Quotulatiousness

January 28, 2025

What Britain desperately needs is common-sense pointy stick controls

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

Britain’s gun laws make Canada look like the wild west, yet the government still wants far greater control over objects that can be used as weapons. The conviction of the Southport murderer, who used a knife obtained through Amazon, seems to have given the British government under Kurt Stürmer Keir Starmer an excuse to crack down even further on any kind of device with a sharpened blade rather than the criminals who wield them:

Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Photo released by Merseyside Police.

“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”

What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.

Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives — edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.

“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”

It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard for fun. One of my nephews turns files into knives on a grinding wheel. Scraping an appropriate material against a stone will give you an edge and a point. ID checks don’t seem like a barrier to people with bad intentions and the ability to make ricin in their bedrooms.

A Case History in Ridiculously Restrictive Policies

This is why the U.K. strikes many Americans as the reductio ad absurdum of policies that demonize objects rather than targeting bad actors. Opponents of authoritarian laws ask: What will the authorities do once they’ve made firearms difficult to legally acquire, and crime continues? Will they ban knives?

The answer from the U.K., which already has restrictive gun laws, is yes, they will ban knives — or at least impose access and carry restrictions and consider forbidding blades to have points. The result has been a black market in smuggled and illicitly manufactured firearms that will inevitably extend to knives. Harmless people are now arrested for having Swiss Army knives in car glove compartment or for possessing locking knives on the way home from jobs that require them. And the country’s crime problems continue to grow.

That’s bad enough, but U.K. authorities, like those elsewhere, also prefer to surveil the entire population to detect anything they could call a danger to public order, rather than focusing on specific individuals harming others.

“There are now said to be over 5.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK,” according to Politics.co.uk. “Surveillance footage forms a key component of UK crime prevention strategy,” but “the proliferation of CCTV in public places has fueled unease about the erosion of civil liberties and individual human rights, raising concerns of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ culture.”

The British government also monitors online activity to an extent that Edward Snowden deemed it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”

That surveillance turns up comments, jokes, and rants authorities just don’t like. “Think before you post,” the government warns people. “Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.” But the authorities enforce a broad definition of unacceptable material. People have been arrested for dressing as terrorists for Halloween, for making intemperate online remarks, and for just getting things wrong when posting on the internet (they’ll need a big paddy wagon for that one).

January 26, 2025

QotD: The map is not the territory, state bureaucrat style

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

… most bureaucrats aren’t evil, just ignorant … and as Scott shows, this ignorance isn’t really their fault. They don’t know what they don’t know, because they can’t know. Very few bureaucratic cock-ups are as blatant as Chandigarh, where all anyone has to do is look at pictures for five minutes to conclude “you couldn’t pay me enough to move there”. For instance, here’s the cover of Scott’s book:

That’s part of the state highway system in North Dakota or someplace, and though again my recall is fuzzy, the reason for this is something like: The planners back in Bismarck (or wherever) decreed that the roads should follow county lines … which, on a map, are perfectly flat. In reality, of course, the earth is a globe, which means that in order to comply with the law, the engineers had to put in those huge zigzags every couple of miles.

No evil schemes, just bureaucrats not mentally converting 2D to 3D, and if it happens to cost a shitload more and cause a whole bunch of other inconvenience to the taxpayers, well, these things happen … and besides, by the time the bureaucrat who wrote the regulation finds out about it — which, of course, he never will, but let’s suppose — he has long since moved on to a different part of the bureaucracy. He couldn’t fix it if he wanted to … which he doesn’t, because who wants to admit to that obvious (and costly!) a fuckup?

Add to this the fact that most bureaucrats have been bureaucrats all their lives — indeed, the whole “educational” system we have in place is designed explicitly to produce spreadsheet boys and powerpoint girls, kids who do nothing else, because they know nothing else. Oh, I’m sure the spreadsheet boys and powerpoint girls know, as a factual matter, that the earth is round — we haven’t yet declared it rayciss to know it. But they only “know” it as choice B on the standardized test. It means nothing to them in practical terms, so it would never occur to them that the map they’re looking at is an oversimplification — a necessary one, no doubt, but not real. As the Zen masters used to say, the finger pointing at the moon is not, itself, the moon.

Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.

January 25, 2025

“How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; … be Fascism redux?”

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

As discussed yesterday, one of the many “hitting the ground running” acts of Donald Trump at the beginning of his second term in office has been to issue executive orders to dismantle a lot of progressives’ favourite policies, and many of them are calling it “fascism”:

Trump-the-Presidency 2.0 has already proved to be rather different from the 1.0 version. It is not merely that this time around he won the US popular vote. It is that he has “hit the ground running” with a whole stack of executive orders.

Watching the reaction to this has become — to put it mildly — a somewhat bifurcated experience. Lots of people, who were relieved at his victory, applaud what they see as a return to common sense; a rejection of censorship; a rejection of a politics intrusive into any and all aspects of life.

Conversely, there are also lots of — typically very online — people who see it as Fascism redux, as the equivalent of the end of Weimar Germany being live-streamed. How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; of removing DEI commissars from the US Federal Government; that includes appointment of women and persons of colour to senior positions; be Fascism redux?

The short answer is: it isn’t. The question then becomes, how can it be seen as such? This is where the long-run consequences of anti-discrimination law kicks in.

Anti-discrimination law creates a legal-bureaucratic structure that operates on the basis that the general citizenry is continually hovering on the edge of wrong think (racism) and wrong act (discrimination). The presumption becomes — without all this active effort — racism and discrimination will be unleashed.

