My “favourite” stupid workplace idea is “bring your whole self to work”. Only someone who does not understand how teams work would suggest such a toxically dumb idea.
Organisations and institutions are formalised teams. Due to past ruthless selection — see the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck — the male expression of Homo sapien genes is much better at teams than is the female expression of the same. This does turn out to matter.
We have spent centuries, millennia, dealing with the bad traits of men in power. We better start wrestling seriously and quickly with the bad traits of women in power, or we could end up with a cascading collapse of complex systems (see the LA fires for an example). We are already seeing some serious institutional degradation.
But if we remain stuck in “if you criticise men, it’s feminism; if you criticise women, it’s misogyny”, we have a potentially terminal problem.
Lorenzo Warby, Substack Notes, 2026-02-21.
May 27, 2026
QotD: “Bring your whole self to work”
May 26, 2026
Canadian parents are increasingly adopting the “helicopter” or “bulldozer” model
Eva Chipiuk on concerning trends in Canadian parenting styles and the long-term impact on children:
Not many people have really turned their minds to the psychology of Canadians. Most are too busy reacting to the latest outrage, headline, or political controversy.
However, David Redman has cautioned about what he has identified as a trend in Canada: “helicopter” and “bulldozer” parenting, where children are either constantly hovered over or where every obstacle is removed before they ever have to face it themselves.
Over time, that kind of environment can produce people who become uncomfortable with uncertainty, overly dependent on authority, fearful of risk, and hesitant to think independently or challenge difficult ideas. As this article put it:
Children, the authors observed, are now deliberately shielded from any sense of risk or uncertainty. How can anyone — young boys most of all — learn about the world around them when school principals announce at the onset of every snowfall that “all snow must stay on the ground”. The ideal of adventure and resilience has been replaced by a debilitating sense of fragility and risk-avoidance …
Adventure should properly be considered a spirit, not a place. It is driven by a powerful mixture of curiosity, necessity, and an openness to experiencing new things. And it can be found wherever uncertainty reigns. Today, that might entail travelling to strange lands, meeting new people, or even engaging in uncomfortable discussions about whether Alberta should remain part of Canada forever.
Wherever the unknown lies, adventure can be found.
That mindset does not just affect childhood. It shapes entire societies. It affects how citizens respond to disagreement, political debate, uncertainty, criticism, and even new ideas.
Somewhere along the way, many Canadians lost their sense of adventure, resilience, curiosity, and willingness to engage with uncomfortable conversations or difficult questions.
Where did that spirit go? What happened to the mindset that encouraged people to explore, question authority, take risks, debate ideas openly, and build something better even when the outcome was uncertain? Somewhere along the way, discomfort itself seems to have become something to avoid rather than something people grow through.
Because if we stop exploring, questioning, debating, and taking risks, we lose something essential about what it means to live freely and think independently. A society that becomes afraid of uncertainty eventually becomes dependent on being told what is safe, acceptable, and permitted.
If we are going to move forward in any meaningful way, we need to rediscover the spirit of curiosity, resilience, and adventure that pushes people to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and engage with the unknown instead of fearing it.
Perhaps one of the most important conversations we should be having is this: what does it actually mean to be Canadian today?
Because for many, it increasingly feels like the answer is becoming less about courage, resilience, curiosity, and self-determination, and more about compliance, comfort, and avoiding difficult conversations.
QotD: Entropy versus Revolution
They’re simply nihilists, and their nihilism is just a way station to suicide. Their “program”, such as it is, aims at absolute stasis — they want everyone and everything to be exactly one thing, now and forever, because this is the closest to annihilation they can get without being forced to admit to themselves that what they’re really longing for is the sweet release of death. The purpose of all those bespoke sexualities, for instance, clearly isn’t “to find a likeminded person to have sex with”; rather, it’s to make sure you can never have sex with anyone at all.
Ooops, sorry, you only fulfill 459 of the 462 bullet points on the checklist.
Which is weird, I realize, because the “Left” (for rhetorical convenience) are always in frantic motion. But it’s displacement activity. As I’ve written before, you can call it “permanent revolution”, but it’s Isaac Newton’s version, not Leon Trotsky’s — forever spinning in place, going nowhere. So long as they never stop spinning, they’ll never hear the vast emptiness of their own lives. They’ll never have to look their death wish straight in the eye.
The “Right” (again for rhetorical convenience) seems to be locked in a never-ending battle against entropy. That’s what it seems to boil down to. Things fall apart and pass away, and in their breakdown we are robbed of our fundamental dignity. In the end, that’s the only thing worth “conserving” — your fundamental dignity; the only “right” that matters is the right not to be a clown.
One always loses the battle against entropy eventually, but the dignity is in the fight. For the “left”, who have no dignity, the fight is just a distraction, sound and fury to distract from the nothingness that always threatens to overwhelm them … and that they secretly long for.
Severian, “Entropy vs. Revolution”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-21.
