This is the first of what I hope will be a regular feature at The Slog. I’m launching it because I suspect that damning unreal, mad belief systems as the cancer of our epoch doesn’t seem to cut through unless one presents examples fully accompanied by stats, research and science. If nothing else, I’m not going to run short of material. None of this, of course, will make any difference to Illiberal Demagogues and their unlikely allies among religious fanatics, boneheaded racists of all ethnicities and radical feminists. But then, it’s not aimed at them: it’s designed to arm and encourage Real People increasingly scared about speaking out against the growing power of fancy over fact.

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Despite the general madness apparent in Canadians deciding to reelect their Prime Minister, here and there in that otherwise fine country there are a few glimmers of light trying to illuminate the Dark Ages.

JESSICA Yaniv, a Canadian man-to-woman tranny, has lost a case before the British Columbia Human Rights tribunal. The case was brought against a series of self-employed beauticians after they refused to perform a ‘Brazilian wax’ treatment on Yaniv’s intact male genital area, in what Yaniv claimed was a case of discrimination based on gender identity and expression.

Given he still has the meat and two veg, his is pretty clearly a man. But two years ago, several Canadian States adopted a law permitting individuals to self-identify their gender on all official documents without any requirement for physical alteration.  This same ‘woke’ legislation also prohibits discrimination against individuals based on ‘gender identity’. That is to say, you may be in breach of human rights law if you refuse to call someone ‘Ms’ who, on dropping his trousers, reveals male bits inclusive in the original factory fittings.

Jessica/Jess or whatever had brought a series of cases against beauticians, the clear intent of which was to claim damages as a means of amassing filthy lucre. But the BCHR tribunal dismissed his claims earlier this week, with harsh words from the judiciary about those trying to “weaponise human rights legislation for personal gain”. Several of the female beauticians thus abused objected to working on male genitalia for religious reasons.

The case itself isn’t that encouraging, because there is no sign anywhere that the Canadian government has any desire at all to reverse the ridiculous existence of this law. The idea that the human right of a person with functioning primary senses is not allowed to express what he or she can clearly see is a monstrous attack on personal freedom, and an encouragement to the Fluffy tendency to carry on Owen Joneseasque bleating about men who are women and vice versa.

FACT: Women cannot naturally impregnate a female partner, and men cannot have natural periods or babies.

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Eight weeks ago, the IPO WeWork’s two lead Wall Street underwriters, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs put a valuation on WeWork’s shares to the public at slightly over $47 billion.

The company’s hippyesque founder Adam Neumann was attempting to cash out of his company…a concern that can scarcely be called “commercial”, because in its decade of pointless existence, it never made so much as a cent in profits.

The company is very clearly, it now emerges, about to run out of money, and its actual worth – at absolute best – is under $8 billion. 

In the first six months of this fiscal year, WeWork ran up losses of an eye-popping $900 million.

Now, for those Americans who think me some kind of Commie for continuing to doubt the role, honesty, regulation or indeed point of the Bourses as a means of raising honest money for capitalist expansion, here is my response: caveat emptor does not even begin to cover it:

• Where was the Underwriters’ due diligence in all this? The investor – private or institutional – has a right to expect those launching the ship to have at least checked for holes, the use of steel as opposed to stone, and whether the keel ran along the bottom or top of the vessel.
• Why has Neumann not been immediately held by law enforcement agencies for failing to disclose the obvious possibility that SS WeWork was a thinly disguised Poseidon Adventure about to happen?

FACT: It used to be a ‘given’ for launches onto everything from the old USM to the Paris Bourse that companies wouldn’t even be considered without a track record of at least three years of consecutively growing profits.

The reality is that finance in our culture reflects ethics that have diminished, are diminishing further, and the trend ought to be reversed.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is biased, or stupid….and quite probably both.

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There are those MPs – most of them Labour MPs with slim majorities or Mayite Tories with fat egos – who opine that Boris Johnson is being “irresponsible” in saying the country needs a general election. They aver that this is not what the country wants.

However, a snap YouGov survey conducted yesterday shows that half the country (50%) would support calling a general election – more than twice the number who oppose (23%).

All voting groups are in favour of an election. While Conservative voters express the highest levels of support (62% vs 24% opposed), Labour voters are also much more likely to prefer an election than not (48% vs 25%).

Of course, some voters want an election before Brexit, and some afterwards. But the largely Labour/LibDem Revokers don’t want Brexit at all, and most Labour MPs don’t want an election at all.

The House of Commons, its major Parties and its Speaker are, in that sense, completely out of kilter with the British People.

FACT:  Seven days ago, a large-scale survey found that 54% of British voters think the 2016 referendum result should be honoured. 54% vs 46% is not a slim majority.

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The US Federal Reserve (which awarded itself the title but is not a government agency at all) is engaging in double gobbledyspeak to pretend that money it is pumping into the frighteningly illiquid New York banking community is merely a temporary glitch affecting just one small part of the US financial system.

New York City contains both Wall Street and Madison Avenue. The slush fund being pumped into assuaging the nerves of US lenders is QE that refuses to speak its name. New York is the vital core at the heart of American finance and multinational business. The problems it is facing are a futher symptom of the US Fed getting it hopelessy wrong on the fantasy of “economic recovery”.

Over last weekend, the New York Fed tried to alter reality – indeed, censor it – by removing all those pages from its website illustrating the hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money it has been giving to Wall Street securities firms since mid September.

The pages were restored late Monday, but put an entirely different spin on things.

Spin is not reality.

FACT: The multivariate US debt problem is five times more acute than it was in 2008, because all the regulatory reforms suggested after that global crisis were watered down or ignored by the banking community.

Elizabeth Warren’s standing in the Presidential election polls is going from strength to strength. You can sort of see why.

UK Chancellor Sajid Javid would have you believe he can spend his way out of what’s heading our way. He can’t. Only a more balanced economy can do that.

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Finally, it is time to finally lay to rest the myth that the 2016 Betty Chihuahua referendum was, in accepted British terms, a very close result.

In fact, it’s absolute validity is based on several factors.

• At 72% turnout, it was the most inclusive poll for many years, and by far the biggest referendum in UK history
• The Prime Minister of the day David Cameron made it crystal clear that the result was mandatory, not advisory….and over 80% of Westminster MPs supported that view
• The outcome was that 1.3 million more Britons voted to Leave than voted to Remain in the European Union. That is the equivalent of everyone living in Birmingham and Glasgow combined.
• But it’s when you use the FPTP constituency system so beloved of the 18th century Tories and 19th century Marxists that the full nature of the scale of the victory becomes clear. After all, surely what applies for regular general elections should also apply to once-in-a-lifetime hahaha referendums? Nearly two thirds of all Labour-held constituencies voted to leave. Nearly three quarters of all Conservative-held seats voted to leave. Three times more UK regions voted to leave rather than remain.
• Spookily, just under three-quarters of all MPs voted to Remain. Just fancy that. Here are the numbers that prove it:

A clear majority of Scottish electors voted to Remain. But then, Scotland represents only 8.4% of the UK population, and a majority of Scots want to stay in the UK. The seats Scotland has in the UK Parliament are 9.6% of the total, and of course they have their own Parliament with devolved powers as well.

FACT: Britain has a Leave electorate, and a Remain Parliament. Parliament continues to use every wheeze at its disposal to revoke the People’s decision to leave. The SNP is using the 6% of Scottish Brits who voted Remain to wield power over the Government. That is most emphatically not majority-rule democracy.

As I have pointed out before, the whingeng SNP bombast Ian Blackford is full of it.

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Postscript: I came across an online ad last night about why French internet speeds are so low. OK, it was selling a product (at $49.99) to overcome the problem, but it sounded like good value to me. So I pressed the link to the buying point. This is what I found:

Down Slog, bad Slog….naughty Slog.

Now ‘Bad Request’ started out life as a corrupted file notification, and/or the server couldn’t understand it. But it ain’t necessarily so – and as myriad search engine forums suggest, ‘400 Bad Request’ in the European Union has become “we don’t like American products blowing the gaff on our scams”.

The scam here in France is that the telcoms lowlife flog you a weak router that slows down the speed. When you complain about it, they offer to upgrade you to a more powerful model. Thus meaning you bought two routers, when one would’ve sufficed. Neoliberal EU business, eh, doncha love it?