I want to begin with an observation, obvious but frequently ignored: states are complex things. The apparatus by which a state gathers revenue, raises armies (with that revenue), administers justice and tries to organize society – that apparatus requires people. Not just any people: they need to be people of the educated, literate sort to be able to record taxes, read the laws and transmit (written) royal orders and decrees.
(Note: for a more detailed primer on what this kind of apparatus can look like, check out Wayne Lee’s (@MilHist_Lee) talk “Reaping the Rewards: How the Governor, the Priest, the Taxman, and the Garrison Secure Victory in World History” here. He’s got some specific points he’s driving at, but the first half of the talk is a broad overview of the problems you face as a suddenly successful king. Also, the whole thing is fascinating.)
In a pre-modern society, this task – assembling and organizing the literate bureaucrats you need to run a state – is very difficult. Literacy is often very low, so the number of individuals with the necessary skills is minuscule. Training new literate bureaucrats is expensive, as is paying the ones you have, creating a catch-22 where the king has no money because he has no tax collectors and he has no tax collectors because he has no money. Looking at how states form is thus often a question of looking at how this low-administration equilibrium is broken. The administrators you need might be found in civic elites who are persuaded to do the job in exchange for power, or in a co-opted religious hierarchy of educated priests, for instance.
Vassalage represents another response to the problem, which is the attempt to – as much as possible – do without. Let’s specify terms: I am using “vassalage” here because it is specific in a way that the more commonly used “feudalism” is not. I am not (yet) referring to how peasants (in Westeros the “smallfolk”) interact with lords (which is better termed “manorialism” than as part of feudalism anyway), but rather how military aristocrats (knights, lords, etc) interact with each other.
So let us say you are a king who has suddenly come into a lot of land, probably by bloody conquest. You need to extract revenue from that land in order to pay for the armies you used to conquer it, but you don’t have a pile of literate bureaucrats to collect those taxes and no easy way to get some. By handing out that land to your military retainers as fiefs (they become your vassals), you can solve a bunch of problems at once. First, you pay off your military retainers for their service with something you have that is valuable (land). Second, by extracting certain promises (called “homage”) from them, you ensure that they will continue to fight for you. And third, you are partitioning your land into smaller and smaller chunks until you get them in chunks small enough to be administered directly, with only a very, very minimal bureaucratic apparatus. Your new vassals, of course, may do the same with their new land, further fragmenting the political system.
This is the system in Westeros, albeit after generations of inheritance (such that families, rather than individuals, serve as the chief political unit). The Westerosi term for a vassal is a “bannerman”. Greater military aristocrats with larger holding are lords, while lesser ones are landed knights. Landed knights often hold significant lands and a keep (fortified manner house), which would make them something more akin to European castellans or barons than, say, a 14th century English Knight Banneret (who is unlikely to have been given permission to fortify his home, known as a license to crenellate). What is missing from this system are the vast majority of knights, who would not have had any kind of fortified dwelling or castle, but would have instead been maintained as part of the household of some more senior member of the aristocracy. A handful of landless knights show up in Game of Thrones, but they should be by far the majority and make up most of the armies.
There’s one final missing ingredient here, which is castles, something Westeros has in abundance. Castles – in the absence of castle-breaking cannon – shift power downward in this system, because they allow vassals to effectively resist their lieges. That may not manifest in open rebellion so much as a refusal to go on campaign or supply troops. This is important, because it makes lieges as dependent on their vassals as vassals are on their lieges.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.
February 9, 2023
QotD: Collecting taxes, Medieval-style
February 7, 2023
Making Canada’s gun laws more illogical, but appealing to urban Liberal voters, regardless of the political cost elsewhere
In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts the federal government’s political gyrations over their attempt to ban vast numbers of rifles and shotguns owned by law-abiding Canadians:
Classifying guns is complicated. There are a lot of ways to do it. You can do it by the “action”: is it a pump action? A lever action? Is it semi-automatic, or even fully automatic? You can do it by the length of the total firearm, or the length of just the barrel. You can do it by the caliber of the ammunition. You can do it by the type of magazine the firearm uses, and what its capacity is (the magazine is the compartment, which can be removable or integrated with the firearm, that holds the ammunition). You can try and be targeted with your definitions, or you can just go across the board and say “All rifles are allowed but all handguns are banned.” The point here isn’t to argue what the policy should be, but simply to note that whatever your policy is, you have to be able to define it in a way that makes sense.
Canada’s current gun laws date, more or less, to the 1990s. They’ve been changed a bunch of times since, for better or worse, but that’s when the current overall system of firearms legislation began. We came up with three broad categories of firearm then. There are “non-restricted” firearms, which you must be licensed to own, and mostly mean very typical rifles and shotguns, of which millions of licensed Canadians own many millions. There’s also the “restricted” category, which basically meant handguns — either semi-automatic pistols or revolvers. These require extra licensing, more background checks and training, and are subject to much stricter conditions for storage and use. And then there’s the very rare “prohibited” firearms, which are mostly either very compact handguns, or fully automatic weapons, including machine guns, which were owned by Canadians already when the new laws came in almost 30 years ago. These owners were given a special and highly limited rights to retain the firearms they already owned, but not to transfer them to others, except to someone else with a rare prohibited licence, or to a direct descendent. (That last bit was to cover family heirlooms.)
None of the above is as simple as I’ve just described it. Weird absurdities have been part of the system from the outset. The reason for these absurdities was always political. Back in the 1990s, the Liberals, under then-prime minister Jean Chrétien, realized that the categories above would result in certain kinds of rifle (including the AR-15) being classified as non-restricted, and subject to the least onerous controls. Unhappy with the optics of that, and other similar examples, they wrote in exceptions to the way some firearms are categorized. A firearm would be categorized by its technical specifications unless the government specifically ordered it classified as something else, is probably the easiest way to summarize a complicated policy.
Using the AR-15 again, according to the “evergreen” technical definitions we settled on in the 1990s, that’s a non-restricted gun. To avoid awkward political questions, the then-Liberals deemed it a “restricted” firearm, and therefore subject to tighter controls.
There were other similar examples, and they resulted, as noted above, in a lot of absurdities, with very similar guns categorized differently, but since only a relatively small number of firearms were so specially categorized, the system more or less functioned reasonably well for decades. The absurdities were limited enough to be broadly known and adapted to, and the overall system made enough sense to function coherently enough to do a reasonably good job regulating the sale, ownership and use of firearms in Canada. And very successfully: gun crime by licensed gun owners in Canada is, as is well known, quite rare. The system basically worked, and was working.
[…]
But hey, then politics happened. The sunny ways days ended. Liberal fortunes waned. Scandals and baggage and awkward photos of the PM in his younger days accumulated. And suddenly, the Liberals were talking a lot about banning assault rifles. They talked about it even more after the 2019 election reduced them to a parliamentary minority, leaving them dependent on a cluster of urban and suburban ridings in Quebec and Greater Toronto where support for just about any half-coherent sounding gun-control measure is typically high. The Liberals didn’t do much of anything — mostly just talk, as is their style. Then, in early 2020, there was the horrific massacre in Nova Scotia, and within days, the Liberals announced they were banning 1,500 models of assault rifle. (It was actually far fewer — closer to 20 — but the Liberals counted each different version and brand as an entirely different rifle to get to a more-impressive sounding figure. Those fierce opponents of disinformation at work again!)
Anything even close to meeting a broadly shared definition of “assault rifle” was already banned in Canada, of course — it had been classified “prohibited” back in the 1990s. There’s no universally agreed upon definition of an “assault rifle”, but those who know guns could agree in broad terms what it would mean — and in Canada, they were all banned, and had been for decades. So the Liberals, keen to have their lookin’-tough-and-bold moment, started talking about “assault-style” rifles.
Appending “-style” to anything is a gigantic red flag for bullshit, as I’ve noted here before. That somehow failed to deter them, alas, setting the stage for their current woes.
February 6, 2023
Food prices going up? Destroying “excess” production? That’s Canada’s Supply Management system working at peak efficiency!
Jon Miltimore reports on recent comments about some of the weird requirements for quota-holding dairy farmers under the Canadian Supply Management system:
Canadian dairy farmer is speaking out after being forced to dump thousands of liters of milk after exceeding the government’s production quota.
In a video shared on TikTok by Travis Huigen, Ontario dairy farmer Jerry Huigen says he’s heartbroken to dump 30,000 liters of milk amid surging dairy prices.
“Right now we are over our quotum, um, it’s regulated by the government and by the DFO (Dairy Farmers of Ontario)”, says Huigen, as he stands beside a machine spewing fresh milk into a drain. “Look at this milk running away. Cause it’s the end of the month. I dump thirty thousand liters of milk, and it breaks my heart.”
Huigen says people ask him why milk prices are so high.
“This here Canadian milk is seven dollars a liter. When I go for my haircut people say, ‘Wow, seven dollars Jerry, for a little bit of milk'”, he says, as he fills a glass of the milk being dumped and drinks. “I say well, you have to go higher up. Cause we have no say anymore, as a dairy farmer on our own farm. They make us dump it.”
[…]
In the United States, the primary regulations are high-level price-fixing, bans on selling unpasteurized milk (which means farmers have to dump their product if dairy processors don’t buy it), and “price gouging” laws that prevent retailers from increasing prices when demand is low, which incentivizes hoarding.
In Canada, the regulations are even worse.
While the price-fixing scheme for milk in the US is incredibly complicated and leaves much to be desired — there’s an old industry adage that says “only five people in the world know how milk is priced in the US and four of them are dead” — in Canada the price is determined by a single bureaucracy: the Canadian Dairy Commission.
The Ottawa-based commission (technically a “Government of Canada Crown Corporation”), which oversees Canada’s entire dairy system (known as Supply Management), raised prices three times in 2022, citing “the rising cost of production”.
Food price inflation remains a serious issue in Canada, but the problem is particularly acute in regards to dairy products, which has seen their annual inflation rate triple over the past year, to almost 12 percent.
If the farmers were doing this sort of price-fixing themselves, it would be illegal. Instead, because it’s the government doing it, it’s mandatory. You aren’t allowed to produce any of the supply-managed products outside the system, and the government helpfully protects Canadians from being “victimized” by cheaper imports by high tariffs on anything competing with supply managed output.
As with any rigged market, the costs of “protecting” the market are diffused among all Canadian consumers, but the benefits are concentrated in the hands of the quota-holders (and the bureaucrats who oversee the system). My issues with the supply management system are one of the “hobby horses” I’ve ridden many times over my nearly 20 years of blogging.
January 24, 2023
QotD: The primary goal of a bureaucracy
Theodore Dalrymple, “Kafka’s Victory”, City Journal, 2005-01.
January 22, 2023
It’s not plunder if you wrap it into a “communications contract” with a “consultant”
Paul Wells notices an oddity with current federal government ministers’ continued dependence on outside contractors to help them with “communications”:
Immigration minister Ahmed Hussen at the Toronto Caribbean Carnival in 2017.
Photo by Bruce Reeve via Wikimedia Commons.
We’ll circle back to some specifics in a minute, but I’m fascinated by the notion of “communications” embodied here. I have questions.
- Four, five and seven years after being elected, who still needs communications help? You tell your voters the world will end if they elect the other team. A reporter calls, you send them bullshit. This isn’t exactly tricky.
- In what sense is this “communications”? Look at what Munch More Media did when Global came calling. (1) They erased their website. (2) They scrubbed their IG. (3) They shut down their Twitter account, which Global says had a single follower. (4) They left their Instagram account, whose last post was from 2018, and their LinkedIn account, which lists four followers and names no employees, intact. This is not a company with a proud story to tell. There’s a term for a communications firm that uses no social media. It’s “A firm that had damned well better have a sister in the minister’s office.”
