Quotulatiousness

December 4, 2021

Things I never expected to read on the CBC website — “…frantically firing up the gaslights and moving the goalposts on COVID restrictions and vaccinations”

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

Canada’s state broadcaster has been — as you would expect — a staunch supporter of every government initiative to limit free speech and the rights of Canadians in tackling the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic. They’ve consistently portrayed any concerns or doubts about draconian government action as irrational, anti-science conspiracy theories and the people raising such concern as effectively “enemies of the people”. As such, I never expected to see anything like this CBC Opinion piece by Allan Richarz:

Listen closely and one might be able to discern the unmistakable sounds of our elected and unelected officials frantically firing up the gaslights and moving the goalposts on COVID restrictions and vaccinations.

It was a precipitous but inevitable shift from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to get the jab or lose your job, and unsurprisingly, there is still more to come.

Met the provincial vaccination targets? Great; but now it’s time for a booster. Ready for the “temporary” vaccine passport system to expire? Sorry, we need to extend it through spring; proving once again that if you give the government an inch on your rights, they will go for the mile every time.

Less than a year ago, government and public health officials touted vaccination as a panacea to end the pandemic. It’s safe, effective and will allow the country to put COVID behind us, we were told. To that end, citizens were encouraged, prodded and eventually threatened to get their shots, with holdouts demonized by politicians at all levels. Yet, in Ontario, even as the province exceeded by weeks its vaccination and case number targets of the government’s phased reopening plan, citizens were offered only breadcrumbs in return: moving up Phase 3 reopening by just a few days, with no plans at the time for a complete reopening.

And now, with new case numbers in Ontario essentially split evenly between the unvaccinated and fully vaccinated and questions about waning vaccine efficacy, the goalposts shift again with the rollout of booster shots elsewhere in the country and calls for expanded eligibility.

One does not need to look hard to guess what the next step will be across Canada. In Israel and France, the definition of fully vaccinated was changed to include boosters; those six months out from their second dose, or first booster, are now considered unvaccinated, and their vaccine passport privileges suspended.

H/T to SDA for the link.

December 3, 2021

“Power corrupts and absolute power …” is something governments are not eager to give up, post-pandemic

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Europe, Government, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Miguel Castaneda quotes Lord Acton’s famous aphorism (which I truncated in my headline) and warns of the consequences of giving governments too much power:

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The words of Lord Acton, a fierce opponent of state power, are sadly no less relevant today than they were at his time of writing.

Over the past 20 months, the authoritarian approach of Western leaders has been justified by our representatives as a necessary response to a global emergency. Whether that’s true or not is up for discussion, however, one thing remains clear: such attitudes have handed governments a level of power that, left unchecked, severely curtails individual rights.

This path is not unique to the UK, nor is it unique to Europe. We’re seeing a near global normalisation of state overreach. Lockdowns in many liberal democracies have been brought in suddenly and without thorough scrutiny.

In this country, at no point were other methods to address the pandemic tested. They were barely even suggested. And with little counter from the mainstream media, the UK and others have normalised shutting down the country for the purpose of virus control.

It was only a few months ago that Australia locked over 5 million people after identifying a single case. A severe overreaction which likely contributed to the dramatic fall in Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrisson’s approval ratings of the handling of the pandemic, which fell from 85 per cent at the start of the pandemic to 47 per cent in the latest poll in August.

A commonly overlooked consequence of these authoritarian practices is the precedence it sets for how governments can and should act when faced with novel challenges. It has been predicted that future pandemics will become more frequent, and perhaps more deadly. Are we going to react again by shutting entire populations in their homes?

Looking to the continent, the ease at which governments are bringing in authoritarian measures should be an international scandal. Take Austria, where a national lockdown has just been extended until at least December 11th. Or Germany, which has announced today a de facto lockdown for the unvaccinated, and is debating bringing in a policy of mandatory vaccinations.

This extreme way of thinking is a new virus spreading across the Western world. Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Australia have all seen similar policies introduced.

December 1, 2021

Polling bias in a time of pandemic

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

At The Daily Sceptic, Mike Hearn looks at the often incredible poll results turned up by YouGov that seem to indicate that well over half the population of Britain are budding medical fascists who want nothing more than a full-on pandemic tyranny from now to the end of time:

Recently YouGov announced that 64% of the British public would support mandatory booster vaccinations and another polling firm claimed that 45% would support indefinite home detention for the unvaccinated (i.e., forced vaccination of the entire population). The extreme nature of these claims immediately attracted attention, and not for the first time raised questions about how accurate polling on Covid mandates actually is. In this essay I’m going to explore some of the biases that can affect these types of poll, and in particular pro-social, mode and volunteering biases, which might be leading to inaccurately large pro-mandate responses.

There’s evidence that polling bias on COVID topics can be enormous. In January researchers in Kenya compared results from an opinion poll asking whether people wore masks to actual observations. They discovered that while 88% of people told the pollsters that they wore masks outside, in reality only 10% of people actually did. Suspicions about mandate polls and YouGov specifically are heightened by the fact that they very explicitly took a position on what people “should” be doing in 2020, using language like “Britons still won’t wear masks”, “this could prove a particular problem”, “we are far behind our neighbours” and most concerning of all – “our partnership with Imperial College”. Given widespread awareness of how easy it is to do so-called push polling, it’s especially damaging to public trust when a polling firm takes such strong positions on what the public should be thinking and especially in contradiction of evidence that mask mandates don’t work. Thus it makes sense to explore polling bias more deeply.

[…]

Given the frequency with which large institutions say things about COVID that just don’t add up, it’s not entirely surprising that people are suspicious of claims that most of their friends and neighbours are secretly nursing the desire to tear up the Nuremberg Code. But while we can debate whether the chat-oriented user interface is really ideal for presenting multi-path survey results, and it’s especially debatable whether YouGov should be running totally different kinds of polls under the same brand name, it’s probably not an attempt to manipulate people. Or if it is, it’s not a very competent one.

When I was much younger, I’d very occasionally get a call on our land line from a polling firm. I’d sometimes take part in the poll, although I don’t recall every seeing any of the polls I took part in being published later. After a few years, I stopped taking part and now I hang up as soon as it’s clear that the call is from a polling company. Apparently I’m far from alone in this learned aversion to dealing with polls:

Online panel polling solves the problem of low phone response rates but introduces a new problem: the sort of people who answer surveys aren’t normal. People who answer an endless stream of surveys for tiny pocket-money sized rewards are especially not normal, and thus aren’t representative of the general public. All online panel surveys face this problem and thus pollsters compete on how well they adjust the resulting answers to match what the “real” public would say. One reason elections and referendums are useful for polling agencies is they provide a form of ground truth against which their models can be calibrated. Those calibrations are then used to correct other types of survey response too.

A major source of problems is what’s known as “volunteering bias”, and the closely related “pro-social bias”. Not surprisingly, the sort of people who volunteer to answer polls are much more likely to say they volunteer for other things too than the average member of the general population. This effect is especially pronounced for anything that might be described as a “civic duty”. While these are classically considered positive traits, it’s easy to see how an unusually strong belief in civic duty and the value of community volunteering could lead to a strong dislike for people who do not volunteer to do their “civic duty”, e.g. by refusing to get vaccinated, disagreeing with community-oriented narratives, and so on.

In 2009 Abraham et al showed that Gallup poll questions about whether you volunteer in your local community had implausibly risen from 26% in 1977 to a whopping 46% in 1991. This rate varied drastically from the rates reported by the U.S. census agency: in 2002 the census reported that 28% of American adults volunteered.

November 27, 2021

Americans fear the power of “Big Oil” and other cartels. Canadians rejoice under the buttery thumb of “Big Dairy”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Jen Gerson hates Canada’s supply management “system” with the heat of a thousand suns. And she’s perfectly right to do so:

Former federal Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, paid tool of Big Dairy, chugs some milk during a Press Gallery speech in 2017. I’ve called him the “Milk Dud” ever since.
Screencapture from a CTV video uploaded to YouTube.

