Quotulatiousness

August 22, 2026

The WEF – first up against the wall come the revolution

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski considers just how the lizard people of the World Economic Forum came to be “The People Who Decided They Should Run Everything”:

Every year in January, the most important people in the world travel to Davos, Switzerland — a ski resort — to discuss the problems facing humanity. They arrive on private jets. They stay in five-star hotels. They are protected by five thousand soldiers and police. They eat very well. They talk about inequality, climate change, and the need for ordinary people to consume less. Then they fly home on private jets.

This is not satire. This is the schedule.

1. Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 – a German professor who decided that the solution to the world’s problems was to get the people who ran the world’s largest corporations into a room with the people who ran the world’s governments, and have them agree on things before anyone elected them to agree on things. If you control the conversation before the democratic process begins, you control the outcome without being subject to it. Davos is where the agenda is set. Everything after is implementation.

2. The Young Global Leaders program is the masterpiece. Founded in 2004, with its predecessor, Global Leaders for Tomorrow, running since 1993. Together the programs have formed: Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and the health ministers who designed most of the Western world’s COVID response. The pipeline runs continuously. The list is published on the WEF website. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an alumni directory.

3. The program works because it operates before power, not after. By the time a Young Global Leader becomes a prime minister or finance minister, they have already spent years in the same rooms, sharing the same assumptions, networking with the same people. They don’t need to be told what to do. They already know – because they were formed together, in Davos, before anyone gave them the job. The Fabian Society permeates institutions over generations. The WEF does it in a long weekend, with better catering.

4. The Great Reset — announced in 2020 with timing that should give everyone pause — is the program stated plainly. “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” Build Back Better. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The language is always the language of inevitability: this is happening, the question is only how to manage it. The managed future, designed by the people in the ski resort, for the people who were not invited.

5. The irony is structural. The people most loudly “concerned about inequality” meet in one of the most expensive places on earth. Those most “concerned about climate change” arrive by private jet. Those most “concerned about democracy” design systems insulating them from democratic accountability. The gap between the speech and the life is visible from orbit. They don’t notice it. Or they notice and calculate, correctly, that nobody who matters will say so.

6. What Davos actually produces is “consensus” – the consensus of people who have implicitly agreed before arriving, because people who disagree don’t get invited. Climate policy, AI regulation, tax harmonization, digital currency – these are not debated at Davos. They are shaped there. The debate happens later, when implementation is already underway.

7. The Young Global Leaders are the tell. A program that identifies, selects, and forms the next generation of leaders before they become leaders is not a networking event. It is a formation pipeline. The Jesuits understood that if you form a person before they have power, you own what they do with the power. The WEF understood the same thing and built it into a global institution.

The question is simple:

Who decided Klaus Schwab should select the world’s next generation of leaders?

Nobody.

He just started doing it.

And the people who run things let him – because increasingly, the people who run things were people he had already formed.

Did you choose them?

August 5, 2026

Power corrupts, but unaccountable power attracts bureaucrats

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

We used to joke around election time that no matter who you voted for, the government always got in. Gallows humour, because it’s quite literally true. Enough people can get angry about the government in power and vote out the politicians … but the politicians aren’t the one implementing the policies that get people upset. The permanent bureaucracy barely notices when the government changes because the government rarely manages to get anything done that the civil service doesn’t want to do. It’s actually worse in Europe, because the politicians are even more mere figureheads than they are in the Anglosphere:

Christine Lagarde and Ursula von der Leyen

Nobody grows up dreaming of a career shuffling directives around Brussels.

Those jobs always fill with the same type of person: people drawn to power for its own sake, the ones who crave authority without ever answering for it. Bureaucracy doesn’t attract the best. It selects for the worst, then shields them when they inevitably screw up.

Hayek named this in The Road to Serfdom. His chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top” spelled out the logic. Unchecked power appeals most to the people least troubled by wielding it.

Mises found the engine underneath. In a market, a bad decision shows up as a loss, and losses remove you. Bureaucratic management faces no such test. Fail to fix a problem and you keep your job, then collect a bigger budget and a larger staff to keep failing with. The incentive runs backwards: waste earns you more, and the machine grows on its own.

Look at the European Union. Ursula von der Leyen presides over the Commission, the body that proposes almost all EU law. No European voter ever put her there. Heads of state handed her the post in a 2019 backroom deal and waved her through parliament. Christine Lagarde runs the European Central Bank, setting monetary policy for more than 340 million people and steering the value of the money in their pockets. She faced no voters for the job either.

You can throw out your national government every few years, but nothing above it moves, the apparatus stays. The unelected keep their offices, their pensions, their power, untouched by the only check ordinary people have.

This is the design, not a flaw in it. The people with the most control over your money and your future are the ones you are not allowed to fire.

July 30, 2026

QotD: The three most important books on management

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

There are three management books — and only three — that need to be read. They also need to be read by everyone. The Peter Principle, Up the Organisation and Parkinson’s Law. Which state, in reverse order, that bureaucracies will always grow until they eat the organisation, that management’s proper job is preventing them from ever starting and that if they’re there then you promote them out of the way. In our case, in this grassroots political movement which is the Hang the Lanyards Party, promote them to transcendence and their eternal rewards.

[…]

This is also what needs to be done with every bureaucracy from time to time. Those management books insist — nay prove — that every organisation always ends up like this. For the driving force of any organisation is the survival of the organisation. To be, not to do, is the aim.

Yes, this does apply to private sector ones but we’ve a natural corrective for those. Other organisations which arrive and not yet having created an all encompassing bureaucracy they outcompete them. So the old bureaucracies die, the new ones grow until they too start hiring power skirts and the decay sets in.

A government bureaucracy does not have that outside force culling it when its time has come. Therefore we must be the merciful farmer taking them out given that we’ve killed off the wolves that thin the herd of the old and lame.

As we can see 65 years is long enough for such a bureaucracy to reach this stage. Rather Brave New World in fact as that was the age at which all reported to be turned off.

So, every bureaucracy, every department, gets closed after 60 to 65 years. Some sooner, just to keep people on their toes. Yes, every. Say, the Department of Education. Or of Defence. Once we’ve killed it and fired everyone just leave be for a few years. If we still have some problems that really do need to be dealt with we can always hire a few, give ’em a corner of a desk somewhere, and we get the vigour and growth of a new organisation actually trying to solve things.

Until, obviously, the arrival of power skirts and the renewal process starts again.

Tim Worstall, “Closing US AID is What We Should Do To All Government”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2026-04-29.

July 28, 2026

The establishment pretends not to understand why AfD is still on the rise

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

Normally, I get my updates on German politics from eugyppius’ Substack, but this article is from the New English Review with Bruce Bawer reporting:

… even as the problematic aspects of Islam become increasingly manifest, mainstream politicians and journalists in Germany feign puzzlement over the growing popularity of AfD, which ever since its founding in 2013 has been characterized by the German establishment as heralding a Nazi renaissance. How, the German elites pretend to wonder, can so many voters transfer their loyalty from seasoned, sensible, upright political leaders to ragtag radicals who bring to mind Munich putsches and Nuremberg rallies? How on earth can they have become so misguided? Such is the coy approach of Jochen-Martin Gutsch in a recent article for Der Spiegel, in which he takes a spin around the former East Germany in purported search for an explanation as to why the “far-right” AfD has won majority backing in that part of the Bundesrepublik.

Gutsch’s first move is to act astonished at the fact that an AfD gathering in Salzwedel, Saxony-Anhalt, drew ordinary-looking families, plus “[a] surprising number of young people in their twenties, smartly dressed in blazers”. What, no Hitler Youth uniforms? Gutsch’s line is that he’s just plain perplexed by the numbers: “in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is currently polling at more than 40 percent. In the ARD Deutschlandtrend poll, the AfD is in first place; it’s even the most popular party, nationwide.” But it’s one thing to read the numbers, another thing to see all these – gasp! – ordinary-looking people flocking to show their support. This is what really blows Gutsch’s mind, or so we are meant to believe: the “normalization” of AfD, the party’s growing “acceptance”, its rapid “transformation into a mainstream party in the east”, all of which was, in Salzwedel, brought to vivid, terrible life before his eyes.

Ten years ago, Gutsch recalls, AfD received 20 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, and he, for one, was sure that it had peaked. He’s from eastern Germany himself, and he thought he knew his neighbors. He was wrong, and now, he claims, he’s alarmed – unlike his “friends and colleagues sitting in Hamburg, Cologne, or Munich, who give a friendly, bored look when I talk about the AfD. For them it’s still far away. Somewhere ‘over there’, whereas for me it’s a reality I can’t escape.” Therefore, he tells us, it’s important for him to make unravel the mystery of the AfD‘s remarkable rise in the polls.

Of course, the reason for the rise of AfD is obvious to anyone who’s been following developments in Western Europe for the last quarter-century or so. More and more voters have been demanding that immigration, especially from Muslim countries, be drastically curbed, if not altogether ended, and that the unassimilated masses who’ve already relocated to Western Europe from the Muslim world – only to swell the welfare rolls and the crime statistics – be sent back to where they came from. We’re told that the Berlin Pride killer, Abdul Ballout, belongs to “Islamist circles” in Germany. Why, ask AfD voters quite reasonably, should there be “Islamist circles” in Germany?

Yet Gutsch is, or pretends to be, blind to such concerns. His initial hypothesis, as he heads into the east, is supposedly that AfD is gaining popularity there because of economic hardship. But no, when he drives through Brandenburg now, he encounters prosperity. The city of Großräschen, once the Ruhr of East Germany, became a “ghost town” after 1990; now it’s thriving again, with the unemployment rate a mere seven percent, the old lignite mine converted into a lake with “a lovely beach” lined by “white houses” with “luxury SUVs parked out front”. Why, then, asks Gutsch, are the residents of these stately homes casting their ballots for AfD?

A veteran local politician tells Gutsch that he travels often to Bochum, in western Germany, which, compared to Großräschen, is an economic basket case. And yet the residents of Bochum are “more easygoing” than those in Großräschen. They possess a “fundamental optimism”. They “trust” and “respect” their political leaders. “What beautiful words”, Gutsch comments. He’s not being ironic. To be sure, he understands why eastern Germans aren’t brimming over with love for their leaders, whether in Berlin or Brussels. Many of them are old enough to remember 1990, when the once-mighty East German state “crumbled … before their very eyes.” One might add that before 1990, that same state was the very picture of totalitarian tyranny, as chillingly depicted in the film The Lives of Others. And before that – well, you know. Then there’s 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to insufficiently vetted Muslim immigrants, who proceeded to cause mayhem in both east and west.

But why, then, do so many western Germans still “trust” and “respect” their leaders? It seems baffling. Yet to listen to Gutsch, loyalty to the political establishment remains the way to go – the only intelligent, mature, and reasonable option. When he talks with an AfD politician, Karsten Hilse, to get the latter’s perspective on things, he’s lost at sea. In Hilse’s opinion, mainstream German politicians are too obsessed with “tolerance”; they have at least a degree of hostility toward Germany; and they accept without question the preposterous ideologies of gender and climate-change.

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 6, 2026

“The Road to Hell is Always Paved with Good Intentions”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam expresses his frustration with young people’s recent affection for more socialism, despite all the evidence of history:

When I see the younger generation demanding more and more Marxism, more socialism, more State, more “planning” to fix a world they’ve been taught to hate — I don’t feel like snickering. I feel like screaming.

Because I recognize the opening chapter of a story whose final page I know all too well.

That story, a man wrote in 1944, under the bombs. Friedrich Hayek. The book: The Road to Serfdom. And he dedicated it — read carefully — “to the socialists of all parties”. Not out of contempt. Out of affection. Out of urgency. Because he had seen, with his own eyes, an entire Europe tip over the edge.

Remember this, it’s the heart of it all: totalitarianism never starts with monsters. It starts with good people.

It starts with idealists who want the common good. Generous young people who can’t stand injustice anymore. Soft, consensus-driven parties that promise to fix everything if you just give them a little more power. The problem isn’t their intentions. The problem is the mechanism they set in motion.

Here’s that mechanism. Follow it, it’s relentless.

To plan an economy, you need a single decision where there were once millions of free choices. So you have to concentrate power. But no society ever agrees on a single plan — everyone has their own ends, their dreams, their priorities. The planner then hits a wall: disagreement. And disagreement becomes an obstacle to eliminate. You start by persuading. Then by coercing. Then by silencing. Not out of sadism — out of logical necessity. The plan demands that you crush what resists it.

And then comes Hayek’s most chilling chapter: “Why the Worst Get on Top”. In a system that demands total power, it’s not the best who win. It’s those who are ready for anything. The scrupulous man hesitates; the man without scruples acts. The collectivist machine, whatever its colors, mechanically selects the brutes.

Look at Germany. You’ve been told Hitler fell from the sky, an anomaly, an accident of evil. That’s false, and it’s dangerous to believe it. What Hayek understood was that Germany had spent half a century abandoning classical liberalism — the individual, rights, the market — in favor of the cult of organization, the collective, the State that knows better than you. The left and the right already shared the same premise: the individual must submit to the nation’s plan. Hitler didn’t have to build that machine. He found it already assembled, warmed up, ready. He just had to grab the wheel.

That’s the warning. Totalitarianism isn’t an ideology. It’s a structure. You can fill it with red, brown, any generous color you like. Once you’ve accepted that the individual must bend to the collective, that property is just a revocable privilege, that the freedom to trade, to speak, to innovate stops where “the common good” decreed from above begins — you’ve laid the tracks. The train, it’ll come on its own.

And it always comes with the world’s best intentions. Every step toward the abyss is justified, reasonable, compassionate. One more tax for the poor. One more control against the bad guys. One less freedom, but “just that one”. No one chooses servitude. You slide into it, one good intention after another.

