Quotulatiousness

September 7, 2020

Public compliance with masking rules

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren on the temptation for public health officials to treat the citizenry as slightly dim children who need direct supervision by enlightened public health officials:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The present danger — the Red Chinese Wuhan Laboratory Batflu — is visible everywhere thanks to state-mandated muzzles or batmasks. We are now in the sixth month of “fifteen days to flatten the curve,” and I’ve noticed that these filthy mouth-pieces have become another urban environmental blight, on a scale even worse than the sidewalk basketball bouncers I recently decried. I spotted four discarded Batflu-spreaders on the sidewalk during a walk of less than one city block yesterday, to a deadbeat “supermarket” to fetch milk for my tea.

I’m sure these cloth garottes are choking our Blanding’s Turtles — already considered endangered by our provincial bureaucracy because less than one in a thousand of their eggs ever hatch, and then the adults try to cross country roads. Call up a picture of one on the Internet, and gentle reader will see that they are all apparently wearing yellow batmasks on their chins, in compliance with guvmint regulations. For if they took them off, they would risk being confused with another turtle species that might not be Protected.

But while my affection for Blanding’s Turtles, and empathy in light of their persecution by Ontario motorists, is of long standing — a friend proposes that we found a Blanding Lives Movement — I am even more concerned about the fate of our children. The Batflu has been discouragement enough, to those who may never reach maturity, but the spectacular success of the Nanny State effort to keep them socially atomized and in muzzles, portends innumerable (fake) “pandemics” to come. For what faceless time-server, “dressed in a little authority,” can resist an opportunity to treat the general population as if they were retarded children? Especially now, that the general population has shown it will comply?

According to an item that somehow slipped into the New York Times, only a tiny fraction of the much-publicized Batflu deaths were attributed to the Batflu alone, on death certificates sampled from across the Natted States. By this focus, the “pandemic” toll is reduced from the official number of 187,777 (I just checked this morning), to about 9,200. Of course, the commie and never-Trumper meejah have gone splenetic to “cancel” this interesting fact. It is as bad as the French study which showed that your one-in-ten-thousand chance of dying with the Batflu in that country is cut a further five times if you happen to smoke. Or the Hydroxychloroquine scandal, in which Mister Trump suggested (correctly) that a simple anti-malaria drug, already mass-produced and dirt cheap because long out of patent, can cut it by a few times more.

Who Was Leif Erikson?

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 9 Oct 2019

Happy Leif Erikson Day! Allow me to regale you with the saga of the daring Viking who sailed to North America five hundred years before Columbus (that hack) and called it Vinland. We all know his name and his famous deeds – but what sort of man was Leif Erikson?

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September 5, 2020

Kareem Shaheen on the shame of mask-shaming

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Kareem Shaheen — who is a mask-wearer and was one before they were made mandatory — explains why shaming anti-maskers is a terrible way to encourage compliance, but a great way to virtue-signal:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The mask shaming mirrors the way social media has warped our culture. The Twitter and ‘gram “in crowd” flaunt its mask use to demonstrate an ostensibly superior grasp of morals and science — and to bully those who don’t follow its cues. Those who perceive themselves to be on the outside of this circle can’t help but cringe at the manipulation and grandstanding behind these seemingly well-intentioned gestures.

Mask resistance, then, becomes a virtue signal of its own.

And, of course, Twitter itself has been a cesspool of counter-productive shame. Back in July, the hashtag #NoMasks trended, which gave the illusion of a groundswell of opposition against mandatory masking laws. But an analysis by First Draft, a nonprofit based in the United Kingdom, examined 8,000 Twitter accounts that used the hashtag. It found that the majority of people who tweeted #NoMasks were actually pro-mask. Their condemnation of the supposed anti-mask contingent actually boosted #NoMasks, bringing more people in contact with related conspiracy theories and arguments against wearing masks.

The moralizing is all the more galling because our own governments were forced to do an embarrassing about-face on their efficacy.

In the early weeks of the pandemic, health agencies in Canada and the United States recommended against wearing masks because there was insufficient evidence that they could prevent the spread of the virus, remember? They said that masks would provide a sense of false security, and suggested that we were all too dumb to know how to wear them properly.

This despite widespread use of masks in Asia, and while there was a growing consensus in hard-hit parts of Europe that they were effective and necessary.

With so much confused messaging, it’s no mystery that so many people are now skeptical about wearing masks. Sure, some of the most ardent mask-haters are also Q-Anon-spouting, anti-vaxxer crystal-healing masks-are-fascism conspiracy theorist kooks. But not all them fit that description.

And the problem with all of this is that if you’re actually trying to convince people to wear masks — as opposed to merely demonstrating your own superior morality via the veil — shame is one of the least effective methods of persuasion.

Chinese 7.62mm Sten Gun

Filed under: Cancon, China, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 May 2020

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…

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During World War Two, Canada supplied some 73,000 Sten guns (made by the Long Branch arsenal) to Chinese Nationalist forces in an effort to help them fight the Japanese. These Stens were standard MkII pattern guns, chambered for the 9x19mm Parabellum cartridge. However, many of these were eventually converted to 7.62mm Tokarev ammunition, especially after the victory of the Communist forces over the Nationalists. The conversion involved a new barrel and new magazine and magazine well. The 7.62mm barrels were typically longer than the original ones, and the magazine of choice was that of the PPS-43. Some were done by installed a magazine adapter into the original magazine well, and some (like this one) were done by cutting off the original magazine well and replacing it with a new one. In addition, some Sten guns were made domestically in China, both in 9mm and 7.62mm. The 7.62mm Tokarev cartridge was popular both from Russian pistols and submachine guns and also from China’s long military use of the dimensionally-identical 7.63mm Mauser cartridge in C96 pistols.

Many thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to film and disassemble this interesting submachine gun! The NFC collection there — perhaps the best military small arms collection in Western Europe — is available by appointment to researchers:

https://royalarmouries.org/research/n…

You can browse the various Armouries collections online here:

https://royalarmouries.org/collection/

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

September 3, 2020

Fallen Flag — The Great Northern Railway

Filed under: Business, Cancon, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This month’s Classic Trains featured fallen flag is an American railway that definitely deserved to call itself “great”, James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway. Hill was noteworthy as the only “Robber Baron” of that era who was scrupulous in avoiding government entanglements (including grants, loans, subsidies, and other forms of money-with-political-strings-attached), building his entire railway system using private funds and rational profit-oriented economic decision-making (the other transcontinental lines often over-built to claim higher subsidies or added money-losing branch lines to please powerful politicians). The result was that when economic hard times hit the railway business, his was the only transcontinental that never needed to declare bankruptcy.

In an earlier post, Dane Stuhlsatz summarized the GN’s engineering:

Hill’s line […] was methodically surveyed and built, on the shortest routes possible, with the least gradient possible, and using the best steel and other materials on the market at the time. Rather than political largess, Hill made his decisions based on profit and loss. But, for all the efficiency that Hill built into his line — he was able to transport across the country faster, cheaper, and with less maintenance costs than could the UP and CP — arguably the most important aspect for the viability of his business was the freedom to conduct business untethered by the strings that accompanied government subsidies.

Route map of the Great Northern Railway, circa 1920. Red lines are Great Northern trackage; dotted lines are other railroads.
Map by Elkman via Wikimedia Commons.

George Drury outlines the origins of the railway:

In 1857, the Minnesota & Pacific Railroad was chartered to build a line from Stillwater, Minnesota, on the St. Croix River, through St. Paul and St. Cloud to St. Vincent, in the northwest corner of the state. The company defaulted after completing a roadbed between St. Paul and St. Cloud, Minnesota, and its charter was taken over by the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, which ran its first train between St. Paul and St. Anthony (now Minneapolis) in 1862.

For financial reasons the railroads were reorganized as the First Division of the St. Paul & Pacific. Both StP&P companies were soon in receivership, and Northern Pacific, with which the StP&P was allied, went bankrupt in the Panic of 1873.

Canadian-born “Robber Baron” James J. Hill (1838-1916) in 1914.

In 1878 James J. Hill and an associate, George Stephen, acquired the two St. Paul & Pacific companies and reorganized them as the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway (“the Manitoba”). By 1885 the company had 1,470 miles of railroad and extended west to Devils Lake, North Dakota. In 1886 Hill organized the Montana Central Railway to build from Great Falls, Montana, through Helena to Butte, and in 1888 the line was opened, creating in conjunction with the StPM&M a railroad from St. Paul to Butte.

