Quotulatiousness

December 26, 2023

Canada is the unchallenged international champion of “the gesture” and “the pose”, yet always manages to be out of the room when the bill needs to be paid

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

Sorry for being several days behind on this, but Matt Gurney‘s message — while necessary and timely — does not have a “best-before” or an expiration date … it’s going to be valid for a long time to come:

On the military front, Canada has actually made some meaningful investments since that speech was given. We have announced deals for new transport and refuelling jets — desperately needed and long overdue. We more recently announced a plan to sole-source new surveillance planes, also desperately needed and long overdue. We also, just this week, announced that we are procuring a fleet of large, long-ranged, armed surveillance drones, to patrol our remote air and sea frontiers, after a mere two decades of mulling it over.

There ends the good news, sadly. Most of these procurements are many years away from actually being in service. And even once we have them, as good as the new equipment will be, the biggest problem for the military today is a crippling personnel shortage. The military is, to be blunt, a disaster. Far worse than is generally known. I’ve been covering military and defence issues for longer than I care to recount, and I can tell you plainly, dear readers, that the level of panicked leaking and lamenting coming out of the Canadian Armed Forces is like nothing I’ve ever seen. We don’t have the troops, sailors and aircrew to meet even basic obligations. Training is falling behind. The in-service availability of equipment and vehicles is appallingly low for lack of trained maintenance personnel and money for spare parts and equipment.

This is showing up in operations. The army doesn’t have enough soldiers to meet every commitment. The air force has cut back on operations. The navy’s top admiral is openly speaking, in public, about the crisis in his service.

We at The Line often talk about the Canadian love of talking about inputs instead of outputs. It’s easier to say “Our government has committed X dollars over Y years to address Societal Problem Z” than it is to actually ever have to answer to the public about why Z is somehow still getting worse. New procurements are an input; the desired output is a functional Canadian Armed Forces, capable of meeting its domestic obligations, honouring our treaty commitments and also being prepared for any unexpected contingencies. We do not have that military today. We cannot have that military for years. It would take massive investments and sustained effort to begin fixing this problem.

That is not happening. Hell, we took Anita Anand, one of Justin Trudeau’s better ministers and replaced her with Blair, a man for whom that has never been said. I can tell you with certainty that our allies, and our senior military commanders, had no trouble reading between those lines. Trudeau thought the military mattered, briefly, but then he stopped thinking that, and here we are.

So, 14 months out from Freeland’s speech and on the military front, well … Merry Christmas, or something?

But wait! There’s more!

Freeland’s speech also talked about other ways Canada could support its allies, and democracies in general. Some of it was vague and aspirational — hard to measure or follow-up on. But she was specific about two things: providing our threatened allies and the democracies broadly with a stable, democratic and reliable source of critical strategic resources. Energy, for example. And minerals.

Fourteen months later, how are we doing on those fronts?

I’m not an expert in either area, but I know experts in both. Andrew Leach is an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta (I literally copied that bio right off his webpage there). He is also, simply put, one of the smartest guys on the energy file in this country. I called him this week and found him grading papers, which is probably why he was so willing to talk with me. I explained to him what I was doing with the Brookings speech, and asked him if there was anything he could point to over the last 14 months as signs that we’d gotten serious and were doing as Freeland had said we would and must.

Nope!

“By any metric, it’s worse today,” Leach said. Two months ago, he noted, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trudeau government’s energy policies. “Now, there are no clear processes to get approvals for anything,” he added, except, somewhat ironically, pipelines, whose approvals process wasn’t included in the court ruling. I asked him if this was something the Trudeau government had done to itself, or if it was a victim of happenstance, and he said that some of the legislation they were dealing with dated back to the Harper era — before their time — but that in general, the Trudeau government hadn’t handled this well. “They messed up. They assumed they had powers they didn’t have, and didn’t make the arguments for those powers. They didn’t think about the framing. They had to earn that. They didn’t.”

December 24, 2023

QotD: Dreaming of George Bailey’s world while living in Pottersville

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

George Bailey, the hero of It’s a Wonderful Life, missed the two events that made the ideal man of his time, place, and social class: going to college and serving (as an officer, of course) in the Second World War. Instead of doing those things, either of which would have sent him out into the world beyond the limits of Bedford Falls, he remained at home, taking care of his family, his business, and his community. In other words, the hero of America’s favorite exercise in Yuletide nostalgia epitomized a way of life that, in the season of the film’s cinematic debut (the summer of 1946), was already on its way to the dustbin of history.

This, the most enduring of the many works of Frank Capra, became the Atlantis myth of post-war America. That is, those who, over the course of the last half-century, saw It’s a Wonderful Life on television, knew well that the age of community and connection depicted on their screens had already passed into the realm of legend. Moreover, to add injury to insult, they also knew that, if they wished to enjoy the fruits of a middle-class existence, they would have to live in the manner of vagabonds.