- Hussen’s office hopes you’ll believe that a cabinet minister’s constituency office and his ministerial office never talk, but they sure seem to have closely studied the example of Munch More Media when it comes to fielding reporters’ queries. “Hussen’s office — over multiple conversations this week — did not acknowledge any connection between the director of Munch More Media and one of his most senior advisers,” Global reports. Now that’s gold-star communicating.
- This approach to communications is having its desired effect. Quick: What on Earth is Ahmed Hussen the minister of? How about Mary Ng? Don’t worry, I’m stumped too. Can you quote anything either person has ever said about anything? Of course not. If Hussen — or, might as well shoot for the moon, Ng — resigned from cabinet today, a resolution I here heartily advocate, you’d have to spare some sympathy for the poor wire-service reporter who’d be expected to come up with some kind of ending for the sentence beginning, “The minister is best known for ____.”
- Hussen’s riding has been held by the Liberals (and one apostate Liberal, John Nunziata, after he left the caucus to sit as an Independent) since Hussen was three years old, except for four years after the 2011 election. It’s one of the most reliably Liberal ridings under the eye of God, except for four years after the 2011 election. The only communications material a Liberal in York South-Weston needs is a billboard saying, “Michael Ignatieff Is No Longer the Liberal Leader.”
Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks. Because that’s where the money is, he said. Well, communications contracts are the new banks. There will always be money in communications contracts, and, gloriously, the simple answer — “Answer the question” — is never correct. The goal of communications is not to communicate. It’s to figure out how to communicate as little as possible.
January 11, 2023
“[T]o the ordinary American, those values [diversity, equity, and inclusion] sound virtuous and unobjectionable”
John Sailer writes in The Free Press on the rapid rise of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy in American higher education:
Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
The principles commonly known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) are meant to sound like a promise to provide welcome and opportunity to all on campus. And to the ordinary American, those values sound virtuous and unobjectionable.
But many working in academia increasingly understand that they instead imply a set of controversial political and social views. And that in order to advance in their careers, they must demonstrate fealty to vague and ever-expanding DEI demands and to the people who enforce them. Failing to comply, or expressing doubt or concern, means risking career ruin.
In a short time, DEI imperatives have spawned a growing bureaucracy that holds enormous power within universities. The ranks of DEI vice presidents, deans, and officers are ever-growing — Princeton has more than 70 administrators devoted to DEI; Ohio State has 132. They now take part in dictating things like hiring, promotion, tenure, and research funding.
More significantly, the concepts of DEI have become guiding principles in higher education, valued as equal to or even more important than the basic function of the university: the rigorous pursuit of truth. Summarizing its hiring practices, for example, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering declared that “excellence in advancing equity and inclusion must be considered on par with excellence in research and teaching”. Likewise, in an article describing their “cultural change initiative”, several deans at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine declared: “There is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias.”
DEI has also become a priority for many of the organizations that accredit universities. Last year, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, along with several other university accrediting bodies, adopted its own DEI statement, proclaiming that “the rich values of diversity, equity and inclusion are inextricably linked to quality assurance in higher education”. These accreditors, in turn, pressure universities and schools into adopting DEI measures.
Much of this happened by fiat, with little discussion. While interviewing more than two dozen professors for this article, I was told repeatedly that few within academia dare express their skepticism about DEI. Many professors who are privately critical of DEI declined to speak even anonymously for fear of professional consequences.
The Invention of DEI
How has this fundamental shift taken place? Gradually, then all at once.
For decades, university administrators have emphasized their commitment to racial diversity. In 1978, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell delivered the court’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, taking up the question of racial preferences in higher education. Powell argued that racial preferences in admissions — in other words, affirmative action — could be justified on the basis of diversity, broadly defined. Colleges and universities were happy to adopt his reasoning, and by the 1980s, diversity was a popular rallying cry among university administrators.
By the 2010s, as the number of college administrators ballooned, this commitment to diversity was often backed by bureaucracies that bore such titles as “Inclusive Excellence” or “Diversity and Belonging”. Around 2013, the University of California system — which governs six of the nation’s top 50 ranked universities — began to experiment with mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements became a standard requirement in the system by the end of the decade. The University of Texas at Austin in 2018 published a University Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, which began to embed diversity committees throughout the university.
Then came the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. The response on campus was a virtual Cambrian explosion of DEI policies. Any institution that hadn’t previously been on board was pressured to make large-scale commitments to DEI. Those already committed redoubled their efforts. UT Austin created a Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, calling for consideration of faculty members’ contributions to DEI when considering merit raises and promotion.
White Coats For Black Lives, a medical student organization that calls for the dismantling of prisons, police, capitalism, and patent law, successfully petitioned medical schools around the country to adopt similar plans, including at UNC–Chapel Hill, Oregon Health & Science University, and Columbia University. In some cases, administrators even asked White Coats For Black Lives members to help craft the new plans.
All at once, policies that previously seemed extreme — like DEI requirements for tenure and mandatory education in Critical Race Theory — became widespread.
January 10, 2023
Repent, wrongthinker!
Neeraja Deshpande outlines the demands of the College of Psychologists of Ontario to send heretic wrongthinker Jordan Peterson to the re-education camp:
Jordan Peterson speaking at an event in Dallas, Texas on 15 June, 2018.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Have you seen the “men will literally do X instead of going to therapy” meme? It’s funny: Men will literally join 10 improv teams instead of going to therapy. Men will literally teach you how to open a can of beans for 6 hours instead of going to therapy. You get the drift.
Canada’s most famous public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, brought that meme to real life this week when he announced he’d rather never work again than be forced onto the couch.
I don’t blame him.
The College of Psychologists of Ontario has told Peterson that if he doesn’t go to therapy — sorry, a board-mandated “Coaching Program” with a board-issued therapist — it may revoke his license to practice psychology.
What warranted this ultimatum? A few tweets and a podcast.
According to Peterson, about “a dozen people” from around the world complained to the college about comments he had made on Twitter and on Joe Rogan’s podcast, claiming that those statements had caused “harm”.
In March, the college began investigating these complaints. Then, in November, the college informed Peterson: “The comments at issue appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole, and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.”
Among those comments: Calling an advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “prik”. Snarking at environmentalists for promoting energy policies that hurt children in developing countries. Using female pronouns in reference to the transgender actor Elliot Page. Declaring a plus-sized model on the cover of Sports Illustrated “not beautiful”. (This Wall Street Journal editorial has a good rundown.)
With perhaps one exception — a comment Peterson made calling a former, unnamed client “vindictive” — the public statements that triggered this whole affair are political snipes that have nothing to do with his capacity as a psychologist. Nevertheless, the College is demanding that Peterson not only go through a re-education program, but also that he sign off on the following statement: “I may have lacked professionalism in public statements and during a January 25, 2022 podcast appearance.”
Now, no one who has followed Peterson — presumably including the higher-ups at the College of Psychologists of Ontario — seriously believes he would agree to such a request. He has confirmed as much on Twitter. (This is a guy who burst onto the scene in 2016 after refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns.) And Peterson is famous enough at this point to be inoculated against the financial consequences of refusing to submit, which the college must know.
The college’s statement, then, is not a message to Peterson, but a message to other would-be dissenters: Comply with our politics, or risk losing your livelihood.
January 8, 2023
QotD: Unintended consequences, fuel economy division
whenever americans say that they *need* a massive pickup truck that gets 12mpg just show them the Subaru Sambar
utility vs. ego pic.twitter.com/NqexDbQcok
— sam (@sam_d_1995) May 11, 2022In response, a lot of people will defend their big truck purchase by saying they need a larger vehicle for their family, their business, or just because they like it. And to an extent, market forces are partly responsible for the increase in truck sizes, particularly when it comes to features like crew cabs. But it turns out that even a lot of people who like the big trucks don’t know the full story of how their trucks got so big.
The rest of the story is something the folks at Freakanomics might enjoy because it is a classic tale of unintended consequences. In brief, Obama-era fuel regulations incentivized automakers to build bigger trucks.
