With the focus on colonial oppression as an evil in contemporary society, people who are not aware of history tend to imagine that life was like the Garden of Eden in North America, before those nasty white Europeans arrived.
No. As Hobbes wrote: “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
And it was cruel — especially if you were an Indigenous orphan or disabled.
Portland appeared to be living the liberal dream. Set beneath the snow-capped Mount Hood, beside the Columbia river, the thriving West Coast city was home to big business like Nike and Adidas, and famed for its art, food and youthful left-wing culture.
In the summer of 2020, when much of America rose up in protest against the killing of George Floyd, the city reacted with three big changes. The police force was defunded to the tune of $15 million. The top prosecutor adopted the prevailing philosophy of refusing to press charges for low-level crime. And in 2021, Oregon decriminalised most drug possession, becoming the first state in the US to do so.
Polling maps in recent months have shown swathes of blue across most of the country, except for big cities like Montreal and Toronto where ridings generally looked solid red.
This tapestry changed in the early hours of June 25, when a lone blue square emerged from the core of the traditional Liberal stronghold of Toronto.
The Toronto–St.Paul’s riding, held by the Liberals for over three decades, switched to Conservative by 590 votes.
According to “energy transition” and “net-zero” enthusiasts, the future looks bright for electric vehicles (EVs). Though not so bright, it seems, that the federal and some provincial governments haven’t had to offer at least $15 billion in subsidies to prompt carmakers to develop Canadian production facilities, as well as lavish subsidies to get people to buy EVs. And since even that isn’t enough to bring consumers around, a Trudeau government mandate now requires that all new light-duty vehicles sold in Canada must be electric or plug-in hybrid by 2035. In other words, the government is banning traditional internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs).
A top Biden Administration health official repeatedly urged an influential transgender advocacy group to remove proposed age minimums for transgender surgical procedures from its policy guidelines, according to recently publicized court documents.
My recently published research into the U.K. Government’s deployment of behavioural science strategies – ‘nudges’ – leads to a startling conclusion: in every sphere of daily life, our thoughts and actions are being psychologically manipulated so as to align them with what the state’s technocrats have deemed to be in our best interests. It seems that open, transparent debate is no longer considered necessary.
How did my nation, a purported beacon of freedom and democracy, descend to such a position? While there have been multiple participants in this journey into behavioural science-fuelled authoritarianism, a historical review of the key players indicates that American scholars have contributed in crucial ways to this trajectory.
On August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the American destroyer USS Maddox. Fire was returned and ultimately there were no U.S. casualties. This, on top of what is now known as a fictitious attack (evidently triggered by false radar returns, according to James Stockdale, who was there) two days later on the 4th, led Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — which began the shooting phase of the Vietnam War.
The Muslim Vote (TMV) campaign has attracted a great deal of attention in the build-up to next week’s UK General Election. Seeking to mobilise Britain’s four million Muslim voters, it pledges to support pro-Palestine parliamentary candidates who back an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. It is especially keen to inflict electoral harm on Labour MPs who – in TMV’s eyes – have failed to sufficiently condemn Israel for its actions in Gaza.
Airport world is a parallel dimension. No matter where they are geographically, all airports are essentially the same place, with a simplified “international English” and a time zone only loosely tethered to its location. Airport world even has its own climate: uniformly air-conditioned, typically somewhere in the 21-24°C zone that studies also suggest represents the zone of maximum human productivity and cognitive performance.
Last week, airport world deposited me in Boston for a few days, during a heatwave that reached humid highs of 36°C. But the heat barely registered as such, thanks to America’s ubiquitous climate control, which helpfully kept my seminar strictly in the productivity zone.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals now stare oblivion in the face.
Or as a friend put it more colourfully, the byelection loss in Toronto-St. Paul’s “greased the skids.”
The skids to where, exactly?
A subgenre of Republican commentary this election is the scolding of Democrats, establishment media, White House staffers, and Jill Biden for their callous cruelty in exposing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline before millions of people. As a New York Post editorial wrote, “Whatever it [the reason] is, to any outsider it looks downright cruel to keep trotting Biden around under the pretense that he can possibly serve four more years in the world’s most grueling job. . . . How much longer must we bear this grim charade?”
A German woman reacting to the vicious gang rape of a 15-year-old by ten predominately migrant men is set to spend a weekend behind bars for alleged “hate postings” made over WhatsApp to one of the attackers.
The gang rape was perpetrated in September 2020 in a prominent public park in Hamburg, with the ten men, ranging from 16 to 20 years old, taking advantage of the teen’s inebriated state and the lack of witnesses due to ongoing lockdown measures.
Despite a fresh round of calls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign, a new poll shows that the Liberal Party is already too far gone to be saved by his departure.
In a survey published Monday, the Angus Reid Institute found that a clear plurality of respondents were already disillusioned with the Liberals regardless of who was the helm.
The federal Liberals might poll better if they just cut back on the obviously stupid stuff.
The most recent head-scratcher out of Ottawa was that Justin Trudeau’s government needed more than 1,500 days to weigh Iran’s downing of UIA Flight 752, not to mention the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) overt backing of global terror groups, before finally agreeing to designate the IRGC as terrorists. (The Harper government designated the Quds Force, the IRGC arm in charge of overseas operations, as a terrorist organization in 2012.) Am I the only one who recalls that it took Trudeau less than 30 days following the start of the 2022 Trucker Convoy protest to seize more than 200 bank accounts (a decision a federal court later deemed to be overreach)?
OTTAWA — A majority of younger Canadians believe that older generations are rigging things to benefit themselves, while making life harder for millennial and Gen Z voters, and most aren’t convinced the recent Liberal budget will help matters.
They also aren’t big fans of plans for more government spending and higher carbon taxes. Nor are they confident that the government’s recent massive subsidy announcements for EV and battery plants will benefit them.
A horrible era to be young.
