Quotulatiousness

May 23, 2020

“If you want to advance your cause, make friends with the Ontario Mohawks. They pretty much run the country.”

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

Chris Selley on the utter, abject defeat of the Canadian and British Columbian governments in their “negotiations” with the hereditary leadership of the Wet’suwet’en:

“Vancouver Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en” by jencastrotakespictures is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

“We’re not understanding what is the rush here,” elected chief Maureen Luggi told CBC — a sentiment Naziel echoed. “We sat here for 30 years already, waiting and talking about it,” Naziel said. “We can wait another year or two. It’s not going to hurt anything.”

Indeed, from the average Wet’suwet’en member’s point of view, there is no hurry at all. The logical thing would be to fix the governance structure, heal the wounds that need healing, and then undertake these monumental negotiations.

But for the governments involved, this wasn’t about offering the Wet’suwet’en a better future. It was about putting out a fire: A group of Mohawks thousands of kilometres away in eastern Ontario had blockaded CN’s main line in solidarity with the hereditary chiefs; and the Ontario Provincial Police, armed with an injunction demanding the blockade end, refused to lift a finger.

Something had to give. Somebody had to get screwed, and it was the rank-and-file Wet’suwet’en. For no good reason whatsoever, the hereditary chiefs now hold all the keys to their future. It’s an appalling and appallingly predictable result.

“I don’t see why the government gave them this, because this has got nothing to do with what the protests across Canada started from,” chief Dan George of Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation told CBC. “Those issues are not resolved. They can set up roadblocks again and do it again, and that’s what I’m worried about.”

If negotiations don’t go well, that might well prove to be a prescient remark. But for now, the hereditary chiefs’ victory is total: They have every reason to stay the course. The message to other groups, however, is clear: If you want to advance your cause, make friends with the Ontario Mohawks. They pretty much run the country.

Screencap from a TV report on Mohawk Warriors attempting to set a freight car on fire along the Canadian National mainline through Tyendinaga near Belleville, Ontario in February, 2020.

May 22, 2020

When raising tax rates reduces total tax revenue

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

In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains that the US tax system is already drawing too much in tax and any hope of increasing the total revenue will hinge on reducing the tax rate:

It is often stated that the rate [the Laffer Curve peak rate] discovered here is 75 to 80%. This is not so – that could be the rate if only we entirely and wholly changed the taxation system in a mass of highly undesirable ways. If we remain with roughly what we’ve got in structure and intent then the peak of the Laffer Curve is 54%. That is not income tax, that is taxes upon income. That means we add together all Federal and State taxes upon income, including “employer paid” portions of Social Security, Medicaid, special amounts for this and that and so on and on. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the US taxation system will note that top earners are, already in many states, paying this or more.

There is something else though. The Laffer Curve is not about taxes upon high earners. It is about taxes upon income. It’s true that there will be slight differences in what the peak rate on lower incomes should be, or what the peak of the curve is there. The income effect will be higher than the substitution at lower incomes than it is at higher. We don’t know how much so let’s just stick with what we’ve got – 54%.

At which point:

    The U.S. has a plethora of federal and state tax and benefit programs, each with its own work incentives and disincentives. This paper uses the Fiscal Analyzer (TFA) to assess how these policies, in unison, impact work incentives. TFA is a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing program that incorporates household borrowing constraints and all major federal and state fiscal policies. We use TFA in conjunction with the 2016 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances to calculate Americans’ remaining lifetime marginal net tax rates. Our findings are striking. One in four low-wage workers face marginal net tax rates above 70 percent, effectively locking them into poverty.

This includes the withdrawal of welfare benefits as income rises – as it should – and so is compatible with the Universal Credit idea that the peak tax and withdrawal rate should be 60%. Or is it 66%?

As we can see that rate is hugely above the Laffer Curve peak. It should, therefore, be lower.

It’s possible to extend the taper. Withdraw benefits at slower rates as income rises. This is, however, hugely, vastlylily, expensive. So it’s not going to happen to any significant degree and if it does then it will be financed by reducing the overall amount of benefit being paid. Which would mean taking money off the truly low income in order to soften the blow to the marginally low income – not the way we want to be doing things.