In 1881 Hill took over the 1856 charter of the Minneapolis & St. Cloud Railroad. He first used its franchises to build the Eastern Railway of Minnesota from Hinckley, Minnesota, to Superior, Wisconsin, and Duluth. Its charter was liberal enough that he chose it as the vehicle for his line to the Pacific. He renamed the road the Great Northern Railway; it then leased the Manitoba and assumed its operation.

[…]

Even before completion of the route from St. Paul, the Great Northern opened a line along the shore of Puget Sound between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1891. In the years that followed, Hill pushed a number of lines north across the international boundary into the mining area of southern British Columbia in a running battle with Canadian Pacific. In 1912 GN traded its line along the Fraser River east of Vancouver to Canadian Northern for trackage rights into Winnipeg.

Great Northern gradually withdrew from British Columbia after Hill’s death. In 1909 the Manitoba Great Northern Railway purchased most of the property of the Midland Railway of Manitoba (lines from the U.S. border to Portage la Prairie and to Morden), leaving the Midland, which was jointly controlled by GN and NP, with terminal properties in Winnipeg. The Manitoba Great Northern disposed of its rail lines in 1927. They were later abandoned.

Postcard photo of the Great Northern Railway’s “Empire Builder” streamliner between Everett and Seattle, Washington, circa 1963.
Great Northern Railway postcard via Wikimedia Commons.

The Great Northern and Northern Pacific lines agreed to a merger in 1901 (both lines were controlled by Hill) but the plan was vetoed by the Interstate Commerce Commission. A second attempt in the 1920s after Hill’s death was again turned down by the regulator unless the combined company divested ownership of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy which was both railways’ connection from Minneapolis to Chicago. It was only on the final attempt in 1970 that the deal gained the government’s grudging approval and the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and CB&Q merged to form the Burlington Northern.

September 2, 2020

Cold War 2.0 — you’re soaking in it

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell responds to a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Nadia Schadlow:

Dr Schadlow posits that “A new set of assumptions should underpin U.S. foreign policy … [and, concomitantly, the foreign polices of the US led West, including Canada’s, because] … Contrary to the optimistic predictions made in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, widespread political liberalization and the growth of transnational organizations have not tempered rivalries among countries. Likewise, globalization and economic interdependence have not been unalloyed goods; often, they have generated unanticipated inequalities and vulnerabilities [and] although the proliferation of digital technologies has increased productivity and brought other benefits, it has also eroded the U.S. military’s advantages and posed challenges to democratic societies.”

After outlining the rosy assumption made by leaders and policy makers from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton to Barack Obama ~ assumption which I shared, Nadia Schadlow says that “China had no intention of converging with the West [because] The Chinese Communist Party never intended to play by the West’s rules; it was determined to control markets rather than open them, and it did so by keeping its exchange rate artificially low, providing unfair advantages to state-owned enterprises, and erecting regulatory barriers against non-Chinese companies. Officials in both the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations worried about China’s intentions. But fundamentally, they remained convinced that the United States needed to engage with China to strengthen the rules-based international system and that China’s economic liberalization would ultimately lead to political liberalization. Instead, China has continued to take advantage of economic interdependence to grow its economy and enhance its military, thereby ensuring the long-term strength of the CCP.” Of course, from a Chinese perspective it might, very reasonably, appear that the liberal, US made (in the late 1940s) “rules based international system” was, in fact, designed to strengthen the US economy and enhance its military and ensure America’s long term strength … and that is not, many would say, a totally unreasonable view.

[…]

America’s allies, including Canada, need to step up and help the USA (and India) with the containment of both China and Russia in several regions: in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, too. Canada is a G-7 nation. It needs to start acting like one.

Australians, Brits, Canadians and Danes need not share Dr Schadlow’s Trumpian view of the world and of Cold War 2.0 to understand that:

  1. It is here. We are in it, like it or not; and
  2. Like its predecessor, it can turn hot if we do not manage it with care.

Now, at this time, the conventional wisdom is that foreign and defence policy must take a back seat to beating COVID-19 and restarting the economy. But, the Chinese and the Russians are not putting their plans on hold while they deal with the pandemic. (Maybe that’s why Justin Trudeau admires China’s “basic dictatorship” so much.) They will both be moving ahead with plans that aim to put the US-led West, including Canada, at a disadvantage. Additionally, now is a good time to announce plans to build more new warships ~ two or three large helicopter carriers, another supply ship (for a total of four) 16 major surface combatants (the new Type 26 ships) and a dozen smaller corvettes … can be and politicians should say will be built here in Canada, by Canadian workers. Defence related projects, when well conceived and directed, can be great long-term job creators. Canada can do both: speed up our recovery from the pandemic and strengthen our global position by making defence procurement a priority for the recovery.

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

August 31, 2020

Michelle Remembers, the seminal Satanic Panic book

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jen Gerson discusses the first modern Satanic Panic and the book about the “recovered” childhood memories of a British Columbia woman in the 1970s:

QAnon may sound like something that could only have birthed in the darker corners of the internet. But QAnon predates president Donald Trump and even the internet itself; It’s just the latest iteration of a moral panic that swept the highest levels of Western society only a generation ago. One of the most polarizing and divisive social movements in modern history; it destroyed families, turned communities against one another, and sent numerous innocent men and women to prison.

And it all started in Victoria, BC.

It was known as the Satanic Panic; a conspiracy theory that convinced millions of well meaning and rational people that a secret cabal of Satanists had infiltrated the highest echelons of society in order to sexually molest children. The Satanists were accused of sacrificing animals and using women as “breeders” to create an endless supply of dead babies for use in their gory, bloody-fuelled rituals and orgies.

It destroyed lives and ripped apart families. Reports of ritualistic child abuse were reported across the English speaking-world. Almost all of them were eventually found to have been partially, or wholly fabricated, but not before dozens of innocent people were falsely accused, and sentenced to years and even decades in prison.

Born of a genuine historical injustice — society’s neglect of childhood sexual abuse — this was a panic that saw some of the world’s smartest minds taken in by accusations, that, at their root, were as preposterous as any raised during medieval European witch hunts. It was legitimized by a professional class, captivated law enforcement and proved itself a lucrative grift for fraudsters and attention seekers. Worse, as the conspiracy grew under its own weight and influence, the hysteria inspired real and horrific crimes — usually by disturbed teenagers who claimed they were sacrificing humans to Satan.

This is a case study of how badly off the rails we can go when we allow our best intentions and passions to overwhelm us.

The story begins in 1980, with the publication of a book called Michelle Remembers. It detailed the fantastic claims of Michelle Proby, who recounted several months of gory and sadistic ritualistic abuse at the hands of a cabal of Satanists when she was a child in 1950s Victoria. The memories, she alleged, were repressed for decades, until she sought help from psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder. Under a state of hypnosis, Proby began to uncover a horrifying tale of murder, torture, abduction, and molestation. She claimed to have been taken from her willing family and groomed to take part in a ritual to call the devil — one in which she witnessed the murder of children, was forced to eat human remains, covered in dead baby parts, and locked in a cage with snakes.

An explosive bestseller. Michelle Remembers would become the folkloric template for countless other claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse ostensibly uncovered during therapy during the 80s and 90s.

QotD: The Alt-right and Jordan Peterson

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

You can hear this in the visceral contempt with which Peterson’s “young white male” audience is described by his journalistic detractors, (most of whom are white, and many of whom are male). And yet this crucial piece of hearsay, linchpin of the Peterson narrative, is not true. It hasn’t been true for a while, if it ever was. Anyone who cares to know the truth can go out and find it: I saw it myself with my own eyes at three events I attended in the winter, as did the Maclean’s reporter who found that:

    They are new Canadians, people of colour, men and women. And in a way that seems out of sync with op-ed portrayals of Peterson’s supporters as committed to preserving old hierarchies and positions of privilege — they often see themselves as searchers, truth-seekers and iconoclasts.

Popularity, even among people of color, is not, of course, proof in itself of the salubriousness of anything, especially in a world where Fox News, Breitbart, and InfoWars also command the attention of tens of millions. And indeed, Peterson really was avidly embraced at first by the far-right when he emerged, denouncing concepts of unconscious bias and white privilege, and stated his intention to defy any prospective attempt through the force of law to compel him to adopt gender-neutral pronouns in his classroom at the University of Toronto. In his rather coarse-grained and Manichaean analysis of so-called Social Justice Warriors, Peterson occasionally invoked a term, “Cultural Marxism,” whose lineage was said, by others, to have also birthed a far-right conspiracy theory that, in turn, figured prominently in the manifesto of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. So anyone playing a game of connect the dots in order to portray Peterson as part of a recrudescence of reactionary modernism has material to work with, some of it even provided by Peterson himself.

Yet it soon enough became clear to anyone paying attention that Peterson’s initial embrace by the alt-right was a case of mistaken identity. Eventually, the spokesmen of that poisonous and amorphous internet tendency decided in concert that Peterson had been sent by the left to disrupt their “movement” and siphon off its energies by redirecting it toward an individualistic creed that would prove fatal to their own racist ethnonationalism. Peterson then rapidly crossed over to an audience that is now many multiples the size of the cohort of problematic young males who first embraced, then rejected him, even as the progressive left tried to hold on to the alt-right’s original, mistaken read.

Wesley Yang, “The Shocking Truth About Jordan Peterson”, Tablet, 2018-05-28.

August 27, 2020

QotD: Racism and the minimum wage

Filed under: Australia, Business, Cancon, Economics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Minimum-wage laws can even affect the level of racial discrimination. In an earlier era, when racial discrimination was both legally and socially accepted, minimum-wage laws were often used openly to price minorities out of the job market.

In 1925, a minimum-wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.

A Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia’s minimum wage law as a means to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese” who were willing to work for less.

In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum-wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.

Some supporters of the first federal minimum-wage law in the United States — the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and underbid construction companies using unionized white labor.

These supporters of minimum-wage laws understood long ago something that today’s supporters of such laws seem not to have bothered to think through. People whose wages are raised by law do not necessarily benefit, because they are often less likely to be hired at the imposed minimum-wage rate.

Thomas Sowell, “Why racists love the minimum wage laws”, New York Post, 2013-09-17.

August 23, 2020

The right of asylum

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall is writing here about the situation in the United Kingdom, with would-be asylum claimants risking their lives to cross the English Channel so they can legally claim asylum in Britain, but exactly the same situation should apply with claimants entering Canada from the United States:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

Everyone at even risk – let alone reality – of substantial discrimination in their home country has the right, the right, to asylum. This is one of those international things that we should indeed agree with too. Few of us have anything but contempt for those who wouldn’t let Holocaust fleeing Jews (and or gypsies, gays, whatever, it’s just that we have substantial documented evidence about Jews who were turned away) tarnish their national doormats. Few of us think those who abused such limitations are anything but heroes. I even know of one monk who married Jewesses multiple times to bring them out by train. Umm, married multiple people, not one many times. People working within the too restrictive rules even gave us one of the finest moments of TV ever.

So, asylum, good thing.

And here’s the next thing. That right is restricted. To claiming it in the first safe place you get to. This has some oddities, if you leave Sudan by plane and step off at Heathrow then the UK is where you can – righteously – claim asylum. If you come by land then you have passed through many safe places before reaching the UK. You don’t have the right to asylum in the UK and, to be strict about it, don’t even have the right to apply.

So, people drowning in the Channel because they have to make their asylum application once in the UK? This could be true of those who are being oppressed in France. It’s not true of anyone not being oppressed in France. So there is not that need to take the open boat the 26 miles.

Sure, there’s the desire, we all understand that. But that’s a desire, not a right to asylum.

Here in Canada, we had this arrangement with the American government under the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement, which our Federal Court struck down last month — incorrectly, in my opinion — as being in violation of section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court allowed six months for the federal government to act, but as we all know, the federal government is unlikely to do anything as politically radioactive as passing legislation that could — and would — be seen as anti-refugee.

Trudeau’s hopes for re-election hinge on promising “an organic chicken in every pot and a solar panel on every shed”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Line wonders who the hell the Liberals think they are:

It may have been easy to miss amid the news coming out of Ottawa, but as the government lost its finance minister, appointed Chrystia Freeland to yet another job, prorogued parliament, halted testimony into its latest scandal, prepared for the announcement of a new Conservative Party of Canada leader and braced for a likely second wave of COVID-19, the prime minister promised to announce a transformative agenda. One that promises sweeping social change, and a wholesale re-invention of our economy in line with the greenest ambitions. We here at The Line have but one question.

Who the hell do these people think they are?

