Now, obviously, there are reasons why building infrastructure is expensive. One is that politicians have taken unto themselves the power to decide what infrastructure should be built how and where. Therefore infrastructure is built by fuckwits, obvious, innit? We’ve also allowed far too many people to dip their ladle in the gravy — that £300 million planning inquiry into a tunnel under the Thames. And did I say fuckwits already — that £100 million bat tunnel.
But one reason all these things are so expensive is because we’re not doing them on terra nullius. If we start with a bare field a ground source heat pump might well not be that bad an idea. Communal heating systems into an entirely new development, maybe.
But putting ground heat pumps into central London? Can’t do that ‘ere mate, someone’s already built central London right where you want to dig up. HS2 goes right through some of the most expensive — and inhabited by the highly vocal — countryside in the nation. Edinburgh, minor though it is, still has that central London problem.
This also explains why Mercury Comms employed the ferrets. The tubes already existed and fibreoptic could be stuffed down them. They didn’t have to dig up central London, see?
Agreed, this isn’t one of the world’s truly great insights but it is something to keep in mind. The reason building the infrastructure for the next level of civilisation costs so much is because we already have a civilisation. The existence of which gets in the way of the building men …
Tim Worstall, “Why Is Infrastructure So Damn F’n Expensive?”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-11-18.
February 21, 2025
QotD: Why does it cost so much to build modern infrastructure?
February 20, 2025
The Space Race Begins – W2W 006
TimeGhost History
Published 19 Feb 2025The Space Race has begun. As Stalin’s USSR and Truman’s U.S. compete for technological dominance, the Pentagon prepares for a future of missile warfare. Project Diana shatters barriers by bouncing radar off the Moon, proving space can be conquered — whether for exploration or war.
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Retaking Burma with the Fourteenth Army in 1945
Dr. Robert Lyman discusses the start of the campaign to reconquer Burma from the Japanese led by Lieutenant General Bill Slim and the Fourteenth Army:
Why Burma? Because in Burma in 1945 a series of marvellous military miracles (is there a synonym starting with “m” for concatenation?) engineered by General Bill Slim and his mighty 14th Army, broke the back of the Japanese Burma Area Army and smashed forever Tokyo’s dreams of an empire in South East Asia. 1945 is worth celebrating!
Even today, few people are aware of just how dramatic these events were, and just how spectacular was the victory wrought by the Indian, British, African, US and Chinese forces in the country.
Indeed, at the start of 1945 few people would have predicted the extraordinary outcome of the developing campaign. If Lieutenant General Sir Bill Slim (he had been knighted by General Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy, the previous October, at Imphal) had been asked in January 1945 to describe the situation in Burma at the onset of the next monsoon period in May, I do not believe that in his wildest imaginings he could have conceived that the whole of Burma was about to fall into his hands. After all, his army wasn’t yet fully across the Chindwin. Nearly 800 miles of tough country with few roads lay before him, not the least the entire Burma Area Army under a new commander, General Kimura. The Arakanese coastline needed to be captured too, to allow aircraft to use the vital airfields at Akyab as a stepping stone to Rangoon. Likewise, I’m not sure that he would have imagined that a primary reason for the success of his Army was the work of 12,000 native levies from the Karen Hills, under the leadership of SOE, whose guerrilla activities prevented the Japanese from reaching, reinforcing and defending the key town of Toungoo on the Sittang river. It was the loss of this town, more than any other, which handed Burma to Slim on a plate, and it was SOE and their native Karen guerrillas which made it all possible.
Crossing the Irrawaddy
(Victoria State Archives)The potential of a Karenni-based resistance raised the possibility, long argued by old Burma hands, of a British armed and trained fifth column operating behind Japanese lines for the purpose of gathering battlefield intelligence and undertaking limited guerrilla action. Slim had long complained about the poor quality of the battlefield intelligence (as opposed to the signals intelligence, about which he was well provided) that he and his Corps commanders received. He was concerned, among other things, about knowing “what was on the other side of the hill”, the product of information provided – where it existed – by effective combat (ground and air) reconnaissance. There was no shortage of organisations attempting to assist in this task – at least twelve – but their coordination was poor and most reported to SEAC or parts of India Command, rather than to 14 Army. Slim dismissed most of these as “private armies” which offered no real help to the task of defeating the enemy on the battlefield. One of the groups, part of Force 136 (i.e. Special Operations Executive, or SOE), which had operated in front of 20 Indian Division along the Chindwin between 1943 and early 1944 under Major Edgar Peacock (and thus known as “P Force”) did sterling work with local Burmese and Karen agents reporting on Japanese activity facing 4 Corps. Persuaded that similar groups working among the Karens in Burma’s eastern hills – an area known as the Karenni States – could achieve significant support for a land offensive in Burma, Slim (to whom Mountbatten transferred responsibility for Force 136 in late 1944 for this purpose) authorised an operation to the Karens. Its task was not merely to undertake intelligence missions watching the road and railways between Mandalay and Rangoon, but to determine whether they would fight. If the Karens were prepared to do so, SOE would be responsible for training and organising them as armed groups able to deliver battlefield intelligence directly in support of the advancing 14 Army. The resulting operation – Character – was so spectacularly successful that it far outweighed what had been achieved by Operation Thursday the previous year in terms of its impact on the course of military operations in pursuit of the strategy to defeat the Japanese in the whole of Burma. It has been strangely forgotten, or ignored, by most historians ever since, drowned out perhaps by the noise made by the drama and heroism of Operation Thursday, the second Chindit expedition. Over the course of Operation Extended Capital some 2,000 British, Indian and Burmese officers and soldiers, along with 1,430 tons of supplies, were dropped into Burma for the purposes of providing intelligence about the Japanese that would be useful for the fighting formations of 14th Army, as well as undertaking limited guerrilla operations. As historian Richard Duckett has observed, this found SOE operating not merely as intelligence gatherers in the traditional sense, but as Special Forces with a defined military mission as part of conventional operations linked directly to a strategic outcome. For Operation Character specifically, about 110 British officers and NCOs and over 100 men of all Burmese ethnicities, dominated interestingly by Burmans (which now also included 3-man Jedburgh Teams) mobilised as many as 12,000 Karens over an area of 7,000 square miles to the anti-Japanese cause. Some 3,000 weapons were dropped into the Karenni States. Operating in five distinct groups (“Walrus”, “Ferret”, “Otter”, “Mongoose” and “Hyena”) the Karen irregulars trained and led by Force 136, waited the moment when 14 Army instructed them to attack.
Enfield MkII: Better Than the MkI, I Guess
Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Nov 2024The Enfield MkI had only been in service for two years when the MkII was adopted in March 1882 to resolve some of its problems (and reduce its cost). At the same time, a new cartridge was adopted (the MkIII) with a heeled .477” bullet — also in hopes of resolving some of the problems with the Enfield revolver.
The Enfield used a selective ejection system that was intended to dump empty cases but retain unfired live cartridges. It was a bit finicky, with the live rounds often moving during the ejection process and jamming the system up. The larger heeled bullets were hoped to help stop that — and they were also thought to provide better accuracy in the gun’s Henry type rifling.
Simplifications to reduce cost of the gun included:
Unchecked grips
Smooth holster guides
Simplified geometry on the lower frame and top strap
Semicircular front sightFinally, a number of mechanical changes were made. Small elements were added to the clockwork to prevent cylinder rotation when not firing, and to lock the trigger and hammer when the loading gate was open. A second side plate screw was added to ease disassembly, and the grip attachment redesigned to use the lanyard ring as a screw to hold them in place. A fatal accident with an Enfield led to design of a hammer block safety that was intended to be universally retrofitted to guns in service, but many of the guns already sent out to far corners of the planet were never returned for this work.
In total, 13,102 MkII Enfield revolvers were made between 1882 and 1885, plus one gun each in 1886 and 1887. In 1887, the Webley MkI revolver was adopted to replace it, presumably much to the relief of Ordnance officers across the Empire.
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QotD: Those memorable quotes from history
I still don’t know how those people felt, but let me do the Robot Historians of 2334 a solid. In this particular case, guys: It feels stupid. Really, really stupid. Any sane person, watching this, can only marvel at how fucking fake and gay it all is. I wish I could say something more quotable about it (that’s a dirty trick of the History biz, by the way — often the quotes you see are quoted just because some crank had a good turn of phrase. The other sadly common reason is “because the quoted person’s letters are the only ones with handwriting you can read”). But I can’t, so … there it is.
Severian, “We Hold Erection For King!”, Founding Questions, 2024-11-05.
February 19, 2025
Europe’s moral leaders stand strong against grotesque American fascism
You have to hand it to the great and the good of Europe … they sure can find every. last. rake. to step on as they hysterically react to the slightest hint of disagreement or contradiction:
Germany is right. Opposition parties must be forbidden or firewalled. Political criticism must be criminalized. The public sphere must be firmly controlled by government, with guardrails against disagreement and heterodoxy. If we don’t do these things, we might descend into authoritarianism.
Margaret Brennan’s bizarre response to JD Vance’s speech in Munich — free speech? but that’s the weapon the Nazis used to commit the Holocaust! — wasn’t mere ignorance or accident. It’s a maneuver. You’re going to see more of it, in an urgent wave of moral inversion. Case in point, from the New Republic today:
Remember that Vance said things like this:
The good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.
And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still. Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organisers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them …
I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people.
So governments should live in dialogue with the populations they govern; citizens should speak freely; banning or limiting political parties makes society less free and less open. From start to finish, Vance spoke for liberty and openness, for free expression and societies organized through unfettered debate.
The calculated response — the calculated response, a deliberate deflection — is: Oh no, he’s saying we should turn into Nazis! Look at the subhed to the thing in the New Republic: arguing for freedom is aligning ourselves with international fascism.
Openness is genocide. Freedom is fascism. Speech is violence. Free societies arrest people for saying the wrong thing. Free speech — you mean like ADOLF HITLER!?!?
Read the piece in the New Republic, and look closely at Michael Tomasky’s language, which is full of Stasi-adjacent framing: “The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a ‘suspected extremist’ organization by the German domestic intelligence agency.”
The Korean War 035 – The Battle of Chipyong-ni – February 18th, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 18 Feb 2025Chinese Commander Peng Dehuai has launched his 4th Phase Offensive, pushing the UN forces back in the center of Korea, and should his forces take Chipyong-ni, they will compromise the entire UN position. Chipyong-ni must hold!
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:21 4th Phase Offensive
03:07 Retreat from Hoengsong
06:27 Chipyong-Ni Must Hold!
08:50 First Relief Attempt
10:22 The Battle of Chipyong-Ni
15:34 Battle Side Notes
17:36 29th Brigade
19:36 Summary
19:59 Conclusion
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A brief nod to the shade of Missouri Representative James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark
I was aware that the greatest Liberal Prime Minister in Canadian history, Sir Wilfred Laurier, had lost an election on the basis of a negotiated free trade deal with the United States, but I was not aware of exactly how that happened. Colby Cosh provides the gory details that got Laurier out of office for good:
Funny thing I noticed: Friday marked the anniversary of the 20th century’s most remarkable explosion in Canadian-American relations, which took place on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1911. On that day, Feb. 14, Missouri Democratic congressman James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark gave a short speech in defence of a free-trade agreement that had been hammered out between the (Republican) Taft administration and Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government.
Clark, a progressive and witty westerner who had already been chosen to become Speaker of the House in April, was widely expected to be the Democratic nominee for president in 1912. He was, in other words, a man who counted. And on the floor of the House, he advocated passage of the free-trade deal on grounds that eventually doomed it: namely, that it was a conscious step toward total American absorption of the Dominion of Canada.
When Clark’s remarks hit the newspapers up north — and no news story hit harder between 1900 and the dawn of the Great War — there was a spasm of anti-American and pro-Empire feeling throughout the country. As any schoolbook will tell you, this helped lead to the defeat of Laurier and the ruin of the trade deal in September 1911’s general election. This gaffe is indeed now what Clark is best remembered for, along with his eventual fumbling away of the 1912 presidential nomination to an unassuming professor named Woodrow Wilson.
When I was an undergraduate, we all had to have it explicitly explained to us that back in Edwardian days, the Liberals were the party of free trade, and the Conservatives the great defenders of tariff protection (although Sir John A. had sometimes sought without success to kick-stark “reciprocity” negotiations with the U.S.). Perhaps the most confusing feature of the 1911 controversy to students of today will be Champ Clark’s idea that the U.S. government would want to lower trade barriers to facilitate eventual annexation of Canada, rather than raising them to mutually punitive levels as a matter of crude antagonism.
Between Confederation and Champ’s time, Americans often just assumed as a matter of course that Canada would fall into their laps without any need for aggression or invasion. We northerners would eventually see that the benefits of American citizenship were more valuable than our romantic imperial attachments, and we would come beat down the door. This was certainly Clark’s own idea, and it created no controversy among Americans themselves when he expressed it.
Of course, in Laurier’s day “liberal” meant something closer to the modern sense of “libertarian” than it does to the current incarnation (or shambling corpse) of that party.
HBO’s Rome – Ep 4 “Stealing from Saturn” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 28 Aug 2024Vidcaps taken from the dvd collection and copyright belongs to the respective makers and channels.
Transcript
QotD: The inborn bias of all mankind
Why was I on a panel with a priest and a revolutionary communist? Long story — not very interesting: we were debating the future of ethics with special attention to the role of religion. The interesting part, however, is that at some point, after we all shook hands like adults and I was on my way home, I realized that I meant it — I would choke them all. Well, of course, one can’t be entirely sure that one’s actions will follow one’s intentions. The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that. But, given some weird Twilight Zone scenario wherein all their deaths somehow saved my son’s life, I was at least hypothetically committed. The caveman intentions were definitely there.
The utilitarian demand — that I should always maximize the greatest good for the greatest number — had seemed reasonable to me in my 20s but made me laugh after my son was born. And my draconian bias is not just the testosterone-fueled excesses of the male psyche. Mothers can be aggressive lionesses when it comes to their offspring. While they are frequently held up as icons of selfless nurturing love, that’s mostly because we offspring — the ones holding them up as icons — are the lucky recipients of that biased love. Try getting between a mammal mother and her kid, and you will see natural bias at its brutal finest.
Stephen T. Asma, “Confucius Got It Right: Giving in to ‘Bias’ is Part of Living an Ethical Life”, Quillette, 2020-02-01.
February 18, 2025
Canadian academic life now entails mandatory indoctrination about “settler colonialism”
In Quillette, Jon Kay talks about the pervasive indoctrination of Canadian university students in that invasive intellectual weed from Australia, “settler colonialism”:
Last month, I received a tip from a nursing student at University of Alberta who’d been required to take a course called Indigenous Health in Canada. It’s a “worthwhile subject”, my correspondent (correctly) noted, “but it won’t surprise you to learn [that the course consists of] four months of self-flagellation led by a white woman. One of our assignments, worth 30%, is a land acknowledgement, and instructions include to ‘commit to concrete actions to disrupt settler colonialism’ … This feels like a religious ritual to me.”
Canadian universities are now full of courses like this — which are supposed to teach students about Indigenous issues, but instead consist of little more than ideologically programmed call-and-response sessions. As I wrote on social media, this University of Alberta course offers a particularly appalling specimen of the genre, especially in regard to the instructor’s use of repetitive academic jargon, and the explicit blurring of boundaries between legitimate academic instruction and cultish struggle session.
Students are instructed, for instance, to “commit to concrete actions that disrupt the perpetuation of settler colonialism and articulate pathways that embrace decolonial futures”, and are asked to probe their consciences for actions that “perpetuate settler colonial futurity”. In the land-acknowledgement exercise, students pledge to engage in the act of “reclaiming history” through “nurturing … relationships within the living realities of Indigenous sovereignties”.
My source had no idea what any of this nonsense meant. It seems unlikely the professor knew either. And University of Alberta is not an outlier: For years now, whole legions of Canadian university students across the country have been required to robotically mumble similarly fatuous platitudes as a condition of graduation. It’s effectively become Canada’s national liturgy.
After my tweet went viral, I was contacted by a US-based publication called The College Fix, which covers post-secondary education from a (typically) conservative perspective. Like many observers from outside Canada, reporter Samantha Swenson couldn’t understand why Canadian students were being subjected to this kind of indoctrination session. “I hope you can answer,” she wrote: “Why do schools make mandatory classes like these?”
I sent Swenson a long 13-paragraph answer — which, at the time, felt like a waste of my time: I assumed the reporter would pluck a sentence or two from my lengthy ramble, and the rest of my words would fall down a memory hole.
So when her article did come out — under the title, Mandatory ‘Indigenous Health’ class for U. Alberta nursing students teaches ‘systemic racism’ — I was pleased to see that I’d been quoted at length. I especially appreciated the fact that Swenson had kept in my point that educating Canadians (especially students in the medical field) about Indigenous issues is important work; and that courses such as Indigenous Health in Canada would provide value if they actually served up useful facts and information, instead of self-parodic faculty-lounge gibberish about “decolonized futurities”.
Trump is a lot of things, but he’s no Neville Chamberlain
Tom at The Last Ditch reacts to his European friends’ facile association of Trump’s overtures to Putin with Chamberlain’s ill-fated attempts to appease Hitler:
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Heston Aerodrome, waving a copy of the Anglo-German Declaration he had negotiated with Adolf Hitler, 30 September, 1938.
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe via Wikimedia Commons.
It’s interesting to watch my Continental friends react on their socials to President Trump’s overtures to that monster Putin — the greatest modern example of a real life Bond villain. Their sympathies, like mine, are with plucky Ukraine. Its soldiers, outgunned and outmanned, have fought like lions and their place in history is assured. Toasts will be drunk and songs will be sung, for sure. But they’re losing and not one European power is ready to send in troops. Under Biden the policy of the West was to fight to the last Ukrainian. Trump sees it in more practical terms.
[…]
Trump’s drama, trolling and exaggeration is in the same category. Most people just don’t get it and react to his bluster like that naive articled clerk I once was. Everything he says and does is calculated to find a path to the best achievable outcome. There’s not a virtue-signalling molecule in his body and yet there’s more actual virtue than in his hypocritical critics.
My European friends are comparing Trump to Chamberlain and Putin to Hitler. Europe seems unable to move on from World War II. Every issue is analysed through the historical lens of how they mishandled the rise of the Nazis. As someone once said, all we really learn from history is that we never learn from history.
The hypocrisy here is breathtaking. If his critics were any more ready than him to send in their troops, they’d have the moral high ground over him. They aren’t and (Poland perhaps excepted) they never will be. So whether it’s just or not, Ukraine can’t win. The only people the Germans and French are ready to see die in this war are Ukrainians, Americans and their loyal English-speaking sidekicks — as usual. So they have no moral basis for their maiden auntery
The post-war settlement has expired. Continental Europeans have to meet their long-neglected NATO obligations and stop expecting Uncle Sam (already carrying more debt than the world has assets) to pay for everything.
Putin is evil, yes, but Ukraine is every bit as corrupt as Russia and would add nothing to NATO’s strength. It’s in the right here as a matter of international law and (for what it’s worth in war) morality. But international law is a myth unless the rich nations enforce it by (plausible threat of) military action. Europe is just standing by signalling virtue while breaching sanctions and sending half the military matériels it promises. Meanwhile Ukraine loses men and wealth with no hope of victory. When the last Ukrainian soldier has died or surrendered, what do Europeans think the outcome will be? Ukrainian flags on your socials won’t win it mes amis.
My advice to my Continental chums? They should let the President try to make peace and hold their comments until they see the result. Based on all my years working in Continental Europe, I expect them all to decry the result and pretend their leaders (prepared to sacrifice nothing) would have done better. It’s bullshit. War is hell and has to end eventually. This is not a Hollywood movie. There are no guarantees that the (relatively) good guys will win. If you won’t end it with arms, then jaw jaw is all you have. This man is much better at jaw jaw than you are so shut up and stop assisting the enemy by showing him how divided the West is.
World War 2 rations on the British Home Front
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 8 Oct 2024Mock banana cream on whole grain National Loaf
City/Region: United Kingdom
Time Period: 1944British rationing lasted from 1940 all the way to 1954, and they had to completely do without foods like bananas for years. The National Loaf began to be distributed in 1941. Made of 85% wholemeal flour enriched with vitamins B and C, it was nutritious, but dense, gummy, and went stale very quickly.
My National Loaf, based on the Imperial War Museum’s version, is dense, but I like the complex flavors from the whole grains. The mock banana cream has a texture that’s really close to mashed bananas, though the taste is an interesting mixture of parsnip and banana. Not bad, but not quite banana.
Mock Banana Cream
Here is a more economical banana cream recipe. Prepare and boil 1lb. parsnips until soft. Add 2 ozs margarine, 1 level tablespoonful sugar, 2 teaspoonfuls banana flavouring and beat until creamy. This must be used quickly, but half the quantity can be made if desired.
— Daily Record, Glasgow, May 27, 1944
QotD: The soft sexism of low expectations
- She’s been told she’s great — fabulous! — just the way she is.
- She’s been taught to dismiss all push-back as misogynistic.
- She’s been assured that she’s entitled to success — and that any failures to achieve said success are the fault of men.
- She’s been trained to demand that these dastardly men — who are totes holding her back — kindly step aside and let her take the trophy — whether she’s actually earned it or not.
You might think I’m being unfair here, but frankly? I don’t agree. Given all the stuff I’ve read in the news for the past decade plus, I believe I’m right on the money.
Everywhere I look, I see illustrations of all four of the above bullet points. I hate to keep harping on the fat acceptance movement, but really: isn’t that a textbook example of point number one? Go ahead, ladies: eff those unrealistic beauty standards and rock on with your 300 pound selves. Yas, queen, slay! (And don’t worry that you can’t make it up a single flight of stairs without getting winded. The negative impacts of extreme obesity are way over-stated, amirite?)
Then there are all the times leftists of the distaff persuasion have thrown down the poor-me-I’m-being-harassed-by-meanie-sexist-men card each time they start losing an online argument. To be sure, in the absolute dumpster fire that is internet discourse, such women probably do get burned with the occasional “die, bitch!” PM or email. But as I noted on my fan blog, men get that crap too — and oddly, I don’t see them whining about it nearly as often. (Probably because crying doesn’t work for men. Only women get picked up by the waaaaaambulance.)
And just to hit on bullets three and four: everywhere I look, I see leftists justifying moves to ease standards to give vag a hand up. Just last month, for example, it was reported that Oxford is considering removing Homer and Virgil from a foundational classics course due to “attainment gaps between male and female candidates”. Don’t buckle down and study your Latin and Greek, dears. We’ll remove that pesky obstacle for you. And oh my great and fluffy Lord, I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard feminists complain about the academic weeding that goes on in engineering or computer science — because apparently, advanced math is oppressive and patriarchal. As a woman who numbers pretty good — indeed, I even teach that stuff for a living! — I headdesk so hard whenever I hear this BS that I’m surprised my skull is still intact.
Where does all this anal-smoke-blowing lead? When you’re told constantly that you should get prizes simply for being a good little girl — as leftist women are — the result is predictable: you stop developing. If you’re already Ms. Polly Perfect, well — that obviates the need for critical self-examination and the consequent moves towards self-improvement. If your naysayers are all dismissible as “women-hating men bitter over the loss of their privilege” (or as women suffering from “internalized misogyny”), then your arguments are almost certainly untested and malformed. And if people have always been clearing the road for you and shielding you from any real challenges, you’re no doubt much stupider than your competition — and much weaker.
Stephanie S., “Prizes for Good Little Girls Syndrome”, Conservative Thoughts, 2020-03-07.
February 17, 2025
A maple-flavoured DOGE? Maxime Bernier proposed this in 2020
It’s both amusing and alarming seeing the kind of things the US government has been pouring money into, as the young auditors of Elon Musk’s DOGE dig into the accounts. Some folks on social media have been asking for a Canadian version of DOGE, but they’re nearly five years behind PPC leader Maxime Bernier:
Did you know that the Canadian government is spending $143,000 to help the African country of Senegal implement a “sectorial gender strategy” in its armed forces?
Or $46,793 to improve healthcare for intersex people in the Chinese province of Shandong?
What about $4.6 million to develop programs promoting a “positive masculinity” in Cuba?
There are hundreds of such crazy programs costing Canadian taxpayers billions of dollars every year to fund the Liberals’ woke ideology in other countries.
Many people on social media just found out that these programs exist last week, after they started looking for them on the website of the Government of Canada.
They were inspired by similar crazy programs that Elon Musk has unearthed with his DOGE team in Washington.
The DOGE – or Department of Government Efficiency – was created by President Trump and has already cut tens of billions of dollars in frivolous spending after only a few weeks.
I’m being asked if I support having the equivalent of a DOGE in Canada.
Not only do I support it, but I didn’t wait for Trump and Musk to do it to propose one. I did years ago!
In 2020, I stated that a PPC government would have a Minister of Government Downsizing to examine every federal program and cut or abolish everything that is inefficient, wasteful or not essential.
And speaking of DOGE, Coyote Blog shares some thoughts about some of the reasons Democrats are critical of the organization’s efforts:
… having thought about this longer, I think this is about more than just money. It is also about class. Just listen to how the cool kids in the media talk about Musk’s group of young weirdly-nicknamed geeks. This is fairly typical:
He was speaking specifically about a Trump executive order that decrees that the Department for Government Efficiency can force federal agencies into firing four people for every new hire. “Who the hell voted for Mr. Musk?” Begala raged. “Who the hell voted for — excuse the phrase — a guy who calls himself Big Balls? A 19-year-old kid going in there and trying to fire cancer researchers and scientists and teachers and agricultural specialists. It’s, it’s appalling.”
This is moderately hilarious from a) a party who still has not told us which unelected people really were making decisions behind the curtain for a senile Joe Biden; and b) an individual (Begala) who wielded immense power and influence across all departments of the Clinton Administration. The department staffs in DC are 99.99% people who are both unelected and unconfirmed by Congress. The issue is not that they are unelected, the issue is that they are “the wrong sort”. I am reminded of the British aristocracy in the 19th century that would tolerate almost any sort of governmental incompetence or malfeasance as long as the people were “the right sort” — meaning of their class.
The mention of Victorian England reminds me of another way that class is likely involved here. In the English aristocracy the oldest son inherited the title and often all the land and income (which was entailed to the title). This left little for any additional sons, so an income had to be found somewhere for them in a profession that did not require them to sully themselves with “trade” (daughters were handled a different way, through the marriage market). Reading for the law was an acceptable profession for a son with brains, and the army or navy were outlets for many. But most families needed a way for their sons without too much brains or ability and not militarily inclined to make a living. A position in the Church was often the solution.
Modern American blue-blood parents are no different — they need a way to secure a living for their kids who won’t or can’t land a job in the modern elite career choices (law, consulting, investment banking, or a sexy startup). Unlike in Victorian times, the military or the Church are no longer preferred elite options. So what to do with your 22-year-old gender studies major? The parents need her to get an income and they need her to do it in a context that they can proudly report to their friends — Paul Begala does not want to tell his friends that his son’s job is maintaining distributor pricing lists (anyone who does not believe the latter criteria should have been at my Princeton or Harvard Business School 25th reunions).
The solution? Get them a job at a non-profit, the modern American version of going to the Church. As Arnold Kling noted once, non-profits tend to have much higher status than do for-profits. And without competition they don’t have to carry the same performance standards as for-profits. And they are incredibly susceptible to trading a position for your kid in exchange for a nice donation.
The employment rosters of non-profits and NGO’s are stuffed with the children of privilege. So much so that there are many non-profits that seem to do nothing EXCEPT employ and pay the travel expenses of 20-something kids from rich and/or influential families. I have been writing about the non-profit scam for years. As I wrote then:
From my direct experience, I would go further. There is a tranche (I don’t know how large) of non-profits that are close to outright scams, providing most of their benefits to their managers and employees rather to anyone outside the organization. These benefits include 1) a salary with few performance expectations; 2) expense-paid parties and travel; 3) myriad virtue-signalling opportunities; 4) opportunities to build personal networks. This isn’t just criticizing theoretical institutions — people I know are in such jobs in these organizations.
The spending that DOGE is going after at USAID and other departments likely threatens the income of a number of under-qualified elite kids. So I will update my meme:
