Quotulatiousness

May 7, 2023

The Line reports on “a Liberal policy convention in Fantasia”

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

It used to be said that the marketing department in any given organization was where the rubber met the sky (three drink minimum), but the Liberal convention in Barad-dûr-by-the-Rideau now owns that territory:

Once upon a time, Canada was led by a serious man named Pierre Elliot Trudeau. No matter what you think of his tenure as prime minister, there is no question that he took the job, and the country, seriously. Today his offspring, both biological and ideological, prance around the Canadian political landscape, smug and entitled and all the rest of it. But none of them has the foggiest idea of what they are doing with with the power they inherited, or why, or for what purpose.

[…]

For the evening entertainment on Friday, they brought out Jean Chrétien — another fantastically unserious person — to do his usual petit gars de Shawinigan routine. And did the old coot ever deliver, bragging yet again about keeping Canada out of Iraq, jabbing at Pierre Poilievre, and joking that he expects The Globe and Mail to call for a royal commission into Hillary Clinton showing up at the Liberal convention and interfering in Canadian elections.

Oh, our sides. They split. No matter that two days ago was World Press Freedom day. No matter that Friday also happened to be NNA night, where the Globe and Mail won nine awards. This is the Liberal convention after all, where one of the main policy proposals up for debate is a suggestion from the B.C. Liberals to essentially nationalise the news. Why not aim a few kicks at the media. The Liberals are paying for it anyway, aren’t they?

In his speech, Chrétien played to the latest Liberal idée fixe, which is that all of the party’s troubles since 2018 — from SNC Lavalin to WEgate to the egregious handling of Chinese interference — are all due to the clickbait chasing yellow journalists at the failing Globe and Mail.

For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to live through the nineties, Chrétien is the Liberal prime minister who brought you such hits as “what me worry?” about a Quebec referendum on secession; a joke about his PMO ordering the RCMP to pepper spray UBC students protesting his decision to invite a brutal dictator to dinner on their campus; and the Shawinigate and Adscam scandals, both of which are still routinely taught and referenced as case studies in ruling party greaseballery at its most unctuous.

But Liberals be Liberals. As National Post columnist Chris Selley noted: “This is deadly serious shit and this buffoon is playing it for laughs, just like [he] always played deadly serious shit.”

The “deadly serious shit” Selley had in mind is surely the river of scandal coursing through the Liberal Party in Ottawa over Chinese interference in Canadian politics, with tributaries flowing in from riding associations across the country, the Trudeau Foundation in Montreal, and numerous other parts of the Canadian political landscape. On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported on a CSIS analysis from 2021 which alleged that the family of Conservative MP Michael Chong was targeted by China’s security apparatus for unknown sanctions, in response to Chong’s sponsorship of a House of Commons motion calling China’s persecution of the Uighurs a genocide.

On Tuesday an understandably alarmed Chong was given an emergency briefing about the threat by CSIS director David Vigneault, in a meeting arranged by the prime minister.

This isn’t just about Michael Chong. Every member of parliament, every member of the government, should be up in arms over this. The Chinese diplomat in Canada involved, Zhao Wei, should have been sent home immediately, but Melanie Joly is still weighing the pros and cons.

As appalling as the targeting of Chong is in its own right, more scandalous still is the government’s response — equal parts utterly incompetent, unbelievably shady, and shamelessly partisan.

The scandal begins with the fact that Chong himself was never told about the CSIS report. Why is that? On Wednesday, the prime minister claimed it was because the threat identified in the CSIS report wasn’t deemed serious enough by the intelligence agency, so it never circulated outside of the agency. The first Trudeau had heard of this, apparently, was when he read about it in the newspaper.

But on Thursday, Michael Chong told the House of Commons that he’d been told, in a call from Trudeau’s current national security advisor Jody Thomas, that the report had actually made its way to the desk of one of her predecessors. When Trudeau was asked to explain this apparent contradiction on Friday, he said: “In terms of what I shared, I shared the best information I had at the time on Wednesday, both to Mr. Chong and to Canadians.” When asked who had given him this information, Trudeau declined to answer.

Look, we’ve seen this game before, countless times, with this government and this prime minister. Trudeau’s habit of responding to allegations of wrongdoing or incompetence or mismanagement by first denying any knowledge of the issue, then discrediting the source, and finally throwing unidentified third parties under the bus, is a well trod path for this deeply unserious man.

Given the pattern, we’re pretty skeptical of Trudeau’s claim that he’d been given incomplete information. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise us in the slightest if it turns out that he just made the whole thing up.

May 6, 2023

The federal Liberals want even more control over the internet

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

Paul Wells notes that a policy proposal at the Liberal conference this week indicates just how much the Liberal Party of Canada wants to control free expression on the internet:

Here on the 2023 Liberal convention’s “Open Policy Process” page are links to “Top 20 Resolutions” and “Fast-Tracked Resolutions”. The latter go straight to the plenary floor, the former go through a smaller preliminary debate and, if they pass, then on to the plenary. These things move fast because, in most cases, Liberals are paying only listless attention to the discussions. Policy is for New Democrats. Well, I mean, it used to be.

But sometimes words have meaning, so this morning I’m passing on one of the Top 20 Resolutions, from pages 12 and 13 of that book. This one comes to us from the British Columbia wing of the party.

It’s in two screenshots simply because it spreads across two pages. This is the entire resolution.

BC Liberals want “on-line information services” held “accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms” by “the Government”. The Government would, in turn, “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced”.

This resolution has no meaning unless it means I would be required to clear my posts through the federal government, before publication, so the “traceability” of my sources could be verified. I don’t suppose this clearance process would take too much more time than getting a passport or a response to an access-to-information request. Probably only a few months, at first. Per article.

After publication, “the Government” would hold me accountable for the veracity of my material, presumably through some new mechanism beyond existing libel law.

I’m not sure what “the Government” — I’m tickled by the way it’s capitalized, like Big Brother — would have made of this post, in which I quote an unnamed senior government official who was parked in front of reporters by “the Government” on the condition that he or she or they not be named. But by the plain meaning of this resolution, I would not have to wonder for long because that post would have been passed or cleared by the Government’s censors before publication, and I’m out of recourse if that process simply took longer than I might like.

May 5, 2023

JunkScientific American

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

Stephen Knight calls out the woke editors of once-proud publication Scientific American for their anti-scientific support of the gender warriors:

A dangerous strain of utopian thinking has taken hold of the “progressive” left. Many now share the delusion that if we pretend certain falsehoods are true, then various forms of oppression and bigotry will magically disappear. Worse still, the proponents of these falsehoods demand their unequivocal affirmation from the rest of us.

Today’s leftists rightly insist on the importance of scientific truth when it comes to questions like climate change, vaccine safety and evolution. But they will discard scientific facts the moment they become inconvenient to their own worldview. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more pronounced than on the issue of gender, where transgender ideology has almost entirely supplanted scientific truth among the left. More alarming still is the fact that many scientists and scientific institutions, which really should know better, are colluding in this deception.

The latest scientific institution to promote gender pseudoscience is the once-venerable Scientific American magazine, which this week published an article headlined “Here’s why human sex is not binary”.

Make no mistake, sex in human beings really is binary and immutable. There are few things more emphatically true in our scientific understanding of the world than the human sex binary. Human beings cannot change their sex – we are either male or female, as determined by which type of gametes our biology is organised to produce (sperm or eggs). These are observable, testable scientific facts. And this objective truth matters in very real and consequential ways – to our society, to law, to healthcare and to the safety of women and children.

Trans ideologues claim that the categories of male and female are on a “spectrum”, or that they represent nothing more than a subjective feeling. These ideas have already had disastrous consequences for society. It is thanks to these ideas that male rapists have been placed in women’s prisons in the UK. It is why, just this weekend, a biological man won an elite women’s cycling race in America – finishing 89 seconds ahead of the closest female competitor and netting $35,350 in prize money. We would simply recognise this as “cheating” were it not for the hold that gender ideology has over our institutions – and for the opprobrium that is visited on anyone who dissents.

After some silly and irrelevant trivia about the biology of lizards and fish (humans are neither fish nor lizards), the Scientific American article concludes by claiming that anyone who upholds the human sex binary is “trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society”. This single claim inadvertently reveals a great deal about what is wrong with the trans movement. Unable to refute the truth of the human sex binary, gender ideologues resort to demonising those who notice it as having ulterior, sinister motives.

This isn’t the first time Scientific American has lent its (now waning) credibility to gender nonsense. Back in 2018, it published an article titled “Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is overly simplistic”. To this day, this piece is gleefully shared around by gender activists, emboldened by this apparent vindication of their ideology from a credible, scientific publication. However, the author of the piece has since clarified that reality actually is as simplistic as humans having only “two sexes”.

May 4, 2023

Despite all the evidence, Canada’s official motto doesn’t translate as “we broke it”

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

In The Line, Justin Ling adds more to the towering pile of evidence that “Canada is broken”:

If The Line has an editorial position, it is probably thus: Everything is broken.

This newsletter, of course, comes at the idea more earnestly than, say, the leader of the Conservative party. When my friend Matt Gurney advances that proposition, it is a lament. When Pierre Poilievre does: It’s wishful thinking.

While citizens of this country can’t always agree on what, exactly, is busted in our country, or why, or who is responsible — we can all agree, I hope, that things in this country could use a tune-up, at the very least. Canadians, after all, are imbued with a cloying optimism. An insufferable belief that things can be fixed. It’s a good thing.

Lucky for us, we have plenty of words written about how to fix much of what ails us. Because we, as a country, have a compulsive need to inquire about those problems. Our national pastime isn’t hockey, it’s the royal commission.

And we’ve got a government in office that loves to study the nature of the problem. There’s good work, these days, for the special rapporteurs and retired judges amongst us. And if you’re a Canadian that loves a good public consultation, you must be run ragged.

Yet we also have a government in office that has a pathological inability to take advice. And this problem may help explain why it feels like we’re sliding backwards.

[…]

When the government tapped an expert panel to study the use of solitary confinement in Canada’s prisons — literally torture — Correctional Services Canada blocked them from doing their job, and the public safety minister ignored their cries for help and then let their contracts lapse. Thanks to some scrutiny, the government renewed the study, then ignored it when the numbers showed they were still torturing people. Oops!

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians — a body Trudeau created — warned in 2019 that Ottawa wasn’t taking foreign interference seriously, particularly when it came to China. “In short, government responses were piecemeal, responding to specific instances of foreign interference but leaving unaddressed the many other areas where Canadian institutions and fundamental rights and freedoms continue to be undermined by hostile states.” Prescient!

One of the most absurd examples is the sexual misconduct crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. When Trudeau came into office in 2015, he had an external review on his desk from Marie Deschamps. One good external review deserves another, so the Liberals ordered one from Louise Arbour in 2022. What she found was harrowing: “We have been here before. Little seems to change.” Not only had the government failed to implement the Deschamps report, it was still failing to live up to the recommendations from the 1997 Somalia Inquiry. Fuck!

[…]

At the very centre of this tootsie-pop is, surprise, elitism. This Liberal government, armed with its paper-thin mandate, is convinced that they — and only they — are the verifiers of good ideas. And we should be grateful for whatever decision they deign to make.

If they farm out an idea to the public service, and the idea doesn’t come back in the form they envisioned, no matter: Send out the McKinsey signal. For just a few million dollars, their crack team of subject matter non-experts can prepare a PowerPoint presentation laying out the exact policy the political staff wanted in the first place.

The Liberals take a similar approach to consulting with the unwashed masses. When the government consulted the public on their plan to police “online harms,” they published a “what we heard” report that was broadly supportive of their plan.

Can we see the submissions? Journalists and academics asked. No. Came the reply.

May 2, 2023

Si vis pacem, para bellum

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

CDR Salamander suggests that the “War Gods of the Copybook Headings” are not happy with us, and he’s probably right:

Relief at the entrance of the Cultural Center of the Armies (formerly the Serviceman’s Casino) of Madrid (Spain), showing the Latin phrase Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war).
Photo by Luis Garcia (Zaqarbal) via Wikimedia Commons.

Mindsets are universal.

Yes, no one can see the future. Of course, it is easy to play “got-cha” in hindsight. Yes to all the excuses … but that isn’t the point.

Two things to keep in mind as you read the below:

  1. Our “experts” may lack broad expertise. Always question. Defer only when earned.
  2. We have a horrible record of predicting even the predictable for a whole host of reasons, most bureaucratic.
  3. At peace, assume you have leaders who can only imagine peace unless they actively demonstrate otherwise, that they will plan and act in line with their priors. When war comes, it will be up to others to fix things (as they say in the movies, “When they get in trouble, they send for the sons of bitches“.). The harder peacetime leaders are pressed by those who understand the constants of history, the less difficult the fix will be when war comes.

This is one of the virtue/vice dualities of democratic states. In peacetime, there is no political appetite for military spending and no political party will be eager to provide the opportunity to be accused of warmongering. An opposition party might briefly call attention to defects in the standing military, but only to embarrass the governing party, not because they would address the problem if they were in power. There may be widespread passive support for the military, but this isn’t represented at the ballot box because there are always far more urgent issues that drive how the voters allocate their support … and military spending is a lot of money put into things that don’t fix the roads, improve public health, address law and order concerns, or clean the environment.

Peacetime military establishments are huge bureaucracies at the best of times, and those who want to rise through the bureaucracy need to learn how use the same tools, schemes, and stratagems as in every other civil service organization. The longer a country has been at peace, the less capable the military administration will be of transitioning to a war footing. If you haven’t seen war in twenty years or more, then every officer up to the very top of the chain of command got there not for being a good soldier/sailor/airman but for being a good peacetime manager and administrator. This is totally normal, as is the massive disruption when a real war is imminent. If you’re lucky, some of those administrators-in-uniform can make the transition to being combat leaders quickly, but many of them will not be able or willing (it’s just human nature to resent and resist sudden change of long-standing practice).

Well meaning people can be wrong. Just because they are well meaning and have tenure-reputation-rank should not mean that everyone has to defer to them or their plans.

Good leaders with sound ideas and well developed plans will welcome hard questions and informed challenges.

Bad leaders with weak ideas and compromised plans will be defensive, flinty, and more often than not will resort to appeals to authority or credentialism. Those are your warning signs.

Sadly, highly isolated decision nodes — think the Transformationalists in the first half of the ’00s — don’t think they are wrong. They have filtered their information sources and filled out their staffs with either clones or the obsequious — often found in the same person.

They are the ones who have a blinkered focus on usually something far on the horizon that can’t be measured right now — but is very attractive to them for reasons of either a broader ignorance, ego, or monetary.

They don’t fully accept “risk” – they dismiss it.

In the area of national security — such a mindset and practice can create an existential crisis and it comes from hubris.

Smart people who are so convinced of their wisdom without humility will filter out any concerns, and won’t allow questions that might challenge their wisdom.

They may be right as they didn’t, mostly, get to where they were by being wrong — and they don’t consider they may not be and hedge accordingly.

May 1, 2023

The Presidential re-match nobody wants

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

At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage contemplates the potential re-match of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2024 election … and shudders:

Perhaps for good reason, any American with their eyes on the White House must be at least 35 years of age when assuming office. Mercifully, this rule prevents anyone with a TikTok account from being taken too seriously.

Apparently, Americans apply this rule to its very extreme.

This week, President Joe Biden announced his bid for re-election, promising in a video announcement to “finish the job”. Quite what job he refers to is anyone’s guess. Though in better shape than Great Britain (a bar so low it’s a carpet) America is not having the best of days, weeks, months, years, decades, or twenty-first centuries.

Biden wasted no time. His sales pitch? He’s not Donald Trump. Evidently, the Biden team assumes Trump will steamroller over Ron DeSantis en route to the Republican party nomination. It’s 2020 again.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but every time I see “2020” written down, or the mere words “twenty-twenty” seep into my eardrums, my heart flutters, my brain jangles, and a panic attack seizes control of my body with all the charm and consideration of a central African coup d’état.

Americans seem to agree. Seventy percent of Americans don’t think the 80-year-old Biden should run for re-election. Even 51 percent of Democrats nod their heads. Meanwhile, sixty percent, including one-third of Republicans say Trump, 76, should not run for president.

President Biden is not the most spring of chickens. Half of those who think he should sit this one out say Biden’s age is a “major” reason behind their thinking.

To put it mildly, this decade hasn’t quite gone the way of the “Roaring Twenties”. In 2019, I told anyone with ears that this decade would be the decade of decades. Reader, the jury is out. By “out” I don’t mean they’re busy making their considerations. By “out” I mean the jury is riddled with hollow-point bullets.

Perhaps that’s why a 38 percent plurality told pollsters they felt “exhausted” over the very idea of a Biden versus Trump rematch. Twenty-nine percent said they felt “fear” whilst just under a quarter felt both “sadness and fear”.

Which brings me to vice president Kamala Harris. This week, we learned of Biden’s intention to rehabilitate Harris’ image. Harris hasn’t had the most illustrious of tenures. Why? Well, let’s just say VP Harris is suited to other modes of employment. Ideally, Harris would find her feet in jobs which don’t require speaking in coherent, plain sentences and jobs which place a premium upon one’s ability to laugh at the most inappropriate of times. Reader, I’m about as socially attuned as a headbutt. Unlike Harris, I’m not literally one stopped heart away from the presidency.

It cannot be that a country of 330 million people, one which correctly claims to be the greatest country on earth, must limit itself to re-running the worst year in recent history.

And yet, there’s quite some time to go before the serious business of campaigning kicks into gear. If this horrendous decade has taught me anything, it’s that conventional wisdom isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

April 29, 2023

Justin can’t let Joe steal his thunder on this critical issue!

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

Justin Trudeau’s love of the vastly expensive and utterly useless virtue signal is almost unmatched among western leaders, but as Bruce Gudmundsson relates here, some of Joe Biden’s lower-echelon cronies in the Pentagram Pentagon have put up a virtue signal that will be very hard for Justin to top:

In the United States, the president enjoys the privilege of appointing 4,000 of his supporters to positions within the Executive Branch. When the president is a Democrat, the best connected of these invariably prefer perches in the vast social service bureaucracy, there to reign (but rarely rule) over like-minded civil servants.* Those with the fewest friends, alas, end up in the Pentagon.

I’m honestly surprised that the number of direct appointees is so low … I’d have guessed at least ten times that number. I was vaguely aware that the formal “spoils” system was broken up late in the 19th century, but the US federal government and its various arms-length agencies are several orders of magnitude larger than they were back then.

The appointees who suffer the latter fate know nothing of the work they supposedly supervise. Indeed, having been raised in homes in which there were “no war toys for Christmas”, they cannot distinguish a sailor from an airman, let alone explain the difference between a soldier and a Marine. What is worse, like impoverished Regency belles, obliged to spend the Season wearing last year’s frocks, Defense Department Democrats live in constant fear of losing caste.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that the aforementioned appointees embrace, with great enthusiasm, projects of the sort they can discuss at Georgetown cocktail parties. During the Obama years (2009-2017), many of these bore the brand of “green energy”. (No doubt, the appointees in question made much of the double entendre.) As might be expected, many of these programs went into hibernation during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021), only to spring back to life after the inauguration (in 2021) of Joseph Biden.

In a recent post on his Substack, the indispensable Igor Chudov lays bare the folly of one of these initiatives. Part of the Climate Strategy unveiled by the US Army in 2022, this plan calls for the progressive replacement, over the course of twenty-eight years, of petroleum dependent cars, trucks, and tanks with their battery-powered counterparts.

I mean, on the plus side, it would mean that wars could only take place on sunny days (for solar-powered tanks) or windy days (for wind-powered tanks). The sheer stupidity of the notion would be laughable, except they really seem to be serious about military combat vehicles running on batteries recharged with solar cells, windmills, or unicorn farts. I’d call it peak Clown World, but it’s a safe bet that they can get even crazier without working up a sweat.

Searching for an appropriate graphic to go with this article, I found this gem at Iowa Climate Change from back in 2021:

    * Lest you think, Gentle Reader, that this post serves a partisan political purpose, I will mention that am convinced that the one Republican political appointee with whom I am well-acquainted is a knucklehead of the first order. Indeed, if I ever manage to locate the proper forms, I intend to nominate him for a place of particular honor in the Knucklehead Hall of Fame.

Bad advice for Robert Kennedy Jr.

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

C.J. Hopkins proffers advice to the declared candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois on October 14, 2007.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. is running for president. I could not possibly be more excited. So, I’m going to give Bobby some unsolicited advice, which, if he knows what’s good for him, he will not take.

I feel OK about doing this because, even if Bobby, in the wee hours of the night, when the mind is vulnerable to dangerous ideas, were to seriously consider taking my advice, I am sure he has people — i.e., PR people, campaign strategists, pollsters, and so on — that would not hesitate to take him aside and disabuse him of any inclination to do that.

OK, before I give Bobby this terrible advice, I have to do the “full disclosure” thing. I’m a pretty big fan of RFK, Jr. I don’t generally get involved in electoral politics, but, if I were a Democrat, I would definitely vote for him. Also, he was kind enough to blurb my book (which isn’t going to make his PR people happy) and invite me onto his podcast, RFK, Jr. The Defender, to talk about “New Normal” totalitarianism. So, I am fairly biased in favor of Bobby Kennedy. I think he is an admirable, honorable human being. I would love to see him in the Oval Office.

That isn’t going to happen, of course. The global-capitalist ruling classes are never going to let him near the Oval Office. They learned their lesson back in 2016. There are not going to be any more unauthorized presidents. The folks at GloboCap are done playing grab-ass, and they want us to know that they are done playing grab-ass. That’s what the last six years have been about.

As I put it in a column in January, 2021 …

    … This, basically, is what we’ve just experienced. The global capitalist ruling classes have just reminded us who is really in charge, who the US military answers to, and how quickly they can strip away the facade of democracy and the rule of law. They have reminded us of this for the last ten months, by putting us under house arrest, beating and arresting us for not following orders, for not wearing masks, for taking walks without permission, for having the audacity to protest their decrees, for challenging their official propaganda, about the virus, the election results, etc. They are reminding us currently by censoring dissent, and deplatforming anyone they deem a threat to their official narratives and ideology … GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it. They just installed a new puppet president, who can’t even simulate mental acuity, in a locked-down, military-guarded ceremony which no one was allowed to attend, except a few members of the ruling classes. They got some epigone of Albert Speer to convert the Mall (where the public normally gathers) into a “field of flags” symbolizing “unity”. They even did the Nazi “Lichtdom” thing. To hammer the point home, they got Lady Gaga to dress up as a Hunger Games character with a “Mockingjay” brooch and sing the National Anthem. They broadcast this spectacle to the entire world.

Does that sound like the behavior of an unaccountable, supranational power apparatus that is prepared to stand by and let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., or Donald Trump, or any other unauthorized person, become the next president of the United States?

So, here’s my bad advice for Bobby.

Fuck them. They’re not going to let you win, anyway. They are going to smear you, slime you, demonize you, distort every other thing you say, and just generally lie about who you are and what you believe in and what you stand for. They are going to paint you as a bull-goose-loony, formerly smack-addled, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-vax fanatic no matter what you do. If you tone down your act and try to “heal the divide” and “end the division,” they are going to have you for lunch, and then sit around picking their teeth with your bones. You know, and I know, and the American people know, that the things you say you want to do as president — which I know you sincerely want to do as president and are crazy enough to actually try to do, i.e., “to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country” — are things … well, as Michael Corleone once put it, that they would “use all their power to keep from happening”.

So, fuck it, and fuck them. Tell the truth.

Not the ready-for-prime-time truth. Not the toned-down-for-mainstream-consumption truth. The truth. The ugly, unvarnished truth. The scary, crazy-sounding truth. The angry, divisive, uncensored truth.

Yes, there is a “divide”. A great divide. A chasm. A schism. A gulf. An abyss. A gaping, yawning, unbridgeable fissure. A Grand Canyon-sized fault in the foundation of society. A rupture in the very fabric of reality.

H/T to Robert Swanson for the link.

Of course, not everyone is as fond of RFK, Jr. — and for good reason, as Matt Welch points out:

Ever since the 69-year-old conspiratorial activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination last week, a curious new category has appeared among the commentariat—libertarians and/or right-of-center journalists expressing strange new respect for a Hugo Chavez–admiring scion of the Establishment who has serially fantasized about throwing his political opponents in jail.

“I’m quite certain that I’ve never heard a more erudite speech in any political context,” enthused Brownstone Institute President Jeffrey Tucker after attending Kennedy’s announcement rally. “As [a] Democrat he must be bad on all sorts of things,” tweeted Antiwar.com’s Scott Horton, “But not the ones that matter the most.” The Libertarian Party of Colorado tweeted (and then deleted) “Bravo and godspeed hero.” Tablet, a publication not usually known for boosting overheated analogies to murderous 20th-century totalitarians, gave RFK Jr. an 18,000-word valentine with such soft-toss “questions” about his previous controversial statements (like terming the impact from childhood vaccines “a holocaust”) as: “You activated an automated outrage machine that was looking for a gotcha.”

The newly Kennedy-curious are intrigued by the rabble-rouser’s potential to disrupt an otherwise rubber-stamped Democratic primary, sure, but also by him having the right enemies — the media, the military-industrial complex, and, most of all, a political class that backed COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates.

“Just as Donald Trump … retrieved political themes from the deep past of the Republican Party,” National Review‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty mused, “so it must be that a Democrat should come along and try to revive left-leaning skepticism of government and corporate power, to denounce crony capitalism, censorship, and the CIA to boot.”

Recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he’ll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy’s son has repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science.

[…]

Yet in 2023, Kennedy can plausibly claim (to those with short memories) the mantle of anti-censorship, for having been on the receiving end of Big Social Media’s often government-pressured pandemic speech-policing. He was banned from Instagram in February 2021 “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”, and his anti-vaccine-mandate nonprofit Children’s Health Defense was similarly booted by both Instagram and Facebook in August 2022. He published a book last year called A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals. As Tablet‘s David Samuels wrote, in one of that piece’s many eye-popping passages, “At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country’s leading ‘conspiracy theorist’ alone qualifies him to be president.”

So is the enemy of your enemy your friend? Depends on your tolerance for unlikely conspiracy theories, and your comfort level in Kennedy’s proposed punishments for alleged perpetrators. Where Jeffrey Tucker sees an orator with a “command of facts, history, and issues,” motivated both by “truth-telling in an age of nonstop lies” and a genuine urge to “heal” the political divide, I see someone whose presentation of facts — including grave accusations of criminality — have been repeatedly and persuasively found lacking.

April 27, 2023

It’s not environmentalism I object to, it’s environmentalists

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I thoroughly agree with Tom Knighton here:

I tend to be pretty critical of environmentalism. It’s not that I don’t value things like clean air, clean water, and pristine land free of pollution. I actually do value all of those things. I actually care about the environment.

What I don’t care about, though, are environmentalists.

Much of my issue with them is that they don’t seem to recognize reality or, if they do, they just want everyone to have to pay more and make do with less.

Most evironmentalists I’ve dealt with fail to understand one of the basic tenets of economics: There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Yes, we can make certain changes to how we do things to reduce our impact on the natural environment, but such changes are almost never free and sometimes the potential cost is significantly higher than any rational expectation of benefit from changing. Economics — and life in general — is all about the trade-offs. If you do X, you can’t do Y. If you specialize in this area, you can’t devote effort in that area, and so on. Time and materials limit what can be done and require a sensible way of deciding … and most environmentalists either don’t understand or refuse to accept this.

For example, take the electric cars that are being pushed so hard by environmentalists and their allies in the government. They’re not remotely ready to replace gas- or diesel-powered vehicles by any stretch of the imagination. They lack the range to really compete as things currently stand, and yet, what are we being pushed to buy?

Obviously, little of this is new. I wrote that post nearly two years ago and absolutely nothing has changed for either better or worse. Not on that front.

But there have been some changes, and they really show me why I’m glad I don’t describe myself as an environmentalist.

Actually, I take back a bit of my accusation that environmentalists don’t see the trade-offs: they do see some of them. They see things that you will have to give up to achieve their goals. That’s the kind of trade-off they’re eager to make.

Even if you don’t think climate change is real and manmade — I don’t, for example — I like the idea of clean, cheap sources of energy. Solar and wind aren’t going to produce all the electricity we need, but nuclear can.

Yet why do so many environmentalists focus on wind and solar? It can’t make what we need. It won’t replace coal power plants, especially with regard to reliability. Coal creates power when it’s overcast and when there’s no wind to speak of.

Nuclear can.

Nuclear, in fact, could create power on a fraction of the footprint, minimize pollution due to power creation, and do it safely. For all the fearmongering over nuclear power, there have been only two meltdowns in history — both of which were at facilities with reportedly abysmal safety records and one of which still needed a massive earthquake and tsunami to trigger it.

But wind and solar don’t just create “clean” energy. They also require Americans to make do with less.

That is the heart of the environmental movement. It’s not so much about saving the planet. If it’s not about a cult of personality, as Lights encountered, it’s about making people step backward in their standard of living.

April 24, 2023

Canada won’t meet its defence spending targets, and Trudeau is totally fine saying this to our allies, if not to the public

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

Canadian defence freeloading has been a hallmark of Canadian government policy since 1968, and as The Line confirms in their weekend dispatch, it should be no surprise that Justin Trudeau is okay continuing his father’s basic policies:

A story we’ve been watching in recent weeks was the remarkable leak of sensitive U.S. national security documents onto the dark web, and from there, widely across social media. A young member of the Air National Guard has been arrested and now faces serious charges. News reports suggest that he had access to classified material at work and began sharing it privately with a small group of online friends, apparently simply to impress and inform them, with no broader political agenda. Some of those friends, in turn, appear to have leaked the documents further afield. It took months before anyone noticed, but once picked up by several individuals with large followings — including some who are none-too-friendly to the U.S. and Western alliance — the story exploded and the full scope of the leak was finally discovered.

This is, for the U.S., a huge embarrassment and a diplomatic nightmare. For us, it was simply a fascinating story. This week, though, we suddenly had the coveted Canadian Angle: the Washington Post claims to have reviewed one of the leaked documents, apparently prepared for the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, that assesses Canada’s military serious military deficiencies, and also reports that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has privately told fellow NATO leaders that Canada isn’t going to hit NATO’s two-per-cent-of-GDP spending target.

To wit:

    “Widespread defense shortfalls hinder Canadian capabilities,” the document says, “while straining partner relationships and alliance contributions.”

    The assessment, which bears the seal of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Germany is concerned about whether the Canadian Armed Forces can continue to aid Ukraine while meeting its NATO pledges. Turkey is “disappointed” by the Canadian military’s “refusal” to support the transport of humanitarian aid after February’s deadly earthquake there, the document says, and Haiti is “frustrated” by Ottawa’s reluctance to lead a multinational security mission to that crisis-racked nation.

Your Line editors just sort of sighed heavily and rubbed their temples when they read that. It was, to us, nothing we didn’t know already. It was actually almost some kind of a relief to know that the PM will at least say privately what he won’t admit publicly: we aren’t living up to our pledge, and don’t plan to.

The Post says that Trudeau told NATO that there won’t be much more military spending in this country until the political situation here changes. We aren’t sure if he meant the priorities of the voters or the composition of our parliament. It doesn’t matter — it’s true either way. We are disappointed, but again, in no way surprised, to see Trudeau seeing this as an issue that he’ll just accept as-is, as opposed to attempting the hard work of showing actual leadership. He’s always been more about the easy path of demonstrative gestures instead of working hard to achieve real change.

