Quotulatiousness

August 16, 2026

In Ontario, bike lanes are not a “human right”, thank goodness

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

On his Substack, Brian Lilley celebrates two recent developments in Ontario that — unlike so many others in the last several years — align with common sense:

Last year I wrote about the horrible court decision put out by “Justice” Paul Schabas on bike lanes being a Charter right. I put “Justice” in quotations because as I described at the time, the decision was so horrible and so political that it wasn’t worthy of an Ontario court.

Today, the Court of Appeal of Ontario agreed with me. As I wrote in my Toronto Sun column, they didn’t just overturn the ridiculous decision by Schabas, they excoriated him and his ruling.

AI-generated image from Brian Lilley

I quoted different sections of the appeals court ruling in my column, and trust me it was tough to choose which parts to quote in such a brilliant decisions. Here, I want to quote from early in the ruling, paragraphs 3-5.

    [3] The application judge’s decision presents as a straightforward application of orthodox s. 7 principles. But the application of those principles, divorced from a broader understanding of the constitution of which they are a part, has led to a surprising outcome: the conclusion that routine legislation regulating road usage is unconstitutional.

    [4] Something has gone wrong.

    [5] The application judge erred in law in interpreting and applying s. 7. But his decision is wrong in a more profound sense, for it subverts a fundamental principle of our democratic constitutional order: a legislature cannot bind its successors. Legislatures in the Westminster tradition are free to undo legislation by amending or repealing it as they see fit. That is the nature of democratic lawmaking in our constitutional order. Of course, all laws are subject to the Charter, but this does not preclude the amendment or repeal of legislation the legislature was under no constitutional obligation to have passed in the first place. Amendment or repeal of legislation may breach the Charter only if the breach can be established independent of the prior state of the law.

There is so much to digest here, but I am glad to see judges — who come from different backgrounds and were appointed by both the Harper and Trudeau governments — agree on fundamental principles. That should be a given, we shouldn’t think about such things, but today, we can’t those fundamentals for granted.

The idea that one Parliament, or legislature, cannot bind the hands of another is fundamental to our system. If I pass a law saying that wearing blue on Tuesdays is illegal and the next Parliament passes a law saying that it isn’t, the more recent law takes precedent.

Yes, I used a ridiculous example on purpose, but just to prove a point. It’s sad that so many people, including those who report and comment on politics, aren’t familiar with this basic concept on the role of Parliament.

And the other reversal of an absurd policy:

Last month there was a tribunal ruling in Ontario that said people in the country illegally were still entitled to welfare. I wrote about it at the time and said it was a crazy ruling that the Ford government needed to deal with.

They promised to do so at the time and on Thursday announced that they had.

Friday morning I was forced to write about the ridiculous take by the Toronto Star‘s “senior immigration reporter” Nicholas Keung. It seems, based on his stories, that Keung has never met someone he doesn’t think should be in Canada.

I’ll say as the son of immigrants, who grew up in an area where kids with parents who had Canadian accents were the strange ones, most immigrants don’t back illegals getting welfare.

Still, this was the Star‘s headline on the story.

As I point out in my Sun column, Parsa is himself an immigrant having come from Iran with his family as a child.

But sure, the Star‘s “senior immigration reporter” smears him as racist.

Let me explain something to you. When a reporter says “experts” say and they only find experts from one side, that is them finding the people they agree with to say what they want said.

Understanding Canadian politics

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

To an outsider, the ins and outs of Canadian politics must seem quite illogical — and for lots of good reasons — but L. Wayne Mathison offers an explanation that may help:

I think the “constraints” framework explains a surprising amount of Canadian politics.

Canada increasingly governs as though good intentions can overrule physical and economic limits.

We want more housing, but often ignore land-use rules, permitting delays, skilled-trade shortages, infrastructure capacity and construction costs.

We want better health care, but governments can promise “universal access” far more easily than they can produce doctors, nurses, operating rooms, diagnostic machines and hours in the day.

We want rapid population growth, while pretending housing, roads, schools and hospitals will expand at the same speed.

We want reliable electricity while making major generation and transmission projects harder to build.

We want higher wages and stronger public services while giving far less attention to productivity, capital investment and the businesses that ultimately generate the income being taxed.

This is where I think the constrained versus unconstrained distinction is useful.

Politics often treats shortages as failures of compassion or policy design. But sometimes the problem is much simpler: you cannot legislate resources into existence.

I learned that farming. You could have the best plan in the world, but weather, machinery, labour, soil, interest rates and time still had the final vote. Reality didn’t care how sincere you were.

Government faces the same rule.

This doesn’t mean government is useless, and it doesn’t mean every left-wing idea ignores constraints or every conservative understands them. Plenty don’t. But Canadian policy would improve dramatically if every proposal had to answer one basic question:

What are the real-world bottlenecks, and what happens when we hit them?

You can redistribute money. You can rewrite regulations. You can announce targets.

You cannot redistribute houses that haven’t been built, doctors who don’t exist, electricity that hasn’t been generated or productivity that hasn’t been created.

Eventually the physical world collects its bill.

August 15, 2026

“Forestalling collapse is simple: all we need do is reinstate meritocracy within institutions”

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

John Carter discusses the ever-more-concerning collapse in basic competence in western societies, which left unchecked will absolutely lead to civilizational collapse due to the vastly complex interconnection of so many systems that we all depend on day and night:

Helen Andrews recently wrote an essay for Compact Magazine, titled The Racial Crossroads, which has been making waves for daring to use the verboten descriptor “race communism” for the acrimonious racial spoils system that has replaced meritocracy throughout the dying West. It’s very good. You should read it.

Personally, I prefer the more descriptive “gay race communism”. The progress pride flag is inseparable from the clenched Marxist fist of Black Lives Matter in regime iconography. Moreover, gay race communism is a deliberate subversion of the left’s own “fully automated luxury gay space communism” meme.

There are zero communists who actually look like this, gay or otherwise.

To be fair, Andrews introduces the concept as “gay race communism”, and even directly acknowledges its coinage by Twitter anon Drukpa Kunley. It wasn’t that long ago that conservative popularizers laundered ideas emerging from the anonosphere without attribution, as a means of hiding their origin and making themselves look more original, and Helen deserves credit for not doing this. Also to be fair, given the focus of Andrews’ piece, adding the “gay” to “race communism” could be seen as an unnecessarily inflammatory complication. It isn’t, but we’ll get to that in due time.

Andrews spends the first half of her essay detailing how the regulatory framework built by the Civil Rights Act created the cultural conditions for the rise of wokeness, affirmative action, and DEI initiatives. The official explanation given for anti-discrimination laws was that they were well-intended correctives to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Affirmative action was to be an explicitly temporary measure to give American blacks a helping hand, with the understanding that – after a decade or at most a generation of assistance – they would no longer need a thumb on the scale. Once racism was defeated, we could all live in utopian colour-blind race-neutral Star Trek liberalism, judging one another by the content of our individual characters and no more concerned by the phenotypic differences of ancestral population groups than we are by sartorial quirks. Kumbayah and such. This isn’t an original argument: the same points have been made by Christopher Caldwell in his 2021 book The Age of Entitlement, and of course most directly by Richard Hanania in his 2023 book The Origins of Woke (whom Andrews doesn’t mention, possibly because everyone hates Hanania now).

The central point of Andrews’ essay is the following:

    The old racial bargain is breaking down, due to a combination of changing demographics and a dawning realization that racial outcomes are not going to converge any time soon. One possible path forward is to throw out the old racial bargain and establish a new one based on equality under the law. The other possible path is to accept permanent racial favoritism at every level of society.

As Andrews sees it, the first problem with the Civil Rights regime is that it reifies the abstraction of equality into a legal presumption that there are no salient biological differences between human population groups. This simply isn’t true, but the assumption that it is true leads to the necessary conclusion that all differences in outcome between groups must be a consequence of discrimination based on irrational prejudice, rather than a natural result of inborn distinctions of cognitive capacity or behavioural profile. Biological differences are real and significant, but the make-believe that they are socially constructed and unimportant incentivizes a perpetual inquisition that dismantles society as it persecutes innocent people for ever more tenuous spectres of racism implicitly haunting the privileged depths of their incorrigbly white ids. This places institutions in an impossible quandary, since the only way to avoid being dragged into court in discrimination lawsuits is to preemptively discriminate in favour of protected groups, which is to say, against unprotected groups. Human resources departments have formed as a direct response to the legal sword of Damocles poised over every institution’s neck: their function isn’t actually to hire the best people, or to hire anyone at all, but rather to ensure that the employer won’t get sued for hiring people from the wrong groups, or not hiring the people from the right groups, or for allowing people from the right groups to get offended by things said by people from the wrong groups. A doctrine predicated on denial of reality must go to war with reality to preserve itself, and as the war on noticing grinds on the battlefront presses into ever more intimate corners of people’s lives, their public speech, their private speech, their silent thoughts, their very emotions.

Your emotions are illegal, chud.

The second problem Andrews identifies is demographic mission creep. When race communism first got rolling in the 50s and 60s, the focus was quite specifically on African-Americans, who had an arguable claim to restitution on the basis of their long period of bondage on the cotton plantations.1 White Americans largely agreed with that, and were trying to do the decent thing, to make up for the abuses and indignities suffered by the disadvantaged blacks.

The mass migration of the third world into the first upsets that balance. America is no longer a 90% white country with a small rump of Africans, but more like a 50% white country, with large and growing minorities from every benighted slum in the Global South … and every single one of those groups gets to classify itself as an oppressed racial minority from the Global Majority, and therefore help itself to the largess spilling forth from the cornucopia of white guilt. In the 70s and 80s affirmative action was largely no more than an annoyance for white Americans, but in the 2020s young American whites find themselves shoved aside in university admissions, in corporate hiring, in the availability of loans and grants for education, in the availability of venture capital, in promotions, and so on, with these opportunities being bestowed instead upon supposedly oppressed minorities who arrived five minutes ago and were never actually oppressed by white Americans.

[…]

Institutional collapse is a near certainty on this track. Our civilization is a staggeringly complex system of systems. Operating and maintaining those systems requires a high degree of competence. Competence has to be learned, but it can’t be learned by anyone. DEI pushes incapable people into key positions, while denying even the opportunity for training to the potentially capable. Eventually, the systems themselves begin to malfunction. Repair becomes impossible, because there’s no one who actually knows how to repair the systems: the ones working in the system are too stupid to understand it, while those who could have learned were locked out and therefore didn’t learn what they needed to know. One system breaks, causing a problem in another system, which leads to a problem in a third system, and soon cascading failures junk the entire machine. DEI – and by extension, Civil Rights – has precipitated a competence crisis, and Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis.

This complex systems collapse is already happening. Andrews uses the example of failures in airplane manufacturing, pilot training, and air traffic control that have made air travel that much more hazardous, and which seem to trace directly to DEI-motivated recruitment policies, although naturally it is difficult to verify this as the regime does everything it can to obscure such a connection. The general enshittification of the Internet is probably at least partly a result of less talented and less scrupulous Indians replacing white software engineers. Entertainment media has become ludicrously bad in direct proportion to the replacement of white male directors, showrunners, screenwriters, animators, artists, and programmers by women of pronouns. Academia is in the midst of a credibility collapse for exactly the same reason.

It is not hard to extrapolate this degenerative process out a generation or two. Instead of building cities on Mars, we will be bouncing over potholes on dirt roads. Tap water will have to be boiled, assuming water even comes from taps. Electricity will only be available a few days a week, and that in the good neighbourhoods. What did South Africans use for light before they had candles? Light bulbs. There are still liberals in South Africa, by the way.

Forestalling collapse is simple. All we need do is reinstate meritocracy within institutions.

Simple does not mean easy. Reinstating meritocracy is in fact ideologically impossible for the regime.

  1. The merits of that case can certainly be debated: white Americans have spilled rivers of their blood and mountains of treasure to end and make up for slavery, and when is enough enough?; the crime and dysfunction blacks have brought to American cities must surely be included against them in the accounting; the standard of living of the most low-down American hood rat is orders of magnitude better than that of his distant cousins in the shantytowns of Lagos, suggesting that if anything blacks should be grateful for free transport to the New World. Putting all of that aside, the fact remains that American blacks have a long history in America, and therefore have some claim to consideration.

Debunking common Supply Management beliefs

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

On his Substack, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois debunks ten myths about Canada’s supply management cartel that interfere with Canadians’ ability to engage with the idea of dismantling the government’s favourite oligopoly:

Suddenly, everyone — and their grandmother — seems to be an expert on supply management.

That newfound interest is healthy. Canadians are finally examining the benefits, costs and contradictions of a complicated system affecting roughly one-quarter of the country’s agricultural economy.

A generation ago, few economists openly criticized supply management. Those who did faced fierce attacks, while the dairy lobby deployed a nationwide marketing budget approaching $200 million annually. Remember the Doug Gilmour milk advertisements? Today, the “Milk” logo appears on Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys through a multimillion-dollar sponsorship.

For years, criticizing supply management was almost politically taboo. Social media has changed that. Consumers can now see milk being dumped, compare Canadian prices with those abroad and question why Ottawa repeatedly compensates a protected industry.

Dairy farmers are not the problem. They operate rationally within rules created by governments and administered by marketing boards. But those rules should not be immune from scrutiny.

Here are 10 myths Canadians should stop believing.

1. Dairy farmers are poor […]

2. Supply management is saving the family farm […]

3. Canadian dairy farmers receive no subsidies […]

4. Trade agreements make every dairy farmer lose money […]

5. Ending supply management would automatically lower prices […]

6. Farmers alone pay for dumped milk […]

7. Milk dumping is unavoidable […]

8. Canada has fully respected CUSMA […]

9. Supply management guarantees food security […]

10. Reform means abolishing the system overnight […]

Mark Steyn denies being a “Never Trump”-er

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

From his sickbed, Mark Steyn responds to a criticism from one of his long-time readers that he’s “gradually devolved into NeverTrumpism:

I have no idea where I saw this meme, but it makes me laugh

I begin to understand why, since I emerged from my coma, the docs have recommended eschewing the Internet. Following Wednesday’s Clubland Q&A, Joe Huber comments:

    Unfortunately, SteynOnline (once my favorite place to visit) has gradually devolved into NeverTrumpism, and that’s sad. But it is what it is.

We may have to introduce weekly ceremonial expulsions from The Mark Steyn Club. I’m not “NeverTrump” on immigration, DOGE, MAHA, endless war, etc, and I would still favour him over any likely Democrat candidate or “mainstream” Republican. The first time I met him was over thirty years ago, when his then wife was auditioning for a Broadway musical produced by a friend of mine. The only substantive exchange we had that day was his demand for assurance that the show was a bona fide hit … because the defining characteristic of Trump has always been his utter contempt for what he calls “losers” and his disinclination to allow his brand to be contaminated by association with them.

So it is a mystery to me that he allowed himself to get mixed up with an institution that, by any objective measure, is the biggest “loser” on the planet.

By contrast, my position on this has been exactly the same throughout the time Mr Huber regarded SteynOnline as “my favorite place to visit”. This piece, for example, was published in the print edition of National Review over fifteen sod-bollocking years ago, and its first sentence remains the question that, multiple unwon wars later, the Rah-Rah Right still declines to answer. I recall multiple back-and-forths with the editors over passages they felt were too strong meat, and I would probably write it more bluntly today. But its comparative sobriety should cause Mr Huber to reflect that his charge of “NeverTrumpism” is bollocks, and that my concerns about US inability to use half of the entire planet’s military budget to accomplish any minimal strategic purpose is principled, long-held, and borne out by any random headline. From today:

    Russia Captures Record Share of India’s Oil Market

And so it goes. (Incidentally, just as a minor point: I note the increasing adoption of the term “West Asia” for the zone of conflict. “Middle East” is a designation that reflects the view from Washington; “West Asia” is how it looks from Delhi and Beijing.)

You will see in the latter half of my ancient piece the reference to the US military as “the expeditionary force of the Parliament of Man”. It is safe to say that President Trump — with his declaration that he’ll pick the next Supreme Leader — does not see it like that, but that’s the point: the rhetoric may change, but the self-bollocksing of American warmongering does not.

August 14, 2026

Ontario premier doubles-down on provoking Trump. What could go wrong?

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

At some point you have to ask yourself … if Canada was being run by people who wanted to destroy it, what would they have done differently in the trade negotiations with Donald Trump’s government?

Is Doug Ford the dumbest Canadian?

I know, it is a deep bench. But the tubby premier is extraordinary. You have to appreciate talent.

There are, apparently, two schools of Canadian thought on the trade fracas with the US. “Punch the bully in the nose.” and “For God’s sake get a deal already.” As I prefer a Canada with an economy, I pick door number 2.

Our Chief Trade Negotiator Janice Charette, is more combative. If Trump brings in his retaliatory tariffs in a week she’s packing up and going home. That’ll learn him.

The idle threat school of negotiation enjoys wide currency in both Ottawa and Queens Park. Meanwhile, Canadian businesses are looking [longingly] at the low tax, low reg world inside the Trump tariff wall.

I’m having a beer with a buddy who is in “founder’s mode” on a startup and, frankly, he’d be crazy not to be looking at domiciling his business in the States. Sure, have a Canadian sub, but why put your main business in Canada?

And decisions like this are being made all over Canada and, indeed, the world. People might hate Trump and all his works but the business attractions of Red States make Ontario and BC look pathetic.

You would think that after Ford’s Super Bowl ad fiasco he would have the wit to remain silent as his province’s fate is being negotiated. You know, avoid more damage. But no, the tubby premier likes to “talk tough”.

I actually feel a bit sorry for Carney having to deal with the fallout of this idiot’s remarks. Unless, of course, like the Super Bowl ads, Carney actually encouraged these remarks … In which case the competition for dumbest guy in Canada has tightened up.

AI’s coming, everyone panic!

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

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Mani Basharzad suggests we do the exact opposite of my chosen headline in regard to the inevitable collapse of civilization rise of artificial intelligence:

In recent weeks, a letter on AI titled “We Must Act Now” has made headlines. Its list of signatories brought together an unlikely coalition of intellectuals, from Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman to Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, and Niall Ferguson.

The signatories agree on three key propositions. First, they argue that “AI may become radically more powerful over the next decade”. Second, they argue that it could “transform the economy on a scale larger than the Industrial Revolution, but over a much shorter period, bringing both large-scale job displacement and significant improvements in living standards”. Third, they argue that “economists, policymakers, and technology leaders must act now to create the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to ensure AI benefits society”.

These propositions have created an unusual consensus among economists and policymakers. They also reflect a broader public anxiety about AI and its impact on people’s livelihoods. Yet, as Stanford economist John Cochrane remarked in response to the letter, “You see AI everywhere, except in productivity and labor statistics”. That is the first problem with the argument: those are the two places where the letter’s predictions should already be showing up.

The letter makes extraordinary claims, and as the famous saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet the evidence offered is remarkably thin. The language is dramatic — “large-scale job displacement”, “larger than the Industrial Revolution”, and “major gains in living standards” — but every prediction is qualified by one word: could. There is still little evidence that AI has fundamentally reshaped employment or productivity.

Take the labor market as an example. A widely cited survey claimed that employers plan to reduce graduate hiring because of AI. But the study was forecasting the future, not describing present reality. It found that “four in ten employers believe entry-level roles could disappear within the next five years”. Once again, the evidence rests on expectations and fears rather than observed outcomes.

Now compare that with what is actually happening. Economist Valentin Boboc has argued that entry-level jobs are growing fastest at firms that are aggressively adopting AI. If AI were already eliminating these positions, we would expect to see the opposite.

Consider youth unemployment. Which developed country currently faces one of the most severe youth employment crises? The answer is not a country overwhelmed by AI, but the United Kingdom. More than 1 million people aged 16–24 are classified as NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), at an estimated annual cost of £125 billion ($169 billion) to the economy.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about the “Something must be done! This is something! Therefore we must do it!” reaction to the rise of widely available LLM agents. If all the claims for AI’s disruptive abilities are true, then change is going to happen whether we want it to or not. I’ve had little direct contact with the various agents, having used Grok a couple of times to generate graphics to accompany blog posts, but I’m told by others that they get lots of benefit from using their preferred AI for all sorts of things.

“Ultra vires“

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eva Chipiuk explains why it’s never a good thing to have your government ever extending the things it is involved in:

Governments going ultra vires should concern every citizen.

Ultra vires means “beyond the powers”. In a democracy, governments and public institutions do not have unlimited authority. They can only exercise the powers the law actually gives them.

Yet increasingly, we see governments, regulators, agencies, and other public bodies stretching their mandates, assuming powers they were never granted, and acting as though their authority is limited only by what they can get away with.

That turns the rule of law on its head.

The question should never be: “Where does the law say government can’t do this?”

The question is: “Where does the law give government the authority to do this?”

That distinction matters.

Government is not above the law. Public institutions are creatures of law, and their power has boundaries. When those boundaries are ignored, courts must enforce them, legislatures must correct them, and citizens must demand accountability.

Because once we accept government exercising powers it was never given, the limits on government become meaningless.

Staying within your legal jurisdiction is not optional. It is the foundation of the rule of law.

August 13, 2026

German democracy from the POV of “Our Democracy Enjoyers”

Filed under: Germany, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

If you’ve been wondering about the state of democracy in Germany, your first move should be to check the latest update from eugyppius:

“Bundesrat of Germany” by photosteve101 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

In civics class, parties appear as little more than informal election-winning cooperatives. Now and again “the sovereign” – that is to say, “the people” – may grant one or various parties a limited right to govern, but the state is held to be in some sense public property. Politicians and their parties are at best its temporary custodians.1

Our Democracy Enjoyers particularly deplore state systems in which parties have captured the state – a special political form we might call the “party state”. Germany became a party state after 1933, when the NSDAP seized the entire state apparatus and outlawed all competitors. Contemporary states owned and operated by single parties include China, Cuba and North Korea. Our Democracy Enjoyers hate all single-party states because they are not democratic.

Party states need not however be single-party states. While the Socialist Unity Party (SED) effectively owned the DDR, they tolerated an array of subservient bloc parties from the very beginning. None of these parties ever had any chance of governing; they functioned only as extensions or alternative faces of the SED itself. These parties included gutted, early opposition parties like the CDU (Ost) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPD), but also SED concoctions like the Democratic Farmers’ Party (DBD) and the cynically post-Nazi National Democratic Party (NDPD). The SED cultivated these parties both as a democratic figleaf and also to integrate “non-proletarian” (particularly Christian) elements within the communist system. The precedent of the DDR shows that the party state can assume various innovative forms and that multiple parties may be useful for political, propaganda or other purposes.

My thesis of the Federal Republic is that it is also a party state. The only difference between the DDR and the BRD is that, in the BRD, several different parties share ownership of the state among themselves.

The three anecdotes at the head of this piece reveal this party ownership in incidental but telling ways. They show, for example, how a substantial portion of the police consider their oath of office to preclude loyalty to a democratically elected opposition party. Should the voters go rogue and install any such party at the state level, a prominent police union functionary openly hopes for insurrection and federal intervention. Periodically voiced ambitions and campaigns to cleanse the civil service of AfD elements come from a similar place. The ownership parties cannot countenance opposition creep into the bureaucracy, because they correctly regard the bureaucracy as their property.

