually deepen my awareness of meditation and eventually understand better the teaching of Benedictine and Thomas Merton.  I love the Bodram and communal chanting of my aboriginal brethren with thier small group sweat lodge studies.  The Baptists had been happy to purify me in dunking baths but the native elders introduced me to the sweat long before I was doing Hamas with my Muslim scholar friends.  My Israeli mentor by contrast had me dousing myself with hyssop. One can never be too pure or for that matter too learned.
So when my Muslim friend said that the great religions were all the same all coming from the wisdom of Abraham, I was somewhat taken aback.  Surely Judaism has come from Abraham. Islam takes it's roots from there. But Christ was different I wanted to say.  Except Jesus was a Jew and he took his history from Judaism. Jesus wasn't at first a rebel but rather wanted to fulfill the Covenant with God given too the Jewish people with the New Accord of Christianity.
Dr. Maguire's lecture, serendipitously,  was on Abraham.  I've grown fat with pain and sloth and Hagen dad Ice Cream so have been forcing myself against all the temptations of demonic possession to run with my less than enthusiastic cockapoo dog Gilbert in the morning. I find that if I shut off the screams and derision of my mind with the incredible sound system of the Apple IPhone 7 I can drag myself along the trail with less focus on the tortuous pain of my screaming muscles and joints.
Yesterday country singer Reba MacIntyre with her complaints about men and love of God did the distract trick but today I tried I Tunes U.    Dr. MaQuire as a lecturer was extremely engaging and entertaining, even if he wasn't a beautiful country and western singer
Abraham, also know by the nick name, Abram, was the patriarch in the second millennium, the so called 'patriarchial age'.  Job was considered to be of this time too.  Dr. Maguire showed how the chronology of the Bible and chronology of Egyptian records were difficult but not impossible to compare.  Abraham was the third dynastic period of Ur. Ur was an important Sumerian city of Mesopotamia. The ruins of Ur are not far from Baghdad Iraq today at a site known as Tall al Mugayyar, Iraq. Mesopotamia is within the Tigris-Euphrates River system corresponding today with Iraq, Kuwait, eastern Syria, south eastern Turkey.  The Sumerians and Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians) dominated the region from the beginning of written history 3100 BC to the fall of Babylon 539 BC.

Abraham was Semitic. Semitic means off spring of Shem or of Noah.  2000 years BCE Ur was an advanced civilization in what has in recent years been called the Fertile Crescent, this area where the greatest accomplishments of technology, agriculture, war, science, culture and religion originated. The argument is that human kind originated here and spread to the rest of the world.  Naturally the Chinese would argue this point but they have always felt they were the centre of the universe.
Abraham was also of the Akkadian Empire
Our ancestors have been around 6 million years but civilization only began about 6000 years ago with humans as we know them evolving only about 200,000 years ago.  Dr. MaQuire mentioned that as Europeans we have Neanderthal genes so they were about back in the day.  Even today parents are trying to keep their teenagers from having sexual congress with the Neanderthals of the neighbourhood so not much changes.  
From Wikipedia I just learned that the Third Dynasty of Ur was also known as the new-Sumerian empire and referred to the 2112 to 2004 BC.  This area is the area of modern day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran.  It's significant to me that ISIS is destroying all the non Muslim culture and artefacts wherever they go.  True ignorant barbarians that make the actors in the  "Dumb and Dumber"  movie look brilliant.  The hillbillies of the Deliverance movie are more cultured civilized and intelligent than the ISIS in breeds.  One suspects ISIS followers have more Neanderthal genes than the rest of us.
Sadly much the income of this area depended on tourism from people like me who really would have been interested in seeing what architecture of the day was like rather than seing yet another mosque with mosque's as prevalent as MacDonald's franchises.  Young men and women never appreciate till it's too late the wonders of the ancients, including old men and old women. I was like the these thugs when I was a teen but thankfully I've learned a wonderful appreciation  for archeology. I am saddened at the losses to the people of the region economically and to historians.
Dr. Maguire said that droughts and famines caused migrations and that a common destiny was tthe 'fertile' delta of Egypt.  Abraham had moved his people from Ur to Canaan (Canaan is roughly the area of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and western Jordan and western Syria)  and then from there to Egypt. The Bible tells us his wife was Sarah, his concubine Hagar and his second wife was Katsura.   Dr. Maguire referred to the Genesis tale as well as to archeological materials and the Jewish historians of later periods such as Josephus.  There appears to have been migration not just fof Abraham but other Semitic peoples and in the day they may have come as labourers and mercenaries.
