This, by the way, is the thing people don’t get about space. Every time humanity takes some tiny step along the path to becoming a multiplanetary species (by which I mean “every time SpaceX does something cool”), someone comes along and complains that it seems kind of pointless. The Moon is very far away, Mars is even farther, and we have this whole big planet right here that’s already full of “uninhabitable” regions like the Sahara or the Antarctic or, uh, the entire American West. Starting there seems easier, since they already have things important elements such as “air” and “water” and “a biosphere”. Play your cards right and you won’t even need a passport, let alone a spaceship. A friend of mine even coined the slogan: “Terraform Terra first”.
But this misses the point. Yes, space colonization appeals because it’s part of the wizardly dream of innovation, of building new and exciting things, and thus has an aesthetic draw that goes beyond practical arguments. Yes, long-term we probably shouldn’t put all our civilizational eggs at the bottom of one gravity well. And yes, many humans have a Promethean (Faustian? Icarusian?) drive to expand, to explore, to see what’s beyond the horizon. All of which is a pull to space.
Now pause for a moment and think about what would actually happen if you decided to set up your terran terraforming in, say, the Owyhee Desert of southwestern Idaho. There’s a river in parts of it. It rains occasionally, and snows in the winter. Whatever techniques you were planning to generate power and conserve water on Mars would certainly work in Idaho — more efficiently, for solar, since we’re closer to the source, and with more margin of error if you can add water to the system. Plus the desert is full of exciting minerals you can mine to sell or even to extract water from! And the second you tried, the Bureau of Land Management (which owns most of the Owyhee, and indeed most of the American West) and the Environmental Protection Agency (which has opinions about mining) and the ranchers (who would also like to use that water, thank you) will come down on you like a ton of bricks.
That’s the push to space.
The dream of space colonization is partly about all the ways it would be cool to live on Mars or the Moon. But it’s also, implicitly or explicitly, a claim that it’s easier to solve enormous technical challenges (air! water! food! solar radiation!) than it is to solve societal challenges on Earth. Terraforming is hard; eunomiforming is harder.1
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Powers of the Earth, by Travis J.I. Corcoran”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-04-29.
- Though to his credit Corcoran has a diverse portfolio: in addition to the space colonization dreams, he’s tackling the “terraform Terra” angle with an active homestead (he’s written some guides) and the “improve society somewhat” approach through more direct political engagement than I’ve ever done.
October 5, 2025
QotD: Why go to the Moon or Mars?
October 4, 2025
Rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)
At Woke Watch Canada, Igor Stravinsky tells the story of “Jane and John”, a distressing tale of rapid onset gender dysphoria:
Image via the Boston Medical Center
In Ontario elementary schools, students are taught that whether you’re a boy or a girl is not determined by your physical body. Kids are encouraged to “explore their identity”. You may have a girl’s body. But how do you feel about it?
These kinds of discussions are going on because schools have accepted what rational people call “gender ideology”, but I prefer the term “gender mythology” because an ideology usually has to do with political systems. In my view the idea that a person’s sex is unrelated to their physical body, that they have a kind of soul sex, if you will, is clearly a myth.
[…]
Jane and John
This is a true story. The names have been changed to protect the privacy of this person.
Jane was a happy, clever, talented, and expressive girl who always wanted to help others. She displayed precocious empathy and enjoyed teaching younger kids various skills. Jane became socially conscious at an early age and was bothered by the fact that she enjoyed a middle-class, Western quality of life while so many others were clearly struggling. As an elementary student, she canvassed her neighbourhood collecting donations for disadvantaged kids. She came to identify with groups she saw as persecuted or oppressed.
Her school was very racially diverse, but she did not observe much racial discrimination. What she did notice was a fair bit of homophobia. She quickly took every opportunity to be an ally to the LGBT cause. In her middle school, there was an LGBT club, which she joined. Jane would often arrive home from school in an angry state because another student had said something that upset her, like, “being gay is a sin”, for example.
Jane’s parents were progressives who made it clear that she would be loved and accepted if she were a lesbian. Jane laughed at that and replied that she “dreamed about boys”.
Jane was a high achiever who was active in athletics and music. At 16, she became a vegan. She was in most ways a typical high school student, but her allyship with LGBT people gradually moved towards activism.
At university she quickly gravitated towards Indigenous and Gender Studies. Her close friends were all LGBT people. Her best friend was a transwoman (a man who identified as a woman). Jane came out as “bisexual” but her main romantic relationship was with a man.
Then, abruptly at the age of 20, she announced to her parents that she was to be called “John” and that she was going to transition to male.
By her own admission, Jane had been perfectly happy as a girl/woman for 20 years- “until I wasn’t”. This does not fit the Gender Mythology narrative. There is simply no way you can reasonably argue that she had, at this late age, suddenly realized what she truly was. She herself did not even claim that. So, what happened?
[…]
It was pretty obvious to me that Jane’s “transition”, like [trans-race activist Rachel] Dolezal, was the result of a combination of personal qualities and social influences. All the stars aligned to point her in that direction. She desperately wanted to be part of the community she had connected with and was tired of just being an ally. Claiming to be bisexual did not really cement her position as an insider. But becoming trans was her ticket.
Due to the extreme nature of taking on that identity — lifelong drug regimens and a number of surgeries, all of which presented serious health risks, going down that road reflected a true commitment and not only made her a part of the LGBT tribe but catapulted her to the top of the hierarchy.
What Jane experienced is known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and was first identified by the physician/researcher Lisa Littman. Learn more about it here. If you want to get a 2SLGBTQ++ (plus whatever other letters and numbers they’re using now — I can’t keep up) activist spitting mad mention ROGD. The phenomenon proves beyond a reasonable doubt that gender dysphoria can be induced in vulnerable people by social circumstances and aligns well with the research and clinical practice of Dr. Kenneth Zucker from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto.
Zucker ran the clinic for some 20 years and was pushed out due to his refusal to accept “affirmative care” as the only acceptable treatment for gender dysphoria. Zucker found that about 80% of kids would eventually grow out of their dysphoria and thus did not believe in affirming kids’ identities but rather focused on helping them cope with their condition.
Since affirmative care (an oxymoron!) has been adopted, we thus know that 80% of the kids who have been put on the road to gender transitions (and most carry through to the end) would have seen their gender dysphoria dissipate naturally over time. But once the first step — puberty blocking drugs, is taken, kids almost always go on to cross sex hormones and many continue with various surgeries.
Gender clinics do not do follow up nor do they support de-transitioning, but it is clear that the number of young people out there who have seriously harmed themselves through “affirmation” treatments is significant, and more harm is being done day by day as long as affirmative care remains the standard treatment for gender dysphoria.
September 30, 2025
“San Francisco [is] a sort of market-segmented scheme [extracting] the basic comforts of civilization and licensing them back as upgrades”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen describes the very comfortable lives of the very wealthy, who can support any kind of luxury beliefs because they never have to face the consequences that “the poors” who ape them do:
Dear sir,
I am not a filthy poor, and therefore conditions on the street level in Portland do not matter to me.
I drive my Jaguar to nice restaurants, give it to the valet to park, then go inside and order a fancy treat. So long as the valet parks my car, and the waiter brings my fancy treat for me to consoome in peace, I am utterly unaffected by conditions ten blocks away.
While I am technically forced to acknowledge that other humans exist — otherwise who would park my car or prepare my fancy treat? — I am not actually forced to consider what their lives are like.
And if you try to force me to confront this, I will simply point out that you are a filthy poor, who is unable to live a lifestyle that insulates you from this sort of unpleasantness.
At which point I don’t have to pay attention to you, loser.
Okay, here’s what’s really going on.
At a recent gathering in San Francisco, I listened to the tech bros I was dining with and their complaints about spending a million dollars a year on security teams, and a thought occurred to me, which I shared with the congregation.
I observed that San Fransisco, and perhaps other cities as well, seemed to be a sort of market-segmented money extraction scheme whereby the basic comforts of civilization are systematically removed from the environment, and then licensed back as upgrades to those who can afford them.
In Tennessee, it doesn’t cost me a thing to not be murdered for what I write online. Sure, I have a metric fuckton of extremely high-powered weapons and the skills to use them, but let’s be honest … I own them on principle, not because I would be murdered without them.
In SF, saying right-of-center things online while not being murdered costs a million dollars a year.
It probably costs slightly less than that to have zero drugged-out and/or schizophrenic bums urinating on your porch, but again, in Tennessee, this is a free service that comes with the “Western Civilization” package.
Also, it doesn’t cost anything go to a drugstore where nothing is locked behind glass, and be told “have a nice day” by someone at the register who actually means it.
And I’m told there is some sort of mythical beast called “graffiti”, but I have to go online to find out what it looks like.
In short, the argument that “civilization is just fine because I can still buy my way out of trouble” doesn’t hold any water, because it ignores the fact that you have to buy your way out of trouble, because civilization is shrinking.
You can’t have civilization without ass-kickings.
And if you forget that, you start having to buy your way into ever more and more exclusive clubs where the uncivilized can’t afford to go.
Until they figure out that they don’t have to pay, they can just push their way past the doorman. At which point you must be prepared to kick ass again.
All civilization rests on pillars made of violence. You are in danger until the moment you understand this.
Chris Bray also responded to the Nicholas Kristof take:
Now, here’s the hugely respectable New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a very important Pulitzer Prize recipient, explaining from the heights of his journalistic perch what’s really happening in Portland:
This is as flawless a summary of the progressive cathedral classes as you could possibly manage: “‘Hell’ does not serve Pinot Noir this good”.
- Portland street journalist: Portland is a public graveyard
- Progressive New York Times columnist: Akshully, the Pinot Noir is exquisite
It’s time to shove these people onto a barge and tow them out to sea.
Like Karen Bass describing the open-air drug market of MacArthur Park as a sylvan paradise full of happy children and wonderful families having picnics, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek explained this week that Donald Trump is bizarrely intervening in a utopia, and for crying out loud look at this facial expression:
No one has ever been more lost than this. Your average good urban liberal is more insane than a psych ward full of psychotics. Akshully, the Pinot Noir is delightful. We are burdened with the existence of high-status people who have departed from earthly reality, and we can’t afford them.
Update, 1 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
September 29, 2025
Screen addiction – “No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen-and-app companies”
Ted Gioia on the eight things about screen addiction that David Foster Wallace tried to warn us about before he took his own life in 2008:
Those same youngsters are now showing up on college campuses, and we can begin to gauge the societal impact of a screen-driven life. It ain’t pretty.
So this is a good time to revisit what Wallace tried to warn us about thirty years ago. He was ahead of his time in the worst possible way, experiencing firsthand all the debilitating symptoms that now plague millions.
That’s why his writings feel so eerily contemporary. They read like commentaries on what’s happening right now.
Of course, Wallace knew very little about the Internet — he deliberately avoided it. He also refused to own a television. He understood how susceptible he was to screen addiction, and took drastic steps to reduce his exposure to all screens.
But he wrote about it — most tellingly in his huge novel Infinite Jest. The title refers to a film that is so addictive that people who watch it can’t stop. They literally watch it to death. It’s an infinite diversion, much like the endless scrolls on today’s social media apps.
He returned to the topic in his final book The Pale King, and also discussed it in interviews and essays. I’ve read through all of these including more than thirty interviews with the author. These allow me to put together a point-by-point summary of what Wallace tried to tell us.
We ignore his warnings at great risk.
(1) Screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people.
In almost every interview, Wallace eventually talks about loneliness. It was a looming crisis, he insisted. But he was one of the first to link this to the ways we divert ourselves via screens. […](2) This will lead to widespread depression.
Wallace also knew this firsthand. He suffered intensely from depression. His inability to find a suitable treatment led to his suicide in 2008. […](3) This will also happen at a larger scale. Society will grow more fragmented and disconnected.
As each person falls into an isolated relationship with a screen, larger communities begin to fray. Wallace anticipated a “new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of watchers and appearers”. […](4) Screen technology promises to liberate us, but the reality is that it controls us for the benefit of others.
The most dangerous part of the screen entertainment is the illusion that it serves us. But the reality is that we actually serve tech platforms and their advertisers. […](5) The people who control the technology work to hide their purposes and goals.
“They’re trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery in 1993. “This is McLuhan right? ‘The medium is the message’ and all that? But notice that TV’s mediated message is never that the medium is the message.” […](6) Our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces.
If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda to monetize us — at a tremendous cost in loneliness, depression, and social disconnection. […](7) We don’t have many tools, but kindness and compassion will be the starting point.
We need to replace irony, sarcasm, and cynicism — which have contributed to our self-debasement — with softer, gentler attitudes. Cynicism is useful in criticizing, but is impotent when we need to build something better. Irony only destroys, never builds. […](8) Art can help us heal.
He wrote his big books with the hope that they would help us find a way back to a more caring and connected world — but connected via people, not screens. […]
September 27, 2025
Dislike of Trump prompts the CBC to spread faulty medical advice
It’s a long-running joke that US progressives — and the legacy media, BIRM — are programmed to respond to anything Donald Trump says by doing the exact opposite of what he says:
The CBC apparently felt the need to do the meme:
It was not controversial for news outlets like CBC to report in 2016, and later 2021, on new medical research raising concerns about the impact of Tylenol use on pregnancy and fetal development. But in 2025, those studies (among others) have become the basis for a new cautionary approach by the U.S. government that critics and media are trying to debunk.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that, as part of a bigger strategy in quelling autism, it would be issuing a “physician notice and begin the process to initiate a safety label change for acetaminophen”.