This is nonsense. Anglosphere countries have low levels of racism and anti-discrimination norms have become widely accepted. Where there are discrimination issues, they are mostly problems of cultural distance that have a significant element of practicality from differing expectations between groups.

Nevertheless, it is very much in the interests of the legal-bureaucratic structure that anti-discrimination law sets up that propensities to wrong act and wrong think be seen as real, and endemic. Even better, is if the problem is seen as even larger than originally conceived.

So, we get a double expansion. The first expansion is in the range of protected groups. This provides a broadening of the social ambit of the potential wrong thinking (racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia …) and of the potential wrong acting (who might be discriminated against).

As this moral dimension becomes so elevated—not least because there are so much employment involved, but also as considerable social leverage is created by for those who can set what is, or is not, legitimate action and speech—there is expansion of what constitutes wrong think and wrong act. There is large, indeed expanding, ambit for intellectual and other entrepreneurs to identify new sins of discrimination, new sins of unequal consideration, new ways wrong think propagates, and new ways of signalling one’s rejection of such sins.

It is better still if uttering true things becomes a wrong act, expressing wrong think, for people are prone to do that, to notice things. Of course, if you start trying to shun, shame and punish folk for expressing true things, for noticing things, you are likely to generate quite a lot of resentment. This is useful, for such pushback just further “establishes” the propensity to wrong think and wrong act. Hence Transphobia and Islamophobia becoming such markers of wrong think—there are so many true things to not notice.

There is even a term for someone who notices inconvenient patterns — far right. A term that has become the classic thought-terminating cliché in the service of not noticing.

The stabbings will continue until morale improves

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

Sebastian Wang discusses the stabbing attacks in Southport, Merseyside last year:

On the 29th July 2024, a man went on a stabbing spree in Southport, Merseyside, killing three children and injuring ten others. The attacker, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the son of Rwandan immigrants, was arrested at the scene. By all accounts, the attack was shocking not only in its savagery, but in its attendant circumstances. Witnesses report that Mr Rudakubana shouted slogans as he killed that suggested he was an Islamic terrorist. Almost at once, social media was filled with questions and with speculation. Also, protests began in several northern cities – Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford, for example – where demonstrators blamed the Government and the ruling class for immigration policies that had made the killings both possible and likely.

Instead of considering these protests and promising to address the causes of the crime, the British Government and the legacy media focussed on managing the narrative and silencing comment on the immigration policies that had allowed Mr Rudakubana’s family into the country. Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister, seemed more worried about potential “violence against Muslims” than the actual brutality of Mr Rudakubana’s attack on English people. “For the Muslim community I will take every step possible to keep you safe,” he said in his first public statement on the killings. On the protests he added: “It is not protesting, it is not legitimate, it is crime. We will put a stop to it“. His focus was not on the victims, but on ensuring that no one questioned the system that had allowed this to happen.

In the days after the attack, several men were arrested for spreading what the government called “misinformation” online. Their crime? Posting details about Mr Rudakubana’s background and motivations — details that turned out to be broadly correct. Despite being right, these men were prosecuted and imprisoned under Britain’s hate speech laws. The most recently convicted, Andrew McIntyre, was sentenced earlier this month to seven and a half years in prison for postings on social media. Peter Lynch, a man of 61, was sent to prison last August for two years and eight months for the crime of shouting “scum” and “child killers” at the police. Last October, he hanged himself in prison. I am told he was seriously “mistreated” in prison. British prisons for many years have been overcrowded. Room was found for these prisoners of conscience after the Government began releasing violent criminals.

The injustice of this is glaring. These men were punished not because they lied, but because they spoke approximate truths the government wanted to suppress. Their imprisonment sends a clear message: in modern Britain, it’s better to be wrong on the side of the Government than right and against it.

A Carefully Managed Narrative

The media played its part in the cover up. At first, Mr Rudakubana was described, without name, as “originally from Cardiff“. It took days before we were told he was a child of asylum seekers from Rwanda. Even then, the coverage was carefully balanced by a picture of him as a respectable schoolboy – not at the beast in human form shown by more recent photographs.

Only much later, when the story had faded from the headlines, did the real facts emerge. Mr Rudakubana was not just a troubled individual. His phone contained materials linked to terrorism and genocide, and his actions appeared to have an ideological motivation. Yet by the time these details came out, they barely caused a ripple. The public had been moved on to the next distraction.

It’s hard not to assume that the British media was fully in on gaslighting the public about the accused murderer, when you compare the photo that almost universally was used in the time before the trial and a more recent image:

Mark Steyn:

Say what you like about Axel Rudakubana, the slaughterer of three English girls under ten years old, but — unlike the British Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Liverpool Police and most of the court eunuchs in the UK media — he appears to be an honest man:

    It’s a good thing those children are dead … I am so glad … I am so happy.

He has always been entirely upfront about such things, telephoning Britain’s so-called “Childline” and asking them:

    What should I do if I want to kill somebody?

Judging from his many interactions with “the authorities” (including with the laughably misnamed “Prevent” programme), the British state’s response boiled down to: Go right ahead!

It seems likely that the perpetrator of Wednesday’s Diversity Stabbing of the Day — the Afghan “asylum seeker” who killed a two-year-old boy and seriously wounded other infants in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg — is also “so happy”. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” deliberately targeted a gathering of the very young — in this case, a kindergarten group playing in a municipal park. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” did not just deliver sufficient stab wounds to kill: he plunged his knife into each target dozens and dozens of times. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” was well known to the authorities: he had been detained for “violence” at least thrice.

Did these guys also enjoy it? From our pal Leilani Dowding:

For the benefit of American readers, being stabbed in Asda, Argus and Sainsbury’s is like being stabbed in Kroger, Costco and Wegman’s. As you may recall, a DC jury awarded climate mullah Michael E Mann a million bucks because someone unknown gave him a mean look in Wegman’s supermarket. No one stabbed in a UK supermarket will get a seven-figure sum: it’s increasingly a routine feature of daily life — per Sir Sadiq Khan, part of what it means to live in a great world city.

Sir Keir Stürmer and every outpost of the corrupt British state have lied to the public about every aspect of the Southport mass murder since the very first statements by the Liverpool chief constable passing off the killer as a “Cardiff man”. Her officers knew within hours that the Welsh boyo who loved male-voice choirs was, back in the real world, an observant Muslim in possession of the Al-Qaeda handbook and enough ricin to kill twelve thousand of his fellow Welshmen. But they did not disclose this information for months — not until freeborn Britons minded to disagree with Keir Stürmer’s Official Lies by suggesting that this seemed pretty obviously merely the umpteenth case of Islamostabbing had been rounded up, fast-tracked through Keir’s kangaroo courts, gaoled for longer than Muslim child rapists, and in at least one case driven to his death. Does Sir Keir feel bad about the late Peter Lynch? Or does he take the same relaxed attitude to his victims as Axel Rudakubana?

    It’s a good thing that that far-right extremist is dead … I am so glad … I am so happy.

Even now, six months on, the organs of the state are still lying — although, with all the previous lies being no longer operative, Stürmer & Co have had the wit to introduce a few new ones. For example:

    ‘A total disgrace’ that Southport killer could buy a knife on Amazon aged 17, says Cooper

That would be Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary — which is the equivalent of what Continental governments usually call the Minister of the Interior, because that’s where the knives penetrate.

QotD: “Big budget cuts!”

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

So why is there such a big disconnect in the media? Why are there headlines about cutting and slashing when government is growing by every possible measure?

For the simple reason that the budget process in Washington is pervasively dishonest, as I’ve explained in interviews with John Stossel and Judge Napolitano. Here are the three things you need to know.

  1. The politicians created a system that automatically assumes big increases in annual spending, called a baseline.
  2. When there’s a proposal to have spending grow slower than the baseline, the gap between the proposal and the baseline is called a cut.
  3. It’s like being on a diet and claiming progress because you’re gaining two pounds each month rather than five pounds.

Defenders of this system argue that programs should get built-in increases because of things such as inflation, or because of more old people, which leads to more spending for programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

It’s certainly reasonable for them to argue that budgets should increase for these reasons.

But they should be honest. Be forthright and assert that “Spending should climb X percent because …”

Needless to say, that won’t happen. The pro-spending politicians and interest groups like the current approach because it allows them to scare voters by warning about “savage” and “draconian” spending cuts.

Daniel J. Mitchell, “The Media’s Pervasively Dishonest Coverage of Trump’s New Budget”, International Liberty, 2020-02-10.

January 24, 2025

The end of “affirmative action” in US government hiring

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

In The Free Press, Coleman Hughes outlines how the US federal government got into the formal habit of hiring and promoting staff based on things other than ability and merit during the Nixon administration:

Trump’s Executive Order 14171 is titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. It describes how vast swaths of society, including the “Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)”.

In response, Trump has ordered the executive branch and its agencies “to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements”.

That is a lot of preferences and mandates. Trump’s executive order accurately describes the enormousness of the DEI bureaucracy that has arisen in government and private industry to infuse race in hiring, promotion, and training. Take, for example, the virtue-signaling announcements made by big corporations in recent years — such as CBS’s promise that the writers of its television shows would meet a quota of being 40 percent non-white.

And so, we will now see what federal enforcement of a color-blind society looks like. We’ll certainly see how many federal employees were assigned to monitor and enforce DEI — Trump has just demanded they all be laid off.

The most controversial part of this executive order is that it repeals the storied, 60-year-old Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Johnson’s original order mandated that government contractors take “affirmative action” to ensure that employees are hired “without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin”.

The phrase affirmative action, however, has come to have a profoundly different meaning for us than it did during the 1960s civil rights era. Back then, it simply meant that companies had to make an active effort to stop discriminating against blacks, since antiblack discrimination was, in many places, the norm. Only later did the phrase come to be associated with the requirement to actively discriminate in favor of blacks and other minorities.

One of the great ironies of affirmative action is that it was not a Democrat but a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who did more than anyone to enshrine reverse racism at the federal level by establishing racial quotas. According to the Richard Nixon Foundation, “The Nixon administration ended discrimination in companies and labor unions that received federal contracts, and set guidelines and goals for affirmative action hiring for African Americans”. It was called the “Philadelphia Plan” — the city of its origin.

For the first time in American history, private companies had to meet strict numerical targets in order to do business with the federal government. Philadelphia iron trades had to be at least 22 percent non-white by 1973; plumbing trades had to be at least 20 percent non-white by the same year; electrical trades had to be 19 percent non-white, and so forth.

In the intervening decades, this racial spoils system has not only caused grief for countless members of the unfavored races — it has also created incentives for business owners to commit racial fraud, or else to legally restructure so as to be technically “minority-owned”. As far back as 1992, The New York Times reported that such fraud was “a problem everywhere” — for instance, with companies falsely claiming to be 51 percent minority-owned in order to secure government contracts. In a more recent case, a Seattle man sued both the state and federal government, claiming to run a minority-owned business on account of being 4 percent African.

