Quotulatiousness

June 21, 2020

Jagmeet Singh’s social media moment in the sun

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Most Canadians seem to have forgotten about federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, so this parliamentary kerfuffle — perfectly timed for maximum social media attention — is a great boost to his political visibility.

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.

In this woebegotten year of 2020, blessed is the politician who can stumble into a scandal perfectly tailored to the tyranny of Twitter.

As protests, riots, and rage make their mark across the world in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh got himself ejected from the House of Commons for calling Bloc MP Alain Therrien a “racist.”

It was an act of civil disobedience, well suited to the passions of the moment, that generated overwhelming support for Singh.

“Only in a racist country does a brown man get ejected from parliament for insisting that the denial of systemic racism is racist,” was a fairly typical, and popular, example on Twitter.

I’m not interested in disputing the point, but rather deconstructing it. So let’s start, for a moment, with the prim prohibitions on unparliamentary language.

In keeping with the long-standing “tradition of respect for the integrity of all Members,” elected officials are barred from using personal attacks, obscenities and insults while in the House of Commons.

And, yes, I’m mentioning this point mostly for the joy of listing off some of the language that has been deemed “unparliamentary” in the past, including, my favourite; “Honourable only by courtesy” (ruled against in 1880), “Coming into the world by accident,” (1886) and “The political sewer pipe from Carleton County” (1917).

Whatever else we can say about the state of our political culture, the quality of our insults has declined alarmingly.

There are a few examples in the parliamentary record of the term “racist” being used in the House. In several instances, the record can’t identify who said it. Or the subject of the insult failed to call a point of order on the matter.

June 20, 2020

“What did you do in the Wuhan Coronavirus war, Daddy?”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley metaphorically dons the garb of a war correspondent to report on how the Canadian government systematically mishandled the epidemic “war”:

Toronto General Hospital.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

At first, comparisons to wartime seemed a bit silly. All we were being asked to do, after all, was stay indoors. As the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic 100 days ago, the commanders had everything under control: the borders, the epidemiology, the strategy, support for shuttered businesses and their employees. Traditionally, wartime puts those of us left on the home front to work whether we like it or not. This was entirely the opposite: the worst we would have to put up with — in theory, assuming government aid was as advertised — was the indignity of idleness. Collective inaction would flatten the curve, the forces of COVID-19 would be beaten back, and summer would be saved. Peace in our time.

And then it instantly turned to quagmire. Canadians watched slack-jawed as COVID-19 breached our most fundamental defences. You don’t need Sun Tzu’s perspicacity to inform people arriving in Canada of their responsibility to self-isolate, and exactly what self-isolation means — go directly home, do not stop for groceries, do not receive visitors. I just did it, right there, in half a sentence. But we couldn’t manage it: Where information was distributed at all, it was excessively complex even as it failed to deliver the central message. Provincial forces threatened mutiny. Alberta Commander-in-Chief Jason Kenney stormed into the Edmonton airport demanding answers. It took weeks to sort out.

[…]

If it didn’t seem like a war before, it sure did once the real live army was drafted in to bail out long-term care homes in Ontario and Quebec that had descended into horrifying squalor. We learned the appalling details from leaked military reports. And now, in an almost poetic act of military pigheadedness, the Ottawa Citizen reports the Armed Forces are trying to hunt down and punish the leakers.

The war must go on. But sitting here in still-locked-down Toronto, stewing in my own bile, I cannot say this is filling me with patriotic fervour. I find myself simultaneously envious of other provinces that are in the process of reopening, and sympathetic to their residents: If it weren’t for the two sick men of the federation [Ontario and Quebec] dominating the narrative, they would likely have reopened much earlier.

Indeed, jealousies have bloomed as weeks turned to months. Apartment dwellers envy other apartment dwellers who have balconies. All apartment dwellers envy homeowners. Everyone envies cottage-owners. Some cottage-country mayors have told cottage-owners to stay put and keep their infestations to themselves. People cooped up with their kids sometimes envy those with time to themselves; singletons who have had enough alone time to last a decade occasionally envy those trying to juggle kids with working from home. The pleasant novelty of Zoom-based socializing faded ages ago, as everyone realized that Zoom-based socializing sucks.

More than 8,200 Canadians are dead, most having lived long lives but many having died in grim and lonely circumstances. In future, considerably more deaths and distress will be associated with the lockdown itself. The psychological effects of this will be studied for decades. If war isn’t quite the right analogy, it’s certainly closer to a war than anything that has been contested on Canadian soil in my or my parents’ lifetime, and it will come at a greater cost to the whole of society than any actual war that Canadian forces have fought over that time. It’s a terrible shame that as a nation, we didn’t win.

June 19, 2020

National Defence Headquarters needs to go on a crash diet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell knows how Canada’s NDHQ got into the state it is in, and has some suggestions for getting it out of its critical state of administrative morbid obesity:

Major General George R. Pearkes Building in Ottawa, home of National Defence Headquarters on Colonel By Drive.
Photo by DXR via Wikimedia Commons.

National Defence Headquarters is a HUGE place with diverse functions. First: it is, simultaneously, the management centre of the Department of National Defence, which is a very large (and complex) department of government that includes the Canadian Armed Forces (but the CAF is just one of DND’s “arms”), and it is the national command centre for the Canadian Armed Forces. Second: it is one of the biggest budget departments in Canada. Defence spending supports many hundreds of thousands of jobs in the military, in the civil service and all across the spectrum of Canadian industry from the highest of high-tech enterprises through to janitorial services. It is never surprising when things fall through the cracks in any large, complex organization, is it?

But there are two other problems:

As defence spending has declined, year-after-year, always in terms of GDP and often in terms of its share of the public accounts and sometimes in real, dollar terms, too, the headquarters, especially the military’s command and control (C²) superstructure, has grown. A bit of growth is not surprising when one must “do more with less” as I well remember being told during the rounds of budget and staff cuts in the 1990s. Although to their credit, defence ministers in the Chrétien-Martin era imposed a series of staff cuts on the HQs in Ottawa, there was a bit of growth in the (largely civil service) policy and financial management areas. But in the Harper era that all changed. Budget pursestrings were loosened by governments after 2001 and, under e.g. Conservative Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor the Canadian Forces began to receive some much needed new equipment including the big CC-177 Globemaster III transport planes, new CH-147F Chinook transport helicopters and Leopard tanks ~ all procured on sole-source contracts, over the objections of many. But then O’Connor was replaced by Peter MacKay and, it appeared to me, the generals and admirals took over and the HQ went from lean to overweight and then to downright fat. Then, in the Trudeau era, the HQ went from simply being fat to being morbidly obese. There are, now, hundreds of admirals and generals, managing a military force that numbers in the (too few) thousands. Even serving flag and general officers have told me that cutting the highest ranks by ⅓ would do no harm and some retired officers and civil servants (with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the HQ at the highest levels) say that a 50% cut would be healthy. The simple fact is that the Canadian Forces have too many very smart, very able senior officers with too little real work to do. They, not surprisingly, fill the time available with “work” of their own devising which, often, involves creating new and more complex command structures which require more and more general officers. The process seems unconstrained from the top.

Why? What happened?

Well, it started with the very best of intentions. I recall being told by one very, very fine general that we, the Canadian Forces, must, above all else, be “interoperable” with our American allies and that, he explained, meant adapting to their command and control system, poor as he thought it was. He said, and he meant, adapting, not adopting. But he retired and a new generation of officers entered the most senior ranks and some of them seemed, to me, to be more interested in adopting than in just adapting to. We seemed, in the 2000s, to be seized by a giant case of military penis envy and we seemed to want to have a local version of whatever the Americans had. The result was a proliferation of new command and control organizations, all put in place as the combat elements were actually shrinking. The end result was an unconscionable GOFO [General Officer/Flag Officer] to combat sailor and solder ratio and a bloated and, in my opinion, weak and inefficient command and control superstructure.

June 15, 2020

Canada’s ongoing experiment with Justin Trudeau’s “basic dictatorship”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell outlines the development of the concept of “rights” from Saxon England through Magna Carta and how a bad king finally triggered a rebellion that forced him to grant the Great Charter which still acts as a foundation for British (and Canadian) law. Justin Trudeau may be the modern day version of the bad king:

A few hundred years later, one of liberalism‘s and democracy’s greatest voices told us that we have three absolutely fundamental, natural rights: to life, to liberty and to property. These rights were not and still are not unlimited. There were and are ways to lawfully and properly deprive a person of his property and his liberty and, in some countries, even his life. A few centuries after John Locke another philosopher wanted to do away with the right to property: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” Karl Marx wrote, and many, far too many, believed. The only real problem with Marx’s notion is that it requires that humans are perfect … and most of us know how rare that is. Here in Canada, especially since the early years of the 20th century, we have had far too much Marx and far too little Locke.

Now, in 2020, we even have a new version of King John: a vain and foolish prime minister who seems to believe that he has been sent to rule over us. Justin Trudeau is profoundly ignorant about both liberalism and democracy. He is, actually, more of a puppet than a ruler but it is less easy than it should be to determine just who is pulling on which strings. He does not appear to have the mental capacity to pull more than a couple of ideas together at any one time.

Because we have been panicked by the coronavirus pandemic we have decided accepted that more government is the best least bad answer. To give us more and more government, Justin Trudeau’s handlers suspended parliament until September … they wanted to have that “basic dictatorship” thing.

Democracy is in peril in Canada … it’s not because Justin Trudeau is an evil dictator, it’s because we, as a people, are too complacent. We have come to believe that democracy is, somehow, automatic, that it is natural. It’s not. It needed to be carefully built, brick-by-brick, over many centuries. We needed to fight for democracy: we needed to win it and then defend it, too. It doesn’t renew itself, it is not the natural order of things, and, In Canada, in 2020, it is in peril. Parliament needs to be recalled, soon, before September. Parliament needs to tend to its ancient rights, duties and powers. The Trudeau regime needs to be called to account and then replaced by a new, better, government.

June 14, 2020

Healthcare is a provincial responsibility … thank goodness

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

Chris Selley reminds us that despite all the attention the media pays to every twitch of the federal government, it’s the provinces that are actually responsible for the healthcare systems in their territory:

Front view of Toronto General Hospital.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Here in Canada, however, astonishing scenes continue. On Thursday the Toronto Transit Commission announced it intends to make masks mandatory for riders — no word of a lie — in three weeks, on July 2. That’s assuming the commission approves the measure … next Wednesday. TTC CEO Rick Leary was at pains to stress the rule would never be enforced.

Meanwhile Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, could not appear more reluctant to endorse mask wearing unless she advised against wearing them altogether — which was, famously, her original position. On Wednesday, she unveiled a four-bullet-point plan for getting safely back to semi-normal under the moniker “out smart.” The word “masks” does not appear. Supplementary text only concedes they “can be used … when you can’t maintain physical distance of two metres.”

This is a strange qualification: The official federal advice stresses you shouldn’t touch your mask except to take it off at home and immediately wash your hands. You shouldn’t be taking it on and off while you’re out and about, when social distancing suddenly becomes impossible. But it’s not as strange as the qualification Tam offered on her Twitter account, where she offered a link to an instructional video but only “if it is safe for you to wear a non-medical mask or face covering (not everyone can).”

It is true that some people with asthma or severe allergies have trouble wearing masks. Presumably they know who they are, and would not risk suffocating themselves when mask-wearing isn’t even strongly recommended, let alone mandatory. Blind people will struggle to keep two metres’ distance from others. People with aquagenic urticaria can’t wash their hands with water. People without arms can’t cough into their sleeves. Those “out smart” recommendations aren’t qualified, because that would be silly — as is the qualification on masks.

I would be lying if I said I had any idea what the hell is going on. But this never-ending weirdness is doing us a favour, in a way. The fact is, we have been paying far too much attention to the feds throughout this ordeal. Canada’s COVID-19 experience was always much too different from region to region to justify everyone taking their cues from a single public health agency — let alone one that comprehensively botched something as simple as issuing self-isolation advice to returning foreign travellers.

Canada is a federation by design, not by accident, and thank goodness for that: Far better that most provinces’ authorities did a good job knocking down COVID-19 than that a single one screwed it up for the whole country. It’s something Liberals and New Democrats should bear in mind next time they find themselves demanding yet another “national strategy” in a provincial jurisdiction.

June 10, 2020

“Gender critical” feminism

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barbara Kay finds herself in agreement with an academic who, having come from a Marxist and radical feminist background, she would not normally have much in common:

Kathleen Lowrey, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, ascribes much of her intellectual formation to Marxism and radical feminism. Not, I think my regular readers would agree, someone with whom I would normally have a great deal in common. And yet, in this strange cultural moment, Prof. Lowrey and I find ourselves amicably united in the service of a mutually revered ideal. I write this column with ardent sympathy for her in her present predicament.

Academics’ time is generally split 40/40/20 amongst, respectively, research, teaching and “service” to their community — meaning committees, mainly. Until late March, Lowrey served as associate chair for undergraduate programs on behalf of the department of anthropology. Following anonymous complaints about her views from one or more students to the university’s office of safe disclosure and human rights, as well as to the dean of students, Lowrey was asked to resign. She was not given a precise reason, only told that because she holds “gender critical” opinions, she was making the learning environment “unsafe” for the anonymous complainants who felt that her views caused them “harm.” (It’s not clear — Lowrey believes it is doubtful — that the complainants were even taking her courses.)

“Gender critical” refers to what was shortly ago normative feminism doctrine in considering biological sex of primordial importance in fighting for women’s rights. Where the traditional rights of biological women collide with asserted rights of trans women — sport, intimate spaces, rape crisis centres, prisons — gender-critical feminists join with conservatives like me in insisting that biological women’s rights must prevail: for the sake of their safety, privacy and right to a level playing field.

Until what seems like a few minutes ago, there was nothing controversial about this opinion. But now there is. The only “correct” opinion to hold is that gender expression trumps biology in any rights-based claims. And in academic circles, Lowrey’s views, which she is at no pains to hide on campus and off, are a form of apostasy that cries out for punishment.

June 8, 2020

D-Day – The Last German Holdouts

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Mark Felton Productions
Published 6 Jun 2020

Some German coast defences managed to survive on D-Day and fought on behind Allied lines. One was the massive Douvres Radar Station bunker complex between Juno and Sword Beaches. It held out for 12 days after D-Day, and required a special operation to knock it out.

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June 7, 2020

Why determining the Impact of Lend-Lease is so complicated

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Military History Visualized
Published 14 Aug 2018

Determining the impact of the Western Aid that was provided to the Soviet Union in the Second World War is quite controversial. This aid was provided under the Lend-Lease act, as such it is usually just called Lend-Lease. The majority of the support was provided by the United States, yet other countries like the United Kingdom and Canada aided the Soviet Union as well.

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» SOURCES «

Boris V. Sokolov: “The role of lend‐lease in Soviet military efforts, 1941–1945”, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 7:3 (1994) p. 567-586

Hill, Alexander: The Red Army and the Second World War. Armies of the Second World War. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2017.

Glantz, David M.; House, Jonathan M.: When Titans Clashed. How the Red Army stopped Hitler. Revised and Expanded Edition. University Press of Kansas: USA, 2015

Harrison, Mark: THE SOVIET ECONOMY AND RELATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES AND BRITAIN, 1941-1945, Draft 25 August, 1993

Hill, Alexander: “British Lend Lease Aid and the Soviet War Effort, June 1941 June 1942”, in: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Jul., 2007), pp. 773-808

Cambridge History of the Second World War. Volume 1: Fighting the War. Cambridge University Press: UK (2015)

Broadberry, Stephen; Howlett, Peter: “The United Kingdom: ‘Victory at all costs'”, in: Harrison, Mark (ed.): The Economics of World War II. Cambridge University Press: UK (1998), p. 43-80

Strydwolf: Lend-Lease to Soviet Union, significance, impact and myths

Protocol and Area Information Staff of the U.S.S.R. Branch and the Division of Research and Reports: REPORT ON WAR AID FURNISHED BY THE UNITED STATES TO THE U.S.S.R, November 28, 1945

Harrison, Mark: “The USSR and Total War: Why Didn’t the Soviet Economy Collapse in 1942?” In: Chickering, Roger (ed.); Förster, Stig (ed.); Greiner, Bernd (ed.): A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1939-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005), p. 137-156.

Tooze, Adam: The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Penguin Books: United Kingdom (2006).

Overy, Richard: Why the Allies Won. Pimlico: London, UK (2006).

Higham, Robin (ed.); Kagan, Frederick W. (ed.): The Military History of the Soviet Union. Palgrave: New York, 2002

Havlat, Denis: Western aid for the Soviet Union during World War II, Wien, 2015 (Master Thesis)

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June 6, 2020

Cognitive dissonance is real

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Gurney had a discussion with one of his readers that left him shaking his head in disbelief:

The reader haughtily asked if I’d ever make such a criticism for a Liberal.

I said yes.

The reader didn’t believe me, and said, oh yeah, show me an example?

As it so happened, I actually had a column of mine open in another tab; I was referring back to it for research. +
—
The column in question contained a perfect example of me saying a very comparable thing about a Liberal as I had about the Conservative. So I had, OK, here you go. Pasted the link and replied.

And the reader replied right away. The reader was very confused.
—
The reader had questions about how I could criticize both a Conservative and a Liberal. The reader asked about agendas — who had insisted I write one piece, and why had they then permitted me to write the other?

I wrote both on my own initiative, I explained. +
—
And I made criticisms of both gentlemen, the Conservative and the Liberal, because they’d both done things that pissed me off.

The reader didn’t believe this was possible. There had to be another explanation, or an ulterior motive. +
—
I eventually disengaged. But I’ve been thinking about that all day. There’s a grown-ass person in Canada, totally literate and presents very normally, who really struggled to understand that someone could be critical of both the left and right without being compromised.

END

June 5, 2020

Toronto radio station to be required to denounce itself in Canadian Content “Struggle session”

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

Wikipedia defines a “Struggle session” as “a form of public humiliation and torture that was used by the Communist Party of China (CPC) at various times in the Mao era, particularly years immediately before and after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and during the Cultural Revolution. The aim of a struggle session was to shape public opinion and humiliate, persecute, or execute political rivals and those deemed class enemies.” It seems that Canada is becoming just a bit more like China (whose “basic dictatorship” has been publicly admired by our Prime Minstrel), as Toronto’s CFRB has been found in violation of the whims of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council:

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that a news broadcast that jokingly criticized Canadian content violates the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Code of Ethics and the Radio Television Digital News Association of Canada’s (RTDNA) Code of Journalistic Ethics. The complaint arose from a December 2019 broadcast on Toronto radio station CFRB. David McKee used his lead-in to a report on a possible Netflix tax to state “the libraries of streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ could soon have more of a Canadian flavour that nobody watches or wants if the federal government gets its way.”

That comment was too much for one listener, who filed a complaint with the CBSC, arguing that “Canadian Content is important, and Mr McKee seems to forget that he is part of a Canadian Content Broadcaster. His opinions should be kept off of the regular news sections and limited to a specific commentary section if he is so transfixed on being a commentator.”

The CBSC agreed, taking aim at the words “nobody watches or wants”, which it concluded constituted inserting personal opinion into the broadcast […]

As a penalty, CFRB must now broadcast that it breached the ethics standards on several broadcasts. While few will likely take notice, Canadians should take notice of the regulatory policing of the line between news and commentary on a radio broadcast. Indeed, one wonders if there would be a similar outcome if the broadcaster had expressed support for Canadian content.

Moreover, the Broadcast and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel, which Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault plans to implement, recommended extending Canada’s broadcast regulatory framework to the Internet, including sites and services that aggregate the news.

June 4, 2020

Trudeauvian “performative sanctimony” on display … again

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

Chris Selley on the Prime Minstrel’s latest attempt to virtue signal on racial issues:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

In agonizing for 21 seconds before answering a question about President Donald Trump’s threat to send the military after civilian protesters in American cities, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau likely risked causing as much trouble as he was hoping to avoid. Those who would like to see him denounce the president in full throat might be as annoyed as those who think he should accept there’s nothing Canada can really do to help and look out for our own best interests while the socio-political nightmare plays out.

Trudeau’s response wasn’t anything inspiring or novel or revolutionary. “It is a time for us as Canadians to recognize that we too have our challenges — that black Canadians and racialized Canadians face discrimination as a lived reality every single day,” he said. “There is systemic discrimination in Canada, which means our systems treat Canadians of colour, Canadians who are racialized, differently than they do others.”

He continued: “We need to see that, not just as a government and take action, but we need to see that as Canadians. We need to be allies in the fight against discrimination. We need to listen, we need to learn and we need to work hard to figure out how we can be part of the solution on fixing things.”

But here, at least, he was getting to the nub of the issue: To the extent the federal government can make things better for marginalized Canadians, Trudeau is the guy driving the boat. To read some of his ministers’ pensées, you would think they were just regular folks.

[…]

In the meantime, however, you can bet the farm we will soon learn that the Liberals’ changes to impaired driving laws — allowing police to stop and breathalyze drivers without any suspicion of impairment — have disproportionately affected black and Indigenous drivers in particular. Literally everybody saw it coming except Trudeau and his ministers.

OK, I’m kidding — they saw it coming too. They might want to log off, dial down the performative sanctimony and think on that a while.

June 3, 2020

Inglis High Power: How a Chinese Whim Became A British Service Pistol

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Jan 2018

Sold for $3,163.

During World War Two, the Canadian government set up a loan program to help Chinese companies provide all manner of material aid to Canada’s allies. Among many others, one recipient of this aid was the Nationalist Chinese government under Chiang Kai Shek. Chinese representatives asked the John Inglis company to manufacture no less than 180,000 Browning High Power pistols, and the company agreed.

After some wrangling, Inglis acquired a license from FN representatives to make the guns, got a complete technical package through the British government and FN’s representatives in exile, and the direct personal aid of Laloux and Saive from FN. Delivery proved difficult, though, with only about 4000 guns being shipped to Karachi and then needing to be flown over The Hump in cargo planes, along with massive amounts of other aid — and a few pistols didn’t get a lot of priority there.

By the fall of 1944, the contract was cancelled under concerns that it was not really contributing to any progress in the war against the Japanese, along with insistence from American General Stilwell that the Chinese forces be armed with weapons that could be supplied more easily through the American logistic network. Production restarted after the defeat of Germany, with another 40,000 or so being made and delivered before it was cancelled again when the Nationalist Chinese forces were seen to be clearly losing to their Communist opponents.

Each of these pistols was supplied with a combination shoulder stock and holster. In the US, attaching a stock to a pistol would normally subject it to registration as a Short Barreled Rifle, but the Inglis High Powers are among the guns exempted from this requirement. They are, in fact, among the least expensive and most modern guns to be exempted in this way.

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QotD: From “the media’s” point of view

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

But what if they’re right? The media are most often accused of three things: bias, sensationalism and negativity.

Bias. Everyone leans a certain way politically. Ideally, that wouldn’t affect the way a reporter covered a city council meeting or a police news conference. But to tell the truth, I’ve probably worked with 10 times more liberal-leaning journalists than conservative-leaning journalists over the past three decades. The profession attracts people with an affinity for underdogs. That has to have some impact on the stories we choose to do and the ones we don’t.

Sensationalism. It depends how you define it. If we talk to the relatives of a murder victim, are we doing it to make money? I hope we’re there because we’re trying help the community grieve together. But let’s face it, that story is going to be well-read so maybe it will make more money in some click-based, page-view algorithm that I’ll never understand.

Negativity. We don’t make cars crash. We don’t bomb civilians. The world can be an ugly place and these things won’t stop if we ignore them. On the other hand, I haven’t met many reporters who would rather cover a parade than a murder trial. Darker stories seem, by their nature, more important. So maybe we are negative.

But I’ve already fallen into the trap of thinking in terms of “us” and “them.” There should be no distinction. It’s here where the media are their own worst enemies. We tend to think we’re infallible because we’re doing God’s work. But if we want more people on our side, we could do a much better job of showing the public what we do, why we do it and how we do it. We like to crow about open courts, but what about open newsrooms?

Maybe we should trust people enough to let them in on the process. To boil it down to one example, if the police shoot an Indigenous man and we decide to mention his race in coverage, we should tell people why we thought it was relevant and maybe admit that we agonize over such decisions. It might not stop the haters but it would at least give “them” a chance to understand “us.”

Cam Fuller, “Do people really hate us and if so, why?”, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, 2018-03-03.

May 30, 2020

David Warren reports from “the High Doganate” (Parkdale, Toronto)

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

I haven’t lived in Toronto for many years now, but as David Warren highlights in his Essays in Idleness posts, things haven’t changed much in all that time:

The Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto.
Map by Alaney2k via Wikimedia Commons.