In the movie, slum-lord Henry Potter tries, but fails, to turn the provincial paradise of Bedford Falls into a run-down haunt of spinsters, drunks, and floozies. In the real world, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who put the kibosh on the original Main Street, USA. To be more precise, the principal achievements of America’s greatest tyrant, the Great Depression and the Second World War, undermined the financial, legal, and cultural foundations of the “wonderful life”. Thus, by the time this process had run its course, inflation had made a fool’s game of simple thrift, the replacement of law with regulation had hobbled private enterprise, and people who had left home for the sake of college, work, or military service found themselves lost in a sea of strangers.

In response to these changes, colleges and universities stepped up to the proverbial plate, happy to offer substitutes for the things that had been lost. They gave young people a chance to obtain certificates that would attest to both their suitability for service in the ranks of corporate minions and their social respectability. At the same time, these institutions gave older people a way to convert their value-losing cash into an asset that promised to pay dividends that would benefit their children (and, indeed, their grandchildren) for decades to come.

Thus arose the people I have come to call the MICE (Mobile, Individualistic, College Educated) people. Bereft of regional accents, productive property, and deep connections to friends and relations, they wandered the world, building networks, acquiring degrees, and padding resumés. However, after two generations of such peripatetic solipsism, the age of the MICE people is coming to an end.

Young men of parts, who realize that college has nothing to do with either liberal learning or vocational training, are simultaneously taking up skilled trades and stocking their MP3 players with learned podcasts. At the same time, young women of quality are beginning to think that the traditional troika of Kirche, Küche, und Kinder offers better odds of deep satisfaction than life as a hormone-hobbled, Starbucks swilling, girl boss.

So, if you know young people like the ones I’ve just described, do posterity a favor, and put them in contact with each other. After all, they deserve a life as wonderful as that of George and Mary Bailey.

Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, “College, Class, and Christmas”, Extra Muros, 2023-08-06.

December 17, 2023

How RFK, Jr. helped destroy British Columbia’s resource-based economy

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

Elizabeth Nickson found herself added to one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s fundraising mailing lists:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois on October 14, 2007.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons.

I am on RFKJr’s campaign mailing list, probably through Children’s Health Defence and they asked me for money, and I said sure, just as soon as he fixes the catastrophe he caused in the province where I live.

Got a message back!

It read, “Elizabeth, I am sure Robert would fix whatever harm he caused, can you explain?”

No problem, I said.

1. In British Columbia, we had the largest industrial forest in the world

2. It paid for education and universal “free” health care.

3. The environmental left decided to shut it down.

4. The reason for their protest was that the government, as was common practice, had sold cutting permits with long leaseholds. A new socialist government announced it was pulling the permits and taking those forests back.

5. In order not to lose all the invested money, which they had not only paid for upfront and in annual leasing charges, but paid taxes on, some for decades, lessees immediately clear cut their lands. Clear cuts are ugly. (but they are fire breaks)

6. That triggered the protest.

7. RFK Jr came in under RiverKeepers and supercharged the protest. His celebrity and glamour made the protest major international news. I was in London, I heard about it. More kids joined the protest. And then more and more. Until the government caved. Would it have happened without his presence? I do not think so. He gave very young people who had no access to power, nor any hope of it, ever, a very heady hit of significance and their lives took on huge huge meaning. For many it remains the high point of their lives. Because for the province, it was all downhill from there. All promise vanished and a grinding slow growth followed.

8. Over the ensuing ten years, cutting was diminished and heavy regulation covered the rest. By 2002, written regulations piled on top of each other stood seven feet high, taller than a man.

9. Forested communities died.

10. 100,000 families lost their livelihood.

11. Resource jobs have huge multipliers, not only forested towns died, so did regional metropolitan centers. Greens, replete with success, hit other resource industries – mining, ranching – which died. More families bankrupted.

12. They were told to go into tourism.

13. Which pays minimum wage and can only support a family if everyone, even the children, work. And, it’s seasonal.

14. Over time, the unmanaged forests became clogged with overgrowth, little trees like carrots pulled all the water from the forest floor, desiccated the soil and then pulled water from aquifers. The forests became tinder. And increasingly every summer, they explode in fire.

15. The government needed money.

16. Casinos provided it.

17. Asian cartels – you cannot imagine how violent they are – moved in and used the casinos to launder most of the drug money from North America. They bribed immigration, they bribed city government, they threatened anyone who tried to stand in their way.

18. They were so successful, human trafficking and child sex trafficking shot up. We have the second largest port on the west coast of North and South America. Through it streams container loads of drugs and trafficked children and women. At the port, you just stand aside, if you want to live. You think most of the fentanyl comes in through Mexico? Nope. It comes in through us.