It is obvious to anyone who has been reading the news and possesses even residual brain function why the prime minister would like to be talking about a plan for transformative change. Talking about all the amazing things he could do for Canadians with borrowed money beats talking about his government’s bumbling of the WE file and the departure of now-former finance minister Bill Morneau.

Promising an organic chicken in every pot and a solar panel on every shed is obviously more appealing to Trudeau than repeating the last month. But it is astonishing to us — as jaded as we have undeniably become — that the government is talking about this instead of the necessary steps needed to shore up this country ahead of a likely second wave of COVID-19.

This government has a mandate to respond to the emergency, by mere unlucky virtue of being in power at the moment the virus hit. It is the duty of every Canadian government to safeguard the wellbeing of the population, full stop. But the emergency, contrary to what you may believe if you’ve been reading Liberal Party HQ memos, is not over. We have an urgent need to secure more medical equipment, to harden our long-term care facilities, to prevent any further lockdowns from derailing a fragile economic recovery, to ensure the resiliency of critical supply chains, and to shore up our health-care system. This is what every Canadian official should be focused on right now.

[…]

But can anyone maintain faith that the Liberals will stick to their knitting when we hear buzzwords like “transformative” social change? Sweeping climate-change reforms? Engineering a new green economy? They are all fine notions — let’s put them to the people and vote on them. Until calling that election is feasible (mid-pandemic, it is not) this government simply does not have the mandate to undertake such far-reaching efforts.

It’s easy to forget now, but only nine months ago this government was reduced to a minority of seats in parliament. The Liberals lost the popular vote, and saw one million of their own prior voters abandon them. They are only in government because the Conservatives, to the surprise of no one, found several novel and exciting new ways to fail.

August 21, 2020

Geography works against CANZUK ever happening

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell is a big fan of the CANZUK scheme (Canada-Australia-New Zealand-United Kingdom) to create an “anglosphere” power alongside the current economic big-hitters on the world stage like the United States, China and the European Union. I agree it has historical, nostalgic appeal, but as Aris Roussinos points out, geography is a big stumbling block to it ever being much more than an idea:

Since losing the empire, Britain has notoriously struggled to find a role on the world stage. Initial attempts to piggyback on the power of our successor as global hegemon, the United States, by acting as a guiding force — a Greece to America’s Rome, in Harold Macmillan’s phrase — faltered due to the total absence of interest ever shown in this arrangement by any American administration.

The subsequent attempt to remould Britain as a European power acting in concert with its continental neighbours through the European Union was an unhappy marriage, and has ended in a rancorous divorce whose final settlement is still to be determined. Adrift on the world stage, we are in need of good ideas.

Instead, we are offered CANZUK, a reheated Edwardian fantasy of a globe-spanning Anglosphere acting as a world power which excites the enthusiasm of a small coterie of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologues, if no one else.

In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, the historian and Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts argued that the CANZUK nations — Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK — ought to establish “some form of federation among them” as a “second Anglospheric superpower” combining “free trade, free movement of people, a mutual defense organization and combined military capabilities” , which would “create a new global superpower and ally of the U.S., the great anchor of the Anglosphere”.

One cannot fault Roberts for the grandeur of his vision, even if the details of how this would actually work are left to others to fill in. Instead, we are reassured, this would not be a centralising project like the hated EU; rather, “its program for a loose confederal state linking the Westminster democracies would be clearly enunciated right from the start.” Already, we see the harsh hand of reality ready to crush this initially appealing vision. On the one hand, CANZUK is a globe-spanning superpower ready to be born; on the other, it is merely a loose grouping of separate national governments, which would, like all national governments, act according to their own interests above all.

By totting up the different GDP figures of the various CANZUK nations, Roberts claims that his proposed Empire 2.0 “would have a combined GDP of more than $6 trillion, placing it behind only the U.S., China and the EU,” while “with a combined defense expenditure of over $100 billion, it would also be able to punch above its weight”.

Yet the flaws of this argument are obvious. As other critics have noted, only a minuscule proportion of the CANZUK nations’ trade is with each other, save New Zealand, an economic satellite of Australia. Australia is a great East Asian trading power, and will remain so. Canada is enmeshed in the greater North American trading sphere, as are we with Europe, whatever Brexiteers may wish. As always, the simple matter of geography trumps the affective bonds between far-flung kith and kin, whatever their emotional appeal.

August 19, 2020

Dieppe 1942 – Slaughter on the Shingle

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Mark Felton Productions
Published 14 Mar 2020

Find out how and why the Dieppe Raid was launched in 1942 and why is went so disastrously wrong.

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QotD: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The CBC was conceived 90 years ago to give the country a national broadcaster and to help Canadian regions understand each other better. It has often lived up to that mandate and in places still does.

But it is an infestation of leftist biases, and is often grossly unprofessional. For decades, despite being almost entirely funded by Canadian taxpayers, it was the principal house organ of the Quebec separatist movement, to the point that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, shortly before the 1980 Quebec independence referendum, threatened to shut the French network down; when asked what he would replace it with, he responded with his customary vivacity of wit: “Still pictures of Chinese and Japanese vases, at least they have some cultural value.” It is compulsively misanthropic and nasty, and almost always takes a snide leftist view of everything, including foreign affairs. Brexiters were cavemen, U.S. President Donald Trump is a racist, sexist crook and moron, and it is racism and xenophobia to assert that the coronavirus originated in China. Can’t we have better and more original insights than this?

Conrad Black, “Canada needs a much better CBC”, New English Review, 2020-05-02.

August 16, 2020

Surviving the surrender of Japan as allied Prisoners of War

Filed under: Cancon, History, Japan, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Seventy-five years ago, the war in the Pacific had ended with the surrender of Japanese imperial forces after the atomic bombing attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war may have technically ended, but there was still plenty of danger for the surviving POWs in various camps around the Japanese home islands. George MacDonnell was a Canadian soldier who had been captured in the fall of Hong Kong early in the Japanese swathe of conquest that engulfed so many areas. He had been held as a slave labourer at a prison camp in the mountains of northern Honshu in Iwate Prefecture. In Quillette, he tells how his captivity came to an end:

US Navy aerial photo of Ohashi prison camp in 1945.

It was noon on August 15th, 1945. The Japanese Emperor had just announced to his people that his country had surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Powers.

To those of us being held at Ohashi Prison Camp in the mountains of northern Japan, where we’d been prisoners of war performing forced labour at a local iron mine, this meant freedom. But freedom didn’t necessarily equate to safety. The camp’s 395 POWs, about half of them Canadians, were still under the effective control of Japanese troops. And so we began negotiating with them about what would happen next.

Complicating the negotiations was the Japanese military code of Bushido, which required an officer to die fighting or commit suicide (seppuku) rather than accept defeat. We also knew that the camp commander — First Lieutenant Yoshida Zenkichi — had written orders to kill his prisoners “by any means at his disposal” if their rescue seemed imminent. We also knew that we could all easily be deposited in a local mine shaft and then buried under thousands of tons of rock for all eternity without a trace.

We had no way of notifying Allied military commanders (who still hadn’t landed in Japan) as to the location of the camp (about a hundred miles north of Sendai, in a mountainous area near Honshu’s eastern coast), whose existence was then unknown. Because of the devastating American bombing, Japan’s cities had been reduced to rubble, its institutions were in chaos, and millions of Japanese were themselves close to starvation, much like us. The camp itself had food supplies, such as they were, for just three days.

Lieut. Zenkichi seemed angry, and felt humiliated by the surrender. Yet he appeared willing to negotiate our status. And after some stressful hours, we reached an agreement: The Japanese guards would be dismissed from the camp, while a detachment of Kenpeitai (the much feared Military Police) would provide security for Zenkichi, who would confine himself to his office.

To our delight, the local Japanese farmers were friendly, and agreed to give us food in exchange for some of the items we’d managed to loot from the camp’s remaining inventory — though, unfortunately, not enough to feed the camp. Meanwhile, through a secret radio we’d been operating, we learned that the Americans were going to conduct an aerial grid search of Japan’s islands for prison camps. We followed the broadcasted instructions and immediately painted “P.O.W.” in eight-foot-high white letters on the roof of the biggest hut.

Two days later, with all of our food gone, we heard a murmur from the direction of the ocean. The sound turned into the throb of a single-engine airplane flying at about 3,000 feet altitude. Then, suddenly he was above us — a little blue fighter with the white stars of the US Navy painted on its wings and fuselage. But the engine noise began to fade as he went right past us. Please, God, I thought — let him see our camp.

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