Without some ethical checks, could AI destroy humanity?
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Peter Shawn Taylor looks into the trove of unclassified evidence regarding the role of NML scientists in aiding China’s expanding quest for the study – and potential military use – of deadly viruses.
Wali is the nom de guerre of a Canadian Armed Forces veteran who hails from rural Quebec. He served two tours of duty in Afghanistan with the famed Royal 22nd Regiment (a French-speaking infantry unit commonly known as the Vandoos). In Afghanistan he earned a reputation as an elite sniper – perhaps one of the world’s best. Shortly after he left the Canadian military in early 2015, he almost immediately headed back into combat, this time as a volunteer with the Kurdish Peshmerga in Northern Iraq where he fought against Islamic State for a short time. Since then, he’s made his living as an IT consultant.
Read the full story only at https://c2cjournal.ca/2022/05/dispatches-from-the-front-a-canadian-volunteer-in-ukraine/
Hard Facts Puncture Inflated Anti-Fossil-Fuel Fantasies
Perhaps the Liberal Party of Canada’s new tagline could become a play on an old song, something like “Up, up and awaaaaay, in our magical, our magical balloon.” As they waft ever-higher, the rest of us will be left behind to deal with the remains. The Liberals’ magical thinking, notes Gwyn Morgan, largely revolves around the fantasy that Canada’s transition to “net zero” can simply be declared, demanded and decreed while Canada’s oil and natural gas sector is regulated out of existence. This is worse than naïve, Morgan argues, it is colossally irresponsible, already doing real damage by indirectly enriching Russia’s war machine. And if not reversed soon it portends even worse for Canadians and others around the world. Morgan offers a bracing list of facts to puncture the Liberal airship.
Under the Gun in Armenia
Say you grew up in one country with your immediate family, where you were educated and are now enjoying a promising career. And then another country, the country of your ancestors, a poor and vulnerable place in a tough geopolitical neighbourhood, falls into dire straits. Beset from nearly all sides, its very existence threatened, it could really use help from anyone with skills, experience and energy. And your skills are indeed military. Unfortunately, the country of which you are a citizen isn’t especially fond of the country of your forebears. In fact, it’s quietly backing the other side. What would you do? Fin DePencier reports from Armenia on the moral dilemma of a Canadian citizen who answered the call of his ancestral homeland.
Read the full story at https://c2cjournal.ca/2022/01/under-the-gun-in-armenia/
The Sticky Facts on Soda Taxes: Why They Don’t Work (And No One Likes Them)
Taxes in Western countries were traditionally meant to raise money for necessary government expenditures. They weren’t supposed to shape individual behaviour, let alone attempt to turn taxpayers into better human beings. Free-market economists later added the principle that taxes should seek to minimize damage and distortion to both the economy and taxpayers. So what should we make of a new tax that is essentially moralistic in purpose, damaging to those least able to afford it and likely doomed to failure? Peter Shawn Taylor delves into debt-ridden Newfoundland and Labrador’s plan for a new tax on sugary beverages, and the formidable array of international evidence that argues against it.
Read the full story only at https://c2cjournal.ca/2021/11/the-sticky-facts-on-soda-taxes-why-they-dont-work-and-no-one-likes-them/
The Case for the Classics in Alberta’s New K-6 School Curriculum
Kids have been back in school for almost two months – much to the relief of millions of parents – but in Alberta they are marching back to a curriculum and teaching mindset bearing the imprint of the previous NDP government’s “progressive” ideology, including the virtual erasure of history. It is an open question whether the current UCP government’s controversial education reforms will proceed. Student Lucas Robertson, for his part, hopes that they do. Robertson has loved classical history since before he began elementary school, and he sees rightness, truth, valid purpose and even beauty in Alberta’s plan to teach today’s kids about ancient people and events. Parents across Canada take note, for the outcome in Alberta could have national implications.
Read the full story only at https://c2cjournal.ca/2021/08/the-case-for-the-classics-in-albertas-new-k-6-school-curriculum/
How to Cool Canada’s Overheated Statue Removal Business
Just a few years ago we passed them on the street without a second thought. Today, they’re political minefields. Statues are one way for a society to remember its heroes and its great moments. But amid a rethinking of our past, perhaps we need a new way to decide which heroes are worthy of remembering, and which moments were truly great. Setting aside the heated rhetoric and rampant vandalism currently determining the fate of Canada’s statues of historical figures, Lloyd W. Robertson surveys the global experience and looks for ways to reconcile public memorials from the past with present-day concerns.
Read the full story only at https://c2cjournal.ca/2021/07/how-to-cool-canadas-overheated-statue-removal-business/
Why Do the Liberals Love Hate Speech Laws?
Social activists and politicians love to create solutions to problems. And if there are no problems to solve? They can create those too. So it is with Canada’s hate crime and hate speech laws. Statistical evidence simply does not support claims that Canada is a seething cauldron of hate, that the problem is growing rapidly or that new technology is to blame. Nonetheless, as Bradford H.B. reports, the federal Liberals are about to burden the country with a new online hate speech law – something that could have grave consequences for what we can and cannot say.
Why the Private Sector is Essential to Ottawa’s National Childcare Plan
The Trudeau government's $30 billion plan to transform childcare nationwide is focused on more than just families. It also wanders into an ideological battlefield by declaring the non-profit sector preferable to private operators. Ottawa is thus ignoring the vital role played by childcare owners in expanding supply and meeting the diverse needs of working parents. In a deep dive into Canada’s complex childcare system, Peter Shawn Taylor talks to several remarkable female entrepreneurs and other key figures to reveal the reality and necessity of for-profit childcare.
Read the full analysis only at https://c2cjournal.ca/2021/05/why-the-private-sector-is-essential-to-ottawas-national-childcare-plan/
Do Lockdowns Make a Difference in a Pandemic?
Randomized control trials may be the gold standard for generating scientific evidence, but such precision isn’t always possible. Natural experiments – such as comparing similarly-situated jurisdictions responding to the same crisis through different policy choices – offer the next best thing and sometimes the only thing. Using two carefully selected pairs of U.S. states, Masha V. Krylova examines key Covid-19 metrics across a year of hard and softer pandemic response policies. The results of her meticulously researched natural experiment provide important evidence on the efficacy of lockdowns and how we should tackle future pandemics.
Read the full story only at https://c2cjournal.ca/2021/03/do-lockdowns-make-a-difference-in-a-pandemic/
Equalizing Canada’s Equalization
Federal equalization has become a decades-long windfall for Quebec and an unending slow bleed for Alberta – that much is well-known. But the constitutionally enshrined policy has not merely levelled the playing field for Canada’s “have-not” provinces, it has enabled some of them to fund better public services than “rich” provinces. And, further, to hide billions in revenue that should be used to assess whether they even qualify for equalization. Tom Flanagan sets out the perverse incentives and bizarre outcomes baked into Canada’s equalization policy. More important, Flanagan lays out a plausible scenario for how Alberta could soon break the constitutional logjam.
The Fake News Fake-Out
The news business is at its least reliable when reporting on itself. Coverage of a media company’s own financial results, for example, is inevitably glowing and upbeat, whatever the actual figures might say. The same thing holds for concerns over “fake news”. Seizing on recent panic about the spread of misinformation, and thanks to a generous federal grant, Canada’s legacy newspapers have devised their own system for identifying fake news. But as Peter Shawn Taylor discovers, the criteria strangely celebrate their own product at the expense of their many online competitors. And much of it contradicts the basic rules of good journalism.
Read the full story only at https://c2cjournal.ca/2021/02/the-fake-news-fake-out/
Hating Jordan Peterson
Who kicks a person when they’re down? Who dresses up their own resentment, spite or ideological fervour as analysis? One doesn’t need to agree with Jordan Peterson’s every idea to regard his recent comeback from the brink of death, destruction and oblivion as welcome, commendable and inspiring. At least worth a shred of empathy. But not from the more doctrinaire of his woke Left critics. As Janice Fiamengo finds, they aren’t just revelling in the popular author’s misfortune but are committing what they normally consider an unforgivable sin: blaming the victim.
Paid Sick Days: How Not To Spur An Economic Recovery
One might think that with Canada’s formidable array of pandemic restrictions, lockdowns, curfews, shuttered businesses and myriad other prohibited places and activities, the last thing Canadians need is another incentive to stay home and do nothing. And yet demands for paid sick days are now reaching a fevered pitch. Alongside labour and the political left, even some business groups claim to support the idea. As Peter Shawn Taylor finds, however, European-style sick-day benefits are no panacea. In fact, they threaten great harm to Canada’s post-pandemic economic recovery.
Read the full analysis only at https://c2cjournal.ca/2021/02/paid-sick-days-how-not-to-spur-an-economic-recovery/
Our Man In Stepanakert
While most Canadians paid it little attention, the brief war between Armenia and Azerbaijan late last year proved to be an extremely deadly and consequential affair. Deemed the ”most intense conflict in Europe or its periphery this century”, over 5,000 soldiers on both sides were killed in just six weeks of fighting – more than the entire U.S. military death toll in Iraq from 2003 to 2019. Azerbaijan’s swift victory was mainly due to adept use of a fleet of Turkish-built drones, a lethal battlefield innovation that Armenia’s aging and now shattered tank force could not answer. This conclusive defeat forced Armenia to relinquish large swaths of its traditional territory, causing an estimated 100,000 civilians to flee their homes.
Read the full story here https://c2cjournal.ca/2021/01/our-man-in-stepanakert/
The Beaver And The Dragon