So I’m tossing this bottle into the sea. To you who are twenty and on fire with passion. Your revolt against injustice is beautiful — keep it. But for the love of God, learn history. Read Hayek. Read what the 20th century really was, not the caricature they’re feeding you. The tens of millions of deaths it left behind weren’t killed by sadists from another world, but by systems built, at the outset, on dreams of justice.

Freedom isn’t the problem to fix. It’s the treasure they’re convincing you to sell off cheap.

Wake up.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

QotD: Cloud people and dirt people

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

A striking feature of American liberal democracy is the great gap between the reality of the political class and the people. The Cloud People are not just floating above the Dirt People, living different lives, like aristocrats of old. They no longer have a clear vision of the Dirt People below them. Instead, they conceive of the people over whom they rule based on inputs from the managerial class. To the political class, the general public is an abstraction, not a physical reality.

One example of this is in how the political class understands hierarchy. Every Washington politician and appointee lives in a world where hierarchy is well understood and respected. The appointed class have an array of titles that indicate their position in the hierarchy. Elected officials, of course, have their office and their committee assignments, along with their seniority. This is a world every one of them inherited when they entered politics. It is how it has always been.

In this world, a senator tells his staff to do something and he just assumes they will do it, assuming it can be done. If it cannot be done, then he is going to have them find out why it cannot be done and report back to him. An appointee works the same way within the bureaucracy. They have a staff, usually of appointees, and that staff carries out the orders of the director or secretary. Even though nothing of public good is done in Washington, the petty tasks are carried out with precision.

In this regard, the political class is a petty aristocracy. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, commands absolute loyalty from his staff. Not only does his staff do what they are told, they faithfully keep his secrets. He has been in the Imperial Capital for a quarter century, without a hint of scandal, despite the obvious. Congress operates a private slush fund to settle sexual harassment claims. Over 260 claims have been paid, without a word about the details. That’s loyalty.

Scan the biographies of the political class and the thing you will be hard pressed to find is anything resembling real world experience. Few have ever worked in the dreaded private sector. Those that have, worked in the law or maybe finance. These careers were just alternative paths to the place they wanted to be all along. There are no sons of the soil in Washington.

The Z Man, “Us And Them”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-06.

July 4, 2026

“The fact that [Canadians] cannot define our values should concern every one of us”

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

While our American neighbours are busy celebrating their 250th anniversary, Canadians are still left wondering why we can’t seem to define what our own values are except in opposition to those of the United States. Eva Chipiuk discusses this briefly here:

In writing my book, Reconnect to Canada, the most difficult part was not recounting our history or explaining our political and legal systems. It was answering a simple question:

What does it mean to be Canadian?

Over the last few years, I have asked that question repeatedly.

It was clear that something fundamental had shifted, but I could never quite articulate what it was.

The responses to that question were revealing, and most telling was that there was no common answer at all.

Some said hockey. Some said healthcare. Others said diversity or simply that Canadians are “nice”.

The fact that we cannot define our values should concern every one of us.

Then I came across this article, and it put things into perspective:

    Socialism, in its depraved but effective way, appeals to people’s worst instincts and impulses. It presents the world as a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers. It pits groups of people against each other based on arbitrary measures. For the narrow-minded, it makes sense.

    It embodies most of the seven deadly sins.

    Pride: Socialists have zero humility because they reject the fallibility of humanity. They can micromanage an entire society. They can create a centralized, one-size-fits-all, command-and-control utopia. They know all and know best.

    Envy: Taking one’s property because they have too much to give to others who have less is not noble; it is theft. Stealing with state-sanctioned approval is unjust. The sheer resentment that some have more, better, or bigger material possessions is the driving force of socialist ideology.

    Wrath: Socialist doctrine fuels anger, rage, violence, and a desire for vengeance against the so-called oppressors. Instead of mimicking the successful, the people turn their ire toward them.

    Sloth: Because socialism is about passing the buck and the blame, it excuses idleness and promotes laziness. It allows one to shirk personal duties and retards personal growth.

The uncomfortable truth is that Canada increasingly reflects these traits, yet we refuse to acknowledge it.

We insist we are compassionate while shaming and disparaging those who hold different opinions.

We claim to value equality while encouraging envy.

We preach inclusion while dividing Canadians into competing groups.

We speak of unity while constantly finding new reasons to divide ourselves.

We demand accountability from everyone except the government.

We expect government to solve problems that citizens, families, communities, and free people once solved themselves.

Worst of all, we have become experts at pretending none of this is happening.

We congratulate ourselves on being tolerant, generous, and virtuous while our institutions fail, productivity declines, public debt explodes, trust evaporates, and Canadians become more divided than they have been in decades.

That is not something to celebrate.

It is something to confront.

If Canadians can no longer articulate what it means to be Canadian, perhaps it is because we have abandoned the principles that once defined us: freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, accountability, respect for the rule of law, and service to one another rather than dependence on the state.

You do not need to take my word for it.

Just open your eyes. Look around!

A country does not lose its identity overnight. It loses it one abandoned principle at a time.

A nation without shared values eventually becomes little more than a collection of people living within arbitrary borders.

So if we are going to celebrate Canada today, let us celebrate the principles that made this country worth celebrating in the first place and commit ourselves to restoring them where they have been lost.

June 25, 2026

Why Britain voted for Brexit

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Pat Condell explains some of the reasons British voters chose Brexit over staying in the EU back in 2016:

Why did we vote for Brexit ten years ago? Because we understood that the core purpose of the European Union is to destroy the independent countries of Europe by opening the borders and transforming a diverse continent of sovereign nations into a single homogenous political bloc governed by a committee of unelected bureaucrats, as a model for the planned global dictatorship.

Obviously, you’re not going to get many votes for that if you just lay it out for people, so you start with something innocuous like trade.

You say “Let’s harmonise our trade arrangements and everything will run more smoothly.”

And people say “Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”

Then you say “While we’re at it, let’s give this small group of people the power to organise all this from one place, and everything will run more smoothly.”

“Well, I suppose that makes sense. We want things to run smoothly.”

Then it’s “Actually, let’s give these people the power to make our laws and override our parliament and justice system, and everything will run much more smoothly.”

“Hold on a second, I don’t know about that …”

“You fascist. You racist. You xenophobe. You bigot. You pig ignorant little Englander. You vermin. You scum.”

Although that attitude certainly helped to tip the balance, the most important reason we voted for Brexit is that politicians had no right to sign away the governance of the UK to a foreign entity, but that is what they did, while pretending it was about trade. They lied to us, and they tried to cheat us out of our country.

That is why we voted for Brexit, and it’s why we’re now being punished for our disobedience by traitors who refuse to secure the border and who are allowing our country to be flooded with millions of unwanted and incompatible immigrants and illegally invaded and occupied by an army of dangerous military age men in whose presence no woman or child is safe.

Forced mass immigration from hostile and barbarous cultures is punishment for Brexit. Our country is being purposely destroyed for not voting the way we were told.

June 23, 2026

They don’t do “democracy” in Europe for any important issue: the voters might get it wrong

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, France, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It used to be a joke that voting never matters because the voters can’t be trusted with that kind of power. Over time, the joke stopped being at all funny, because that’s exactly what has happened in most western countries at the national level, but most blatantly in the European Union, where voters can express their will in a clear majority, yet see exactly the opposite policies implemented by Brussels:

EU delenda est

2005: the day they decided your “no” didn’t count

May 29, 2005. The French vote. Referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty.

Result: 54.68% NO.

Turnout: 69%.

Not a vote of abstainers, not a misunderstanding.

A people speaking out, massively, with full awareness.

Three years later, the same text — or nearly so — came into force. Without asking their opinion again.

Here’s how.

The context.

The Constitutional Treaty was the great federal leap: a text that gave the EU the attributes of a state. A flag, an anthem, a “constitution”, a foreign minister, supremacy written in black and white. Chirac, full of confidence, calls the French to the polls. The “yes” campaign mobilizes everything: the state, the major parties, the media, big business, the institutional unions.

And the French say no. For reasons the elite refused to hear: fear of social dumping (the infamous “Polish plumber”, the Bolkestein directive), a sense of a machine slipping out of their control, rejection of a project decided from on high and ratified by acclamation. Five days later, the Dutch say no in turn. 61%.

The treaty is dead. Officially, it’s called a “period of reflection”. In reality, it’s time to find a workaround.

The workaround has a name: Nicolas Sarkozy.

2007 campaign. Sarkozy proposes a “simplified treaty”. And above all, he lays out the adoption method: it will be the parliamentary route. No referendum. Parliament will vote in place of the people.

That’s his promise. He is elected.

And he keeps it against the people who had already decided.

The sleight of hand: the Lisbon Treaty.

Signed in December 2007.

They remove the symbols that scared people: no more “constitution”, no flag in the text, no “minister”.

They keep the essentials: permanent presidency of the Council, extension of qualified majority voting, retreat from unanimity, the Union’s legal personality, European diplomatic service. The institutional substance of the rejected text, repackaged.

The most cynical part is that they admitted it. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the architect of the Constitution, wrote it himself: the tools are the same, we’ve simply changed their order in the box. The stated goal: make the text unreadable so no government would be forced to submit it to a referendum. Technique replacing the popular verdict.

February 2008. Versailles.

Congress convenes to amend the French Constitution and allow ratification. Then Parliament ratifies Lisbon. The government left, which had campaigned for “no”, abstains and lets it pass. The French, they are never consulted again.