May 25, 2026
“When I was in high school, I was taught that every single Canadian adored Pierre Elliott Trudeau”
My family arrived in Canada in October 1967, just as the last of the Centennial events were shutting down. Pierre Trudeau became Liberal leader and Prime Minister not long afterwards. I think the “Trudeaumania” of 1968 was nearly 100% media generated, but it was new to Canadian voters who liked the idea of Canada being led by a sophisticated international playboy rather than the stolid, rather unfashionable men who preceded Trudeau. The media continued to “love him long time”, which definitely helped keep him in power and then back into power after the brief Joe Clark experiment. Since he left office, his reputation has been cherished and burnished by progressives in the educational system, as Harrison Lowman relates:
A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.
“When I was in high school, I was taught that every single Canadian adored Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I learned that when the rose-pinned prime minister winked and pirouetted, the whole nation swooned.
It wasn’t until first-year university that I was first exposed to the fierce Western backlash to his National Energy Program.
It wasn’t until I graduated that I learned about any opposition to his Charter of Rights and Freedoms, his policy of national bilingualism, and official multiculturalism.
It was my Ontario high school civics teacher’s fault. While she was a great educator in other ways, the politics lessons she taught us were clearly slanted in the Liberal direction; a direction she supported.
My experience as a young person 20 years ago demonstrates the immense power teachers hold in moulding young minds. It’s a power that concerns me when I imagine dropping off my eight-month-old son at school in three years. Today, that teaching slant has become even steeper, with too many educators unwilling or unable to provide political or ideological balance in their classes.
This week, I interviewed Stephen Reich, a PhD student at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) who researches the proliferation of critical theory in kindergarten to Grade 12 policymaking.
Reich told me I should be concerned—that the educational leaders in this country have all but abandoned what should be the true purpose of education: imparting civilizational knowledge to the next generation. Instead, they’ve replaced it with seeking multiple “truths” and a narcissistic obsession with oppression narratives. Never mind that 92 percent of Canadians polled say they don’t want their children separated by race: taught to see themselves as “privileged” vs. “oppressed”. Reich says certain teachers are far less interested in producing independent thinkers and far more interested in producing activists.
“I have a feeling that success [for them] is ideological conformity,” he explained. That they aim to help foment some sort of “liberation.”
QotD: Modern movie casting
For a long time now, Hollywood has been taking great care to make the good characters black and the bad ones white. For a short while, the bad guys could be Arab terrorists, but now bad guys are white again. If they need to be foreign baddies, then they are neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or Russian gangsters. Of course, the smartest characters are black or female. If we’re lucky, the brainiac is a black lesbian. Every computer hacker is now non-white or female.
On occasion the blackwashing gets ridiculous. Some figure from white history is played by a black actor. A black guy in a show about medieval Europe could be amusing, but that’s not how it is done. Instead, we get black cowboys saving a white town or a black playing King Lear. It will not be long before we have historical dramas in which well-known figures from white history are played by black actors as black people. Imagine Ben Franklin played by Morgan Freeman.
The Z Man, “Blackwashing”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-02.
May 24, 2026
The British Climate Change Committee report is “full of howlers”
Matt Ridley expands on a recent Daily Mail article on the antics of the Climate Change Committee’s latest “findings”:
The British public has been propagandized to believe the most extreme risks are far more common than they really are … even in the way the weather is reported.
In my Daily Mail essay on the @theCCCuk‘s new report, I point out that they have a vested interest in exaggeration.
“Between the moment when these climatecrats wake in the morning and the moment they lay their overworked brains to rest on feather pillows at night, they have one all-consuming ambition: to maximise their own budget.
They achieve this goal by being as alarmist as possible.
Imagine if they found evidence that climate change was no big deal or even good news: would they want to publish this? Of course not. It would be disastrous for their (taxpayer-funded) income.
The committee has never produced a report on global greening: the remarkable 15-20 per cent increase in green vegetation on the planet over the past four decades, caused mostly by carbon dioxide emissions.
Nor do its members talk about falling deaths from cold weather anywhere near as much as they do about the smaller number of deaths from hot weather.
Good news for us, in short, is no news for them.
The report is full of howlers. It states emphatically that, by 2050, ‘sea levels will be [not “could be” or “may be”] 20–45 cm higher around UK coasts than today.’
That implies sea levels rising over the next 24 years by 8mm to 19mm per year.
But over the 35 years we have had satellites measuring it, sea levels have risen on average by just 3.4mm per year. There was a little acceleration in 2015-2020 and there has in fact been a deceleration since then: 4.5mm increase per year since 2010 and 3.7mm per year since 2015. (In some parts of the country, such as East Anglia, the land is sinking, a different effect.)
So to assume that the rate of sea-level rise could more than quadruple within the next quarter-century is completely unscientific. Neither Greenland nor Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate — and they are the only possible sources for such a huge increase.
How, then, does @theCCCuk justify this hysteria over sea levels?
It bases its sea-level prediction “on a high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5), using the upper-end estimate (95th percentile)”.
RCP8.5 is an economic scenario that was produced in 2011 for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by a team of mathematical modellers.
Their instruction was to find out what it would take to increase CO2 emissions at a rapid rate to a very high level by the end of the century.
First, the modellers said, the world would have to massively increase the use of coal at the expense of oil and gas — using coal to make fuel for cars and planes, burning eight times much coal in 2100 as the world did in 2000, and projecting that fully half of all the world’s energy would be supplied by coal by the end of this century.
Yet even this back-to-coal fantasy was not enough to achieve the gargantuan emissions the modellers were tasked with producing. So they assumed both that the world’s population growth would also reverse its current slowdown, surging to 12 billion people by the end of the century, that innovation to make our lives more fuel-efficient would largely end, and also that we wouldn’t even try to cut emissions.
None of these are going to happen.
Scientists have been saying for more than a decade that the apocalyptic RCP8.5 scenario is extremely unrealistic, and even the alarmist BBC said in 2020 that it was “exceedingly unlikely”.
The IPCC has recently announced that it is abolishing RCP8.5 altogether, while one of the Climate Change Committee’s own members, Professor Piers Forster, wrote an article just last week “on the death of RCP8.5”.
Nobody, at all, ever, under any circumstance, should be using RCP8.5 to forecast climate. Yet the CCC is still using it to terrify the government and the British people – and even taking its “upper-end estimate”!
Hollywood took the wrong lessons from Joss Whedon’s work
I was a huge fan of the TV show Firefly, which I think was Joss Whedon’s best work — perhaps more so because it was cancelled before any of his typical tics and quirks took the show in overtly progressive directions. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a comment on yesterday’s post about writers needing empathy to fully portray the characters they create:
Koko (literal gorilla) @Mark68002312
I think Joss Whedon did great at writing characters in the Joss Whedon universe. At least through Firefly.
I don’t understand how people — even people who don’t write for a living — think the character and the context/universe they live in are independent
Joss Whedon wrote the characters in Firefly the way he did because they were:
1. Rebels and iconoclasts, thus irreverent.
2. Broken people, thus inclined to hide deep pain behind shallow humor.
3. Familiar with each other already, thus more likely to banter.The style worked in Firefly because it created a sense of character and setting, which it was appropriate to.
Joss was no master of individualizing character voice, but he at least managed to get the group dynamics right.
However, Hollywood, sack of narcissistic overfunded retards that they are, managed to learn the wrong lesson from the show’s resonance with audiences.
“Oh, the people want light, quippy dialogue with a joke to interrupt every tense moment with a laugh. They are not interested in drama, pathos, gravitas, or emotional weight”, they concluded, and proceeded to pack every damn film with snark for the next twenty years, like Pacific islanders making landing strips and control towers out bamboo, enacting rituals to bring the “cargo” back.
The lesson they should have learned is that audience want, will always want, dialogue that illustrates and enhances character and setting.
Banter is a good tool, sometimes, but it is one good tool in a toolbox of many, and an author must select the right one to do character voice correctly.
“He will run. A vampire can run throughout the night, untiring. Verdammnis, is there no metal in this room larger than the buckles on braces? Were we women, at least we would have corset stays …”
“Here.” Asher sat suddenly on the lid of the coffin and pulled off one of his shoes with his good hand. He tossed it to the startled vampire, who plucked it out of the air without seeming to move. “Is your strength of ten men up to ripping apart the sole leather? Because there should be a three-inch shank of tempered steel supporting the instep. It’s how men’s shoes are made.”
“Thus I am served,” Ysidro muttered through his teeth, as his long white fingers ripped apart the leather with terrifying ease, “for scorning the arts of mechanics.”
Don Simon Ysidro doesn’t say “Well excuuuuuse me for not knowing all about shoes”, because Don Simon Ysidro is a three hundred year old Spanish nobleman turned vampire, not a homosexual Las Vegas nightclub DJ.
And when he remarks upon his own deficiency in knowledge, he says “mechanics”, not “tradesmen”, or “blue-collar workers”, because to a nobleman of the renaissance, a “rude mechanical” is not an impolite robot, he is an uncultured man who works at physical labor or crafts, rather than social or intellectual pursuits.
May 23, 2026
A referendum? In our Alberta? There they go!
I hope Jen Gerson will forgive my hubristic use of “our Alberta” in my headline, as there’s at least a possibility that at the end of this process, Alberta won’t be “ours” any more:
So I guess we’re doing this, eh?
I mean, of course Alberta is holding a secession referendum. It’s Alberta; the province that consistently exhibits the inverse of one of Paul Wells’ most-famed Rule of Politics. To wit: “1: For any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome”.
Okay, well. Yeehaw, I guess. Alberta hits different.
I suppose I’ll be doomed to die here — everywhere else would be boring by comparison.
