Quotulatiousness

November 12, 2025

Bike lanes are only the start

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Spaceman Spiff explains how aspirational schemes proposed by our technocratic governments at all levels seem to quickly and effortlessly shift from a nice non-intrusive improvement in life to an overbearing imposition of ever tighter controls on our lives:

Bike lanes on Yonge Street north of Bloor Street in downtown Toronto.
Image from Google Street View

The adoption of cultural novelties follows a predictable path. Some bright idea is proposed and there is nominal support or at least not widespread opposition.

Soon after implementation begins its opposite is condemned. This is the first warning the lunatics have taken over the asylum. We move from a positive, optimistic drive to condemning a perceived negative. By then the intolerant are amassing, attracted to a secular pulpit with which to lecture the rest of us.

More time passes and condemnation of the opposite is not enough. We are commanded to behave in ways more pleasing to our public servants. We learn a key aspect of our future has been decided by a shadowy committee we have never heard of. A well-meaning experiment has become an imperative used to control us.

This absurd sequence is more common than it should be.

A common example in Britain is the creation of bike lanes.

The idea sounds benign. Let’s build cycle lanes to encourage exercise. It is broadly popular, a kind of inoffensive fad to encourage better health despite the weather being an impediment for most.

Few people actively object which is taken to mean they endorse these projects.

It is not long before support for helping cyclists degenerates into discouraging cars since people should be cycling more anyway. The initiative lends moral weight to an otherwise fringe view. The construction of the bike lanes accelerates these ideas as roads are narrowed and traffic slows, frustrating many. There are too many vehicles on the road we are told, all the more reason to get on your bike.

Soon suggestions are made to ban cars completely. The new idea proposed is to shut down the congested roads and replace them with even more bike lanes and pedestrian zones.

Some even openly discuss intentionally making driving awkward and expensive as an explicit goal. The technocratic mind often forgets its charges are people not slaves.

Before long everything shifts, then we wonder how we got to the point our own paid employees can openly gloat we will soon be banned from travelling in ways they dislike as if they are our controllers.

An idea appealing to a minority is imposed on all. Acquiescence to novelties becomes weaponized and subsumed into the ambitions of others. No one ever votes for these things. They seem to just appear.

The end result is often the destruction of goodwill as popular initiatives are rammed down our throats and used to berate us for failing to live up to the standards our public servants impose upon us.

We then tire of the lectures. We wonder where these lunatics come from.

A moment of complacency means unwanted bike lanes but before long it is banned cars, government-controlled IDs and digital currencies. Those who pay attention to the activist world often sense they’d build concentration camps if they could get away with it and all thanks to some benign-sounding scheme we didn’t object to.

November 11, 2025

How not to solve your housing affordability crisis

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen explains why allowing fifty-year mortgages are not the solution that financial journalists seem to think they are:

    Wendy O @CryptoWendyO

    I don’t think a 50 year mortgage is bad.
    It gives everyone more flexibility financially
    You can pay a mortgage off early
    Not sure how else to lower home costs in 2025

Buyers: “How much will this house cost me?”

Sellers: “What’s your budget?”

Buyers: “Well, it was 500K, but with these new fifty year mortgages, I think it could stretch to million.”

Sellers: “I have an astonishing coincidence to report.”

Look, I don’t know exactly who’s retarded enough to need to hear this, but if you throw money at something, you get more of it.

Which means that if you subsidize demand, you get more demand.

And if you have the same supply, and more demand, price goes up.

This is how the federal Stafford Loan program made college a gateway to permanent debt slavery. Subsidize demand, price goes up.

The reason people don’t understand this is that most people are only smart enough to think about individuals, not populations.

They think if you have more money, you can buy more things, as if things come from the item store in a Japanese console RPG, where the store always has infinity stuff to sell you, and infinity money to buy your loot.

People who are capable of thinking about large groups quickly realize that money is just a way of distributing things.

Like, there’s a limited supply of things, and you’re just choosing who gets them. Having more money doesn’t make more things.

Except … it should, shouldn’t it?

Eventually?

Like, if apples get super expensive, because somebody invented a new kind of apple that’s so delicious that everyone wants them, then the price of those apples goes up, so more people start growing them.

So why doesn’t that work with houses and colleges?

Why don’t the super-inflated prices of those things inspire profit-minded people to make more?

It’s almost as if there were some sort of gatekeeper, whose permission you needed to make a house or a university.

But that’s impossible, because this is a totally capitalist country, so you can just do things, right?

Ian Runkle/Runkle of the Bailey chimes in:

Okay, let’s talk about 50 year mortgages.

First, let’s talk about what sets the price in a market where there’s more demand than supply. It’s set by what people can afford to pay, which means the payment/month.

What that means in practical terms is that the total price isn’t the limiter. It’s the monthly payment.

So, if X house is going for a price that has a 2500/month payment, the market is going to land total prices on a 2500/month payment.

So, increasing the mortgage terms makes things more affordable for about six months before the market adjusts. After that, it stops making it more affordable.

But “affordable” here doesn’t mean inexpensive. In fact, quite the opposite. Extending from a 30 year to a 50 year mortgage is likely to double the cost of credit.

But that’s before the prices adjust upward to “eat” the supposed affordability gains.

This doesn’t make houses more affordable, it makes them more expensive by far.

November 10, 2025

Canadian military expansion

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

In the free-to-cheapskates portion of this week’s dispatch post from The Line, the editors discuss some of the implications of the significant expansion plans for the Canadian Armed Forces (with the caveat that little of these plans are funded and would be subject to major changes if the government fails to get its budget through Parliament):

Canadian Armed Forces photo.

The amount of defence spending we’re talking about here is something that we have not thought about at all in recent generations. It’s a good thing. But it’s going to create some real challenges that we need to start thinking about, and coming up with solutions for, right away.

The numbers look something like this: the government had already announced a $9-billion influx of money into national defence, as well as a little bit of creative accounting, all with the goal of getting our spending up to the NATO two-per-cent-of-GDP target immediately, instead of on the absurdly prolonged trajectory the last prime minister deemed appropriate. A big part of this — and a welcome part — was a pay raise for members of the Canadian Armed Forces, particularly those at the lower scale of the pay grids for enlisted personnel and officers. One of the major problems the military has had in recent years is retaining trained personnel, and a pay raise is a tried-and-true way of helping address that. It also has the effect of juicing our spending at a time when our allies were looking for a tangible commitment. It’s a win-win.

