Quotulatiousness

July 28, 2022

Is the US Navy in crisis?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander outlines why he is very concerned about the current state of the United States Navy:

US Navy ships from the John C. Stennis and Nimitz Carrier Strike Groups with ships from the Bonhomme Richard Expeditionary Strike Group in the Gulf of Oman, 22 May 2007.
US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Denny Cantrell via Wikimedia Commons.

If you believe the threat from China is overblown, our Navy is well led, and that our fleet is big enough, then this is not the post for you. If you are concerned for all of it, grab a fresh drink and dive right in.

We are facing of something our nation has not had to seriously consider in well over three decades; we do not have free and unfettered access to the sea.

Even when Soviet submarines roamed the world’s oceans at will – though closely watched – and the Red Banner Fleet could send battle groups on cruises through the Gulf of Mexico, we had fair confidence in one thing – the Pacific was an American lake.

No more.

The leaders of the USN seem to have very different notions about what the Navy needs:

f you feel the Navy needs a larger share of the budget to meet the challenge of China, then you need to advocate for it. You need to fight for it … and when I say “you” I mean “we” and the most important and powerful parts of that “we” are our institutions; our maritime power institutions dedicated to seeing the USA remain the premier seapower.

Let’s start with the most obvious. Our uniformed Navy is itself an institution. It reports to its civilian leadership in the Executive Branch with oversight from the Legislative Branch. There are your big pixel maritime governmental institutions; the uniformed and civilian leaders in the Department of the Navy.

As reviewed yesterday, the CNO is engaged in a rather low-energy talking point about 500-ships, but in 2022 that is not even remotely achievable. He knows it, you know it, Congress knows it as well. A number is not an argument, and yet he is investing personal and institutional capital on this line that is almost immediately ignored if it is heard at all. Why?

In the last year one of his highest profile public appearances was when he shoveled heaping piles of personal and institutional capital in a fight defending a red in tooth and claw racial essentialist Ibram X. Kendi against who would normally be the US Navy’s natural allies in Congress. Ultimately he lost that battle and removed Kendi’s racist book and others from his reading list, but in the face of everything else going on in the maritime world, why?

What about the Vice CNO, Admiral William K. Lescher, USN? Maybe he could throw some sharp elbows for the maritime cause? Sadly, not. Just look at his exchange with Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) back in March. He seems to be the “Vice Chief of Joint Force Operations” more than anything else. He is focused on something, but advocating for sea power is not it.

With the night orders from the CNO and VCNO as they are, if you expect any significant advocacy from the uniformed Navy leadership who report to them for — checks notes — the Navy, you are going to have to wait for a long time, time we don’t have. It isn’t going to happen.

[…]

Take a moment and ponder – when was the last time you heard the SECNAV or Under out front on The Hill or to the greater public about our maritime requirements? Yes, I fully understand what goes on behind closed doors, but that slow roll in an ever-slower bureaucracy infested with scoliotic nomenklatura is well past being of use. The American people must be provided the information and motivation to understand how their entire standard of living – and to a great extent their freedoms – is guaranteed by our mastery of the seas. Is even a rudimentary effort being made in this regard?

Just look at the USN’s YouTube feed – a primary communication device for the American people. What has the SECNAV talked about there this year? LGBTQ+ Pride Month, Juneteenth, Army birthday, Asian-Pacific Islander Month, Mental Health Awareness Month, Women’s History Month, carrier air birthday, and Black History Month.

There you go. There’s your communication. Dig harder if you want … but if you read CDRSalamander and you are not readily aware, then imagine the general population’s situational awareness of the dragon just over the horizon.

July 27, 2022

Baghdad Biden speaks

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

Chris Bray recounts the story of a local government attempting and — for a while — succeeding with the Baghdad Bob blanket denial strategy:

In the Deep Blue suburban town where I live, our city government has been stumbling through a series of crises. For a couple of years, employees fled from City Hall like the building was on fire, and nowhere was the crisis more acute than in the finance department — where we had five directors in a little over two years, and lost most of the other staff, including one who sued the city over her departure. There was a year when we couldn’t pass a budget, because the budget proposal was such a shambles, and a discussion at a meeting of an advisory commission in which a commissioner asked one of the many finance directors if the numbers in the city’s bank accounts matched the numbers in the city ledger. (Try to guess the answer.)

Recently, an ad hoc committee of local citizens — all finance professionals — wrote a report on the period of crisis, and presented our city council with a recommendation that they hire someone to do a forensic audit of the city’s accounting during those years. The council scheduled the report as a “receive and file” item, placing it on a 28-item agenda as, you’ll never guess, item #28. Then, in a brief discussion that began after midnight, they said that the report was nonsense and hearsay. The end.

So, yes, there was no financial crisis in our city during the years when we had five finance directors, when “permanent” finance directors left after a few months, when we lost most of the finance department staff, when we couldn’t pass a budget, and when we had no idea how much money we were actually supposed to have in the bank. Our city council says so. “These are not the ‘droids you are looking for.”

Meanwhile, we’re not in a recession, or even facing the risk of a recession, because that’s not Joe Biden’s view, and because the technical definition of a recession is very complicated.

Also, the inflation of 2021 was transitory. Zipped right by! Also, Joe Biden has a plan to shut down the virus.

The war in Ukraine is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, the economy is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, the continuing Covid-19 “emergency” is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, and the mRNA injections are REALLY REALLY SHUT UP. Actually, the way experts measure this is really complicated, and technically …

July 26, 2022

What’s worse than having a nepotistic elite running the country? Having an incompetent nepotistic elite running the country

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

Kurt Schlichter isn’t a fan of the kakistocratic “elite” running most of the western world at the moment:

The things we took for granted decades ago are uncertain, and there’s always an excuse — inevitably one that blames us. Like the new take on air conditioners, which is that they are an extravagance we should learn to live without. What the hell? Why?

And don’t get me started on the bizarre insistence of the resetters that we all need to give up beef and start eating bugs. I have a better idea. How about we eat ribeyes and burgers like Americans instead of crickets and locust like Third World famine victims?

A proper ruling class would see the problems and move to solve them, because the proper relationship between the ruling class and the rest of us is that the ruling class provides prosperity and security and the rest of us let them skim some cream off the top. If they were doing a decent job, their riches and luxuries would not bother us much; but when they have failed yet still expect full pay and benefits anyway, that grates. It is unsustainable.

So why doesn’t the ruling class try to get America moving again instead of telling us that we should settle for less and less? For one thing, because our ruling class is not competent. Joe Biden is, in a way, the perfect president for the resetters — stupid and getting seniler, corrupt, yet absolutely sure of his own genius despite literally no basis for that self-regard. Look, the solutions are there. Want to fix crime? Do what Giuliani did in New York City in the nineties. Want energy independence? Do what Trump did in 2016. Want the economy roaring? Do what Reagan and Trump did. These tactics are not secrets, yet they seem to be too hard for our elite to pull off. Our reset revolt will be to embrace someone who can.

Of course, the incompetence issue assumes that our elite wants to succeed in doing what elites should do. Does it really? Does it really want us prosperous, secure and free? Oh, the elite wants to succeed for itself, and it sure has. The elite is richer than ever. And it intends to stay that way even after you are reset to “Peasant” mode. The elite won’t be taking public transportation among the hobos like you. They will be safe behind armed guards while you are disarmed and victimized — defend yourself at your peril! And they will keep eating steak tartar while you slurp up beetle paste. Yum yum, proles!

The ruling caste has no intention of you living like a civilized citizen. No, you are their sacrifice, to Gaia, the angry weather goddess or whatever other pagan idol that empty void inside them worships. Your pain is the point. Remember, bullies love the raw exercise of power. Making you miserable is a manifestation of their urge to dominate and crush. That’s the genesis of those seemingly insane moves around the world like Sri Lanka giving up fertilizer or agricultural powerhouse Holland evicting farmers. But these moves — including the destruction of our own energy industry — only seem insane if you refuse to accept their ultimate goal. They want to hurt you. Your pain is a feature, not a bug — which will be your next meal if they get their way.

Is Trudeau channelling Caligula? – “Let them hate me as long as they fear me”

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

Spencer Fernando, writing for the National Citizens Coalition:

When trying to ascertain where the Trudeau Liberals are trying to take the country, it’s important to look at the foundations of Justin Trudeau’s worldview.

Clearly, he was heavily influenced by his father, someone who continuously expanded the power of the state.

Justin Trudeau’s father was well known as a Communist-sympathizer, being a big fan of both Fidel Castro and Communist China.

Note, the version of the CCP that existed in Pierre Trudeau’s era was even more brutal than the CCP as it exists today. At the time, it was not far removed from the time of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a government-imposed “reshaping of society” that led to roughly 45 million deaths.

To look at that, and still be a fan of the Chinese Communist Party, is to show a deep ideological commitment to authoritarian socialism and a deep aversion to human freedom.

The apple clearly didn’t fall far from the tree, as Justin Trudeau praised China’s “basic dictatorship” (AKA the centralized power structure that enables horrific crimes).

Trudeau also sought to move Canada closer to China’s orbit, only giving up on that when public opinion – and a subtle revolt among some backbench Liberals – rendered it politically unfeasible.

We can see how the authoritarian socialism that Trudeau praised in China (and let’s not forget his fawning eulogy for Fidel Castro), lines up with the fear and contempt he and the Liberals have for many Canadians.

Now, let’s also note this essential point:

The Liberals continuously target the same individuals that authoritarian socialists and communists have targeted:

    Rural Conservatives.

    Private Enterprise.

    Religious Groups.

    Freethinkers.

    Individualists.

    Private Farmers.

    Rural Gun Owners.

    Independent Press Outlets.

Historically, those are all groups that the far-left has targeted when given the opportunity.

We only need to look at how the Liberal approach to Covid was modelled after the approach taken by Communist China, and how both the Liberals and the CCP have been largely unwilling to move on.

While the Liberals are more constrained than the CCP by the fact that Canada maintains some freedoms, do we have any doubt that they would be far more severe if they could get away with it?

Remember, the moment he feared losing the 2021 election, Justin Trudeau used very divisive and disturbing rhetoric (especially disturbing when seen in a historical context), and purposely sought to direct hatred and blame towards those who resisted draconian state orders.

Since then, the Trudeau Liberals – even in the face of criticism by a few courageous Liberal MPs who were quickly “put back in their place” – have almost gleefully abused their power, purposely creating an “Us vs Them” narrative designed to pit Canadians against each other.

At the same time, they’ve continued their efforts to gain control over social media, silence dissenting views, and turn the establishment media into an extension of the state propaganda apparatus.

This is all being done because they fear those who have the intelligence and strength of character to see through their agenda.

They fear you, and have contempt for you.

