Quotulatiousness

December 8, 2024

How it started – Blame Canada. How it’s going – Annex Canada?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Humour, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper has some fun imagining what the Dominion of Canada would have written in its diary over the last week after President-elect Donald Trump joked about making it the 51st state:

TUESDAY
Don’t get me wrong; annexation would be thrilling. What could be naughtier than abolishing the world’s longest undefended border? Or getting a Chik-Fil-A in all 10 provinces? Or watching CNN as a swing voter, instead of just as a voyeur. Or screaming “I know my rights!” at a cop and having it mean something.

Who among us doesn’t want to lock up serial child molesters in a Supermax instead of sending them to a healing lodge? Or strap a revolver to one’s belt just to see what it would feel like to be an armed citizen at the mall. Or go to a store that sells booze, cigarettes, firecrackers and shotguns all in the same place.

I’m not ashamed to say it all gives me goosebumps. I’ve resented you, looked down on you, claimed to hate you, but I’ve never said I wasn’t attracted to you.

WEDNESDAY
And the lifestyle benefits; my god. A four-lane interstate to Alaska. Flyovers at CFL games that consist of an entire formation of fifth-generation fighters, instead of just a search and rescue helicopter. Hell, maybe they wouldn’t even *be* CFL games?

A dollar that’s worth … a dollar, rather than 60 cents. Books that can be purchased at the actual price, instead of the “in Canada” price. Productivity and per-capita GDP to burn, and all with lower taxes.

The thought is always there. Every time I’m clipping coupons or subsidizing some foreign automaker just so they’ll build me a battery plant, there’s always that weak moment where I think, “You wouldn’t need to be doing any of this if you’d just let America take care of you.”

THURSDAY
And yet, even when I lay out all the material benefits of statehood, I know it’s not for me.

Snoop Dogg has a net worth of $150 million. You know what his favourite snack is? Hard-boiled eggs like his mom used to make. You can offer me the world, but it’s not what I know.

I like giant monopolistic, uncompetitive corporations. Sure, my cell phone bills are high and my butter doesn’t spread at room temperature, but at least the logo on the package never changes. I like government programs that offer me benefits in theory, even if not in practice: I can’t find a family doctor or a daycare spot, but I can dream. I like making unrealistic international pronouncements, because no one would ever expect me to back it up with aid or military force.

Why your landscape photos are boring 🥱

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Yorkshire Photo Walks
Published Jun 9, 2024

In this video Tom outlines a five-step process for turning your landscape photos from flat, boring shots to professional looking images.
(more…)

QotD: Who invented the vending machine?

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This one surprised me: the vending machine was invented not for Coca-Cola or cigarettes or snack foods, but for books.

Richard Carlile was a shit-disturbing English bookseller. He insisted on selling Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason despite it being seditious and blasphemous for its attacks on organized religion, particularly the Church of England. Impressively stubborn, Carlile was arrested in 1819, imprisoned, and fined a massive £1,500 for selling Paine’s work. While a guest of the state, his wife, Jane, and other associates kept selling The Age of Reason, leading to more arrests.

Sometime around his release in 1822, Carlile came up with the idea of automating sales. His device was crude, but effective. A person inserted coins and pulled a lever that opened a compartment from which a copy of The Age of Reason could be retrieved without human intervention. Police had no one to arrest for selling seditious material.

The book vending machine didn’t keep Carlisle out of jail — he would spend nine years locked up for acts of political rebellion. Nor was he able to patent his device. I admire the hell out of him, tho.

Jump ahead to the early twentieth century and vending machines were being used in France and Germany to sell newspapers, postcards, maps, as well as books. The idea crossed the English Channel in 1937. Allen Lane, who single-handedly invented the modern paperback and founded Penguin Books with his brothers in 1935, launched the Penguincubator two years later. Based on the German machines, it was described by the Times as “an unfamiliar contraption of metal and glass”. Lane installed it at 66 Charing Cross Road, outside Collet’s bookshop.

Lane’s contraption was no more successful than Carlile’s. It got wheeled out of Collet’s shop at closing time every night and wheeled back in every morning when the shop opened. Another Charing Cross bookseller recalled seeing letters shoved under the shop’s door each morning complaining of coins lost in the machine. Customers also learned that you only had to pound the side of the box in order for it to disgorge about a third of its inventory. The Bookseller reported that when this was pointed out to the manager of Collet’s, he “gave his incontinent robot a terrific thrashing. As a result of this all the rest of the Penguin’s promptly fell out.”

That perhaps explains why I couldn’t find a mention of the Penguincubator in Stuart Kells’ otherwise excellent book, Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution.

Ken Whyte, “Have I got a business for you!”, SHuSH, 2024-09-06.

December 7, 2024

Rediscovering the legacy of “Silent Cal”

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jacob M. Farley recently discovered the history of Calvin Coolidge’s presidency and the economic policies he pursued to such good effect in the 1920s (although Herbert Hoover’s energetic turn as Commerce Secretary for Harding and Coolidge strongly indicated that the benign laissez faire approach would be changed once Coolidge left the Oval Office):

Calvin Coolidge, Governor of Massachusetts, 1919.
Photo by Notman Studio, Boston, restored by Adam Cuerden via Wikimedia Commons.

In the pantheon of American presidents, Calvin Coolidge, or “Silent Cal”, often plays the role of the overlooked extra in the corner of history’s grand narrative. I can attest to this, as my first real exposure to him occurred recently during a visit to a museum whilst travelling in the US. Having spent some time since then reading up on everything Cal-related, I’ve become increasingly convinced that there’s a compelling case to be made that Coolidge’s approach to governance, particularly his economic policies, should be dusted off and revisited, not just for historical curiosity but as a lodestar for free marketeers far and wide.

Before I go any further, let’s set the scene of Coolidge’s era. The 1920s is often remembered for jazz, flappers, and the stock market’s dizzying heights. But beneath the cultural tumult, Coolidge was busy orchestrating what can quite fairly be called a symphony of minimalistic governance. His philosophy was profoundly simple: government should do less, not more.

Whilst this may seem extraordinarily mundane to you, consider that this wasn’t simply cheap talk on the campaign trail designed to get a nod of approval from over-50s. His ideas weren’t born out of laziness or disinterest but from a profound belief in the efficacy of the market’s invisible hand over the visible, often clumsy, hand of government intervention.

Coolidge’s administration slashed taxes like a bootlegger cuts whiskey – to make the good times flow more freely, notably through the Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926. This wasn’t just about giving the rich a break; it was about stimulating economic activity by leaving more money in the pockets of Americans. By leaving more money in the pockets of Americans, he was essentially saying, “Here’s your allowance, now go make some noise at the stock market”.

The result? A crescendo of consumer spending, industrial growth, and a stock market that seemed to reach for the stars.

Coolidge believed in setting the rules of the game and then letting the players play. This isn’t to say there was no regulation, but rather, it was about not over-regulating, about allowing businesses to innovate, expand, and yes, even fail, without the government always having its finger on the scale. Imagine if the conductor only pointed out the tempo and let the musicians interpret it – that was Coolidge’s regulatory approach.

Under Coolidge, the U.S. economy boomed. Unemployment dipped to levels we can only dream of today, and real GDP growth was robust. If the economy were a piece of music, it was hitting all the right notes. But here’s where the narrative often shifts to a sombre tone – the Great Depression. While Coolidge left office before the market crashed, the seeds of economic disaster were arguably sown in the very success of the 1920s, exacerbated by policies that followed his term, particularly those of the Federal Reserve.

This is where the story of Coolidge’s economic policy gets nuanced. The Federal Reserve, relatively new on the scene, played its own tune by the late 1920s. Its policies, intended to stabilise the economy, are often critiqued for contributing to the eventual bust. Coolidge’s hands-off approach might have been a wise nod to market self-correction, but the Fed’s actions, flooding the number of dollars in circulation to stimulate the market’s trajectory in a way they deemed desirable, led to an artificially manufactured drunkenness, leading to a nasty hangover – The Great Depression.

After Coolidge, the economy didn’t just crash; it was like the Charleston dancer tripped over its own feet.

There had been a brief, nasty recession following the end of the First World War, but Harding and Coolidge responded not by muscular government action but by letting the market sort things out. Hoover, as Coolidge’s successor, was not cut from that cloth. Hoover was a believer in the progressive big-government approach to just about everything and his attempts to respond after the 1929 crash absolutely made things much, much worse. Later historians have chosen to forget Hoover’s actual policies and pretend that he followed Coolidge’s lead (most historians over the next couple of generations were pro-Roosevelt, so portraying Hoover as a conservative non-interventionist allowed them to contrast that with Roosevelt’s even more centralizing, interventionist policies).

The FBI’s future – fix it or abolish it? Decisions, decisions …

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

At Racket News, Matt Taibbi provides some background information on FBI failures leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks:

On August 13, 2001, 33-year-old French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui paid $6,800 in $100 bills to train on a 747 simulator at the Pan-Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota. A retired Northwest Airlines pilot named Clarence “Clancy” Prevost thought Moussaoui’s behavior was odd for someone with no pilot’s license and told his bosses as much. When they said Moussaoui had paid and they didn’t care, Prevost said, “We’ll care when there’s a hijacking and the lawsuits come in”.

The company went to the FBI and on August 16, in what should have been one of the biggest arrests in the history of federal law enforcement, Moussaoui was picked up on an immigration violation. Agents on the case wanted permission to search Moussaoui’s belongings, with one asking superiors as many as 70 times for help in obtaining a warrant. The situation grew more urgent when the French Intelligence Service sent information that Moussaoui was connected to Islamic radicals with ties both to Osama bin Laden and the Chechen warlord Khattab, and that even within this crowd, Moussaoui was nicknamed “the dangerous one”.

Coleen Rowley, the Chief Division Counsel for the Minneapolis Field Office, absorbed agents’ concerns quickly and was aggressive in asking superiors to seek a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to investigate further. One of the goals was a look at Moussaoui’s computer, as agents believed he’d signaled he had “something to hide” in there. But unlike the former Northwest pilot Prevost, whose superiors trusted his judgment and escalated his concerns, Rowley and the Minneapolis field office were denied by senior lawyers at FBI Headquarters. The Bureau was sitting on the means to stop 9/11 when the planes hit the towers.

This story is actually worse than described, as Rowley made clear in what became a famous letter she wrote to then-Director Robert Mueller the following May. “Even after the attacks had begun,” she wrote, “the [Supervisory Special Agent] in question was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui’s computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence with Misseapolis’ prior suspicions about Moussaoui.”

While the Bureau blamed 9/11 on a lack of investigatory authority, the actions of the Minnesota office showed otherwise. Rowley’s decision to confront Mueller with a laundry list of unnecessary bureaucratic failures made her perhaps the FBI’s most famous whistleblower. Her letter excoriated the Bureau’s Washington officeholders for failing to appreciate agents in the field, and for implicitly immunizing themselves against culpability.

Aftermath: December 8

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 8 Dec 2021

December 7, 1941 is remembered as the date that will live in infamy, but that term was spoken by President Franklin Roosevelt on December 8th. Nowhere was the weight of history more obvious than in the territory of Hawaii.
(more…)

QotD: Game of Thrones as PoMo “deconstructionism”

Filed under: Books, Education, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Finally, Game of Thrones. I think it’s the same deal here, the same faux world weary cynicism. I’ve only seen one or two episodes of the show, but I read the first two or three books, up to the point where I realized two things: 1) he has no idea how he’s going to finish the story, and 2) it’s yet more tedious PoMo “deconstruction”.

Again, I guess I can forgive my colleagues, under-sexed little closet cases that they are, for being distracted by the boob cornucopia up on screen, but in the books, anyway, this comes through plain as day: Everyone in Westeros is either a psychopathic scumbag, or dead. In the very best PoMo style, the author is rubbing our faces in his belief that, since it’s extremely difficult to be heroic — or, all too often, merely decent — everyone who even thinks about trying is a fool, and deserves all the awful shit that happens to him. I’m told that back in the 18th century, a fun topic of debate at salons is whether a society of atheists could endure. Martin’s entire oeuvre seems dedicated to proving that life — mere, grubby, eating-shitting-sleeping existence — will continue in a society composed entirely of scumbags … but he has no idea why.

I have no idea why this idea (if that’s the right word) is so deeply appealing to academics, but evidently it is … and these are the people who are teaching your children.

Severian, “The One Pop Culture Thing”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-16.

December 6, 2024

Victoria’s Canada through the eyes of British visitors

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Michael Ledger-Lomas considers what earlier British visitors to Canada after Confederation wrote about their experiences:

Portrait of Rudyard Kipling from the biography Rudyard Kipling by John Palmer, 1895.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

… The re-election of Donald Trump, who has already daydreamed about turning Canada into his 51st state, might even rekindle Tory patriotism. After all, their Victorian ancestors created the dominion of Canada in 1867 to keep British North America from the clutches of the United States.

A longer view shows that Canada has allured but also vexed British observers ever since its creation. The Edwardian era produced an especially rich crop of writings on Canada. In 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, the first train from Montreal pulled into Vancouver. This completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had persuaded the Crown colony of British Columbia to join in the new federation. In expanding Canada, the CPR also made it easier for British people to see the country. Having crossed from Liverpool to Montreal on a fast liner, they could visit most of its major cities, which were found on or near the railway.

Literary celebrities did so in enviable conditions. The CPR’s bosses loaned the poet Rudyard Kipling his own carriage in 1907, so he could travel in comfort and at his own speed. His impressions, which appeared in newspapers and then as Letters to the Family (1908), make for particularly resonant reading today. Although a man of strong prejudices, he had seen the country up close, rather than merely retweeting allegations about it, and was prepared to be surprised as well as disappointed by it.

Kipling’s contemporaries travelled with heavier and very different ideological baggage than we carry today. It was not wokery that worried them, but irreligion and greed, two poisons that had crept north from America. When the clergyman Hensley Henson steamed into Vancouver, in July 1909, he was horrified to see its beaches plastered with “vulgar advertisements”. The further [East] he travelled, the worse things became. The Anglican clergy were “weaklings” who made no dent on a materialistic society. Winnipeg was given over to “graft”. Young people in Ontario spoke like gum-chewing Yankees. Quebeckers were despoiling their province by setting up hydroelectric dams on its waterfalls.

Kipling did not share Henson’s churchy desire to scold his Canadian hosts. He was a cheerful freethinker who considered materialism a necessary part of nation-building. Canada had “big skies, and the big chances”: he admired its railway workers and lumberjacks for their insouciant and sometimes drunken swagger. Boom towns like Winnipeg excited him: he loved to see office blocks rise and streets flare with natural gas lamps; he lost considerable sums speculating on Vancouver real estate.

What worried him was rather Canada’s fading strategic commitment to the Empire. The modern Right understands Canada as a battleground for the values of “the West”. Kipling, who had married an American and lived for some years in Vermont, naturally believed in and did much to formulate the fervent if vague sense that English-speaking peoples share a civilisation. Yet this did not weaken his overriding concern for the political cohesion of the British Empire. Canada’s failure to join as enthusiastically in Britain’s recent war against the rebellious Dutch Boers of South Africa as he would have liked weighed on him — so much so that he kept calling the prairie the “veldt”. Kipling regarded the scepticism of Liberals and Socialists at home about whether the Empire offered value for money as a “blight”: now this “rot” seemed to be spreading like Bubonic plague, “with every steamer” to Canada.

The way to draw the dominion back to the motherland was to fill it with English settlers who shared his distaste for domestic Socialism. The dilution of English Canada worried Kipling. He allowed the Francophone Catholics of Quebec their differences — he found their basilicas romantic — but the policy of settling the prairies with hardy Slavs from the Habsburg and Russian Empires appalled him. These “beady-eyed, muddy-skinned, aproned women, with handkerchiefs on their heads and Oriental bundles in their hands” could never assimilate to English Canada. Nor did he care that many were fleeing oppression: people who renounce their country have “broken the rules of the game”.

Hegseth is clearly unfit to be Secretary of Defense because LOOK! A SQUIRREL!

Filed under: Government, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I don’t recall having heard Pete Hegseth’s name before Trump nominated him to be the next Secretary of Defense, but Chris Bray clearly thinks the accusations are purely partisan:

Pete Hegseth is being Kavanaughed. And the only people dumb enough to fall for it are Republican senators.

I was willing to hear arguments that Hegseth wasn’t the best choice for Secretary of Defense. In his 40s, he’s on his third marriage, and while the rape allegation from his visit to a conservative conference in Monterey is clearly false, I was wide open to the argument that his actions demonstrated poor judgment. I was prepared to hear an argument. Like many combat veterans, Hegseth had some post-war chaos in his life. Discussion was merited.

But the more these arguments have been made, the dumber they’ve become. We’ve seen this play, and we know the third act: more heat, less light, the descent into completely irrational ranting.

Let’s pretend to take this number at face value, for the sake of argument, though Warren is egregiously misrepresenting the estimate about unreported assaults. Let’s just look at the structure of the claim: In 2023, while Lloyd Austin was the Secretary of Defense, 29,000 troops were sexually assaulted. Therefore, Pete Hegseth must never become the Secretary of Defense.

This is the kind of argument people make when they’re piling on, in an atmosphere of hysteria. It has no logic or order to it, and it does the opposite of the thing it’s intended to do: It depicts current leadership as failures, while arguing against a course correction. Bob punched me in the face, which proves that John is very bad. This is currently the logical structure of half the “news”.

In another Martha-do-you-hear-yourself moment, Lloyd Austin himself recently attacked Hegseth for arguing that women shouldn’t serve in the combat arms:

But read this carefully, and look for the own-goal:

Women serving in combat are facing more danger than men, Austin said.

Therefore, women should serve in combat. Explain the logic, Lloyd. Amazingly, the journalist who reported Austin’s comments missed the implications, mindlessly typing up the claim that women in combat are in more danger than men, then — next paragraph! — framing that statement as a rebuke to someone who warned that the service of women in combat “made fighting more complicated.” We’re not discussing; we’re ritually lining up behind our teams.

Liberal cabinet minister accepts “free” Taylor Swift tickets

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve often joked that it isn’t surprising that politicians can be bought … what is surprising is just how little it can take. This situation isn’t quite as clear-cut as that, but it looks bad to everyone except Liberal Party insiders:

Former Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan in happier times (yeah, it’s the only picture I have of the minister).

On Tuesday we learned that federal Liberal cabinet minister Harjit Sajjan will be attending a Taylor Swift concert at BC Place in Vancouver, in a private suite, courtesy of PavCo, the Crown corporation that operates the stadium. The federal government partially funds PavCo, including $116 million earlier this year for improvements to the stadium in advance of the 2026 World Cup.

It’s a textbook conflict of interest. Open and shut. Dead to rights. So much for Sajjan’s political career. Only … not. The only people who seem to disagree that it’s a conflict are federal Liberals and, sorry to say, the office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner — because Sajjan donated $1,500 to a food bank as a gesture to compensate for the coveted opportunity.

“If an item is paid for through a charitable donation, then it would not be considered a gift,” a spokesperson for the commissioner said in response to questions from National Post. “In the case of Minister Sajjan, for example, the original market value of a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert in Vancouver was roughly $600.”

Where do we even begin with this nonsense?

PavCo offered private-box seats to various dignitaries on the understanding they would donate some appropriate amount of money to good causes. Sajjan says he’s proud to have participated.

But you can’t “pay for” a free concert ticket — to use the commissioner spokesperson’s term — by giving money to a food bank. That’s like The Keg offering you a free dinner so long as you pay for it at Montana’s … except food-bank donations, unlike steak dinners, come with tax receipts.

The Halifax Explosion | A Short Documentary | Fascinating Horror

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Railways, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Fascinating Horror
Published Feb 23, 2021

“On the 6th of December 1917 two ships collided in the mouth of Halifax Harbour in Nova Scotia, Canada …”

â–º Suggestions: hello@fascinatinghorror.co.uk

MUSIC:
â–º “Glass Pond” by Public Memory

#Documentary #History #TrueStories

QotD: Herbert Hoover in the Harding and Coolidge years

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

[Herbert] Hoover wants to be president. It fits his self-image as a benevolent engineer-king destined to save the populace from the vagaries of politics. The people want Hoover to be president; he’s a super-double-war-hero during a time when most other leaders have embarrassed themselves. Even politicians are up for Hoover being president; Woodrow Wilson has just died, leaving both Democrats and Republicans leaderless. The situation seems perfect.

Hoover bungles it. He plays hard-to-get by pretending he doesn’t want the Presidency, but potential supporters interpret this as him just literally not wanting the Presidency. He refuses to identify as either a Democrat or Republican, intending to make a gesture of above-the-fray non-partisanship, but this prevents either party from rallying around him. Also, he might be the worst public speaker in the history of politics.

Warren D. Harding, a nondescript Senator from Ohio, wins the Republican nomination and the Presidency. Hoover follows his usual strategy of playing hard-to-get by proclaiming he doesn’t want any Cabinet positions. This time it works, but not well: Harding offers him Secretary of Commerce, widely considered a powerless “dud” position. Hoover accepts.

Harding is famous for promising “return to normalcy”, in particular a winding down of the massive expansion of government that marked WWI and the Wilson Administration. Hoover had a better idea – use the newly-muscular government to centralize and rationalize American In his first few years in Commerce – hitherto a meaningless portfolio for people who wanted to say vaguely pro-prosperity things and then go off and play golf – Hoover instituted/invented housing standards, traffic safety standards, industrial standards, zoning standards, standardized electrical sockets, standardized screws, standardized bricks, standardized boards, and standardized hundreds of other things. He founded the FAA to standardize air traffic, and the FCC to standardize communications. In order to learn how his standards were affecting the economy, he founded the NBER to standardize government statistics.

But that isn’t enough! He mediates a conflict between states over water rights to the Colorado River, even though that would normally be a Department of the Interior job. He solves railroad strikes, over the protests of the Department of Labor. “Much to the annoyance of the State Department, Hoover fielded his own foreign service.” He proposes to transfer 16 agencies from other Cabinet departments to the Department of Commerce, and when other Secretaries shot him down, he does all their jobs anyway. The press dub him “Secretary of Commerce and Undersecretary Of Everything Else”.

Hoover’s greatest political test comes when the market crashes in the Panic of 1921. The federal government has previously ignored these financial panics. Pre-Wilson, it was small and limited to its constitutional duties – plus nobody knows how to solve a financial panic anyway. Hoover jumps into action, calling a conference of top economists and moving forward large spending projects. More important, he is one of the first government officials to realize that financial panics have a psychological aspect, so he immediately puts out lots of press releases saying that economists agree everything is fine and the panic is definitely over. He takes the opportunity to write letters saying that Herbert Hoover has solved the financial panic and is a great guy, then sign President Harding’s name to them. Whether or not Hoover deserves credit, the panic is short and mild, and his reputation grows.

While everyone else obsesses over his recession-busting, Hoover’s own pet project is saving the Soviet Union. Several years of civil war, communism, and crop failure have produced mass famine. Most of the world refuses to help, angry that the USSR is refusing to pay Czarist Russia’s debts and also pretty peeved over the whole Communism thing. Hoover finds $20 million to spend on food aid for Russia, over everyone else’s objection […]

So passed the early 1920s. Warren Harding died of a stroke, and was succeeded by Vice-President “Silent Cal” Coolidge, a man famous for having no opinions and never talking. Coolidge won re-election easily in 1924. Hoover continued shepherding the economy (average incomes will rise 30% over his eight years in Commerce), but also works on promoting Hooverism, his political philosophy. It has grown from just “benevolent engineers oversee everything” to something kind of like a precursor modern neoliberalism:

    Hoover’s plan amounted to a complete refit of America’s single gigantic plant, and a radical shift in Washington’s economic priorities. Newsmen were fascinated by is talk of a “third alternative” between “the unrestrained capitalism of Adam Smith” and the new strain of socialism rooting in Europe. Laissez-faire was finished, Hoover declared, pointing to antitrust laws and the growth of public utilities as evidence. Socialism, on the other hand, was a dead end, providing no stimulus to individual initiative, the engine of progress. The new Commerce Department was seeking what one reporter summarized as a balance between fairly intelligent business and intelligently fair government. If that were achieved, said Hoover, “we should have given a priceless gift to the twentieth century.”

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.

December 5, 2024

Mélanie Joly in Halifax, demonstrated her belief that “communication” is much more important than “action”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney continues his report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum, where the Trudeau government’s representatives were Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Bill Blair, the Minister of National Defence:

Whoo boy. Mélanie Joly has got to go. Now. Today, if possible. Because we’ve got problems enough without, uh, well … maybe I should just explain what happened.

Joly is, of course, our foreign affairs minister. She and Bill Blair, the national defence minister, constituted the “star power” the Trudeau government sent to the Halifax International Security Forum, which I attended late last month. Joly would have, no doubt, taken part in many direct meetings with allied counterparts and various stakeholders behind closed doors during the three-day event. I can’t tell you what happened there. I can tell you, though, what happened during her public, on the record appearances. One of them in particular. And I can tell you what happened after it.

It wasn’t good.

I covered a bit of the basics about the Forum itself — what it is, who funds it, who shows up — in my last column about this year’s event, so I’ll skip the recap this time. Except for this: the event schedule is divided up into on-the-record panel discussions, off-the-record sessions (generally, those are the more interesting ones), and just lots of slack time for networking and gabbing over coffee and routinely excellent food. Joly took part in two of the on-the-record sessions. In one, she gave introductory remarks. They were about what you’d expect. The other time, she was a panelist. And that’s the one where things went wrong for Joly.

Joly was on a panel titled “Era of Unity: Victory for Ukraine”, moderated by Russian political dissident and chess grandmaster (uh oh) Garry Kasparov. Kasparov can be an aggressive moderator, and he and Joly sparred about the value of the United Nations. (I’m more of Kasparov’s view on the value of the UN, to put it mildly, but Joly more or less held her own under his questioning.) Kasparov followed up with a question about tangible support by Canada for Ukraine. He set it up as a hypothetical — he alluded to the recent re-election of Donald Trump, and noted that there are many who’d be happy to sell out Ukraine to secure some kind of peace with Russia. “Will Canada step in … will Canada play a bigger role? Canada is an important country, as you said,” Kasparov put to Joly. “When you have free time from diplomatic victories at the United Nations,” he asked, a bit mockingly, “can you help Ukraine win?”

Oh dear, I thought. This could be bad.

And it was. And then it got worse.

To Kasparov’s specific question — would Canada help Ukraine win? Would Canada step up and do more? — Joly replied at length about how much she believes in defence. And collaboration. And working together with allies. And why we need an Arctic strategy. And the value of deterrence. And the need for a stronger security architecture in the Indo-Pacific. And then some stuff about North Korean missiles. And then a nice bit about Canada’s long friendship with Ukraine. And how Canada, even though we’re smaller than the U.S., will always advocate for Ukraine at the NATO table.

I haven’t quoted directly from what the minister said. I am conscious about not wanting this entire column to become long quotes. You can see the entire exchange between Kasparov and Joly here, starting at around the 37 minute mark. What I can tell you as someone who watched it in person was that there was a real vibe shift — see, I can talk about vibes, too! — in the room as Joly spoke. Kasparov had asked a straightforward question and he’d gotten an answer that seemed as if Joly was envisioning a globe in her head, and spinning it, and just commenting on everything that came to mind as a different region came into view. Oh! There’s the Indian Ocean! Say something about the Indo-Pacific!

It was bad. Everyone in the room knew it was bad, with the possible exception of Joly.

But Joly hadn’t hit bottom yet.

Ontario’s housing market squeezed by the 35.6% combined tax rate on new builds

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The housing situation in Toronto and the rest of the province has been very tight for years. Lots of would-be buyers chasing the proportionally smaller number of new houses being built. This drives prices higher, but no matter how much of the final price is the builder’s profit margin, the government gets nearly four times as much on every new house sale:

The National Post previously reported that at least a third of a new home’s sticker price in Ontario was comprised of taxes, but an updated report, courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis (CANCEA), now puts the figure at 35.6 per cent.

(It gets even better when it comes to affordable housing — but more on that later.)

The Increasing Tax Burden on New Ontario Homes: 2024, which was commissioned by the Residential Construction Council of Ontario and released by CANCEA on Tuesday, is eye-opening for reasons beyond the fact that a compendium of largely superfluous taxes and production levies has reached 35.1 per cent of the final purchase price of a new home in the city of Toronto. It’s 35.5 per cent in the outlying 905 region, and 34.5 per cent in Ottawa.

The report needed only 16 pages to elucidate how bureaucratic machinations aren’t just gouging prospective homebuyers, but homeowners, too — especially the estimated 1.2 million whose mortgages, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, are due for renewal in 2025.

Read closely enough, CANCEA’s report makes a strong argument that, effectively, Canadians work for the government rather the other way around.

For example, CANCEA’s report demonstrates that 70 per cent of aforesaid taxes on new homes “consist of direct fees on the home, such as DC (development charges) and other fees”.

“For homes priced at $450,000,” which aligns with median income, “… the tax burden rises sharply to 45.2 per cent,” says the report, which also notes that economics often force developers to build smaller units that are insufficient for families.

We must always trust the experts, say the experts and their journalistic fart-catchers

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

Glenn Reynolds (aka the “Instapundit”) welcomes Nate Silver to the expert-doubting party:

Well. I was writing about this stuff long before Nate got hip. Back in 2017, just as Donald Trump began his first term, I wrote “The Suicide of Expertise”, by way of responding to Tom Nichols’ book, The Death of Expertise. Nichols’ thesis was that the experts were expert, but that ignorant, superstitious Americans rejected their advice out of insecurity and an unwillingness to be proven wrong. My response was that the experts’ actual track record wasn’t looking so good:

    Well, it’s certainly true that the “experts” don’t have the kind of authority that they possessed in the decade or two following World War II. Back then, the experts had given us vaccines, antibiotics, jet airplanes, nuclear power and space flight. The idea that they might really know best seemed pretty plausible.

    But it also seems pretty plausible that Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?” Not only have the experts failed to deliver on the moon bases and flying cars they promised back in the day, but their track record in general is looking a lot spottier than it was in, say, 1965.

    It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.

    And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty …

    On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.

    It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.

And this was long before the experts’ ne plus ultra of failure, the bungled, dishonest, and downright self-serving response to the Covid pandemic. The pandemic stemmed from experts’ arrogance, in the form of illegal “gain of function” research funded by the U.S. and laundered through Chinese labs, was met with ass-covering “wet market” lies to try to conceal that origin, and then with public health measures, such as lockdowns and social distancing and masking rules, that were backed by no actual science at all, and that were cheerfully flouted by those propounding them whenever it suited their purposes. The final nail in the experts’ authority-coffin, though, was when, after all the lockdown hysteria, they approved massive public marches by Black Lives Matter because, we were told, racism was a public health problem.

Well, so are STDs, but they weren’t encouraging anyone to march against gonorrhea.

Rather they were (ab)using their position to promote the leftist cause du jour. Everyone saw through it, and their stock collapsed.

So. Welcome to the party, pal. Nate’s noticing just how far things have gone downhill.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress