Quotulatiousness

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.

May 16, 2026

Canada’s imaginary “immigration consensus”

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

An informative post from earlier this year, showing how the much-talked-about “immigration consensus” was never any more than an expression of Laurentian Elite luxury belief:

Ever since immigration became a hot issue, it has become fashionable to say that “Trudeau broke Canada’s immigration consensus”. But this “consensus” was based on a false narrative that is easily disproved with data.

UNHEARD VOICES

Until about 10 years ago, I had also believed that there was an “immigration consensus” in Canada. But once my life in Canada had settled down enough for me to have the mental space to dabble in public debates online, I came across an opposing view. An Indian immigrant who was then working as editor for an English language community newspaper in the GTA wrote often about opinion polls showing a fairly high level of opposition to high immigration. His name is Pradip Rodrigues. I corresponded with him via email, and later we became friends.

What struck me at the time was that the lone voice talking about these polls was himself an immigrant. Some years later, I came across an article in [the] Vancouver Sun by journalist Douglas Todd, saying that Indo-Canadians in the Vancouver region were unhappy with the large influx of international students [from] India. Given how much value the Progressives (which category most of the MSM is a part of) put on “lived experience”, the reporting by Pradip and Mr. Todd should have attracted urgent attention.

But because the mess being created by excessive immigration hadn’t reached crisis levels by then, these voices went unheard. At best, they were preaching to the choir, and at worst, they were accused of racism (or, in the case of Pradip, “internalized racism”). Smart people see beforehand the problems that are coming and take steps to avert them. People of average intelligence attend to problems after they have occurred. Fools keep denying that problems have occurred, and it always takes a full-blown crisis to get them to accept that they have a problem on their hands – at which point they segue effortlessly to blaming others for the problems. We see this in many policy areas in Canada, and immigration is one of the most salient examples of this shortcoming in Canadian society.

RAISON D’ETRE

No politician will ever tire of saying that “Canada needs immigration to boost our economy”. An ancillary statement is that “immigrants pay taxes that support Canada’s social programs”. But as I showed in my article “Immigration Does NOT Increase Prosperity“, the inflation-adjusted compounded average growth rate (CAGR) in per capita GDP fell by a precipitous 84% between 1970 and 2021, ending up at an anemic 0.67% in the decade ending in 2021:

Clearly, the capacity of Canadians – long-time residents and newcomers alike – to “boost Canada’s economy” and “pay (more) taxes that support the social programs” has been eroded almost to zero. It is worth pondering how, in spite of clear signs evidenced by data, the exact opposite narrative could prevail over such a long period, and how so many people subscribed to it. This is as if Abraham Lincoln’s sage statement that “You can fool some people all the time, or all the people for some time, but not all the people all the time” was held in abeyance in Canada from 1970 onwards – or is that the case?

Not all of the people, but enough of the boomer generation who were raised with the constant drumbeat of propaganda from the Liberals — Canada’s “Natural Governing Party”, as they liked to refer to themselves — and now that most of them are comfortably retired, they seen no reason to rock the boat, even when their own children and grandchildren tell them how bad Canada has become since their prime.

“Do not expect a quick fix or some magical solution”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Chipiuk points out that it’ll take more to get our governments out of the habit of kicking the can down the road than just change of faces at the top:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

No one said it would be easy. Nothing worth fighting for ever is.

Fighting powerful institutions is what I have done my entire life. It is not easy, but it is worth it because you know what is at stake.

This is also not a new problem. History has repeated this pattern before. “The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.” — Ernest Hemingway

Most do not want to give up an inch of their power or control because many have built their identity, influence, and livelihoods around those systems. Some have convinced the public that they know what is best for everyone else better than citizens know for themselves. Yet all you have to do is look around to see the lie. We are not better when people are divided, angry, fearful, and distracted, turning on each other instead of asking harder questions about the institutions and incentives driving the problems in the first place.

And if good people stop standing up, asking questions, and pushing back when something is wrong, those institutions only become more powerful and less accountable. That has been happening for a long time, which is exactly why many systems are so entrenched and disconnected from the people they are supposed to serve.

History repeatedly shows that when governments and institutions avoid addressing deeper structural problems, they rely on temporary measures, slogans, fear, distractions, and promises of quick fixes to maintain stability and public support. But eventually reality catches up, and and ordinary people bear the cost.

So do not expect a quick fix or some magical solution. Democracy, accountability, and freedom require informed citizens willing to stay engaged, stay principled, ask difficult questions, and do the hard work necessary to protect them.

Because in the end, what is more important to fight for than freedom, accountability, and the society we leave behind for future generations?

May 7, 2026

Great success! Honda “postpones” their Ontario EV project

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As part of their mindless fanboyism for anything remotely related to “Net Zero”, the federal government and the Ontario provincial government have been serving up subsidies for electric vehicles and hastening the “inevitable transition” away from internal combustion vehicles. Through legislation and regulation, they’ve been doing everything they can to close down the traditional car and truck manufacturing sector and replace them with zero emission vehicles. The various governments have handed out subsidies amounting to billions, and yet one after another after another the much ballyhoo’d EV factories, battery plants, and other futuristic projects fall by the wayside, leaving very little in exchange for those billions:

There was a time, not very long ago, when Liberal politicians treated EV battery announcements like moon landings.

Hard hats. Safety glasses. Giant ceremonial cheques. Breathless speeches about “the future”. Every battery plant was “historic”. Every subsidy package was “transformational”. Every corporate press conference looked like a motivational seminar for people who think buzzwords are infrastructure.

All we were missing was a fog machine and Bono.

Meanwhile ordinary Canadians were standing in grocery aisles doing mental math over bacon prices, delaying dental work, and wondering whether they could survive another winter utility bill without sacrificing whatever scraps remained of their savings.

But while Canadians were trying to keep their heads above water, Ottawa was busy launching one of the most expensive industrial subsidy experiments in modern Canadian history.

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

The Honda EV project in Ontario was supposed to be one of the crown jewels of this brave new green economy. Politicians lined up in hard hats and safety glasses like a traveling theatre troupe performing The Future Is Here. Canadians were assured this was proof the country was becoming an EV superpower.

Turns out it may have been more of a very expensive PowerPoint presentation with taxpayer financing attached.

[…]

In March 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Mark Carney as an informal economic adviser during the COVID recovery period. Over the following years, Carney increasingly promoted “green transition” investment frameworks, climate-linked financial systems, ESG-focused economic planning, and massive public-private investment partnerships tied to decarbonization strategies.

Which is important context now, because the EV subsidy era did not emerge out of thin air. It grew out of a broader worldview that treated government-directed green investment as both economic policy and moral mission. The assumption underneath all of this was breathtakingly simple:

“If government wants it badly enough, reality will cooperate.”

That is usually where things begin going sideways.

Canadians were told the EV transition was inevitable. Questions about affordability, charging infrastructure, winter range, electrical grid capacity, or consumer demand were often brushed aside like annoying little details raised by peasants who simply lacked sufficient enlightenment.

Then came the subsidy gold rush.

[…]

Corporations are not charities. They are not loyal patriots. They are not emotionally attached to government slogans.

They follow incentives. They chase profitability. They change direction when conditions change.

That is exactly what Honda did.

Meanwhile Canadians are left holding the bill for another “historic transformation” that produced:

  • endless announcements
  • glossy photo ops
  • consultant buzzwords
  • government self-congratulation
  • escalating subsidy exposure
  • and corporate renegotiations every time market conditions shifted
  • while producing no completed Honda EV manufacturing hub and no fleet of Canadian-built EVs rolling proudly off Ontario assembly lines.

What remains instead is a stalled megaproject, a confused tariff policy, a government spinning contradictory narratives depending on the week, and taxpayers once again discovering they were voluntold into becoming venture capitalists for political vanity projects.

Apparently this is what “economic leadership” looks like now.

Hard hats. Press releases. Fifty-plus billion dollars in EV-related exposure. And a factory plan slowly evaporating into the mist while Chinese EVs roll through the front gate anyway.

May 6, 2026

“I don’t want a solution, I want to dismantle our socio-economic system!”

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

On his Substack, Christopher Snowden explains how “public health” is just another of the many, many anti-capitalist branches of progressive belief:

Some people don’t really want to solve problems. They want to change the world for other reasons. That was the argument I made in Not Invented Here last year, a multi-author IEA publication that essentially elaborated on this meme …

One example is obesity, which we are told can only be tackled by fundamentally changing the food environment, banning advertising, taxing more products and demonising “Big Food”. None of this has ever actually worked anywhere. We do, however, now have GLP-1 drugs that work wonders for many people.

Plenty of “public health” academics are notably resistant to “fat jabs” because what they really want is to fundamentally change the food environment, ban advertising, tax more products and demonise “Big Food”.

Take this article from three self-described “public health scholars” in JAMA Health Forum, for example. They object to obesity being framed as a “a disease requiring individual treatment” because, they say, it undermines public support for government action. They even complain that “medical societies consistently argue that we do need to both prevent and treat obesity” because treatment — i.e. losing weight — is something that individuals can do for themselves. Moreover, studies have shown that when the public hear about people losing weight on their own initiative, they are less likely to support population-wide policies such as food taxation.

    Broadcasting a “we need to do both” message, it turns out, is a counterproductive communications strategy for addressing the obesity epidemic. Studies message-testing obesity narratives find that public support for government action is highest when obesity is framed as the result of food industry manipulation and addresses toxic food environments.

The authors don’t seem particularly interested in whether this narrative is true. The main thing is that it can “build support for addressing upstream drivers of the obesity epidemic”. They conclude that medical professionals should stop talking about GLP-1 drugs in public and bang on about “BiG fOoD” instead.

    While we acknowledge that public and media discourse often expect clinicians to comment on treatment efficacy and emergent therapies, in an ideal world, the medical community would move discussions about GLP-1 drugs targeting causes of individual cases in-house, while using its credibility and authority publicly to amplify much needed political discussions about the root causes of increasing obesity incidence.

    This messaging should include concrete policy proposals targeting unhealthy food environments shifting the debate toward the structural causes of the obesity epidemic, such as World Health Organization–recommended sugar taxes and other policies that would effectively reverse the rise in ultraprocessed food production, marketing, and consumption and, importantly, the corporate power that has so far prevented governments from enacting these policies.

You can see why they are worried about fat jabs. The drugs work by giving people artificial willpower and prove that if obese people simply eat less food they will stop being obese. It has nothing to do with advertising, price, availability or “corporate power”.

From the perspective of the authors, these drugs are a threat, but what exactly is their perspective? The first author, Luc Hagenaars, has written a lot about sugar taxes which he compiled for his PhD thesis. He also worked at the Dutch Ministry of Health in the early 2020s when the Netherlands was undergoing its anti-liberal counter-revolution. Last year, he wrote an article titled “The Ozempic Era Could Shift Blame for Obesity From Individuals to Commercial Food Systems” which made exactly the opposite argument to the one he is making here.

Update, 8 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress