Quotulatiousness

November 8, 2024

“The Science™, that thing we’re supposed to believe in and obey – is distinctly and increasingly political”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

President-elect Donald Trump has a vast array of options to tackle in the traditional first hundred days of his administration. Chris Bray says that one of the very first of these should be the depoliticization of the federal science agencies:

Donald Trump has spoken very clearly about his day-one determination to end the mutilation of children in the service of gender ideology, but let’s look for the roots of that poison tree. Via Billboard Chris, here’s a sample descriptive section from a National Institutes of Health grant given to a pediatric gender physician in Los Angeles, and read this carefully to find the most important sentence:

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy has worked to push gender hormone treatment down to eight year-olds, with research funding from the federal government. Now, big finish: the dates on the NIH grant that Billboard Chris highlighted:

This is a project — gender hormones for eight year-olds — that operated with federal funding during the first Trump administration. Policy expressed in words meets policy expressed in cash. This is what matters, year after year, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike (click to enlarge):

The money, the money, and the money. What you fund is what you’re doing. It may not seem like a big target, but the politicization of federal science funding is a root cause of institutional decay and pathological narrative-making, and cutting the money pipeline to politicized science is the policy action that will matter for decades. Remaking the funding pipeline for federal science grants is a day one priority, because the money will shape policy far more than any declaration of intent.

The problem is everywhere: the NIH, the NSF, NASA, NOAA, and so on. SpaceX is catching rockets; NASA is funding this: “21-EEJ21-0020 ASSESSMENT OF THE GULF COAST ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE LANDSCAPE FOR EQUITY.”

And this: “EXPLORING SYNERGISTIC OPPORTUNITIES BETWEEN CHARLOTTE-AREA ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE INITIATIVES AND NASA EARTH SCIENCE INFORMATION.”

Pick a federal science grant website and spend some time exploring it. Here’s the National Science Foundation’s funding opportunities page. Sample grant program: “Growing Research Compliance Support and Service Infrastructure for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity”.

Today’s funded program for transformative science equity and environmental justice is tomorrow’s new policy measures. This is the pipeline to programs. What you fund today is what you’re going to do in five years.

An alternative path to meeting Canada’s 2% of GDP defence-spending aspirations

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

I’m not convinced that Brian Graff is correct here, but it’s certainly a bit of unusually out-of-the-box thinking on Canada’s defence shortcomings:

Canada has sent a few tanks over to Ukraine, as well as other supplies and financial aid. We will have to replenish these things, and this might be an opportunity to expand Canada’s capacity to make and export military arms and equipment. Maybe our defense policy and spending has been wrongheaded. Since we have so few troops, are unlikely to need to defend our own soil, and are far from any country likely to be in conflict, we may be able to meet our 2% target with some innovative thinking.

Since the Second World War, the US has described itself as the “arsenal of democracy”, a phrase which Franklin Roosevelt used in 1940 when the US was supporting Britain (and Canada) by sending arms, most notably through the “Lend Lease” program that sent ships and equipment to Britain, technically on loan.

Maybe a bigger part of Canada’s own defence policy should be to make and stockpile arms, equipment, and supplies to send to our allies or friends in times of need. Such equipment need not be “state of the art” like F-35 fighter jets. Canada could also expand production of parts for equipment assembled in other NATO countries – particularly for spare parts we need for ourselves.

We need not limit this to new equipment. Canada could also promote companies that refurbish older equipment to be stockpiled or resold. And of course, Canada could determine which countries benefit from our stockpiles of military equipment. We could ensure that this equipment is not acquired by countries with regimes we oppose, and we would have the leeway to give or sell only to the “right” side of a conflict, possibly with strings attached.

Take our Leopard 2 tanks that were built in Germany. We have given some to Ukraine. We have unfortunately scrapped even older Leopard 1 tanks, that could have been refurbished or modified to serve as platforms for other uses. Canada should probably give the rest of our tanks to Ukraine, then get into the business of buying older Abrams tanks from the US to refurbish as replacements or for re-export.

Israel is a good example of a nation that builds up its military capacity with secondhand tanks and other equipment, and is now a major exporter of military equipment that it developed at least in part for its own defence.

The trend in US equipment has been to build state of the art equipment, and buy smaller quantities of it. But the conflict in Ukraine has shown that even when fighting a country with advanced military technology like Russia, using some older equipment combined with innovative new designs has been successful for both sides. Along with the introduction of drones, the Russians have modified older bombs to become guided bombs that are accurate and far cheaper than building new missiles.