One particular goal of the Obama Administration was to increase fuel efficiency through the typical political process: telling someone else to do it. To that end, the DOT and the EPA handed down a series of standards that nearly doubled the miles-per-gallon requirements for cars and light trucks.
The administration praised their own new standards as “groundbreaking”. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood predicted that the program would “result in vehicles that use less gas, travel farther, and provide more efficiency for consumers than ever before”.
The intent was to put pressure on automakers and force them to work out the engineering to meet the tough new standards. Their blindspot was failing to recognize that by placing the regulations solely on cars and small trucks, they had created a much simpler solution.
The new platform-based standards set fuel economy targets based on wheelbase and tread width, that is, how far apart the wheels are. If your vehicle is longer and wider, the fuel-economy targets shrinks. In the words of Dan Edmunds of Edmunds.com, “There was kind of an incentive to maybe stretch the wheelbase a couple of inches and set the tires maybe an inch [farther] apart, because you get a bigger platform and slightly smaller target.”
The regulations meant to get better mileage out of vehicles also made it easier for larger vehicles to meet fuel-efficiency standards. In what should have been an unsurprising move, when faced with the choice between reengineering their vehicles or simply going bigger, automakers chose to go bigger.
AndToddSaid, “The Real Reason Why Are Trucks Getting Bigger”, Todd’s Mischief blog, 2022-05-13.
December 31, 2022
QotD: Casual (aka slobby) clothing at the airport
Indeed, if there is one thing that unites mankind today it is casual slobbery in dress. This is rather odd, considering that so many people seem to spend a lot of their spare time shopping for clothes. The fact is, though, that however much time they spend on shopping, they will always look just as much a mess as ever. They choose, but they do not discriminate. Our unwillingness, and increasing inability, to dress elegantly represents the triumph of self-esteem over self-respect. We dress to please ourselves, not others, and not looking like a slob takes effort, especially keeping it up through the day. Convenience is all, and it is easier to throw on a few casual clothes than to dress well.
What sparked Dalrymple’s ire was his experience at a couple of airports:
Sitting in two airports last week, in Paris and Riga, it suddenly occurred to me that I had not seen a single person who was smartly, let alone elegantly, dressed.
Now I seldom disagree with Teddy about much, but I do on this occasion. Imagine this scenario:
You get dressed to go to an important business meeting, so you do it properly: ironed shirt, tie, decent navy-blue suit, leather belt and shiny black lace-up Oxfords. You check yourself in a mirror and damn, you look good.
But did I mention that the important business meeting was out of town, and you’d need to catch a flight there?
Now go back and reflect how difficult it’s going to be when you’re confronted by the surly TSA apparatchiks at the airport. Belt? Take it off. Shoes? Unlace them, and take ’em off. Jacket? Run it through the X-ray. And that gold tie-clip? We’re going to pat you down and run you through our Magical Cancer-Generating Full-Body Scanner, bub.
All of a sudden, a tee shirt, sweatpants and slip-on moccasins make a lot more sense, don’t they? And the net result is that you look like a slob, because it’s a big enough chore to dress properly in the first place without having to do it all over again at the airport in front of hundreds of people.
Kim du Toit, “Slobbery”, Splendid Isolation, 2018-09-06.
December 27, 2022
Whatever government touches, it makes worse – book publishing as a prime example
The Canadian government has always claimed to want to encourage Canadian book publishers and many, many speeches and press conferences and announcements and gestures have been produced over the years (not just by the Liberals, but usually by the Liberals). The actual results of all that political performance? “Meh” at the very best:
Another of my favorite SHuSHs of 2022 was no. 168, “It Started as Polite Talk”, in which my colleague Dan Wells of Biblioasis complained of the dominance of foreign publishers in the Canadian book market. “I don’t think there’s a literate nation in the world whose native industry makes up a small percentage of its overall market”, he said. “This, perhaps, is the real crisis of Canadian publishing.”