But hey. In this, he has a lot of company. The Tories under Harper were marginally better on defence, but not nearly good enough. We have little faith — next to none, really — that PM Poilievre would do any better on defence. What bums us out the most about this issue is that we recognize and even agree that the choice to neglect defence and shovel those dollars instead into other, more popular vote-buying files does indeed make political sense. It’s what the voters want. We wish it were otherwise. We’ve spent big chunks of our careers trying to change their minds. Our record to date is one of total, utter failure.

Still, never say die, right? So we’ll make this point: we understand and accept the criticism sometimes made by Canadian commentators, who argue that the two-per-cent-of-GDP target is arbitrary and somewhat meaningless. We don’t entirely agree — targets are useful, and two per cent seems reasonable. But we’d be open to an argument that Canada could still punch above its weight in the alliance, even while spending less, if we could deliver key capabilities.

But … we can’t. We probably could, once upon a time, but we can’t even do that now. The air force is a mess. The navy is a mess. The army is a disaster, and couldn’t even send Nova Scotia all the help it asked for after Hurricane Fiona. Sending a token plane or ship on a quick foreign jaunt is symbolism, not above-weight-punching. And the symbolism taps us out.

So we have to pick what we’re doing here, fellow Canucks. We can meet the two-per-cent target. We can find other ways to meaningfully contribute. Or we can do neither of those things, and admit it, but only in private. Right now, alas, we’ve chosen that third option. We see no sign that’ll be changing any time soon.

Pierre Trudeau discovered that Canadian voters are all too willing to accept “peace dividends” in the form of shorting defence spending to goose non-military spending, and few prime ministers since then have done much more than gesture vaguely at changing it. Worse, it’s also quite accepted practice for defence procurement to prioritize “regional economic benefits” over any actual military requirement, which often means Canada buys fewer items (ships, planes, helicopters, tanks, trucks, etc.) at significantly higher prices as long as there’s a shiny new plant in Quebec or New Brunswick that can be the backdrop for government ministers and party MPs to use as a backdrop during the next election campaign. Military capability barely scrapes into the bottom of the priority list on the few occasions that the government feels obligated to spend new money on the Canadian Armed Forces.

Worse, every penny of “new” spending on the military gets announced many times over before any actual cheques are issued, which helps to disguise the fact that it’s the same thing all over again — sometimes for periods stretching out into years. The Canadian military has a well-deserved reputation for keeping ancient equipment up and running for years (or decades) after all our peer nations have moved on to newer kit. It’s a tribute to the technical and maintenance skills of the units involved, but it probably absorbs far more resources to do it over replacing the stuff when it begins to wear out, and it reduces the number available to, and the combat effectiveness of, the front-line troops when they are needed.

April 23, 2023

Dylan Mulvaney’s “triumph of performance and marketing”

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

Andrew Sullivan weighs in on the Dylan Mulvaney phenomenon:

Bud Light’s latest brand ambassador, Dylan Mulvaney

I’ve largely ignored the entire Bud Light tempest in a toxic teacup because social media outrages and brand boycotts come and go and tend to leave little trace behind. But the fuss over the beer brand’s brief commercial dalliance with trans newbie Dylan Mulvaney — with her 10.8 million TikTok followers — nonetheless fascinates. It shows, it seems to me, just how much everyone is projecting, and how (almost) everyone is getting it wrong.

There are, it seems, many layers to Dylan. To countless straight people, left and right, Dylan is a transgender star — because she is biologically male, and yet has been saying she is a girl now for more than a year, wears women’s clothes and is pretty and charming and full of manic energy. (I’m mostly using her preferred pronouns here, the least clumsy option). The woke left therefore loves her, and the Matt Walsh right has had a collective aneurysm. But for many gay men, including yours truly, Dylan’s latest, year-long performance as a “girl” looks and sounds like something much more familiar.

Dylan, to us at least, is a pretty classic, child-actor, musical theater queen — an effeminate gay man who finds great joy and relief in Broadway camp and drama, and is liable to burst into song at any moment. (I used to wonder if this very specific manifestation would die out as gays integrated more. But no! It seems to be in our collective DNA. Every generation mints a new variety.) And she’s managed to bait both the woke left and the anti-woke right into making her very famous and a lot richer than a year ago.

It’s a triumph of performance and marketing. It can be frustrating for a young actor among so many. You can do your best, become a finalist in Campus Superstar in 2018, wear only briefs for a performance at Joe’s Pub, perform, however well, in the cast of Book Of Mormon, camp it up for Ellen, or do the exact same ditzy-girl act on The Price Is Right as a man (Dylan’s previous attempts at fame). But become a parody of a “girl” and provide breathless, daily updates on your transition — and nearly 11 million people on TikTok will follow. At the same time brand yourself as a pioneer for greater understanding, love, and civil rights … and you can get an extended interview on The Today Show and an audience at the White House.

The gimmick was simple: a TikTok clip for every day of “becoming a girl.” As Dylan explained:

    When the pandemic hit, I was doing the Broadway musical Book of Mormon. I found myself jobless and without the creative means to do what I loved. I downloaded TikTok, assuming it was a kids’ app. … [R]ight before I started creating content with “Days of Girlhood”, I thought, “What am I going to do to afford my rent this month?”

Well, she no longer has to worry about that. Dylan has brand partnerships with Anheuser-Busch, Nike, Crest, Instacart, Ulta Beauty, Kate Spade and many more. And here is what Dylan means by “becoming a girl” in his/her own words. Trigger warning for feminists:

    Day One of being a girl and I’ve already cried three times, I wrote a scathing email that I did not send, I ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford, and then, uh, when someone asked me how I was, I said I’m fine — when I wasn’t fine [applies lip gloss]. How’d I do, ladies? Good? Girl power!

If you think this has to be a joke, a parody making fun of sexist ideas about women, you’re not the only one. (Trans YouTuber Blaire White also assumed it was a spoof at first, and her video on Dylan’s “womanface” is well worth a watch.) But no! Here’s more:

    “Hangin with the girlieeees, woohoo! [The camera pans across a series of dolls sitting in chairs] … I almost bought this Audrey [Hepburn] portrait. I just love her, she’s everything I want to be.”

    “Day Three of being a girl and I’ve already become a bimbo. … I think it’s a good fit for me. What do you think, ladies?”

    “Day Four of being a girl and I’m exhausted — the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the high heels. It’s a lot to keep up with!”
    “Day 12 of being a girl and I just picked up some tampons.”

She never subsequently seems to put them down. At one point, we see Dylan hiking in high heels, and running hysterically away from a flying bug. In another clip, she dresses up in a skimpy evening gown and fantasizes about her future husband:

    I want them to know I’ll be their cheerleader on and off the field. So they can picture me walking down the aisle to be their trophy bride, or trophy wife. I would totally be good at that, don’t you think? “Dinner’s ready! Yoo-hoo!”

Call me a transphobe, but I just don’t think that someone who has been struggling with gender identity her whole life and found a pathway to womanhood … would ever celebrate it quite like that. Yet this firehose of misogynistic tropes was one of a handful of people who were invited to the White House to interview Biden personally.

The only thing more absurd than this was the far right falling for the whole schtick as well. After the Bud Light ad, Kid Rock filmed himself shooting cases of beer with a semi-automatic rifle; a businessman opted for a baseball bat in an ad to promote his new “Ultra Right” beer; bomb threats rattled some Bud factories; countless tweets popped up alleging a collapse in sales of Bud Light; then the Trumps went to war with Matt Walsh because Anheuser-Busch is a major GOP donor; then the former cover-girl, current Fox News star Caitlyn Jenner called Dylan’s act an “absurdity“; and so on. Good times.

April 22, 2023

“I’d stock every preschool classroom with The Anarchist’s Cookbook if I could”

Filed under: Books, Education, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

I’m also a libertarian, but I might not go quite as far as Freddie deBoer in the quote in the headline:

Julian Sanchez makes good sense here on recent bills in Florida designed to regulate and censor LGBTQ content in schools:

Yes, indeed. Kids will learn about LGBTQ issues sooner or later. It’s pointless to try and keep them from finding out about the existence of homosexuality, of gay love, of gay marriage, of trans people and gender nonconformity. They’re gonna find out. They have smartphones, usually much younger than they should. They’re curious and the world is always a click away. It’s foolish to try and prevent them from learning about this stuff. And, in fact, the more that you try to restrict what they learn, the more likely they are to explore this world in a way that openly defies your efforts. LGBTQ people, politics, art, and culture exist. You’re entitled to object to LGBTQ rights, in a free society, but you’re not entitled to (or able to) create a bubble in which others are kept hidden from knowledge of the existence of LGBTQ people. People love that I’m forever tweaking liberals about their attachment to various forms of unreality, to thinking that they can wish away facts of life that they’re uncomfortable with. But it’s the same deal here.

Look, I will acknowledge that some of the reporting on the “Don’t Say Gay” bill has distorted and exaggerated what the bill calls for, and I also think there’s a lot of motivated dismissal about the nature of some of the content that’s being debated. For example, some people have gone to the ramparts to defend access to the book This Book is Gay, which explicitly advertises itself as a guide to sex, despite the fact that the author herself says it’s not for children. (Pictures of the book that are routinely circulated are typically dismissed as conservative fabrications, but you just have to look at the book to know that isn’t true.) Probably that particular example is a matter of some groups being lazy when putting together reading lists, but of course there are always going to be debates and edge cases.

Would I ban that book? Of course not. Personally, I’m completely libertarian about this stuff; I’d stock every preschool classroom with The Anarchist’s Cookbook if I could. But there’s a difference between holding that position and believing it’s credible to pretend that there’s literally nothing to debate there. It’s pointless to pretend that books in a public school classroom are going to remain untouched by these disagreements. The views of parents will inevitably be expressed through the democratic apparatus that presides over those schools. Of course people are going to debate this stuff. Vociferously.

Still, the objections are ultimately misguided for the reasons Sanchez says. Plenty of kids in extremely repressive conservative environments dreamed of a future as an openly gay person in a liberal city, before the internet. I’ve always had qualms about the “born this way” framing — if being gay was a choice, would society have any legitimate right to refuse people from making it? — but the simple reality is that gay people and trans people etc have always transcended restrictive social and religious environments in their interior life, even if it was too dangerous for them to express it. If a kid is gay, they’re gonna figure that out. You don’t have to speed along the process, but trying to artificially impede their progress won’t work. That’s an “is” statement, not an “ought” statement.

Epistemology, but not using the term “epistemology” because reasons

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

At Founding Questions, Severian responds to a question about the teaching profession in our ever-more-self-beclowning world:

Proposed coat of arms for Founding Questions by “urbando”.
The Latin motto translates to “We are so irrevocably fucked”.

I know a guy who teaches at a SPLAC where they have some “common core” curriculum — everyone in the incoming class, regardless of major, is required to take a few set courses, and all of them revolve around that question. How do we know what we know? So it’s not just a public school / grade school thing. And epistemology IS fascinating … almost as fascinating as the fact that the word “epistemology” never shows up on my buddy’s syllabi.

I think the problem is especially acute for “teachers”, because the Dogmas of the Church of Woke are so ludicrous that it takes real effort to not see the obvious absurdities. It takes real hermeneutical talent to reconcile the most obvious empirical facts with the Dogmas of the Faith, and very few kids have it. So they either completely check out, or just repeat the Dogmas by rote.

The other problem has to do with teacher training. I know a little bit about this (or, at least, a little bit about how it stood 15 years ago), because a) I was “dating” an Education Theory person, and b) I went through Flyover State’s online indoctrination education Certificate Program.

The former is just awful, even by ivory tower standards, so I’ll spare you the gory details. Just know that however bad you think “social science” is, it’s way way worse. The “certification program” was something I got my Department to sign off on — I was the guy who “knew computers” (which is just hilarious if you know me in real life; I’m all but tech-illiterate), so I got assigned all the online classes, which the Department fought against with all its might, and only grudgingly agreed to offer when the Big Cheese threatened to pull some $$$ if they didn’t. So even though I wouldn’t have been eligible for all the benefits and privileges thereunto appertaining, me being a lowly adjunct, none of the real eggheads could bring themselves to do it, so I was the guy.

The Education Department, being marginally smarter than the History Department, saw which way the wind was blowing, so they started offering big money incentives for professors to sign up for this “online teaching certification program” they’d dreamed up. No, really: It was something like $5000 for a two course, which really meant “two hours a day, four days a week,” because academia works like that (it’s a 24/7 job, remember — 24 hours a week, 7 months a year). By my math, $5000 by 16 hours is something like $300 an hour, so hell yeah I signed right up …

It was torture. Sheer torture. I knew it would be, but goddamn, man. Take the worst corporate struggle session you’ve ever been forced to attend, put it on steroids. Make the “facilitator” — not professor, by God, not in Education! — the kind of sadistic bastard that got kicked out of Viet Cong prison guard school for going overboard. Add to that the particularities of the Education Department, where all of academia’s worst pathologies are magnified. You know how egghead prose hews to the rule “Why use 5 words when 50 will do?” In the Ed Department, it’s “why use 50 when 500 will do.” The first two hours of the first two struggle sessions were devoted to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Success Words, and click that link if you dare.

