James Delingpole on the latest unfortunate burble from one of the much lesser members of the House of Windsor:
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle visit Titanic Belfast in March 2018. Photo from the Northern Ireland Office via Wikimedia Commons.
Prince Harry’s epic stupidity is probably inherited from his presumed father, the Prince of Wales. Prince Charles, too, only got two A levels — a B in History and a C in French — yet somehow strings were pulled to land him a place at Cambridge University (normally it would have required something like three A grades at A Level, plus a decent performance in the entrance exam), where he scraped a lowly 2:2 in History.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with being epically, fabulously, unbelievably stupid. Many upper-class men successfully make their brainlessness part of their comical charm. Where stupidity becomes unattractive and culpable, though, is when it’s deployed to comment on issues far, far above its pay grade, and when it’s afforded undeserved prestige.
No one as thick as Harry, it’s surely a given, ought ever be allowed on to a public platform to pronounce on issues as vital as the protection of free speech. Yet this is exactly what happened when Harry was given space to expound his half-baked views on a podcast. Sure, Harry had the good grace to admit that he hadn’t a clue what he was talking about:
I don’t want to start going down the First Amendment route because that’s a huge subject and one which I don’t understand because I’ve only been here a short time.
Unfortunately, that didn’t stop him declaring that he thought the First Amendment was “bonkers”.
His explanation as to why he thought so was a bit incoherent, but it seemed to involve his belief that it could be used for something bad called “ideology” and could be used as an excuse to “spread hate”. He added: “Laws were created to protect people.” What I’m guessing Harry was struggling to do was to try to wheel out the woke cliche that while free speech is fine, “hate speech” isn’t fine and should not enjoy constitutional protection. This threadbare argument can be demolished in a second by anyone with more than two A Levels. Essentially if “free speech” laws don’t protect “hate speech” then they are not really free speech protection laws at all.
Like Prince Harry, I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert on U.S. history. But I do dimly recall that round about the second half of the 18th century America’s colonists successfully freed themselves from rule by one of Prince Harry’s ancestors. The U.S. Constitution — and that pesky First Amendment — was one of the consequences.
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Reposting his most recent Maclean’s article on his website, Michael Geist explains why the federal government’s blatant hypocrisy over Canadians’ rights online has finally gotten many people paying closer attention:
The government had maintained that it had no interest in regulating user generated content, but the policy reversal meant that millions of video, podcasts, and the other audiovisual content on those popular services would be treated as “programs” under Canadian law and subject to some of the same rules as those previously reserved for programming on conventional broadcast services.
The backlash undoubtedly caught the government by surprise, particularly since the policy change garnered little discussion at committee. As the public concern mounted, Guilbeault retreated to his standard talking points about how the opposition parties were unwilling to stand up to the web giants. The arguments fell flat, however, since the new rules were directly targeting users’ content, not the Internet companies. Further, the public reaction pointed to a government increasingly out-of-step with the public, which may support increased Internet regulation, but not at any cost.
The fact that the Liberal government was open to regulating millions of TikTok and Youtube videos was a reminder of how unrecognizable its digital policy approach has become in recent years. The party was elected in 2015 on a platform that promised to entrench net neutrality, prioritize innovation, focus on privacy rather than surveillance, and support freedom of expression. Most of those positions now seemingly reflect a by-gone era.
It is still anxious to demonstrate its tech bona fides, but now progressive policies appear to mean confronting the “web giants” with threats of regulation, penalties, and taxes. Cultural sovereignty has replaced innovation as the guiding principle, which has meant the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry has been replaced by the Minister of Canadian Heritage as the digital policy lead.
And so for the past 18 months, Guilbeault has been handed Canada’s digital policy keys. In Guilbeault’s eyes, seemingly everything is under threat – Canadian film and television production, a safe space for speech, the future of news – and the big technology companies are invariably to blame.
Few would dispute that an updated tech regulatory model is needed, but evidence-based policies are in short supply in the current approach. For example, the use or misuse of data lies at the heart of the power of big tech, yet privacy reforms have been curiously absent as a government priority. Indeed, Bill C-11 was promoted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last November as legislation to give Canadians greater control over their personal information, but under newly named ISI Minister François-Philippe Champagne, it has scarcely been heard from again.
The government has similarly done little to address concerns about abuse of competition, the risks associated with algorithmic decision-making, or the development of a modernized framework for artificial intelligence. Years of emphasis on the benefits of multi-lateral policy development and consensus-building were unceremoniously discarded the recent budget in order to commit to a digital services tax in 2022 that could spark billions in tariff retaliation. In fact, the US-Canada-Mexico Trade Agreement that the government trumpeted as a major success story restricts Canada’s ability to even establish a new liability regime for technology companies.
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The Prohibition era is still just getting started, but criminal enterprises have already sprung up everywhere to supply thirsty Americans with their drink. In the “summer of sin” of 1922, one man in particular is making waves in the Chicago underworld.
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel and Lewis Braithwaite
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Colorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
Sources:
Library of Congress
Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “London” – Howard Harper-Barnes
– “Infinity Pool & Pool Tables” – Mythical Score Society
– “Rush of Blood” – Reynard Seidel
– “It’s Not a Game” – Philip Ayers
– “Please Hear Me Out STEMS INSTRUMENTS” – Philip Ayers
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “On the Edge of Change” – Brightarm Orchestra
– “British Royalty” – Trailer Worx
– “Break Free” – Fabien Tell
– “Steps in Time” – Golden Age Radio
– “Magnificent March 3” – Johannes Bornlöf
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
3 days ago
As you hopefully realized from the title, thumbnail, description, and first words coming out of Indy’s mouth, a big focus of this episode is the beginning of the gangland Prohibition era and the rise of Al Capone.
It’s a fascinating topic, but something else to draw attention to in this episode is the Catholic Church’s campaign against modernity. Last episode we saw how religion was forced into retreat by the Bolshevik regime in Russia, well this episode we’re seeing one of the oldest religious institutions in the world make its fightback. It shows that the story of modernity isn’t just “old things” fading away and being replaced by “new things”. Instead, it is a story of continual tension, negotiation, and adaption, between the old and the new.
Anyway, philosophical musings on religion aside, this really is an exciting episode and there will be much more on Al Capone and the Beer War in years to come.
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We have nothing like the First Amendment; our Supreme Court is a Leftist institution par excellence and has even decreed in effect that truth is no defense in cases where “protected groups” are insulted or offended. Paragraph 140 of a 2013 Judgment finds “that not all truthful statements must be free from restriction. Truthful statements can be interlaced with harmful ones or otherwise presented in a manner that would meet the definition of hate speech.” Section 15 (2) of the Constitution Act of 1982 abridges the rights that section 15(1) guarantees Canadian citizens.
Further, our Human Rights Tribunals are Soviet-style shadow courts that discard due process in adjudicating cases of supposed discrimination or “hate speech.” As Canadian Human Rights Commissioner Dean Steacy said: “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.” Openness to everything except freedom of speech, chartered principle and practical reason is the hallmark of our justice system, as it is of the nation. As Carl Sagan quipped in The Demon-Haunted World: “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”
We 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.
Music:
“Air Hockey Saloon,” by Chris Zabriskie
“Candlepower,” by Chris Zabriskie
“CGI Snake,” by Chris Zabriskie
“Heliograph,” by Chris Zabriskie
“Hallon,” by Christian Bjoerklund
From the comments:
Temporary Fakename
3 years ago
You know, i thought the Roman political system was pretty odd and arcane. But the Spartans have a dual monarchy that has absolute power, except when it doesn’t, an elected Senate that is chosen partially randomly that can pass whatever the hell they want with a public assembly and punish kings, except when an all-male aristocracy decided no, a female aristocracy that is overwhelmingly rich but can’t vote, and a population so terrified of its own slaves that it ritually committed atrocities against them. Compared to that Roman politics look simple and elegant.
I found the presentation quite interesting and informative, but I felt that some discussion of the differences between the terrible plight of the Helots and the not-quite-free status of the Perioikoi was merited. I also felt that the final segment on the eventual decline of Sparta missed a major factor — Spartan military defeats in the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC and the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BC — but reading down in the comments, I saw someone else had already brought this up:
xelena
2 years ago (edited)
This is a good video, but is missing a super important point at the end: The cause for the decline of Spartan power was its defeat by Epaminondas of Thebes and his freeing of Messenia (the land of the Helots). He also founded Messene in Messenia and Megalopolis in Arcadia for the Helots, which became a powerful check to Sparta. Spartan power never recovered from this death blow to its slave economy and continued to wither away into the nothingness you describe.
Epaminondas is mostly forgotten today, but he was one of the greatest men of antiquity. It was him and Pelopidas who put to bed the myth of Spartan invincibility and freed an entire people who had been enslaved for centuries. So in a way, the crippling blow did come from other Greeks, and the Helots did participate in it.
I’d always generally assumed that Colby Cosh was a libertarian-leaning chap, but here he is banging on the table for executing criminals with that revolutionary French device, the guillotine:
A double guillotine Musée de la Révolution française via Wikimedia Commons.
The history of the death penalty in the English-speaking world looks extremely bizarre from any vantage point in the year 2021. The electric chair, now abolished throughout the United States, has always been a stupid, barbarous idea: it sprouted from a time when electricity was a fashionable new technology, and then just kind of stuck around for a century. Gas chamber arrangements came and went.
Hanging, which is still employed in Japan, has centuries of technique behind it, but is recognizably a holdover from a period when the risk of prolonged death was considered a feature, not a bug. Now the U.S. depends on lethal injection methods, some of them antiquated or illogical, that are very capable of being screwed up.
And in the meantime, the guillotine had its foolproof two-century run in France. The famous Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a revolutionary opponent of capital punishment who advocated for the device as being more humane than existing methods. Can this be argued against even now? Measurement of the suffering involved with various methods of execution (or euthanasia) involves more uncertainty than anyone likes to admit, but patients receiving lethal injection, whether at their own request or the law’s, do receive sedation before actually being administered a fatal substance. The maximum duration of suffering in a beheading is a matter of seconds, not minutes; and if you believe in capital punishment without cruelty, there is no reason a person with a guillotine appointment should not be permitted to load up in advance on drugs of their own choosing.
The guillotine’s last use in France, and anywhere else in the world, took place on Sept. 10, 1977. It is associated in Anglo-Saxon minds with everything from French revolutionary terror to the Gestapo and the Stasi. There are good reasons to be reluctant to introduce mechanization of any kind into the process of executing murderers. Perhaps it makes the fatal step toward killing mere political enemies a little easier.
But, again, Americans used the electric chair without noticeable shame for more than 100 years: it came into use on a wave of passion for modernity before anyone even knew exactly how electricity kills you. Beheading’s principal problem, assuming one is willing to contemplate the taking of a human life by the state, is janitorial.
An investigation into the conduct of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) shows an organization that firmly believes — and acts — as though it is above the law:
To its credit, RCMP leadership accepted the findings of the CRCC [Civilian Review and Complaints Commission]. But the rank and file membership, the actual police officers who interact with the public, and their union, have rejected the report, calling it biased.
All of this is a stain on Canada’s top law enforcement agency, and part of a deeper failure by the RCMP to meaningfully address its own reluctantly acknowledged systemic racism toward Indigenous peoples, but it is far from criminal misconduct.
Unfortunately for the RCMP, obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence is very much a criminal offence and it looks like the boys in red should lawyer up.
In the course of the CRCC investigation, the commission requested all recordings, transcripts, and radio communications from the day of the shooting. These communications would have undoubtedly been important to the investigation and could have provided a window into why the RCMP engaged in illegal and discriminatory conduct.
But the RCMP destroyed those records. They claimed that it was part of a routine procedure and that records with no evidentiary value have a shelf life of two years. Except the RCMP knew that there was an ongoing CRCC investigation and a civil lawsuit by the Boushie family when they destroyed the records.
If you or I destroyed relevant records, while staring down a barrel of a civil lawsuit or investigation, we would end up before a judge on charges.
Every time I ask the RCMP to destroy records relating to my clients who have been acquitted at trial, even after years have passed, I am met with a wall of resistance. So it seems a bit convenient when relevant documents are so easily destroyed when it is the RCMP who are being investigated.
The CRCC report also discloses that the RCMP conducted a parallel investigation into the Boushie incident — with officers questioned and evidence gathered. This RCMP investigation not only potentially contaminated the CRCC inquiry, but the RCMP kept their investigation a secret and failed to disclose the fruits of their internal investigation to the CRCC.
This all reeks of a cover up and an attempt to obstruct justice.
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The Romans were often at war but have you ever stopped to consider how exactly that was announced. Turns out the Romans had a complicated ritual associated with declarations of war aimed at making their casus belli apparent before the gods. I hope you enjoy this documentary on ancient government and religion!
Sources: History of Rome Book I by Titus Livius Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome by Lesley Adkins The Rise of Rome by Anthony Everitt
Music:
“Quirky Comedy” by 8th Mode Music
#RomanHistory
#HowTheyDidIt
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Heh. State representative Fred Maslack of Vermont has proposed a bill under which non-gun-owners would have to register and pay a fee. Entertainingly enough, there is actual justification for this in a careful reading of the Vermont state constitution.