The astonishing thing to me is that the stated policy of the federal government for more than half a century has been to foster and protect a Canadian-owned publishing sector to avoid outsourcing our intellectual life to New York and London. Acres of policy written. Billions spent. The results are risible. Here’s a visual representation of Dan’s point. The 113 members of the Association of Canadian Publishers, representing the vast majority of English-language book publishers in Canada, produce $34 million in annual sales against the $1.1 billion of foreign firms:
If you read the self-congratulatory reports from the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council, everything is fine: “The Canadian book publishing industry consistently demonstrates a high degree of resilience.”
Does this look resilient to you?
I’ve never been much of a Canadian nationalist and, all things considered, I’d prefer less of a government presence in our arts sector, but government is now so deeply entrenched in book publishing and has made such a hash of the industry that there’s really no way out that doesn’t involve better government policy.
What, exactly, better policy might look like is next year’s project.
December 24, 2022
Repost – Hey Kids! Did you get your paperwork in on time?
If you hurry, you can just get your Santa’s Visit Application in before the deadline tonight!
December 22, 2022
The Emulsified High-Fat Offal Tube | Yes, Minister: 1984 Christmas Special | BBC Comedy Greats
BBC Comedy Greats
Published 26 Jul 2021Bernard (Derek Fowlds) walks Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) through the red-tape of signing his Christmas cards, but Jim Hacker is more concerned with worrying plans from Brussels to rename the British sausage.
(more…)
December 15, 2022
The hot new thing for municipal politicians is the “15-minute city”
Elizabeth Nickson on how some of the building blocks of a global police state are being laid at the local level in pretty much every municipality in the western world:
Every single ministry or government department has been writing police-power regulation into their revised policy statements for the last 20 years. It is incremental and surreptitious. I mean come on, if you were going to abrogate democracy, cheat in every election, remove property rights from every citizen, bank that property in multinational/UN hands, you would need a police state, amIright?
That said, the province where I live, which is so crazy, it’s where California gets most of its bonkers ideas, has turned, locally-speaking. The socialists and greens were so confident of sweeping their elections that they didn’t bother to cheat, and as a result most every town and city was taken back by people saying, nope, you’re done. We are going back to basics. Like no more outdoor drug bazaars, silly wasteful green projects, and here’s an idea: let’s respond to our voters and not try to steal everything they have.
This would happen in every single state and county if we managed to stop them cheating. Because trust me, in every election in every jurisdiction, they are cheating.
The catastrophe even reached Davos. When one of their extra-special places is under threat time to roll out the big guns.
Hence 15-minute cities. Get this damn thing done before the slow learners, i.e. city people, wake up.
Therefore Oxford City Council this past week instituted their trial of 15 Minute Cities. This is a UN/WEF project meant to continue the lockdowns by scaring us to death using the nonexistent climate crisis. And if you think this is local to the UK, it’s not. This is being trialed in Brisbane, Portland, Barcelona, Paris and Buenos Aires.
Here are the basic rules. You are allowed out of your neighborhood for fifteen minutes a day and out of your region, 100 days a year. Fifteen minutes is enough to shop, take your kids to school and pick them up. Trespass that and you’re fined. Oxford has approved the installation of electronic traffic filters, placed strategically, which will be able to track your car, wherever it goes. That will cost citizens around $15,000,000. We get to build our own prisons!
The trial lockdown goes into effect January 1, 2024
People voted for this. Or rather they didn’t, but did.
Seems preposterous doesn’t it? Yet those who still read and watch legacy media know about it. They have been selling it hard. When I mean “they”, I mean the massive PR firms paid by WEF and the UN, strategized no doubt by McKinsey.
To refresh, this is what they want: drive people out of rural areas, and place them in 15 minute cities. Take all the resources, and divide them up among multi-nationals who will then tax our use of water, air, minerals, etc. Creating a world of renters, of serfs. You will have a lovely category: Amazon serf, Tesla serf. Bill Gates’ serf.
Pretty much every city council in every city in the world has had 15 Minute Cities pitched to them. Without doubt, every single city council in the world, has some committee and elected officer assigned to the 15 Minute city project. They are “researching” it with your money, which means they are trying to find a way to convince people to sign onto it.