But then there’s the rest of the spending: over $80 billion over the next five years, with a goal of getting up to the new NATO target of five per cent in only nine years, by 2035.

The Line supports this. We support this wholeheartedly. It makes us want to do cartwheels in the streets — and we would, if not for justified concerns for our joints and lower backs. (And dignity, though that’s less an issue.) But we do need to flag how transformative that level of investment would be.

Here’s the simplest way to put this. Almost our entire debate over defence in recent decades has been around the two-per-cent target. Nominally, the Canadian Armed Forces have certain capabilities that were suited to our national willingness to spend around two per cent of GDP. In reality, because of chronic under-funding, a lot of the capabilities we claim to have on paper didn’t really exist in reality. Units were badly undermanned. Equipment either didn’t exist or was not in serviceable condition or was long-since obsolete. Shortfalls of money and trained personnel were cutting into training exercises and basic upkeep on weapons, gear, and facilities. This prolonged fiscal starvation, combined with a fairly high level of demand on the forces for missions abroad and at home, had the effect, year after year, of hollowing out the force.

Getting spending up towards two per cent will help turn that around. This is conditional — and it’s a big condition — on fixing the military’s procurement problems. We could budget a trillion for the military, but it’s not going to make a difference if we have the same broken processes that need 10 to 15 years to actually get from an identified operational need to a signed contract. But still, if only in the big-picture sense, getting to two per cent will actually flesh out the Canadian Armed Forces into the organization that already existed on paper.

That’s good. That would be a big step up. But the problem is, as your Line editors have been screaming into the void for years, even the fully fleshed-out and realized version of the Canadian Armed Forces that existed on paper is too small for the current global environment, and lacks many critical capabilities that will be necessary to effectively fight — or even simply survive — on the battlefield. We need to do things we cannot currently do, and we need to do a lot more of all the things we’re already doing. That’s going to mean a bigger naval fleet, a larger army and a larger air force. That’s just the reality — our current force structure, even if fully manned and ready, is not large enough to meet all our needs.

That’s where the other tens of billions of dollars come in. There’s simply no way around the fact that this amount of money, combined with geopolitical reality and political rhetoric, is pointing to an inescapable conclusion: the Canadian Armed Forces are going to get a lot bigger. A lot bigger. We are looking at a substantial increase in the size of the regular forces, and probably an even larger increase in the size of the reserves.

Indeed, you may have seen this article recently in the Ottawa Citizen, by defence reporter David Pugliese. In it, he discusses proposals being prepared at National Defence Headquarters to establish a new reserve force of approximately 400,000 troops. The Line can confirm the general thrust of Pugliese’s reporting. We have no idea what the politicians will eventually sign off on, and we won’t be surprised if they get weak-kneed when some of the details are laid out before them, but discussion of a massive expansion of the Canadian Armed Forces, on a scale we haven’t seen since the Second World War, is indeed happening in certain rather important rooms in Ottawa.

November 8, 2025

Think Before You Post | How the UK fell to a sinister new form of censorship

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published 27 Oct 2025

“Think before you post.” Those were the words screamed out by government social-media accounts, threatening to lock up people for “hate speech”, as riots swept the United Kingdom in the summer of 2024. To those who hadn’t been paying attention, it offered a stark insight into a supposedly liberal, democratic nation that had come to police speech as much as, sometimes even more so, than actual violence. Inciting racial hatred, inciting religious hatred, “grossly offensive” online communications – over the past 60 years or so, Britain has written one new speech crime after another into its statute books. And it has led to a situation in which at least 30 people a day are now arrested in England and Wales for social-media posts. This is a documentary about some of those speech criminals. What we found out was even more chilling than the headlines would have you believe. Featuring: Maxie Allen, Rosalind Levine, Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Luke Gittos and Jamie Michael.

The Boomers didn’t do it, but they could have reversed it

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter takes the entire Baby Boom generation out to the woodshed for a well-deserved talking-to:

    toking-the-abacus @_toking

    It’s amazing how catastrophically bad the current job market is in the US. No one wants to train anyone. They want 5-10 years experience in skills that you don’t get unless someone mentors you in a more junior role. Then you have rampant visa abuse.

Boomers mostly got paid to get trained on the job for their jobs.

Then they turned around and demanded college for everything. At a steep markup.

Then they rugpulled all the college grads by hiring foreigners to do the jobs people went into debt learning how to do.

Whole lotta incensed geriatrics in the replies saying “That wasn’t boomers, that was Griggs v Duke Power! Those judges were silent generation!”

Yes. And that was 1970. 55 years ago.

That’s kind of the point.

You were the largest generation in history, boomers. You could have reversed that insane decision. You could have ended the crazy practice of disparate impact. You could have ended the systemic bigotry of affirmative action, which discriminated not only against you, but against your own sons and, now, your grandsons. You could have used your institutional and electoral power to block DEI.

You could have done a lot of things.

But you didn’t.

At most you grumbled some, but not too loudly, because after all dad fought in the big war and you didn’t want to do a Hitler. A lot of you supported all of it wholeheartedly, because John Lennon had an imagination and MLK had a dream and remember Woodstock, man. Some of you profited from it handsomely. As a generation, as a group, whether by action or inaction, you entrenched it in every aspect of law and institutional culture.

You participated, each in your own way, in redesigning our entire society around women’s feelings, black self esteem, and sabotaging the minds, bodies, spirits, and lives of your white sons.

Don’t run from your part in this.

I’m not saying this to be mean.

I’m saying this because we fucking need you.

We need your votes, because as a direct result of the immigration policies of the last half century – which, again, yes, have their origin with Greatest and Silents, but whose most severe consequences unfolded on YOUR watch – we are absolutely, 100% screwed if we don’t deport an absolutely incredible, historically unprecedented number of people in a very short period of time. If that doesn’t happen it’s game over for America and, frankly, Western civilization. For now, for as long as you’re still breathing and capable of casting a ballot, whites are a bare majority. When you’re gone we’re outnumbered, the third world swallows the first, and it’s over.

We need you to confront the consequences of your actions and your complacency, to really feel what its done to your descendants, and to be filled with rage at the way you were misled by evil and selfish men, and an implacable determination to spend what remains to you of your lives doing whatever you can to reverse enough of the damage you allowed to be done to salvage something from this crumbling wreck of a society.

That is why we bully you.

Because we need you to see.

November 7, 2025

Milei – “If we don’t have [power], then the left will have it”

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Without Diminishment, Geoff Russ discusses Javier Milei’s recent podcast appearance and his demonstration that unlike a lot of theoretical libertarians, he understands the dynamics of political power:

    There are many liberals, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who are really useless because all they do is criticise, let’s say, those of us who want to lead the world toward the ideas of freedom. And what they don’t realise is that power is a zero-sum game, and if we don’t have it, then the left will have it. Therefore, if you level your harshest criticism at those in your own ranks, you end up being subservient.

Have truer words ever been spoken by an English-speaking politician?

Argentine President Javier Milei’s words on the Lex Fridman podcast were a blunt reminder of something that many conservatives, particularly those in Canada, have chosen to forget.

Politics is the pursuit of political power and the chance to use it before your opponents can. Debates can be won, superb essays published, and quotes recycled from deceased politicians. Without power, however, it all amounts to nothing more than a glorified brainstorming session.

The thoughtful ideas and proposals go to waste if they lie stagnant in perpetual bickering opposition.

On October 26, Milei won a resounding victory in the legislative elections. His party, Liberty Advances, gained forty-two seats and smashed the hard-left Peronists who have dominated Argentina’s politics for more than half a century.

Milei is a fanatical believer in libertarian ideas, and has never pretended to be a moderate or incrementalist. He famously brandishes a chainsaw to represent his willingness to destroy the broken socialist status quo of Argentina.

Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

The rise of Milei has been a cultural battle for the soul of the country, and he is not shy about it. Milei leads a fresh, winning anti-Peronist coalition of forgotten and angry Argentines who want permanent, radical change.

It may be tempting to view Milei’s success as a pure affirmation of the appeal of libertarian ideology, but he is hardly Argentina’s first advocate of economic freedom. He succeeds because he is the opposite of a polite, centre-right reformer. Milei unapologetically embraces his place as a culture warrior seeking to remake the nation.

One of his targets is the institutional decadence and incompetence of the Peronist political machine. By swearing to snuff it out, Milei swept through traditional Peronist strongholds, whose voters had never considered voting for the formerly toothless Argentine opposition.

In Reason, Peter Suderman considers some of the lessons North Americans can learn from Milei’s stunning election victory:

To understand why Democrats overperformed in this week’s elections, look to Argentina.

Last month, Argentinian president Javier Milei won an unexpectedly large electoral affirmation, as his party significantly outperformed expectations by more than doubling its congressional representation in what was widely seen as a referendum on his agenda.

Over the past two years, Milei, the world’s most libertarian national leader, has slashed spending, cut red tape, and made his top priority restoring economic order and prosperity to a country that has long been a socialist basket case. Critics warned that his policies would be destructive, destabilizing, and unpopular. But not only did he deliver the country’s first balanced budget in over a decade, he oversaw a radical decline in inflation — from 200 percent when he entered office down to 32 percent last month.

Despite warnings that the country would reject Milei’s brand of austerity, the country responded with a strong vindication of his policies. In a post-election analysis, The New York Times noted that Milei’s message was that only he offered a “path for a country that has undergone years of runaway inflation under high-spending populist governments”. The report pointed to Milei’s economic record to explain his party’s win: “Many Argentines had grown tired of prices swinging wildly from day to day and of a ruling class they considered to be corrupt and irresponsible”.

The same report said Milei’s outsized victory was “unexpected”. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been, because economic stability and low inflation are what voters the world over clearly want.

When voters swept President Donald Trump into office for the second time last fall, large majorities of his voters gave the economy poor marks and said their own family finances had worsened over the years. Under President Joe Biden, the American economy had been wracked by the biggest surge in inflation in forty years. American voters punished the party that was in power when that happened.

This was true all over the world. After the pandemic, inflation skyrocketed globally, and in election after election, voters rejected ruling parties.

Inflation and economic instability have long been political losers: Look at Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, and his ensuing near-sweep of states in 1984 after taming a decade of out of control price hikes. The post-pandemic years have further reinforced this lesson.

Update: Undoctrination looks at Milei’s time in office so far.

Undoctrination
Published 6 Nov 2025

Javier Milei just pulled off the impossible … again.

In Argentina”s 2025 “midterm” elections, Milei’s 4-year-old party, La Libertad Avanza, went from a tiny minority to the largest party in the lower house, ending socialist dominance in Congress. The election was widely viewed as a referendum on Milei’s shock therapy plan for Argentina. The results are in: Argentines want more freedom.

In this video we cover:
How Milei slashed inflation from 211% to 31.8% in just 2 years
The 34,000 government jobs cut, 10 agencies eliminated, and 672 deregulations that freed the economy during Milei’s first year in office
How the Buenos Aires rental market exploded after lifting controls
How Peronists lost their veto-proof majority — and what it means for the future

And we feature expert analysis from Marcos Falcone, Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberal and Prosperity.

November 6, 2025

Reactions to Tuesday’s budget announcement

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

Mark Carney’s government finally got around to releasing their 2025 budget and lots of folks have thoughts and concerns about what is in it and what isn’t in it. After all, it could be the best possible budget, but it would still not satisfy all concerns … and nobody is pretending that this is anything close to “best possible” territory. Sylvain Charlebois says that the budget ignores the food insecurity issues and grocery prices for ordinary Canadians:

Graphic stolen from Small Dead Animals.

For a government that often talks about food affordability and insecurity, Budget 2025 offers surprisingly little that directly addresses either. There’s no bold food strategy, no affordability roadmap, and no new incentives for domestic food production. Yet, in between the lines, Ottawa has quietly set the stage for some indirect relief — not through grocery subsidies or consumer-facing policies, but through infrastructure, trade, and administrative reforms that could make the food system work a little more efficiently.

The largest signal comes from the government’s $115 billion infrastructure plan, one of its so-called “generational investments”. The new Trade Diversification Corridors Fund aims to modernize ports, railways, and airports — all chronic weak points in Canada’s food supply chain. When bottlenecks ease, goods move faster, and perishable products arrive fresher and cheaper. While no one in Ottawa framed this as a food-price measure, logistics efficiency has long been one of the most effective — and least visible — forms of price control.

[…]

Still, the absence of a broader vision for food affordability stands out. After years of grocery price volatility and public debate about “greedflation”, Canadians might have expected a more direct focus on food resilience — investments in innovation, local processing, or retail transparency. Instead, the government seems to have opted for a quieter, systemic approach: strengthen the arteries of trade and logistics, and trust that efficiency will trickle down to the dinner table.

The budget forecasts a $78.3 billion deficit for the 2025-26 fiscal year, which is significantly higher than notorious spendthrift Justin Trudeau’s last budget number. This adds to an already staggering $1.27 trillion debt load, which is nearly double what it was just before the pandemic. In the lead-up to the budget release Mark Carney had hinted at major sacrifices to be made, and while there wasn’t a lot in the document directly corresponding to sacrifice, the need to service that long-term debt will do the job quite adequately.

In the National Post, John Robson says that the budget is “elbows up, IQs down”:

Since I was last propelled years ago into the purgatory known as “the lockup”, where journalists spend budget day, have either process or contents improved? No. Instead they now insert a false stolen-land “acknowledgement” before even getting to the same old same old labeled bold and new. Which is especially troubling at this supposedly critical juncture.

The document is the familiar brick, 406 paper pages and 493 digitally with no explanation for the discrepancy and no excuse for the length. (Or for being called “Canada Strong” with an inexplicable picture of a ship.) Especially as the Finance Minister gabbled “This is a budget that talks to everyday Canadians,” and its purpose is to state plainly how much the government intends to spend, where it hopes to get the money and how far short it already knows it will fall, you shouldn’t have to wade through 248 pages of sludge to find out.

As P.J. O’Rourke said, “beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud”. Though we “privileged” insiders search “Summary Statement of Transactions” and voila, submerged on p. 249 (all references digital) is a $78.3 billion deficit next year if all goes well, and the national debt increasing $80.5 billion so it already didn’t.

Much commentary, and special-interest attention, focuses on trivial fiddles. But what matters is that Leviathan is in hock up to its horns, with interest payments projected at $55.6 billion next year, soaring to $76.1 billion by 2029-30. If the Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise, both forlorn hopes. NDP MP Leah Gazan, who would jail you for “downplaying” residential schools, snarled about not supporting an “austerity budget” but she won’t get the chance.

Some may bleat that times are tough. Indeed the finance minister’s campaign-speech “Foreword, Budget” gasses “The world is changing, profoundly and in real time; we are no longer living in an era of calm, but of significant change”.

The projected deficits are clearly hallucinatory, as the Liberals never seem to get deficit spending to go down, running deficits every year since 2015:

However, on the ludicrous side, the feds want to spend money to “investigate” Canada taking part in the freaking Eurovision contest:

On the slightly less ludicrous side, Noah considers the military aspects of the budget:

Budget 2025 outlines the government’s generational investment to quote, “defend Canada’s people and values, secure its sovereignty, and position the nation as a strong, reliable partner to its allies“. This starts by initiating a process of rebuilding, rearming, and reinvesting in the DND, CCG, and CAF to provide everyone with the necessary tools and equipment to protect sovereignty and bolster security.

Budget 2025 starts by outlining the government’s previous commitment to accelerate investments to meet NATO’s 2 per cent defence-spending target this year, which is five years ahead of schedule.

Budget 2025 goes a step further by setting Canada on a path to meet NATO’s 5 per cent Defence Investment Pledge by 2035. This will be broken down into two categories, 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035 in core military needs, including supporting the CAF, modernising equipment and technology, and building up defence industries, and 1.5 per cent on security-related infrastructure and investments.

This reinvestment in defence and security is the largest in decades, totaling $30 billion over a five-year horizon on an accrual basis. This funding is allocated across three main pillars: $20 billion for capabilities, $5 billion for infrastructure and equipment, and $5 billion for industrial support.

On a cash basis, Budget 2025 proposes to provide $81.8 billion over five years, starting in 2025-26, to rebuild, rearm, and reinvest in the CAF. This figure includes over $9 billion in 2025-26 that was previously announced in June 2025. This is the funding previously set out for Canada to reach the 2 per cent NATO target.

Key investments from this $81.8 billion fund include $20.4 billion over five years to recruit and retain a strong fighting force, which incorporates the previously announced updates to pay and support for CAF health care.

An additional $19.0 billion over five years is allocated to repair and sustain CAF capabilities and invest in defence infrastructure, including the expansion of ammunition and training infrastructure. Upgrades to digital infrastructure for the Department of National Defence, CAF, and the Communications Security Establishment, particularly for cyber defence, are funded with $10.5 billion over five years.

Finally, $17.9 billion over five years is designated to expand Canada’s military capabilities, with investments in logistics, utility, and armoured vehicles, as well as counter-drone, long-range precision strike capabilities, and domestic ammunition production.

This is a serious chunk of change, although sadly, and as you will see, we don’t get a major breakdown of what this looks like. What we are left with are general piles of money, which isn’t always a bad thing. It’s also expected. The budget is set for a timeline before many critical capabilities will be delivered, so they won’t be included. Almost everything comes after 2030.

November 4, 2025

The Great Feminization isn’t catching on in the culture, despite its power in our institutions

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lorenzo Warby provides a bit of hopeful news that despite the ever-expanding march of feminization through our various organizations and institutions, the culture is displaying strong resistance and effective:

Western culture is not feminising. How can I tell? The travails of Disney. Disney spent billions buying male-centric franchises — Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Indiana Jones … It then proceeded to so alienate the fan bases of those franchises that it is now reduced to openly discussing how to appeal to male audiences that it spent billions acquiring and further billions alienating.

If Western culture was feminising, then Disney should have had no trouble with its feminised products. Clearly, it has had problems. Meanwhile, the Top Gun: Maverick sequel to a 1986 movie can do excellent box office ($1.5bn) precisely because it knows what it is about.

The question then becomes, how and why did Disney so alienate those male-dominated fanbases it spent billions acquiring entree to? A simple answer would be that Disney was a Princess-story factory and it turned its new acquisitions into Princess-stories — stories not necessarily with literal princesses, but with female protagonists.

There is certainly a fair bit of that. A recent study found that Disney has tended, over time, to feminise male characters in its animated movies.

For it was not only that the Disney turned those franchises into launch pads for new Princess stories. Yes, Rey in the Star Wars sequels is an obvious example of doing precisely that. Nevertheless, there was rather more going on.

