Quotulatiousness

January 19, 2025

California’s wildfire plight

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

Theophilus Chilton on the end of California dreamin’:

Southern California has had a REALLY rough week. Wildfires, started by arsonists and driven by the Santa Ana winds, have burned thousands of acres in the city and county of Los Angeles and destroyed over $150 billion worth of property (and counting). As I write this, the fires still burn and largely remain uncontained, even as new blazes break out. It is a disaster of epic proportions, striking one of the richest and most economically and culturally relevant portions of the country.

Never ones to let a crisis go to waste, the Left responded to this disaster by … focusing on climate change. Not empty fire hydrants, not drained reservoirs, not incompetent leadership, but climate change. These fires, we have been breathlessly assured, are the result of ever-worsening climatic conditions in the region, drying it out and making it susceptible to this kind of affliction. Never mind that observers since Spanish times consistently noted the same kind of weather conditions and hazards that we see today, which suggests that maybe things aren’t actually changing all that much. Of course, those who are blaming climate change fail to recognise the fundamentally chaotic, nonlinear nature of the Earth’s biosphere and the interactions of its constituent parts, something governed by complexity (in the chaos/complexity theory sense of the term). As a result, it’s somewhat foolish to try to draw a direct, causal link between two variables (such as atmospheric CO2 content and temperature) which depend upon nonlinear interactions with hundreds of other factors. Thankfully, they don’t seem to be getting much traction with this.

So what did create the conditions that burned down Los Angeles?

First of all, there was the implementation of a number of policies driven by the state’s radical environmentalist lobby. Thanks to the fanatics, common sense policies that would help to mitigate the region’s inherent fire hazard went undone. Regular controlled burns of underbrush are a standard conservation technique in dry areas that help to thin out brush and prevent wildfires from getting out of control. Building a sufficient number of desalination plants is a good way for coastal desert areas to provide themselves with abundant fresh water for things like drinking, watering crops, filling reservoirs, and fighting fires. In fact, filling reservoirs for future needs would make a lot of sense. But all of these things are “unnatural” and might have “negative impacts” on local wildlife and whatnot.

Another contributory issue is the state’s policies towards the chronically homeless and its de facto sanctuary status for illegal aliens. The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years and California’s particular policies have made the situation in their state even worse. For decades, California has regularly seen wildfires caused by untended campfires started by homeless junkies getting out of control, which the state’s liberal approach to its indigent population has only made more prevalent. Likewise, California’s harbouring of illegal aliens has created a situation in which the state is flooded with masses of hostile foreign elements, some of whom have been caught starting fires all around the LA basin and creating the current catastrophe.

Then there is the fact that California has systematically implemented a set of DEI policies for its governmental workers, including its firefighters. As a result, the state’s leadership in the relevant departments is very good at “promoting inclusion,” but not so good at dealing competently with emergencies when they take place. Indeed, Los Angeles’ mayor Karen Bass and LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley presided over budget cuts for the city’s firefighting capabilities while adding layers of “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracy aimed at systematically de-white-maleing the department and depriving it of the demographic most prone to self-sacrifice and overall technical competence. That reflects trends across the board in which the state and the city have regularly spent more on gay choirs and social justice artwork than they have on necessary functions of government.

(more…)

January 17, 2025

Trump’s demands include some things that would be quite beneficial to Canada

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Bryan Schwartz suggests that some of the things Trump has raised as issues in Canada/US trade would be economically sensible for Canada to address because they’d reduce costs of doing business in Canada which would be good for all Canadians (except the crony capitalists in the blatantly protectionist “supply management” cartels):

US President-elect Donald Trump trolling about Canada becoming the 51st state of the union does seem to have directed attention to our bilateral trade situation wonderfully.

The threatened Trump tariffs would hurt both the United States and Canada in many ways. But the U.S., with a larger and more productive economy (on a per capita basis), is better able to sustain the immediate pain. The economic pressure on Canada is, therefore, serious and credible.

Canada should first address issues that are of particular importance to the Trump administration. The incoming president tends to emphasize national security, even over economic nationalism. The authority of the president, under the inherent powers of the office and congressional statutes, is greater if the issue relates to national security.

The same holds under international trade agreements. The president can raise issues that Canada can address in a prompt and reasonable manner. These include border security and increasing Canada’s commitment to contributing its fair share to international alliances, which would include increasing military expenditures.

Second, Canada should recognize that external pressures can provide opportunities to do things that are in this country’s own interests, but are otherwise politically difficult. Outside pressures have in the past encouraged Canada to adopt several measures that are good for the country, such as reducing pork-barreling and regional favouritism in government contracting.

Canada’s dairy protectionism provides a good example of a trade concession that would benefit Canada, as it is unfair to lower-income Canadians and, in the long run, hurts the industry itself. An industry more exposed to competitive pressures would be incentivized to be more productive and seek to expand into international markets.

Australia has shown how such marketing boards can be abolished in a manner that gives some time to the industry to adjust and ultimately benefits all concerned. Canada could similarly rid itself of its outdated and counterproductive Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation, as well. To the extent that the United States pressures us to eliminate such supply management systems, it is actually doing us a favour.

Likewise, given that the U.S. is moving away from suppressing free expression in cyberspace, Canada would benefit from joining such initiatives rather than continuing down the path of having government or big companies effectively engage in censorship under the guise of fighting “disinformation”. The best remedy for any wrongheaded speech is rightheaded speech, not censorship.

At Dominion Review, Brian Graff steals a line from George C. Scott’s portrayal of Patton who said (in the film, not in real life) – “Rommel, you magnificent bastard. I read your book!” after reading the book of Trump’s Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer:

Lighthizer wrote a book (released in June 2023) about his trade views and experience entitled No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers, which I just read. I only became aware of Lighthizer in November, in part because of a review of his book in The Guardian.

I don’t think Lighthizer is a bastard (literally or figuratively). He is hardly magnificent, but his book should be required reading for Canadians interested in our upcoming negotiations with the US. Our government would learn how best to counter the US by preparing a strong strategy and going on offence even before negotiations begin.