January 23, 2025

Do you want an imperial presidency, because this is how you get an imperial presidency

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

On paper, prime ministers in Westminster parliamentary systems have more power, but the US president has more immediate, practical power to direct government activity using totally non-democratic executive orders. Democrats didn’t mind that when it was Obama wielding the pen, but they’re incandescent now that it’s the Bad Orange Man inking rules into existence. MAGA Republicans hated when Joe Biden’s ventriloquist was writing the orders, but suddenly it’s fine because it’s their president doing it. In neither case is democracy safe:

A quick image search turns up plenty of examples of Presidents proudly showing off freshly signed documents. Usually these will be laws passed by the legislators but sometimes (especially in January 2025) it’s rule-by-decree on steroids.

Well before President Donald Trump returned to office, his supporters boasted that he would start the second term with a flurry of executive actions. The new president exceeded expectations with an avalanche of pardons, orders, and edicts on matters great and small. Some should be welcomed by anybody hoping for more respect for liberty by government employees. Others extend state power in ways that are worrisome or even illegitimate. All continue the troubling trend over the course of decades and administrations from both parties for the president to assume the role of an elected monarch.

From an Interoffice Memo to “Shock and Awe”

“When President Trump takes office next Monday, there is going to be shock and awe with executive orders,” Sen. John Barrasso (R–Wyo.) predicted last week.

The president signed some of those orders as he bantered in the Oval Office with members of the press, engaging in more interaction than we saw from his predecessor over months. Wide-ranging in their scope, Trump’s orders “encompassed sweeping moves to reimagine the country’s relationship with immigration, its economy, global health, the environment and even gender roles,” noted USA Today.

Executive orders, which made up the bulk of Trump’s actions (he also pardoned and commuted the sentences of participants in the January 6 Capitol riot), are basically interoffice memos from the boss to executive branch agencies. “The President of the United States manages the operations of the Executive branch of Government through Executive orders,” according to the Office of the Federal Register of the National Archives and Records Administration.

That doesn’t sound like much — and at first, it wasn’t. Executive orders as we know them evolved into their modern form from notes and directives sent by the president to members of the cabinet and other executive branch officials. Nobody tried to catalog them until 1907.

But because executive branch officials interpret and enforce thickets of laws and administrative rules under which we try to live, guidance from the boss is powerful. Interpreted one way, a rule regulating unfinished gun parts leaves people free to pursue their hobbies; interpreted another, and those owning the parts are suddenly felons. The president can push interpretations either way.

They Can Be Used Correctly, or Abusively

So, some of Trump’s executive orders are very welcome, indeed, for those of us horrified by federal agencies pushing the boundaries of their power.

“The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end,” Trump said in his inaugural address regarding an order intended to punish politically motivated use of government power. “I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” he added of another.

January 21, 2025

QotD: Raw democracy

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

In a democracy, the majority rules and individual rights are irrelevant. If the majority votes that half of your income be confiscated before you can even buy groceries, oh well. If the majority votes that you must educate your children in a certain location because you live on a certain side of an arbitrary line, oh well. If the majority votes that you must be disarmed and defenseless against violent criminals, oh well. If the majority votes that your religion be designated an “outlaw religion” and that you and all other practitioners be committed to mental institutions, oh flipping well.

(And this is what our political, economic and media elites want to export across the globe?)

Doug Newman, “An Understatement: The Founding Fathers Hated Democracy”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-08-14.

January 19, 2025

California’s wildfire plight

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

Theophilus Chilton on the end of California dreamin’:

Southern California has had a REALLY rough week. Wildfires, started by arsonists and driven by the Santa Ana winds, have burned thousands of acres in the city and county of Los Angeles and destroyed over $150 billion worth of property (and counting). As I write this, the fires still burn and largely remain uncontained, even as new blazes break out. It is a disaster of epic proportions, striking one of the richest and most economically and culturally relevant portions of the country.

Never ones to let a crisis go to waste, the Left responded to this disaster by … focusing on climate change. Not empty fire hydrants, not drained reservoirs, not incompetent leadership, but climate change. These fires, we have been breathlessly assured, are the result of ever-worsening climatic conditions in the region, drying it out and making it susceptible to this kind of affliction. Never mind that observers since Spanish times consistently noted the same kind of weather conditions and hazards that we see today, which suggests that maybe things aren’t actually changing all that much. Of course, those who are blaming climate change fail to recognise the fundamentally chaotic, nonlinear nature of the Earth’s biosphere and the interactions of its constituent parts, something governed by complexity (in the chaos/complexity theory sense of the term). As a result, it’s somewhat foolish to try to draw a direct, causal link between two variables (such as atmospheric CO2 content and temperature) which depend upon nonlinear interactions with hundreds of other factors. Thankfully, they don’t seem to be getting much traction with this.

So what did create the conditions that burned down Los Angeles?

First of all, there was the implementation of a number of policies driven by the state’s radical environmentalist lobby. Thanks to the fanatics, common sense policies that would help to mitigate the region’s inherent fire hazard went undone. Regular controlled burns of underbrush are a standard conservation technique in dry areas that help to thin out brush and prevent wildfires from getting out of control. Building a sufficient number of desalination plants is a good way for coastal desert areas to provide themselves with abundant fresh water for things like drinking, watering crops, filling reservoirs, and fighting fires. In fact, filling reservoirs for future needs would make a lot of sense. But all of these things are “unnatural” and might have “negative impacts” on local wildlife and whatnot.

Another contributory issue is the state’s policies towards the chronically homeless and its de facto sanctuary status for illegal aliens. The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years and California’s particular policies have made the situation in their state even worse. For decades, California has regularly seen wildfires caused by untended campfires started by homeless junkies getting out of control, which the state’s liberal approach to its indigent population has only made more prevalent. Likewise, California’s harbouring of illegal aliens has created a situation in which the state is flooded with masses of hostile foreign elements, some of whom have been caught starting fires all around the LA basin and creating the current catastrophe.