July 23, 2022

Still living, still breathing, still walking around … but “legally dead”

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

I missed this from Alistair Dabbs last weekend, but it’s still just as concerning as it was then:

Zombies walk among us – until they need a nice sit-down, of course. It can be tiring to be undead. No wonder they drag their feet around and do all that moaning.

One such moaner is 58-year-old Michel from Montpellier. He has never stopped complaining since the postman delivered a letter one morning in June to offer him condolences on his recent death.

It was, as you might imagine, an administrative error: someone had probably clicked in the wrong checkbox or filed a request in the wrong folder. It was unlikely to be the result of a concerted Kafka-esque conspiracy to erase Michel from existence. Uncheck that box, drag the file out of the folder. It should be easy enough.

Evidently not. Once you’ve been declared dead, it sets in motion a sequence of automated digital-only procedures that sprint towards completion with alarming rapidity. You may have heard of France’s notoriety for officious paperwork and the snail-pace of its bureaucracy when you are living and breathing. But once you’re a stiff, it’s the fast lane electrons all the way.

Michel discovered that his bank accounts had already been frozen. His social security file had been closed immediately. His national health ID card was no longer valid and his top-up health insurance was cancelled.

He nipped over to his local social security office to see if they could put the brakes on the process but apparently it was too late: everything had already been done to kill him off, bar physically shoving him in a box and inviting friends and relatives around for beer and sandwiches.

Surely there’s a rollback option?

Ah now, it’s not that simple. The system architect that designed the automated process did not think of making [Alive] and [Dead] a pair of either-or radio buttons. They did not envisage a situation in which death, our ultimate existential destination, could be reversed by choosing Edit > Undo. There are no second- or third-life Power-Ups IRL. Instead, the system architect not unreasonably assumed that dying would be a one-way trip from which nobody is expected to return.

The system is not a complete disaster, though. The woman at the desk of the social security office was able to use it to find that a French national with exactly the same name and birthdate as Michel had died – albeit 4,500km (c 2,800 miles) away in Israel – and the two strangers’ records had probably been mixed up by a poorly trained official. So the error has been located. Good. Can it be corrected, please?

Yes, she said, before booking him in for a meeting to discuss it in two weeks’ time. No doubt he was also asked to bring documents that explicitly state when he didn’t die.

Some of the events that lead to the Dutch farmers’ revolt

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

In UnHerd, Senay Boztas provides a useful chronology of how the Netherlands government managed to piss off so many Dutch farmers, leading to the protests we are still seeing (even if the legacy media is doing their best to ignore it):

“For many farmers it’s the end of their business and they will fight until the last. Sometimes these farms go back generations, they were built by hand, and people feel farmers heart and soul. This is all being taken away.”

Jan Brok, vice chairman of the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) party, understands why Netherlands farmers have spent the past month blockading food distribution centres, roads and ministers’ driveways. They are horrified by a new environmental policy that will mean a likely 30% reduction in livestock.

The Netherlands is a country of four million cattle, 13 million pigs, 104 million chickens, and just over 17 million people. It is Europe’s biggest meat exporter with a total area of just over 41,000 square kilometres, and a fifth of this is water. It is one of the world’s most densely populated countries, with the EU’s highest density of livestock.

But there is a significant cost to this abundance: the local environmental impact. Such intensive agriculture, and livestock farming in particular, creates harmful pollution. Manure and urine mix to produce ammonia, and together with run-off from nitrogen-rich fertiliser on fields ends up in lakes and streams, where it can promote excessive algae that smothers other life. Manure here is not a vital fertiliser but a problem waste product.

For decades, this success in trade and agriculture has been accompanied by high emissions of harmful nitrogen compounds, including nitrogen oxides emitted by industry and transport. Levels were dropping, and in 2015, the Dutch introduced a “trading scheme” known as the Programmatische Aanpak Stikstof (PAS) to try to reduce the pollution.

But a Council of State court ruling in 2019 — on a case brought by two local environmental organisations against various farms — ruled that this offsetting scheme was invalid. Permission could not be granted for polluting projects or farm expansion in exchange for promised nitrogen-related reductions in the future: the reductions needed to come first.

The government panicked: national shutdowns were put in place, building projects were put on hold and traffic speeds reduced to 100 kph in the daytime on major roads; it was also obvious that farming was a problem — something needed to be done about all ammonia, nitrogen oxide and nitrous oxide emissions.

Then, in January, the conservative-liberal-Christian coalition pledged to halve nitrogen production by 2030, with a €25 billion budget to back it up. That money was the loud part. The quiet part included the possibility of expropriation, of the government forcibly purchasing farmland. Plans drawn up by civil servants include slashing livestock numbers by 30%. More than €500 million is being brought forward for regional government to buy out farmers this year and next.

Leading the charge among the coalition partners are the Democrats 66 (D66) party. They insisted on “real action for the climate” in their last manifesto. Tjeerd de Groot, the D66 nature and farming spokesman, pointed out that the Netherlands is Europe’s biggest nitrogen emitter, followed by Belgium and Germany. He told a current affairs programme last week: “It is absolutely essential — but also painful — that the plans go through.”

In June, the government published two documents. One: a map showing the areas that need to reduce emissions by between 12% and 95%. The second was a statement that aimed to help farmers — which De Groot admits failed spectacularly. Farmers saw ruin, not a pair of documents. They looked at the percentage reduction figures next to their farms, and began interpreting how many cattle they would need to cull. It was an enormous blow. Many of them had made huge, expensive investments in new equipment to reduce the environmental impact of their herds.

