Welcome to the start of the “work” week: it’s Monday, February 24, 2025, and National Tortilla Chip Day. They are basically an altered cultural appropriation from Mexico, and now are found worldwide. This photo from Wikipedia is captioned “Tortilla chips, salsa, and guacamole from the Restaurant Weisshorn, Zermatt, Switzerland.” Switzerland! I’ll have the guacamole, please.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 24 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*It seems likely that there will soon be a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, with Ukraine giving up about 20% of its land to Putin and half of its rare-earth minerals to the U.S. Now two countries in Europe have offered to monitor Ukraine if such a ceasefire occurs, but of course that depends on the Orange Man’s approval.
Britain and France are developing a plan to deploy up to 30,000 European peacekeepers in Ukraine if Moscow and Kyiv reach a cease-fire deal, European officials say.
But the European proposal hinges on persuading President Trump to agree to a limited U.S. military role—dubbed a “backstop” by British officials—to protect the European troops in Ukraine if they were put in danger and deter Russia from violating any cease-fire, the officials said.
An initial test of Trump’s willingness to consider U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine will come in the next few days when U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron are scheduled to hold talks with the president at the White House.
The emerging European plan wouldn’t require the U.S. to deploy its own forces in Ukraine, which the Trump administration has all but ruled out, but would seek to draw on U.S. military capabilities that European forces lack, the officials say.
The U.S., for example, might operate air-defense systems in neighboring countries that covered swaths of Ukraine while contributing other air-defense systems to the Europeans, European officials said. U.S. air power based outside Ukraine could be kept at the ready in case European troops were in danger.
Will Trump agree to that? Given his stupid remarks about Ukraine, and seeming disdain for the country (“they shouldn’t have started the war,” he said), I’m not sure such a guarantee would happen. And given that that membership in NATO requires unanimous assent of existing members, we can forget about that for Ukraine as well.
*I forgot to note that Hadi Matar, the man accused of trying to kill Salman Rushdie 36 years after the 1989 fatwa against the author and his publishers, was found guilty on Saturday of attempted murder. (I recently read Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Rushdie’s account of the crime and his long physical and psychological recuperation, and recommend it highly.)
A jury on Friday afternoon convicted the man who was charged with stabbing and trying to kill the author Salman Rushdie as he delivered a lecture at a literary gathering in western New York state in 2022.
Hadi Matar, 27, of Fairview, New Jersey, was quickly declared guilty of attempted murder in the second degree. He could receive up to 25 years in prison at a sentencing hearing tentatively set for 23 April.
Jurors deliberated for less than two hours on Friday afternoon, after lawyers’ closing arguments followed days of testimony that included a vivid account from Rushdie of how he was certain he was going to die at the hands of a man who rushed him on stage with a knife.
Matar was also found guilty of assault on the man Rushdie was talking to on stage, Ralph Henry Reese, who was wounded in the attack.
The district attorney, Jason Schmidt, had played a slow-motion video of the attack for the jury on Friday morning, pointing out the assailant as he emerged from the audience, walked up a staircase to the stage and broke into a run toward Rushdie.
After Matar’s conviction, Schmidt said such evidence “really is as compelling as it can possibly get”.
“Mr Matar came into this community as a visitor,” Schmidt remarked. “And, really, it’s my job that he stays a resident of New York state for the next 25 years.”
Seated at the defense table, Matar had no obvious reaction to his conviction. His public defender, Nathaniel Barone, later said Matar was “disappointed” but “quite frankly … well prepared for the verdict”.
. . . A trial for Matar on federal terrorism-related charges is scheduled for later in US district court in Buffalo.
Disappointed? There was no doubt that Matar was guilty, as he was apprehended on the spot and there is video. Frankly, I think 25 years isn’t long enough, but perhaps that’s the maximum. This is a man who, I think, cannot be rehabilitated. And get this desperation from the lawyer:
The assistant public defender Andrew Brautigan told the jury that prosecutors had not proved that Matar intended to kill Rushdie. Therefore, Brautigan argued that prosecutors had not proven their case against Matar.
“You will agree something bad happened to Mr Rushdie, but you don’t know what Mr Matar’s conscious objective was,” Brautigan said.
Is anybody stupid enough to believe that? What his conscious objective was? It is not surprising, though, that the Guardian neglects to mention that Matar is a citizen of both the U.S. and Lebanon and had praised Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in a prison interview last August.
*The Times of Israel reports that Israel has halted the release of Palestinian prisoners in return for hostages
Israel said early Sunday that it was delaying the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners who had been slated to go free Saturday until Jerusalem receives assurances regarding the end of “humiliating ceremonies” staged by Hamas when hostages are handed over.
The statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office came after over 600 inmates had already boarded buses to leave Ofer prison, in the largest single-day release of the first stage of the ongoing Gaza ceasefire. Instead, the inmates were told to disembark, their release on indefinite hold. Hezi Markowitz, a former Prisons Service southern commander, said Sunday that the hundreds of prisoners were on the buses for hours, waiting for release and then en route to their release destinations, when the decision was made to return them to their prisons.
The prisoners had been slated to be let go as part of a deal for the release of six hostages who were freed by Hamas earlier in the day. But with Israelis fuming over the handling of the transfer of the bodies of mother Shiri Bibas and her two small children murdered in captivity, and new anger sparked by a propaganda video showing hostages being brought to a ceremony where others were being freed, Netanyahu said Israel would demand an end to the gauche fanfare before resuming freeing prisoners.
Israel said early Sunday that it was delaying the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners who had been slated to go free Saturday until Jerusalem receives assurances regarding the end of “humiliating ceremonies” staged by Hamas when hostages are handed over.
The statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office came after over 600 inmates had already boarded buses to leave Ofer prison, in the largest single-day release of the first stage of the ongoing Gaza ceasefire. Instead, the inmates were told to disembark, their release on indefinite hold. Hezi Markowitz, a former Prisons Service southern commander, said Sunday that the hundreds of prisoners were on the buses for hours, waiting for release and then en route to their release destinations, when the decision was made to return them to their prisons.
The prisoners had been slated to be let go as part of a deal for the release of six hostages who were freed by Hamas earlier in the day. But with Israelis fuming over the handling of the transfer of the bodies of mother Shiri Bibas and her two small children murdered in captivity, and new anger sparked by a propaganda video showing hostages being brought to a ceremony where others were being freed, Netanyahu said Israel would demand an end to the gauche fanfare before resuming freeing prisoners.
“In light of the repeated violations by Hamas — including the ceremonies that demean our hostages’ dignity and the cynical use of our hostages for propaganda purposes — it has been decided to delay the release of terrorists planned for yesterday until the next release of hostages is guaranteed, and without the humiliating ceremonies,” read a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office sent just after 1 a.m. Sunday.
Israel’s announcement abruptly put the future of the truce into further doubt.
*I can’t vouch for the truth of this assertion made by Jennifer Sey on her site “Sey Everything”, but I’m betting it’s true. The piece is called “The NCAA wrote a toothless policy that won’t keep men out of women’s sports.” (h/t Ginger K.)
. . . . on February 6, the NCAA announced a new policy and their intention to follow the Executive Order. Seemed pretty good on the surface.
It’s not.
The policy is riddled with loopholes. And ensures that the NCAA need not take any accountability for ensuring that women’s sports and spaces in federally funded, Title IX governed institutions remain for women only.
The primary loophole, and the one I will focus on here, is that the “proof” that must be provided to “test” for sex is a birth certificate. And the NCAA need not go any further once a birth certificate is provided, thus “certifying” that an athlete is female.
But here’s the thing: the vast majority of states have laws on the books allowing people to change their sex on their birth certificate with varying levels of requirements. (Only 6 states don’t allow it at all.)
I’m not even going to get into how Orwellian that is. Well, maybe I will a little.
A birth certificate is a record of fact. And it can now be altered to change — literally — facts. All that is required is a “signed statement of identity” and a photo ID for the mother or father listed on the birth certificate. What??
They call it a “gender marker correction.” It’s not a correction. It’s a lie.
I just also learned you can change your “gender marker” on your social security card! All you need is a driver’s license, a birth certificate (which you just got changed by filling out a form) and a completed application.
And now, governors across the nation are moving to accelerate the paperwork to change sex on birth certificates. Governor Bob Ferguson of Washington State has announced that his Department of Health will process all “gender designation” changes in 3 business days! Hurrah! Now men can lie faster!
The tweet:
The NCAA policy is no policy at all. There are holes upon holes upon holes, and mostly the NCAA wants to appear to satisfy the Executive Order while allowing the gender ideologues and whiny scream-y failed male athletes to still have their way and validate their kooky identities.
It’s a case of the NCAA taking no accountability. Pointing fingers in both directions and saying Well, we did everything we could! Sorry your daughter lost out to a dude.
I’m saying it again: this ends when public opinion and the cultural conversation changes.
Sey notes that this policy may change when the administration changes, but so many Americans agree that trans-identified men shouldn’t compete in female sports that this could be an issue in any Presidential election. It’s a touchstone of fairness. But Sey also notes that it’s up to us to keep women’s sports for women, so if you feel that way, don’t be afraid to speak up about it.
*Over at the (Canadian) National Post, physicist Lawrence Krauss tells us “Indigenous land acknowledgements often ignore history,” with the subtitle “We should avoid creating mythology and special recognition that may have no basis in fact.” An excerpt:
I remember the first time I heard a statement at a public event along the lines of, “This building is located on traditional unceded Aboriginal land.” It was in Australia, and it struck me as disingenuous, simplistic and patronizing. If the people making this statement really felt that badly about the land they (and possibly their forebearers) lived and worked on for generations and ostensibly stole, then they would reasonably choose to give the land back along with all they had built upon it.
However, the people who utter such statements implicitly recognize that the country they inhabit and the land they live and work on is only distantly connected to the land occupied, or colonized earlier by groups we now label as Indigenous. Moreover, the land acknowledgments also skip over the reality that in some nations, treaties cover part or all of the territory — Canada and New Zealand, as examples.
In giving primacy to the more activist Indigenous groups, institutions and governments around the world readily express their willingness to not only change history, but also to ignore scientific evidence as well.
I live in Prince Edward Island and regularly attend musical and theatre events here. Every show begins with someone coming out to recite their Indigenous mea culpa. But the last time I heard the phrase, it was slightly different, and it jarred me. I heard that the Mi’kmaq, the Indigenous tribe with deep roots in the province, had been here “since time immemorial.” Since that event, I have begun to hear more extreme versions of this prescribed mantra, with “time immemorial” replaced by “the beginning of time.” While “time immemorial” can legally refer to any time before 1189, the claim that Indigenous people have been on the land since the beginning of time is historical and scientific nonsense.
. .None of this is to suggest that we should ignore past mistreatment of Indigenous groups. The Mi’kmaq culture began to be supplanted on Prince Edward Island beginning around the 1700s; we can and should bemoan the fact that they were not treated better.
But that does not justify creating a mythology and special recognition that may have no basis in fact. We need to respect history, even as we work to provide equal opportunities for everyone in this country, within a realistic 21st-century context. We all share this land, its laws and resources, whether our ancestors moved here decades, centuries or even millennia in the past. These ancestors were, at various times in history among the colonizers or the colonized. Let’s celebrate the diverse cultural mix that makes up present-day Canada, along the fact that if we go back far enough, we are all related, instead of creating myths to appease any modern guilt about the past.
Land acknowledgments are perhaps the most arrantly performative aspects of “woke” culture. They accomplish nothing save parade the virtue of the issuer. Those who say them have no intention of reimbursing the indigenous people for the “theft,” nor will they ever give back the land. What, then, do they accomplish? I suppose there is a subset of people who really do think that one must say these things, and who don’t ask themselves, “What does this accomplish?” The best I can say is “gives a partial history lesson.” But even that may be misleading.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s showing a bit of bioblophilia. I’m told the book she’s looking at is John Maddox’s, What Remains to be Discovered.
by John Maddox.
Hili: What haven’t we discovered yet?A: What are you talking about?Hili: About this book, it looks interesting.
Hili: Czego jeszcze nie odkryliśmy?Ja: O czym ty mówisz?Hili: O tej książce. wygląda na ciekawą.
*******************
From Things With Faces:
From The Dodo Pet. Poor pigeon!
An update from Feminist News:
From Luana, who got her Ph.D. at Cornell:
Cornell sent a letter today that seems to comply w/Trump’s EO to dismantle DEI programs, pledging a focus on merit-based hiring and diversity of views
But I found several current job postings which still demand applicants demonstrate a commitment to DEI, “anti-racism”, etc. pic.twitter.com/Ae1hdAJOEW
— Neetu Arnold (@neetu_arnold) February 21, 2025
From my BlueHair feed, a terrific leaf mimic:
I couldn’t resist putting up this exchange between Fuentes, who has an upcoming book on why sex isn’t binary, and Martina Navratilova (yes, the real one).
Is really you? I am a fan of your tennis playing. My book presents A LOT about female reproductive biology and its central role in human life, but also the range of important biological and behavioral variation in humans that is missed/ignored when we use a simple binary frame
— Agustín Fuentes (@Anthrofuentes) February 17, 2025
From Malcolm; helpers at the nest:
Rescuers found puppies under the rubble of a building. Upon closer inspection, they found that the puppies were protecting newborn kittens and mama cat..🐈🐾🙏❤️ pic.twitter.com/61xK8mrnzF
— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) February 3, 2025
From my feed. I love this!
A show of absolute tolerance and purrsistence in earning a kitten’s trust pic.twitter.com/JieNdx4N5A
— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) February 22, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
A French Jewish boy gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz. He was five.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-24T10:46:17.757Z
Two from Dr. Cobb, hot-tubbing it in Asilomar. Matthew says “Words of wisdom from John Dean,” but I am not so sure I agree with the predictions.
If Trump continues to defy the Courts and increasing numbers of people protest, Trump will rely on the Insurrection Act and call on federal troops to stop the protests. When the stock market crashes Trump may reconsider or the GOP Congress may find its spine. If not American democracy ends!
— John W Dean (@johnwdean.bsky.social) February 10, 2025 at 2:56 PM
I wonder what creationists would say about this:
On this day, the 10th of February 1825, a letter from Gideon Mantell was put before the Royal Society. We became aware of the large and iconic Early Cretaceous herbivorous dinosaur ‘Iguanodon’. So happy 200th birthday Iguanodon. Probably the best dinosaur in the world.
— Jeremy Lockwood (@valdosaurus.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T07:56:50.503Z
Eventually I found tortilla chips either extremely salty, so thin they break, too expensive ($6 for Tostitos?) etc., and I abandoned them after I tried tostadas – they can be purchased in a stack in bags. Guerrero brand is good :
guerrerotortillas.com/es/productos/tostadas-caseras-amarillas/
Olé is another, or La Banderita. I had always thought “tostada” meant a complete dish – but it really means just the fried corn round.
They have other variations, like baked, etc.
They are so strong they can really scoop up a big dollop of sauce, but still break when necessary. It sounds crazy but if you try it I think you’ll see. I think the Guerreros have the optimal strength profile.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
We’re here to put a dent in the universe. -Steve Jobs, entrepreneur and inventor (24 Feb 1955-2011)
Regarding Dean’s predictions, it’s not clear to me that Trump has defied the courts. I believe that the Administration has been responding to all legal challenges in the appropriate, legal way. One of the way that the MSM is failing everyone right now is shown by the lack of stories summarizing legal actions against the Admin and tracking the current status. MSM has forgotten how to do its job, and just engages in outrage.
Reporting the outrageous actions of this administration does not equal merely engaging in outrage. Please let us all know when anything Trump does warrants any level of concern.
Dr. B, that’s been my biggest source of frustration with the MSM.
Everything Trump does or says is reported as a horrible thing and “experts” are quoted to express fear and concern. The press is back to it’s #Resist philosophy rather than reporting the news (or ignoring things, as they did during the Biden years). There’s some level of analysis, but it always ends with a “Trump’s evil” type of summary.
I’m finding better info on X.
Tilgate! There’s a name from my past: I was born in a house named ‘Tilgate’ as my parents loved the place. My father was a borough engineer responsible for that aspect of building Crawley as a new town in the early 1950s. I wonder if people still name their houses in the UK?
I like those youtubes of mid-century new towns in the UK (I enjoy brutalist architecture).
My Mum was born in the UK in the 1940s in a named house called “The Chantry”.
As a younger man in Japan my small apartment building was named “Cherry Bloom Villa” and now I live in a large (150 apartments) named building in Chelsea Manhattan. So you see it sometimes but not that often. In the US it is mainly expensive, pretentious apartment buildings I think.
Seems like a lot of those UK new towns haven’t turned out so well – but I like the look of them and the sentiments behind them.
D.A.
NYC
Fortunately for me, my parents had moved before I was born, so my only experience of a new town was when I was a student doing ‘away’ pediatrics. I spent some time in Basildon, a soul-less place of innumerable roundabouts, plastic pubs and houses that all looked the same. Turns out that all the social ills of life in a tower block occur in new towns, just spread out like paté on toast.
I looked up (map) Basildon – it looks like a pretty standard British city with all the stuff you people like. 🙂 I’m currently in Florida – vacation. I’m in an historic neighborhood where some of the beloved structures are at least thirty years old!
I’m interested in designed capitals and cities after visiting Canberra on a school trip as a kid. Usually planned communities don’t work. hahah Like the USSR.
🙂
D.A.
NYC
I don’t understand the intricacies of the NCAA but even some movement in the direction of protecting female sport is a good thing that may have knock-on effects of getting more people to pay attention to the incoherence of gender ideology. Jennifer Sey is always worth listening to. She was featured on a podcast last year on the topic of marketing and changing the cultural conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIV2-W7ahHo
The problem seems to hinge on deciding who is female. The NCAA link says they can use a birth certificate.
But most states permit trans people to change their birth certificates to match their “new sex.”
I think genetic testing might be the only way. It would also find cases of 5-ARD where a newborn boy doesn’t have visible male genitalia and may be marked female.
Cases of 5-ARD are XY and develop male strength.
I’m sure the NCAA decided on birth certificates because it knew that was the easiest way to thwart President Trump’s directive while appearing to comply with it enough to get money. Not a bug, a feature.
Quite possibly. The trans lobby is very determined and aggressive.
I was not aware that birth certificates could be changed. I had made the argument that they could be used to simply identify male / female in a clean way that follows the person from birth. I was clearly wrong!
It does sound like genetic testing is the only way.
Woke may have peaked but as others have said it is now retrenching in the institutions. Here is my university doubling down on land acknowledgements.
events.sfu.ca/event/43085-how-to-steal-a-mountain-how-sfu-got-its-land
The leaders of that event are as expected intersectional leaders of other progressive movements like the demand to free, free Palestine.
themainlander.com/2024/04/26/divestsfu/
I’m afraid this will get worse before it gets better at universities.
Yes, it’s all part of The Resistance.
I don’t think it will get better at all, anywhere, in Canada, Mike. To almost all Canadians, everything President Trump says or does just vindicates our smug certainty that our way is the right way. One of the Prime Minister’s last utterances before he announced his intention to resign was to criticize sexist Americans for missing their second opportunity to elect a woman as President. If Mussolini really had made the trains run on time, Canadians would take that as proof that trains ought to be late or, better yet, cancelled for not doing land acknowledgements.
Canada is a lost cause.
As you know I share all of your views about this. I try to stay more hopeful than that for the sake of my kids. It’s not easy.
Agree. It’s too depressing to just give up. Keep fighting!
I don’t know, Leslie. While a lot of the woke cancer infects your snowy land, there seems to be some decent pushback. I like the style of that Pierre Pouvile (sp?) chap you have up there, all his apple munching ripostes. 🙂
They’ve even stopped looking for the mountain of indigenous baby skulls you had sneakily buried under Kamloops! That’s progress.
Dire… but not a lost cause.
D.A.
NYC
Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives have to be elected to form a government first, and he’s already been dismissed in these pages as “dire”. We’ll see what happens in the election, whenever the new Liberal Prime Minister, whoever he or she might be, decides to call one.
Pierre Poilievre’s apple-munching interview was certainly a great example of how to push back when interviewed and received a lot of attention. However, I remember reading the article that was published as a result of that interview and the writer was able to spin it in a completely different way than how Poilievre had actually answered the questions in the video. I’ve been interviewed more times than I can count by media, and I learned the hard way that no matter what you say, a good journalist can make you out to look like a fool or a hero while using nothing but your own words.
Leslie, good luck up there!. When I was a kid our family used to drive across the Ambassador bridge to visit our “neighbors to the South” as we laughingly said each time we drove over (Detroit is actually north of Windsor). Then we’d come home and watch SCTV on CBC (channel 9). When I got older my buddies and I would drive over on Saturday to pick up a case of Brador’s since the drinking age was lower than in the US. Ah the good old days of 40 some years ago! I moved to the SE US many years ago and haven’t been back but still like to follow what goes on there.
Regarding land acknowledgements, I’m a trustee at a small liberal arts university in Utah. They used to do land acknowledgements at essentially every event, but there were disputes and differing historic anecdotes about who was there, at what time, who was displaced by whom, etc, and no one could agree.
So they still do the same thing at their events, reverently listing off the five different tribes they know of who might have been at the site, but they don’t call it a “land acknowledgment.” They call it a “land recognition.” Lol.
I have run a bit hot and cold on Lawrence Krauss’ writings in the past, but this piece on land acknowledgements and the thinking processes behind them is excellent. In any case after reading Dawkins’ “The Ancestor’s Tale”, it seems that we are all cousins to some degree, making land ownership writ large more of a family squabble at this point.
And I appreciate the reference to “time immemorial” defined!
The “time immemorial” thing I find deeply obnoxious. Growing up in Australia and NZ I was told in both schools the indigenous peoples had been there for “time immemorial”.
In Australia I’d argue 50,000 years is indeed pretty immemorial for humans.
For the Maori’s 700 or so years… not so much. Maybe my Aussie teachers didn’t have the benefit of “Maori Science”. hehee
There are companies, cathedrals and universities older than that.
There are a lot of leftie lies they (still) teach in schools. See Wilfred Reilly’s “Lies my liberal teacher taught me” book.
D.A.
NYC
The NCCA “policy” is a non-policy. Birth-certificates can be changed (obviously), passports can be changed (obviously). Using either is a big mistake. In some cases, birth-certificates are just plain wrong. CAIS persons get a ‘F’ on their birth-certificates. However, they are not female. 5-ARD (see the prior comments by Frau Katze) persons are frequently considered to be female at birth (for example, C. Semenya and I. Khelif), but are actually male. The rule should be ‘anyone who has gone through male puberty will be considered to be male’. However, no test (that I know of) exists for male puberty. I suggest Buccal Swabs. They are fast, cheap, and non-invasive. Of course, appeals should be allowed for those case where a Y chromosome does not provide any athletic benefit. CAID and Swyers come to mind.
Khelif is Algerian. In many Arab countries the kind of documents we in non-corrupt countries have a lot of faith in, are much more… negotiable. Despite not driving I have a Lebanese drivers license from my time there and a friend (a white American) has a Somali passport.
The more corrupt a country is the less reliable everything it asserts is. That goes for government statistics, battle reports and official documents.
This mismatch between high and low trust societies causes a lot of mistakes and disfunction. A good and sharp example of this are Hamas v Israeli numbers and stories. A lying Israeli press spokesman can be called out by a free media, not so a Hamas spokesman in Gaza (hence the several million baby doctors killed by the Zionists, we’re told) 🙂
D.A.
NYC
CAID should be CAIS
The important thing with a land acknowledgement is that the speaker never gives it on land that she or her audience owns personally. It is always the concert venue, or the town council chambers, or the university auditorium that the speaker acknowledges. Someone else’s land. This neatly finesses Jerry’s challenge that if you think the land you occupy was taken unjustly, then give it back. The speaker simply has no power to do that, nor does anyone in his audience (unless the King of England is present, who, theoretically, owns as sovereign all the land in Canada.) The actual fee-simple owners of the venues of course have no intention ever to sign over their deeds. They perceive it to be harmless good will to permit their employees to make performative land acknowledgements. Prohibiting them would create much rancour and media criticism from the activist crowd, like declining a request to fly a Pride flag. Someone has to go first and risk getting shot in the back.
Land acknowledgements in Canada are driven by the demands — all 94 of them — in the Orwellianly-named Truth and Reconciliation Commission for (one-way) reconciliation over the Indian Residential Schools. The TRC didn’t mention land acknowledgements explicitly in its calls to action. They sprang into existence from nervous settlers copying Americans as always, hoping that the performance would allow us to ignore demands that would cost money and cause disruption, as we mostly have done. (The TRC was a make-work project. The activists know the real money is in the Courts. Even if they don’t get land back, which they would have no use for anyway, they can get many billions of dollars in awards and settlements for letting us use our own land. See Restoule in Ontario.) Not doing land acknowledgements would be seen as a “hateful” snub, a form of residential-school denialism which activists are hoping to make illegal when Parliament is disinterred in the spring.
No one does land acknowledgements at his private home because then yes, some insolent pubescent offspring could ask at the dinner table, “Dad, why don’t we give our house and quarter acre to the Six Nations just across the road?”
Chunks of land have been handed back in BC. The former Queen Charlotte Islands, now known as Haida-Gwaii, is an example.
In New Brunswick, too, maybe, depending on how the Woolastock case goes. Here the aboriginals are going after privately owned land. These are large tracts of forest land that seven timber companies purchased outright from the provincial Crown many years ago. The Court in New Brunswick has just ruled that the Woolastocks can sue the Crown to compel it to expropriate the private land — I believe America calls the process “eminent domain” — and hand it over to them. We are talking about one third of what is admittedly a small province. Poor little broke New Brunswick, up against a fat-cat Toronto law firm.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/aboriginal-title-has-become-constitutional-threat-canada
I think it’s safe to say the KC Irving Pulp and Paper Company doesn’t start off its board meetings with a land acknowledgement.
That’s discouraging. There’s more land in BC but I haven’t been following it closely.
Many people are completely fed by the Kamloops residential school grift. No missing children have been named. No remains have been found, just an accusation that ground-penetrating radar shows a big graveyard of murdered native children.
But Trudeau went crazy, flying the flag at half-mast for months, spreading the story worldwide and paying huge sums of money.
Now there’s an inaccurate movie about. Plus other tribes are finding their own “graveyards” so they too can get in on it. The natives conveniently refuse to excavate as they know there’s nothing there and the gravy train will end.
Trudeau and the Liberals are absolutely appalling and they need to go. I don’t know if the Conservatives will be any better but we need a change.
It may not be possible for any elected Government of any party to do anything about this. Specifically talking about land claims, this is an issue with the way our Courts up to the Supremes interpret the Section 35 provisions for aboriginal rights we wrote into our Constitution back in 1982. The Supreme Court’s progressive vision may be coloured by all the land acknowledgements its judges have been hearing since they were law students dreaming of the day when a Liberal Prime Minister will appoint them to the bench.
Channeling Sam Harris, progressives are like a grandfather clock: the pendulum swings back and forth symmetrically but the gears and hands move always in one direction.
Moral blackmail is the hallmark of our era.
D.A.
NYC
The runaround done by the NCAA suggests, along with other examples, that organizations controlled by or held captive to the left will not change until forced to do so. Question for those on the left who never cross the political aisle and who decry many of the “progressive” insanities we discuss on this site. Over the last year, I’ve heard many names tossed out on who might lead the Democratic Party to victory in 2028. The problem is that every one of these prospects—without exception—have supported and, in many cases, aggressively pushed many of the same misguided policies and laws regarding gender and DEI that raise so much consternation here. To my question: as the left has had extraordinarily limited success in changing any of the madness in its own institutions, how do you propose to change it at the state and federal level if you keep supporting the same people who mandate the madness?
Is there a course correction? Pete Buttigieg, perhaps true to his McKinsey DNA, has put his finger in the wind and is recalibrating his course. Months ago, he silently removed the pronouns from his social media accounts after once declaring them a profile in courage and a necessity to peoplekind. Now he has been making rounds talking about sensible ways to do DEI, basically maintaining the new cloak so as not to offend, yet resurrecting the Spirit of liberals past. A belated recognition of sense, or another round of opportunism? Time will likely tell. But let memories of Biden keep you cautious of the claim, “He is a moderate.”
If the left doesn’t shed the “progressive” sickness (it’s terrible in Canada too) they’re going to lose more elections.
The activists are well-funded (often by private funds) and are very aggressive.