The “no” of 2005 has just been converted to “yes” by procedure.

And for those who might doubt the method: Ireland, for its part, was constitutionally required to vote. It says no in June 2008. They make it revote in 2009 until they get the right result. Vote until you get it right.

And that’s where it all connects.

This isn’t a procedural anecdote. It’s the founding act of a legitimacy problem that France has never settled.

Because the question of 2005 is exactly the one today. When Brussels signs 96 billion in development aid, when the NDICI directs billions to foreign “civil societies”, when the Global Gateway promises 300 billion the real question is never “should we do it?”.

It’s: who decided, and with what legitimacy?

The answer, we’ve known it since 2005: an administration that believes the people, when they answer wrong, must be circumvented, not heard. Hayek called it the fatal conceit.

The idea that a center knows better than the peoples what is good for them including against their explicit vote.

The French never accepted Lisbon. They were never asked.

And a structure built by going over the head of a lost referendum doesn’t carry a democratic deficit: it carries a birth defect.

The American Constitution starts with “We the People”.

Ours, the European version, started with a people who said no and an apparatus that decided it didn’t count.

Auto-translated by X from Brivael Le Pogam’s original French post.

June 22, 2026

Progressive intellectual arrogance

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

John Konrad tries to explain the apparently universal intellectual snobbery of progressives, which has brought pretty much every western country into the era of the expert:

Why is the left so arrogant?

Because they put their trust in a global elite. Not directly, but through the media and the universities the elite manipulate.

My dad always said it the other way around: privilege comes with responsibility. But responsibility is hard. Responsibility requires knowledge.

And in a world growing more complex and unpredictable by the year, understanding what’s happening around you takes more and more of it.

Twenty years ago you could walk through Manhattan around noon on a Sunday and watch half the city reading the Times. The thing was massive, but a fast, educated reader could come away with a decent picture of the whole world in a few hours.

Then two things happened.

Craigslist gutted newspaper revenue, and DEI mandates swapped great reporters for morally indignant j-school hacks. The quality and accuracy of information cratered.

At the same time, the internet roared to life and the world got radically more interconnected overnight.

So the elite grew less informed exactly as complexity exploded.

To cope, they borrowed a trick from NASA. There aren’t enough hours in the day to be the best rocket scientist and the best navigator and the best flight surgeon all at once. So mission control compartmentalized. The best person in each silo got a desk. Thruster problem? Everyone turns to the engine expert. Someone’s hurt? Everyone turns to the flight surgeon. The rocket guy never had to learn a thing about medicine.

The elite copied the model. They switched their brains off for anything outside their lane. Everyone specialized inside their own bubble.

But compartmentalization runs on trust. Put one bad actor in mission control, and the moment everyone turns to him, bad things happen.

To guard against that, they doubled down on credentialism. They learned to trust only the experts minted by certain colleges and blessed by certain think tanks.

And the bad actors had a field day. Fraud, disinformation, theft, all of it could happen inside a silo, unseen. And it did.

Then came a mission control director who told them not to worry. Everything was fine. They didn’t know what was going on, but he did, and he was smarter than all of them. He said so, right there in the meetings.

Everyone loves a brilliant, competent boss, especially a charismatic one who seems kind, because it means they no longer have to worry. He’s got it handled. Just trust him.

And trust Obama they did.

But he had nothing handled except his own aura. And he let Marxist actors run loose inside the silos that mattered, education and HR chief among them.

The right was skeptical, so they kept reading, kept hunting for alternative sources, kept trying to make sense of the complexity themselves. Nobody cracked it completely. But they started seeing the big red anomaly lights blinking across the dashboard.

So the smart people on the right kept building broad knowledge while the left stayed siloed. Ten years passed, and the left’s elite fell far, far behind.

They’re starting to see that Obama was a fool. But they’re stuck. You can’t cram ten years of missed homework into a few months. And they’re rich and powerful and have no interest in going back to school.

They have two options. Admit they were wrong and put in months, maybe years, of hard work to take responsibility for their actions. Or keep acting like sheep. If the rewards weren’t there, some might choose the work.

But the system is so riddled with fraud, so many hollowed-out silos kept on life support, that there’s more than enough money sloshing around the NGOs to fund their posh lives.

They have the privilege with none of the responsibility. It’s a comfortable place to sit. They don’t want to change.

But holding that position requires one thing: they have to believe their mission control director has it all under control and is smarter than anyone on the right.

The bottom line is the have to be arrogant. Or the whole house of cards comes down.

June 21, 2026

QotD: Wishful thinking

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The wish is often father to the belief, never more so when our interests are in play. But even without material interests, we are often so attached to our ideas or theories that wishful thinking easily overcomes evidence that casts, or at any rate ought to cast, doubt on them. No one is immune from wishful thinking, and therefore from special pleading. Not surprisingly, the latter is easier to spot in others than in oneself.

There is a déformation professionelle that is very common among practitioners of the human sciences, namely the tendency to treat the human beings who are the objects of their study as if they were no different in principle from sticks or stones or stars. A striking example of this tendency was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April this year, in an article titled “Stigma and the Toll of Addiction” by Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The first thing one might have looked for in an article by the director of the Institute was a certain modesty. After all, the Institute has been witness to a vast increase in the abuse of drugs, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, without having been able — notwithstanding claims to advance in the scientific understanding of addiction — to effect improvement in any significant way whatever. No mea culpa is required, but a tone of hectoring evangelism is not very seemly in the circumstances.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.

May 22, 2026

Canada – an example of a “cut-flower civilization”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison explains why Canada still looks somewhat like a functioning country, but it’s just a fading illusion:

“Cut Flowers, 2021” by F. D. Richards is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Os Guinness coined the phrase “cut-flower civilisation” to describe a culture cut off from the roots that once gave it life.

Look at Canada today under the Liberal machine and its latest boardroom saviour, Mark Carney, and the phrase fits a little too well.

Canada still looks alive. In many ways, it is. We are still a wealthy country. We still have decent people, vast resources, serious workers, inherited institutions, and enough stored national strength to keep the lights on for a while.

But the wilting is visible.

The problem is not that Canada lacks talent, land, energy, minerals, farmers, tradespeople, engineers, entrepreneurs, or ambition. The problem is that the governing class has spent the last decade cutting away at the very roots that made those things productive.

Canada did not become a G7 country because Ottawa held press conferences, hired consultants, or released glossy strategy documents. Canada became prosperous because earlier generations understood the basics. Build things. Produce things. Develop resources. Reward work. Protect property rights. Defend free speech. Keep government limited enough that private competence can actually breathe.

That was the soil.

And that soil has been poisoned by years of managerial arrogance.

Canadians were told that prosperity could be designed from above by technocrats, climate planners, corporate consultants, regulators, and global conference people with expensive credentials and no real skin in the game. They told us that taxing energy would make us richer. Blocking resource development would make us virtuous. Deficits did not matter. Productivity could wait. National unity could survive endless moral scolding from people who confuse a résumé with wisdom.

Now this same crowd wants applause because a few mines, rail terminals, aircraft deals, or manufacturing projects are being announced.

Fine. Good. Canada needs all of it.

But let’s not mistake oxygen for genius.

If a man spends ten years tightening his hands around your throat, he does not deserve a parade because he lets you breathe for ten seconds.

This is not some grand national renaissance because Mark Carney found a clean hard hat and stood beside a podium. Much of what we are seeing is an economy gasping for air after years of political strangulation.

The real question is not, “What project did they announce today?”

The real question is: what did they do to the soil?

Where did the habits of a serious country go?

Thrift. Production. Energy realism. Institutional integrity. Personal responsibility. Local grit. Honest media. Independent journalism. A government that protects the conditions for prosperity instead of replacing them with slogans, subsidies, and corporate welfare.

A cut flower can still look good for a while. That is the trick. It keeps its colour. It photographs well. It looks fine in the vase. But without roots, the clock is already running.

That is Canada’s problem.

We are living off stored capital: financial capital, moral capital, institutional capital, cultural capital. Previous generations built the reserves. This generation of elites is spending them and calling it leadership.

Eventually the runway ends.

And when it does, the speeches get louder, the excuses get thicker, and the very people who cut the roots start demanding credit for watering the vase.

An elite rebrand will not fix this. More Liberal managerial theatre will not save the dollar. Canada does not need another round of carbon-tax sermons from people who fly to international summits to lecture truckers, farmers, and working families about sacrifice.

Canada has to get back to the dirt.

Production. Responsibility. Truth. Energy abundance. Free speech. Strong families. Functional institutions. A state that remembers it serves national life. It does not create it.

The country is not dead.

But it is wilting.

And the first step toward recovery is simple: stop applauding the people holding the scissors.

May 20, 2026

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

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, Politics, Religion, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

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

“That is not diplomacy. That is national self-harm wearing a lanyard.”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to a post about the Canadian government’s amazing nonchalance about protecting Canada’s sovereignty:

Canadians voted in a federal election, not in a referendum to turn the country into a Davos policy lab with a maple leaf sticker slapped on the front.

The line “we will never be the 51st state” is easy politics. Most Canadians agree. But then the same elbozos turns around and flirts with every other form of sovereignty dilution they can find.

Join the EU? Canada is not in Europe. Geography still matters, apparently. Joining the EU would mean importing another layer of bureaucracy, regulation, courts, trade rules, and political obligations from people Canadians cannot remove from office. That is not independence. That is outsourcing control with better stationery.

