Quotulatiousness

December 20, 2025

The “pursuit” of the Brown University shooter as a parable of incompetence

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Mark Steyn is supremely unimpressed with the quality of police work demonstrated by the “forty-seven genius law-enforcement agencies” apparently involved in investigating the murders at Brown University and the murder of an MIT nuclear fusion expert:

The Brown University shooter has been found dead by his own hand in a storage locker in southern New Hampshire. The entire officialdom of Providence, Rhode Island celebrated by throwing “the most worthless, uninformative, cover-your-ass press conference I have ever seen in my entire life“.

You’ll be glad to hear that the DEI Mayor of Providence has declared “we believe that you remain safe in our community“. He said this at 11pm last Sunday, but his statement was technically true because at that point the shooter was driving out of “our community” up to someone else’s community to kill an MIT professor, who would assuredly be alive today had not everybody in Providence bungled everything that could be bungled. The storage-locker guy and the Boston guy are both Portuguese nationals of the same age who are believed by the FBI to have attended the same university in Lisbon at the end of the last century. What that means, who knows? A random mass-shooting as prelude to something more personal and targeted? As is now traditional, I doubt we shall ever know, […] However, we do know how the forty-seven genius law-enforcement agencies “cracked the case”. An Internet user saw this post on Reddit, and brought it to the attention of one of the forty-seven agencies, who shortly thereafter swung into what passes for action. Here’s what the Redditor wrote:

    I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That was the car he was driving. It was parked in front of the little shack behind the Rhode Island Historical Society on the Cooke St side. I know because he used his key fob to open the car, approached it and then something prompted him to back away. When he backed away he relocked the car. I found that odd so when he circled the block I approached the car and that is when I saw the Florida plates. He was parked in the section between the gate of the RIHS and the corner of Cooke and George St.

That’s it. That’s the entire “investigation”. “He blew this case right open. He blew it open,” cooed the Rhode Island Attorney-General, Peter Neronha. “That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs of that individual renting the car, which matched the clothing of our shooter here in Providence, that matched the satchel which we see here in Providence.”

Great. His name is “John”, and he had multiple interactions with the killer on the day of the shooting — both in the bathroom of the building two hours beforehand and by the car to which the killer kept circling back to see if “John” had ended his apparent stakeout of the vehicle. He spoke to the man long enough to determine that he had an “Hispanic” accent. In fact, Portuguese. But close enough. Or closer than the forty-seven kick-ass agencies.

But here’s the thing: “John” only wrote his post on Reddit because nobody on the scene was interested in what he’d seen that day. “John” is apparently a homeless man who lives in the basement below the scene of the shooting.

Come again? Brown University lets the homeless live in its faculty buildings? You might want to bear that in mind if you’re thinking of taking on six-figure debt to be gunned down at the Ivy League.

Oh, wait, no, relax: “John” is not any old homeless man but a graduate of Brown. They’re not all working as baristas. So it’s some grandfathered-in alumni legacy racket.

Which brings us to the other thing: He was generally known to be living there. So, on Saturday or at the very latest Sunday, why did no-one from the forty-seven kick-ass agencies seek to interview him? His would surely have been a unique perspective: neither teacher nor pupil, but someone who knows the building after-hours and observes the comings and goings. One expects the three-mil-a-year DEI president’s “campus security” to totally suck, but how can you call in the FBI and then the elite best-of-the-best G-men not be aware that there’s a guy living in the basement under the scene of the crime who had multiple interactions with the perp?

As I have had cause to remark a thousand times, nothing works anymore. When I observe that of the UK, English readers get mildly peeved. When I observe it of the Fifth Republic, French readers start gabbling and waving their Gauloise-stained hands around so animatedly their strings of onions fall from their shoulders. And, when I observe it of the United States, American readers get particularly chippy. But I’m an equal-opportunity civilisational doom-monger: we’re all going over the falls, and arguing that the canoe of the Euro-pussies or the tight-assed Brits is a foot-and-a-half ahead isn’t really much consolation. Police-wise, the Aussie constabulary bollocksed Bondi Beach and the forty-seven Yank agencies bollocksed Brown and MIT.

Of course, with the revelation that the shooter may have been Portuguese, the race hustlers are busy re-sorting the hierarchies of victimhood:

December 18, 2025

“You can still hunt”

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

The Canadian federal government is working diligently (well, “diligently” by civil service standards) to disarm Canadians, and have been doing so for decades now. Rather than cracking down on criminal use of firearms, which would be difficult, they concentrate their efforts on literally the most law-abiding group of Canadian citizens — legal gun owners … because it’s easy, safe, and gets them lots and lots of friendly media coverage from the equally anti-gun Canadian media (few of whom even know any gun owners personally).

One of the constant replies when legal gun owners protest against yet another gun grab or tightened legal restriction is along the lines of “this doesn’t affect you: you can still hunt” … but hunting is only a part of Canadian gun ownership, and not the largest part. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Gun Owners of Canada explains why “you can still hunt” is neither helpful nor constructive in the larger conversation:

We keep hearing the same tired line:

“You can still hunt.”

But that’s not what this is about.

That phrase exists because it’s simple, relatable, and politically convenient for people who don’t understand Canada’s firearm laws or their history. If you do understand them, you’re in the minority.

For most Canadian firearm owners, shooting has never been just about hunting. Yes, we hunt — but the bulk of our time is spent at the range, participating in recreational and competitive target shooting. That’s where families gather, skills are learned, friendships are built, and the next generation is introduced to safe, responsible firearm ownership.

Sport shooters are the backbone of the firearms community and the industry that supports it. We shoot year-round, we buy ammunition regularly, and we keep ranges and retailers alive. Many hunters will bring the same box of ammo to camp year after year. Both matter — but they are not the same.

Over the past six years, lawful firearms have been prohibited, replaced, and then prohibited again. Models that once brought families together at the range can no longer be used. That experience — one many of us grew up with — is increasingly out of reach for our kids.

This admin grew up at the range with parents and grandparents deeply involved in Canadian shooting sports. That’s where lifelong relationships were formed. Many of those people don’t hunt at all — but they are responsible, licensed, community-minded Canadians.

So when restrictions strip away lawful, safe activities while violent criminals face little consequence, don’t expect silence — or gratitude.

This isn’t about hunting.

It’s about what’s been taken, who it’s been taken from, and who’s expected to quietly accept it.

Don’t accept it. Get involved. It’s not like there aren’t enough advocacy groups to join and political avenues to get involved in.

For my own part, I no longer have the resources to do any shooting, but I was always interested in target shooting, not hunting. It was fun, and isn’t that what your hobbies should be for? Back when I sometimes travelled on business, I used to envy my American co-workers who had legal access to a plethora of shooting ranges and a much-less restrictive licensing regime. Every chance I got to go out to the range and try new-to-me rifles and pistols was like an adult version of a trip to the candy store. The one time I was nearly shot, ironically, was on a military target range when I was in the army reserves … an idiot (who out-ranked me) had a misfire with his submachine gun and turned away from the target towards me as the round fired. Fortunately, the bullet went in a safe-ish direction and nobody was hurt.

Update, 19 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 15, 2025

Clankers on the bench, again

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack, Helen Dale discusses the most recent high profile case of clanker mis-use in the justice system, as Scottish Employment Judge Sandy Kemp clearly leaned far too heavily on ChatGPT or another AI instance to crank out 312 pages of dubious content:

Grok generated this in response to the request for “Robbie the Robot as a judge”

Maybe Judge Kemp only identifies as a judge, because the farrago of nonsense he’s managed to produce in the Peggie matter is, well, a sight to behold.

Industry news/gossip magazine Roll on Friday — otherwise known as the “orange time-suck” among City solicitors — has a handy run-down of the most egregious fake quotations, selective editing, and incorrect citations. It’s a concise one-stop-shop for Peggie errors, although they’ve already had to add to it since it was published yesterday.

The situation is far more serious than the single — and that was bad enough — fake quotation from Forstater, since corrected by means of what lawyers call “the slip rule”. Notably, the corrected quotation does not support the point Judge Kemp wanted to make, rendering the passage nonsensical.

The slip rule or procedure — something many of us have seen in practice — exists to fix typos, wrong page/paragraph numbers, misspellings. One common error I remember from my pupillage days is fat-fingered judges leaving the “o” out of county in “County Court”, which of course litters the judgment with “Cunty Court”. Yes, everyone laughs and says “typo”, but things like this do have to be fixed.

The Roll on Friday piece notes that the Peggie opinion presents “a summary as if it was a quote from a judgment”, something that “appears to be a recurring issue”. This, as most people know by now, is a hallmark of AI.

I can’t prove that Judge Kemp used ChatGPT or Grok or a bespoke AI made available through the Judicial Office, although my suspicions are strong on this point. As an associate back in the oughts (a special kind of pupil barrister who works for a judge in a superior state or federal court in Australia), I’ve drafted multiple legal judgments. I have a good idea about what goes into them.

I also don’t know if Judge Kemp is on the transactivist side of this particular debate. I do know, however, that the judgment is dreadfully written and full of woolly reasoning, and — as other people have pointed out — all the errors tend in one direction.

I’m now going to set out what I think has happened, with the caveat that I could be wrong — something no-one will know until the appeal is heard and an opinion handed down.

December 12, 2025

British Columbia’s embrace of UNDRIP entails vast unintended consequences

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

The government of British Columbia may have downplayed or even deliberately lied about the impact of incorporating the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) into BC’s legal system, but I suspect even they are suddenly realizing just what a legal disaster they have unleashed on their province (and indirectly, on the rest of Canada):

A map showing the Cowichan title lands outlined in black. These lands were declared subject to Aboriginal title by the BC Supreme Court earlier this year, in accordance with the UNDRIP provisions added to BC law in 2019.

When the B.C. NDP introduced a 2019 act committing the province to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), they very specifically assured critics that it would not be a “veto” over existing laws.

“The UN declaration does not contain the word veto, nor does the legislation contemplate or create a veto”, Scott Fraser, the province’s then Indigenous relations minister, told the B.C. Legislative Assembly.

Fraser explained that it was not “bestowing any new laws”, it would not “create any new rights” and it certainly wouldn’t make B.C. subservient to a UN declaration.

Fraser would even explicitly assure British Columbians that there was no conceivable future in which, say, a private landowner could suddenly see their property declared Aboriginal land.

“We are not creating a bill here that is designed to have our laws struck down,” he said.

That it only took six years for all of these scenarios to take place may explain why there is so much panic in B.C. right now.

The newly appointed head of the B.C. Conservative Party is calling for an emergency Christmas session of the legislature to excise UNDRIP from provincial law, saying it has become an anti-democratic tool.

Even B.C. Premier David Eby — a onetime champion of the legislation — has said that “clearly, amendments are needed”.

And British Columbians, whose support for the UN law was already not great, are growing restless. According to an Angus Reid Institute poll released on Wednesday, Eby ranks as one of the least popular provincial leaders in the country.

What changed was a Dec. 5 B.C. Appeals Court ruling that not only struck down a B.C. law (the Mineral Tenure Act) on the grounds that it violated UNDRIP, but effectively ruled that any law or government action could similarly be overturned if it wasn’t in line with the 32-page UN declaration.

By writing UNDRIP into B.C. law, the province had adopted the Declaration as “the interpretive lens through which B.C. laws must be viewed and the minimum standards against which they should be measured”, read the majority decision.

Although UNDRIP is mostly filled with uncontroversial declarations about languages and traditional medicine, its clauses are pretty uncompromising when it comes to issues of land use or resource development.

“Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired”, reads a subsection of Article 26. It also states that Indigenous peoples “own, use, develop and control” any land that they’ve held traditionally.

Eby is saying that the courts took it too far, and that writing UNDRIP into B.C. law was only ever meant as a holistic decision-making guide, rather than a law superceding all others.

As Eby told reporters this week, by signing onto UNDRIP, B.C. wasn’t intending to put courts “in the driver’s seat”.

QotD: Crime and the army

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Law, Military, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

By a “crime” the ordinary civilian means something worth recording in a special edition of the evening papers — something with a meat-chopper in it. Others, more catholic in their views, will tell you that it is a crime to inflict corporal punishment on any human being; or to permit performing animals to appear upon the stage; or to subsist upon any food but nuts. Others, of still finer clay, will classify such things as Futurism, The Tango, Dickeys, and the Albert Memorial as crimes. The point to note is, that in the eyes of all these persons each of these things is a sin of the worst possible degree. That being so, they designate it a “crime”. It is the strongest term they can employ.

But in the Army, “crime” is capable of infinite shades of intensity. It simply means “misdemeanor”, and may range from being unshaven on parade, or making a frivolous complaint about the potatoes at dinner, to irrevocably perforating your rival in love with a bayonet. So let party politicians, when they discourse vaguely to their constituents about “the prevalence of crime in the Army under the present effete and undemocratic system”, walk warily.

Ian Hay (Major John Hay Beith), The First Hundred Thousand: Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of “K(1)”, 1916.

December 1, 2025

If they’re behind bars, they can’t easily re-offend

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

In City Journal, Tal Fortgang makes the case for keeping repeat offenders in prison (which used to be the norm) rather than allowing the small minority of violent criminals to rejoin society ever more easily and more speedily:

Approaching the dock at Alcatraz on a foggy January afternoon, 1991.
Photo by Nicholas Russon

It’s fashionable to blame America’s high incarceration rates on social injustice — and law enforcement — rather than lawbreaking. If policymakers would just provide disadvantaged people with sufficient resources and economic opportunity, on this view, the crime problem could be solved. That utopian vision gained traction during the mad summer of 2020, when activists, rioters, and the mainstream press, reacting to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sought to replace law enforcement with programs that target the root causes of antisocial behavior. “As a society,” wrote activist Mariame Kaba in the New York Times, “we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm”.

The truth is otherwise. As Hyland’s case exemplified, violent crime is overwhelmingly the work of a small group of repeat offenders — that is, it is highly concentrated. The remedy, as [political scientist James Q.] Wilson argued half a century ago in his classic book Thinking About Crime, is not social engineering but incapacitation: keeping the violent few from striking again.

Most people are not teetering on the edge of felony, waiting to become, in the Left’s favored euphemism, a “justice-impacted individual”. The overwhelming majority of Americans never engage in serious criminal behavior, let alone commit violent felonies like murder or armed robbery. But those who do are likely to do so again, the evidence shows. Indeed, crime’s concentration is one of the most well-established findings in social science. In 1972, University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang reported that just 6 percent of males in a birth cohort accounted for 52 percent of all police contacts. (Violent crime, in particular, is overwhelmingly committed by young males.) Thirty years later, a similar study in Boston found that 3 percent of males were responsible for more than half of their cohort’s arrests after age 31.

The pattern holds across time and place. In 2014, data showed that three-quarters of state prisoners — the core of America’s incarcerated population — had at least five prior arrests. Nearly 5 percent had 31 or more, a larger share than those imprisoned after just a single arrest. In 2022, the New York Times reported that “nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City … involved just 327 people,” or 0.004 percent of the population, who had been “arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times”. And in Oakland, a gun-violence-prevention group found that about 400 individuals — 0.1 percent of the city — were responsible for most of the city’s homicides. Violence is concentrated geographically as well. It occurs primarily in poor minority neighborhoods, whose members make up most of its victims.

