Quotulatiousness

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.

Carney panders to the Euro elites and his TDS-afflicted base

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Ben Woodfinden explains Prime Minister Mark Carney’s constant pandering on the international stage:

The average voter won’t care, but the more Carney lays out his worldview the more the contradictions and incongruences in his thinking (or lack of sincerity) become apparent.

In his famous Davos speech he said “we actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be”. But the way he talks about and sees Europe does not fit this, and this statement is bizarre.

We should absolutely be pursuing closer ties to Europe, but it is delusional if he actually believes the new international order will be “rebuilt out of Europe”.

Europe for all its grand aspirations cannot even defend Ukraine by itself and without American help. Europe would need something like 300,000 additional troops and €250 billion a year in extra defence spending just to deter Russia without the Americans.

NATO’s own Secretary General told the European Parliament in January that Europe “cannot at the moment provide nearly enough of what Ukraine needs to defend itself today, and to deter tomorrow”, and that without American weapons “we cannot keep Ukraine in the fight. Literally not.” Rutte told European lawmakers that anyone who thinks Europe can defend itself without the US should “keep on dreaming”. Four years into the most serious land war on the continent since 1945 and this is where we are. That is not a continent about to anchor a new international order.

The world order is quickly is reorganising, yes. But around a US-China axis, not Brussels. The eurozone is forecast to grow 0.9% this year. China at 4.5%. China accounts for roughly 30% of global growth, Europe’s share of global GDP keeps shrinking. Europe is just one of many players. Again if you take Carney seriously here, it’s silly. Build closer ties with Europe yes but do not believe this is the next superpower.

But I suspect this is actually just another sign that Carney is good at politics — he knows exactly what the Davos crowd, his boomer base and media admirers want to hear and he is very good at giving it to them. Flattery has done him enormous favours in European capitals. But telling European elites the future runs through them is not realism, it is the opposite of realism. It is telling people what they want to hear, not the truth.

L. Wayne Mathison also comments on Carney’s profound europhiliac positions:

Europe is not the model. It is the warning label.

High regulation. Weak growth. Expensive energy. Soft defence. Endless bureaucracy.

America built. Europe managed. America innovated. Europe regulated.

And Carney wants Canada rebuilt “out of Europe”?

No thanks. Canada needs strength, productivity, energy, defence, and sovereignty, not Brussels-style decline with better catering.

April 25, 2026

Frank Furedi’s In Defence Of Populism

Filed under: Books, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, Frank Furedi explains why he wrote his new book In Defence Of Populism with especial reference to the recent Hungarian election results:

Photo from Roots & Wings with Frank Furedi

Have you noticed the flood of commentaries and articles appearing in the mainstream media dwelling on the topic of how to crush populism once and for all? The recent electoral defeat of Viktór Orbán’s Fidesz Party in Hungary has emboldened the European centrist technocratic elite to hope that this result spells the end of populist surge on both sides of the Atlantic.

The “is this the end of populism?” literature has been around for some time. To this day, mainstream commentators frequently express the hope that populism is a passing phenomenon. “Has Europe reached peak populism?”, asked a commentator in Politico in 2019, before expressing the hope that “the tide could be turning against the anti-establishment nationalist movements that have upended politics across the Continent, leaving the barbarians howling in frustration at the gates”.1 “We seem to have passed peak populism”, predicted Andrew Adonis, a leading British anti-Brexit voice.2

The outcome the Hungarian elections has led to an explosion of commentaries that are driven by the anti-populist dream of a world where populism is forced back into the margins of society. Polly Toynbee of The Guardian noted that “Viktor Orbán inspired rightwingers across the EU and in Britain. His defeat could represent a turning of the tide”.3

[…]

The main reason why I wrote In Defence of Populism is because it is necessary to counter the anti-populist hysteria about populism. Populism is surrounded by ceaseless hostility and mystification. Just about everything you are likely to read about populism in the specialist academic literature is motivated by their authors’ animosity and contempt towards their subject matter. Their sentiments are reproduced in an intensely polemical form by the mainstream media which habitually dismisses populists as far right and even fascists. According to the dominant media narrative, populists are racist xenophobes, homophobes and a variety of other phobes. At times the media hysteria regarding the so-called populist threat echoes the Red Scare of the 1920s and 1950s in the United States.

The populist voice has been systematically distorted by its opponents. I argue that this movement has been subjected to ideological warfare and recast through a teleology of evil. It is important to grasp the systematic attempt to demonise populism because, in the media and public life, a distorted and fundamentally flawed characterisation of populism prevails. What’s remarkable about this subject is that virtually everything that is communicated in the media and in the literature about populism is framed by individuals who are external to it. The definitions authored by these individuals communicate their bias and suspicion towards populism. Consequently, the way that populism is represented in public life is an invention of its opponents. Those who are ascribed the label populist do not get to decide who they are nor what populism means.

So although the populist movement is in the ascendancy, its actual definition is still unresolved and remains interpreted though the medium of a modern mythology. Almost everything you are likely to read about contemporary populism bears little relationship to the real impulses that drive this movement forward. In Defence of Populism offers an antidote to the confusions and distortions peddled by the anti-populist idealogues. I look forward to getting your feedback regarding what you think about the case for populism advanced in my book.

  1. Paul Taylor, “Has Europe reached peak populism?”, Politico, 5 September 2019 https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-reached-peak-populism-far-right-anti-european-government-election/
  2. Andrew Adonis, “We seem to have passed peak populism”, Prospect, 11 January 2023 https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/peak-populism-donald-trump-boris-johnson-jair-bolsonaro
  3. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/14/viktor-orban-europe-britain-hard-right-populism

April 17, 2026

Canada joining the EU is a terrible idea

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Dean Allison explains a few of the reasons Canada should not be attempting to join the European Union, despite Prime Minister Carney’s obvious love for the idea:

One of the dumbest ideas floating around right now: Canada joining the European Union.

This isn’t a trade deal. This is a surrender.

You don’t “partner” with the EU. You hand power to unelected technocrats in Brussels who dictate policy across 27 countries.

Let’s be clear what that means for Canada:

  • You lose control of monetary policy. Goodbye independent Bank of Canada.
  • Your federal budget gets reviewed and constrained by foreign bureaucrats.
  • Regulations get imposed from overseas with zero accountability to Canadians.

And if you think Ottawa is slow now, wait until every decision requires EU-level consensus. Nothing gets done without layers of approvals, committees, and political trade-offs across continents.

Then there’s censorship.

The EU is aggressively regulating online speech, platforms, and content. Handing them influence over Canada means more control over what you see, say, and share.

This isn’t sovereignty. It’s outsourcing it.

As Brian Lilley points out, we’d be giving up more control than in any U.S. trade deal.

Rejecting becoming the 51st state of the U.S. only to become the 28th state of Europe isn’t strategy, it’s pure stupidity!

And Canadians will pay the price.

April 13, 2026

Young Canadians don’t have the resources to “buy their way out”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter points out the screamingly obvious fact that it’s insane to propose imprisoning young Canadians in a dying economy if they can’t scrape up half a million dollars to escape:

First, young Canadians don’t have shit. They definitely don’t have half a mil to pay the boomers in extortion fees so that they can leave the country.

Second, how are they planning to enforce this? Charge $500k for a passport? What stops the US from just offering amnesty? Ottawa can’t tell Washington what visas it can and cannot offer.

Third, and what makes this malicious boomerfap especially piquant, young Canadian professionals don’t leave because they especially want to. Wanderlust aside, most would prefer to remain close to family and friends.

They leave because they don’t have a choice. The Canadian state is set up to restrict opportunity to the point of nonexistence. Canada is a country that strangles ambition in the crib. As the old joke goes, if Musk had stayed in Canada he’d be a mid-level financial manager at CIBC (with any possibility of further promotion eliminated by the all-of-society DEI imperative).

Canada invests an absurd amount into educating its youth. It then refuses to allow them to use their training. So they leave. The University of Waterloo is one of the best engineering schools on the planet; virtually all of its graduates end up in the Bay area. Because the alternative is sitting on their hands or trying to get a job in the Ministry.

It would be a mistake to see Canadian investment in education as intended for the benefit of Canadian youth, by the way. Like everything else in Canada’s political economy, this is a subsidy to a Liberal Party client group, in this case the academics and administrators staffing the universities. The primary purpose of the universities is providing sinecures to liberals; the secondary purpose is indoctrination of the youth with liberalism; the third, to launder liberal ideas through intellectual channels. Whether the kids learn anything, or whether they can use whatever useful knowledge they acquire to (lol) better themselves or (lmao) “build the country”, is not a priority.

If it were not for the Laurentian Elite running the country into the ground, if young Canadians were not sabotaged at every step of their lives, then there would be no brain drain problem.

But as usual, boomerlibs would rather punish the youth to try and fix the problems the boomerlibs caused.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the progressive hellscape that Canada is becoming, here’s the wife of the Prime Minister boasting to the Liberal convention in Ottawa about how wonderful things are in Soviet Canuckistan:

It would make perfect sense for new grads to look for greener pastures, wouldn’t it? Which is why the Liberals want to force them to stay here, of course.

April 12, 2026

“The ‘Green Energy Transition’ is … a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside”

Filed under: Africa, Business, Environment — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, John Robson discusses the state of the fake green economy in the wake of a carbon market scandal where a now-bankrupt “green” company appears to have sold far more “carbon credits” than they should have:

One problem among many with the “Green Energy Transition” is that it was always a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside. It wasn’t market-driven, it was designed, and hyped, by people who didn’t care what people actually wanted to buy and indeed, in many cases, who actively believed that consumer preferences were inefficient and unenlightened. As when Bloomberg Green worries about “What a Clean Cookstove Company’s Bankruptcy Means for Carbon Markets”. Why one company’s bankruptcy should mean anything for “carbon markets” is less clear even than what a “clean cookstove” would be. One where you sprayed and wiped the backsplash as well as the main surface? But both are clearer than “carbon markets”. You just can’t go into a store and buy carbon. What are they talking about? Why, another face-plant by central planning, of course.

According to the article, in case you weren’t independently aware of it:

    This year was supposed to be a turning point for carbon markets, with the United Nations’ long-delayed country-to-country trading system coming into force and airlines preparing to enter a mandatory program to offset their emissions.

Before we get to “a turning point for carbon markets” let us give a bit of attention to “supposed to be”. Supposed by whom? Perhaps people who think the United Nations was an efficient central planner, or some subset of them. But we’ll bet that nobody normal ever said to you, or anyone else, in the course of a chat last year, “2026 will be a turning point for carbon markets”. Nobody.

Also, who was going to compel airlines to enter a “mandatory program”? Laws are made at the national level, not internationally. Turns out it’s the UN too, via the International Civil Aviation Organization, so no one was going to bungle or cheat, obviously. What could go wrong?

[…]

Why? If a company selling stoves went bankrupt in Peoria, would it cause people in Kenya, or Patagonia, or Tokyo to reconsider the whole issue of applying heat to transform food and decide that stoves, food or both were overrated? No. Of course not. The problem here is that this whole business of carbon credits was flummery.

First you made an estimate of how much harm carbon dioxide did which was nonsense. Then you made an estimate of how much CO2 some activity would release that was also nonsense. And then you made an estimate of how much CO2 some activity would not release (in this case cooking with ethanol in Mombasa) that was also nonsense. And on that basis you proposed to link the worlds of high finance, aviation and having stuff generally to a system that would have been economic rubbish even if it weren’t flashing a big bright sign “Defraud the gullible foreigners HERE!!!” Which it was.

Mathiness being in vogue, Bloomberg Green has a colourful chart explaining that “Cookstove credits are expected to become more important from 2027” that deserves as much respect as the journalistic passive voice typically does. Or perhaps even less.

The story also says:

    Prices on Corsia, the marketplace for airlines where Koko was looking to sell its credits, fell as low as $12.25 from about $15 just before the firm’s collapse, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and now sit at $12.85.

As prices for tulips softened abruptly in the Netherlands in 1637. Except at least there really were tulips and markets for same. Corsia is not a marketplace. It is, instead, the ICAO’s (remember: the International Civil Aviation Organization) “Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation”. As if ethanol stoves in Kenya, a land of some 53.3 million people who presumably only eat three meals a day on average, could offset the vast clouds of so-called “carbon pollution” that travellers, including the big-carbon-footprint bigmouths who lead most western countries, emit every day. The whole thing is speculation piled on ignorance atop mismeasurement built on the sand of dishonesty. What could go wrong?

QotD: “Disinformation”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Neil Stone @DrNeilStone
    X is coordinated disinformation packaged as Free Speech

The concept of disinformation is inherently authoritarian. It presumes some faultless source from which truth flows, such that all speech can be judged by its alignment with this source.

Yes, sometimes certain issues are fairly clear-cut and people are just lying, but more often people fundamentally disagree about both facts and methods. They disagree about who is trustworthy and what institutions and processes are most likely to produce truth.

I, as a private citizen, might call some claim a lie or some person a liar. That’s discourse. I hope to persuade others that I am correct. But to institutionalize disinformation is necessarily to institutionalize a priest caste of truth determiners. This is antithetical to the scientific method and the process of knowledge production in general.

Truth-seeking must start from a place of humility: we are not sure of our claims or our methods. We are doing our imperfect best. We demonstrate the value of our ideas via evidence, argument, and the practical utility they provide. Not by censoring competing ideas.

It is ludicrous to assume that modern academic or journalistic institutions are bias-free oracles, yet this is the basis of the “disinformation” concept.

Hunter Ash, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-27.

April 6, 2026

QotD: Taylorism

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

In the world of management, the ideology of generic, domain-agnostic expertise first made its appearance in the late 19th century under the name of “scientific management”, or “Taylorism” after its godfather Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s insight was that the same engineering principles used to design a more economical or efficient product could just as well be applied to the shop floor itself. In his view, the workers, overseers, and production processes of a factory all combined to form a great living machine, and that machine could be optimized and made more efficient by an application of scientific attitudes.

Taylor was unpopular in his own day and is even less popular today, because his particular brand of optimization of the great living machine was all about stripping autonomy (or as Marx would say, “control and conscious direction“) from workers. But the particular kind of optimization he advocated is less important than the conceptual breakthrough that while a nail factory and a car factory might look very different on the surface, they are both governed by the same set of abstract laws: laws of time and motion, concurrency, bottlenecks, worker motivation and so on. A master of those laws could optimize a nail factory, and then go on to optimize a car factory, and could do both without knowing very much at all about nails or cars.

Who could have a problem with that? Even I don’t think it’s entirely wrong — I may have misgivings about the sheer volume of people going into fields like management consulting, but I’ll admit that there remains alpha in asking a smart and incisive outsider to take a look at your operation and tell you what seems crazy. The trouble comes with confusing that sporadic, occasional sanity-check with the actual business of leading a team of people who are working together to achieve an objective. Because, get this, it’s impossible to lead such a team without a deep understanding of the details of every person’s tasks.

It’s surreal to me that this point has to be made, yet somehow it does. If the team you lead makes nails, you need to know everything there is to know about making nails. If the team you lead operates a restaurant, you need to be an expert, not in “management”, but in restaurants. If the team you lead sells mortgage-backed derivatives, you better know a heck of a lot about finance in general, mortgages in particular, the art of sales, and the specific world of selling financial instruments. There are a thousand reasons why this is true, but consider just one: a subordinate is failing at a task, and tells you that it isn’t because he’s lazy or unqualified but because the task is unexpectedly difficult. How on earth can a manager evaluate this claim without being able to do the job himself?

There’s another, very different reason managers need to be experts in whatever it is their team is doing, and it has to do with morale. A subordinate in any sort of hierarchical organization needs to see that his superior can do his own job as well or better than he can. Almost everybody gets this. In a high-pressure commercial kitchen, if a chef or sous-chef doesn’t like the performance of one of their line cooks, they will often leap in, take over that cook’s station, and begin “expediting.” This has a dual purpose: it both relieves a genuine production bottleneck, and also acts as a showy demonstration of prowess, reminding everybody that they got to be the boss through excellence. At the better tech companies, those managing software engineers are always former engineers themselves, and often the very best of the lot. Just like a chef would do, an engineering manager needs to be able to seize a computer and begin expediting under pressure, both to solve a real problem and as a dominance display. But it’s not just about keeping the troops in line, it’s about inspiring them. Nothing motivates a soldier like seeing his commander leading the charge, weapon in hand.1

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-28.

  1. This shows up in places you wouldn’t expect to. I was once cast in a show, and quickly came to understand that our director could (and often did) leap onto the stage, snatch a script out of somebody’s hand, and play their part better than they could. For any part. Before he did this to me, I found him annoying and bossy. Afterwards, I would follow him into the Somme.

Update, 7 April: 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.

March 23, 2026

Reject multiculturalism as you would reject fake meat

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

Spaceman Spiff looks at the technocratic dream that we’d all give up on eating meat and instead switch to lab-grown, VC-funded, and Bill-Gates-approved fake meat. It failed utterly, of course, because despite all of the arguments the corporations and the astroturf activists could marshal, nobody wanted it. Vegetarians wouldn’t switch to eating something vaguely kinda-sorta meat-ish, and meat eaters were happy continuing their carnivorous habits. It had no real market, so it was a dud product.

Our technocratic elites have been pushing multiculturalism for even longer than they were pushing fake meat, but just as with fake meat, the more people encounter it, the less willing they are to accept it:

Multiculturalism is the belief many distinct cultures can live together and flourish rather than devolve into conflict.

This is false. It has never worked anywhere.

The world itself is multicultural. The solution that emerged to manage different groups was national borders. Each culture could segregate and live apart from others because they could not successfully live together.

As the failures of multiculturalism become impossible to hide, social engineers reach for ideas to make it work. The latest is civic nationalism. The fake meat of the social governance world.

For all human history we have relied upon the real thing, but now today’s social engineers believe they have discovered a superior recipe, one that avoids the hassle and expense of tradition.

Anyone can become someone like you as long as they conform to an arbitrary list of beliefs, behaviours, laws and customs. We can ignore ethnicity, heritage and history. We can manufacture instant populations with passports and certificates just as we can create synthetic meat by combining the ingredients ourselves.

Like fake meat it looks workable on paper. Not only that, it is presented as self-evidently reasonable. Why has nobody thought of this before? How convenient governments and corporations can import a new workforce and they magically become British, American or Chinese because they “share values” and observe laws.

America was the first to experiment, a necessity after the introduction of non-European immigration in the 1960s. Needless to say they didn’t need it before that.

The country found itself importing people with no historical connection to the American population through heritage or history. Far fewer of them married into the family than previous waves of immigrants from European nations. While importing the world America was becoming the world with its racial, ethnic and cultural tensions.

They convinced themselves they had always been a nation of immigrants and conveniently forgot how long it took even the Irish to assimilate into America despite their ostensible similarity to the founding stock.

Strenuous efforts to make this seem normal, despite its novelty, included the energetic emphasis on shared values or adopted customs since the newcomers were often strikingly different.

Civic nationalism seems to be based on the same faulty reasoning as synthetic meat. We can circumvent the traditional approach using innovation. Why live through centuries of strife for a nation to emerge when you can just hand out certificates and make everyone instantly like you because they claim to respect the law and promise to adopt new customs?

Initially this can seem to work. If a small number of skilled immigrants come they are typically absorbed. Most cultures can do this if the numbers are modest and especially if the newcomers intermarry, or their children do.

Even more so, in traditional societies, including our own until recently, the pressure to adapt was almost universal; no translators, no welfare, no slack whatsoever.

Large numbers of immigrants over short time scales retard the process of assimilation, and generous welfare programmes can derail it completely.

America is also big unlike European nations, so it has taken a while for the full effects to be felt.

Despite the endless hype, people reveal their preferences in their behaviour. They can move. Pro-immigrationists have complained about white flight for decades, one very obvious example of the failure of civic nationalism.

Image from Spaceman Spiff

Just like those inconveniently full supermarket shelves with their synthetic products no one will buy, people run from diversity when they can.

Civic nationalists, like climate zealots, resort to repeating their tired lines about their great intent, how amazing it is all meant to be if people would just get into the spirit of things.

But it is all fantasy. Literal fictions that exist only inside the heads of those who imagine utopia. Real life has its own ideas.

Update: Added missing URL.

Update the second, 24 March: 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.

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