Then there is the fact that California has systematically implemented a set of DEI policies for its governmental workers, including its firefighters. As a result, the state’s leadership in the relevant departments is very good at “promoting inclusion,” but not so good at dealing competently with emergencies when they take place. Indeed, Los Angeles’ mayor Karen Bass and LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley presided over budget cuts for the city’s firefighting capabilities while adding layers of “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracy aimed at systematically de-white-maleing the department and depriving it of the demographic most prone to self-sacrifice and overall technical competence. That reflects trends across the board in which the state and the city have regularly spent more on gay choirs and social justice artwork than they have on necessary functions of government.

(more…)

January 18, 2025

Buying military surplus is often a bargain, but buying new military equipment is usually a financial black hole

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

The Canadian government has — since at least 1968 — always viewed major equipment purchases for the Canadian Armed Forces first and foremost as “regional economic development” projects which channel federal dollars into vote-rich areas in need of jobs or to reward provinces and regions for their support of the party in power. This virtually always requires getting all or most of the manufacturing/construction/assembly done in Canada.

To most people this sounds sensible: big military equipment acquisitions mean vast sums of taxpayer money, so why shouldn’t as much of that money as possible be spent in Canada? The answer, in almost every case, is that it will usually be VASTLY more expensive because Canadian industry doesn’t regularly produce these exotic, spendy items, so new factories or shipyards will need to be built, all kinds of specialized equipment will need to be acquired (usually from foreign sources), companies will need to hire and train new workforces, etc., and no rational private industries will spend that kind of money unless they’re going to be guaranteed to be repaid (plus handsome profits) — because CAF equipment purchases come around so infrequently that by the time the current batch need to be replaced, the whole process needs to start over from the very beginning. It would be like trying to run a car company where every new model year means you shut down the factories, fire the workers, destroy the tools and jigs and start over from bare ground. Economic lunacy.

Items like clothing, food, non-specialized vehicles (cars, trucks, etc.) may carry a small extra margin over run-of-the-mill stuff, but it will generally be competitive with imported equivalents.1 Highly specialized items generally won’t be competitively priced exactly because of those specialized qualities. The bigger and more unusual the item to be purchased, the less economic sense it makes to buy domestically. As a rule of thumb, if the purchase will require a whole new manufacturing facility to be built, it’s almost certainly going to be cheaper — and usually faster — to just buy from a non-domestic source.

How much more do Canadian taxpayers have to shell out? Carson Binda has some figures for current procurement boondoggles:

Take the new fleet of warships being built for the Royal Canadian Navy – the River Class Destroyers. The Canadian River Class is based on the British Type 26 Frigates.

The Brits are paying between $1.5 and $2.2 billion in Canadian dollars per ship. Meanwhile, Canada is paying upwards of $5.3 billion per ship, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

That means we’re paying double what the Brits are, even though we are copying their existing design. That’s like copying the smart kids’ homework and still taking twice as long to do it.

If we paid the same amount per ship as the British did for the 15 ships of the River Class, we’d save about $40 billion in procurement costs. That’s twice as much money as the federal government sends to Ontario in health-care transfer payments.

[…]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government bungled F-35 fighter jet procurement is another example of taxpayers losing out on military procurement contracts.

In 2010, the Harper government announced plans to buy 65 F-35 fighter jets for an inflation-adjusted cost of $190.8 million per unit.

The Liberal government canceled that procurement when it came to power. Fast forward to 2023 and the Trudeau government announced the purchase of 88 F-35s at an inflation-adjusted cost of $229.6 million per unit.

That massive increase in cost was totally avoidable if the Liberals would have just kept the Harper-era contract.

[…]

Because so much budget is wasted overpaying for big ticket items like ships, jets and trucks, soldiers aren’t getting the basics they need to keep Canadians safe.

The defence department bureaucrats can’t even figure out how to buy sleeping bags for our soldiers. National Defence spent $34.8 million buying sleeping bags that were unusable because they were not warm enough for Canadian winters.

Recently, Canadian soldiers sent to Ottawa for training had to rely on donated scraps of food because the military wasn’t able to feed them. Soldiers have gone months without seeing reimbursements for expenses, because of bureaucratic incompetence in our cash-strapped armed forces.

    1. Note, however that during the 1980s, the Canadian army wanted to buy Iltis vehicles that were built in Germany at a $26,500 cost per unit. Getting the work done under license in Canada by Bombardier more than tripled the per-vehicle cost to $84,000.

    Incentives matter even to “objective” scientists

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

    A 2019 Canadian “study” ideally illustrates that scientists are just as human as anyone else where they are incentivized to provide “desired” outcomes:

    “The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

    Earlier this year, a major Canadian study on alcohol policy provided an excellent illustration of this. As news headlines across the country reported, 16 scientists and researchers at various universities and institutions had, through their Canadian Alcohol Policy Evaluation, shown that provincial governments are “failing to address alcohol problems”.

    The scientists evaluated provincial government policies and assigned a grade in the “D” range to seven of Canada’s 13 provinces or territories, while five received an “F”. The policy evaluation, however, was a curious one. Strangely, the policy evaluation did not evaluate whether government policies were beneficial to those who want to buy or sell alcohol.

    Instead, provincial governments were evaluated more favorably if they devoted greater efforts toward afflicting buyers and sellers of alcohol through punitive taxes, price controls, heavy restrictions on the sale and marketing of alcoholic beverages, higher minimum legal drinking ages, and so on.

    Even in the most restrictive markets, the researchers found that alcohol was too cheap, or that its purchase was too convenient, or that governments did not do enough to discourage or restrict its sale and consumption.

    Predictably, and perhaps exemplifying Berlinski’s point on scientists grasping for government funds, the report authored by 16 scientists whose livelihoods involve raising public alarm about alcohol consumption concluded that there ought to be more government funding for public education on the dangers of alcohol consumption.

    The report also advocated more government funding for bureaucracies to discourage drinking, more government funding for a lead organization to implement restrictive alcohol policies, more government funding for independent monitoring of such implementation, and more government funding to track and report the harm caused by alcohol consumption.

    Like the CEO of a domestic automobile company insisting that tariffs against car imports — which would cause a massive wealth redistribution from consumers’ wallets into his own and those of the company’s shareholders — are in the national interest, the anti-drinking scientists insisted in the name of public health and wellness upon income redistribution from taxpayers and consumers to their own industry.

    January 17, 2025

    Trump’s demands include some things that would be quite beneficial to Canada

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

    In the National Post, Bryan Schwartz suggests that some of the things Trump has raised as issues in Canada/US trade would be economically sensible for Canada to address because they’d reduce costs of doing business in Canada which would be good for all Canadians (except the crony capitalists in the blatantly protectionist “supply management” cartels):

    US President-elect Donald Trump trolling about Canada becoming the 51st state of the union does seem to have directed attention to our bilateral trade situation wonderfully.

    The threatened Trump tariffs would hurt both the United States and Canada in many ways. But the U.S., with a larger and more productive economy (on a per capita basis), is better able to sustain the immediate pain. The economic pressure on Canada is, therefore, serious and credible.

    Canada should first address issues that are of particular importance to the Trump administration. The incoming president tends to emphasize national security, even over economic nationalism. The authority of the president, under the inherent powers of the office and congressional statutes, is greater if the issue relates to national security.

    The same holds under international trade agreements. The president can raise issues that Canada can address in a prompt and reasonable manner. These include border security and increasing Canada’s commitment to contributing its fair share to international alliances, which would include increasing military expenditures.

    Second, Canada should recognize that external pressures can provide opportunities to do things that are in this country’s own interests, but are otherwise politically difficult. Outside pressures have in the past encouraged Canada to adopt several measures that are good for the country, such as reducing pork-barreling and regional favouritism in government contracting.

    Canada’s dairy protectionism provides a good example of a trade concession that would benefit Canada, as it is unfair to lower-income Canadians and, in the long run, hurts the industry itself. An industry more exposed to competitive pressures would be incentivized to be more productive and seek to expand into international markets.

    Australia has shown how such marketing boards can be abolished in a manner that gives some time to the industry to adjust and ultimately benefits all concerned. Canada could similarly rid itself of its outdated and counterproductive Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation, as well. To the extent that the United States pressures us to eliminate such supply management systems, it is actually doing us a favour.

    Likewise, given that the U.S. is moving away from suppressing free expression in cyberspace, Canada would benefit from joining such initiatives rather than continuing down the path of having government or big companies effectively engage in censorship under the guise of fighting “disinformation”. The best remedy for any wrongheaded speech is rightheaded speech, not censorship.

    At Dominion Review, Brian Graff steals a line from George C. Scott’s portrayal of Patton who said (in the film, not in real life) – “Rommel, you magnificent bastard. I read your book!” after reading the book of Trump’s Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer:

    Lighthizer wrote a book (released in June 2023) about his trade views and experience entitled No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers, which I just read. I only became aware of Lighthizer in November, in part because of a review of his book in The Guardian.

    I don’t think Lighthizer is a bastard (literally or figuratively). He is hardly magnificent, but his book should be required reading for Canadians interested in our upcoming negotiations with the US. Our government would learn how best to counter the US by preparing a strong strategy and going on offence even before negotiations begin.

    In short, we should not give away anything for free. This is Lighthizer’s position in matters of trade. For example, Canada should not volunteer to meet the two percent defense spending target ahead of negotiations. If anything, Canada should be accusing the US of whatever complaints we can muster. Trump might complain about the Canadian border being porous when it comes to people and drugs, but we can make the same claims, and add on the fact that the US should do more to stop the flow of illegal guns into Canada across our southern border.

    Lighthizer provides a history of the US based around the idea that the US revolution and the constitution were a reaction to the mercantilist policies of Britain, which wanted to export manufactured goods and import only raw materials, while also limiting US trade with the rest of the world. Here is Lighthizer’s essential view:

      Today, the tide has turned against the argument for unfettered free trade, in no small part because of the changes we made in the Trump administration. More broadly, evidence and experience have shown us that free trade is a unicorn – a figment of the Anglo-American imagination. No one really believes in it outside of countries in the Anglo-American world, and no one practices it. After the lessons of the past couple decades or so, few believe in it even within that world, save for some hard-core ideologues. It is a theory that never worked anywhere.

    This is his critique of the neoliberal free trade approach:

      According to the definitions preferred by these efficiency-minded free traders, the downside of trade for American producers is not evidence against their approach but rather is an unfortunate but necessary side effect. That’s because free trade is always taken as a given, not as an approach to be questioned. Rather than envisioning the type of society desired and then, in light of that conception of the common good, fashioning a trade policy to fit that vision, economists tend to do the opposite: they start from the proposition that free trade should reign and then argue that society should adapt. Most acknowledge that lowering trade barriers causes economic disruption, but very few suggest that the rules of trade should be calibrated to help society better manage those effects. On the right, libertarians deny that these bad effects are a problem, because the benefits of cheap consumer goods for the masses supposedly outweigh the costs, and factory workers, in their view, can be retrained to write computer programs. On the left, progressives promote trade adjustment assistance and other wealth-transfer schemes as a means of smoothing globalization’s rough edges.

    This section is also key:

      … mercantilism and a free market are dramatically different systems, with distinctions that are important to note. Mercantilism is a school of nationalistic political economy that emphasizes the role of government intervention, trade barriers, and export promotion in building a wealthy, powerful state. The term was popularized by Adam Smith, who described the policies of western European colonial powers as a “mercantile system.” Then and now, there are a vast array of tools available for countries seeking to go down this path. Mercantilist governments, for instance, frequently employ import substitution policies that support exports and discourage imports in order to accumulate wealth. They employ tariffs, too, of course, and they limit market access, employ licensing schemes, and use government procurement, subsidies, SOEs, and manipulation of regulation to favor domestic industries over foreign ones.

    The focus of the book, and the main villain, is China, followed closely by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Canada gets less than 77 mentions, Mexico gets 99 mentions in the first 352 pages of 576 (the e-book stops counting at 99), and Japan gets 99 mentions in the first 400 pages. Compare this to China, which gets 99 mentions within the first 101 pages alone.

    January 16, 2025

    For some unknowable reason, high-tax states keep losing population to low-tax states

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

    It sure is a mystery:

    “U-Haul Rental Truck (44601958941)” by HireAHelper is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

    This probably won’t come as a surprise to many readers, but when people move, they tend to prefer migrating to places where, among other considerations, the taxes are lower than in their old digs. Data from the U.S. government as well as from moving companies reveals that — as we’ve seen in the past — high-tax states are losing residents to states that take a smaller bite out of people’s wallets.

    “Americans are continuing to leave high-tax, high-cost-of-living states in favor of lower-tax, lower-cost alternatives. Of the 26 states whose overall state and local tax burdens per capita were below the national average in 2022 (the most recent year of data available), 18 experienced net inbound interstate migration in FY 2024,” Katherine Loughead wrote last week for the Tax Foundation. “Meanwhile, of the 25 states and DC with tax burdens per capita at or above the national average, 17 of those jurisdictions experienced net outbound domestic migration.”

    Loughead crunched numbers from both the U.S. Census Bureau as well as U-Haul and United Van Lines. The government data tracks population gains and losses across the country while numbers from the private companies is helpful for comparing flows in and out of various states. The results are revelatory, though not unexpected.

    “For the second year in a row, South Carolina saw the greatest population growth attributable to net inbound domestic migration” according to Census Bureau figures. The Tax Foundation separately ranks South Carolina at number 9 for tax burden, with 1 being the lowest tax burden among states and 50 the highest. Rounding out the top-10 population-gainers were Idaho (ranked 29), Delaware (42), North Carolina (23), Tennessee (3), Nevada (18), Alabama (20), Montana (27), Arizona (15), and Arkansas (26).

    According to census data, Hawaii lost the biggest share of its population to other states; it’s ranked at 48 for the third-highest tax burden in the country. The rest of the top 10 states for population outflow were New York (50), California (46), Alaska (1), Illinois (44), Massachusetts (37), Louisiana (12), New Jersey (45), Maryland (35), and Mississippi (21).

    Numbers released this month by U-Haul and United Van Lines showed migration patterns closely, but not precisely, tracking the Census Bureau’s information. Loughead attributes the disparities, at least in part, to the companies’ varying geographic coverage and market share.

    January 15, 2025

    Is there anything climate change can’t do?

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

    Seen on social media earlier this week:

    Confirming this, Chris Bray talks about current reporting on the wildfires in and around Los Angeles:

    In his much-discussed piece on the Los Angeles fires at the Free Press, Leighton Woodhouse looks to Mike Davis for a narrative foundation. In his book Ecology of Fear, Woodhouse notes, Davis “argued that the area between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains simply never should have been developed. No matter what measures we take to prevent it, those hills are going to burn, and the houses we erect upon them are only so much kindling.” Malibu and the Palisades, the land of hard living. That’s why so many rich and famous people lived there: because it was so inherently miserable and dangerous.

    Mike Davis was full of shit for thirty years — he died in 2022 — and I’ve been rolling my eyes at him throughout. He described Los Angeles as an “apocalypse theme park”, a place of ruin and pain, populated by hardened survivors who, “dutifully struggling”, stagger on through the “Job-like ordeal” of clinging to a brutal landscape.

    Also, Sierra Madre has bears. The Los Angeles suburbs are a place of horror and agony, because they back into the mountains, where blood-clawed wild animals prowl and stalk and slaughter. Places where life is especially grim and sanguinary, pgs. 240-41: Bradbury, La Crescenta, Glendora, the areas around the hellscape of Santa Barbara. A poodle was eaten by a mountain lion in Bradbury once, as neighbors gaped in open-jawed terror, YET STILL DO FOOLS ENDURE THE HORROR OF LIVING IN SUCH A PLACE.

    Current real estate listings in Bradbury, a gated hillside community incorporated as an independent city in the San Gabriel Valley with a population of about 900 people:

    How then would ye endure such horror, oh pilgrim, to live thus amid such blood and death? How bearest thou brutal existence upon this land?

