China’s “single-child policy” is a world-class example of unintended consequences. Initiated by the Communist Party in September 1980 to control population, the policy forbade more than one child outside exceptional circumstances. It immediately ran up against cultural preconditions – in China, as in most of Asia, male children are prized for both economic and religious reasons. Females marry out of the family, which means they are not available to care for elderly parents. It is also up to the male child to maintain religious observances regarding ancestors to assure a worthy and stable afterlife. (This is still taken quite seriously even with China’s policy of national atheism.) The result was a wholesale massacre of females by both abortion and infanticide measuring in the millions. Today China has a surplus of males, officially acknowledged as being around 4% but probably much higher. This means that millions of Chinese men will never marry and, in many cases, will never have a girlfriend. This will inevitably lead to frustration, anger, and acting out. The Chinese version of Fight Club will be no joking matter.
Another effect is legions of older people with not enough of a younger population to support them, a social security problem that dwarfs any such in the West.
The Chinese solution is likely to be simplicity itself: shoot the punks and let the geezers starve. Either way, it means social upheaval.
J.R. Dunn, “The Myth of China as Superpower”, American Thinker, 2019-01-09.
October 27, 2021
October 26, 2021
The Constitution of Athens
Historia Civilis
Published 15 Dec 2017Patreon | http://historiacivilis.com/patreon
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The Athenian Constitution by Aristotle: http://amzn.to/2C1mHLv
Politics by Aristotle: http://amzn.to/2AB6KPV
Parallel Lives: The Life of Solon by Plutarch: http://amzn.to/2AT5Viv
The Constitution of the Athenians by Pseudo-Xenophon: http://amzn.to/2z9rE6l
The Rise of Athens by Anthony Everitt: http://amzn.to/2C2ryMu
The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes by Mogens Herman Hansen: http://amzn.to/2AEAtYj
Persian Fire by Tom Holland: http://amzn.to/2AjLB8WMusic:
“Direct to Video,” by Chris Zabriskie
“It’s Always Too Late to Start Over,” by Chris Zabriskie
“Mario Bava Sleeps In a Little Later Than He Expected To,” by Chris Zabriskie
“Hallon,” by Christian BjoerklundWe are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
“…watching The Media spin for Brandon; it’s just so Pravda-licious”
Severian manages to find entertainment in the full-blown propagandization of “The Media”, especially during the course of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
Back when the Kung Flu nonsense first started, I took it quasi-seriously. Let me clarify: Like America’s greatest philosopher, I assume that everything in the newspaper is 90% bullshit, and I read it because it entertains me. Nonetheless, the bullshit operates on several levels, and it’s important to distinguish between them if you want to extract more than entertainment from it. In the case of Covid, back in the earliest days, I assumed that the bullshit was more top tier — that is, that it was mostly ignorance.
Media people are stupid. We all know that, but unless you’ve been around them (or their inbred, banjo-picking cousins, academics) recently, you probably don’t realize just how stupid they actually are. Remember Michael Crichton’s bit about “Gell-Mann Amnesia“? He said that The Media are so dumb, they routinely get important things not just wrong, but completely backwards: The headline would read the equivalent of “Wet Streets Cause Rain”.
And to be fair to The Media — I know, I know, but again, if you want anything more than a chuckle from the propaganda, you must try — it really did seem to be more ignorance than anything. I’m the kind of guy who needs to pull off a sock every time he has to count past ten, but compared to everyone in The Media I’m Euclid himself. I could see right away that the numbers they were spouting would make Kung Flu exponentially more lethal than even the Black Plague, which would, you know, tend to show up on satellite reconnaissance. And since there’s this thing called “Google Earth” …
But even though I knew right away you’d need to scale back their projections by a factor of about eleventy billion, that wasn’t the end of it, because even doing the necessary mental math to scale it down by eleventy billion — take the cosine, carry the one, divide by zero — it still looked pretty bad. But not “pretty bad” in a factual way. Rather, pretty bad in a second-level bullshit way, the mere propaganda way.
Those were the days, you might recall, when — out of the blue, on a dime — the Official Story changed from “China categorically denies there’s any such thing as germs, much less this particular strain of flu” to “OMG, the Chinese are welding apartment doors shut as people keel over in the streets.” Accompanied, in some cases — and good luck finding those video clips now — with grainy little movies of obvious actors keeling over so hammily, Al Pacino himself would tell them to tone it down. Pravda et al would never have been so crude, but those guys were pros, and as bad as the USSR was, affront-to-basic-intelligence-wise, this is Clown World.
Sure enough, the stories soon came out that China had cornered the market on PPE gear. It was an obvious short con, but remember: Clown World.
This — the CCP cornering the PPE market — soon prompted the third level of Media bullshit, the ideological level. Not content to merely take orders from their Chinese paymasters, the Media, being ideology-addled prize graduates of American “higher” “education”, started taking it upon themselves to lecture us for our own good. Masks, which were once bad, were now good, and if one mask was good, then two were even better! Thus the flood of stories like the one covered at the old RC, where the woman went on about swabbing her eyelids with disinfectant and whatnot. They got their chance to hector us for our own good, and they will never turn that down.
October 21, 2021
If Quebec is the model for universal childcare services, then voters will be waiting a long, long time for that promise to be fulfilled
In The Line, Andrea Mrozek talks about the promises (mostly still unfulfilled) of Quebec’s “universal” childcare service model:
Since last month’s election, many have been asking which promises the Liberals made will prove the most difficult to keep. Put child care at the top of the list: The federal government’s five-year, $30 billion Canada-wide child-care plan is rife with complicating factors. When government officials point to Quebec as the model for the rest of Canada, what that means is a system plagued by lack of access, inequality and poor quality.
When Quebec introduced its low-user fee “universal” system in 1997, the goal was to create a centre-based, publicly-funded system for all children. Fees started at $5 a day, briefly shifting to a fee structure based on income, before settling in at the current daily rate of $8.50.
The rapid reduction in fees in only one part of the child-care sector disrupted the care options parents were using in Quebec. Private providers, who were not to be included in Quebec’s system, “understandably crumbled” after the system began. Unfortunately, the public system never picked up the slack. So the Quebec government then coaxed them back into the business of child-care provision through a system of tax credits.
Consider this: We are told publicly funded child care offered at a fixed low price for parents is the way to go across Canada. Consider further that we are told Quebec is the model for said child-care system. Then consider that between 2003 and 2021, in Quebec, public (“Centres de la petite enfance” or CPE spaces) increased by about 55 per cent, or 35,000 spaces. In the same time period, private, unsubsidized spaces increased by about 4,200 per cent or 68,500 spaces. This growth in private provision is not at all what architects of public child-care provision desire. It has, however, proved unavoidable in Quebec, precisely because provision of public spaces has been so slow. Whether it’s lack of funds, political will or some other combination of factors, Quebec has been unable over two decades to build the system of CPE’s envisioned in the mid 1990s.
None of this is a secret: The Quebec auditor general reported last fall there are “not enough spaces available in subsidized child care to meet the needs of families in Quebec.” There are 98,014 spaces in CPEs but 46,000 on a waiting list for a CPE space, as per the auditor general. Does this sound like a policy success?
Further, the waitlists are now themselves a source of inequity. The same auditor-general report highlights that in Montreal in particular, “the children of low-income families are underrepresented in (CPEs).” Previous studies showed this to be a problem across Quebec. Sociologist Rod Beaujot wrote this in a 2013 paper: “In Quebec, day care is used less by children in vulnerable environments, and the services they use are of lower quality (Giguère and Desrosiers 2011). In contrast, the higher the mother’s education, and the higher the family income, the greater the usage of child-care in the Quebec program (Audet and Gingras 2011.) While the program has provisions for disadvantaged families, it would appear that other provinces are more successful in tailoring programs to families with lower incomes.”
So, it’s another “universal” program that disproportionally benefits the wealthy and well-connected (who tend to be Liberal Party supporters and voters)? Tabarnak! Who could ever have possibly seen this coming? Oh, and the Quebec model the rest of the country is supposedly eager to adopt has literally the worst ratios of adult caregivers to children, and 81% of Quebec parents say “Finding quality child care is a way bigger hassle than it should be for parents today”, which is a higher percentage than it is in any other province.
October 20, 2021
Alberta and Quebec, the dark twins of Confederation
In The Line, Jen Gerson explains why the Alberta government is consciously taking some of its strategies for dealing with the feds and other provinces from the generations-long success that has been Quebec’s planbook:
Quebec — as the single largest recipient of equalization cash — is often a target of anger in these parts, but I’d encourage any readers from thereabouts not to read too much into this fact. Both Alberta and Quebec suffer from a culture of political grievance that feed off one another. Alberta resents the fiscal balances, often casting Quebec as an ungrateful recipient of the very oil wealth that the latter regards with contempt. And I can only imagine how Quebec must read this; as a signal of its own isolation from Anglo culture more broadly. On both sides, I see politicians who have made a generational art of milking these respective grievances.
So sometimes it’s worthwhile to point this out.
Alberta doesn’t hate Quebec.
The provinces exist on flip sides of the very same coin; they are each others’ dark twins, and Alberta seeks mostly to emulate its French sibling.
Kenney made this point entirely explicitly in the days leading up to the referendum.
“We’re using this to get leverage to basically take a page out of Quebec’s playbook in having successfully dominated the political attention of the federation for the last 40 or 50 years.”
What playbook was he referencing, here?
The answer is obvious; the separation referenda of 1980 and 1995. In fact, the whole logic of Alberta’s referenda last night was predicated on a novel reading of the Quebec Secession Reference, in which a clear majority on a clear question must force the federal government to the negotiating table in good faith. The fact that this reference spoke to a secession question — and not a longstanding quibble over an item within the constitution — is a material difference from a legal point of view, but not a psychological one.
The hope is that this referenda will give us somethin akin to the “leverage” Quebec has enjoyed vs. Ottawa since its failed separation referenda; and the disproportionate financial and cultural incentives that followed in the following decades. Essentially, Alberta is asking for the leverage of a true separatist movement without suffering the risk of actually separating. We are play-acting a little Potemkin secession referendum, here. If it falls to me to point out the show is a little childish and even a touch pathetic, well, so be it.
October 19, 2021
Sarah Hoyt on getting #teamheadsonpikes to trend
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt considers the people who are still desperately hoping that if they just vote harder, the next election will fix everything:
Normalcy bias is YUGE in America. It is a testament to the founders’ vision that after a century of attempts to wrench us away from a constitutional republic, after a massive, in the open election steal, people are still counting on elections to right this mess.
They’re right and wrong.
Look, I’m holding up my lighter with tears in my eyes, and whispering hopefully “Team heads on pikes”. Because I think a brief, brutal convulsion is our best hope to come back to ourselves as ourselves.
In the end we win, they lose, but the gradual road is in the end more costly. Perhaps the butcher’s bill will be hidden. You won’t see heads on pikes and bodies on overpasses. But the squid farms on Mars, the unborn babies, the uninvented conveniences, the–more costly. Because socialism kills, either fast or slow, and the longer we play footsy with it, the more lives will be lost. In that case, probably lives that don’t exist.
And frankly, though #teamheadsonpikes might not eventuate, I still see a brief and violent convulsion in our future. Understand “violent” here does not refer to the butcher’s bill. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be the Junta and their toadies, as I think there will be a few Romanian Christmas Gift events, but MOSTLY? MOSTLY there will be a lot of retirements, if we’re lucky a few prison sentences, almost for sure a lot of people taking themselves overseas for retirement (I’m hoping the Obama posse and their cronies are dumb enough to run to China. (Looks heavenward. Lord, if I’m a very good girl for the rest of my life …) our institutions will turn over so fast you’d think they were on wheels. They might retain the name but that will be the last resemblance. People will lose all faith in government (we’re mostly there) and this bizarre idea of scientific governance will be finally put to bed with a shovel. About 100 years after it should have been, but hey.
Why do I think that? Why do I expect an uprising at all? Americans are supine and taking it and reeeeeeeee.
Will someone PLEASE get me my eyes? The cats aren’t here, but the floor is covered in dust and paint chips. That can’t be good.
Two things: Normalcy bias. As I said, most people who aren’t political animals (Party like it’s 1776, yo) are still waiting for the elections to fix everything. Hell, I’ve seen people who are political animals waiting for it. And the left is lying to itself very hard and half believes their wins are legitimate. (AH!)
And: IF there is a rebellion and the news doesn’t report it, would you know about it?
Hell, the world has been in more or less open rebellion for 5 years, and our news sits on it, like it’s their favorite thumb. And most people don’t see it, except for things like Brexit, or Trump’s election. Ask them about German farmers driving their tractors to city hall and they’ll look at you like you’re nuts.
So now?
October 17, 2021
QotD: Like Justin Trudeau, too many western politicians admire China’s “basic dictatorship”
Then there is the Chinese government’s ability to surveil and control their people – for their own good, of course. How many over here would love a Social Credit System, where they can reward and punish people according to government’s priorities, from environmentally-conscious behaviour to public health considerations. In democracies, the people rate their leaders; in China the leaders rate their people. Just imagine how much more effectively our governments and health authorities would be able to to deal with all of us during the current pandemic if they could “see” and “nudge” every individual at every moment and in every situation. The most dangerous virus to come from China recently is not COVID, it’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” with its siren call of unrestrained power for large sections of our political and economic elites.
Arthur Chrenkoff, “World hearts commies”, The Daily Chrenk, 2021-07-01.
October 16, 2021
Alberta’s Equalization referendum is “political theatre, and it’s poorly timed political theatre at that”
The province of Alberta is unhappy with the current federal-provincial equalization arrangement. This is not new … it’s been the case off-and-on for most of my life, but this year the province is undertaking a formal referendum on the issue, as Jen Gerson explains in The Line:
Let’s start with all the usual but necessary rigmarole about the Alberta referendum on equalization: a “yes” vote won’t peel equalization from the constitution; even a resounding victory may not actually force the federal government to sit with the province of Alberta to discuss the matter. I mean, it might: this was Ted Morton’s idea, and his argument. That Alberta can force Ottawa and the provinces to engage in some kind of open-hearted exchange by piggybacking on the Quebec Secession Reference is not totally impossible, I guess.
As this Fraser Institute bulletin by Rainer Knopff points out, that reference is specific to questions of, well, secession and probably can’t be re-applied willy nilly to any old provincial grievance. However, Knopff goes on to note that the referendum is necessary to create a provincial legislative resolution on the matter, which would allegedly trigger some kind of duty to negotiate — although certainly no duty to come to an agreement that Alberta would find acceptable.
Most credible individuals begin to handwave furiously when asked to nail the technical legal details about how we’re going to make Ottawa cede a damn thing. Even Morton had to point out that the referendum’s greatest power lies in granting Alberta “moral force” on the question.
In other words, it’s political theatre, and it’s poorly timed political theatre at that.
Equalization is a perennial complaint in Alberta, and not one totally without merit. Although the province doesn’t cut Ottawa some kind of novelty-sized equalization cheque at tax time, we are a comparatively wealthy province, which means the province traditionally sends more money to the federal government through its income and business tax remittances than it receives in rebates and services. There is a sense of injustice, here, which notes that equalization-receiving provinces offer services like cheap daycare, and are now racking up rainy day funds as Alberta falls ever deeper into debt. Meanwhile, we can’t seem to get a pipeline built to transport the very product that provides so much of this national bounty and wealth because other provinces oppose them.
QotD: Social security
Julian Sanchez, “Social Security’s Progressive Paradox: Retirement ‘insurance’ as a Rube Goldberg machine”, Reason, 2005-05-02.
October 13, 2021
Elitist scorn for “dollar” stores
Laura Williams uses the often-debunked tale of Marie Antoinette telling the poor of Paris to eat cake to illustrate a very real present-day issue of local governments trying to limit or even eliminate low-cost retail options in poor areas of their municipalities:
“Family Dollar Store” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Sixty-two percent of adults surveyed by brand intelligence firm Morning Consult say Dollar Tree “has a positive effect on my community” (compared to 51 percent for Starbucks and 59 percent for Target).
People who can afford more choices — driving out to a big-box store, buying in bulk, ordering online, patronizing a farmer’s market — simply can’t see the perspective of someone for whom the dollar store is the most practical option.
[…]
Opponents of dollar stores often contradict each other or even themselves.
Critics objected when suburban growth sent stores running for whiter, more affluent suburbs. But dollar stores’ explicit attempts to reverse this trend — to set up affordable retail options in poorer, underserved neighborhoods — are somehow also the target of scorn.
You’ll also hear critics claim dollar stores engage in “predatory” behavior by offering prices that are simultaneously too low (undercutting potential competitors) and also too high (as compared to a per-unit cost at the Costco 15 miles away).
Haters complain retail jobs offered by dollar stores are “low quality and low-wage” but also that dollar stores don’t create enough of these low-quality, undesirable jobs. One is reminded of the Woody Allen line complaining about a restaurant’s “terrible food … and such small portions!”
A Tulsa councilwoman begrudgingly confirmed that dollar retailers offer essentials like toothpaste and school supplies, bread and eggs, in areas where supermarkets “have consistently failed”. Why this is condemnable, rather than laudable, she does not explain.
With backward economic thinking, CNN claimed dollar stores “limit poor communities’ access to healthy food,” blaming low-cost retailers for the gaps they try to fill.
Bans on walkable, ultra-affordable stores do nothing to increase the availability of fresh food; they merely stamp out the only existing option.
October 12, 2021
The Southwest canary in the coal mine?
Jim Treacher wonders, based reactions from the self-imagined elites, if they consider airline pilots to be slaves now:
I’m one of the pesky minority of Americans who are both pro-vaccine and against vaccine mandates. The evidence overwhelmingly proves that these vaccines are effective against the coronavirus, and I will continue to encourage everyone to get vaccinated. And, also, in addition to that, vaccine mandates are not only un-American but counterproductive. In addition to all the other dishonest, lame-brained, self-negating messaging we’ve heard during this pandemic, telling Americans what to do just doesn’t work. That’s not how we’re built.
And just on principle, vaccination is your decision as an individual. That’s how it’s supposed to work in this country. This is still a republic, if you can keep it.
Which is why it’s interesting that now this is happening:
Southwest is the only airline cancelling so many flights. Is that because the employees, including the pilots who are needed to fly the planes, are refusing to comply with the company’s new vaccine mandate?
The airline is saying otherwise:
“Disruptive weather”? Wouldn’t that affect all the airlines, not just one?
In any case, the smart fellers seem to think it’s about the vaccine. And they ain’t happy:
Oh, is that how it works? Those pilots are no longer individual human beings, with individual thoughts and opinions? They must subsume themselves into the corporation? The government throws money at everything in sight, and therefore all that stuff is owned by the government? All those people are owned by the government?
And these clowns call us fascists?
Airline pilots aren’t slaves. If they don’t want to work because of an employer’s mandate, that’s between them and the employer. If they get fired, that’s their problem. But nobody owns them, let alone entitled @$$holes like Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Of course, you can always trust The Babylon Bee (America’s Most Trusted News Source™) to get to the heart of the matter:
October 10, 2021
First the Bloc Québécois, then “Wexit”, now Bloc Montréal?
Barbara Kay makes the case for Montreal to re-evaluate its position within Quebec as the Quebec government pushes toward even more legal efforts to reduce the English-speaking community to a second- or even third-class citizenship:
Oct. 7 brought an end to consultations on Quebec’s Bill 96, which amends the 1977 Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) and — unilaterally, never before attempted by a province — the Constitution Act of 1867. A few anglophone institutions were invited to the hearings, but their inclusion was pro forma. Bill 96 will pass through use of the notwithstanding clause.
The bill affirms Quebec is a nation, with French as its “common” as well as its only official language, adding several new “fundamental language rights” for French. It effectively creates both a Canadian and Quebec Charter-free zone in a wide range of interactions between individuals and the state. Even before passage, use of the P-word (“province”) has become politically charged, and quietly redacted from public usage by Bill 96 dissidents.
The impact of Bill 96 on anglophones could be momentous. One amendment, which restricts access to English health and social services to those with education-eligibility certificates, could negatively affect upwards of 500,000 anglophone Quebecers. It speaks volumes that the Minister of the French Language will take responsibility for outcomes delivery in that sector away from the Minister of Health and Social Services. Bill 96 will also negatively affect young francophones by capping their numbers at English cegeps [Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel or “General and Vocational College”].
