“As you can see with the stock markets over the recent days, they are susceptible to increased interest rates and potential threat of additional hikes. While we understand central banks policies to increase rates to allow them room to drop rates if the markets go into a recession; could this policy actually trigger a recession? I thought this article would help explain that central banks need to be cautious about hikes affecting world markets.”  Craig Burrows, CEO TriView Capital Ltd.

Generally speaking, there were two responses on Bay Street to the new North American free-trade agreement: “All that, for that?!” and “Get ready for higher interest rates!”

The Financial Post’s Geoff Zochodne did a sweep of the big banks’ economists on Oct. 1 and found that the received wisdom now is that the Bank of Canada will … Click for full article

“As you can see with the stock markets over the recent days, they are susceptible to increased interest rates and potential threat of additional hikes. While we understand central banks policies to increase rates to allow them room to drop rates if the markets go into a recession; could this policy actually trigger a recession? I thought this article would help explain that central banks need to be cautious about hikes affecting world markets.”  Craig Burrows, CEO TriView Capital Ltd.

Generally speaking, there were two responses on Bay Street to the new North American free-trade agreement: “All that, for that?!” and “Get ready for higher interest rates!”

The Financial Post’s Geoff Zochodne did a sweep of the big banks’ economists on Oct. 1 and found that the received wisdom now is that the Bank of Canada will … Click for full article

Hoax academic papers expose the intellectual malware in our universities

Rosa Klebb is back — as a hacker. In April the heirs of 007’s foe attempted to hack the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague, after it had exposed Moscow’s use of chemical weapons in an attempted assassination. The Russians also tried to get into the email accounts of anti-doping organisations.

Meanwhile, the Chinese have slipped microchips into the motherboards of servers used by the Pentagon, the CIA and the US navy — not to mention dozens of companies. The servers were made by Supermicro of San Jose, California, and sold by Elemental, based in Portland, Oregon. But the pin-sized chips were inserted by agents of the People’s Liberation Army embedded with manufacturing subcontractors in China. A probe by Amazon identified the chips, which created a stealth doorway into any network connected to the Supermicro servers.

In other news, Facebook announced last month that it had suffered yet another massive hack, affecting at least 50m users. It raises the possibility that Facebook Connect — the tool that allows users to log in to other sites via Facebook — has been compromised. The attackers have yet to be identified.

Yes, my fellow netizens (or “data cows”, as you are known to the folk who milk you for your personal information, contacts list and browsing history): cyber-war is here and we are all under attack, even if most of us don’t yet know it.

Yet none of the above was the biggest hack revealed last week. Raise a glass to my new heroes, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. In an article published on Tuesday, Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship, the trio revealed that they had pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of academia.

In the space of 10 months they dashed off 20 spoof articles and submitted them to established journals in the fields of cultural studies, identity studies and critical theory. As Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian say, their papers were all “outlandish or intentionally broken in significant ways”. Each contained “some little bit of lunacy or depravity”. The hack was devastating in its success. No fewer than seven of their articles were accepted for publication and four were actually published before the hoaxers were rumbled (by the Twitter account Real Peer Review and The Wall Street Journal).

It’s hard to choose a favourite. But let’s start with “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon”, published under the fake name Helen Wilson in Gender, Place & Culture, “a journal of feminist geography” owned by Taylor & Francis, an illustrious British brand.

The abstract gives a flavour of the authors’ genius: “This article addresses questions in . . . the geographies of sexuality by drawing upon one year of embedded in situ observations of dogs and their human companions at three public dog parks in Portland, Oregon. The purpose of this research is to uncover emerging themes in human and canine interactive behavioral patterns in urban dog parks to better understand human a-/moral decision-making in public spaces and uncover bias and emergent assumptions around gender, race, and sexuality.”

“Dr Wilson” posed three questions, each of them ludicrous:

■ How do human companions manage, contribute and respond to violence in dogs?

■ What issues surround queer performativity and human reaction to homosexual sex between and among dogs?

■ Do dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?

The goal of the article was to “suggest practical applications that disrupts [sic] hegemonic masculinities”. But the authors’ implicit proposal was “to train men like we do dogs — to prevent rape culture”. This drivel was praised to the skies by academic peer reviewers (“a wonderful paper — incredibly innovative, rich in analysis and extremely well-written”) and recognised by the editors as one of the 12 best articles in their journal’s 25-year history.

Another article, published in Fat Studies (“an interdisciplinary journal of body weight and society”, also a Taylor & Francis title), was “Who are they to judge? Overcoming anthropometry through fat bodybuilding”. This Swiftian piece proposed “a new classification within bodybuilding, termed fat bodybuilding, as a fat-inclusive politicised performance and a new culture to be embedded within bodybuilding”.

Avid readers of Sex Roles (a Springer journal) were treated to “An ethnography of breastaurant masculinity: themes of objectification, sexual conquest, male control, and masculine toughness in a sexually objectifying restaurant”.

The journal of feminist philosophy Hypatia (Wiley) asked the fictional Dr Maria Gonzalez of the equally fictional Feminist Activist Collective for Truth (FACT) to resubmit a paper arguing that white males in college should not be allowed to speak in class, but should instead be made to sit in the floor in chains to “experience reparations”.

Sexuality & Culture (Springer) published “Going in through the back door: challenging straight male homohysteria and transphobia through receptive penetrative sex toy use”.

Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian are not professional pranksters. Pluckrose is a scholar of English literature. Lindsay is a mathematician. Boghossian is an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. Nor are they conservatives; they are self-proclaimed “left-leaning liberals”, which makes their verdict on the whole field of what they call “grievance studies” all the more damning. The fact that they were able to get “seven shoddy, absurd, unethical and politically biased papers into respectable journals” suggests to them that “these fields of study do not continue the important and noble liberal work of the civil rights movements; they corrupt it while . . . pushing a kind of social snake oil”.

The hoax articles are, of course, very funny. Much less funny are the non-phoney articles published alongside them. Much less funny are the affiliations of the editors of these journals. For example, two of the three editors of Gender, Place & Culture hold positions at UK universities. Both have had their research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Yes, cyber-warfare is scary. But I have long believed that our most dangerous enemies are within. The monstrous regiment of grievance studies has established bases in nearly all the universities of the western world, not merely tolerated by administrators, but enthusiastically funded by governments and credulous donors. Now that’s what I call a successful hack.

The friends of the closed society are also hard at work. The rubbish they publish is the counterpart of the rubbish they teach, and the people they teach then graduate with rubbish degrees and live among us.

You could see some of them in Washington last week, carrying signs saying “We believe all survivors” and “Respect female existence or expect our resistance” and making believe that they were the heirs of Rosa Parks — as opposed to unwitting allies of the other Rosa’s hacker heirs.

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford

Hoax academic papers expose the intellectual malware in our universities

Rosa Klebb is back — as a hacker. In April the heirs of 007’s foe attempted to hack the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague, after it had exposed Moscow’s use of chemical weapons in an attempted assassination. The Russians also tried to get into the email accounts of anti-doping organisations.

Meanwhile, the Chinese have slipped microchips into the motherboards of servers used by the Pentagon, the CIA and the US navy — not to mention dozens of companies. The servers were made by Supermicro of San Jose, California, and sold by Elemental, based in Portland, Oregon. But the pin-sized chips were inserted by agents of the People’s Liberation Army embedded with manufacturing subcontractors in China. A probe by Amazon identified the chips, which created a stealth doorway into any network connected to the Supermicro servers.

In other news, Facebook announced last month that it had suffered yet another massive hack, affecting at least 50m users. It raises the possibility that Facebook Connect — the tool that allows users to log in to other sites via Facebook — has been compromised. The attackers have yet to be identified.

Yes, my fellow netizens (or “data cows”, as you are known to the folk who milk you for your personal information, contacts list and browsing history): cyber-war is here and we are all under attack, even if most of us don’t yet know it.

Yet none of the above was the biggest hack revealed last week. Raise a glass to my new heroes, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. In an article published on Tuesday, Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship, the trio revealed that they had pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of academia.

In the space of 10 months they dashed off 20 spoof articles and submitted them to established journals in the fields of cultural studies, identity studies and critical theory. As Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian say, their papers were all “outlandish or intentionally broken in significant ways”. Each contained “some little bit of lunacy or depravity”. The hack was devastating in its success. No fewer than seven of their articles were accepted for publication and four were actually published before the hoaxers were rumbled (by the Twitter account Real Peer Review and The Wall Street Journal).

It’s hard to choose a favourite. But let’s start with “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon”, published under the fake name Helen Wilson in Gender, Place & Culture, “a journal of feminist geography” owned by Taylor & Francis, an illustrious British brand.

The abstract gives a flavour of the authors’ genius: “This article addresses questions in . . . the geographies of sexuality by drawing upon one year of embedded in situ observations of dogs and their human companions at three public dog parks in Portland, Oregon. The purpose of this research is to uncover emerging themes in human and canine interactive behavioral patterns in urban dog parks to better understand human a-/moral decision-making in public spaces and uncover bias and emergent assumptions around gender, race, and sexuality.”

“Dr Wilson” posed three questions, each of them ludicrous:

■ How do human companions manage, contribute and respond to violence in dogs?

■ What issues surround queer performativity and human reaction to homosexual sex between and among dogs?

■ Do dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?

The goal of the article was to “suggest practical applications that disrupts [sic] hegemonic masculinities”. But the authors’ implicit proposal was “to train men like we do dogs — to prevent rape culture”. This drivel was praised to the skies by academic peer reviewers (“a wonderful paper — incredibly innovative, rich in analysis and extremely well-written”) and recognised by the editors as one of the 12 best articles in their journal’s 25-year history.

Another article, published in Fat Studies (“an interdisciplinary journal of body weight and society”, also a Taylor & Francis title), was “Who are they to judge? Overcoming anthropometry through fat bodybuilding”. This Swiftian piece proposed “a new classification within bodybuilding, termed fat bodybuilding, as a fat-inclusive politicised performance and a new culture to be embedded within bodybuilding”.

Avid readers of Sex Roles (a Springer journal) were treated to “An ethnography of breastaurant masculinity: themes of objectification, sexual conquest, male control, and masculine toughness in a sexually objectifying restaurant”.

The journal of feminist philosophy Hypatia (Wiley) asked the fictional Dr Maria Gonzalez of the equally fictional Feminist Activist Collective for Truth (FACT) to resubmit a paper arguing that white males in college should not be allowed to speak in class, but should instead be made to sit in the floor in chains to “experience reparations”.

Sexuality & Culture (Springer) published “Going in through the back door: challenging straight male homohysteria and transphobia through receptive penetrative sex toy use”.

Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian are not professional pranksters. Pluckrose is a scholar of English literature. Lindsay is a mathematician. Boghossian is an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. Nor are they conservatives; they are self-proclaimed “left-leaning liberals”, which makes their verdict on the whole field of what they call “grievance studies” all the more damning. The fact that they were able to get “seven shoddy, absurd, unethical and politically biased papers into respectable journals” suggests to them that “these fields of study do not continue the important and noble liberal work of the civil rights movements; they corrupt it while . . . pushing a kind of social snake oil”.

The hoax articles are, of course, very funny. Much less funny are the non-phoney articles published alongside them. Much less funny are the affiliations of the editors of these journals. For example, two of the three editors of Gender, Place & Culture hold positions at UK universities. Both have had their research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Yes, cyber-warfare is scary. But I have long believed that our most dangerous enemies are within. The monstrous regiment of grievance studies has established bases in nearly all the universities of the western world, not merely tolerated by administrators, but enthusiastically funded by governments and credulous donors. Now that’s what I call a successful hack.

The friends of the closed society are also hard at work. The rubbish they publish is the counterpart of the rubbish they teach, and the people they teach then graduate with rubbish degrees and live among us.

You could see some of them in Washington last week, carrying signs saying “We believe all survivors” and “Respect female existence or expect our resistance” and making believe that they were the heirs of Rosa Parks — as opposed to unwitting allies of the other Rosa’s hacker heirs.

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford

I’m quite concerned about government tax policies that promote the idea that 1% of the population should be able to subsidize the remaining 99%. No wonder governments have seen dramatic drops in revenue from personal income, their strategy hurts the small business owner and the overall economy. As I have said in the past, the 1% notion is absurd. There are approximately 270,000 Canadians who would qualify for that category (StatsCan “High-income trends among Canadian tax filers, 2015”). Imagine the city of Saskatoon subsidizing the rest of the country. The math and the premise simply don’t add up.

“What do we get for our PM’s Robin Hood philosophy? You get government that wants to tax you more, make it difficult to run a business and create policies that choke our economy. What the Libs and the Dippers fail to understand is that poor economic policies do not help poor people.”

So who are the 1% when it comes to income?

They are the people who earn more than $250,000 per year. It sounds like a lot but when most of these people are professionals or small business owners, they usually don’t qualify for EI, have no gold-plated pensions and work a lifetime to hopefully sell their business to use as their pension when they retire. If the government takes $125,000 for income tax, the $125,000 left over isn’t much to live on and create a nest egg to retire based on the risk. To add insult to injury, your spouse can no longer draw a dividend from the business as it is more punitive than taking income by using a T4. Another negative consequence is if you have been using dividends for your family and now begin to use T4 for income, they will receive less payment in retirement from CPP due to their lack of T4 income because you legally paid dividends throughout that time.

Unfortunately, they don’t stop at the 1%, they are now after the 5% which are people who earn more than $150,000 per year in income. This group gets taxed at 40% or more in most provinces. What do we get for our PM’s Robin Hood philosophy? You get government that wants to tax you more, make it difficult to run a business and create policies that choke our economy. What they fail to understand is that poor economic policies do not help poor people.

How can you mitigate the Robin Hood philosophy?

At TriView Capital Ltd., we believe people must pay their fair share of tax and we feel that we can help the Top 5% or any taxpayer that feels they pay too much. Over the next 8 months, we will show you valuable ways to save money through some interesting tax strategies that you may not be aware of. Here are three strategies that we will discuss between now and the end of the year:
1. Maximizing your registered funds
2. Investing in opportunities that provide capital gains or return of capital rather than highly taxed interest payment investments
3. Investing in opportunities that provide access to provincial and federal tax credits

If you live in Alberta or BC, the government has created tax incentive plans to help create diversified economies by allowing residents to invest in their own economy. We will be holding city road shows in mid-November in Victoria, Vancouver and Calgary and we will make sure that MoneyTalk listeners and subscribers will have the chance to learn more about these tax effective strategies. If you are a small business owner or someone in the Top 5% of income earners ($150,000 or more), you’ll want to attend these events and make sure you bring your accountant!

Best regards,

Craig Burrows

President & CEO, Tri View Capital Ltd.

www.triviewcapital.com