Hence the massive uprising.

July 21, 2022

Prime Minister Look-At-My-Socks shocked to discover that betraying an ally has consequences

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

In The Line, Andrew Potter outlines why the Ukrainian government is unhappy with Prime Minister Photo-Op’s decision to break the sanctions on Russia as a favour to Germany:

Well, one thing is for certain: There isn’t going to be a “Justin Trudeau Lane” anywhere in Ukraine any time soon.

In case you missed the drama last week, Trudeau found himself on Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s shit list after Canada announced, on July 9, that it would allow Siemens to return to Germany up to six gas turbines for the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that were being repaired in Montreal. Russia was threatening to shut down the pipeline and cut off the flow of gas to Germany, which is facing a very serious energy crisis.

In response, a furious Zelenskyy summoned Canada’s ambassador to Ukraine for what one presumes was a solid chewing out, after which the Ukrainian president posted a video in which he lit into Trudeau for “an absolutely unacceptable exception to the sanctions regime against Russia”. As Zelenskyy put it, the problem isn’t just that Canada handed some turbines back to Russia, via Germany. It is that it was a direct response to blackmail by Russia. And if Canada is willing to bend when its sanctions become politically uncomfortable, what is to stop other countries from carving out their own exceptions to their own sanctions, when it suits? Furthermore, Zelenskyy added, it isn’t like this is going to stop Russia from shutting down the supply of gas to Europe — the turbines were always just a pretext, an opportunity to cause strife and stir dissension amongst the countries allied with Ukraine against Russia.

Trudeau — who spent the weekend flipping pancakes at the Calgary Stampede — must have woken up on the Monday wondering what had gotten into his old buddy in Kyiv. After all, hadn’t Trudeau, along with other members of his cabinet, made it clear through their many, many tweets on the subject that Canada stood by Ukraine? Hadn’t Canada sent enough money, arms and humanitarian aid to Ukraine? Hadn’t Trudeau himself paid a visit to Kyiv in May, to re-open our embassy and to underscore just how seriously Zelenskyy should understand Canada’s commitment?

[…]

Ultimately, the problem here is a serious failure by Canada to manage Ukrainian expectations, brought about by the profound mismatch between the level of our rhetoric and the clear limits of our commitment. For Ukrainians, there is a moral clarity to the Russian invasion of Ukraine that, from a Western perspective, has not been present in any other conflict since the Second World War. Zelenskyy assumed that Canadians saw that. He assumed that if Ukrainians were going to be slaughtered, the least we could do would be to stick to our principles, even if it meant asking the population to suffer economic harms and the government to manage genuine political discomfort.

He assumed wrong.

Five months into their war for survival against the genocidal Russian regime, the Ukrainians have learned something important about Canadians: When it comes to our foreign affairs, we don’t mean what we say. When we say we stand with a country, that we fully support them, that we will help defend them or hold their enemies to account, there’s always a “but” or an “until” or an “unless”. We will stand with you, unless it’s politically difficult. We will help you, but not if it means genuine sacrifice. We will support you, until the costs get too high. Then, all bets are off.

The bigger point is this: Canada doesn’t do moral clarity anymore. Whether it is our business dealings with China, our arms sales to Saudi Arabia, or sending a diplomat to a garden party at the Russian embassy in Ottawa, we are always and everywhere hedging our bets, fudging our principles, letting down our allies.

Farmers’ protests against insane environment mandates continue in the Netherlands

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

For some unknown reason, the huge protests by Dutch farmers against ridiculous environment-protection rules seems to be getting almost no media coverage. As Rex Murphy pointed out in the National Post, if this was happening in Canada, the government would already have imposed the Emergencies Act and be actively depriving people of their civil rights across the board. Somehow, this protest is uninteresting to most of the legacy media, but as Brendan O’Neill explains, it is a huge deal:

This strange, sunny week has provided the best proof yet that the West’s elites have taken leave of their senses. That they have fully retreated from reason, and from reality itself. As farmers and workers across the world continue to rise up against the tyrannical consequences of climate-change alarmism, what are the elites doing? Engaging in yet more climate-change alarmism. Wringing their hands over the hot weather and its forewarning, as they see it, of the manmade heat-death of the planet that is apparently just around the corner. They continue to peddle the very politics of eco-dread that is whacking farmers and the working class and storing up problems for us all.

The contrast could not have been more stark. On one side we have farmers everywhere from Ireland to the Netherlands to, of course, Sri Lanka making it as plain as they can that the warped ideology of Net Zero will make it harder for them to produce the food that humanity needs. And on the other side we have the Net Zero fanatics of the upper middle classes continuing to push their dire, destructive green ideology. The heatwave proves we must cut emissions even faster and more severely, they tweet in their breaks from sunning themselves in their spacious gardens, even as farmers tell them that the zealous obsession with cutting emissions will make it harder to grow crops. So this is where we’re at – with a ruling class more invested in fact-lite narratives of apocalypse than in the basic responsibility of a society to make food.

This politics is best understood as luxury apocalypticism. It is clearer than it has been for a very long time that the fantasy of the end of the world, of marauding, industrious mankind polluting itself into oblivion, is something only the well-off and time-rich can afford to indulge. The dream of eco-doom is a simultaneously self-hating and self-serving political narrative. It expresses the elite’s turn against the very modernity they helped to create while also flattering their belief that only they can save us. That only their plans to slash emissions, to cut back on global travel and generally to shrink the “human footprint” can hold Armageddon at bay. The great benefit of the global revolt of farmers and workers is that it is injecting a truth and a realism into public discussion that might just help to push back the luxurious and ruinous ideologies of the new elites.

Everywhere, farmers are saying “Enough”. In the Netherlands farmers have been revolting for weeks against their government’s perverse demands that they slash their use of nitrogen compounds. The Dutch government, under pressure from the EU, has committed itself to cutting its nitrogen emissions in half by 2030. This would entail farmers getting rid of vast numbers of their livestock, crushing their ability to make a living and to produce what needs to be produced. So we have the truly surreal situation where Dutch farmers are protesting in their thousands for the right to feed the people of the Netherlands while the elites of the Netherlands demonise them, harass them and even shoot at them. I can think of no better illustration of the loss of logic and humanity within the modern elites than this strange spectacle.

July 20, 2022

The Myth of Rosie the Riveter – On the Homefront 016

Filed under: Business, Government, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 Jul 2022

With American men going off to fight the war, there are concerns about a labor shortage. Enter Rosie the Riveter. The women who answered the “We Can Do It” call and entered the factories. But did she really exist?
(more…)

July 19, 2022

Drawing the proper lessons from the massive Rogers outage earlier this month

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains the really important lesson that seems to have escaped a lot of the critics who covered the Rogers internet/cell/TV outage that took a third of the country offline for 24 hours or more:

Most of the conclusions reached after the Rogers telecommunication outage two weeks ago are wrong. Millions of people lost home internet, television and cellphone service for the better part of a day (some for much longer). For those who had all their services bundled with Rogers, this meant being entirely cut off, including from access to emergency services. It was a big deal, both in terms of lost economic productivity and for those Canadians who needed help and could not access it.

The problem isn’t with Rogers, though. The problem is with everyone else.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Rogers is bad. It did have a big problem. I am not a fan. Their customer service is generally awful. Their reliability and performance is decidedly meh and the meh costs a fortune. So don’t take this column as some sort of apologia for Rogers. I am one of their customers, but I’m only one of their customers because none of the other options are much better.

But still. The lesson of two Fridays ago shouldn’t be that Rogers is bad. It also shouldn’t be that the CRTC is bad or that our politicians are spineless and that our regulators are thoroughly captured. All of those things are true, but they’re not the lesson. That wasn’t the failure of two Fridays ago. The failure of two Fridays ago was that when one of our telecom companies went down, a pretty horrifying cross-section of Canadian society had no back-up plan.

Let’s imagine an alternate universe where things in Canada simply functioned better. Close your eyes and just dream it up. You’re in a different Canada now. The CRTC is awesome. Our politicians are terrific. Rogers is an incredibly good company that is masterful at delivering services that are overwhelmingly reliable and affordably priced. Even in this increasingly far-fetched parallel timeline, no telecom company is going to bat a thousand. You will never have 100 per cent service reliability. This alternate Canada still has outages — maybe they’re rare and brief, but they’re not unheard of or impossible.

And that’s why we can’t look at what happened two weeks ago as a failure at Rogers. Obviously Rogers failed. But the real failure was a failure of imagination and planning on the behalf of millions of individuals, and a worryingly diverse set of institutions, that did not have a back-up plan.

July 11, 2022

Canadians deserve better than “core network maintenance problems” for critical cell phone and internet services

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

Our internet service provider, Rogers, suffered a major network failure early on Friday morning, taking down not just wired internet services, but also cable TV, and cell phone services and causing knock-on issues that utterly disrupted many emergency 911 services, government websites, banks (including ATM and point-of-sale terminals) and many more. I subscribe to both Rogers internet and Rogers cell phone services, but fortunately my wife has a different wireless phone provider so we weren’t completely offline all of Friday and most of Saturday. Michael Geist and his family weren’t as lucky:

Like many Canadians, I spent most of the massive Rogers outage completely offline. With the benefit of hindsight, my family made a big mistake by relying on a single provider for everything: broadband, home phone, cable, and wireless services on a family plan. When everything went down, everything really went down. No dial tone, no channels, no connectivity. Work was challenging and contact with the kids shut off. It was disorienting and a reminder of our reliance on communications networks for virtually every aspect of our daily lives.

So what comes next? We cannot let this become nothing more than a “what did you do” memory alongside some nominal credit from Rogers for the inconvenience. Canada obviously has a competition problem when it comes to communications services resulting in some of the highest wireless and broadband pricing in the developed world. Purchasing more of those services as a backup – whether an extra broadband or cellphone connection – will be unaffordable to most and only exacerbate the problem. Even distributing the services among providers likely means that consumers take a financial hit as they walk away from the benefits from a market that has incentivized bundling discounts. Consumers always pay the price in these circumstances, but there are policy solutions that could reduce the risk of catastrophic outages and our reliance on a single provider for so many essential services.

First, there is a need to better understand what happened and why. Rogers CEO says the problem lies with maintenance to the core network, which caused some routers to malfunction. But that’s just tech talk. Canadians deserve answers that explain not only how this happened, but how we find ourselves in a position where malfunctioning routers at one company cause a nationwide payment system to go down, government services to be taken offline, and emergency services to be rendered inaccessible. It is one thing for my household to make a mistake, but another for Interac to do so. That means conducting an open CRTC process into this outage alongside a Parliamentary hearing on the broader issues since this is a matter that requires both regulatory and political response. There is no need to wait: these hearings must happen this month with the goal of identifying the scope and source of the problem along with potential policies that might mitigate future harms.

