Quotulatiousness

August 16, 2026

In Ontario, bike lanes are not a “human right”, thank goodness

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

On his Substack, Brian Lilley celebrates two recent developments in Ontario that — unlike so many others in the last several years — align with common sense:

Last year I wrote about the horrible court decision put out by “Justice” Paul Schabas on bike lanes being a Charter right. I put “Justice” in quotations because as I described at the time, the decision was so horrible and so political that it wasn’t worthy of an Ontario court.

Today, the Court of Appeal of Ontario agreed with me. As I wrote in my Toronto Sun column, they didn’t just overturn the ridiculous decision by Schabas, they excoriated him and his ruling.

AI-generated image from Brian Lilley

I quoted different sections of the appeals court ruling in my column, and trust me it was tough to choose which parts to quote in such a brilliant decisions. Here, I want to quote from early in the ruling, paragraphs 3-5.

    [3] The application judge’s decision presents as a straightforward application of orthodox s. 7 principles. But the application of those principles, divorced from a broader understanding of the constitution of which they are a part, has led to a surprising outcome: the conclusion that routine legislation regulating road usage is unconstitutional.

    [4] Something has gone wrong.

    [5] The application judge erred in law in interpreting and applying s. 7. But his decision is wrong in a more profound sense, for it subverts a fundamental principle of our democratic constitutional order: a legislature cannot bind its successors. Legislatures in the Westminster tradition are free to undo legislation by amending or repealing it as they see fit. That is the nature of democratic lawmaking in our constitutional order. Of course, all laws are subject to the Charter, but this does not preclude the amendment or repeal of legislation the legislature was under no constitutional obligation to have passed in the first place. Amendment or repeal of legislation may breach the Charter only if the breach can be established independent of the prior state of the law.

There is so much to digest here, but I am glad to see judges — who come from different backgrounds and were appointed by both the Harper and Trudeau governments — agree on fundamental principles. That should be a given, we shouldn’t think about such things, but today, we can’t those fundamentals for granted.

The idea that one Parliament, or legislature, cannot bind the hands of another is fundamental to our system. If I pass a law saying that wearing blue on Tuesdays is illegal and the next Parliament passes a law saying that it isn’t, the more recent law takes precedent.

Yes, I used a ridiculous example on purpose, but just to prove a point. It’s sad that so many people, including those who report and comment on politics, aren’t familiar with this basic concept on the role of Parliament.

And the other reversal of an absurd policy:

Last month there was a tribunal ruling in Ontario that said people in the country illegally were still entitled to welfare. I wrote about it at the time and said it was a crazy ruling that the Ford government needed to deal with.

They promised to do so at the time and on Thursday announced that they had.

Friday morning I was forced to write about the ridiculous take by the Toronto Star‘s “senior immigration reporter” Nicholas Keung. It seems, based on his stories, that Keung has never met someone he doesn’t think should be in Canada.

I’ll say as the son of immigrants, who grew up in an area where kids with parents who had Canadian accents were the strange ones, most immigrants don’t back illegals getting welfare.

Still, this was the Star‘s headline on the story.

As I point out in my Sun column, Parsa is himself an immigrant having come from Iran with his family as a child.

But sure, the Star‘s “senior immigration reporter” smears him as racist.

Let me explain something to you. When a reporter says “experts” say and they only find experts from one side, that is them finding the people they agree with to say what they want said.

How Not to Be A Nazi – Death of Democracy 28 – Epilogue

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 15 Aug 2026

Nazi Germany destroyed democracy in weeks, launched a war that killed tens of millions, and carried racial persecution to industrialized mass murder. But after 1945, Germans and Europeans faced another question: how could they prevent it from ever happening again?

In this final, independently viewable epilogue to Death of Democracy, Spartacus examines how West Germany transformed the lessons of dictatorship and war into the Grundgesetz — a constitutional system built around human dignity, enforceable rights, federalism, judicial independence, social stability, and a democracy empowered to defend itself.

We trace how the Federal Republic combined lessons from Weimar, the United States, Britain, Austria, France, and other democratic traditions; how Konrad Adenauer’s generation tied Germany to a new European order; and how the same determination to restrain power and prevent another continental war eventually shaped the European Union and the Lisbon Treaty.

Finally, we ask how well those democratic fortifications are holding in 2026 — and return one last time to the diarists, victims, witnesses, supporters, and resisters whose voices guided us through Germany’s descent into dictatorship.

From the comments:

@spartacus-olsson
12 hours ago

Thank you for joining me on this adventure. I hope it has been eye-opening. If you watched to the very end, you will know that I’m soon launching a World War 2 Trivia board game – I’ve been super punny and named it World War IIrivia (2rivia with Roman numerals).

After so many years of studying this and sharing it in the darkest possible way, I felt it was time to look at the whole affair in a way that’s fun, social, and still educational. So a couple of months ago I came up with something. It turned out to be one of those moments when the work seems like extra fun. Before I knew it, I was spending my sleepless nights on the idea, sketching rules in Word, writing questions into lists in Excel, designing the game in Photoshop, testing gameplay against myself, and redesigning. And then there it was — an actual game. It’s a game for both novices and experts, with some unexpected twists and turns. If you’re interested in this period of history and enjoy a night of board games, this is for you. Stay tuned for more updates about the launch.