In short, we should not give away anything for free. This is Lighthizer’s position in matters of trade. For example, Canada should not volunteer to meet the two percent defense spending target ahead of negotiations. If anything, Canada should be accusing the US of whatever complaints we can muster. Trump might complain about the Canadian border being porous when it comes to people and drugs, but we can make the same claims, and add on the fact that the US should do more to stop the flow of illegal guns into Canada across our southern border.

Lighthizer provides a history of the US based around the idea that the US revolution and the constitution were a reaction to the mercantilist policies of Britain, which wanted to export manufactured goods and import only raw materials, while also limiting US trade with the rest of the world. Here is Lighthizer’s essential view:

    Today, the tide has turned against the argument for unfettered free trade, in no small part because of the changes we made in the Trump administration. More broadly, evidence and experience have shown us that free trade is a unicorn – a figment of the Anglo-American imagination. No one really believes in it outside of countries in the Anglo-American world, and no one practices it. After the lessons of the past couple decades or so, few believe in it even within that world, save for some hard-core ideologues. It is a theory that never worked anywhere.

This is his critique of the neoliberal free trade approach:

    According to the definitions preferred by these efficiency-minded free traders, the downside of trade for American producers is not evidence against their approach but rather is an unfortunate but necessary side effect. That’s because free trade is always taken as a given, not as an approach to be questioned. Rather than envisioning the type of society desired and then, in light of that conception of the common good, fashioning a trade policy to fit that vision, economists tend to do the opposite: they start from the proposition that free trade should reign and then argue that society should adapt. Most acknowledge that lowering trade barriers causes economic disruption, but very few suggest that the rules of trade should be calibrated to help society better manage those effects. On the right, libertarians deny that these bad effects are a problem, because the benefits of cheap consumer goods for the masses supposedly outweigh the costs, and factory workers, in their view, can be retrained to write computer programs. On the left, progressives promote trade adjustment assistance and other wealth-transfer schemes as a means of smoothing globalization’s rough edges.

This section is also key:

    … mercantilism and a free market are dramatically different systems, with distinctions that are important to note. Mercantilism is a school of nationalistic political economy that emphasizes the role of government intervention, trade barriers, and export promotion in building a wealthy, powerful state. The term was popularized by Adam Smith, who described the policies of western European colonial powers as a “mercantile system.” Then and now, there are a vast array of tools available for countries seeking to go down this path. Mercantilist governments, for instance, frequently employ import substitution policies that support exports and discourage imports in order to accumulate wealth. They employ tariffs, too, of course, and they limit market access, employ licensing schemes, and use government procurement, subsidies, SOEs, and manipulation of regulation to favor domestic industries over foreign ones.

The focus of the book, and the main villain, is China, followed closely by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Canada gets less than 77 mentions, Mexico gets 99 mentions in the first 352 pages of 576 (the e-book stops counting at 99), and Japan gets 99 mentions in the first 400 pages. Compare this to China, which gets 99 mentions within the first 101 pages alone.

January 16, 2025

“The only possible conclusion is that we didn’t call them racist often enough”

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

Apparently there are still a lot of US politicians who think that letting men compete in womens’ sports is not only okay, but praiseworthy:

Of all the absurdities of the culture war, perhaps the most egregious is the normalisation of the idea that men should be able to identify their way into women’s sports. We are living through a period of mania, so we cannot clearly see how this will look to future generations. But I have little doubt that all those photographs of hulking men towering over women on winners’ podiums will be the memes of the future. “Can you believe they let this happen?” they’ll say, scratching their AI-enhanced cyborg heads.

Wherever one stands on Donald Trump, there can be little doubt that his imminent arrival at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will act as a corrective to this problem. Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act with its goal of preventing males who identify as female from participating in school sports. If passed into law, schools that attempt to defy the ban would have their federal funds withheld. The bill was introduced by Republican representative Greg Steube of Florida, and makes clear that it will be a violation of federal law “for a recipient of Federal financial assistance who operates, sponsors, or facilitates an athletic program or activity to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls”.

One of the most astonishing aspects of the passing of this bill was the voting outcome. 216 Republicans and only 2 Democrats (Vicente Gonzales and Henry Cueller) voted for the motion. Is it really that controversial that sex, as the bill puts it, “shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth”? You will recall the outcry back in November when Democratic politician Seth Moulton admitted that he objected to mixed-sex contact sports in schools. “I have two little girls,” he said, “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that”. For this he was branded a “transphobe” and a “Nazi cooperator”, because we all know that one of the top priorities of the Third Reich was the preservation of women’s rights.

Moulton failed to retain his backbone for the latest vote (he called the bill “too extreme”), but his previous comment had been striking for its honesty. He was willing to openly state that fear was the key factor in the reticence of Democrats on this issue. It cannot be the case that only two Democratic members of the House take the view that there is no advantage in sports conferred by male puberty. Surely most of them must have glanced at a biology textbook from time to time. The charitable conclusion is that they have been browbeaten into voting ideologically, not that they genuinely don’t know that there exist anatomical differences between men and women.

Disturbingly, this vote would seem to suggest that the Democrats are not learning their lessons from the election, and instead are determined to double down on the very attitude that cost them the White House.

The allegations against author Neil Gaiman

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

I haven’t read the article in question, but it certainly looks ugly if even a few of the allegations turn out to be true:

New York magazine has just published a very long investigative piece on alleged sexual misconduct by the author Neil Gaiman, both contextualizing previously-known allegations and introducing new ones. Writer Lila Shapiro, who clearly did an awful lot of legwork, found several new women who allege various forms of bad sexual behavior against Gaiman. It’s all very serious and disturbing, obviously. I have nothing to contribute and no one cares what I think about such things, so we can leave that story there.