The only other way to do this is to reduce the taxation of the income of those low income folks. This has been done, a bit, by the Trump tax reforms and the much larger personal deduction. A further bite could be taken by FICA taxation only applying to the income above the personal deduction, not from dollar $1 of income as now. In fact that would be the simplest manner of at least beginning to get to grips with this problem. FICA only starts at $12,000 a year or so. Or even, if all are to be sensible, starting income tax and FICA only at the poverty line, currently $14,000 or so a year for a single adult.

May 21, 2020

The Great Exhibition of 1851 also served (for some) as the 19th century equivalent of the “Missile Gap” controversy

Filed under: Britain, Education, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of his Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes discusses the changing role of the British government and how the Great Exhibition was also useful as subtle domestic propaganda for a more active role for government in the British economy:

The Crystal Palace from the northeast during the Great Exhibition of 1851, image from the 1852 book Dickinsons’ comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851
Wikimedia Commons.

… a whole new opportunity for reform was provided by the Great Exhibition of 1851. As I explained in the previous newsletter, an international exhibition of industry functioned as an audit of the world’s industries. It, and its successors, the world’s fairs, gave some indication of how Britain stood relative to rival nations, especially France, Prussia, and the United States. And whereas some people saw the Great Exhibition as a clear mark of Britain’s superiority, for would-be reformers it was a chance to expose worrying weaknesses. Thus, Henry Cole and the other original organisers of the exhibition at the Society of Arts exacerbated fears of Britain’s impending decline, giving them an excuse to create the systems they desired.

They identified two areas of worry: science and design. Britain of course had many eminent scientists and artists — some of the best in the world — but other countries seemed to have become better at diffusing scientific training and superior taste throughout the workforce as a whole. Design skills were an issue because France appeared to be catching up with Britain when it came to the mechanisation of industry; if it caught up on machinery while maintaining its lead in fashion, then Britain would not be able to compete. And scientific training appeared more useful than ever, with the latest scientific advances “influencing production to an extent never before dreamt of”. Visitors to the Great Exhibition had marvelled at the recent inventions of artificial dyes, a method of processing beetroot sugar, and the latest improvements to photography and the electric telegraph. Thus, for Britain to maintain its lead, it would need to improve the education of its workers.

The reformers’ scare tactics worked. The aftermath of the Great Exhibition saw the creation of a government Department of Science and Art under the direction of Henry Cole, who in turn oversaw the agglomeration of various museums, design schools, and other cultural institutions to what is now the “Museum Mile” in South Kensington. (Curiously, the area was originally called Brompton, but when Cole opened a museum of design and industry there, he named it the South Kensington Museum. Kensington was a much more aristocratic area nearby, though it had no “south” at the time. The museum evolved, rather complicatedly, into what is now the Victoria & Albert Museum. But unlike so many top-down area re-brands, the name South Kensington stuck.)

And that was just the beginning. Cole and his allies then oversaw a dramatic expansion of the state into education, largely through the use of examinations. Although state-funding for education had initially centred on building new schools, getting any more involved was a highly contentious issue. Most schools were controlled and funded by religious organisations, but were split between the established Anglican church and dissenters. When the government first became involved in schools, it was thus bitterly opposed by many dissenters as they feared that their children might become indoctrinated to Anglicanism. And naturally, the government could not teach dissenting religions. Yet the proposed compromise of teaching no religion at all was unacceptable to both sides. Schools were crucial, the groups believed, to keeping religion alive.

So the utilitarians came up with a workaround. Rather than getting the state too involved directly in managing the schools themselves, it would instead influence the curriculum. By holding examinations, and then paying teachers based on the outcomes of the tests, they could incentivise the teaching of certain subjects and leave the schools free to teach whatever religious beliefs they pleased. Indeed, by diverting more and more time towards teaching particular subjects, the reformers saw it as a secularising blow “against parsonic influence”. The tactic was initially applied to adult education. The Society of Arts would first trial out examinations without payments, to test their viability. Then Cole would have his department take over the examinations, first for drawing, and later for science, using his budget to fund payment-by-results. The effects were dramatic. The Society’s relatively popular examinations in chemistry, for example, rarely had more than a hundred candidates a year. But when the department instituted its payments, it soon drew in thousands. By 1862, when the government wanted to improve the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic in schools, they adopted Cole’s suggestion that they also use payment-by-results.

May 19, 2020

The Karenist coup

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on our current self-inflicted plight:

We find ourselves here, in this particular time and this particular place in the history of our republic, because of a 239-year-old oversight made by the Founding Fathers, in that the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights (the name itself is a mistake), contain no penalty clause for those — politicians, bureaucrats, policemen — who violate them. I’m not entirely sure it was accidental, but, as a result, they are violated daily, hourly, as a matter of course, and this Corona Virus farce — many others come to mind — is simply the most recent and most preposterous example.

(The name itself is an error because this document is not a mere list of privileges that the government generously lets the people exercise. Quite the opposite, it is a list of things that the government is absolutely forbidden to do It should have been called the “Bill of Limits”. And if the Founders, who had just fought and won a desperate, bloody war against the world’s most brutal and rapacious super-power, hadn’t meant them to be absolute, then why — for all you “living document” idiots out there — would they have even bothered to write them down?)

All over this bruised and battered country, a flock of mean, moronic, petty tyrants have issued illegal orders to those they clearly regard as the peasantry: stay home, avoid your fellow human beings, and above all, shut down the Machinery of Freedom which we know as capitalism. If it’s ever allowed to start up again, it must strictly be on terms that are essentially Marxist in character. No mere individual can ever again scratch his ass without written government approval and permission. In effect, the left has the revolution — as usual, achieved by somebody else — it has wanted for 180 years, since the days of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

What’s more, many otherwise decent and intelligent folks are out there begging for their rulers to let them be free again. I find that repulsive and unAmerican. And to those boobies (including Sean Hannity and Joy Behar) blubbering about patriots bring their weapons to demonstrations, listen up: the Founders meant the government to be intimidated by the people, you hapless buffoons.

My bottom line, here, is that, in the short run, we must free ourselves — now — from what we have to call Faucism. Scientific pleaders like the dictatorial doctor must be made painfully aware that when their pronouncements have clear political and economic consequences, their protests of innocence sound a bit too much like “I was just following orders”.

May 18, 2020

Safetyism

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

Matthew Crawford:

Safetyism is a disposition that has been gaining strength for decades and is having a triumphal moment just now because of the virus. Public health, one of many institutions that speak on behalf of safety, has claimed authority to sweep aside whole domains of human activity as reckless, and therefore illegitimate.

I suspect the ease with which we have lately accepted the authority of health experts to reshape the contours of our common life is due to the fact that safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. At the level of bureaucratic grasping, we can note that emergency powers are seldom relinquished once the emergency has passed. Together, these dynamics make up a kind of ratchet mechanism that moves in only one direction, tightening against the human spirit.

Acquiescence in this appears to be most prevalent among the meritocrats who staff the managerial layer of society. Deferring to expert authority is a habit inculcated in the “knowledge economy”, naturally enough; the basic currency of this economy is epistemic prestige.

Among those who work in the economy of things, on the other hand, you see greater skepticism toward experts (whether they make their claim on epistemic or moral grounds) and less readiness to accept the adjustment of social norms by fiat ­– whether that means using new pronouns or wearing surgical masks. I am regularly in welding supply stores, auto parts stores and other light-industry venues. Nobody is wearing masks in these places. They are very small businesses: an environment largely free of the moral fashions and corresponding knowledge claims that set the tone in large organisations. There is no HR in a welding shop.