I know y’all won’t believe this, but I’ll tell you anyway: I spent more than an hour rewriting the “objectives” section of my class syllabus to conform to that nonsense. Instead of just “Students will learn about the origins, events, and outcomes of the US Civil War,” I had to say shit like “Engaging with the primary sources” and “evaluating historical arguments,” and yes, the “taxonomy” buzzwords had to be both underlined and italicized, for reasons I no longer remember, but which were of course retarded.

Given that this is fairly typical Ed Major coursework, is it any surprise that they have no idea what learning is?

April 21, 2023

The bigger the government, the worse it does everything

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sarah Hoyt wants you to see the illusions that the government and the legacy media have invested so much time and effort to make you believe:

The last century hasn’t actually brought about great “scientific” improvements in governance or the condition of man. It has brought about better production and better commerce, which was enough to stop the periodic famines which plagued our ancestors.

Famines and scarcity subsist only where pernicious central governments stomp on human liberty and individual freedom. And they need to stomp pretty hard. We haven’t managed it. But there are rumors out of China and Venezuela. And of course Russia managed it, just as they did the near-starvation of “never quite enough.”
However, all those advances in material culture didn’t bring about similar advances in centralizing government and “sculpting” the new man.

Humans remain human. And the more centralized, over a larger area, that government is, the more inefficient it is. Even — fortunately — at creating misery. Government that requires certain results gets certain results reported. Even if they have nothing to do with reality.

Sure, the Soviets didn’t have nearly our nuclear arsenal. But the people at the top there MIGHT very well have thought they did, at least after a while. Because the underlings had to report it was done. or else.
All of you repeating the nonsense about boiled frogs, and how their sloooooowwww plan has worked perfectly are just buying into the same juvenile, retarded lie. NONE of their plans ever worked perfectly. Their history is littered with five year plans that worked only in someone’s imagination.

So why would their plans work better in a far away place they never fully understood? With a people who are notoriously averse to obeying?

Of course they didn’t. They don’t. You can convince yourself they have, particularly if you listen to the left and ignore all the times they got stomped on, got smacked, got their cookies taken away.

Look, their plans at changing THE PEOPLE and the people’s beliefs worked so well that despite their total control of federal democracy, two presidents that broke the script, almost 40 years apart, were enough to wreck all their illusions and control. Reagan and Trump, amid a train of uniparty parrots were enough to destroy the left’s certainties and “control”.

This is because their control was always — and still is — largely not real. It’s an illusion created by the mass-industrial communications complex. Here as in Russia, they don’t control ANYTHING but the narrative. The narrative is how they keep telling you to give it all up, because, look, their plan worked perfectly, and now your children are theirs and mwahahahaha.

In true fact, they’ve broken their teeth on America. They’ve managed — with propaganda — to take over the sectors that are less in contact with reality: academia, the arts, the rarefied heights of corporations. (Those aren’t really business. They’re to business what MBAs are to running a lemonade stand. Having worked for corporations, the large ones have more in common with massive, inefficient states than with commerce of any kind.)

The rest of us? We have not surrendered our guns or our minds. Yes, the propaganda machine keeps pushing those who have, but that’s the only thing the centralized state was ever good at: propaganda.

But if their plans were working perfectly, “Let’s go Brandon” would not have gone viral. That one proved not only that the majority of people aren’t with the left, but also that the majority of people see the media manipulation. More importantly, do you remember what the “Let’s go Brandon” was all about? Right. There were spontaneous flash mobs forming everywhere screaming “F*ck Joe Biden.” I’d known about them for months. They were forming everywhere, including in New York City. That one was just one that was caught on camera. (Because of course, the media never showed those.)

The Neo-Prohibitionists have taken over the World Health Organization

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Media, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Christopher Snowden illustrates some of the deliberate lies promulgated by the World Health Organization’s anti-alcohol activists:

The incompetent and corrupt World Health Organisation has produced a “guide for journalists” to help hacks report on issues related to alcohol accurately. Not entirely unpredictably, it is a catalogue of anti-drinking tropes, half-truths and brazen lies. The very first words are “No amount of alcohol is safe to drink” and it doesn’t get any better thereafter.

The health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption really stick in the craw of the neo-temperance lobby and so that is where the WHO starts:

    Isn’t drinking some alcohol good for your health?

    No, there is no evidence for the common belief that drinking alcohol in moderate amounts can help people live longer by decreasing their risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke or other conditions.

No evidence?! Even a casual follower of the science knows that there is at least some evidence. Those who are more familiar with the literature know that there is a huge amount of evidence built up over decades, tested and re-examined from every angle precisely because so many people in ‘public health’ don’t want to believe it.

    It is inaccurate to say that “experts are divided” on whether there is no amount of healthy alcohol drinking. The scientific consensus is that any level of alcohol consumption, regardless of the amount, increases risks to health.

This is just a lie. That is not the consensus, and the only reason there isn’t unanimous agreement that moderate drinking is beneficial to health is that anti-alcohol academics such as Tim Stockwell have made it their life’s work to cast doubt on the evidence.

    While several past studies did suggest that moderate consumption could, on average, promote health benefits …

Note that this immediately contradicts the claim that there is no evidence.

    … newer research (1) shows that those studies used limited methodologies and that many of them were funded by the alcohol industry (2).

The first reference is a short commentary by some WHO staffers which doesn’t discuss methodologies at all. The second reference is a study which found that only 5.4 per cent of research papers in this area were funded by the alcohol industry and concluded that “the association between moderate alcohol consumption and different health outcomes does not seem to be related to funding source.”

The WHO must hold journalists in low esteem if it thinks they won’t check up the citations like this.

    The dicussion [sic] about possible so-called protective effects of alcohol diverts attention from the bigger picture of alcohol harm; for example, even though it is well established that alcohol can cause cancer, this fact is still not widely known to the public in most countries (3).

The “bigger picture” is overall mortality. When all the risks are taken into account, including the small risks from a few rare cancers, do moderate drinkers live longer than teetotallers? Yes. Yes, they do.

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