Quotulatiousness

July 2, 2025

“In short order, Trudeau was describing his own country with the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric one typically associates with, say, the Holocaust, Holodomor, or Rwandan Genocide”

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

In Quillette, Tristin Hopper provides some excerpts from his book Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, published earlier this year:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holding a teddy bear in the proximity of a soil disturbance in a field at the site of a former residential school in Cowessess First Nation, Saskatchewan.
July 6, 2021.

This is the story of how, in 2019, Canada became the first (and, to this day, only) country to declare itself guilty of committing an ongoing genocide against its own citizens.

To outsiders, who (correctly) view Canada as a humane democracy, the tale will seem bizarre. But to Canadians, there was a certain twisted political logic to it — at the time, at least.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, back when my country was still ruled by Justin Trudeau, Canada’s progressive elites bought into then-ascendant social-justice manias with a born-again fervour that was arguably unmatched in any other nation. This was a time, readers will recall, when college students were busily confessing their internalised white supremacy and racist thought crimes to one another on social media. Seeking to ingratiate his Liberal Party with this young demographic, Trudeau extrapolated their cultish movement on a national scale.

His rhetorical style became increasingly manic, as one social-justice slogan led to another; with each being rapturously liked and retweeted on social media. In short order, Trudeau was describing his own country with the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric one typically associates with, say, the Holocaust, Holodomor, or Rwandan Genocide.

In this regard, Trudeau’s first truly epic act of national self-incrimination took place at a 2019 women’s conference in Vancouver. The PM had just been handed the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), a probe he’d authorised as a means to investigate the high rates of homicide committed against Canada’s female Indigenous population.

As it turned out, however, the MMIWG report authors’ most prominent demand had nothing to do with the technical details of criminal investigation. Instead, they were focused on language: They wanted homicides targeting Indigenous women and girls to be described as an ongoing “race-based genocide” perpetrated by Canadian society at large.

Murder wasn’t the government’s only instrument of genocide, the authors claimed. Higher rates of Indigenous heart disease and suicide attempts were also described as foreseeable results of Canadian policies that are “explicitly genocidal”.

Canadians tend to feel guilty about the genuinely shameful way their country treated Indigenous peoples at many historical junctures (more on this below). Because of this high baseline guilt level, it is often seen as taboo (especially among journalists) to push back against even the most obviously counterfactual claims made on behalf of Indigenous peoples. And the MMIWG report was a case in point: the inquiry’s insistence that Canada was in the midst of an active genocide was reported uncritically by most media outlets.

Some public figures did speak out against this hyperbolic use of language — such as Roméo Dallaire, the retired general who’d been in Rwanda during that country’s (actual) genocide in 1994. Yet Canada’s most important public figure — Trudeau himself — accepted the inquiry’s conclusions without reservation; even if this meant that he was now signalling his status as leader of a nation that, day in, day out, under his own watch, was committing a genocide against its own population.

“Earlier this morning, the national inquiry formally presented their final report, in which they found that the tragic violence that Indigenous women and girls experienced amounts to genocide,” he told his Vancouver audience. Trudeau then paused for nine seconds to accommodate his desired reaction — which consisted of cheers and applause.

QotD: The bane of socialism — boredom

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… even the Yankee Leviathan at the very height of its powers couldn’t have made Socialism work long term, for as the Bolshies discovered, there’s more to life than just shit, shoes, and bread. The old proverb says “A man with an empty belly has one problem; the man with a full belly has a thousand”, and like most old proverbs it’s 100% true. It’s no surprise our modern cat ladies — of both sexes and all however-many-we’re-up-to-now genders — don’t realize this, as you can overfeed a housecat into total somnolence, but anyone who has ever had so much as a dog knows what happens when all its immediate physical needs are satisfied: it grows bored.

Most “bad” dogs aren’t actually bad. They’re not misbehaving because they’re willful, or mean, or whatever. They’re just bored out of their fucking skulls, because the kind of bugman who gets a dog these days has no idea that you actually have to play with it, and pet it, and interact with it, in much the same way you have to interact with a young human. Given a dog’s limited intellect, the only thing it can think of to do to alleviate its boredom is chew on things, or dig in the yard, or piss on the rug, or, if all else fails, chew its own fur off.

Being slightly more complex critters, humans have more options, but bore a human enough — overfill his material needs, so that he’s stuffed to somnolence, but take his sense of purpose away — and you’ll see the exact same dog behaviors. Why do you think they shove all that metal shit in their faces? And no, I am absolutely not joking. Why all the huge, gaudy, gross tattoos? The constant changes of hair color and style?

Have you ever asked them?

Again, I’m 100% not joking. I know most of y’all avoid SJWs like the plague, and that’s a smart move, can’t blame you for it, but if you do, you’ll just have to trust me: I was in academia for a long time, so I was around not just SJWs, but bleeding-edge lunatic SJWs, and I asked them about it. One must be discreet about this, of course — hey, I’m thinking of getting a roll of toilet paper tattooed on my bicep, to remind me that We’re In This Together, what do you think? — but it’s fairly easy to do. And every time, they’d spin me some elaborate tale of how deep and meaningful it all is.

No, really. By some mental process I can’t begin to reproduce, getting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face tattooed on your calf is, to them, striking a blow at ambient civilization. That is the literal truth of their motivation. It’s the same reason the dog digs in the backyard, or pisses on the rug, or chews its own fur off: That’s the only agency it has, the only purpose it can find.

Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.

July 1, 2025

Like a cheap suit, Canada folds under Trumpian pressure on the Digital Services Tax grab

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

A couple of days back, I characterized Prime Minister Mark Carney’s determination to push ahead with the Digital Services Tax “insane”, as it was overwhelmingly likely to trigger a strong reaction from the Trump administration. As it did. So, finally recognizing they were in a no-win situation, the federal government announced at the last minute that they wouldn’t be demanding the literally billions of dollars from the US “tech giants” after all. Michael Geist can legitimately say “I told you so” on this issue:

President Trump Attends G7 Summit in Canada by White House https://www.whitehouse.gov/gallery/president-trump-attends-g7-summit-in-canada/ CC BY 3.0 US

After years of dismissing the warnings of likely retaliation, the Canadian government caved last night on the digital services tax. Faced with the prospect of the U.S. suspending trade negotiations, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced that the government would drop the DST altogether, payments scheduled for Monday would be cancelled, and legislation will be forthcoming to rescind the legislation that created it in the first place. Over the weekend, I wrote about the repeated warnings that the DST was a serious trade irritant with the U.S. that cut across party and presidential lines. While ignoring the risks was bad enough, I argued that Canada played its DST card too early. Rather than delaying implementation in the hopes of incorporating it into a broader trade deal with U.S., it marched ahead, leading to an entirely predictable response from U.S. President Donald Trump. That left Canada in a no-win situation: stick with the DST but face the prospect of higher tariffs or embarrassingly drop the DST (and $7.2 billion in revenue over five years) with only restarting negotiations that were on until government overplayed its hand to show for it.

It is hard to overstate how badly the government managed the DST issue over the past five years. It alienated allies by pushing ahead with the DST despite efforts at an international deal at the OECD, stood alone in rejecting an extension of a moratorium on new DSTs, made the DST retroactive which solidified opposition, and continually downplayed the concerns of successive U.S. Presidents and Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle. Meanwhile, when companies began passing along the costs of the DST to Canadian businesses, it did nothing. And when they urged the government to delay implementation to at least allow for the issue to be incorporated into a broader trade pact, it ignored the advice.

At every step, there were better options. This year, the likelihood that the DST would come to a boil was obvious to anyone who was paying attention. But rather than following the UK strategy, which managed to salvage a smaller DST (2% rather than 3%) as part of a bigger agreement that includes a commitment to support UK digital access to the U.S. market and to negotiate a larger digital trade deal, Canadian officials seemingly assumed that the U.S. was bluffing and would not retaliate.

If this sounds familiar, it is because the Canadian government misreading the tech sector has become a hallmark of its policy. Talk tough, practically dare companies and foreign governments to respond, and then frantically seek an exit strategy when they do. This was the case with the Online News Act and Meta’s blocking of news links, with the government’s AI regulation which new Minister of AI Evan Solomon says will not be re-introduced, with the Online Harms bill, and now with the DST.

The Food Professor explains what Trump got right in his Trade War

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, aka @FoodProfessor explains how Trump’s Trade War strategy is working out for US interests, in contrast to the Trudeau/Carney governments’ approach:

The Globalism Hangover: What Trump’s Trade War Got Right

“Trump’s bombastic style aside, his nationalist approach to trade and food policy is forcing global institutions to justify their existence — and that’s a conversation Canada can no longer afford to ignore.”

For the past six months, President Donald Trump’s trade policies have been widely mocked, criticized, and condemned. Some of it is certainly warranted. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, recently likened his tariff-heavy approach to global trade as a direct path toward another Great Depression. But data out of the United States tells a more nuanced story — one that challenges conventional wisdom.

Despite persistent headwinds, the U.S. economy continues to outperform expectations. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta projects second-quarter GDP growth at 3.8%. In May, the U.S. economy added 139,000 jobs, outpacing forecasts, while inflation remained subdued at 0.1% month-over-month and 2.4% annually. The U.S. trade deficit has been cut nearly in half, pointing to stronger export performance and a rebalancing of trade relationships.

Canada, by contrast, is showing signs of economic strain. The national economy is shrinking, manufacturing is struggling under U.S. trade pressure, and food inflation is outpacing general inflation. In short, our economy is not keeping pace—despite our public criticism of the Trump administration.

To make matters worse, the Trump administration has now halted all trade negotiations with Canada, signaling that our bilateral economic relationship holds little strategic value for Washington. For the U.S., Canada is no longer a priority — especially under a Carney-led government that has visibly pivoted toward Europe, a market still heavily invested in maintaining close ties with the United States. From an agri-food standpoint, this shift is consequential: access to our largest trading partner is narrowing, while Ottawa appears more focused on diplomatic optics than on securing stable, competitive trade channels for the Canadian agrifood economy.

This is the one thing the ‘Elbows Up’ crowd never understood — and still doesn’t. We’re not in a trade war with the U.S. There’s no war to be won. For Trump, this is about a realignment of the global order, plain and simple — one centered entirely on American supremacy.

Love him or loathe him, Trump is not destroying the U.S. economy — not yet, anyway. His unapologetically nationalist agenda extends far beyond tariffs. He has withdrawn U.S. support from key global institutions such as the WHO and is threatening to sever ties with others, including NATO and several UN-affiliated agencies. Among them is the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN’s most authoritative body on food security.

At a recent event in Brazil, a senior FAO official acknowledged that fundraising dynamics have shifted. In the Trump era, governments are asking harder questions: Why should we fund the FAO? What domestic benefit does it provide? What used to be assumed support is now conditional — and arguably, more accountable.

This shift isn’t unique to Washington. Many countries are quietly aligning with the U.S. position, scrutinizing globalist institutions with renewed skepticism. Transparency and accountability are byproducts of this anti-globalist sentiment — something not inherently negative.

For decades, globalism pushed the world to believe that trade liberalization was the only viable path to growth and prosperity. It became conventional wisdom. But globalism has made some nations — and some people — richer, while leaving others behind. In the process, domestic sectors, including agriculture, were often sidelined or sacrificed in the name of global efficiency.

The problem with globalism, particularly in agri-food policy, is its tendency to pursue uniformity over relevance. Canada, for example, adopted the carbon tax under a globalist climate agenda that often overlooks the vital role food producers play in feeding people. Instead of being supported, the sector is too often vilified as a problem. But agriculture is not a liability — it is a necessity.

Trump’s message — wrapped, of course, in provocative and often abrasive language — is that one-size-fits-all global policies rarely work. Nations have different socio-economic realities, and those should come first. While cooperation is essential, so is recognizing local and regional priorities. In this sense, his “America First” approach is not without logic — especially when it seems to be yielding short-term economic gains.

For Canada’s agri-food sector, the lesson is clear: striking a better balance between global commitments and national imperatives is overdue. We should not abandon multilateral cooperation, but we must stop anchoring policy to global agendas we have little influence over. Instead, let’s define what works for Canadians — what supports our farmers, protects our food security, and reflects our unique landscape — while keeping the broader global context in view.

We are not there yet. But if this moment of disruption sparks a more realistic and regionally attuned approach to food policy, we’ll be better for it.

June 30, 2025

“This is not toxic empathy, it’s psychotic empathy”

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

Elizabeth Nickson suggests that we’re well past peak political feminism:

Last week, no month, there have been cries from the heights of official culture begging men to come back. I joked on Facebook that they are all at my house, hiding out with someone who doesn’t hate them, which is sort of true; my immediate family is all male, and Christmases are a bro-fest with me in the kitchen. I exaggerate. No. Yes. I don’t know. Of course they help but I do wish for one daughter/sister in law to keep the chaos down. My father once said, “women civilize men, that’s their job”. I don’t think he meant harangue, demand, prosecute and imprison.

In any case, I started the first feminist theatre in Canada. I know this because a grad student did her master’s thesis on Feminist Theatre in Canada (poor thing) and called to interview me. I was 22, and dumb as a rock. But eager to tell the world its faults (plus ca change). My artistic director Svetlana — who was in the MFA program — and I decided that we would only hire women, do women’s plays, etc.

Problem was there were no plays. Aphra Behn was the only one we could find that wasn’t trivial, and she lived 250 years ago. That was when I discovered I loved writing because we had to write our own. Now, of course, there is a massive, over the top, gold-platinum-diamond-and rubies Renaissance in women’s art, and my silly self was as usual so far ahead of the game I didn’t profit from it. Well, I did, it helped my college expenses no end.

So I got a couple of grants, and we collected box office, and ran “plays” and workshops on how to have difficult feminist conversations, one memorably at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where the wife of a famous poet told us that all this guff was going to be forgotten once the estrus cycle kicked in. Svetlana telegraphed ignorance at me, and I back; no one had any idea what she meant. We 22 year olds argued her down, she clung to her thesis and, guess what, turned out she was right. Everyone “met” someone, got pregnant, built marriages and families, but Svetlana who decided she was gay (at the time we worked together she was married), and died young from alcoholism. Is that my fault? It was my idea.

Feminism marched on. To this:

I repent here and now. What feminism has become is anathema. I am actually scared of women. I am afraid of their anger, and I am afraid of their cruelty, their harshness, and I see it everywhere. Luckily through my work I have met women who think like me and we are friends and I am not afraid of them. But I shrink from all other friendships. Female friendships today are built on one thing: are you on side? Are you for abortion, against the patriarchy, for Hamas and most recently, the Mullahs, celebrate female politician wins as long as they are on side, ally with the LBGTZQ+ community, etc.? I am none of these things, so were I to venture into ‘women’s spaces’ eventually the furies would plot revenge. I would be cast afloat, thrown into the wild to fend for myself, as an uppity woman would have been in clan or tribal times, to which we are reverting.

In business, conform or be ruined. Think like us or we cancel your dates, your performance, your promotion. Even the mega-famous:

Therefore I now avoid the friendship of women, in which I used to luxuriate. So if I can’t even spend time in their presence, how the hell are men supposed to marry them?

This is how stupid political women have become. This was last weekend in Germany, and, well, everywhere these women breathe, and that means everywhere in the west.

This is not toxic empathy, it’s psychotic empathy.

DOGE couldn’t address the structural problems with the US government

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

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Mohamed Moutii looks at the reasons DOGE was unable to come close to achieving the lofty goals it was launched with:

DOGE’s biggest failure was its inability to deliver its promised sweeping transformation. From the start, its $2 trillion savings target was unrealistic. Cutting nearly 30% from a $7 trillion budget was never feasible, especially with politically untouchable programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense off the table.

Musk’s claim that eliminating waste alone could close the gap didn’t hold up. While most budget experts support cutting inefficiencies, they agree that waste isn’t the main driver of the fiscal crisis. Even slashing all discretionary spending would save only $1.7 trillion. The real pressure comes from mandatory programs, which account for nearly two-thirds of the budget, leaving only a quarter of spending truly up for debate.

As reality set in, Musk’s savings claims shrank from $2 trillion to just $150 billion. While DOGE cites $170 billion saved, independent estimates suggest closer to $63 billion, less than 1% of federal spending, with many claims either inflated or unverifiable. Some savings were credited to long-canceled contracts. Though headline-grabbing layoffs and cuts were made, they were often botched, forcing agencies to rehire staff or reverse course. Meanwhile, federal spending rose by $166 billion, erasing any gains. Trump’s fiscal agenda worsens the outlook with the first-ever $1 trillion defense budget, sweeping tax cuts, and protected entitlements — all while annual deficits approach $2 trillion.

Yet DOGE’s failures ran deeper than mere fiscal naiveté. What began as Musk’s role as a “special government employee” quickly expanded into an unchecked exercise of executive power, raising constitutional alarms. His team reportedly accessed classified data, redirected funds, and sidelined entire agencies — actions taken without Senate confirmation, potentially in violation of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. Legal pushback swiftly followed, with fourteen states suing Trump and Musk over the constitutionality of Musk’s White House-granted authority.

Meanwhile, glaring conflicts of interest became impossible to ignore. Musk’s companies — X, SpaceX, and Tesla — hold $38 billion in federal contracts, loans, tax breaks, and subsidies while facing over 30 federal investigations. His push to dismantle regulatory agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — while X launches the “X Money Account“, a mobile payment service subject to CFPB oversight — only deepened concerns. Musk was legally obligated to separate his business dealings from government decisions. One major result has been the impact on Musk’s reputation. Once hailed as a visionary for his promotion of electric cars, he is now viewed unfavorably by many former fans.

June 29, 2025

Carney’s insane determination to keep the Digital Services Tax

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

One of the most noted features of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s attitude toward, well, everything is his unwillingness to take the concerns of his opponents into account. He seems to feel that he always knows best and therefore any opposition is therefore, by his definition, wrong. The government had been warned by pretty much every observer that the attempt to impose a protectionist digital service levy had incredibly high chances of triggering blowback … and it has:

Mark Carney’s thought process when he encounters dissent, probably

In other words, you can have many reactions to the current DST battle, but surprise should not be one of them. Canada pushed ahead despite efforts at an international agreement on the issue and later dismissed the increasing friction over the issue with the U.S., which has been signalling its opposition to the DST for many years. Donald Trump has taken action, but his views are not dissimilar from Joe Biden’s on the issue nor Members of Congress from both parties. Further, the companies directly affected by the rules have been similarly responsive. For example, Google began levying a 2.5% DST fee on Canadian advertisers last year in anticipation of the DST taking effect in 2025, thereby passing along much of the DST cost to Canadian businesses and consumers.

To be clear, Canada is free to adopt whatever tax policies it wants and tech companies should pay their fair share of taxes. Ensuring tech companies collect and remit sales taxes on digital sales and services is now well established in Canada. But the government’s policy of “making web giants pay” by going above taxes all companies pay with a percentage of revenues to support Canadian film and television, millions for the news sector, and now the DST was always going to spark a reaction.

Further, the Canadian DST is exceptionally complex, covering a wide range of digital revenues that occur in Canada. The baseline applicability is for companies that generate 750 million euros (about C$1.1 billion) in global revenue of which at least $20 million is digital services revenue in Canada. Digital services revenue can arise from (1) online marketplace services revenue (which would cover an Ebay, Airbnb or Uber), (2) online advertising services revenue (Google or Microsoft), (3) social media services revenue (Facebook or TikTok), and (4) user data revenue (any company that collects and sells user data). Targeting these services means there is a lot stake, estimated by the Parliamentary Budget Officer at $7.2 billion over five years.

Other countries have DSTs, but Canada was the only one to introduce one despite an agreement to institute a moratorium on new DSTs years ago at the OECD. And then it was one of the only countries to reject an extension of that moratorium. The government insisted it would move ahead without delays and indicated it was confident it could avoid retaliation.

Given the trade tensions with the U.S. since the election of Donald Trump, unilaterally dropping the DST in the midst of a trade battle did not make much sense as we needed policy certainty under a broader deal. In other words, the DST was a card we had to play as part of a negotiation. But once we played that card by announcing the tax would take effect next week, it virtually guaranteed the U.S. would respond as it did. The priority should have been a broader deal. The government could have adopted a Trump-style delay for a month to give more time for negotiations. It could have have followed the UK model of weaving it into a broader agreement and committing to a larger digital trade deal. Instead, the government continued years of dismissing the trade risks associated with the DST, potentially creating bigger economic problems in the process.