For those who have not yet been fully read in: In a speech on Thursday that can only be described as a rhetorical onion of bad faith and gaslighting, Smith called for a secession referendum based on Forever Canadian leader Thomas Lukaszuk’s successful petition, which was intended to rally support of federalists ahead of an expected pro-secession petition. Lukaszuk’s question proceeded to the legislature, while the separatist Stay Free Alberta attempt was subsequently quashed in the courts.
Smith will continue to appeal that ruling and in order to stay ahead of the judicial process will now hold a non-binding secession vote in October based on the successful federalist petition. Except the actual question won’t be based on Lukaszuk’s exact wording, but will rather be something both novel and maybe able to pass judicial review.
The imminent question now to be posed to us reads: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”
So we’ll have a referendum on having another binding referendum. This, as far as I can tell, will please neither federalists nor separatists. It will increase the odds that an initial vote to leave Canada will pass if voters regard it as a harmless protest exercise; this will thus ensure that secession remains a live feature of Alberta politics for the foreseeable future.
Yes, I know this is confusing.
The trick is just don’t think about it too much. If you haven’t been following since at least March, you’ll never get fully caught up now. Just feel it out. If you get the sense that you are swimming in the surreality of an episode of Veep, you probably have it about right.
I can’t even give you ordinary political analysis, anymore. We just have to imagine that we’re all trapped in an improbable soap opera we can’t shut off, hostage to terrible over-actors whose intentions and actions only make sense to those of us who have been religiously following every B-rate plot twist for years. I’m waiting for a demonic talking puppet named Timmy to roll into town on the back of a Ford F150 driven by a malevolent witch who casts love spells and curses in order to triangulate a never-ending high school drama populated by bored corporate memo takers and Calgary School dorks who decided politics was the highest and best use of their short time on this God-given earth.
They could have started a soup kitchen, or taken up diamond painting from those kits they sell at Michael’s, but nah. It’s this.
So here we are. Staring down the barrel of a referendum that has a higher chance of securing a thin majority than anyone seems to realize, even if it is very unlikely to lead to a legal separation of the province. Either way, simply holding the vote opens the whole country up to an unpredictable cauldron of economic and political consequences, in addition to God-knows what foreign interference. It’s so goddamn crazy, the plot would get rejected for a one-man YouTube shorts series.
And all of this because Danielle Smith is beholden to an emboldened and committed political base of separatists that has threatened to blow up her leadership and her party if she doesn’t hold a secession vote. Meanwhile, the moderates in caucus are proving to be something less than profiles in moral courage. Only two, Matt Jones and Nate Horner, noted opponents of holding a vote, seem willing to speak up, and both of them resigned on Wednesday. Everyone else is either cowed, indifferent, or a separatist too lacking in integrity to say so outright in public.
The UCP has become a party of snivelling, weak little thieves who operate by night.
May 22, 2026
Achtung! Achtung! Extremely extreme extreme-right alert! Achtung! Achtung!
Shocking and dreadful news from democratic Germany comes to us from eugyppius, as the extremely extreme extreme-right Hitler Nazi Fascist party continues to soar in the polls, signalling existential danger for “Our Democracy”, just like the 1930s all over again:
Last Saturday, INSA published a nationwide poll that caused immense disquiet among the defenders of Our Democracy because it showed Alternative für Deutschland a whole seven fat points ahead of the centre-right Union parties. That beastly Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler AfD had never polled so strongly before and had also never clocked such a large lead over the Union before.
Suddenly 1933 was that much closer, and this made the Defenders of Our Democracy uncomfortable. Thus there ensued a lot of hand-wringing and panic and motivated reasoning about how this poll might just be an outlier and also too leftoid conspiracy theories that INSA because reasons and as part of a nefarious plot might be cooking the numbers to make AfD look stronger than they actually are.
People stopped saying things like that when Forsa, another polling operation, published their own nationwide survey three days later, which had the AfD at 28% with a six-point lead over the CDU …
[…]
The establishment received their latest shit sandwich this morning, in the form of yet another INSA survey – this time a state poll – showing that the AfD in the Free State of Saxony with 42% support, against a badly weakened CDU at 21%:
These numbers are very close to a recent poll of Sachsen-Anhalt. Together, these polls show that the AfD is on track to achieve outright parliamentary majorities across multiple East German states in the coming years. Basically, we’re looking at a preference cascade, as the press turns on a badly weakened Pigeon Chancellor Friedrich Merz, voters move their support to the only CDU alternative in view, and AfD support thereby becomes socially normalised – which draws still more voters towards the party in turn. Who knows when it will end, or if any of these alienated voters can ever be won back from Evil Nazi Hitler Fascism to Our Democracy, or how the Union can hope to survive the tectonic shifts that are already moving the ground beneath them.
These and other imponderables have driven our political establishment to the brink of psychosis. The CDU have responded to their impending doom by publishing a defamatory 36-page pamphlet screeching that the AfD are “Detrimental to democracy”, “Anti-Semitic” and “Nationalist”. The screed reads like it was written by a pinched schoolmarm and portions of it are very likely legally actionable, mainly because they contain straight-up unadulterated lies. The document raised eyebrows across Germany because its hysterical, desperate tone is so out of character for the staid, unimaginative propagandists of the Union. They must really be losing their minds over there in the CDU.
May 21, 2026
Evaluating the Boomers’ complaints from the Zoomers’ point of view
As a dirt-poor boomer (or Generation Jones-er as some term us extra-late boomers), I don’t have a lot of sympathy for others in my age cohort who complain about their kids and grandkids not getting ahead when they’re occasionally back in Canada from their second or third extended exotic foreign vacation since before the snow fell last fall. (It’s been more than a decade since the last time we were able to take any kind of vacation … and that was just a week’s driving holiday to South Carolina.) The Zoomers (and Millennials, and even some of the Gen X’ers) have valid complaints that the boomers generally are not capable of understanding, as John Carter explains:
I’m going to have a little rant, here, so I’ll start by emphasizing: Not All Boomers. Look, my mother is a boomer, and I love her dearly, in large part because she represents the opposite of so many boomer stereotypes. Many of you reading this are boomers; I know this because you’re in the comments, writing some of the best comments, you can ask anyone, the very best comments, everyone says it, it’s true. I know full well that much of what follows doesn’t apply to you, because you’re the good ones, the exceptional ones, the few, the proud So, please, do not take any of this personally.
With that said.
The shouting match broke down along the expected lines. Boomers – including spiritual boomers – loudly agreed with O’Leary’s remarks. If you only spend $2 a day on lunch, they insisted, the resulting $26 a day that you save adds up to $9490 a year; after 5 years, you’ve got the down payment for a $250,000 house. Checkmate, you financially illiterate layabouts!
Zoomers, millennials, and Gen-X replied that $250,000 will get you a leaky shack in rural Arkansas with black mold in the unfinished basement; that by the time you save up the money for the down-payment, that shack will be going for $500,000; that recent immigrants receive government assistance to get onto the property ladder (along with preferential employment) and so do not have to spend years of their lives saving up at all. Disaffected youth (and these days, that is just ‘the youth’) generally heaped scorn on the idea that it’s even possible to save in this economy, or that there’s anything worth saving. “If you live on instant noodles and margarine sandwiches for twenty years, you too, my son, can one day afford a van down by the river.”
As an aside, isn’t it incredible how fashion has barely changed since Chris Farley did this skit on SNL back in 1993? Stuck culture is everywhere.
Image and caption from Postcards from BarsoomI can see both sides of this. I tend to live frugally myself, not so much because I consider it virtuous but out of simple necessity. Throughout my 20s and 30s I was a career student living paycheck-to-paycheck, as a result of which I became very accustomed to cooking my meals and buying only what’s necessary. I’ve never once used DoorDash or Uber Eats. I buy my clothing at thrift stores, only purchase a new laptop once every decade or so, and have somehow managed to avoid racking up much in the way of debt … and by ‘somehow’ I mean that I’ve never owned a house or a car, partly because I changed continents too regularly to make such big-ticket purchases practical or necessary, but mostly because I couldn’t afford them. Even finishing my doctorate did not really bring anything you could call prosperity in its wake: my first position was for the princely some of just over USD30,000 per year. By the time I reached the median national income in my late 30s, I’d gotten so accustomed to frugal living that money started piling up in my account just because I had no idea what to do with it, and little inclination to spend it because I was honestly just happy to not have to worry about budgeting to make rent. That turned out to be very helpful when DEI came for my career track; I lived on those savings for a couple of years after.
[…]
There was a famous Stanford experiment called the Marshmallow Test which measured time preference in young children. A child would be left in a room with a single marshmallow on the table. They were of course free to eat the marshmallow, the experimenter would tell them, but if they didn’t, then later on they would get a second marshmallow. Children with high time preference – meaning that they strongly prefer the immediate reward to the hypothetical future reward – would cram the marshmallow into their candy-holes without a second thought. Children with low time preference – meaning that they value the future at a similar or even higher level to the present – would patiently wait, and be rewarded with a second marshmallow. These children were then followed, and it was demonstrated that the children with low time preference demonstrated better life outcomes: they maintained higher grades, were less likely to fall into debt, were less likely to develop drug addictions, were less likely to get pregnant before marriage, were less likely to get fat, and so on. All of which makes sense. The capacity to endure present pain – by studying, dieting, working out, what have you – in order to obtain a better future outcome is obviously going to be linked to better outcomes.
How would a smart kid react if the experimenter failed the marshmallow test?
For instance, say the experimenter simply lied. There was no second marshmallow; the child waited for nothing. Or, even worse, the first marshmallow was snatched away, and replaced with two marshmallows, each one half the size of the original? Or a third the size? Here are your two marshmallows, sucker, joke’s on you. What would the results be if, after this experience, the children were tested a second time? I don’t know if such an experiment has ever been conducted, but the outcome is not hard to guess. Every single one of the children, whether they’d passed the marshmallow test the first time or not, would scarf down the marshmallow the moment it was in front of them.
The capacity for low time preference may be largely innate, but whether it expresses or not is entirely a function of social trust. In order to defer gratification for a greater future reward, one must believe that there is a reasonably high chance of that reward manifesting. The less likely the future reward becomes, the more steeply a rational actor will discount the future.
I don’t want to minimize the hardships that boomers endured when they were young. Boomers worked hard, and they didn’t enjoy the same conveniences that we enjoy now. They fought in the Vietnam War (well, about 3% of them), they spent most of their lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, they suffered through the oil shock and stagflation in the 70s, they were punished by double-digit interest rates in the early 80s, and they spent their working lives trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the skyrocketing inflation that was unleashed when Bretton-Woods fell apart and the last vestigial support of the gold standard was kicked out from under the brrrring money printer.
But, despite all of that drama, the one thing boomers could generally rely upon was that – so long as thermonuclear annihilation was averted – things would generally get better. Technology would advance. Working conditions would get safer. The special effects in movies would become more convincing. Houses would get larger. Cars would get nicer. Air conditioning would get quieter. The environment would get cleaner. Society would become more just. The world would become freer and safer for democracy. And so on and so forth. Baby boomers have enjoyed a charmed life such as no other generation has known: free of major wars, full of technical wonders, in which whatever difficulties you might endure now, you could generally count on the future being a better place. For the boomer, deferred gratification always had a payoff.
For the zoomer – and the millennial, and generation X – this has simply not been the case. After 9/11 a police state panopticon settled over society. The 2008 real estate crash pulled the rug out from under the millennials, after which real-estate got ZIRPed to the Moon. Mass immigration pumped real estate demand further, while undercutting wages and rendering public spaces steadily more alienating, unpleasant, and dangerous. Black Lives Matter immolated quaint notions of racial harmony. DEI threw young white men, their careers, their futures, and their unborn children to the wolves. COVID stole two years from young people’s lives so that old people could feel safe from the coof. Now, AI^2 (Artificial Intelligence + Actual Indians) means that the only thing the young expect in their future is gig work in the sex trade industry (until robots take that, too).
The RCAF Snowbirds
The RCAF’s aerobatic flight demonstration team, the Snowbirds (431 Air Demonstration Squadron), have been needing new aircraft for a couple of decades, but there was never the political will to purchase new jets just for the PR benefits the Snowbirds provided. This year, the government announced they’d be “pausing” the Snowbirds until sometime — perhaps in the 2030s — when new aircraft could be provided. Paul Wells argues that, should the team survive this operational pause, they will be just as effective flying turboprops as the CT-114 Tutor jets they’ve been flying since 1963:
I’m just catching up to this story now, after a long weekend away. I won’t keep you long. I just want to make a few points. These are:
- Airplanes get old. Eventually it becomes harder to fly them safely, and harder to be proud of owning them when they do fly.
- Concern about the Snowbirds is almost as old as the Snowbirds. The Tutor jet is a sturdy beast, as are many things that first saw light in 1960 — the Twist, Hitchcock’s Psycho, televised presidential debates — but it’s always been fair to wonder whether a barnstorming team is the best use of scarce military resources, and people have wondered.
- Other countries have, on occasion, grounded their aerobatic teams; replaced old fleets with newer fleets for those teams; even occasionally replaced older jet-propelled fleets with newer prop-driven fleets. There seem to be countries that have viewed this sort of decision as routine and easy. Canada hasn’t been one of them. It would be good if we got better at making simple decisions that obviously have to be made.
A CT-114 Tutor of the Snowbirds team in St. Catharines, Ontario on 26 August, 2006.
Photo by Balcer-commonswiki via Wikimedia Commons.
[…]In August 2003 the Defence Department’s director of major service delivery procurement wrote that the Snowbirds Tutors might last until 2010, or if heroic measures were used, perhaps as far as 2020. “With each passing year, the technical, safety and financial risk associated with extending the Tutor into its fifth decade and beyond, will escalate,” the review said. Emphasis, as always, added.
The Defence department should proceed “immediately” with Snowbirds fleet replacement, the report said.
It didn’t.
[…]
We’re supposed to get weepy over the beloved Snowbirds, but with great respect to the flight crews that have flown the Tutors with durable proficiency and the ground crews that have kept them airborne, surely it wouldn’t be a big deal if they never came back? Other countries sometimes ground their aerobatics teams — the Asas de Portugal in 2010, the Philippine Blue Diamonds in 2005, Sweden’s Team 60 in 2024. The old newspaper stories I just quoted all called the Snowbirds an unbeatable recruitment tool for the Canadian Armed Forces, but I suspect the Afghanistan war was a bigger boost to recruitment and morale, and Donald Trump might yet give it a run for its money. Also useful: the internet, which the Tutors predate.
I have enjoyed many fun hours at air shows, and in my high-school days was a bit of a fighter geek. But it’s always been strange to idolize a particular model of vintage trainer rather than the whole portfolio of work a competent military performs. Perhaps a parliamentary committee or, I don’t know, a parliament could have discussed such matters, at some point in my lifetime. Perhaps a government could make a decision. “Air shows are fine, but participating in them is not a priority of government policy,” one might say. And even: “We’re taking the sign out of the window.”
Committees, parliaments and governments having proven reluctant to grasp the nettle, perhaps we could farm it out to some arms-length body. An equivalent of the Parliamentary Budget Officer could make decisions, rather than simply costing them. Call her or him the Parliamentary Finding Some Stones Officer. Her or his office would make actual decisions, with funding attached, about official residences, flight-show equipment, and supply management. Parliamentarians could flutter their hands over their brows and exclaim, “I had nothing to do with it!” Everybody wins. Sorry that it’s come to this, but we tried it the other way and it went poorly.
Explaining why more men are “opting out”
On Substack, Bettina Arndt shows some of the reasons why men are less and less willing to commit — not just to relationships, but to huge swathes of what we used to call “adult life”:
The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic — inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture, and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible, and less than a real man.
Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame, and the yoke comes off.
Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.
The trend is not confined to America. Australian men’s workforce participation has fallen from around 79% in 1978 to approximately 71% today (see below), while similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK and Canada.
[…]
If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.
The modern woman: a prospectus.
- They are the most miserable, anxious, and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.
- Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
- Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
- They’ve gone full throttle left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
- They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
- Yet their hypergamy (desire to marry up) is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
- The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.
- They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.
What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?
QotD: “Theory” in film interpretation
[Camille Paglia] What has been called “theory” since the arrival of deconstruction in elite U.S. universities in the 1970s is in my view one of the most pointless and pretentious movements in modern cultural history. The catastrophic results should be obvious by now: the humanities are in ruin and have lost public respect and even internal support in academe, where budget reduction has come to the fore. I would refer those seeking greater specifics to my long attack on poststructuralism, Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, published by Arion in 1991. Seven years ago, I did a follow-up assessment of current “theory” when the Chronicle of Higher Education asked me to review three new academic books by women about the bondage and domination trend. My unhappy response was “Scholars in Bondage”, which laments the damage done to promising young professors by a tyrannical academic establishment still chained to the bleached-out corpse of “theory”.
My approach to art is grounded in the sensory. Art is not philosophy. Art by definition refracts meaning through some medium of the material world. Hence my interpretation of art is grounded in the five senses. Perhaps the only theorist who fully grasped this issue was Gaston Bachelard in his 1957 book, The Poetics of Space, animated by a phenomenology that partly aligns with my own practice. It is no coincidence that I have spent most of my teaching career at art schools, where the body remains front and center in most art forms. Digital genres are certainly spreading and flourishing, but dance, music, and theater remain grounded in physicality — which is partly why art schools are finding it so difficult to adapt to the harsh, distancing realities of the virus crisis.
May 19, 2026
“That is not diplomacy. That is national self-harm wearing a lanyard.”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to a post about the Canadian government’s amazing nonchalance about protecting Canada’s sovereignty:
Canadians voted in a federal election, not in a referendum to turn the country into a Davos policy lab with a maple leaf sticker slapped on the front.
The line “we will never be the 51st state” is easy politics. Most Canadians agree. But then the same elbozos turns around and flirts with every other form of sovereignty dilution they can find.
Join the EU? Canada is not in Europe. Geography still matters, apparently. Joining the EU would mean importing another layer of bureaucracy, regulation, courts, trade rules, and political obligations from people Canadians cannot remove from office. That is not independence. That is outsourcing control with better stationery.
Give China influence over resources? That is even worse. A serious country protects strategic assets: energy, minerals, food, ports, telecom, data, and critical infrastructure. You do not hand leverage over your future to an authoritarian state and then call yourself sophisticated. That is not diplomacy. That is national self-harm wearing a lanyard.
The real issue is this:
Canada’s elites love sovereignty when it means rejecting America.
They seem much less interested in sovereignty when it means resisting Brussels, Beijing, the UN, global finance, or climate bureaucrats.
So the question is fair:
Who voted for Canada to stop acting like a country?
Not Canadians. Not directly.
This is elite mission creep. They run on patriotism, then govern like national borders are an administrative inconvenience.
Other items that popped up in the news over the weekend included the United States Department of War announcing that they will be “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, a US-Canadian body that has been continuously operating since 1940 when US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King established it in a meeting in Ogdensburg, New York. Is this a big deal? Some people certainly think so:
In a bit of a sudden, surprise move, Under Secretary of War Elbridge “The Biggest Cheese” Colby has announced on X of all places that the Unites States would be pausing participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, the Oldest and most Foundational node of the Canada-US security partnership.
[…]
As we all know, on August 17, 1940, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King met in a railway car in Ogdensburg, New York. They issued the Ogdensburg Declaration, an agreement to create a joint board to study sea, land, and air defense problems.
For over 80 years the PJBD has serves as one of the major intersects of the Canada-US relationship. It has been the forum where we have been able to engage and work collaboratively on matters of National Security, Continental Defence, and Critical Infrastructure.
Obviously, given how late it is for me, I sadly can’t dive head first into things. However, I did wanna get something out there. It’s no doubt a very petty move to make, part of a long line of petty moves between everyone in the last year. The pressure is obviously there to push Canada along, and the inclusion of the Prime Ministers Davos speech by Colby should go as a sign to one of the areas that is troubling the current administration.
Trying to apply pressure through such acts though isn’t something that I think will be successful. Granted, being a bit of a dick and doing petty shit in hopes of manipulating opinions, only for it to backfire due to a general miscalculation, is something this Administration does on the regular, and so I can’t be surprised to see it done here.
Nor is it surprising for the performative PM and his government to be utterly blindsided when one of their petty performances triggers a strong negative reaction from the United States.
Another issue that the Liberals in Ottawa seem to think both uncontroversial and straightforward is one of their batch of anti-civil-liberties bills before Parliament, in this case Bill C-22, which the US Congress considers to be a dangerous attempt to control US companies who do business in Canada:
The government’s plans for lawful access have gone off the rails. In recent days, Signal has warned it would pull out of the Canadian market rather than comply with Bill C-22. Windscribe, the Toronto-headquartered VPN provider, has said it would relocate its headquarters out of Canada and NordVPN has warned it would consider following suit. Apple and Meta have both raised public concerns about the bill’s effect on encryption and cybersecurity. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, civil liberties groups, and a long line of legal and security experts have all called for changes. The chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees have written to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree warning that the bill threatens U.S. national security and the integrity of cross-border data flows. Even the bill’s own oversight body, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, has told the SECU committee it does not have the access it needs for effective oversight. If the government thought it could push through the bill largely unnoticed, it has been proven painfully wrong as there are now trade frictions with the U.S., the prospect of leading companies exiting the Canadian market, and weaker cybersecurity protections for ordinary users.
[…]
The bill nominally protects against the worst outcome through a systemic vulnerability safeguard, which says that core providers are not required to comply with a regulation if compliance would require the introduction or maintenance of a systemic vulnerability. But the safeguard falls apart on careful reading. First, the term “systemic vulnerability” lacks specificity in the statute, which means the government could define encryption and vulnerability narrowly enough to hollow out the protection. Second, Sections 5(5) and 7(5) state that providers are not required to comply where doing so would result in a systemic vulnerability, but Sections 12 and 13 unconditionally require compliance with orders and provide that orders prevail over inconsistent regulations. The net effect is that providers are stuck with contradictory provisions in a system shrouded in secrecy and which could lead to the weakening of security systems. That is why Signal, Windscribe, NordVPN, Apple, Meta, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, and the U.S. Congress are raising the alarm.
The best approach to address these risks is to go back to the drawing board on Part 2 of the bill. Committee hearings should be extended to ensure that the long list of expert witnesses, industry voices, and international counterparts who have asked for changes receive a full hearing. Further, real amendments should be on the table that better balance law enforcement needs with Canadians’ privacy rights. Failure to do so will result in some of the world’s most privacy-protective services exiting the market, leaving behind a law that is vulnerable to constitutional challenge with millions of Canadians facing genuine privacy and cybersecurity risks.
QotD: Software developers as wizards
A lot of software developers are feeling disoriented and threatened these days. Programming by hand is clearly going the way of the buggy whip and the hand-cranked auger. Which is how we’re finding out that a lot of people have their identities bound up in being good at hand-coding and how it feels to do that.
That’s not me. It’s not me at all. Rather to my surprise, I don’t miss coding by hand, not any more than I missed writing assembler when compilers ate the world and made that unnecessary. (That was in a couple years back around 1983, for you youngsters.)
Maybe the fact that I’m not feeling any of this disorientation disqualifies me from having anything to say to people who are. On the other hand … if you can learn to emulate my mental stance and be completely unbothered, maybe that would be a good thing?
So. If you’re a programmer, and you’re feeling disoriented, try this on for size:
I like being a wizard. I like being able to speak spells, to weave complex patterns of logic that make things happen in the world. Writing code is a way to manifest my will.
Yes, I’ve piled up a lot of arcane knowledge over the 50 years I’ve been doing this. But languages of invocation, they come and they go. Been a long time since I’ve had any use for being able to program in 8086 assembler, and that’s okay. I have better spells now, and these days some rather powerful familiars.
What I’m inviting you to do is think of yourself as a wizard. Not as a person who writes code, but as a person who is good at assuming the kind of mental states required to bend reality with the application of spells.
And if that’s who you are, does it matter if the spells are painstakingly scribed in runes of power, versus being spoken to an obedient machine spirit?
It’s all one; it’s all the manifestation of will. Arcane languages come and go, machine spirits appear and then diminish to be replaced by more powerful ones, but you? You are the magic-wielder. Without you, none of it happens.
Same as it ever was. Same is it ever was. And so mote it be.
ESR, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-02-17.
Update, 21 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
