The House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment on flag burning last week, in the course of which Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham (Republican of California) made the following argument:
Ask the men and women who stood on top of the Trade Center. Ask them and they will tell you: pass this amendment.
Unlike Congressman Cunningham, I wouldn’t presume to speak for those who died atop the World Trade Center. For one thing, citizens of more than 50 foreign countries, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, were killed on 9/11. Of the remainder, maybe some would be in favor of a flag-burning amendment; and maybe some would think that criminalizing disrespect for national symbols is unworthy of a free society. And maybe others would roll their eyes and say that, granted it’s been clear since about October 2001 that the Federal legislature has nothing useful to contribute to the war on terror and its hacks and poseurs prefer to busy themselves with a lot of irrelevant grandstanding with a side order of fries, they could at least quit dragging us into it.
And maybe a few would feel as many of my correspondents did last week about the ridiculous complaints of “desecration” of the Koran by US guards at Guantanamo – that, in the words of one reader, “it’s not possible to ‘torture’ an inanimate object”.
That alone is a perfectly good reason to object to a law forbidding the “desecration” of the flag. For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat Senators want to make speeches comparing the US military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It’s always useful to know what people really believe.
Mark Steyn, “The Advantage of Knowing What People Really Think”, SteynOnline, 2017-06-14 (originally published in The Chicago Sun-Times, 2005-06-26).
July 7, 2019
QotD: Speaking for the dead
July 4, 2019
Is there a country with which Justin Trudeau hasn’t messed up Canada’s relationship?
Ted Campbell responds at some length to a Globe and Mail article by Doug Saunders, outlining the degradation of diplomatic relations with almost all our allies and trading partners since Justin Trudeau became PM.
The Globe and Mail‘s award-winning international affairs correspondent Doug Saunders, someone with whom I (almost equally) often disagree and agree, has penned an insightful piece in the Good Grey Globe in which he says that “Suddenly, Canada finds itself almost alone in the world, with a Liberal government realizing that its optimistic foreign policy no longer entirely makes sense … [but, he concludes] … Even if the current crisis in liberal democracy proves temporary and short-lived, we know that it can recur – and likely will. If the institutions of 1945 no longer work and the doctrines of 2015 have failed to have an effect, we should develop new ones that will keep Canada connected to the better parts of the world for the rest of the century.”
[…]“After the Second World War,” Mr Saunders writes, “Canada gained a few more foreign-policy outlets. Canada played a large role in creating the institutions that governed the postwar peace: the United Nations and its various organizations; NATO; the global trade body that became the World Trade Organization; the Bretton Woods institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Canada was decisive in the international agreement that authorized the future creation of the twin states of Israel and Palestine, giving it a role in the Middle East that expanded with its creation of the institution of peacekeeping after the Suez Crisis in 1956 … [but this really is a silly statement, albeit one that too many Canadians believe to be true. Canada didn’t create the “institution of peacekeeping” in 1956. It was already there, in the United Nation’s case since Ralph Bunch (USA) and Sir Brian Urquhart (UK) created it in 1948 and it had been around since, at least, Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points speech in 1918, but it is now part of the Laurentian Elite‘s quite dishonest revisions of Mike Pearson’s sterling legacy as a diplomat and politician] … And, starting in the 1950s, Canada became a player and a spender in the new field of foreign aid and development. Under both Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments, Canada used those tools to play a small but well-regarded place in the liberal-democratic order – and to slowly but profitably build its trade and economic relations.”
[…]
I agree with Doug Saunders about the sources of Canada’s current weakness. He neglected to mention the root cause: Pierre Trudeau explicitly rejected, in the late 1960s, the “St Laurent Doctrine” and replaced it with a social “culture of entitlement” which meant that our place in the world had to be sacrificed on the altar of a reinforced social safety net. I agree that Donald J Trump is the key to our and the West’s current angst and confusion, not Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Arab terrorists, all of whom are easier to understand, but I would argue that we would be much better placed to cope with president trump and the 21st century had we not abandoned our role as a leading middle power circa 1970. I have reservations about all three of Mr Saunder’s prescriptions:
- I’m not sure another G-N, not even a “committee to save the world” is a really good idea;
- I am nervous about interfering in the internal affairs of other countries ~ think about “do unto others” and all that; and
- I really doubt that Canadians are ready to spend what’s needed on our defence and, I suspect, they will not be until it is (almost) too late.
Like Mr Saunders, Mr Lang and Professor Paris, I, too, want to save the liberal world order and Canada’s place in it; I’m just not sure that any of the proposed solutions offered by Doug Saunders, by Eugene Lang or even by Professor Roland Paris are going to be enough. I think we need less formality and fewer organizations in international actions and a lot more ad hocery. I hope that we will have new, adult leadership here in Canada in the fall of 2019 and I hope that a new, grownup prime minister will begin, quickly, to mend relations with Australia, India, Japan and the Philippines and other Asian nations, to shore up our relations with Europe and, especially, with Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and UK. I also hope Canada will open new, more productive dialogues with Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America and with Iran, Russia and China, also. I am convinced that Professor Stein is correct and we must have an “interests-based,” even a selfish suite of foreign, defence, immigration and trade policies. We should not go about looking for enemies, but we must understand that we have precious few friends and, for now, we cannot count on America to be one of them. America, Australia and Britain, China, Denmark and India, Japan, Mexico and the Philippines, and Singapore and Senegal, too, will all act in pursuit of their own interests; Canada needs to be willing and able to do the same and to work with them, even with Donald Trump’s America and Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia when our interests converge and, politely, stand aside when they diverge. The G7 and G20 and a proposed new G9 are all harmless, but also, largely useless, talking shops. Both diplomacy and foreign affairs must be conducted on a case-by-case, country-by-country, issue-by-issue and interest-by-interest basis and diplomacy and foreign affairs can only be conducted with positive effect when Canada is respected for both its examples and values (soft power) and for its hard, economic and military power, too.
Thus, the first step in doing our part to “save the world” is probably the one that most Canadians will have near the bottom of their priority list: rebuilding Canada’s military ~ which must start, after a lot of the fat has been trimmed from a morbidly obese military command and control (C²) superstructure, with steadily growing the defence budget … and that cannot happen until the economy is firing on all cylinders, including energy exports to the world.
Gyrojet Carbine, Mark 1 Model B
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 27 Aug 2015http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Hammer price: $3,000
The Gyrojet was one of the more creative and one of the most futuristic firearms innovations of the last few decades – unfortunately it wasn’t able to prove sustainable on the market.
The idea was to use burning rocket fuel to launch projectiles, instead of pressurized gas. The advantage was that without the huge pressure of standard cartridges, a rocket-firing gun could be made far lighter and cheaper, as it had no need to contain pressure. The rockets would accelerate down the barrel as their fuel burned (and the 4 rocket jets would be angled to put a spin on the projectile for accuracy), and the weapon would actually have the most kinetic energy at something like 20 yards downrange, when the fuel was expended.
A decent number of Gyrojet handguns were made and sold (mostly as curiosities), but intrinsic accuracy problems prevented them from ever being taken seriously as weapons. The company behind the guns (MB Associates) went out of business shortly, unable to fully exploit their full range of ideas. One of those ideas was a carbine variant of the gun. A few hundred were made in two different models, and we have the chance today to take a look at one of the Mark 1 Model B sporter-style carbines.
July 3, 2019
A sneak peak at the new “History of Diversity” course outline at Woke State University
At Rotten Chestnuts, Philmon gives us a taste of the new mandatory American history program to be introduced this Fall at WSU:
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
… people from other parts of the world had heard about this wonderful place where they, too, could come and be diverse, and they started coming … from China, from Japan, from Mexico, and the Middle East, with only the distant dream of Diversity™ on their minds.
We also created great UniDiversities to increase our knowledge and awareness of Diversity™ (especially after the Democrats freed the slaves!)
But in 1972, the Republican (aka, “Nazi”) Party was founded by Richard Nixon specifically to ban Diversity™ and put to everybody who wasn’t white into concentration camps. Fortunately, the Democrats came roaring back with Jimmy Carter in 1976, who created the Department of Education that has vastly improved Education in the United States by teaching us all to be more Diverse™. Since then our education has become the best in the world! And! he graciously let 52 Americans be the guests of some nice Iranian students for more than a year just so they could become more diverse.
But then Ronald Reagan inexplicably won the election of 1980 (due to a clerical error at Trump, Inc*) and he immediately started a nuclear war with Russia. This was because he was not diverse and they were … well never mind, but it greatly reduced the Diversity™ in the world. Plus, Toxic Masculinity. Which is not Diverse™. Everyone should be more like women. That would be Diverse™.
After 12 years of cruel, oppressive Republican rule during which Reagan coerced some Germans to vandalize an historic, diverse wall, the great Bill Clinton was elected the First Black President™, which Americans thought finally ushered in Diversity™ once and for all.
But alas, it wasn’t to be, because G.W. Bush (aka “Hitler”) stole the election 8 years later by cleverly winning a majority of the votes in the Electoral College (like that was even legal!) and had the CIA fly planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon so that he could attack Iraq. This was clearly because they were brown and he hated Diversity™, and also for oil. The United Nations had asked Saddam Hussein nicely 17 times to stop killing his own people, but it turned out he was doing it to reduce Iraq’s carbon footprint. Well this was the last straw (before California bravely banned them). Bush viciously attacked and removed Hussein from office because racism. And also blood for oil. Halliburton!!!! By the time he left office he personally had 100% control of all Iraqi oil, which he quickly lost to Dick Cheney (aka “Darth Vader”) in a drunken bet at a bar the night before the next election (Cheney then poured the oil all over Grand Teton National Park just so it could be drilled up again — also because he hates nature and especially fly-fishing).
After that, America came to its senses and elected Barack Obama, Savior of the Universe™, to be the Second First Black President™. Under his wise and kind rule, Americans began to get along Diversely like never before. Some people in Ferguson, Missouri even burned and looted a bunch of minority owned business just so they could get insurance money which they were owed by their former oppressors, who were now forever banished. It was almost the Paradise that Michael Moore proved Iraq was before G.W. Bush (aka “Hitler”) went in and started terrorism as we know it today (and stole all their oil).
Summer Stupidity: BOSTON (City Review!)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 2 Jul 2019The summer stupidity continues with another city review! I hope you like seafood, tea shops, woodlands, college and twisty streets because boston has all this and… not much else!
PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
QotD: Elon Musk as a modern-day Ferdinand DeLesseps
I used to love Elon like everyone else. I still think that having four or five billionaires in a space race against each other is finally the world I thought I was going to get growing up reading Heinlein. The Tesla Model S was probably one of the most revolutionary cars of the last 50 years. But he lost me when he committed outright fraud in the Solar City – Tesla deal and since then have only become more skeptical about he and Tesla.
Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.I sort of laugh when folks tell me that really smart successful rich people believe in Tesla. You mean like James Murdoch, on the board of Tesla and who also was lost his entire investment in Theranos? Or like Larry Ellison, an adviser and fan of Elizabeth Holmes who invested $1 billion in Tesla just 6 months ago and has already lost 40% of it? The window on this is probably closing, but over the last 10 years if you wanted to get Silicon Valley investors to throw a lot of money at you, find a traditional bricks and mortar business and devise a story in which you take that industry and convert its economics to that of the networked software world (see: Uber, WeWork, Tesla, and even Theranos in some of its strategic pivots).
Or how about true millennials and Elon Musk? Name a wealthy millennial supporter of Elon Musk and Tesla and I can bet you any amount of money they have not looked at Tesla’s balance sheet or cash flow or the details of its global demand trends. They have not thought about its dealership strategy or manufacturing strategy and the cash flow implications of these. They just like what Elon says. It sounds big and visionary. They buy into Elon’s formulation that he is saving the environment and everyone opposed to him is in a cabal with big oil (ignoring the fact that Elon routinely uses his Gulfstream VI to commute distances less than 60 miles). So saying that rich millenials adore Elon is effectively saying that they want to be associated with the same things Elon says he is for — the environment and space travel et al.
Elon Musk is Ferdinand DeLesseps. He is PT Barnum. He is Elizabeth Holmes. He is the pied piper. He is fabulous at spinning visions and making them sound science-y. But he is not Tony Stark. There is a phenomenon with Elon Musk that everyone thinks he is brilliant until they hear him speak about something about which they have domain knowledge, and then they realize he is full of sh*t. For example, no one who knows anything about transportation or physics or basic engineering has thought his Boring Company and Hyperloop make any sense at all. His ideas would have been great cover stories for Popular Mechanics in the 1970’s, wowing 13-year-old boys like me with pictures of mile-long cargo blimps and flying RV’s. He is like a Marvel movie that spouts science that is just believable-enough sounding that it moves the plot along but does not stand up to any scrutiny.
All of this would be harmless if he was not running a public company. I don’t really care about the rich folks who were duped by Elizabeth Holmes, but hundreds of thousands of small millenial investors who have totally bought into the Elon hype are literally putting their last dollar into Tesla, and sometimes borrowing more. Tesla shorts often laugh at these folks on Twitter, calling them “bagholders,” but it is a tragedy. Unless Tesla finds a sugar daddy sucker, and the odds of that are getting longer, I think it is going to end badly for many of these investors.
As a disclosure, I have been short Tesla via puts for a while now. It you really want to understand Elon, the best book I can recommend is The Path Between The Seas about the building of the Panama Canal. First, it is a great book you should read no matter what. And second, Ferdinand DeLesseps is the best analog I can find for Musk.
Warren Meyer, “People Who Express Opinions Outside of their Domain Seldom Have Really Looked into it Much”, Coyote Blog, 2019-05-28.
July 2, 2019
Antifa strikes back against the White Patriarchy … by assaulting a gay, visible minority journalist
Andy Ngo suffered potentially serious injuries in an assault by Antifa “activists” during a Portland demonstration:
Andy Ngo, a photojournalist and editor at Quillette, landed in the emergency room after a mob of antifa activists attacked him on the streets of Portland during a Saturday afternoon demonstration.
The assailants wore black clothing and masks, and were engaged in a counter-protest against several right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys. Ngo is a well-known chronicler of antifa activity, and has criticized their illiberal tactics on Fox News. He attended the protest in this capacity — as a journalist, covering a notable public event.
According to Ngo, his attacker stole his camera equipment. But video footage recorded by another journalist, The Oregonian‘s Jim Ryan, clearly shows an antifa activist punching Ngo in the face. Others throw milkshakes at him:
First skirmish I’ve seen. Didn’t see how this started, but @MrAndyNgo got roughed up. pic.twitter.com/hDkfQchRhG
— Jim Ryan (@Jimryan015) June 29, 2019
Quillette posted their reaction to the attack:
All revolutionary movements seek to sanctify their lawless behaviour as a spontaneous eruption of righteous fury. In some cases, such as the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine, this conceit is justified. But usually their violence is a pre-meditated tactic to intimidate adversaries. Or as Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin put it, “In revolution, he will be victorious who cracks the other’s skull.”
The Antifa thugs who attacked Quillette editor and photojournalist Andy Ngo in Portland yesterday did not quite manage to crack his skull. But they did manage to induce a brain hemorrhage that required Ngo’s overnight hospitalization. (For those seeking to support Ngo financially as he recovers, there is a third-party fundraising campaign.) […]
Andy Ngo is an elfin, soft-spoken man. He also happens to be the gay son of Vietnamese immigrants — salient details, given Antifa’s absurd slogans about smashing the heteronormative white supremacist patriarchy. Like schoolboy characters out of Lord of the Flies, these cosplay revolutionaries stomp around, imagining themselves to be heroes stalking the great beast of fascism. But when the beast proves elusive, they gladly settle for beating up journalists, harassing the elderly or engaging in random physical destruction.
Antifa’s first prominent appearance was in 2017, when black-clad protestors at Berkeley used violence to shut down an appearance by provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. This set a pattern whereby their rallies have been presented as counter-demonstrations aimed at “taking back the streets” from right-wing groups. But more and more, this conceit has dissolved into farce — as in Washington last year, when Antifa gangs showed up to protest largely non-existent conservative protestors. “Again and again, small groups of Antifa members harassed, threatened and occasionally jostled reporters,” the Washington Post reported. “The activists demanded not to be photographed as they marched down public streets — even as many of them hoisted their own phone cameras and staged their own photo ops.”
Update: I’m told that this is the lawyer who will be acting on Mr. Ngo’s behalf:
Goodnight everyone except Antifa criminals who I plan to sue into oblivion and then sow salt into their yoga studios and avocado toast stands until nothing grows there, not even the glimmer of a violent criminal conspiracy aided by the effete impotence of a cowed city government.
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) July 1, 2019
June 30, 2019
Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty
Michael Filozof on the hundred-year anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles and the American President who had so much to do with the casting of the treaty:
Eight months after committing troops to war, Wilson cobbled together a list of progressive war aims in his Fourteen Points. They demanded an end to secret deals (i.e., the Treaty of London and the Sykes-Picot Agreement); “ethnic self-determination” for Poland and Austro-Hungarian territories that would soon become Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia; “a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,” and finally, a collective security organization, the League of Nations, which would be formed by a “covenant” (using the biblical term for a pact with God Himself) to maintain peace and territorial security of all nations.
Woodrow Wilson, 1919
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.Upon reading the Fourteen Points, French prime minister George “the Tiger” Clemenceau is said to have sniggered, “God gave us only ten.”
In 1919, Wilson became the first sitting president to venture overseas, practically abandoning his domestic duties and spending six months at the Paris Peace Conference personally negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. He was joined by “The Inquiry,” a group of over 100 academics and professors who surely knew how to fix the world and usher in Wilson’s global utopia.
Initially, Wilson and his Fourteen Points were wildly popular. He was greeted as if he were a latter-day rock star in France and Italy. Delegations from ethnic groups around the world came to Paris to beg Wilson for “self-determination.” (His French and British counterparts, Clemenceau and David Lloyd George, sneered that Wilson “thought he was Jesus Christ.”)
But they were soon to be disappointed. Wilson’s aims were so grandiose that they could not possibly be fulfilled. Italians, who had switched sides in the war to gain territory on the Dalmatian coast, became disillusioned when Wilson refused to accede to Italian demands. The negotiators did create Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, but all three were destined to become communist dictatorships, and the latter two failed to outlast the twentieth century.
Worst of all was Wilson’s hypocrisy when it came to dealing with Germany. Wilson had railed against German imperialism, but turned a blind eye to the biggest empire at the Conference: Great Britain. A pro-British bigot, Wilson was contemptuous of Irish demands for self-determination and had been disgusted by the Easter Rising of 1916. Wilson granted Britain and France Ottoman territories they had secretly agreed to divvy up in the Sykes-Picot agreement — not as “colonies,” but under the guise of League of Nations “mandates.” He willingly partitioned Germany into two non-contiguous territories, separated by the Polish Corridor, and placed millions of ethnic Germans in the newly created nation of Czechoslovakia and the Free City of Danzig.
On a slightly lighter note, Al Stewart’s “A League of Notions” does a wonderful job of capturing the machinations at Versailles:
Chipping away at Martin Luther King’s reputation with new FBI surveillance revelations
Stephen Smith discusses the struggle of scholars specializing in the life and works of Martin Luther King, Jr. to cope with new revelations about the civil rights leader:
President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House Cabinet Room, 18 March 1966.
Photo by Yoichi Okamoto via Wikimedia Commons.
These are difficult days for students of Martin Luther King, Jr. The man many of us have dedicated long months and years to researching, often out of a profound sense of respect, is facing an allegation of laughing and even offering advice while a fellow Baptist minister raped a woman in a Washington, D.C. hotel room in January 1964.
The source of this explosive claim is a trove of newly released FBI surveillance documents unearthed by the dean of MLK historians himself, David J. Garrow, author of The FBI and Martin Luther King: From “Solo” to Memphis and the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on King, Bearing the Cross.
Since the article detailing Garrow’s new findings came out at the end of May in the British magazine Standpoint, Garrow has taken more of a pounding in the press than King. No surprises there, perhaps. Like those now criticizing Garrow, I desperately want to believe that the 55-year-old allegation is a trumped-up product of the FBI’s “viciously negative attitude” toward King, as Garrow described it in “Solo” to Memphis — a book that earned him the Bureau’s enmity prior to its publication in 1981.
The record, however, is also pretty clear that King relieved the crushing stress of daily death threats and the insatiable demands of the civil rights movement with women and liquor. To his credit, King was the first to admit he was far from perfect as America’s “moral leader” — but this far?
Much of the criticism that Garrow is now facing over the article is focused on the validity of FBI evidence concerning King’s sexual activities, namely the bombshell assertion made by FBI agents spying on King in 1964 that he “looked on, laughed and offered advice” during the reported sexual assault (which, as Garrow has since underscored, the agents listening in did nothing to stop). This allegedly took place in two Washington, D.C. hotel rooms rented to King and four other Baptist ministers, although the controversial claim is made in a handwritten note appended to a summary of the FBI’s microphone surveillance.
Garrow argues that “without question” the handwritten annotation would have been added with both the original surveillance recording and a full transcript of the recording at hand. He adds that Justice Department investigators who reviewed both the tapes and transcripts in 1977 confirmed the accuracy of the FBI’s claims. The tapes and transcripts, along with the rest of the fruits of the FBI’s intensive electronic surveillance of King, were subsequently sealed by a court order until Jan. 31, 2027.
I know Garrow and I know his respect for the man he calls “Doc” runs deep, and this is not an allegation he would carelessly report. Some of his detractors have called him “irresponsible” for running with it without access to the original tapes and transcripts, but Garrow has at least 40 years of experience working with primary sources produced by the FBI’s intensive surveillance of King. If anyone can tell what smells off and what doesn’t, it’s him.
June 29, 2019
Canada’s inability to deal with Chinese hard ball tactics
The Canadian government complied with a request from the United States government to detain a Chinese national for possible extradition to the US. But this was no ordinary Chinese citizen: it was Meng Wanzhou, the Chief Financial Officer for Huawei, a very big and very well-connected Chinese conglomerate. Ms. Wanzhou is not just a high-ranking executive, but also the daughter of the founder of the company. The Chinese government is more than miffed at Canada’s legal presumption and has been piling on the means of persuasion to get Canada’s notoriously pliable government to just pretend this never happened and to let Ms. Wanzhou proceed on her way. Under normal circumstances, this might well happen, but the US government is now under the control of a man who reputedly makes our Prime Minister lose control of his bladder, so we can’t just be seen to knuckle under to the bullying of the Bad Orange Man, nor can we be seen to knuckle under to the bullying of the PRC, leaving poor Justin Trudeau looking weak and powerless (and, to be fair, he is weak and powerless).
Andrew Coyne suggests that the best way to help a couple of poor Canadians who have been caught up in the inter-governmental shenanigans is to stop talking about some sort of “deal”:
U.S. Department of Justice among others announced 23 criminal charges (Financial Fraud, Money Laundering, Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, Theft of Trade Secret Technology and Sanctions Violations, etc.) against Huawei & its CFO Wanzhou Meng
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
I don’t doubt that behind the scenes government officials are doing everything they can, or think they are. But the pressure to bring the Canadians home is surely less for the conspicuous failure of other Canadians to give a damn.
Indeed, what is striking throughout this standoff is that most of the pressure has come from the other side. It is China, not Canada, that has used trade as a weapon, blocking imports of Canadian meat and canola. It was the Chinese air force that buzzed a Canadian warship in the East China Sea.
It is the departing Chinese ambassador to Canada who has launched one incendiary attack after another on this country, while Canada’s now-former ambassador to China was floating trial balloons about getting the Americans to drop the charges against Meng. It is China’s leaders who refuse to meet ours.
And yet for all of China’s lawlessness, for all its bestial mistreatment of our citizens and baseless attacks on our interests, the most common response in this country is not to demand that China repair its relationship with Canada, but to ask how Canada can mollify China.
June 27, 2019
“Raise our taxes!” cried the hypocritical virtue signallers
We’ve been over this ground before. Some very rich people are getting fawning media coverage for their “selfless”, “virtuous” demand that the government raise their taxes. Except they’re far from selfless: they’re demanding that other people be forced to pay more tax, but they’re very much not putting their own money where their bleating mouths are. Most governments are happy to accept more money from you than your formal tax liabilities:
- The Canadian federal government
- The British government
- The US federal government
- The province of Ontario
- The City of Toronto
… are all very eager to accept your contributions. But most people don’t take advantage of this mechanism, especially the ones garnering headlines for their “altruism”. Because they’re virtue signalling, and almost certainly don’t actually want to be taxed more. Don’t believe what people merely say they want, watch what they actually do (economists call this “revealed preference“). Hypocrites, the lot of them.
QotD: “Misandropologies”
Even though black women live longer than white men in the USA … and even though women control more disposable wealth than men do … and even though women are snagging most of the college degrees these days … and even though the law and public sympathy heavily lean toward women in any dispute between the sexes … and even though the media portray men as either bumbling incompetents or bloodthirsty rape-monsters … and even though men are far more likely to commit suicide, die on the job, or be homeless than women … we’re still lectured by these bitter fat blobs and their testosterone-free male enablers that misandry isn’t real because men still benefit from certain mysterious “systemic” and “institutional” advantages that none of these assholes seem able to enumerate even when calmly asked to do so.
It’s a funny sort of “patriarchy” we inhabit.
To allege that women are capable of malice and violence and deception is only to allege that they’re human. To expect anything less of them would be dehumanizing and patronizing — which, ironically, shares a root word with “patriarchy.” When feminism ditched the “equity” rhetoric in favor of a menses-splattered pagan goddess religion that depicts men as irredeemable worker drones and women as innocent angels, men who weren’t entirely asleep or pussy-whipped realized that the rules had changed and that they were under attack. But even to notice that a lot of women openly exult in hating men gets you labeled a “woman-hater.”
Misandry is real, and those who seek to deny or justify it deserve a stern paddling. And even if you acknowledge that it’s real, don’t try to make excuses for it using some postmodern gobbledygook, because then you become a misandry apologist — a misandropologist. Just admit that women can be every bit as mean, nasty, horrid, foul, vile, shitty, and hateful as men. It’s part of the human condition.
Naïve as it may be, I envision an enlightened future where there is no longer any misogyny or misandry — only a beautiful, sweet, shared sense of misanthropy.
Jim Goad, “Confronting the Misandropologists”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-05-08.
June 26, 2019
Social media giants can be publisher or platform, but not both
At Ace of Spades H.Q., Ace explains why Facebook, Google, and the other social media companies have been playing fast and loose with the rules, sometimes using the rules that apply to publishers and sometimes the ones that apply to platforms, depending on their whim:
Only a speaker or publisher of claimed defamatory content can be sued.
Not being a speaker or publisher of a defamatory statement gives you total immunity from suit. You’re just a guy, you had nothing to do with the tort alleged.
Section 230 [of the Community Decency Act] specifically says that “neutral content platforms” shall not be deemed to be the “speaker or publisher” of a claimed defamatory statement made by a third party using their service — hence, the complete immunity from suit. You can’t be sued for something someone else said, obviously.
Now newspapers can be sued for the defamatory remarks of, say, an interview subject. They are publishers of that defamatory statement — they chose to publish it. The interview subject made the statement, but then they chose to publish it themselves, becoming another “speaker” of the defamation.
Now, “neutral content platforms” are never considered “speakers” of third-party defamations (or any third-party crime involving speech, such as offering to sell contraband or conspiring to commit a crime). But a newspaper or media company — or this blog — could be.
The corporate cucks claim that you cannot put restrictions on Google, Facebook, or Twitter as regards their right to censor opinions they disagree with because that constitutes “compelled speech.” You’re compelling them to speak things they do not believe, the cucks’ argument goes.
But… section 230 states that, as a legal matter, they are not considered the “speakers” of any statement made on their “neutral content platforms.”
So which is it? Are they the speakers of these words — in which case, like a newspaper or tv station, they’d have every right to exercise editorial judgment and decide what they wish their company to say — or are they not the speakers of these words, which is their claim whenever someone tries to sue them?
As it stands, they are speakers when it comes to their power to block people from speaking on their platforms — and thus can indulge in the vice of censorship — but not speakers when it comes to people suing them for what other people said on their platforms.
Choose one or the other: Either you are a speaker of other people’s words or you’re not. You can’t forever choose one and then the other when it’s in your interest to have the Clown Nose On or the Clown Nose Off.
“… what’s happening now is even better than Apollo”
At Popular Mechanics, Joe Pappalardo reminds us that the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing is coming up next month, but that current developments in space are worth celebrating too:
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, stands on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module, Eagle, during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, mission commander, took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. While Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the lunar module to explore the Sea of Tranquility, astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit with the Command and Service Module, Columbia.
Apollo was born of Cold War desperation: a political exercise that paid enormous scientific and technological dividends. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, it became vital to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon, a geopolitical urge that created an enormous budgetary effort.
The problem with politically motivated — well, anything — is that the faucet of support can be closed just as quickly as it opened. It happened to Apollo, as follow on missions were cancelled and the focus shifted to a reusable craft to service low-earth orbit. This pattern of shifting space priorities and strategies whipsawed NASA, most noticeably when the Obama administration’s cancellation of the Bush-era Constellation moon program in 2010.
But multiple private companies pursuing their niches in space have an obvious redundancy. While companies may rise and fall, the very nature of a commercial effort isn’t as dependent on government funding. If it’s worth doing, especially if it makes money, space industry will endure political shifts. The objectives of a well-run company do not change that much every four years.
That leaves today’s NASA with a choice: Do it themselves and control everything (the traditional way), or fund private companies to develop the tech the agency needs and then allow them to sell their services to any nation, company, or individual (the new way). With those services on the open market, NASA would be one of many customers for a new U.S.-based space economy.
This debate is boiling over right now. The ongoing effort to return to the moon, called Artemis (after Apollo’s sister), is becoming a lesson in the advantages of the commercial model.
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If only investment guaranteed results. For those who miss bloated, government-run spaceflight, there is already a NASA spacecraft mired in the old ways of thinking. The feds have sunk a lot of money into the Space Launch System, a mega-rocket built to NASA specs for deep space missions. It was supposed to fly in 2017, but we’ll be lucky to see a first flight in 2020 — and it busted the $9.7 billion estimated budget, now costing about $12 billion.
But something happened during these SLS delays: the commercial space industry started delivering on its promises. Most visibly, private firms have been delivering supplies to the International Space Station for years and (hopefully soon) will ferry astronauts as well. Blue Origin and SpaceX has started development of crewed spacecraft able to reach to the moon and Mars. Elon Musk even sold a moon trip to a Japanese billionaire.
What is the problem that a wealth tax is designed to solve?
Andrew Coyne asks the obvious question about the sudden keen interest in imposing wealth taxes:
“washdc040208-02” by carencey is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
It is noteworthy how the debate on inequality has shifted in recent years: from the problem of poverty, whose evils are obvious, to the “problem” of great wealth; from the gap between the poor and the rest of us, to the gap between the rest of us and the rich, or indeed between the rich and the very rich.
But it is not obvious why it is wrong, in itself, that a small number of people should get stinking rich. It is clearly objectionable if they did so by illicit or unethical means — but then it is the means itself, not the wealth, to which we object. And it would be in poor taste, at the least, if they spent it all on themselves. But that is not how the great fortunes are typically disposed of — it’s physically impossible to spend more than a small fraction of it.
Perhaps the argument is less that the rich are too rich than it is that the government is too poor. You can make a case that government should spend more on certain things, especially in America. It doesn’t follow that you need to raise taxes to do so. A lot of good new spending could be funded by cutting bad old spending.
Suppose there were a case for raising taxes. Are wealth taxes the way to go? Wealth is, after all, merely the accumulation of past income — and we already tax income. If rich people are exploiting loopholes to avoid paying tax on their incomes, by all means close the loopholes. But the case for taxing income twice seems obscure.
Yes, we already have a kind of wealth tax, in the form of municipal property taxes — and they’re a notorious mess. They conform to none of the usual principles of good taxation, being neither simple, nor efficient, nor fair.
Why unfair? The bedrock criteria of tax fairness is supposed to be ability to pay. That’s only uncertainly related to wealth. Suppose the value of your house shoots up. Congrats: suddenly you’re wealthy. But your income is unchanged. And it’s income you need, or more accurately cash, to pay your taxes. It’s not clear why you should pay more in tax than someone with the same income, but a cheaper house.
