Quotulatiousness

May 7, 2024

But Carbon Dioxide is scary, m’kay?

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Chris Morrison shared some charts that show atmospheric carbon dioxide to be nowhere near high enough to be a concern … in fact, compared to ancient atmospheric conditions, CO2 may be at a potentially concerning low point:

Last year, Chris Packham hosted a five-part series on the BBC called Earth, which compared a mass extinction event 252 million years ago to the small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide seen in the last 150 years. He said he hoped the “terror factor” generated by his programme would “spur us to do something about the environment crisis”. But as we shall see, the only terror factor is having to sit through an hour-long film consisting of cherry-picked science data and unproven assertions in the hope of persuading us that the increase in global temperatures in the last 150 years or so is comparable to the rise in temperatures over a considerable swath of geological time. Great play was made of a 12°C rise in average global temperatures 252 million years ago as CO2 levels started to rise, although Packham fails to report that CO2 levels were already at least four times higher back then than in modern times. The “science” that Packham cloaks himself with on every occasion is hardly served by terrorising the viewer with what is little more than a highly personal political message.

Think of all that suffering and wastage, he says about the fourth great mass extinction. I don’t think we want a comparable extinction to the one that happened 252 million years ago on our conscience, he adds. Of course, Packham is not the first person to politicise the end-Permian extinction when most plant and animal life disappeared to be replaced eventually with what became known as the age of the dinosaurs. As we can see from the graph below, even though that extinction event coincided with an uptick in CO2 levels, the general trend over a 600-million-year period was downwards ending in the near denudation currently experienced today. But scientists note that the rise started some time before the extinction event, with most of the Permian characterised by very low levels of CO2.

It is obvious why the three other great extinctions are of little interest to modern day climate alarmists. The Ordovician extinction 445 million years ago occurred when CO2 levels were 12 times higher than today, the Devonian wipe-out happen 372 millions ago when CO2 levels were falling, while the later Triassic/Jurassic event 201 million years ago occurred at a time of stable CO2. Hard to see a pattern there suggesting rising CO2 levels equals a mass extinction event. The disappearance of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is generally attributed to the impact of a giant meteorite, while the current sixth mass extinction exists only inside the head of the Swedish doom goblin, and need not detain us at this point.

Since Packham was essentially making a BBC political film promoting Net Zero, he inevitably started with the fixed view that all our current environmental problems are the fault of CO2. An intense period of volcanic eruptions that led to huge coal deposits catching fire increased CO2 levels and almost instantly sent temperatures soaring at the end of the Permian period. About 20 million years of rain subsequently followed, he observed, taking some of the CO2 out of the atmosphere and order it seems was restored. Certainly, CO2 resumed a small descent but levels remained almost as high, or for some periods higher, as those at the end of the Permian period for another 120 million years. Packham does not provide an explanation of what happened to the average global temperature at this time.

The graph above shows why he avoided the subject. Temperatures did rise at the end of the Permian period after a long decline, but only as far as previous highs recorded 200 million years earlier. They then stayed at those levels for most of the next 200 million years, throughout the age of the dinosaurs. Helped by the increased levels of CO2, this is considered one of the most verdant periods in Earth’s history.

April 25, 2024

“… good Lord, is [Chrystia Freeland] ever terrible at politics”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s terrible response to a topical question from a reporter:


Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in October, 2022.

In fairness, noting that Freeland, she of the infamous Disney+ flop, is bad at politics is not an original observation. I confess that. But, still. Yikes! What the hell was that?!

I’m referring to Monday’s unfortunate gaffe. Freeland was in Montreal doing post-budget stuff with the small business minister, and after touring a business, took questions from reporters. Sarah Leavitt from the CBC asked a question related to a particularly vile eruption of overt antisemitism at a protest in Ottawa last weekend. A man leading the crowd in chants said “Our resistance attacks are proof that we are almost free … Oct. 7 is proof that we are almost free. Long live Oct. 7, long live the resistance, long live the intifada, long live every form of resistance.”

Oct. 7, of course, means the Hamas rape-and-murder pogrom of Oct. 7.

By the time Leavitt quizzed Freeland, the comments in Ottawa had already been widely disseminated and, critically, condemned. Among the condemners: Freeland’s boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He’d commented via Twitter a day before Freeland faced Leavitt’s question. This ought to have been an extremely easy exchange for Freeland.

As it turns out, though, not so much, actually.

In the interests of transparency, let’s simply see in full both what Leavitt asked, and how Freeland replied.

The question was clear enough: “Over the weekend, protesters in Ottawa were heard chanting, among other things, ‘Long live October 7’ and ‘October 7 is proof that we are almost free’. Is this hate speech?”

[…]

Let’s walk through her answer, putting her reply into the discrete points she’s been trained to hit.

Phase One: Ass covering. “I wasn’t in Ottawa over the weekend. And I’m not aware of those specific reports. And so it would be just wrong of me to comment on something that I am not specifically aware of.”

Phase Two: Banal statement that favours no group in particular but mentions the key stakeholders. “What I will say is, today is a time in Canada, when antisemitism and Islamophobia are on the rise. When we have a lot … there are a lot of Canadians who are not feeling safe. In my own riding of University-Rosedale, the JCC, a really important centre for Jewish Canadians but also for all Canadians, has faced a lot of pressure. And I’ve been there to meet with people there. There’s also a mosque in my riding that faced pressure and attacks and I’ve met with the leaders there.”

Phase Three: Attempt to sound like you’re engaging with the actual question, even though you are not. “Hate speech is absolutely not acceptable. Glorifying … I mean, I can’t even say the word because it’s … you shouldn’t. It’s too terrible. And what happened on October 7 was a heinous terrorist attack. People were killed. People were raped. Women, men, children … totally unprovoked attack on civilians. That is not acceptable.”

Phase Four: Pivot back to approved talking points. “Canada recognizes Hamas as a terrorist entity and our government is very, very clear on that. We have also been really clear that there needs to be a ceasefire, that a humanitarian catastrophe is happening right now in Gaza, and Canada and Canadians are there to support the people, the suffering people, there, too.”

This is how the PM answers questions, too. It’s a pattern that, once seen, will never been unseen. The problem for Freeland is that the PM is better at it. He’s smoother and quicker on his feet. His evasive non-answers sound more natural, but have begun to get old in recent years, as foreign journalists are generally better at pointing out than Canadian ones. Freeland has never been comfortable doing talking-point politics, and has always sounded extremely unconvincing when she tries.

March 4, 2024

QotD: The “ABC” movement in wine

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

Back in the 1990s when I first got into wine, there was a movement against the growing homogenisation of the world’s wine called ABC: “anything but chardonnay” which handily also stood for “anything but cabernet”. This was at a time when growers from Piedmont to Penedès were planting chardonnay (or cabernet sauvignon for reds) instead of local grape varieties.

There was a worry that in the future all wine would taste the same while the more obscure varieties would disappear. As an ABC enthusiast, I thought it far better and more interesting to drink riesling, or fiano or albariño or esgana cão (a Madeiran grape that means “dog strangler” in Portuguese because of its ferociously high acidity).

Jancis Robinson was also not a chardonnay fan. Recently I’ve been watching her Wine Course made in the 1990s on YouTube. It still holds up well, and the budget by modern standards is mind-blowing; one moment she’s in Burgundy, the next she’s in Australia.

Can we have another series like this again soon please? Each episode is devoted to a grape and in the chardonnay one Jancis (she’s one of the few famous people who it is acceptable to refer to by just her first name, like Britney or Boris) can barely contain her contempt for many wines made from the variety describing them as “sugar water”. She’s also not keen on the world’s second favourite variety, sauvignon blanc, either.

I was with Jancis. In fact, I was with Jancis on most things which points to a possible explanation for my chardonnay conversion. When I started out, I hadn’t developed my own tastes and so I was buying wine that I thought sounded sophisticated — such as Mosel riesling.

But as I’ve got older, I’m now buying bottles purely because I like them. Furthermore, I cook and entertain a lot more than I did when I was in my twenties and chardonnay, especially white Burgundy, goes with pretty much anything. If you don’t know what to order when eating out then a bottle of Mâcon-Villages will cover all your bases (the red equivalent if you’re interested is a bottle of Beaujolais).

But also your average chardonnay has got a lot better since the ’90s, or perhaps I should say that it leans more towards my tastes. I’ve been watching a lot of old episodes of Frasier recently and the chardonnay they drink is nearly orange. This style which is still very popular in the US is based on very ripe, some might say overripe, grapes which are then treated to a pre-fermentation maceration to get colour and body out of the skins.

Following fermentation with a yeast which accentuates tropical fruit flavours, the wine would be perked up with some tartaric acid and then either aged in new oak casks or more likely for cheaper wines have oak chips added.

The finished product would be thick and syrupy with a deep golden colour. Not very chic but a revelation in 1980s Britain when everyday white wine meant Blue Nun or Black Tower. They’re what Oz Clarke called “bottled sunshine” in his colourful slots with Jilly Goolden on BBC2’s Food and Drink programme. Like those loud waistcoats everyone thought were so witty worn with a morning suit or dinner jacket, they were great fun then but a bit embarrassing now.

Henry Jeffreys, “Chard: an apology”, The Critic, 2023-11-14.

March 3, 2024

From bank robbery to church burning to welfare state collapse

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

Kulak talks about an old Canadian TV show episode and how the lessons learned could be (and arguably are already being) used to undermine any western welfare state:

In a show that had helicopter escapes, motorcycle chases, modded out James Bond spy cars, teenage money forgers, veteran jewel thieves, super hackers, aviation engineer super smugglers … This one stood out for its nigh stupid simplicity.

He treated bank robbery as a literal door to door business.

Gilbert Galvan’s great innovation wasn’t any innovation, it was stripping bank robbery itself down to its barest essentials. And then repeating it at scale. To the point where he could rob one bank, and then rob the bank across the street whilst police were still in the first investigating (literally! this was how they found out he existed).

He’d line up with the rest of the customers, wait his turn, approach the teller, and then quietly show her his pistol before demanding the money, and WALKING out the front door of the bank, the person behind him in line never knowing that the robbery had even happened.

The limitation was of course he never hit the safe, and only got one teller’s worth of cash, about 5-20k per robbery (1980s dollars, so double or triple modern dollars), but wearing elaborate theatrical disguises for every heist the chance of of him ever being tracked down were effectively Zero. And needing only one man, there was no accomplice to rat him out.

He carried out FIFTY heists this way, and to this day this remains the greatest lesson I’ve learned from the show… The devastating effect of simple marginally effective things, done at scale. It’s certainly served me well marketing this blog.

Now apply this lesson to the modern Cradle to Grave Total State

Since the Trudeau government funded media started promoting a blood libel against Christian church run Residential schools, falsely alleging ground penetrating radar had found “mass graves” at the site of the schools from the first half of the 20th century, over 100 churches have been attacked or burned in Canada.

Whilst the first few fires were probably set by the same person in British Columbia, once it became a national story with political valence disaffected copycats quickly sprung up around the nation. There is basically a zero percent chance the vandals on one end of the country know or have ever met the vandals on the other side. And basically no way that catching even one group of vandals or arsonists would stop the attacks.

Now I would like you to imagine the implications for civil strife in the US, and western welfare states, when this starts happening to government offices or schools which get embroiled in LGBTQ or Childhood transition scandals.

Remember that the average public elementary or high school has 1000+ students in it, the bottom 10-20% of whom absolutely despise the place. People always wonder at how many mass shootings there are in the US, I’m always shocked at how few there are. there are 40,000 suicides a year in the US, and while the numbers are hard to grab at least 10,000 of those are youth suicides. That so few decide to take classmates with them always struck me as bizarre, given human beings have killed 100s of millions of each other in the past 100 years, but then isn’t it also interesting the number of mass shootings has risen so rapidly since Columbine and the media cycle popularization of it public conciousness?

