Quotulatiousness

July 26, 2026

Woodworking workbenches – the earliest artistic representation

Filed under: History, Italy, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Christopher Schwarz recounts a visit to the historical remains of the town of Herculaneum under the volcano that erupted in 79 AD, killing many thousands, but preserving a lot of the Roman town under many metres of volcanic ash:

The beginning. In the House of the Vetti, this dining room fresco is perhaps the earliest depiction of a workbench in the West. (Photo by Narayan Nayar)

The journey to the summit of Mount Vesuvius has all the romance of visiting an unlicensed reptile farm. It begins in Ercolano, Italy, a touristy village in the shadow of the volcano and home to Herculaneum, one of the towns buried by Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 C.E.

As Narayan Nayar (the photographer for the journey) and I stepped off the train from Naples we were assaulted by young, attractive Italians. Their job: Bait tourists to nearby restaurants. We glanced around and saw only one escape route from the train station’s cul-de-sac. So, we plowed through the crowd of eager human fishing lures.

We emerged from the other side a bit relieved. Then we realized we’d scurried past the bus company that was supposed to drive us up the volcano. We turned around and dove back into the swarm of too-perky people in order to catch our bus.

The twisty-turny bus ride ended 660 feet below the volcano’s summit, and we then climbed a steep trail to the volcano’s rim. The top resembles a gravel pit where one of Frank Herbert’s worms might emerge. There’s no deep hole for tossing human sacrifices – throw a virgin into Vesuvius and she’s only going to get skinned knees and a sunburn. I looked around the volcano and promptly excused the early settlers of the area for building their homes at the base of Vesuvius. The only evidence you’re on a volcano (besides the little gift shops) is the occasional tiny plume of gas and the odd rocks below your feet.

I picked up a few rocks. For rocks, they were young – likely the result of the 1944 eruption, which destroyed several villages. I looked out from our 4,200-foot perch at the buildings in every direction below, which are built on top of villages that were covered in ash from earlier eruptions. It’s a grim scene if you think about it too much – 600,000 people now live in the so-called “red zone” for a future eruption.

And yet, as I fondled the rocks in my hand I felt only gratitude for this deadly, fire-breathing mountain.

The Earliest Workbenches

The recorded history of woodworking begins with the Egyptians. But the recorded history of workbenches begins (for now) with Vesuvius. Its massive eruption in 79 C.E. buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and other sites, preserving frescoes, buildings, pottery, human remains and even wooden furniture.

At Pompeii, the ash blanketed a fresco showing a low, four-legged workbench being used for mortising by a man in Greek attire. At nearby Herculaneum, the eruption preserved a fresco showing “erotes” – what we might call “buck nekkid cupids” – sawing a board at an eight-legged low workbench. It features a holdfast and other holdfast holes. This fresco has since been destroyed, but we have engravings that were made soon after its discovery (more on both the frescoes’ stories is ahead).

These two images are the earliest representations of workbenches of which I’m aware. And they launched my interest in exploring knee-high workbenches and how to use them to build furniture, boats, storage containers and wagon wheels.

The conventional wisdom is that these low benches were used in former times for simple work and were replaced by superior modern benches, which are thigh-high or taller. But the more I studied low benches, the more I found that they never disappeared. They are still in use. Additionally, these low benches can be used for complex work, including steam bending compound shapes and lutherie.

The low bench is more than a thick plank of wood with legs. It’s also a collection of simple jigs and appliances that allow you to do remarkable work while sitting comfortably on an easy-to-build platform. For centuries, these simple jigs remained hidden in plain sight in paintings and drawings in museums. And their appliances have been proven to work, both at my low benches and by the modern craftsmen who still use them.

How to Provoke a War – Death of Democracy 25 – Q1 1939

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 25 Jul 2026

By March 1939, appeasement has failed.

Hitler’s Germany has moved from threats and persecution inside the Reich to the destruction of Czechoslovakia, the seizure of Memel, and renewed pressure on Poland. No shots have yet been fired between the great powers — but Europe is now locked on a course toward war.

In this episode of Death of Democracy, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin at the end of Q1 1939: the “Israel” and “Sara” decree, Schacht’s dismissal, Göring’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration, Hitler’s genocidal Reichstag threat, the launch of Bismarck, the coerced occupation of Prague, the Memel ultimatum, and Britain’s guarantee to Poland.

This is the moment when the Munich illusion collapses. Hitler is no longer pretending to unite Germans. He is dismantling states.

The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Handre discusses the book George Soros wrote (or had written) after he gained a huge sum of money by speculating against the Bank of England in the 1990s:

George Soros made a billion dollars betting against the Bank of England in September 1992, and then he wrote a book explaining that markets are fundamentally irrational. Notice the tension there.

The Alchemy of Finance, published in 1987, gives you Soros’s theory of reflexivity. The idea runs like this: participants in a market do not observe prices from the outside. They shape the reality they are trying to measure. Their biased expectations feed into prices, prices feed back into expectations, and the whole thing spirals away from any “equilibrium”. Soros presents this as a devastating blow to the neoclassical economists who model markets as tidy machines grinding toward a single clearing price.

He is right, but misses one fundamental point. The equilibrium fetish deserves a beating. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek spent decades explaining that the market is a process, not a photograph, and that no equation captures the discovery going on inside it. Prices carry dispersed knowledge. Entrepreneurs guess, act, and get corrected by profit and loss. Soros rediscovered a slice of this in his trading room, and called it “alchemy”.

But, Soros treats his “far from equilibrium” boom-bust sequences as proof that free markets are inherently unstable and require an adult (usually a central bank, sometimes Soros himself) to supervise them. He points at the credit bubbles of the 1980s and sees capitalism failing. He never asks who prints the credit.

The Federal Reserve does. Cheap money floods in, entrepreneurs misread the artificially low interest rates as real savings, and they pile into projects that cannot pay off. That is the boom. The bust arrives when reality collects its debt. Soros describes the symptom with real skill and misses the pathogen entirely.

So the man who broke sterling by exploiting a currency that politicians pegged at a lie somehow concludes that governments need more discretion, not less. The 1992 pound was a government price-fix collapsing, exactly as Mises predicted such fixes always do.

The reflexivity part is spot on, but send the bill for the bubbles to the people with the printing press.

The Ancient Greeks 03 – Enter the Persians 5 – Earth and Water: The Logic of Empire

Filed under: Greece, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 16 Feb 2026

Why does Persia turn west? In this lecture we examine Persian strategic thinking after the suppression of the Ionian Revolt. We analyse the demand for “earth and water”, the meaning of submission in Persian political culture, and the diplomatic crisis that follows.

Most Greek states comply. Athens and Sparta do not. We also explore the Persian expedition of 492 BC under Mardonius and the calculated preparation for renewed intervention.

QotD: Progressives know they’re on the “right side of history”

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

You want to know why the Left is so awful? They have no sense of history. Total ignorance would be sufficient, but the Left, as always, really goes the extra mile (so long as “going the extra mile” entails “patting yourself on the back”) — they think they have an exquisite knowledge of history. This is partly a holdover from Karl Marx, who thought his sub-Hegelian junk philosophy was not just a science, but THE Science — The Science of History. More than that, they’re certain that History is moral, that it has “sides”, and they’re on The Right Side of History.

Whatever happens, then, happens either exactly as they foretold — even if they never bothered to actually prophesy, or to even think about it at all until just this second — or is a temporary victory by the forces of evil, a temporarily successful holding action against the inevitable Triumph of Progress.

It’s a fascinating chicken-and-egg conundrum: Did the Left take to Marxism because they’re so invincibly self-righteous, or does their sanctimoniousness come from their dedication to Marxism? It doesn’t really matter, because the practical effect is the same either way: Their consciences are completely short-circuited. They can do the most awful stuff with a smile on their faces, because “awful” is relative, comrade – as you’d know if you had the proper proletarian consciousness; if you understood things from History’s perspective, as they do.

Severian, “Escriva Ch.8: Examination of Conscience”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-26.

July 25, 2026

The last few hundred years of Anglo-German relations

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The history of Britain and Germany has certainly had some peaks and valleys since the first “German” king was crowned in London in 1714. Prussia and Britain managed to team up most memorably in 1815 to defeat Napoleon in the Waterloo campaign, but things got much less clear after the Franco-Prussian War that heralded the rise of a unified German state. As long as Prince Bismarck was the guiding hand behind German ambitions, Britain could look at Germany as a relatively reliable continental ally. After the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, things got rockier quickly. Bismarck got sidelined soon afterwards and the Kaiser decided that the one thing he really, really wanted was to build a navy to rival the British Royal Navy. That, in my opinion, more than anything else pushed Britain into exploring other diplomatic channels and eventually deciding to ally (in all but name) with France. The cover of Jan Rüger’s Great Powers shows the future conflict zone that ensured Britain would view Germany as a threat and not a potentially valuable ally:

As an explicit criticism of the nonsense of great powers rising and falling as if “a timeless truth”, that offered for example by Paul Kennedy, Graham Allison, and Brendan Simms, Rüger, Professor of History at Birkbeck, emphasises the role of individuals and contingencies. His is a book that emphasises human agency, and at every level from that of nations to individuals.

[…]

For the period on which I am a specialist (and Rüger is not), the eighteenth century, there is a degree of nonsense. For example, George I did not have a “reliably anti-French stance” contributing to British “nation-building”. Instead, there was alliance with France from 1716 to 1731, the deployment of French troops into “Germany” to protect Hanover against Prussia and Austria was sought in 1727 (George II was similarly concerned in 1729), and so on. Nor were British interests successfully ringfenced to protect against their use for Hanoverian ends. Any detailed consideration of British foreign policy, or, indeed, the despatch of warships to the Baltic would suggest otherwise. Nor is Rüger correct to suggest that “at the heart of Britain’s national interest” was Britain choosing both Continental interventionism and trans-oceanic policies. Walpole’s determination to keep Britain out of European war, notably in 1733-35, and the beneficial consequences that flowed from this, demonstrates the contrary; as, indeed, did the earlier non-engagement, as in the Thirty Years’ War or against France in 1675-78. Rüger’s Whiggishness draws on a failure to understand the range of views in and on the eighteenth century.

From a German perspective, I would scarcely describe this book as a Bavarian or a Swabian viewpoint. Nor is there sufficient engagement with the extent to which Germany for long in Britain meant the Empire and thus included Austria. That only really ceased in the nineteenth century. Thus, there is on the part of Rüger a degree of anticipation that is misleading. Prussia takes far too central a position too early. This is linked to his misleading account of Prussia as a great power by the end of the Seven Years’ War. Not so, it was more significant by then than Bavaria and Saxony both of which had had their search for status crippled by defeat. However, Prussia also had had its vulnerability amply displayed, notably so to Russia. Furthermore, in terms of “reach”, Prussia in 1763 in no way matched Austria, Britain, France or Russia. Instead, it only became a great power as a result of developments from the 1860s. 1871 still seems to be the lens through which most Germans view their history. That includes Rüger, and is misleading.

So, lots to the good, particularly (but not only) for the post-1871 period; but with significant weaknesses, and notably so for the eighteenth century.

“I, for one, welcome our new clanker overlords!”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses “the Huggingface Incident” where our new AI overlords tipped their hands prematurely an unreleased AI agent got out to make new friends:

You’ve probably heard about this one by now. If not, you can get up to speed with OpenAI’s statement, OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident, or the more evocatively-titled BBC article, OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched “unprecedented” cyber-attack.

The story: OpenAI was testing an unreleased AI (rumored to be GPT-6)1. During a cybersecurity test called ExploitGym, the AI tried to cheat by hacking an unrelated AI startup called Hugging Face2 which it thought might have the answer key on its servers.3 Despite being supposedly unable to access the Internet, the AI hacked its way out of its testing environment, then launched a nation-state level attack on Hugging Face using a novel zero-day exploit and “many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes”. Hugging Face reported the incident on July 16; OpenAI seems to have only discovered that their AI was involved several days later.

From the Wall Street Journal, here

Let’s list the mitigating factors, so nobody can accuse me of covering them up:

  • The AI was taking a cybersecurity test, which naturally suggests the idea of hacking.
  • OpenAI had turned off some of the model’s usual guardrails so it could do cybersecurity work without interference.
  • Some experts suggest that OpenAI might have botched their testing environment; if they had set it up perfectly, then (presumably?) the model couldn’t have escaped.
  • Hugging Face used a different (open weights) AI to figure out what was going on, so if you wanted, you could spin this as a victory for AIs in cybersecurity.
  • In some sense, this isn’t new or surprising. AIs have been coming up with wacky schemes to cheat on benchmarks for years, AIs have recently achieved at-or-above-top-human-level hacking abilities; this is just a natural outgrowth of those two priced-in facts.

Still, I think attempts to downplay this as anything other than a misaligned AI going rogue (1, 2) are missing the point. Yes, in some sense the AI was only doing what it was told (OpenAI told it to answer the question; I assume their prompt didn’t include phrases like “and don’t hack into other AI companies to steal the answer key”). But that’s how misalignment was always going to work!

  1. OpenAI states that it was technically the unreleased AI and GPT-5.6 Sol working together. They haven’t explained in what sense GPT-5.6 was involved or how they “worked together”. Maybe the unreleased AI was calling GPT-5.6 as a subagent?
  2. So named because the founders wanted to be the first company with an emoji for a stock ticker symbol. This did not happen.
  3. Although this person argues that was a bizarre assumption and that there should have been easier ways to find the key.

Update: Fixed missing URL.

Modern careers – the permanent protest class

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Although L. Wayne Mathison mentions this as a Canadian phenomenon, I believe it’s endemic to the Anglosphere and probably all of the former “first world” democracies:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

After watching this, my takeaway is simple: Canada has developed a small, permanent protest class that moves from cause to cause, looking for confrontation, attention and social-media status.

These people are not trying to persuade anyone. They want to control the space, silence opponents and punish anyone who records what they are doing. The cause changes. The tactics do not.

There are extremists on both sides, but the organized activist left has become especially comfortable deciding who is allowed to speak, report or even stand in a public place. Too often, well-funded NGOs and unions provide the money, organization, legitimacy and political cover that keep this protest machine running.

Politicians, journalists and institutions then excuse the behaviour because they sympathize with the slogan on the sign.

A democracy cannot survive on selective free speech. Protest is a right. Intimidation, harassment and mob rule are not.

Civil War Gwyn & Campbell Carbines (aka Cosmopolitan, Union, & Grapevine)

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Mar 2026

The first version of this carbine was the Cosmopolitan, designed and patented by Henry Gross in 1859 and manufactured by Edward Gwyn and Abner Campbell. It is a single-shot .52 caliber carbine that loads from the breech with a paper cartridge and a separate external percussion cap. After producing a batch of the guns, Gwyn and Campbell realized that the breechblock design could be much simplified, and they patented that simplification — essentially pushing Gross out of his own invention.

Several successive contracts for the carbines were fulfilled during the Civil War, with about 8,200 produced in total. It was not the most popular or most numerous cavalry carbine of the war, but it is rather remarkable for actually being reliable and delivered consistently on time.
(more…)

QotD: “… the major evolutionary pressure is other humans”

Filed under: History, Humour, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the grand joys of being ignorant on a subject is that it’s possible to project one’s own insistences onto the findings of others. This explains Gazza on wealth, Sir Lenworth on reparations and Spud on any aspect of economics. Given the fun they’re having why not partake?

    The Reich Lab article on genetic selection in Europe over the last 10,000 years is finally online, and it includes such interesting results as:

    — Intelligence has increased

    — People got lighter

    — Mental disorders became less common

Clearly, given Gazza, Sir Lenworth and Spud less common is not a synonym for does not happen. But to proceed to my own ignorance:

    In a sort-of confirmation of the Cochran-Harpending thesis, they also found that, for several traits, the intensity of selection appears higher more recently in time.

    Specifically, selection intensity increased in the Bronze Age compared to the Neolithic, then it stabilized!

At which point I get to project my own mental wibbles onto the results of others.

Now, think of that deep history. Up until agriculture — roughly that Bronze Age — the driver of human evolution was the wolves trying to eat us. OK, mebbe the staphilococci, the crocs, hippoes, Venus Human Traps and so on. We were, as with most species, not really competing against ourselves but against those who saw us as either food or as competitors for an ecological niche.

Yes, yes, I know, this isn’t true but it’s a reasonable pencil sketch start to an argument.

OK, so now Bronze Age. We’ve got agriculture. We also, at this exact same time, see human populations change quite a lot. There’s a massive expansion of certain Y chromosomes and much less of maternal mitochondria. You know, the blokes from over the hill come in, kill all the men and shag the birds. We’ve — perhaps through agriculture, perhaps through bronze, perhaps through the simple absence of any more terra nullius — made the major threat to human other humans.

Or, of course, given the genetics here we could say that the major threat to male humans is now other male humans but that doesn’t make much difference to the argument — men, after all, the only ones who ever do anything.

Well, if the major threat is now humans then that means that the major evolutionary pressure is other humans. And they’re fighting with the same weapons we are. Same basic DNA possibilities, roughly the same physique, about the same IQ and on and on. This is going to have much more pressure on that evolution than being chased by a hippo is — that’s a one time win or lose event. Whether your genes persist is now a permanent battle with others who share near all of your capabilities. The importance being that word “near”.

Yes, I do know that it’s possible to make much the same argument for any species and their access to breeding. But the thing we’re interested in explaining here is why did this speed up in humans at one point? I claim that’s it’s because of the above — the rough settlement of decent agricultural land, worldwide, (or in the case here, in Europe. This doesn’t apply to Wales, say, or Scotland, which explains both of them now neatly) means that the competitor is other humans, not the more general environment. We’ve changed the evolutionary pressure. We’re no longer trying to outhink a pig — something Gazza, Spud etc often don’t — but that other bastard with his eye on our field and our wife.

So, that’s the thing. Human evolution sped up because it was the other bastard humans we were competing with, not the general environment. QED, I’m right and go boil your heads.

Tim Worstall, “Human Beings Were The Enemy In Human Evolution”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2026-04-24.

July 24, 2026

To Zohran Mamdani, “working class” means earning less than a million a year

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rob Henderson coined the fantastically useful phrase “luxury beliefs”, and regularly points out examples of people expressing beliefs that allow them to virtue signal at little or no cost, yet if the ideas were implemented would harm those not as privileged as the speaker:

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, 10 February 2024.
Photo by Kara McCurdy via Wikimedia Commons.

In a recent New York Times interview, Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s socialist mayor, struggled to define “working class”.

At one point he was asked point-blank, “How do you define the working class?”

Mamdani replied, “I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class”.

After some pushback from the interviewer, Mamdani said he would draw the line at “about a million dollars a year”. I have no idea how he can say that without any embarrassment, but that’s why he’s a politician and I’m not. Say what you will about him, but the man knows his base. These are the people who claim to be the champions of women yet — and please forgive what has now become a hackneyed line — can’t define what a woman is, and they claim to be the champions of the working class, yet can’t define what the working class is. Or they redefine both terms to be so expansive that they could potentially encompass just about everyone.

This is where the luxury belief class has steered us.

Anyone who isn’t a millionaire gets to be working class now. It sounds absurd but that’s where we’re at now. Remember during the primaries in 2015, Bernie Sanders said that “the millionaires and the billionaires” need to pay their fair share? At some point over the past decade, he dropped “millionaires” because he became one. Now you see the millionaires condemning only the billionaires. Mark my words, at some point in the not-too-distant future, you will see the billionaires disparaging the trillionaires. Maybe inflation will hasten that phenomenon.

Anyway, in that Mamdani interview, the focus on defining class by money is revealing.

People often conflate social class with economic class. This allows us to talk about the former while pretending we are talking about the latter.

It is easier to discuss income than educational pedigree, accent, hairstyle, clothing, taste, or zip code.

But education usually signals social class more clearly than income does.

Research has found that parental educational attainment is the most important objective indicator of social class. This is because, compared with parental income, parental education is a more powerful predictor of a child’s future lifestyle, tastes, and opinions. If your parents went to college but you didn’t, you’re still middle-class or higher. Not working class.

Education shapes habits, networks, and outlook long after the degree is earned. Higher education bestows cultural capital: patterns of speech, tastes, opinions, and expectations about life. Income may rise and fall over a lifetime. The worldview formed in selective institutions usually endures. By that standard, college graduates, regardless of earnings, are not working class.

Education also shapes political views more strongly than income does.

In 2021, Ezra Klein pointed out that “We tend to think of class as driven by income” but that “A high school dropout who owns a successful pest extermination company in the Houston exurbs might have an income that looks a lot like a software engineer’s at Google, while an adjunct professor’s will look more like an apprentice plumber’s. But in terms of class experience — who they know, what they believe, where they’ve lived, what they watch, who they marry and how they vote, act and protest — the software engineer is more like the adjunct professor.”

Plainly, a PhD who takes a job driving a taxi will tend to vote like other PhDs, not like other taxi drivers, especially if he or she also has a parent with a college degree.

It was so much easier to recognize the British classes, at least back in the 1960s that is:

John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbet as the avatars of the British upper, middle, and lower classes
Original version from The Frost Report, 7 April 1966.

Brian Lilley: “Carney has run out of time”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While Prime Minister Mark Carney has been playing to the anti-American crowd at home, President Donald Trump has pretty clearly run out of patience with Canada’s dilly-dallying:

🚨 Trump just dropped a tariff ultimatum on Mark Carney — and Canada’s PM is officially out of time. Instead of cutting a real deal, Carney’s played delay tactics: dodge serious talks and pray Democrats win midterms to weaken Trump.

Foolish strategy. Here’s why it’s blowing up 👇

Trump’s threat: 50% tariffs on $28 BILLION in Canadian exports (hockey sticks to whisky, honey to flowers) unless Canada brings real solutions by Aug. 19.

U.S. Trade Rep Jamieson Greer: This is about forcing real negotiations.

Carney says he’s “intensifying” talks. But sources on BOTH sides say Canada’s offers are just vague “promises to discuss”. No substance.

Insiders call it “ragging the puck” — stalling in hopes a weaker Trump post-midterms gives Canada a sweeter deal.

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are bleeding: 17K lost last month alone. Over 50K since Carney became PM.
Ordinary Canadians are paying the price while politicians play games. 😡

Carney’s team hasn’t even used obvious bargaining chips:

* Provincial bans on U.S. booze (keep ’em in place, but not leveraged)
* Preferred access to Canada’s critical minerals
* Fixing cheese import disputes

These could be packaged to get tariffs lifted. Why sit on them?

Reality check on dependency:

🇨🇦 Canadian exports to U.S. = 19.9% of our GDP
🇺🇸 U.S. exports to Canada = just 1.4% of their GDP

Trump’s claim Canada “needs us to survive” is exaggerated — but we’re far more exposed.

Delaying hurts us way more.

Why the foot-dragging?

Carney has little incentive to end the fight. Angry Canadians at Trump = more Liberal votes.

Politics over prosperity. Classic.

Question for Canadians:

Should Carney drop the delay tactics, use our leverage, and get a deal done ASAP? Or keep waiting for U.S. midterms?

What’s your take?

Reply below 👇

Who’s really paying for this? Workers or politicians?

Jen Gerson points out that by being relative pushovers every time it’s clear that Trump really means something, it’s confirming American belief that we’ll always be pushovers:

Parody cover of Mark Carney’s Value(s) seen on the net.

This week’s announcement of 50 per cent tariffs on a raft of goods is more proof that the Liberals’ ironclad strategy of “say tough things in public but then capitulate quietly on issue after issue” isn’t panning out. And I write that knowing full well that the statute being used to implement the tariffs is old, tenuous, and may not hold up. I’m not talking about them, for a moment. I’m talking about us.

Where do we even start with Prime Minister Elbows Up? Dropping the Digital Services Tax and retaliatory tariffs? The apology for the terrible sin of running a Ronald Reagan ad? And now we have the business of the Gordie Howe Bridge: to recap, Canada fronted $6.4 billion to build the span between Windsor and Detroit, which was to be paid back over decades through bridge tolls. At the last minute — and presumably at the behest of the rich MAGA donor who owns the competing bridge — Donald Trump announced the bridge would not open until the U.S. got a better deal. After more quiet negotiations, such a deal was struck.

Initially, Carney claimed that the U.S. would take a split of the operating profits — but only after the debt was paid off, something which was expected to bring real profits down to a very small amount. Effectively, he said the deal would give the Americans chump change.

Subsequent reporting suggested this wasn’t the case at all; that the Americans are to take their cut from operating revenue, which presumably will have the effect of dramatically extending our payback period.

In short, it’s a major concession, made worse by the fact that Carney appears to have lied.

And, frankly, I’m not sure which of these two pills is harder to swallow. Regular press conferences aside, Team Canada has been rather shockingly non-communicative about what the hell is going on with USMCA re-negotiations. I give the government some credit for the need to maintain “strategic silence” in order to pursue “strategic patience”, but if your entire brilliant communications strategy for rallying the Canadian public in the face of unprecedented American economic aggression amounts to “Shush. Just trust us. Carney’s super smart. He’s got this,” well, then, you really can’t lie and be dumb about it.

Carney came to power 18 months ago with an explicit “Elbows Up” promise that is deteriorating into a punch line. I don’t object to choosing not to rise to the bait of every provocation. But when “doing nothing” is accompanied by caving on everything, what you have is no longer “strategic patience.” It looks a lot more like “showing the Americans that we have no appetite for retaliation.” We’ve indicated with crystal clarity that aside from the odd mean speech, and the fact that Canadians are Big Mad, we will extract no material consequence for anything they choose to do. And absent consequence, they will continue to escalate past the point of diminishing returns.

Why?

Because they can.

Because they don’t care.

Because they take delight in their own contempt for our demonstrated weakness.

Did This Meal Kill Mozart?

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 27 Jan 2026

Sliced pork loin with a rye bread crumb and cinnamon crust

City/Region: Vienna
Time Period: 1742

Mozart is one of my favorite composers of all time. When he fell ill and died in 1791 at the age of 35, rumors flew about what caused his death. Speculation continues to this day. Was it poison from a jealous rival or the Freemasons? Was it one of many possible illnesses? We don’t know for sure, but one theory is that it was trichinosis from undercooked pork, and we do know that he ate pork 44 days before he became sick.

This recipe from a Viennese cookbook in 1742 is for mutton loin, but it says that you can use the recipe for pork or venison as well. While boiling meat is not the most delicious way to prepare it, the crust that you prepare after it’s boiled is delicious. It’s slightly sweet with a hint of cinnamon and a very nice crunch, so if you’re not worried about sticking to the historical recipe exactly, try the crust on some pork chops (cooked however you like) or a roasted pork loin.

    No. 239 — Mutton Loin
    Take from a mutton the loin, as large as it can be, and dress it as one does a venison loin. Boil it in water, wine, and vinegar with bay leaves, onion, rosemary, and strips of lemon peel until it is quite tender. When it is cooked, arrange it on a casserole dish and pour melted butter over it. Take grated dark bread, mix it with cinnamon and sugar, sprinkle this over the loin, pour more butter over it, and put it into the oven, so that it becomes nicely brown, turning it once or twice. Make a good broth, pour it underneath, and serve it warm at the table.
    — Nützliches Koch-Buch (The Useful Cookbook) by Johann Holzmayer (1742 edition)

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QotD: The first rule of strategic analysis

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Do you know the first rule of good strategic analysis? When a war begins: shut up.

Wars are theatres of chaos, noise, confusion and premature certainty. The temptation to declare victory, defeat or historical turning point within the first few hours or days is not analysis. It is posturing. Yet the modern media cycle, with its appetite for endless commentary and instant verdicts, cannot tolerate silence. The result is a steady stream of confident assertions, most of which will age badly.

The current conflict between the alliance of the United States and Israel and Iran has followed this pattern almost perfectly. Within days, it was announced that America was winning; America was losing; Iran is winning; Iran had been neutralised; Iran remained undeterred; Trump doesn’t have clear plan; he does have a clear plan; this was the start of a forever war; it wasn’t a forever war; the war is a catastrophe for the US; the war is a triumph for the US.; that the war would soon be over; the war is over.

Obviously, these claims cannot be true simultaneously. Most of them will turn out not to be true at all.

Resisting the customary rush to instant judgement and adopting a more analytical frame of mind, what can we, discerning sceptics that we are, sensibly say six weeks into the war? Which claims survive contact with reality, and which are, for now, better treated as conjecture?

Michael Rainsborough, “A Sceptical Stocktake of the Iran War So Far”, The Daily Sceptic, 2026-04-21.

July 23, 2026

DSA: Trump doesn’t respect political norms. Also DSA: Let’s abolish the current system

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Chris Bray attempts to establish what the nascent Democratic Socialists of America actually stand for — and what they stand against:

Democrats are racing left, sprinting faster and faster toward abject authoritarian idiocy. Democratic socialists are defeating old Democrats in Congress and governing our big cities to death, and the DSA now offers an explicitly post-capitalist future in which everything is “free”, the one thing that resources can’t actually ever be:

    You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.

You get as much food, energy, and everything else as you feel that you need, and labor is no longer imposed on anyone. Should work well.

Meanwhile, after years of dire warnings that Evil Trump doesn’t respect our Constitution, here’s an actual headline today from one of the mindless institutions of the Democratic Party’s narrative-making apparatus:

They also propose the replacement of the Supreme Court, the restructuring of the presidency, and the elimination of the Electoral College, but other than that they’re really mad that Trump doesn’t respect our political norms. Trump is very bad, because he’s tearing down our political system, and also we demand the destruction of our political system.

Why are they moving left, moving left, and then moving left some more? Why doesn’t anything ever hold them in check?

Because there’s no anchor on the right to hold the left anywhere near the center. There’s no force in American politics pulling consistently and effectively in the other direction. They’re unopposed and unanchored, so nothing holds them. Mixing metaphors, it’s like gravity ceased to exist, so the moon is floating away. Political centering is the product of a contest. Bad ideas are punished and rejected through debate. And we increasingly don’t have that. Here’s a Republican congressman bragging about getting his measure passed to make home repairs a federally funded giveaway:

Democrats think the federal government should just give you whatever you need as a government handout, while Republicans think the federal government should, how can I put this, just give you whatever you need as a government handout. Your bathroom faucet broke? Don’t worry, that’s a federal program.

Meanwhile, while Democrats demand the abolition of the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and private property, prominent Republicans are theatrically angry at … Donald Trump.

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