Quotulatiousness

October 12, 2021

The Southwest canary in the coal mine?

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

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?

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

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”

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

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

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

The most recent Chinese communist brainstorm involves the “Social Credit” (shehui xinyong) system, which has no connection whatsoever to the utopian early 20th-century economic proposal of that name. Under the Chinese system, citizens are issued 1,000 “credits” and then monitored cybernetically, electronically, and socially. Any “anti-social” or anti-party activity results in credits being taken away. It’s impossible to add points. After points drop to a certain level (it’s unclear exactly what this actually is; it’s also unclear how many points each offense costs, along with other details), penalties kick in. These range from being banned from airline travel and expelled from high-ranking schools to cutting down internet access and taking your dog away.

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”

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

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.

October 3, 2021

QotD: Taxes

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

Not paying taxes is against the law.
If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined.
If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed.
If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot.
Thus I — in my role as citizen and voter — am going to shoot you — in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck — if you don’t pay your fair share of the national tab.
Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, “Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?”

P.J. O’Rourke

September 29, 2021

If you squint carefully, you can pretend this is a “win” for equal rights …

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

In Tuesday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh “celebrates” the elimination of another barrier to American women achieving truly equal rights with American men:

“Soldiers complete a 5K in preparation for a jungle operations training course at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, May 12, 2021”
US Army photo by Spc. Jessica Scott.

Congratulations to the women of the United States, who took a big step toward full equality before the law last week. The punchline, if you want to call it that, is that this step was: “At long last, the ladies are eligible for military conscription.” Both houses of Congress have now passed versions of the annual military appropriations bill, which open the U.S. Selective Service System to females as well as males.

Conservative diehards on the Republican side were outnumbered nearly three to one in Thursday’s House vote, and while the House and Senate bills still have to be matched up for presentation to the president, the day of inverse liberation for young women seems imminent.

The whole thing is one of those mysteries of American tradition that naturally confuse citizens of other countries. Most of the European countries that require military service (or some substitute for conscientious objectors) are still unapologetically all-male. Israel, where military conscription is continuous and urgent and the armed services are perhaps the world’s most co-ed, actively drafts both sexes; the requirements are a touch more rigorous for the men. Norway registers both sexes for “mandatory” military service, but the instructional programs and the military generally are lightly funded at best, so only a fraction of the draftees are put to any trouble.

[…]

The minimum of debate that female draft registration has received is mostly concerned with the vague social implications of the hitherto existing one-sex policy. It’s perhaps a little awkward that boys have to undergo the weird rite of Selective Service passage — whether or not they are capable, physically or ethically, of fighting — and that girls don’t. Tough Republican-type women soldiers advocated for removing the sex discrimination because young females ought to know that they share responsibility for national defence and that the military is open to them. Oddly, no one (apart from Reason magazine) seems to concern themselves much with the social implications of the state being able to subject everybody to servitude and danger, and having a giant apparatus that exists to remind them of this subjection.

The way Reason magazine has been tacking hard to the left over the last five years means I’m actually mildly surprised that they bothered to point out the minor issue that conscription is a form of slavery …

September 28, 2021

“Eating healthy”? You’re doing it wrong

Filed under: Europe, Food, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Joanna Blythman pulls some useful tasty tidbits out of a recent Swedish study that contradicts much of what western governments have been pushing as “healthy” eating habits for the last fifty-plus years:

The NHS Eatwell Guide, fondly known to its critics as the Eat badly guide, still tells us to choose lower-fat products, such as 1% fat milk, reduced-fat cheese, or low-fat yoghurt. This is based on the inadequately evidenced postwar belief that saturated fat is bad for your heart.

How embarrassing, then, for government dietetic gurus, that a major study of 4,150 Swedes, followed over 16 years, has last week reported that a diet rich in dairy fat may lower, not raise your risk of cardiovascular disease.

This Swedish study echoes the findings of a 2018 meta-analysis of 29 previous studies, which also found that consumption of dairy products protects against heart disease and stroke.

A body of research also suggests that consumption of dairy fat is protective against type 2 diabetes.

[…]

Five a day
A slogan invented to shift more fruit and veg, but not one to live your life by

This catchy slogan, now a central plank of government eating advice, came out of a 1991 meeting of fruit and veg companies in California.

Five a day logos now appear on many ultra-processed foods, from baked beans to ready meals, imbuing them with a questionable aura of health.

But other than as a marketing tool, any justification for this slogan is thin.

[…]

The health case against meat is predicated on cherry-picked evidence from low-quality, unreliable, observational studies that fail to draw a distinction between meat in its unprocessed form and multi-ingredient, chemically altered, ultra-processed meat products, such as hotdogs.

Association doesn’t mean causation. Confounding factors exist; someone who eats bacon butties daily might also be eating too much sugar, be consuming lots of additive-laden bread, be under stress, or smoke – the list goes on.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer’s 2015 claim that red meat is “probably carcinogenic” has never been substantiated.

In fact, a subsequent risk assessment concluded that this is not the case.

September 27, 2021

Britain’s electricity grid facing the inevitable result of over-dependence on “renewable” generation

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

Peter Hitchens on the grim choices ahead for Britain, as the choice to switch to carbon-free electricity generation has left the country with a less reliable and more expensive grid:

These worrying signs came just after we learned that nothing, apart from luck and prayer, stands between us and a shutdown of our power grid. Our gas reserves are almost gone. We have blown up our coal-fired power stations. We have failed to build new gas-powered plants that should have replaced them. Our ancient nuclear power system is fast wearing out.

So we must rest our hopes on wind that does not always blow and on foreign power that may not arrive when we need it.

Can we even begin to imagine what will happen to us if this all goes wrong? We are far more reliant on electricity than ever before. The computers that govern all we do cannot run on anything else, and if they crash cannot be instantly switched on again.

In response, our allegedly conservative Prime Minister praises the green policies that have created this disaster, and pledges to continue them. And he is applauded for doing so.

We may not be facing The Day Of The Triffids, but we face the Day Of The Nitwits, when 30 years of relentless green zealotry send us spinning into the Third World.

There, we’ll be the only Third World country with a submarine-launched nuclear deterrent – Burkina Faso with rockets, as an old joke about the USSR went.

Once again, I saw this coming. Arguing with the Greta Thunberg lot is like arguing with the Spanish Inquisition. The only thing they want to hear from me is a full confession before they burn me at the stake, using carbon-free fuel.

So rather than contesting their faith, I suggested that our best future lies in non-polluting nuclear power. As long ago as 2006, I urged: “Building nuclear power stations, and making ourselves independent in energy, is at least as important as maintaining a nuclear bomb.” I also pointed out, rather before this was fashionable, that “the Russian threat is to our energy”.

Now, I don’t fantasise about being Prime Minister. The job seems to me to be unrewarding, unhealthy, physically exhausting and surprisingly powerless. But on this occasion I have to say that if I could have seen this in 2006, so could the Government and the Civil Service.

And if serious action had been taken then, we could now have a fleet of modern nuclear power stations that would make us secure in energy, and probably turn us into a power exporter.

Instead, leaders of both parties chose the path of vanity, an unusable Cold War superpower weapon, maintained at impossible cost long after the Cold War ended, and even longer after we ceased to be a superpower.

And they chose the pursuit of green policies – the most all-embracing, dimwit wooden-headed dogma since the death of Communism, without enough sense to take any precautions in case it did not work out.

Update: Link was broken.

QotD: The functions of the state

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

The great trouble today is that we have too many laws. I believe that primarily a government has but two functions — to protect the lives and property rights of citizens. When it goes further than that, it becomes a burden.

John Nance Garner, Vice President of the United States 1933-1937.

September 26, 2021

“… is there a single area of public policy where Canada has its shit together?”

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

In The Line‘s weekly round-up, they point out a little-noticed Globe and Mail article that illustrates something that should really concern Canadians:

Sometimes the big lessons are in the small things. While everyone was busy jawboning about the federal election returns earlier this week, we were also struck by a barely noticed story in the Globe and Mail reporting that the federal government had awarded a contract to begin replacing the disastrous Phoenix payroll system. Phoenix, you’ll recall, was an IT project designed to harmonize the payroll for the entire federal public service. The 2016 rollout was a disaster, resulting in thousands of employees being paid too much, too little, or not at all. Fixing it has cost billions and has not entirely succeeded, and now it is being replaced entirely.

We were still pondering this news when Alex Usher idly wondered: “Genuine question: is there a single area of public policy where Canada has its shit together?”

Alex isn’t some rando Twitter troll. By day he runs Canada’s premier higher education consultancy. But he’s also one of the country’s most perceptive policy analysts, writes a daily blog about just about anything policy related, and is probably one of the three or four smartest Canadians still on Twitter.

Which is why his question was met with more thoughtful responses than the usual schoolyard heckling that is typical of the platform. Fiscal policy between 1993 and 2015, offered Ken Boessenkool. Andrew Coyne half-heartedly suggested monetary policy. Rachel Curran proposed immigration, prisons, and the coast guard, but was quickly set right by people who knew what they were talking about.

So when Usher followed his question with a long Twitter thread showing just how broken Canada is, with a sophisticated and nuanced take on why that’s the case, there really wasn’t anyone left making a serious argument against him. Everyone knows it is true.

Everyone, that is, except two of the most politically polarized groups in the country, who disagree about everything except the capacities of the government.

On the one hand there are the Build Back Better people, mostly housed in the increasingly unpopular Liberal Party of Canada. These people persist in believing that the federal government is poised to make big decisions, to take big actions, on big issues such as climate change, pandemic preparedness, and dealing with the rise of China. They are prepared to talk big talk, and spend big money, in pursuit of their policy objectives.

On the other, there are the paranoid conspiracists who believe that the government is using the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic to implement all manner of social controls. These include suspicions that the government would use a contact tracing app to engage in mass surveillance, that they are putting a 5G payload into the vaccines, or that this is all part of a big Liberal internationalist plan to set up a world government.

While these seem to be diametrically opposed worldviews, what they share is the deep conviction that the government can actually do something. Indeed, what is charming about the conspiratorial worldview is how much faith it actually has in the authorities.

Confront China? Please. We can’t buy ships, planes or even handguns for our military. Pandemic preparedness? You’re kidding, right? We can’t even hire enough nurses for the health-care system. Set up a world government? Lol who would we hire to work for this government? We can’t even figure out how to pay the public servants we already have on staff.

As usual, the correct counter to conspiracy-minded thinking is not to have faith in government, it’s to be realistic about it. Similarly, the correct response to the build back better crew is not enthusiasm, but realism. And ultimately, the right approach to everything the government proposes is deep, deep, deep cynicism.

One of the major reasons I’ve long favoured smaller government — the smaller the better — is that the bigger any organization gets and the more things it tries to do, the less effective it is at all of them. Governments in the western world generally have gotten so big that they’re incapable of doing almost anything in an effective, competent, and repeatable manner. A hypothetical world government would be even worse (just look at the existing United Nations to see how billions of dollars not only get nothing useful done, but often exacerbate existing problems).

September 25, 2021

Samizdat from “Ozcatraz”

Filed under: Australia, Government, Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Through some miracle of invisible ink, blind mail drops, and all the necessary modern cloak-and-dagger technical equivalents, James Morrow manages to get some news out of locked-down-to-the-nth-degree Australia:

You really have to feel for the poor people at Tourism Australia.

Having spent decades happily if not particularly creatively pitching their product to the world with the time honoured formula of “beaches, Opera House, outback, crocs”, they now have to figure out how to sell a country that looks more and more like a tropical North Korea.

That is, of course, if the federal government ever lets visitors in again without forcing them to first spend a week or two quarantined in some prefab hotel or desert facility in the name of “keeping Australians safe”.

The question thus becomes, both for those of us trapped here in Ozcatraz as well as bemused outside onlookers, how did a free and easy land of opportunity become gripped by a neurotic covid puritanism that truly believes any sort of fun or joy or sociability is deadly, and a place where protesters and cops are having pitched battles in the street over mandatory vaccinations?

If you don’t believe me, consider that in Melbourne — ground zero for Australia’s covid madness, the city just crossed the line to become the most locked-down city in the world — the state premier ordered playgrounds shut and had concrete bollards hoisted into skate parks to stop kids from riding their bikes.

A few weeks ago, after some wags took advantage of a loophole that allowed bars to offer takeaway cocktails and organised an al fresco pub crawl, outdoor consumption of alcohol was banned always and everywhere.

Even a tiny loosening of restrictions there to allow beleaguered residents to meet up for a brief, vaccinated, socially distanced picnics left the prohibition on alcohol in place, all in the name of the Holy Blessed Science.

In Sydney, which is comparatively sane and where there is at least a decent plan to get back to some sort of vague simulacrum of normal over the next few months, everyone still has to “mask up” when outdoors, even if not around anyone else. The only socialising allowed is under very limited outdoor circumstances, among the fully vaccinated, who are not allowed to travel too far to meet up with one another.

What makes it most bizarre is that even the state’s health minister recently admitted outdoors was the safest place to be and everyone understands that the mask rule was imposed largely to shut up a depressingly totalitarian press gallery that wasn’t going to shut up until everyone was welded into their homes Wuhan-style.

Yet, as Sydney moves into summer, every weekend sees Twitter flooded with photos of sunbakers on local beaches asking WHY IS THIS ALLOWED? and demanding police action.

On any given Monday in the local park where I exercise my spaniel, my very earnest bourgeoise-left neighbours grumble about it all not being “in the spirit” of the health orders while rabbinically parsing whatever latest decree has just come down from the Temple, er, Ministry of Health.

Update: Alex Berenson confirms much of the situation in Oz (h/t to SDA for the link).

Americans have the wrong idea about Australia.

Thanks to some brilliant tourism branding and Crocodile Dundee, we think of it as rough-n-ready frontier country, Montana with bigger beer cans. The dingo ate my baby!

In reality it’s Canada with a mean streak. The Karens are in charge and they are mad.

[…]

So when Covid rolled in, the Australian government (and lots of Aussies) saw it as just another ugly export from China that needed to be beaten back at all costs. To its credit, Australia pushed hard for an independent investigation of the origins of Sars-Cov-2 last year (the Chinese pushed back, going so far as to call for a boycott of Australia’s delicious wine).

But Australia also went cray-cray — the technical term — for the fantasy of zero Covid. It effectively closed its borders not just to other countries but to its own citizens. For most of the last two years, they have had a hard time coming home — and an even harder time leaving.

[…]

Until the last couple of months, the frogs were not just luxuriating in the pot but asking for a little more heat! Australians were so pleased to be Covid-free — for the entire first half of 2021, they had only one Covid death — that the majority happily tolerated these restrictions.

Yes, a few rabble-rousers complained, but even videos of police arresting people inside their homes or attacking (truly) peaceful protestors didn’t dent support for the creeping police state.

But in the last couple of months, and especially the last few days, the equilibrium has shifted. And — inevitably — the response of Australia’s fearless leaders has been to try even harder to stamp down unrest. As a result, the situation is increasingly unstable.

QotD: The 2nd Amendment is obsolete because … the government has nukes?

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

Last week a congressman embarrassed himself on Twitter. He got into a debate about gun control, suggested a mandatory buyback — which is basically confiscation with a happy face sticker on it — and when someone told him that they would resist, he said resistance was futile because the government has nukes.

And everybody was like, wait, what?

Of course the congressman is now saying that using nuclear weapons on American gun owners was an exaggeration, he just wanted to rhetorically demonstrate that the all-powerful government could crush us peasants like bugs, they hold our pathetic lives in their iron hand, and he’d never ever advocate for the use of nuclear weapons on American soil (that would be bad for the environment!), and instead he merely wants to send a SWAT team to your house to shoot you in the face if you don’t comply.

See? That’s way better.

Larry Correia, “The 2nd Amendment Is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants To Nuke Omaha”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2018-11-19.

September 23, 2021

“The truth about the origins of Covid would have serious consequences for the US Government and its ‘public health’ bureaucracies …”

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

Mark Steyn on the deliberate blindness of western governments to any evidence that points to the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic actually originating in Wuhan:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

The first pieces published about ChiCom-19 at this website were on the insanity of empowering China and the lies of Beijing when it comes to the spread of infectious diseases. Nineteen months in, my main interest remains the origins of the WuFlu.

At the same time, one notices the almost total lack of interest in its origins from virtually anyone who matters, starting at the very highest levels of government. As Rumsfeld used to say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Somewhat analogously, overwhelming lack of interest in evidence is paradoxically evidence of interest. The truth about the origins of Covid would have serious consequences for the US Government and its “public health” bureaucracies, and for the broader “science” community and its peer-reviewed journals and grant-application processes. Furthermore, the public deference to political leaders who claim to be “following the science” — already fraying badly in France and Australia — would take a huge hit once it became clear that the killer virus is itself the creation of “science” and of a Washington public-health bureaucracy that followed it all the way to an insecure lab in Wuhan.

From my old friends at the Telegraph:

    New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.

    They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund the work.

    Papers, confirmed as genuine by a former member of the Trump administration, show they were hoping to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” to bat coronaviruses which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells.

Ah, I miss the old days when a Google search for “human-specific cleavage sites” would be strictly NSFW. Now it’s links that are Not Safe For Google or Facebook or Twitter or any of the other media so censorious of anything that dissents from the official line. The Telegraph report is based on the work of DRASTIC, the ad-hoc group of international researchers who, so Wikipedia assures us, “have engaged in personal attacks against virologists” – so just hitch your mask up over your ears and don’t listen to them.
As for “novel chimeric spikes”, that’s the last year and a half, starting with the chimera of “zero Covid”. And we are in this mess because the central strategy of American foreign policy for a third of a century — that China can be economically endowed into behaving as a normal part of the global order — is the biggest chimera of all.

September 22, 2021

The “She-lection” or the “what was that?” election or the “what was the point?” election

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

In Tuesday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh looks at the sham election we just experienced … differently … here:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

What to say about a federal election in which nothing happened? Surely last night’s refusal by the Canadian public to budge an inch is more astonishing than almost any other imaginable result could be. Our last two elections were separated by exactly 700 days. During that brief time, Canada experienced a science-fiction disease pandemic with mass death and violent protests, a fairly urgent diplomatic crisis with China, a dramatic change in the U.S. presidency, a foreign-policy disaster in Afghanistan, epic Liberal scandals and constitutional strife. Canadians seem to have lived through all of this and decided that it made no difference, or no net difference, in how they wanted to vote.

Maybe this could be considered a psychological defence reaction to the surprising prospect of an election. Given the incredible result — no consecutive Canadian elections have ever been remotely this close in seat outcome — we can hardly even say “surprising and unwelcome”. Everyone knew who was responsible for calling an election. In Liberal ridings, the response seems to have been gratitude for the opportunity to vote Liberal again so soon.

In conversation with a non-representative sample of Canadian voters outside the Toronto border, it’s rare to find people who admit to voting Liberal, yet clearly enough people did yet again — nearly 20,000 of them in my riding alone. I live in Erin O’Toole’s riding, so the winner wasn’t in a lot of doubt despite him not having any spare time to campaign here. I was pleased to find over 3,600 other Durham voters willing to vote PPC this time around, giving Patricia Conlin about 5.6% of the vote. I’ve generally been a Libertarian voter all these years … at least when there’s been a Libertarian candidate to vote for … but this time around as in 2019 the Libertarians didn’t have anyone running here, so voting PPC was my best option.

The more we watch NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh campaign, the more we think, “Toronto does have an awful lot of people who ought not to be especially eager to run headlong into stuff like wealth taxes and confiscatory rates on capital gains.” The New Democrats seem increasingly determined to cement their all-urban base among youths and convinced leftists with bolshie rhetoric. Are the resentful, hopeless millions they hope to add to these stagnant forces really out there? Was this an election result that reveals a populace disaffected with neoliberal capitalism — of a kind genuinely beset by rent-seeking, cronyism and corruption — and keen on revolutionary change?

Unfortunately, the very failure of the election to yield a different result probably means that every party can treat last night as a rehearsal rather than a test. NP Platformed‘s initial instinct, which we reserve the right to throw out, is that we’ll be back at it with the same cast of characters in another 700 days or so. Everyone failed: what else is there but to follow Beckett’s dictum? “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Other than Maxime Bernier, is there a federal party leader who can point to the results of this election and claim much more than a bare moral victory?

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