We can tell this from the Mulan live-action remake. The original 1998 Disney animated Mulan — despite controversy at the time of its cinematic release — acquired some popularity in China. It was seen as an engaging adaptation of the original story: a story deeply familiar to Chinese audiences. Worldwide, the film was a box office success.

The 2020 live-action Mulan remake was not a box office success. It was not for many reasons, but it was also emblematic of the problems of what YouTube critic Critical Drinker calls our post-creativity era.

2020 Mulan turned a female-protagonist story into a “woke” great-because-girl female-protagonist story. It turned a story of filial piety — a girl disguising herself as a boy to train and become a soldier in place of her disabled father, and struggling to overcome the limitations inherent in that — into something rather different.

Animated Mulan becomes accepted into the team of soldiers and triumphs through cleverness and teamwork. What makes the story resonate so well is there is nothing special about Mulan. She takes what she has and works hard at becoming better and succeeds in, and through, doing so. There is no hint of great-because-girl: rather it is fine being girl. Being a girl imposes limitations on her that she has to deal with and overcome: which she does — but not without genuine struggles — by sheer persistence and being clever, a problem-solver.

The key difference between a traditional Disney Princess story and contemporary Disney “woke” Princess story is the injection of great-because-girl. Live-action Mulan is a prodigy warrior with extra qi (or chi) who can do what the boys can do, but better. This is a cinematic version of a classic failing of feminism — by taking a blank slate view of humans, turning what men do into the standard for women. Women are great because they can do everything men can do, but even better. Feminist antipathy for stay-at-home mothers expresses this valorisation of matching men.

Live action Mulan is also much more politically conformist, even retrograde, in its denounement of Mulan celebrating service to the Emperor and going off to be a soldier. Animated Mulan rejecting a job as imperial advisor, and returning to her beloved father, is much less deferential to public authority.

The live-action film virtue-signals at the expense of story and understanding. It sacrifices clever cultural engagement for much flatter message-signalling.

If you want to watch a story set in China about women warriors, then the recent Chinese drama (C-drama) hits of Legend of the Female General and Shadow Love are available. These are smart, character-driven stories with the pervasive professionalism and sense of beauty—anchored in the cultural confidence—that one expects from contemporary costumed C-dramas, which are very much not based on trashing cultural heritage or we-know-better disrespect for source material.

Costumed C-dramas regulary have strong female lead characters while also having strong male lead characters. (As it happens, the male lead characters in both the aforementioned dramas are played by Cheng Lei; the female leads by Zhou Ye and Song Yi respectively.)

Update, 5 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 3, 2025

The BC government “has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.”

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

A Fraser Institute commentary by Bruce Pardy addresses the role of the NDP government of British Columbia in undermining the established laws on land title in the province among other actions to the advantage of First Nations bands and to the definite disadvantage of ordinary British Columbians:

Recently, British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma said that fee simple title in private property is superior to Aboriginal title. She’s a day late and a dollar short. In fact, her NDP government, led by Premier David Eby, has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has granted several First Nations a portion of a 1,846-acre land claim on Lulu Island. B.C. Supreme Court

A few days earlier, the City of Richmond sent out a letter to more than 125 property owners warning them that the security of their land is in doubt. “For those whose property is in the area outlined in black,” the letter reads, “the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership … The entire area outlined in green has been claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.”

The Richmond letter is a consequence of a recent decision of the B.C. Supreme Court, which awarded Aboriginal title over 800 acres of land in Richmond to the Cowichan First Nation. Wherever Aboriginal title is found to exist, said the court, it is a “prior and senior right” to other property interests, whether the land is public or private.

It is finally dawning on British Columbians that obsequious devotion to reconciliation is putting their land at risk. Sharma claimed that B.C. was pursuing multiple grounds of appeal, but that makes her a hypocrite. Her government did not robustly defend in court against the Cowichan claim. And in a dozen other ways, the Eby government has sought to put title and control of B.C. into Aboriginal hands.

In early 2024, it proposed to amend the province’s Land Act, which governs the use of Crown land in B.C. It planned to give B.C.’s hundreds of First Nations a veto over mining, hydro projects, farming, forestry, docks and communication towers. The government tried to consult quietly, but the backlash was immediate. It withdrew the proposals, promising to be more transparent. But it did not shelve its objectives or its plans. And did not deliver on its promise. Instead, it sought to make agreements over specific territories with specific Aboriginal groups, often negotiated covertly and announced after the fact.

In April 2024, the Eby government recognized Aboriginal title to Haida Gwaii, the archipelago on Canada’s West Coast. Around 5,000 people live on Haida Gwaii. About half are Haida, who voted overwhelmingly in favour of the deal. But non-Haida residents had no say. The Haida agreement says private property will be honoured, but private property is incompatible with Aboriginal title, which is communal. If Haida Gwaii really is subject to Aboriginal title, then no one can own parts of it privately.

Update: I forgot to include the URL to Mr. Pardy’s article … fixed now.

November 2, 2025

Canada finally getting serious about the military? Ignore the words and wait for concrete actions

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

The Canadian military used to be one of the best in the world. We “punched above our weight” as the hoary old cliché had it. But it was true. Then came Lester Pearson and the notion of peacekeeping, which is related to but not the same thing as having a military prepared to fight. Then came Pierre Trudeau and his loyal acolyte Paul Hellyer and the notion that merging the Canadian army, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) into a single organization — the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) — would magically reduce our military spending while maintaining our military power. It may have saved some money on paper, but its real impact was allowing the federal government to cut, cut, cut until the CAF was no longer capable of fielding significant numbers of combat troops, aircraft, or naval vessels and we began quietly withdrawing from our NATO and UN commitments (while still propagandizing about being a “soft power” superpower and persuading Canadians that we were still world leaders in peacekeeping).

Later Canadian governments have made noises about correcting the mistakes of the past half century and getting proper equipment — and enough of it to matter — and resurrecting the fighting capabilities (and numbers) of the CAF … even bringing back the proper names of the RCN and RCAF … but the promises were rarely implemented and even more rarely maintained beyond the life of a given government.