Many of you readers have listened to the likes of me complain about supply management over the years, but for those of you whose eyes glazed over until you started to notice your rent money disappearing into your grocery bill, here’s a very quick primer.

The supply management system insulates eggs, dairy, and poultry from the vicissitudes of the free market, assuring established farmers in these few sectors a guaranteed return to produce a pre-ordained supply of these products. The federal and provincial governments oversee the system via various dairy commissions.

Some government involvement in dairy has been a feature of our agricultural system since the late 19th century, however the system as it exists today came into effect in the ’70s. It consists, broadly, of three policy mechanisms. Prices are set internally to assure farmers receive a healthy profit for their labour, farmers are protected from competition though ruinous import tariffs, and then supply is managed via a quota system.

As one might expect, this has created extraordinary economic distortions, assuring that a container of milk in Canada is radically more expensive than an identical product south of the border. (Yes, American milk is subsidized too, although less than it once was. And from a consumer’s perspective, so what? If the Americans want to subsidize cheap milk to send north, all the better for shoppers.)

In order to keep production at a steady level, the system has to keep newer, cheaper players from entering the market, and this is accomplished via a quota system that has led to absurd economic incentives and outcomes. According to this report from the Canadian West Foundation from 2016, the quota was valued at about $28,000 per cow. That means that the value of the right to own one milk-producing cow far outweighed the actual value of the animal — and someone seeking to start a dairy farm would need to pay for millions of dollars worth of quota in addition to cows, land, food, and farm equipment.

The quotas themselves are a multi-billion dollar racket; this is roughly akin to the way a license to run a taxi costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cities, many multiples of the value of the car itself. When a government creates a regulatory system that imposes artificial scarcity, the value of the thing regulated radically increases.

Since the supply management system was introduced, much of the agriculture has consolidated; this, combined with the value of the quotas they possess mean that most dairy farms — far from being quaint, picturesque family homesteads — are multi-million dollar operations, with farmers themselves making six-figure profits after paying their own wages.

The system has also proved a obstacle in multiple free-trade deals, arguably making it difficult for other agriculture sectors to compete globally.

And who pays for all of this?

Well, of course, you do.

November 26, 2021

The more government tries to do, the less well it does everything

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

In what I suspect will be a long, long series of stories illustrating government’s ever-increasing appetite for control and decreasing ability to competently discharge its authority, Matt Gurney says he remembers to the day when he realized the Canadian government didn’t have a clue in an emergency. ANY emergency:

It seems a very long time ago now, but let me set the stage for you: this was just days after March 12th, the Thursday most North Americans seem to agree marked the real beginning of it all here — the day the NBA and NHL suddenly shut down and, in Toronto at least, the schools closed. Though the prime minister wouldn’t officially ask Canadians to come home from abroad for a few more days, thousands were landing at our airports each day. The federal government had said that enhanced screening had been established to meet them. Sadly, this wasn’t exactly, you know, true. I knew this for a fact: I’d been out of the country with my wife and children, arriving home the day before Joly’s press conference. I’d expected screening, questions, temperature checks, pamphlets, PA announcements — to be blunt about this, I expected a gigantic hassle. Hell, I wanted to be hassled and sternly ordered home for 14 days of isolation. Nope! Here’s how I described our arrival in a column in the National Post:

    [We] were processed by an automated kiosk with a touchscreen (that is hopefully being regularly cleaned). It scanned our passports and took photos of my wife and I — our children, being under 12, were exempt from photographing. Alongside the usual questions about value of purchased goods and whether we’ll be visiting a Canadian farm, there was a question asking whether we had recently visited Iran, Italy or China’s Hubei province. I (honestly) clicked no. The kiosk printed out a form, which I handed to a customs officer. He glanced at it, asked where we were returning from, looked at our passports for the barest moment, and welcomed us home. [The] entire process took barely six minutes.

    No questioning about symptoms. No temperature screening. No information about mandatory 14-day self-isolation. No signage, or at least not obvious signage. No multi-language pre-recorded PA announcements with public health details. My wife did see a pamphlet listing COVID-19 symptoms, but nothing about self-isolation was noted. (Photos have circulated on Twitter claiming to show updated pamphlets given out at airports containing self-isolation information; we did not receive one on Saturday night.)

Our hassle-free arrival, to be clear, was not what was supposed to be happening. Worse, the federal government really seemed to have no idea what the facts on the ground actually were. Bill Blair was tweeting out complete nonsense that had absolutely no relation to what was actually happening. Provinces and cities were surging their own people to the airports to assert some order, since the federal government was clearly completely incapable of getting a handle on the situation, probably because it was blissfully unaware that there was a situation.

So that was bad.

But the next day, our first day back, was when it got really scary.

Joly had been at a cabinet meeting, and afterward, tried to project confidence and calm. She was full of smiles when she addressed the media, saying that there’d be announcements to come the next day. The Globe and Mail‘s Marieke Walsh, doing a vastly better job containing her temper than I would have, demanded to know why Canadians sitting at home were being teased about an announcement instead of just told what the announcement was. Joly had no real answer to that really, really good question, and just tried to smile her way through it, until David Lametti tried to save her by lavishing praise on the leadership of … Patty Hajdu, our then-health minister.

Read that paragraph again. Joly. Lametti. Hajdu. It’s a miracle any of us are still alive.

November 25, 2021

History of Venice: Rise to Glory

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

Epic History TV
Published 14 Dec 2018

Listen to or download the music HERE: smarturl.it/epichistoryvenice
Music by https://www.musicdesigngroup.com

Thanks to Elias Tsiantas for the 3D Venetian galley footage
Thanks to Miłek Jakubiec for the Battle of Marignano image

Support the channel & get exclusive previews at Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/epichistorytv

Want to learn more? We recommend A History of Venice by the late John Julius Norwich, a great popular historian on all things Mediterranean (as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases): http://geni.us/7q71zx

#EpicHistoryTV #HistoryofVenice

QotD: Corporate coercion can be just as dangerous as state coercion

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

So many libertarians […] have a simplistic, dare I say dualistic notion about bad-things-done-by-private-business and bad-things-done-by-the-state. One is met with “so start up a rival company” the other with “an outrageous example of state overreach that must be opposed politically.”

And in an ideal world, yes, that makes sense. We do not live in anything resembling an ideal world.

In an era when three (two really) credit card companies and a handful of payment processors have an off-switch for pretty much any on-line business they take a dislike to (unless they are called Apple or Amazon), as more and more of the economy goes virtual, what we have is turn-key tyranny for sale to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder is always going to be a state. I am uncertain what the solution is, but as we do not live in a “free market”, not convinced “so go set up your own global credit card and payment processing network” adds anything meaningful to the discussion. It is a bit like saying when the local electric provider turns off the power in your office (or home) because they disapprove of what you are doing “so go set up your own electric supply company”, as if that would be allowed to happen.

Perry de Havilland, “This is what so many libertarians cannot understand …”, Samizdata, 2021-08-22.

November 21, 2021

British Columbia’s annus horribilis

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson does a distressingly good imitation of Cassandra’s warnings … and just like Cassandra, her words are probably going to be ignored until things get much worse:

“A job well done by @RCAF_ARC’s 442 Transport & Rescue Squadron. Using 3 CH149 helicopters and supported by a CC115 Buffalo, the Sqn evacuated 311 people, 26 Dogs and a Cat to safety in Agassiz after being trapped by landslides on roads in BC.
RCAF Operations, Nov 16, 2021 (https://twitter.com/RCAFOperations/status/1460664604648947721)”

So now here it is. We have flooding so acute that we are airlifting food supplies to small towns in British Columbia cut off by destroyed transport routes that it may take weeks to repair. The damage has cut off rail and road links from the city of Vancouver to the rest of Canada. Not only does this trap all the rail and truck resources now stranded in the isolated areas, it also cuts off one of the largest ports in North America in the midst of a global supply chain crisis.

On top of that, many of those economists who told us inflation was not going to happen are now hedging their bets. Oh, and we are still dealing with a pandemic, and its lingering health and economic damage.

Once again we have proven ourselves utterly dependent on the military to manage a domestic crisis — a military that is so profoundly underfunded and under equipped that it has reached a state of generational decline. (For more on that, read Matt Gurney’s piece in The Line from yesterday [linked here].)

Meanwhile, we’ve been writing here at The Line about the utter collapse of our institutional capacity; the unavoidable fact that our governments seem totally unable to anticipate obvious, immediate, and pressing disasters. A recent example of that came from the federal government’s failure to sound the alarm on COVID-19 back in 2020. However, the residents of British Columbia sure didn’t get the same kind of notice of imminent danger that their American counterparts surely did.

God help us if a really bad winter storm hits somewhere in this country over the next six to eight weeks. Another severe ice storm, or a real blizzard; I genuinely fear we would have people starving to death in their homes for lack of resources to spare to dig them out.

I am a 37-year-old woman who had never seen an empty shelf in a grocery store until COVID-19. Now I’m seeing scenes out of Kamloops supermarkets that look like something out of The Walking Dead. No serious shortages in 35 years — and now I’ve seen two episodes of panic buying clearing out the shelves in the past two.

We keep on acting as if this disaster is the peak. This is the worst year ever, and we’re going to get back to normal any minute now.

Maybe.

But what if we don’t?

November 20, 2021

Twenty years of TSA bullying

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

In Friday’s Reason Roundup newsletter, Robby Soave calls for the end of the Transportation Security Administration after twenty long years of futility on making travel safer but brilliant success in making the travel experience so much worse for passengers:

Exactly 20 years ago today, President George W. Bush signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act into law and created the Transportation Security Administration, better known as the TSA. A response to the 9/11 attacks, the TSA was thought to be a necessary tool for confronting the new reality of terror in the skies.

Two decades later, the TSA has more than 54,000 employees, a budget of $8 billion dollars, and a long track record of harassing passengers for no good reason. Far from contributing to actual safety, the TSA is a stunning example of government failure: Its absurd travel restrictions make air travel no safer, deprive passengers of their civil liberties, and make the process of flying much more costly, time-consuming, inconvenient, and unenjoyable. The agency should never have been created, and its 20th birthday is as good a time as any to abolish it.

For starters, the TSA routinely fails at its main purpose: preventing passengers from carrying deadly weapons onto airplanes. TSA agents constantly miss weapons, drugs, and other illicit items when government agents try to smuggle them in as part of testing.

“TSA screeners failed to detect weapons, drugs, and explosives almost 80 percent of the time,” noted the Heritage Foundation in 2017. “While the exact failure rate is classified, multiple sources indicate it is greater than 70 percent.” During one test, at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, the TSA’s failure rate was 95 percent.

The 9/11 terror attacks, in which a small number of men were able to use crude, simple weapons to hijack airplanes and crash them into important buildings, were a scarring moment for the nation. The U.S. government vowed to be more vigilant. But the truth of the matter is that preventing hijackings is now trivially easy: Pilots can lock the cockpit doors, which are almost impossible for intruders to breach. Prior to 9/11 most airplane hijackings involved detours to different locations; hijackers did not intend to crash the planes, and thus neither crews nor passengers had much reason to fight back. This calculus is forever changed: Would-be plane hijackers will face insurmountable difficulties, whether or not they’ve received aggressive pat-downs from the TSA.

Meanwhile, the TSA’s security theater has made air travel a much more grueling process. It’s not just the ritualistic humiliation of having to remove belts and shoes, empty out backpacks and suitcases, and submit to full-body scanners. TSA agents are also frequently caught stealing from passengers, groping them, and delaying them for no reason. Again, there is no point to any of this. It does not make people safer. If anything, it makes us less safe: It is likely that some people choose to drive to their destination, rather than deal with the hassle. Car travel, though, is far more dangerous than air travel — many more people die in car crashes than in plane crashes each year. And not even COVID-19 could tip the scales in airplanes’ favor, according to The Washington Post.

Enough is enough. There is not a single good reason that Americans should have to endure such misery at the hands of this utterly pointless bureaucracy. The best time to abolish the TSA was right after it was created. The second-best time is now.

Remy made a parody video on the TSA that’s definitely worth a watch. Back in 2010, Iowahawk created some helpful new slogans for the TSA, free of charge.

November 15, 2021

QotD: Britain at war

Filed under: Britain, France, Government, History, Media, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in Europe that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its nationals into exile or the concentration camp. At this moment, after a year of war, newspapers and pamphlets abusing the Government, praising the enemy and clamouring for surrender are being sold on the streets, almost without interference. And this is less from a respect for freedom of speech than from a simple perception that these things don’t matter. It is safe to let a paper like Peace News be sold, because it is certain that ninety-five per cent of the population will never want to read it. The nation is bound together by an invisible chain. At any normal time the ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck; but let popular opinion really make itself heard, let them get a tug from below that they cannot avoid feeling, and it is difficult for them not to respond. The left-wing writers who denounce the whole of the ruling class as “pro-Fascist” are grossly over-simplifying. Even among the inner clique of politicians who brought us to our present pass, it is doubtful whether there were any conscious traitors. The corruption that happens in England is seldom of that kind. Nearly always it is more in the nature of self-deception, of the right hand not knowing what the left hand doeth. And being unconscious, it is limited. One sees this at its most obvious in the English Press. Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese. Public life in England has never been openly scandalous. It has not reached the pitch of disintegration at which humbug can be dropped.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

November 14, 2021

The Media — declining to report the news and instead depleting the strategic reserve of Narrativium

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

This week’s excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish explores the many, many ways that the mainstream media have been actively abandoning any semblance of informing their audience and instead now concentrate almost exclusively on propagandizing them:

The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

You know the situation is bad when Andrew Sullivan references Donald Trump without a sneer!

We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”

The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate”, even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.

November 12, 2021

One Pretendian’s “cultural Munchausen syndrome”

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

In Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh updates us on the story of Carrie Bourassa, who had effortlessly surfed to high profile, well-remunerated positions at the University of Saskatchewan and with the federal government largely on the basis of her claimed First Nations background:

Carrie Bourassa with media.
Lead photo in Geoff Leo’s article for the CBC – https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/carrie-bourassa-indigenous

Newspapers have a slightly nasty characteristic: it’s easy for them to get pre-emptively mad when institutions are a little slow to do the right thing, and it’s also easy for them to forget to give credit when those institutions get around to it.

So let’s acknowledge that the federal government and the University of Saskatchewan are dealing — as best they can, almost certainly — with their shared Carrie Bourassa problem.

Two weeks ago, CBC News investigative reporter Geoff Leo published an astonishing tour de force. His feature article established, beyond almost any doubt, that Bourassa, a high-profile Indigenous scholar who told and published countless stories of racist treatment and childhood adversity, is actually a fabulist from a wealthy white family. The Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health soon put Bourassa, its scientific director, on unpaid leave. The U of S suspended her with pay, probably having no better immediate alternative.

[…]

Since Prof. Bourassa was put on ice in her lucrative Aboriginal-health jobs, Indigenous folk have been labouring to explain in the press what was wrong with her concoction and aggressive peddling of a fake Métis upbringing on the mean streets of Regina. Drew Hayden Taylor’s Globe and Mail op-ed about Bourassa’s “cultural Munchausen syndrome” is instructive and funny, but we hope it is all right to tell Aboriginal-Canadians that no white settler with a lick of sense would consider Bourassa’s tapestry of falsehoods to be harmless “fibs”. This may be a self-serving observation, but her confabulations about her personal history wouldn’t be consistent with the standards of a newspaper, let alone those of a university.

About a year ago, the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation gave Bourassa an award (not her first) and published a capsule summary of her career. If you read it, you will notice how she was, from time to time, offered career advancement out of the blue by Indigenous supporters who had been taken in by her stories. Even a white grad student living on ramen in a basement apartment might be a little ticked about this. The University of Saskatchewan’s original claim that Prof. Bourassa hadn’t benefited from claiming Aboriginal ancestry is pathetic hokum: Bourassa tellingly accused her own sister of “looking for … a way to make some money” by accepting Indigenous scholarship funds during her PhD studies.

And it probably occurred to the USask brass sometime between the two press releases that an investigative reporter like Leo, in taking on a topic, always looks a couple articles ahead. Bourassa, for example, claims to have suffered from tuberculosis in her late 20s — a useful credential, unfortunately, for someone studying the field of Indigenous health. It’s useful because the disease has been nearly eliminated among non-Indigenous Canadians: the incidence rate for First Nations is 40 times higher, and the cases tend to be concentrated in remote northern Indigenous communities. Even if we overlook Bourassa’s propensity for creative autobiography … well, if she contracted TB, she was certainly very unlucky.

November 8, 2021

QotD: The Nanny State

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

By treating the poor as if they are not choosing their diets in any meaningful sense, people license themselves to start making choices for the poor. John doesn’t realise that his hamburger is killing him, so I’ll just take it away and give him a nice sliced turkey sandwich and an apple and if Johnny is very, very good Mommy will take him to the zoo later. I’ve never understood how the belief that a large swathe of our society is in need of a nanny is reconciled, ideologically speaking, with the belief that we should do everything we can to encourage those people to vote.

Jane Galt, “Suddenly, and for no apparent reason …”, Asymmetrical Information, 2005-05-16.

November 7, 2021

Prime Minister Look-at-my-socks loves the limelight at COP26

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

Jen Gerson on Canada’s fundamentally unserious Prime Minister Photo-Op grandstanding at the climate love-in in Glasgow:

In a rare moment of unity, both Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and NDP opposition leader Rachel Notley objected to Trudeau’s announcements.

“I don’t know why they would make an announcement like this without consulting with the province that actually owns the overwhelming majority of Canada’s oil and gas reserve,” said Kenney.

I mean, yeah. He’s right.

When asked for actual details about this brave new plan at COP26, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault didn’t have much to share … because the plan doesn’t exist yet. It’s a plan to make a plan.

“We will need to be developing this, and that’s exactly what we will be doing in the coming months,” Guilbeault said, according to the CBC. Both he and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson have asked the net-zero advisory board to help them come up with a plan. “Specifically, we seek your advice on key guiding principles to inform the development of quantitative five-year targets,” they said in a letter sent on Monday.

There’s no path, here. There’s been no discussion; no consultation, nothing. There’s not even a draft of an idea.

So why is Trudeau getting on a stage in front of the world’s leaders half-cocked with ambitious promises for an emissions cap before he’s worked out the details at home?

To quote Line co-founder Matt Gurney during our weekly meeting: “To ask that question is to answer it.”

Trudeau is signalling what he cares about and what he doesn’t. He’s more concerned with how the audience abroad perceives him than he is about the finer points of governing. It’s about getting back-pats by the Davos set, not actually running our embarrassing, open-pit G7 backwater.

It was hard to avoid the sense during the last election that Trudeau didn’t have his heart in the fight; that he’s more invested in acting the part of prime minister than being it.

I put little stock in rumours that the Liberal leader will soon leave his role — if you’re going to act a part, after all, there are few better. And what a great platform it provides for a launch to better things. But I do wonder: If someone offered him a ranking job at the UN or the WEF or something else with a suitably impressive acronym and a travel expense account, how long would he stick around?

Apparently we need to block the “Random Penguin & Schuster” merger to protect the 0.001%

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

In the most recent SHuSH newsletter from Kenneth Whyte, the US Department of Justice case against allowing the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster is examined in some detail:

On Tuesday, the US Justice Department (DOJ) filed suit to block Penguin Random House from purchasing its rival, Simon & Schuster, for $2.18 billion. It promises to be a fascinating case, in part because there’s so much at stake for the two firms involved, and also because of the unusual angle from which the DOJ is attacking the file.

As one of two US agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust law (the other is the Federal Trade Commission), the DOJ believes the proposed deal, struck last year, would leave Penguin Random House, already the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, “towering over its rivals”. The combined entity would have revenues more than twice its next closest competitor, and “outsized influence over who and what is published, and how much authors are paid for their work”.

Bertelsmann, owner of Penguin Random House, and Viacom, owner of Simon & Schuster, promise to fight the DOJ in court. They acknowledge that the Big Five Publishers, a grouping that also includes Hachette, HarperCollins, and Macmillan, will be a Big Four after the merger, but maintain that these firms plus new publishing entrants, such as Amazon, and an abundance of small and midsize publishers will provide sufficient competition for authors and books. “The publishing industry is, and following this transaction will remain, a vibrant and highly competitive environment,” they said in a joint statement.

So far, so ordinary corporate behaviour. Who or what do we need to protect, beyond hoping to maintain something vaguely resembling a competitive marketplace for books? A tiny sub-set of authors:

With this suit, the DOJ is taking a narrower approach. One test of whether a merger results in illegal market dominance is spelled out in the Horizontal Merger Guidelines jointly issued by the DOJ and the FTC: it asks if the combined firm would be in a position to increase its profits by imposing a price cut — a small but significant and lasting price cut — on one of its suppliers. In other words, if the new and enlarged Penguin Random House is better able than the old Penguin Random House to squeeze one supplier on one product line, the merger is illegal.

To apply this test to the deal, the DOJ needs to identify which supplier and which product line is vulnerable if the firms are allowed to merge. It has a range of options. Book publishing is a complicated marketplace, with many suppliers and product lines. Publishers sell books to retailers, and market books to consumers; they buy distribution services, printing, advertising, editorial services, and so on. The DOJ might have argued that a merged Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster would have the muscle to make its printers or copyeditors reduce their rates. Or that it could force retailers to accept smaller cuts of sales revenue.

Instead, the DOJ put its chips on the discreet line of business in which authors supply manuscripts to publishing houses. Its complaint says that the combined firm would have the power to improve its profits by significantly and permanently lowering the advances it pays to authors for the rights to publish their books.

Advances, notes the DOJ, provide the bulk of author income at the Big Five publishing houses (few authors earn out their advances and collect further royalties). Were Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster to combine, there would be nothing to deter it “from imposing a small, but significant, and non-transitory decrease in advances”. And if it did so, the complaint maintains, authors would have nowhere to turn. The DOJ ignores the existence of the other three members of the Big Five. It admits that the US has 3,000 small and mid-size houses but, these, according to the complaint, are economically irrelevant, mere “farm teams” for the big houses. Self-publishing, it adds, is not a serious alternative.

That may sound like the DOJ is suing to stop this merger on behalf of the writing community, a heartwarming notion, but it’s not. The lawsuit is primarily concerned with a small subset of writers: those who produce “anticipated top-selling books”. According to the complaint, there exists a small but definable market for “anticipated top-selling books”. It represents a distinct line of commerce, as required under the Clayton Act, and that is the real focus of the complaint.

The DOJ is going to war for sellers of “anticipated top-selling books”, the .001% of the publishing world.

Its lawyers foresee a time when Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster will target John Grisham and his ilk with lower advances, and John Grisham will have no choice but to accept. So far as the DOJ is concerned, that is how this merger fails the Horizontal Merger Guidelines, and why it is illegal. The phrase “anticipated top-selling books” appears 29 times in a 26-page document.

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