Quotulatiousness

January 10, 2024

“[T]he prime minister is either three spins into a profound self-destructive spiral: or he really just does not care”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Line returns from the holidays with a solid betting pool on what the hell Prime Minstrel Justin Trudeau is thinking:

We at The Line have two theories, each championed by its respective editor; the prime minister is either three spins into a profound self-destructive spiral: or he really just does not care.

Theory 1: Trudeau is constitutionally incapable of stepping away from his current role. There are no viable leadership alternatives, and his party has been so centralized into a cult of personality that the Liberals may not not be able to recover from his departure.

At the same time, Trudeau is neither particularly capable as a prime minister, nor does he actually enjoy the role very much. After almost a decade in power, he’s been unable to champion a real vision for the country and he struggles to get anything done — long gone are the days of bold promises, replaced now by time extensions granted by the epically borked NDP. This has left him grasping for legacy policy changes that are largely superficial (and sometimes unconstitutional), if well meaning.

Most of Trudeau’s term has been reactionary, in the value-neutral sense that he has been forced to react to events and crises beyond his control or making, from the election of Trump and COVID, to the Trucker Convoy. Clearly, this job has taken a toll on him and his family and, at least subconsciously, he doesn’t actually want to do it anymore. But he just can’t bring himself to step aside and appear the coward before Pierre Poilievre.

So, essentially, this theory goes — he’s engaging in self sabotage. Consciously or otherwise, he’s replaying his previous poor judgment and ethical lapses because, deep in his heart, he wants to be fired.

If that’s a little too much pop psych for you all, the second theory is that Trudeau simply DGAF. He got away with all of those previous fancy holidays. Why not get away with this one? The usual partisans will scream and whine for a few days and we’ll all move on. He’ll get a nice vacation, and if it pleases the ex and makes the kids happy, well, all the better. Trudeau doesn’t care about optics or ethics because he doesn’t have to care; his critics don’t matter, and his supporters have clearly signalled that they are along for the ride no matter what he does.

Both of these theories may be true or wrong, but it will be interesting to ponder as 2024 plays out whether Trudeau’s greatest bane proves to be self-sabotage or indifference.

Your Line editors are opening the betting table now.

The unexpected rise in “Unknown Cause”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Mark Steyn rounds up some interesting details on that long-forgotten-by-the-media pandemic and corresponding heavy-handed government interventions that made things so much worse:

The obvious problem with appeals to authority, at least for anyone more sentient than an earthworm, is that across the western world the last four years have been one giant appeal to authority – and the result of mortgaging the entirety of human existence to the expert class is the rubble all around. Just for starters:

US scientists held secret talks with Covid ‘Batwoman’ amid drive to make coronaviruses more deadly

You don’t say! When would that have been? Oh:

…just before pandemic

Well, there’s a surprise!

    A new cache of documents, obtained by Freedom of Information campaigners and seen by The Mail on Sunday, reveal the extent to which the controversial work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was supported, and often funded, by America.

You got that right. Wuhan is the virological equivalent of a CIA black site in Pakistan: it’s where the Deep State goes to do the stuff it can’t do in suburban Virginia.

So how’s that working out for the planet? Way back in 2022, The Mark Steyn Show reported that “Unknown Cause” was now the leading cause of death in Alberta. According to the somewhat lethargic lads at Statistics Canada, taking eighteen month to catch up with yours truly, that same year it was the fourth leading cause of death across the entire country. “Unknown Cause” is rampaging from Nunavut igloos to the Hamas branch office in Montreal: Between 2019 and 2022, it was up almost five hundred per cent.

Does “Unknown Cause” have an awareness-raising ribbon like Aids or breast cancer? Are there any celebs who’d like to headline a gala fundraiser or do an all-star pop anthem?

Apparently not. Gee, it’s almost as if taking too great an interest in “Unknown Cause” can lead to a bad case of cancer of the career. Nevertheless, the official StatsCan numbers are, to put it at its mildest, odd. By the end of 2022, Canada was one of the most jabbed nations on earth, with a Covid vaccination rate of ninety-one per cent, the highest in the G7, by some distance (UK and US both at eighty per cent).

And yet, if these government numbers are to be believed, something very strange happened. In the most jabbed member of the G7, Covid deaths went up. As The Western Standard‘s Joseph Fournier noticed, while almost nobody else did, Covid deaths per annum across the Deathbed Dominion shot up 25 per cent from the days of curfews, and arrests for playing open-air hockey:

    2020 15,890

    2021 14,466

    2022 19,716

So, in Jabba Jabba Central, more people died of Covid in the most recent annual round-up than at the height of the pandemic. In fact, on those numbers, Canada has yet to reach “the height of the pandemic”. Here’s another striking feature – again, direct from Statistics Canada:

    During the first year of the pandemic, older Canadians (65 years of age and older) accounted for 94.1% of COVID-19 deaths, while those aged 45 to 64 years accounted for 5.3%. In 2021, while the number of COVID-19 deaths among individuals aged 65 years and older (82.0%) remained high, the proportion of deaths among those aged 45 to 64 years nearly tripled to 15.5%.

So, in the most vaxxed nation of the G7, middle-aged persons account for three times the proportion of Covid deaths than they did at “the height of the pandemic”.

Like I said: odd.

Canadian life expectancy? Down. Oh, just by four months or so. But that’s three times the size of last year’s drop.

Excess mortality? Indeed: In 2019 the age-standardised death rate was 830.5 per 100,000 people. In 2022 it was 972.5. As I’ve pointed out a gazillion times on telly, that’s the opposite of what’s meant to happen post-pandemic: After the Spanish Flu, the mortality rate fell because people who would otherwise have died in 1924 had already died in 1919. That phenomenon is visible in Eastern Europe, but nowhere in the Dominion of Death.

Last year I mentioned en passant to my friend Naomi Wolf that the Covid vaccines were beginning to remind me of the scandals of her old chum Bill Clinton: one such can do a politician in, but, if you have (as Slick Willy did) a multitude of ’em, who can follow it all? If Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca just caused, say, myocarditis, maybe people would find it easier to focus on. Instead, it causes myocarditis in men and infertility in women and, if you manage to dodge the latter, the mRNA shows up in newborn babies; it brings on Guillain–Barré syndrome and Ramsay Hunt syndrome and lightning-speed turbo-cancers. Alternatively, you could get a dose of the SADS and drop dead on stage or on the footie pitch, or at home watching the telly. It’s a lot to keep track of.

Or maybe, as in Alberta, you just die of … whatever. And nobody cares to find out.

The problem of engaging with “the great classical works”

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The first book review for 2024 at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf is a look at Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus by John Psmith:

    It is easier, given his nature, for a human being to rule all the other kinds of animals than to rule human beings. But when we reflected that there was Cyrus, a Persian, who acquired very many people, very many cities, and very many nations, all obedient to himself, we were thus compelled to change our mind to the view that ruling human beings does not belong among those tasks that are impossible … We know that Cyrus, at any rate, was willingly obeyed by some, even though they were distant from him by a journey of many days; by others, distant by a journey even of months; by others, who had never yet seen him; and by others, who knew quite well that they would never see him. Nevertheless, they were willing to submit to him.

I am not well-read in the classics. My excuse ultimately boils down to the same argument that all the classicists give for why you should be well-read in the classics: reading a book that has been widely admired for a very long time isn’t just reading a book, it’s entering into a “great conversation” taking place across the aeons. I feel awkward reading a book like that without knowing something about the commentaries on the book, all the people it has influenced, all the people who influenced it, the commentaries on the commentaries, and so on. It’s exhausting and overwhelming, and when I ignore all that and plunge ahead, I often don’t enjoy the book and then I feel dumb. A “great conversation” sounds nice, but only if you’re one of the participants and you actually get the inside jokes and references. Otherwise it’s as alienating and isolating as showing up to a party where you don’t know anybody, and where everybody else has already been chatting for a few thousand years.

I don’t remember who recommended Xenophon’s Cyropaedia to me or how it wound up on my reading list, but when it finally made its way to the top of my stack, I saw it and shuddered. How could I possibly appreciate this semi-fictionalized biography of the founder of the Persian Empire without first being familiar with Xenophon’s work as a mercenary for one of Cyrus the Great’s distant descendants? Or with all the ways he was riffing on and responding to the political philosophy of his frenemy Socrates? Or with the complicated politics of the Peloponnesian War, and the way that Xenophon, an Athenian exile and the original Sparta-boo, was actually writing PR for King Agesilaus II, but concealing it within a story about the exotic Persians?1 Or with how this book led to the creation of an entire major genre of books in the Middle Ages? Or with the most famous and subversive instance of that genre, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and with all the hundreds of subsequent works reacting and responding to that one?

You see the problem? One could very easily conclude that it would be impossible for me to appreciate this book. Fortunately, I ignored all that and read it anyway. No doubt I missed all kinds of subtle layers of meaning and nuance, but even read on a totally superficial level by an ignoramus, this book rocks.

The title has the word “education” in it, but the book covers Cyrus’s entire life and reign, and only the first section concerns his education in the literal sense. That first section is very important to what comes next, though, so I’m going to dwell on it a bit. Cyrus, along with the other Persian boys of his social class, is being trained to lead. And so their education is centered around having lots of opportunities to judge, instruct, and coerce others; but also opportunities to serve and obey. If you’re old enough, you might remember when the education of the American leadership class worked this way too, but even those of you who are younger have seen vestiges of it in the bizarrely disproportionate weight given to extracurriculars in US college admissions.

    1. If you’re an American, then you’re already familiar with this trick. Most of our debates about the virtues and vices of other nations are just thinly-veiled attempts to “own” domestic political opponents.

How to Sharpen and Set up a No.80 Scraper | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 6 Oct 2023

The #80 cabinet scraper handles the wildest grain, but because of its name, it is also one of those misunderstood tools with misunderstood sharpening.

In this video, I walk you through the most unique sharpening method there is for any woodworking hand tool. Once you learn how to sharpen and set up this tool, you’ll be able to refine any hard and dense-grained wood surface you will ever encounter, bar none.

Where the hand plane might fail you, the #80 cabinet scraper takes over.
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QotD: The root of leftism is envy

Filed under: Books, Economics, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    “Social justice” is sacralized envy.

Which fits a lot better on a Pepe the Frog meme, you must admit.

Note also the slight, but important, change in emphasis — from “hate” to “envy”. Recall that [Economics in One Lesson author Henry] Hazlitt was writing in 1946, when material deprivation was still a thing, even for Americans. Back then it was assumed that the hate sprang from the envy, which meant that the hatred could eventually be dissipated. It implied an endpoint. Hazlitt, like seemingly everyone else on the Right, took Lefties at their word — that some level of “equality”, by which they meant material prosperity, would cause the Left to finally hang up their jocks and hit the showers.

Three quarters of a century later, we know that’s not true. There’s nothing you could give them that would ever satisfy them. Go ahead, do it Jesus-style — turn the other cheek, give them your coat and your cloak, walk with them two miles, all that jazz. You know as well as I do what will happen — they’ll still hate you. It doesn’t matter what the “reasons” are. Before, they hated you because they didn’t have a coat and cloak. Now they’ve got yours, but they still hate you, because you’re right-handed, or blonde, or have webbed toes. Or because you don’t have webbed toes.

Whatever, something, anything. I won’t bother repeating the O’Brien quote from 1984; you’ve heard it enough by now to know what I mean when I say that for the Left, the point of envy is envy. They don’t envy you for what you have. They don’t even envy you for what you are. They just envy. The mere fact that you exist, a separate entity from them, means that they’re not all there is in the world. In other words — French judges, take note — we’re down to three words:

    Leftism is solipsism.

They envy your mere existence, since you are the walking, talking proof that not everything in this world is as shriveled and petty and miserable as they are.

Severian, “Crossing the Bar”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-06.

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