Another great racy story in the Bible that female Sunday school teachers don't dwell on is  about Sarah being like the Marilyn Monroe Sophia Loren Angelina Jolie of her day and Abraham being less than Brad Pitt or Colin Firth or Gregory Peck and offering Sarah to the Pharoh claiming that she's his sister not his wife. The Pharaoh takes her into his Harem then rejects her when he realizes she's Abraham's wife and not his sister. Better than Day's of Our Lives.  Abraham was the happening event in Egypt around 1900 BC.
Moses is around 1400 BC.  The Hyksos Invaders reigned in Egypt in the 15th dynasty around 1650 BC.
The Hyksos was  translated from the Egyptian hieroglyphs as 'foreign kings' .   The Native Pharaoh's were from the time before and after them and Dr. Maguire wondered if the 'falling out' of the exodus period was related to Abraham being friends with the former 'native pharaoh's' and now Moses was at odds with Hysksos invaders or some such thing that I didn't really follow because my cockapoo Gilbert chose that moment to poop in the middle of the path and I had to stoop and scoop avoiding on coming cyclists.
I remember seeing the Hysksos artefacts in the Athens museum.  Very impressive.
The interesting insights that Dr. Maguire gave about Moses and the Egyptians were the plagues. Moses turned the river into blood. The Egyptian hieroglyphs couldn't be understood till the Rosetta Stone finding because the hieroglyphs were phonetic language with the pictures representing 'sounds like' images of parts of words.  But today they can be read fairly accurately and show the migrations. As a result today we also know that their religion was a zoological paganism.  In deed the war between the northern delta Hysksos Dynasty and the southern native dynasty began because in the south they started killing Hippopotamus which were the gods of the Hyksos.  Moses plague of locust was the plague of the land turning the worshipped land against the Egyptians.
When Moses lead the people out of Egypt into Canaan Dr. Maguire argued that much of the requirements of the Moses religion were to get the Egyptian out of the people.  Egyptians could eat pork but not a whole lot of other animals because they were sacred. So by making pork taboo and forcing the Israelites to eat what had once been sacred to Egyptians he was purifying them.  The Golden Calf wasn't something new but the fertility god of Egypt as the people were reverting back to the Egyptian god whenever they lost faith in the monotheism of Moses.
Great lecture. I just touched on points that I remember.  It kept me running rather than walking as well as Reba MacIntyre.

Referring to my original discussion,  I had thought Abraham was the patriarch the religion of Judaism and the religion. The religion of Christianity is fundamentally different from Judaism.   The new almagamation religion of Islam is something altogether different again.  It's like the Mormon's in that sense. They have elements of Christianity but a whole lot of other 'stuff'. As the Bahai are an amalgamation religion with a whole lot of other stuff too.
Tribal religions are different from Universal religions.  Both Judaism and Islam began as tribal religions but Christianity by contrast was not.  The great discussion of genital mutilation of men between Paul and Peter brought it to the level of universal religion. Genital mutiliation of men has tended to keep the Jewish religion at a more tribal level.   Islam has attempted universality in later years but continues to have fetish issues with tribal genital mutilation while Judaism remains routed in it's tribal history.  Hinduism long left it's tribal origins but mostly maintained an ethnic association while Buddhism had a universal construction.  Confuscianism isn't so much a religion but a broader form of Robert's Rules of Order with serious life implications.   Buddhism more than Hinduism has spread from its eastern basis.  Communism the aetheist religion which has a short history of abject failure was like the militaristic Islam formulated as a totalitarian earth conquering construct. "Workers of the world unite."  The god there was the worker state, with it's special dictator class like the priest class of other religions.  Today totalitarian religions are mostly driven by money which can be generalized from Marx as the religion of the world. Money is truly worshipped in high places.
Dr. Magure's lecture was thought inspiring and I would not suggest my thoughts are his. What I've written was just my thoughts after an enjoyable lecture taken while running with my dog.  Great way to start a day.