President Donald Trump relayed this to the press, stating the medication “can be associated with a very increased risk of autism”.
“So taking Tylenol is not good, all right? I’ll say it; it’s not good. For this reason, they are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary. That’s, for instance, in cases of extremely high fever that you feel you can’t tough it out.”
[…]
The statement was reported in the mainstream news — including CBC, which found Canadian doctors who seemed to support the cautionary approach. The impression from these experts was that this wasn’t cause for panic and that more evidence was needed, but it was an occasion for discussion. The advice back then? Take the smallest amount for the shortest period of time, and don’t use it as a first resort to managing pain, which is consistent with the U.S. guidance.
Indeed, no major figure in this story is advocating for total avoidance because unmitigated pain and fever are bad for pregnancy, and in small amounts, Tylenol seems to be fine. That said, the manufacturer doesn’t recommend it for pregnant women (which they can’t really do without extensive testing, even if doctors generally consider it safe for mothers in minimized amounts when medically indicated).
More recently, a review of other studies by a team including Harvard University’s public health dean found similar “evidence of an association” between the drug and neurodevelopmental conditions. The dean released a statement saying that the “association is strongest when acetaminophen is taken for four weeks or longer”. That should be uncontroversial, because nobody is supposed to take Tylenol for that long, pregnant or not.
But perhaps, as the Babylon Bee suggests, it’s all Trumpian 4D Chess:
September 25, 2025
“Intentionally elevating strangers above ourselves, xenophilia, is artificial”
In Aporia, Spaceman Spiff explains the function and value of what are called “dead man’s switches” both for railway locomotives and societies:
Image from Aporia
A dead man’s brake is a safety feature found in dangerous machines such as lifts or trains. With this mechanism, a brake is always on, preventing action or movement. A conscious choice or effort must be made to override it.
On a train, a human driver must be present to depress a foot pedal that disengages the brake so the train can move at all. If he is absent the train cannot move. If he withdraws his foot while the train is in motion — if he dies, for instance — the train stops. Hence the name.
The key feature of a dead man’s brake is that it requires energy to operate. Its default zero-energy position is OFF; only with energy can it go to ON.
Wariness of strangers, xenophobia, is the default position for most human beings. This is a hardwired evolutionary response to protect us. It served us well. It requires no energy to operate. Children quickly point out people who seem different.
Intentionally elevating strangers above ourselves, xenophilia, is artificial. We must be educated to make it happen, and explicitly taught to overlook differences. It must be reinforced to remain in operation as our instincts typically push against it.
This requires energy. In parts of the world not subject to Western educational norms, they do not teach it to children. Consequently, they do not usually adopt policies like mass immigration or asymmetric multiculturalism.
It is worth noting that xenophobia denotes a wariness of strangers, not hatred or disdain of them. In practice, our working assumption is people different from us may be a threat, and our actions should reflect this until proven otherwise.
Xenophobia is not the racial animosity the propaganda wishes us to believe, such as harming others based on visible differences like skin colour. Such extreme views are in fact rare. The underlying drive of xenophobia is caution, not aggression. Xenophilia attempts to ignore this sensible restraint, which is why it often fails without external pressure.
These instincts are deeply embedded within us because a cautious approach is a strong foundation upon which to preserve our lives and our cultures. It is the reason we have a nation and a culture in the first place.
Xenophilia, then, is a dead man’s brake. It requires energy applied to something that would not typically occur in nature. It makes us ignore differences in order to get along. Or so the theory goes.
Update, 26 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
September 24, 2025
Zardoz: A Technocratic Parody
Feral Historian
Published 30 Jun 2023After another viewing, I now think of Zardoz as an unintentional parody of the technocratic mindset that was congealing in the 1970s. It’s a strange film, a sometimes tedious film, but it’s worth a look if only because there’s nothing else quite like Zardoz.
I keep saying “Immortals” when I mean “Eternals” and I had to recut this one a bit due to some semi-random copyright issues so I apologize for any perceptible jank.
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September 21, 2025
From Eat Pray Love to plotting a murder
On Substack, Elizabeth Nickson charts the career of Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat Pray Love and more recently a memoir of her life up to the point where she planned to murder her “once in a million year” partner:
Gilbert, you certainly know, wrote Eat Pray Love which was a massive international bestseller made into a film with Julia Roberts, which was also very successful. During the Pray portion, Gilbert retreated to an ashram in India to worship a living sub-deity called The Mother. At the time I was still tangentially aware of life in the world of moderately successful upscale arty women from the mega-cities and I’d heard of the Mother and her clinging clanging worship sessions — Siddha Yoga — going round the Pilates and yoga studios and the upscale self-help programs. The Mother’s satsangs were guaranteed to put you into an ecstatic state where you fused with the divine. And then you’d heal. From the abuse of the Patriarchy.
During the Pray section, Gilbert had a series of intense moments, which &mddash; coupled with an earlier session on the bathroom floor where God told her to wash her face and go to bed — meant, to her, a great deal. Her “God” gave her direction and purpose, where before she was caught in an unhappy marriage, being apparently the breadwinner in that marriage with a husband who a) didn’t work, b) wanted her to buy more and more stuff and c) have a child.
This seems a poor choice for a husband, but never mind. Gilbert was successful in the New York world of publishing and magazines and much occupied with that pursuit, a business which I now suspect is financed by the drug trade and used to launder money. In that world where success is one in ten thousand, one hundred thousand, and where Gilbert experienced perhaps the biggest literary success of her generation. She became universally, ridiculously, excessively loved.
And embrace it she did. For the past 15 years, Gilbert has traveled the world, usually with a woman companion to keep her on the rails, dishing out nostrums and platitudes with relish meant to show you how to “find yourself” and “live your truth” to women searching for purpose. “Creativity” or “art” is now substituted for what women in the before times used to call service to their communities and families, which is now called slavery to the patriarchy.
The following is the progression of “evolving” for modern left-of-center women, for whom finding a meaningful work is the number one priority, children being the last, as the below illustrates.
When the recognition of slim to no talent or at least un-sellable talent, is made and a future of grinding for multinationals is revealed, and spiritual enlightenment or Kundalini awakening seems out of reach, the desperation moves onto Democrat politics, and ends in middle-aged and elderly woman on the streets, face contorted in rage. Those women, a full 40% of whom are childless and family-less, spend their lives slogging away in some corporate or health or educational structure, becoming semi-insane. As an aside note, in my years-long investigation of voter fraud, many of the operators are women just like these below: middle-aged, put together, well dressed, polite, fully criminal.
In searching for your creativity — the highest good — you have to become fully aligned with your child self, your spiritual self, and that self becomes the most cherished part of you. Your intelligence, your executive function is demoted. Your creativity, your spirituality, then becomes fused to others whom you perceive being as weak as that child self you have elevated as spiritually superior. Women, it seems hardwired, must have people to care about. In the absence of family, it is the helpless to whom you assign your life.
Gilbert’s once-in-a-million-years love was a gay Syrian immigrant hairdresser with a history of heroin addiction and incarceration. No more victimish victim can be found.
For Gilbert’s millions of acolytes, spiritual worth, meaning,creative power is found in allyship with the weak, with whom they fully identify. And meaning is also found in hysterical advocacy and fury on behalf of the weak. There is no thinking attached to any of this, no analysis, no study. Just intense emotionality.
September 18, 2025
NYC smokers get most of their cigarettes from the black market
Smokers in New York City pay very high taxes for their nicotine delivery systems, so it shouldn’t have surprised public health officials that many would turn to the black market … but the state and local taxes add so much to the price of a pack of cigarettes that most of the supply now comes from the black market:
“Enjoyin’ a cigarette at busy Time Square, NYC” by Mel Schmidt is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
In 2023, New York raised its cigarette excise tax by $1.00 to $5.35 per pack. New York City imposes its own tax of $1.50 per pack, and that’s before you include federal and sales taxes, making for the most expensive smokes in the country. That is, cigarettes are expensive in New York for those who pay those taxes. But state officials were warned that such a high rate would drive consumers to the black market, and that’s exactly what happened. According to recent research, more New Yorkers than ever are turning to tax-evading illicit sources for their nicotine needs.
Taxes Into Good Health — or Not
When the New York excise tax was hiked, the Albany Times-Union noted, “it’s the nation’s highest and brings a pack of cigarettes at many retailers to about $12 … Health advocates hailed the increase, saying it will lead to fewer smokers and cancer deaths. Anti-tax groups, though, predicted it will increase trafficking in illicit untaxed cigarettes in the state.”
Health advocates like taxing vices on the theory that raising taxes simultaneously generates government revenue while escalating prices for allegedly bad things — like cigarettes — out of reach of many consumers. What they rarely consider is that there are other options, such as buying cigarettes smuggled from jurisdictions with lower levies.
“New York has created a cigarette-smuggling empire, and the worst is yet to come,” Todd Nesbit, an economics professor at Ball State University, and Michael LaFaive, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, warned even before the 2023 tax increase. “It’s the unavoidable consequence of the state’s decades long history of raising the cigarette tax.”
“If enacted, consumers will go across borders to do their shopping or rely on black-market suppliers,” agreed the Tax Foundation’s Adam Hoffer. “Tax revenues will fall, illicit activities will thrive, and law enforcement spending will need to increase.”
In fact, as Nesbit, LaFaive, and Hoffer emphasized, even before the dollar-per-pack tax hike, more than half of cigarettes sold in the state of New York lacked local tax stamps and were smuggled from elsewhere. Since 2023, illicit dealers appear to have claimed even more market share.
September 17, 2025
Dark Forest Deterrence: Bureaucrats are Destroying the Universe
Feral Historian
Published 2 Sept 2022A quick look at a minor and neglected detail of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem series. I trust that everyone has done the reading.
September 13, 2025
“It was about control before green policy became popular, and it is about control now”
In the National Post, Carson Jerema identifies the common thread among all of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s efforts since becoming Liberal party leader:
Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Prime Minister Mark Carney may not be as obnoxiously progressive as Justin Trudeau, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t stubbornly left wing in his own right, though he has managed to convince many critics otherwise.
Over the past decade, the Liberals were particularly self-righteous over climate policy, so much so that the deviations made by Carney since assuming office have been met with praise — or, on the left, with scorn — that he is somehow pro-business and represents the return of the centre-right Liberals. Some even think he’s a conservative. Others have suggested that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is now entirely redundant.
This narrative is just more proof of how utterly captured the media is in this country by the Liberal party. It is true that Carney gives the appearance that he is abandoning many of the government’s environmental policies. He set the carbon tax rate to zero, paused the EV mandate and, on Thursday, he refused to endorse his government’s own carbon-emissions targets.
None of this, however, should be taken as evidence that Carney represents some sort of rightward or pro-business shift in the Liberal party. He is not proposing to let markets determine what infrastructure projects get built. Nor is he proposing to minimize regulations to attract investment.
Instead, Carney wants to command the economy by himself, laying bare the reality that what attracts left-wing politicians to climate policy is not saving the planet from carbon, but using environmental objectives to manage the economy. It was about control before green policy became popular, and it is about control now. For Carney specifically, before he entered politics, “decarbonizing” markets was quite remunerative in his various banking roles.
Noticeably absent from the five infrastructure projects that the prime minister said on Thursday would be fast-tracked under the Major Projects Office was an oil and gas pipeline. Also noticeable was the fact that all five of the projects had already been approved, but the government tried to pass them off as something new anyway.
Even if the projects had been all brand new, the lack of a pipeline would still be of no surprise, as what private investor would be willing to back a pipeline when the Liberals’ Impact Assessment Act, tanker ban and emissions cap all exist to conspire against energy projects of any kind?
One thing that became incredibly obvious early in Justin Trudeau’s premiership was that the prime minister — and his ministers in general — really did seem to believe that talking about doing something was as effective in solving problems as actually doing the thing. Many had hoped that Mark Carney would be different … but as Dan Knight points out, he may actually be worse:
From there, [Poilievre] broadened the attack. He spoke of an entire generation priced out of homeownership, of immigration growing “three times faster than housing and jobs”, of crime rising, and of what he called “the worst economy in the G7”. And then he turned squarely on Carney: “Mr. Carney is actually more irresponsible than even Justin Trudeau was“, citing an 8% increase in government spending, 37% more for consultants, and 62 billion dollars in lost investment — the largest outflow in Canadian history, according to the National Bank.
The message was simple: Liberals talk, Conservatives build. Poilievre painted Carney as a man of speeches and promises, not results. “The mistake the media is making is they’re judging him by his words rather than his deeds“, he said.
It was an opening statement designed less to introduce policy — those details came later — and more to frame the battle. For Poilievre, Carney isn’t just Trudeau’s replacement. He’s Trudeau’s sequel, and in some ways worse.
[…]
Pierre Poilievre didn’t hold back when asked about Mark Carney’s record. His words: “Mr. Carney is actually more irresponsible than even Justin Trudeau was“. That’s not a throwaway line, he backed it with numbers.
According to Poilievre, Carney inherited what he called a “morbidly obese government” from Trudeau and made it worse: 8% bigger overall, 37% more for consultants, and 6% more bureaucracy. He says Carney’s deficit is set to be even larger than Trudeau’s.
Then the jobs number: 86,000 more unemployed people under Carney than under Trudeau. That, Poilievre argued, is the real measure, not the polished speeches Carney gives. His line: “The mistake the media is making is they’re judging him by his words rather than his deeds“.
September 12, 2025
Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs
At Acceptable Views, Alexander Brown calls for the end to the Canadian federal temporary immigration scam programs:
It’s not hyperbole to say that Canada has built an entire economy on exploiting cheap, foreign labour through TWFP, as well as the International Mobility Program (IMP). These are two slightly different programs that allow foreign nationals to work in Canada, with most going to Ontario. But contrary to its name, there is nothing “temporary” about the TFWP. Its original purpose was to remedy proven labour shortages while Canadians were hired and trained to eventually do the jobs in question. Meanwhile, the IMP allows international students to work—with or without a proven labour shortage—while they’re studying in Canada.
Between 2019 and 2023, the TFWP increased by 88 percent and the IMP increased 126 percent. They account for close to 1.58 million work permit holders, equal to roughly 7 percent of Canada’s labour force.
Taken together, the results of the TFWP and IMP are deplorable. The TFWP allows foreign nationals to be recruited abroad in vast numbers, brought to Canada, housed in degrading conditions, paid the minimum wage, forced to work long hours, pressured into not joining a union, and required to work for only one employer. Yes, the IMP is more flexible, but it’s more pernicious because it does not even pretend to address labour shortages.
Both schemes are also of course bad for Canadians themselves. The problem is especially grievous for young Canadians trying to get started in the labour market. Canada lost 40,800 jobs this past July, the unemployment rate is now 6.9 percent, and youth unemployment (those between 15 and 24 years old) is now 14.6 percent.
Both the TFWP and IMP are used as business models. Hiring foreign nationals at minimum wage keeps prices low and profits high—most notoriously in the hospitality and trucking sectors, but no industry seems untouched now.
Addicted to cheap foreign labour
The use of the TFWP in the healthcare sector, for example, has grown by an appalling 1,700 percent since 2000. That dramatic rise has no doubt been abetted by the absence of uniform standards and credential recognition among Canadian provinces. If medical personnel could move easily from one province to another, shortages could be filled by Canadians. But historically this has not been possible, and so medical institutions have had to turn to the TFWP. Ontario’s recent determination to solve this problem by speeding up recognition of 50 “in-demand” professions from other provinces is a step in the right direction, and hopefully not too little too late.
Meanwhile, the IMP is a vehicle for outright fraud, ranging from fake acceptance letters from bogus “colleges” to elaborate human-trafficking schemes. Not long ago, nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were working and attempting to settle here, rather than studying at any Canadian university or college. Most were migrants from India, and some were trying to cross the border illegally into the United States. The RCMP is now working with Indian law-enforcement to investigate alleged links between dozens of “colleges” in Canada and two “entities” in India allegedly facilitating passage into the U.S. When we reflect that an astounding 4.9 million temporary visas are set to expire this year, we have reason to believe that this abuse, exploitation, and fraud are on a much larger scale that we understand.
The consequences for young Canadians
Both the TFWP and the IMP serve to keep wages artificially low and profits high, and to price Canadians out of the job market. It wouldn’t be wrong to view these programs as distortionary government subsidies or welfare for unproductive businesses. The effects disproportionately harm younger Canadians who are priced out of the labour market, given that temporary workers overwhelmingly earn less than the median wage. And yet, we’re constantly hectored about labour shortages, Canadians’ “unwillingness” to do certain jobs, and the need for foreign workers.
It shouldn’t take much intellectual effort to see that the use of foreign labour and the difficulties of employing younger Canadians are two sides of the same ugly coin. Foreign workers are more cooperative because they are bound to their employers like serfs. They face normally insurmountable barriers to joining unions and have no attachment to the community in which they’re expected to work. In comparison, the domestic population is generally better educated and rooted in the local community.
Young Canadians can afford to be discriminating and should rightly expect higher wages than foreign nationals. Employers should instead work harder to invest in and reward their domestic workforce. In any other era, this would have been obvious. But now there is little incentive for businesses to look beyond cheap, foreign labour.
To get an idea of the magnitude of our collective failure here, consider the following fact. A 2024 study by RBC Economics revealed that Canadian businesses are sitting on a stockpile of cash worth almost a third of our country’s GDP. In other words, Canadian companies have the means to invest in hiring and training Canadians, but simply refuse to do so. The results of this refusal are stagnant wages, structural unemployment, and a de-skilling of the domestic population.
Britain’s network of weather stations is becoming less and less reliable
Well-sited weather stations can provide useful raw data on temperature ranges, wind speed, precipitation, and other measurables, but that “well-sited” makes a huge difference. Older weather stations situated in areas of rapid urban expansion will often be less reliable as they become part of the urban heat island and report higher temperatures due to locally generated heat sources rather than the ambient temperature they were able to record before. This is what has apparently happened to far too many of the UK’s temperature measuring sites, according to Chris Morrison in The Daily Sceptic:
The latest WMO Class figures at the Met Office shown in block graph form. The higher the class number, the less reliable the station reports become.
Image from The Daily Sceptic
In March 2024 the Daily Sceptic shocked the science and political world by disclosing that nearly 80% of the UK Met Office’s temperature measuring sites were so poorly located that potential “uncertainties” could corrupt the readings by a numbers of degrees of centigrade. World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Classes 4 and 5 in its CIMO scale come with “uncertainties” up to 2°C and 5°C respectively, and a Freedom of Information (FOI) request found that 77.9% of its sites were in these two “junk” categories. It should have been a wake-up call demanding immediate improvement of the nationwide network, not least because the Met Office frequently catastrophises its temperature figures in the interest of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. Alas, no. A new FOI has found that the Classes 4 and 5 junk sites have increased significantly over the last 18 months and now total an appalling 80.6% of the entire network. Pristine Class 1 sites – which measure a credible ambient air temperature with little chance of unnatural heat corruption – are just 4.9% of the total, having fallen in number in this short period from 24 to 19.
Hundreds of millions of pounds have flowed through this Government department over the last 18 months but little effort seems to have been made to improve its basic and important meteorological measuring function. What is worse is that the Met Office doesn’t seem to understand the scale of the problem. Over the 18 months, it appears that 20 new sites have been opened in its now 387-strong network. Seventeen of these have been given WMO classifications, of which a frankly ludicrous 64.7% are starting life in the Class 4/5 junk lane.
The WMO rates weather stations by the degree of possible temperature corruption caused by nearby unnatural or natural influences. Classes 1 and 2 are considered what we might call pristine, with no significant errors arising from artificial influences. The latest figures show that the Met Office has just 12.1% of its sites in these two unadulterated categories. Class 3 comes with an uncertainty of up to 1°C and accounts for 7.23% of the total. The real shocker is Class 4 where the percentage of the total has risen from 48.7% to over half at 50.1%. Class 5 has no defining conditions and could be located next to a blast furnace door. It has risen over the last 18 months from 29.2% to 30.5%. The WMO states that a Class 1 location can be considered a “reference site”. A Class 5 site is said to be a location “where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”.
Despite this, Class 5 “extremes”, often caused by temporary but obvious heat spikes, litter the Met Office databases and record books. Of course such Class 5 data, unsuitable for providing an accurate temperature for a “wide area”, are loaded into databases producing “hottest evah” days, months, seasons and years. Their final destinations are the global datasets that exaggerate recent warming, again to promote Net Zero. Sprinkling the Class 4 and 5 fairy dust over the figures adds a bit more of the urgency required for elite political purposes.
September 11, 2025
QotD: Heritable IQ and the ability to think critically
It has become well-known recently that at IQ 90 and downward people start having real trouble handling counterfactual conditionals. “How would you feel if you hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning?” is the probe of this capability that has gone viral.
How are you going to do critical thinking if you can’t process counterfactual conditionals? It would be like trying to dance when you can’t walk. But this is a problem that extends above the normal IQ 85 threshold for mental subnormality. We’re looking at 20% to 25% of the U.S. population here.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-19.
September 9, 2025
Uh-oh. It’s not a good sign to see your town’s name in Not the Bee
We’ve lived in Bowmanville for ten years and in that time the demographics have changed substantially. Some of those changes have been positive, but others have definitely been negative:
Video out of Bowmanville, Ontario, shows Southeast Asian men (do with that what you will) flipping salmon out of a small stream during the annual salmon run back to their spawning locations.
Early September is peak salmon-fishing season. Fisherman across the continent catch millions of fish as they return upriver to spawn.
But it is highly illegal to catch salmon near their actual spawning sites (especially with nets), which includes Bowmanville (upriver from Lake Ontario). It is also unsafe, as the fish die off in mass numbers after spawning, making the meat inedible.
Despite this, migrants have been seen poaching fish in the area for several years (at least).
In the comment section, some people shared stories of their own, including this anecdote from Port Hope, Ontario.
Over the summer, SE Asian men went viral in Muskoka, Ontario, for filming themselves shooting up a local bridge and river. Locals say they have reported such incidents for years, but despite the danger and the leftover environmental pollution, authorities have been slow to act.
