It was a big week for creative problem-solving. Britain fixed a failed government energy company by starting a second, Canada is balancing its budget by renaming the spending, and Boston paid $335,000 to call itself racist and failed. Here are a few of the most absurd stories in case you missed them.
Britain fixes its failed government energy company with a second one
Before the 2024 election, Britain’s Labour Party promised that a new state-owned company called Great British Energy would help families save up to £300 a year on their energy bills.
So far electric bills have increased instead.
Not to worry. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced his fix: create a SECOND state-owned energy company to basically do the same job as the first.
After all, when one state-owned enterprise fails miserably, the only logical solution is to create a second state-owned enterprise and expect a different result.
Canada’s plan to balance the budget: change the definition of ‘spending’
We’ve long said that when the deficit and inflation numbers become bad enough, politicians will simply reinvent the way they calculate these figures.
Canada has now done just that.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has promised to balance Canada’s gruesome budget deficit. But his plan is to change the definition of the word ‘spending’.
Carney’s big idea is to only count day-to-day operating costs as ‘spending’. And anything else that he deems to be an ‘investment’ won’t count.
We all understand the difference. In your own household, the electric bill is considered an expense. Purchasing shares of Newmont Mining is considered an investment.
Now, my wife has tried to stretch this definition a time or two by insisting that a beach vacation or pretty necklace is actually an investment.
Carney is applying this same logic to an entire national economy. It’s completely subjective and inconsistent, plus it lacks any transparency.
Giving money away on woke priorities? Not an expense! It’s an investment in community! Paying Canadians to turn in their completely legal firearms? Not an expense! It’s an investment in safety! (more on this below)
Carney has now reinvented the math, making Canada look just as ridiculous as WeWork when then CEO Adam Neumanm spoke of his company’s “Community-Adjusted Earnings”.
Canada’s last line of defense is the gun owners it’s disarming
Mark Carney isn’t done with his insanity. He recently told the New York Times that it’s his job to look at the “extreme tail risk” that Donald Trump orders military action against Canada.
According to Carney himself, in the absurd likelihood of a US invasion, US forces would overrun Canada’s defenses within a week, possibly within two days. After that, Carney will be counting on “small groups of irregular military or armed civilians” to fight on with ambushes and sabotage, like the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets.
The trouble is that Canada has banned more than 2,500 makes and models of “assault-style” firearms since 2020, and the government is paying gun owners to hand them in.
So apparently Canadians are expected to fight house to house with hockey sticks… until the government comes for those too.
Boston paid $335,000 to call itself racist… and failed
If any place in America can say it made the right call on slavery early in its history, it’s Massachusetts. The state’s chief justice declared slavery finished in 1783; he cited the state constitution that “all men are born free and equal.”
Yet the city government in Boston has still chosen to put itself on trial more than two centuries later.
In 2022 local politicians set up a task force to study reparations for slavery, with one member positively giddy that the research would give it the “evidentiary pool from which to argue for [reparations].”
So the city spent $335,000 of taxpayer money to hire a Tufts University team led by historian Kerri Greenidge.
She came with all the right awards. Her 2022 book The Grimkes, about a slaveholding family that produced two famous abolitionist sisters, had been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won a prize from the American Historical Association.
Apparently if you write about slavery, no one bothers to check whether it’s accurate. They just give you awards.
But it turns out Greenidge’s book was “riddled with factual errors.” It cites letters held at the University of Michigan which don’t actually exist. It references other historians’ research that doesn’t exist. In short, it’s about as accurate as a Hollywood adaptation.
Ms. Greenidge naturally clapped back and claimed that pointing out her errors is an “attack on Black women [in] academics…”
So, Boston was willing to spend taxpayer money to call its own taxpayers racists, and the expert they hired turned out to be another race grifter with no credibility.