19. The cartels do pay taxes. You think Black Rock is bad? These guys kill if they don’t get what they want. They are buying every business they can, to launder money through. The cartels also launder money through real estate in the city. That means housing is insanely expensive and property taxes are sky high. Canadians can’t afford to buy houses or live in the ones they own. A family making a median income has to pay 100% of income to buy a median priced house.

20. Crime is a) a driver of the economy and b) a principal source of government revenue.

21. Green has destroyed the province.

And that, I am afraid, is what celebrities do. It is why they are so hated, and one of the reason Hollywood is dying. They destroy the lives of ordinary men and women, and then move on to greater heights. Their lives are so privileged, they have absolutely no idea how people make money. And RFKJr, mind-numbingly privileged from birth, is the same. When asked about climate change, he says it’s happening but taxes won’t work. “Regenerative agriculture” he says, vaguely. It is true, regenerative agriculture could capture a lot of carbon, the amount debatable but it has promise. But cutting regulation? He has no, zero, absolutely no idea of how regulation punishes the non-elites. His is a black hole of ignorance and that is common; a majority have zero idea. Zero.

QotD: When “factions” coalesce into “parties”

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

Madison, Hamilton, and Jay got it wrong. If you recall your high school civics class from back when that was a thing, you’ll remember that the authors of The Federalist Papers thought that geographic expansion would be a check on what they called “faction”, which meant something like “proto political party”. Back in Britain, the “Whigs” and the “Tories” weren’t parties in the modern sense; they were groups of men of a similar outlook that coalesced around a dominant personality, a kind of bastard feudalism for the parliamentary age. But since there are always more clever, ambitious men than there are places for them in such a system, Britain’s “party” system was always tearing itself apart — that’s a big reason the rebellion started in the first place, and one reason the Colonials won the war.

Geographic expansion keeps that in check, the Federalist guys thought, because clever, ambitious men who feel themselves blocked by the Old Boys’ Network can always head west, to try their luck in one of the burgeoning frontier communities. Which worked — that’s the part the Federalist guys got right — but enough clever, ambitious men stayed back East that “factions” transformed into something much worse: Actual political parties.

Severian, “Real Federalism Has Never Been Tried”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-03.

December 15, 2023

Bill S-210 “isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

You sometimes get the impression that the only person in Ottawa who actually pays attention to online privacy issues is Michael Geist:

“2017 Freedom of Expression Awards” by Elina Kansikas for Index on Censorship https://flic.kr/p/Uvmaie (CC BY-SA 2.0)

After years of battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, few Canadians will have the appetite for yet another troubling Internet bill. But given a bill that envisions government-backed censorship, mandates age verification to use search engines or social media sites, and creates a framework for court-ordered website blocking, there is a need to pay attention. Bill S-210, or the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, was passed by the Senate in April after Senators were reluctant to reject a bill framed as protecting children from online harm. The same scenario appears to be playing out in the House of Commons, where yesterday a majority of the House voted for the bill at second reading, sending it to the Public Safety committee for review. The bill, which is the brainchild of Senator Julie Miville-Duchêne, is not a government bill. In fact, government ministers voted against it. Instead, the bill is backed by the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP with a smattering of votes from backbench Liberal MPs. Canadians can be forgiven for being confused that after months of championing Internet freedoms, raising fears of censorship, and expressing concern about CRTC overregulation of the Internet, Conservative MPs were quick to call out those who opposed the bill (the House sponsor is Conservative MP Karen Vecchio).

I appeared before the Senate committee that studied the bill in February 2022, where I argued that “by bringing together website blocking, face recognition technologies, and stunning overbreadth that would capture numerous mainstream services, the bill isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”. As I did then, I should preface criticism of the bill by making it clear that underage access to inappropriate content is indeed a legitimate concern. I think the best way to deal with the issue includes education, digital skills, and parental oversight of Internet use including the use of personal filters or blocking tools if desired. Moreover, if there are Canadian-based sites that are violating the law in terms of the content they host, they should absolutely face investigation and potential charges.

However, Bill S-210 goes well beyond personal choices to limit underage access to sexually explicit material on Canadian sites. Instead, it envisions government-enforced global website liability for failure to block underage access, backed by website blocking and mandated age verification systems that are likely to include face recognition technologies. The government establishes this regulatory framework and is likely to task the CRTC with providing the necessary administration. While there are surely good intentions with the bill, the risks and potential harms it poses are significant.

The basic framework of Bill S-210 is that it creates an offence for any organization making available sexually explicit material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. Organizations (broadly defined under the Criminal Code) can rely on three potential defences:

  1. The organization instituted a “prescribed age-verification method” to limit access. It would be up to the government to determine what methods qualify with due regard for reliability and privacy. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
  2. The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
  3. The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).

The enforcement of the bill is left to the designated regulatory agency, which can issue notifications of violations to websites and services. Those notices can include the steps the agency wants followed to bring the site into compliance. This literally means the government via its regulatory agency will dictate to sites how they must interact with users to ensure no underage access. If the site fails to act as instructed within 20 days, the regulator can apply for a court order mandating that Canadian ISPs block the site from their subscribers. The regulator would be required to identify which ISPs are subject to the blocking order.

December 13, 2023

Ontario discovers that even “great ideas” with the “best of intentions” sometimes go wrong

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

In The Line, Adam Zivo reports on Ontario’s “safe supply” drug program running into another one of those pesky human nature problems that couldn’t possibly have been foreseen:

Image courtesy of Meme Generator

New research from Ontario has yielded further evidence that Canada’s “safer supply” drug programs are being widely defrauded and putting addicts’ lives at risk.

These programs claim to reduce overdoses and deaths by providing drug users with pharmaceutical alternatives to potentially tainted illicit substances. In Canada, that typically means distributing large volumes of hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin, in the hope of reducing consumption of illicit fentanyl.

Addiction experts have widely reported that, based on their clinical experiences, drug users regularly trade or sell (“divert”) some (perhaps much) of their safer supply on the black market to fund the purchase of stronger substances. This has flooded some communities with hydromorphone, crashing its street price by up to 95 per cent over the past three years while spurring new addictions, especially among youth.

The federal government denies that these problems exist and has said that any evidence of harm is “anecdotal” — but two addiction experts working in a hospital in London, Ontario recently used patient data to show that the problem is indeed very real.

Dr. Sharon Koivu and Allison Mackinley (a nurse practitioner) examined the charts of 200 patients who had been referred to Victoria Hospital’s addiction medicine consultation service between January and June 2023.

The review showed that 32 per cent of patients who were not in a safer supply program had self-reported using diverted hydromorphone — the vast majority of these patients indicated that their hydromorphone came from purchasing drugs provided to someone else as part of a safer supply program.

“It was more common for them to actually specify safer supply than to say they didn’t know the source,” said Dr. Koivu in an interview. “They said things like, ‘The person in the apartment beside me goes and picks up her safer supply and when she comes back I get 20 of her pills’. It was quite specific.”

Diversion was not the only problem that was validated.

The chart data suggested that safer supply clients were roughly five-to-10 times more likely to be hospitalized than drug users receiving traditional, evidence-based addiction medications, such as methadone or buprenorphine (these medications are known as “opioid agonist therapy“, or “OAT”). Compared to OAT patients, drug users on safer supply were more than 15 times more likely to be hospitalized for serious infections.

These findings were so concerning that when a group of 35 addiction physicians recently wrote an open letter calling upon the federal government to reform safer supply, they included this data in their accompanying evidence brief.

(This chart, included in a recent evidence brief, compares the number of hospitalized patients with the number of drug users in London, Ontario who receive safer supply (250), methadone (2,000), and buprenorphine (300).)

Safer supply patients also had a slightly higher hospitalization rate, and only slightly lower infection rate, than patients who were receiving no addiction treatment at all, which suggests that the health benefits of safer supply may actually be negligible.

Dr. Koivu said that the hospitalization rate seen among safer supply patients was “alarmingly high” considering that safer supply programs provide significant wraparound supports (i.e. access to doctors, housing and social assistance) in conjunction with free hydromorphone. Any patient who receives such supports should see substantially improved health outcomes.

December 12, 2023

QotD: “Natural hierarchies” don’t work in distributed systems

Filed under: Germany, Government, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This, I think, is a function of something like the Dunbar Number. There IS a “natural hierarchy”, but it only works in person – that is, in a group where everyone interacts face to face. Any given group of humans will naturally sort itself, and again, yeah yeah, I’m not a biologist, but I’ve been to a few bars in my time. If you doubt it, just head down to your local dive and pilot a barstool for a few hours, you’ll see enough basic primate behavior to give Jane Goodall a stiffie.

Politics, being a distributed system, doesn’t work like that. Neither does the corporate world, which is why both invariably end up dominated by sociopathic, sexually deviant shitweasels. Whereas the social interaction in a bar, in a pickup basketball game, in a church group, whatever, naturally bends towards a baboon troop, “social” interaction in a distributed power structure bends towards whoever has the time, energy, and sheer Wille zur Macht, as our friend above would put it, to dominate it.

Example: Even at the height of his power, when he really could have liquidated everyone in the room with a wave of his hand, Joe Stalin didn’t win arguments with his nomenklatura by threatening to have them all shot. Rather, he outworked them. Even when he exercised the most raw power any one human being is capable of wielding, Stalin’s work ethic was legendary – he spent a minimum of fifteen hours a day at his desk, every day, 365 days a year. He simply ground down all lesser men with the sheer force of his leather ass and cast-iron bladder … and compared to Stalin, when it came to paperwork, all men were lesser men.

