Simple on Socialism

1955: [Best read accompanied by a CD of Noel Coward songs, particularly the one about the Duchess whose son went red.]

Babes in the bath

You may see Socialism as a great road, stretching to infinity across a barren, waterless waste. Along it trudge half the peoples of the world, bowed, manacled, parched, exhausted. By the verges lie the gaunt wrecks of crashed and burnt-out nations; and skeletons picked clean by vultures and bleached by the pitiless sun.

Appalled by the prospect before them, certain Socialists, fainter in heart or stronger in head than the rest, have hesitated, halted or even turned back. These are now rebuked by Prof. G.D. H. Cole, who still steps stoutly ahead, undeterred, undeterrable, invincibly blind and cheerful.

Be of good courage, he bids his wavering comrades. "Much has been done bacdly amiss in the Soviet Union," he concedes but the Soviet worker enjoys "in most matters...an immensely enlarged freedom." To throw away Socialism because it can be "perverted" to serve totalitarian ends is "to throw out the baby with the dirty bath-water."

This is familiar [indeed, I heard it from my very modern and freethinking English grandfather, so Mr. Simple isn't making it up, it was the popular train of thought with early 20th c. upper-middle class English socialists. ed.] and most m anifest nonsense. What has gone "amiss" in Socialist countries is not mere chance disfigurement, like a false moustache scrawled by a madman on a masterpiece. It is Socialism itself, taken to its logical conclusion.

The death of freedom, the enslavement of the masses, the withering of art and culture, the restless, ruthless hunt for scapegoats, the aggressive folie de grandeur of Socialist dictators - these are no mere "perversions" of Socialistm. They are Socialism unperverted, an integral and predictable part of any truly Socialist system.

We are not faced here with so much dirty bath-water surrounding a perfectly healthy, wholesome Socialist baby. The dirty bathwater is Socialism, and the baby was drowned in it at birth."

Music, Monks and the Melancholic Tory

A friend of mine is culling his CD herd and I am the grateful recipient of a lot of his castoffs. It's quite a pile and a great deal more than I would be able to afford if I took it upon myself to buy them. Collections of Bach's concerti and sonatas from Deutsche Grammophon, a pile of Vivaldi's violin concerti and whatnot.

Right now I'm working through a 8-disk set of medieval and baroque music from Spain, Espana Antigua by Jordi Savall (who looks surprisingly like Robert DeNiro if the picture is to be believed,) and all his little friends. For some reason I am cottoning on to medieval Spanish music lately. I quite enjoyed disk #2 which is mostly 14th. c. It's cheery and bouncy. Medieval rockabilly.

Funny to think that people in the 14th.c. were sticking in bits of Gregorian chant for the same sort of dreamy antique effect for which it is prized by modern pop singers today. It is easy to forget that by the 14th.c. the good bits of the middle ages were already pretty much wrapping up and stuff like Gregorian was already hundreds of years out of date. Of course, the Plague was shortly to come along and lend considerable assistance to the project of sweeping aside the old order.

* ~ * ~ *
Speaking of monks,

I did a thing today on that Carthusian monk movie. I was struck particularly by a comment the director made about his experience coming back down from the mountain into the seething atmosphere of the 21st. century.

"When I left the monastery... having had this experience of living with people who are pretty free of fear makes you realize how fear-driven our society is. We tend to say that our society is driven by consumerism or greed but it’s not true. Greed, consumerism, wanting to have a new Porsche, for example, is a disguise of pure fear. It’s a near panicking society..."

* ~ * ~ *

Just reading the obit in the (UK) Spectator of Michael Wharton, aka Peter Simple, one of English journalism's last great Tory satirists, and again thanking God, (with Whom I seem to be having very slightly improved relations lately) that I knew John Muggeridge long enough for him to drag me out of my sinkhole of journalistic, political and literary ignorance.

No less a personage than A.N. Wilson wrote the piece in the Spec: "In the death of Michael Wharton we have lost both the funniest writer of our generation , and the truest. Time was when The Reactionary Times and Feudal Chronicle was scarcely distinguishable from those parts of the Telegraph, Daily and SUnday, written by Michael's friends, Colin Welch, Malcolm Muggeridge or Peregrine Worsthorne...

"Little by little, however, like the Welsh language or the Grey Elves in Tolkien, the Old Believers died out, and soon their voice was only to be heard in the 'Peter Simple' column.

"What he shared with the truly religious, (two of his wives were Catholics) was a perpetual sense of exile, and this sprang not from his non-English ancestry but from being a human being. The essential strangeness of life on this planet, especially in England during the period of her putrescent decline, would create this sense of exile in any but the insensitive."

I have two Simple books, starting in 1967 and am now able not only to know what the Spec's obit is talking about, but am able properly to mourn the loss of another one of the Old English Conservatives. I am becoming, perhaps, over sensitive to the loss of these old conservative English guys with Tory sensibilities and Catholic wives. They are disappearing at an alarming rate, and being replaced with humourless people who like David Cameron.

Certainly the gloomy mood that everything once great is fading away never to be recovered is palpable in all the books I have been reading lately. I fear to pick up another early 20th. century English writer. All the guys on my shortlist of Things I Must Get to Next are of the same ilk. Not fearfule so much, but more melancholie and nostalgick.

I was eyeing something by Waugh a minute ago and thinking about what to pick up after Robert Hugh Benson, but now I might have to read something less depressing. Maybe David Frum's stuff on how to be a good right wing American. They're much more cheerful.

* ~ * ~ *

Benson has been quite a wonderful discovery for which I have to thank not John this time but Fr. David Roche who said, quite rightly, that if I had liked Michael O'Brien's Catholic paranoia novels, I would loooove Benson who invented the genre. Benson is certainly one of those names that should have been household. Had he lived longer, he certainly would have been as famous among the early 20th c. English converts as Knox and Chesterton. I found his life by C.C. Martindale SJ., (another of that clique) as one of the overlooked leftovers from the Muggeridge collection.

Lord of the World was written at a time when the Great Ideological States were still only the stuff of the feverish dreams of conspiratorial apostates and syphilitic undergraduate maniacs. The old world was about to topple, but still looked solid enough to most. It was published in aught seven and in it, Benson predicts the late 20th century, post-war anti-Christian leftist stateism that we have now spreading its diseased tendrils everywhere.

He envisioned a terrible war between the socialistic West, which, too busy cramming its ideologies down the throats of a spiritually starving post-Christian populace, does not notice until too late the rise of the recently re-barbarized Eastern Empire.

In Benson's future, Protestantism is dead, finally splintered down to atomized particles so small that no one can reside in it. Catholicism is under legal attack everywhere in a socialist European Superstate.

In the first forty pages, one recognizes the modern world. And he wrote before electricity was common, before inter-continental communications, before the aeroplane for Pete sake! He predicts atomic weapons, the socialist welfare state, the EU, the rise of militant oriental religions and the ever-so-gentle, imperceptible destruction of the Church. I was especially struck by one scene in which a young woman witnesses the crash of a passenger plane ("volors" in Benson's astonishingly prescient imagination).

"...a voice hissed suddenly in her ears: “Let me through. I am a priest.”

She stood there a moment longer, dazed by the suddenness of the whole affair, and watched almost unintelligently the grey-haired young priest on his knees, with his coat torn open, and a crucifix out; she saw him bend close, wave his hand in a swift sign, and heard a murmur of a language she did not know. Then he was up again, holding the crucifix before him, and she saw him begin to move forward into the midst of the red-flooded pavement, looking this way and that as if for a signal. Down the steps of the great hospital on her right came figures running now, hatless, each carrying what looked like an old-fashioned camera. She knew what those men were, and her heart leaped in relief.

They were the ministers of euthanasia."


The one thing he didn't seem to foresee was that the Church would be colluding in its own destruction. In Beson's time, the Modernist crisis was thought to be over. Benson's future English Catholics, those who survive, still have the Mass, still rejoice (not apologise) over converts. It is the same, strong, coherent Catholicism he knew. I cannot help but wonder if his confidence might have been shaken by the capitulation of the Conciliar renewal. I wonder what he would have made of the Vatican's wheedling, dhimmi-esque press release on the Khartoon riots.

Certainly, if you enjoyed having your black-helicopter-secret-government-concentration-camp Catholic paranoia buttons pushed by Father Elijah or Eclipse of the Sun, it's worth tracking down a copy of Lord of the World.

I just can't resist one more boast though: my copy is signed "to Anne Muggerdige, Michael Davies, Park Cottage 1987."

!@#*@&!$# !!! Bell Canada!!!!

Bell Canada will have my internet up and running sometime soon.

Any minute now

aaaaaannnny minute now...

...

I have complete confidence in our glorious Revolutionary, Government-subsidised telephone service.

Everything is getting better and better under the watchful eye of our dear leaders. I entirely denounce the wicked plots of the US-backed cultural imperialists who would impose their so-called competetive dogmas on our economy.

The Love Pope

The lefties in the press, having set up their memes, are now shocked and horrified as Ratzi, like John Paul before him, openly defies their categorizations...

Could it be "part of a vast, rightwing Opus Dei conspiracy, one to set expectations so low that when his first encyclical was released giving us love, love, love everyone is perplexed"?

Hey, everyone said he was evil, and a Nazi and Hitler and everything...

What gives with all the love stuff? This must be a trick.

I have to say I burst out laughing when I read the New York Times headline: "Benedict's First Encyclical Shuns Strictures of Orthodoxy"

because, of course, if you're the New York Times, the entire doctrine and dogma, discipline and sacraments, art and history of the Roman Catholic Church is about contraception, abortion and gays. If the New York Times says that the Church's "strictures of Orthodoxy" are about the Big Three Topics, it must be so...

Now we have a Times columnist getting a clue. Do these people read nothing but each other's editorials?

So, we've never come across St. John of the Cross hey? Never heard of Teresa or Therese?

There's something here the crossed my mind. Perhaps Ratzi didn't like being the prefect of the CDF, a job that was far from using his talents to the full. A guy like Ratzinger, someone whose love of God needs to pour out of him in words, having only his piano to express it, cast by the whole world as the heavy, the Church's bad cop. Maybe he likes being pope better because he can tell us all the stuff he has been saving up and have the world's biggest pulpit to do it from.

Passionate Prose is a Real Revelation
By Ruth Gledhill
Times UK

I STARTED reading Deus Caritas Est expecting to be disappointed, chastised and generally laid low. An encyclical on love from a right-wing pope could only contain more damning condemnations of our materialistic, westernised society, more evocations of the “intrinsic evil” of contraception, married priests, homosexuality. It would surely continue the Church’s grand tradition of contempt for the erotic, a tradition that ensures a guilty hangover in any Roman Catholic who dares to indulge in lovemaking for any reason other than the primary one of reproduction. How wonderful it is to be proven wrong.

The first half of the encyclical, the part on eros written by the new Pope himself, is a startling revelation, almost akin to reading one of George’s Herbert’s poems on love and God, or C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves. The language itself verges at times on the erotic.

Believe me, happiness is shy,

And comes not aye when sought, man.


Happy Feast Day!
(translated in Canada to the following Sunday)

Today, one is obliged to be Scottish.

On the plus side, lovely lovely plaid, soft mists, echoing hills covered with heather, warm fires, and single malt whiskey.

on the down side...

Presbyterians and haggis.

One must take the good with the bad.

(For our friend John Cahill, our most loyal fan.)

* ~ * ~ *

Address Of Beelzebub

To the Right Honourable the Earl of Breadalbane, President of the Right
Honourable and Honourable the Highland Society, which met on the 23rd of May last at the Shakespeare, Covent Garden, to concert ways and means to frustrate the designs of five hundred Highlanders, who, as the Society were informed by Mr. M'Kenzie of Applecross, were so audacious as to attempt an escape from their lawful lords and masters whose property they were, by emigrating from the lands of Mr. Macdonald of Glengary to the wilds of Canada, in search of that fantastic thing-Liberty.
1786


Long life, my Lord, an' health be yours,
Unskaithed by hunger'd Highland boors;
Lord grant me nae duddie, desperate beggar,
Wi' dirk, claymore, and rusty trigger,
May twin auld Scotland o' a life
She likes-as butchers like a knife.

Faith you and Applecross were right
To keep the Highland hounds in sight:
I doubt na! they wad bid nae better,
Than let them ance out owre the water,
Then up among thae lakes and seas,
They'll mak what rules and laws they please:
Some daring Hancocke, or a Franklin,
May set their Highland bluid a-ranklin;
Some Washington again may head them,
Or some Montgomery, fearless, lead them,
Till God knows what may be effected
When by such heads and hearts directed,
Poor dunghill sons of dirt and mire
May to Patrician rights aspire!
Nae sage North now, nor sager Sackville,
To watch and premier o'er the pack vile, -
An' whare will ye get Howes and Clintons
To bring them to a right repentance-
To cowe the rebel generation,
An' save the honour o' the nation?
They, an' be d-d! what right hae they
To meat, or sleep, or light o' day?
Far less-to riches, pow'r, or freedom,
But what your lordship likes to gie them?

But hear, my lord! Glengarry, hear!
Your hand's owre light to them, I fear;
Your factors, grieves, trustees, and bailies,
I canna say but they do gaylies;
They lay aside a' tender mercies,
An' tirl the hallions to the birses;
Yet while they're only poind't and herriet,
They'll keep their stubborn Highland spirit:
But smash them! crash them a' to spails,
An' rot the dyvors i' the jails!
The young dogs, swinge them to the labour;
Let wark an' hunger mak them sober!
The hizzies, if they're aughtlins fawsont,
Let them in Drury-lane be lesson'd!
An' if the wives an' dirty brats
Come thiggin at your doors an' yetts,
Flaffin wi' duds, an' grey wi' beas',
Frightin away your ducks an' geese;
Get out a horsewhip or a jowler,
The langest thong, the fiercest growler,
An' gar the tatter'd gypsies pack
Wi' a' their bastards on their back!
Go on, my Lord! I lang to meet you,
An' in my house at hame to greet you;
Wi' common lords ye shanna mingle,
The benmost neuk beside the ingle,
At my right han' assigned your seat,
'Tween Herod's hip an' Polycrate:
Or if you on your station tarrow,
Between Almagro and Pizarro,
A seat, I'm sure ye're well deservin't;
An' till ye come-your humble servant,

Beelzebub.
June 1st, Anno Mundi, 5790.

"Keep your laws off my body and I'll keep my hands off your throat!!"

The face of tolerance in San Francisco.

Worth dying for?

At dinner with a friend the other night, we were discussing Canada and the perennial vexer, 'national identity.' We talked about the legitimacy, in Catholic teaching, of patriotism as one of the natural loves and whether it is possible to be a Canadian patriot under our current diminished circumstances. Does Canada qualify as a country for which one can have this natural love?

C.S. Lewis gave one of the best starter-kit descriptions I have yet come across for patriotism (which we must distinguish from nationalism.) Despite his reputation as a logician, Lewis had a keen sense of the poetic and visceral. He said, if I remember rightly, that patriotism is simply the natural love of one's home.

But we have a difficult conundrum here. Our home no longer loves us. It is difficult to see why those of us who have been used as a scapegoat in this election, who every party in the race has defined as the enemies of freedom and the principles upon which the country is founded, would continue to love that country. If your country hates you, can you be a patriot?

In the course of our conversation, my friend Neil pointed out that some months ago, there had appeared a little burst of letters to the editor from veterans who said that this thing created in the image and likeness of Pierre Trudeau was not the country they had fought for and for which many of their friends had given their lives.

That is an interesting question isn't it?

Would you die for Canada as it is defined by the Liberal party flackmachine? By Margaret Atwood, Peter C. Newman, Bill Graham and Irwin Cotler?

Who will write high heroic poetry about the New Canada? Who will go over the top of the trench for it? (Notice it seems silly to use the feminine pronoun "her".) Who now, after having been raised in the Liberal party's threatened child indoctrination centres, will love Canada for anything other than the handouts? The state-subsidized housing projects and medical care and state euthanasia centres to speed you painlessly on your way? As Steyn put it a few weeks ago, countries cannot make its secondary products into its primary aims.

How can one die for a meaningless abstraction like "multiculturalism"?

Canada suffers not only from an abandonment of its original guiding principles - they were not perfect, but they at least were founded in something concrete and related to the Natual Law - but from a surfeit, perhaps an obsession with things for which there is no concrete reality. Ephemeral and indefinable slogans have replaced the historic principles. Where we had notions like "Peace, order and good government," "God, the Queen and my country" (if I remember correctly from the Brownie pledge), we now have a state that bases itself on "a woman's right to choose." A euphemism that was devised to deceive, a slogan that leaves one wondering, "Choose what?" (But of course, with a finger laid to the side of the nose, we all know what the woman is choosing yes? No need to say it, no need to embarrass her or ourselves.)

Martin's hysterics in the last days of the campaign have, at last, shown us what this country is all about: Abortion.

It has been a pretty abortion-free campaign until he stated panicking and telling us what he really thinks. He has told us, the foundational right of the Nation of Rights-without-responsibilities, is abortion. Ours is the abortion state.

In the early days of the campaign, at the debates for example, the old Liberal party rule applied: never never use the "A" word.

For a very long time I have known that the one thing that is strictly off limits for discussion, is the one thing that must be protected, the heart of the matter, the holy of holies and core of our national identity. No other issue is protected so closely that we are forbidden to use the word: Abortion.

If we must mention it, we must use the approved slogans and euphemisms; the knowing wink that we all know what we are talking about, but that it is so sacred it must never be threatened by revealing its true name. This was a hard rule under Chretien, and was broken only on the back of Stockwell Day, that sweet man who never mentioned the "A" word either until the Globe and Mail was ordered by the Party to attack him on the subject.

But again we see it is the Liberal party secret weapon, being weilded very ineptly by Paul Martin. It has long been my thought that abortion being the one thing the Liberal party will never mention, never address in Parliament, never talk about in the media, is in fact, the foundation stone of their government. The right of a private citizen to kill another without even legal scrutiny, never mind legal repercussions, is the right that must ultimately undermine the proper rights of the government to rule.

Looking at it quite apart from the moral issue of whether it is acceptable to kill a defenceless innocent, the rammifications for a government who cedes the ultimate power over the lives of its citizens into the hands of the individual, is a government that has cut off its own feet.

So we have a strange situation. There is no capital punishment in Canada, and for various reasons, though I am in agreement with the Church that capital punishment must remain the right of the state, I sincerely hope that we do not reinstate it until political sanity has been restored. We have a government that on the one hand has deliberately denied itself its proper powers, has eliminated its international stature (once considerable) as a fighting force with a patriotic and strong-minded, stout-hearted populace, and on the other hand has granted the ultimate authority to kill citizens to anyone who wants to. (Oh, I correct myself, to any woman who wants to. But we will save the examination of this other inversion of the natural order for another day.)

It is why the whole enterprise of the New Canada will fail. It is failing of course, but the old assumptions held by most Canadians, (outside the 416 area code) are propping it up. A government that denies itself its proper authority, will not rule long. What I fear is that something much worse will replace it.

Something that does not fear to call itself what it is.

We have been liberated from freedom and citizenship and all to the tune of "rights." But a country that can invent new rights out of whole cloth can do anything. It may have ceded its proper earthly authority, but it has replaced that authority in its own fond imaginings, with godlike powers to invent "rights" ex nihilo. A state with such powers to grant "rights" to selected bodies of the population, is in a position to remove rights with equal facility from other bodies.

What has disturbed me in the course of the election campaign, is that the body most vilified, most demonized has been the chimera, "social conservatives." Harper, Martin, Layton and that other guy, have been unanimous in their characterization of this straw man as Canada's deadliest enemy. The trouble again, with undefined and indefinable slogans is that, having no concrete reality to create a distinction between what a thing is and is not, the indefinable definition can be applied to anyone. In the shifting sands of Canadian political opinion, a "social conservative" is a very useful label. It can be slapped on anyone who does not go along with the crowd.

Having been made the new scapegoats for the New Canada's set of indefinable defining slogans, Social Conservatives have become, without having done anything, enemies of the state. It would be interesting to insist to someone like Martin on a clear definition and examples. But of course, everyone who knows, knows. We know they are among us. They are everywhere. Why, your own family might harbour Social Conservatives. They might be sitting next to you in Church listening. They might be skulking around the water cooler at work. They might be taking notes on your conversation on the streetcar.

There is a lot wrong with this country, but I still find an amusing irony here. It is the Social Conservatives who are able to define Canada. The new breed of Canadian, having been raised in the shifting hall of mirrors that is postmodernism, cannot define a rock on which he has tripped. The Social Conservatives, are the type that are willing to give their lives for their country. They know how to define a country, without agonizing or editorializing or establishing a Royal Commission. They know too what value a country has. But we are the enemy, the snake in the grass seeking to destroy the new indefinitions.

By giving the very definition of Canada over to those who resist the principle of definitions, the New Canadians risk having their country disappear, as if it was eating its own tail and finally got to the head.

What will remain to govern those who live within the Old Canada's geographic territory is anyone's guess. But I don't imagine it will be somewhere I or any of my friends would want to live. I venure to guess also, it will not be to the liking of the latte-sipping Annex crowd either. The trouble is that by the time it arrives, people with the will to resist it will already have been made to disappear along with the old definitions.


I am a Canadian,
a free Canadian,
Free to speak without fear,
Free to worship God in my own way,
Free to stand for what I think right,
Free to oppose what I believe wrong,
Free to choose those who shall govern my country.
This heritage of freedom,
I pledge to uphold,
For myself and all mankind.

Toronto Pravda

If Canada were the old Soviet Union, Toronto would be wallowing in nostalgia for the glory days of Communist rule.

Led by The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, the Pravda and Isvestia of Canadian journalism, the entrenched media in Toronto are giant fronts for the old and decrepit Liberal/NDP establishment, wellsprings of agitprop for more and bigger government. On this election alone you could write a book about Toronto journalism and the relentless anti-Conservative twist embedded in most stories and opinion.


That's Terence Corcoran writing in the National Post.

The same National Post that is headed up by David Asper. Who is actively backing the Conservtives. Of course, that sounds good until you look at what kind of Conservative he is backing.

And the Rule of Law is...?

WHATEVER THE HELL WE SAY IT IS DAMMIT!

"I'm merely pointing out a fact that courts for the most part have been appointed by another party,"

And the other party is?

Justice Minister and Attorney General Irwin Cotler suggested Harper's statements had been "disrespectful of the rule of law, of the independence of the judiciary and the administration of justice."

and they've really picked some people with a firm and deep grasp of jurisprudence. yah.

McLachlin laid out her plan for the re-engineering of Canadian – or any like-minded liberal society – away from democratic principles saying, “The rule of law requires judges to uphold unwritten constitutional norms, even in the face of clearly enacted laws or hostile public opinion.”
McLachlin told the law students that Justices must be “emboldened” to supercede even the letter of such foundational documents as a nation’s constitution and that their role ought to supercede that of elected representatives. “I believe that judges have the duty to insist that legislative and executive branches of government conform to certain established and fundamental norms, even in times of trouble,” she said.

In Search of the Lost World of H.V. Morton

In between thinking Large Thoughts and following the election, I have been enjoying a set of books written by a charming English gentleman, and, in his time, famous travel writer, H.V. Morton.

Warren started me on him by giving me his book In the Steps of St. Paul last year. Just recently, I have been finding him everywhere. I got In the Steps of Our Lord somewhere recently; at least, there it was on my shelf one day so I assume I bought it.

Then when it came time to go prospecting in the Muggeridge library, I found an entire collection. My Morton library now boasts, In Search of England, Ireland (green leather binding and gold edges!), Scotland and Wales, In the Footsteps both of St. Paul and Our Lord. All filled with the lovliest descriptions of the people and places he met on his long rambles and interspersed with beautiful sepia-toned pictures of a world that was, in mere moments, about to disappear forever.

Much of his descriptions are slightly melancholy as, even in the 1920's, '30's and '40's the world he was describing was fading away like elves left behind. It is to this England that I have always wanted to run away, having been raised on books published before 1950. I have to keep reminding myself that were I to go and look for it, I would only end up disillusioned. Best to just keep reading the books I suppose.

I have In Search of England on my lap. Here is Morton's description of his visit to Cornwall:

"There is a strangeness about Cornwall. You feel it as soon as you cross the Tor Ferry. The first sight that pleased me was a girl with a shingled head driving a cow with a crumpled horn. I knew, of course, that I was in fairyland! And the next thing was a village that was trying to climb a hill. One whitewashed cottage had reached the top, but all the others had stuck half-way, with their gardens gazing in a rather surprised manner over their chimney pots. In these lovely, disorderly gardens some of the oldest men I have ever seen had apparently taken root in the act of watching the beans.

When I stopped to give the car a drink of water, a woman came to a cottage door with a jug. And she sang her words prettily, as the Welsh do! Like the Welsh, these people possess a fine Celtic fluency, so that their lies are more convincing than a Saxon truth."

Now I discover that there are quite a few H.V. fans out there. Enough to have a website or two.