They only got here because we stopped paying attention. No one went to meetings, no one followed what they were doing in committee. We trusted them. As someone pointed out, WEF and the UN during COP26 hold meetings and lectures that show precisely what they are planning to do, that are videotaped and available to anyone who wants to know what they are planning. Views of each? 26 people. 50 tops.
I’d like to advise you to get involved with your local government, because they have undoubtedly gone rogue and are amassing power and attaching funding requirements to each project. Many of them, if green-based, and locally everything is green-based, will be ill-founded, the science can be exploded. At our last virtual meeting here, a man from the real world, with real skills made a presentation showing that our local government was selling a fraudulent idea, and had put itself at risk legally. They had used a flawed study checked by no adult, sloppily researched and written by a university student to create the climate policy. Instead of being an ideal carbon sink, as was claimed, it turned out the islands were much less effective in that regard than other parts of the province.
Our local government had used this study for the past year, to harangue citizens and senior governments to push for more restrictive regulation on islanders.
The New World Order is built on sand, it is feather-weight, it can be blown over by a single honest consultant who can read legislation and do math. Become one. It is super satisfying. And the friends you will make will last beyond the grave.
December 7, 2022
QotD: Career path from recent B.A. to being “an expert” on national TV
Just for giggles, I clicked on the bio of the cutest contributor — called, hilariously, “analysts and associates” — a
womangirlpersyn named Karolina Hird. Here’s her official bio, in full:
Karolina is a Russia Researcher on the Russia/Ukraine portfolio at ISW. She graduated from George Washington University in December of 2021 with a B.A. in International Affairs and a concentration in Security Studies. Karolina’s undergraduate research examined aspects of international law and Eastern European security with a special focus on the rise of Polish populism. She has also conducted research pertaining to Russian objectives and geopolitical strategies on NATO’s Southern periphery.
Did everyone catch that? A Bachelor’s Degree. In December 2021. This gal is all of nine months out of college.
I’ve read my share of undergraduate research. Some of it is decent. There are some undergrads I’d trust to hit the archives for limited purposes. But there are no 21 year old kids on this earth whose judgments I’d trust, because I’ve taught a LOT of college kids, and y’all …But of course she’s not doing anything policy-related. You know how this kid’s career trajectory will go: A few years at ISW, in which she’ll start appearing as a guest on the “news” as a “Ukrainian affairs expert” — and you can tell she’s an expert, because she’s an “analyst” at the “Institute for the Study of War”. Once her looks start going, she’ll move over to a staff job for some politician, then off to a think tank, then maybe a run for office in her own right, then back to the Media as a “senior analyst”. I’d wager many crisp stacks of Crispus Attucks that this lady couldn’t tell the difference between a MiG-31 and a Mazda Miata, but we’re a year or two away from putting her on national TV as an “expert” on war and peace.
How do you stop that kind of thing? How would you even start?
Severian, “Slipping the Leash”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-27.
December 4, 2022
QotD: In praise of mediocrity
Mediocrity is not a problem in itself; it is inevitable. Indeed the world needs many mediocrities, that is to say mediocrities who know themselves, and are perfectly content, to be such (complacency is as much an underestimated quality as rebelliousness is an overestimated one). The problem with mediocrity begins when it is allied to overweening ambition, as it seems so often to be the case nowadays.
Ambition is likewise a quality that is excellent when it attaches to something worthwhile in itself, but which is dreadful when it does not. And the rapid and phenomenal spread of education has increased the spread of ambition with it, much of it inevitably of the apparatchik type, that is to say the determination to climb some bureaucratic career ladder detached from any purpose except survival and, if possible, self-aggrandizement. To climb such a ladder you have to be both ruthless and submissive at the same time. You have to be egotistically prepared to stab people in the back in the scramble for advancement, while at the same time being prepared to suppress your own personality by uttering other people’s clichés at the expense of your own thoughts. Unpreparedness to do this, either through lack of training or moral scruple, unfits you for a career in the organization, any organization. You have to learn to lie with clichés, and do so with a straight face.
Theodore Dalrymple, “In Defense of Mediocrity”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-02-17.
