Quotulatiousness

May 12, 2025

Hiding Sir John A. from the woke mob

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

Woke iconoclasm swept across the country, but the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald outside the Ontario Legislature in Queen’s Park was hidden away inside a plywood box. James Pew catches up on the situation inside Queen’s Park Crescent:

“Free John” spray painted on the plywood boards covering the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in Queen’s Park Toronto.

It’s not just historical content distorted by bad actors, it is the entire way history is thought about, taught, and used to legitimize all sorts of nefarious agendas, which forms a broader set of concerns. For instance, a Toronto man recently found himself in trouble over a meaningful act of non-destructive civil disobedience involving a monument to a beloved and needlessly contentious Canadian historical figure. Daniel Tate is an ardent patriot and founder of a civic advocacy group called IntegrityTO, who describe themselves as “a coalition of concerned citizens who want to restore integrity-driven leadership so that Toronto can be a great city once again”. In a minor act of public vandalism, and in a moment of frustration over the disrespect shown to Canada’s boxed up father of confederation, Tate spray painted “Free John” on the plywood hoarding covering the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald at Queen’s Park in Toronto. No paint touched the statue itself, just the plywood that hides it away from the public, and protects it from the angry and destructive social justice mob.

Sir John A’s Queen’s Park statue initially became the unseen centerpiece of the current unsightly plywood enclosure after an incident which took place in 2020; three radical social justice activists splashed it with pink paint. It is worth pointing out that this cherished monument to the father of confederation was first installed in 1894. And although Black Lives Matter activists Daniel Gooch, Danielle Smith, and Jenna Reid initially found themselves in hot water over their costly and disrespectful acts of public vandalism (they also painted statues of Egerton Ryerson and King Edward VII Equestrian), all charges were withdrawn in 2021. In their statement to the media the group said, “along with a coalition of artists, the group artistically disrupted statues of slaveholders and monuments to colonialism at Ryerson University and at Queen’s Park”. One would think Daniel Tate should be extended the same leniency for his “artistic disruption”.

Image of Black Lives Matter activists vandalizing the Queen’s Park statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, (via CBC)

As it stands, Tate has been criminally charged with mischief under $5000 which carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. Still in the preliminary stages, his next court appearance is scheduled for June 30.

Last month Tate appeared on AM 640’s The Oakley Show where he remarked, “The sad irony of it, people were defacing and vandalizing national monuments with impunity … four or five years ago. No Charges. We were all watching aghast at how this was all happening. And, it was acceptable somehow. And here I am five years later. I didn’t even deface a statue or a monument, it was literally a piece of plywood – the cheapest plywood you could find. And now I’m clogging the criminal justice system with this completely frivolous charge.”

While covering Tate’s case, independent journalist Daniel Bordman said, “This is a great example of 2-Tier policing because if he wrote Free Palestine instead he’d probably be given the key to the city”. And journalist Anthony Furey posted the following on X: “There has been so much lawlessness and disorder on Toronto streets in recent years that goes totally unchecked … But if you write FREE JOHN on a boarded up statue of Sir John A, police handcuff and arrest you on the spot – which is what happened to Daniel Tate the other week”.

This begs the question, if security was on-site to arrest Tate in the immediate moments that followed his minor spray paint transgression, why does Sir John A. need to be boxed up at all? One security guard around the clock would suffice. Does the Queen’s Park premises not already have security? It appears they keep a close eye on Sir John A’s unfortunate wooden container. So, why not free John? Beef up security a little if necessary, but let our first Prime Minister once again be visible and unadulterated in his rightful place of honour. For the sake of our blessed Holy Peter, it’s been five bloody years!

May 1, 2025

The economics of migration

Filed under: Economics, Education, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lorenzo Warby wonders if an entire discipline can commit suicide:

Can an academic discipline seriously decline? Yes. Disciplines which were once mainstays of universities have either vanished or shrunk to pale shadows of their former selves.

What about a social science? One can envisage a social science disappearing. The most obvious way is it gets utterly discredited and replaced. A less obvious way is its institutional bases could disappear. A final way is its entire social basis disappears.

The West is currently marked by two entirely different discourses on migration that seem unable to interact. One is migration-as-economic-boon. This is the outlook of mainstream Economics. Migrants add to the economic activity of societies and potentially retard the effect of an ageing population by replacing absent local children with foreign migrants. This discourse invokes the authority of Economic Theory and its statistical methods.

This outlook typically treats criticism of migration as economically illiterate, socially retrograde, or morally bankrupt; or some combination of thereof. It is protected by the Self-Righteous, Knowing scoff which is such a feature of the modern professional-managerial class. They are the Masters of Knowledge, and of Moral Concern, who the plebs should defer to.

The other discourse talks in terms of social and democratic decay, increased crime, threats of violence, increased fiscal stress, even the possibility of civil war.

This is the world where, in Sweden — due to the stress on social and fiscal order from migration — it has become policy to pay migrants to go away. This is the world where highly intelligent and informed folk quietly discuss how the performance of economists on migration has been so catastrophically bad, it may bring down the entire discipline.

The adherents of the second, problems-with-migration, discourse are well aware of what mainstream Economics has to say on migration, and judge it to be obviously and demonstrably — even catastrophically — false. That it is much harder for migrants to contribute positively to a society than mainstream Economics admits, and this gets worse the higher the rate of migration. A recent Dutch study (Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569) found that:

    Only 20% of all immigrants [to the Netherlands] make a positive lifetime net contribution to the public budget. Groups with large contributions come from Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon world and a few other countries like France and Japan.

The adherents of the first discourse seem either utterly unaware of the second discourse, or protected from even considering it by the Self-Righteous Knowing scoff. Their mastery of Theory is such, they cannot possibly be so catastrophically wrong.

The notion that migration could break a society along its existing fracture lines to the point of civil war would absolutely be treated with the Self-Righteous Knowing scoff, despite there being — as is discussed below — at least three historical examples of precisely that happening.

April 29, 2025

QotD: The confidence game

Filed under: Law, Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the basics of the confidence game have not changed all that much with the new technology. The confidence man gets his name because he is adept at winning the confidence of the mark. The mark then lowers his defenses and foolishly trusts the con man, rather than his own natural skepticism. The mark is manipulated into thinking the con man is a friend or at least someone who can be trusted. The con man then uses that trust to exploit the mark.

The way in which the con men does this is by flattery. The mark trusts the con man, because the con man finds small ways to confirm the beliefs of the mark. The adept grifter will be a good listener and pick up the little things that the mark thinks are important, like religious beliefs or opinions about personal matters. Seemingly out of the blue, the con man will express those same opinions, which flatters the mark. After all, everyone likes being told that their private opinions are smart.

That’s something you see with the internet grifters. They often have worn a lot of masks as they seek out on-line audiences. […]

Another aspect of the con that remains constant is how the con man uses his alleged status as a victim to work the mark. Con men will use their mark’s natural empathy to win their confidence. Today that often means claiming the big bad tech companies are censoring them. Alternatively, they will claim evil trolls are haunting their internet activity, causing them harm. The term troll has been changed from meaning someone seeking attention to something almost supernatural.

The Z Man, “Carny Town”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-29.

April 28, 2025

A potential positive to the explosion of AI-generated fake porn

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The one thing we have always been able to predict with 100% confidence is that every new media will be used for pornography and crime, often in the same product. However, No Pasaran makes a case for there being a socially useful side to the ever-increasing realism of fake porn from popular LLM generators:

Seriously?! Am I the only person that sees the benefits of this “troubling trend” of online bullying?!

Think about it.

Blackmail is now a thing of the past.

That’s it.

It’s over.

Whether you are a teen or an adult, whether the photos are real or not, you can simply pass all of them off — indeed, you can do so nonchalantly — as fakes or deepfakes. To your classmates, to your spouse, to your constituents. Who will know whether you are fibbing or telling the truth? (Maybe you hardly know yourself …)

(In a totally different context, of course, that is exactly what Joe Biden’s White House did …)

As it happens, a considerable size of the audience for these sex photos/videos — maybe far more than half — will already be assuming that they’re fakes … (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.)

Depression at 16? Suicide at 17? Why fear sextortion at this point? Compliment instead the (anonymous) photo/video creators for doing a good job — for doing an outstanding job.

On my phone I keep receiving photos of Donald Trump tenderly cuddling with Joe Biden or Vladimir Putin or Stormy Daniels. Lots of apps now make you “repair” snapshots that are decades or (over) a century old, colorize them, and make them into mini-movies (the latest one I saw delighted me as it involved Civil War daguerreotypes from the 1860s).

I also keep receiving AI ads where, by combining a couple of photos of myself and of any girl (someone I know and am perhaps infatuated with or some rock or movie star or someone — Marilyn Monroe? Rudolph Valentino? Che Guevara? Queen Victoria? — who has been dead for decades) I can make myself hug or kiss that person — hungrily — on the mouth.

Years ago (long before AI), I was writing a TV script imagining a politician who was on national television and who was all of a sudden ambushed with private photos of him in a compromising position (with a woman other than his wife, with a man, with many women, with many men, at an orgy, in a BDSM cave, with a money shot, whatever …). Talk of falling victim; talk of bullying; talk of harassment (justified or otherwise)!

How should he react?

Ignore the content. And, with an admiring voice, let out a whistle and praise the work: “Wow, that’s well done!”

“What do you mean?!” interrupts the TV presenter, visibly frustrated. “No no no! Don’t tell me you are claiming they’re fake?! We have proof that you were seen at—”

Again, this was before AI, needless to say, which only made the politician’s next words even more startling: “It is so how admirable the degree to which studios have made progress with special effects!”

April 25, 2025

Canada’s lost decade, 2015-2025

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

It’s quite remarkable how many economic charts show the US and Canadian economies tracking along similar paths up until “something” happened in 2015 that knocked the Canadian economy well below the US trend line. I wonder what happened in 2015 that could account for this quite visible change in fortune?

GDP growth in Canada fell off a cliff over the period from 2015 onwards. This kinda matters.

Throughout the 2025 campaign, the Conservatives have frequently referred to what they call the “Lost Liberal Decade”, a reference to the fact that Canada has lagged dramatically on virtually every available indicator since the Liberals first came to power in 2015.

In sum, the economy is worse, crime is worse, public services are worse, affordability is worse — and there’s a whole galaxy of niche indicators, such as firearms incidents, refugee backlogs, even life expectancy, that are worse than they’ve ever been.

Below, a quick guide to the fact that, whatever you think of the Liberals, the last decade has really not been great for Canada.

In the year the Liberals took office, 604 people were murdered across Canada. This was already a slight uptick from the year before, when murder rates hit a low not seen since the mid-1960s.

Just seven years later, in 2022, homicides would hit a high of 874. In raw numbers, that’s 270 more murdered Canadians.

But even when accounting for population growth, there are way more murders happening now than in 2015. The homicide rate in that year was 1.71 murders per 100,000 people. As of 2023, the most recent year for which Statistics Canada has released data, it was 1.94.

Put another way, if Canada had stuck to the homicide rates of 2015, we’d have had 94 fewer murders in 2023, 216 fewer murders in 2022, and about 150 fewer murders in 2021.

And it’s a similar story when it comes to virtually every other category of crime. Statistics Canada maintains a “crime severity index” that attempts to aggregate the raw amount of criminality each year in Canada. The index bottoms out just before the Liberals came to power in 2015, and has been on the upswing ever since.

Unfortunately, this is particularly true when it comes to violent crime. For one thing, the number of guns being turned on people each year in Canada has never been higher.

In 2015, for every 100,000 Canadians, there were 28.6 incidents of firearm-related violent crime. By 2022, the last full year for which data is available, this had surged to 36.7 incidents — nearly a 30-per-cent increase in just seven years.

The Correctional Service of Canada publishes annual statistics on incarceration rates, and a noticeable trend begins to emerge starting in 2015: The prison population begins to plummet.

April 20, 2025

The essence of (most) modern western governments

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

Chris Bray on the paradox of how many western governments manage the alchemy of being both omnipresent and yet absent simultaneously:

Adding to my last post about covering language that masks the massive expansion of government behind performative language about limiting government: The most Los Angeles thing I have ever seen happened behind the Yoshinoya Beef Bowl.

See the alley between the Yoshinoya and the pharmacy? As I drove by on Wilshire, two extremely alert LAPD officers on motorcycles were sitting at the edge of that parking lot, postures tight and poised for action, urgently scanning the street. It was like watching a gunfighter movie, in the scene when the camera closes in on the gunfighter’s eyes, watching his opponent for the draw. These dudes were ready. If you did 38 in the 30 MPH zone, then brother, you were dead-ass done, nailed up in the trophy case.

Also, no more than thirty feet away from them, a little gaggle of filthy human zombies was passing a glass pipe around the circle, throwing up clouds of smoke, at the top end of an alley wall-to-wall full of open drug use and not terribly subtle drug dealing (and probably the prostitution that pays for the drugs, but I didn’t wander into the alley to look). But California made the possession and use of heroin, meth, and cocaine a misdemeanor, and the DA at the time was very proud that he wouldn’t allow his office to file most misdemeanor cases, because misdemeanors are lifestyle crimes that punish people for being poor, or for being “individuals experiencing homelessness”. So that alley full of people Hunter Bidening all day out in the open weren’t doing anything that could lead to prosecution, but your expired registration tags would bring down an immediate police response in you happened to roll by them.

Grand Guignol human depravity and ruin: no big deal. Minor traffic offenses: front and center.

This is Blue Zone governance, full stop, the thing people describe as anarcho-tyranny. Common San Francisco business owner experience: Police don’t intervene in the constant vandalism and tagging that degrades business property, but the highly alert army of code enforcement officers fine business owners for failing to clean up the damage that the city hasn’t prevented.

I forget who recently suggested this on I-still-call-it-Twitter, but go to Yelp and read some reviews for gas stations in Oakland:

April 15, 2025

What is it with the progressives’ love for (some) brutal murderers?

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

I’ve managed to avoid watching any of the interview, but Taylor Lorenz was on CNN, where utter inhumanity is apparently the flavour of the month for all right-thinking progressives:

Former New York Times and Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, speaking about accused killer Luigi Mangione on CNN MisinfoNation with Donnie O’Sullivan:

    To see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone stanning a murderer when this is the United States of America. As if we don’t lionize criminals … There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and the angles that mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels … You’re going to see women especially that feel like, “Oh my God”, right? Like, “Here’s this man who’s revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who is young, who’s smart”. He’s a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.

I know Lorenz is a human bug-zapper whose purpose is luring people to doom by drawing them to the glow of the impossibly stupid online utterance, but even by her standards this is nuts. For one thing, Lorenz is a leading advocate for dumbed-all-the-way-down media like her “beloved” Vine, which featured six-second-max videos. If someone handed her a hardcover book, she’d be a serious threat to bite it. Her invoking Flannery O’Connor and A Good Man is Hard to Find in the context of Luigi Mangione is high comedy. Regarding America “stanning” murderers because “we give them Netflix shows,” which does she mean? Americans may be fascinated by O.J. and Bundy and Phil Spector, but we don’t gush cartoon hearts at them over cable, we watch them in lurid docudramas.

As Jim Treacher puts it:

The thing I like most about journalism is the moral authority.

Journos are better human beings than the rest of us — morally, ethically, and intellectually — and they’re not shy about saying so. Their views are the correct views, after all. Their political opinions are the North Star. And if you disagree with anything they know to be true about the world, you’re the enemy and they don’t care what happens to you.

Hell, if you’re on their literal hit list, they’ll openly laugh and swoon over anyone who hurts you. If you don’t believe it, just watch the following clip from a cable news network.

Dramatis Personae:

  • Donie O’Sullivan is a “senior correspondent” for CNN.
  • Taylor Lorenz is a reporter who has worked for the New York Times and the Washington Post.
  • Luigi Mangione, the heir to a wealthy Baltimore family, shot a health insurance executive named Brian Thompson in the back as he was walking to work in Manhattan.

And now, here are O’Sullivan and Lorenz celebrating the murder on national television.

March 16, 2025

Female sexual predators

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

Every civilized person rejects the notion that male sexual predators should be tolerated, yet few are willing to accept the notion that female sexual predators might even exist. They absolutely do exist and they do commit terrible crimes against their — often very young — victims, as Janice Fiamengo shows:

Even when we are aware that women prey on children, many of us can’t really believe it. When Florida Congresswoman Anna Luna, a Republican elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, proposed three new bills last year that would impose harsh penalties, “including the death penalty”, for various forms of sexual abuse, child pornography, and child sexual exploitation, it is impossible to believe that Luna thought any number of women would be executed for child rape, and nor will they be given the leniency that is shown to women in the criminal justice system (see Sonja Starr’s research).

Yet similar crimes to Ma’s are easily discovered. In the same month that Ma pled guilty, a Martinsville, Indiana teacher was charged with three counts of sexual misconduct against a minor, a 15-year-old boy who has alleged that as many as ten other students were raped by the same woman. The month before that, a New Jersey primary school teacher was charged with aggravated sexual assault against a boy who was 13 years old when she bore his child; it is alleged that she began raping the boy when he was 11. The month before that, a Tipton County, Tennessee teacher [pictured below] pled guilty to a dozen sex crimes against children ranging in age from 12-17 years old. It is thought that she victimized a total of 21 children.

In the same month, a Montgomery, New York teacher pled guilty to criminal sexual assault of a 13 year old boy in her class, whom she assaulted over a period of months. In the previous month, a San Fernando Valley teacher was charged with sexual assault of a 13 year old male student; police believe she victimized others also. Earlier in the year, a substitute teacher in Decatur, Illinois was charged with raping an 11 year old boy. These are just a few recent cases, and only those involving female schoolteachers. Female predators are also to be found amongst social workers, juvenile detention officers, and sports coaches.

The feminist position on male sexual abuse of women and girls has for a long time been that it is about power. Men rape and abuse, according to Susan Brownmiller [quoted above] and others, because they believe it their right as men to keep women subordinate. Rape compensates for male inadequacy and allows for the expression of men’s hostility toward women: it is not about lust but about men’s need to humiliate and degrade. As Paul Elam once noted in a Regarding Men episode, the theory is fatally weakened if even a single woman does the same thing. Feminists have responded by saying that female sexual abuse is fundamentally different from male, less dangerous to society, less hurtful to its victims.

While I was doing research for this essay, I happened upon a recent podcast discussion between Louise Perry, British author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and Meghan Murphy, Canadian Substack author and editor of Feminist Current. The podcast was called “What Happened to Feminism?” and I tuned in because I have enjoyed their perspectives on other issues.

Perry and Murphy are both critics of feminism who remain, as their conversation confirmed, staunchly feminist and anti-male. At one point in the podcast (at about 50:00), the conversation turned to #MeToo, and especially to allegations against teachers. Having already agreed that 95% of MeToo allegations were true, or at least based on something real, the pundits went on to agree, with disconcerting laughter, that there was no comparison between a “crazy” woman who “had sex” with a male student in her class, and a “dangerous” man, a “predatory rapist”, who went after under-age girls in his power.

Murphy even trotted out the old chestnut that abused boys were “stoked about the situation” in getting with “the hot teacher”. After all, she chuckled, “Men are gross predators. Men are perverts. They can’t keep it in their pants.” Perry, seeming taken aback by Murphy’s vulgarity, nonetheless agreed that the sexual abuse of boys is in an entirely different category from that of girls: “It is so annoying to me,” she said, “when people will go around claiming that these are exactly the same”.

Indifference to the victimization of boys, and lack of shame in admitting it, could hardly have been more stark. I mention the podcast not because it was singularly outrageous but because the attitudes expressed in it are still so much the norm, even amongst women who claim to have rethought other feminist beliefs.

March 3, 2025

Is DOGE merely uncovering what used to be called “honest” graft?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jon Miltimore explains where the expression “honest graft” came from and gives examples of what the DOGE investigations have turned up so far:

In 1905, George Washington Plunkitt made arguably the most famous defense of political graft in American history.

“Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft,” the New York state senator and Tammany Hall member wrote, “but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft”.

Plunkitt was responding to The Shame of the Cities, a book by journalist Lincoln Steffens that exposed sweeping political corruption in U.S. cities.

The ward boss’s shameless defense of “honest graft”, which is still assigned to undergraduates a century after Plunkitt’s death, comes to mind when looking at the fraud, waste, and abuse Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and others are uncovering.

To take but one example, consider the billions of dollars in taxpayer funds the Environmental Protection Agency awarded last year to Power Forward Communities. If you’ve never heard of the nonprofit group, you’re forgiven. Almost nobody has — because it didn’t exist until late 2023.

Power Forward Communities had no footprint, online or otherwise, until October 2023, when it was announced as part of the Rewiring America program, an organization linked to former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, which says its mission is “all about Rewiring America’s values, people, and culture.”

Less than a year after its creation, Power Forward Communities was awarded $2 billion via the EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund — even though it reported just $100 in revenue during its first three months of operation.

The payment, which is slated to continue through June 2031, caught the attention of Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator.

“It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion,” Zeldin said.

Indeed. It’s graft on a scale the Tammany Hall charlatans couldn’t have imagined.

Historical sources say 19th-century politician Boss Tweed and his ring of cronies took in at least $50 million in corrupt money in backroom deals, kickbacks, and skimming before Tweed was convicted of larceny and forgery in 1873 and fled to Cuba, and later Spain. In 2025 dollars, that’s about $1.3 billion — considerably less than the single payoff former President Joe Biden’s EPA awarded Power Forward Communities.

February 27, 2025

Reining in the ATF

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

J.D. Tuccille on the ATF’s immediate future with FBI director Kash Patel as the newly appointed acting head of the bureau:

Kash Patel, 9th Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

… it’s impossible to credibly argue that the ATF doesn’t need a shakeup. After all, this is a federal agency that ran guns to criminal gangs in Mexico as part of a bizarre and failed “investigation”, manipulated mentally disabled people into participating in sting operations — and then arrested them, lost thousands of guns and gun parts, killed people over paperwork violations, and unilaterally reinterpreted laws to create new felonies out of thin air (which means more cause for sketchy investigations and stings). The federal police agency obsessively focused on firearms has long seemed determined to guarantee itself work by finding ever more things to police.

But what about putting the same person in charge of both the ATF and the FBI? How does that make sense?

Well, there’s a lot of overlap in the responsibilities of federal agencies. During the ATF’s “Operation Fast and Furious” gunrunning escapade in Mexico, it coordinated — badly — with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). During its 2012 investigation of that fiasco, the Justice Department Inspector General “conducted interviews with more than 130 persons currently or previously employed by the Department, ATF, the DEA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” on its way to identifying “a series of misguided strategies, tactics, errors in judgment, and management failures that permeated ATF Headquarters and the Phoenix Field Division”.

[…]

Done right, you wouldn’t need as many agents for the combined agency, and you would have lower overhead. But — and this is a big concern — done wrong, you’d end up with a supercharged federal enforcement agency with all the hostility to civil liberties its old components embodied when separate, but now with lots more clout.

When he took charge of the FBI, Patel became the leader of an agency that has long served as a sort of political police. Its abuses date back decades and never seem to go away, just to morph into new ways of targeting anybody who criticizes whoever is currently in power.

“The FBI entraps hapless people all the time, arrests them, charges them with domestic terrorism offenses or other serious felonies, claims victory in the ‘war on domestic terrorism’, and then asks Congress for more money to entrap more people,” John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower, wrote in 2021.

That means there’s already a problem that needs to be addressed, or it could infect a combined agency rather than taking the sharp edges off the ATF.

Also troubling is that before his nomination to head the FBI, Patel made comments suggesting he wants to target his own political enemies. He’s backed off those threats, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee he’s committed to “a de-weaponized, de-politicized system of law enforcement completely devoted to rigorous obedience to the Constitution and a singular standard of justice”. But it’s worth watching what he does with his roles at the separate FBI and ATF before combining the two agencies into something more dangerous.

Or maybe the Trump administration won’t take the next step of formally integrating the ATF and the FBI. Self defense advocates have long called for ATF leadership that isn’t actively hostile to gun owners. If all Patel does is rein in the ATF so that Americans get a few years of relief from that agency’s abuses, that’s a victory itself. But eliminating a much-loathed federal agency would be even better.

February 26, 2025

QotD: The banality of crime

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

When I was still in grad school, there was a big pot bust in College Town. Big enough to merit statewide notice, anyway — a couple hundred pounds, something like that, obviously not El Chapo level but enough to where some kind of actual, organized smuggling was involved.

Cynical bastard that I am, I immediately wondered just how they’d managed this feat of law enforcement. College Town being, well, a college town, it had a surprisingly large police force, but the cops dealt overwhelmingly with quality-of-life stuff. I doubt they had more than one or two full time detectives (if that) chasing burglars; I don’t recall College Town ever having a homicide. They certainly didn’t have narcs on the force, is what I’m getting at, so how on earth did they disrupt this small-time, amateurish, yet still legit (on volume alone) drug smuggling operation?

I forget the details, but as you’d surmise from this story taking place in Clown World, they were fake and gay. I’m slightly fictionalizing, and slightly exaggerating, but it really was on the level of “A prowl car saw a guy driving erratically and pulled him over, at which point smoke started billowing out of the windows. The cop looked in and found a felony amount of pot sitting in a garbage bag on the front seat, and the driver copped a plea — he ratted out his supplier, and when the cops showed up with a warrant, that knucklehead, too, had his bales of marijuana sitting out in plain view on the living room couch.”

Most crime works like that, as it turns out. Even in the big cities, where police departments have bigger budgets and more combat power than a lot of European armies. Homicides, for instance, are 99% paperwork, I’m told. Everyone knows that Peanut shot Ray Ray over a pair of sneakers, not least because Peanut is walking around in the damn things, and probably still has the gun shoved in the waistband of his track suit, too. “Solving” the homicide is just a matter of putting the paperwork through. Stone cold whodunits, like big sophisticated undercover narcotics operations, are vanishingly rare, because the cost of enforcement, let’s call it, is extremely high.

I know, I know, The Wire was a tv show, but people I know who really do work in law enforcement say it’s close enough to the real thing for our purposes. Drug dealers down in the ‘hood aren’t nearly as smart and sophisticated and above all self-disciplined as the Barksdale Crew, but the basic principle is the same: Since the low-level people are inevitably going to get busted, make sure that the low-level people don’t have anything on the guys one level higher, and your drug dealing operation is more or less safe. Just as Peanut could probably get away with blasting Ray Ray in broad daylight if he were smart enough not to wear the shoes around, so the pot dealers in College Town could’ve gotten away with their operation more or less forever, provided they weren’t stupid enough to be driving around high on their own supply, with said supply in plain view in the passenger seat.