Once again, many, many thanks to all of you for watching. Thank you to Iryna, Astrid, Anna, and Clara for your great work on the series. Thank you to the TimeGhost Army members for enabling me to do this. With that, as Mr. Murrow would put it:

Good Night and Good Luck,
Your Spartacus

August 14, 2026

Ultra vires

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eva Chipiuk explains why it’s never a good thing to have your government ever extending the things it is involved in:

Governments going ultra vires should concern every citizen.

Ultra vires means “beyond the powers”. In a democracy, governments and public institutions do not have unlimited authority. They can only exercise the powers the law actually gives them.

Yet increasingly, we see governments, regulators, agencies, and other public bodies stretching their mandates, assuming powers they were never granted, and acting as though their authority is limited only by what they can get away with.

That turns the rule of law on its head.

The question should never be: “Where does the law say government can’t do this?”

The question is: “Where does the law give government the authority to do this?”

That distinction matters.

Government is not above the law. Public institutions are creatures of law, and their power has boundaries. When those boundaries are ignored, courts must enforce them, legislatures must correct them, and citizens must demand accountability.

Because once we accept government exercising powers it was never given, the limits on government become meaningless.

Staying within your legal jurisdiction is not optional. It is the foundation of the rule of law.

August 8, 2026

Larry Correia’s A to Z Guide to Anti-Gun Vulture Talking Points

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Larry Correia reposts his talking point guide on the issue of gun control:

Looks like it is time to once again post my A to Z Guide to Anti-Gun Vulture Talking Points!

A. Gun owners are never trained enough so are dangerous and shouldn’t be armed at all.

B. Gun owners who do train are crazy psychos living out their wannabe fantasies itching to shoot someone.

C. Even though it takes orders of magnitude more effort to become marginally effective with martial arts than a gun, you are better off using martial arts and not having a gun.

D. *Real Men* use their hands. This is why your mom and grandma shouldn’t have guns either.

E. Twitter randos who have never been punched in the face are experts on real life violence, and whatever you have personally experienced doesn’t count.

F. No matter how trained you are, it is never enough for the hypothetical attacker they make up. Sure, your concealed handgun might be enough to stop a regular robber or rapist, but what about if you get attacked by 20 Chechen terrorists with AKs, huh? Huh? (we call this the Dracula Riding Godzilla rule)

G. If the anti-gun vulture was ever in the military, this makes them a Military Trained Expert. Even though most of the time this means they got to put 20 rounds through an M-16 once in 1992.

H. No matter how many certified MMA bad asses or combat vets go “lol wut, dork? I’d rather have a gun.” the anti-gun Twitter vulture will remain undeterred.

I. Goldilocks Rules apply. No matter how much you know about guns, you’re either too ignorant and dangerous, or you know too much and that makes you dangerous. Whatever amount the anti-gun zealot knows is Just Right.

K. Whatever stats they pull out of their ass are sacrosanct. If you cite any numbers they reflexively scream “SOURCE?!” and then have some reason they won’t accept that source when provided. “The actual FBI Crime Statistics? LAME!”

L. At some point they’ll need to talk about how big our penises are, because guns are for compensation. Obviously the female gun owners are compensating for their tiny uteruses.

M. “I believe in the Second Amendment BUUUUUUUUT-” (insert statist bullshit here)

N. If you insist on using terms correctly and words having actual definitions, clearly this demonstrates you are a fanatic. Words mean whatever they need to mean in that moment, especially legal ones.

O. “Castle Doctrine” is a secret right wing code word that means that you can just shoot whoever you want.

P. Get ready for a history lesson about “what the founders really intended” from some dumb motherfucker who was stoned through every history class in high school.

Q. Everybody knows big blue cities are way safer than the scary red state flyover country.

R. Gun control isn’t racist! Sure, historical gun control was all about keeping guns out of the hands of the “undesirables” like freed slaves, Indians, and the Irish, but that’s totally different now!

S. AR-15s are the most dangerous gun that’s ever existed. It can fire ten thousand ultra deadly murder bullets a second and each one can explode a moose from a thousand yards away. There is nothing this miracle death machine can’t do.

T. lol your AR-15s are utterly useless against a tyrannical government.

U. The NRA is an all-powerful, super evil entity which has tricked innocent Americans into wanting ultra deadly assault rifles, to satisfy their incessant blood lust. They do this through their ultra powerful marketing, like giving out free hats.

V. Anti-gun organizations are all totally innocent grass roots movements made up of moms, orphans, and kittens, funded entirely by bake sales, who just want the best for all Americans.

W. “I grew up around guns” makes you an unassailable subject matter expert on the topic.

X. The gun industry is made up of giant soulless mega corporations who make trillions of dollars off of selling Glocks to preschoolers. This message was brought to you by benevolent small businesses like the six companies that own most of the world’s media.

Y. Even though everything the anti-gunner proposes is ass backwards and would just make the problems they are crying about worse, and everywhere they get their way good people are disarmed while evil doers are empowered…they CARE HARDER than we do. So we’re the real bad guys.

Z. “You sound angry.”

July 28, 2026

“The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization”

Filed under: Europe, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski discusses the history of the right to bear arms from ancient Greece to modern America:

The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization. Not a weapon. A technology. The technology that made the idea of equality physically real.

1. The longbow democratized warfare – a peasant could kill a knight with a stick and a string, and Agincourt proved it. The gun completed the process. The armored warrior class whose claim to social dominance rested on physical superiority became obsolete. The aristocratic monopoly on violence ended not with a philosophy but with a mechanism. The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else.

2. The Roman citizen had the right to bear arms. The Greek citizen had it. The English yeoman had it. The Swiss canton built its entire civilization on it. The disarming of the population has always been, in every civilization, in every century, the first act of the government that intends to stop being answerable to that population. Show me a disarmed population and I will show you a population that lost something else shortly after.

3. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is not about sport. It is about the relationship between the armed citizen and the state – the explicit constitutional acknowledgment that the citizen’s right to defend himself, his family, and his civilization against any threat, including the government itself, is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. Power flows upward from the armed citizen, not downward from the armed state.

4. The gun defends the family. The woman alone with her children. The farmer on the edge of civilization. The shopkeeper in the neighborhood the police no longer patrol. The gun is the equalizer – the technology that makes the physical difference between a large man and a small woman irrelevant. Every argument for disarmament is, at its core, an argument that the state will protect you better than you can protect yourself. The evidence for this proposition is not encouraging.

5. In Europe, the disarmament is now nearly complete – and it happened precisely as the state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens began to decline. The timing is not coincidental. A population that cannot defend itself must trust the state to defend it – which is a population that cannot effectively question whether the state is doing so. The dependency is the design.

6. The gun is a civilizational technology in the deepest sense: it requires responsibility, judgment, and the willingness to accept the consequences of your decisions. You cannot outsource it. You cannot have a committee fire it. It is the most anti-bureaucratic object ever invented – a direct, personal, consequential instrument that puts the full weight of the decision on the individual holding it. Which is precisely why the administrative state finds it intolerable. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is sovereign.

7. The family that can defend itself does not depend on the state for its most fundamental security. The civilization that can defend itself has not yet outsourced its survival to an institution that will negotiate the terms of that survival on its own behalf. The gun determines who controls violence – and therefore who controls everything that violence can threaten. Which is everything. The Sobieski who rode down the hill had a sword and sixty thousand horsemen. The equivalent today is the armed citizen who understands what he is defending and why. Every civilization that forgot this discovered it the hard way. The ones that remembered it are still here.

July 11, 2026

Governments should not have easy access to emergency powers

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As we found out in Canada in 2022, when the government gives itself emergency powers unrestricted by normal legal procedure and due process, they abuse those powers. The UK government is eager to grant itself similar powers due to a “climate emergency” that will, among other things suspend habeus corpus and the 1689 Bill of Rights:

Emergency, d’ye see? National security emergency.

But here’s the problem if the government declares a national security emergency:

    Part 1 of the act establishes a new and broad definition of “emergency”. The definition includes war or attack by a foreign power, which were defined as emergencies under previous legislation, as well as terrorism which poses a threat of serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom and events which threaten serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom or to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom.

Damage to the environment in the UK. So, that matches. And if they then declare such an emergency, under the act, then the following laws — among others — no longer apply:

    The only primary legislation which may not be amended by emergency regulations is the Human Rights Act 1998 and part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act itself

That is, all other laws no longer apply. It’s an Enabling Act, allowing rule by decree for the length of the emergency. Absolutely everything is up for grabs. These laws are not, repeat not, protected:

    The peers tried to protect the following laws from emergency regulation:

    Habeas Corpus Act 1679

    Bill of Rights 1689

    Section 7 of the Parliament Act 1911 which limited the duration of a parliament to five years[e]

    Act of Settlement 1701

    House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975

    Life Peerages Act 1958

    House of Lords Act 1999

Seriously, it wipes out the entire legal and constitutional structure.

So, you know, no. Not because there is, or isn’t, a climate change emergency. But because of the powers they’ll take if one is declared.

No.

It’s not November yet, but this sign seems rather appropriate:

July 9, 2026

A new proposal for limiting “unreasonable searches and seizures”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Reason, Jacob Sullum outlines Justice Gorsuch’s proposed new test for limiting government abilities to surveil and monitor private actions:

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy swears in Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on Monday, April 10, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The Court’s 1967 decision in Katz v. United States, which held that the Constitution’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” applies when people have a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, continues to shape Fourth Amendment rulings six decades later. That was clear on June 29, when the Court decided Chatrie v. United States, holding that a government-ordered analysis of cellphone location data qualifies as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.

