Notes from the edge of civilization: Apr. 28, 2024
No one wants EVs, but governments keep subsidizing them; Canada's economy is being zombified; Education — higher and otherwise — is still woke, but not awake; and, cursive as cure.
Last week Ford announced its electric vehicle (EV) division, known as Model e, lost $1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2024. That translates to a loss of $132,000 per vehicle for the 10,000 units the company managed to sell. Ford anticipates the losses will continue to mount for the rest of the year, with a projected annual loss of $5 billion.
The world’s largest EV maker, Tesla, is also hemorrhaging profits. The company’s adjusted earnings for the first quarter fell by 48%, underperforming even the lowered expectations set by most Wall Street analysts.
But governments are still pouring in massive amounts of taxpayer dollars to subsidize a product that consumers don’t want to buy.
On Thursday, Canada announced a $5 billion corporate welfare package for Honda to build an EV battery plant and manufacture EVs in Ontario. When Justin Trudeau released a video about the new deal on X over the weekend, the comments were not kind:
DeTocqueville14: You bribing Honda with money stolen from taxpayers isn't them betting on you.
govt_corrupt: Justin Trudeau bribes Honda. Buys 1k jobs for $5B and bets on an industry with declining sales and rising inventories. Govt 'investing' at its finest...
jpkiekens: 5 million $ per job subsidy for an industry plagued with a huge oversupply of vehicles and with insufficient electric energy supply in most provinces. Bravo. It’s genuine theatre. But a very bad play.
“In Canada we’re giving about $10 billion every year to corporations,” Maxime Bernier told us in our latest episode of the Collapse Life podcast. He also pointed out that the country’s deficit for FY2024 is projected to be $40 billion CDN. (For comparison, Canada’s population isn’t quite 40 million people). The leader of the People’s Party of Canada is fed up with crony capitalism and wants to see a return to free markets, where taxpayer dollars are no longer used to prop up corporations that would otherwise be headed for bankruptcy. Watch the whole interview and let us know your thoughts:
The last time Max Bernier joined us on Collapse Life, he and host, Zahra Sethna, talked about how woke ideology has taken over society and seemingly displaced common sense. Things have only gotten worse since then, and nothing demonstrates that better than an exposé this week in the Washington Free Beacon, showcasing the material in a required course for first-year medical students at UCLA:
Here are the objectives for the course, entitled Structural Racism and Health Equity:
Understand the concepts of race/racism, power, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism and their manifestations in the history of medical thought, education, practice, and research and shaping the healthcare system overall.
Understand the impact both structural and social determinants have on the health of marginalized communities.
Learn about the concept of structural competency and demonstrate proficiency in applying a structural analysis lens to patient care.
The Free Beacon spoke with prominent physicians to get their take.
Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, said the curriculum "promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation."
UCLA "has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate," said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. "As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking."
Professor Nicholas Christakis of Yale University, an academic who also spent many years providing medical care to underserved communities in Chicago, told the Free Beacon the curriculum was "nonsensical."
The relationship between health and social forces "should indeed be taught at medical school," Christakis wrote in an email, "but to have a mandatory course like this—so tendentious, sloganeering, incurious, and nonsensical—strikes me as embarrassing to UCLA."
This ‘indoctrination parading as education’ starts the minute a child enters formal education, an idea we explored further in an article earlier this week in Collapse Life.
First-graders are being taught about white supremacy during math lessons focused on “our government’s legacy of commemorating, almost exclusively, white men” on our currency’s bills and coins. In an attempt to equalize math outcomes in Pittsburgh, the city spent $50,000 on workshops to “center” the learning needs of students of Color, disrupt “oppressive practices in STEM instruction,” and help students reclaim “their ancestral genius.”
In the name of ‘social justice,’ we are putting a final nail in the coffin of independent thought, while imperiling everything from a person’s chances of career success to the health of our democratic institutions.
If you’re a parent, please be sure to investigate your children’s curricula and find out what is being taught and how. If you don’t have kids or yours are already grown, be sure to share this information with other people who may be interested. When parents speak up in defense of their children, change is possible.
Just a tiny — but significant example — from Oklahoma this week: a bill requiring all public and charter schools to teach handwriting to third, fourth, and fifth graders was signed into law.
One parent, Ebony Ewing, told local news station KOTV that said she wants her daughter to be able to read documents like the Constitution of the United States, which is written in cursive handwriting.
"They would need to know that and know how to read it, and I'm sure lots more documents and diaries that they may need to know how to read someday for research and things like that," said Ewing.
Another mom, Crystal Carter, loves history and told reporters it was important for her daughter to learn cursive so she can love history too.
"These are the things that are written in history. And this is what it looked like originally. And this is what it meant. Reading it in its original context and being able to decipher, 'How can I be a better citizen now based on what these particular documents said and my personal beliefs?'"
We’re so grateful for parents like these!
Thanks Z + S for these articles and videos shining the light on the dire situation in Canada. We are losing our democracy, freedom of speech, our wealth and our health. Oddly only a tiny percentage of people I know are aware of the depth of malfeasance and treachery at the highest levels. Maxime tells it like it is, but few are listening. There is a huge taboo in our society to talk about things like the horrible injections, all the deadly effects, the failure of healthcare policy etc. However there's a definite feeling that something is very wrong starting to leak out on alternate and even some mainstream media. Maybe so many people who took the shot can't face the mental anguish in realizing that their lives, and all future generations are in peril. As the evidence mounts and the true scope of the situation comes to light, many will be forced into denial and will choose, perhaps unconsciously, to be willfully blind. So the carnage continues for now, and will continue I suppose, until the collapse comes calling.