Ward Bertram

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

Where are we now?

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

Taps sign

[Warren Kinsella @kinsellawarren]

Should anyone be disliked for being successful in business? Nope.

There can be other reasons for being disliked, however.

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

@marissenmark How ideologically blinded does one need to be that this is your take away? It's so gross. Why not ask what else could be changed to save more lives rather than continuing with your divisive partisanship.

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

@marissenmark How so? NDP finally changes their opioid policy after years of pressure from the right and almost immediately we see a year over year decline in deaths. I think you mean it confirms the right was correct and it wasn't just 'narrative' at all.

[Dirty Texas Hedge @HedgeDirty]

Over 4000 workers just became millionaires by owning the means of production and the socialists are pissed

[Patrick Carroll @PatrickC1995]

I agree, it's kind of insane the government hasn't done this yet with its $7 trillion budget.

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

Opposing the confiscation of Musk's wealth does not by default make one a supporter of Musk.

[Handre @Handre]

Property rights aren't some abstract legal concept. They're the operating system for human cooperation. When you can't secure the fruits of your labor, you stop producing beyond survival. Why build a better mousetrap when the village chief's nephew can just take it?

Look at North Korea versus South Korea. Same people, same culture, different property regimes. The South protects what you create and earn. The North... doesn't. Result: $31,000 per capita GDP versus $1,300. That's not a rounding error.

Every prosperous society in history built itself on this foundation. The Romans codified property law and conquered the Mediterranean (then abandoned it and collapsed). England secured property rights in 1688 and launched the Industrial Revolution. China started protecting private property in 1978 and lifted 800 million people out of poverty. The pattern never breaks because the incentives never change.

[Bad Hombre @Badhombre]

83 billionaires donated to Kamala, including Epstein's buddy Reid Hoffman. You had nothing to say about that.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1949.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine has just gone to the man who invented the lobotomy. Your doctor suggests one for your sister, who has not been herself since the baby came. It is the most celebrated advance in psychiatry of the age, and he is simply current. By the time the prize curdles into an embarrassment, close to twenty thousand Americans have had the operation, and proportionally more here in Britain.

The year is 1956.

Lay the baby down on his front, the doctor says. So does the most trusted childcare book ever written, the one on every new mother's shelf. On his back he might choke, the reasoning goes. Millions obey. The advice holds for nearly thirty years, long after the evidence has quietly turned, and a generation of cot deaths is counted before anyone thinks to roll the babies over.

The year is 1966.

A bestselling book informs your wife that menopause is a disease, that she is, in the author's word, a castrate, and that a small daily pill will keep her youthful and tolerable to live with. Her doctor agrees. The drug becomes one of the most prescribed in the country. Nobody mentions that the author sat on the payroll of the company that made it. That detail surfaces decades later, in the same year the landmark trial is halted early for raising rates of breast cancer, stroke and clots.

The year is 1979.

Your ulcer is caused by stress and sharp food, the doctor explains. Calm down, drink milk, take the antacid that happens to be the best-selling medicine on earth. Two Australians are about to prove that most ulcers are caused by a bacterium and cured by a fortnight of antibiotics. The profession laughs. One of them eventually drinks a beaker of the stuff to settle the matter. The establishment takes the better part of twenty years to stop laughing. The Nobel lands in 2005.

The year is 1985.

Butter is dangerous, the doctor says. Switch to margarine, it is modern, it is heart-healthy, the experts are united. The spread he nudges you toward is loaded with trans fats, which the next decade will identify as the genuinely dangerous one, and which will eventually be banned outright. The butter goes quietly back in the fridge. No correction is ever printed at the volume of the original warning.

The year is 1992.

There is a pyramid on the surgery wall, and the very same one in your grandchild's classroom. Bread, cereal, rice and pasta form the broad virtuous base, up to eleven servings a day. Fat is exiled to the tiny tip. The chart was reportedly held back a year while the relevant industries had their say. It is wrong at the bottom and wrong at the top.

Now it is today.

Your doctor has new guidelines, new studies, a fresh consensus, delivered with precisely the steady confidence of every guideline above. He believes it, and he has good reason to. So did every doctor in this thread. None of them were villains. Each was sincere, most were kind, and all were certain, reading from a map that somebody else had drawn and handed them. That is the part worth sitting with.

So when the man in the white coat tells you what to eat, what to fear, and what to swallow every morning for the rest of your life, you are allowed to ask. Who paid for the study. What the evidence says beneath the headline. What he was just as certain about thirty years ago, and where that advice sits now.

Then make up your own mind. Call it scepticism, or call it whatever your grandmother called it when she ignored the advert, kept the butter where it was, and lived to ninety-one.

It has outlasted every consensus on this list. It will outlast this one too.

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

Just a reminder: as soon as you use a platform to speak to the public, you give implicit permission to the public to say something back. If you don't like the terms of that arrangement, it's you who needs to STFU, not the public.

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

@4TaxFairness Tax fairness is an oxymoron. The fair amount of what someone else produced that you are entitled to is zero.

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

Question: do you hate the 5000 newly minted SpaceX millionaires too?

[litquidity @litcapital]

SpaceX alone just created over 5,000 millionaires while you have lifted zero people out of poverty or created zero millionaires (besides yourself)

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

@KDimitratos This is awesome

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

Replaced now, but how does this get published in the first place?
Because the people who wrote it actually feel this way, and they thought everyone else does too.
Disgraceful.

[The Globe and Mail @globeandmail]

Opinion: SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him https://t.co/qAQVdquwCP

[Ben Woodfinden @BenWoodfinden]

Richard Wagner has spent his time as Chief Justice turning himself into the self-appointed guardian of Canadian democracy: annual press conferences, speeches about the rule of law, warnings about democratic backsliding.

The old convention was that judges speak through their rulings and otherwise keep quiet. Wagner seems to find that beneath him. He wants to be a public figure, not just a judge.

The irony is that every time he steps up to the microphone to defend the court’s legitimacy, he’s the one politicizing it. A judiciary that lets its work speak for itself doesn’t need a spokesman. Wagner has made himself one anyway, and the institution is worse off for it.

[Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms @JCCFCanada]

Bill C-34: Government officials are reportedly considering digital ID as an age-verification solution.

According to privacy expert and law professor @mgeist, government officials told participants at a technical briefing that they are exploring “leveraging government ID systems” for age verification.

The language of Bill C-34 requires affected social media platforms to prevent minors from creating accounts through age-verification or age-estimation measures. Australia has pursued a similar model. But government officials are now contemplating a different possibility: Canadians proving eligibility through government-operated digital ID systems such as the Alberta Digital ID, BCeID, or perhaps even a future national digital ID.

This may never materialize. But the fact that government officials are considering government-controlled digital ID systems as a gateway to social media access should concern every Canadian who values freedom of expression, access to information, and privacy.

More to follow.

[Klara @klara_sjo]

"If I could time travel I’d kill Hitler”

“If I had time travel I’d stop my favorite politician getting assassinated”

You’re all thinking way too small.

If I had time travel I’d stop Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from dying on the moon due to Soviet sabotage, kicking off the Great Nuclear War and devastating half the planet.

[Ward Bertram @wardbertram]

The movement? What the fuck...

[Emmanuel Macron @EmmanuelMacron]

✅ Thanks for joining the movement.

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

A Scandinavian economist once boasted to Milton Friedman:

“In Scandinavia, we have no poverty.”

Friedman replied:

“That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.”