Throwing Like a Girl: Is Biology Allowed to Explain Anything?

Proof that if transwomen athletes transition puberty, they must be allowed to compete with real women and if you don't, that is transphobic and anti-scientific.

No surprise that Fausto-Sterling is also responsible for the ridiculous comparison of intersex to redheads. 

This also deals with the Myth of the Myth of Man the Hunter.

Even 20 years ago, you would've been overwhelmingly laughed at for claiming that physical differences between men and women were due to socialisation. But the reality of the slippery slope means that this is not an uncommon view nowadays.

Left wing logic: puberty happens after birth. Therefore, socialisation causes puberty.

Throwing Like a Girl: Is Biology Allowed to Explain Anything?

"The phrase “throw like a girl” is a crude stereotype, but, like many stereotypes, it contains more than a grain of truth. In fact, the sex difference in overhand throwing is one of the largest behavioral sex differences ever measured.

Psychologists typically express group differences in standard deviations. Among young children, boys outperform girls in throwing distance and velocity by about 1.5 standard deviations. The gap widens across childhood and adolescence. By late adolescence and adulthood, estimates are generally around two standard deviations or greater. Thomas and French’s classic meta-analysis remains a useful starting point for examining this sex difference.

A difference of two standard deviations is roughly the same magnitude as the familiar adult sex difference in height. It means that the average man throws as well as or better than about 98 percent of women.

The raw numbers make the point just as clearly. In one study of young adults, men threw a tennis ball at an average velocity of 29.4 meters per second, compared with 18.6 meters per second for women. In other words, the women averaged about 63 percent of the men’s throwing velocity. At elite levels, the sex difference remains large. In modern track and field competition, men throw the javelin about 30 percent farther than women despite using a heavier javelin. The sex difference in javelin performance is therefore substantially larger than the familiar male advantages in running and jumping events.

These are group averages, not rules about individuals. The distributions overlap, some girls and women throw extremely well, and training matters. Nonetheless, the sex difference is large, appears well before puberty, and generally increases with age.

In 2018, we published two review articles in The Quarterly Review of Biology. The first, Born to Throw, examined the ecological circumstances that may have favored the evolution of powerful human throwing. The second, On the Evolution of Sex Differences in Throwing, explored why throwing ability is so strongly sexually differentiated.

We argued that throwing probably first became important in threat displays and physical conflict and was later incorporated into hunting and power scavenging—that is, driving predators and other scavengers away from kills. Because males participated far more often in dangerous physical combat and more often in hunting, we proposed that selection for throwing-related traits was stronger in males.

Our claim was never that training and culture do not matter, that every boy throws better than every girl, or that girls and women should be discouraged from throwing activities. We argued only that the large average sex difference in throwing is partly innate...

Developmental biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling published Throwing Like a Girl: A Critique of Past Approaches and an Illustrated Proposal for a Path Forward in Biology of Sex Differences. Much of her article challenges our evolutionary account...

Blank Slate thinking can persist even among researchers who readily acknowledge that nature and nurture interact.

Steven Pinker popularized the Blank Slate metaphor in his 2002 book The Blank Slate. In its most extreme form, the Blank Slate view holds that humans possess little meaningful evolved psychological structure and that culture and socialization therefore do nearly all the work in producing behavioral differences, including differences between girls and boys and between women and men.

Few serious scholars explicitly defend that position today. Instead, they say that nature and nurture interact.

Good. They do.

The problem begins when we ask what biology is actually allowed to explain.

Fausto-Sterling is not an incidental figure in modern debates about sex. Her famous 1993 essay The Five Sexes helped popularize the idea that the familiar male-female binary is biologically inadequate. She proposed additional “sexes” based on intersex conditions and argued more broadly that sex should be understood as a continuum.

Those arguments became enormously influential. In our view, they also created lasting confusion by encouraging people to mistake variation in sexual development for evidence that biological sex itself is not binary. But when it comes to sexual reproduction, the distinction is straightforward: females are organized around producing ova and males around producing sperm. There is no third gamete type or reproductive role, and intersex conditions do not create one...

Can an important behavioral difference between males and females be partly biological?

Fausto-Sterling emphasizes that nature and nurture are “entangled.” Fine. We agree. The problem is that after making this concession, she allows biology to explain essentially nothing.

Fausto-Sterling portrays recent challenges to “Man the Hunter” as a serious problem for our hypothesis. Women, she argues, hunted more than traditional accounts acknowledged. She therefore concludes that the idea that women experienced less selection for throwing prowess needs to go “back to the drawing board.”

There is an immediate problem with this critique: hunting was not our primary evolutionary scenario. Combat was.

We said this explicitly. Both of our 2018 papers proposed that throwing first arose in threat displays and fighting and was later incorporated into hunting. Indeed, the abstract of Born to Throw states that “throwing first arose during agonistic interactions and was later incorporated into hunting by human ancestors.” This was not a stray speculation buried in a footnote. It was the central evolutionary scenario we proposed.

The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that physical aggression, lethal combat, and warfare are heavily male-biased behaviors. That part of our hypothesis therefore matters greatly.

Fausto-Sterling does not merely give combat too little attention. She effectively recasts our hypothesis as one centered on hunting and then attacks that version instead.

We cannot know whether this reflects careless reading or something less innocent. What we can say is that her readers are not given an accurate account of the hypothesis she claims to be criticizing. That is poor scholarship.

That said, hunting was an important secondary component of our hypothesis, so her treatment of that evidence deserves attention as well.

A 2023 paper by Anderson and colleagues, The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s Contribution to the Hunt Across Ethnographic Contexts, received enormous publicity. After reviewing ethnographic descriptions of 63 foraging societies, the authors reported evidence of women hunting in 79 percent of them.

The finding quickly spread as evidence that “Man the Hunter” was a sexist myth, and Fausto-Sterling embraced it as a challenge to our evolutionary scenario.

There was, however, a serious problem. Roughly a year before Fausto-Sterling submitted her paper in 2025, a 15-author team—including numerous researchers with extensive experience studying hunter-gatherers—published Female Foragers Sometimes Hunt, Yet Gendered Divisions of Labor Are Real. The authors identified problems with sample selection and coding, as well as a more fundamental problem with what the 79-percent statistic actually measures.

The basic issue is easy to understand: asking whether women ever hunt is not the same as measuring how sexually differentiated hunting is.

Imagine a society in which 100 men hunt regularly and one woman hunts occasionally. If an ethnographer mentions her, that society can be coded as “women hunt.”

Technically true, but nearly useless for estimating the magnitude of the sex difference.

Hagen, one of the critique’s authors, illustrated the problem using individual-level records from a large cross-cultural dataset on foraging. Males accounted for the overwhelming majority of hunting records and about 99.7 percent of the recorded hunted meat...

Fausto-Sterling’s treatment of the evolutionary evidence is only part of the problem.

Our 2018 argument did not rest on a handful of studies showing that boys throw farther and faster than girls. We reviewed evidence on throwing velocity and distance, accuracy and targeting, elite performance, training and sports experience, cross-cultural behavior, prenatal androgen exposure, shoulder and arm anatomy, and injury patterns.

Fausto-Sterling engages with only one part of that evidence: sex differences in children’s throwing.

Consider experience. Girls improve when they practice throwing. Of course they do. The important question is whether differences in experience explain most or all of the sex difference.

The evidence suggests they do not. In Does the Throwing “Gender Gap” Occur in Germany?, Ehl, Roberton, and Langendorfer studied German children partly because throwing sports were less culturally prominent there. Boys nevertheless displayed more advanced throwing patterns than girls. More strikingly, there was almost no overlap in throwing velocity, with a sex difference of roughly five standard deviations.

An especially informative study examined Aboriginal Australian children. Historical accounts suggested that Aboriginal girls and women had substantially more throwing-related experience than is typical in Western societies. The Aboriginal girls threw better than girls in several comparison samples. In other words, experience mattered. Yet Aboriginal boys still threw faster than Aboriginal girls. The sex difference was smaller than in U.S. samples but remained large, at about 1.4 standard deviations. Thomas and colleagues’ study of Aboriginal Australian children illustrates what a genuine interactionist account would predict: environmental experience can alter performance without erasing an underlying sex difference.

Then there is anatomy. Our review identified numerous sexually differentiated features of the shoulder and upper body that contribute, or plausibly contribute, to throwing performance. Consider just one: the glenoid fossa, the socket of the scapula where the upper arm articulates with the shoulder.

Across the eight adult samples we reviewed that measured glenoid height or breadth, males had larger dimensions in every case. The median sex difference was about 2.3 standard deviations—a very large difference, despite some overlap between the male and female distributions. Sex differences in glenoid dimensions can even be detected in young children.

No single finding proves our evolutionary hypothesis. What matters is the convergence of developmental, cross-cultural, performance, and anatomical evidence. Fausto-Sterling does not seriously grapple with that convergence. 

Fausto-Sterling makes an especially puzzling developmental argument when discussing the early emergence of the sex difference. She notes that throwing differences are “not there at birth, when infants cannot even lift their head.”

Well, yes.

Many evolved traits and capacities—such as walking and talking—are absent at birth and emerge only through development. An innate predisposition does not need to appear fully formed in a newborn. Genes regulate developmental pathways. Hormones act at particular stages. Bones and muscles grow. Nervous systems mature and respond to experience.

A newborn’s inability to throw therefore tells us essentially nothing about whether later sex differences in throwing are partly innate. Treating “not present at birth” as evidence against an evolved contribution confuses innateness with neonatal expression.

For a developmental biologist, that is a remarkable mistake.

Fausto-Sterling makes another blunder in her use of statistical control.

She discusses Roberton and Konczak’s study of children’s overarm throwing, which measured developmental components such as humeral motion, trunk and forearm action, stepping, and stride. Once those components were entered into a regression model, sex explained little additional variation in throwing velocity. Fausto-Sterling highlights the authors’ description of sex as “redundant with developmental level.”

But this analysis describes the difference; it does not explain its cause.

Suppose we tried to explain the male-female difference in height by entering femur length, tibia length, and torso length into a regression. Once those components were included, sex would add little additional predictive power for total height. That obviously would not show that the height difference is nonbiological. It would merely identify the physical components through which the sex difference is expressed.

Fausto-Sterling’s article also includes an empirical component: an exploratory analysis of ten infants—five boys and five girls—with especially detailed discussion of one boy and one girl. The five boys began active ball play at an average age of 9.7 months, compared with 12.1 months for the girls. Fausto-Sterling also observed more ball-related interaction in some mother-son dyads and uses these observations to illustrate how different experiences might send boys and girls down different developmental pathways.

The observations are interesting and may point to real environmental contributions. They cannot, however, answer the most important causal questions. Did mothers create the difference by treating sons and daughters differently? Did the infants differ in their attraction to balls and thereby elicit different responses from their mothers? Did both processes contribute?

Observations of ten infants cannot tell us.

More fundamentally, Fausto-Sterling treats developmental and evolutionary explanations as though they compete, when they should complement one another. A complete account must address both how a sex difference develops and why natural selection may have favored the underlying predispositions.

Children are not passive recipients of socialization. They seek out some experiences and avoid others, differ in what captures their attention, and may elicit different responses from parents. Parents, in turn, influence their children. Ridley captured this dynamic in the title of his 2003 book, Nature Via Nurture: biological predispositions often develop through experience rather than instead of it.

There is also a striking asymmetry in Fausto-Sterling’s standards of evidence. She questions whether studies of sex differences in children’s throwing across eight countries can support broad conclusions, partly because some samples were modest. By our calculation from the studies listed in her own Table 1, the median sample size was 160. Yet she is willing to draw theoretical lessons from a study of just ten infants, with much of the detailed narrative resting on only two of them.

Small samples, apparently, become more illuminating when they point in the preferred direction.

This is where the throwing dispute becomes more interesting than throwing itself. Few scholars today explicitly embrace the strong Blank Slate. The standard language—including Fausto-Sterling’s—is interactionist: nature and nurture interact; genes and environments interact; biology and culture interact.

For many sex-and-gender scholars, however, this interactionist language amounts to little more than lip service. Again and again, reasonable observations about development or social influence are used to prevent biology from explaining much of anything.

A trait is plastic, so biology is discounted. Parents treat boys and girls differently, so parental behavior is presumed to have created the difference. Practice changes performance, so the original difference is treated as socially produced. Development mediates a difference, so developmental processes are treated as alternatives to evolutionary ones.

The premises may be true. In each case, however, the conclusion does not follow.

Consider nutrition. It strongly affects height, but no serious person concludes that the average sex difference in height is therefore socially created. Or consider walking. Experience helps children learn to walk, but habitual, efficient bipedal locomotion depends on evolved anatomy and developmental machinery.

Saying that nature and nurture are “entangled” is therefore correct, but it does not answer the question of what each contributes. Throwing provides one unusually clear example. Occupational interests provide another—and one that matters far more in ordinary modern life.

Throwing probably mattered greatly throughout much of human evolutionary history but matters relatively little for most people today. Occupational interests are almost the reverse. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors never had to decide whether to become computer programmers, carpenters, graphic designers, nurses, or elementary-school teachers. Yet the interests that shape such choices now have major practical consequences.

One of the largest and best-replicated psychological sex differences involves the people-things dimension. In their 2009 meta-analysis, Men and Things, Women and People, Su, Rounds, and Armstrong analyzed data from 503,188 people. Men showed greater interest in working with things, while women showed greater interest in working with people. The difference was nearly one standard deviation, and the sex difference in engineering interests was even larger.

More recently, Stoet and Geary analyzed the occupational aspirations of 473,260 adolescents across 80 countries and economic regions. In every country, more boys aspired to things-oriented and STEM careers, while more girls aspired to people-oriented careers. These differences also tended to be larger in countries with greater female empowerment.

Cross-national comparisons cannot settle questions of causation, but the recurrence of these differences across societies is difficult to reconcile with a socialization-only account.

Relevant differences also appear long before young people begin choosing careers. A meta-analysis of 75 studies found robust sex-typed toy preferences, while a longitudinal study by Kung found that gender-typed play at age three and a half predicted gender-typed occupational interests at age 13.

None of this proves that occupational interests are innate. Socialization begins early too.

Evidence consistent with a hormonal contribution comes from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or CAH. Females with classic CAH experience unusually high prenatal androgen exposure. Beltz, Swanson, and Berenbaum found that females with CAH showed greater things-oriented interests than unaffected females, while Frisén and colleagues found that women with CAH were more likely than controls to work in male-dominated occupations, especially among those with the form associated with the greatest prenatal androgen exposure.

CAH cannot by itself establish the effects of prenatal androgens because the condition has consequences beyond hormone exposure, and sample sizes are necessarily modest. But when considered alongside the large population-level sex difference, its early developmental precursors, and its recurrence across cultures, the CAH evidence makes a purely socialization-based account increasingly difficult to sustain.

So how do scholars who describe themselves as interactionists, yet remain deeply skeptical of evolutionary explanations, respond to this evidence?

A 2021 exchange about sex differences in STEM provides a striking example.

STEM interests are not identical to the broader people-things dimension, but the connection is direct. Engineering, physics, and computer science are among the most things-oriented fields, and broad differences in occupational interests help shape who enters them.

In Men, Women and STEM: Why the Differences and What Should Be Done?, Stewart-Williams and Halsey argued that sex differences in career-related preferences—including people-things interests—reflect both biological and cultural influences and contribute to unequal participation in STEM.

El-Hout, Garr-Schultz, and Cheryan responded in Beyond Biology: The Importance of Cultural Factors in Explaining Gender Disparities in STEM Preferences. They accurately acknowledge that Stewart-Williams and Halsey’s position is interactionist: both social and biological factors contribute. They then write, “There are three reasons why we find the biological explanation troubling.”

From there, nearly all of their explanatory attention turns to culture: stereotypes, “masculine defaults,” belonging, classroom environments, self-promotion, and interventions intended to make STEM settings more attractive to women.

Much of this evidence is useful, even compelling. For example, high-school girls reported greater immediate interest in taking a computer-science course after encountering a classroom without stereotypically “geeky” cues. That shows that environmental cues can shift expressed interest. It does not show, however, that the effect persists, alters career choices, or explains the broader sex difference in occupational interests.

More importantly, evidence that environments can influence interests tells us nothing about whether innate predispositions also contribute. Yet this is the rhetorical implication of El-Hout and colleagues’ argument: evidence for social influence is treated as though it weakens the case for biological influence. The inference does not follow.

El-Hout and colleagues then make a different kind of argument: biological explanations may have undesirable social consequences. They warn that such explanations can reinforce stereotypes and describe them as “treading on dangerous ground.”

Some biological claims may indeed have undesirable social consequences, and that matters when scientists consider how to communicate their findings. But it tells us nothing about whether those claims are true.

Fine, Joel, and Rippon employ a similar strategy in their widely circulated essay Eight Things You Need to Know About Sex, Gender, Brains, and Behavior. Most of their cautions are valid: distributions overlap, brains are plastic, development is complicated, and environmental effects occur. But none of those observations shows that psychological sex differences are not substantially influenced by biology.

This is the recurring move. Begin with a sound observation about overlap, plasticity, development, or social influence. Then treat it as though it undermines the possibility of an innate biological contribution.

The premise is true. The implied conclusion does not follow.

So let’s return to throwing and ask a more precise question: What evidence would refute—or at least substantially weaken—the hypothesis that the male throwing advantage partly reflects innate factors?

Suppose carefully controlled studies found that the sex difference disappeared once boys and girls received equivalent training and experience. Suppose the difference did not consistently appear across cultures. Suppose prenatal androgen exposure was unrelated to throwing-relevant behavior. Suppose males and females showed no systematic differences in anatomy relevant to throwing.

Would those findings weaken our hypothesis? Absolutely.

But much of the evidence points in the opposite direction. The male advantage appears across cultures, emerges early, persists even when training and experience are taken into account, and is accompanied by relevant anatomical and hormonal evidence. No single finding proves our hypothesis. Taken together, however, the evidence makes a socialization-only explanation difficult to sustain.

The researchers who produced this evidence deserve more than silence. Many spent years designing demanding developmental, cross-cultural, anatomical, hormonal, and training-controlled studies precisely to test whether socialization alone could explain the difference. Imagine doing that work, only to see Fausto-Sterling write about the same question as though the research does not exist whenever its findings are inconvenient for her argument. That is more than selective citation. It is a shabby and deeply disrespectful way to treat both the researchers and the evidence.

The strong Blank Slate—the idea that human psychology is largely written by culture—has been declared dead many times. Yet it refuses to stay dead. That is why we think of it as a zombie.

Today, biology is usually acknowledged. Nature and nurture interact. Fine. But the Blank Slate survives through two recurring moves. First, reasonable observations—that traits are plastic, parents influence children, experience matters, and development mediates behavior—are treated as though they rule out an innate contribution. They do not. Second, evidence that could challenge a socialization-only explanation is ignored, minimized, or sidestepped.

Fausto-Sterling uses both moves. Together, they make the Blank Slate effectively unfalsifiable—and therefore impossible to kill. That may be rhetorically effective, but it is not science. Science requires allowing evidence to overturn the story you would prefer to believe."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Links - 18th September 2026 (1 - Canadian Politics)

Kim J Dobranski | Facebook - "Day three in Yakima, Washington.  I've spent a lot of time in the US over my life, traveled all over the country, and never thought much about it. But over the last three days I've spent more time simply observing everything. Of course, this is all anecdotal and based on my own experiences. It may or may not reflect other areas. They were absolutely zero issues crossing the border. Nothing had changed in the last 30 years of me crossing the border. It was as straightforward as it always has been.  First of all, Canadians think about the US far more than Americans think about us. In fact, most people here don't really think about Canada at all. It's just not on their radar. They know we're their northern neighbour, but they don't spend much time thinking about our politics. We're just not that relevant to them. When they find out you're from Canada, they're genuinely interested. I haven't experienced any animosity or hatred toward Canadians the way many Canadians seem to have toward Americans. In my experience, it's been the opposite. Honestly, it's almost embarrassing knowing how many Canadians talk so negatively about the US, while Americans I've met have viewed Canada positively. There's no rioting in the streets. ICE isn't dragging people into detention centres everywhere you look. People aren't getting shot where they stand. Washington is a concealed and open carry state. Yes, a state that's probably more liberal than Canada in many ways. If you're legally allowed to possess a firearm, you generally don't need a permit to openly carry one. Yet oddly enough, I haven't seen a single gun, and certainly no gunfights in the streets. In fact, I haven't seen any violence. I haven't seen any crime. Everybody's just going about their day, living their lives. I also don't think I've seen a single homeless drug addict since I've been here. I'm not saying they aren't here. Maybe I simply haven't been to the areas where they are. But in Kelowna, they're everywhere I go. Literally everywhere. Every day in Kelowna, and I mean every single day, I hear police, ambulance, and fire sirens multiple times throughout the day. I've been here three days and I haven't heard one. Not one. People are genuinely nice. I'm still using a cane as I recover from surgery, and everywhere I go people have been very helpful, holding doors open for me and even offering to carry my things out to the bus. There's not this constant left-versus-right division that the media wants you to believe. Everybody seems to be getting along just fine. Nobody's being attacked for being a Trump supporter. And yes there are Trump supporters everywhere here.  Everybody's very patriotic. American flags are everywhere. You can feel the patriotism. It's embedded in their DNA. I wish Canada had more of that same pride. I'm lying here in my hotel room waiting to take the Kelowna Falcons to a game today, and I thought I'd share some of my observations. America is not a bad place. In fact, I know many Canadians don't want to hear this, but we're a lot more like Americans than many of us probably want to admit. And from what I've experienced, they're a lot like us too."

A federation at crossroads: Alberta’s case for equality in Canada | Calgary Herald - "For years, Alberta has been told its frustrations are exaggerated or rooted in partisanship. But the truth is far simpler and far more structural — Canada is not an equal federation, and Alberta is the province most affected by that reality. Canada operates under what political scientists call asymmetry, meaning one province has different powers, rights or exceptions that others do not. This isn’t a criticism of Quebec or a denial of its unique culture. It is simply how the federation was designed. Quebec holds powers no other province has — control over immigration selection, unique authority over language and cultural policy, the ability to opt out of federal programs with compensation, its own pension plan and police force. These powers were created to protect Quebec’s identity — a goal many Canadians respect — but they also mean Quebec operates under a different set of rules. Alberta’s position is straightforward — if Quebec has these powers, every province should have the same options. Alberta is not asking to take anything away from Quebec. It is asking for equality. This is where the structural conflict becomes unavoidable. Quebec’s political identity is built on being distinct, not equal. Alberta’s political identity is built on fairness, not special treatment. These two visions cannot coexist within the same constitutional framework. Alberta’s grievances flow directly from this imbalance. Equalization remains unreformable because Quebec treats it as untouchable. National energy corridors cannot be built when another province can veto them. Federal overreach lands more heavily in the West. And constitutional reform is impossible because Quebec will not support changes that dilute its special status. These are not emotional complaints. They are structural realities. Yet, across the country, there is a reluctance to acknowledge this. Canadians dislike conflict, and reopening constitutional questions feels risky. Ontario benefits from the status quo and fears instability more than inequality. Atlantic Canada depends on federal transfers and avoids debates that might threaten it. And in recent months, both B.C. and Manitoba have taken public shots at Alberta — not because it is the source of the problem, but because criticizing Alberta is politically safe. Confronting Quebec’s special status is not. It is easier to frame Alberta as unco-operative than to address the deeper imbalance at the heart of the federation. Meanwhile, the national media often frames Alberta’s concerns as regional irritability rather than legitimate structural issues. This reinforces the perception that frustrations are emotional rather than grounded in the design of the federation itself."
Time to condemn Albertan separatists as traitors and give Quebec even more privileges, because equality and democracy mean pushing the left wing agenda and doing what the Laurentian Elite say

Why Ottawa needs to upend equalization - The Globe and Mail - "One of the most intriguing possibilities – and undoubtedly, one of the most politically explosive – would be to change how the equalization formula deals with revenues and profits from the sale of electricity.  Right now, electricity revenues are included in the natural resources category, with only actual rather than potential revenues counted. If a province opts to keep electricity prices low, it is not penalized under the equalization formula.  But that is a policy choice, one that deliberately and artificially deflates a province’s fiscal capacity. The current structure of the equalization system creates a disincentive for any province that might think of charging market rates: the Fraser Institute has estimated that a province would see 70 cents in equalization payments clawed back for every dollar it took in from higher electricity prices. Ottawa does not need to cajole the provinces to raise their electricity rates. It can simply calculate the provinces’ fiscal capacities as if that were the case, thereby removing any fiscal incentive for artificially low rates. Already, the equalization formula does this for taxation – Alberta’s fiscal capacity is calculated as if it had a provincial sales tax, even though it very much does not.  If the federal government were to similarly read in higher electricity prices for Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia, it would have saved $3.4-billion in the current fiscal year (without the fixed-growth rule), according to the equalization simulator on the Finances of the Nation website. Along with eliminating adjustment payments, that would trim $4.1-billion from the program. Those are substantial savings that could be redeployed to other spending, or better yet, used to reduce personal income tax rates, or to simply trim the deficit. But there are other reforms that could push those savings higher. One big problem with equalization is that it mutes the incentive for provinces to increase their revenues through economic growth. Without the cushion of equalization payments, New Brunswick might not be quite so quick to dismiss development of natural gas reserves through a ban on fracking.  A possible solution is to set the bar for equalization slightly lower, perhaps levelling up the provinces to 95 per cent of the average national fiscal capacity rather than 100 per cent. That change, without the fixed-growth floor, would reduce the cost of equalization to $20.3-billion this year, freeing up $6.9-billion. There could be even bigger savings if Ottawa were to use a 95-per-cent rate and change how equalization deals with electricity revenues. As this last graphic shows, the cost of the program would fall by $10.5-billion. Quebec would still be the largest recipient, but its payments would decline by nearly $8-billion, or more than half.  Another tricky question is that of accounting for the differing costs of providing services. Wages and other costs are typically lower in have-not provinces. If price differences were taken into account, their equalization payments would fall (although Ontario would morph into a have-not province). There’s also the consideration of geography: Newfoundland, for instance, faces higher costs because of the distance between small, scattered communities.  And then there is the demographic factor. Provinces with older populations will, all things being equal, be hit with higher health care costs. Ottawa should take those factors into consideration as part of a reevaluation of equalization.  Not all of the savings discussed above are politically achievable... Every penny paid out from equalization savings should be contingent on a recipient province eliminating any interprovincial trade barriers. The resulting boom in economic growth would be the best equalization program possible."
Time to accuse Alberta of being selfish and continue to parasite off it, while still holding it back economically
Left wingers love to bash Ford for Ontario having expensive electricity, of course. In left wing land, everyone can be a net recipient

Mario Zelaya on X - "🚨 MAJOR BREAKING The state broadcaster, funded by the state, now decides what the state considers disinformation, using tools the state will not disclose. This is full blown tyranny"

'Very concerning' lack of transparency on federal finances: economists | National Post - "Economists are sounding the alarm on what they view is a lack of transparency around the federal government’s spending and fiscal outlook.  Since the spring economic update, Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced several new spending initiatives including a national AI strategy, a food security strategy, a West Coast pipeline project and a cooperative prosperity agreement with the province of British Columbia.  In a recently published report, Desjardins deputy chief economist Randall Bartlett, said the new commitments add $40 billion in extra spending over the next decade, beyond what was announced in the last fiscal update in April. “A lot of it seemed to be from previous envelopes, but some of it doesn’t all seem to be accounted for,” he said.  Bartlett pointed out his estimate of unaccounted spending is based on incomplete information, because the federal government has not been transparent on how it plans to pay for these measures...  “I think that lack of transparency is very concerning because it all points to high and rising debt levels, and I’m not really sure what sort of restraint outside of reductions to the public service are being shown right now, and what sort of analysis is going into funding these projects,” he said.  Bartlett is not the only one who is raising concerns about the lack of clarity around federal financial commitments. on Drummond, former chief economist at TD Bank and professor at Queen’s University, said there is a lack of information surrounding how the federal government has reached its defence spending target under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  Drummond said he assumed the percentage of core defence spending to GDP was two per cent by 2030. But Carney’s comments in May suggested total defence spending would hit four per cent of GDP by 2030, suggesting higher core defence spending of 2.5 per cent.  “Our fiscal framework has already provisioned to achieve four per cent of GDP in total defence spending by the end of this decade, ahead of NATO’s timetable,” said Carney, during an announcement on May 27.  “And we will make additional provisions to achieve NATO’s five per cent spending target on or ahead of schedule,” he added.  Drummond said it’s not shown anywhere, including in the recent spring economic statement.  “I’ve been involved in budgets since 1977, and I’ve never seen such a lack of transparency,” he said. The office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer has also flagged that the federal government has not shown its work in terms of how it plans to meet its defence spending targets. Drummond said the PBO office is currently waiting to receive more information through access to information requests.  In addition, the PBO’s recent report, published in early June, said it expects higher deficits than what was projected in last fiscal update, averaging $4.6 billion per year between 2025-26 to 2030-31...  Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said earlier this month that Canada can afford increased deficit spending, because it has one of the best fiscal positions among G7 countries. In addition, Champagne has said fiscal spending remains focused on growing the economy.  Bartlett said not all infrastructure projects have the same economic return, and he is old enough to remember Japan trying to boost its economy by building bridges to nowhere.  “This is money that you know is going to be paid off by future generations, as well as being paid down by the current generation,” said Bartlett. “We need to know that rigorous analysis is going into this at the front end, and we haven’t seen that.”... Bartlett said that as more unplanned spending gets added to the outlook, it could push the debt-to-GDP ratio higher year after year.  “That’s essentially the definition of an unsustainable path for Canada’s federal debt,” he said."
Damn Maple MAGA! Don't they know Mark Carney has both a Masters and PhD from Oxford?!

Meme - Tim Pettit: "This is a common theme of progressives. A major crisis erupts. There is the possibility that the negligent actions or omissions of a progressive government are responsible for causing or contributing to the crisis. But rather than fairly raising questions as to accountability of a progressive government, we are told that we must be silent, raise no questions but rather mutely support said progressive government. It's an interesting approach but it's wrong. Reasonable speech should never be silenced and certainly never to protect incompetent governments. Folks need to figure out what happened and vote accordingly."
Cindy Heinrichs @Cynthia95001250: "12,000 people have been evacuated from their community, some by helicopter, and the response of the Conservatives in BC is to politicize it. And the sheer ignorance! My heart goes out to the people of Summerland. May they receive all the support they need to make this bearable."
Tara Armstrong: "I don't believe British Columbians should have to live with a bag packed and ready to flee their homes every summer. We should have a government that is ready to prevent, fight and respond to wildfires, not one telling them to prepare for its failures."
Weird how in Ontario, left wingers kept blaming Doug Ford for the wildfires
Of course, if there's a mass shooting, the decent thing to do is talk about gun control and if you don't, you're a monster who wants people to die

Geoff Russ: Yes, the B.C. wildfires should be politicized | National Post - "One of the laziest tropes about governance is that tragedies should not be politicized. Generally speaking, the ones who relay that silly maxim are the ones who must reckon with the tragedy and don’t want the headache or their rightful share of the blame... the choice not to expand airborne firefighting capacity, the treatment of wildfire fuels, and post-fire reconstruction are all political choices. If the Okanagan is going to burn, taking beloved homes and lives with it, there is responsibility that must be assigned. In fact, accountability in these situations is the decent thing... A state of emergency is in effect in B.C., having been declared on Aug. 8. That was four days after Emergency Management Minister Kelly Greene said that such extraordinary tools were not yet justified. Conditions and political calculations have apparently flipped with equally terrifying and infuriating speed. It was precisely this volatility and danger that the B.C. NDP government claimed it was preparing for months ago.  Back in March, the province assured British Columbians that it was “ready” for the wildfire season... Not every hill, patch of grassland, and knoll can be manned by a crew. Nor can the government shield the surface of the Earth from electrical storms or identify every lunatic firebug who drops a lit match. Still, the NDP has been in office for nine years and has yet to produce a transformative wildfire response strategy, despite escalating disasters throughout its tenure. Changes in the climate, wind patterns, and snowfall can help us understand why the fires keep getting worse, but they do not explain the government’s ongoing preference for improvisation.  In 2026, the B.C. NDP government’s forward budgeting shows that funding for fire preparedness is set to be cut by 2028–29, as is funding for fire management. Despite the destruction of the Fraser Canyon town of Lytton and the solidification of the nickname “Smokanagan” amid the seemingly endless clouds of smoke that blanket B.C.’s wine country, it is clear that a modernized wildfire response is not on the books. The B.C. NDP is running a $13.3 billion deficit, with funds being directed toward what the government deems more important to its political success and hold on power. These include boutique grants, bureaucratic experiments, ideological rebranding of institutions, and all the sleazy sinecures that come with modern left-wing governance. What about larger permanent crews, advanced nighttime operations, aggressive fuel reduction, or enhanced aerial capacity?  Why is the protection of life and property less important than the political baubles the government dangles before itself and its allies?  The private sector is, in fact, outdoing the provincial government. Coulson, a company in Port Alberni that specializes in firefighting, has just conditionally purchased 10 retired Royal Canadian Air Force CC-130H Hercules aircraft and plans to convert them for aerial firefighting. While the deal is not yet final, it is the sort of bet that the provincial government should have emulated long ago. Coulson is planning for the long term while the province is more concerned with damage control. Has Lytton been forgotten? A fire in 2021 destroyed almost the entire village, killing two people, and the community has yet to be rebuilt. A report from B.C. Premier David Eby’s auditor general placed blame on the tiny municipality for having failed to procure an engineer and for not sufficiently partnering with the local First Nations. A town reduced to ash was supposed to become its own emergency ministry, reconstruction authority, and secretariat for local Indigenous relations.  Browbeating a shattered village for failing to uphold the NDP’s standard of hyper-ideological Indigenous engagement is a scandal. Can Lytton perhaps be forgiven for failing to perform every little procedural ritual that the province demands of it? However, the NDP cannot pass the blame for the Bald Range fire down to Lytton, eastward to Ottawa, or backward to long-dead B.C. Liberal governments. The NDP has held power since 2017, receiving repeated warnings with every successive fire season. It has no more excuses for failing to modernize B.C.’s wildfire strategy. Flames are not partisan, but the NDP certainly is, as are its decisions within a democratic system.  British Columbians should politicize these wildfires because politicians bear responsibility for preventable failures. David Eby’s government should stop pretending that it did everything possible and own up to the fact that it did not do enough. Then, finally, it might credibly claim to have shown some leadership."
If you blame "climate change", local politicians get to escape responsibility

Facebook - "A source tells CTV News Ontario is re-thinking support for ALTO after the feds grounded the Billy Bishop expansion. Eastern Ontario PC MPPs are also expressing concern with the high speed rail project"
As usual there're different standards when you push the left wing agenda
Comment: "The mayor says Toronto loves its waterfront. Eastern Ontario loves the wilderness and farmland that ALTO threatens. The same reasons for cancelling the airport expansion should apply to cancelling ALTO. Ontario does not end at Toronto's city limits."

A Billy Bishop expansion should never have been linked to Alto rail | National Post - "An agreement that the federal Liberals would wave through the Ontario PC plans for a massive expansion of Toronto’s island airport, and in exchange members of the Ford caucus would give their tacit blessing to Carney’s Alto high-speed rail vision. The pact was made between the two leaders at the premier’s Toronto home. There was reportedly a handshake and everything... no sooner did the Liberals shelve Ford’s Billy Bishop dreams than a bunch of his MPPs in eastern Ontario — 11 of them, including two members of Cabinet and the government House leader — went public with a letter that declared their constituents needed to be fully consulted on Alto before it goes much further... what in blazes were they doing making that kind of deal in the first place?  It is, in a word, insane.  Both the proposed Billy Bishop expansion and the Alto high-speed rail concept are massive undertakings. The rail plan, such as it is to this point, is many magnitudes larger than Ford’s airport vision, but each involves many billions of dollars and years of investment. It is simply alarming that the two leaders would agree to some kind of quid pro quo on infrastructure projects of this scale without any, you know, facts. It is staggering. It’s unconscionable. Someone needs to invent a new word, because ridiculous does not begin to cut it.  We are used to Ford shooting for the moon with some of his ideas, for example the tunnel under Highway 401 that is currently in the middle of the world’s most pointless feasibility study. But Carney is supposed to be a business-school pragmatist. What is the point of the shiny new Major Projects Office if an airport expansion can simply be traded for a train line? The fairest criticism of the Billy Bishop proposal at this point in its existence is that it lacked details... As this country embarks on tremendous infrastructure spending that was spooked by a broken trade relationship with the United States, is this seriously how major projects are going to be decided? Do the merits of any such project matter less than whether leaders can quietly fist-bump over the broad strokes of a proposal at dinner?  You’d like to imagine that the particulars of a given multi-billion dollar plan would matter a great deal to any leader before giving it an endorsement, tacit or otherwise. You would be wrong, evidently. (Lest anyone argue that this is what Carney has done by pulling his support, his transport minister cited public feedback as the reason for their decision, not doubts about the viability of the plan.)  Even at their most basic level, both proposals deserved skepticism. Would an expanded island airport really drive economic growth, or just move flights from one Toronto airport to another? And would an incredibly costly high-speed rail corridor really be a wise investment in a province that has struggled to build even the simplest of light-rail commuter lines?...  You back my project and I’ll back yours, details TBD. They might as well have written “big jets = speedy choo-choos” on a napkin and been done with it.  It seems like a crazy way to run a country. But here we are."

Canada will build at speeds not seen in generations – unless, of course, there’s a byelection - The Globe and Mail - "The proposed expansion of the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport was a test case for Prime Minister Mark Carney – and a fairly straightforward one, too.  Here was an infrastructure project that did not involve multiple jurisdictions, competing provincial interests, or Indigenous land claims (though in late May, the Haudenosaunee Development Institute asked to be formally consulted on the plans). The federal government didn’t even need to initiate development plans: This was Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s baby. All Ottawa needed to do, really, was stand back and let it happen.  There was massive opposition to the expansion of the airport, of course, as there has been for virtually any effort to increase flight operations at Billy Bishop. Opposition to a bridge to the island airport arguably turned the mayoral race in 2003 in David Miller’s favour. There was a protest staged the first day a Porter plane took off from Toronto Island to Ottawa. There were rallies and protests against a plan to allow jets to operate out of the airport in 2015. And most recently, more than 87,000 people responded to a call for consultation from the government about expanding the island airport – again to allow jets – with 87 per cent opposed. Those results clearly reflect some degree of selection bias, since random-sample polling shows more of a split: According to a recent Liaison Strategies poll, roughly 49 per cent of Torontonians oppose the airport expansion, while 46 per cent are in support. Initially, Mr. Carney was among those seemingly supportive of the plan, which he dubbed a “very interesting vision” when asked about it back in March. “Big possibilities there,” he said, while also noting that it was too early to make a definitive decision.  But that was before Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith confirmed he would be resigning his seat in Beaches-East York, a riding that stretches down to the eastern waterfront of Toronto, where the effects of expanded airport operations will be felt most acutely. The riding has been held by the Liberals federally since 2015, but it was won by the NDP in 2011, and tends to vote NDP provincially. A federal byelection is now slated for Aug. 31, when Mr. Erksine-Smith’s former staffer, Tanveer Shahnawaz, hopes to hang onto the seat.  Mr. Shahnawaz, a relative political unknown, would have had no chance of doing that had the NDP been given the space to leverage opposition to the island airport expansion. So Mr. Carney took that space away: Late last month, Ottawa announced it was blocking Mr. Ford’s plans to expand the airport to allow jet operations, citing the “feedback” the Transport Minister has received on the project. But this week, when asked whether he has decided to put off the decision to allow jets “forever,” the Prime Minister responded: “Forever is a long time.” Indeed, perhaps his opinion will again change, as early as the morning of Sept. 1. Reasonable arguments can be made both for the airport expansion (job creation, traveller convenience, economic output, greater aviation-industry competition) and against it (greater noise and air pollution, increased congestion, and lakefill disruption, though that is already happening to some degree with runway safety expansions). But this government has repeatedly insisted that economic development is at the forefront of its political agenda: That “to become the strongest economy in the G7, Canada must act now. Invest now. Precisely when it’s hard.” That “Canada must build critical new infrastructure at speeds not seen in generations.”... Mr. Carney vowed to get things built, but in this fairly uncomplicated case, with a geographically contained opposition and without any particular special interest, he’s already stumbled. How strong will Mr. Carney’s resolve to build be when actual plans for a new pipeline, or mine, or high-speed rail run through disputed Indigenous territory, or run afoul of provincial interests, or provoke more organized climate activists? What happens if there is a byelection slated in some of those areas too?  Mr. Carney has failed his own test of building major projects now, “precisely when it’s hard.” Perhaps he’ll opt for a do-over – just as soon as the byelection is over."

Former minister Freeland violated election rules during 2024 byelection, watchdog finds - "Former deputy prime minister and cabinet minister Chrystia Freeland violated election rules during a 2024 byelection, the Commissioner of Canada Elections said on Friday.  The violation stemmed from comments Freeland made in response to reporter questions following a government announcement, a report from Commissioner Caroline Simard's office said. When asked by reporters about the upcoming vote, Freeland offered "supportive remarks" about Liberal candidate Leslie Church, the report said. Offering support for a political candidate while using government resources could constitute a contribution to Church's campaign.  "Ms. Freeland was unaware that those political statements made in response to unsolicited press questions could turn the bona fide costs of a government event into unlawful contributions to a federal political entity," the report said.  The report says that the estimated costs "associated with these events" represented a commercial value of just over $900. The Liberal Party's electoral district association in Freeland's former riding agreed to pay that amount to the government."

cbcwatcher on X - "The Chinese-Canadian accused woman sent to spy on NATO used to be an election worker for the Liberal Party of Canada. More proof that Liberals have a major foreign interference problem INSIDE their party... almost completely ignored by almost all media in Canada and buried in this Globe story: "In her applications, she listed past volunteering experience for the Toronto International Film Festival and for an “election campaign for Liberal Party of Canada,” which she did not specify." You can bet the CBC would lead every newscast with this "seriously disturbing" allegation if it was the Conservative Party. Media Protection Program example of the day @brodiefenlon"

Vesper on X - "2010, Freeland, in her own words: "Forget left and right. The real divide is technocrats versus populists." Later becomes Technocrat, George Soros's BFF. Today she's in the NY Times telling Canada to: "Fight back" against the "populists." The love of money..."

L. Wayne Mathison on X - "$135 million spent, and Ottawa failed to make sure the vehicles could even be fuelled, repaired or maintained.  Canadian taxpayers funded 3,196 motorbikes, 266 pickup trucks, 16 station wagons, uniforms and work boots for agricultural agents in Ghana.  Then the government’s own review found inadequate oversight. Local agencies could not afford fuel, spare parts or repairs. Ghanaian researchers had already described the motorbike program as a “costly failure.”  This is exactly what Pierre Poilievre has been warning about.  Canadians are generous, but generosity does not mean handing bureaucrats a blank cheque. Foreign aid should have clear goals, strict oversight and measurable results. Buying thousands of vehicles without a workable plan to keep them running is incompetence, not compassion.  Think about the opportunity cost. That $135 million could have paid the annual cost of roughly 1,300 registered nurses, supported Canadian food banks or helped families struggling with housing, food and healthcare.  Justin Trudeau created this spending culture. Mark Carney now leads the same Liberal government, filled with the same people who believe announcing how much they spent matters more than proving what Canadians received for it.  Pierre is right. Review foreign aid. Cut waste. Demand accountability. Put Canadians first.  A government that cannot manage the money has no business demanding more of it."
Damn Pierre Poilievre's unnecessary by-election which cost $2.3 million, which is money that could've been used for healthcare!

Andy Burnham and Thatcher

Burnham’s attack on Thatcher ignores rot inherited, and transformation delivered

"Framing the 1980s as a period that harmed ordinary people and northern communities, he declared that Britain took “a series of wrong turns” when “political power was centralised and economic power privatised”.

This path, he claimed, had failed working-class areas such as his Makerfield constituency for the past 40 years. His alternative? Devolution, reindustrialisation, greater public control of utilities and housing, and the biggest council house-building programme since the post-war era – a pointed contrast with all of Thatcher’s policies such as privatisation and the Right to Buy.

It is a familiar narrative, spread by many on the Left. But its premise is profoundly misleading. The deindustrialisation Mr Burnham laments was not primarily Thatcher’s doing. It was the inevitable reckoning for industries that had been propped up by taxpayer subsidies and state control for decades.

Post-war heavy industry in Britain – coal, steel, shipbuilding, cars, utilities – operated as a series of protected monopolies. Shielded from competition and bailed out by the taxpayer, there was no incentive for them to innovate, raise productivity, improve customer service or control costs.

Powerful trade unions, like the NUM and TGWU, called the shots, not the politicians nominally in charge (and certainly not the public who supposedly “owned” these industries).

Union bosses, often “elected” late at night by a show of hands from activists, acted as the real managers, enforcing restrictive practices, overmanning and wage demands untethered to economic reality. Strikes were endemic: nearly 30 million working days were lost in 1979 alone.

Chronic inefficiency became the norm. British Leyland and British Steel were serial loss-makers requiring repeated bailouts. By the late 1970s, Britain had earned the grim title “the sick man of Europe”, plagued by high inflation, stagnant growth, and the winter of discontent.

Global competition laid bare the truth: Japanese and German manufacturers, South Korean shipyards and many others were vastly more efficient. It was cheaper to import coal from Australia than to extract it from this country’s deep, geologically challenging coal mines.

Thatcher’s government did not cause this decline. It merely called time on the futile policy of artificially prolonging the life of loss-making, badly managed industries through ever-larger subsidies that drained resources from more productive parts of the economy.

Yes, it was painful, but Britain had to be brought up to date. And out of the transition, new industries sprang up and modernised. Manufacturing productivity, the lowest in the G7, became the highest. Britain shifted towards services and light industry, playing to its strengths.

Blaming Thatcher for the visible disruption ignores the deeper rot she inherited. You cannot save dinosaurs from a changing world. Delaying the inevitable for decades, as Labour and Conservative governments did through the 1960s and 1970s, only magnified the eventual shock. The scale of the pain is down to Thatcher’s predecessors, who kicked the can down the road. She managed the necessary correction.

And she did what she could to help those displaced by change, with the Manpower Services Commission’s retraining programmes, enterprise allowances and support for those starting and growing small businesses. Thousands transitioned into self-employment and growing sectors.

The results speak for themselves. Under Thatcher, Britain was transformed. The top rate of income tax was cut from 83 per cent to 40 per cent, and the basic rate from 33 per cent to 25 per cent. These reductions, far from starving the Treasury, broadened the tax base as entrepreneurship flourished and high earners were incentivised to stay and invest.

Inflation fell dramatically from a peak of 21.9 per cent in 1980 to 2.4 per cent by 1986. The number of days lost to strikes plummeted from 29.5 million in 1979 to 1.9 million in 1990. Real take-home pay for the average earner rose by a third.

Meanwhile, home ownership increased from just over half to two thirds (67 per cent) as more than a million council tenants bought their homes under Right to Buy. They gained assets, security, and the ability to borrow and invest, but their first step was to fix the roofs, windows and doors that the council owners had neglected for years.

The democratisation of capital brought by home ownership was reflected elsewhere. The number of individual shareholders surged from three million to 11 million, thanks to privatisation. And people really did own the industries that were once held in their name but controlled by vested interests. Britain became a “capital-owning democracy”.

Living standards improved markedly under Thatcher. The number of foreign holidays roughly doubled. The proportion of homes with a telephone rose from two thirds to nearly nine in 10, thanks again largely to the privatisation of a sclerotic telephone system that, remarkably, was owned by the Post Office (the people who brought you “first class” mail).

Pensioners’ real incomes rose by around 30 per cent and, at the other end of the age range, infant mortality fell by almost 40 per cent. Real GDP grew by nearly a third, outpacing France, Germany, and Italy. The number of self-employed people rose from 1.9 million to 3.5 million. Foreign investors arrived: Nissan in Sunderland, Toyota in Derby, Honda in Swindon. Britain became a net oil exporter and the City of London was restored to its place as a global financial centre.

Fiscal discipline returned to government. The Thatcher administration ran budget surpluses for three years, repaid debt and reduced national debt as a share of GDP from 47 per cent to 28 per cent. State spending fell as a proportion of GDP and the Civil Service was slimmed down from 732,000 to 565,000.

Corporation tax was cut from 52 per cent to 35 per cent (and the small firms’ rate from 42 per cent to 25 per cent). Personal allowances were raised by more than 25 per cent in real terms, higher tax rates were simplified and exchange controls were scrapped after 40 years.

Privatisation was a cornerstone of the turnaround. More than 40 nationalised businesses were moved to the private sector, taking 600,000 employees with them. Some were transferred to their workforce, some were sold by shares, a few ended up with more efficient and productive private companies, but taxpayers benefited in every case.

The 33 major state industries went from absorbing £500m in subsidies in 1980 to contributing £8.4bn to the Exchequer by 1987. British Steel turned from world-record losses to healthy profits. BT and British Gas delivered enormous share offers that gave ordinary people a stake in the economy. British Airways transformed from a loss-making national carrier into “the world’s favourite airline”.

Thatcher’s foreign policy achievements were equally significant. The liberation of the Falklands in just 10 weeks. Securing budget rebates from the EU. Early support for Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin’s in Russia. Partnership with Ronald Reagan winning the Cold War. 

And don’t forget, three consecutive election victories – making Thatcher the longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century. Bit different from today, don’t you think?

Mr Burnham’s speech recycled a comforting but false history. The “wrong turns” were taken long before 1979, when governments of both parties sustained a failing economic model at taxpayers’ expense. Thatcher faced reality, delivered results that raised living standards across the board and left Britain more optimistic, stronger and again respected in the world.

Romanticising the pre-Thatcher era and promising a return to greater state control will simply reincarnate the mistakes of the past. Britain thrived when it embraced enterprise and competition. It suffered when it did not. The evidence of the 1980s is clear for those willing to see it." 

 

Burnham wants to destroy Thatcher’s legacy. He should be careful what he wishes for

"He thinks Mrs Thatcher is the root of most evils. “Growing up in and around these streets,” he said in a video for his triumphant Makerfield by-election campaign. “I saw what Thatcher’s government did to places like this – the deindustrialisation, the draining away of social, economic and political power.” They were “left behind”. Her “Britain has been on that path for 40 years”. He will follow a new path.

Such remarks will please many Labour activists, but they tend to confine Mr Burnham to the geographical and political ghetto of the Liverpool/Manchester corridor, where resentment trumps innovation. Even voters who never liked Mrs Thatcher – not to mention those who cannot remember her – may find it strange that such feelings should be fanned for career advancement nearly 40 years after she left office.

So it would be nice simply to remind Mr Burnham of some things that happened when Mrs Thatcher was prime minister. It would be interesting to learn from him which parts of that legacy he would like to undo...

Following her 1987 victory, she had reduced public spending, as a percentage of GDP, to 34.6 per cent. This year, it is expected to hit 44.9 per cent.

In 1987, the national debt stood at 45.85 per cent of GDP; today, 95.1 per cent.

In the same year, public sector borrowing represented 1 per cent of GDP; today, 4.2 per cent...

By her middle period in Downing Street, over 60 per cent of people aged between 25-34 owned their own home. The same figure today is below 30 per cent...

The sale of the water companies is currently regarded as a major failure. But surely even Mr Burnham would think it unwise to renationalise all but a tiny fraction of the above. If, for example, he tried to re-create the old state monopoly of telephones, our entire communications system would collapse. 

Here are some other, non-economic statistics and assorted facts:

• In 1983, by which time Mrs Thatcher had tightened immigration policy, net annual immigration into Britain stood at 20,000. Today it is 171,000. The number of entries and departures is much higher. In 1983, about 170,000 legal long-term migrants entered Britain. In 2025, that figure was 813,000. Illegal immigration was a problem even then, but not remotely on the scale of today’s small boats.
• By 1984, responding to Nato’s call for higher spending to guard against the Soviet threat, British defence spending was 5.5 per cent of GDP. By 1989, when the tough policies had helped win the Cold War, it had fallen to 4 per cent of GDP. Today, despite more multifarious foreign threats than ever and urgent Nato targets, the Government is in a terrible tangle about whether it can manage even 2.5 per cent of GDP. Pious hope says it will reach 3.5 per cent, but not until 2035.
• In April 1982, when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, it took Mrs Thatcher three days to assemble and send a task force of 36 ships (eventually augmented to 127). When the US/Israel/Iran war broke out earlier this year, it took the Government six days to launch a single destroyer, HMS Dragon, in the direction of Cyprus.
• Mrs Thatcher opened the M25 and gave birth to the Channel Tunnel. Neither is universally loved but it is impossible to imagine modern British life without them.
• Without her, we might still live under all sorts of funny monopolies and restrictions which hampered life. Until she broke the monopoly, for example, you could buy spectacles only from an optician, which kept prices absurdly high. It was also illegal for anyone except the BBC and ITV to publish their full, long-term television listings. Millions were forced to buy the BBC’s Radio Times and ITV’s TV Times just to find out what was on.
• Mrs Thatcher’s only Second Reading defeat in Parliament was on liberalising Sunday shopping. But her successor eventually enacted her policy. Nowadays, it would be considered quite mad to prevent most sales of most items on a Sunday.
• She made pensions “portable”, so that no one had to stay with a single employer to guarantee a secure retirement.
• She shaped and passed the Single European Act, later nullified by Brexit. Mr Burnham would surely love to revive it...

Iin 1979, she had a staff of fewer than 100 people in Downing Street. Today it is four times bigger and therefore many times worse. Yet Mr Burnham wants to add to the bureaucratic pile-up by adding a “No. 10 North”."

Links - 17th September 2026

A Rejection Mind-Set: Choice Overload in Online Dating - "The paradox of modern dating is that online platforms provide more opportunities to find a romantic partner than ever before, but people are nevertheless more likely to be single. We hypothesized the existence of a rejection mind-set: The continued access to virtually unlimited potential partners makes people more pessimistic and rejecting. Across three studies, participants immediately started to reject more hypothetical and actual partners when dating online, cumulating on average in a decrease of 27% in chance on acceptance from the first to the last partner option. This was explained by an overall decline in satisfaction with pictures and perceived dating success. For women, the rejection mind-set also resulted in a decreasing likelihood of having romantic matches. Our findings suggest that people gradually “close off” from mating opportunities when online dating."
Aka why dating apps are bad

Meme - Dilbert running: "Puff puff puff"
Dogbert: "HOW WAS YOUR RUN?"
Dilbert: "GREAT... I FEEL AWFUL"
Dogbert: "PARDON A SIMPLE DOG FOR ASKING , BUT WHY DO YOU RUN IF IT FEELS AWFUL?"
Dilbert: "WELL, IF DO IT EVERY DAY, I'LL LIVE A LONGER LIFE."
Dogbert: "SO, LIFE WILL FEEL AWFUL, BUT AT LEAST IT WILL LAST A LONG TIME."
Dilbert: "UNLESS I GET HIT BY A TRUCK..."

Meme - Romy @Romy_Holland: "I want to take acid this weekend but the idea of having to pump while on acid is extremely unappealing."
Romy @Romy_Holland: "showed the pediatrician videos of my baby's default state of fussing and she was like "wow i've never seen this before" and then she asked some follow up questions and was like "hmm yeah don't think it's medical but maybe you should go to this intervention for kids with ADHD. i've never heard of it for a 9 month old but maybe they can help you." i'm stressed you guys. you do not want a doctor 30 years into her career to look at your baby and say "wow i've never seen this before? it seems like nothing good follows this? ahhhh."

Meme - Katie Chen @dear_kxtie: "My hinge date took me to Hawaii. If you're hot girl in SF, get hinge and thank me later. The men there literally do anything for you"
BDB @BigDickBull69: "Was in San Francisco years ago and a guy I met at the bar kept referring to the women there as "The San Francisco 49rs" Asked him why and he said it's because they are all 4s who act like 9s. I still think about that statement to this very day"
Adam Yoder @amyoder: "Someone one said white men and Asian women can't accurately pinpoint how attractive each other are and this causes a lot of disorientation there"

Bernie Sanders Once Defended Daniel Ortega's Crackdown on Nicaraguan Citizens
Nicaragua's Ortega says 'never again' for elections after two decades in power - "Nicaragua's long-serving president Daniel Ortega said the Central American country will no longer hold elections, eliminating the possibility ‌of an electoral challenge when his term ends next year and further entrenching the rule he shares with his wife... The Trump administration has described the Ortega government as a dictatorship, and imposed sanctions on more than 2,350 Nicaraguan officials and their relatives. Nicaragua's last election in 2021 was widely disputed after Ortega detained opponents and business leaders and criminalized dissent. Last year, Ortega further consolidated his power through a series of constitutional reforms that included naming his wife Rosario Murillo as "co-president" and extending the presidential term to six years. He and his wife control virtually every aspect of the government, including the armed forces and the judiciary. The U.N. Human Rights Council has accused Ortega and Murillo's government of transforming the country "into an authoritarian state" and systematically violating human rights. In 2018, Ortega responded ‌to widespread ⁠anti-government protests with a crackdown in which more than 300 people were killed."
Clearly, we all know the real reason Nicaragua is cancelling elections and killed over 300 people in 2018: President William Howard Taft intervening in 1912! Once again, America/Israel are responsible for all the world's problems!

Meme - "Nothing about the world we live in will ever make sense to you unless you understand you live under an occupation and are thus subject to the rules of the occupiers.  If you do not start from there, you will search for multiple explanations and rationalizations that will lead you to ineffective ends. You are not an active participant in politics and public debate, you are its problem.  Public debate is debating why you’re the problem, politics is about dealing with that problem. The opposition in debate simply offers an alternative path to your destruction, the end goal is never resisted.  Therefore you cannot seek to influence the debate or enter politics.  Your humiliation is the enemies goal. To take a hit and fight on is honorable. To take a beating every day is just sad.  Humiliation robs you of your humanity, your will, your reason to fight on. Humiliation takes everything from you and debases it in front of all, it robs you of being worthy of empathy. It has been used by every occupier in history, it’s our natural primal understanding of defeat. The Ottoman practice of Köçek was an ultimate example, similar to the concept of “Drag Kids” in modern America. Köçek were a combination of dancers, clowns and prostitutes, they were young non-Muslim boys taken from their parents and trained to be willful sexual objects… and entertainers for the Turks.  The goal was to have the occupied think “if we allow that to be done to our boys what else can they do?” The answer is anything. It is full spectrum domination of the conquered’s mind.  Your enemy doesn’t want gay pride parades in your street, drag queens in your adverts, your son transgender, your parents dead from opioids, your daughter in porn, your meat replaced with bugs all while your media laughs at you because they think it’s for anyone’s benefit.  They want it because they know you don’t want it but can’t stop them, they want to humiliate you. There isnt any other reason."

In defense of anonymity, the guard dog of free expression - "Among social media commenters, columnists, and even heads of state, it’s a typical refrain: If we just rid ourselves of that pesky internet anonymity and pseudonymity, we will have a cleaner, better, happier world. Anonymity, the common sentiment goes, is the weapon of the evil and the cruel.  Despite some prevalent misconceptions, anonymity is not an invention of social media, email, or the internet age. The American founding fathers, for example, took great advantage of pseudonymous and anonymous expression, as have denizens of Rome for hundreds of years on the city’s “talking statues.”   Opposition to anonymity is not new either — far from it... There are some figures, politicians especially, who advocate an end to anonymity with ill intent and the specific desire to curb public criticism. Look back through history, one week ago or one millennium ago, and you’ll find frequent attempts by the powerful to diminish the right to anonymous speech as a means to attack political speech. The reason is simple: Without the protection anonymity offers, critics may be far less likely to risk the punishment that may accompany challenging power... the notion that anonymity is largely to blame for ugliness online is not particularly well supported. South Korea actually legislated “real names” rules in the early 2000s, with various developments culminating in a 2008 law requiring real names from commenters on sites with 100,000 daily visitors. The results were not what supporters expected. Research found little to no evidence that the requirements made a difference in the amount of cruel and ugly comments posted and “consensus across these studies was that the real name registration policy did not deter wild and unfounded positions from being promoted online.” Not only that, but South Korean websites became “prime targets for hacking both from in and outside of the country” and “a series of high-profile cyberattacks made it clear that the real-name system was untenable,” including one hack affecting 35 million people — over half of the country’s population. (These are exactly some of the privacy concerns that FIRE has raised about burgeoning age and identity verification schemes internationally and in the U.S., which will also diminish anonymous speech.) Four years later, the Korean Constitutional Court overturned the law on free speech grounds.  “Real name” supporters are wrong for another big reason, too. Anonymity and pseudonymity are not weapons trained upon the vulnerable. Rather, anonymity is the protector of the vulnerable, the shield between them and consequences ranging from embarrassment to social fallout to the worst forms of government oppression.   So who, exactly, is anonymity for?   It’s for a teenage girl who lost her mother when she was young, just got her period for the first time, and is too embarrassed to meet with a school nurse.   It’s for a 45-year-old who hasn’t drunk in years but is realizing that he’s struggling with his sobriety again and needs to talk privately about it.   It’s for a woman coming to terms with the fact that her boyfriend is abusive, and figuring out how to get away from him without his knowledge.   It’s for a Chinese immigrant who wants to speak about the human rights abuses he witnessed at home without his family in Beijing paying the price for his words, or repression following him abroad.   It’s for a factory worker looking for resources about how to report unsafe conditions without losing his job.   It’s for a college freshman who needs to talk about being gay without fearing his family will learn of it before he’s ready to tell them.   It’s for a grandmother who just received a breast cancer diagnosis and wants to discreetly discuss her anxiety about mastectomy.   It’s for a priest dealing with depression who doesn’t know how to manage his feelings of emptiness amidst his duties to his parish. It’s for anyone who has ever experienced a fear, thought, idea, or emotion that they need to express but aren’t ready to share with colleagues, family, friends, acquaintances, or authority figures. We need to abandon the tired conception we have of anonymity — the cheesy 90s-era stereotype of a hacker in a hoodie typing away rapidly in a shadowy room. Anonymity is for anyone who has ever needed the protection offered by a barrier between their ideas and their identity. It’s a guard dog that allows freer communication, truth-seeking, and soul-baring.   A difficult truth we need to accept is that in a free society we cannot just restrict the rights of others based solely on our fears and nightmares."
Damn far right extremists!

Alexander Dugin on X - "The very concept of the success is deeply immoral. If you are successful the other is loser. We shouldn’t accept it. We should prosper or suffer together. Otherwise it is satanic."
mike hock on X - ""ayn rand villains are unrealistic""

Pathfinder on X - How is Jack a nickname for John?"
Merriam-Webster on X - "John ultimately comes from the Latin name Johannes. Here’s the journey ⬇️
-Johannes shortened to Jan.
-The diminutive suffix -kin was added to make Jankin.
-The first n was dropped to make Jackin.
-Then shortened to Jack."

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "Islamic scholar in California says the quiet part out loud: “Islam is not just a religion. It is a complete political, social, and economic system. Anything that is not Sharia, we will not obey. We are superior to everyone else, and we will dominate the entire world!”"
Time to jail him for promoting Islamophobia

Plane passenger invoked Sharia law to not sit next to woman, hit stewardess: German police - "A plane passenger "invoked Sharia law" to avoid sitting next to a woman, then hit a flight attendant, according to German police.  The incident occurred on a flight from Turkey to Dusseldorf on June 1, and reportedly involved a 29-year-old Turkish migrant living in Germany... The passenger allegedly slapped the flight attendant when she spoke to him... The passenger confessed the crime to the police, but insulted the officers in Turkish. One of the officers spoke Turkish, resulting in the passenger being charged with insulting the officers, in addition to assaulting the flight attendant."
Time to condemn the toxic masculinity of European men and demand that they do better and/or blame Islamophobia

Pirate Wires on X - "Heather Cox Richardson has more subscribers than Jimmy Kimmel has viewers. And every night, or thereabouts, she tells her 2.7 million followers that America is sliding into authoritarianism. Trump is a dictator, MAGA is inspired by Nazi political theory, and right-wing violence is a deliberate attempt to maintain control despite their fading popular support.  She’s built a media empire by offering her audience, who treats her like a pastor at the pulpit, exactly what they want to hear: a morality tale where they are always the good guys, and the other side has gone insane. Some of her subscribers claim to spend their Social Security checks on her newsletter because subscribing is an act of patriotism, an endorsement of the facts. But in Richardson's telling, the facts always skew left.  When it was revealed that Charlie Kirk's assassin was not the right-wing extremist she claimed he was, she never corrected the record. When Biden's debate performance was so bad The New York Times called for him to drop out, Richardson claimed he “thoroughly” proved his competence. When an assassin murdered Minnesota lawmakers, it was "horrific," but when Luigi Mangione assassinated UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, it was a moral protest.  And yet Richardson has been embraced by mainstream media as a “distinctly unruffled” voice of reason. She’s a historian, after all.  Today in Pirate Wires, @dodgeblake  and @default_friend  report on HCR’s revisionist history and what she represents: the choices we all make to numb ourselves to the “other side.”

gen0m1cs on X - "Some factions on the right get flak for engaging in too much conspiratorial slop, and sure, that's a rightful criticism. But at the same time, there exists an entire world of predominantly educated, credentialed professional liberals who engage in nothing but the most utterly deranged, conspiratorial, just mind-numbing slop. And because it is dressed up in academic liberal speak and peddled by professional people (e.g., tenured professors), it's seen as "thoughtful analysis.""

Blake Dodge on X - "things that Heather Cox Richardson has written:
- members of Trump’s inner circle are creating “a system” that will make it possible for them to “retain control over the country even without Trump"
- Biden did good in The Debate: he’d just listed the accomplishments of his administration "in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand"
- Charlie Kirk was shot by a right-wing, white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family
- Republicans were attacking those who celebrated Kirk's murder in order to “mobilize violence” against their enemies, “a tactic suggested by Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt”
- 9/11 kicked off GOP efforts to suppress voters
- Budget cuts are a prelude to an authoritarian takeover
- recent Supreme Court decisions are a prelude to an authoritarian takeover
- Trump deploying troops to DC is a prelude to an authoritarian takeover
this is someone who has been embraced by traditional media as a “distinctly unruffled" voice. i think being a watchdog is generally valuable. but if these takes — that we are literally losing our democracy to an authoritarian regime — are now mainstream, we shouldn't be surprised when there's political violence. you may have never heard of her, but HCR is the most successful independent journalist in the US at 2.7 million subscribers. that's 1 million more people than Jimmy Kimmel’s average audience size, and just shy of Hasan Piker’s 3 million streaming followers."
Time to censor the "far right" for spreading "misinformation"!

Report: Cori Bush is under investigation for funneling tornado relief money to her campaign PAC 👀

Meme - "In 1999, the movie Dick (about Nixon) came out, and it didn't stop playing at this drive-in theater all year long
"THE HAUNTING
DICK
MUPPETS FROM SPACE"
"ANALYZE THIS
DICK
BIG DADDY "
"10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU
BRINGING OUT THE DEAD
DICK"
"DICK
VIRUS
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE"

Meme - NPC: "We can't trust ordinary people with freedom."
SAME NPC: 5 Minutes Later: "We should trust the government with Al, surveillance, healthcare, education, and all our money."

Meme - "When Sweden plays Denmark, the scoreboard reads SWE-DEN. The unused letters spell DEN-MARK. The same works with the following countries: BHU-TAN leaves TAN-ZANIA CYP-RUS leaves RUS-SIA POL-AND leaves AND-ORRA"

Meme - drac @eversnevers: "two minors a car and a dog"
Addict @strbrkrr: "disney really gifted us with some fine ass women" *Kim Possible, Jasmine from Aladdin, Sally from Cars. Lady from Lady and the Tramp*

Singapore Has 2x Hong Kong’s GDP Per Capita. Its Citizens Have Half the Wealth. - "There is a chart that has been circulating in finance circles and Singaporean social media for years. It claims that despite having one of the highest GDP per capita figures in the world, the typical Singaporean holds less personal wealth than their counterparts in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, and South Korea... why does a country with the third-highest GDP per capita in the world — roughly 2x Hong Kong’s, 2.4x Taiwan’s, 2.6x Japan’s — have median household wealth that ranks middle-of-the-pack against its own peer group?... Singaporean households missed the equity boom. Not by accident — by design... In the United States, roughly 68% of household assets sit in financial instruments — equities, mutual funds, retirement accounts. American households are massively more exposed to equity markets than Singaporean households are.  Over the past decade, the S&P 500 has returned approximately 13% annualised in USD terms. CPF Ordinary Account returns 2.5%. Special and Medisave Accounts return 4%. Singapore residential property has appreciated meaningfully but with much lower volatility than equities.  Americans owned the asset class that ran. Singaporeans didn’t. That is most of the gap. CPF prioritises retirement security over capital appreciation. HDB ownership prioritises near-universal homeownership over speculative gain. Both choices come with real costs in foregone wealth growth — and real benefits the median wealth comparison doesn’t show."

Meme - Lewis: "My dad's been liking every hot girl's Instagram posts, so I figured I'd give him a heads-up that everyone can see it. I don't think it worked."
"Hey Dad... you know people can see every time you like all those hot girls' Instagram posts, right? You might wanna cool it a little."
"Why would I care?? They're putting pictures out there, and they deserve to know I appreciate their hard work. if I didn't they might stop. I'm doing this for everybody"

Meme - "Female influencers after being called fat or ugly in the comments *crying Jean Grey*
Male shitposting page admins getting called r*tarded in the comments (ragebait is working) *smiling Cyclops on huge ass cordless/old mobile phone*"

Meme - *Bronze Medal Meme*
*USSR*
USA: "first manned lunar landing. first humans in lunar orbit. first docking. first proper mars landing. first manned rover. first venus orbiter. first planetary flyby. first useful satellite."
USSR: "boiled a dog in space"

Meme - Basil the Great: "Bluesky put an "intolerance" label on a post disagreeing with paedophilia"
Pericles @pericles.bsky.social: "Intolerance"
"I may get a lot of hate for this on BlueSky, but I do not agree with the pedophile lifestyle"
Time to call Trump a pedo and non left wingers pedo supporters again

Meme - "Pixar movies used to be a special event but now there's one every two years about girls of increasingly specific and obscure latin descent discovering their family's hidden ability to like shapeshift into furniture as some metaphor for getting fat during middle school"

Postmodern beliefs linked to left-wing authoritarianism
This also explains why the woke are so violent. If there is no truth, it's all a power game

Real Peptides on X - "Everyone's heard of the famous Wolverine Stack (BPC-157 + TB-500), But not many really understand how it functions. Here’s a breakdown of one of the most comprehensive recovery protocols in peptide research: (1/11)"
Real Peptides on X - "People are claiming that BPC-157 healed their: Tendon. Gut. Bone. Ligament. Muscle. Nerve. And after 30 years of animal research and three small human studies, nobody's found a serious adverse effect yet. It's one of the most remarkable compounds we've come across."

Greed, betrayal and medical misconduct at North York General - "The labour and delivery nurses were suspicious. Five pregnant women, all in rapid labour, arrived at the North York General Hospital triage on the same day—a Saturday in May 2016. The deliveries were happening fast—too fast—and because it was the weekend, the nurses were short-handed. One patient, at term in her first pregnancy, was fully dilated just an hour after being admitted and gave birth 25 minutes later. Another arrived suffering from uterine hyperstimulation—when contractions come too frequently or last too long, a serious complication of being induced. As a result, her baby’s heart rate was slowing ominously, and the staff had to deliver it via emergency C-section.  But the patients all said they hadn’t been induced, and their charts showed no indication of induction, either. What those five women had in common was their doctor: Paul Shuen, a highly respected ob-gyn and gynaecological oncologist."