“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information”, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an opinion joined by four of her colleagues. Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with the result but not the rationale. The Katz test, he complained, “has no basis in the Constitution’s text or history”. He added that it has proven unworkable in practice because it has never been clear how courts should determine whether an expectation of privacy is “reasonable”.

Gorsuch is surely right that the Katz test has produced inconsistent and puzzling results. In cases addressing intrusions such as trash searches, demands for bank and telephone records, surveillance by low-flying aircraft, and police trespassing on private property, the Supreme Court has perceived no expectations of privacy it was prepared to recognize as reasonable. Applying the same test, it has repeatedly ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to information that people voluntarily share with third parties. Yet the Court has repeatedly rebelled at the disturbing implications of that principle without explicitly renouncing it.

That is what happened in Chatrie, which involved a Virginia bank robbery investigation. Police used a “geofence” warrant to identify the perpetrator by requiring Google to search customer data collected by its Location History feature, which tracks the whereabouts of cellphone users. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Court declined to apply the third-party doctrine, instead reverting to the original, unmodified Katz test.

A better approach, Gorsuch argued, would be to treat Location History records as “effects” covered by the Fourth Amendment — as a form of personal property, in other words. While it is not clear exactly how that property-rights approach would work in other contexts, it does seem less malleable than the Katz test, which gives courts wide discretion in discerning expectations and deciding whether they are reasonable. Gorsuch aptly likened the Court’s understanding of that test to its definition of obscenity in the 1960s: “We know a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ (and an exception to the third party doctrine) when we see it”.

June 20, 2026

Bill C-22 passes the Commons “as MPs raced for home for the summer”

Canadian Members of Parliament care more for their summer vacations than they do for the rights of Canadian citizens. While this isn’t really news, it’s just the latest proof that our elected representatives are … well, I was about to describe their moral failings in great detail, but that could get me arrested and jailed if-and-when the many authoritarian measures the Liberals want to enact become law. Instead, here’s Michael Geist‘s summary of the way Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Bill, got sent to the Senate on Thursday night:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, passed the House of Commons yesterday with the government invoking a single motion to approve several bills without further debate or individual votes as MPs raced for home for the summer. Bill C-22 will now head to the Senate, where it can expect a rougher ride when study begins in the fall. Rather than use the final days of the House session to answer the privacy, security, and oversight concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner, academics, technology companies, and civil society groups, the government spent the time ensuring it would not have to, rushing the bill through committee, cutting off debate, and maligning critics with tactics that they once decried when in opposition.

The final days of Bill C-22 in the House marked a genuine abrogation of democratic norms. The government moved a motion to shut down the clause-by-clause study in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, preventing the committee from adjourning until the bill had been pushed through. That led to a session that stretched past midnight, as MPs were barred from introducing new amendments and were left to vote on amendment after amendment without any discussion, debate, or even public disclosure of their contents. By the end of the committee session, no one could have known the contents of the bill that MPs had duly approved and sent back to the House for final approval. As noted, once back in the House, there was no further debate, discussion or even a vote. Just a motion that said the deal was done.

If the process was troubling, the rhetoric was embarrassing. I wrote earlier this week about Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s Vic Toews moment, as he said it was time for opposition parties to “choose” whether to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime (a refrain that sounded a lot like Toews’ 2012 comment to Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, who is now the Speaker of the House, that he could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”). Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon pushed that posture further on Thursday by dismissing the bill’s critics as wearing “tinfoil hats” engaged in “paranoia.” The charge fits a broader pattern in which this government treats independent privacy scrutiny as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, seen most clearly in the Bill C-36 approach to strip the Privacy Commissioner of authority over private-sector privacy law altogether.

The committee did approve some government amendments to the bill that improve aspects of the lawful access plan but they are still likely to leave companies, security experts, and privacy advocates concerned. For example, the maximum metadata retention period the government can impose drops from one year to six months, and a category of metadata can now be mandated only where the Minister is satisfied that the category and all of its elements are essential to investigations. That is better, but still not good enough as it is not tied to any actual evidence about why six months is needed and both the costs and risks associated with metadata retention, which is not a requirement in the U.S., are largely unchanged.

As The Reclamare explains, this bill is yet another likely irritant in US/Canadian affairs, as it will expose US citizens’ data to Canadian government oversight:

– A USA person creates/maintains a social media account — lets call it “XXX”

– Using its new C22 law, Canadian RCMP develops a “reasonable grounds to suspect” of “XXX” to a CDN investigation (a low investigative hunch standard under C-22).

– RCMP obtains a Canadian judicial authorization (an “Order”) and sends the Social Media company an International Production Request, which is not a USA warrant, not a §2703(d) order, and not routed through full MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) review.

– The social media company is bound by US law (SCA/ECPA), treats the request as a formal foreign inquiry.

– The social media company discloses limited metadata: summary of login IP ranges, account country setting, and other classification signals to prove USA origin

– This disclosure happens at Canada’s “reasonable suspicion” threshold, which is lower and less scrutinized than the US domestic requirement of “specific and articulable facts showing relevance and materiality” under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) for the exact same type of data.

– The USA user’s metadata, which would normally enjoy stronger 4th Amendment derived judicial protections, if sought directly by US authorities, is handed to a foreign government on weaker foreign grounds, without the same level of US court filtering or notice that a purely domestic US request would trigger.

– The 4th Amendment protection is effectively diluted because the platform’s good faith compliance with the foreign lower bar creates a new, easier pathway around domestic US constitutional safeguards for accounts that platforms classify as American

Canada’s Liberal government continues to chip away at our “Charter of Rights”, under the guise of “Protecting Citizens” and we are moving towards authoritarianism

While I loathe to create friction, I also hope your Rights can help slow Canada’s devolvement

It impacts you too

June 15, 2026

QotD: “… shall not be infringed”

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

The United States Constitution is the highest law of the land. Its Amendments, it therefore follows, are the highest of the high. Read the Second Amendment for yourself. It forbids the government from infringing on the individual right to own and carry weapons. Now look up the word “infringe” in a decent dictionary. Not a single federal, state, or local gun law of any kind, from 1917 until today, is Constitutional.

L. Neil Smith, “Ballistic Exceptionalism”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2020-09-20.

June 10, 2026

“Don’t talk to the police”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Canadian lawyer Ian Runkle (aka “Runkle of the Bailey”) jokingly suggested that he needed to make a change to his normal billing practice:

This rustled the jimmies of Jake Sun:

Which led to a more extended discussion from Ian:

Okay, ignoring the whole Canadian vs. American thing, let’s talk about this notion that it is somehow un-American to advise people not to speak to the cops.

Cause holy shit that’s funny.

First, when the cops want to put you in jail, cooperating with them and making that easier for them is a real dumb move. If you’re sitting in the interrogation room it’s not because the cops are looking to help you find a burglar or because you’re calling 911. It’s because they want to put you in jail, potentially for years. Wanting to help them at that point is as dumb as it gets.

Second, your right not to talk to the cops is enshrined in the Constitution in both Canada and the U.S. In other countries, likely not as much, which means that being able to tell the cops “Fuck you, no” is absolutely American, both because it is a thing in America and because exercising your Constitutional rights is an American and patriotic thing to do.

Third, if we’re talking about the United States specifically, we’re not talking about a country founded on respect for and obeisance to authority. The slogan was never “Give me Liberty, if the government allows it”. No one asked for a permit to throw tea in the harbour. The U.S. was not founded on the principles of obedience and deference to authority, but instead the rights of the individual against authorities are fundamental to the American experience.

America is not and never was about “Yes, sir.” It’s far more about “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.”

May 20, 2026

The seax as an English ethno-national equivalent to the kirpan

As most will know, the UK government has been steadily working to prevent UK citizens from carrying weapons of any time … except the religious exception for Sikhs to carry the kirpan, which is part of their faith. John Carter claims that the case for the Saxons to carry the seax is at least as strong:

Infamously, as one of its many assaults upon British tradition – the latest of which is the end of jury trials, a right Englishmen have enjoyed since the Magna Carta – the decline’s managers disarmed the British people. The right of (Protestant) Englishmen to keep and bear arms was enshrined in the Glorious Revolution’s 1689 Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment of the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights is essentially a reiteration of this ancient right of Englishmen; indeed, one of the complaints of the revolutionary colonists was that their rights as Englishmen were not being respected by the English crown. The right to bear arms was first expressed in the 1689 Bill of Rights, but its origin is much older, in the ancient Germanic understanding that a free man is an armed man, and that only slaves are prohibited the means of assuring their personal security. Britain’s managerial regime spent the twentieth century patiently gnawing away at the right to bear arms. It began its assault with licensing requirements in 1920, finally escalating to absolute bans following the 1988 Hungerford massacre and the 1996 Dunblane massacre.

As with all of its petty oppressions, the excuse for banning firearms has always been public safety, which the Yookish regime claims to prize much more highly than public liberty, which it does not claim to prize at all, that being the only honest thing about it. The sincerity of these invocations of safety is rendered dubious by the simultaneous premium Westminster, Whitehall, Number 10 Downing, and Buckingham Palace place upon the uninterrupted mass importation of humanoid dross from the most violently dysfunctional countries on the planet, which (notably) started in earnest at almost exactly the same time that the British people were disarmed.

It was not enough to take away the tools of self-defence. The principle of self-defence was also effectively eliminated: if a private citizen injures or kills a criminal in the course of defending himself against criminal predation, he will be charged as a criminal himself. The British people are expected to outsource their personal defence to police who refuse to defend them, in a country to which their government deliberately imports as many dangerous men as it can. Notably, defence against dangerous men of diversity is particularly frowned upon, because this is racist; indeed, even to complain about diversity danger is treated as a worse crime than rape, robbery, assault, or murder. The Yookay arrests more people for speechcrime than any other country on the planet.

Since firearms are banned, Britain’s criminal element has turned to knives, leading to a long-standing hysteria over knife crime. “Zombie-style knives” and “ninja swords” were banned in 2024 and 2025, while online knife sales now require 2-step age verification. There have even been calls to ban knives with sharp points, which would present certain challenges to the culinary arts. Meanwhile the stop-and-search policies intended to control knife crime on the streets are routinely derided as racist, as it is (surprise!) overwhelmingly young black men who are caught with concealed knives, which of course they conceal because their intent is to use them in the commission of robbery, assault, and murder. Which the British people are not permitted to defend themselves from, and which the Yookish police refuse to do anything about.

All of this raises the question of why, precisely, Digwa was walking around with a big knife.

The answer to this is that Digwa is a Sikh, and Sikhs have a special carve-out for the kirpan, a ceremonial knife which their religion mandates they carry with them at all times, as (if I understand correctly) a symbol of resistance to oppression and their readiness to always be prepared to defend the weak from injustice. Symbolic or not, the kirpan is a very real knife, with a very real edge.

The special religious dispensation granted Britain’s Sikhs is merely the most visible double-standard when it comes to keeping weapons. We saw another example during the Southport riots, when large numbers of Muslims turned out on the streets with machetes. Rather than arresting the lot of them (which the Yookish authorities couldn’t do, as they were busy filling the prisons with British protesters), the law enforcement officers on the scene advised them to hide their weapons in their mosque, which out of respect for the delicate sensibilities of the vibrant Islamic community the police would certainly never even dream of searching. One wonders just how many mosques are hiding caches of weapons.

Unlike the benevolently blind eye the Yookish authorities cast upon their treasured Muslims, however, the Sikh exemption is actually written into law.

As the Nowak case broke across social media a few days ago, a lot of people called for an end to this double standard. If whites are disarmed, then everyone else should be as well. There should be no special treatment on account of their heathen gods.

This is an understandable position, but I think it’s the wrong one. It is the thought pattern of The Raped.

Rather than wanting to drag Sikhs down to the subbasement of slavish cuckery into which they’ve been pressed, Anglo-Saxons should instead demand that they, too, be allowed to arm themselves.

The Sikh argument is that their faith requires that they be armed at all time.

The Saxon argument is similar to the Sikh, but if anything it is even more fundamental.

The name Saxon derives from the seax, the characteristic short sword carried by the Germanic invaders who made England their home in the 5th century. “Saxon” literally means “the sons of the knife”, “the people of the blade”, or “the swordsmen”.

The very identity of our tribe is intertwined with privately held armaments. This is pre-political; it’s pre-religious; for the Saxon, armaments are an identitarian symbol that goes to the very core of what a Saxon is. To remove the seax from the Saxon is to strip him of his identity. Which, of course, is the avowed goal of the Fabian social engineers who have laboured for generations to reconstitute the definite form of the Anglo-Saxon into a pliable mush of generic, vaguely-defined, ahistorical, and universally extensible “values” that no Anglo-Saxon had even heard of until five minutes ago.

The same principle obviously applies to knife crime. Criminals are opportunistic predators. They avoid hard prey. There’s profit in jacking up easy meat to get a free iPhone, but not so much in getting stabbed into fresh meat yourself. If every Saxon wore a seax, street crime would very rapidly become a non-issue.

Of course, from the perspective of the Yookish governing apparat, the powerlessness of its subjects against criminal predation is quite an insignificant price to pay in exchange for ensuring the powerlessness of the autochthonous helotry against the apparat itself. If anything it’s a bonus. The regular humiliation of being forced to endure low-level criminality encourages a feeling of helplessness. The rainbow communists will therefore never “allow” the Saxon to rearm himself.

But what if the Saxon wore the seax without permission?

May 19, 2026

The Gracchi – socialists avant la lettre?

Filed under: Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Gracchi brothers — Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus — were Tribunes of the Plebs in the Roman Republic during the second century BC. Tiberius had been a rising star within the cursus honorum until he was involved in a military disaster that seriously tarnished his reputation and derailed his political career. His attempt to regain his former upward march through the offices of the Republic involved running for election as Tribune and then forcing a major land “reform” through using tactics that bent or even broke the traditional way things were done (the mos maiorum – the unwritten constitution of the Republic).

Handre makes the case that the Gracchi were indeed socialists before the term was coined:

The Gracchi brothers destroyed Rome’s property rights in 133 BC, then wondered why their republic collapsed within a century. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus seized private land through legislative force, redistributing it to landless citizens under the banner of “reform”. They created the template for every socialist redistribution scheme that followed.

Rome’s wealthy families had legitimately acquired vast estates (latifundia) through conquest, purchase, and development. The land generated wealth, employed thousands, and fed the empire. The Gracchi saw inequality and decided government theft would solve it. Tiberius bypassed the Senate entirely, appealing directly to popular assemblies who voted themselves other people’s property. When senators objected to this constitutional violation, Tiberius had his colleague Octavius deposed. Pure mob rule.

The economic consequences arrived swiftly. Landowners stopped investing in improvements, knowing politicians could seize their property at will. Agricultural productivity declined as redistributed plots went to inexperienced farmers who lacked capital for proper cultivation. Food shortages followed. The Gracchi had broken the link between productive effort and reward, destroying incentives across the entire system.

Worse than the economic damage was the political precedent. Future demagogues learned they could buy votes by promising to redistribute wealth from productive citizens to political supporters. Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar all followed the Gracchi playbook, using land redistribution to build personal armies of grateful beneficiaries.

Property rights form the foundation of civilization itself. When politicians can seize private property through majority vote, you get warlords fighting over the spoils while your economy burns.

The period of the Republic featuring the Gracchi have been discussed at some length before.

March 25, 2026

UNDRIP’s malign power in Canada

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

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) has been adopted into law by the provincial government in British Columbia and the federal government. In BC, voters were assured that this was a purely symbolic act to advance reconciliation with First Nations groups in the province. But that was deliberate misdirection and lies:

During the debate on DRIPA [BC’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act] in the legislature in late 2019, government ministers of the day waxed lyrical that DRIPA and UNDRIP created no new rights, had no legal force, did not apply to private land, and did not provide a veto. Those assurances were used to justify passing DRIPA, which resulted in the B.C. Opposition unanimously supporting the legislation. It turns out that the government’s assessment and promises were neither correct in substance nor valid legally.

Much has been written lately about DRIPA, some of it wrong. Prior to the B.C. Court of Appeal decision in Gitxaala, some DRIPA defenders insisted it was merely a “process” piece of legislation that bound the government to an arguably undemocratic joint government and Indigenous leadership arrangement, set out in section 3, to evaluate every B.C. statute for conformity with the 46 Articles of UNDRIP and then amend statutes as deemed necessary to create that conformity.

DRIPA itself, though arguably highly undemocratic and perhaps unconstitutional, is not the real problem in this province. The real problem is that DRIPA has been effectively employed as a “smokescreen” by the B.C. NDP and certain of its allies, while the government, secretly and with no explicit public mandate, imposes the Articles of UNDRIP throughout B.C. as a fundamental matter of policy, as though they have the force of law.

Let’s be clear, this is a devious political manoeuvre, much of which is not underpinned in law by DRIPA or, more importantly, by Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence at all.

Notwithstanding statements made to the legislature in 2019 to get DRIPA passed, the NDP government immediately chose to implement a policy approach to UNDRIP throughout B.C. under which UNDRIP Articles would be applied by the government and the public service as though they were, in fact, the law in this province, notwithstanding the fact that they are inconsistent in many respects with Canadian constitutional law.

In the wake of recent court decisions, there is no indication that the government’s policy approach has changed or that the Premier is thinking about backing away from it, even though there is now much greater public scrutiny of what the government has really been up to since 2019.

The Eby government claims to be upset that UNDRIP is now being applied by the courts as the law in B.C., which it knows will create utter chaos. What has upset it more, however, is that the courts have usurped the NDP government’s desire to quietly and secretly implement UNDRIP everywhere in the province as a matter of policy, a policy that they would like to be viewed as law but without being legally enforceable by judges.

This amounts to a policy of subterfuge by a government that has shown an inclination towards deception on matters concerning First Nations. It appears that a law is not a law unless the B.C. government says it is a law, but some laws, like DRIPA, can be used as a false “front” to allow the covert implementation of a complex UN-based policy that is clearly unfit for the Canadian context, with no one being the wiser.

In the National Post, Warren Mirko explains the murky theory that allows “indigenous ways of knowing” to be taken more seriously than science, history, and legal procedure:

Canada is rapidly abandoning a principle that has shaped western democracies since the Enlightenment: the idea that no person or group has privileged access to sacred or divine knowledge unavailable to everyone else.

Now, this principle is being threatened by Canada’s increasing embrace of “Indigenous Knowledge” — whereby knowledge is treated as collectively owned and restricted by ancestry rather than something open to examination and shared across society.

The governments of British Columbia and Canada — both of which have formally adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) — endorse “Indigenous Knowledge” as inherited, rooted in ancestral relationships to the land, and encompassing spiritual, cultural and metaphysical dimensions passed down through generations.

Remarkably, the defining quality to possess this knowledge is not study, training, time spent on the land, or lived experience by any individual alive today. Instead, it’s lineage itself.

That’s a paradigm shift. When knowledge is said to be possessed by birth rather than learned, its universality is replaced with mysticism and its value diminished.

This comes with real-world consequences: ancestry-based considerations are reshaping how public land and resources are managed on Canadians’ behalf.

In British Columbia, newly proposed changes to hunting and wildlife regulations are described as being informed by “the best available science and Indigenous Knowledge“. In practice, this means “Indigenous Knowledge” is being used to design a regulatory regime that falls almost entirely on non-Indigenous users. That’s because Indigenous harvesting rights are recognized under Section 35 of the Constitution, not bound by the same hunting seasons, bag limits, gear restrictions, or limited-entry systems that apply to the broader public.