These figures may even understate how concentrated antisocial behavior is. Wolfgang found that the offending minority committed dozens of crimes for every one that led to arrest. Fifty years later, a similar study reported that delinquent youth “self-reported over 25 delinquent offenses for every one police contact … with some youth reporting upwards of 290 delinquent offenses per police contact or arrest”. Combined with the fact that more than 60 percent of violent crimes reported each year go unsolved, the implication is clear: by the time a violent offender ends up in prison, he has likely committed multiple violent acts and many lesser offenses. Again, these patterns are most common among young men “who exhibited more psychopathic features”, the 2022 study’s authors noted, and “who displayed temperamental profiles characterized by low effortful control and high negative emotionality”. As a massive study from Sweden concludes: “The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality”.

Update, 2 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 29, 2025

Eliminating fathers – a long-term goal of early Feminists

Filed under: History, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo laments a recent British change to family law that “family courts will no longer work on the presumption that having contact with both parents is in the best interests of a child”. This is merely the latest move in a long-running legal and political struggle to alienate fathers from their children:

“Even today most people will refuse to believe that one of feminism’s main aims is, and always was, to give women the power to rid their families of men.” — William Collins, The Empathy Gap (2019)

“‘The person who is least likely to abuse a child is a married father,’ notes Canadian Senator Anne Cools. ‘The person who is most likely is a single, unmarried mother.'” — quoted in Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage and the Family (2007)

[…]

It is a truism that feminists seek to destroy the father-led family and have long worked to do so through anti-father propaganda, legal chicanery, and evidence-free allegations of abuse.

Those who have not read feminists’ own words on this subject may have difficulty appreciating the depth of their desire to deny fathers any legally- or socially-recognized familial role.

Elizabeth Gould Davis’s The First Sex (1971) provides a compelling example. Written at the height of the Second Wave of feminism, and published three years before the author’s death by suicide, it was a popular female-supremacist treatise. In it, Davis rhapsodized about goddess worship and female power in the ancient world, detailing a time when societies allegedly recognized and revered women as the superior sex.

In these societies, according to mythographer Robert Graves, “Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch” (quoted p. 121). In thrall to women, men were peripheral, their roles as fathers non-existent: “[The woman] took lovers, but for her pleasure,” writes Davis, “not to provide her children with a father, a commodity early woman saw no need for” (p. 121). In this matriarchal sexual utopia, “Sexual morals were a matter of personal conscience, not of law” (p. 116), and the sole familial bond was between the mother and her offspring.

A chapter on “Mother-Right” made the case for a return to such a system, explaining that fathers contribute nothing good to their children’s lives. “The father is not at all necessary for a child’s happiness and development” (p. 117). Even children allegedly know this to be so: “In nearly every child’s experience, it is the mother, not the father, who loves all the children equally, stands by them without regard to their worth or lack of it, and forgives without reservation” (p. 118).

The father’s irrelevance is rooted, Davis explained, in men’s inability to love. “Maternal love was not only the first kind of love. For many millennia it was the only kind” (p. 119). Man has merely “learned to appreciate and be grateful for woman’s love, even though he was not emotionally equipped to return it in kind” (p. 119). She quoted Freudian psychoanalyst Theodor Reik to support her view that when men speak of love, they are actually speaking of a mere ‘scrotal frenzy'” (p. 119).

This rhapsody to female power and assertion of male uselessness continues for hundreds of pages in Davis’s ludicrous yet impressively-detailed book. Many feminists at this period made similar claims, attacking fatherhood and calling for the destruction of the patriarchal family. Author and activist Kate Millett, for example, argued in Sexual Politics (1970) that women’s oppression could not be ended without a transformation of “patriarchy’s chief institution […] the family” (p. 33).

In the same year, feminist radical Shulamith Firestone excoriated the patriarchal nuclear family as the “most rigid class/caste system in existence” (The Dialectic of Sex, p. 15). Two years earlier, would-be killer Valerie Solanas had expressed the sentiment crudely in her SCUM Manifesto: “The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch — everything he touches turn to shit” (p. 45).

These were not simply sad cranks penning screeds in cat-piss-scented rooms (though many of them were mentally ill). They were acknowledged leaders of a movement that would, within a few decades, shape and control the core institutions of western civilization.

QotD: Are there no prisons? Are there no asylums?

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

When the Trump administration proposed imprisoning homeless people who don’t voluntarily go to shelters, and the predictable howls of outrage arose, I remembered the most interesting fact I’ve ever learned about imprisonment rates.

The US is often pilloried for having a high level of imprisonment per capita relative to other countries. The US is also quite unusual in having shut down most of its insane asylums many decades ago.

My perspective on these facts changed a great deal when I learned that if you aggregate rates of imprisonment with rates of commitment to mental institutions, the US stops looking like an outlier.

The low-level mentally ill didn’t go away when we closed the asylums. Nor did they magically become more able to function in society when we pushed them out the doors. Instead, they now land in our prisons.

Another implication of all this is that it’s not “structural racism” or any other specific evil that gives the US high imprisonment rates. It’s an inevitable consequence of the social decision to make it very difficult to involuntarily commit people to asylums.

I’m not going to argue today about whether that decision should be reversed. I have an opinion about that, but this post is about facts and consequences, not value claims or what “should” be.

Let’s return to the homeless. It is now common knowledge that homeless people are almost never simply poor or down on their luck. Almost all have serious issues with mental illness or drug addiction, or both. Many refuse to go to shelters because they don’t want to — or are not capable of — complying with a homeless shelter’s behavioral restrictions.

While I don’t have firsthand knowledge or controlled studies to back me up, it seems obvious that the shelters are acting as a filter — the least damaged and most functional homeless go to them, leaving the crazies to inhabit the streets.

Thus, throwing homeless people who won’t go to shelters in prison is an exact functional equivalent of involuntary commitment to a mental asylum.

My question for people who object to imprisoning the mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless is: what do you propose we do instead? Are we prepared to reopen the asylums and lower the bar for involuntary commitment?

I don’t think there’s a third alternative anymore. Donald Trump, whatever his other failings might be, has an acute sense of the zeitgeist; popular tolerance for having the streets of our cities inhabited by crazy people is collapsing. It turns out we can only tolerate so many news stories about naked screaming nut-jobs on the subway.

I’m not going to propose an answer to the question I just raised, because I’m conflicted about it myself. My goal is to start people thinking about the right question, which is a very large one.

What is the humane way to treat people who are too damaged or broken to be functional members of society, and who inflict large costs on others if they’re not separated from society?

If it’s not prisons or asylums, what are we going to do? And given how ineffective psychiatric treatment is at anything beyond management of symptoms, is “prison” vs. “asylum” even a meaningful distinction?

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-13.

November 26, 2025

The importance of “a bicycle shop in Bermuda” to Mark Carney’s financial affairs

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

It’s no secret that Prime Minister Mark Carney is a rich man. When he entered politics, he put his financial holdings into a blind trust to satisfy the federal government’s ethical and conflict of interest rules. But through this arrangement, he still owns significant positions in companies whose fortunes can (and are) affected by the actions of his government. On Monday, this was discussed at some length by a Parliamentary committee in Ottawa, as reported on his Substack by Dan Knight:

On November 24, in a basement room of West Block, MPs spent two hours asking a very simple question that everyone in Ottawa is suddenly pretending is complicated:

If Mark Carney gets richer when Brookfield does better, and Brookfield is running big climate and infrastructure funds out of what one MP described as a bicycle shop in Bermuda, how on earth is that not a problem for the Prime Minister of Canada?

The man in the hot seat was Justin Beber, Chief Operating Officer of Brookfield Corporation. His job was to calm everyone down. Instead, under oath, he calmly confirmed just about everything the government would rather you didn’t think about too hard.

He started with the corporate biography. Brookfield, he reminded the committee, is a massive global investor headquartered in Toronto. It has more than 600 direct employees in Canada, more than 15,000 workers in its operating businesses, and it paid over $750 million in federal tax last year, not counting provincial and local taxes. All of that is true. None of it changes the basic conflict: the sitting Prime Minister still has long-term compensation that rises when Brookfield, and certain Brookfield funds, succeed.

Conservative MP Michael Barrett went straight there. He asked Beber whether, when Brookfield’s value increases, the value of stock options and deferred share units also increases. Beber said yes. Then Barrett asked whether that changes if those options and units are placed in a blind trust. Beber said no. It does not. The economic reality is exactly the same: if Brookfield’s share price goes up, those instruments are worth more, whether they are in Mark Carney’s brokerage account or parked with a trustee behind frosted glass.

[…]

Cooper spelled out why it matters. Carney, he said, knows what kind of public policy could improve the success of the fund. The fund’s success determines his future bonus pay. Without knowing who the investors are or all of the fund’s positions, Canadians have no way to see where those incentives may line up — or collide — with the national interest. These are not theoretical conflicts. They are simply invisible ones.

Eventually, after some confusion over terminology, Beber did confirm that Transition Fund I has invested in 20 companies and that their names are listed in the ethics annex. Only one of those firms, Entropy, is in Canada. The rest of the portfolio, and the roster of big-money investors behind it, sits offshore, beyond any serious public scrutiny, while the Prime Minister’s upside rides on how well those bets pay off.

The tax side of the story is just as revealing. Bloc MP Luc Thériault put it bluntly: tax avoidance is not a conspiracy theory, it is a business model so widespread that the OECD and G20 built an entire 15 percent global minimum tax regime to deal with it. He cited Canada Revenue Agency estimates of tens of billions of dollars in lost federal revenue each year, including billions attributable specifically to tax avoidance. He asked Beber whether Brookfield engages in tax avoidance. Beber refused to use the term. “We practice tax planning”, he said, like “any other company”. He repeated that Brookfield pays all taxes that are “due and payable” in the jurisdictions where it operates.

That phrase sounds reassuring until you remember who writes the rules that decide what is “due and payable”, and who benefits when the system can be routed through Bermuda via something that, on paper, looks like a bicycle shop.

[…]

At some point, the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. The Prime Minister of Canada left a giant global investor with standard executive incentives, kept his vested long-term instruments, retained a carried interest in a $15 billion Bermuda-run climate fund that will operate into the 2030s, and knows exactly which sectors that firm is betting on. His government is now pouring public money and regulatory support into many of those same sectors. The firm uses structures justified as “tax transparent” that just happen to run through low-tax jurisdictions, including one address a Conservative MP described as a bicycle shop in Bermuda. The man running the firm’s operations will not say the Prime Minister’s potential upside is small. He will not say the global minimum tax is being met in practice. He will not disclose who the fund’s other investors are.

You do not need to be an expert in securities law to see the conflict. You do not need to be an expert in global taxation to see why a bicycle-shop registration in Bermuda is not about cycling. You just need to watch what they are desperate not to talk about directly: the hard link between public power in Ottawa and private profit offshore, wrapped in legal jargon, buried in annexes, and shielded from sunlight by a blind trust and a lot of very careful answers.

November 19, 2025

US Democrats issue clarion call to the military: “You must refuse illegal orders”

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

Well, thank goodness that someone remembers Nuremberg! Apparently President Trump has been issuing illegal orders to the US Army, Navy, and Air Force, and these brave legislators are putting their careers — and even their lives — on the line to defend democracy. I’m unaware of what these specific orders may be, but as Chris Bray points out, he’s the Bad Orange Man so pretty much anything he orders must be illegal:

Note what they don’t say. They say that the American military is being “pitted against” their own countrymen, and they say to servicemembers that “you can refuse illegal orders …”

… they don’t say, even once, even in a pretty clear hint, precisely what illegal orders Trump has issued. He’s being vaguely bad, so you don’t have to obey him. The serious version would look like this: On [date here], the President of the United States ordered [unit name] to enter [place name] for the purpose of [specific action], and that order violated [explicit citation of US Code]. They mushmouth around a set of feelings-signals about Mean Orange Something, but they never quite manage to spit it out. What’s the illegal order anyone is supposed to disobey, and what makes it illegal? News reports suggest that they mean to refer to the boat strikes, but click on that link if you want to see more vagueness and weak hinting.

This is exactly what the Catholic bishops just did in their own stupid virtue performance, the precise mark of an absence of seriousness in a coven of drama queens, as they declared that they’re very concerned about questions that have arisen regarding certain situations involving immigrants. More mush from the wimps. Donald Trump is very bad, because mumble mumble mumble. Be precise and clear, or be silent.

This is an age of unseriousness, and here’s another heaping plate of it. Soldiers, you don’t have to obey the orders of your military superiors if you feel that they, that they, uh, oh hey look at the time anyway I have to go. It’s passive-aggressive bad girlfriendspeak as politics. I guess if you feel like you have to obey, that’s fine. No, it’s fine! I’m not mad! Let’s just go to dinner!

We want to speak directly to members of the military, but we don’t actually have anything to say. Just, you know, disobey the president. Small thought, not a big deal.

High school drama club president Elissa Slotkin has been banging on this drum in an especially insistent way, as she holds town hall meetings with veterans who mumble their own vague slogans about Trump bein’ against the Constitution real hard and stuff.

But all of their descriptions are stupid. Sending a few hundred National Guard troops to a city of hundreds of thousands of people with narrow orders about protecting federal facilities and personnel or patrolling to deter violence isn’t military conquest of the population or the militarization of all law enforcement. The hyperbole renders the argument insane. Related, the veterans in Slotkin’s video talk about the “systematic removal” of military leaders, and the “purge of the generals”. The US military has over 800 flag officers; the Trump administration has removed about 15. There’s a desperate stupidity to all of this panic-mongering that just renders it deeply tiring.

Actual servicemembers will be familiar with the rhetorical style of the shithouse lawyer, the idiot in the barracks who tells you that akshully they can’t order you to do that, it’s totally illegal.

You should just tell your drill sergeant that you refuse! He can’t even do nothin’ about it! He’ll just back right down!

November 17, 2025

The US Supreme Court considers whether Trump’s tariffs are legal

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

Thanks to the staggering incompetence (and/or deliberate provocation for domestic political advantage) of the Carney government’s dealings with President Donald Trump, the current case before the Supreme Court is of significant interest to those of us on the north side of the US-Canadian border. On his Substack, David Friedman discusses the issues before the court:

There are three things wrong with Trump’s tariffs. The first is that they cannot be expected to provide the benefits claimed, can be expected to make both the US and its trading partners poorer; the arguments offered for them depend on not understanding the economics of trade. For an explanation of why that is true, see an earlier post.

The fact that the tariffs make us poorer may be the most important thing wrong with them but it is irrelevant to the Supreme Court; nothing in the Constitution requires the president to do his job well. The questions relevant to the Court are whether what Trump is doing was authorized by past Congressional legislation and whether it was constitutional for Congress to authorize it.

What Counts As An Emergency?

Tariffs are under the authority of Congress, not the president.1 Trump’s justification for setting them himself is congressional legislation, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

    (a) Any authority granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may be exercised to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.

    (b) The authorities granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose. (IEEPA, 50 U.S. Code § 1701, emphasis mine)

Trump declared that his Worldwide Reciprocal Tariffs were intended to deal with the US trade deficit.2 Whether the deficit is a threat and whether tariffs are a good way to deal with it are questions for economists3 but whether it is unusual is relevant to judges, since if it is not the IEEPA does not apply.

[…]

The Court on Trial

Delegating to the president the power to impose tariffs, a power explicitly given to Congress in the Constitution, is a major question. Under doctrine proclaimed by this court that means that the legislation claimed to delegate that power must be read narrowly. On a narrow reading, on anything but a very broad reading, the legislation fails to apply to President Trump’s tariffs for two independent reasons:

    It only grants power in an emergency, which under the language of the Act neither the trade deficit nor the illegal drug problem is; the deficit has existed since 1970, the War on Drugs was proclaimed in 1971.

    The powers granted to the president in the Act do not include the power to impose tariffs.

If the six conservative justices believe in the principles they claim, the administration will lose the case 9-0.

  1. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations … (U.S Constitution, Article I, Section 8).
  2. “I found that conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States that has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States. I declared a national emergency with respect to that threat, and to deal with that threat, I imposed additional ad valorem duties that I deemed necessary and appropriate.” (Executive Order July 31, 2025).
  3. The answers are no and no.

November 8, 2025

All cultures are not equal, especially when it comes to crimes like rape

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Dr. Sydney Watson responds to a post on feminists blaming all men for the actions of some men from other cultures:

    Jessica Pin @jess_ann_pin

    It bothers me so much when some feminists act like men are just as misogynist and violent everywhere.

    That’s not true. Men from some cultures are absolutely worse than others.

    I’m not saying there is a genetic difference. But there are definitely cultural differences, and we need to be careful about who we let in.

    [Full sized images in the linked post]

I don’t know how to explain this succinctly —

But, ages ago I watched this series about prisons around the world. There were a few episodes that focused on prisons in African countries – how the prisons ran, what people were charged with etc.

What stood out to me was that over 50% of the male prisoners were there for some sort of sex crime – rape, sexual assault, child sexual abuse etc.

What was even worse was that, when asked about why they committed these crimes, a lot of the men said things about how they were “teaching the woman a lesson” or raping her was some sort of “punishment.”

And I couldn’t help but think, “well, that checks out. Given how these men from these places come to Western countries and rape women.”

People might not like hearing that, and the less evolved among us chalk it up to “racism” (lol) but if someone comes from a culture that views rape as a form of punishment for unruly women, then why would that viewpoint suddenly change when their feet hit British/Swedish/Canadian soil?

If, culturally, you view women as barely people, why on earth would you suddenly start because you’re in a new place?

Point being – it’s utterly mad to put women and girls at risk because people don’t want to admit that some cultures are horrible. I’m tried of pretending that all cultures are equal when they’re so obviously not.

Update, 10 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Think Before You Post | How the UK fell to a sinister new form of censorship

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published 27 Oct 2025

“Think before you post.” Those were the words screamed out by government social-media accounts, threatening to lock up people for “hate speech”, as riots swept the United Kingdom in the summer of 2024. To those who hadn’t been paying attention, it offered a stark insight into a supposedly liberal, democratic nation that had come to police speech as much as, sometimes even more so, than actual violence. Inciting racial hatred, inciting religious hatred, “grossly offensive” online communications – over the past 60 years or so, Britain has written one new speech crime after another into its statute books. And it has led to a situation in which at least 30 people a day are now arrested in England and Wales for social-media posts. This is a documentary about some of those speech criminals. What we found out was even more chilling than the headlines would have you believe. Featuring: Maxie Allen, Rosalind Levine, Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Luke Gittos and Jamie Michael.

November 3, 2025

The BC government “has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.”

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

A Fraser Institute commentary by Bruce Pardy addresses the role of the NDP government of British Columbia in undermining the established laws on land title in the province among other actions to the advantage of First Nations bands and to the definite disadvantage of ordinary British Columbians:

Recently, British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma said that fee simple title in private property is superior to Aboriginal title. She’s a day late and a dollar short. In fact, her NDP government, led by Premier David Eby, has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has granted several First Nations a portion of a 1,846-acre land claim on Lulu Island. B.C. Supreme Court

A few days earlier, the City of Richmond sent out a letter to more than 125 property owners warning them that the security of their land is in doubt. “For those whose property is in the area outlined in black,” the letter reads, “the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership … The entire area outlined in green has been claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.”

The Richmond letter is a consequence of a recent decision of the B.C. Supreme Court, which awarded Aboriginal title over 800 acres of land in Richmond to the Cowichan First Nation. Wherever Aboriginal title is found to exist, said the court, it is a “prior and senior right” to other property interests, whether the land is public or private.

It is finally dawning on British Columbians that obsequious devotion to reconciliation is putting their land at risk. Sharma claimed that B.C. was pursuing multiple grounds of appeal, but that makes her a hypocrite. Her government did not robustly defend in court against the Cowichan claim. And in a dozen other ways, the Eby government has sought to put title and control of B.C. into Aboriginal hands.

In early 2024, it proposed to amend the province’s Land Act, which governs the use of Crown land in B.C. It planned to give B.C.’s hundreds of First Nations a veto over mining, hydro projects, farming, forestry, docks and communication towers. The government tried to consult quietly, but the backlash was immediate. It withdrew the proposals, promising to be more transparent. But it did not shelve its objectives or its plans. And did not deliver on its promise. Instead, it sought to make agreements over specific territories with specific Aboriginal groups, often negotiated covertly and announced after the fact.

In April 2024, the Eby government recognized Aboriginal title to Haida Gwaii, the archipelago on Canada’s West Coast. Around 5,000 people live on Haida Gwaii. About half are Haida, who voted overwhelmingly in favour of the deal. But non-Haida residents had no say. The Haida agreement says private property will be honoured, but private property is incompatible with Aboriginal title, which is communal. If Haida Gwaii really is subject to Aboriginal title, then no one can own parts of it privately.

Update: I forgot to include the URL to Mr. Pardy’s article … fixed now.

October 29, 2025

Clankers on the bench

Filed under: Australia, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The cynic in me wonders if having AI judges would make the justice system any worse, given the ever-increasing pro-criminal bias on display in courtrooms across North America and Europe:

Grok generated this in response to my request for “Robbie the Robot as a judge”

It’s the question rattling through chambers and law schools. Are we in danger of a world where the solemn business of justice, liberty, livelihood, and who really owns the back fence is entrusted not to a human in robes but to a chirpy algorithm with a software bug and a 4,000-word disclaimer? Are we handing over judgment itself to machines, or simply giving them the photocopying and hoping they don’t start offering opinions?

Because, depending on whom you ask, AI in law is either (a) the long-delayed democratization of justice for ordinary people or (b) the first act of a constitutional farce in which courts drown beneath PDFs full of nonsense and fake footnotes.

The Machinery Arrives

Beneath the wood paneling and the reassuring thump of legal pomposity, something mildly heretical is afoot. Judges, clerks, and barristers — those high priests of precedent — are quietly feeding their briefs to generative AI, which now whirs away in the background, summarizing, drafting, and rummaging through case law while its human overlords wrestle with the biscuit tin and their consciences.

According to the Judicial Commission of New South Wales (NSW), the robots are already in the building. Their latest handbook cheerfully notes that AI is used for legal analytics, mass document review, “natural language” searching, and predictive modeling — all of which sound terribly sophisticated until you realize they’re essentially Excel spreadsheets with delusions of grandeur. A UNESCO survey adds the clincher: nearly half the world’s judges, prosecutors, and court staff have used generative AI for work, and only 9 percent have had what’s politely called safe-usage training. This is training where someone explains that you shouldn’t upload confidential evidence to a chatbot that lives in the cloud or take legal advice from a program that thinks Brown v. Board of Education was a musical.

The Law Society of NSW, in a rare fit of clairvoyance back in 2016, created something called the Future Committee — the sort of name that already sounds like a sci-fi tribunal convened to ban fun. Their brief was to consider what might happen when clients demanded more for less, junior lawyers were burnt to a crisp, and artificial intelligence started politely asking, “Shall I draft that for you?” The conclusion was simple: adapt or be eaten.

Meanwhile, in London, the Law Society of England and Wales skipped the warm-up act and went straight to the apocalypse. Its 2021 report, Images of the Future Worlds Facing the Legal Profession 2020–2030, envisioned a legal world in which routine advice would be swallowed whole by AI portals, full-time lawyers would be reduced to an endangered species, and the survivors would work alongside AI and be mandated to take “performance-enhancing medication in order to optimise their own productivity and effectiveness.” The whole thing reads like 1984 rewritten by a management consultant — right down to the faint violin of self-pity playing somewhere in the distance.

Oh, but those were in Australia and the UK, it’s not that bad in North America, surely? Uh, well …

Across the Atlantic, the award for Legal Farce of the Century goes to Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. 2023). In this modern masterpiece of professional self-immolation, a team of lawyers filed court papers quoting three magnificent precedents: Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, Martinez v. Delta, and Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines. Unfortunately, none of them existed — not in Westlaw, not in Lexis, not even in the fever dreams of law students. When the judge asked, quite reasonably, to see the cases, counsel could only offer the look of people discovering gravity for the first time. Sanctions followed under Rule 11 for what the court delicately called “subjective bad faith”, which is American for “you made this up”. The ruling is now shown at continuing-education sessions under the optimistic title Let’s Not Do That Again.

The sequel writes itself:

  • Massachusetts: A lawyer submitted memoranda stuffed with phantom cases, blamed “the office AI”, and was fined. The judge, channeling divine exasperation, warned that blind acceptance of AI-generated content is not a defense — it’s a lifestyle choice.
  • Alabama: Attorneys for the state prison system filed citations to imaginary authorities and were sentenced to the most humiliating punishment known to the bar: writing apology letters to their law school deans and delivering public lectures on ethics.
  • California: One overzealous litigator managed to produce a brief in which twenty-one of twenty-three authorities were pure fiction. The court fined him, the press dined out on it, and AI-compliance seminars across America gained a new slide.

Thus, the first commandment of the digital age is: the robot may write it, but the Submit button still belongs to a human — and the human still gets to explain it to the judge.

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