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Published 6 Feb 2026Sports subsidies suck.
If sports is a trillion dollar industry, with billionaire team owners and millionaire players, and hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic fans, and weird pervert mascot creatures, why is the government giving them your money?
June 9, 2026
Stop buying stadiums for billionaires!
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QotD: The temptations of totalitarianism
In 1977, the French essayist, Jean-François Revel, published a tract with the title The Totalitarian Temptation. In it, he condemned the western intelligentsia’s faiblesse, which was at the same time dishonest, posturing, stupid, and evil, for Stalinist-style dictatorships.
One might have thought — I certainly thought — that with the downfall of the Soviet Union, the totalitarian temptation had been exorcised once and for all. This, of course, was a very superficial view. Instead of disappearing, the temptation balkanised, so to speak, and was also repatriated. Totalitarianism had been shown almost as conclusively as anything in the sphere of human affairs to be inherently absurd, intellectually nugatory, and catastrophic in practice. This fact was not sufficient, however, to destroy its attractions — at least for those who desire a complete solution to all of life’s little problems such as how to live and what to live for. A solution in the mind is worth a thousand disasters in the world.
Naturally, it takes a certain level of education to feel the temptations of totalitarianism: they do not occur to the illiterate, for example, but only to the intelligentsia. The latter has increased in size almost exponentially with the expansion of tertiary education, or at least with attendance at institutions of tertiary instruction. In retrospect, it is not surprising that totalitarianism should continue to exert its siren-song in previously liberal societies, particularly when the young, always tempted by radical ideas, face genuine if intractable problems, seemingly worse than those of the previous generation.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Temptations of Power”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-06.
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June 8, 2026
Milton Friedman – accessory to Grand Theft Taxation
I’ve only read a small part of Milton Friedman’s work, but I have great respect for him and think that overall, he was a very strong proponent for smaller, less intrusive government. But there’s one terrible thing that he was instrumental in implementing that almost outweighs everything else:
Milton Friedman’s greatest regret.
The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.
Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.
Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.
This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.
Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.
Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard was far more scathing about Friedman:
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June 6, 2026
Civil forfeiture is legalized theft where the process is part of the punishment
J.D. Tuccille points out that most victims of civil forfeiture actions in the United States never get a day in court to fight against the theft:
Two years ago, the Netflix film Rebel Ridge turned a common law enforcement tactic into a cinematic study of injustice. In fictionalized form, the movie brought home to audiences the reality that civil asset forfeiture is nothing more than legalized theft. Unfortunately, as documented in a recent Institute for Justice (I.J.) report, while several states have sought to reform the use of civil forfeiture, it remains a source of profit for many law enforcement agencies and a cause of grief to unlucky victims who rarely get to argue their cases in a courtroom.
Forfeiture “Clearly Has Been Abused”
Civil asset forfeiture is “a legal process enabling law enforcement agencies to seize property which is suspected of having connections to criminal activity,” Northeastern University criminology professor Nikos Passas explained when Rebel Ridge spurred Americans to wonder whether cops could really take money and property without convicting anybody of a crime. “The difference between criminal and civil forfeiture is that the criminal one requires a conviction. A civil forfeiture targets the property itself, and often it is done without charging the owner with wrongdoing.”
The problem, he added, “is that by giving a profit motive, a financial motive, to law enforcement it introduces a bias. … It clearly has been abused.”
I.J. has long tracked and battled those abuses. In the fourth edition of Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture, authors Lisa Knepper, Jason Tiezzi, Matthew P. West, Elyse Pohl, and Mindy Menjou document legal changes that have reformed or even abolished civil asset forfeiture in some states, and the work that remains to rein in abuses. Change has been slow because stealing under color of law is a huge moneymaker for government agencies against which people have little recourse.
Seizures by Default, With No Courtroom Proceedings
“Most forfeitures never reach a courtroom, available data show. For example, in a large sample of Indiana cases, just 4% were decided by a judge. Instead, forfeiture typically happens by default,” the recent report notes.
Why is that? It’s often because in their seizures, police departments take enough money or property to be lucrative, but not at a value that would justify a legal fight.
“Very few owners who contest forfeiture have legal representation — just 6% in Arizona and 7% in Oregon — likely because it is prohibitively expensive,” according to the report. “A straightforward state-court forfeiture case costs an estimated $3,300, nearly twice the median cash forfeiture of $1,678 across 24 states.”
Since it’s a civil process and not a criminal one, people on the receiving end of civil forfeiture aren’t entitled to public defenders. Many find the cost of hiring attorneys to be much higher than the value of what is stolen from them by authorities. The money winds up in government coffers without a fight. Those who do fight end up running a gauntlet.