Our allies have been urging us to take the military more seriously for so long that it seems inevitable that any new expansion plans will fade into the mist just as quickly as all the previous fever dreams. Even when the government actually provides new funding, the bureaucracy is so incapable that time expires before they actually spend some or even all of it. All of which is why I’m highly skeptical that ongoing noises about increased military spending will actually result in anything more than a higher head-count in the civil service and lots (and lots, and lots) of re-announcing the spending plans:

In summer 2023, NATO held its largest-ever air exercise in Germany. Canada did not take part because its fleet was up on bricks.

Understaffed by around 10,000 regular soldiers, thanks to a 12 per cent attrition rate, the CAF was rocked by sexual misconduct scandals and chastised by a government more focused on culture change than war fighting.

Critics like Mark Norman, a former vice-chief of the defence staff, said Canada was increasingly seen as irrelevant in Washington.

But Norman said he is encouraged by the Carney government’s moves.

“Let’s be clear, the Forces are still in a decrepit state. We haven’t resolved the fighter jet or recruitment problems, or produced a defence industrial strategy. But I acknowledge that the prime minister has done a lot to try to refocus the government and, more broadly, Canadians,” he said.

A major problem for all governments has been actually spending money approved by Parliament. This week’s PBO report said that between 2017/18 and 2023/24, actual capital spending fell short of planned expenditure by $18.5 billion. Every year, the Department of National Defence failed to spend an average of $2.6 billion of its procurement budget.

“The scale of the planned increase raises questions about the government’s capacity to manage a higher volume of procurement activity and the domestic defence industry’s ability to support it,” the report said.

Norman suggested the new Defence Investment Agency, headed by former banker Doug Guzman, is a positive development. “The public service is not designed to produce operational outcomes, so the (appointment of an outsider) is encouraging,” he said.

According to David Pugliese, the Canadian Army is looking to vastly expand the existing army reserves:

The Canadian military has set in motion an initiative to increase the number of its part-time soldiers from the current 28,000 to 400,000 as part of an overall mobilization plan, according to a directive approved by senior leaders.

The directive, signed by Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jennie Carignan and defence deputy minister Stefanie Beck on May 30, 2025, outlines the need to increase the current reserve force from 23,561 to 100,000 and supplementary and other reserves from the current 4,384 to 300,000.

Beck and Carignan approved the creation of a “tiger team” which will work on setting the stage for a Defence Mobilization Plan or DMP to accomplish such a goal. That team will examine what changes are needed to government legislation to allow for such a massive influx of Canadians into the military.

Beck and Carignan pointed out that the plan would require a Whole of Society or WoS effort, meaning that all Canadians would have to contribute to the initiative.

“In order to assure the defence of Canada against domestic threats ranging from a low-intensity natural disaster response to high-intensity large scale combat operations, the DMP will be developed to empower a timely and scalable WoS response by achieving pre-conditions for the expansion and mobility of the CAF,” according to the nine page unclassified directive.

The initiative has drawn some critical responses on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

QotD: The “Blob”, aka the Deep State

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The parasitic unholy alliance of Big Corporations, Big Government, Big Bankers and their entire fan club and cheer squad of supporters. Dangerously, this also includes the watchdogs: the Spy Agencies and large parts of the media. The Blob takes money from citizens, pays other parts of the Blob (eg USAID, The UN, The BIS, The World Bank etc), pretends to “help” some token victim group or environmental cause, or even to monitor or audit The Blob, but the outcome benefits The Blob more than the victims. They line their own pockets and increase their own privileges.

The Blob also includes a special category of “useful idiots” who naively assist them in looting Western Civilization. These people are paid in status or an illusory sense of purpose rather than money. They may not realize they are part of the self-serving Blob, and in the long run are not only harming the trees, birds and whales they say they want to save, but are harming their own health, wealth, national security, and worse, that of their children.

Jo Nova, “The Secret Ruling Class – Why the anonymous Blob needs to be invisible”, JoNova, 2025-07-18.

November 1, 2025

MAGA is not a monolith, thank goodness

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

In The Line, Alex Muir looks at Canada-US relations (such as they are currently) and why MAGA not being a monolith is something Canadian politicians need to understand to stand any chance of successfully navigating our dealings with President Trump and his administration:

If there’s one thing that we’ve seen in recent days, as Donald Trump plays an endless game of “deal or no deal” with countries around the world, it’s that the current administration is volatile.

Why? One answer to that question is factionalism — to an extent that has enshrined unpredictability as a core operating principle of the second Trump term.

Canadians are particularly exposed to this. From north of the 49th, it looks like American policy is oscillating between nationalist populism, business pragmatism, tech conservatism, and social traditionalism. That is, however, a misreading. Administration policy is remarkably consistent if you focus on the current rather than the waves. First and foremost, the president and his team obsess over visible status, a game you can play through flattery or strength and symbolic gesture — there are winning examples of both.

In concrete policy terms, the Trump administration expects us to help them on missile defence, border control, and maritime security. They expect access to our resource and energy assets, on their terms. And they want our manufacturing sector to relocate to America. They also expect Canada to know its place as a loyal American ally.

Zoom out to the bigger picture and all the daily clutter can be understood as moves to advance, or at least attempt to advance, those broad goals. And that understanding, in turn, can help inform a successful Canadian response to U.S. actions.

[…]

You cannot understand what is happening today if you do not understand what factions hold sway within this new structure. I recommend thinking of the United States as a monarchy wearing a representative democracy’s clothes. Decisions do not rest in the administrative state, or even in a political party (like Hungary), they rest in the attention of a restless and aging president and those known to have his ear, and his trust. How close to the president a decision-maker is, and who else has a voice on any given topic, goes a long way toward explaining outcomes.

The various MAGA factions colonizing D.C. share several important background beliefs on Canada. First, and arguably most important, they don’t notice it much, and care even less. Second, they assume all foreigners want to be Americans, or are somehow defective if they do not. Third, Canadians look and sound so much like Americans that the latter assumption is magnified.

Fourth, there is a wide streak of Manichaeism in several of the factions that make up the administration, and the MAGA movement more generally. This means resistance, or even evasion, is quite likely to be taken as evidence of ill intent — or even outright evil intent — as opposed to the furtherance of legitimate competing interests. All of these are wrapped up in a fairly magnificent degree of self-involvement. America is so big, so rich, and so strong, that all administrations overwhelmingly focus on domestic issues and domestic politics since nothing that happens outside their borders is generally seen as existential. (Whereas American elections and culture wars absolutely are.)