    Famously, in 1999, the Los Angeles Times, which used to be a newspaper, ran a long story examining Mike Davis and his vision of Southern California. It’s full of sentences like this:

    • Los Angeles’ most provocative social critic has stretched, bent and broken more than a few facts in “Ecology of Fear,” his latest, darkly themed work on the urban area he claims to love.
    • … more than a third of the time there were factual problems with his work.
    • Davis concedes the error.
    • Davis does not say where he got this piece of information.
    • “I honestly don’t know what I’m referring to,” Davis said.
    • Some of Davis’ mistakes involve mergers of fact and fiction, including making up a quote.
    • Davis attributes the false quote to a mix-up.
    • Then he takes readers on a partial flight of fantasy …
    • An examination of the Malibu Times article shows that Davis made up the parts about the jewels, the hair color, the kayakers’ occupations, the evidence of their callous classism and the ethnicity of their maids.
    • Davis is mischievously unrepentant.
    • Davis also merges fact and literary fiction, without acknowledgment, while arguing that Pomona, like other older, outer suburbs, is dying.

    And so on.

    The Times concluded that Davis could be read as “a polemicist, who makes cogent, incisive arguments on big themes”, but not as “a historian who is expected to be reliable, even on details”.

    January 14, 2025

    Andrew Sullivan on the “grooming gangs” scandal in Britain

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

    These rape gangs have been operating for more than a decade in English towns and cities yet the government does everything it possibly can to avoid taking action, for fear of being accused of racism (or perhaps fear of what they’d discover if they did properly investigate) and losing all those Muslim votes:

    The first response of most human beings to news of irredeemably evil acts is to ask who committed them. And if the answer makes us deeply uncomfortable, we tend to move on pronto. You see this most obviously on social media with news of an atrocity. Was the shooter white, a Democrat, a Republican, Muslim, MAGA, woke, trans? And where did the victim fit into these categories?

    Our priors instantly color our moral judgment, and even our sense of the seriousness of the offense. And the temptation simply to deny what seems to be in front of our nose can be overwhelming.

    […]

    The more intense the horror, the more powerful the instinct to doubt when you first hear of it. The sex-abuse scandal in my own church first numbed and incapacitated me. It took some time for me to see the totality of what had happened, and how deeply it had destroyed Catholic moral authority. Again, when I first read about, say, the Catholic school for deaf children where a priest had picked his victims among those whose parents did not know sign language, the feeling of horror was almost too much to process at all. And as with the Bush administration’s torture policy, it took even more time to grasp how this moral rot had been enabled by the very top.

    This is why, I think, the scandal of Britain’s Pakistani rape-gangs, and the institutional negligence toward tens of thousands of underage victims over several years, has had a second burst of life. A serious national inquiry on the scandal was conducted years ago (its recommendations not yet implemented). But several towns with the worst records were omitted from that inquiry; and the sheer scale and depravity of what happened has finally begun to sink in. The precipitant was Elon Musk pontificating about the scandal on X, as part of his campaign to bring down Keir Starmer.

    The details are hard to absorb. Think of the hideous abuse suffered by that extraordinary French woman, Gisèle Pelicot, sedated and raped by dozens of French men, organized by her husband. Now think of that kind of organized gang-bang — but make it close to ubiquitous in some towns and the victims under-age girls: raped, brutalized, mutilated, beaten, their lives destroyed. Yes, it was that bad. Tens of thousands of rape victims across the country. This is how one British judge addressed some culprits at sentencing:

      You coerced her into providing sex to vast numbers of strangers. Up to four or five men would be invited to addresses so they could have sex with her … Threats were made to kill her … If she resisted, she would be coerced. Customers would become angry … If oral sex was required, her head would be pushed down, her hair pulled and she would be slapped. Strangers would burn her with cigarettes. A stranger almost throttled her. One deliberately scratched her vagina with his nails. One inserted a hairbrush into her vagina.

    The victim was just 13 years old. And she wasn’t unconscious. In just one town, a “conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited” between 1997 and 2013. And in communities dominated by men of Pakistani origin, largely from the Mirpuri region of Kashmir, who held huge sway over the police and local community — just like the Catholic Church in Boston — cover-ups were routine.

    Among the abuse concealed: gang-rapes of a single minor by 20 men; putting a pump into a girl’s anus so more men could penetrate her at once; and constant threats of murder of the girls or their families if anyone spoke up. In one case, a minor was arrested and charged with prostitution for having oral sex in a car with a john. When she attended her trial, she discovered that the magistrate in charge of her case was the man she’d fellated. No one knows the full number of minor girls affected, but it is in at least the tens of thousands, and possibly in the six figures.

    Why was this allowed to go on for so long? For the same reason the Catholic Church covered up child rape for decades, and Dick Cheney covered up torture. Because the orthodoxies of Catholicism, of the American military, and, in this case, the multicultural experiment were respectively involved. These orthodoxies were sacred, their cultural power extreme. Catholic Boston, conservative America, and elite liberal Britain therefore defended their own orthodoxies for a very long time. And with every successful deflection of responsibility, the number of victims increased.

    The truth damns the multicultural project in Britain. Rather than integrating these men of Pakistani heritage, insisting that they adopt the laws and mores of the native population, and treating them like everyone else, the UK elites celebrated cultural difference, enabled the siloing of these populations, bemoaned their own white working-class populations, and forbade any criticism of Islam. So if you called out this stuff, you were instantly called racist. After all, to accuse a non-white minority of raping white girls was a trope right out of white-supremacist fever dreams. And yes, it is a hideous racist trope — from the depths of the American South. But sometimes the trope is the truth.

    In all the major cases, I’ve found no reported evidence of Pakistani or Muslim girls being groomed and raped — only poor, white natives. The justification among the rapists, moreover, was that these non-Muslims were sluts who were asking for it and beneath contempt. Racist insults were common as these girls were brutally abused. These were not just rapes, but hate crimes of a grisly sort.

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