“Even owners who successfully reach a judge typically wait months. Adding together statutory deadlines, the median forfeiture process takes more than six months on paper just to reach a courtroom. … In practice, cases frequently take far longer. In Virginia, for example, half of successful challenges lasted more than nine months, and a quarter stretched beyond 16 months.”
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QotD: Richard Nixon – more sinned against than sinning?
The Nixon White House, museum display panels announce, was consumed by “a climate of deep suspicion”. The infamous Plumbers took action against “perceived political opponents within the Federal Government”. A video display allows visitors to choose clips on the theme of Nixon’s “Conspiracy Thinking”. Paranoid, the president mindlessly lashed out at enemies that he hallucinated. This is still the official history, in museum exhibits curated by the National Archives and Records Administration.
On Friday morning, the consistently pro-Nixon docents hadn’t heard about the important Feb. 8 story in The New York Times that describes a plot within the government to spy on the Nixon White House, with Navy Yeoman Charles Radford stealing documents and sending them to the Pentagon as insurance against budget and policy meddling from the person serving as the president of the United States.
The revelation from a newly declassified document, longtime journalist James Rosen concluded, “bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the ‘deep state’. … Nixon proved to a team of federal prosecutors and grand jurors not only that such a beast existed but also that he, guilty as he was in Watergate, had been its victim.”
Chris Bray, “The Nixon Library Is Wrong About Nixon And The Deep State”, The Federalist, 2026-02-13.
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June 5, 2026
Canada’s AI “strategy”
I’m at the point where I honestly can’t tell whether this is parody or actual Canadian government policy:
AI in Canada lost before it even got started.
They literally are trying to get AI to give a Land acknowledgement before any session.
Here are 6 statements that show how Canada already blew AI like we all knew it would.
1. “The Government of Canada commits to applying Gender-Based Analysis Plus in a meaningful way across policy design, skills development, innovation, and governance to ensure that AI reflects our values, protects those most impacted, and leads to outcomes that are safe, inclusive, and beneficial for all Canadians.”
2. “Canadian AI must support, reflect, and project Canadian culture, which includes our customs, our history, and our heritage. Canadian voices, languages, communities, and knowledge must also be represented in how AI systems are designed, built, and used.”
3. “support Indigenous self-determination over how AI is built and used in Indigenous contexts, and build domestic capacity to address the specific harms Indigenous Peoples face”.
4. “promote the world’s first AI equity-based national standard on accessible AI to drive inclusive and accessible AI and remove accessibility barriers from AI systems, and ensure Canadian AI reflects the Accessible Canada Act principles.”
5. Repeated framing around “disproportionate exposure and impacts of AI harms to equity-seeking groups” and the need to “address the systemic barriers experienced by racialized communities, persons living with disabilities, and others who too often fall on the wrong side of the digital divide”.
6. “Canada will support and amplify Indigenous-led AI initiatives that reinforce cultural expression and linguistic vitality in Canada and around the world, building on existing efforts …”
The Canadian economy, RIP
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, James E. Thorne writes an obituary for the Canadian economy:
For the record.
In Canada, It Matters How the Economy Dies.
The Canadian economy is dead. It just didn’t die with a crash big enough to satisfy the models. No Lehman moment, no Covid-style cliff, just two negative quarters of GDP, years of falling output per person, negative productivity, and a private sector slowly strangled by rates and regulation while the establishment insists the patient is “resting”.
On the facts, this isn’t ambiguous. Real GDP has contracted for two consecutive quarters on an annualized basis. Labour productivity has been flat or negative since 2021. Real GDP per capita is below its pre-pandemic level. Ontario has logged its worst non-pandemic quarterly job losses since the mid-1970s. The only consistent growth is in government payrolls and compliance, not in private enterprise and investment. If that isn’t recessionary, the word is meaningless.
And yes Macklem threatens rate hikes through all of this insanity.
Yet Canada’s official guardians insist nothing fundamental has broken. The C.D. Howe recession-dating committee says the downturn is not “pronounced, persistent, and pervasive” enough. The central bank warns against overreacting to “technical” weakness. Bay Street talks about “soft landings” and “resilience”. In some quarters, the answer to this slow-motion collapse is not relief, but further rate hikes. Ignore the body on the table, we are told, the vital signs aren’t quite bad enough yet to fill out the certificate.
Their rulebook was built for heart attacks, not cancers. It excels at spotting sudden collapses in aggregate GDP and jobs. It barely registers slow organ failure: a few tenths off real GDP per capita each year, productivity edging down, ugly quarters for private-sector employment and capex offset by public hiring. None of that triggers the old alarms until the damage is permanent.
Meanwhile, Canada has been busy throwing away the advantages that once justified its prosperity. Energy and resource projects are stalled or strangled. Business investment per worker trails peers. A country rich in capital, talent, and geography behaves as if it can live forever off inherited endowments while making it harder to build anything new. That is not “resilience”. It is delusion.
Canada’s economic establishment needs to wake up.
Two negative quarters of GDP, negative productivity, falling GDP per person, historic job losses in the core province, a suffocated private sector and calls for more tightening on top, are not signs of an economy “cooling toward trend”. They are signs of an economy that has already crossed the line from stagnation into decay.
The Canadian economy is dead in the way that matters: as an engine of rising living standards and a place where private capital is rewarded for building the future. It just didn’t die loudly enough for the old definitions. The real question now is not what we call it, but how long our institutions will keep pretending the corpse is “resilient”.
As the propagandists of the mainstream media do everything they can to deflect any hint of blame from their Liberal paymasters, we can still see that things are getting worse, not better:
The federal Liberals are getting fantastic return on their investment … giving our money to the presstitutes of the legacy media in return for kid-glove treatment of the government and attack-dog tactics against the opposition:
Why Do 50% Still Support Carney? My long-winded response.
That is a question we need to take seriously.
Leger’s latest federal polling has the Liberals at 50% support among decided voters, their highest level in that firm’s tracking since the Liberals first formed government in 2015. Abacus also found the political environment still favourable for Carney and the Liberal government. So this is not imaginary. This is not just CBC fairy dust sprinkled over Ottawa. The support is real. The harder question is whether it is rational.
My answer is simple: many Canadians are not voting for results. They are voting for the illusion of relief.
Even though Carney was in the economic background since 2020 he appeared to arrive after the Trudeau years like a man in a clean suit walking into a room after the dog crapped on the floor. Trump threatened 51st State. Carney looked calm. Unlike Trudeau. He spoke in complete sentences. He had the central banker aura. For exhausted voters, that was enough. They did not examine the wiring. They just saw someone who did not seem to be setting the curtains on fire.
Carney’s appeal is not built mainly on performance. It is built on contrast. Compared with Trudeau’s theatre-kid government of slogans, selfies, and moral lectures, Carney looks serious. But “serious” is not the same as right. A surgeon can look serious while operating on the wrong leg.
Canada’s economy is now weak enough that Carney himself has had to acknowledge ugly economic data. Reuters reported him addressing Canada’s technical recession and warning that some data will be “uneven” “ah ah ah” as the government pushes through policy changes. The Wall Street Journal reported GDP weakness, including two consecutive quarterly contractions, while Carney framed the pain as part of a broader economic rebuild.
That is where the sales pitch gets slippery.
When the economy weakens under Conservatives, it is called failure. When it weakens under Liberals, it becomes “transition”, “restructuring”, or “long-term transformation”. Same corpse, nicer label on the toe tag.
The deeper problem is that Canadians were never really asked whether they wanted Carney’s ideology. They were sold competence, not doctrine. They were sold expertise, not a governing philosophy that puts the state, regulators, climate finance, and elite managerial planning at the centre of national life.
Nobody knocked on doors saying, “Would you like a prime minister who believes markets should be bent around elite-defined social and environmental values?” No. They said, “He is smart. He ran banks. He knows Trump. He will steady things.”
That is not a mandate. That is a branding exercise.
And this is why the Conservative attack has to get sharper. Not louder. Sharper.
Calling voters stupid is a dead end. Many Carney supporters are not stupid. They are terrified of Trump. They are tired. They are anxious. They are looking at housing, debt, food prices, crime, productivity, health care, and a country that feels smaller than it used to, and they want someone who looks like an adult. Carney gives them the visual. He gives them the voice. He gives them the vibe.
But vibes do not build houses. Vibes do not raise productivity. Vibes do not lower debt. Vibes do not attract investment. Vibes do not make young Canadians believe they have a future.
The Carney government’s strongest weapon is not success. It is emotional permission. It lets Liberal voters tell themselves they have moved on from Trudeau without admitting the Liberal machine remains fundamentally intact. Same operating system, cleaner looking wallpaper.
That is why 50% still support him.
They are not endorsing the results. They are postponing the verdict.
Canada does not need a better-spoken manager of decline. It needs a government willing to reverse the policies that caused the decline in the first place.
Because a tight ship headed toward the rocks is still headed toward the rocks.
June 4, 2026
Bill C-9 is “what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa”
L. Wayne Mathison explains how the Canadian government persuaded itself to push a “hate speech” bill that will upend centuries of free speech practice and criminalize good-faith arguments. Like many such brainfarts, they cannot imagine what consciously evil people will do with these legal tools in hand:
AI-generated image by L. Wayne Mathison
If you want to see what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa, look at Bill C-9.
This is not just another “hate speech” bill. It is a sign of a much bigger shift.
The old political arguments were about wages, factories, class, ownership, and the economy. That was the old Marxist world. Today’s politics is about language, symbols, identity, emotion, culture, and who gets to decide what “harm” means.
Parliament has stopped arguing about who owns the factory.
Now it wants to control the dictionary.
Bill C-9 reads like a critical theory seminar that escaped campus, found a suit, and got hired by the Department of Justice.
Under the older liberal model, the law punished actions. Assault someone? Crime. Vandalize property? Crime. Block access to a building? Crime. The state dealt with what you actually did.
But C-9 moves the centre of gravity from action to meaning.
What did your words mean?
What did your symbol represent?
What was your motive?
What cultural message did your expression create?
That is not law as a neutral referee. That is law as a cultural therapist with police powers.
The most revealing part is the proposed removal of the long-standing “good faith” religious defence for hate propaganda. That defence existed for a reason. It protected freedom of conscience. It recognized that in a free country, people may express religious beliefs that others find offensive, outdated, or wrong, as long as they are not wilfully promoting hatred or violence.
That was not a loophole.
It was a guardrail.
But to the modern ideological mind, an ancient religious text is not treated as a source of conscience. It is treated as an artifact of power. A legal protection for religious speech is no longer seen as freedom. It is seen as oppression wearing a church hat.
So the guardrail has to go.
And what does government offer instead?
Trust us.
Trust that prosecutors will be reasonable. Trust that judges will interpret the law narrowly. Trust that ordinary Canadians will not get dragged through the process for saying something unpopular, traditional, religious, or politically unfashionable.
Sorry, but that is not how liberty works.
Rights are not protected by hoping the state behaves itself. Rights are protected by limiting what the state is allowed to do in the first place.
That is what makes the Senate debate so revealing. The Senate was supposed to be sober second thought. The old establishment airbag. The place where bad laws were supposed to slow down before hitting the public at full speed.
But now even the Senate is wrestling with a bill built from an intellectual toolkit designed to dismantle the very traditions the Senate was created to preserve.
Bill C-9 does not build social cohesion. It does not repair trust. It does not ask why people are angry, alienated, or radicalized in the first place.
It does what modern bureaucratic progressivism always does.
It manages symptoms by expanding state power.
It turns culture into a compliance file. It treats offensive expression less like a social problem to be answered with argument, courage, and moral confidence, and more like a hazardous substance to be regulated by experts.
The Frankfurt School wrote in dense, foggy jargon to expose hidden systems of power.
The joke is on everyone.
The modern state did not reject those tools. It absorbed them, stripped out the revolutionary romance, bolted them onto the Criminal Code, and called it public safety.
Bill C-9 is what happens when cultural theory becomes administrative power.
It is what happens when the state stops protecting public order and starts managing public meaning.
And that should worry anyone who still thinks freedom means more than government-approved speech.
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June 3, 2026
“… basically it’s a plan to make power more expensive while campaigning on affordability”
John Robson examines a few of the ways the Ontario government (and other provincial and state governments) frames what they call “affordability”, yet somehow it always seems to cost more afterwards and nobody is ever held responsible:
In many areas of life, the devil is famously in the details. And it presents both an opportunity and a frustration because there is so much out there deserving readers’ attention that you can’t even follow it all let alone cram it into a newsletter. Including former banking executive Parker Gallant‘s vigilance about the absurdities of the power system in the Canadian province of Ontario that the aspiring Conservative premier Doug Ford promised to fix in the 2018 campaign and then has smugly done nothing about. These things might seem uninteresting if you do not live in Ontario … until you realize it’s just as bad wherever you live. And when we say bad we mean both the cost and the deviousness with which it is presented to, or hidden from, the public. On this very point we like to quote the late great P.J. O’Rourke that “Beyond a certain point complexity is fraud … when someone creates a system in which you can’t tell whether or not you’re being fooled, you’re being fooled.” Which brings us to the shiny new buzzword “affordability” which refers to policies that make everything more expensive and the beneficiaries hide the fraud in tangles of complex bureaucracy.
If you want to get a headache, stay with us while we explain what it is that Gallant tracks. Ontario has what they call the “Independent Electricity System Operator” so politicians can claim whatever disaster is unfolding isn’t their fault. Sure, they make the laws and oversee the creation of the regulations. But heck, these things are “arms’ length” and “impartial” and independent and expert and wise and wonderful so shut up.