That’s a cast of mind, reinforced by the habits of a lifetime. Stalin was also a dominant personality by the end, of course, but he certainly didn’t start that way – he was cringingly servile to Lenin, for instance, and even once to Trotsky, which is probably the main reason Trotsky had to die when you come right down to it.

Hitler was the same way, in his own special, bizarre way. While no one would ever accuse Hitler of an overactive work ethic when it comes to government – those who study these things still can’t get their heads around it, the fact that for long, critical periods the Third Reich basically didn’t have a government – but he could wear you down with the best of them when it came to party speeches, organizing, propaganda. No one worked harder at that stuff than Corporal Hitler … and no one knuckled under to authority faster, which is why he remained Corporal Hitler despite four years on the Western Front.

Combine them, and you get the Big Man On Campus thoroughly dominated by the deviant sociopathic shitweasels. The BMOC dominates every personal interaction; therefore, he thinks it’s the rules which get him where he is. Society is set up, he thinks, to produce people such as himself. And since that society is also set up such that the deviant sociopathic shitweasels (we should probably acronymize that; hereafter, DSS) do the boring shit like student government, when the DSS pass some bizarre law the BMOC just rolls with it …

Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.

December 11, 2023

Roman glossary

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I continue to post QotD entries drawn from Bret Devereaux’s fascinating historical blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (with Dr. Devereaux’s kind permission, I hasten to add), the number of names and specialized terms from the Roman Republic and Empire also expands. As some of these terms pop up in my shorter excerpts without immediate context, I think that a glossary for Rome is called for (similar to the Spartan glossary, as there’s a lot more Roman content coming up, it being Dr. Devereaux’s area of academic specialization) to help explain the terms that I think may need expansion in these excerpts from his longer posts. As usual, most of the information is drawn directly from ACOUP (often from more than one original post) and where I’ve felt the need to interpolate any additional information it will be enclosed in square brackets. Errors and misinterpretations of his original work are purely mine.

(more…)

QotD: The Palace of Westminster

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Government, History, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Work outwards from this change and you will begin to have some idea of how much Britain has altered. The bits you don’t or can’t see are as unsettlingly different as those tattoos. Look up instead at the Houses of Parliament, all pinnacles, leaded windows, Gothic courtyards and cloisters, which look to the uninitiated as if they are a medieval survival. In fact they were completed in 1860, and are newer than the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The only genuinely ancient part — not used for any governing purpose — is the astonishing chilly space of Westminster Hall, faintly redolent of the horrible show trial of King Charles I, still an awkward moment in the national family album. But those who chose the faintly unhinged design wanted to make a point about the sort of country Britain then was, and they were very successful. Gothic meant monarchy, Christianity, and conservatism. Classical meant republican, pagan, and revolutionary, and mid-Victorian Britain was thoroughly wary of such things, so Gothic was chosen and the Roman Catholic genius Augustus Welby Pugin let loose upon the design. Wherever you are in the building, it is hard to escape the feeling of being either in a church, or in a country house just next to a church. The very chimes of the bell tower were based upon part of Handel’s great air from The Messiah: “I know that my Redeemer liveth”.

I worked for some years in this odd place. It is by law a Royal Palace, so nobody was ever officially allowed to die on the premises, in case the death had to be inquired into by some fearsome, forgotten tribunal, perhaps a branch of Star Chamber. Those who appeared to have deceased were deemed to be still alive and hurried to a nearby hospital where life could be pronounced extinct and an ordinary inquest held. We were also exempt from the alcohol laws that used in those days to keep most bars shut for a lot of the time, and if the drinks were not free they were certainly amazingly cheap.

In my years of wandering its corridors and lobbies, of hanging about for late-night votes and dozing in committee rooms, I came to loathe British politics and to mistrust the special regiment of journalists (far too close to their sources) who write about it. I had hoped for a kingdom of the mind and found a squalid pantry in which greasy, unprincipled deals were made by people who were no better than they ought to be.

But I came to love the building. Once you had got past the police sentinels, who knew who everyone was, you could go everywhere, even the thrilling ministerial corridor behind the Speaker’s chair, from which Prime Ministers emerged to face what was then the genuine ordeal of Parliamentary questions, twice a week. There was a rifle range beneath the House of Lords, set up during World War I to make sure honorable members of both Houses would be able to shoot Germans accurately if they ever met any. There was a room where they did nothing but prepare vast quantities of cut flowers, and which perfumed the flagstone corridor in which it lay. There was a convivial staff bar (known to few) where the beer was the best in the building and politicians in trouble would hide from their colleagues. The Lords had a whole half of the Palace, with lovely murals illustrating noble moments of our history, and the Chief Whip’s cosy, panelled office where reporters would be summoned once a week for dangerous gossip and perilously large glasses of whisky or very dry sherry, generously refilled. And high up in the roof, looking down over the murky Thames, was the room where the government briefed us, in meetings whose existence we were sworn never to reveal. Now they are pretty much public, so the real briefings must happen somewhere else, I suppose.