The McDonald’s ice cream machines are always broken because of bad IP laws

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

Even if you never to to a McDonald’s yourself, you’ve undoubtedly heard that the ice cream machines are always broken. I hadn’t really given it any thought — it’s been years since I visited one of the restaurants and I don’t eat much ice cream — but Peter Jacobsen explains the weird and infuriating reason for the phenomenon:

Image Credit: Magnus D via Wikimedia | CC BY 2.0

How could it be that the ice cream machines at McDonald’s are so consistently broken? It turns out that, until just recently, it was illegal to hire most people to fix them. To understand why, we’re going to have to take a detour into the world of intellectual property.

DMCA Woes

So why has it been illegal for McDonald’s to hire people to fix their ice cream machines? Well, that’s where the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) comes in. If you’re familiar with the DMCA, this is probably confusing to you.

Generally the DMCA is a big concern on content creation platforms like YouTube. If someone uses copyrighted music, he or she gets DMCAed. This is slang for when a video gets its monetization redirected to the owner of whatever copyrighted content was used.

DMCA takedowns draw a lot of ire, because the law is clumsily applied and often even legitimate uses of copyrighted content (e.g., fair use) are punished.

But the DMCA extends beyond content creation, as chronicled by Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixit, an organization dedicated to ensuring that product owners have the right and ability to fix their property. Many machines ranging from phones to ice cream machines utilize copyrighted software to function. Sometimes, this software limits product users more than they’d like.

For example, iPhone software locks users into particular user interfaces. If a user wants to customize past some point, he’s going to have to modify the software more than the company intends. This process, called jailbreaking, involves breaking through “digital locks”. The DMCA often interprets breaking these locks as a violation of the intellectual property of the copyright holder.

The problem gets even worse when you recognize that fixing things — say, McDonald’s ice cream machines — means breaking past those digital locks. This means anyone hired to repair the machine would need an official blessing from the manufacturer.

However, things have changed. As of October 18th, the opening of digital locks for “retail-level commercial food preparation equipment” is now exempt from this DMCA rule. McDonald’s will now be able to hire from a larger group of people to fix their ice cream machines.

DMCA has allowed a lot of intellectual property owners to collect unearned rents while neglecting the needs of the customers who’ve bought, leased, or rented things that incorporate their IP.

Note, this is only an exemption to the rule. The rule itself has not changed. Second, other regulations still hamper McDonald’s franchise owners from fixing their own machines. As Chamberlain points out:

    While it’s now legal to circumvent the digital locks on these machines, the ruling does not allow us to share or distribute the tools necessary to do so. This is a major limitation … few will be able to walk through it without significant difficulty.

    It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame … Without these tools, this exemption is largely theoretical for many small businesses that don’t have in-house repair experts.

So your chance of getting a McFlurry has improved, but you can’t quite celebrate a total win yet.

The battle against these DMCA laws isn’t limited to ice cream machines. The “right to repair” movement spearheaded by organizations including iFixit has already battled for exemptions for medical devices, consumer devices like phones and tablets, vehicles, and assistive technologies for people with disabilities.

November 3, 2024

QotD: Minutemen

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

Ten years ago, America’s right-wing paramilitaries were so anti-government, they thought that driver’s licenses were an unbearable infringement on their liberties. Now they’re out on the border HELPING THE FEDS ENFORCE THEIR REGULATIONS. What the hell’s up with that?

Granted, there’s not necessarily much overlap between the two groups. But one has supplanted the other in the mass media, the public imagination, and the affection of the right-wing radio hosts — and so help me, I think I miss the days when I felt a certain kinship with the crazies.

Jesse Walker, “More ’90s Nostalgia”, Hit and Run, 2005-07-28.

November 2, 2024

Maxime Bernier on Canada’s immigration crisis

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

This article has been posted at the Telegraph in the UK and mailed out by the PPC here in Canada, so I guess it’s okay to share it here:

Newsflash: Canada is in the process of falling apart.

No, it’s not because Quebec is once again threatening to hold a referendum on separation, although this may happen again in the coming years.

Our country is experiencing a series of crises because of the deliberate policy of mass immigration instigated by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government soon after its election in 2015.

Last year, Canada’s population increased by almost 1.3 million people, or 3.2 per cent. This was the fastest annual population growth rate since the post-war years. The difference however is that this was not caused by a baby boom, since 97 per cent of the growth was due to international migration, mostly from Asia and Africa.

This includes not only immigrants per se – or “permanent residents” – but also so-called temporary foreign workers, foreign students, and asylum seekers. Although supposed to be temporary, the last categories have in fact become pathways to seek permanent residency.

Because of this, housing in Canada has now become completely unaffordable. Young couples who want to have children just cannot afford to buy a home with a nice backyard where they can raise them any more, with the result that our birth rate has dropped dramatically.

Our hospitals, social services, and infrastructures are being overburdened by this massive demographic tsunami.

Immigration is often justified by its supposed positive impact on the economy. But productivity and wages have been stagnant for a decade in Canada, as cheap immigrant labour is favoured by employers over capital investment and automation.

Canadian politics has been mired for months in scandals over foreign interference, in particular China and India. India has been the largest source of immigrants to Canada for several years. Last week, Canada and India expelled diplomats over allegations by the Trudeau government that Indian diplomats have been involved in attacks against Khalistani militants in our country, including the murder last year of one that India considers a terrorist.

Because of mass immigration, Canadian politics is more and more focused not on actual Canadian issues, but on ethnic, religious, and foreign issues and wars, with establishment politicians spending an extraordinary amount of time courting the votes of minority ethnic groups in suburban marginal ridings.

The third most important national party, the New Democratic Party that has kept the Trudeau minority government in power, is headed by Jagmeet Singh. A Sikh by background, he initially declined to condemn Talwinder Singh Parmar, the mastermind responsible for the 1985 bombing of an Air India plane in which hundreds of Canadians were killed. However Singh did change his stance when a Canadian inquiry concluded that Parmar was definitely behind the outrage.

For his part, the leader of the Conservative Party and very likely our next prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, is known for donning national or religious dress as he panders to members of various communities.

In 2018, as a then Conservative Member of Parliament, I posted a series of tweets that denounced what I called Trudeau’s “cult of diversity” which, I contended, would lead to the Balkanisation of Canadian society, and potentially to violence.

Almost daily scenes of Muslims attacking Jewish institutions, Sikhs burning the Indian flag, and Ethiopian factions fighting each other in the streets of our cities, have proven me right.

Publicly attacking these woke dogmas wasn’t allowed at the time in Canada though, and it provoked a huge outcry. Even my leader and colleagues in the Conservative Party denounced me, which led me to resign and launch a populist right-wing party which is broadly the Canadian equivalent of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.

If you believe that more diversity is always good and always enriches your society, then it’s logical and inevitable that you will end up importing lots of people with incompatible values and attitudes from around the world, including religious fanatics and even terrorists, who can’t possibly integrate in a country with a European, secular Christian heritage.

That’s what we’ve been doing for years, and that’s why everything that historically made Canada what it was is rapidly being destroyed. I know there has been a similar trend in the UK and other European countries, but Canada went way further down this road.

Canada’s demise started when what was already a very diverse country (with Indigenous, French and British founding peoples, and many different regional cultures) fell for this radical version of multiculturalism instead of tempering it with a focus on shared values and attitudes, pride in our history, and in the achievements of Western civilisation.

Now, not only are our democratic institutions, our economy, and our social peace and cohesion, falling apart, but so are our very identity and reason to exist as a country.

All these trends are so overwhelming that, unable to deny the reality any more, the Trudeau government finally announced last week that they would be gradually lowering their immigration targets in the coming years instead of continuing to increase them.

Although this is a massive U-turn for this government, it is far from being a sufficient reduction, and a lot more will need to be done to repair the damage. Otherwise, I don’t believe Canada will survive the 21st century.

November 1, 2024

Canada – 30 protectionist marketing boards wrapped in a flag

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

In The Line, Greg Quinn points out just how blatantly hypocritical Canada’s politicians and diplomats are in any discussion with other nations when the subject turns to free trade:

Let me say this upfront, and clearly: when it comes to international trade, Canada is protectionist to an astonishing degree whilst at the same time claiming it is a supporter of global free trade. It wants every other country to open up (and complains when they don’t, or when they stand their ground) whilst ensuring access to the Canadian market is more difficult. This is a result of federal policy, inter-provincial restrictions, and vested interests. And it is flagrantly hypocritical.

When it comes to dairy, beef and the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, for example, Canada’s claim to openness is simply a lie. Agricultural groups and businesses dominate and control the local landscape and attempts to either overcome that (or bring external companies in) have failed on many occasions over the years. This could well get worse if the Liberals agree to what the Bloc Québécois has demanded — even more dairy protections — in a desperate attempt to remain in power for a little while longer.

Some of these issues are well known to Canadians — particularly the domestic ones, or the ones that touch on national unity frictions. But I’m not sure Canadians understand how this is perceived globally, including by Canada’s allies. Readers may recall that there was a mild furore a while back when the U.K. dared to pause trade negotiations as Canada refused to move on access for British cheese. There were accusations of the U.K. not playing fair and such like.

It’s bad enough that we “protect” Canadians from lower-priced foreign food, but we even manage to maintain inter-provincial trade barriers that directly harm all Canadian consumers:

Then we have interprovincial trade barriers. According to the Business Council of Alberta in a 2021 report, these barriers are tantamount to a 6.9 per cent tariff on Canadian goods. They also noted that removal of these could boost Canada’s GDP by some 3.8 per cent (or C$80 billion), increase average wages by some C$1,800 per person, and increase government revenues for social programming by some 4.4 per cent.These barriers hinder internal trade between the provinces, including the work of those companies that import goods from other countries.

A freer market, at home or globally, would not solve all the issues that exist with prices, but it would certainly increase competition and give consumers more choice. What exists at the minute is a pretense of choice.

Opening up the Canadian market would certainly benefit other countries, including my own United Kingdom, and there would be some impact on local business and producers. This is true, and acknowledged. But opening itself up to more global trade and dismantling internal trade barriers — and these are things all the politicians insist they like the sound of in theory — would be a win-win for Canadian consumers and Canadian society as a whole. Some big companies and carefully coddled special interests would be upset, but they aren’t supposed to be the ones making decisions in a democracy, or in a free market.

“[H]er plan will mean the obliteration of your savings, the end of banks and even the destruction of ‘money as we know it'”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Environment, Germany, Government, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It’s astonishing how many highly placed bureaucrats, NGO functionaries, and the very, very wealthy are super gung-ho for reducing the rest of us to the status (and living conditions) of medieval serfs:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

This week, VW announced plans to cut tens of thousands of jobs and to close three factories. That is a very big deal, because they have never closed a single German factory before. I try to avoid economic topics, but this story is so much bigger than economics. As Daniel Gräber wrote in Cicero last month, “the VW crisis has become a symbol for the decline of our entire country“.

The Green leftoid establishment are eagerly blaming management for these failures, which is on the one hand not entirely wrong, but on the other hand not nearly an absolution. The German state of Lower Saxony holds a 20% stake in Volkswagen, and so they also manage the company. Recently, in a fit of virtue, they placed a Green politician – Julia Willie Hamburg – on its supervisory board. Hamburg does not even own a car and has used her position to argue that Volkswagen should regard itself not as an automobile manufacturer but as a “mobility services provider” and shift its focus away from “individual transport”.

The absurdly named Julia Willie Hamburg is merely symptomatic of a broader phenomenon. Germany has succumbed to political forces that have nothing but indifference and disdain for the industries that have made us prosperous. Our sitting Economics Minister, Robert Habeck, gave an interview to taz in 2011 in which he said that “fewer cars will not lead to less economic growth, but to new industries”, and attacked “the old growth theory, based on gross domestic product“. And behind Green politicians like Habeck are even more radical forces, like Ulrike Herrmann, the editor of taz, for many years a member of the Green Party and also an open advocate of wide-scale deindustrialisation. Because I am going to quote Herrmann saying some very crazy things, you need to know that she is in no way a fringe figure. She appears regularly on all the respectable evening talkshows and every politically informed person in the Federal Republic knows who she is.

Herrmann has outlined her political views in various books like The End of Capitalism: Why Growth and Climate Protection Are Not Compatible – and How We Will Live in the Future. From these monographs, we learn that Herrmann sees climatism as a means of imposing a centrally planned economy in which we will own nothing and be happy. Happily, Herrmann also talks a lot, and in her various speeches and interviews she states her vision for decarbonising Germany in very radical terms. I am grateful to this twitter user for highlighting typical remarks that Herrmann delivered in April of this year before a sympathetic audience of climate lunatics.

There, Herrmann elaborated on her vision for a future economy in which all major goods would have to be rationed:

    Talking about rationing: It’s clear that if we shrink economically, we won’t have to be as poor as the British were in 1939; rather, we’d have to be as rich as the West Germans were in 1978. That is a huge difference, because we can take advantage of all the growth of the post-war period and the entire economic miracle.

    The central elements of the economy would have to be rationed. First of all, living space, because cement emits endless amounts of CO2. Actually, new construction would have to be banned outright and living space rationed to 50 square metres per capita. That should actually be enough for everyone. Then meat would have to be rationed, because meat production emits enormous amounts of CO2. You don’t have to become a vegetarian, but you’ll have to eat a lot less meat.

    Then train travel has to be rationed. So this idea, which many people also have – “so okay then I don’t have a car but then I always travel on the Intercity Express trains” – that won’t work either, because of course air resistance increases with speed. Yes, it’s all totally insane. Trains won’t be allowed to travel faster than 100 kilometres per hour, but you can still travel around locally quite a lot. This is all in my book, okay? But I didn’t expand on it there because I didn’t want to scare all the readers.

At this point Herrmann begins to cackle manically, ecstatic at the thought that millions of Germans will be stuck riding rationed kilometres on slow local public transit.

October 31, 2024

Riley Donovan – “October 24th was a tragic day …”

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

Riley Donovan enumerates some of the most notable losers from the federal government’s belated realization that cutting immigration numbers was politically necessary:

A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message. The PPC has been the only federal party against mass immigration from its founding.
Photo from The Province

October 24th was a tragic day for real estate developers, speculators, cheap labour employers, business lobbyists, slumlords, corrupt immigration consultants, and strip mall diploma mill operators. On that day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reluctantly caved to public opinion and announced that the Liberal government will slash permanent resident levels by 21%.

Less than one week before the October 24th announcement, an Abacus poll revealed that support for immigration restriction has reached 72% – a statistical supermajority. This includes a majority of all four major political parties and every age group. A month before the announcement, a Leger poll found that majorities of both white and non-white Canadians want lower immigration.

It is now impossible to find even one demographic subset of Canadians that registers majority support for high immigration – except perhaps if you exclusively surveyed CEOs, bank presidents, or woke university professors (politics makes for strange bedfellows).

There is no prominent, well-funded immigration restriction lobby in this country – in fact, there is a prominent, well-funded pro-immigration lobby. Columnists – with the exception of yours truly – almost never wrote the word “immigration” before the summer of 2023. The Canadian public was not goaded by public figures into opposing mass immigration by a margin of three to one; this trend was entirely grassroots.

The shift in public attitudes was the result of countless private conversations in which regular people shared worries about job lines full of international students that stretched around the block, Canadian youth outcompeted by foreign workers for positions at Tim Horton’s, seniors living in RVs because of sky-high rent, and hospitals overcrowded by an annual inflow of 1.3 million newcomers.

October 28, 2024

QotD: Democracy as theatre

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

The world does not have much experience with democracy. What we know of it comes from the century or so the West been tinkering with it and, of course, what can be learned from the ancient Greek experiment with it. Unlike monarchy or various forms of despotism, democracy has had a relatively short run. We have more real world experience with various types of totalitarianism than we do democracy, so it stands to reason that we are just coming to understand its benefits and liabilities.

One thing we are learning about modern democracy is that it is a myth. The people are not in charge. They get to vote on things and select representatives, but those representative don’t actually represent the interests of the people, who voted them into their positions. The office holders in a modern democracy represent the interests of the money-men who sponsored them. Politicians in a democracy are like prize fighters, in that they are controlled by a management team.

Like a prize fighter, one of the demands placed upon a modern politician is that he must at all times seek the attention of the public. Much of what we see in our modern democracies is false drama, designed to gain attention. This is why women have proven to be so successful as politicians. Women are naturally gifted with the ability to get attention, especially through false drama. It turns out that democracy is a form of governance modelled on the beauty pageant.

This is the point of the impeachment fiasco. The Democrats are the party of girls and gay men, so they naturally seek drama. Trump’s great sin is that he is a great showman, so he gets all the attention. Impeachment allows the vagina party to one-up him and force him to pay attention to them. If you look at the people celebrating in the streets, it’s lesbians and middle-aged woman. They are not celebrating because they hate Trump. They are happy someone is noticing them.

The Z Man, “Impeaching Democracy”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-19.

October 26, 2024

The coming Hundred Days (?)

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

In spite of everything, I still lean toward optimism, so I can’t say that I agree with Kulak’s take here:

January 6th, 2021 — A protest that got out of hand or the worst act of insurrection since 1861, depending on your political preference.