The Hon. Rep. Maslack is joking. I think. And I’m against requiring people who don’t want to bear arms to do so. But gad, how tempting – because underlying his argument is a truth that the drafters of the Vermont and U.S. constitutions understood. People who refuse to take arms in defense of themselves and their neighbors are inflicting a cost on their communities far more certainly than healthy people who refuse to buy medical insurance (and yes, I do think that proposed mandate is an intended target of Maslack’s jab). That externality is measured in higher crime rates, higher law-enforcement and prison budgets, and all the (dis)opportunity costs associated with increased crime. And that’s before you get to the political consequences …
I’ve never made a secret of my evaluation that refusal to bear arms is a form of moral cowardice masquerading as virtue. Real adults know how precious human life is, when they are ethically required to risk it on behalf of others, and when killing is both necessary and justified. Real adults know that there is no magic about wearing a police or military uniform; those decisions are just as hard, and just as necessary, when we deny we’re making them by delegating them to others. Real adults do not shirk the responsibility that this knowledge implies. And the wistful thought Rep Maslack’s proposal leaves me with is … maybe if moral cowardice cost money and humiliation, there would be less of it.
In a recent post at Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander posted a link to an article in the US Naval Institute Proceedings putting forward arguments for the United States issuing modern day Letters of Marque. Today he posted a few reactions from his readers to the proposal:
On the article about privateers, local naval expert Bean writes:
It’s time for the standard disclaimer any time Proceedings comes up: Proceedings is intended as a forum for discussion of matters of interest to naval officers, and it is not peer reviewed. Often very not peer reviewed. Like in this case. Please don’t judge the USNI on the basis of this stuff. They do a lot of good work.
And yes, it is that stupid. First, privateering is probably illegal today. The US didn’t sign the 1856 Paris declaration outlawing it, but the ban is almost certainly considered customary international law today, and thus binding on the US, too. (International law is very weird.)
Second, it makes no sense. It was something that people did in an era when the ability of the state to do things was sharply constrained, and it was never all that profitable. These days, the government is a lot more effective, and if it wants to hunt Chinese commerce (never mind the issues about who owns the cargo, which is rather different in the days of worldwide communications and the shipping container) it will make auxiliary commerce raiders of its own. There’s definitely no need to have a DDG sit outside a Brazilian port waiting. Take any reasonable civilian ship (big yacht, fishing boat, tug, whatever) and fit it with a couple of 40mm guns and a boarding party. Have it do the waiting instead.
And our other defense expert, John Schilling, writes:
Modern naval weapons are too good at sinking ships, whereas privateering requires capturing ships intact to be profitable. For a trivial, and in this context uncontroversial, investment, China can equip their merchant fleet with defensive weapons that will sink any privateer, unless the privateer sinks them first.
– Privateers, being incapable of surviving a fight with real warships (especially modern ones), need to be able to hide from and if necessary outrun enemy warships. That’s a lot harder to manage in a world of radio, radar, maritime patrol aircraft, and satellites. Harder still if you insist on taking prizes, which will be Lojacked beyond your ability to clear at sea. Even in a hot war with the United State, China will probably be able to spare e.g. an H-6K for a day to sink the privateer that just sank one of China’s freighters, and that’s all it will take.
– The rest of the world regards privateering as flat-out illegal, so virtually all of the ports of the world will be closed to the privateers *and their prizes*. Operating in the South China Sea directly from Hawaii, without any intermediate bases (what’s left of Guam will have its hands full), is going to be logistically challenging to say the least. And the value of that prize ship you just took is greatly diminished if it can only be used in the US coastal trade, its cargo sold only on the US domestic market never to be reexported.
This is a stupid idea that keeps coming back every year or two because somebody read too many Napoleonic sea-adventure stories and thinks they’re the only one who read those stories so their clever “obscure” idea is something the rest of us haven’t heard and rejected a dozen times already.
There’s a problem in medicine where people think doctors are trustworthy experts. While this is often true, there are about a million doctors, and some tiny fraction of them are insane. The reasonable doctors mostly keep their mouths shut, but sometimes an insane doctor will endorse some sort of terrible alternative medicine, and then people will get excited: “A doctor endorsed it! It must be real!” The fact is, you can find doctors saying pretty much any bizarre thing — I hear some of them even have Substacks.
My thought when reading that article was “this sounds crazy … but wait! It’s written by a colonel and published by the US Naval Institute! That sounds just wacky enough to make a good link!”
Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this.
Colonels absolutely do work the same way as doctors, lawyers, and (especially) journalists — Michael Chrichton christened this the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect”.
The topic is as good an excuse as I’m likely to find to post Mark Knopfler’s “Privateering”:
“Privateering”
Yon’s my privateer
See how trim she lies
To every man a lucky hand
And every man a prize
I live to ride the ocean
The mighty world around
To take a little plunder
And to hear the cannon sound
To lay with pretty women
To drink Madeira wine
To hear the rollers thunder
On a shore that isn’t mine
Privateering we will go
Privateering, yo ho ho ho
Privateering we will go
Yo ho ho, yo ho ho
The people on your man o’ war
Are treated worse than scum
I’m no flogging captain
And by God I’ve sailed with some
Come with me to Barbary
We’ll ply there up and down
Not quite exactly
In the service of the Crown
To lay with pretty women
To drink Madeira wine
To hear the rollers thunder
On a shore that isn’t mine
Privateering we will go
Privateering, yo ho ho ho
Privateering we will go
Yo ho ho, yo ho ho
Look’ee there’s my privateer
She’s small but she can sting
Licensed to take prizes
With a letter from the King
I love the streets and taverns
Of a pretty foreign town
Tip my hat to the dark-eyed ladies
As we sally up and down
To lay with pretty women
To drink Madeira wine
To hear the rollers thunder
On a shore that isn’t mine
Privateering we will go
Privateering, yo ho ho ho
Privateering we will go
Yo ho ho, yo ho ho
Britannia needs her privateers
Each time she goes to war
Death to all her enemies
Though prizes matter more
Come with me to Barbary
We’ll ply there up and down
Not quite exactly
In the service of the Crown
To lay with pretty women
To drink Madeira wine
To hear the rollers thunder
On a shore that isn’t mine
Privateering we will go
Privateering, yo ho ho ho
Privateering we will go
Yo ho ho, yo ho ho
Any criminologist will tell you that criminals as a group are also highly deviant in ways that are not criminal. They have very high rates of accidental injury, alcoholism, nicotine addiction, and involvement in automobile collisions. They have poor impulse control. They have high time preference (that is, they find it difficult to defer gratification or regulate their own behavior in light of distant future consequences). And they’re stupid, well below the whole-population average in IQ or whatever other measure of reasoning capacity you apply. I’m going to revive a term from early criminology and refer to these dysfunctional deviants as “jukes”.
One clue to the long-term fall in crime rates may be that most of the juke traits I’ve just described are heritable. Note that this is not exactly the same thing as genetically transmitted; children may to a significant extent acquire them from their families by imitation and learning.
The long-term fall in crime rates suggest that something may have been disrupting the generational transmission of traits associated with criminal deviance. Are there plausible candidates for that something? Are there selective pressures operating against jukeness that have become more pressing since the 1960s?
I think I can name three: ready availability of intoxicants, contraception, and automobiles.
Once I got this far in my thinking I realized that the authors of Freakonomics got there before me on one of these; they argued for a strong forward influence from availability of abortion to decreased crime rates two decades later. And yes, I know that a couple of conservative economists (Steve Sailer and John Lott) think they’ve found fatal flaws in the Levitt/Dubner argument; I’ve read the debate and I think Levitt/Dubner have done an effective job of defending their insight.
But I’m arguing a more general case that subsumes Levitt/Dubner. That is, that modern life makes juke traits more dangerous to reproductive success than they used to be. Automobiles are a good example. Before they became ubiquitous, most people didn’t own anything that they used every single day and that so often rewarded a moment’s inattention with injury or death.
Ready availability of cheap booze and powerful drugs means people with addictive personalities can kill themselves faster. Easy access to contraception and abortion means impulse fucks are less likely to actually produce offspring. More generally, as people gain more control over their lives and faster ways to screw up, the selective consequences from bad judgment and the selective premium on good judgment both increase.
In 1977, Roman Polanski drugged, raped, and sodomized a 13-year-old girl. When he believed a sort-of-plea-bargain was about to come unstuck, he took it on the lam. He lived the high life in this self-imposed exile for thirty years, until busted in Switzerland recently. Now various of the usual suspects on the right wing’s enemies list are campaigning to block his extradition.
There’s a good deal of perplexity being expressed about this, and some predictable chuntering from right-wingers about lefties being moral degenerates. But this flap isn’t really about politics at all — it’s much simpler than that. It’s about people who think of themselves as “artistes” reserving themselves a get-out-of-jail card when they feel like behaving like repellent scum of the earth, too.
[…]
If you want to make that argument, Roman Polanski makes a great stake in the ground — not in spite of the heinousness of his crime, but because of it. If even a child-raper can invoke the all-purpose artiste excuse for scumminess, than the merely ordinary transgressions of artistes become trivia to be airily dismissed. And if the Polanski case becomes a “teachable moment” whereby people can be talked into feeling like boors or philistines for even thinking that artistes should be held to civilized standards of behavior, so much the better!
None of this is more than tenuously connected to leftism, and I have to say the the right-wing efforts to gin up indignation on that score sound quite contrived and stupid to me. This dispute isn’t about politics, it’s about privilege — not just whether Roman Polanski is above the law, but about whether his defenders can claim to be too.
Colby Cosh on a recent incident in Regina where a Canada Post employee took it upon himself to act as a local censor for people on his delivery route:
Today’s idiot of the day is not, perhaps surprisingly, the Regina postman who got suspended for refusing to deliver the Epoch Times, the oddball anti-communist newspaper that’s affiliated with China’s persecuted Falun Gong religious movement. Don’t get us wrong: Ramiro Sepulveda is clearly a bit of a nitwit. He seems to believe that a newspaper founded by commie-hating Chinese-Americans is designed to provoke hatred toward “Asian communities in North America.”
Sepulveda didn’t want to deliver free copies of the Times to non-soliciting customers because it “spits lies.” Perhaps regrettably, the strong reaction by Canada Post means that our junk mail, quite a lot of which consists of boastful missives from politicians, is not destined to be fact-checked and aggressively suppressed by the corporation’s rank and file.
Sepulveda was properly punished for not doing his job. And Canada Post used the opportunity to promote its content-neutrality as an agent of the state, although it did not quite dare to use the phrase “statutory monopoly.” In a statement to the broadcasters who reported on Sepulveda’s off-piste personal fact-checking, the agency said: “Canada Post is obligated to deliver any mail that is properly prepared and paid for, unless it is considered non-mailable matter. The courts have told Canada Post that its role is not to act as the censor of mail or to determine the extent of freedom of expression in Canada.”
They might have added that access to the mail has been denied to individuals for spreading hatred only a handful of times in the history of the country; this, too, is as it ought to be, and it is certainly not postal employees who ought to be improvising such bans. Ideally, all postmen would be doing their best not to create the suspicion that they are eyeballing what is sent to our homes with the intention of ringing up a reporter and causing a fuss. Say what you like about these poor toilers: most of them never give us any reason to doubt their discretion.
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A tale as wild as the Seven Seas, the story of the Lady Juliana, a special convict ship full of prisoners sent to Australia, is one of the strangest in the continent’s history. The Lady Juliana had a specific mission: carrying a cargo of female prisoners the British government hoped would help reform the struggling convict colony in New South Wales. This motley crew of British women ultimately had a lasting impact on the history of Australia.
#prisonship #australia #weirdhistory
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… “loopholes” is a term most often used by people who don’t understand accounting or tax law, to complain about how somebody else used the existing laws created by congress to pay less than what that person thinks is “fair.” Regular people have heard the bullshit term loopholes tossed around so much that they start to believe that it is some magical easy button that rich guys can just push that makes it so they don’t have to pay taxes.
Nope. They’re just laws. These “loopholes” exist because at some point in time congress (both democrat and republican both!) decided that they wanted to promote some type of behavior or discourage some other behavior. So they basically put a reward into the law saying if you do this thing we like, you’ll pay less taxes! Or the opposite, congress wanted to discourage some behavior, so if you do that thing we don’t want, it will cost you more.
Both sides have done this forever, state and federal. We want you to drive electric cars so if you buy an electric car you get a tax break this year. YAY! Uh oh, we want you to stimulate the economy by buying this kind of machinery faster, so you have to depreciate your assets this other way or you’ll pay more! BOO! You get a discount for paying your employees health insurance, YAY! Oh, wait … Not that kind of health insurance. BOO!
So on and so forth, up and down, these perks come and go, all based upon whatever behavior congress is trying to promote at that time (or what favors they are doing for their friends). Why was mortgage interest deductible? Because at one point congress said “we really want people to own houses!” Even regular people have things that are considered “loopholes” to somebody.
So when the blue check mark journalism major (who probably dropped out of PoliSci because “there’s too much math”) declares that it is immoral that some rich dude didn’t pay his fair share because he used loopholes, those are basically a bunch of meaningless buzz words strung together to prey on the feelings of the gullible.