Peter Hitchens, “An Empty Parliament”, First Things, 2017-10-03.

December 8, 2023

“When you see the same signs here that characterised collapse in other polities for the last 5000 years, it means collapse is coming here too – we’re not special snowflakes”

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

Feeling good? Happy with your culture and comfortable that major disruptions won’t disturb you? Here’s Theophilus Chilton to harsh your mellow:

There are essentially three basic reasons why those on the American Right haven’t shrugged the same way regular folks in Europe are beginning to (see Spain and France as well as Ireland for recent examples). The first of these is because the American Right still holds onto a residual trust in elections and democracy and the whole “We’ll get ‘em next election!” mentality. Having been fed a decades-long diet of reverence for democracy and voting and whatnot acts as a desensitising agent that keeps many Americans anesthetised to the actual uselessness of such attitudes.

But this will continue to erode as we see more obvious election fraud. Eventually, when the norm becomes “go to bed with the right-wing candidate ahead by 10% and wake up with the left-wing candidate winning by 0.5%,” elections will lose what legitimacy they have left. Further, as “democracy” comes to be increasingly defined as “whatever the Regime wants to do“, more and more normies will start to clue in to the fact that democratic forms are not going to save America, but are in fact what are destroying it.

Second, Heritage Americans and those on the normie Right tend to assume that everybody still plays by the old, traditional set of norms, including FedGov. This “seemed” plausible when the Regime employed incrementalism to gradually acculturate normies to its agenda. But as they accelerate their revolutionary overthrow of everything that normies thought would be sacrosanct like they have over the past few years, this sense of “norms” will go away. And when that happens, there will be a whole lot of people suddenly open to the possibility that something else might become a new set of norms.

Third, because America is so BIG – especially in the geographical sense – Heritage Americans have been able to self-mitigate many of the worse aspects of the Regime agenda. They could get away from the slums. Federalism allowed them to find states in which to prosper despite the Regime’s efforts. And so forth. Regular folks in many places could still plausibly think America was a high trust, high social cohesion society because where they were at locally might well have been. But as the Regime accelerates, this also will stop. $oros DAs will continue to release violent criminals while punishing law-abiding citizens for defending themselves and their property. Immigration and inflation will further erode the economic prosperity that still remains, which is something that fleeing to a Red state can’t fix. And of course, it will all be brought home starkly once 20,000 or so Palestinian “refugees” get relocated into their counties.

Let’s remember that this is what we actually saw in Ireland. Even into the Oughts, Ireland was homogenous, relatively high IQ and high trust, was the Celtic Tiger with lots of prosperity. Then globohomo decided that Ireland needed tons of “refugees” just like the rest of Europe and suddenly that prosperity and safety and high trust went away. What was the response? Riots and continued disorder that Regime attempts to clamp down on are only going to make worse.

This is going to wear out eventually, which is something that FedGov knows. That’s why they’ve been ramping up gun control efforts over the past few years despite constant opposition from the courts. They’re merely trying to prepare for the inevitable by disarming the people they know they need to suppress the most. Unlike most Euro and Anglosphere countries, Americans haven’t allowed themselves to be disarmed — and that’s something that really does vex The Powers That Be.

But the problem is that it isn’t the 1950s anymore, or even the 1990s for that matter. Back in the 1950s, FedGov could literally stick bayonets at the backs of high school students and force unwilling southern states to integrate their schools. Even in the 1990s FedGov could send its agents to besiege and murder dozens of men, women, and children and most people even at an official level wouldn’t say a thing. But now its 2023 and we’re quite a bit further along the decentralisation path in our secular collapse phase. What FedGov had the moral legitimacy and competency to pull off back then isn’t guaranteed for them now anymore.

So what happens when the FBI wants to do another Waco? What happens if Texas decides it doesn’t want to allow the FBI to do another Waco? We’re past the point where we can blithely say, “Well, the Feds can just make Texas go along with it!” Our place in our collapse cycle means that’s not going to fly like it could have 30 years ago.

At this point, the goal should not be to calm people down but to get them riled up so that when (not if) the break comes, it will be so widespread and numerous that it will completely overwhelm the ability of FedGov and its agencies to deal with it. In this vein, I think of Solzhenitsin’s quote from Gulag Archipelago,

    And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? … The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If … if … We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation … We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

So what does this mean practically? It means people need to start organising locally with people they trust, building a network in their town or county, coordinating with friendly local power holders. It means stockpiling the necessary tools for the maintenance of their freedoms. It means training to shoot, learning how to use comms, thinking both strategically and tactically — obtaining the knowledge to use with your organising. Most of all, it means being morally and temperamentally prepared to oppose the enemies of our people, both foreign and domestic.