    There are decades when weeks happens, and weeks in which decades happen
    – Variously attributed to Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Robespierre, Napoleon, and Steve Bannon

As of writing it is 18 days to the election on Nov 5th, and 94 days to Inauguration Day on Jan 20th.

Maybe the most knowledgeable meta-historian/Commentator alive today, whatifalthist, has predicted a civil conflict in which over 1000 Americans die will begin in this period …

And I’d put the odds of “A Conflict” in which over 1 million die involving the US overlapping with this period at something like 70-80%. If it doesn’t happen then Biden will have somehow played the perfect drunken master and embodied the Trifecta of God favouring “fools, drunkards, and the United States of America”.

That is a major American conflict: beginning, continuing, or dramatically ending within this period.

Civil War or “Troubles” is still slightly below a 50% likelihood … But that’s because I think The Ukraine or Israel wars going nuclear, a hot war with Iran, A Chinese move towards Taiwan, or what’s increasingly looking like a possible foreign backed Cartel-War on US soil (see Aurora) … might suck the oxygen out of a final domestic reckoning between America’s two political factions (Trump and Swamp) … at least until 2028 or 2032.

However America’s domestic instability is what’s driving the risk of escalation, miscalculation and uncertainty everywhere else and that will be the focus of this piece …

I am unprepared for what I think is coming … I’ve maybe thought about such an outcome for a decade now, I lived through 2020 and the Canadian Lockdowns with outrage and totalitarian anxiety (remember Canada was the testing ground for what they wanted to everywhere else, we got what Alex Jones only prophesied), and I’ve been a amateur and semi-professional war and preparedness commentator for 2 and a half years now … and it’s hit me how unprepared I am.

I’m more prepared than most, but, setting aside the political implications, I would trade A LOT for another 4 year election cycle of 2023 conditions to make money, network, buy kit, develop skills, read books, write articles, prepare, plot …

I’m doubtful I’ll get it.

I’m also painfully aware that a very large percentage of people and institutions would not financially or morally survive a long Biden “normalcy” … and that that desperation is driving a lot of the instability.

But ya, I’m already starting to intuitively anticipate/feel that hard times — things moving too fast — reactive loss of initiative feeling that I’ve only really felt when a relationship was imploding, during that one very rough exam season in Uni, at the height of the 2020 election-2021 Canadian Lockdowns, or those months when the doctors discussed amputation as an possibility …

And depending on who you are and your personal situation, you’re either keenly feeling that as well or blissfully unaware.

October 24, 2024

It’s called “piercing the corporate veil” and it’s a terrible idea

Filed under: Business, Europe, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall explains why the EU’s latest brain fart is not just a bad idea in its own right, but a truly horrific precedent for the future:

Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.

… But now, this, now this is even more important than that. We can deal with free speech by the judicious use of lampposts. This is worse:

    The European Union has warned X that it may calculate fines against the social-media platform by including revenue from Elon Musk’s other businesses, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Neuralink Corp., an approach that would significantly increase the potential penalties for violating content moderation rules.

    Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules.

In English law that’s known as “piercing the corporate veil”. It’s also something we don’t do. Because that corporate veil is the very thing, the only thing, that makes large scale economic activity possible.

It has actually been said — and not just by me — that the invention of the limited company is the third grand invention of all time. Agriculture, the scientific method, the limited company.

Before the limited co everything was done through partnerships. Every individual involved in the ownership of something was liable for all of the debts of that thing. Which, when you’ve got 5 or 10 blokes trading isn’t that bad an incentive upon them to be honest.

Now think of large scale activity. We want a blast furnace — plenty of folk say Britain should have one after all. £3 to £5 billion these days. OK. No one’s got that much. So, we need to mobilise the savings of many thousands of people to go build it. But without limited liability that means all of those thousands are liable for all the debts — off into the future — of that blast furnace.

“Invest £500 in the new, new British Steel. And if we fuck up then in 10 years’ time they’ll come and take your house.”

Err, yes.

Large scale economic activity depends upon being able to separate the debts of one specific activity from the general economic life of all its backers. If this is not true then no one will invest in large scale economic activity. Therefore we won’t have large scale economic activity. Which would, you know, be bad.

October 18, 2024

Justin Trudeau “has, yet again, outsmarted himself for the short-term win”

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

A rare appearance of a Matt Gurney column outside the paywall at The Line explains why the Prime Minister couldn’t resist the temptation to attack Pierre Poilievre on the national security file, despite the fact that it gives Poilievre a strong counterattack:

Prime Ministers Starmer and Trudeau at the NATO summit in Washington.
Image from Justin Trudeau’s X account.

What Justin Trudeau did on Wednesday from the witness standing at the foreign interference inquiry — when he made his dramatic announcement of having seen a list of Conservatives who are compromised by or vulnerable to foreign interference — makes a kind of sense.

It does. It was an effective attack on Pierre Poilievre, who has stubbornly led with his chin for months. The reaction of many of my Conservative friends was telling. They knew Trudeau landed a hit, and they were pissed. They were ready for it — I think their counterattack was as good or better. But this whole story, or at least this little snippet of it, starts with Trudeau taking a swing, and not missing.

[…]

In that context, Trudeau’s decision to tease the possibility of some unnamed Conservatives being involved in the machinations of foreign interference makes sense. He saw Poilievre’s chin and decided to shove his fist into it. It’s politics. I get it.

But, once again, I’m not sure that the PM thought this through all the way. Our PM has a habit of occasionally letting his combative instincts get the better of him. The man has a weakness for showy, dramatic gestures, and loves to try and seize the big moments. Sometimes they blow up in his face. I think this one will, too. It is, I suspect, less a punch to the face, and more of an elbow-to-the-boob. It’ll cause more problems than the gesture was worth.

[…]

Trudeau doesn’t get a lot of opportunities to look like a tough leader these days, and he got two this week. His eviction of six Indian diplomats that Canadian intelligence believes were involved in guiding violent crimes in Canada, aimed at politically connected members of Canada’s large Indian diaspora, was one (and I am not yet cynical enough to believe the timing was politically motivated). The second, of course, was Trudeau’s bombshell testimony. Given the shellacking he’s been taking of late, it probably felt amazing [to] go on the attack yesterday.

The problem for the prime minister is that, today, having had his dramatic moment, there’s no follow through. He dropped the mic and then Poilievre did what he was always and obviously going to do: the opposition leader picked that mic right back up again and started talking into it.

Here’s part of Poilievre’s statement (full statement is here):

    My message to Justin Trudeau is: release the names of all MPs that have collaborated with foreign interference. But he won’t. Because Justin Trudeau is doing what he always does: he is lying. He is lying to distract from a Liberal caucus revolt against his leadership and revelations he knowingly allowed Beijing to interfere and help him win two elections. … If Justin Trudeau has evidence to the contrary, he should share it with the public. Now that he has blurted it out in general terms at a commission of inquiry — he should release the facts. But he won’t — because he is making it up.

If Poilievre’s decision to forgo a security clearance is overly complicated and technocratic, then Trudeau’s decision to attack him for it suffers the same drawbacks. By comparison, Poilievre’s approach, here, is better, simpler, and most crucially, it’s right: Release the names!

If MPs from any party have been compromised, the public deserves to know.

I don’t say that lightly or impulsively. There are absolutely downsides to releasing the names, including the very real risks to compromising our investigations and destroying the reputations of people who may have committed no crime. This sucks. But there are greater downsides to not releasing the names — until the Canadian public knows them, our entire democratic system is suspect. To put it another way, if it is inappropriate to release the names in full, then it is equally if not more inappropriate for a prime minister to publicly tease those names during his testimony, while hiding behind oaths of national security in order to avoid handing over the receipts. Protections of “national security” are intended to protect real sources and reputations — not to serve as a launchpad to lob allegations at foes while dodging accountability and transparency.

October 17, 2024

Democratic Germany considers banning 2nd-largest political party “to save democracy” of course

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

It’s totally a normal democratic urge to try to outlaw the second-largest political party in Germany and not in the least bit “authoritarian”, right?

This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.

Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD are accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.

A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talkshow tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “right wing extremism”, all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would’ve long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.

Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by political editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue“. The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.

Let’s read it together.

Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky”, “too soon” and “simply undemocratic”, and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising”.

    The problem … is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down,” Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD senior president was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.

What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans“, the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.

Failing upward into the federal civil service

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

Woke Watch Canada charts the rise and rise of Kimberly Murray from failure to higher-paid failure to the federal civil service on a six-figure annual salary:

Kimberley Murray – Image from APTN News

Kimberly Murray has just wasted $10 million dollars of Canadian taxpayers’ hard-earned money with the blessing of two successive Ministers of Justice, David Lametti and Arif Virani.