We continue to be well-as-can-be-expected, up here in the High Doganate, though stir-crazy, and over-informed about the Batflu (also known as the Kung Flu, or Peking Pox). The housefinches on our balconata persist in their social distancing, and at street level, the dogs continue to walk their masters. The brave, without a dog, may go out, without a mask, if they can stand up to the Virtue Signallers (or as I prefer to call them, the Smugly Foocklings). But that is in the respectable parts of town, at least three miles away, where designer masks are now de rigueur. There are plenty of trolleys, but they travel mostly empty. This is because the transit authorities are “committed to keeping customers and staff safe.” Knowing that most of the public health measures are fraudulent, and/or counter-productive, is not helpful to one’s peace of mind.

These measures would include the vast public doles which our guvmints have been generating, electronically. It could be taken as pay, for those who’d otherwise riot. Eventually, the guvmints hope to electronically rake it back, both from those who were paid and those who were not, in the form of much extended taxes. To understand the Batflu response, is to understand the welcome it gave to bureaucrats and their patrons, wherever the Left won the last election. They do not surrender such powers lightly.

Most of the people I hang out with are their particular targets — from freelance giguers to flea marketeers to those with religious vocations. Such people naturally resist the Kafkaesque arrangements our progressives relish and demand. The Batflu “crisis” put as many as possible of these statistically inconvenient people out of work. (Many are compulsive tax-evaders, after all!) These “little people,” especially those trying to support uncool, old-fashioned, frankly heterosexual families, are the ones for whom I most pray, as they and their children face the “green” future, which will exclude them in the name of “diversity.”

But also I think of the vast slave armies, in the “service economy,” with their idiotizing jobs, from flipping hamburgers to humping boxes in the Amazon warehouse — pinned to their minimum wages until their functions can be mechanized. (When they unionize, this happens faster.)

The “professional classes,” who can work from home, because they do nothing of value, needn’t go months without revenue, while their debts are piling up. They sneer at those who oppose a lockdown, that is perfectly comfortable for the professional classes, who at worst save money by dining in, or must order what they want through Amazon.

May 28, 2020

Wuhan Coronavirus versus Canadian government planning and implementation

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

As Chris Selley illustrates, this was a clear failure for the various levels of government:

When Ontarians look back on the COVID-19 pandemic as the moment when their government finally ponied up the big bucks and fixed the province’s long-term care system, they will likely also wonder what the hell took so long. As appalled as everyone quite rightly is by the Canadian Forces’ report into the state of five long-term care homes that were in dire enough shape to require military intervention, we really shouldn’t be shocked. As the Ottawa Citizen in particular has reported in recent years, the system’s staffing levels were designed for a much less old, much less sick and much less Alzheimer’s-afflicted population than lives in them today — and it led to some terrible outcomes in normal times.

Perhaps it was easy to blame such incidents on individual villains: Ottawa support worker Jie Xiao, who was caught on video punching 89-year-old Georges Karam 11 times in the face; or Elizabeth Wettlaufer, one of Canada’s most prolific and yet somehow least-famous serial killers, who murdered at least eight senior citizens in long-term care homes during her red flag-festooned nursing career. Perhaps tales of society’s most vulnerable being forced to wallow in their own filth, or even just left alone in confusion and misery, are too much for the human mind to contemplate at length.

In any event, it only stood to reason that a virus as potent as the one that causes COVID-19 would exploit weak points in a long-term care system. Between wandering patients, fans circulating air throughout facilities and a lack of basic sterilization control, you would almost think these five facilities wanted the virus to spread. It’s a wretched understatement to say we can do better.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves, though: Long-term care homes will always be uniquely vulnerable. And as the economy reopens, it’s essential we keep focusing on them. It’s essential that we focus, period.

There is a tendency among media in Central Canada to treat “Canada’s COVID-19” outbreak as a single thing affecting all of society. It clearly isn’t. The numbers are all over the map. Quebec has reported by far the most cases and deaths: 5,655 and 480 per million population, respectively. Ontario is at roughly one-third of that: 1,778 cases per million and 144 deaths per million. At 1,569 cases per million, Alberta has a comparable number of cases to Ontario — but far fewer deaths, at just 31 per million. British Columbia has the same death rate as Alberta, but with only one-third as many cases. Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and New Brunswick have reported just 18 deaths between them. Quebec has nearly 30,000 active cases; Ontario has just over 6,000; Manitoba has 16.

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