Severian, “The Cost of Enforcement”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-29.

February 12, 2025

QotD: Jacob Zuma – South Africa’s answer to Donald Trump

Filed under: Africa, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Thabo] Mbeki’s presidency ended in disaster and humiliation, but it paved the way for one of the most colorful politicians alive today: Jacob Zuma. The most important thing for Americans to understand is that Zuma is basically a left-wing and South African version of Donald Trump. He is colorful, bombastic, and over-the-top. He has a tendency to break into song at political rallies and church services. He says outrageous and inappropriate things. He is beloved by the far left and grudgingly admired by the far right and fanatically hated by all the bien-pensants in the center. He was viciously persecuted by the South African deep state, and his accession to the presidency caused a bitter #NeverZuma faction to break off the ANC and start another party (incredibly this party is called “COPE”). Finally, he is an out and proud polygamist and brags openly about his corruption, and people love this because they know every politician is doing it, he’s just honest about it.

The ANC bosses did not like Zuma. For decades the ANC had been dominated by elite, western-educated, communist Xhosas, but Zuma was none of those things. Zuma came from nothing — his mother was a janitor and his father died when he was 3. Zuma was so illiterate and uncultured that Mbeki tapped him to be deputy president on the theory that it would keep his own position secure, since nobody would ever let Zuma be president (yeah this backfired spectacularly). Most shocking of all, Zuma was a Zulu. He danced in a loincloth and leopard skin with the Zulu king at the Shaka festival. The idea of this savage wildman becoming president was just beyond the pale. Something had to be done to stop him.

The last chance to stop Zuma was a credible-seeming rape accusation from a family friend. The ANC pounced on this, and initiated a high-profile criminal trial. This incensed Zuma’s supporters, who insisted that the prosecution was politically motivated (given that over the past decade the ANC had all but stopped prosecuting rape cases in society more broadly, they may have had a point). The trial was a total debacle. Countless thousands of young activists showed up outside the courtroom wearing t-shirts with slogans like “One hundred percent Zuluboy”, “Burn the bitch”, and “Zuma was raped”. When summoned to the witness stand, the president-to-be performed war dances and led the crowds in song. The prosecution collapsed after the accuser’s story was found to be inconsistent on numerous points, and a triumphant Zuma rode the backlash all the way to the presidency.

There’s another way Jacob Zuma is like Donald Trump: the corrupt and failed ruling classes of both South Africa and the United States find it convenient to blame these men for everything that has gone wrong in their countries ever since. In fact in Zuma’s case, history has begun to be rewritten so that he can be blamed for things that happened before he became president. Many of the South Africans I’ve spoken to will confidently assert that some problem (say, the power outages) is all due to Zuma. When I gently point out that those outages began in 1998 and innocently ask who was president then, they shut down entirely. Zuma is the scapegoat for the failings of an entire country, and making him the sole source of all evil plays the important social role of allowing everybody to pretend that things were great until he showed up (things were not great). In a similar vein, I will not be shocked if decades from now, Donald Trump is blamed for starting the fentanyl epidemic.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: South Africa’s Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-03-20.

February 3, 2025

Rational response to Trumpish provocations? Don’t be silly, we must run in circles with our hair on fire!

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

My first entry in the “Trump tariff diary” on social media perhaps takes the situation too flippantly:

President Trump trolled Justin Trudeau about Canada becoming the 51st state.

Trump tariff diary, day 1: Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada struck back at the Big Orange Meany by wearing particularly fashionable socks to his press conference. Ontario will remove all bottles of Jack Daniels from the government liquor monopoly distribution system. The American national anthem will be formally booed at all NHL games played in Canada from now on.

At the National Post, Tristin Hopper offers much more substantive and serious suggestions:

Order Ryan Reynolds to defame American directors until free trade is restored.

Spend 10 years relentlessly kneecapping the Canadian economy for no reason to show Trump we’re not scared of him.

Politely suggest that the U.S. may have confused us with China. Say that although both countries start with the letter C, China is the one seeking to destroy American hegemony via economic means, and we’re just an obsequious neighbour who sells them raw materials.

As a gesture of fealty to American continental supremacy, immediately adopt the U.S. Constitution as Canadian law. Uphold it about as loosely as our existing constitution so there’s no material change.

Volunteer an honour guard of Mounties to serve alongside the Secret Service. Force them to wear red serge if Trump asks.

Offer to pillory a Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago if the tariff threats stop, but don’t specify which one.

Put sugar in the crude oil so all the U.S. refineries seize up.

Instead of shutting off Canadian electricity exports, export too much electricity so that their toast burns and the coffee is too hot.

Send Trump a bentwood box filled with smoked salmon as a gesture of goodwill. When he opens it, it’s just filled with bees.

On a rather more serious note, PPC leader Maxime Bernier posted this on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter:

It’s important to understand that the 25% tariffs announced by President Trump today are NOT imposed on Canada — they will be paid by American consumers and businesses who buy goods imported from Canada. Tariffs are a tax, and Americans who will have to pay more or go without our products will be the first to suffer.

Of course, Canadian exporters of these goods will as a consequence lose clients, contracts and sales, and will be forced to cut down on production and lay off workers. Or they will lower their prices to keep market shares and will see their profits diminish.

Because 75% of our exports go south of the border, our economy will for sure be very negatively impacted by this.

The stupidest thing our government can do however to deal with this crisis is to impose the same kind of tariffs “dollar for dollar” against US imports.

The US economy is ten times bigger than ours, much less reliant on trade than ours, and much less dependent on our market than we are on theirs.

Not only would retaliatory tariffs have much less impact on American exporters, they would immediately impoverish Canadian consumers forced to pay more for imported goods, as well as destabilize Canadian businesses that need inputs from the US in their production processes. It would more than double the harm of the US tariffs to our economy.

Trade wars are bad for everyone, but they are much worse for a small country with fewer options. We simply cannot win a trade war with the US. It’s very unlikely that Trump will back down. All we will do is provoke a massive economic crisis in Canada, until we are forced to capitulate.

Another self-destructive thing to do would be to set up giant “pandemic-level” bailout plans to support everyone affected by this trade war. This will simply bankrupt our governments even more than they already are and make us even weaker.

So what should we do?

1. Double down on efforts to control our border, crack down on fentanyl dealers, deport all illegals, and impose a complete moratorium on immigration, to answer Trump’s immediate concerns about Canada.

2. Tell the US administration that we are ready to renegotiate North American free trade and put dairy supply management and other contentious issues on the table.

3. Wait and see to what extent Trump is willing to keep tariffs in place despite the harm it does to the US economy. Despite his pretenses that Americans don’t need our stuff, the reality is that on the contrary they have few other options for crucial resources like oil, lumber, uranium and other minerals, etc. He will stop acting like a bully when he sees that he can get more results by sitting down and negotiating.

3. To reduce our dependence on the US market, immediately implement an ambitious plan to tear down interprovincial trade barriers and help our impacted exporting industries find alternative markets in other countries.

4. Immediately implement a series of bold reforms to make our economy more productive, including: reduce corporate and personal taxes, abolish the capital gains tax, abolish all corporate subsidies, get rid of excessive regulation, remove impediments to the exploitation and export of natural resources, drastically cut government spending, mandate the Bank of Canada to stop printing money and start accumulating a gold reserve to prepare for the global monetary reset (which is likely part of Trump’s plan).

In short, instead of adopting a suicidal strategy to confront Trump, we must do what we should have done a long time ago to strengthen our economy and our bargaining position. The transition will be rough, but not as much as complete bankruptcy and disintegration.

My strong suspicion is that Trump’s extended tantrum directed at Canada is actually a way to provide pressure against other future tantrum targets … “if he’d do that to friendly neighbour Canada, what won’t he do to us?” An updated version of Voltaire’s quip that Britain needed to shoot an admiral every now and again pour encourager les autres.

Coyote Blog facepalms over Trump’s self-sabotage of the US economy:

Trump’s first few weeks have been a mix of good and bad for this libertarian, all against a backdrop of horror at how Imperial the presidency has become. […] Because we are all tired of those fentanyl-toting Canadians crossing the border illegally. I mean, we all saw the Proposal and know how all those Canadians are trying to cheat US immigration law.

Seriously, this is beyond awful — and not just because of the threat of retaliation, though that is real. Even if all the affected countries roll over and accept these modified tariffs without response, this is still a terrible step for the US. No matter how Trump and his very very small group of protectionist economist friends sell this, this is a tax on 300 million US consumers to benefit a small group of producers. I don’t have time right now to give an updated lesson on free trade — that will have to wait for when I am not on vacation. But I will offer a few ironies:

  • After campaigning hard on inflation, Trump is slapping a 10-25% consumption tax on foreign goods. That is a straight up consumer price increase for a variety of key products including much of the lumber we use to build homes, a lot of our oil and gas, a lot of our grain and beef, and many of our cars and appliances.
  • Much of this inflation is going to disproportionately hurt Trump’s base. No one is going to care much if a Hollywood actor has the fair trade coffee they buy at Whole Foods go up in price, but Trump voters are going to see a direct effect of this on prices at Wal-Mart.
  • Republicans have spent 4 years (rightly) condemning Federal and State governments for the economic disruptions of COVID lockdowns and restrictions. While some of the inflation of the last 4 years was due to ridiculously high government deficits, another major cause was the COVID supply chain disruptions. And now Trump is voluntarily recreating them.

The only small hope I have is that Trump is steeped from his business career in a certain style of brinksmanship bargaining that consists of taking an entirely destructive and irrational position in hopes that they folks on the other side of the table will back down and give him more than he should. My son won poker tournaments like this because he would do so much crazy stuff that no one at the table wanted to challenge him. I have always said that I don’t think Trump is a particularly good business person — he has run business after business that has failed. But he is a good negotiator, and has exited numerous bankruptcies with his creditors giving him far more than one would think was necessary.

January 31, 2025

“… and 10% for the Big Guy”

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

In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Miranda Devine’s new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America:

Even now, roughly half of Americans seem to believe that all the attention that’s been paid to Hunter Biden and his laptop has to do with his love of prostitutes and drugs rather than with high crimes and misdemeanors committed by him on behalf of his dad and other members of the clan. Even now, many Americans seem to be blithely unaware of the mountains of evidence showing that Hunter has long been fleecing foreign firms on Daddy’s behalf. For some reason those clueless Americans, even if capable of accepting that Hunter was up to no good, simply can’t believe that his pop – good old Lunchpail Joe – has ever been guilty of anything. (These same people, of course, are convinced that Donald Trump is the most corrupt politician ever to come down the pike.)

This blindness to facts – or stubborn refusal to pay attention to them – is immensely frustrating. And it must be especially frustrating for Miranda Devine, the Australian-American New York Post journalist who, in Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide (2021), detailed the contents (by turns sordid and criminal) of Hunter’s celebrated computer, the story of which her newspaper broke 20 days before the 2020 presidential election, and who in her new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America, focuses on the cover-up.

To say that Devine tells her story in impressive detail would be an understatement. Like War and Peace, The Big Guy opens with a long list of the main players, just in case you lose track of who’s who. And you will. Reading this book isn’t just like reading War and Peace – it’s like reading War and Peace at the same time as One Hundred Years of Solitude. You have to remember a slew of foreign-sounding names, many of which sound very much alike, all the while following an exceedingly labyrinthine narrative.

To be sure, this tale also involves plenty of Americans, some of them public officials who, when they scented the heady whiff of corruption in the Biden circle, actually did their jobs by digging into the facts and gathering evidence. Others, alas, are people who also held positions of authority but who did their damnedest to put up “roadblocks” or “obstructions” or “delays” or “logjams” – to use some of the many synonyms that Devine uses to describe efforts to keep the public in the dark.

And boy, was there a lot to cover up. Among the expenses that Hunter tried to write off on his taxes – not that he was quick to pay them, mind you – were disbursements to prostitutes and drug dealers and memberships in sex clubs. During one “crack and hooker bender” in 2018, he spent $8,000 on a single sex worker, $140,000 on a stay in Las Vegas, and $34,000 on a sojourn at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. The Chateau Marmont is legendary for playing host to celebrities on drug binges, but Hunter caused so much damage to his room that he was banned from the place thereafter, which even he suspected was a first.

Part of the reason why Hunter was able to go through a small fortune so quickly was that he had a “sugar daddy” by the name of Kevin Morris, who for reasons that still remain a mystery chose to give him millions of dollars over the years to save him from financial crises (such as the ones posed by the relatively modest monetary demands of Hunter’s baby mama in Arkansas). A 2019 book contract with Simon & Schuster also netted Hunter a $750,000 advance, even though the book (surprise!) ended up selling so few copies that it made back only a tiny fraction of that sum. Then there were his paintings, which brought in at least $1.5 million. People laughed when Hunter first revealed his artworks to the world in 2020, but I didn’t: they’re no worse than a hell of a lot of contemporary art – and, after all, the art market these days is as much about laundering money than it is about aesthetics.

But Hunter’s main sources of mazuma were foreign companies. One of them was Barisma in Ukraine. Another, in Russia, was run by a man named Zlochevsky who said that Hunter, whom Joe Biden had called the smartest man he knew, was in fact stupider than Zlochevsky’s dog. A third was the Chinese energy company CEFC, a leading promoter of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. CEFC put Hunter on its board – and paid him millions – in exchange for his promise to use his father’s name to “open … doors around the world” for the firm.

Collecting loot from all these sources and funneling some of it to family members involved a complex network of bank accounts and shell companies that was designed to make the moolah tough to trace. To illustrate the process, Devine follows the path of a single $5 million payment by a CEFC affiliate to one of Hunter’s firms, HWIII. Over time, Hunter transferred most of that $5 million to another firm of his, Owasco; in addition, he wired some of it to his uncle Jim’s company, after which Jim’s wife, Sara, withdrew a fraction of that sum and deposited it in the couple’s personal account and dispatched a $40,000 check to Joe Biden.

January 28, 2025

What Britain desperately needs is common-sense pointy stick controls

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Britain’s gun laws make Canada look like the wild west, yet the government still wants far greater control over objects that can be used as weapons. The conviction of the Southport murderer, who used a knife obtained through Amazon, seems to have given the British government under Kurt Stürmer Keir Starmer an excuse to crack down even further on any kind of device with a sharpened blade rather than the criminals who wield them:

Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Photo released by Merseyside Police.

“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”

What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.

Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives — edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.

“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”

It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard for fun. One of my nephews turns files into knives on a grinding wheel. Scraping an appropriate material against a stone will give you an edge and a point. ID checks don’t seem like a barrier to people with bad intentions and the ability to make ricin in their bedrooms.

A Case History in Ridiculously Restrictive Policies

This is why the U.K. strikes many Americans as the reductio ad absurdum of policies that demonize objects rather than targeting bad actors. Opponents of authoritarian laws ask: What will the authorities do once they’ve made firearms difficult to legally acquire, and crime continues? Will they ban knives?

The answer from the U.K., which already has restrictive gun laws, is yes, they will ban knives — or at least impose access and carry restrictions and consider forbidding blades to have points. The result has been a black market in smuggled and illicitly manufactured firearms that will inevitably extend to knives. Harmless people are now arrested for having Swiss Army knives in car glove compartment or for possessing locking knives on the way home from jobs that require them. And the country’s crime problems continue to grow.

That’s bad enough, but U.K. authorities, like those elsewhere, also prefer to surveil the entire population to detect anything they could call a danger to public order, rather than focusing on specific individuals harming others.

“There are now said to be over 5.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK,” according to Politics.co.uk. “Surveillance footage forms a key component of UK crime prevention strategy,” but “the proliferation of CCTV in public places has fueled unease about the erosion of civil liberties and individual human rights, raising concerns of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ culture.”

The British government also monitors online activity to an extent that Edward Snowden deemed it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”

That surveillance turns up comments, jokes, and rants authorities just don’t like. “Think before you post,” the government warns people. “Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.” But the authorities enforce a broad definition of unacceptable material. People have been arrested for dressing as terrorists for Halloween, for making intemperate online remarks, and for just getting things wrong when posting on the internet (they’ll need a big paddy wagon for that one).

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