December 7, 2023

Canada is great at gesturing on the international stage … far less so in doing anything substantive, especially militarily

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

In The Line, Harrison Ruess channels his inner Star Trek geekiness to illustrate the Kobayashi Maru situation the Royal Canadian Navy (and the rest of the armed forces) find themselves in:

Canada is, and has been for some time, caught between two irreconcilable positions. We don’t want to spend any money on the military but also continue to prioritize how important and influential we want to be in the world (“Canada is back”, etc).

Friends, either of these things is possible. We just can’t do both at the same time.

So let’s have an honest conversation and decide which road we want to go down, commit to it, and then do the best we can in whichever adventure we choose. Talking, domestically and internationally, about how determined Canada is to make a positive impact in the world, while not investing in the systems to give our words weight, sets both Canadians and our allies up for disappointment. The old adage that it’s best not to over-promise and under-deliver should be remembered. We seem to aspire to the reverse.

If Canadians really don’t want to invest in our military, then we need to be honest about the consequences of those decisions. It means a more inwardly focused Canada, less able to support our allies, with fewer seats at big tables, less able to respond to emergencies or disasters, and likely less able to help our own. Given our unstable world, I would not personally advocate for this road, but there is a case to be made for it. So if you are someone who thinks this is the right path, then make your case honestly. Explain why you think it’s swell that our navy will need to launch under-equipped vessels, or not launch them at all. Defend your ground. But stop trying to sell Canadians a fable that we can have a shell of an armed forces while at the same time having increased global influence and impact.

On the other hand, if we do think Canada has a positive role to play — and even a responsibility — in trying to bring some order to the world, help those who need it, and ultimately protect our own interests, then we need a military, and a military budget, strong enough to meet the demands of the task. This includes procurement budgets, maintenance budgets, budgets to offer competitive wages, and budgets to sustain missions, both training and the real deal.

Proponents of this position need to do a much better job of explaining why this is the best path to both improving the lives of Canadians and stabilizing our destabilized world. Then our governments must pursue and defend this road, even when defence isn’t top of the polling priority list — which it never is.

The current status-quo doesn’t work. It’s dishonest. And most importantly, it hurts Canadians and our awareness of what our country is — or isn’t — capable of doing. Kudos to V.Adm. Topshee for, in not so many words, trying to explain the impact of this reality on the navy.

Having a capable, equipped military costs money — starting with perhaps the NATO-agreed upon two per cent of GDP. That’s the cost of doing business as a serious, mature, supposedly globally oriented country. Are we that? Do we even want to be?

Burying the lede … and the victims

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

Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier sent out a fundraising letter to PPC supporters that included some disturbing new data from Statistics Canada:

As usual, the biggest news in Canada is being ignored by all of our crooked establishment politicians and the dishonest corporate media.

Last week Statistics Canada released a report on deaths in Canada (causes of death, overall life expectancy, etc), which include the latest data from 2022.

I’m not a doctor, a scientist, or even a statistician, but when I saw the table below, a few things jumped out at me.

First, deaths related to covid-19 (check the fourth line) were at an all-time high in 2022!

Can you believe that? There were more covid deaths in 2022 than the two years before.

And yet that same year saw the end of mask mandates, vaccine passports, and most covid measures.

For two years the elites blasted us with propaganda and warped our society around this mild illness, but when deaths were rising, they were silent. Bizarre!

To be clear, I am not advocating for any of these unnecessary draconian restrictions to return, I am just demanding some honesty and consistency from our morally corrupt politicians, public health officials, and media!

It has never been so obvious that covid restrictions were not scientific, they were just about politics and control.

But the most disturbing part is what I have circled at the bottom of the table. Deaths with “ill-defined or unspecified causes” have been steadily increasing since 2020.

These deaths have almost TRIPLED since 2020 from 6,841 to 16,043 in 2022.

What could be causing this? What happened in 2021 that could have caused this explosion of unexplained deaths over the last 2 years?

An experimental pharmaceutical product was rushed to market and forced on Canadian society, is what happened.

They told us it was “safe and effective” but over the last few years we have learned more and more about how that covid shot was neither.

Now more and more Canadians are dying from causes very likely related to the covid shot.

And where is the accountability?!

There is no admission of any possible error on the part of the government. On the contrary, it’s still encouraging everyone to get boosters!

There are no demands for an inquiry by the opposition parties to investigate the potential risks associated with the covid jab.

There are no investigative journalists trying to get to the bottom of one of the biggest medical scandals in Canadian history.

No! They’re just trying to sweep it under the rug and move on!

We can’t wait for the political establishment to hold itself to account. We saw throughout the covid years that the government, the opposition, and the media will all work together to protect themselves and each other.

And we can’t let them get away with it!

QotD: Displacing the “little platoons”

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

Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.

Janice Rogers Brown, “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, a speech to the Federalist Society, 2000-04-11.

December 2, 2023

Joe Biden solves the inflation problem, fat!

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

Like any lying dog-faced pony soldier would know, it’s as easy as saying “Trunalimunumaprzure“:

Inflation is kicking just about everyone in the junk here lately, regardless of whether that junk is an innie or an outie. It’s been rough on a lot of us, but I know just how hard it’s been on me and mine.

Prices are up significantly over the last few years and my income isn’t up nearly as much. This creates issues with our finances. The upside is that it’s forced me to be better with money.

But prices are still higher than Willie Nelson on a SpaceX flight.

Luckily, President Joe Biden has figured out the solution to all our problems. He’s going to just tell companies to drop prices.

Yes, seriously.

    This week, the White House announced the launch of a Council on Supply Chain Resilience, created with the hope to “strengthen America’s supply chains” and “lower costs for families.”

    …

    President Joe Biden delivered remarks from the White House on Monday to announce the new council’s creation. He touted the lower inflation rate and falling grocery prices but admonished American companies for, in his view, not going far enough.

    “Let me be clear: To any corporation that has not brought their prices back down — even as inflation has come down, even as supply chains have been rebuilt — it’s time to stop the price gouging,” Biden warned, imploring them to “giv[e] the American consumer a break.”

Here’s the issue, at least as I see it.

At Thanksgiving, it was noted here that prices are nearly 20 percent higher than in 2019. This while inflation has supposedly decreased. Prices are still high because it’s not so much that inflation has fallen but that the rate of inflation’s increase has fallen. It doesn’t mean prices should drop, only that they should increase at a slower rate.

November 30, 2023

The challenge facing Javier Milei

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Craig Pirrong outlines just how much work Argentinian President-Elect Javier Milei will have to accomplish to begin to bring Argentina’s government in line with his electoral mandate:

When I wrote Milei is not a leftist, let’s say that rather understates the matter. Milei loathes leftists and leftism, and repeatedly refers to them on television and in public appearances in scatalogical terms, calling them “leftards”. He despises collectivism, and asserts bluntly that leftists are out to destroy you. His mission is to destroy them first.

As someone so vehemently hostile to the left and well outside conventional political categories, Milei’s victory has triggered a mass moral panic, especially in the media. The New York Times coverage was (unintentionally) hilarious: “Some voters were turned off by his past outbursts and extreme comments over years of work as a television pundit and personality.” Well, obviously a lot more weren’t, but I guess one has to take solace where one can, eh, NYT?

Milei’s agenda is indeed a radical one, especially for a statist basket case like Argentina. To combat the country’s massive (140 per cent annualised) inflation, Milei says he will dollarise the economy and eliminate (“burn down”) the central bank. He also wants to reduce radically the role of the state in Argentina’s economy. He says he wants to “chainsaw” the government – and emphasises the point by campaigning with an actual chainsaw.

His election on this programme sparked a rally in Argentine financial markets, with government debt rising modestly and stock prices rallying smartly.

Will Milei be able to deliver? Some early commentary has doubted his ability to govern based on the fact that his party’s representation in the legislature is well below a majority. That may be an issue, but not the major obstacle to Milei’s ability to transform Argentina into what it was at the dawn of the 21st century: an advanced, rapidly growing economy and a relatively free society.

The real obstacle is one that is faced by anti-statists everywhere – the bureaucracy. (I do not say “civil service” because that phrase is at best aspirational and more realistically a patent falsehood. Akin to the Holy Roman Empire that was neither holy nor Roman, the “civil service” is neither civil nor a service.)

Argentina’s bloated state is its own clientele with its own interests, mainly self-preservation and an expansion of its powers. Moreover, it has created a whole host of patronage clients in business and labour. Milei’s agenda is anathema to this nexus of public and private interests. They will make war to the knife to subvert it.

Even a president with an electoral mandate faces formidable obstacles to implementing his agenda. The most important obstacle is what economists call an “agency problem”. The bureaucrats are agents of the chief executive, but it can be nigh unto impossible to get these agents to implement the executive’s directives if they don’t want to. Their incentives are not aligned with the executive, and are often antithetical. As a result, they resist and often act at cross purposes with the executive.

The modern chief executive’s power to force his bureaucratic agents to toe the line is severely circumscribed. At best, the executive can make appointments at the upper levels of the bureaucracy (such as the heads of ministries or departments), but the career bureaucrats who can make or break the executive’s policy are beyond his reach, and not subject to any punishment if they subvert the executive’s agenda.

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