Dan Knight on how Ottawa deliberately baited Trump, despite all the warnings that this was an incredibly stupid idea:

Donald Trump has officially walked away from the negotiating table. The trigger? Canada’s ill-conceived Digital Services Tax (DST) — a reckless, retroactive grab for revenue targeting U.S. tech firms. Trump isn’t mincing words: he’s calling it a “blatant, discriminatory attack” on American innovation, and now he’s moving to punish Canada economically for it.

So what exactly is this tax?

The Digital Services Tax, passed by the Liberal government and implemented under Mark Carney’s leadership, applies a 3% levy on revenue — not profits — earned by large digital firms operating in Canada. And it’s retroactive. That means it’s being applied to earnings from as far back as January 1, 2022, with companies forced to make lump-sum payments by June 30, 2025.

This tax specifically targets companies with global revenue of at least 750 million and Canadian digital revenue of at least CAD 20 million. Translation: It’s a direct hit on American giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, Airbnb, and Uber, and it spares Canadian firms and EU-based entities from equivalent exposure. It’s not tax fairness — it’s protectionism with a smiley-face sticker.

Trump has responded in kind. As of June 27, all trade negotiations with Canada are suspended. Retaliatory tariffs — already mounting since February — are set to escalate. Trump is drawing a red line, and he’s daring Canada to cross it.

What’s at stake?

Everything. Canada sends over 75% of its exports to the United States. We’re talking about nearly a trillion dollars in annual trade. With Trump now actively leveraging tariffs and ending negotiations, entire sectors — from automotive to agriculture, energy to manufacturing — are in the crosshairs.

Already this year, Trump has slapped 25% tariffs on Canadian imports, with specific hits to steel, aluminum, vehicles, and auto parts, and 10% tariffs on Canadian oil, gas, and potash. These moves have already disrupted markets. Ending trade negotiations is a body blow to an already wobbly Canadian economy — still reeling from Trudeau-era mismanagement and Carney’s corporate globalist agenda.

So who could have seen this coming?

Almost everyone.

June 27, 2025

RAF Brize Norton apparently had almost no security for its planes at all

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

Domestic terrorists got into RAF Brize Norton, one of Britain’s main airbases, last week and committed damage that may range into the tens of millions of pounds … and were in and out with the RAF none the wiser:

So this was a serious attack; it’s also an intensely embarrassing one. The terrorists got in and out completely undetected; it appears nobody at Brize Norton was aware of the attack until the perpetrators had already escaped. This would be bad enough if they’d been Spetsnaz-trained infiltrators, flitting silently from shadow to shadow towards their targets. In fact, however, they were a couple of unwashed hippies from Palestine Action, and they “infiltrated” the base on electric motorbikes. It is absolutely staggering that they were able to get in, attack two valuable aircraft and then get out again without being intercepted.

Or maybe it isn’t. This is the station commander of RAF Brize Norton:

Gp Capt Henton appears to have spent her entire career in non-operational roles. She also seems to have some very strange ideas about concepts such as masculinity and even patriotism. In a paper she wrote (which is available online) Henton appears strongly critical of traditional military culture, particularly that in the combat units she has never been part of. Is it just coincidence that, under the command of someone who is effectively an HR manager in a uniform, traditional military concerns such as security appear to have been badly neglected?

It’s undeniable that security at Brize Norton was neglected. One of the things I was trained in, as an Intelligence Corps operator, was protective security. We tended to focus on the protection of classified information, but the same principles apply to the protection of anything else (for example aircraft), and one of those principles is that if the security around an asset is weak in one respect — for example, physical barriers like fences — you can plug that gap by deploying other assets — for example, guards.

I used Google Street View to do a perimeter recce of Brize Norton, and took this screenshot looking from Station Road at the eastern end of the base’s runway:

This shot is taken from a public road, outside the base. The only perimeter security is a simple, easily climbed wooden fence less than six feet high. For a long stretch it has no “topping” — security jargon for razor wire or other anti-climb obstacles. There is also no perimeter security lighting along this section of the road. There aren’t even streetlights on the road itself. This is a massive weakness in physical security, which any terrorist can easily identify using open-source tools like Google Street View. The red ellipse I have drawn on the image highlights aircraft — seven of them, a mix of Voyagers and A400M transports — parked on the apron. They are less than three-fifths of a mile (900m in new money) from the perimeter fence, a distance that an electric scooter can cover in around 90 seconds. This level of physical security is completely unacceptable for the protection of such valuable assets, so it should have been supplemented with armed guards. It wouldn’t take all that many. A twelve-man guard under the command of a corporal could easily supply a pair of two-man prowler patrols, one on the apron and one randomly checking vulnerable points around the perimeter. That would have been enough to intercept and stop this attack.

The fading Boomer Laurentianus

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

Last week in The Critic, Charles Kirwin described the people who saddled us with three terms of Justin Trudeau and hope to continue their reign of error by supporting Mark Carney with his Europhile whims and intolerance for dissent:

Boomer Laurentianus is a Canadian subspecies of Boomerus Senectus, so named because he models himself on the so-called Laurentian Elite, Canada’s governing class that inhabit the “Laurentian corridor”, the narrow strip of land along the Saint Laurence river between Montreal and Toronto that, for a certain kind of Canadian, is the only bit of the country that matters.