Including this nutty system where the province buys power we don’t need at grossly inflated rates from wind and solar virtue-signallers and then sells the surplus at deep losses to the neighbouring province of Quebec and some American states including New York and Michigan. So he looked in depth (we promised a headache) at just half a day, May 19, 2026, because a post by another of the people who keeps an eye on this stuff for the benefit of an indifferent or baffled populace alerted him to something fishy in the IESO forecast of generation by Industrial Wind Turbine operators. But it seems to be hard to find out exactly how much the taxpayers, via this wonderful “Independent” system with its hand in their pockets via the arm of the state, actually paid these IWTs not to produce power.
Paid them what? Yup. It’s how it works. And the idea is that if they didn’t produce the original forecast rather than the revised one we’d have had to pay them even more for what they didn’t do. Weird even by the standards of government. And expensive. As Gallant sums it up:
The net result is that those IWT cost us Ontario ratepayers almost $2.6 million for NOTHING over just the first 12 hours but we should rest assured the IWT owners loved it!
You read that right. The citizens of Ontario paid $2.6 million to the energy producers of the future not to produce energy in the present in just half of one day. If it were typical, it would be over $5 million a day times 365 days in the year so yes indeedy folks nearly $2 billion a year.
[…]
He then looks at various efforts to try to figure out the cost to consumers, including one by “my friend Roger Caiazza (the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York)” based on the auction price of “allowances” in March 2025:
Roger’s conclusion at that time was that the RGGI auctions were adding about $8-11/MWh to the wholesale cost of electricity, for electricity produced by natural gas. That would mean an addition of about 1 cent/kWh on a consumer’s bill. A penny may not seem like much, except when you realize that the average price in the country is less than 18 cents/kWh, so the penny is about 6%.
Imagine if people knew. As he concludes:
remember that the structure of the program is that the amount of allowances goes down every year and the price is intentionally driven up. And data centers are going in all over the place. And the Northeastern states have refused to build new power plants for a couple of decades now in the midst of the climate hysteria. So the 10-15% extra cost being experienced now is only the beginning of much worse to come. The worst part of the RGGI ‘cap and invest’ scheme is that the consumers get absolutely nothing for the increased cost. It is just a gratuitously inflicted injury brought about by completely artificial scarcity. Keep this in mid when you hear a politician from an RGGI state talking about how they care about energy ‘affordability’.
Or, we add, transparency. Or accountability.
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June 2, 2026
Judging Javier Milei’s work by the numbers
Thanks to automated translation from the original French on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Laurent outlines what he sees in the data from Argentina before and after Javier Milei became president:
I’ve been wondering for a while now about the (provisional) balance sheet of Milei in Argentina. You read everything and its opposite. So I stopped reading the commentary and looked at the raw numbers.
Argentina is the full-scale experiment that economists have been waiting for for 50 years. Same country. Same people. Same culture. We change ONE variable: the economic method.
Before: decades of statist and Peronist management, “redistributive”. The concrete result? 211% inflation, 42% poverty, a state in permanent deficit that funds its lifestyle by running the printing press.
Then Milei arrives. The opposite method, brutal, acknowledged: we cut, we deregulate, we stop printing.
Two years later ([snapshot] at his arrival (end of 2023) vs today):
Annual inflation: 211% → 31%
Monthly inflation: 25% → ~2%
Public deficit: −5% of GDP → +1.8% (surplus)
Growth: −1.6% → +4.4%
Poverty: 42% → 28%No debate. Judge for yourselves.
And the essential point: these gains don’t go “to the rich” or “to the markets”. They go first to the poorest.
Inflation is the most unjust tax that exists — it hits those who have no assets to protect themselves. Dividing it by 7 is giving back purchasing power to those at the bottom. And 14 fewer poverty points means millions of people, not an Excel line.
For a century, Argentines were told that the state would protect them by spending more and more. Result: one of the richest countries in the world in 1910, ruined. We’ve just reversed the method. Look at the result.
At some point, you have to accept what the facts say: on the economic front, the liberal method has delivered in two years what decades of socialism promised without ever delivering. And it benefits the most modest first.
You can hate Milei’s style — the chainsaw, the excess, the improbable outbursts, he’s nothing like a classic statesman. But you don’t judge an economic policy by the style of the one who leads it. You judge it by what it does to people’s lives.
And the numbers have spoken.
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June 1, 2026
America before the Constitution
In The Critic, Clement Knox discusses how the newly independent United States of America were governed — or not governed — under the pre-Constitution arrangements:
Declaration of Independence by John Turnbull (1756-1843), showing the Committee of Five (Adams, Livingston, Sherman, Jefferson, and Franklin) presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on 28 June, 1776.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
The historian James Breck Perkins once observed that the Declaration of Independence was French and the Constitution was English. One was a coup de folie — all Gallic bombast and improvisation — the other a coolly logical exercise in state construction.
Often overlooked is that these documents came into effect thirteen years apart. And the story of how the Americans went from the Declaration to the Constitution, from France to England, over the course of those years is filled with lessons for the present.
This year is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. It is also the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Articles of Confederation, which were commissioned at the same time as the Declaration but enjoy none of its renown. This is odd, as the Articles were the founding governmental structure of the United States, the system intended to effectuate the high-flown principles of the Declaration, and did so for over a decade until they were replaced by the Constitution in 1789.
The reason nobody talks about the Articles is because they were disastrous. Under them the United States government had a single legislative branch, congress, whose presiding officer was also the head of the executive branch. There was no federal judiciary. Neither congress nor its president had any real powers. Congress could not actually raise money. It could only “request” funds from the states — requests which were typically ignored. Congress also had no power over the regulation of commerce which meant that states could and did broker trade deals with foreign powers and impose taxes on the trade of their neighbouring states. Moreover, this hapless system could not be reformed as the articles required unanimity among the states to make even minor changes to them.
The regime imposed by the articles brought the nation to its knees. “The existing Confederacy is tottering to its foundation,” James Madison said in 1787, and few would mourn its passing as it “neither has nor deserves advocates.” “No money is paid into the public treasury,” he continued, “No respect is paid to the federal authority … It is not possible that a government can last long under these circumstances.” His pessimism was shared by George Washington who feared that “without some alteration in our political creed, the superstructure we have been seven years raising … must fall. We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion.”
Not prepared to allow the legacy of 1776 to be national ruin, Madison did something extraordinary: he moved to replace a failing regime with a functioning one. In 1786 he organised a convention in Philadelphia with the loosely-defined purpose of “revising” certain elements of the Articles. Once the convention was in session Madison revealed his true purpose. He did not want to revise the Articles but replace it with a constitution of his own composition.
The story of Madison’s high-stakes political gambit and how it played out in the years between the Philadelphia convention and the adoption of the constitution in 1789 is told in The Framers’ Coup by Michael J. Klarman. A professor at Harvard Law School, Klarman has written not just the seminal account of America’s founding but a classic account of how peaceful regime change can occur.
May 31, 2026
How the Nazis Got Rich Preparing Germany for War – Death of Democracy 17 – Q1 1937
World War Two
Published 30 May 2026By March 1937, Nazi Germany had renewed dictatorship, buried Versailles, and turned rearmament into a corruption machine.
Berlin, March 31, 1937. Adolf Hitler’s regime appears stronger than ever. The Enabling Act is extended for another four years, the civil service is bound more tightly to Hitler personally, and Germany formally rescinds its signature from the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty.
But behind the speeches about honor, work, and national revival, another transformation is underway.
In the first quarter of 1937, Nazi Germany moves deeper into an economy built around rearmament, Party patronage, racial exclusion, corporate privilege, and theft. The new German Corporation Law weakens ordinary shareholder control and strengthens management boards. Industrial giants profit from military preparation. Jewish property becomes a field of extortion and enrichment. Hitler himself grows wealthy through book royalties, image rights, hidden payments, and political slush funds.At the same time, the regime tightens control over public life. Civil servants are required to serve the Nazi state without reservation. Journalists, professors, doctors, artists, and Jewish Germans are pushed out of public and professional life. Concentration camp roundups expand beyond political opponents. And on Palm Sunday, Pope Pius XI’s Mit brennender Sorge is read from Catholic pulpits across Germany, openly challenging Nazi ideology.
This episode looks at Germany in the first quarter of 1937: a moment when dictatorship no longer needs to look revolutionary. It looks administrative, profitable, respectable — and permanent. This is the story of how power, profit, propaganda, and fear helped turn a modern state into a robber regime preparing for war.
0:00 Berlin, March 31, 1937
0:47 A World in Crisis
01:10 Germany Extends the Legal Shell of Dictatorship
01:23 Civil Servants Bound to Hitler
01:51 Hitler Rejects the Versailles War-Guilt Clause
02:21 The Enabling Act Is Renewed
02:48 Göring in Rome, Reassurances in Warsaw
03:44 The New Corporation Law
04:00 The Catholic Church Challenges Nazi Ideology
05:08 Police Roundups and Expanding Concentration Camps
05:46 Press, Education, Medicine, and Culture Under Control
08:20 The Nazi Economy: Private Profit, State Power
09:41 Aryanization and Organized Theft
10:20 Rearmament, Industry, and Oligarch Profits
12:21 How Hitler Personally Got Rich
14:55 The Party Mood: Confidence at the Top
15:22 German Public Sentiment and Victor Klemperer
16:20 Analysis: How Results Become Consent
17:06 Conclusion: The Quiet Theft of Democracy
18:27 Never Forget / Support TimeGhost
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Canada slips into recession: state media rally to attack official opposition
Even before they became explicitly subsidized presstitutes for the Liberal Party, the Canadian mainstream media have always been far more critical of conservatives, so this pivot to defend the government after official statistics show the country is in a technical recession is very much on brand:
Stuart, this is exactly the problem.
You’re acting like annualized quarter-by-quarter numbers are some exotic partisan invention. They aren’t. That is one of the standard ways GDP is reported and understood.
And the “reporter’s narrative” point is weak. The reporter framed the question as if calling it a recession was irresponsible, even though the numbers show real weakness: contraction, stalled growth, falling investment, weak productivity, and Canadians losing ground.
Pierre did what more politicians should do: he challenged the frame.
Because the frame matters.
When Conservatives warn about decline, it’s “doom”.
When Liberals preside over decline, it’s “complex global headwinds”.
When Canadians get poorer, it’s “resilience”.
When GDP shrinks, it’s “not quite the word we’d prefer today”.
Give me a break.
Canadians do not live inside a Statistics Canada footnote. They live inside rent, mortgage renewals, grocery bills, job insecurity, and taxes. Pierre is speaking to that reality.
The press gallery can massage the vocabulary all it wants. The country is weaker, poorer, less productive, and more expensive.
That is not a narrative.
That is the room.
The Liberals are getting great value for their money — well, our money — as even though the economy is tottering, media-massaged messaging is reflected in polls (feel free to doubt the accuracy of polls like this if you like):
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May 30, 2026
Unlike Canada, Sweden can have a sensible, rational public discussion on indigenous issues
Yeah, I know. I’m just as shocked as you are, but Warren Mirko and Laurisa Dohm have the receipts:
Something happened in Sweden recently that would be nearly unthinkable in Canada.
There was a substantive public discourse about the tension between Indigenous rights, the broader public interest, and the state’s jurisdiction, in prominent newspapers and on television.
Ebba Busch, Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, stood at a press conference in Luleå and argued that reindeer herding should no longer be classified as a riksintresse, a formal national interest designation that grants legal protection in land-use planning. She proposed that reindeer stocks should be cut and subsidies re-allocated to other cultural programs in order to ease tensions between competing land-use interests in northern Sweden. Her reasoning: reindeer herding affects very large areas of Sweden’s land mass but carries limited economic significance.
The response was immediate. Indigenous Sámi groups called it election propaganda. The chairman of Girjas Sámi village published a rebuttal arguing that Sámi rights to hunt and fish are grounded in ancient tradition, and that her party’s framing mischaracterizes those rights as economic interest rather than constitutionally recognized Indigenous rights. The Swedish public broadcaster’s own reporter called the debate “a hornet’s nest“.
And yet the debate actually took place. On the nightly news, no less.
Deputy Prime Minister Busch made a substantive argument about how she thinks the state should weigh competing interests in its northern regions, with her reasoning stated plainly, and Sámi leaders answered in kind. That is democratic governance.
Canada’s political class has spent decades avoiding exactly this kind of clarity and honest intellectual engagement. It has been sacrificed at the altar of conflict avoidance and by the acceptance of canned platitudes carefully crafted to say precisely nothing at all.
Sweden ranks fourth in the world on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, with a near perfect score of 9.4/10 for political culture. It also takes Indigenous rights seriously, having established an independent truth commission in 2020 to study historical abuses against the Sámi.
And yet Sweden’s Supreme Administrative Court upheld the government’s decision in June 2024 to grant an iron ore mining concession at Kallak in northern Lapland, despite contentious opposition and legal arguments that insufficient consultation had violated Sámi’s rights to free, prior, and informed consent. Now, its Deputy Prime Minister is arguing publicly that the state must regain clearer authority to make decisions across its entire territory, and that the interests of reindeer herding cannot be allowed to dominate and block decision making processes as they do today.
Sadly, Canada does not seem to take lessons from more mature nations. Or any lessons, really. Our politicians are so afraid of “third rail” issues and controversy that they avoid any hint of actually addressing real problems in favour of performative announcements, repeated endlessly with no attempt to actually perform actions.