For Canada, this has meant many things, none of them positive. We’ve seen the rapid (and apparently random) escalation of tariffs (so far mostly on specific goods, or things not explicitly covered by USMCA), plus the endlessly repeated threats of higher duties in response to perceived Canadian provocations. There have been threats and intermittent moves to sideline Canada from vital security relationships, including the Five Eyes and NORAD. Canada has committed to some initiatives in order to satisfy American demands, like intensified border enforcement initiatives and committing new resources to national security priorities. It is difficult, however, to get out in front of a rapidly moving target in terms of the administration’s desired outcome.

And that’s the crux of the matter — what do the factions of the administration see when they look at Canada, and what do they want? Answering that question involves understanding what the factions are. The following summary of the factions within MAGA has been condensed from my other work, and should help Canadians understand the complexity of what we must face.

EBTpocalypse imminent?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The US government’s extended “shutdown” may trigger the loss of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to around 10% of America as of Saturday. A few years ago, Nathan Mayo pointed out that despite the good intentions of the SNAP program, it isn’t actually doing the job it is meant to be performing:

A recent administrative action has permanently increased benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by 25 percent. Unfortunately, this historic boost fails to address the structural problems that plague this nearly 60-year-old program.

The official Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) webpage proudly proclaims that, “SNAP provides nutrition benefits to supplement the food budget of needy families so they can purchase healthy food …”

To that admirable end, the program formerly known as food stamps distributed $79 billion to 40 million people last year. Yet this desire to provide wholesome food to needy families conflicts with clear evidence that wholesome food is not what they think they need. Whether they play by the rules or not, people receiving SNAP benefits currently spend between 70-100 percent of that benefit on things other than healthy food.

Government researchers determined that average SNAP recipients increase their food expenditure by only 30 percent of the value of their benefits. In other words, a person previously spending $300 on food a month who qualifies for $100 of food stamp benefits will start spending $330 on food and shift the $70 from his existing budget to other purposes. This surprisingly low percentage suggests that food is not recipients’ top priority, as people who were in dire need of food would be expected to boost their food budget by the full value of the benefits.

What of the hope that needy families will buy nutritious food? According to a study of a major retailer, recipients spend about 20 percent of their total grocery budget on junk food, with soft drinks as the top purchase—enough to supply a family of four with 20 two-liters of soda per month. Given the marginal amount of SNAP spent on food and the typical benefits for a family, SNAP literally expands the grocery budget by the exact amount needed to cover the junk food. SNAP recipients also spend about 27 percent less on fruits and vegetables than non-SNAP households. This difference cannot be attributed to a lack of access because around 85 percent of SNAP purchases are made at large chain grocery stores with vast produce selections. However, one factor in these choices is likely smaller grocery budgets and the fact that fresh produce is more expensive.

A less savory contributor to this poor nutrition may be that SNAP encourages unhealthy purchases through the “house money” effect. When gamblers win money, they are less careful with their winnings since they view the “house money” as more disposable than their own cash. Similarly, when people receive SNAP dollars, they are sometimes less careful about their purchases than they would be with their hard-earned dollars.

On the one hand, the lack of SNAP benefits might be lower impact than expected, or it might mean most major American cities go “full Mad Max“:

There are 41.7 million Americans slurping up Supplemental Nachos And Porkrinds (SNAP) benefits. That’s an amazing number, and it shows just how far down the bread and circuses route that we’ve gone. I was surprised at the number, but I can now surmise that the only people voting for Democrats are single white women and freeloaders. But I repeat myself.

The federal government shutdown is, as I write this, dragging into its fourth week. I’m generally pretty happy about that since the impact to almost everyone I know is … zero. However, that may soon change. EBT cards, (EBT stands for Entitled Bums Treats) are about to have a zero balance.

The Democrats in the Senate have voted a dozen times as I write this to not fund the SNAP (Socialist Nourishment And Pampering) program. The reason? This is one of their key weapons against Trump. They want to blame Trump for not having a budget because it won’t fund the SNAP (Scam Network for Appetite Pandering) program. Since people who use EBT (Endless Bailout for Takers) aren’t generally the ones who pay attention to anything that takes longer than 17 seconds, they’ll buy it.

Some states (Virginia, for one) realize that the place will look like Mad Max in by Monday if the pizza rolls stop flowing, and have found some cash in the couch cushions to kick the can down the road. New Jersey doesn’t even own a couch, so they have no money, and Connecticut has mobilized their National Guard for emergency ramen drops.

No more swiping for that purple drank or Hot Pockets®. When the EBT (Everyone But Taxpayers) card goes dry, life may get … interesting.

What will happen? “Mostly peaceful” flash mobs looting grocery stores. These flash mobs will make the 2020 riots look like a church picnic gone wrong because someone demanded gluten-free tofu.

Because SNAP (Subsidized Nuggets for Apathetic Parasites) isn’t just a program: it’s the duct tape holding urban America’s powder keg together. As mentioned, there are 41.7 million people, about 12.3% of the U.S. population, who rely on those cards for daily food.

H/T to Clayton Barnett for that link.

Oh, but wait … yet another judge has issued a ruling directing the federal government to ignore the lack of congressional approval or funding:

An order today from a federal judge in Massachusetts requires the Trump administration to pay SNAP benefits even though Congress hasn’t funded the current operation of the program.

Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, concludes that people will be harmed if SNAP benefits are not provided, and Congress previously appropriated contingency funds for emergencies in the SNAP program, so there’s no need for current appropriations — the executive branch must use emergency and contingency funds to pay for current operations despite the absence of current appropriations.

[…]

Defendants — the Trump administration — are required to use contingency funds to pay for current operations, whether or not Congress has funded current operations. A court has just concluded that a federal program must operate in the absence of current appropriations. That’s … an interesting choice.

Update, 3 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 30, 2025

Javier Milei’s party does well in mid-term elections

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

J.D. Tuccille on the results of Argentina’s recent elections which returned significantly more of Javier Milei’s allies than pre-election polls predicted:

And things were going so well before 2am …

Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei won an important election victory on Sunday when his coalition, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), received a plurality of votes in the country’s legislative elections. With about half of the seats in the lower house up for grabs and a third of the Senate, LLA didn’t gain a majority, but it dramatically increased its share enough to block repeals of presidential decrees by lawmakers from other parties and to support presidential vetoes.

As Reason‘s César Báez commented, the results give Milei and his allies crucial time to continue needed free-market reforms and, hopefully, restore the fortunes of a country once held up as a model of prosperity, but which has been driven into poverty by decades of statist misrule.

In what it calls “a shocking electoral victory”, La Nacion reports that LLA pulled 40.66 percent of the vote. That’s well ahead of the opposition Peronists, who have long dominated the country and drew 31.7 percent of votes. Importantly, LLA won the populous province of Buenos Aires (home to 40 percent of voters), a Peronist stronghold where Milei’s allies were recently trounced in local elections.

From Wealth to Poverty Under Government Economic Meddling

This is good news for anybody who hopes for the advance of freedom, of course. But it’s especially encouraging for Argentines who, over the course of generations, have seen their country reduced from one of the wealthiest in the world to an impoverished basket case.

“At the end of the 19th century, economists agreed: Argentina, the ‘land of silver’, had a golden future ahead of it,” Deutsche Welle noted in 2020. “‘Rich like an Argentine’ was a common phrase at the time.”

The German broadcaster added, “in an unprecedented fall, Argentina went from ranking among the world’s top economies to one at the very bottom of the list. Today, economists simply roll their eyes at the fate of Argentina, which is now a developing country.”

The reason is simple enough: Argentines handed their political fates to a man named Juan Peron. In the 1930s, Peron served as a military observer in Europe, traveling to countries including Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. He was deeply impressed by some of the worst ideas to ever motivate a government and blended them into his own “justicialist” ideology. Through decades of political dominance, first Peron and then successor justicialists demonstrated that, in practice, there’s no real difference between fascism and socialism and that statist economics by any name are destructive.

To illustrate just how destructive Peron’s legacy has been, it’s worth pointing out that after Sunday’s election, The Wall Street Journal reported that Milei’s free-market, smaller-government policies “have restored some credibility to Latin America’s third-largest economy, but about one in three people still live in poverty”. One-third of the population living in poverty is horrifying, but what’s remarkable is that this is an improvement over what went before. At the end of the preceding Kirchner presidency, poverty stood at 41.7 percent and then briefly rose to 52.9 percent before falling to its current level.

In Spiked, Hugo Timms points out that the success of La Libertad Avanza is almost diametrically opposed to what most mainstream media reports were saying in the days leading up to the elections:

Argentine president Javier Milei has won a significant victory in Argentina’s midterm elections, held on Sunday. His libertarian party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), claimed more than 40 per cent of the vote, effectively doubling its share of seats in the senate and lower house to 37 (out of 72) and 64 (out of 257) respectively.

The result came as a bitter shock to much of the mainstream Western press. Milei’s assault on established economic orthodoxies since his election in December 2023 led many “experts” to take it for granted that Milei’s party was in for a hiding.

In a primer for the election published last weekend, the Observer had already begun salivating over the prospect of Milei’s defeat. “Argentina is counting the cost of its turn to Javier Milei”, wrote economics editor Heather Stewart. Glum portraits of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump behind Milei loomed above the article. “Politicians around the world are closely watching what happens when populist economic prescriptions collide with reality”.

This was a comparatively soft take compared with what the Guardian published earlier in October. “Farage, Trump, Musk: your boy Javier Milei just took one hell of a beating. Why so quiet?”, blared the headline when Milei’s party was defeated in a provincial election in the capital Buenos Aires. The Guardian said Milei’s “hard right” administration was “melting away”, along with his “once-packed international throng of cheerleaders and wolf-whistlers”.

Unsurprisingly, the BBC struggled to get to grips with Milei’s victory on Sunday, even though its only job was to convey the results impartially. Apparently, the president made gains despite Argentina “hurtling towards an economic collapse”, it editorialised. It said the voter turnout of 68 per cent reflected “widespread apathy”. This might be lower than past midterm elections in Argentina, but it was still higher than turnouts at last year’s US presidential election (65 per cent) and the most recent UK General Election (60 per cent).

None of this should come as a shock. Since Milei’s rise to power in 2023, most of the commentariat has been eager to see him fail. His promises to radically cut public spending and deregulate key industries were seen in the eyes of many economic experts to only mean one thing: the dreaded return of Thatcherite “neoliberalism”, from which, they claim, Britain and America have never truly recovered.

The antipathy is mutual. In a speech to the World Economic Forum in January 2024, Milei famously referred to the world’s political classes as “parasites who live off the state”. That his speech was shared approvingly by Elon Musk on X confirmed, in the eyes of the Western establishment, Milei’s status as a dangerous insurrectionist.

Unlabelled cloned meat – coming soon to Canadian grocery stores

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

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois on a recent Health Canada decision to allow cloned meat to be sold in Canada with no label to differentiate it from ordinary meat:

Sometimes the most significant food-policy changes happen not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic whisper.

According to Health Canada’s own consultation documents, Ottawa intends to remove foods derived from cloned cattle and swine from its “novel foods” list — the very process that requires a pre-market safety review and triggers public disclosure. Once this policy takes effect, cloned-animal products could enter the Canadian food supply without announcement, notice, or label.

From a regulatory standpoint, this looks like an efficiency measure. From a consumer-trust standpoint, it’s a miscalculation.

Health Canada’s rationale is familiar: cloned animals and their offspring are, by composition, indistinguishable from conventional ones. Therefore, the logic goes, they should be treated the same. The problem isn’t the science — it’s the silence.

Canadians are not being told that the rules governing a deeply controversial technology are about to change. No press release, no public statement, just a quiet update on a government website most citizens will never read.

Cloning, after all, is not about making food cheaper or more nutritious. It’s a genetic management tool for breeders and biotech firms — a way to reproduce elite animals with prized traits. The clones themselves rarely end up on the dinner plate; their offspring do. The benefits, if any, are indirect: perhaps steadier production, fewer losses from disease, or marginally more uniform quality.

But the consumer sees no gain at checkout. Cloning is costly and yields no visible improvement in taste, nutrition, or price. The average shopper might one day unknowingly buy steak from the offspring of a cloned cow — and pay the same, if not more, for it.

And without labels, any potential efficiencies or cost savings stay hidden upstream. When products born from new technologies are mixed with conventional ones, consumers lose their ability to differentiate, reward innovation, or make an informed choice. In the end, industry keeps the savings, while shoppers see none.

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