Give China influence over resources? That is even worse. A serious country protects strategic assets: energy, minerals, food, ports, telecom, data, and critical infrastructure. You do not hand leverage over your future to an authoritarian state and then call yourself sophisticated. That is not diplomacy. That is national self-harm wearing a lanyard.

The real issue is this:

Canada’s elites love sovereignty when it means rejecting America.

They seem much less interested in sovereignty when it means resisting Brussels, Beijing, the UN, global finance, or climate bureaucrats.

So the question is fair:

Who voted for Canada to stop acting like a country?

Not Canadians. Not directly.

This is elite mission creep. They run on patriotism, then govern like national borders are an administrative inconvenience.

Other items that popped up in the news over the weekend included the United States Department of War announcing that they will be “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, a US-Canadian body that has been continuously operating since 1940 when US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King established it in a meeting in Ogdensburg, New York. Is this a big deal? Some people certainly think so:

In a bit of a sudden, surprise move, Under Secretary of War Elbridge “The Biggest Cheese” Colby has announced on X of all places that the Unites States would be pausing participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, the Oldest and most Foundational node of the Canada-US security partnership.

[…]

As we all know, on August 17, 1940, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King met in a railway car in Ogdensburg, New York. They issued the Ogdensburg Declaration, an agreement to create a joint board to study sea, land, and air defense problems.

For over 80 years the PJBD has serves as one of the major intersects of the Canada-US relationship. It has been the forum where we have been able to engage and work collaboratively on matters of National Security, Continental Defence, and Critical Infrastructure.

Obviously, given how late it is for me, I sadly can’t dive head first into things. However, I did wanna get something out there. It’s no doubt a very petty move to make, part of a long line of petty moves between everyone in the last year. The pressure is obviously there to push Canada along, and the inclusion of the Prime Ministers Davos speech by Colby should go as a sign to one of the areas that is troubling the current administration.

Trying to apply pressure through such acts though isn’t something that I think will be successful. Granted, being a bit of a dick and doing petty shit in hopes of manipulating opinions, only for it to backfire due to a general miscalculation, is something this Administration does on the regular, and so I can’t be surprised to see it done here.

Nor is it surprising for the performative PM and his government to be utterly blindsided when one of their petty performances triggers a strong negative reaction from the United States.

Another issue that the Liberals in Ottawa seem to think both uncontroversial and straightforward is one of their batch of anti-civil-liberties bills before Parliament, in this case Bill C-22, which the US Congress considers to be a dangerous attempt to control US companies who do business in Canada:

The government’s plans for lawful access have gone off the rails. In recent days, Signal has warned it would pull out of the Canadian market rather than comply with Bill C-22. Windscribe, the Toronto-headquartered VPN provider, has said it would relocate its headquarters out of Canada and NordVPN has warned it would consider following suit. Apple and Meta have both raised public concerns about the bill’s effect on encryption and cybersecurity. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, civil liberties groups, and a long line of legal and security experts have all called for changes. The chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees have written to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree warning that the bill threatens U.S. national security and the integrity of cross-border data flows. Even the bill’s own oversight body, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, has told the SECU committee it does not have the access it needs for effective oversight. If the government thought it could push through the bill largely unnoticed, it has been proven painfully wrong as there are now trade frictions with the U.S., the prospect of leading companies exiting the Canadian market, and weaker cybersecurity protections for ordinary users.

[…]

The bill nominally protects against the worst outcome through a systemic vulnerability safeguard, which says that core providers are not required to comply with a regulation if compliance would require the introduction or maintenance of a systemic vulnerability. But the safeguard falls apart on careful reading. First, the term “systemic vulnerability” lacks specificity in the statute, which means the government could define encryption and vulnerability narrowly enough to hollow out the protection. Second, Sections 5(5) and 7(5) state that providers are not required to comply where doing so would result in a systemic vulnerability, but Sections 12 and 13 unconditionally require compliance with orders and provide that orders prevail over inconsistent regulations. The net effect is that providers are stuck with contradictory provisions in a system shrouded in secrecy and which could lead to the weakening of security systems. That is why Signal, Windscribe, NordVPN, Apple, Meta, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, and the U.S. Congress are raising the alarm.

The best approach to address these risks is to go back to the drawing board on Part 2 of the bill. Committee hearings should be extended to ensure that the long list of expert witnesses, industry voices, and international counterparts who have asked for changes receive a full hearing. Further, real amendments should be on the table that better balance law enforcement needs with Canadians’ privacy rights. Failure to do so will result in some of the world’s most privacy-protective services exiting the market, leaving behind a law that is vulnerable to constitutional challenge with millions of Canadians facing genuine privacy and cybersecurity risks.

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