The hysteria surrounding a thwarted SPD nomination to the Federal Constitutional Court reveals that the parties that own the BRD extend their proprietary interests not only to the executive and legislative branches, but also to the allegedly independent judiciary. The ruling parties have divided the prerogative to nominate judicial candidates informally among themselves. This prerogative is so jealously guarded that a leading Union politician cited a single thwarted SPD nomination to make the case for mass censorship and regulation of “alternative” media.

And while it is a minor incident that hardly matters, the dispute over the Otto-Wels-Saal shows that the proprietary feelings of the state parties extend to physical architecture, even specific rooms and buildings, which the parties of the party state regard not as public property but as their very own chambers – to name, possess and use as they see fit.

While progressive liberal political systems are all oligarchies, and this because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, they are not all party states – far from it. The party state is a clunky and outmoded political system that historically arose out of accident or necessity, generally following a revolution perpetrated by a single party or political movement in a moment of particular ascendance. The Federal Republic was founded as a party state in 1949, mainly to foreclose the possibility that subversive National Socialist or communist elements might return to influence via democratic processes. This is the basic meaning of German “defensive democracy”, which denotes an array of legal or constitutional tools for the parties that own the state to fend off or criminalise competitors.

  1. Now, we know this is mostly nonsense. “The people” are an abstraction and as such they cannot grant anybody anything. All political systems ultimately redound to the control of more or less stable oligarchies. “Democracy” describes little more than a set of procedures via which the these oligarchies (or their representatives) assume power and enact their will.

August 12, 2026

“It might be Carney’s unconditional surrender to Trump, but it’d be worse under Poilievre”

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

I exaggerate a tad in my choice of headline, but Canada’s bought-and-paid-for relic media will always choose to present a spectacular Carney faceplant as being somehow better than any theoretical action by Poilievre. If Carney’s going to surrender to the Yanks unconditionally, it would obviously be far worse if the Leader of the Opposition had been PM instead. eLbOwS uP, everyone!:

The new Canadian trade flag – The Line

Well, it looks like our prime minister is losing his nerve, eh?

Reports are now leaking fast and furious that Trump’s surprise August 19 tariffs have worked to break our strategic patience. Canada is working to secure some kind of interim deal, and if the leaks are to be believed, we’re going to give the Americans essentially everything they want while they maintain most tariffs on us. It appears to be a shit deal for us, and one that puts us directly in the glide path toward vassal state.

Worse — and, to be frank, I do think this is the worst part of all of this — it’s the exact opposite of what we elected Mark Carney to do. When facing economic and political aggression from a neighbour and once-ally like the United States, surrender vs. resistance is a valid conversation to have. Given our circumstances, one could make a legitimate case for either choice. However, as a people, we did have that conversation, in the spring of 2025. We did make that choice. We chose resistance. We chose sacrifice. That was the premise of the last election, and that was the value proposition Mark Carney made for himself.

Instead, what we’ve actually done in the past year-and-a-half is a counter-productive middle path: yes, we’ve made moves toward strengthening our economy internally, and this is all to the good. But when it comes to measures that require a willingness to stand up to real power, all we’ve offered has been performative resistance in the form of angry social media sputtering and grandiose global speeches, followed in private by concession after concession. This has left us with the worst of both options. We’ve demonstrated that we lack the collective will to sustain real economic sacrifice. And we’ve just annoyed the Americans, which has clearly only increased their desire to make an example of us.

What we absolutely did not vote for was the prediction offered by Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a political risk analysis firm with long ties to Carney and the Liberals. Last year, Bremmer wrote: “Canadian leaders have a political incentive to put up a bigger fight because Trump’s threats toward Canada’s economy and sovereignty have sharply inflamed nationalist sentiment north of the border in the run-up to the April 28 elections. However, I expect Ottawa will quietly fold shortly after the vote to ensure that ongoing relations with the U.S. remain functional.”

Congratulations, Canada. You got punk’d.

In honesty, I can’t think of a worse strategy for achieving a remotely fair trade deal with the United States than the one Carney chose to follow. If he’d been dealing with George W. Bush, this plan might have worked, but I think that Bush was the last US president who would put up with the juvenile performative “strategy” Canada used. Barack Obama would have easily turned the tables, as the relic media loved (and still love) Obama more than they love maple syrup and oxygen. Even Joe Biden’s handlers could have highlighted just how J.V. Canada was acting. But for some reason, the Liberals decided that constantly pissing in Donald Trump’s cornflakes was a winning strategy. And now we’re looking at a maple-flavoured Appomattox Court House meeting … and Trump has no interest — quite the opposite, in fact — in being as generous to a defeated foe as Ulysses S. Grant was to Robert E. Lee.

QotD: The art of admitting our mistakes

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

The painting below by Paul Cézanne demands our consideration. It cannot be passively observed. The glassy patch of water in the lower right-hand corner is where the painting – “Reflections in the Water” – gets its name. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the thick tree on the bank whose ghost is captured on the surface of the pond where the foliage gives way, but really it is the slim sapling, unreflected, unbroken, rising boldly along the canvas’s left edge, that is the true subject of this piece. It is a triumph of subtlety and nerve.

Except that I’m wrong. I’ve been looking at the painting on its side and forming a completely inaccurate impression. Oh well. I’m probably not the first. There is an unconfirmed story that this painting by Cézanne was hung sideways for thirty-one years in London’s National Gallery. The origin of this gossip is from the economist Oswald Toynbee Falk (1879–1972), who lays the blame at the feet of one of its trustees, John Hugh Smith, exactly the kind of person who would in those days have had a hand in such decisions. I can find no corroboration of the story, but I do hope it’s true.

Of course, an establishment as prestigious as the National Gallery would be unlikely to admit to such a galloping blunder. And anyway, as I’ve said, the sideways version has much to recommend it. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s surely that once we commit to an error of thinking for too long it can be mortifying to correct ourselves, particularly if public humiliation is to be the outcome.

It strikes me that the culture war is largely characterised by groups of intelligent people investing in delusional ideas with such gusto that to backtrack would be a kind of social death. One might sooner teach a mule to moonwalk than persuade a celebrity who has championed gender identity ideology to admit that human beings cannot change sex. After demonising women for insisting on single-sex spaces, making excuses for the medicalisation of healthy children, and encouraging the dismantling of gay rights – all in the name of progress – it must be tremendously difficult to admit that it was all for nothing.

For many, the response to being corrected is simply to deny there was any mistake at all and to double down. This is certainly the position of the Green Party, whose representatives are now wholeheartedly wedded to the absurd proposition that human beings have an innate gendered soul that can be misaligned from their body. Their supporters are even congratulating them for their doggedness in the face of reason and evidence, so there is no incentive to course-correct.

Andrew Doyle, “The art of admitting our mistakes” ($), Andrew Doyle, 2026-05-08.

August 11, 2026

The surging Democratic Socialists of America

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

J.D. Tuccille on the unlikely rise of the DSA faction within the Democratic party in time for the 2026 midterm elections:

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary battle is only the latest by candidates affiliated with or adjacent to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Unlike many of the openly socialist officeholders and political hopefuls gaining traction in the Democratic Party, El-Sayed claims to be a capitalist, but his positions are indistinguishable from those of the left-wing figures he campaigns with, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), and podcaster Hasan Piker, who has aligned himself with both the Chinese government and Hamas.

As democratic socialists in general and the DSA in particular take over the Democratic Party, it’s worth examining the positions they take, the enemies they pick, and who supports them to see what they have in store for us as they seek to remake the country.

Young, Credentialed, and Unhappy Recruits

At a time when trust in higher education is sliding among Americans, the socialist surge is largely a project of young college graduates. El-Sayed “eked out his victory by winning young voters and highly educated voters”, finds a Washington Post analysis. That squares with a June Pew Research report that “Democrats who are White, younger or college-educated are more likely to view democratic socialists positively”. Credentialed but relatively low-income people make up the core of DSA recruitment.

Political analyst Nate Silver writes that “the sweet spot for the DSA” is “voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year”. Silver adds that “only 19 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher had household incomes of $60K or below. The DSA rate is around twice that.” He puts this in the context of Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction hypothesis which argues that the country’s universities crank out too many credentialed graduates, with student loan debt attached to not-so-useful degrees, to be absorbed into the prestigious positions they believe they’re entitled to. The result is disillusionment and a search for somebody or something to blame.

That blame is falling on capitalism, American and western civilization in general, and Israel and Jews (the line between the people and the only majority-Jewish nation is inherently fuzzy, and “antizionism” has become a cover for bigotry the way the pseudoscientific term “antisemitism” repackaged old-fashioned Jew-hatred in the 19th century).

[…]

Socialists Revive Ancient Bigotry

DSA-aligned figures are not especially fond of the United States and its allies. It’s not difficult to find comments like New York socialist congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier’s quip: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me”. But as a group, they especially despise the world’s only majority-Jewish state.

Michigan’s El-Sayed says he believes the Israeli government is as evil as the terrorist group Hamas, which launched the October 7 attacks, and calls it guilty of “apartheid” and “genocide”. The DSA last year adopted a resolution denouncing Zionism (the belief that Jews have the right to establish and maintain Israel) as “a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project” and made belief that “Israel has a right to defend itself” an offense punishable by expulsion from the organization. Hasan Piker claimed and repeated that Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel. Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros declined to label as antisemitic a deadly firebombing attack on a Jewish rally in Boulder.

“Some people did some things” during the pandemic, let’s move on …

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

I noted a little while back that I was astonished how quickly the “Spanish Flu” epidemic slipped out of the historical record in the early 1920s, but having gone through the Wuhan Flu experience, I understood it far better. In the Spanish Flu era, the survivors needed to move on with their lives, while in the Covid era, a lot of people wanted to forget how they’d treated their friends, co-workers, and fellow citizens. Different motivations, but similar results. But we shouldn’t let the Covid years slip gently out of memory, because people in positions of power and journalists who should have reported honestly all elected to go full authoritarian and need to be held to account for it, as L. Wayne Mathison explains:

This was never just an American problem, and it was never just about Anthony Fauci.

Canada had its own version of the same institutional failure.

During COVID, too many journalists stopped asking hard questions and started treating government public-health messaging as settled truth. Canadians who questioned lockdowns, mandates, school closures, travel restrictions or changing mask guidance were often dismissed as ignorant, selfish, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Some people certainly did spread nonsense. That does not excuse treating every dissenting argument as misinformation.

Good journalism is supposed to challenge power, especially during an emergency when governments are exercising extraordinary power over ordinary citizens.

Instead, much of our media became emotionally invested in defending the institutions it should have been scrutinizing.

That creates a serious problem now. Admitting that governments, public-health officials or journalists got important things wrong means admitting that people were sometimes mocked, censored or socially punished for raising questions that deserved answers.

So the temptation is to defend the old narrative rather than examine the record honestly.

Canada needs a proper accounting of the pandemic response. What worked? What failed? Which restrictions produced enough benefit to justify their cost? What happened to children, small businesses, mental health, civil liberties and public trust? Where did officials communicate uncertainty honestly, and where did they pretend to know more than they actually knew?

I followed the rules. I got vaccinated. I took COVID seriously.

But I will never accept the idea that taking a virus seriously required switching off critical thought.

Science improves through questioning. Journalism exists to question authority. Democracy requires governments to justify extraordinary powers.

We should have demanded all three.

QotD: The long lead-up to the invasion of Iraq

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s a story that the Bush administration came into office in 2001 itching to get rid of Saddam Hussein and looking around for a pretext. Near as I can tell, this is totally false — actually, the entire US government had been looking for a pretext since at least a decade earlier than that. It all goes back to 1990 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Prior to that, Iraq was an American ally and proxy that helped contain the revolutionary regime in Iran. That relationship gave Saddam a long leash and meant he could get away with a tremendous amount. But the leash was not as long as Saddam thought, and he badly overstepped his limits when a diplomatic fight with Kuwait over the terms of some war loans escalated into a military confrontation. Improvisational decision-making was not out of character for Saddam, who had a tendency to do things like go alone into one of his many palaces and emerge wild-eyed the next day declaring that he had a prophetic dream which would henceforth guide state policy. But this time he got into some real trouble.

The Americans kicked Iraq out of Kuwait quickly and easily, and then … hesitated about what to do next. Nobody wanted to keep Saddam around (remarkably, when you have outlived your usefulness, people suddenly start to notice all of your human rights abuses), but nobody wanted to march into Baghdad and topple him either. There was some wishful thinking that the Kuwait defeat would cause Saddam’s regime to collapse, but most US foreign policy thinkers just shrugged their shoulders and figured better Saddam than chaos and a Vietnam-style quagmire. One especially perceptive official put it this way to a PBS journalist:

    I felt there was a real danger here that you could get bogged down in a long drawn out conflict … and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after. And then you have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all-US operation, I don’t think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you’re going to take a lot more American casualties if you’re gonna go much around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don’t think it would have been worth it.

That official’s name was Dick Cheney.

So Saddam was left in place, and throughout the ’90s American policymakers seethed about it. There was no official policy that said we were going to overthrow him, but prominent politicians like Al Gore were out there writing op-eds saying that Saddam must be toppled and his government dismantled. This produced what Mazarr calls “destructive ambiguity” — everybody knew that everybody else knew that the real policy was to get rid of the guy, but since this was an unofficial position it went through none of the usual policymaking channels and was never formally debated. It also left a lot of room for freelancing.

For example, CIA clandestine operative Bob Baer (whose memoir is a terrifically fun read, by the way) began organizing a coup in 1995, not because he was directly ordered to do so but because he thought it was what his supervisors wanted. Even the strategy of the coup points towards this ambiguity — rather than straightforwardly overthrowing the government, it aimed to spark a rebellion that would gain some momentum but not enough to win, so that when Saddam moved to crush it the US would be pulled in and forced to act.1 Think for a moment about what an odd plan this is, and how it only makes sense if you believe the US secretly wants to invade while officially pretending not to.

The leader of this rebellion was supposed to be Ahmed Chalabi, one of the more fascinating characters in this story. Chalabi was a dapper, cosmopolitan, and erudite bank manager who got exiled from Iraq for gross financial corruption. He promptly reinvented himself as a freedom fighter, rented beautiful houses stocked with fine art in several major cities, and set about ingratiating himself with Western elites. He also began organizing his fellow emigrés and exiles into an effective political lobbying force. Unsurprisingly given his educated and aristocratic manner, he was extremely good at the lobbying part, and soon placed a special focus on the United States, wining and dining congressmen and writing op-eds for major newspapers. Soon he managed to convince the CIA that there were thousands of resistance fighters back in Iraq ready to follow him into battle.

He was good at convincing, but they also wanted to be convinced. Chalabi and his fellow emigrés were charming, cultured, westernized intellectuals who at least pretended to be pro-democracy. It was oh-so-tempting to believe that everybody in Iraq was like that, when in fact they were completely unrepresentative. As a rule of thumb, when a country has a revolution or a civil war or other social breakdown, the ones who make it out are the ones bright enough to see it coming and rich or well-connected enough to escape. Whether it’s the Russian Revolution, the Lebanese Civil War, or whatever you call what’s happening in South Africa, the people who leave are not a random subset — they’re the creme-de-la-creme. Unfortunately the US government somehow couldn’t figure this out in the case of Iraq. They met the emigrés, and were impressed by them, and decided that Iraq really was a civilized and cosmopolitan place under the surface, when in fact the society that created the emigrés had been destroyed decades earlier.

The emigrés represent one pole of the Baptists-and-bootleggers coalition that emerged in the ’90s to advocate for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. The other is exemplified by Paul Wolfowitz, a soft-spoken academic who bounced between senior government positions and jobs at think tanks. Wolfowitz was a humanitarian in the most sincere sense. Much of his extended family had been killed in the Holocaust. The plight of oppressed peoples was not an abstraction for him, and he dedicated his life and career to the proposition that the United States should use all available means to end tyranny and oppression wherever they existed.

Wolfowitz is commonly described as a fanatical neoconservative, and he is, but I think it’s important to demystify that term. Too often it gets used as a catchall for “people we don’t like”, but at least when it comes to foreign policy the neoconservatives fit squarely within the American mainstream. With the notable exception of Donald Trump, every American president of the past few decades has had essentially the same foreign policy, driven by essentially the same core ideas: (1) Americans are the good guys, (2) it’s the job of the good guys to right wrongs wherever they are happening, (3) freedom and democracy are the non-negotiable inheritance of everybody on planet earth. These ideas drive the neoconservatives, yes, but they also drive Samantha Power and Susan Rice, not to mention Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

If you are an American, it may not be apparent to you how weird these ideas seem to the rest of the world. If I were to characterize how previous empires — and America’s current rivals — think about the world, it would be more like: (1) every country has core interests and peripheral interests, (2) you should not interfere in another country’s core interests if you can help it, (3) different peoples and cultures are adapted to different forms of government, and this diversity makes life spicy and interesting. Perhaps most shocking to Americans: most countries do not self-identify as “the good guys”, instead they think of themselves as a people with a history and a set of territorial claims.2

Mazarr describes this peculiar American quality as “the missionary impulse”, and notes that while it comes from a well-intentioned place, it “can produce a theological and absolutist conception of America’s responsibility as well as a romantic conviction that America can renovate other societies at will”. Or, to put it in blunter words, it makes us do insane things like invade and occupy a culturally alien country on the other side of the world, and stand there in blinkered incomprehension when people don’t like it. Perhaps the most damning thing about this missionary impulse is the way it provides a self-excusing justification for recklessness: since America is definitionally the good guys, all the horrible consequences of America’s dumb decisions must be somebody else’s fault, and anyway we meant well so you can’t really blame us.3 It’s like a speeding driver who hits and kills pedestrians over and over again, and when confronted gets huffy and points out he’s on his way to feed people at a soup kitchen.

Why is our national character like this? It’s one of those eternal questions. Maybe it’s because we were settled by various strains of fanatical Protestants, or because our ethnos was born during the Enlightenment, or some other “genetic” factor. Alternatively, it could be something about our historical development, or perhaps the large oceans that have always insulated us from most of the negative consequences of our decisions. Or maybe it’s just inevitable that whoever the current world empire is will feel this way, a consequence of our “unipolar moment”.4 Whatever the cause, it’s been a frequent source of misunderstanding between American and foreign diplomats, and few more so than Iraq’s.

The inability of the Iraqi regime, and of Saddam Hussein in particular, to “get” America or its motivations is a recurring bit of comic relief in Mazarr’s book, and one of the first big episodes of it occurs here in the mid ‘90s. This was the time when the Iraqis completely shut down their WMD programs and destroyed every trace of them. But even while halting their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons projects, they continued to loudly insist that they were operational. This appears to have been done out of fear that they would lose prestige if they admitted to backing down. Saddam also really wanted the Iranians to think that he still had chemical weapons out of fear that they’d invade if he didn’t, and he figured that US intelligence would obviously figure out that the programs had been stopped, so they didn’t have to come out and say it themselves.

I remember when I was a kid watching Dr. Strangelove, and laughing at the part where the Soviets built a doomsday device without telling anybody, completely defeating the purpose of having a doomsday device. Then I got older, and learned that no actually, in real life the Soviets built a doomsday device, and then didn’t tell anybody, because they apparently assumed that its psychological effect would be more powerful if America found out about it from its spies (naturally, we didn’t find out until after the Cold War was over). Saddam’s mistake was a weird inverse of this, destroying all his doomsday weapons and then just assuming we’d figure it out. I guess the moral of the story is that in real life, these too-clever-by-half schemes where you double-bluff your opponent are rarely worth it.5

Anyway, Saddam destroyed all of his WMD, and then kicked out the UN inspectors so as to maintain the charade that he still had them. At the same time that all of this was happening, the sanctions regime that the US had imposed was clearly falling apart. European and Asian businessmen were swarming all over Baghdad, trying to get things in place for when foreign investment inevitably flooded back into the country. All of this contributed to an ambient sense that something had to be done; the attempt to kick the can down the road was failing. By the late ’90s, the Clintons had already convinced themselves that a rematch with Saddam was inevitable, but they didn’t have time to act on it before their term was up and a new sheriff rolled into town.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-06-30.

  1. Yes, this was exactly Strelkov’s strategy in the Ukrainian civil war. And for similar reasons — the Russian government as an official body was dithering and indecisive, but a large faction within it wanted to act.
  2. My north star here is, as always, my former coworker from Bulgaria.
  3. Graham Greene did an exquisite job skewering this attitude in his novel The Quiet American. One character says of the titular American: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused”.
  4. Did the Romans feel this way? Did the Chinese? I don’t actually know, but I think there’s something distinctive about the American imperial attitude. It really does come down to our belief that we’re bombing you for your own good (or overthrowing your government for your own good, or whatever). My sense is that past hegemons have been a bit more honest.
  5. Then again, Gaddafi did what Saddam arguably should have done, and look what that got him. I guess the real lesson is just not to make too much trouble until your nukes really work.

August 10, 2026

Clarkson’s Farm (and seven subsidiary businesses)

Filed under: Britain, Business, Environment, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

While I don’t watch much TV outside the NFL season, I was certainly aware of Jeremy Clarkson’s post-Top Gear/post-The Grand Tour TV show, I only started actually watching it earlier this week. And that was only because of a glowing review from The Critical Drinker. I’ve been missing a really good show, but I’ve got four-and-a-half seasons to catch up on — I’m not a binge watcher, so that’s not going to happen immediately. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Sama Hoole points out just how tenuous a farming business can be in England nowadays and how many other businesses Clarkson has started on his farm to try to make it profitable:

Jeremy Clarkson of Clarkson’s Farm.

Jeremy Clarkson runs at least eight businesses off a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Seven of them make money.

Count them. A farm shop. A pub. A lager brand. A bestselling book every autumn. A streaming series. A merchandise range. And now an app, built by Lisa Hogan, connecting the public to farms.

Then the eighth. Growing food.

Year one, working the ground flat out: £144. By year six, a £5,000 loss where £37,000 had been projected. This summer, two hundred of those acres grew nothing at all, because putting wheat in them was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed.

Every enterprise on that farm turns a profit except the farming.

The lager tells you why, and the chain of cause is on the record. Government subsidies were falling, so in 2021 he decided to brew beer from his own barley. That is the entire origin of Hawkstone. A decision taken in Whitehall turned an arable farmer into a brewer, and the beer worked.

Nothing about the grain changed. Barley sold as barley goes at whatever the buyer offers that morning. Barley in a bottle goes at the price the man who grew it decides.

That one difference is the whole business.

The pub is the same move in bricks. A derelict barn nobody had wanted since 2013, bought for reportedly under a million, now with a queue. On the menu a sausage from his own pigs costs 74p against 18p for the imported version, and he absorbs that gap on every plate. The farm shop, meanwhile, is legally barred from selling food produced more than sixteen miles away, and still cannot keep up with demand.

Now look at what the farming has behind it that yours does not. One of the best land agents in England. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. An agronomist. A production company covering the costs. A queue down the lane. A name that sells anything it is printed on.

It loses money anyway.

And this is the ordinary arrangement, not an eccentric one. Defra’s own figures say 72 percent of farms in England now take income from something that is not farming, and diversification accounts for 31 percent of total farm income. The government’s own Batters Review found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making outright in 2024.

Diddly Squat is simply the loudest version. The shop subsidises the field. The pub subsidises the field. The television subsidises the field.

A thousand acres of English farmland, and the one thing it cannot do is pay for itself by producing food.

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