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May 29, 2026
Debunking the “it’s just phone book information” claim for Bill C-22
Michael Geist explains why the “it’s just phone book information” hand-waving by politicians and government officials is worse than misleading: it’s deliberate mendacity.
en telefonbog (a Danish telephone directory)
Photo by Tomasz Sienicki via Wikimedia Commons
If this sounds familiar, it is because the same tired claims have been used for years. In September 2011, then-Public Safety Minister Vic Toews defended the Harper government’s lawful access proposals by claiming “linking an internet address to subscriber information is on par with the phone book linking phone numbers to an address”. Christopher Parsons, then a researcher at the Citizen Lab, responded with a detailed anatomy of what a lawful access “phone record” actually contained, showing that the three-field directory entry the government was invoking was being used to describe an eleven-field record including IP addresses, IMEI and IMSI numbers, SIM serials, device identifiers, and account information from multiple providers, any one of which could be cross-referenced to build a comprehensive profile of a person’s online life.
The Supreme Court of Canada put the issue to rest in the Spencer decision, holding unanimously in 2014 that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in subscriber information precisely because the disclosure of such information “will often amount to the identification of a user with intimate or sensitive activities being carried out online, usually on the understanding that these activities would be anonymous”. It returned to the same terrain in Bykovets in 2024, extending Charter protection to IP addresses on the reasoning that an IP address is the “first digital breadcrumb that can lead the state on the trail of an individual’s Internet activity”.
Bill C-22’s new subscriber information production order applies a low evidentiary standard but covers name, pseudonym, address, telephone number, email address, account identifiers, types of services provided to the subscriber, the period during which they were provided, and information that identifies the devices, equipment, or things used by the subscriber in relation to those services. In short, a modern subscriber record is not a phone book entry but rather an index of a person’s digital life and the government is proposing to reduce the standard needed to gain access to that information.
Moreover, the same phony framing is now being stretched beyond subscriber data to mandatory metadata retention. As Conservative MP Andrew Lawton noted to Fraser at committee, the government and its officials have been telling Canadians that requiring electronic service providers to retain metadata for up to a year is “no different than just having a copy of the phone book that someone could leaf through”. That is a laughable comparison, given that metadata includes the date, time, duration, and type of a communication, the identifiers of the devices involved, and information identifying the location of the device. It is as if the phone book would include the details of every call made including location, call recipient, and device. And given retention for up to a year, the plan poses a disproportionate privacy risk that is likely to be struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, should it survive in its current form.
And in a follow-up post, he writes:
On encryption, Anandasangaree said the bill “was never meant to breach encryption” and promised to “clarify it in the Bill”. Language clarification is welcome but structural problems remain. The safeguards in Bill C-22 at ss. 5(5) and 7(5), which state that a provider is not required to comply if compliance would create a systemic vulnerability, are incompatible with s. 12, which unconditionally requires compliance with orders, and with s. 13, which specifies that orders prevail over regulations when inconsistencies arise. The term “systemic vulnerability” is not defined in the statute, and the Governor in Council has the power to make regulations “respecting the meaning of any term or expression for the purposes of this Act”. None of this is fixed by promising clearer language. It is fixed by the kind of amendment the Privacy Commissioner proposed this week, namely adopting Australia’s definition, which expressly covers actions that render encryption less effective, together with an explicit prohibition on regulations or orders that require the introduction of, or prevent the rectification of, a systemic vulnerability.
Moreover, Anandasangaree’s defence of the bill’s privacy implications was a deflection rather than an answer, as he tried to turn the attention to the privacy practices in the private sector, stating, “I drive a vehicle where every single point that I drive to is tracked. And that data is not with me.” Commercial data practices are indeed a real concern and Canada needs stronger laws to address them. However, the bill’s surveillance map of every Canadian is not justified by pointing to the absence of meaningful constraints on data collection and to the failure of his own government to address long-overdue private-sector privacy reform.
That brings the press conference back to the Privacy Commissioner. Asked directly whether he would accept Commissioner Philippe Dufresne’s amendments, the Minister said he would “be looking at” them and “looking to see what he has to offer”. Dufresne tabled eight concrete amendments at committee on Tuesday: narrowing subscriber information to a closed list (name, address, telephone number, IP address), restricting who can be compelled to telecommunications service providers, defining “publicly available information” to exclude information in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, an overarching requirement that SAAIA obligations be necessary and proportionate, an Australian-style amendment to “systemic vulnerability”, an explicit prohibition on orders requiring vulnerability introduction or preventing rectification, an exemption to the SAAIA’s confidentiality rules to allow disclosure to regulatory bodies such as the OPC, and allowing his office to investigate if data breaches result from application of the new powers. Anandasangaree’s comments, coming a day after the Dufresne’s committee appearance, noted that “we have until like five o’clock today” for amendments. That window does not leave room to seriously consider the Commissioner’s recommendations. The “I will be looking at” claim, delivered hours before the deadline, amounted to a rejection of the recommendations.
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