Neither the CRTC nor the current government has shown much inclination to challenge the big telcos. CRTC Chair Ian Scott has reversed years of a consumer-focused Commission into one more comfortable supporting the big providers, while the government has been far more interested in sabre rattling or shaking down Internet companies than taking on big telecom. Yet as we were reminded on Friday, the linkage to the availability of essential services – payments, health care, government services – runs through the telcos, not the Internet companies.

This is the second object lesson in concentrated power in a small number of government-approved hands this year. Our first wake-up call was when the government prompted chartered Canadian banks to cut off some of their customers from all financial services even though no crimes had been committed and no charges were laid. It’s not clear how many people were affected, but arbitrarily denying people access to their bank accounts and credit cards should have rung alarm bells for many people. Now, we’ve been shown how dangerous it can be to allow a very small number of companies to divide the mobile phone and internet service market between them and use the power of government to keep out potential competitors. Will enough Canadians notice?

July 9, 2022

QotD: Chinese “technocracy”

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

For a while, all (or almost all) of China’s top officials had engineering degrees.

When Xi Jinping first joined the Politburo Standing Committee in 2008, eight of its nine members were engineers. Paramount Leader Hu Jintao was a hydroelectric engineer. His second-in-command Wen Jiabao was a geological engineer. There were two electrical engineers, a petroleum engineer, a radio engineer, and two chemical engineers (including Xi himself). The only non-engineer was Li Keqiang, an economist.

And this was actually a low point in engineers’ dominance of Chinese power. The term before, 100% of Politburo Standing Committee officials had been engineers! What’s going on?

For one thing, Deng Xiaoping thought engineers were cool, and he was powerful enough to do whatever he wanted. A government made up entirely of engineers? Sure, whatever you say. And since the top echelons of Chinese government appoint their own successors, these engineers could appoint other engineers and so on.

But also: during the Cultural Revolution, about half of Chinese people who got degrees at all got engineering degrees. The Cultural Revolutionaries were really not big on education (according to one article, “Xi’s secondary education [was cut short] when all secondary classes were halted for students to criticise and fight their teachers.”) But engineering was useful for building factories, and so was grudgingly tolerated. That meant that of the people smart and ambitious enough to get into college at all, half did engineering.

The other half? I’m not sure. Law is a popular major for would-be politicians in the US, but here’s a Chinese person explaining why it doesn’t work that way in China (short version: China doesn’t have great rule of law, so lawyers don’t matter much and are low status).
Here is an article telling us not to take China’s engineer-kings too seriously. It argues that (aside from Deng’s original picks), most of them never did much engineering, and just studied the subject in school as a generic prestigious-sounding degree to springboard their government career. Chinese engineering curricula are easy, and powerful people frequently cheat or pay others to write their dissertations.

Aside from a few of Deng’s personal picks, we should think of this less as “China is a magic place where rational scientists hold power”, and more as “for idiosyncratic reasons, social climbers in China got engineering degrees.” Certainly none of these people were selected for the Politburo on the basis of their engineering acumen. They got their power by bribing, flattering, and backstabbing people, just like everyone else.

In any case, Xi’s old Politburo class was the last one to be made primarily of engineers. The current Politburo has only one engineer — Xi himself.

Scott Alexander, “Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping”, Astral Codex Ten, 2022-04-07.

July 8, 2022

Dutch government clearly has been cribbing notes from Justin Trudeau’s brownshirt tactics for dealing with unarmed protests

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

For such a big story, the revolt of the Dutch farmers doesn’t seem to be getting as much international coverage as you might expect … almost as though governments and the tame mainstream media are trying to hide it:

Whether it’s the Netherlands or Canada, the story is the same across the globe. Over the past several years, elitists occupying positions of power within governments have grown accustomed to imposing their will on ordinary citizens.

It doesn’t matter that they’re blatantly violating the social contract established by their own people. For the elitist, the only item on the agenda is maintaining power and dominion over the populace, whom they view as nothing more than subjects meant to obey their diktats without question.

Avoiding such power grabs, however, requires a vigilant citizenry, whose dedication to liberty must be stronger and more widespread than elitists’ devotion to tyranny. As witnessed during the Covid regime, compliance with the state gives birth to more draconian edicts, which only continue to erode the line between democracy and oligarchy.

Make no mistake, if the Dutch farmer protesters let their foot off the gas for one second, the state will not hesitate to shove their alarmist, degrowth policies down the people’s throats without remorse. Any form of surrender will likely continue to enable more overreaching policies, which will undoubtedly infringe upon the everyday lives of Dutch people.

The other day it was reported that police had opened fire on a tractor driven by a 16-year-old. Today, the young man was released from custody without charges:

Farmers’ protests in the Netherlands have reached the royal palace at Dam Square in Amsterdam. 16-year old Jouke, who was shot at by a police officer on Tuesday, was released without charges.

Opposition leader Geert Wilders released a bombshell letter showing the globalist Dutch government wants to use expropriated agricultural land for asylum centers.

Around 40,000 Dutch farmers paralyzed traffic in the Netherlands and blocked around 20 food distribution centers over the weekend with trucks and tractors. Yesterday the protests reached Dam Square in Amsterdam and the seat of government in The Hague. The airport in Groningen was blockaded by demonstrators on Wednesday, German farmers joined the protests in Heerenberg near the Dutch-German border.

In an incident near the blockaded food distribution center at Heerenveen in Friesland, police officers shot at 16-year-old Jouke’s tractor, which was already turning away from the roadblock, missing the boy’s head by an inch (Gateway Pundit reported). Jouke and two other protestors were arrested on suspicion of “attempted manslaughter” after which an angry crowd gathered in front of the police station in Leeuwarden. All three have now been released without charges.

A farmer in Leeuwarden told Canadian journalist Keean Bexte that the Rutte government had “created a climate where the police think they can shoot”. Dutch farmers are being dispossessed and committing suicide, the protester said, while China, for example, fails to meet any environmental regulations.

[…]

Sky News Australia host Rowan Dean compared the Dutch police tactics to the violent quashing of Canadian trucker protests by uparmored riot police, calling Premiers Trudeau and Marc Rutte the “golden pin-up boys for Klaus Schwab and the globalist fantasists of the World Economic Forum.”

“The similarities between Canada and Holland are as startling as they are disturbing,” Dean said. “Only a few months ago, it was the Canadian government that attacked its own citizens in the most grotesque and terrifyingly authoritarian manner during the so-called Truckers’ Convoy when the government actually froze the bank accounts and basically starved out any individuals in what was legitimate peaceful democratic opposition to Covid (vaccine) mandates. That ended badly for Trudeau.”

At the World Economic Forum in Davos 2021, Dutch PM Marc Rutte had boasted about “Holland’s involvement with the World Economic Forum’s Global Food Innovation Hubs, which is busily ‘transforming food systems and land use'”, Dean said.

At Ace of Spades H.Q., J.J. Sefton had this to say about the protests and the repressive measures taken by the Dutch and Canadian governments toward peaceful protestors:

Mind you, this is in Holland. I’m no ethnographer, but the Netherlands is a country and people that are about as liberal, peaceful and secular as they come. Like many other European nations, they atoned for the collective guilt over what happened to its Jews during the war (among other things) by opening its borders to a massive influx of Muslim immigrants with predictable results. Strange how what happened to Theo Van Gogh was all but ignored and someone like Geert Wilders is vilified. Yet with this green madness, somehow the people have woken up to the Globalist/EU wolf at their throat. The Dutch government’s response? Crush the farmers. You have to wonder what the reaction would have been had most or even some of them had been Muslim? Meh, Muslims don’t farm. But, think about it. This is Holland. Not North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela or Iran. Holland. A supposedly enlightened European democratic society that imposes its will on people and sets the water cannon and tear gas on them for daring to object.

Well, look at Canada only a few short months ago. In the wake of the truckers’ convoy protest over forced injections, how did Justin Castreau-cescu react? Arrests, confiscation of vehicles and bank accounts, among other things. Cana-fucking-da. Now look at what that maple syrup sucking hoser is up to:

    The Canadian government is funding a booklet being sent to schools across the country that teaches children to be wary of people who champion “free speech.”

    Yes, really.

It’s a Paul Joseph Watson video, hence the short quote. But it says it all. Holland is no longer Holland. Canada is no longer Canada and America is no longer America. You know it. They know it. The forces that hijacked those governments and societies know it. The question is not do they know that we know? Of course they know we know. Yet they are betting the farm that we are not going to do a damned thing about it. So, okay, J.J. What about this “optimism” thing? In a sense, as Dave in FL and CBD talked about, I am optimistic in that I understand that what cannot go on will not go on. And this crap for sure cannot go on.

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill comments on the lack of interest among the people you’d expect to be most vocal in support of working people protesting against out-of-touch, arrogant elites:

If police were opening fire on protesters in a European nation, we would have heard about it, right? If there was a mass uprising of working people in a European Union country, taking to the streets in their thousands to cause disruption to roads, airports and parliament itself, it would be getting a lot of media coverage in the UK, wouldn’t it? The radical left would surely say something, too, given its claims to support ordinary people against The System. Cops shooting at working men and women whose only crime is that they pounded the streets to demand fairness and justice? There would be solidarity demos in the UK, for sure.

Well, all of this is happening, right now, in a nation that’s just an hour’s flight from Britain, and the media coverage here is notable by its absence. As for the left in Britain and elsewhere in Europe – there’s just silence. This is the story of the revolting Dutch farmers. These tractor-riding rebels have risen up against their government and its plans to introduce stringent environmental measures that they say will severely undermine their ability to make a living. They have been protesting for a couple of years now, but their fury has intensified in recent weeks. They’ve blocked motorways, blocked roads to airports, set fire to bales of hay, and descended on The Hague. Things are so serious that yesterday, in the province of Friesland, police opened fire. Mercifully, no one was injured.

There has been some reportage outside of the Netherlands, of course. But it has been strikingly muted. And it isn’t hard to see why. This is a people’s revolt against eco-tyranny, against the modern elite’s determination to slash “harmful” emissions with little regard for the consequences such action will have for working people and poor people. To the formers of elite consensus opinion, for whom environmentalism is tantamount to a religion, the sight of pesky little people rebelling against green diktats is too much to bear. So they either demonise these dissenters, as is happening in the Netherlands, or they ignore them in the hope they will go away, as is happening outside the Netherlands.