The growing influence of this genetically transmitted, ancestry-qualified knowledge extends to matters of public safety and economic security, like nuclear regulation: “Indigenous ways of knowing and the Indigenous cultural context enhance the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s understanding of the potential impacts of nuclear projects and strengthen the rigour of project reviews and regulatory oversight”, says the government of Canada website.

Governments championing the principles of UNDRIP insist that “Indigenous Knowledge” can be combined with “Western” science to produce better public policy. But this is a contradiction. Knowledge cannot at once be exclusive and universal.

March 15, 2026

Using US gun statistics to argue against Canadian gun owners

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Gun Owners of Canada respond to a troll post trying to confuse the legal situation for Canadian gun owners by using statistics from the US, where the laws are significantly different:

Typical. He blocked without further discussion.

But, he’s wrong.

There is a fundamental flaw in using that 1998 [US] DOJ literature review to argue the Stand on Guard Act will lead to more gun deaths. The claim relies on a completely broken comparison between U.S. and Canadian law.

Here is why applying that specific American data to this Canadian bill proposed by the CPC simply does not work.

The DOJ report relies heavily on American statistics where firearms kept for self defense are typically stored loaded and unlocked. That specific environment, meaning immediate and unrestricted access to a loaded weapon, is the primary driver for the increased rates of accidental shootings and suicides highlighted in those U.S. studies.

The Stand on Guard Act does not create that environment in Canada. Saying it does such is just fear-mongering.

This proposed legislation is strictly an amendment to Section 34(2) of the Criminal Code. It establishes a presumption that force used against a violent home invader is reasonable. The goal is to spare Canadians from years of legal limbo for defending their families.

Crucially, this bill does not amend the Firearms Act and it does not repeal Canada’s strict safe storage regulations.

A legally compliant Canadian firearm owner must still store their firearms unloaded and secured with a locking device, or locked inside a sturdy cabinet or safe. Ammunition must also be stored separately or locked up securely in the same safe.

The specific risks identified in the U.S. data, like a child finding a loaded gun or someone in crisis having instant access to a weapon, are mitigated by our existing storage framework.

Debating the merits of self defense thresholds is perfectly fair. However, importing U.S. data based on a completely different regulatory baseline to predict Canadian outcomes is a clear misapplication of the evidence. We need to ground this conversation in actual Canadian law rather than American statistics.

So, as a reminder — welcome to Canada — let’s buy Canadian, support Canadian and recognize Canadian facts.

March 11, 2026

The Supreme Court of Canada in Santa Claus mode (even if they no longer use those robes)

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

In a pretty conclusive 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada seems to have overturned not only the Quebec childcare entitlement at issue in this case, but the notion of citizenship in a much wider sense:

The SCC recently abandoned their traditional red robes for black robes more similar to those of the US Supreme Court. This is a case where the older robes would be more appropriate for other reasons.

On Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada delivered its latest stupefying ruling. According to an 8–1 majority in the case of Quebec (Attorney General) v. Kanyinda, the Charter requires the Quebec government to extend subsidized daycare benefits to refugee claimants — asylum seekers who have not yet proven the legitimacy of their claim to refugee status. Founded on a prevalent but contentious reading of constitutional equality rights, the court’s reasoning has far-reaching potential to destabilize parts of the nation’s immigration and social welfare systems.

Until last week, Quebec law granted daycare subsidies to certain categories of parents, including Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and those with approved refugee status. When Bijou Cibuabua Kanyinda, the plaintiff in this case, arrived in the province and sought asylum in 2018, she fell into none of those categories. Aided by cause lawyers, and a coterie of social justice interveners (third party interest groups who submit arguments to the court), Kanyinda argued that the exclusion of refugee claimants from this welfare scheme amounted to unconstitutional discrimination.

Remarkably, the majority of the Supreme Court not only agreed with Kanyinda that the Quebec daycare scheme violated Section 15(1) of the Charter — which provides for “the right to the equal protection and benefit of the law without discrimination” — but bypassed the Quebec legislature by “reading in” a remedy directly into the law. In other words, the court rewrote the statute to immediately grant subsidies to “all parents residing in Quebec who are refugee claimants”.

More troubling than the outcome itself, however, will be the judicial reasoning that rationalized it. Writing for the majority, Justice Andromache Karakatsanis held that the Quebec scheme created a distinction “on the basis of sex”, a proscribed ground of discrimination under Section 15. But rather than fostering a distinction between men and women, Justice Karakatsanis asserted that the scheme discriminated between “men and women refugee claimants” — even though neither group was eligible for benefits at all. Because Quebec’s exclusion of refugee claimants worsened the economic disadvantage of the female claimants, she concluded, it constituted discrimination that violated Section 15.

The court’s reasoning is convoluted, to be sure. Readers may be forgiven for struggling to understand how a ruling that extends benefits to “refugee claimants” can follow from a supposed distinction on the basis of “sex”. In fact, the judgment exposes the incoherence into which the Supreme Court’s equality rights jurisprudence has fallen.

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