But I’m afraid that Shapiro’s piece does again force me to think about New York‘s story last year about Andrew Huberman. You could be forgiven for thinking “New York‘s SIMILAR story last year about Andrew Huberman,” but this would not be a correct characterization; where Gaiman is accused of many acts that, if true, rise to the level of sexual misconduct, including rape, the Huberman piece contains no such allegations. Huberman is accused of dating multiple women at the same time without the knowledge of all involved, of infidelity generally, and there’s a bizarre fixation on his regular tardiness. It is not a MeTooing piece. And the trouble, I’m afraid, is that the piece was written, edited, packaged, and promoted in a way that inevitably gave audiences the impression that such allegations were included — that Andrew Huberman had been MeToo’d.

The fact that the piece contains no allegations of that type, but seems to have been very deliberately associated by New York, its author Kerry Howley, the magazine’s social media channels, and their many media kaffeeklatsch allies with MeToo stories, was a terrible error in editorial judgment. The Gaiman story helps underline why: this shit is so serious that we can’t afford to play around with these types of narratives. The Rolling Stone University of Virginia gang rape fraternity initiation story, a narrative that fell apart under the barest scrutiny and should never have survived even an amateur journalistic investigation, did a lot of damage in our ongoing efforts to take sexual assault on campus seriously. There’s a higher bar to clear with this stuff for that reason, and the Huberman story utterly failed to clear it.

The story’s presentation in the magazine was draped with innuendo, with as many leading terms and dark implications as can be stuffed in. The image on the cover is styled and colored to make him look sinister. People associated with New York tweeted about the piece as if it was a nuclear bomb, using the kind of language that we’ve grown accustomed to when a MeToo story is published and kills a career. I would argue that the story is deliberately written in the slow-burn reveal style that is typically deployed in MeToo stories — that’s deployed, in fact, in the Gaiman story. (There it makes sense, because the slow burn leads to actual accusations.) At every opportunity, the story exaggerates the implication of a man who, yes, was a shithead to some women he dated. The article is forever presenting quotidian-if-unfortunate behaviors and acting as though we should interpret those behaviors as worthy of the kind of censure that has been brought to bear by men guilty of sexual misconduct in the MeToo era. “I experienced his rage,” says one of Huberman’s exes, suggesting some sort of domestic violence situation, when in fact that’s a reference to a verbal argument — again, maybe unfortunate, but simply not in the world of misconduct.

The magazine’s internal references to the piece, and their social media, played up the usual teasing manner of such publicity, broadly hinting at bad behavior in the realm of sex and romance. The repeated phrase used was “manipulative behavior, deceit, and numerous affairs”. I don’t need to tell you that many people, trained by six-plus years of reading about sexual misconduct, are going to assume that a vast cover story in one of the country’s biggest magazines about a man’s bad behavior and deceit towards his partners is going to be a MeToo story. As many would go on to say, the fanfare and length and publicity about the piece themselves implied that it was a MeTooing. After all, what else would justify that level of attention?

For some unknowable reason, high-tax states keep losing population to low-tax states

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It sure is a mystery:

“U-Haul Rental Truck (44601958941)” by HireAHelper is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

This probably won’t come as a surprise to many readers, but when people move, they tend to prefer migrating to places where, among other considerations, the taxes are lower than in their old digs. Data from the U.S. government as well as from moving companies reveals that — as we’ve seen in the past — high-tax states are losing residents to states that take a smaller bite out of people’s wallets.

“Americans are continuing to leave high-tax, high-cost-of-living states in favor of lower-tax, lower-cost alternatives. Of the 26 states whose overall state and local tax burdens per capita were below the national average in 2022 (the most recent year of data available), 18 experienced net inbound interstate migration in FY 2024,” Katherine Loughead wrote last week for the Tax Foundation. “Meanwhile, of the 25 states and DC with tax burdens per capita at or above the national average, 17 of those jurisdictions experienced net outbound domestic migration.”

Loughead crunched numbers from both the U.S. Census Bureau as well as U-Haul and United Van Lines. The government data tracks population gains and losses across the country while numbers from the private companies is helpful for comparing flows in and out of various states. The results are revelatory, though not unexpected.

“For the second year in a row, South Carolina saw the greatest population growth attributable to net inbound domestic migration” according to Census Bureau figures. The Tax Foundation separately ranks South Carolina at number 9 for tax burden, with 1 being the lowest tax burden among states and 50 the highest. Rounding out the top-10 population-gainers were Idaho (ranked 29), Delaware (42), North Carolina (23), Tennessee (3), Nevada (18), Alabama (20), Montana (27), Arizona (15), and Arkansas (26).

According to census data, Hawaii lost the biggest share of its population to other states; it’s ranked at 48 for the third-highest tax burden in the country. The rest of the top 10 states for population outflow were New York (50), California (46), Alaska (1), Illinois (44), Massachusetts (37), Louisiana (12), New Jersey (45), Maryland (35), and Mississippi (21).

Numbers released this month by U-Haul and United Van Lines showed migration patterns closely, but not precisely, tracking the Census Bureau’s information. Loughead attributes the disparities, at least in part, to the companies’ varying geographic coverage and market share.

QotD: “At promise” youth

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A new law in California bans the use, in official documents, of the term “at risk” to describe youth identified by social workers, teachers, or the courts as likely to drop out of school, join a gang, or go to jail. Los Angeles assemblyman Reginald B. Jones-Sawyer, who sponsored the legislation, explained that “words matter”. By designating children as “at risk”, he says, “we automatically put them in the school-to-prison pipeline. Many of them, when labeled that, are not able to exceed above that.”

The idea that the term “at risk” assigns outcomes, rather than describes unfortunate possibilities, grants social workers deterministic authority most would be surprised to learn they possess. Contrary to Jones-Sawyer’s characterization of “at risk” as consigning kids to roles as outcasts or losers, the term originated in the 1980s as a less harsh and stigmatizing substitute for “juvenile delinquent”, to describe vulnerable children who seemed to be on the wrong path. The idea of young people at “risk” of social failure buttressed the idea that government services and support could ameliorate or hedge these risks.