A pandemic is a deadly serious business. But we would do well to remember that bureaucracies have their own interests, quite apart from the public interest that is their official brief and warrant. They are very much in the business of tending and feeding the narratives that justify their existence. Further, given the way bureaucracies must compete for funding from the legislature, each must make a maximal case for the urgency of its mission, hence the necessity of its expansion, like a shark that must keep moving or die. It is clearer now than it was a few months ago that this imperative of expansion puts government authority in symbiosis with the morality of safetyism, which similarly admits no limit to its expanding imperium. The result is a moral-epistemic apparatus in which experts are to rule over citizens conceived as fragile incompetents.

But what if this apparatus were revealed to be not very serious about safety, the very ideal that underwrites its authority? What then?

May 16, 2020

Remy: “Surfin’ USA” (Beach Boys Lockdown Parody)

Filed under: Government, Health, Humour, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 15 May 2020

Remy discovers the dangers of exercising alone.

Written and performed by Remy. Music tracks, mastering, and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom. Video produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

LYRICS:
If you go out on the ocean
Across the USA
And you’re wearing a swim shirt
‘Cuz of your scrawny weight (it’s for the sun, I swear)

Well, uh, you just might notice
The police in your wake
Cuz it’s illegal to be surfing
In the USA

They’re catching them out paddle boarding
Letting their children play
While they’re releasing this guy
A logical checkmate

You’re out in nature alone now
No one in six-foot range?
Well it’s illegal to be surfing
In the USA

If only you had flashed some children
It’d be your release date!
But you’re going to jail for surfing
In the USA

You’ve been distancing for months now
To keep the spread rate down
The only places you’ve been going
Are where there are no crowds

You’re making sacrifices
For your community
Now put your hands on your head because you are surfing
In the USA

He’s helping the flattening the curve now
He’s exercising alone
Rocking a super baggy swim shirt
To hide his muscle tone (I said it’s for the sun)

If only you had flashed some children
It’d be your release date!
But you’re going to jail for surfing
In the USA

The Wuhan Coronavirus, the excuse for an emergency without end

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

Mark Steyn on the seven-hundred-and-fifty-third day of our captivity:

Emergency without end is the staple of almost every futuristic dystopia — and that’s true for real life, too. So Americans shuffle shoeless through the airports for twenty years while their governments negotiate with the very organization that enabled those attacks — the Taliban — to restore them to power. Is a culture that cannot see off goatherds with fertilizer really going to rouse itself to decouple from a global superpower that supplies everything from its crappy “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts to its surgical masks and pharmacy medications?

~For my own part, I have been reading ancient accounts from Occupied France and Vichy for tips on finding workarounds for restraints on the citizenry. As wily and innovative as the French Resistance were, I wonder if their efforts would even be possible in an age when cheap Chinese-made drones can hover unseen and monitor every conversation.

[…]

Even without governors terrorizing those tavern-keepers or hairdressers who defy them, the lockdown has exaggerated the contradictions: The state wants open borders for “migrants” but a security perimeter around the homes of its citizens. Maybe the absurdities become so obvious that there is widespread rejection of them. Or maybe, one by one, the poor put-upon over-surveilled citizenry take a cue from their undocumented non-brethren. Perhaps I should just mug an illegal immigrant and steal his fake ID…

~The emergency is already feeling permanent. It starts with the social norms: Dr Fauci tells us the handshake is gone for good. That’s not a small loss. I don’t care for the suggested replacements, like the lame-o hand-on-heart gesture. I bow from the neck to the Queen — and just last year I did so to her Canadian vicereine, Mme Payette. Her Excellency then stepped forward and gave me a hug. But I don’t suppose she’s doing that anymore…

People ask me why I haven’t been on TV lately. Well, I mainly like going on TV to behave like a person who’s on TV. So, if you notice, on the “Fox & Friends” live-audience shows, I come bounding in like Tigger and do a lot of gladhanding with those on the aisle (including the odd hug), and then I give Steve and Brian manly handshakes and do a little light kissy-kissy with Ainsley. And all that — the basic language of telly for seventy years — is gone, apparently forever.

[…]

The WHO, the Beijing public relations firm whose pronouncements the BBC, The New York Times et al insist on taking as gospel, now says Covid-19 is here to stay — like HIV. With HIV, it wasn’t that difficult to avoid catching it, because it required the exchange of bodily fluids, which is a fairly intense and specific degree of intimacy. With Covid, we are rolling a protective condom down over every routine social intercourse.

A contributor at the Continental Telegraph explains why he no longer supports the lockdown:

First, it turns out that the drastic steps we were taking were based on one model. That no one outside the team using it was allowed to review. We were even told that we couldn’t check the coding because it was so old & patched together that it’s too hard to follow. That’s like saying you can’t check the brakes because you won’t be able to see all the duct tape and Velcro we’re using. Further, we’re told that this software doesn’t provide the same results from one run to the next.

Next, I heard about Dr. Ferguson’s history of wildly overestimating the fatalities from mad cow disease and bird flu (50k compared to <200, 200 million versus <500 respectively). Also, the CDC’s estimate of Ebola deaths in Sierra Leone (1.4 million compared to 8k). And let’s not forget the U.S. Public Health Service’s overshoot on the number of AIDS infections in 1993 (450k versus 17k). At this point I gave more thought to the issue of modeling – prior to retiring I was an actuary and modeling was what I did for a living. A few points about how modeling works: The more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to build a good model. And, more importantly, the more difficult it becomes to test your model and confirm that it accurately mirrors the real world. And this looks like one of the most complex systems to model I’ve ever heard of. How can you test this against reality? I don’t think you can. You can run simulations and confirm it looks like you expected, but that doesn’t mean the virus behaves like your model. Another point about modeling is that the results are extremely dependent on the assumptions you’re using. And in this case two critical assumptions are how infectious the virus is and how lethal it is. We still have a poor understanding of these variables months after we started Lockdown. Then a lot of us noticed that the goal shifted from “flattening the curve” to avoid a catastrophic overflow at hospitals to Lockdown until “fill in the blank” (in some states a vaccine, in others no deaths for 14 days, etc.). And the lockdown rules are inconsistent and illogical – in Michigan you can’t buy plant seeds but you can buy lottery tickets. To add insult to injury, many of the people with their foot on our necks violate the rules (the mayors of Chicago and New York, Dr. Ferguson, etc.). I’m stunned and angry at how little attention the human costs of the Lockdown receive. We know that this will lead to increased suicides, homicides and drug overdoses. Let’s not forget more child abuse, domestic violence, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, the list of miseries goes on a very, very long way (I may write up an article just on this, the Lockdown harpies should have to admit to all the harm they’re so enthusiastically spreading).

May 15, 2020

Wuhan Coronavirus muzzles mandated by “politicians who are completely-fall-down-drunk on Chateau d’House Arrest”

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Laura Rosen Cohen at Steyn Online:

Hello again, and welcome to week eleventy billion gazillion of CCP-Style Lockdown in the Allegedly Free World.

Another week of hypocrisy from the politicians who are completely-fall-down-drunk on Chateau d’House Arrest.

And another week of me feeling like I look rather like this penguin when attempting to articulate how disgusted I am with the governments of western countries – my own country and province in particular.

I don’t want any more “we’re all in this together” e-mails. I don’t want to hear “Covid-19” uttered in a morose, yet sadistically gleeful, tone with odd, demonic-like smiles. I don’t want to see any more playgrounds taped up. I don’t want to see any more “Stay Home” notices. And I most certainly will refuse the “new normal” being offered to us by the power-drunk politicians and nanny-craving, safe space lunatic multitudes.

I was talking to my wonderful and brilliant partner-in-crime Kathy Shaidle about why we hate masks. (Oh go on, just admit it, you hate them as well). First of all, like with the WuFlu, we have no exact science about them, and the reasons for wearing or not wearing keep changing, just like the reasons for continued lockdown. For a while now, I’ve been looking at them as a kind of pandemic virtue signalling device. Like a Health & Safety Boy Scout badge. But I couldn’t articulate exactly what else was bothering me about them. She sent me this:

and said ‘leave it to a Hitchens to articulate it’. Bingo.