By June 2022 — after five years as Executive Director at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a one-year stint as Executive Lead at the Survivors’ Secretariat looking for allegedly missing children — Kimberly Renée Murray had failed to produce the name of a single verifiably-missing residential school child.

Despite this abysmal record of six years looking for the name of a verifiably missing child without being able to find one, Kimberly Murray was appointed by Order in Council as a federal civil servant under the Public Service Employment Act as special adviser to the Minister of Justice at a salary in the range of $228,900 – $268,200 to continue her fruitless search:

    Appointment of KIMBERLY RENÉE MURRAY of Toronto, Ontario, to be special adviser to the Minister of Justice, to be known as Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools, to hold office during pleasure for a term of two years, effective June 13, 2022.

    Her Excellency the Governor General in Council, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, under paragraph 127.1(1)(c) of the Public Service Employment Act, appoints Kimberly Renée Murray of Toronto, Ontario, to be special adviser to the Minister of Justice, to be known as Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools, to hold office during pleasure for a term of two years, and fixes her remuneration and certain conditions of employment as set out in the annexed schedule, which salary is within the range ($228,900 – $268,200), effective June 13, 2022.

During the two years of her mandate, while going through her $10 million dollar budget (and according to one of her interviews, knowingly exceeding Treasury Board guidelines), Kimberly Murray failed in her primary mission — i.e., to produce the name of at least one verifiably-missing child.

Despite this spectacular failure, and her admission to the Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples on 21 March 2023 that there are no missing children, the current Minister of Justice, Arif Virani, re-appointed Kimberly Murray for a further six months by Order in Council on 28 May 2024, this time at a salary in the range of $254,000 – $297,800.

October 12, 2024

Canadians don’t hate their banks enough

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte follows up on an earlier item thanks to the many Canadians who responded with their own tales of woe in their dealings with Canadian banks:

Since I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we have published Andrew Spence’s Fleeced: Canadians Versus Their Banks, the latest edition of Sutherland Quarterly, I’ve been inundated with people’s horror stories of their dealings with Canada’s chartered banks. Jack David’s tale in the above interview is a classic of the genre.

In Fleeced, Andrew lays out in aggravating detail how Canadian banks, although chartered by the federal government to facilitate economic activity in the broader economy, do all they can to avoid lending to small and medium businesses, never mind that small and medium businesses employ two-thirds of our private-sector labour force and account for half of Canada’s gross domestic product.

By OECD standards, small businesses in Canada are starved of bank credit, and when they are able to secure a loan, they pay through the nose. The spread between interest rates on loans to small businesses and large businesses in Canada is a whopping 2.48 percent, compared to .42 percent in the US — more than five times higher.

Why? Because Canada’s banks are a tight little oligopoly, impervious to meaningful competition. Their cozy situation allows them to be exceedingly greedy. Their profits and returns to shareholders are wildly beyond those of banks in the US and UK (and, as Andrew demonstrates, their returns from their Canadian operations are far in excess of those from the US market, meaning they screw the home market hardest.)

Our banks never miss an opportunity to impose a new fee, or off-load risk. From their perspective, small business involves too much risk — some of them will inevitably fail. The banks prefer that publishers and dry-cleaners and restaurateurs either finance themselves by pledging their homes, or use their credit cards to cover fluctuations in cash flow or make investments that will help them hire, expand, and grow. And that’s what entrepreneurs do. According to a survey by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, only one in five respondents accessed a bank loan or line of credit. Half of respondents financed themselves, tapped existing equity and personal lines of credit, and about 30 percent used their high-interest credit cards.

By severely rationing credit and making it exceedingly expensive, Canada’s banks siphon off an ungodly share of entrepreneurial profit to themselves while leaving the entrepreneur with all the risk. Their insistence on putting their own profits above service to the Canadian economy is one of the main reasons Canada has such a slow-growing, unproductive economy and a stagnant standard of living.

There is much else in this slim volume to make your blood boil: exorbitant fees on chequing and savings accounts; mutual fund expenses that torpedo investments; ridiculous mortgage restrictions, infuriating customer service …

Fleeced: Canadians Versus Their Banks is a stunning exposé of the inner workings of our six major banks — something only a reformed banker and financial services veteran such as Andrew could write. He also explodes the myth that a bloated, uncompetitive banking sector is the price we have to pay for stability in times of financial crisis.

We are in desperate need of banking reform in Canada. Read this book and you’ll be shouting at your member of Parliament for prompt action.

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