Instead of calling vulnerable kids “at risk”, says Jones-Sawyer, “we’re going to call them ‘at-promise’ because they’re the promise of the future”. The replacement term — the only expression now legally permitted in California education and penal codes — has no independent meaning in English. Usually we call people about whom we’re hopeful “promising”. The language of the statute is contradictory and garbled, too. “For purposes of this article, ‘at-promise pupil’ means a pupil enrolled in high school who is at risk of dropping out of school, as indicated by at least three of the following criteria: Past record of irregular attendance … Past record of underachievement … Past record of low motivation or a disinterest in the regular school program.” In other words, “at-promise” kids are underachievers with little interest in school, who are “at risk of dropping out”. Without casting these kids as lost causes, in what sense are they “at promise”, and to what extent does designating them as “at risk” make them so?

This abuse of language is Orwellian in the truest sense, in that it seeks to alter words in order to bring about change that lies beyond the scope of nomenclature. Jones-Sawyer says that the term “at risk” is what places youth in the “school-to-prison pipeline”, as if deviance from norms and failure to thrive in school are contingent on social-service terminology. The logic is backward and obviously naive: if all it took to reform society were new names for things, then we would all be living in utopia.

Seth Barron, “Orwellian Word Games”, City Journal, 2020-02-19.

January 15, 2025

Is there anything climate change can’t do?

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

Seen on social media earlier this week:

Confirming this, Chris Bray talks about current reporting on the wildfires in and around Los Angeles:

In his much-discussed piece on the Los Angeles fires at the Free Press, Leighton Woodhouse looks to Mike Davis for a narrative foundation. In his book Ecology of Fear, Woodhouse notes, Davis “argued that the area between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains simply never should have been developed. No matter what measures we take to prevent it, those hills are going to burn, and the houses we erect upon them are only so much kindling.” Malibu and the Palisades, the land of hard living. That’s why so many rich and famous people lived there: because it was so inherently miserable and dangerous.

Mike Davis was full of shit for thirty years — he died in 2022 — and I’ve been rolling my eyes at him throughout. He described Los Angeles as an “apocalypse theme park”, a place of ruin and pain, populated by hardened survivors who, “dutifully struggling”, stagger on through the “Job-like ordeal” of clinging to a brutal landscape.

Also, Sierra Madre has bears. The Los Angeles suburbs are a place of horror and agony, because they back into the mountains, where blood-clawed wild animals prowl and stalk and slaughter. Places where life is especially grim and sanguinary, pgs. 240-41: Bradbury, La Crescenta, Glendora, the areas around the hellscape of Santa Barbara. A poodle was eaten by a mountain lion in Bradbury once, as neighbors gaped in open-jawed terror, YET STILL DO FOOLS ENDURE THE HORROR OF LIVING IN SUCH A PLACE.

Current real estate listings in Bradbury, a gated hillside community incorporated as an independent city in the San Gabriel Valley with a population of about 900 people:

How then would ye endure such horror, oh pilgrim, to live thus amid such blood and death? How bearest thou brutal existence upon this land?

Famously, in 1999, the Los Angeles Times, which used to be a newspaper, ran a long story examining Mike Davis and his vision of Southern California. It’s full of sentences like this:

  • Los Angeles’ most provocative social critic has stretched, bent and broken more than a few facts in “Ecology of Fear,” his latest, darkly themed work on the urban area he claims to love.
  • … more than a third of the time there were factual problems with his work.
  • Davis concedes the error.
  • Davis does not say where he got this piece of information.
  • “I honestly don’t know what I’m referring to,” Davis said.
  • Some of Davis’ mistakes involve mergers of fact and fiction, including making up a quote.
  • Davis attributes the false quote to a mix-up.
  • Then he takes readers on a partial flight of fantasy …
  • An examination of the Malibu Times article shows that Davis made up the parts about the jewels, the hair color, the kayakers’ occupations, the evidence of their callous classism and the ethnicity of their maids.
  • Davis is mischievously unrepentant.
  • Davis also merges fact and literary fiction, without acknowledgment, while arguing that Pomona, like other older, outer suburbs, is dying.

And so on.

The Times concluded that Davis could be read as “a polemicist, who makes cogent, incisive arguments on big themes”, but not as “a historian who is expected to be reliable, even on details”.

The Korean War 030 – Revived North Korean Army Strikes Wonju – January 14, 1951

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 14 Jan 2025

UN troops around Wonju get a gentle reminder that they’re not only fighting the Chinese. The North Koreans are back, and hammer the weak point in the UN lines all week. With UN forces still organizing a defence, and lots of holes in their formation, will they be able to hold on? Or will failure here undo all of Eighth Army Commander Matt Ridgway’s good work thus far?

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:45 Recap
01:06 Disposition
02:00 The KPA Attack
05:38 Cracking an Almond
07:55 The New Eighth Army
10:50 At the UN
12:41 Summary
12:57 Conclusion
(more…)

Desert Storm: The Gulf War 1990-1991

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 6 Sept 2024

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, he didn’t anticipate a massive international backslash and unanimous Security Council response. Soon a broad military Coalition under leadership of the United States assembled and kicked the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. In the aftermath several Iraqi groups rose up against Saddam but the Coalition didn’t support a regime change.

CHAPTERS:
00:00 Intro
00:29 Saddam Hussein Victorious (but Broke)
03:49 Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait
06:02 The Coalition Against Iraq Forms
08:37 Operation Desert Shield
10:55 Operation Desert Storm
20:26 Iraqi Highway of Death
21:39 Iraqi Uprisings
(more…)

January 14, 2025

Baking the Original Brownie – The History of Brownies

Filed under: Books, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 3 Sept 2024

Fudgy brownies with walnuts

City/Region: Chicago, Illinois
Time Period: 1904

I love a gooey, chocolatey brownie, so I opted not to make the first recipe for something called brownies from 1896, because it had no chocolate and instead used molasses. Certainly not the brownies of my heart.

There are a couple of origin stories about brownies, but the one for Bangor brownies goes that a housewife forgot to put baking powder into her chocolate cake. While I question the validity of this story, we do see a lot of recipes for Bangor brownies during the early 20th century that closely resemble brownies today.

While these may not rival my favorite modern ones, they’re very good. They come out fudgy and dense without being heavy and have a surprising amount of chocolate flavor for the amount of chocolate in the recipe. No matter their origin, brownies haven’t changed all that much in the last 120 years.

    Bangor Brownies
    Cream one-half cup of butter, one cup sugar. Add two squares (one-quarter cake) Baker’s chocolate, melted, two eggs. One half-cup pastry flour and one-half cup chopped walnuts. Spread on baking tins and bake fifteen minutes in a moderate oven.

    — Service Club Cook Book, 1904

(more…)

January 13, 2025

Muttering something about “manifest destiny” while glancing north

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

The Line‘s weekly dispatch is, as usual, mostly behind the paywall but the portion visible to cheapskates contains much of interest:

Manifest Destiny, 2025? Big Serge’s updated map for the old US War Plan Red for a military invasion of Canada.

It’s no coincidence that as Canada’s leadership devolved into its own navel, the very-soon-to-be-inaugurated Donald Trump escalated his provocations. This week, Trump threatened to use “economic force” to push Canada to bend the knee. Meanwhile, we cannot help but notice that the idea of a Canadian state is starting to gain significant traction in even moderate and mainstream American conservative circles. Meanwhile, we’ve got Alberta Premier Danielle Smith supping with Kevin O’Leary and Jordan Peterson down in Mar-a-Lago.

Tap tap. May we suggest that you peruse the safety cards tucked into the back of your seat, buckle up, and take note of your nearest emergency exits?

Whether we are talking about some kind of economic union, or a full-blown annexation, the fact that at least some in America are reviving the term “Manifest Destiny” is a possibility that we can no longer afford to dismiss as mere trolling. While we hope that the Trump administration is going to be so bogged down with other policy priorities that “Canada 51” is soon overshadowed, your Line editors have been game theorying out a host of possible scenarios and … none of them look great. If Trump et al get serious about this idea — and, again, we have no way to know if they will get serious about this idea — then we at The Line fear that Canada is in for some serious turmoil in the coming few months.

As I said in an email to Severian the other week, “… Canada will have very little ability to react to whatever Hitler, er, I mean “Trump” will do as soon as he’s inaugurated. It was clear before this that Trudeau cared very little about ordinary Canadians’ lives, but this really is dereliction of duty on a cosmic scale. If Trump does follow through with that huge tariff, the Canadian economy is likely to collapse, as we’re so deeply intertwined with the US on so many levels. Sadly, this might make it even more attractive to Trump, as it would absolutely encourager les autres on a global scale. If the BOM is willing to destroy the economy of his closest trading partner, what might he do to France? Or Germany? Or South Korea?” Back to the dispatch:

To explain our alarm, let’s first look at another news item to cross the desk. This week, Justin Trudeau travelled south to attend the funeral of Jimmy Carter, and stopped at the CNN studios for a quick interview with Jake Tapper on the way through.

On the whole, we think his interview was fine. Look, Trudeau’s been through a lot in the last few days, and considering the circumstances, it’s not reasonable to expect a breakthrough performance. So we’re being a bit unkind to nitpick, but something he said during that interview deserves scrutiny.

Justin Trudeau got far too comfortable with being treated as a progressive superstar, not only among the sycophants with CBC nametags but even on the international stage … perhaps especially on the international stage. Trudeau was always inclined to the performative in everything he did, and he might well only feel fully alive when cameras are rolling. The evidence certainly seems to point in that direction.

The “most prolific Canadian actor” meme was mildly amusing during Trudeau’s first term in office, as he went out of his way to put on elaborate costumes and to perform for the audience. This sort of thing was understandable if not particularly welcome to those who wanted Canada to be taken seriously by our allies and trading partners. It was clichéd to joke about what novelty socks Trudeau was wearing at any given international event … because it was his trademark. As was the clearly diminished respect he got as his time in office went on.

When asked about Trump’s provocations, Trudeau affirmed Canadians’ pride in their own sovereignty by noting — half jokingly, we presume — that we fundamentally define ourselves as “not American”.

Firstly, this is not a particularly diplomatic jibe to be launched at actual ordinary Americans; it made us wince to consider how it must have landed to CNN’s ordinary watching audience.

Secondly, if the only way in which Canadians can define themselves nowadays is “not-American”, Jeez, that’s an extraordinarily thin peg upon which to hang a hat.

This stuff matters.

It is to wince. However, even that pathetic response was better than launching into yet another diatribe about Trudeau’s firm conviction that Canadians are all genocidal white supremacist morons, I guess.

The ability of a population to withstand neighbourly aggression — “economic force”, if you will — depends on two things. The first is internal social cohesion and identity. The second is what the aggressor is willing to do or offer in order to secure capitulation.

In this case, the second part of that equation is outside our control. So we look to the first: does Canada have a strong sense of self right now? Do its leaders command the moral authority necessary to create the social cohesion required to withstand a period of sustained material sacrifice?

If we are “not Americans”, it rather asks the question why aren’t we Americans? And, more crucially, what are we actually willing to give up in order to preserve that independence?

A people can be rallied to make extraordinary sacrifices for a greater ideal, including the ideal of independent nationhood. Look at the sacrifices of blood and treasure made every day in Ukraine, for example.

If necessary, Canadians can band together and survive on lentils and supply managed dairy and eggs for many months or years. We can pull together through a period of inconceivable material hardship — but only if we’re doing it for something. Canadians, as per usual, can talk a big game, but how many of us are willing to suffer a real collapse of our quality of life to preserve a quasi-ironic, tautological, or negative self-identity?

Before Trudeau’s time in office, I wouldn’t have thought to question Canadians’ pride in their country and willingness to defend it. Nearly ten years later, Trudeau and his minions have done a fantastic job of undermining any kind of patriotic enthusiasms in our “post-national state”, haven’t they?

We at The Line don’t believe there is even a vanishingly small chance of the Americans using martial force to secure Canada — and if they choose to amass a brigade at the border on Monday morning, we’re all taking the Pledge of Allegiance by noon, so let’s not grace this fantasy with a lot of real consideration.

I’d love to refute that, but it’s probably true, at least in the more densely populated areas of southern Canada … the US could send a brigade north to Vancouver, another to Calgary, another to Winnipeg, and one to Montreal. Thanks to the lower lakes, it’d take a bit more to secure Toronto and Ottawa but not a lot more. We literally couldn’t stop them, both because our very limited troops are not positioned to stop an invasion from the south and because they’re not even close to being in a ready-to-move condition. Even our local reserves would have to be notified, travel to their local armouries, be issued weapons and the very limited amount of ammunition kept in local storage and by the time they were ready, there’s a foreign flag waving over Queen’s Park and Parliament hill.

Big Serge’s map at the top of this post vastly overstates the number of US troops necessary to secure the major population areas.

However, it is worthwhile to imagine it as a pure thought experiment: what would you really be willing to give up in order to continue to be “not-American”.

Your investment savings? Your property? Your house? Would you sacrifice the life of your child, or your grandchild, to preserve the legal independence of Canada?

We ask this question not because we think it’s going to come to that, but rather because these questions test the integrity of our national concept. They allow us to examine our resilience, and our willingness to withstand an assault of an economic or moral nature. And, folks, we’re just not convinced that our national resilience is very high at the moment.

Well, I’m sure a lot of new Canadians would want the rest of us to defend the place while they take advantage of all the government and corporate positions that need to be “diversified” … surely us evil white supremacists are willing to lay it all on the line for a more diverse society, right?

It was interesting to us to note, this week, that the most powerful moral appeal for the concept of nationhood was proposed in a Globe and Mail oped by Jean Chrétien. While we salute the old patriot, we can’t help but point out that he’s, well, very old — 91, to be precise.

We at The Line have a sneaking suspicion that Canadian patriotism and, more importantly, a willingness to make serious sacrifices to preserve that patriotism, is going to decline precipitously by age cohort in any well-constructed survey of the topic.

Would the young fight to preserve Canada against the Russians or the Chinese? Yes, we think our fellow Canadians could absolutely be called upon to make serious sacrifices to circumvent the rule of autocrats and dictators. But to prevent being subsumed by the — checks notes — wealthiest and most powerful democratic nation on earth (presuming America stays that way)? A nation that shares almost all of our essential values; one that looks and sounds just like us, and would probably provide a better set of opportunities to our kids? The place an increasing number of us are going to do start business and receive timely medical care?

Why?

Why would we do that? Can someone — anyone — please articulate a vision, here? Is anyone in our leadership class even trying?

It’s been noted many times that people are willing to charge even bare-handed into machine guns and cannons for things like “Liberté, égalité, fraternité“, but nobody is going to man the ramparts for “peace and good government”.

We put a lot of the blame for this on Justin Trudeau, and on the identitarian politics that consciously sought to undermine national legitimacy in the pursuit of progressive ends. But, if we’re being honest, we think this complacency of identity predates these social movements by many decades.

The Liberal Party as an institution owns a lot of it for the ways in which the “Natural Governing Party” has tied national identity to its preferred partisan policy options, at the direct expense of more transcendental and bi-partisan national self concepts. The Liberals have usurped “Canada” into a party brand

The national flag is effectively the Liberal Party flag … thanks Mr. Pearson!

and marshalled the very concept of “patriotism” to build consensus for picayune material entitlements. Trudeau couldn’t even help but do this in his CNN interview with Jake Tapper this week: “We delivered $10-a-day childcare. We’re delivering a dental care program that provides free dental care for people who don’t have coverage. We’re moving forward on a price on pollution that puts more money in the pockets of eight out 10 Canadians.”

We suppose Trudeau found that argument very compelling argument to Americans marvelling at Canada’s inability to meet its basic NATO commitments.

The weird thing is that Trudeau could have deflected a lot of these criticisms by our NATO allies almost painlessly without spending any more money directly on the Canadian Armed Forces — “It’s well known that Justin Trudeau has no time for military issues, but it’s surprising that he hasn’t done a few things that wouldn’t increase the actual spending on the CAF, but would be “bookkeeping” changes that would shift some existing government spending into the military category, like militarizing the Canadian Coast Guard. (That is, moving the CCG from the Fisheries and Oceans portfolio into the National Defence portfolio, not actually putting armaments on CCG vessels. Something similar could be done with the RCMP, switching it from Public Safety to National Defence with no other funding or operational changes.) That Trudeau hasn’t chosen to make even these symbolic changes shows that he actively opposes fulfilling the commitment his government has made twice in the last ten years for reasons of his own.”

This tactic has been very electorally effective for the Liberals, no doubt, but it’s also reduced the idea of “Canada” to a smug transactional exchange. “Canada” as nothing more than what provinces and citizens can wheedle out of the commonweal in transfer payments, equalization cheques, and grandiose but poorly executed national program spending. At least we’re better than America, though, right? We’re “not American!” — we’re so much more thoughtful and compassionate, as evidenced by the entitlements we’ve voted for ourselves, secure in the knowledge that the troglodytes to the south will spend and bleed and die for our coddled asses if Russia lobs a missile from the North.

Canada has become a question of what we, citizens, are able to get, rather than one of what we’re willing to give. And we’re smarmy, preachy assholes about it, to boot. (There’s a very famous political quote we could drop in here about what citizens can do for their countries and vice versa, but you’ll know why we aren’t, if you can guess the quote! It would be a little on the nose.)

A nation that is unwilling to make serious sacrifices of blood and treasure to protect its own sovereignty is a nation that is going to cease to be a nation sooner or later — and if we judge Canada by its commitment to its military, ours is a nation that has regarded itself as a quasi-ironic post-modern punchline for many generations now.

Forgotten War – Ep 7 – Imphal ’44 Pt1 – Planning Prevents

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published 12 Jan 2025

DO NOT PANIC IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE OTHER VIDEOS IN THIS SERIES YOU CAN START HERE

A video discussing the planning phase of the Battles of Imphal and Kohima at the start of 1944

Please consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
(more…)

The “Thucydides Trap”

Filed under: Books, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At History Does You, Secretary of Defense Rock provides a handy explanation of the term “the Thucydides Trap”:

In the world of international relations, few concepts have captured as much attention — and sparked as much debate — as the “Thucydides Trap”. Brought to prominence by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, the term suggests that conflict is almost inevitable when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, a dynamic often invoked to frame the strategic rivalry between the United States and China. Lauded as a National Bestseller and praised by figures like Henry Kissinger and Joe Biden, Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? has become a staple of policy discussions and academic syllabi. Yet beneath the widespread acclaim lies a deeply flawed analysis, one that risks oversimplifying history and perpetuating a fatalistic narrative that could shape policy in dangerous ways. Far from an inescapable destiny, the lessons of history and the nuances of modern geopolitics suggest that the so-called “trap” may be more myth than inevitability.

The term “Thucydides Trap” is derived from a passage in the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ work History of the Peloponnesian War, where he explained the causes of the conflict between Athens (the rising power) and Sparta (the ruling power) in the 4th century BC. Thucydides famously wrote

    It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.

Allison defines the “Thucydides Trap” as “the severe structural stress caused when a rising power threatens to upend a ruling one”.1 More articles by Allison using this term previously appeared in Foreign Policy and The Atlantic. The book, published in 2017, was a huge hit, being named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and Financial Times while also receiving widespread bipartisan acclaim from current and past policymakers. Historian Niall Ferguson described it as a “must-read in Washington and Beijing”.2 Senator Sam Nunn wrote, “If any book can stop a World War, it is this one”.3 A brief search on Google Scholar reveals the term “Thucydides Trap” has been cited or used nearly 19,000 times. In 2015, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull even publicly urged President Xi and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to avoid “falling into the Thucydides Trap”.4 One analyst observed that the term had become the “new cachet as a sage of U.S.-China relations”.5 The term has become so prominent that it is almost guaranteed to appear in any introductory international politics course when discussing U.S.-China relations.

Allison wrote in his essay “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” in The Atlantic published in 2015, “On the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment” forewarning, “judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not”.6 A straightforward analysis of the 16 cases in the book and previous essays might indicate that, based on historical precedent, there is approximately a 75 percent likelihood of the United States and China engaging in war within the next several decades. Adding the additional cases from the Thucydides Trap Website would still leave a 66 percent chance, more likely than not, that two nuclear-armed superpowers will go to war with one another, a horrifying and unprecedented proposition.7

With such alarm, it’s no surprise that the concept gained such widespread attention. The term is simple to understand and in under 300 pages, Allison delivers a sweeping historical narrative, drawing striking parallels between events from ancient Greece to the present day.8 International Relations as a field often struggles to break through in the public discourse, but Destined for War broke through, making a broad impact on academic and popular discourse.

    1. Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 29.

    2. Ibid., iii.

    3. Ibid., vi.

    4. Quoted by Alan Greeley Misenheimer, Thucydides’ Other “Traps”: The United States, China, and the Prospect of “Inevitable” War (Washington: National Defense University, 2019), 8.

    5. Misenheiemer, 1.

    6. “Thucydides’s Trap Case File” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, accessed December 31, 2024

    7. Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” The Atlantic, September 24, 2015.

    8. Misenheimer details what Thucydides actually said about the origins of the Peloponnesian War, 10-17.

January 12, 2025

Big Serge updates War Plan Red for a 2025 invasion of Justin Trudeau’s “post-national” “genocide” state

Filed under: Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

After the farcical attempt by outgoing PM Justin Trudeau to pretend that he somehow has changed his mind and now likes and wants to defend the country he’s described variously as a “post-national state” with no core beliefs, steeped in white supremacy and misogyny, and still engaged in “genocide”, Big Serge suggests the US invasion plan should change like this:

When Trump invades Canada, the key will be rapid advances in the opening 48 hours to take advantage of Canada’s odd force disposition.

The country’s political and economic center of gravity is the urban corridor from Toronto to Montreal, but a significant share of the Canadian Army is dispersed, with large garrisons in Quebec, Halifax, and the western provinces. Only handful of brigades are garrisoned in the critical theater.

The war will be won quickly and decisively, without massive destruction of Canadian cities, if American forces can establish blocking positions to isolate the urban corridor from peripheral Canadian garrisons. In this maneuver scheme, we utilize highly mobile elements including 1st Cavalry Division and airborne forces to block the highways into Toronto, while an eastern screening group isolates the urban centers from reinforcements scrambling in from Quebec.

We envision inserting HIMARS at operational depths via Chinook slings, saturating Canadian road traffic with rocketry. A mobile firebase (“Firebase Maple”) will be established north of Toronto near Lake Simcoe that will have a dominant position over the city’s northern approach.

With reinforcements unable to scramble into the critical theater and Toronto severed from the cities in the eastern corridor, the Canadian 31st and 32nd Brigade Groups will be isolated and destroyed. Unconditional surrender is anticipated within 14 days.

If there is a Canadian insurgency, we’re calling it the Maplejideen.

As an addendum, artillery airlifted onto Isle Royale in Lake Superior will support an advance out of Minnesota towards Thunder Bay, which will add an additional level of interdiction on Canadian reinforcements moving eastward by rail.

People are so mad about this!

And after much kerfuffle among the easily trolled, he suggests:

There’s no community note on this post which means it has been fact checked as true by real patriots.

As to why Trump would want to invade a frozen failed state on the brink of bankruptcy, even Big Serge doesn’t have an answer.

Quebec within the British Empire after 1760

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Fortissax, in response to a question about the historical situation of Quebec within Canada, outlines the history from before the Seven Years’ War (aka the “French and Indian War” to Americans) through the American Revolution, the 1837-38 rebellions, the Durham Report, and Confederation:

First and foremost, Canada itself, as a state — an administrative body, if you will — was originally founded by France. Jacques Cartier named the region in 1535, and Samuel de Champlain established the first permanent French settlement in North America in Quebec City in 1608. This settlement would become the largest and most populous administrative hub for the entire territory. Canada was a colony within the broader territory of New France, which stretched from as far north as Tadoussac all the way down to Louisiana. It included multiple hereditary land-owning noblemen of Norman extraction.

Much of the original territory of New France

During the Seven Years’ War, on 8 September 1760, General Lévis and Pierre de Vaudreuil surrendered the colony of Canada to the British after the capitulation of Montreal. Though the British had effectively won the war, the Conquest’s details still had to be negotiated between Great Britain and France. In the interim, the region was placed under a military regime. As per the Old World’s “rules of war”, Britain assured the 60,000 to 70,000 French inhabitants freedom from deportation and confiscation of property, freedom of religion, the right to migrate to France, and equal treatment in the fur trade. These assurances were formalized in the 55 Articles of the Capitulation of Montreal, which granted most of the French demands, including the rights to practice Roman Catholicism, protections for Seigneurs and clergymen, and amnesty for soldiers. Indigenous allies of the French were also assured that their rights and privileges would be respected.

The Treaty of Paris in 1763 officially ended the war and renamed the French colony of “Canada” as “the Province of Quebec”. Initially, its borders included parts of present-day Ontario and Michigan. To address growing tensions between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies and to maintain peace in Quebec, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774. This act solidified the French-speaking Catholic population’s rights, such as the free practice of Catholicism, restoration of French civil law, and exemption from oaths referencing Protestant Christianity. These provisions satisfied the Québécois Seigneurs (land-owning nobleman), and clergy by preserving their traditional rights and influence. However, some Anglo settlers in America resented the Act, viewing it as favoring the French Catholic majority. Despite this, the Act helped maintain stability in Quebec, ensuring it remained loyal to Britain during the American Revolutionary War and Quebec was fiercely opposed to liberal French revolutionaries.

British concessions, from the terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris to the Quebec Act of 1774, safeguarded the cultural and religious identity of Quebec’s French-speaking Catholic population, fostering their loyalty during a period of significant upheaval in North America. Following this period, merchant families such as the Molsons began establishing themselves in Montreal, alongside early Loyalist settlers who trickled into areas now known as the Eastern Townships. These merchant families quickly ingratiated themselves with the local Norman lords and seigneurs.

The Lower Canada Rebellion arose in 1837-1838 due to the Château Clique oligarchy (an alliance of Anglo-Scottish industrialists and French noble landowners), in Quebec refusing to grant legislative power to the French Canadian majority. The rebellion was not solely a French Canadian effort; to the chagrin of both chauvinistic Anglo-Canadians and French Canadians, who in recent years believed it was either a brutal crackdown on French degeneracy, or a heroic class struggle of French peasants against an oppressive Anglo elite. It included figures like Wolfred Nelson, an Anglo-Quebecer who personally led troops into battle.

In response to the unrest following the rebellions of 1837-1838, Lord Durham, a British noble, was sent to Canada to investigate and propose solutions. His controversial recommendation, outlined in the Durham Report of 1839, was to abolish the separate legislatures of Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) and merge them into a single entity: the Province of Canada. This unification aimed to demographically and culturally assimilate the French Canadian population by creating an English-speaking majority.

However, the strategy failed for multiple reasons, and was given up shortly after. Lord Durham, having neither been born nor raised in the New World, underestimated the complexities of Canadian society, which was a unique fusion of Old World ideas in a New World setting. His assumption that French Canadians could be assimilated ignored their strong cultural identity, rooted in large families, which encouraged high birth rates as a means of survival. While Durham hoped unification would erode divisions, the old grievances between the British and French began to dissipate naturally.

The Province of Canada, whose unofficial capital was Montreal, where the two groups mixed

Despite Lord Durham’s intentions, French Canadians maintained their dominance in Quebec. Families averaged five children per household for over 230 years, a trend actively encouraged by the Catholic Church’s policy of La Revanche des Berceaux (the Revenge of the Cradles). This strategy aimed to preserve French Canadian culture and identity amidst the British short-lived attempts at assimilation. In Montreal, British industrialists expanded their influence by forging alliances with French landowning nobles through business partnerships and intermarriage. This blending of elites produced a bilingual Anglo-French upper class that became historically influential.

Such alliances drew on long-standing connections established as early as 1763 and later exemplified by the North West Company (NWC). The NWC in particular is interesting as a prominent fur trading enterprise of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in that it embodied this fusion of cultures. Led primarily by Anglo-Scots, the company’s leaders frequently formed unions or marriages with French Canadian women, fostering vital ties with the French Canadian communities crucial to their trade. Simon McTavish, known as the “father” of the NWC, maintained alliances with French Canadian families, while his nephew, William McGillivray, and other leaders like Duncan McGillivray followed similar paths. Explorers such as Alexander MacKenzie and David Thompson married French women. These unions strengthened familial and cultural bonds, shaping the broader Anglo-French collaboration that defined this period.

This relative harmony between Anglo and French Canadians continued with the formation of the modern Canadian state in 1867 during Confederation. Sir John A. Macdonald deliberately chose George-Étienne Cartier as his second-in-command. This collaboration contributed to the emergence of Canada’s ethnically Anglo-French elite, who have historically been bilingual. This legacy is evident in the backgrounds of many Canadian politicians, such as the Trudeaus, Mulroneys, Martins, Cartiers, and countless others who have both Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian roots.

In more recent history, this dynamic has been further solidified by the federal government, where higher-paid positions often require bilingual proficiency. Interestingly, about 20% of Canada’s population is bilingual, reflecting the ongoing influence of this historical coexistence.

    The last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain will be fired by the hand of a French Canadian.
    ~ George Etienne Cartier

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress