Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Apr 2, 2024Cornmeal cakes and the bacon in whose fat they were fried
City/Region: Oregon Trail
Time Period: 1856The Oregon Trail was tough. It was gruelling, food could become scarce, and even the drinking water was mostly unpalatable (not to mention the threat of dysentery). Emigrants packed well over 1,000 pounds of food into their wagons, staples like flour, bacon, coffee, sugar, rice, and hardtack (clack clack). They also relied on finding food like edible plants, fish, and game along the way.
These cornmeal cakes went by many names, including johnny cakes and hoe cakes. The ingredients are simple, but they’re surprisingly delicious. Without anything to leaven them, they’re a bit dense, but they taste great. The flavor is a combination of cornbread, sweet molasses, and bacon, kind of like a 19th century McGriddle. This is a great recipe to play around with. You could add some spices for a fancier version, swap out some of the water for milk, or use other fats or sweeteners.
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July 15, 2024
What Pioneers ate on the Oregon Trail
QotD: Sticking it to “the Man” in Collegetown, USA
Back in College Town, it was as predictable as sunrise: Every election year, a group of Leftie goofs would picket Republican Party headquarters. It was an exercise in futility, of course — since College Town was exactly that, and it totally dominated its surrounding county, no Republican had bothered even making a whistle stop there since the 1950s. A Republican couldn’t get elected dog catcher; the token county headquarters was, no fooling, located in an all-but-abandoned strip mall next to a thrift store.
But it made a certain type of college kid, and of course xzhyr professors, feel good about themselves, sticking it to The Man like that, so they kept on keepin’ on. In the grand tradition of puerile student protest, they’d routinely chalk up the parking lot and sidewalk in front of the building with catchy slogans like “this sidewalk brought to you by socialism!” Yes, they really thought that, and if you’ve followed my “inside the ivory gulag” posts, you can easily suss out why: Sidewalks are public services; public services are paid for by taxes; “conservatives” are against taxes; “conservatives” are also against socialism; therefore sidewalks are socialist.
No, really — I’ve heard more than one professor make a version of that “argument”. If it’s a public service of any kind — police, trash pickup, whatever — it’s by definition “socialist”, because it’s paid for by taxes, and “conservatives” think all taxes, everywhere, are totally illegitimate.
College these days runs about $20K per year on average, by the way. What a deal, huh?
Severian, “Caveat Emptor”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-16.
July 14, 2024
Japan’s New Defense plan, 100 million dead – WW2 – Week 307 – July 13, 1945
World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2024Japan is aware that soon enough the Allies will invade the Home Islands, and they will mobilize absolutely everything and everyone they can for their defense plan, “The Glorious Death of the 100 Million”. In the meantime, Allied carrier forces keep hitting them, the Australian advance on Borneo continues, the Chinese advance on Guilin continues, the Allied rebuilding of Okinawa continues, and American preparations are nearly complete for a test detonation of an atomic bomb.
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July 12, 2024
They’ll confidently claim they’re merely “anti-Zionist“
James Pew on the disturbing rise of antisemitism in all western nations that got turbocharged by the October 7 atrocities by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians on the Gaza border:
“Student encampments – UofT – Camping at the university” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Jew hatred in this country, and around the world, is something I completely miscalculated. Like so many others, including many Jewish people, I naively thought that antisemitism was a thing of the past. Or at least, it was something that had been greatly diminished to the extent that it ceased to be much of a problem. Tragically, I was wrong about this.
The global expansion of Islamo-fascism and the mixing of pro-Jihadism with leftist critical social justice activism, is something I also, similarly, underestimated.
When I think of October 7th I am overcome with disgust and sadness. The world should be aligned with Israel, and aggressively opposed to Palestine/Hamas (Hamastinians) and the corrupt United Nations Relief and Workers Agency (UNRWA). That in many cases it appears to be the other way around, that many political leaders, media, and insufferable celebrities support Hamas’ terrorist aspirations, their evil nonsensical movement to wipe Israel off the face of the planet, is something that is incomprehensible to me.
In one of the late Rex Murphy’s final National Post columns, he proclaimed that “Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time”. Placing the blame for the “red-ignorant core” of the post-October 7th rise in antisemitism on “woke campuses”, Rex wrote the following concerning the legitimacy of the state of Israel:
Dear Israel is but a spit of earth on a huge globe. Three years after six million Jews were put to torture, humiliation, whippings, rape, medical experiment, starvation, and vile death, was it not surely time — time for all the nations of the Earth who had reached some moral understanding of life and government — to allow Jewish people time to rest, time to mourn, time to see what and who might be left of them.
While I’m the first to admit that no nation, including Israel, is beyond criticism, I feel there is both a time and place, and an appropriate proportionality that should be reflected in a fair critical analysis of any nation. When Douglas Murray made the point at the recent Munk debate that no serious person ever questions the legitimacy of the nation of Pakistan — a nation founded in a way similar to Israel — like they question and challenge the legitimacy of Israel, so-called anti-Zionists claimed that the audiences’ embrace of Murray’s logic was simply evidence of their Islamophobia.
Murray expanded on his Pakistan/Israel comparison by asking the audience to imagine someone who feels that Pakistan is not legitimate and therefore should not exist at all. Imagine also, that this person holds no antipathy directed at the Pakistani people. Preposterous! Yet the anti-Zionists ask us to believe this in regards to Israel. The anti-Zionist will look you straight in the eyes, and with all the sincerity in the world, express their belief that Israel should not exist, and absurdly, implore this does not mean they hate Jews (the majority of Israelis). Why in the case of an analogy where Pakistan is at stake, is it so clear which position is the correct and moral one? Alternatively, why are such questions involving Israel so difficult to answer?
In Canada, the increase in antisemitism has been going on for years. Record levels of antisemitism were recorded in 2021, with dramatic increases in Quebec and British Columbia.1 B’nai Brith Canada reported the number of antisemitic incidents across the nation more than doubled from 2022 to 2023, now reaching an unprecedented high.2
In February of 2024, Global Media reported that “Homes, businesses, schools, places of worship, neighbourhoods and institutions have all been targeted in what community leaders are calling an unparalleled spike in hate crimes against Jews”. And the Toronto Police warned the following month that “56% of reported hate crimes in 2024 have targeted Jewish people”.3
None of this distracts Canadian Islamists, like Younus Kathrada, from what they feel are the important social issues. Kathrada has been known to the government’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre since at least 2020.4 He preaches to his Islamic followers in British Columbia, “I want our children to understand this well: the non-Muslims are the enemies of Allah, therefore they are your enemies”.5
Loading An Ore Ship – The Massive Mesabi Miner
SD457500
Published Jan 15, 2024The Twin Ports is home to a bustling array of shipping, and industry by both rail and water. The massive iron ore docks see huge ships coming and going, while being loaded with taconite. This video has unique, and rare views seldom seen!
In this video, we’ll see how the MASSIVE Mesabi Miner gets loaded, how the taconite gets unloaded, and an aerial view of the large Canadian National Dock 6 in Duluth. This is a neat operation, complete with the unloading of taconite cars — something rarely seen!
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July 11, 2024
On immigration, progressives are following Brecht’s advice to “dissolve the people and elect another”
In the US, Canada, Britain, and most of western Europe the tide of immigration (legal and illegal) never seems to ebb, despite clear indications from the electorates that they’ve had enough. But perhaps progressives in each country are merely taking Bertolt Brecht’s advice for times when the people have forfeited the government’s confidence:
The problem extends far, far beyond merely glutting the labor market and lowering our wage scale, however. See, I’ve explained above why many Republicans go along with the Amnesty Express. But what about the Democrats? What’s in it for them, especially since Big Labor – whose members stand to lose a great deal because of the depression of wage levels – makes up such a prominent part of the Democrat coalition?
What the Democrats stand to win is permanent political power.
See, unlike previous waves of immigration, we are making no effort whatsoever to assimilate current immigrants to our culture and society. Instead, immigrants tend to cluster in indigestible lumps, maintaining their own cultures, languages, and ways from “the old country”. This is doubly true of illegal immigrants, who have managed to turn large swathes of many of our cities into small-scale replicas of Mexico and Morocco. This is even more troublesome because practically all of these immigrants come from places whose histories and traditions are grossly incompatible with our own. These folks don’t know about the idea of protecting life, liberty, and property through a rule of law system, so consequently they don’t CARE about such a system. They’re just here to get jobs or get welfare, for the most part.
In essence, when you import millions of people from socialistic and/or primitive Global South countries, you will end up with a socialistic, primitive Global South country of your own. And that’s what the Democrats are counting on. This is essentially what has been happening with the millions of people coming across our southern border from all over the world.
If the Democrats can get all of the 30-60 million illegals in America amnestied so that they can stay here and start their “path to citizenship”, and can bring in millions more through the various visa processes, then the Democrats are setting themselves up to be able to gain total control in about two decades – which is how long it will take for the children of all these immigrants to join the pool of voters with their parents. Further, they don’t seem to even want to have to wait that long, considering how they are opposing a bill currently before the Congress that would crack down on voting by illegal immigrants. Essentially, the Democrats – who have been unable to convince the current set of American voters to consistently elect them – want to replace us with a new set of voters, one which will vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats every election, up until we reach the point where there aren’t any more elections.
This is why I say that immigration is more important even than abortion or these other issues that people on the Right are so concerned about. Think about it. With 100 million newly-minted Democrat voters, the Democrats will be able to gain permanent control of all branches of government, at all levels, in nearly all of the states. What that means is that they will get to push through their policies at will. That means no more pro-life restrictions on infanticide. No more gun rights. No more religious liberty. No more rollback of the gay agenda. No more tax cuts or spending rollbacks. No more economic liberty. Kiss private property goodbye. THAT’S what the Democrats want – and the only way for them to get it to convince enough idiots in this country to give it to them via immigration, both legal and illegal.
So while conservatives are clawing each other’s eyes out because one candidate or the other isn’t as pro-life as they want them to be, the Democrats are setting up the playing field to replace the current American electorate with a new one from the Third World, complete with all the third world values of corruption and socialism that come with them.
Of course, for “Democrats”, read “Liberals” in Canada, “Labour” in the UK, and so on. The party labels change, but the basic beliefs are remarkably consistent across the western world (and Rishi Sunak’s just-ousted Conservatives were just as committed to open borders and mass immigration as Keir Starmer’s new Labour government).
QotD: Armchair generals
Robert E. Lee, quoted at American Digest, 2005-08.
July 10, 2024
The four horsemen of cultural collapse
Chris Bray provides yet more examples of cultural decay and the collapse of law and order in America’s Trudeaupia, California under the loving care of Justin Trudeau’s spiritual twin, Gavin Newsom:
Today tells you about next year.
In a long history of murder in America, the historian Randolph Roth argued that violence follows other losses of trust and order. The murder rate surges in the face of “four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy”.
Read that list carefully, because it should sound familiar.
Similarly, the originators of the theory of “broken windows policing” argued that peace and order grow from peace and order; neighborhoods are more likely to be calm when they’re “places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls”. Crime follows crime; vandalism, for example, “can occur anywhere once communal barriers — the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility — are lowered by actions that seem to signal that ‘no one cares'”. The police commissioner William Bratton famously reduced all categories of crime in New York City subways by assigning officers to arrest turnstile jumpers who entered the system without paying. He sent a signal at the front gates.
“Broken windows” is a much-criticized theory: “He contended that the very notion of ‘disorder’ is subjective and racially fraught”. But the criticisms tend to reduce the complexity of the theory in order to “debunk” it.
Decay communicates. Disorder is a message.
The Korean War – Never Fear, MacArthur’s Here! – Week 003 – July 9, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 9 Jul 2024American troops have arrived in Korea and engage the KPA — the forces of the North — in the field this week for the first time. It does not go well for them. In fact, it’s hard to imagine it going worse. The Americans are outnumbered and outgunned and are routed. In fact, the KPA are advancing all over the country, though they are taking heavy casualties themselves.
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July 9, 2024
QotD: “No official Propaganda Department has ever been half as effective as Twitter and Facebook”
Our overlords figured that out, give credit where it’s due. No official Propaganda Department has ever been half as effective as Twitter and Facebook. But that’s a problem, too, as we’re starting to see. The problem with freelance propaganda is the free market problem of marginal utility.
Facebook and Twitter are SJW cesspools. Everyone knows this. Even your sweet old granny, who is only on Facebook to exchange pie recipes and knitting ideas, knows this, because the #WokeStapo came for knitting years back. When the “trust and safety council” goes so far as to ban the sitting President of the United States, even hermits living in remote Himalayan caves got the message — toe the Party line on social media, or else.
This reduces the value of ALL information on social media to, effectively, zero. Sure, it might be true — and propaganda, as we know, works better the closer to the truth it steers — but given that they’ve even gone after knitting, for pete’s sake, means that any even halfway sorta quasi rational person assumes everything on social media is nothing but propaganda.
Severian, “If They Were Clever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-08.
July 8, 2024
All the conspiracists seem to find room for the Rockefellers in their theories
Elizabeth Nickson on a new book by Jacob Nordangård that illustrates just how important Rockefeller funding is to so many activists and the environmental pressure groups that deploy them:
In the climate change arena, the Rockefellers call the shots. The whole thing was their idea, they took a silly but interesting theory and amped it up with hundreds and hundreds of million of dollars. They founded institutions and linked the survival of those institutions to promoting climate change and population reduction. They adopted one likely politician after another.
The Rockefellers have created 990 Climate Change activist organizations. They give them directions, financing, and launch them on the world. The Green Movement was started, financed, organized, and militarized by the Rockefellers. By the late 40’s the family was all in, on the same page. In the 50’s they began to stand up countless institutions, committees, university departments, university institutes, foundations, and policy shops gathered around this one idea, as below:
Let’s just pause here and recognize that the United States and Canada are 5% developed. If it were 50%, then maybe we would have reason to worry about the effects of trace gas that takes up .04% of the atmosphere, of which 3% is currently contributed to by humans. But were we to have that level of development, our science would have long ago solved the problem. Our sense of proportion, size and consequence has been twisted, propagandized via hundreds of billions of purposed dollars. And all of it is exaggerated science done by scientists compromised by Rockefeller money.
By 1998, the Rockefeller family had swept the table clean of any opposition to this one idea. Any scientist not on board with the agenda was imperiled. Any university department not working towards this one artificial goal, was in danger of being marginalized. Infiltration had begun into every media organization, every entertainment division of every major corporation. This, as stated below, would be a generational goal. For everyone. Or get off the bus.
What is evidentiary, what can be proved in a court of law, rather than opinion, however, is that the Fabians started the idea of this whole one-world, no nation state. It is clear too that after the First World War, the Fabians roped in the second generation of Rockefellers. It was a major catch. It meant they had America. And it was spiritual. It was meant to change mankind, to kill off Homo Sapiens and turn us to Homo Universalis.
The New Man would be not-Christian, quietist, and self-obsessed. The economy would trend towards zero-growth if not de-growth. There is a preponderance of data, many many publications that laid out their plans. They twisted education away from practical science, engineering and building things towards social movements, the humanities, the arts, and pleasure. And via Laurance Rockefeller’s money and organizational skill, they devised and invented the discipline of cybernetics from which the internet flows.
“See, Trump’s plan is … Christofascist ethnic cleansing. It’s all so obvious now, isn’t it?”
Chris Bray finds the stupid so painful that it hurts:
I was worried, a year ago, about an election-year decline into hysteria and evil. What I didn’t see was the descent into grinding moronization.
“They want to dismantle the administrative state and give more power to the executive branch.” I … can’t. I just can’t. It’s like somebody made a special kind of rice cereal for infants that replaces the rice with shit. It’s sewage gruel for toothless adult babies. It’s like saying “they want to take power away from judges and transfer it to the judicial branch”, but that doesn’t really begin to do justice to the stupidity of these statements.
Similarly, this segment on MSNBC warns that Trump is planning to “bring the agencies under the umbrella of the executive branch”.
Imagine living in a world where the Department of Commerce was part of the executive branch. And on and on and on. […]
See, Trump’s plan is … Christofascist ethnic cleansing. It’s all so obvious now, isn’t it?
QotD: The Potlatch
The point, of course, is to show off how rich you are by showing off how much crystallized labor you are able to destroy. This pattern is not an uncommon one across human societies — a lot of human and animal sacrifice, while ostensibly religious in motivation, has this sort of showing off as an undertone. But what makes the potlatch especially interesting is its competitive nature. The Indians believe that as the goods are consumed by the blaze, every other wealthy man is “shamed” unless he comes back and burns objects of equal or greater value. It’s value destruction as a contest, like a dollar auction for status where the final price is set on fire rather than being paid to somebody, a negative-sum machine for destroying economic surplus.
Good thing our culture is way too civilized to do anything like that.
I don’t remember when it was that you told me I had to read this book about VIP “models and bottles” service at nightclubs, but I’m glad you did because it’s sort of like the Large Hadron Collider but for human social practices. By analyzing behavior under these extreme conditions, certain patterns that are normally obfuscated (often deliberately so) emerge with stark clarity. Much of your research focuses on “disreputable exchange” — the ways people buy and sell things while hiding the fact that they’re buying or selling something. Have you been able to get the NSF to pay for a night out in South Beach yet?
Gabriel: I should start off by disclosing that I’m friends with Ashley. However I don’t think that biases my opinion since the reason we are friends is that I admire her work.
Potlatch is one of the most interesting cultural practices in the world and the keystone upon which both economic anthropology and economic sociology are built. Indeed, you left out just how amazing it is in that not only did the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest destroy property in the form of salmon, blankets, and copper; but also wealth in the form of human beings, as they would use the occasion to both free and kill slaves. To us 21st century WEIRD Americans, murdering a slave and manumitting a slave seem like opposites, because manumission is humane and human sacrifice is brutal. But from the logic of status competition, they are alike in that both demonstrate that one is so wealthy that one can afford to give up the value of some of one’s slaves. Thus we see that not only the Tlingit but also the Romans would both murder and free slaves in funerary contexts.1 Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death has some very interesting material on this and is generally the greatest work of comparative scholarship on economic institutions since Max Weber — I hope to review it with you or Jane some day.
Now imagine it’s your job to describe one of the most interesting things to have ever happened, a ritual of passive-aggressively inviting rivals to parties that gavage your guests and culminate in wealth bonfires and human sacrifice, and the only thing you find worth emphasizing about it is how mean the Canadian government was to suppress the practice. This is how the Gene Autry Museum here in Los Angeles describes it, and you see similar emphasis at other museums that follow the curatorial heuristic of maximizing pious status redistribution and involvement of the descendants of the community being described, while avoiding at all costs anything that would serve as such a near occasion of awesome as to lead your internal monologue to roll tape for the Basil Poledouris score to Conan the Barbarian.
So now that we know what potlatch 1.0 is, why do I describe the models and bottles scene as a douchebag potlatch? There’s no human sacrifice, and the rivalry is a bit more friendly, but otherwise bottle service has a lot in common with a traditional potlatch. Most obviously, it is a ritual of competitive feasting where powerful men show off how much they can waste. The nightclubs are well aware of this and actively encourage “bottle wars”, where different tables compete to see how many bottles they can order. The service the club offers is not intoxication, but the spectacle of other clubgoers (and the home audience on Instagram) seeing how much the customer can spend. And so they don’t merely send a busboy or a waitress to quietly deliver the bottle, as would be the case at Applebee’s, but a bottle girl carrying bottles festooned in sparkler fireworks and, in one particularly decadent instance, the manager dressed as a gladiator and riding a chariot pulled by busboys. And once the bottles are drained, the bottles remain at the table. At a normal bar or restaurant, uncleared dishes would be a sign of lazy staff, but at a bottle service club the debris is an accumulating trophy that makes visible to all the consumer’s glorious expenditure.2
John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.
1. Gladatorial ludi were originally funerary in nature. And we know from the Lex Fufia Caninia that by 2 BC funerary manumission was considered to be in such an escalatory spiral that it would ruin estates absent sumptuary laws limiting the practice.
2. Another example of garbage as testament to the host’s opulent generosity is the “unswept floor” mosaic motif common to many Hellenistic and Roman triclinia.
July 7, 2024
Aussies Land on Borneo – WW2 – Week 306 – July 6, 1945
World War Two
Published 6 Jul 2024Australian forces land at Balikpapan to hopefully secure the oil facilities there; In Burma, the Japanese try a diversion to allow some troops to escape the country, but the timing is not what it should be; in the Philippines there is an American landing on Mindanao, but behind the scenes there are those wondering if they really need to push Japan for complete unconditional surrender.
00:00 Intro
00:31 Recap
00:55 Landings On Balikpapan
03:23 A Diversion In Burma
06:10 Luzon And Mindanao
07:39 Unconditional Surrender?
11:18 Polls And Polling Numbers
15:25 Notes
15:48 Conclusion
16:56 Us Army’s 11th Airborne Division Memorial
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July 6, 2024
Canada, NATO’s most egregious freeloader
In The Line, Eugene Lang and Vincent Rigby explain why our NATO allies are less and less willing to listen to Canadian virtue-signalling and posturing when we continue to refuse to live up to our commitments on the Canadian Armed Forces and contributing our full share toward NATO operations:
Next week’s NATO Summit in Washington marks the 75th anniversary of the trans-Atlantic Alliance. Yet despite being one of the original 12 founding members, Canada’s credibility within the alliance will be at an all-time low.
There is no question Canada has a proud history with NATO. Canadian statesmen — including Lester B. Pearson, Louis St. Laurent, Hume Wrong and Escott Reid — were architects of the alliance in the late 1940s, and helped author Article Two of the North Atlantic Treaty calling for political and economic collaboration among member-states, the so-called “Canadian Article”.
Over the decades, the Canadian military has made significant contributions to NATO missions in western Europe, the Balkans and Afghanistan. But that was then and this is now, and two years ago, Michel Miraillet, France’s ambassador to Canada, put things bluntly: “You are riding a first-class carriage with a third-class ticket. If you want to remain in the first-class seat, you need to train and expand (the military) and to go somewhere.”
Sentiments like these have been fuelled by Canada’s stubborn refusal to meet NATO’s defence spending target of two per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) — a commitment Ottawa has signed onto twice in the past ten years but is far from achieving. Last year, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg expressed frustration over this recalcitrance: “Canada has not conveyed a precise date but I expect (it) to deliver on the pledge to invest two per cent of GDP on defence, because this is a promise we all made”.
Stoltenberg’s comments evidently had little impact in Ottawa. While Canada’s recent Defence Policy Update (DPU) placed greater emphasis on the Arctic (NATO’s northern flank) and promised new defence investments, its pledge to increase defence spending to 1.76 per cent of GDP by 2030 fell well short of the NATO target. Canada, currently spending 1.37 per cent of its GDP on defence, remains among only a handful of NATO members which have failed to reach the two per cent threshold and have no plan to do so.
The Defence Policy Update’s silence on this issue did not go unnoticed among allies. Criticism of Canada’s NATO posture reached new heights last month when 23 U.S. senators wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, stating “we are concerned and profoundly disappointed that Canada’s most recent projection indicated that it will not reach its two percent commitment this decade”. Canadians can be forgiven for failing to recall the last time nearly a quarter of the U.S. Senate wrote to the Canadian government on anything.
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.