The farmers have a very good case. Their concern is that the government’s plans for slashing greenhouse gases will hit farming – and other industries – very hard indeed. The targets, introduced last month, commit the Netherlands to halving its use of nitrogen compounds by 2030. The government says emissions of nitrogen oxide and ammonia, both of which emanate from livestock, will need to be drastically cut. This will entail farmers getting rid of vast numbers of their livestock, potentially devastating their livelihoods. Fishermen are concerned, too. As of next year, fishing permits will be given out on the basis of the eco-friendliness of the trawler the fisherman is using, and many are worried that they’ll end up permit-less, unable to earn a living. They have blocked harbours in solidarity with the farmers. The construction industry could also suffer. Courts have blocked numerous infrastructure projects on the basis that the emissions they cause will breach the new eco-rules.

July 6, 2022

The ongoing protests by Dutch farmers demand your attention

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Protests in many countries in the western world can get violent and even be claimed (by the targets of the protest) to be “insurrections”, but protests in the Netherlands always have more of an edge to them than elsewhere, because when the Dutch really get angry they have, in the past, gone so far as to kill AND EAT their prime minister. The current protests haven’t gone that far yet, but politicians should keep in mind that Dutch farmers can react primally to being treated in the way the Soviets treated the kulaks:

This is really important – you know, on the level of “pay attention or your food supply is next”.

We reported last week that Dutch farmers were attacking government vehicles, blocking roads, and dumping manure on government buildings in response to a new “climate” policy that shut down numerous family farms because their cows were farting too much.

These farmers are now banned from working their own land to feed their families.

Let me explain what’s happening and why it is of the utmost importance as I randomly drop in videos of what the Dutch farmers are doing to keep your attention.

Unelected elites at the World Economic Forum, World Bank, United Nations, and BlackRock think us little people are rodents that are polluting the Earth, and that it’s their job to cull us and tame us so we can follow their smartypants amazingness into what is obviously a glorious future.

These elites get corporations to fall in line by promoting “Environmental-Social-Governance” metrics (a scorecard, if you will) that shows how many woke policies a company is adopting. Do they have a climate pledge? Are they hiring based on skin color, gender, and sexual fetish? Do they fly a rainbow flag over their headquarters? Do they have at least a few dozen “equity” executives to make sure everyone is a good little Marxist?

Companies lose customers by joining this radical, perverse cult, but they get access to the trillions of dollars represented by the elites and the corrupt organizations, from the WEF to the WHO to the mega-investment firms. They don’t care if you boycott them because they are expecting to simply outlast you.

The elites then get governments to fall in line by lobbying, pushing big money into local elections, and taking over school boards and classrooms to ensure good little disciples are being churned out to vote for the right people. They get young people riled up, telling them the planet is burning and that unarmed black men are yelling “Hands up, don’t shoot!” while being gunned down by racist white cops in the streets. Good people watch as their cities burn and politicians bail out the rioters.

“The Great Charter of the Liberties” was signed on June 15, 1215 at Runnymede

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

Ed West on the connections between England’s Magna Carta and the American system (at least before the “Imperial Presidency” and the modern administrative state overwhelmed the Republic’s traditional division of powers):

King John signs Magna Carta on June 15, 1215 at Runnymede; coloured wood engraving, 19th century.
Original artist unknown, held by the Granger Collection, New York. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

England does not really go in for national monuments, and when it does they are often eccentric. There is no great shrine to Alfred the Great, for example, the great founder of our nation, but we do have, right in the middle of London, a large marble memorial to the animals that gave their lives in the fight against fascism. And Runnymede, which you could say is the birthplace of English liberty, would be a deserted lay-by were it not for the Americans.

Beside the Thames, some 10 miles outside London’s western suburbs, this place “between Windsor and Staines”, as it is called in the original document, is a rather subdued spot, with the sound of constant traffic close by. Once there you might not know it was such a momentous place were it not for an enclosure with a small Romanesque circus, paid for by the American Association of Lawyers in 1957.

American lawyers are possibly not the most beloved group on earth, but it would be an awful world without them, and for that we must thank the men who on June 15, 1215 forced the king of England to agree to a document, “The Great Charter of the Liberties”.

Although John went back on the agreement almost immediately, and the country fell into civil war, by the end of the century Magna Carta had been written into English law; today, 800 years later, it is considered the most important legal document in history. As the great 18th-century statesman William Pitt the Elder put it, Magna Carta is “the Bible of the English Constitution”.

It was also, perhaps more importantly to the world, a huge influence on the United States. That is why today the doors to America’s Supreme Court feature eight panels showing great moments in legal history, one with an angry-looking King John facing a baron in 1215.

Magna Carta failed as a peace treaty, but after John’s death in 1216 the charter was reissued the following year, an act of desperation by the guardians of the new boy king Henry III. In 1300 his son Edward I reconfirmed the Charter when there was further discontent among the aristocracy; the monarch may have been lying to everyone in doing so, but he at least helped establish the precedent that kings were supposed to pretend to be bound by rules.

From then on Parliament often reaffirmed Magna Carta to the monarch, with 40 such announcements by 1400. Clause 39 heavily influenced the so-called “six statutes” of Edward III, which declared, among other things, that “no man, of whatever estate or condition he may be … could be dispossessed, imprisoned, or executed without due process of law”, the first time that phrase was used.

Magna Carta was last issued in 1423 and then barely referenced in the later 15th or 16th centuries, with the country going through periods of dynastic fighting followed by Tudor despotism and religious conflict. By Elizabeth I’s time, Magna Carta was so little cared about that Shakespeare’s play King John didn’t even mention it.

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