I replied to my dear Kathy that they are indeed like a burkah, something that anonymizes you and that renders normal civil discourse and interaction, like smiles, conversation and flirtation impossible. She added that they are also a kind of affront, a dare to others who you imply are inferior for not wearing yours. Then I saw this: indeed it is, the Corona Niqab. Nuts to that. And if you think I’m pissed, I urge you to listen to this interview with novelist Lionel Shriver who puts it better than I ever could. Shriver delivers the outstanding righteous fury we need to hear, a level of outrage matched and raised to a new level each day by my gracious and prophetic host himself.

May 14, 2020

QotD: Anti-dumping laws

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

The antidumping law is defended as a remedy for market distortions caused by foreign government policies. Yet in actual practice, the methods of determining dumping under the law fail, repeatedly and at multiple levels, to distinguish between normal commercial pricing practices and those that reflect market-distorting government policies.

As a result, antidumping law as it currently exists routinely punishes normal competitive business practices — practices commonly engaged in by American companies at home and abroad. It is therefore not the case that the law guarantees a level playing field for American companies and their foreign competitors. On the contrary, it actively discriminates against foreign goods by subjecting them to requirements not applicable to American products.

Brink Lindsey and Dan Ikenson, Antidumping Exposed: The Devilish Details of Unfair Trade Laws, 2003.

May 12, 2020

Dave Grohl on live music

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

Writing in The Atlantic, he regrets having to miss a particular event:

Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters at Rock am Ring, 3 June 2018.
Photo by Andreas Lawen via Wikimedia Commons.

Where were you planning to be on the Fourth of July this year? Backyard barbecue with your crankiest relatives, fighting over who gets to light the illegal fireworks that your derelict cousin smuggled in from South Carolina? Or maybe out on the Chesapeake Bay, arguing about the amount of mayonnaise in the crab cakes while drinking warm National Bohemian beer? Better yet, tubing down the Shenandoah with a soggy hot dog while blasting Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band”?

I know exactly where I was supposed to be: FedExField, outside Washington, D.C., with my band Foo Fighters and roughly 80,000 of our closest friends. We were going to be celebrating the 25th anniversary of our debut album. A red, white, and blue keg party for the ages, it was primed to be an explosive affair shared by throngs of my sunburned hometown brothers and sisters, singing along to more than a quarter century of Foo.

Well, things have changed.

Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has reduced today’s live music to unflattering little windows that look like doorbell security footage and sound like Neil Armstrong’s distorted transmissions from the moon, so stuttered and compressed. It’s enough to make Max Headroom seem lifelike. Don’t get me wrong, I can deal with the monotony and limited cuisine of quarantine (my lasagna game is on point!), and I know that those of us who don’t have to work in hospitals or deliver packages are the lucky ones, but still, I’m hungry for a big old plate of sweaty, ear-shredding, live rock and roll, ASAP. The kind that makes your heart race, your body move, and your soul stir with passion.

There is nothing like the energy and atmosphere of live music. It is the most life-affirming experience, to see your favorite performer onstage, in the flesh, rather than as a one-dimensional image glowing in your lap as you spiral down a midnight YouTube wormhole. Even our most beloved superheroes become human in person. Imagine being at Wembley Stadium in 1985 as Freddie Mercury walked onstage for the Live Aid benefit concert. Forever regarded as one of the most triumphant live performances of all time (clocking in at a mere 22 minutes) Freddie and Queen somehow managed to remind us that behind every rock god is someone who puts on their studded arm bracelet, absurdly tight white tank, and stonewashed jeans one pant leg at a time just like the rest of us. But, it wasn’t necessarily Queen’s musical magic that made history that day. It was Freddie’s connection with the audience that transformed that dilapidated soccer stadium into a sonic cathedral. In broad daylight, he majestically made 72,000 people his instrument, joining them in harmonious unison.

May 10, 2020

Justin Trudeau’s allergy to scary black fully semi-automatic “military style” rifles gets even less coherent

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley on the federal government’s purely virtue signalling gun ban:

In a recent column, I questioned whether the Liberals’ new “ban” on certain kinds of semiautomatic rifles — “ban” in quotation marks, inasmuch as current owners can keep them — constituted the sort of good public-health policy we’re demanding nowadays in the face of COVID-19. I concluded it did not. Even if you support the idea of banning such weapons, you can’t really support this endeavour except in the way a starving man might welcome his least favourite meal. Indeed, gun control advocates are nearly as annoyed by it as gun rights advocates, and rightly so.

The Liberal “ban” targets certain semiautomatic rifles falling under the undefined term “military-style,” while leaving other semi-automatics alone. It focuses on rifles, which collectively are the least lethal form of previously legal weapons, while leaving handguns — which are used in 65 per cent of firearm homicides — alone. “You don’t need an AR-15 to bring down a deer,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says, yet the “ban” exempts current owners of these weapons who use them to hunt for the purposes of sustenance.” Upon its unveiling, it was very nearly perfectly incoherent. And it’s nearer still now.

In recent days the Liberals have touted the “ban” as a way of protecting women and girls in particular. “These guns make it easier to commit mass murder,” Trudeau added. “And the culture around their fetishization makes our country inherently more dangerous for the people most vulnerable. And that is women and girls.” Trudeau cited reports about increasing domestic violence during the pandemic, and grim statistics about the number of Canadians killed by their spouses.

There is very little evidence to support this case for the “ban.” And when you go looking for it, you wind up only with more questions.

To be fair, there is very little evidence to support any position on gun control. Nobody comprehensively keeps track of how many Canadians are killed using currently restricted weapons, or by the weapons the Liberals are “banning,” or even by rifles as opposed to shotguns — so we certainly don’t know how many men and women are killed by these various kinds of firearms.

May 9, 2020

Lies, damned lies, and even-more-damned statistics

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

David Warren does not trust “the numbers” (and I think he’s quite right to doubt):

At some point — but it is seldom a discrete moment in space or time — the weight of the anecdotal in science, or that of the circumstantial in law, becomes overwhelming. This is the opposite of a statistical fact, in part because there are no statistical facts. I am reminded of this whenever the “scientific” control freaks of statistics lay down some law, indifferent to the Law in nature. The difference between 999,999 and one million is, in any imaginable situation, not a difference at all. Where it is made the basis for a decision, that decision is arbitrary, and not infrequently, cruel. By contrast, such differences as those between pregnant and not pregnant, dead and not dead, are unchallengeably significant. They are in the realm of meaning.

I am reminded of this hourly or better, these days, when consulting the news. All readers of the mass media (accurately described by Trump as “fake news”) are being covered, constantly, by the vomit of statistics — few with any context, and many knowingly false. They “look scientific,” which is to say, they answer to the moron’s conception of science. In “disciplines” like economics, today, and throughout the other social sciences, the participants sleepwalk. Nobel prizes are given out for numerical sludge, presented to the purpose of selling one destructive “policy” or another, that will be imposed on real, live, particular human beings. The same is true of the “mathematical biology” that has disinformed all our public health “professionals.”

The Red Chinese Batflu, now transforming our world, is a spectacular case in point. Not only the epidemiological projections, but even the counts of dead and wounded, are taken on faith — from people who are characteristically faithless. Information on prevention and cures is hostage to the work of statisticians. “Double blind tests,” which would be absolutely immoral — wicked — on human subjects facing life or death — are demanded by our medical apes.

History Summarized: The Meiji Restoration

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Humour, Japan, Military, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 8 May 2020

Japan may well have the record for World’s Speediest Industrialization, but how did they accomplish so much so fast without falling victim to Europe’s favorite 19th century pastime of “Colonization”? And how did Japan build up a Pan-Asian empire so darn quickly? All that and more in this deep-dive into the Meiji Restoration!

SOURCES & Further Reading:
Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction by Goto-Jones.
The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War by Paine.
Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Nitobe.

THAT WACKY POLITICAL CARTOON: “Japan Makes Her Debut Under Columbia’s Auspicies” https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services…

This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/

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May 8, 2020

The Wuhan Coronavirus lockdown – “perhaps the worst policy mistake ever committed by Western governments during peacetime”

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

Toby Young on the fall of “Professor Lockdown”, the former top advisor to the British government on the response to the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic:

The reason for looking into the political affiliations of the scientists and experts who’ve been advising governments across the world during this crisis is that it may throw some light on why those governments have made such poor policy decisions. Will the vast majority of those advisers turn out to be left-of-centre, like Professor Ferguson? I’m 99% sure of it, and I think that will help us to understand what’s happened.

I don’t mean they’ve deliberately given right-of-centre governments poor advice in the hope of wrecking their economies for nefarious party political reasons or because they’re members of Extinction Rebellion and want to destroy capitalism. Nor do I believe in any of the conspiracy theories linking these public health panjandrums to Bill Gates and Big Pharma and some diabolical plan to vaccinate 7.8 billion people. I have little doubt they’ve acted in good faith throughout – and that’s part of the problem. The road they’ve led us down has been paved with all the usual good intentions.

The mistakes these liberal policy-makers have made are depressingly familiar to anyone who’s studied the breed: overestimating the ability of the state to solve complicated problems as well as the capacity of state-run agencies to deliver on those solutions; failing to anticipate the unintended consequences of large-scale state interventions; thinking about public policy in terms of moral absolutes rather than trade-offs; chronic fiscal incontinence, with zero inhibitions about adding to the national debt; not trusting in the common sense of ordinary people and believing the only way to get them to avoid risky behaviour is to put strict rules in place and threaten them with fines or imprisonment if they disobey them (and ignoring those rules themselves, obviously); arrogantly assuming that anyone who challenges their policy preferences is either ignorant or evil; never venturing outside their metropolitan echo chambers; citizens of anywhere rather than somewhere… you know the rest. We’ve seen it a hundred times before.

More often than not, the “solutions” these left-leaning experts come up with make the problems they’re grappling with even worse, and so it will prove to be in this case. The evidence mounts on a daily basis that locking down whole populations in the hope of “flattening the curve” was a catastrophic error, perhaps the worst policy mistake ever committed by Western governments during peacetime. Just yesterday we learnt that the lockdowns have forced countries across the world to shut down TB treatment programmes which, over the next five years, could lead to 6.3 million additional cases of TB and 1.4 million deaths. There are so many stories like this it’s impossible to keep track. We will soon be able to say with something approaching certainty that the cure has been worse than the disease.

May 7, 2020

“When it’s over we can shave the heads of a few easy victims and vilify a few who enjoyed it too much. But I collaborated too.”

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

The mandatory shutdown of most of the world’s economy is inducing some introspection:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

I looked again at the decisions of the Johnson government. Should they have followed my instincts? No lockdown. Shield the elderly and the vulnerable, like my elder daughters immuno-deficient boyfriend, but let all normal life continue. Let the virus rip. Let the football league play out its conclusion and more to the point let out beloved Dundee Stars Elite Ice Hockey Club break our hearts and miss the playoffs. Such a government would probably have fallen within days, battered by the broadcast media, backbench rebellion and a nation that preferred to be kept safe from the unknown that they feared. Had they survived the month, then the elderly who by choice refused to be shielded would have pitched up in their thousands at A&E, to be faced with experienced nurses like my wife who triaged them on the doorstep and sent many of them home to die, to preserve the ICU beds for those who could be saved. Instead of admitting them so that they could die with every bit as much certainty. Had he survived the first month, Johnson would have fallen regardless and nation would be traumatised by the memory of grandparents sent home to die

Had I been in his shoes, I too would have sued for peace. My nation demanded it of me. I would have convinced myself it was the right thing and when the chest pain and cough arrived, I would have felt relief that I had made the correct call. I would have looked at the Malice of Piers Morgan and convinced myself that I was still moderate. I would have dismissed the feeble objections of lunatic libertarians.

When it’s over we can shave the heads of a few easy victims and vilify a few who enjoyed it too much. But I collaborated too.

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