Likewise half a million Americans are treated for self inflicted injury every year, of which over 100k are Youth, and 424,000 youth are arrested on some crime or other every year.

I’m going to call it right now:

In the next 5 years someone out there, might be in America, might be Europe, is going to start burning down schools for some ideological reason, we might never even know why if they are never caught.

And At that point copycat school burnings will become one of the most dramatic and prominent trends in western life as it’s quickly copied around the western world. In the past 3 years of those 100 Canadian churches vandalized, 33 burnt right to the ground (10 per year). If you assumed the same number with no boost from all the students/parents who despise their school or maybe even feel mortal danger from them, that’d still be (population adjusted) something like 100 schools per year burning in America, probably til the end of time. Assuming those government buildings have the usual ludicrous construction costs of 20ish million … that’d be about 2 billion dollars per year in lost buildings, which lets be honest probably won’t get replaced in a timely manner.

There are 97,500 public schools in America, assuming just that Canadian Church burning rate of attacks that’d be more than 1% of American public schools gone in a decade.

March 1, 2024

Understanding the modern media

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

It’s hard for Baby Boomers and even some older Gen X folks to grasp just how much the mainstream media has changed since the 1960s and 70s. Helpfully, Severian provides the context to properly understand what drives them and why they do the things they do:

Proposed coat of arms for Founding Questions by “urbando”.
The Latin motto translates to “We are so irrevocably fucked”.

There is no local news, because all “news” is Apparat audition tape. Back when — back when they were called “reporters” — news people had a clear career progression within a specific industry. A hungry young reporter for the Toad Suck, Nebraska, Times-Picayune might end his days as a reporter for the New York Times or Washington Post, but that was as high as he could reasonably expect to go. Same with the television division — the bobblehead at WSUX in Toad Suck might end up, at most, on CNN or Fox.

These days, though, they call themselves “journalists”, and “journalist” is just an entry-level Apparat post. They’re not just auditioning for the NYT or CNN, of course. A hungry young “journalist” might end xzhyr career at either, of course, but also as a corporate communications director, a political campaign consultant, a professor of “journalism”, a Diversity Outreach Coordinator, any one of a million “Media strategies” and “Media consulting” gigs … or, of course, as an outright lobbyist, because all of those are just euphemisms for “lobbying” anyway.

And that’s before you consider that all the “independent” papers and stations have been bought up by huge conglomerates, and depend on advertising revenue. Noam Chomsky was right — the Media does dance to the tune its corporate paymasters’ call. He was just wrong on those paymasters’ political orientation. Combine all that, and even the most straight-up, just-the-facts-ma’am local “news” story will find some way to insert The Sermon. If you don’t see The Sermon, you’ve either found an incompetent journalist (which happens) … or you might be looking at something subtle.

[…]

The Media, like Skynet, is self-aware. This significantly complicates the stoyachnik‘s task, as The Media understands its own power, and it increasingly wants to drive Narratives itself, especially as its power is on the verge of… well, not collapse exactly, but certainly a sea change. Because The Media is not monolithic, and that’s part of its self-awareness. So many “journalists” do nothing but hit refresh on Twitter all day, and Twitter knows this — that makes Twitter the real power broker. Google, too, obviously is more self-aware than traditional Media. That ludicrous AI image generator represents years of effort; they expended enormous resources to get precisely that result. They understand how utterly dependent the lower layers of The Media are on them; they are more self-aware.

Let us […] use Google’s own AI “summarizer” to refamiliarize ourselves with the tale of Comrade Ogilvy:

    Comrade Ogilvy is an imaginary character in the novel 1984, created by Winston Smith to replace Comrade Withers, an Inner Party member who has fallen into disgrace and been vaporized. Comrade Ogilvy supposedly lived a patriotic and virtuous life, supported the party as a child, designed a highly effective hand grenade as an adult, and died in action at the age of 23 while protecting important dispatches for his country. He did not drink or smoke, was celibate, and only conversed about Party philosophy, Ingsoc. Comrade Ogilvy displays how easy it is for a member of The Party to be pulled from thin air, and how determined The Party is to keep unpersons from the media.

The Apparatchiks at Google are more self-aware than the Apparatchiks at, say, the New York Times. That is, they understand their place in the Apparat better, and see the networks more clearly. They know how mal-educated “journalists” are, far better than the “journalists” themselves do. Google, like Winston Smith, knows full well that there’s no Comrade Ogilvy. But the “journalists” at the New York Times who are utterly reliant on Google for their “facts” do NOT know this. How could they?

And thus, the only White people in all of human history were Nazis. At least according to Google’s AI image generator, and therefore — soon enough — it’s what “everybody knows”. (And it’s necessarily recursive. The second generation of Google engineers will not know there’s no Comrade Ogilvy, any more than the current generation of “journalists” does).

February 28, 2024

QotD: When the rules in the dating market all changed

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

So far we’ve only been talking about guys, but the gals went through their own version of the same process way back in the days. Indeed, it’s because the girls changed that the guys got into PUA in the first place.

Under the old dispensation, back before the Clinton Era (1988-2001), everyone acknowledged that there were a lot of users and abusers, douchebags and parasites and losers, out there in the world. That being the case, simply being an all-around ok guy with a steady job — what the PUAs came to term “beta providers” — was, in itself, a pretty solid resume in the dating market. “Just be yourself” was every guy’s dad’s advice when it came to dating, and back then it was pretty solid, since it was assumed that the decent job etc. flowed from being a decent human being. And since every girl’s mom was telling her complementary things, the system worked … until it didn’t, and you can date the change precisely: June 6, 1998, the premiere of the HBO series Sex and the City.

[…] Everyone has met one of those “one of the guys”-type girls. They’re great fun, and while you know what I mean when I say they’re not necessarily marriage material as-is, you therefore also know what I mean when I say they really are what feminists all claim to be: Strong, confident women. They are what they are, and they know it, take it or leave it.

The problem is, most women — and, it goes without saying, all feminists — aren’t “strong, confident women”, in the same way the vast majority of guys aren’t naturally “alpha males”. That’s the dialectic I’ve been trying to get at in this series of posts. Sex and the City, as much as every episode needs to be burned and the ashes shot into deep space, was just the manifestation of a long-developing process. Thanks to all that “self-esteem” shit that started in the Seventies, sometime in the Clinton Era a critical mass of young women decided that what they needed was to be “strong” and “self-confident”. But they didn’t know how to do that, because the people telling them this were fat lesbian college professors. Then HBO, sensing a valuable market niche, got into the act …

Sex and the City […] is the gayest show in the history of television. Carrie and the Gals don’t act like women; they act the way women think men act — which is to say, they act like gay men. Recall that the late 1990s also saw an explosion of female “comedians”, whose one “joke” was some version of “I got my period today, but damn, I still crave dick.” (Sex and the City, you’ll recall, was pitched as a comedy). And that’s a serious problem, because as every straight guy has said at least once in his life, being gay would be fabulous if not for the “sex with guys” part. I mean, how awesome would it be (every young man thinks), if you could reorient your whole life around your crotch?

Severian, “Mental Middlemen III: SATC”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.

February 27, 2024

Thank goodness we don’t get all the CBC we pay for!

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

In the dim, dark recesses of history … say twenty-five years ago … the CBC was what the government still seems to believe it is: a credible, trusted source of news and entertainment. In truth, it was never as loved as some might claim, as it had a deep bias in favour of Quebec and Ontario issues and tended to only occasionally remember the rest of the country. The federal government has been subsidizing the CBC, yet the network’s audience has shrunk to the point that it’s rare to encounter anyone who consumes very much of the programming on offer. Part of that is just the sheer variety of other options available to Canadians and part of it is the CBC’s sour, toxic, hectoring tone when lecturing about “the current thing”. Far from being a major player in upholding Canadian culture, the CBC is clearly one of the major factors that are destroying it:

… looking at the viewer and listener stats for the CBC, our national behemoth, which eats up $1.5 billion annually, and which amounts to 50% of the media dollars spent, is equally disheartening. The state spends another $600 million supporting once-successful media because “internet”. CBC television is watched by 3.9% of Canadians and only 0.8% watch CBC News. Again, half of all media dollars, half. Half is spent engaging less than 4% of Canadians. CBC radio is considered reasonably good, and is listened to by 10%, despite its vindictive calling out of anyone who disagrees with their hard socialist stance. As to other mainstream media, propped up by government via hundred of millions, it is still shedding staff and readers in double digits.

Despite every conceivable advantage, advertising on the CBC dropped 20% during the pandemic. In fact, they are so disliked that CBC is hiring “close protection security” for the next two years. They are so disliked, they have turned off commenting on their various programs. They are so disliked that there is a brand of coffee called “Defund the CBC”. This isn’t passive ignoring, this is active dislike to the point of needing bodyguards.

Why? Because our media show us to ourselves as racist, stupid, sexist, stupid, stupid and more stupid. And while they are at it, shallow and violent. That is the real reason, and the only reason CanCon is dying. They hate us. Why? The only people who have thrived during the past twenty years in Canada when private and public wealth doubled then doubled again, are the ones who live off the government, whether through mandated consulting in the enviro and other business, or direct granting or though quasi-private-sector jobs that are heavily subsidized. Public Private Partnerships have to be the most fiendish way to flat out loot the public ever been invented. Or straight up public sector jobs which are among the most lushly funded and unionized in the known universe, the number of which have grown 400% in the last ten years. Do or did you get six weeks of paid holiday a year?

And do they hate us, in fact correcting us is how they get the grants, the jobs, the subsidy. Everything they do is meant to fix us deplorable Canadians.

Sit at a downtown Toronto dinner party as I have, with say, the head of CBC drama, as I have and listen to just how much they hate the rest of Canada. Why? They hate the rest of Canada because they feel guilty. They know they are cheating and they know they are stealing. I tell ya, I needed close protection security — this woman was terrifying. “Sit Down While I’m Talking to You“, she roared at me.

February 25, 2024

Canadian publishing “has been decimated since Ottawa took an active interest in it and while federal policies haven’t been the whole problem, they’ve been vigorous contributors”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte contrasts the wholesome intentions of the Canadian federal government on cultural issues with the gruesome reality over which they’ve presided:

Even James Moore, [Liberal cabinet minister Melanie] Joly’s Conservative predecessor in the heritage department, applauded her initiative as good and necessary, although he warned it wouldn’t be easy. Moore had wanted to do the job himself, but his boss, Stephen Harper, didn’t want to waste political capital on fights with the arts community. He told Moore his job in the heritage department was to sit on the lid.

Joly got off to a promising start, only to have her entire initiative scuppered by a rump of reactionary Quebec cultural commentators outraged at her willingness to deal with a global platform like Netflix without imposing on it the same Canadian content rules that Ottawa has traditionally applied to radio and television networks. Liberal governments live and die by their support in Quebec and can’t afford to be offside with its cultural community. Joly was shuffled down the hall to the ministry of tourism.

She has been succeeded by four Liberal heritage ministers in five years: Pablo Rodriquez, Steven Guilbeault, Pablo Rodriguez II, and Pascale St-Onge. Each has been from Quebec and each has been paid upwards of $250,000 a year to do nothing but sit on the lid.

The system remains broken. We’ve discussed many times here how federal support was supposed to foster a Canadian-owned book publishing sector yet led instead to one in which Canadian-owned publishers represent less than 5 percent of book sales in Canada. The industry has been decimated since Ottawa took an active interest in it and while federal policies haven’t been the whole problem, they’ve been vigorous contributors.

Canada’s flagship cultural institution, the CBC, is floundering. It spends the biggest chunk of its budget on its English-language television service, which has seen its share of prime-time viewing drop from 7.6 percent to 4.4 percent since 2018. In other words, CBC TV has dropped almost 40 percent of its audience since the Trudeau government topped up its budget by $150 million back in the Joly era. If Pierre Poilievre gets elected and is serious about doing the CBC harm, as he’s threatened since winning the Conservative leadership two years ago, his best move would be to give it another $150 million.

The Canadian magazine industry is kaput. Despite prodigious spending to prop up legacy newspaper companies, the number of jobs in Canadian journalism continues to plummet. The Canadian feature film industry has been moribund for the last decade. Private broadcast radio and television are in decline. There are more jobs in Canadian film and TV, but only because our cheap dollar and generous public subsidies have convinced US and international creators to outsource production work up here. It’s certainly not because we’re producing good Canadian shows.

[…]

When the Trudeau government was elected in 2015, it posed as a saviour of the arts after years of Harper’s neglect and budget cuts. It did spend on arts and culture during the pandemic — it spent on everything during the pandemic — but it will be leaving the cultural sector in worse shape than it found it, presuming the Trudeau Liberals are voted out in 2025. By the government’s own projections, Heritage Canada will spend $1.5 billion in 2025-26, exactly what it spent in Harper’s last year, when the population of Canada was 10 percent smaller than it is now.

That might have been enough money if the Liberals had cleaned up the system. Instead, they’ve passed legislation that promises more breakage than ever. Rather than accept Joly’s challenge and update arts-and-culture funding and regulations for the twenty-first century, the Trudeau government did the opposite. Cheered on by the regressive lobby in Quebec, it passed an online news act (C-18) and an online streaming act (C-11) that apply old-fashioned protectionist policies to the whole damn Internet.

This comes on top of the Liberals transforming major cultural entities, including the CBC and our main granting bodies, The Canada Council and the Canada Book Fund, into Quebec vote-farming operations. The CBC spends $99.5 per capita on its French-language services (there are 8.2 million Franco-Canadians) and $38 per capita on Canadians who speak English as the first official language. The Canada Council spends $16 per capita in Quebec; it spends $10.50 per capita in the rest of Canada. The Canada Book Fund distributes $2 per capita in Quebec compared to $.50 per capita in the rest of the country. Even if one believes that a minority language is due more consideration than a majority language, these numbers are ridiculous. They’re not supporting a language group; they’re protecting the Liberal party.

February 19, 2024

QotD: Cleopatra VII Philopator

Filed under: Africa, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This week on the blog we’re going to talk about Cleopatra or to be more specific, we’re going to talk about Cleopatra VII Philopator, who is the only Cleopatra you’ve likely ever heard of, but that “seven” after her name should signal that she’s not the only Cleopatra.1 One of the trends in scholarship over the years towards larger than life ancient historical figures – Caesar, Alexander, Octavian, etc. – has been attempts to demystify them, stripping away centuries of caked-on reception, assumptions and imitation to ask more directly: who was this person, what did they do and do we value those sorts of things?2

Cleopatra, of course, has all of that reception layered on too. In antiquity and indeed until the modern era, she was one of the great villains of history, the licentious, wicked foreign queen of Octavian’s propaganda. More recently there has been an effort to reinvent her as an icon of modern values, perhaps most visible lately in Netflix’ recent (quite poorly received) documentary series. A lot of both efforts rely on reading into gaps in the source material. What I want to do here instead is to try to strip some of that away, to de-mystify Cleopatra and set out some of what we know and what we don’t know about her, with particular reference to the question I find most interesting: was Cleopatra actually a good or capable ruler?

Now a lot of the debate sparked by that Netflix series focused on what I find the rather uninteresting (but quite complicated) question of Cleopatra’s heritage or parentage or – heaven help us – her “race”. But I want to address this problem too, not because I care about the result but because I am deeply bothered by how confidently the result gets asserted by all sides and how swiftly those confident assertions are mobilized into categories that just aren’t very meaningful for understanding Cleopatra. To be frank, Cleopatra’s heritage should be a niche question debated in the pages of the Journal of Juristic Papyrology by scholars squinting at inscriptions and papyri, looking to make minor alterations in the prosopography of the Ptolemaic dynasty, both because it is highly technical and uncertain, but also because it isn’t an issue of central importance. So we’ll get that out of the way first in this essay and then get to my main point, which is this:

Cleopatra was, I’d argue, at best a mediocre ruler, whose ambitious and self-interested gambles mostly failed, to the ruin of herself and her kingdom. This is not to say Cleopatra was a weak or ineffective person; she was very obviously highly intelligent, learned, a virtuoso linguist, and a famously effective speaker. But one can be all of those things and not be a wise or skillful ruler, and I tend to view Cleopatra in that light.

Now I want to note the spirit in which I offer this essay. This is not a take-down of the Netflix Queen Cleopatra documentary (though it well deserves one and has received several; it is quite bad) nor a take-down of other scholars’ work on Cleopatra. This is simply my “take” on her reign. There’s enough we don’t know or barely know that another scholar, viewing from another angle, might well come away with a different conclusion, viewing Cleopatra in a more positive light. This is, to a degree, a response to some of the more recent public hagiography on Cleopatra, which I think air-brushes her failures and sometimes tries a bit too hard to read virtues into gaps in the evidence. But they are generally gaps in the evidence and in a situation where we are all to a degree making informed guesses, I am hardly going to trash someone who makes a perfectly plausible but somewhat differently informed guess. In history there are often situations where there is no right answer – meaning no answer we know to be true – but many wrong answers – answers we know to be false. I don’t claim to have the right answer, but I am frustrated by seeing so many very certain wrong answers floating around the public.

Before we dive in briefly to the boring question of Cleopatra’s parentage before the much more interesting question of her conduct as a ruler, we need to be clear about the difficult nature of the sources for Cleopatra and her reign. Fundamentally we may divide these sources into two groups: there are inscriptions, coins and papyrus records from Egypt which mention Cleopatra (and one she wrote on!) but, as such evidence is wont to be, [they] are often incomplete or provided only limited information. And then there are the literary sources, which are uniformly without exception hostile to Cleopatra. And I mean extremely hostile to Cleopatra, filled with wrath and invective. At no point, anywhere in the literary sources does Cleopatra get within a country mile of a fair shake and I am saying that as someone who thinks she wasn’t very good at her job.

The problem here is that Cleopatra was the target of Octavian’s PR campaign, as it were, in the run up to his war with Marcus Antonius (Marc Antony; I’m going to call him Marcus Antonius here), because as a foreign queen – an intersecting triad of concepts (foreignness, monarchy and women in power) which all offended Roman sensibilities – she was effectively the perfect target for a campaign aimed at winning over the populace of Italy, which was, it turns out, the most valuable military resource in the Mediterranean.3 That picture – the foreign queen corrupting the morals of good Romans with her decadence – rightly or wrongly ends up coloring all of the subsequent accounts. Of course that in turn effects the reliability of all of our literary sources and thus we must tread carefully.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Reign of Cleopatra”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-05-26.

    1. Or even just the seventh!

    2. This is not to diminish the value of reception studies that trace the meaning a figure – or the memory of a figure – had over time. That’s a valuable but different lens of study.

    3. It’s not all Octavian, mind. Cicero’s impression of Cleopatra was also sharply negative, for many of the same reasons: Cicero was hardly likely to be affable to a foreign queen who was an ally of Julius Caesar.

February 9, 2024

QotD: “Five, Four, Three, Two, One. Thunderbirds Are Go!”

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

To break the BBC’s monopoly on viewing, Independent Television had been founded by Act of Parliament in 1955 as a network of fifteen regional television franchises funded by advertising. Alerted by TV Times, on that September Thursday in 1965, the nation’s children (including Your Humble Scribe) settled down to watch a man with a mid-Atlantic accent as he counted down a series of weird spaceships and aircraft with the sequence, “Five, Four, Three, Two, One. Thunderbirds Are Go!”

Although there had been earlier offerings from the same stable, such as Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray, and others which followed, it was Thunderbirds that gripped my generation and has never really let go. Set in the future, the genre devised by Gerry Anderson focused on the heroic exploits of secret but benevolent organisations operating from remote or hidden bases on land, in the sky or on the moon. Equipped with advanced technology, their missions were to protect civilisation from aggression, accident and sabotage, countering devious, often extra-terrestrial opponents. It was his brother’s service in the RAF that gave Anderson a life-long fascination with flying machines. Thunderbird Field at Glendale, Arizona, where his older brother learned to fly, provided a name for the series.

In his future worlds, planet Earth is generally united under a world president, in contrast to the traumas of the recently passed world war. Each programme featured life-like puppets, filmed in what Anderson dubbed “Supermarionation”. They were tributes to his brother. It was on 27 April 1944 that these future television series were really born. Flight Sergeant Lionel Anderson never got to pilot Stingray or Thunderbird One, or fly an Interceptor from Cloudbase, for during the early hours of that April Thursday, his twin-engined Mosquito was hit by flak on a night intruder raid and crashed near Deelen in Holland. Now he and his navigator, Sergeant Bert Hayward, lie in the corner of a cemetery in Arnhem, “Mourned by his devoted parents and brother Gerald”, as the Commonwealth War Grave headstone reads.

The war traumatised Gerry Anderson, whose Jewish grandparents had fled pogroms on the Polish–Russian frontier. He would complete his own national service in the RAF and experienced two more dramatic flying events. In 1948, he saw a Mosquito — his brother’s aircraft type — crash during an air display, killing many bystanders. Later a Spitfire came in to land without its undercarriage lowered. The helplessness he felt, and need for some divine intervention, such as that provided by the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (Stingray), International Rescue (Thunderbirds), Spectrum (Captain Scarlet) or Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation (UFO), provided more seeds for the future series, where the world was united and fought external foes. In German, the last was screened as Weltraumkommando SHADO, but the concept precisely echoed the UNIT organisation of Doctor Who.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s we were promised robots, space travel, lunar colonies and travel to Mars. Films, television series, science fiction short stories and magazines guaranteed it to the point of entitlement. Airfix plastic model kits, cardboard cut-outs on cereal packets, Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky diecast toys reinforced this expectation, underwritten by the real, manned Mercury missions of 1961–63, Gemini space launches of 1965–66 and Apollo craft of 1968–72. Gerry Anderson’s vision (shared by the American script writers of Star Trek, which debuted exactly a year after Thunderbirds on 8 September 1966) of a world government did not seem absurd to the young minds of 1965. It is partly the innocence of those years which touches us today. I, for one, still feel short-changed.

Peter Caddick-Adams, “Broadcasting anniversaries”, The Critic, 2023-11-04.

February 8, 2024

“Mwa-mwa-mwa”, they said

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

Chris Bray expands on the topic of yesterday’s post about the legacy media wanting you not to do your own research because it might lead to the “wrong” kind of answers:

I’m a hundred pages into a book I’ve been meaning to read for years, and I meant to spend last night reading it. But then I accidentally looked at social media.

For years, now, I’ve been watching as journalists and politicians connect a set of fact claims to a conclusion that has nothing to do with the evidence they’ve just given: This happened, and this happened, and this happened, and, trust us, all of that means this. It snaps your head back, because the statement about the meaning of the evidence is so ridiculous they can’t possibly have failed to notice. The news is frequently a series of bizarre interpretive non-sequiturs.

I wrote about a favorite example here, as an army of Barack Obama hagiographers described The Lightbringer’s glorious childhood in Indonesia. He went there with his mother and Indonesian stepfather in 1966, during a massive purge of communists by the army that included a great deal of mass killing, and Obama’s biographers describe the future American president being a young child in a place where rivers were choked with corpses and soldiers marched prisoners through the streets. Then, casually, they conclude that his time in Indonesia was idyllic and warm, and Jakarta was the place where this wonderfully decent future leader learned the gentle values of civic engagement and democratic pluralism.

See also this example, from back in the days when I didn’t have many subscribers, discussing an op-ed piece that described the Freedom Convoy as a movement of anti-government radicals who wanted to live in a society with no rules at all and marched on Ottawa behind the banner of authoritarianism to implement their fascist agenda.

Over and over again, reading the “news” that these people write, you catch yourself muttering but you JUST SAID …

Fact claims don’t add up, categories clash, paragraphs self-refute, sentences start out insistently claiming X and then wander into a firm insistence upon Not X before the period arrives at the end. The great complex of global news and politics has the internal consistency and logic of the day ward at a mental hospital.

Last night we seem to have suddenly turned the knob on that machine up to eleven, BECAUSE HITLER IS IN MOSCOW TO DO AN INTERVIEW. The people who are proud that we’re fighting authoritarianism by arresting the leading figure of the political opposition and throwing him off the ballot are also very angry that Tucker Carlson is interviewing an autocrat, and they hate autocracy, so Tucker Carlson must be arrested and bankrupted and barred from returning to the United States, to stand up to authoritarianism. I had a moment last night when I sincerely wondered about the wisdom of paying attention, because the experience of hearing from The Responsible People™ became painfully hallucinatory.

The officials at the EU get to decide who counts as a real journalist and who gets ruined, to protect democracy. Ukraine is the brave and incorruptible vanguard of ideal democracy, by the way, and so pure it floats, like an ad for soap. Nothing bad has ever happened there, you Nazi, but now Satan Putin’s vampire fangs drip with innocent blood, and there’s absolutely nothing else to say about it, send cash.

Watching people like Bill Kristol and David Frum comment on real-world events now is like watching a homeless drug addict having a psychotic break at a bus shelter. The connection between fact and interpretation has become painfully severed. A whole layer of allegedly high-status people have gone barking mad. We need to arrest everyone who disagrees with us about politics or else we’re going to lose our system of open society to authoritarianism, and you really ought to smoke some of whatever we have inside this glass pipe.

January 20, 2024

Looking for some kind of consistency in political commentary

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney notes that the reactions to a former National Post columnist seeking the nomination for the Conservatives in a 905-area seat fall into depressingly predictable patterns on partisan lines:

Anyone have a standard they can apply consistently in each of these cases? If so, should we maybe write it down or something?

Here’s my take: Each of these cases posed some problems, but none of them fatal, because I think the fear of influence peddling and favour currying actually has the flow reversed: media figures don’t skew their on-air or in-print work to seek political opportunities, but political parties absolutely actively recruit like-minded people with large media profiles.

Maybe I’m wrong. Okay. Just tell me the rule, then, and I’ll go with it.

And then, oh Lord, there’s the rest of it.

Maddeaux’s announcement was met with some, uh, interesting responses. Liberal MP Pam Damoff went right after Maddeaux over a column she’d written on gun control; Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier took umbrage with Maddeaux’s comments on bilingualism. This is fine; Maddeaux has stepped into the political arena and political attacks on her are fair game. But what was stupid was how Conservatives and their numerous social media proxies rushed to play the misogyny card.

Check out this, by long-time CPC staffer and now comms professional Laura Kurkimaki. Kurkimaki tweeted “[S]everal Liberal ministers attacked a young woman today on social media who had just announced she’s running for a @CPC_HQ nomination … Interesting, the same people who say add women change politics, feminist government, sunny ways etc. Embarrassing. Desperate.”

I hope Kurkimaki doesn’t feel picked on here; I chose her comment as a representative example of the eye-rolling array of responses for two reasons: it’s one of the less gross examples of the rush to portray Maddeaux as a victim of sexism; I’d rather not link to the dumber ones. Further, I actually mostly agree with Kurkimaki’s broader point: the Liberals do seem really rattled by Maddeaux’s announcement, and that’s interesting.

But back on topic: is Maddeaux a fair target for reasonable criticism, or does she get some kind of protected status because she’s a woman?

I vote the former! And I suspect that her Liberal critics, from cabinet ministers right on down to the #IStandWithTrudeau crowd on X, would agree. The problem, of course, is that those very same people, again from the cabinet right on down to Trudeau’s social media proxies, are probably mostly — all? — guilty of reacting with exaggerated outrage and cries of misogyny when certain other women are attacked. Chrystia Freeland, Mélanie Joly, Maryam Monsef … I can tell you from personal experience that if you make even reasonable and narrow criticisms of the policies and political performance of those three women, or other prominent Liberals who tick at least one DEI box, you will be swiftly informed that you are, in fact, simply a prejudiced white man.

Oh.

Of course there is sexism in our politics. And other forms of prejudice. And social media is absolutely flooded with rank misogyny and every other disgusting societal cancer you can imagine. Freeland, Joly and Monsef have all been, and will continue to be, targeted with absolutely appalling stuff. Just as Maddeaux has been, and will continue to be. All of it is disgusting.

But for all that, some of what people have to say about these women and their professional performance will be fair, or at least reasonable, and it is incumbent on all to not fake being idiots who cannot tell these two things apart. It’s dumb when it’s Conservatives pretending that Maddeaux is being attacked because she’s a woman, it’s dumb when the Liberals do the same to protect Freeland et al, and, in what I think was the uber-example of this kind of brainrot, it was really dumb when Trudeau responded to credible reports of Chinese electoral interference in Canada, which his government had basically ignored, by lecturing everyone about anti-Asian racism.

January 13, 2024

It’s not lying lying

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Homewood on how Brits are propagandized through slanted reporting on the weather (which has always been a topic of interest in the British Isles):

Storm Gerrit arrived the day after Boxing Day, accompanied by the usual headlines: “85mph gales barrelled down on Britain”, screamed the Daily Mail.

As usual the public were being deliberately deceived. The 85mph claim was based on one site in North East Scotland, at the top of a 400ft cliff overlooking the North Sea, marked in red below.

Inverbervie, Kincardineshire

A few miles away at sea level average wind speeds never got above 30mph. The Met Office never reports any of this, preferring to publish its favourite sites on clifftops or halfway up mountains.

It was the same story a week later, when another system of low pressure came along to be given yet another silly name, “Henk”.

“94mph winds pummel the UK”, shrieked the Mirror. This time the wind speeds were measured on the Met Office’s go-to weather station, the Needles, off the Isle of Wight. As this column has discussed before, the Needles sit at the end of a long, narrow peninsula, and the station is on top of a 260ft cliff. Winds there are routinely 30mph higher than even exposed sites nearby, such as St Catherine’s Point. Meanwhile average winds inland were typically around 30mph.

It rained as well last week! During the two days of Storm Henk, about an inch fell in parts of southern and central England. There is nothing at all unusual about this amount; it is the sort of thing which happens every year. Because the ground was already saturated, following wet weather last month, there was inevitably some flooding. But, for the most part, this was little more than flooded fields, overflowing river banks and localised flooding. Again, normal scenes in England. And as Patrick Benham-Crosswell pointed out in TCW this week, many houses built on flood plains were once again flooded. There was certainly none of the major river flooding which has hit the country many times in the past.

According to the Environment Agency, about 2,000 properties were flooded, a tragedy for everybody involved. But in overall terms, this is a tiny number. For instance, 55,000 were flooded in 2007.

Inevitably, the media jumped to blame it all on climate change. According to ITV: “Henk is the eighth named storm to have hit the country this winter and the pattern is likely to continue due to the effects of climate change. ‘This is climate change and the impacts we are seeing,’ the Environment Agency’s Tom Paget added. ‘We are seeing these increasingly wet and blustery winters. We are seeing storm upon storm which is exacerbating the issues’.”

Claims like this explain why the Met Office decided to start giving every low-pressure system a silly name back in 2015. But as it admitted in its State of the UK Climate last year, storms used to be much stronger:

    The most recent two decades have seen fewer occurrences of max gust speeds above these thresholds [40, 50, 60 kts] than during the previous decades, particularly comparing the period before and after 2000.

    This earlier period [before 2000] also included among the most severe storms experienced in the UK in the observational records including the “Burns Day Storm” of 25 January 1990, the “Boxing Day Storm” of 26 December 1998 and the “Great Storm” of 16 October 1987. Storm Eunice in 2022 was the most severe storm to affect England and Wales since February 2014, but even so, these storms of the 1980s and 1990s were very much more severe.

Nor is there any evidence that December or the autumn last year were unusually wet.

We look like getting a few weeks of cold, dry weather from now on – so expect drought warnings soon!

January 12, 2024

The rise of “anti-woke” comedy

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

Andrew Doyle suggests we should stop calling Ricky Gervais “anti-woke”:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A man’s wife divorces him and shacks up with his boss. Soon after, a friend suggests that he should remarry. “What for?” he asks. “Are you looking for a wife as well?”

It may not be the funniest joke, but that’s because it’s an anecdote from The Lives of the Caesars by the Ancient Roman historian Suetonius. The comedian in this case was a senator called Aelius Lamia whose wife had left him for the Emperor Domitian. For making this casual quip, Domitian had Lamia put to death. Now that’s a bad review.

It might be worth keeping this anecdote in mind when the usual debates flare up about whether comedy “goes too far”. The notion of people being offended by jokes is as old as comedy itself, and often people react angrily if humour isn’t to their taste. The current manifestation of this age-old debate takes the form of a simple dichotomy: “woke comedy” versus “anti-woke comedy”.

Already we are in treacherous waters. It is very unwise to define whole genres by terms that have no settled definitions. The actor Kathy Burke believes that “woke” simply refers to people who are neither racist nor homophobic, which would surely mean that the overwhelming majority of us would happily embrace the term. But for those who have been on the receiving end of the bullying, harassment and intimidation by activists who self-define as “woke”, it is clear this issue is not so straightforward.

Over the past few years, we have seen the emergence of a new comedy movement, one branded by commentators as “anti-woke”, that seeks to push back against the orthodoxies of our time. Its closest historical precedent is the “alternative” comedians of the Eighties, who also took aim at establishment norms and were often similarly blunt in their approach. The key difference today is that there is no broad agreement about where the power in society lies, and so while “anti-woke” comedians see themselves as anti-establishment, their critics insist that the opposite is true.

Consider the example of Ricky Gervais, whose new Netflix stand-up special Armageddon has sparked this most recent round of discussions about the supposed red lines in comedy. Some have accused Gervais of taking a reactionary stance, most notably because of jokes relating to migrants and disabled children. Gervais has been branded an “anti-woke” comedian, but I doubt very much that he would see it in such reductive terms. Anyone familiar with his work will know that he has always lampooned closed systems of thought, and it just so happens that “wokeness” currently represents the dominant incarnation. There was a time when many of Gervais’s critics were perfectly happy to see him take a wrecking ball to the certainties of religious faith. It would appear they take a different view when it’s their own belief system taking a battering.

January 8, 2024

Vivek Ramaswamy versus the HR team

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray finds the humour in Vivek Ramaswamy’s most recent viral video moment:

I’m not sure which part of the employee handbook he violated, but Vivek Ramaswamy was obviously called into a conference with HR.

“Mr. Ramaswamy, security will now escort you to your desk to collect your personal belongings.”

Federal debt has now passed $34 trillion, is well over 100% of GDP, and is on track to top $40 trillion in maybe two years. What are we going to do about that? We’re going to spend over a trillion dollars a year in the foreseeable future to cover the interest on that debt. Worth noticing?

The United States fought the Taliban for twenty years, accomplished nothing, and then let them take all of Afghanistan instead of just the half they controlled when we invaded. How did that happen? How did we spend thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on literally nothing? We trained and funded the Afghan National Army, which then turned out to not actually exist at the very first moment it was expected to function without us. Should we work to understand that failure? Should we maybe ask where the money went?

And so on. Pick your own top ten things that need to be discussed and examined. Covid policy, the emerging disaster of learning loss from school closures, the failure and increasingly obvious danger of the mRNA injections, our long history of remarkably unwise foreign interventions, the Frankenstein’s monster of our corporate-state merger and revolving door regulatory capture, the ideological rigidity of academic culture, whatever. There are crushingly obvious and disturbingly consequential failures all over our recent national record.

So our presidential candidates are facing persistent and aggressive questioning about … their willingness to denounce white supremacy. Is racism bad? Is racism bad? Is racism bad? Will you denounce it? Will you denounce it? Will you denounce it, denounce it, denounce it?

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