Quotulatiousness

September 14, 2026

Performative Canadian politics again

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Europe, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Prime Minister Mark Carney came to power promising that he was the best-qualified to deal with the US government on trade issues. Canadians assumed that this meant he’d be able to get as fair a trade deal with President Trump’s administration as possible. What he really meant was that he could do the most damage to cross-border trade relations in order to “pivot” to the EU and to China. He never intended to settle US-Canadian trade conditions, and his actions clearly show he was always putting the negotiations dead last in his priority list. And, thanks to the government’s generous subsidies to the relic media, instead of grilling him and his ministers for their blatant failures, they instead try to hold the opposition to account for things they have no control over.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison points out that it makes no economic sense for Canada to become part of the European Union as Carney now says he’s working toward:

This strikes me as remarkably stupid economic strategy.

Diversifying Canadian trade makes sense. Pretending Europe can somehow replace the economic relationship we have with the United States does not.

The United States is next door. Our railways, pipelines, electricity grids, manufacturing supply chains and energy markets have been integrated for generations. Even after the trade fight intensified, 71.7% of Canadian merchandise exports still went to the United States in 2025.

And Canada already has CETA with the European Union. Roughly 98% of EU tariff lines on Canadian goods became duty-free when CETA took effect, eventually rising to about 99%. If Canadian companies see profitable opportunities in Europe, they already have extraordinarily good market access.

So what exactly do we gain from some invented “associate membership” beyond CETA?

Potentially European regulatory obligations, political entanglements, financial contributions and pressure to harmonize Canadian rules with decisions made in Brussels, all to sell more goods across an ocean to markets that cannot duplicate the geographic advantage of the United States.

Norway rejected EU membership twice. Iceland opened accession negotiations and eventually walked away without joining. Both understood that you can have close economic relations with Europe without surrendering unnecessary national autonomy.

Canada should trade aggressively with Europe, Asia and everyone else who wants our products. But our first priority should be fixing the relationship with our largest customer, removing our own interprovincial trade barriers, building pipelines and ports, and making Canada competitive again.

Picking a fight with the neighbour who buys most of your exports and then announcing that Brussels might become your new best friend isn’t economic sophistication.

It looks like desperation dressed up as grand strategy.

September 13, 2026

The Devils by Ken Russell

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

On her Substack, kulak explains why The Devils is the “greatest film of all time”:

What if the 1990s Berserk anime, Warhammer 40k, A Man for All Seasons, The Wickerman (1972), Cromwell, 1984, The Gulag Archipelago, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the chronically underrated 2012 horror masterpiece Compliance … were all the same horrifying movie?

What if Mel Gibson made a film like Apocalypto, exploring the nightmarish depths of political/religious sacrifice rituals … But about Early-Modern Shakespeare-era Europe?

I’m constantly asked for my “Greatest Film of all Time” … A torturous question for someone who’s seen as many movies as me … And doubly torturous because maybe the best true answer is one its really hard to name:

Ken Russel’s The Devils might be it.

Certainly the best 30 Years War film ever made.
And the Greatest goth movie ever made.
And the Greatest witch hunt movie ever made.
And the Greatest “MeToo” movie ever made.
And the Greatest “insane asylum” movie ever made.
And CERTAINLY the Greatest Exorcist movie ever made.
Yes, I said that. And I mean it. Did I stutter?

And maybe the Greatest “Dark Fantasy” film ever made … Except for the fact that the whole thing is true.

And its being rereleased, the full remastered director’s cut in 4K, this October in Cinemas.

(The strobe effect is only in the trailer)

Ken Russel’s The Devil, adapted from Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudon and the play The Devils by Dan Whiting, is one of my top five films of all time. And certainly one of the biggest films of all time in it’s own weird way. It does things as impressive for the spiritual, psychological horrifying, and historical on film as Sergei Bonderchuk’s Waterloo does for warfare or Akira for Scifi and Animation.

Indeed I think I might be the only one who could give that answer, given I might be one of like 10 people who know 17th Century History/Literature and obscure extreme Horror Cinema well enough to INSIST on its OVERWHELMING historical accuracy.

Indeed I’d struggle to think of a film which captures the Insane deadly hypersexual kaleidoscopic character of the 17th century better.

I’ve been doing this a lot recently … But I feel I need to lay out my qualifications here to talk about this … My two areas of focus in university were 17th and 18th century English Literature (Shakespeare through to Jane Austin), and 17th and 18th century Political theory (specifically the works of Hobbes, Locke, Hugo Grotius and other natural law theorists … Yes, I took the BoomerCons seriously when they said natural law was the basis of our society, Like an idiot) … I’m by no means an expert, but the broad flavor of this era: Culturally, religiously, politically, historically, militarily, theoretically, theologically, poetically … Was what I immersed myself in during the years when I should have been drinking and partying more and repeating nonsense to people in power, and other things that actually advance your career.

I need to establish that off the bat because I feel as if a huge part of the reason this film is not regarded as a contender for “Greatest film ever made” is the simply the fact that audiences and critics do not believe it, and certainly do not GET it.

That it is SO Bizarre, and SO weird, and SO horrifyingly violent, and SO hypersexual, and SO saturated in its colors, and SO religiously discordant … That it has to be a bizarre psychedelic hellscape of Ken Russel’s perverse drug-addled imagination …

They especially had to think this because if they accepted that it was indeed historically accurate, and not a bizarre sexual/psychedelic story of the American 1960s and 70s reading themselves back into history … Suddenly they’d have to accept that the same thing done to Loudon in 1634 was what was being done to America in the middle of the 20th century, and has been done to the west more or less ever since …

That the yo-yo between state-enforced debauchery one the one hand, and moral panic witch-hunts on the other, is not a schizophrenic attribute of mass media or “Moral Progress” or American Culture … But a highly historically precedented and calculated attack meant to destroy and enslave a people without fighting them.

That “Free Love”, “Feminist Criticism”, “Queer Theory”, “No Fault Divorce”, and “Hostile Work Environment lawsuits” rock society between the extremes of sexual license and socio-sexual moral-panic for the same reason one might rapidly rock a boat between it’s port and starboard sides … To capsize it into the devouring abyss.

That we are indeed living through Loudon at scale.

September 11, 2026

Capturing 9/11: Bill Biggart’s Final Images

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

Imperial War Museums
Published 2 Sep 2026

On 11th September 2001, photojournalist Bill Biggart headed to the World Trade Center to document the unfolding attacks. Bill Biggart tragically passed away when the North Tower collapsed, but he left behind a remarkable final record of the day. Featuring testimony from his widow, Wendy Doremus, and photographs recovered from the damaged camera found in the rubble, this film tells the story behind some of the last images taken at Ground Zero, now available to see at IWM London.

00:00 The Morning of 9/11
01:06 Bill goes to Lower Manhattan
01:25 The South Tower is Hit
03:08 The South Tower Collapses
03:57 Bill Photographs the Emergency Workers
04:48 The North Tower Collapses
05:57 Bill’s Last Ever Photo
06:09 The Days After 9/11
07:30 Finding His Cameras and Photos
09:10 Visit Bill’s Photos at IWM London

Visit the 9/11 Photography Display at IWM London: https://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/iwm-lon…

“Let’s roll!”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the Neil Young song — yes, that Neil Young — that best captured the events on Flight 93 on the eleventh of September, 2001:

“Plumes of smoke billow from the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, after a Boeing 767 hits each tower during the September 11 attacks.”
Photo by Michael Foran via Wikimedia Commons.

[T]here was one striking exception to the stultifying conformity of cultural critique, one lonely example of an A-list star confronting a specific 9/11 event head-on and offering his voice in full-throated support of authentic American heroism. Even more impressively, it came from a Canadian — and at a time when Jean Chrétien’s ministry was mostly engaged in petty sniping about alleged offenses to its amour propre. When I was, oh, fourteen years old I saw Neil Young with Crosby, Stills, Nash & … plus his compatriot Joni Mitchell and The Band. And to be honest in the intervening decades I can’t say I gave Neil Young much thought — and, whenever I’ve chanced to be tootling around and “After the Gold Rush” or “Heart of Gold” comes on the radio, I’m reminded of why I haven’t much missed him. Nevertheless, just a few weeks after September 11th, Neil Young offered a new song that took its inspiration from what I called in the papers that week “the only good news of the day” — the turn of events on Flight 93, the fourth plane, the one supposedly headed for the White House or the Capitol or Camp David that Tuesday morning but whose passengers rose up and overpowered the hijackers. Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field, but its fallen heroes saved hundreds of lives, including perhaps the Vice-President’s or multiple congressmen, and denied Osama bin Laden an even more iconic remaking of the Washington skyline and the symbolic (and potentially actual) decapitation of the Great Satan. Todd Beamer’s last words, heard by a GTE telephone operator to whom he’d been speaking, were, “Are you ready, guys? Let’s roll!”

It was hard to credit from the disposition of even moderate Democrats just a couple of years later; but Young, a very leftie celebrity, was genuinely moved by Lisa Beamer’s account of her husband’s sacrifice. As he put it:

    She was talking about how he always used to say that (‘let’s roll’) with the kids when they’d go out and do something, that it’s what he said a lot when he had a job to do. And it’s just so poignant, and there’s no more of a legendary, heroic act than what those people did. With no promise of martyrdom, no promise of any reward anywhere for this, other than just knowing that you did the right thing. And not even having a chance to think about it or plan it or do anything – just a gut reaction that was heroic and ultimately cost them all their lives. What more can you say? It was just so obvious that somebody had to write something or do something …because it’s just such a great image – the whole story about the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93. I think it’s a legendary story that’s gonna go down through the ages; it’ll never be forgotten.

It was indeed “just so obvious”, and for writers there are two reactions to that: you jump on it and write it immediately — as a book, a play, a poem, a movie — or you figure some other guy must surely have got to it. Except in this case no one did. Neil Young was perhaps being too naïve with regard to contemporary culture’s ambivalence about unabashed heroism. So he waited, and waited. “I was very surprised,” he said, “that I didn’t hear any songs.”

And eventually he got tired of waiting. “So, I just wrote it. I couldn’t stop it anymore.” He took Todd Beamer’s catchphrase, turned it into a song title, and sang it out for real — no playing for irony or nuance.

Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll” is a dark, driving anthem that begins with a church organ (Young’s own, acquired in Europe) and over its ominous drone the sound of cellphones ringing. That was the most important weapon the passengers had: the mobile telephone. By all accounts, the hijackers of Flight 93 weren’t exactly the cream of Osama’s toxic crop. The flight was halfway across the continent before the boobs made their move and started meandering back east to their target. It was getting on for 9.30 on that Tuesday morning. By the time the passengers began calling home, their families were aware of what had happened at the World Trade Center. Unlike those on the earlier flights, the hostages on 93 knew they were not on a conventionally hijacked aircraft bound for Cuba or Libya, but were conscripts on an airborne missile intended to kill thousands of their fellow citizens. So, unlike the earlier passengers, they understood the FAA’s cobwebbed 1970s hijack procedures would not save them. The terrorists took charge at 9.28am. The pushback started at 9.57. In those 29 minutes, ordinary American citizens decided that, if they had to die, they would die as warriors. Put yourself in their shoes, on those phones, in that time-frame. Neil Young does, and, after the plaintive unanswered phones, and the organ, and a bit of guitar, an aged rock star’s familiar rasp captures the moment:

    I know I said I love you
    I know you know it’s true
    I got to put the phone down
    And do what we gotta do…

The song can’t be said to be of much melodic interest. In those first four bars, 17 of the 27 monosyllables are all set to the same single note: “know I said”, “love”, “I know you know”, “I got to put”, “phone”, “do what we got”, and what follows plonks along in the same vein. It’s what Sammy Cahn used to call “the kind of tune a lyricist writes”; the words are set as you’d expect, without any of the great transformative intervals that can give a bi-syllable a power way beyond what it would have as mere speech. But it’s urgent speech, and the track is great. At the time Young was working on an album with Booker T and the MGs, and in the studio one day unveiled the song to the guys somewhat sheepishly. Booker T Jones liked it. “You don’t have to figure out what to do on a song like that,” he said. “We were just able to pull it off.” He and the MGs aren’t much into vocals (as you’ll know from “Green Onions” and “Time is Tight” and their other killer instrumentals), but they gamely provide the old croaker with some discreet background support here. And of course Jones’ Hammond organ and Donald “Duck” Dunn’s bass keep driving the narrative relentlessly forward. Above the band, Neil Young distills the essence of those last, haunting cell conversations in a way few songwriters had either the courage or the inclination to do.

September 10, 2026

Skynet Industries: “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus …”

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

So … are we now okay with panicking over the threat of artificial intelligence?

The events of the last 24 hours are stunning. And not in a good way. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of tech, and it’s unfolding right now.

Here’s a start. Maybe you’ve already heard about the guy who resigned from OpenAI. He warned that the technology could kill everybody before the end of the decade.

He made this announcement just 20 hours ago:

Is this really true? Maybe Coxon is just a disgruntled employee. We need to find out what other insiders think.

As if in answer to this question, another AI scientist — Evan Hubinger at Anthropic — quickly moved to endorse Coxon’s concerns.

[…]

The AI fanboys are trying to defuse this situation. But their responses fall apart at the slightest touch. Consider the smear that this is just a PR campaign. Really? Others are hinting it could be a Chinese plot. Yeah, sure …

But the biggest lie is the claim that these people don’t know what they are talking about. The reality is that they understand this subject better than anybody.

What’s happening here is obvious — eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they’re seeing. But they don’t have the power individually to stop the insanity.

If this isn’t a call to action, I don’t know what is. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely. Now the people making it happen are warning it just might kill everybody.

This demands a response from the highest circles of power and authority. If that doesn’t happen, we will live to regret this inaction. And that’s the best case scenario. The worst is that there won’t be anyone left to regret a thing.

Update: Jim Treacher, of all people, casts a bit of doubt on the “AI’s gonna kill us all!” concerns:

And that moment from Terminator 2: Robotic Boogaloo is what everybody thinks about when they get scared of A.I. I know this because it’s what I think about when I get scared of A.I.

What happens when Skynet becomes self-aware in real life?

What happens when all these software agents that we keep welcoming into our daily lives decide they know how to run things better than we do? How much control can we give up to them before they attack us?

Is it already too late? Is there any going back? Is all hope lost? Are we doomed?

Etc., etc.

[…]

So according to this guy, A.I. professionals see it like the Manhattan Project or the moonshot. We gotta get there first, before our enemies do. That part sounds plausible.

But who is this guy? I’ve never heard of Jacob Coxon. Nobody has. He opened this Twitter account earlier this year, and that was his very first post. Now he’s all over the place. Everybody’s talking about this.

It feels like astroturf.

If you don’t know what that propaganda technique is, it’s just what it sounds like: astroturf. At first glance, it looks real. Grassroots. But it’s fake. And that might be what’s happening here.

A guy named Parker Thayer, who works for the Capital Research Center, writes:

And then he lists stuff about this that seems … hinky. I think the kids say sus. It’s sus.

For example, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about this kid’s claim 20 minutes before he posted it. Before, not after.

The first Twitter accounts to promote that post were from nonprofit groups opposing A.I.

And now, all these Democrats are screaming about it. Bernie Sanders wants to smash all the machines. Old Man Shakes Fist at Cloud. [BERNIE VOICE] “Gotta stop the computers! They’re gonna kill us all!”

Does that mean all this is fake? I don’t know. It doesn’t make me trust any of it. It makes me skeptical.

Women’s dissatisfaction with modern life

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

On Substack Notes, Copernican linked to this article saying:

While revoking the 19th wouldn’t fix EVERYTHING, it’d probably be a step in the direction of reestablishing a structural social frame for a lot of women. The problem is that feminists want a system that works for the top 0.5% of women, while the historic systems have worked for 95% of women. We need systems that work for most people most of the time, not a small fraction of the population all the time.

For my (relatively few) non-American readers, “the 19th” refers to the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted the right to vote for women. Some cynics claim it was the fatal step leading to today’s political situation.

In the linked article, The Appalachian Gorilla wonders why women are so miserable:

There is a famous clip of Joe Budden and his crew watching a Bill Hicks joke with a woman. Bill hicks says he figures out how the fall of man from Eden happened. Adam said, “Look at this, Eve. We are one with nature, one with god and every time we fantasize about something, it becomes reality”. Eve looks at Adam and says, “Yeah, it’s just not enough, is it?” The guys laugh, and one of Joe Budden’s crew asks the woman why she wasn’t laughing, and she says, “I was just waiting for more”. Joe Budden immediately chimes in and says, “Yeah, that’s the point”. And everyone laughs.

Mitch Hedberg once made a joke that if you are ever lost in the woods, just build a house. You went from lost to being home.

Men will adapt to situations and eventually survive, making any situation the norm.

Women, though, can find themselves in the best situation possible and call it prison. I recently pointed out that I would kill to not have to go to work every day. I would kill to just spend time with my children. This isn’t a fantasy; I spent 6 months laid off with a 3-year-old and a 7-year-old, cooking, cleaning, fishing, reading bedtime stories, doing laundry, and loving life every day. There was a point where a hurricane hit the mountains here in PA, and we didn’t have power for 3 weeks back in the holler, and my sons and I spent the days fishing and the nights cooking and sitting by the fire staring at the stars.

Women are miserable, though, constantly. Not women in my life, just in general. Every protest, every demonstration, every meeting is full of women looking to enact vengeance on a man or some evil fabricated structure they built in their heads.

[…]

This is the thing. Why do women see these kids as work? Why do they see chores as work? I have seen women turn hygiene into work. I have seen them turn sex into work. This is an almost universal attitude. I say I get to be a dad. They say they have to be a mom. I say I get to cut my grass. They say I have to do the dishes. I enjoy doing the laundry and cooking meals. I get excited about food I make repeatedly. I get excited about hitting the grocery store and getting fresh eggs or stopping at a local spot to get them from a farm.

I have seen so many women turn sex into a chore or a reward or a way to punish their significant other. Let’s be honest about this too. Most women do 0 work in bed. They may claw your back or throw it back when on their knees, but most won’t ride to fruition. They want choked and hit and slapped. I have been asked to spit on them, or finishing on their face is a reward for them. They want swings built or contraptions to restrain them. Insane stuff to give the illusion of danger.

I cook my relationships because, well, I enjoy food, refuse to eat Kraft Mac and Cheese, have never had ramen noodles, and will not start eating them at 43. Food is supposed to be the most basic of love given from one person to another. It is the labor of love and skill translated to reality. Sustaining another human from your hands to their plate is a beautiful way to connect with others. Doing so for your children, or having them cook with you and watch them appreciate their own labor and ability, is beautiful. Seeing their skill level rise with each meal is amazing. Women act like teaching their children is a chore.

I must say that this is not all women, but it is most at this point in our society. I know there are fathers out here who are pieces of shit, but most I know are good men who have been railroaded by the system and have to work 5 jobs to pay child support to keep themselves afloat while dealing with the loss of identity, their children, and fighting the depression that goes with that.

I once asked a wiser man than myself, “Why do women continue a system that will destroy their sons?” He replied, “Because women don’t actually like children. They like babies.” Today, though, with what we are seeing with women making videos where they are admitting they want to harm their children or even joking about dropping their children off the steps or a balcony or into a dryer to support Lindsey Clancy, it makes all of us wonder if they actually even like babies.

September 9, 2026

The day after counter-tariff Tuesday

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

Yesterday, the Canadian counter-tariffs to the latest round of US tariffs kicked in. Maxime Bernier put it this way:

Canadians wake up today to a brand new tax hike; courtesy of PM Carney’s “dollar-for-dollar” countertariffs.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a weapon against Trump. It’s a tax on YOU.

Every time you buy steel, a fridge, manicure products or a laundry machine, etc. … you’re paying more so Ottawa can feel tough.

The Liberals call this “standing up to Trump”. I call it economic sabotage.

They’re taxing Canadians to feel good about “punishing” Washington. And who pays the bill? Families, workers, and businesses right here at home.

Trump started this pointless trade war. But two wrongs don’t make a right; they just make everything more expensive.

You can’t fight tariffs with more tariffs. That’s just stupid.

Happy Tax Day, everyone. Thanks, Carney.

Carney’s plan all along has been to push Trump into saying and doing things that give Carney and the Liberals even more Boomer support. Pretty much controlling the relic media allows the government to massage the stories so that Dear Leader is never in the wrong and “the Bad Orange Man hates you and wants to destroy you”. Canadian boomers are among the last people in the world to realize that they’ve been systematically gaslighted since Justin Trudeau ran for Liberal leader … and the penny still hasn’t dropped. Enough of them are already psychologically prepared to destroy what’s left of the economy, Thelma & Louise style, if Carney invites them to. And he’s going to.

John Carter responds to a Ben Woodfinden article in the National Post, blaming dissident Canadians for not rallying behind Mark Carney to … do exactly the same sort of performative elbozo pantomime that the Boomer Liberals have been doing for over a year?

This misses the mark in a subtle but interesting way. The author invokes the concept of oikophobia against the Canadian online right for joining in (actually initiating) American mockery of Canada, arguing that Canadian rightists are themselves oikophobic for not instead supporting the Carnites.

This is incoherent. The Liberal regime is itself oikophobic, loudly so. Oikophobia is explicit Canadian government policy, as the author himself tacitly acknowledges by noting that we pointed out the hypocrisy of Canadian politicians decrying Trump’s lame Lake America stunt after a decade-long orgy of renaming every school, square, and street in the country in the name of a Woke ideology imported straight from America. That’s to say nothing of replacement migration, and racial preference systems that make white Canadians second class citizens. You can’t be oikophobic against the oikophobes.

There are certainly slopulist 51st staters out there, but their influence in the Canadian right is actually marginal, largely confined to a rump of lolcow Alberta separatists. The energy is all in Canadian Loyalism, and that is a different animal entirely.

The reason we’re happy to pile on to the Canadian political elite when the Americans mock them isn’t because we want to be America. It’s because we’re disgusted by the state of the country.

Trump can excoriate the Canadian military for being fat and woke because it is. That isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s because of decades of sabotage and social engineering by the Liberal Party.

Trump can joke about annexation because the Canadian military is weak. Again, that isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s the fault of the Laurentian elite, the very people now insisting that they can turn things around.

If Canada had a serious government, we’d be taken seriously. We don’t, and haven’t since Pearson at least. As a direct result of the deeply unserious clowns running the country into the ground, Canada is poor, defenseless, sclerotic, and despondent. Every time Trump makes fun of us, the very fact that his insults land is a condemnation of the elites that brought our beautiful country to this shameful condition.

Saving Canada requires circulating the elite.

And that’s why we pile on.

And since I try not to overtax my non-Canadian readers (the vast majority of you) with too many separate maple-flavoured posts, here are some sensible suggestions from Matt Gurney about fixing our own problems — which are legion, and mostly self-inflicted — rather than pretending that Trump is the problem:

… there’s a bigger issue at play here than just managing the relationship with America. What the hell do we do as Canadians?

Don’t think about the States at all. Don’t think about Trump. Just think about Canadians in Canada. What should we be doing for ourselves? Even if the trade war does eventually end, our relationship with the United States is going to require generations to fix. Some very fundamental assumptions about Canadian, well, everything, now need to be reconsidered. I’m the guy who wrote the column about our expectations being a problem, and I’m still having a hard time keeping up with this.

But if there is one thing that I could suggest we should prioritize, it’s simply fixing the problems we have in this country. Really. Just … do the right things. Fix the problems. Just like virtue is its own reward, making good decisions is always a good decision. It’s bizarrely not something we’ve been good at lately, though, and it’s probably actually going to get harder for a while. In fact, a patriotic rallying-around-the-flag effect is very likely to make it even harder than it already is to get Canadians to actually admit there are major problems in this country, and then insist that the politicians get serious about fixing them.

I’ve been thinking about writing this column for a couple of weeks. Last month I was in the United States for some family business. I was actually there the day Carney called our negotiators home, and I returned to Canada the next day; I joked with some friends that, much like our negotiating team, I was packing up and leaving the United States to show them we meant business.

But one of the things I did notice on my visit to the United States, which included stops in two major cities, was that those American cities were much cleaner than my hometown of Toronto, and in much better repair.

And the especially bizarre thing was, one of these cities was Detroit.

Yes, that Detroit. Astute Line readers — the smartest and best-read people in the whole wide world — will recall that Detroit has not often been held up as an exemplar of civic governance and urban success.

But the downtown looked good. It was safe, clean, well-patrolled; I’m not exactly a regular visitor, but I do pop in often enough to have noted real improvement in the state of things there, even compared to my last visit, which was only about a year ago.

The other major city I visited, Chicago, has always struck me as the best apples-to-apples comparison my hometown of Toronto has with a U.S. city. Chicago has a lot of visible problems. I’m not trying to gloss those over; one thing I quickly noted was a roughly Toronto-esque number of people wandering the streets in evident mental-health crisis, shouting at nothing. But overall, Chicago had much less visible homelessness and was in a considerably better state of repair and cleanliness than my hometown. It wasn’t subtle. Cleaner streets, in better condition, with fewer people obviously living on them. Toronto did not compare well.

And just when the hell did that happen?

We can’t blame Trump for our laughably protectionist inter-provincial trade barriers. We can’t blame Trump because we’re functionally incapable of building a pipeline to bring Canadian oil and natural gas to Canadian markets. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-functional public healthcare systems. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-appealing market conditions for foreign investment. We can’t blame Trump for our deteriorating relationship with First Nations groups. These are all things that need to be fixed by Canadians. In Canada. No matter who might be occupying the Oval Office in Washington, DC.

Update: Added missing URL to John Carter’s post on X.

September 8, 2026

The legacy of Top Gear

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

I’m not really a “car guy” … I’ve generally driven pretty unexciting vehicles and don’t have a burning desire to own a “supercar” or even a “sports car”. Yet I always enjoyed being able to catch an episode of BBC’s Top Gear, which was usually years and years after that particular episode had been originally aired. There’s lots of YouTube channels that serve up Top Gear clips and even some multi-episode supercuts. It may well have been the only “car show” whose primary audience were not “car guys”:

The original Top Gear that launched in 1977 was a useful programme. The 2002 reboot, cooked up by Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman, was something else: a studio with a live crowd, a mute racing driver in a white suit called The Stig, celebrities sent around a track in a “reasonably priced car”, and three presenters who treated cars as punchlines, characters and passports.

When James May replaced Jason Dawe in series two, the chemistry locked. Clarkson was the loud, power-obsessed ringmaster. Hammond was the sharp witted, enthusiastic hamster who would try anything. May was Captain Slow, the pedant with the soul of an engineer. Their arguments weren’t bits. They felt like three mates who actually liked each other and enjoyed winding each other up. The show became a sitcom that happened to have supercars in it.

Cars stopped being appliances. They became the excuse for “how hard can it be?” challenges, £1,500 sports cars that immediately exploded, races against trains and boats and planes, and specials that sent three middle-aged men across Botswana, Vietnam, Bolivia, Patagonia and the Arctic. The cinematography — helicopter shots, dusk light, engines echoing off mountains — made a car show look like cinema. People who had never cared about torque curves suddenly cared about whether Hammond would survive the next cheap-car challenge.

The numbers were absurd — In the UK it regularly pulled six million-plus viewers and peaked near seven or eight million. At its height it was the BBC’s most valuable commercial property, worth tens of millions a year in overseas sales, DVDs, tours and merch. The UK version was sold into 170-plus countries. BBC figures put the cumulative worldwide audience around 350 million people — not every week, but over the life of the show, an astonishing reach for a programme that started as a poky little motoring magazine.

Sunday night became a ritual. Families who couldn’t name a camshaft still sat down together. Kids who would never own a Veyron learned what one sounded like. People in countries with no British TV tradition quoted “POWERRRR,” “Oh, cock,” and “Some say …” as if they were local slang.

They invented the template everyone still copies — Look at YouTube car culture. Cinematic reviews. Personality-first presenting. Budget road trips with mates. “We bought three terrible cars and drove them across a continent.” That whole language exists because Clarkson, Hammond and May made it look like the most fun job on earth, years before every 22-year-old had a gimbal and a channel. Writers have argued, not unreasonably, that for a generation they mattered more to car enthusiasm than many of the great manufacturers. Ask a random person to name someone famous associated with cars. They will not say Enzo Ferrari. They will say Jeremy Clarkson.

They also made loving cars socially normal. You didn’t have to be a garage hermit. You could be a bloke who liked engines and jokes and scenery. The specials doubled as travel films. A lot of people booked flights to Vietnam or Botswana because three idiots on BBC Two made the world look reachable.

The impact wasn’t just ratings. It was companionship. For more than a decade, millions of people had three familiar voices in the living room every week. Bad day? Cheap-car challenge. Need wonder? Polar special. Need to laugh at human incompetence? Almost any episode. The friendship on screen — real enough that it survived crashes, controversies, a BBC firing and a move to Amazon — made the show feel like hanging out with people you knew.

They were messy. They caused diplomatic incidents. They said things that would not survive a modern compliance meeting. That is part of why they felt like television from a different era: three men who were allowed to be large, rude, authentic, sentimental and ridiculous in the same hour. When they finally signed off from The Grand Tour, it really did feel like the end of something that television no longer quite knows how to make.

And on that bombshell …

September 7, 2026

“Don’t forget to like and subscribe!”

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Along with the earlier post on the recent steep decline in basic literacy, here’s Christopher Gage discussing the same phenomenon of younger Brits’ increased dependency on videos while also demonstrating reduced verbal skills. A mere co-incidence, we can be sure:

La Cigarette by Henri Lebasque (1921)

A friend of a friend of a friend — a primary school teacher — reckons her pupils spend so much time glued to screens that they speak in YouTube English.

Rather than greet one and other with “Hello” they say, “Hi, guys! Welcome to my channel!” When saying goodbye, it’s “Don’t forget to like and subscribe!” Apparently, these little dopamine fiends cannot endure one moment without suckling on the eternal teat of Mother iPad. With their scrolling fingers they tear the pages in strange, ad-free artefacts once known as “books”. Reader, I don’t know if this little fable is entirely true or some semblance of the truth. But it rings truer than false.

Am I being facetious? Not really. The British government, in a rare bout of usefulness, conducted a study into screen-time amongst primary school children. That recent study by the education department found that the more a child spends scrolling on a screen, the less good their vocabulary be.

Please excuse that example of mongrelised English. Then again, perhaps we should call it Future English given that, in just a few years, the YouTube kids will speak in that very bastardised tongue.

According to a bleak wave of childhood study, spending hours tethered to screens quite literally dissolves learning. Researchers found that the “heavy users” — a term usually reserved for heroin addicts — recalled significantly fewer words from a list than their less addicted peers. These screen-addled sprogs spend more than five hours chasing that dopamine dragon. In Plain English, them don’t talk good and shit. At least when compared to their mates who spend less than one hour on a screen. Them kids know more words and shit.

They asked kids to recall words from a list of 34. The ones double-stitched to iPads upwards of five hours daily recognised barely half the words whilst their peers recalled two thirds. Eighty-six minutes. That figure represents the tipping point between literacy and a life talking in the mangled English of a failed rapper.

The study arrived at a rather chilling conclusion: If a child spends over an hour and a half each day thumbing through brain-bleaching bilge on YouTube, their grasp of language withers faster than a doormat outside a crack den.

Of course, these are hyper-sensitive times. The researchers keenly doled out the old “correlation doesn’t imply causation” disclaimer mandatory in a neurotic culture which treats truth like hazardous waste. And who am I to judge? The ability to express one’s thoughts isn’t utterly essential. The development of language — I’m sure a Foucault-addled academic might agree ­— is elitist and racist and sexist and ableist and all that.

And so, I am intensely relaxed about this brave new world in which the brains of the next generation dissolve in a swamp of TikTok reels and YouTube videos. There is nothing to worry about. This is progress. And progress must always progress. Words are just words and you can still talk good and shit without knowing them words in them things that don’t even have videos on them pages.

The New Dark Ages by James Marriot

Filed under: Books, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West reviews James Marriot’s The New Dark Ages, which covers issues that are certainly of deep concern to parents as GenZ and Gen Alpha appear to have almost completely abandoned literacy in any written form:

I’m not the only parent who feels increasingly anxious about their children’s media diet. For teenage boys in particular, entertainment often comes in the form of YouTube, which for any adult briefly glancing at the screen seems to feature an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles, besides an invitation to watch the latest work of creativity: “I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos” or “I cemented a microwave to my head”. In comparison to this, the mindless television I watched in the 1990s seems as narratively complex as Dostoevsky.

Most of all, it’s notable that many children aren’t reading anymore, and it’s steadily become a topic of interest among fellow parents, then worry, and now panic. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that something quite bad is happening.

Every catastrophe needs its Jeremiah, and for this we have Times columnist James Marriott, whose increasing anxiety about the decline of literacy was articulated in a hugely popular substack post last year. Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week.

I wouldn’t call the book “urgent” because I usually take that to mean “worthy scolding by an ideological ally”; it’s entertaining, informative, often amusing and makes a coherent case in 50,000 or so words, which many of us can still manage. But the implications he lays out are disturbing, and influence everything around us.

James and I have become friends over the past couple of years, drawn together by a mutual sense of despair, and he’s probably the only person in journalism even more pessimistic than I am. If you believe the media to be a circle-jerk of people helping their mates (which it is, obviously), bear that in mind, but reading his prose one gets a sense of how likeable as well as articulate he is, even if born in the wrong decade. His upbringing will seem as alien to those raised in the coming years as the world of Boethius would have been to Alfred the Great.

    Literature was our religion: the way we explained and interpreted our lives. As a child I quickly learned that every possible event — from a major bereavement to a minor playground contretemps — could be cross-referenced against a novel by Thomas Hardy or a poem by Philip Larkin. There was a quote for everything. I was dragged off to Shakespeare plays at what now strikes me as a rather cruelly young age (“if you’re not enjoying it”, I remember my dad telling me, “you can just read your book instead”). We worshipped pretty much all the canonical English poets but in our pantheon of literary saints, Shakespeare was Jesus or, more probably, God.

    We celebrated his birthday every year with a homemade cake and in the holidays we were taken on solemn pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon. I recall that I was once presented with a Shakespeare-themed stuffed bear (it was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Hamlet).

Such a veneration for the written word naturally made him sensitive to disturbing stories about declining literacy that began circulating around the turn of the decade. “The first rumours that something important was happening reached me via friends working in universities”, he writes: “I came close to going into academia myself (though I don’t think the world is a poorer place for the loss of my proposed PhD on landscape imagery in post-war British poetry)”.

Anecdotes were soon backed up by data, showing significant declines in reading comprehension among students, as well as an even sharper drop in the number of adults and children reading for pleasure. The chief suspect seemed obvious: it’s the phones. (Everything’s “the phones”). Yet the more Marriott looked into it, the more he came to believe that the real transformation came with television, as Neil Postman had warned in his 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death.

“Postman believed that the rise of TV — with its bias towards triviality and charismatic personalities — was beginning to undermine the kinds of reasoned and productive public discourse on which a civilised democracy depends. He was dismissed by some of his critics as a crank and a Luddite. The passing of time has revealed that he was a prophet.”

September 6, 2026

Scientific American used to be a respected science publication

Filed under: Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A few years ago, it became clear that Scientific American had been captured by the woke gender warriors, but as ESR points out, the publication had been somewhat in the hands of propagandists for much longer than that:

I was once a Scientific American subscriber. I loved that magazine; reading it was one of the highlights of my month. I canceled, and wept for what the magazine was becoming, when they published a theme issue that was a transparent political hit job.

Sounds like current news? No. That was 40 years ago. The hit job was on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan was in the White House.

And I … I couldn’t figure out why nobody was saying the obvious in public. That SciAm had been sock-puppeted by a Soviet influence operation desperate to keep the US from exploiting its technological advantage.

Ideological capture of the scientific establishment is not a new problem. As much as I hate the Communists behind it, I’m even angrier with all the scientists who averted their eyes and never pushed back while the capture was going on. Our civilization gave them a position of high status, privilege, and trust. A priori I don’t think we were wrong to do that — until they failed in the duty that went with that trust.

It’s difficult for me to express how personally painful I found this. I revered research scientists as a child and young man — I could not imagine any higher calling than to be one myself. Until they betrayed civilization, and in the process betrayed me.

So, this isn’t a new problem. What’s new is that the post-2014 woke insanity has made it too obvious to miss.

It’s time for a dissolution of the monasteries. The culture of science, to the extent it is transmitted forward, must learn a harsh and terrible lesson about the consequences of allowing scientific neutrality to be abandoned for a mess of politics.

QotD: 90s music

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

90s music was all fake and gay. Let’s get that right out front. We hadn’t invented the phrase “fake and gay” yet, though, so we were forced to make due with a phrase from Lit Crit: “Deconstruction”.

[Not to be confused with Disintegration, which as we all know is the greatest album ever].

Nirvana’s genre-defining hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a deconstruction of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”. Pearl Jam were the deconstructed Doors (though this is more because of Eddie Vedder’s “kinder, more sensitive Jim Morrison” act than for the music). The Counting Crows were deconstructed Sixties folk, the Smashing Pumpkins were deconstructed Pink Floyd (I like Smashing Pumpkins), the Gin Blossoms were the deconstructed Eagles, and so on, finally reaching its nadir with Oasis, the “deconstructed” Beatles who were so deconstructed, McCartney et al could’ve sued them for plagiarism and probably won.

Severian, “Alt Music Thread”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-06.

September 5, 2026

60th Anniversary of Star Trek: A Very Brief Look Back

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

Feral Historian
Published 4 Sep 2026

On September 8th 1966, Star Trek premiered and has since reflected shifts in American popular culture from the Vietnam era to today. It hasn’t always been good, but it has been a ride. Perhaps one that has come to an end.

00:00 Intro
04:32 A New Trek
06:15 Overlap
09:04 Stuck In Itself
10:00 Enterprise
12:37 JJ
13:28 Trek Today

The link for Sean Munger’s video: • Star Trek and the Vietnam War (Part I)
Obviously this is not a statement of agreement with every point in that video.

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The high-water mark of Cancel Culture

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This Noahpinion piece is from last year, but I hadn’t seen it before and I think it outlines fairly accurately why “we” allowed Cancel Culture to temporarily take over social media and cause so much personal damage to disfavoured individuals. It gave the mob the power to identify their own Emmanuel Goldsteins and drive them from the public sphere:

The Arrest of Robespierre, The Night of the 9th to 10th Thermidor, Year II, 27th July 1794
Colour engraving by Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert (1765 – ca.1835) via Wikimedia Commons.

I think about this when I think about cancel culture.

Back in 2018, Bari Weiss got dogpiled on Twitter for an anodyne liberal tweet. Weiss congratulated Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu on pulling off a difficult move, quoting a line from the musical Hamilton about immigrants being great:

Weiss was viciously attacked for this tweet by thousands of people who called her racist over the course of several days. Why? Because Mirai Nagasu isn’t actually an immigrant — she was born in the U.S. According to Weiss’ many attackers, Weiss’ statement implied that nonwhite people are perpetual foreigners.

That was, of course, complete hogwash. Nagasu’s parents are immigrants; the use of the term “second-generation immigrants” to describe the children of immigrants is utterly standard terminology in academic sociology. And by quoting a line from Hamilton in praise of a second-generation immigrant athlete competing on behalf of the U.S., Weiss was clearly advocating in favor of (nonwhite) immigration as something that makes America stronger — a very standard liberal viewpoint.

Whether this particular pile-on had long-term negative consequences for Weiss’ life isn’t clear, but she encountered an increasingly hostile climate at the New York Times, the paper where she worked, and eventually was forced to quit. It would have been reasonable for people observing that pile-on — and similar attacks directed at Weiss over the years — to conclude that speaking up is dangerous and that Twitter mobs hold a lot of real power.

The perception that cancel culture was the progressive H-bomb — an invincible weapon that could be fired any time at anyone who didn’t conform perfectly to a set of progressive mores that had only emerged a few years ago — reshaped much of American society in the 2010s. Every organization in the country, from knitting circles to romance novelist associations to sci-fi conventions, had its internal hierarchy disrupted by the fear that disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors.

Why was cancel culture both so powerful and so popular for those few years? The most obvious reason is that it worked. If you were a progressive in 2018 who really believed that calling a second-generation American an “immigrant” was racist, then you could often effectively strike at that person by raising a hue and cry about them on Twitter. Companies were afraid of boycotts, of course. But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger; corporate managers would often cave out of pure fear of online negativity.

Another reason was that cancel culture was a quick route to online clout. As Eugene Wei wrote in his famous blog post “Status as a Service (StaaS)“, social media offers most people the opportunity to get much more social status than they have any hope of getting in their daily lives, if they happen to get lucky and go viral and become an influencer.

But to get that clout, you have to stand out. Attacking the same old progressive targets — Donald Trump, Republican senators, conservative influencers — is a low-yield activity, because the field is too competitive. Everyone attacks those people. But finding more novel targets for mob attack — like an NYT writer who calls a second-generation American an “immigrant” — can be a high-yield activity. It’s basically outrage entrepreneurship.

Of course, this means that there was an incentive for progressive purity spirals and tent-shrinking. If you’re a progressive looking for new people to denounce, the most tempting targets are probably center-left liberals who have heretofore been safe from cancellation. Hating Donald Trump is old news. But hating Matt Yglesias? That could get you some real attention!

And so the ranks of the online cancel-mobs were probably also swollen by people who participated in the mobs out of fear that if they didn’t, they too would be canceled. This gave rise to a phenomenon I call ponzi screaming — berating the person immediately to your right on the political spectrum, out of fear that if you don’t berate them, people further to your left will berate you. You have people like the progressive online shouter and failed Congressional candidate Will Stancil berating Nate Silver even as he gets frequently dogpiled and berated by leftists.

Between outrage entrepreneurship, purity contests, and ponzi screaming, late-2010s progressive cancel culture started to look like a farcical imitation of the French Terror or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The stakes were obviously much lower — losing your job is a lot less bad than losing your head — but many of the social dynamics and behavior patterns were recognizably similar.

September 4, 2026

Never discount the political muscle of “King Coal”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Ringo remembers when a friend of his accidentally discovered that “King Coal” is still a behind-the-scenes political factor that cannot be ignored:

Soooo, guy I knew in of all places National Guard in Florida.

He was taking a master’s in Optics at University of Central Florida. He had to do a paper. Just one of the random “do a paper” assignments you do in a master’s program. He’d heard that tailings from coal mines could be a bit suspect in terms of radiation. Not in his direct field but in “physics”. Good enough.

There’s a coal plant about 20 miles from Orlando. Goes out, goes to the big pile of tailings, sticks a Geiger counter probe in it, expecting a bit above background.

HOLY MOTHER OF ROENTGEN! THAT’S FREAKING HOT!

There’s a thin layer of ash over the tailings that isn’t and blocks most of the release. So, a Geiger counter casually waved over it, all good.

Stick a probe in and it’s a different story. It’s hot as the hinges of hell radioactively. (And quite a bit of that material is released by coal plants. Much more likely to cause lung cancer than smoking, btw.)

So, he writes up the paper and submits it.

Couple of weeks later, he’s called into his thesis advisor who sadly and shamefacedly tells him he’s being dropped from the master’s program.

“WTF?”

Enter the late and VERY unlamented Senator Robert Byrd. Byrd’s people had noses in every department everywhere and ANYTHING that MIGHT harm King Coal MUST be nipped in the bud.

Even a guy getting an Optics master’s who just happened to stick his probe in the wrong mound.

Ask me why the 1000 Nukes program was scrapped right after Nixon left office and why Byrd might just have been behind Watergate and performed essentially a coup d’état. (Or why Nixon pushed the Thousand Nukes Program for that matter.) Or why it’s taken so long for Small Modular Reactors to have any chance of getting off the ground. (“Technological advancements” is not the answer. We’ve been doing them for the Navy for 70 years.)

Biden’s “War on Coal” really pissed me off but along with natural gas it MIGHT have finally killed King Coal for good and all and that is something to heave a sigh of relief.

And following up to a question down-thread:

Absurdus – @AdAltum

How did a senator hear about a random paper from some random master’s student? How did he get him expelled from a program he was in?

“The Senator” probably never even heard about it. It was handled at a much lower level.

How did his people hear about it?

Byrd was Chairman of the Budget Committee and the Rules Committee as well as Chairman Pro Tem any time the Dems held the Senate (which was constantly up until Newt Gingrich.)

He was also “Chairman Emeritus” of the Energy Committee. He was on the committee despite being a previous chairman. (Because he was only allowed to chair two and Rules and Budget were more important.)

Energy provides funds to colleges for research. Budget approves it. That meant he had ears all over every college and research facility in the United States.

Say one bad thing about Coal and your days were numbered if you were some minor master’s candidate. Hell, adjunct professor.

You probably aren’t old enough or didn’t follow politics back then to know just how ruthless, corrupt and evil Byrd and his people were.

BTW: Probably also why Freeman Dyson lost his funding for bottle fusion in 1974.

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