Thoughts on Liberalism: the Religion and the New Sharia Communism of the Godly Godless

After the family the tribe is the fundamental unit of society.  The tribe was a collection of men and women who congregated around a leader, traditionally male with a female partner.  This was considered patriarchy whereas a female leader resulted in a matriarchy.  Tribal organization was defined by kinship.  Fundamental blood relatedness was essential to inclusion or exclusion from a tribe.  Jared Diamond in Traditional Societies reviews this feature at length in his anthropological classic.  Beyond the tribe there was the confederation, federation or nation.  Which is why it’s an misnomer to call most of the Canadian and American tribal aboriginal societies “First Nations” because most had not evolved to this more complex relationship.  The exception was the 5 tribes of the Mohawk Nation on the East Coast of Canada. Certainly aboriginal society had achieved nationhood status in Mesoamerica with the Aztecs and Mayan before them but in the rest of north america there were looser associations.
In the tribe the Strong Man and his Woman divided rule along gender with the masculine affairs being military and policing of the physical world while the feminine affairs were more internal to the tribe, religion and health care.  Vestiges of these ideas remain in terms that describe modern hospitals as hotels of god.  There’s this inner and outer sanctuary. The masculine, commonly associated with the Sun and the external or daylight world while the feminine was associated with the Moon, internal or night time world.  There are multiple variations on this obvious reductionism but it is necessary background to understanding Liberalism as the religion it is today.
It's all further confused by the most masculine religion of Islam having a moon goddess and the most feminine religion of Christianity originating as a empire religion with the sun god worshipping Emperor Constantine.  Intellectually, the limits of which are best set forth by Paul Johnson, in his classic, the Intellectuals, there is dichotomy but reality is neither black or white but various shades of grey.  St. Paul described this best by saying that here 'we see through a glass darkly.'  The great medieval saint described the mystical experience and God as "the cloud of unknowing'. Not surprising war is described as the 'fog of war'.  Only arm chair philosophers, Monday morning quarterbacks and eurocrats best described by Kafka know better.
Karen Armstrong in her classic history, Fields of Blood extensively reviewed the association of war and religion. What she found was that at the hunting gathering tribal level there was sanctity of life and little all out war.  Tribes were small and maintained by kinship and conflicted with each other over territory and resources.  The women leading the children did the gathering which accounted for 50% at least of the food while the men in hunting groups roamed the territory of the tribe securing wary game. The methods of food collection were limited with a major focus of time and resources being spent on acquiring food.  Tribal conflicts were limited affairs because food storage was ever a problem and there was simply not time or energy to give to any but cursory combat.  To mount major war fare agriculture was necessary.  Alternatively cattle and sheep herding could provide a mobile food source.  The pemican of the buffalo hunters allowed for limited war as a portable food maintainable food.  Today with refrigeration and drying process and all the transportation and food management of great metropolis's we take this all for granted. Napoleon Bonaparte knew "an army marches on its stomach."
Today's poverty and starvation are continuations of war politics. Matheus recognized that population control operated through the causes of starvation, pestilence and war. Further pestilence and starvation were operations of war. The three were intimately linked. The idea that poverty and starvation are merely a consequence of arbitrary lack of resources overlooks their design and strategy. Gifts of food and medicine are traded for guns all over the world just as they are traded for drugs by the starving homeless in the inner cities.
Agriculture, on a major scale, first occurred in the Fertile Triangle.  Here abundance resulted in the rise of a ruling class which had not been present to any degree in the tribe.  All of the tribe were previously involved in resource management with the leader often simply being the best hunter. The religion with it’s taboos and superstitions followed observations that ‘explained’ the phenomena witnessed by the tribe.  The religion necessary supported the Strong Man or else it would be destroyed. The Strong Man of history was called such because of his/her capacity for violence, paranoia and charismatic leadership.  With the advent of agriculture, grains could be stored, for campaigns. Not only that a class division could occur with peasants or slaves doing the work of agriculture while a few ruled with violence and technology. Again the religion supported this division or else the religiously leadership were removed (killed).
Jared Diamond and Karen Armstrong have impressively demonstrated that with agriculture and portable storable food it didn’t take great intelligence to realize that increased wealth could be achieved by war and piracy.  Campaigns against neighbours gave  rise to such notable folk ultimately as the Huns, Vikings and various other groups that specialized in war.  The Golden Age of many nations was when their technology and warring capacity was superior to their neighbours resulting in an influx of wealth from conquest and theft.  Dr. Johnson summed this up with the phrase best paraphrased by Bob Dylan, “steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king."
Throughout history the problem has been motivating groups of people. The proverbial carrot and stick have proved central. The Torah and Koran, Chinese texts  and even the  Vedas all derive from this time of warring nations, collections of tribes, forming alliances and contesting in an attempt to make an ever greater cohesive body. This is the basis of empires. There are monarchies and then empires with holy wars and ultimately Caesar as God.  Then there is a move in the east and the west to the God being invisible, the early Buddhist warrior invasions of Cambodia, the Chinese and the Dao and Japanese and Shinto and Mohammed and Allah and Constantine and the Christian God Yahvew, the ‘unspeakable beingness name of the God of the Jews.”  Definitely heady times but ultimately all apart of the evolution and devolution we see at the very cellular level with increasingly complexity and organization.  King Lear says to Cornelius in the end, "We'll talk of court news, we'll talk of them too - who loses, who wins; who's in, who's out - and take upon the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies...."
Today that’s culminated in Liberalism and the Globalist Ideologies.  Liberalism demands like all religions that all share it’s basic beliefs and language. There is a superstition in religion that if everyone doesn't agree to worship the same ideas then God will be unhappy and strike the community with calamity.  Ironically Liberalism espouses verbally 'diversity' while  being the least inclusive excluding anyone that disagrees with liberalism especially conservatives.  The State must have no other Gods before it.  The Liberal must have no other Gods before it.  All of the  slogans of liberalism sound good in word while in fact they're more often than not it's opposite.  The Mein Kemp and Communist Manifesto are wonderful sounding socialist treatises far less messy and pedantic than Magna Carta and  the Declaration of Independence.
Religions and States have a central need for inclusion and exclusion.  The Roman’s achieved this through ‘citizenship’. The Ottoman empire had a similar mechanism of allowing tribal members to rise within their ranks.  The Jews would to a great extent restrict themselves to blood relationships and influence while others tried various mechanisms to essentially fulfill the task of ‘herding cats.’
Today the religion of liberalism demands that you reject God as an unseen or traditional force.  It's in place you have the State. Socialism, the first major atheist religion, demanded that the State be seen as God.  Marx posited a ‘collective consciousness’ which was a contrast to the “collective unconscious’ described Dr. Carl Jung.  Marx called ‘religion, the opiate of the masses’ all the while developing his own religion with his God as a worker state calling for an International Workers to Unite.  Neitze called Christianity the peasant religion and posited his Superman religion for the benefit of the Strongman and Strong woman of his day.  He said God was dead but he himself died instead. Survival of the fittest appeals most to the winners rather than the losers. Genetics allows the king to say to the revolutionary you must be born king.  There are various strategies for maintaining power since historically revolution and war and the principal means of acquiring power since the time of agriculture and herding. Industrialization just reduced the need for so many bodies as machines could do the jobs.
As Joan Bias, American folk singer said in the Rolling Stone magazine, the shit is still falling from above and there's still fewer of them than us. The only difference is the elite now have 'shit making machines'.  The oldest law of the world is the Chinese Law of the Fish, 'there are big fish and there are little fish and the little fish must be fast and numerous.'
A key superstition of groups demands that all participate in the ‘idea’ or the ‘project’ or the ‘war’.  Indeed having everyone on board with something is the basis of taboos as well. The idea was that if one person in the group did something then all would suffer as a consequence of that person’s deviation.  In an age where children were the material of the work force and the military unit then anything that interfered with child production and rearing was taboo.  Homosexuality was acceptable if men reproduced.  The Spartans had their wives but had homosexual relationships on the side.   Homosexual acts were not the issue but the issue was if there was a refusal to produce war and work materials. Children have always been the old age pension of the mother and the father.  So even today the fear of homosexuality is not the act but rather the absence of grandchildren.  The family was the fundamental building block of the tribe and state but Marx and Engels argued that the reproductive function should be subservient to the state. Marx was especially misyogynist. The Frankfurt Group which tried to mix Freud and Marx into a Cultural Communism or socialism persisted in believing that the fundamental bond of ‘mother and child’ was fundamentally ‘bourgeoisie’. In the socialist system the mother rejected was reduced to  the term ‘breeder’.  The historic spiritual feminine power of the mother was reduced in an attempt to give all power to the masculine State, increasingly a military unit with political agents replacing the priests of medieval age.
The simple solution of revolutions was to steal the riches and kill those who created them, a system originally developed thousands of years before Christ. Of course if one submitted fully then they could be brought into the ‘new world order’.  This phenomena was best described by the Science Fiction technological drone species of Star Trek fame called the" Borg"  Their greeting and  command is “We are the Borg, You will Assimilate. Resistance is futile”.  As reality is said to be stranger than fiction with have the Islam command of 'submit' and 'assimilate' and the communist demand that resistance is future.  Marx claimed that perpetual war between Bougeosie and Proletariat would lead to eventual world communism.
 The solution to herding cats for the Atheist Socialists of Communism was  killing 60 million dissidents in the USSR while making countless millions slave labour in the Gulags.  The Chinese communists killed a hundred million. The communist pol pot nearly halved their nation.  To date atheists appear the greatest most efficient killers of all time.  The thought experiment of Marxism has failed repeatedly but as a revolutionary strategy it’s been highly successful based on the paranoid reduction of ‘us and them’. It continues today all the rage in ‘identity politics’ . Any group with define itself by some characteristic, race, gender, height or weight or whatever and then self proclaim themselves as the ‘victim or oppressed" and the "other", whoever that is, then becomes the " victimizer or oppressor”.  Paranoid schizophrenics always view the world as 'us and them'.  The liberal language really is the language of insanity
The religious parallel has been Islam with a similar demand for assimilation called 'submission or the sword."  There is no freedom in Islam.   Second only to atheism Islam has killed more people in history than any other group.  Islam means ‘submit’ and here the superstition is that everyone must submit to Allah with the underlying unconscious belief that with collective agreement the group will have the pleasure of the deity. The idea of deviance in the tribe was that any difference and individual might attract destruction for the group.
In the early tribal history the great fear was climate changes like drought and floods which affected crops.
Today we have the fear mongering Climate Change Cult demanding ‘consensus’ or the sky will fall and earth will die. Their racket is saving Gaia the planet, a mother earth god.  It’s really surprising how little progress is made mimetically when the themes are considered.  Virgins were sacrificed en mass for the Mayans and Aztecs to ensure the Climate Change Cult of the day, mathematicians with rock computers could maintain their plush lush lifestyle.  The surface looks different but at the deep level the same play of superstition and taboo persists. The elite manipulate the fears of the masses and in return gain more power and control and of course virgins, boys or girls, depending on the flavour of the month.
Sharia communism is the interesting alliance of these two apparently different groups which have made an unholy allegiance no different from Hitler and Stalin, the two great socialisms of the day, Stalins’ International socialism’ and Hitler’s National Socialism’.  Both wanted world dominion.
Today the old communists continue to demand world dominion driven by their fears. These atheists kicked out of Russia by the return of Mother Church of Christendom.  Brussels and the UN persist in the Babylon  attempt at a Global State, atheist global rule, centrist communist authority, not surprisingly promoted by Merkel the former East German communist now nominally Lutheran.
Islam a carry over from medieval days continues with it’s monarchies and world dominion themes. The Hindus, Buddhists and Christians have all actually developed collectively to a federation of diversity in contrast to the two malignant forces of superstitious taboo and religiopolitical conformity. Islam determines the length of skirt of women whereas at one time communism dictated the colour of paint used in buildings. Political correctness is the series of taboos of the atheist religion.
After WWII the Security Council of the United Nations was made of China, Russia, USA, Britain, and France.  These are the allies that defeated the great Axis of evil, Germany, Italy and Japan.  The principle function of the Security Council was to maintain the status quo and it served as the major arms dealers in the world.  These competing military complexes persist to today.  The atheist religion of the USSR communism has been replaced by the reassertion of the mother centred Orthodox Christianity.  China remains atheist communist but Christianity and other god based religions have challenged the State atheist religion brand.  The British and French empires have similarly broken up while retaining freedom of religion.
In the war between atheist China and theistic India, India won  Now Indian, pluralistic theistic nation continues to be challenged by the Pakistani militant Islam.
In contrast to other religions, Islam has maintained it’s principle function as Jihad or War Religion of Assimilation.  In the time of the Crusades Islam's  violent invasion of the middle east and invasion of Europe through Spain and in Italy to Venice was only stopped by the combined forces of European Christendom. Mohammed is one of the greatest murderers of all time.  In India where the Hindus had been invaded and ‘put to the sword’ by the Muslims the British empire with it’s Naval Supremacy had established peace to support trade.  The Ottoman Empire was the largest land based empire of the day, the ethnic Turks with the Islam religion celebrated recurrent wars of victory against the infidel. Islam is a religion of constant jihad.  Ironically Islam claims to be a religion of peace and beheads anyone that disagrees.
Sharia Communism is the latest herding cats strategy. Both are religions of constant and perpetual war.
Liberalism demands adherence to the idea of ideological sexuality.  What "I think" defines my sex. Islam offers virgins in heaven. The socialism of the 60's separated child bearing from sex and with the birth control pill and abortion heralded the sexual revolution.  LGBT etc community has joined the liberal cause because the conservative position was celebrating the mother and family.   Feminism, itself  a sect of the daughter religion,  came as a war between the mother and daughter.  The attack of the daughter was against the mother’s choice of father and the allegiance between mother and father.  Lesbianism removed the need of father as more than 'sperm done' and the Trinity of family , central to the Trinity of Christen god was reduced to the dichotomy of Mother Daughter.  Not surprising transsexualism arises and men incapable of child bearing claim to be woman as the Daughter not the Mother is the god of this sect of Liberalism.  (Transexualism and hermaphritism and homosexuality and bisexuality have always been present throughout history but never as the dominant authority they have today. Lord of the Flies and 1984 are all prescient)
The adolescent rebellion was death based and abortion of the grand children and threat of suicide if you don’t join me against him was central to this dynamic. Women in this reductionist ideology were the ‘oppressed’ and men were the ‘oppressor’. In fact daughters or feminists were principally oppressed by their mothers who were aligned with the Strong man.  The divide and conquer of liberalism and today’s identity politics has resulted in the elite rich gaining more power than all previous history, the division between wealth and poverty accelerating with increasingly liberal Power Couples such as Hillary and Bill Clinton and Michelle and Barack Obama and Sophie and Justin Trudeau all claiming to represent the gender divided populace of modern liberalism.  All of these purported to support the individual all the while the remain 'family' groupings of profound wealth and bring to mind the Ottoman Empire's use of Eunuch's to maintain their power.  Power Couples and Power Families compete for the adults.  In Canada in an attempt to get greater votes the Liberals wish to expand the electorate to adolescence because the message of the liberal brand sells best to youth.  Western youth like the children of monarch's remain attached to the umbilical chord of the family for ever increasingly lengths of time.
Abortion has been a principle liberal tenant along with euthanasia resulting in Liberalism being defined by some as the Religion of Death. Ironically while they cry wolf with the ‘skies falling’ and the “world's going to end’ so we much tax carbon, the very air we breathe, they celebrate killing of the unborn and old. Traditionaly a culture was judged by how well it treated its children, invalids and old. The so called 'multiculturalism' of the state by definition is therefore no more than 'un cultured'. The world is collectively the Wild West.
Islam by contrast to Communism has been able to maintain ‘submission’ for hundreds of years. The Communist totalitarianism lasted a mere hundred by comparison so the joining of Sharia and Communism purports to be a much more powerful mechanism of ‘herding cats’.
The idea since agricultural times is for the elite to have as much freedom and control and for the rest to do the work and obey. Submit. Resistance is futile.
Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly are freedoms that westerners, especially Canadians, take for granted not realizing that none of these exist in Communist countries or Islam.  The beauty of both Communism and Islam and today's UN and Brussels is that they ensure the most centralized authority and wealth to the fewest people who are at the top.
I asked a person who survived communism what it was like when the Berlin Wall fell and USSR dissolved. He said, “We were poor before. We were not able to complain or we’d be put in jail.  Then we remained poor and maybe even poorer but we were able to complain.  The leaders stopped calling themselves communists and called themselves businessmen. They were the same people, just different names.  And we just became complaining poor people."  Different names. The language of the Liberals.
The Oligarchs of China are the present Committee Communist central authority dictators.  Lenin actually called it 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat."  George Carlin the comedian does the best skit on the Rulers.  "They don't care about us."   Once the emperor was Mao, today it’s Xi Jinping.  No one can imagine the personal wealth and power of this man Xi Jinping. The key is the language of politics.
Corporations represent the Medieval baroncies.  They’re a parallel power to the existing nations, transnational entities like the Secret Societies, like Free Masons of olden days. They have their own security forces or armies or police.
The Secular Age would argue that religion is no more but it’s alive and well in Atheist Communism and Islam. The question is really about Centrist or Federalist authority.  The whole of the American constitution was about State and Federal Powers, local versus distant power,  as these were deemed by the founding fathers as most important.  In Canada, the British Empire kept the Commonwealth a loose federalist association with the central authority dominating so that the Monarch could maintain power. Canadians still colonials never appreciate the extent of the propaganda of their central authority Communist Broadcasting Corporation as compared to the State Powers in the Us union or federation.  This  monarch centrist position was greatest in the Calif role of the Ottoman Empire and today exists with King Saud of Saudi Arabia who dictates not only his country and distant resources but also creates the jihad religion of sunni wahabi and the Mecca central control mechanism.   Blood related elites and dynastic rule like the Bush family and the brand Trudeau can't compete with hundreds of years of rule and a medieval peasant society kept with fewer freedom than the middle age Christians.   It really was surprising however that the Clinton brand was Trumped.
In totalitarian countries everyone is trying to escape hence the Iron Curtain communist attempt to keep everyone in and the Migrant movement out of Muslim countries to the freedom of the west.  Trump's wall and the historic immigration policies of the west have been principally to keep people out.  Sharia totalitarianism appeals only to the elite.  The Population Jihad of Islam is no different than the rise of the once defeated aboriginal class of Canada’s whose baby force has increased the percentage of native vote and power exponentially while the feminist anti mother class has celebrated the great abortionist Morgetaller and the white race has self imploded. A major problem of all States is what to do with the defeated as they tend to come back to rule in revenge and blood feuds.
Censorship, whether it is the newest version, against “hate speech’ and “islamaphobia’ is no different than that done against the LGBT community where government officials poured over salacious material deciding which to share with the adult population while claiming to defend children from smut, all the while concealing the pedophila rings which hid in the privacy of the elite and their secret societies.
The activist always claims to be fighting on behalf of others less fortunate while denying their own aggression and resentment. Lenin, the murderous lawyer, killed the Czar because the Czar had killed Lenin’s brother when the same tried to kill the Czar. There’s a basic blood feud theme that runs through the elite. Politics makes strange bedfellows and the ultimate rulers to the most of us may as well be the warring and sexing Greek Gods of yore. Todays' afternoon television reigns in the prevailing families which apparently have dominated the world since early days in Italy.
In the Bhagadva Gita Arjuna the boy looks to Krishna the God and says the war is between my relatives. Krishna says, yes, and the decision is whether to participate or not.  All is ultimately civil war and the trick is to convince your side that the other side is 'not human'.
The Dalai Lama's escape from Tibet when the Chinese atheist communist war machine,  machine gunned the peaceful isolated meditating monks en mass continues with ethnic cleansing and genocide today.  The message though is the same as Cappodocea where the Christians built underground cities with Churches or the Meteora where the Christians built monasteries' on pinnacles, until we get individual space ships there's simply no place to escape Atheist Communism and/or Islam. These are the barbarians of today and wherever they go they rape pillage and destroy history and cultures.  "We are the Borg.  You will Assimilate.  Resistance is futile."
The Liberal cause does not address the genoscide and cultural assimilation of the Tibetans but rather celebrates the militaristic Palestinians and calls the Israeli oppressors. The modern United Nations outside of the real politic of the Security Council has become a Sharia Communist western funded propaganda organ against Israel.  Christians are persecuted and killed en mass in Muslim and Atheist Communist territories but Feminist Liberal Leaders like Jutin Trudeau smoking pot and giving tens of  millions to terrorists ignores the persecution of Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sik, Zorastrians, Bahi, etc . They claim taht the persecutors of Islam and Aethiesm are instead the persecuted. The Marketing Agents of Liberalism maintain that if you tell a lie enough it will be thought to be a truth. Certainly this is the finding of Dr. Peterson who has studied the increasing ignorance of college students who actually are en mass ignoring reality with the help of Liberal professors and widespread availability of drugs.
The language of the Liberal is a religious deceit.  Black is white and white is black.
Addiction, the great idolatry, is described as having sex with a blow up doll and calling it love. Liberalism and the Islam's tribal taqiyya, the doctrine of deception, are akin in that they are ideological definitions of right and wrong with no basis in actual truth or common sense or reality as most understand it.  The communists controlled their nation with their political police just as Islam controls their people with  religious police.
The ends justify the means and the ends is after perpetual rule, the last man standing. For now politics makes strange bedfellows and where once Stalin and Hitler had a Bromance , the  Atheist communists figure they can use Islam to achieve world dominance while Islam figures they can achieve world dominance.