The previous expansions of French language rights in Quebec — and corresponding contractions of English language rights in the province — drove waves of emigration to other provinces, helping Toronto surpass Montreal as Canada’s largest city and economic powerhouse. In the middle of a pandemic, it’s much harder for those who are feeling oppressed to leave Quebec, but there may be another possibility:
Montreal as a city-state, or at least a special autonomous region — a status the Cree nation of northern Quebec has enjoyed for decades — was first raised as a serious idea eight years ago. In 2013 the Parti Québécois proposed language Bill 14, as draconian as Bill 96, which died when premier Pauline Marois’s minority government couldn’t enlist enough collegial support for its passage. Nevertheless, the attempt galvanized alarm sufficient to inspire a transiently influential city-state movement.
A 2014 Ipsos poll on the subject commissioned by that group elicited these key takeaways from Montrealers: Montreal is a distinct society within Quebec (90 per cent); to stop its decline, Montreal needs to take drastic steps to improve its performance (91 per cent); and Montreal deserves special status within Quebec because it is a world-class, cosmopolitan city (74 per cent). Those numbers would likely be as high or higher today.
[…]
We need a Bloc Montréal to represent Montreal/Greater Montreal’s “distinct society” at the Quebec National Assembly in Quebec City. The pivotal moment of the 1995 referendum campaign was the revelation — one that had never before occurred to the separatists — that “if Canada is divisible, then Quebec is divisible”. That was a sobering and clarifying moment. And Montreal has a greater need for augmented representation in Quebec City than Quebec has in Ottawa. After all, Quebec profits handsomely from its affiliation with Canada, while the opposite is true of Montreal and Quebec City.
“The NSBA letter is a blood libel against America’s dissenting parents”
In this Substack essay, C. Bradley Thompson calls the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) demand that the federal government treat dissenting parents as “domestic terrorists” a declaration of war against ordinary American citizens:
On September 30, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration denouncing the nationwide parental protests taking place at school board meetings against Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, pornography in the classroom, mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and remote learning. It turns out that parents all over the country are upset about the indoctrination and censorship in America’s government schools. An army of moms (and dads) have been asserting their parental responsibilities and their constitutional rights by showing up to school board meetings and voicing — sometimes angrily — their contempt and disgust for those school boards and teachers promoting and sanctioning ideas and ideologies opposed by the parents.
The NSBA letter (see here) begins rather ominously by declaring that “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat” and that “immediate assistance” is therefore “required to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety.” The NSBA is essentially declaring a “State of Emergency” for America’s government school system. Let that sink in for a moment.
[…]
Let’s be clear about what the NSBA letter means in practice: first, it is dog-whistling a message which says that protesting parents are engaged in “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” (including, presumably, against their own children); and, second, it is requesting that the Biden administration use the full coercive power of the United States government — power that it has only previously been used against Islamic terrorists and foreign enemies of the United States — to monitor, investigate, arrest, interrogate, prosecute, convict and jail upset parents who are protesting AGAINST the teaching of systemic racism (i.e., CRT), pornography in the classroom, and the unscientific mask mandates for children.
The NSBA letter is saying, in effect, that complaining parents are the moral equivalent of jihadi terrorists, who are out to commit acts of violence and terror against America’s school board members, its teachers, and, yes, even the children. As such, these parents should be treated as a national security threat, and they must be dealt with by all means necessary.
The NSBA letter is a blood libel against America’s dissenting parents. In a decent, free, and just society such a letter would be condemned and dismissed out of hand, but that is not the kind of society in which we live today.
Rather than tossing the NSBA letter in the trash where it belongs, the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, read it and immediately ordered the FBI and America’s National Security State to mobilize its immense power against parents whose only real crime is to take seriously the education of their children. He did this within just a few days of receiving the NSBA letter.
I encourage you to read — and to read slowly — Garland’s official memorandum sent to the Director of the FBI and to various other law enforcement agencies, offices, and divisions.
Garland’s letter is a moral, political, and constitutional abomination. To say there are serious problems with the Attorney General’s Orwellian letter would be an understatement. The letter asserts, for instance, that “there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” It claims as fact a “rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel”. Neither the NSBA nor the Justice Department have provided any credible or meaningful evidence to support this unfounded claim, nor does Garland’s passive-aggressive letter specify what it classifies as “criminal conduct” or “domestic terrorism”. (Not surprisingly, Garland’s letter neglects to mention that some school board members and the teachers’ unions have been harassing and threatening parents for months. See here, here, here, here, and here.) The simple fact of the matter is that virtually no violence has occurred at school board meetings this year.
In support of the NSBA request, Garland’s memorandum announced that he has directed the FBI and each U. S. Attorney to convene meetings immediately with “federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district” in order to “facilitate the discussion of strategies” for dealing with threats against school officials. The Department of Justice will also “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response”. In other words, the government will establish “snitch” lines against parents. If a school board member doesn’t like what they hear in a public meeting, they will be able to report (presumably anonymously) threats of harassment and intimidation.
October 9, 2021
QotD: China’s “social credit” policy
The China lobby excuses the policy by comparing it to Western customer loyalty programs and asserting that it’s not in place around the whole country yet. In truth, it’s a typical aspect of Chinese communism, which loosens the reins for a period before tightening them again. Mao instituted the “Thousand Flowers” campaign in the ’50s that encouraged criticism of the party, following up a few years later with the Great Cultural Revolution, in which those critics were shot or sent to the Gobi.
Like it or not, progress of any sort – social, scientific, artistic – is propelled by the mavericks. Beethoven, Tesla, Einstein, Patton, Kubrick, Trump … all individualists – cantankerous, arrogant, belligerent – who pushed against social inertia, no matter what the consequences. Their story, from Socrates on, is the story of the West. With the “Social Credit” program, China is returning to its immemorial preference for stasis, which has led to disaster time and again. The end result will be a society that is stratified, ossified, and petrified. There is evidence that this is occurring right now.
J.R. Dunn, “The Myth of China as Superpower”, American Thinker, 2019-01-09.
October 5, 2021
Chris Alexander – “The truth is that ‘normal’ in the People’s Republic of China, at least since 1959, has never included the rule of law”
Writing in The Line, Chris Alexander (former Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) explains why attempts to “return to normal” in Canada’s relationship with mainland China are foredoomed to failure:
Yuen Pau Woo was joined in these arguments by senators Peter Boehm and Peter Harder, both seasoned diplomats, who also urged Canada to suspend its judgement with regard to China’s persecution of the Uighurs. This includes the use of concentration camps and forced labour, as well as the repression of language, culture and religion. These are all blatant acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, as the 1951 Genocide Convention defines this “odious scourge”.
Throughout this unfortunate saga, Beijing has had a Greek chorus of supporters across Canada — mostly from people with well-remunerated corporate or political backgrounds — for the preposterous notion of a “prisoner exchange” that would get relations with China back to “normal”.
In the end, the Senate’s genocide motion failed by a vote of 29 in favour to 33 opposed, with 13 abstentions. China’s Foreign Ministry praised Woo, Boehm and Harder as “people of vision” who had seen through the “despicable schemes of a few anti-China forces”. The “clumsy trick of attacking China for selfish political gains” and “the hype of ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang is unpopular and doomed to fail”, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson crowed.
Had Woo, a former president and CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, and the “two Peters”, both former deputy ministers of foreign affairs, voted in favour, the Senate’s genocide motion would have passed. Instead all three chose, on an issue directly threatening the identity and lives of millions, to take the position of the Communist Party of China over one unanimously endorsed by Canada’s elected House of Commons — all in the empty hope of getting back to “normal” with Beijing.
The truth is that “normal” in the People’s Republic of China, at least since 1959, has never included the rule of law. From China’s ferocious and brutal invasion of Tibet that same year, through the murderous Great Leap Forward ending in 1962, to the decade-long Cultural Revolution up to Mao’s death in 1976 (and beyond), China has been a legal void. Serious judicial reforms never featured in Deng Xiaoping’s economic relaunch. On the contrary, basic rights were decimated, as Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur and other refugees attest.
According to Freedom House, the current General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping’s relentless push for all-encompassing surveillance and censorship has made China the worst environment in the world for internet freedom for the seventh year running. Compliance with such global gag orders is enforced by the CCP’s Orwellian digital panopticon, the notorious United Front Work Department, which seeks to browbeat, buy, corrupt, blackmail, extort or otherwise leverage people and firms with connections to China in support of Xi’s agenda.
Thanks to United Front subterfuge, some prominent Canadians still take China’s side, even as Beijing’s favourability score in Canadian public opinion plummeted to 14 per cent, mirroring a worldwide nosedive for China’s image driven by the two Michaels’ ordeal and Beijing’s “wolf warrior” belligerence.