In spirit, he is a child of the sixties and still believes he is a radical at heart. Despite this he expects to be treated with the deference reserved for those awarded the Victoria Cross, despite his closest experience to combat being glancing longingly at pictures of the cancelled Avro Arrow or campaigning to defend the local parking lot from being turned into affordable houses.

Like his British and American cousin, he supports progressive policies like safe supply of drugs, lenient sentences and bail conditions for criminals, and whatever economic policies keep his pension fund high and his property values increasing. Naturally, he lives in neighbourhoods untouched by the crime and addiction that are the direct result of the policies he supports.

It is important to note that while his modes of thinking and beliefs are those of the Laurentian Elite, his mind is shaped by the institutions of the Laurentian Elite: The Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Governor General’s Literary Award, various other high-minded organisations that form the intellectual life of Laurentian Canada, Boomerus Laurentianus is not necessarily “of” them.

Molson Canadian is the spirit of his patriotism. In 2000, Molson released a beer advertisement in which a typical Canadian played by actor Jeff Douglas shouts into a microphone to an audience of Americans, dismissing various Canadian stereotypes (we say aboot, drive dogsleds, are all lumberjacks and fur traders et cetera) and notes some of the differences that make Canada not the US. “I have a Prime Minister not a President … I believe in Peacekeeping not policing … I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack while travelling”. The advertisement is something of a cult hit in Canada and has been parodied by just about everyone including William Shatner.

This one-minute advertisement swells at the heart of the Boomer Laurentianus view of his country. It is both superficial and, in places, factually incorrect (the equivalent of the US president is not the Prime Minister but the King or Queen of Canada). But he has built his entire sense of nationalism around myths such as peacekeeping or being liked by foreigners more than Americans. This last point is sacred to his sense of identity.

Boomerus Laurentianus exists in a superposition state usually reserved for Schrödinger’s cat wherein he is both completely American and not American at all. It was often claimed of Rhodesians that they were “More British than the British”. Boomer Laurentianus is more Yank than the Yanks. Despite his reverence for the CBC, he gets his recipes from the New York Times and his opinions from CNN. He watches American television, travels to the US frequently, may even own a second home there. He can almost convince himself that they are the same country, sometimes to the point of putting up signs supporting, Democratic political candidates, seemingly unaware that he cannot vote in foreign elections.

June 26, 2025

NYC doubles down on Luxury Beliefs

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

New York City voters appear to have selected the ultimate “luxury beliefs” candidate as the presumptive next mayor of NYC in Zohran Mamdani:

The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.

Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.

Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.

And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.

Many politicians and media outlets act like the public disorder problem is overblown. But fare evasion, open drug use and serious mental illness on the subway are still part of daily life.

It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.

And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.

“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.

As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.

But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.

German police raid homes to counteract online “hate speech” by “digital arsonists”

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

Things are getting worse for free speech in Germany, as eugyppius reports:

Apollo News reports on the newest, most irregular German holiday, which consists of the police conducting coordinated raids on and interrogations of ordinary people who are alleged to have said rude things on the internet:

    On Tuesday morning police across Germany conducted raids targeting “hate speech and incitement” on the internet. According to the news agency dpa, there are currently 170 operations underway, including house searches and other measures. Those accused are charged with insulting politicians and inciting hatred …

    The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is in charge of the operation … In North Rhine-Westphalia, several police authorities struck simultaneously at 6 a.m. Police from Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Bielefeld, Münster, Hagen, and Bonn are among those involved. Fourteen suspects are to be questioned and two search warrants executed.1 The individuals in question frequently express themselves on social media, such as on X.

    … The Action Day against alleged hate posts has been taking place regularly for years. On June 18, the BKA joined forces with the reporting center “REspect!” to participate in the “International Day Against Hate and Incitement”. People were called upon to report posts that allegedly spread hate.

Today was the twelfth such “Action Day against Hate and Incitement on the Internet”. That is only an approximate title; it varies slightly across press sources. This dubious ritual began in 2016, after Merkel opened the German borders to the entirety of the developing world and our politicians grew tired of people calling them imbeciles online. Police are very open that the goal of these coordinated Action Days is intimidation – or, as they put it, “deterrence”.

Our federal police love this holiday so much they often celebrate it twice a year, which is why are already on the twelfth such day, even though we have only had nine years since the establishment of this custom. Sometimes our betters even throw in bonus action days that for some reason don’t count, as during Covid when they conducted a special “Action Day against Political Hate Postings” after the seventh “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings” but before the eighth “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings”. Who knows how many such action days we have really had, especially considering that since 2020 the broader EU has adopted this sporadic holiday and occasionally coordinates its own Continent-wide “Action Day against Hatred and Incitement on the Internet”.

[…]

By calling these Action Days idiotic, I don’t mean to minimise them. They are borderline illegal, for they exploit what should be purely investigative tactics (interrogations, house searches) to scare and punish people in advance of any criminal conviction. The emphasis is not only on right-leaning posters, but invariably and most disgracefully on ordinary people with relatively little social media reach, whose posts in many cases have been seen a mere handful of times. The message is clear: They can get you, whoever you are; they can get anybody. Living in a country whose authorities amuse themselves by periodically harassing their own citizens in this way is disturbing. It’s an absolute scandal that all the major political parties support this, save for Alternative für Deutschland. It’s a reason to vote AfD all by itself.

