Retired, sometime civil servant, sometime consultant, active intellectual, former lawyer, active property manager, and on rare occasions in the past a political activist. He has recovered from the experience.

Retired, sometime civil servant, sometime consultant, active intellectual, former lawyer, active property manager, and on rare occasions in the past a political activist. He has recovered from the experience.

Maajid Nawaz on digital currencies

My problem with alarmists like Maajid Nawaz is that they seem so reasonable and lucid in comparison to those who are droning on about, say, global warming and COVID scare awareness.  Where is the real and present danger?  In repressive state interventions, not 1.5C of warming a century.

 

 

What I believe is going on: COVID and the Liberals

New rules going after blockade financing an overreach, critics say | CTV News

 

I believe the following to be, roughly and in the main, true. I cannot prove some assertions but I believe them on what I think are reasonable grounds.

  1. COVID originated in a lab leak.
  2. The Wuhan virology labs were conducting gain of function research on behalf of American health agencies.
  3. It is almost certain that Fauci was involved in the approval of this research, but that is not relevant to the thrust of what I am saying.
  4. The COVID pandemic was used to accustom people to mass surveillance and visible compliance with government orders: isolation, masks (vexatious and close to useless), and lockdowns.
  5. Vaccines for COVID are neither safe nor particularly effective, though they may have had good results for the first few months, after which their effectiveness wears off rapidly.
  6. The vaccinated  transmit the disease as readily as the unvaccinated, or nearly so.
  7. Booster shots are designed to hook the general population onto the need for government-approved mandatory drug therapies (of highly dubious effectiveness).
  8. COVID’s effects are extremely age-stratified. That is, deadly at 80, serious at 60, and a bad cold you would not wish on your enemy at 50 and inconvenient at 30. Measures appropriate to an older age group are out of place for the young. This fact has not be reflected in public health responses, so that children and even infants are being vaccinated, contrary to  the medical evidence of dangers from the vaccines themselves, and the superfluousness of vaccines among the young.
  9. Year over year mortality rates across the world will show that there has been a massive death toll from all causes (excepting COVID), and that all the anecdotal evidence that far too many young and vigorous people dying of heart attacks will be shown to be part of a large scale mortality upsurge. There may also be shown a significant decline in fertility (birthrates).
  10. So that, in addition to the short duration of vaccine effectiveness, it will become evident that COVID vaccines are themselves the cause of these deaths. The implications of these facts will be opposed vigorously.
  11. Canadian government measures were designed to isolate and humiliate those who refuse the vaccines. You are free to disobey them, says our Prime Minister, but you will lose your job and must be isolated from other people. These measures are vindictive acts of malice against the unvaccinated population, based on pseudo-science,
  12. To pay for the massive unemployment engendered by lockdowns, governments printed billions  of dollars to pay for the emergency measures they devised.
  13. Inflation has been the inevitable result of too much money pursuing too limited investment opportunities.
  14. Coincidentally, and for reasons dissociated from COVID, but accelerated by the responses to the pandemic, we are experiencing a massive transfer of wealth upward from the 99% to the 1% and further concentrations of wealth from the 1% to the 0.1% of society.
  15. Our governments and public health authorities are acting in a way that is best explained by active malignance towards the general population, and not merely incompetence.
  16. This is especially so in Trudeau’s Canada, where the Liberals continue to engage in all sorts of measures to denigrate English Canada with fantastic contrivances like Indian residential school death tolls, maligning patriotic expressions of revolt like the trucker’s convoy, and generally fabulating the existence of  right wing white male extremism as a general excuse for repressive measures. I would add the deliberate demoralization of the armed forces by means of accusations and dismissals for sexual impropriety.
  17. Government in western countries, and particularly in Canada, are intent on passing legislation controlling what is said and who sees what on the Internet, by means of massive expansion of regulatory authority over private communications (viz, Bills c-11, C-18, on line harms Act, subsidies for newspapers,) to keep the press compliant and the people quiescent.

Consequently, I realized last night why Pierre Poilievre was going to be the next leader of the Conservatives, and quite possibly the leader of the country. His theme, which he expressed from the moment the leadership race started, was to “take back the power.”

I realized that if I, establishmentarian and patriot as I am, had reached this stage of concern for the country, then the relevant political choices lay between Pierre Poilievre, the official Conservative, and Mad Max Bernier of the even  more disenchanted Freedom Party.

I will be thought nutcase by those still in the grips of the Establishment Laurentian view. Yet as Orwell says, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to see what is plainly before our eyes. To this observer, the current Trudeau government has gone beyond total incompetence into malignance. I want a divorce from these people. I think they are evil, not just bad in the usual human way that people can be.

 

 

Machiavelli

One fine day in the early 1500s, a retired public servant, lately employed by the Florentine Republic, and out of power because of the return of the Medicis, went up into his chamber and sat down and wrote The Prince, thereby inventing political science. He had been the equivalent of Secretary to Cabinet and Clerk of the Privy Council in the Florentine Republic. He personally had known the Holy Roman Emperor, the King or France, and the Pope in the course of his diplomatic travels. A man of many parts.

Here is a serious and deeply well-educated lecture by a British savant, Quentin Skinner, on the subject of Machiavelli. You will absorb it to your benefit. Politics is about outcomes.

 

 

They cannot prevent machines from identifying race

The news that some medical imaging machines correctly identify people by race, even when humans looking at the same images cannot, has provoked the usual flutter of concerns.

This was reported neutrally in the MIT News of May 10, 2022.

Now it is a truism of people who perform autopsies that racial origins can be readily determined to expert eyes by the shape of holes in the pelvis. Indeed I read somewhere that forensic pathologists can even tell about mixed race people, who was part African and who part white, or who part white and part Asian (Mongolian as it used to be called.)

But this finding goes further, namely that race can be readily identified by software-driven machines. Inevitably this puts the lie to the idea that race has no biological underlying reality, which however preposterous, is sometimes argued.

It took the woke Scientific American only a few days to problematize this finding into something more sinister. Some of the findings were that some machines worked less well on darker-skinned people in detecting blush responses, and the like. Fair enough. Yet Scientific American cannot refrain from adding:

“Stopping computational bias means making a much greater effort to recruit people from different populations to participate in the design and testing of medical devices. It would help if research teams were themselves more diverse, observes Rachel Hardeman, a public health scientist at the University of Minnesota, who studies reproductive health and racial equity.”

Inevitably in today’s woke environment the call is for people of different skin colours to participate in medical research. That will not prevent the machines from identifying people by race, nor will it lead to better medical devices if the criterion of selection of the researchers is their skin colour, at the expense of talent and educational attainment. Yet this is exactly what is intended to happen.

 

 

Claude Shannon

Claude Shannon is among the most significant mathematicians of the 20th century, and nothing I have heard about him in the past thirty years has dissuaded me from this view. His ideas about condensing information and sending it along wires dominate the computer communications industry on which everything now depends. Here is a book on him,

 

He spent his spare time inventing and making clever toys, juggling, playing with his kids and riding unicycles. A life devoted to intelligent play. He was also a first rate investor. He spent very little time doing useful work. Everything in the computer world has vindicated his 1948 paper on the limits of what can be communicated.

If that does not make you interested in Claude Shannon, nothing I can say will suffice.

Here is an entertaining video on his life and the issues he dealt with.  As the video says, “Today, everyone carries around Shannon in their pocket”.

 

 

 

 

 

Charitable giving, Canada

The figures on charitable giving are out and, as you might expect, Quebecois show themselves to be the most tight fisted among us. I explain it on the basis that this was a society where volunteerism was not welcomed: the Church or the State did it for you. But when I hear about Quebec’s social solidarity, I snort in derision. Quebec is the least sociable; the most atomized, of Canada’s provinces. Charitable giving is the basis of collective but private action. Low chartable giving lead to low levels of private action. Hence the state steps in, and prevents the development of the habits of private giving for collective action. Read Francis Fukuyama’s Trust for further details of how this works out.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190208/t001c-eng.htm

 

Charitable donations — Canada, provinces and territories

 

Dons de charité — Canada, provinces et territoires
2017 – Donors 2016 to 2017 – Donors 2017 – All Filers 2017 – Charitable donations 2016 to 2017 – Charitable donations 2017 – Median donations
number change in % % thousands of dollars change in % dollars
Canada 5,348,220 -0.9 20.0 9,576,975 7.7 300
Newfoundland and Labrador 73,920 -4.0 17.9 80,970 -1.0 370
Prince Edward Island 24,230 -1.6 21.3 33,685 5.2 440
New Scotland 133 130 -2.2 18.5 198,510 9.1 360
New Brunswick 106,070 -3.6 17.9 150,435 -1.0 340
Quebec 1,219,000 1.0 19.0 900 630 1.7 130
Ontario 2,122,600 -0.6 20.9 4,099,990 5.5 390
Manitoba 219,540 -1.1 23.2 462,295 8.2 450
Saskatchewan 166,980 -3.5 20.6 309 275 -0.5 440
alberta 585 490 -4.4 19.8 1,566,425 9.1 480
British Columbia 687 620 -0.2 19.0 1,758,465 18.9 460
yukon 4,500 -2.4 16.5 7,015 6.0 450
Northwest Territories 3,690 -3.9 12.4 6,205 0.0 400
Nunavut 1,450 -0.7 7.0 3,075 13.5 560
Source(s):
Table 11-10-0130-01 .

 

Greatness is before us

The most difficult part of building the Tesla car company was reaching volume production without going bankrupt. Tesla was the first company to do this since Chrysler in the 1920s. More than this, Elon admits that he and his team made every mistake possible to make. The result, as Musk admits, is that he “knows more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth.” (at minute 38:35)

He spent three years on the factory floor working out problems. It was vital for the workers to see the boss was not in a remote office.

I am skeptical of Musk’s attempts to convert the world from fossil fuels to electrical energy, but if anyone is going to show the way, it will be engineer/scientist/businessmen like Musk, and not climate ideologues like Steven Guilbeault, the federal minister in charge of wrecking the  Canadian energy industry and driving up energy prices through taxation.

I cannot resist comparing Musk with Bill Gates, the vaccine apologist and WEF apostle. Musk seems alive with wit and self awareness, by contrast to Gates, who seems increasingly like an earnest plodder with authoritarian tendencies. The more I see of Gates, the less impressed I become. The more I see of Musk, the more impressed with him I am.

In his youth Musk read a lot of books, and gradually learned that not everything is to be taken literally. With Asperger’s syndrome, “or whatever condition I had”,  he was not intuitively connected to other humans. His childhood was not happy, he admits. Understanding ambiguity and implicit meaning were beyond his reach, He found it rewarding to spend all night programming computers. He was “obsessed with truth”, and turned to physics in consequence. (at minute 47:46) His motivating philosophy is “to find what questions to ask of the answer that is the universe” and “to expand the scope and scale of consciousness so that we may be able to better understand the nature of the universe”. (at minute 51:00)

This is no small mind. This is greatness. I am glad that he has so much money: he will go farther still.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sign of hope

Chantal Hebert notices the obvious: we do not wish to impoverish ourselves by making energy too expensive at the price

“According to a Nanos poll released this week, the Conservative party has built a lead in voting intentions on Trudeau’s Liberals. With a federal election possibly as many as three years away, those numbers do not portend much of anything, but they do suggest the rhetoric on offer on the leadership campaign trail is finding a receptive audience.

“If leading political actors in Ontario, Quebec and on the Conservative leadership front are willing to bet their futures on damping or shrugging off Canada’s environmental ambitions, it is because they are convinced that on climate change, voters — or at least more than enough of them for their purpose — are not ready to put their money where their mouths are. And chances are they are right.