Quotulatiousness

January 23, 2026

Canadian schizophrenia: “Resist US aggression!” but also “Disarm law-abiding civilians!”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Returning to a topic I’ve been mocking all week on the socials, in The Line, Matt Gurney gently suggests to the Canadian government that it’s just not reasonable to expect Canadian civilians to wage some kind of fierce guerilla war against a feared American invasion while actively disarming Canadians who legally own guns:

A lot has happened, is the thing. A lot is still happening. And it all seems to be happening faster.

But it’s still worth slowing things down just a little bit when the news stories arrive in particularly baffling sequences. Consider just two you may have seen this week: Canada is thinking about fighting an insurgency in case the Americans invade us, and Canada is also working hard to disarm its civilian population. Can I just interject here a moment and suggest that these goals are at odds? That this might be a stupid way of doing things? That the Canadian federal right hand would be shocked and appalled to discover what the left hand was doing?

Let’s take a minute and set up the insurgency thing. It comes from an article published this week in The Globe and Mail. Canadian soldiers are not frantically digging trenches quite yet. The overall consensus is that a U.S. invasion of Canada is unlikely. But clearly, the current trajectory of U.S. geopolitics has shifted the prospect from “batshit crazy” to “it would be weird but we should probably think about it”. So the military is thinking about it — it’s now a contingency being considered, just like the military plans for natural disasters or less bizarre military scenarios, like a war requiring a mobilization or an attack by a terror group or hostile nation on Canadian soil.

And what is the military thinking? Allow me to quote from the Globe:

    The two senior government officials said military planners are modelling a U.S. invasion from the south, expecting American forces to overcome Canada’s strategic positions on land and at sea within a week and possibly as quickly as two days.

    Canada does not have the number of military personnel or the sophisticated equipment needed to fend off a conventional American attack, they said. So, the military envisions unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare or hit-and-run tactics.

    One of the officials said the model includes tactics used by the Afghan mujahedeen in their hit-and-run attacks on Russian soldiers during the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War. These were the same tactics employed by the Taliban in their 20-year war against the U.S. and allied forces that included Canada. Many of the 158 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 were struck by improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

Mmm. This yogurt is tasty.

Let me say three things here: first, I can confirm some of the Globe‘s reporting via my own sources. I know for a fact that members of the Canadian Armed Forces are talking, in a very conceptual, high-level way, about what an insurgency against an invader could and would look like in Canada. I do not know of any serious plans or preparations. But discussions? Absolutely. Second, the plan above, in very vague terms, is probably about correct, in terms of how the Canadian population could resist an invader. The actual shooting war would be over almost immediately — the U.S.’s military advantage would be overwhelming. I think two days is optimistic, frankly. I’m not sure it would take much more than two hours to smash any meaningful military resistance.

So, longer term insurgency against a larger and more advanced force would be the only real option, and in that kind of fight, we’d have some real advantages. We’d be a tougher nut to crack, in many ways, than either Iraq or Afghanistan.

But only if we don’t hobble ourselves first. And this brings us to the third point I’d like to make: did you notice the part about “armed civilians”? Because I sure did.

Civilians, sometimes augmented by experienced military personnel in technical and leadership roles, are always the backbone of an insurgency. They have to be. Insurgencies are hit-and-run affairs, and you can’t do that if you’re driving a tank back to a base. In order to be effective, the population must be armed, or somehow have the means to arm itself. Not to be cute, but the resistance being armed is a necessary precondition for a successful armed resistance.

And we are disarming ourselves.

For the record, Canada and the US have historically had plans to defend against one another even at times we’ve otherwise been very peaceful and friendly. About a year ago, Big Serge suggested updates to the old US “War Plan Red” scenario invasion of Canada:

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

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

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

Proving my near-Nostradamus-level ability to foresee the future, I remarked that “As to why Trump would want to invade a frozen failed state on the brink of bankruptcy, even Big Serge doesn’t have an answer”. Now, of course, the biggest risk to US security would come from Canadian “snowbirds” in Florida, Texas, and Arizona, who may be prone to driving their motor homes or golf carts to attack ICE and US Border Patrol facilities before the Bingo games start at 8.

January 21, 2026

We’ll resist the Yankee hordes with our … um, strongly worded tweets?

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

A brilliant example of the general case of progressives never taking into account the impact of their own pet schemes is the Canadian Armed Forces including “armed civil resistance” as part of their contingency planning for an American invasion … at the same time that the Canadian government is moving heaven and earth to disarm as many Canadians as possible:

Jason James writes:

Canadian military planners have modeled a potential US invasion from the south.

Their plan?

An armed civilian resistance.

I’m not sure if they’ve checked in with the Liberal government yet, but they’ve outlawed most “assault style” weapons (meaning anything that could actually be used to mount such a resistance).

And depending on where the US invades, they might have a difficult time finding civilians who actually own anything beyond kitchen knives.

Furthermore, anyone who does own hunting rifles or the few legal “assault style” weapons would be more inclined to fight on the side of the Americans than defend a socialist wasteland that sold their future to China.

So what’s the plan then? Mobilize the Mexican cartels and Chinese organized crime gangs who actually have some fire power? Form a militia of IRGC operatives and Indian drug gangs to fight American special forces?

I highly doubt any of them would be interested in walking into certain death for a country they have no allegiance to.

So I guess we’re down to a handful of lesbians and communists armed with broom handles defending Vancouver and Toronto from the greatest military power the world has ever known.

Good luck with that, comrades.

No disrespect to James, but the weapons the federal government are trying to confiscate are not “weapons of war” or “assault weapons” — they are mostly semi-automatic guns that look vaguely like military weapons. The feds offered to send all confiscated weapons to Ukraine as they fight a desperate war of defence against the Russian invaders and need anything they can get. And Ukraine refused the offer because these weapons would not be useful in combat. But the basis for confiscating them in the first place is that they’re all dangerous military weapons.

This is likely what would happen if such an invasion materialized:

Of course, you can always depend on Not the Bee to provide a tasteful selection of topical memes.

January 18, 2026

“Voluntary”. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The federal government, rather than abandoning its ridiculous and ineffective “voluntary” firearm buyback program, is determined to carry on:

🇨🇦 The “Voluntary” Trap: Ottawa’s Buyback Is Coercion, Not Consent 🇨🇦
by GoC Admins

The federal government unveiled the next phase of its firearms confiscation program on Saturday, insisting, yet again, that the process is “voluntary”. But as the details emerge, that claim collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

What the government is offering Canadians is not a choice. It is a trap designed to force compliance through financial coercion and the threat of criminal prosecution.

Beginning January 19, licensed firearm owners will be contacted by the National Firearms Centre and invited to voluntarily declare their property. The declaration period runs until March 31, 2026. Those who comply may receive compensation. Those who do not will be required to surrender, deactivate, or export their legally acquired property before the amnesty expires on October 30, 2026, or face criminal charges for illegal possession.

That is not voluntary. That is coercion dressed in bureaucratic language.

The “Voluntary” Deadline Is a Financial Squeeze
The most manipulative aspect of this program is its timeline.

The government has set the amnesty to expire on October 30, 2026, but the window to declare firearms for compensation closes seven months earlier, on March 31, 2026. Owners who wait to see whether a future election, court ruling, or policy reversal intervene are punished for doing so.

This gap is not accidental. It predictably pressures owners to act early, before political uncertainty can resolve itself.

If you wait until the summer or fall of 2026 to see whether the law changes, you will have missed the compensation window entirely. At that point, your only options will be to surrender your property for free or face criminal liability.

Yes, owners can technically wait until October 30, 2026, but only if they are willing to receive nothing in return.

That is not a voluntary choice. It is a financial ultimatum.

🇨🇦 Surrender First, Get Paid … Maybe 🇨🇦

Perhaps the most astonishing revelation from the government’s announcement is that declaring your firearms does not guarantee compensation.

Payment will be issued on a “first-come, first-served” basis, subject to available funding.

In any other context, forcing people to surrender lawfully acquired property without guaranteed compensation would violate basic principles of fairness and due process. Under this program, owners are asked to declare thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars’ worth of property with no legal assurance that the money to compensate them actually exists.

If the budget runs dry, you are still left holding a prohibited firearm you must destroy or surrender. The cheque may never come.

Compliance is mandatory. Compensation is optional.

🇨🇦 A Pilot Project That Already Failed 🇨🇦

Ottawa insists this national rollout will succeed, despite the fact that the pilot version of this program was an embarrassment.

Public reporting indicates that when the government tested the scheme in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, it resulted in the collection of approximately 25 firearms from just 16 individuals. After millions spent on administration, IT systems, and police coordination, only a handful of people participated.

If this were a private-sector initiative, it would have been cancelled outright. Instead, the government is expanding it nationwide without addressing the structural failures that doomed the pilot from the start.

🇨🇦 It’s Not About Safety; It’s About Control 🇨🇦

The government inadvertently revealed its true motivation when officials remarked that they do not want owners using compensation money to “buy an SKS”.

This statement exposes the emptiness of the public-safety argument.

The SKS is already licensed, regulated, and subject to existing Canadian firearms law. By acknowledging that owners might simply replace prohibited firearms with other legal ones that function similarly, the government is admitting that the bans are arbitrary.

The objective is not to remove a particular mechanical risk from society. It is to financially exhaust and discourage lawful firearm ownership altogether.

This program is not designed to stop criminals. Criminals do not declare firearms. Criminals do not comply with amnesty deadlines. Criminals do not interact with government portals.

Only compliant, vetted, RCMP-checked Canadians do.

🇨🇦 The Deadlines Are Real. The Logic Is Not 🇨🇦

Government officials closed their announcement by warning Canadians that “the deadlines are real”.
They are right about that.

The government is fully prepared to criminalize people who followed every rule it imposed. People who acquired their property legally, stored it safely, and harmed no one. It is prepared to spend billions enforcing a program that criminals will ignore entirely.

This is not a buyback. It is not voluntary. It is a forced surrender program aimed at the easiest possible target: responsible firearm owners.

While those driving Canada’s violent crime problem continue entirely outside the scope of this policy, law-abiding citizens are left facing a stark reality: Comply now, or be punished later.

History will judge this program not by its press releases, but by its results. And all available evidence suggests it will deliver exactly what it already has: massive cost, deepened division, and no measurable improvement in public safety.

October 15, 2025

Hamburg votes to secede from industrial civilization

Filed under: Environment, Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Despite my always plummetting hopes for Canada I have to admit that I do enjoy a little soupçon of schadenfreude with every new bit of evidence from eugyppius that Germany is determined to ostentatiously self-destruct even before the demented Dominion can:

Hamburg is German’s leading industrial city. Its companies add 20 billion Euros in gross value every year. Much of this economic output is related to Hamburg’s happy location on the Elbe and the fact that the city is home to Europe’s third-largest port. All of this has made Hamburg extremely prosperous, which prosperity has filled it with rafts of clueless virtue-signalling morons who have no idea how anything works, why they find Hamburg attractive in the first place or how their hip urban lifestyles are maintained.

In this photo, published by BILD, you can see some of these unmitigated retards having a happy because they’ve just scored cheap virtue points by voting in their own personal energy apocalypse.

Photo from BILD via eugyppius

Specifically, these dumbasses are celebrating because their completely insane popular referendum passed with 53.2% of the vote on Sunday. This referendum, the so-called Zukunftsentscheid (“future decision”), binds the Free and Hanseatic City to achieving total carbon neutrality by 2040, five years earlier than the 2045 goal set by the almost equally insane Germany-wide Climate Protection Law as emended in 2021, which is in turn five years earlier than the 2050 goal established by the selfsame law as it originally passed the Bundestag in the year of the child-saint Greta Thunberg 2019.

Turnout was pretty low in Hamburg last Sunday, with less than 44% of eligible voters bothering to cast a ballot, most of them by mail. Thus just 23% of the most deranged Hamburgians could take their city hostage and commit its government to destroying all of its industry and most of its economic activity inside the next decade and a half. The biggest joke is that when Hamburg has finally achieved the sacred Net Zero, it will make absolutely zero net difference to anything. Hamburg is responsible for something 0.022% percent of CO2 emissions globally. The city is not even a rounding error.

The referendum was an initiative of Fridays for Future, but it gathered the support of various social and environmental organisations, among them Greenpeace, the union Verdi and even FC St. Pauli. It will successively cap annual CO2 emissions sector-by-sector, imposing a slow and relentless strangulation in turn on transit, households, commerce and industry.

July 29, 2025

Crimes less serious than “Mischief” according to Canadian courts

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper notes that the sentences being sought for Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber are more severe than prosecutors have asked for what appear to be far more serious crimes:

Chris Barber and Tamara Lich

Last week, Crown prosecutors announced they were seeking jail sentences of up to eight years for Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, two organizers of the Freedom Convoy protest.

Both were convicted of mischief, but the Crown is seeking a minimum sentence of seven years in jail for Lich, and eight for Barber, who was also found guilty of counselling others to disobey a court order.

The Crown has argued that the disruptiveness of the Freedom Convoy blockades warrants the harsh sentence, but in a statement this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said courts are throwing the book at Barber and Lich while simultaneously giving free reign to “rampant violent offenders” and “antisemitic rioters”.

It’s certainly the case that you can do an awful lot of heinous things in Canada before a prosecutor would ever think of asking for seven years. Below, a not-at-all comprehensive list of things you can do in Canada, and have the Crown seek a lighter sentence than the one they’re seeking for the organizers of the Freedom Convoy.

  • Sexually assaulting a baby [5 to 6 years]
  • Using a car filled with guns to ram into Justin Trudeau’s house [6 years]
  • Killing multiple innocent people via drunk driving [5 years]
  • Stabbing a man to death because he told you to stop abusing your girlfriend [5 years]
  • Being a police officer who stalks and sexually harasses crime victims [6 months]
  • Amassing enough child pornography to fill a video store [3 and a half years]
  • Torturing a toddler to death [7 to 8 years]
  • Intentionally ramming a car loaded with children and pregnant women [8 years]
  • Beating a fellow homeless shelter resident to death [5 and a half years]
  • Raping a minor and bragging about it online [4 to 5 years]

June 28, 2025

Punctuation microaggression

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

We appear to have an entire generation — Gen Z — suffering undue trauma from, checks notes, aggressive and distressing punctuation marks:

“American typewriter keyboard layout” by Любослов Езыкин is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

What is more delicious than casting sweeping judgements over entire generations? Contrary to prevailing wisdom, studying and mocking the mores and manners of Generation Z is not only morally just but entirely natural. Not to mention good fun.

At the end of this paragraph, re-read this string of sentences. Study the punctuation. You’ll notice that each sentence ends with a satisfying symbol. What Americans call a period and what Britishers call a full stop signifies the end of the sentence — that the sentence contains a complete thought. How lovely.

That unassuming little dot was good enough for Shakespeare, Hemingway, Ibsen, Miller — every writer who mastered the well-mannered violence of the English Language. They understood, too, the writerly compulsion to kneel before that impossible mistress. Submission sets the writer free.

Submission, however, is not in vogue. Submission implies hierarchy, which implies standards — forbidden notions to anyone under 45.

Generation Z. The Zoomers. Those with the misfortune to have spawned here on Earth between 1997 and 2012. This swarm of digital natives has never known a world without the internet. Or, it appears, one with grammatical standards.

According to linguists, Zoomers view the full stop as Bill Clinton views a well-adjusted woman: with intrinsic horror. For Zoomers, the full stop is the mark of unbridled aggression. Zoomers refuse full stops — period.

In The Telegraph, one-linguist-cum-exorcist said that Zoomers find the full stop deeply troubling. That little dot before these seven words provokes a generational panic attack: “Full stops signify an angry or abrupt tone of voice”.

Another expert chimed in. Dr Lauren Fonteyn tweeted, “If you send a text message without a full stop, it’s already obvious that you’ve concluded the message. So, if you add that additional marker for completion, they will read something into it, and it tends to be a falling intonation or negative tone.”

To renew my sense of horror, I probed further. In a 2015 study at New York’s Binghamton University, undergraduates perceived text messages ending with a full stop as “less sincere” than the same message without one.

Language, like the fish, rots from the head. Researchers also found that exclamation marks, those hyperactive symbols of faux cheer, achieved the opposite of full stops. Those employing an exclamation mark appeared “more sincere and engaged”.

June 5, 2025

German judges seem to be dedicated to ensuring that the government never changes policy, regardless of voter preference

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

The times I despair of the pathetic Canadian government, I look to Germany where eugyppius helpfully explains that German judges are even more dedicated to thwarting the will of the voters than Canadian judges are (and that’s a major achievement):

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

At the start of May, CSU Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt effectively abolished asylum as a path into Germany, empowering federal police to push back all illegal migrants at our national borders.

There ensued a period of messaging chaos, in which Chancellor Friedrich Merz assured our neighbours and the EU that nothing much was happening, while Dobrindt quietly insisted that yes, indeed, he was serious. He gave police orders to step up border checks and to send back all illegal migrants regardless of asylum claims – save for pregnant women, the underage and the sick.

These new borders policies have yet to exercise any significant influence on asylum statistics. It is relatively easy to cross into Germany despite the police spot checks, and we don’t yet know how many asylees are managing to evade them.

The deeper legal issues are much more significant right now. We want to know whether Dobrindt’s intervention is workable in theory, and whether our judges will swallow it. Unfortunately, he is already under siege from asylum advocates on the left and the broader migration industry, who have set and sprung a very telling trap, with the aim of getting courts to overturn even these preliminary and quite meagre interventions.

To understand the issues here, we need a brief legal primer: According to German law (the so-called Asylgesetz), foreigners who enter Germany from “secure” states do not get to claim asylum. They are to be sent straight back to wherever it is they came from. Because Germany is surrounded entirely by secure states, that should really be the end of this insane problem. Alas, this sensible law has been superseded since 1997 first by the Dublin Convention, and later by the Dublin II and now the Dublin III Regulation. The latter forbids the Federal Republic from using her own laws, holding that foreigners entering Germany from secure third states must be welcomed pending a procedure to establish which EU member state is actually responsible for them. Effectively, this means that almost all of these aspiring asylees remain in Germany indefinitely, because deporting people who do not belong here is beyond the meagre capacities of our enormous bureaucracy.

Dobrindt sought to get around Dublin by appealing to Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which allows member states to set aside EU regulations when this is necessary to maintain order and security.

Many have eyed this Article 72 strategy for a long time, but nothing is easy, particularly not in countries unduly enamoured of “the rule of law”, which is a lofty euphemism for “the rule of obscure crazy people in robes for whom nobody ever voted and who enjoy lifetime appointments”. These days the government cannot do anything at all except what it was already doing (and sometimes not even that), or unless it is obviously stupid, expensive and inadvisable, because lurking around every corner is a clinically insane judge eager to explain why sensible things are not allowed. In recent years, our extremely learned and far-sighed judiciary has explained why combating climate change is anchored in the German constitution and why basically everybody is entitled to exorbitant social welfare. All that remains for them is to explain why everybody on earth is also entitled to live in Germany and draw benefits from the state, and they will have completed their suicidal triad.

On Monday, 2 June, the Berlin Administrative Court struck the first blow in this direction. Effectively, they called the whole basis for Dobrindt’s new border policy into question, issuing what amounts to a preliminary injunction in the case of three Somalis (two men and one woman) who had crossed from Poland into Germany on 9 May. Federal police intercepted the trio at the train station in Frankfurt an der Oder; they claimed asylum and the police, in line with Dobrindt’s order, sent them back to Poland anyway. Lawyers from the advocacy organisation Pro Asyl then helped them bring suit in Berlin, and the court intervened in their favour. They get to be professional asylees in Germany now.

April 10, 2025

Too much free speech is bad for German democracy

Filed under: Germany, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

eugyppius notes that criticizing German politicians for their lack of commitment to the principles of free speech can land you in prison if you’re not careful:

David Bendels, the chief editor of the AfD-adjacent Deutschland Kurier, has been threatened with prison time and sentenced to seven months of probation for a Twitter meme. It is the harshest sentence ever handed down to a journalist for a speech crime in the Federal Republic of Germany.

This is the illegal tweet, which Bendels posted via the official Deutschland Kurier X account on 28 February 2024:

It shows German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser holding a sign that has been manipulated to read “I hate freedom of speech!” Bendels posted the image to satirise Faeser’s disturbing plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents in Germany, which she had announced at a press conference a few weeks earlier.

Faeser personally filed criminal charges against Bendels for defamation after Bamberg police brought the meme to her attention. Last November, the Bamberg District Court summarily ordered Bendels to pay an enormous fine for this speech crime “against a person in political life”. This is yet another prosecution that proceeds from our lèse-majesté statute, or section 188 of the German Criminal Code, which provides stiffened penalties for those who slander or insult politicians, because politicians are special people and more important than the rest of us.

The same Bamberg prosecutor’s office and the same Bamberg District Court had previously pursued the German pensioner Stefan Neihoff for the crime of posting another meme implying that German Economics Minister Robert Habeck might be a moron. That case, too, seems to have been brought to Habeck’s attention by Bamberg police, who requested that Habeck file charges. The Bamberg police apparently have very little to do beyond trawling the internet for political memes and protecting democracy by suppressing democratic freedoms.

Bendels appealed his summary penalty, and so the Bamberg District Court put him on trial. Yesterday the judges found him guilty and sentenced him to seven months in prison, which they suspended in favour of probation. The judges claimed that Bendels was guilty because he had distributed a “factual claim about the Minister of the Interior, Ms Faeser … that was not recognisably … inauthentic”, and judged that his meme was “likely to significantly impair [Faeser’s] public image”. The presiding judge demanded that Bendels submit a written apology to the Interior Minister for having so egregiously slandered her.

March 31, 2025

The first genuine “bozo moment” of the federal election campaign

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

I saw a mention on social media that an Ontario candidate had publicly suggested that his primary opponent be dragged off to the Chinese embassy for some kind of reward, and I assumed it was another example of something being taken wildly out of context … but no:

Liberal MP Paul Chiang, left, and Liberal leader Mark Carney, right.

So let’s just recap, because this is almost too surreal to believe.

A sitting Liberal Member of Parliament — Paul Chiang — stood in front of a Chinese-language media outlet in January 2025 and said that if someone were to kidnap Joe Tay, a Conservative candidate and Canadian citizen, and deliver him to the Chinese Consulate in Toronto, they could “claim the one-million-dollar bounty”. That wasn’t some fringe YouTuber or anonymous social media post. That was a sitting MP, elected to represent Markham—Unionville, who also happens to serve as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion.

Let me be crystal clear here: that’s not just inappropriate. That’s not just “deplorable”. That’s language lifted directly from the Chinese Communist Party’s playbook. Joe Tay is on a real bounty list. Not fantasy. Not fiction. A real HK$1 million bounty placed on his head by the Hong Kong police for supporting democracy and speaking out against tyranny.

And what happens when a Canadian MP echoes that threat — on Canadian soil?

Nothing.

As of right now—this minute — Paul Chiang is still an MP in good standing in with the Liberals. Not suspended. Not removed from caucus. No RCMP probe. No parliamentary discipline. Nothing.

And the Carney campaign? The Liberal Party’s new face? Crickets. Absolute silence. Carbon Tax Carney, Trudeau’s old money-man turned globalist messiah, who’s spent the last month talking about “foreign interference” and demanding Pierre Poilievre get a security clearance? Not a word. Apparently, if a Conservative doesn’t submit to Ottawa’s surveillance state, it’s a national crisis. But if a Liberal MP plays mouthpiece for Beijing and jokes about abducting a political opponent? It’s just … Tuesday.

Imagine for a second that a Conservative MP had said anything remotely close to this — maybe even joked about placing a bounty on a Liberal politician funded by a foreign regime. Every major newsroom in the country would have declared martial law. CBC would be live for 72 hours straight. The RCMP would have launched a task force. But because it’s a Liberal, they issue a press release. A shrug. A “deplorable” comment, followed by a half-hearted apology and — get this — no consequences.

As former prime minister Justin Trudeau amply demonstrated, consequences are for other people, not members of the Liberal caucus.

March 13, 2025

This explains a lot … IRS employees aren’t issued personal computers (in 2025!)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

You sometimes read a small item and the information in it is so unexpected, it’s like being suddenly dumped into icy cold water, like this little item from Reason‘s “Morning Roundup” email:

Everything’s computer! But not at the IRS.

“The upheaval at the IRS is already having real impacts,” reports The Washington Post, referring to plans (already underway) to reduce the workforce by half. “Sources familiar with the agency report that its level of phone service is falling, in part because employees are spending their time waiting to use shared computers to respond to [the Department of Government Efficiency’s] requests for weekly emails detailing their work. (Not all IRS employees are issued their own computers.) And they report that taxpayer behavior is already adjusting to the reality of a diminished IRS workforce: IRS receipts — taxes paid already and taxes the agency is scheduled to receive from those who have already filed — are significantly lower than they were at this point last filing season.”

Wait, back up. They don’t have their own computers? And they’re sitting in a queue like schoolchildren in the library, waiting to use a single shared computer to respond to Musk’s five-things-you-did-last-week emails? How long does it take to write those emails? And why don’t they have computers?

Look, I’m worried by the slapdash approach Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken. But the continued federal employee freakout over being asked to justify their jobs by detailing what they’ve done at work makes no sense to me.

I know a girl from college who is a “Work-Life Specialist and Mindfulness Facilitator” at the U.S. Department of Transportation. She leads yoga sessions and “meditation made simple” workshops for federal employees, per her LinkedIn. This is a job I don’t want my taxpayer dollars funding. For Musk to apply scrutiny to this type of thing is a huge win for the American people.

There are lots of legitimate criticisms to make about whether cuts in staffing will actually lead to a better IRS. Taxpayer services will surely suffer if there are fewer people available to answer phone calls and emails; refunds might be delayed, which comes at a real cost to people. Worse tax collection means less revenue for the government, and it’s not like spending is under control — expect the fiscal hole we’re in to get worse if this continues. But “we just can’t figure out how to ration computer use in the year 2025 to craft a bullet-pointed email” is an absurd line that elicits no sympathy, and just leaves me confused about what the hell they’ve been doing all this time. Everything’s not, in fact, computer in the federal government.

September 10, 2024

“The world has gone mad. But nothing is as crazy as the AI news”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia is covering the AI beat like nobody else. In this post he shares several near-term predictions involving AI development and deployment:

The world has gone mad. But nothing is as crazy as the AI news.

Every day those AI bots and their human posse of true believers get wilder and bolder — and recently they’ve been flexing like body builders on Muscle Beach.

The results are sometimes hard to believe. But all this is true:

We truly live in interesting times — which is one of the three apocryphal Chinese curses.

(The other two, according to Terry Pratchett, are: “May you come to the attention of those in authority” and “May the gods give you everything you ask for”. By tradition, the last is the most dangerous of all.)

I get some credit for anticipating this. On August 4, I made the following prediction:

But it’s going to get even more interesting, and very soon. That’s because the next step in AI has arrived — the unleashing of AI agents.

And like the gods, these AI agents will give us everything we ask for.

Up until now, AI was all talk and no action. These charming bots answered your questions, and spewed out text, but were easy to ignore.

That’s now changing. AI agents will go out in the world and do things. That’s their new mission.

It’s like giving unreliable teens the keys to the family car. Up until now we’ve just had to deal with these resident deadbeats talking back, but now they are going to smash up everything in their path.

But AI agents will be even worse than the most foolhardy teen. That’s because there will be millions of these unruly bots on our digital highways.

September 1, 2024

The supermarket master plan to defeat the “far right” in Germany

Filed under: Business, Food, Germany, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There are elections ongoing in the German states of Thüringen and Saxony, and the polls show that the “far right” Alternative für Deutschland is potentially going to get 30% of the votes, which would give them more representation in those states than any of the other parties. Panic and hysteria have set in not only among the politicos and the mainstream media, but even among some businesses:

In Germany, all political parties have a colour. The Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union are black, the Social Democratic Party is red, the liberal Free Democratic Party are yellow and the evil fascist Alternative für Deutschland are blue. This coming Sunday, Thüringen and Saxony will hold state elections, and the blue AfD are leading the polls in both states with about 30% support. This has a lot of people very, very upset. Most of them are merely upset with the AfD, but some psychologically unstable people have allowed their anger to embrace the colour blue more generally, because there can be no limits when it comes to resisting the evil antidemocratic forces of fascism.

Among the new sworn enemies of the blue band of the visible electromagnetic spectrum are the marketing team at Germany’s largest supermarket corporation, the Edeka Group. A few days ago, this supermarket chain, whose own logo strangely enough is primarily blue …

… ran an ad in Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung explaining “WHY BLUE IS NOT ON OFFER AT EDEKA”.

That wall of text in the middle reads as follows:

    Yellow bananas, red tomatoes, green lettuce, purple grapes, orange carrots, pink dragon fruit … EDEKA’s fruit and vegetable department is full of colourful diversity. Or is it?

    If you look closely, there’s one colour you won’t see: blue. And that’s no coincidence. Because blue food is nature’s way of warning us: ‘Watch out! I could be harmful!”

    Evolution has taught us that blue is not a good choice.

    And speaking of choices: Blue is not only the natural enemy of a healthy diversity of fruit and vegetables. In Germany, “the blues” are also the biggest threat to our diverse society.

    So let’s read the warning signs correctly ahead of the state elections in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg in September – and ensure that we can live together in harmony. Because we love diversity.

For those wondering whether Edeka have decided to cease selling fascist blue fruits like blueberries, there is a helpful note down in the corner:

There we learn that, while “‘Blueberries’ or ‘Blue cabbage'” may have “‘blue’ in their names”, their “colour pigments” are not blue. This is “at least what Science tells us – and as we know you should always listen to Science more”. Nothing about this is remotely obnoxious; indeed, if current-year Germany needs anything, it is more blind platitudinous calls to Follow the Science – particularly when it comes to exonerating innocent fruits and vegetables from suspicion of blue fascism.

August 7, 2024

QotD: The crew of HMS Sheffield in the Falklands

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

But it’s 40 years since the Falklands. And from that we get this:

    May 4th 1982: As HMS Sheffield is abandoned and the fire spreads towards the Sea Dart ammunition. The remaining crew gather on the foredeck singing “Always look on the bright side of life”.

Now I have heard that story and I’ve always thought it were more than a little bit mythmaking. And yet, and yet. Someone I know (our fathers knew each other, he took a sister out a few times, we worked together for 6 months later on) was actually there. Running the flight control stuff from the next ship over:

    Singing led by the FC that we had loaned to them. One of our Sea Kings closed on the fo’c’sle to pick up wounded and saw them all swaying from side to side with their arms outstretched. I learned why when he got back.

I’ll take that as being something that really happened then. Not for publication, not something published for home consumption, but something that actually happened. Young men, on a burning ship, not knowing whether they’d be lifted off before the fire got to the missiles and the kaboom of their little bits all over the South Atlantic. […]

We’re a weird, weird culture here in Britain. We will, and do, take the piss out of absolutely anything, including our own impending death.

Now, whether that’s quite what the economists mean by institutions that aid in economic development is another thing but it is indeed one of those institutions of that British culture.

It’s also wholly glorious but then I’m a Brit so I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Tim Worstall, “The British Are A Very, Very, Weird People”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-05-06.

July 17, 2024

What do “‘elf an’ safety” concerns have to do with VIP protection details? A lot, it seems

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

I haven’t been following every twist and turn of the post-assassination-attempt story, but this one really does have me scratching my head. According to the person who had the overall responsibility, the reason the shooter’s location was not properly secured was due to health and safety concerns … for the Secret Service agents, rather than the person they were supposed to be protecting:

Oddly, the roof that the counter-sniper team was occupying visually seems to have a steeper pitch than the one identified as too dangerous:

Since we’re looking at the biggest news event of the year (so far), let’s consider what N.S. Lyons calls “The World Spirit on a Golf Cart“:

I’m going to do something I normally resist doing and offer some hot take thoughts based on recent events. Not on the details of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump specifically (there’s already plenty of that out there), but on what feels like his role in our general moment in time.

In the minutes after Trump dodged a bullet on live television, I joked on Substack Notes that “one does not simply shoot Napoleon”. This proved open to misinterpretation in a few different directions, but what I meant was this:

Napoleon famously led from the front, charging time and again into a hail of bullets and cannon shot, and yet not once was he ever seriously injured. In fact his luck seemed so impervious that he quickly acquired a legendary aura of invincibility. This became part of his overwhelming charisma – meaning not just his social charm but the inexplicable sense of unstoppable destiny that he seemed to exude. This aura proved so captivating to normal men that when he escaped from exile and landed alone in France to … well let’s call it make his “reelection” bid, the army sent to stop him promptly surrendered and switched sides at the mere sight of him.

Napoleon had seemed to become something more than mere mortal: he was a living myth, a “man of destiny” whom Providence had handed some great role to play in history (for good or for ill) and who therefore simply couldn’t be harmed until that role had been fulfilled and the world forever changed. This is why when Hegel witnessed Napoleon he described him with awe as “the world-spirit on horseback”: he seemed truly an “epic” figure, the sweep of history seeming to have become “connected to his own person, [to] occur and be resolved by him” alone, one way or another.

This, it should be noted, used to be the standard way of explaining how the course of the world’s history was shaped. Thus was Alexander understood; thus was Caesar. Only after the Enlightenment and the onset of rationalistic modernity did this mythic view begin to wither away with the broader disenchantment of the world, to be replaced by a depersonalized and mechanistic view of historical causality.

We’re so back now though. Donald Trump has always been something of a bafflingly lucky man, as even his enemies are prone to admit. But witnessing him, in response to whatever whisper of Providence, tilt his head at precisely the right moment and degree to cheat death, I and it apparently many others can’t help but feel like he may be more than lucky – that he now seems as much myth as man.

And when he emerged, shaking off his bodyguards and streaked with blood, to stand and pump his fist in defiance beneath the American flag (as captured by a photographer who just happened to be there at the perfect place and time to reveal an era-defining symbolic image), this was rightly described by awed watchers in the stands and across the nation as “epic”. Maybe epic is the word that comes to their mind only because it’s become internet parlance for “cool shit”. But I suspect that they may mean more than that, that they may be attempting to describe the deeper charisma of someone who really seems to somehow have become a man of destiny, and that they intuited the scene as truly epochal in its meaning.

Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024.

Earlier, Mark Steyn wondered whether the security failures in Butler were caused deliberately or through utter incompetence:

Let’s cut to the chase — the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?

Well, I’ve thought the Secret Service were rubbish not just since we learned of the Cartagena hookers but for at least another decade before that. And increasingly, when it comes to American officialdom — from Kabul to Uvalde — to modify Henry Ford, you can get it in any colour as long as it’s bloated, lavishly over-funded and entirely dysfunctional.

And yet and yet … it’s hard to believe even these guys (plus their bevy of five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue Keystone chorus girls) could be this crap. Assuming for the purposes of argument that the body on the roof is actually that of the perp, a goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

In any accountable “public service”, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secret Service gal would already be gone. By this point after the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, Lord Carrington (Foreign Secretary), Sir Humphrey Atkins (Lord Privy Seal) and Richard Luce (Minister for Latin-American Affairs) had already resigned: see my column of September 17th 2001 expressing in my naïve Canadian way mystification as to why, six days later, all the 9/11 flopperoos had not been similarly dispatched.

Because that’s how it goes in the Republic of Non-Accountability, and, if he’s harbouring any doubts about his fitness for the job, Mayorkas figures it can wait till someone takes out RFK Jr. This is a depraved political culture.

What’s the old line? When seconds count, the police are minutes away? Not at a Secret Service event: even when the police are on site in massive overwhelming numbers, they’re still minutes away.

May 25, 2024

Another thing for progressives to obsess about – “horticultural appropriation”

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

In Spiked, Lauren Smith wonders if your garden — yes, your garden — is a nest of racist appropriation:

Is your garden a bed of racist colonialism?

Is your garden racist? As incredible as this may seem, it’s a question many gardeners are being forced to ask themselves. The innocent act of planting a few flowers can now get you branded with the r-word.

A piece in the June issue of the BBC’s Gardeners’ World magazine claims that the weeds of racism have sprung up in some unlikely places. Landscape designer Jackie Herald argues that choosing to plant non-native species in British gardens can constitute “horticultural appropriation”, because they were originally brought to the UK as a result of colonialism.

Herald writes: “Embedded within cross-cultural borrowing is horticultural appropriation, something that’s all too easy for our nation of gardeners to carry on regardless. In many cases, the abundant plant selections that we now take for granted did come via free-willing exchanges, but were sourced by plant hunters during years of colonialism and power-grabbing global trade.”

So, instead of picking out plants willy-nilly, Herald tries to choose plants that “connect to my client’s cultural heritage”. That means you had better check your 23&Me results before filling your flowerbeds, otherwise you could be horticulturally appropriating plants that don’t align with your racial heritage.

Uprooting racism from your garden might be more tricky than you’d think. Not least as some of the UK’s best-loved flowers are products of “colonialism”. Magnolias, for example, came from colonial Virginia and camellias from China.

Apparently, the most problematic perennial of all is wisteria, that inoffensive purple plant you often see hanging around the doors of posh houses. In 2022, Transport for London published a sightseeing guide called Art on the Underground, which claimed that wisteria has “colonial roots” (presumably no pun intended). This is because it was brought to England in the early 19th century from China. The guide also highlighted the supposedly racist nature of using words like “exotic”, “native” or “invasive” to describe plants. According to TfL, these can cultivate painful memories of “histories of conquest” and are best avoided.

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