June 25, 2025

H.G. Wells’ Things To Come: Through The Eyes of its Time

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 10 Jan 2025

H.G. Wells’ Things To Come played much differently in 1936 than it does today. So much so that it offers us an insight into the politics of the period if we can step back from our post-WWII understanding and look at it on its own terms.

Link to the Coupland essay.
http://digamoo.free.fr/coupland2000.pdf

00:00 Intro
02:08 Revolution Envy
05:15 The Gulf of Time
06:32 Wells and the BUF
08:02 Empire and Establishment
12:11 The World State
15:18 To Understand the Past …

June 24, 2025

Political violence increases as the power of the state increases

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

Many people note that they don’t remember political conflicts being quite so nasty in years past as they are now, but the more power that accretes to the state the higher the perceived — and actual — risk of allowing the state to fall into the hands of your opponents. We’d be far better off if partisans would consider the possibility that the latest addition to state power they support will be used by their political opponents after the next partisan shift in electoral fortunes … if you fear this power in the hands of a Trump, you shouldn’t put it in the hands of a Biden.

As should be obvious to anybody following news about riots, assassinations, and arson attacks, politics have become far too important in America. With government large, growing, and reaching into every nook and cranny of our lives, Americans perceive politics as too much of a high-stakes game to lose. And so, they have divided into hostile camps to make sure their side comes out on top — and some turn ideological conflict into literal war.

A Surge in Political Violence

That point came home to me after Israel launched its preemptive attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. My wife’s rabbi (she’s Jewish and I’m not) called me and asked if I was willing to work security during services on Saturday. “No Kings” protests were planned across the country for the day, with the potential to turn nasty at the hands of people who insist anybody wearing a Star of David bears responsibility for the Israeli government’s actions. Tensions were already high after the Molotov cocktail attack on Jews in Boulder, the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and the firebombing of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official residence on the first night of Passover.

So, I spent much of Saturday standing in front of the synagogue, wearing a ballistic vest, with a pistol holstered on one hip and pepper spray on the other.

Underlining the point was that two Minnesota state lawmakers were targeted by an assassin the same Saturday — fatally in the case of one legislator and her husband. The day’s protests were predominantly, but not entirely, peaceful. That’s better than we’ve seen at recent protests against immigration enforcement that turned violent in Los Angeles and Portland, and at some pro-Palestine demonstrations.

That’s all recent. If we go back in time just a little, there’s the bombing of a fertility clinic by an “anti-natalist”; attacks on Tesla cars, dealerships, chargers, and owners by people opposed to Elon Musk’s temporary role in the Trump administration; and, notably, the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, has become something of a celebrity.

“Targeted violence is becoming normalized online and in the real world,” warned a December 2024 report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, affiliated with Rutgers University. “Memes, viral content, gamification and the lionization of Luigi Mangione are constructing frameworks that endorse and legitimize violence, encouraging harassment and further acts of violence against corporate figures.”

The report added that “the spread and scope of justifications for murder have significantly eroded what was once a barrier between mainstream society and fringe online communities that supported violence and glorified killers.”

“Britain’s bill for Caribbean slavery comes to £19 trillion – fifteen times the current annual budget of the UK government”

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The demands for reparations for historic wrongs will continue to grow, but the chances of any of the hustlers making the demands are remarkably slim, and thank goodness for that, because if the principle ever gets established we’ll be on a never-ending beggar-my-neighbour jag:

Britain’s bill for Caribbean slavery comes to £19 trillion — fifteen times the current annual budget of the UK government — according to the 2023 Brattle Report. And if the “Glasgow — City of Empire” display at the Kelvingrove Museum is anything to go by, Scotland owns a large share of that, since Glasgow was “one of the major port cities” involved in the slave-trade, whose profits played “a crucial role” in its economic development and prosperity.

The Tall Ship in Glasgow Harbour

The debt-collectors are already knocking at the door. In March 2023, Clive Lewis, MP and shadow Foreign Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn, called for the UK government to start “meaningful negotiations” over reparations with Caribbean countries. The following autumn, Lewis’s parliamentary office became the centre of a reparations-campaign, funded by Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien. And in April this year, Sir Keir Starmer received the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, into No. 10. “We’ve known each other many years as good colleagues and now as leaders who think alike”, said Starmer. Mottley has stated that Britain owes Barbados £3.9 trillion and it was she who pushed for reparations onto the agenda of the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit last year.

But the case for reparations doesn’t add up. Yes, some Britons were involved in inhumane slave-trading and slavery, mainly from about 1650 to the early 1800s, when they transported over 3.2 million slaves from Africa to the Americas. Yet, while campaigners portray British involvement as uniquely dreadful. It wasn’t.

Up until the end of the 18th century AD slavery and slave-trading were universal institutions, practised since the dawn of time on every continent by peoples of every skin colour. In North America, indigenous societies in the Pacific North-West were built on slave-labour, since subsistence required the rapid processing of salmon, and the quantity of work outstripped the supply of female labour. So, raiding for slaves was endemic. Thousands of miles to the south, the Comanche ran “the largest slave economy” in the 1700s — according to Oxford’s Pekka Hämäläinen. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Arabs had been busy slave-raiding and -trading since at least the 7th century AD. According to one authority, the Muslim trade transported 17 million slaves mainly from Africa, but also from Europe, to the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. This is one context out of which reparations-advocates like to abstract British slavery.

Another is African complicity. British slave-ships off the coast of West Africa didn’t have to raid inland to obtain their slaves. They just waited on the coast for them to be brought. Africans had been busy enslaving and trading other Africans for centuries, first to the Romans, then to the Arabs, and finally to the Europeans. As early as 1550 the Kingdom of the Kongo was exporting up to 8,000 African slaves annually to the Portuguese.

The final context that campaigners studiously ignore is the fact that Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading (in 1807) and slavery (in 1833) throughout its territories. It then used its dominant power to suppress both slave-trading and slavery from Brazil, across Africa and India, to New Zealand for the second half of the British Empire’s life. In the 1820s and ’30s, the Slave Trade Department was the Foreign Office’s largest unit. By mid-century the Royal Navy was devoting over 13 per cent of its total manpower to stopping transatlantic slave-trading. The cost of this alone to British taxpayers was at least the equivalent of up to £1.74 billion today or 12.7 per cent of the UK’s current expenditure on development aid — for half a century. According to the eminent historian, David Eltis, the nineteenth-century costs of slavery-suppression exceeded the eighteenth-century benefits.

The West Africa Squadron, which freed 150,000 African slaves.

June 23, 2025

US strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities

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

One of the most frustrating aspects of internet culture today is the need for instantaneous “analysis” of military events. We all understand the desire for such insight, but the accuracy of information available in the immediate aftermath of any event is highly variable. Between the need to control the narrative on the part of the participant powers, the propaganda value of being “first” to report, and the impossibility of accurate damage assessment, it’s a wise move to discount almost everything you hear about a big event for some time. Chris Bray suggests that the old “72 hours rule” may be insufficient for something like the US bunker busting strikes against Iranian nuclear research facilities:

First, wait a while. Sean Hannity just announced that “a source” told him the attack was a complete success, and all of Iran’s nuclear sites were fully destroyed. I’d hesitate to believe that, is the gentle way to put it. I’d also hesitate to believe the stories being told from the other direction, and don’t forget that Trump’s attack on Qasem Soleimani produced a full week of OH NO WORLD WAR III JUST BEGAN stories in the establishment media. The likelihood is that none of what you’re hearing this week is fully true. Wait and watch. I hope that Iran and the US are backchanneling while engaging in belligerent public posturing, but by definition we’re not going to see the backchanneling. We’ll see. The 72 Hour Rule is in effect, here, at the very least.

Second, the ludicrous story in which Trump is violating law and political norms with unilateral military action is, as always, a deliberate performance of political amnesia. These are our political norms, for crying out loud.

We should probably fix that. But the people who tolerated an American war in Libya without direct congressional authorization, and who tolerated an American war in Yemen without direct congressional authorization, and who tolerated an American war in Syria without direct congressional authorization, aren’t actually going to impeach a president over military strikes in the Middle East undertaken without direct congressional authorization. It’s a show. The More Than a Week Rule requires us to view this action in the longer and generally quite unfortunate context of American foreign policy, and the politicians who are outraged by unilateral military action in the Middle East have zero standing on that score.

Third, and related, the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force is still in effect, and still being stretched and massaged beyond its intent and meaning, but note that Congress still hasn’t repealed it. A Congress that wished to restrain presidential military action in the Middle East would probably start there, and they haven’t.

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds has a few thoughts on the matter:

People have been singing about it since 1980, but yesterday’s bombing raids on Iranian nuclear facilities were the first bombing attack since the 1979 hostage seizure.

Despite numerous calls for action against the Islamic Republic, Operation Midnight Hammer was the first U.S. military action against important Iranian assets on Iranian territory. The bombs fell less than 24 hours ago, but here are a few preliminary takes.

Competence. The most striking thing about the attacks was the extreme competence displayed by the Air Force, the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth, the various intelligence assets involved, the State Department, and the entire administration. There were no leaks. (How did they avoid leaks? Basically, they didn’t tell any Democrats what was coming. Take note.)

Not only were there no leaks, but President Trump and the diplomatic apparatus kept the Iranians in the dark, giving the impression of waffling in the White House even as things were being lined up. They received unintentional help in this from Sen. Charles Schumer, who had been for some time pushing the “TACO” acronym — Trump Always Chickens Out — in the service of a storyline that Trump was all bluster and no follow-through. The Iranians, apparently dumb enough to believe Democrats and the mainstream news media (but I repeat myself) were snookered.

New Diplomacy: In dealing with the Iranians in the 1980s, Donald Regan told President Reagan that America had been repeatedly “snookered” by a bunch of “rug merchants”. The Iranians were in fact very good at leading Americans down the garden path, invoking (often imaginary) splits between “hard-line” and “moderate” Islamists in their government as excuses for delay and backtracking.

In truth, as Henry Kissinger once said, “An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition“. After these raids, and the many Israeli attacks that led up to them, all of Iran is out of ammunition.

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