Quotulatiousness

September 4, 2026

Never discount the political muscle of “King Coal”

Filed under: Environment, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Ringo remembers when a friend of his accidentally discovered that “King Coal” is still a behind-the-scenes political factor that cannot be ignored:

Soooo, guy I knew in of all places National Guard in Florida.

He was taking a master’s in Optics at University of Central Florida. He had to do a paper. Just one of the random “do a paper” assignments you do in a master’s program. He’d heard that tailings from coal mines could be a bit suspect in terms of radiation. Not in his direct field but in “physics”. Good enough.

There’s a coal plant about 20 miles from Orlando. Goes out, goes to the big pile of tailings, sticks a Geiger counter probe in it, expecting a bit above background.

HOLY MOTHER OF ROENTGEN! THAT’S FREAKING HOT!

There’s a thin layer of ash over the tailings that isn’t and blocks most of the release. So, a Geiger counter casually waved over it, all good.

Stick a probe in and it’s a different story. It’s hot as the hinges of hell radioactively. (And quite a bit of that material is released by coal plants. Much more likely to cause lung cancer than smoking, btw.)

So, he writes up the paper and submits it.

Couple of weeks later, he’s called into his thesis advisor who sadly and shamefacedly tells him he’s being dropped from the master’s program.

“WTF?”

Enter the late and VERY unlamented Senator Robert Byrd. Byrd’s people had noses in every department everywhere and ANYTHING that MIGHT harm King Coal MUST be nipped in the bud.

Even a guy getting an Optics master’s who just happened to stick his probe in the wrong mound.

Ask me why the 1000 Nukes program was scrapped right after Nixon left office and why Byrd might just have been behind Watergate and performed essentially a coup d’état. (Or why Nixon pushed the Thousand Nukes Program for that matter.) Or why it’s taken so long for Small Modular Reactors to have any chance of getting off the ground. (“Technological advancements” is not the answer. We’ve been doing them for the Navy for 70 years.)

Biden’s “War on Coal” really pissed me off but along with natural gas it MIGHT have finally killed King Coal for good and all and that is something to heave a sigh of relief.

And following up to a question down-thread:

Absurdus – @AdAltum

How did a senator hear about a random paper from some random master’s student? How did he get him expelled from a program he was in?

“The Senator” probably never even heard about it. It was handled at a much lower level.

How did his people hear about it?

Byrd was Chairman of the Budget Committee and the Rules Committee as well as Chairman Pro Tem any time the Dems held the Senate (which was constantly up until Newt Gingrich.)

He was also “Chairman Emeritus” of the Energy Committee. He was on the committee despite being a previous chairman. (Because he was only allowed to chair two and Rules and Budget were more important.)

Energy provides funds to colleges for research. Budget approves it. That meant he had ears all over every college and research facility in the United States.

Say one bad thing about Coal and your days were numbered if you were some minor master’s candidate. Hell, adjunct professor.

You probably aren’t old enough or didn’t follow politics back then to know just how ruthless, corrupt and evil Byrd and his people were.

BTW: Probably also why Freeman Dyson lost his funding for bottle fusion in 1974.

Marius Saved Rome … Then They Turned To His Greatest Rival | Rome’s First Civil War

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

The Rest Is History
Published 3 Sep 2026

What was the ancient city of Rome actually like in the first century BC? Who was Lucius Cornelius Sulla, another great, but aristocratic, Roman general who would clash with Gaius Marius in a totemic struggle termed the Social War? And, who were the terrifying Germanic tribes amassing on the borders of the empire, potentially spelling its doom …?

Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Rome’s apocalyptic threat from the North, Marius’ wars in defence of the empire, and the rise of his greatest adversary: Sulla.

0:00 Rome’s Most Unlikely Saviour
4:25 The Barbarian Threat to Rome
9:15 Rome’s Catastrophic Defeat
14:04 Marius Rebuilds the Roman Army
16:48 Marius Takes on the Teutones
19:36 The Cimbri Are Annihilated
23:41 Marius Becomes Too Powerful
27:00 The Rise of Sulla
31:02 Sulla’s Ruthless Ambition
35:05 Amazon
36:15 The Extraordinary Wealth of Roman Italy
42:49 Italy’s Second-Class Citizens
46:18 The Social War Erupts
50:44 Rome Fights Back
52:35 Sulla Becomes Rome’s New Hero
56:05 A New War in the East
58:18 Mithridates Takes on Rome
1:02:00 Marius Makes His Comeback
1:04:39 Violence Erupts in Rome
1:07:01 Marius Takes Sulla’s Command

As Tom and Dominic mention during this episode, there’s a members-only bonus episode discussing the (much contested) “Marian reforms” of the Roman army with … Bret Devereaux who is a strong proponent of the notion that the Marian reforms were not a thing.

Loyalist Canada to Liberal Canada, a political devolution

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

On Substack Notes, John Carter discusses the old, stable Canada that the Liberals have spent sixty years trying to destroy, with great success, sadly.

For all intents and purposes, post-1965 Liberal Canada is a completely different country from the Loyalist Canada that it erased. Different flag, different basis for moral legitimacy, different constitution even.

Liberal Canada loves to wear poppies on Remembrance Day, but this is stolen valour. Liberal Canada has never won a single war. Loyalist Canada won every war it fought in.

Liberal Canada built no great works. Most of the infrastructure of Canada was constructed before Liberal Canada. The Trans Canada Highway, the Trans Canada Railroad, the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, the Toronto subway, the Montreal Metro — all were built or initiated by Loyalist Canada. Liberal Canada completed the projects that began under Loyalist Canada, but initiated none of its own, and at best can be said to maintain the infrastructure it inherited … badly. Liberal Canada cannot even build a pipeline to bring its oil to market. Liberal Canada cannot even refine its own oil.

Loyalist Canada built out an organizational infrastructure of Crown Corporations which were once the envy of the world. Liberal Canada dismantled them, giving us toll roads owned by foreigners.

Loyalist Canada built all of this infrastructure, and won all of those wars, without incurring a national debt. The national debt was accrued entirely by Liberal Canada, and is entirely a function of social welfare programs it uses to turn Canadians into domesticated clients of Liberal Party patronage, and indentured servants of the banks.

Then of course there are the demographics. Loyalist Canada was a white Canada, a British and French Canada, and a fecund Canada, with one of the world’s highest birth rates. Liberal Canada is a barren Canada, with one of the world’s lowest birth rates, and it has presided over the systematic replacement of the Canadian people with Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Muslims, to whom it moreover extends preference for social services, university admissions, and employment. Liberal Canada makes Canadians second class citizens in the land their ancestors built.

Liberal Canada is a parasitic entity that is rapidly killing its host. It is an exhausted Brezhnevian sclerocracy that destroys ambition because even the most modest of ambitions are a threat to the soft men, the mild bureaucrats and glassy-eyed ideologues who subsist on the arbitrage of national decline. Liberal Canada is weak, and so it demands that its subjects be even weaker, as this is the only way for weak men to rule.

Liberal Canada is not the real Canada, and Canadians are beginning to wake up from this long nightmare of mismanagement and institutionalized treason, and to remember who they are.

Making Shepherd’s Pie from an 1894 Recipe – Beef or Lamb?

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Mar 2026

Minced beef filling covered in browned mashed potatoes

City/Region: North Ayrshire, Scotland
Time Period: 1894

Cottage pie is made with beef, and shepherd’s pie is made with lamb. Or so they would have you believe. This division between mashed potato-topped meat pies is actually only about 50 years old. Before that, recipes for shepherd’s or cottage pie could call for beef or lamb, or didn’t specify a kind of meat at all.

The clove and the mushroom ketchup are both present but not overpowering, and the potatoes are creamy and delicious. Shepherd’s pie is my absolute favorite way to make meat and potatoes, and this 1894 version holds up.

    Shepherd’s Pie
    Minced beef or lamb; if beef, put in a pinch of pulverised cloves; if lamb, pinch of summer savoury to season it, very little pepper and some salt, and put in a baking-dish; mash potatoes and mix them with cream and butter and a little salt, and spread them over the meat; beat up an egg with cream or milk, a very little, spread it over the potatoes and bake it a short time, sufficient to warm it through and brown the potatoes.
    — Irvine Herald and Kilwinning Chronicle, October 5, 1894

(more…)

QotD: My generation

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

We talk a lot about generations and what defines them — Boomers and Xers and Millennials and Zs — but ultimately a generation is just a scene. It is about who and what you claim as your own, but this is something that is determined largely in retrospect. You only know what was yours once something comes along that is clearly alien and you realize that the culture was something you shared, that you made for one another. Eventually the whole scene moves on.

That’s why one of the weirdest things about getting older is realizing just how much of what you took for granted as part of the permanent furniture of the world was actually highly transient: The Iron Curtain. Guitar rock. Your own hopes and dreams and ambitions. Sometimes they all come wrapped together like a package deal, and failing at one makes it seem like you’ve failed at it all.

Andrew Potter, “Eddie Van Halen, Bill and Ted, and mourning a generation”, The Line, 2020-10-14.

September 3, 2026

That problematic arch-conservative New-Dealer … Norman Rockwell?

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Chris Bray was in Stockbridge Massachusetts recently and discovered that the notorious arch-conservative artist Norman Rockwell … supported the New Deal and FDR … which is unquestionably extreme-right, yet somehow “got woke” in the 1960s:

Stockbridge is in the (astonishingly pretty) Berkshires, where you can’t sell a latte or a $14 egg and cheese sandwich without a trans pride flag and a sticker in the window boldly supporting a woman’s right to choose and a “No Kings in America” sign and on and and on and on.

I’m an outsider, so they won’t show me the manual. But it’s a lot of virtue, signaled with a great deal of self-consciousness, and also there are a ton of German SUVs with New York license plates. Status status status. We stand with immigrants / new Mercedes.

Rockwell lived and painted in Stockbridge, and that’s … that’s … (ambiguous facial expression). He painted images that demonstrated a bone-deep fondness for America and Americans, especially small-town Americans, so he was a huge far-right figure, OBVIOUSLY, and also a major white supremacist, but maybe kind of accidentally a big Klan figure?

You can find this stuff everywhere: Rockwell’s name was “a symbol of an idealized, conservative, white American past”. Click on that link: It’s an essay that says Rockwell is known for an idealized conservative past, and it’s illustrated with a 1943 painting that celebrated FDR’s declaration that Freedom From Want is a basic freedom that that all Americans should enjoy. So, to wrap a bow around this amazing cultural artifact, Rockwell’s idealized conservative past was a celebration of the New Deal president’s declaration that government should assure material comfort for everyone. See, huge right-winger.

[…]

But Rockwell painted a massive quantity of routine shitlibbery alongside his depictions of small-town America as a place he didn’t despise, and, I’m repeating myself, several of his most famous paintings express his affection for that huge far-right figure Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a registered Republican who painted Democrats and Democrat political themes with great warmth, and also liked Ike, and then went on to paint important depictions of the Civil Rights Movement. So he’s … he’s … a huge Trumper who didn’t hate black people? Which lawn sign should we display about this? The past has to be sorted into the categories of right now, in ways that should feel comfortable to an NPR personality: This Thucydides person, was he a Trumper?

The just absolutely amazing leftist discourse about Rockwell is that he changed: He used to be a brutal Republican Nazi like ORANGE MAN, but then he turned into a good person. These essays tend to have the subtlety of a claw hammer to the face. Go read this example at the reliably boneheaded Vox, which describes Rockwell’s “late-life political transformation” and says that the “tumultuous ’60s would convert Rockwell into an overt social liberal”. He turned from right to left! He became good! See, he had an “awakening!”

The reason all of this confuses them is that Rockwell was a social type that no longer exists: a liberal Republican who thought that America had flaws that needed fixing, but who also at the same time loved the country and loved its people. He was sort of center-left on some stuff and center-right on some stuff, and culturally attuned to a nation that he viewed fondly. He liked FDR and the Four Freedoms and he personally liked Eisenhower, who had him over for dinner.

Enshittification of technology today

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Ted Gioia provides nine rules to measure technological innovation based on the work of the late Wendell Berry:

(1) The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

This is a very persuasive selling point for new technology. And for most of my life, tech companies worked hard to lower prices.

I still recall my parents scrimping and saving in order to buy a color television when I was seven years old. It cost almost $500 — a huge amount in those days.

They probably should have waited. A few months later, RCA dropped prices to $399. Prices continued to drop in later years. You can buy a high tech TV today at Best Buy for less than what my parents paid in the 1960s.

Computers also got more affordable — at least until recently. I got my first computer (an Apple IIE) when I was in graduate school — it was an expensive gift from the Boston Consulting Group in exchange for accepting their job offer.

The list price back then was $1,400. I could never have afforded to buy it on my tight student budget.

But, over a period of many years, each subsequent computer I acquired was better and cheaper than my previous model. Alas, that happy trend has now ended.

[…]

(2) It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

This is another good reason to upgrade your setup. And tech did get smaller for many decades.

Guess who played a key role in that? Yes, Steve Jobs again. Because of his obsession with product design, we now carry a huge amount of advanced tech in our pocket.

Just consider this remarkable fact: Every device featured in this Radio Shack advertisement from 1991 has been replaced by your tiny phone.

But this, too, changed soon after Jobs died. (Are you noticing a pattern here?)

The thinnest iPhone ever was the iPhone 6 (2014) — at a slim 6.9mm. The company continued to launch “mini” models for a few years, but stopped after iPhone 13.

Tech is now bulking up. It’s not just the devices — wait until you see those AI data centers. A single facility can spread over two kilometers.

(3) It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.

This is the most obvious requirement for new tech. It needs to work better than old tech.

But Silicon Valley has totally abandoned this ideal. Every web interface I use has gotten worse over time — from search engines to social media to software to shopping apps.

Google is worse than ever. Social media is worse than ever. Amazon is worse than ever. Facebook is worse than ever. Everything I get from Microsoft is worse than ever.

So here, too, we see that new tech previously fulfilled Berry’s requirement — but stopped doing so around the time Steve Jobs died.

John Carter reports on “the largest gathering of Canadian nationalists in generations”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Canadian Red Ensign 1921-1957

Having been peripherally involved in party politics in Canada since the mid 1970s, I hope you’ll forgive my occasional bout of cynicism about getting political change in this country through peaceful means … the long comfortable decades under the US nuclear umbrella has allowed Canadian political parties to get ever more unserious and willing to pretend that taking a two-and-a-half generations-long vacation from the world of realpolitik has been somehow our birthright. I love my adopted homeland and it is distressing to see how easily the Liberal propagandists (supported by the state-funded relic media) can get elbow-flapping choruses of Canadian boomers to chant the slogans and blandly accept the grand theft from their children and grandchildren without a blush of shame.

John Carter says there may still be hope that enough Canadians have recognized the awful situation we’re in and are willing to do what’s necessary to change our collective ways and get back onto a path of constructive nationalism rather than the tame opposition of the current Conservative Party:

I don’t want to overstate things, but I think this was an historic moment.

It was also a hell of a ride.

The Dominion Society was founded barely over a year ago, and rapidly exploded to over three thousand members across the country. It is a peaceful and explicitly non-partisan political advocacy group dedicated to advancing the cause of remigration within Canadian civil society. So far its activities have consisted mainly of selling branded merchandise, putting up posters, cleaning up parks, rallies to oppose Canadian towns from tearing down statues of Sir John A MacDonald and Samuel de Champlain, and a whole lot of social media campaigns.

To anyone in possession of some shred of sanity, all of this would seem to be entirely unobjectionable and non-threatening. To the Canadian government, which long ago released its hold on the last tenuous threads of sanity, this is a five-alarm political fire. They are, it seems, terrified of the Dominion Society to the point of hysteria.

Until recently the Canadian media – which by virtue of a generous state funding apparatus is de facto state media – has for the most part done its best to ignore the Dominion Society, treating it as an irrelevant collection of disgruntled kids who aren’t worth reporting on. That isn’t to say that the political class was not aware of DomSoc. Their founder, Daniel Tyrie, showed up at the Conservative Party conference several months ago with a number of supporters, trolling the Conservative Party of Canada with a big “Conserve What?” sign outside the front door of the venue, showing a picture of CPC leader Pierre Poillievre wearing a Sikh temple hat during one of his many ethnic pandering junkets. The CPC very much noticed this, and were not impressed.

Since then Tyrie and his supporters have sparred with various CPC politicians on X, ratioing them on a fairly regular basis. On February 15th, the Flag Day that marks the 1965 transition from the original Canadian flag to the Maple Leaf, the House of Commons account got thoroughly ensignmogged by a swarm of Canadian nationalists declaring that the Red Ensign was their real flag.

Seriously, just look at the replies and quote tweets. An unending sea of red ensigns.

The flag day ensignmogging was a remarkable eruption of nationalist energy, and it’s very difficult to imagine that the Canadian government has not noticed the sudden popularity of the Red Ensign and the Canadian shield as symbols of Canadian nationalism. This use of these discarded symbols makes Canadian politicians palpably anxious. They have spent many decades patiently erasing Canada’s past in order to socially engineer the wild colonials into the universal economic subject, and the revival of ethnically particular medieval heraldry signals something stirring within the deep recesses of the mass psyche. The natives are restless. Old and terrible gods are awakening.

The question of course is what they can do about that. So far the answer has been “not much that matters”. It would be one thing if the Dominion Society was a bad optics skinhead cult called the White Reich Front or something, brandishing sonnenrads on their shield walls as they formed up for street battle with Trantifa. This would be easily dealt with as something obviously frightening and foreign. But the Dominion Society is none of these things. It is named the Dominion Society, as in the Dominion of Canada – Canada’s official, full name, being a Dominion of the British Crown. Its symbolism draws upon Canada’s own traditional symbolism, symbols that are indeed still quietly used by the Canadian government itself, and it is therefore quite impossible for the regime to characterize DomSoc as something frightening and foreign on aesthetic grounds alone. Worse still, DomSoc is very smart about how it operates. They don’t march through the streets shouting and getting in fights: they’re polite and friendly, focusing on media activism and political pressure campaigns. Their messaging stays strictly within legal boundaries. Their over-arching goal is direct and simple: to popularize the concept of remigration, normalizing it as a topic in the national conversation, such that voters will begin spontaneously raising the issue with politicians: “If we can bring people in, why can’t we send them back? Planes fly in any direction.”

Canada’s “softer, gentler, more inclusive, more sensitive” cadet movement

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was in the army cadets from 1972-76. We were still wearing British-style battledress uniforms rather than the CF Green delivery driver uniforms, but we weren’t in cadets for the pseudo-scouting experience … we wanted to be army cadets. Not long after I left cadets for the reserves, the leadership vision changed to (I assume) make cadet organizations more “inclusive”, as John Carter describes:

This unfortunately isn’t new. I was in Army Cadets back in the 90s. Even then female fatbodies in the adult officer corps weren’t unknown, and cadets was coed.

I didn’t actually mind the coed aspect at the time, I picked up a lot of my hs gfs through cadets. What I did mind was how ridiculously soft it was. Weapons training, in particular, was essentially impossible to obtain unless you joined the marksmanship team (which I did for that specific reason), and even then they only gave us ancient Lee-Enfields with .22 inserts. We did a lot of camping and rucking, including in winter, which was great, but aside from the exercises being on army bases and conducted in combat fatigues using old surplus kit, there was almost nothing to mark it out as military in character. Nor for that matter was there anything in the way of physical conditioning.

I wasn’t the only one annoyed by that. The kids who joined cadets wanted to be little warriors. They wanted to crawl through mud with a knife clenched between their teeth, they wanted to get emotionally abused as they struggled through obstacle courses, and they wanted to handle firearms. There was a rumor that all of us had signed an agreement that in event of war, if the rest of the military had been wiped out, we could be called up for the last line of defence. I doubt that was true but we thought it was the coolest thing.

Instead, the only cadets who were allowed to handle C7s were the honour guard, who were issued (rubberized) rifles before parades.

Unfortunately it didn’t matter what the cadets themselves wanted. The adults had decided that softer, gentler, more inclusive, more sensitive was the name of the game. I didn’t make the connection with the presence of female cadets at the time, though in retrospect that’s obvious. What was obvious to me at the time however was that this was all downstream of liberal females aghast at the very concept of a militarized youth, and weak men who couldn’t tell the females to shut their fool mouths.

As an epilogue, when I turned 17 I joined the Army Reserve, only to discover that this infernal feminine softening had long since infected the military, as well.

The cadet Lee-Enfields firing .22LR were an important part of our weapons training … although due to a weird bit of timing, the very first rifle I ever fired was a full-size .303 Lee Enfield that seemed to have enough kick to push me right out of the rifle pit when I fired it (I was small for a 12-year-old). We hadn’t yet learned about hearing protectors, so my ears were ringing for about an hour after the range trip.

The Last Tiger

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 24 Apr 2026

The war has raged for more than 5 years.

In the Essel Forest, on the north German plain, a troop of British Comet cruiser tanks halts for a brew.

A shot rings out

It’s a Tiger!

Within seconds one of the Comets is hit.

The war is far from over …

This is the story of a fascinating and dangerous moment in time – one of the last duels between the brilliant Comet and the legendary Tiger.

00:00 | Introduction
00:42 | The Last Tiger
04:55 | The Rise and Fall of the Kampfgruppen
06:40 | The British Armour
07:52 | Tiger v Comet
13:08 | April 13th 1945

This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.

In this film, join Chris Copson as he tells the story of one of the last tank duels of the Second World War. On one side, the Tiger. With its 88mm gun and almost impenetrable armour, it had inspired fear in many Allied tank crews. But on the other side, the Brits were prepared with the latest in tank technology – the Comet. Both were imposing sights on the late WWII battlefield, but who would come out on top in the depths of the Essel Forest?

Want to learn more about the Tiger and Comet tanks? Here are some of the sources we used to make this film:

Battleground, Zaloga (Ed), Osprey, 2011.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Comet, Fletcher, 2017
Encyclopaedia of British and American Tanks of WW II, Chamberlain and Ellis, Cassell 2014.
Encyclopaedia of German Tanks of WWII, Chamberlain and Doyle, Cassell 2011.

QotD: Combined arms

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

Combined Arms is the use of different kinds of combat arms in concert; typically this is the combined use of some mix of infantry, artillery, armor (tanks and other armored fighting vehicles or AFVs) and airpower (when analyzing much older armies, we often talk about combined arms as mixing shock infantry, missile infantry and cavalry, so the “arms” being combined vary from era to era). This is important because effective use of these arms in modern warfare requires them to be used together: artillery and aircraft need infantry to help identify targets to strike (since both engage targets they typically cannot observe), while infantry needs them to provide supporting fires. AFVs of all kinds (but especially tanks) typically have poor situational awareness (there’s only so much you can see through even a good set of optics while buttoned up in a tank) and at close range are vulnerable to infantry-carried anti-tank weapons and so require infantry to screen them and be their eyes (while the superior firepower of AFVs enhance the infantry). Note that this can mean that good systems (e.g. an effective tank) can still be ineffective if not used appropriately with supporting arms (e.g. screening infantry with supporting fires). In the opening days of the invasion [of Ukraine in 2022], Russia struggled to use these arms in concert effectively, with the result that the Russian advantage in vehicles and fires, which was considerable, wasn’t realized. That in turn makes it difficult at this point to make clear assessments about the effectiveness of Russian equipment or the overall usefulness of certain kinds of equipment (e.g. tanks) when used properly in a combined arms framework.

Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.

September 2, 2026

Americans’ notorious disinterest in learning foreign languages

Filed under: Business, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Malevitus points out some of the sensible reasons most Americans don’t learn how to speak other languages … and why it makes perfect sense for this situation:

There’s a common complaint about Americans online that goes something like this: “Americans are so dumb. They only know one language, most of the rest of the world is at least bilingual. Why can’t they learn to speak another language?”

To be fair, we Yankees are a pretty monolingual bunch. Only about 20% of Americans speak a language other than English, and for those that do, its mostly because they’re immigrants or children of immigrants. That doesn’t compare favorably to Western Europe, where the majority of adults can speak at least one foreign language (guess which one?)

This is often brought up in the long list of America Bad™ talking points. It’s yet another example of American idiocy. “Europeans can master four languages while Americans are too stupid to master one.” This is pretty much pure copium.

The American Empire

The world we live in is an American world. Since at least the 1990’s (and arguably since the 1940’s), the US has been the undisputed economic and cultural hegemon of the world. Americans don’t learn French or German for the same reason that a Roman in 100 AD would balk at learning Gaulish or Illyrian. Provincials learn the imperial tongue, not the other way around.

For your average non-Anglophone, learning English opens up opportunities in international business, makes it easier to keep up with news from the imperial core, and lets you talk to people around the world (who learned English for all the same reasons you did). For your average American, speaking not-English is a cool trick that takes 600+ hours to learn.

As with any respectable empire, the culture of the periphery is downstream of the core. The influence is largely unidirectional. A typical Frenchman has probably seen Avatar and Titanic. A typical American has definitely not seen Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis or La Grande Vadrouille. The world is buying our blue jeans and listening to our pop music.

[NR: Emphasis mine.]

The Korean War Week 115 – What About Japan? – September 1, 1952

Filed under: China, History, Japan, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 1 Sep 2026

The aftershocks of Typhoon Karen have dumped so much rain on Korea that it’s quiet in the field this week, so I turn my attention to Japan. Japan’s situation with regard to Korea is very important, but is in a state of flux after the occupation of Japan officially ended and the UN troops there went from occupiers to guests. It’s very interesting.

00:00 Hook
00:52 Recap
01:14 Typhoon Karen
02:42 National Police Reserve Japan
07:55 Expanding Forces
10:28 US Military Status
12:38 The Joint Committee
15:04 Summary
15:15 Mobilisation

Jeremy Clarkson is “the worst tax dodger in British history”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Food, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been watching episodes of Clarkson’s Farm and thoroughly enjoying them. I’m doing the opposite of binge-ing them, limiting myself to one episode at a time, and not every night. I’m part-way through Season 3 at the moment. The unrelenting hostility of the local government is a thing to behold … it really does seem as if they think that their role is to prevent any sort of economic activity from taking place in their jurisdiction.

Sama Hoole outlines the steps Jeremy Clarkson has taken over the time since he purchased one thousand acres of farmland:

A timeline of one man’s cunning inheritance tax scheme.

2008: Buy a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Tell The Times that dodging inheritance tax is the critical thing. Scheme live.

2009 to 2018: Do absolutely nothing. A villager farms it on contract. Flawless.

2019: The villager retires. Rather than hire another one, decide to farm a thousand acres yourself, having never grown anything.

Also 2019: Invite a film crew.

2020: Rain for nine weeks. Profit on a thousand acres: £144.

2021: Broadcast the £144 to the largest streaming platform on earth, thereby informing the entire planet that farmland makes nothing.

2021: Open a farm shop. Acquire a queue down a lane and the undivided attention of West Oxfordshire District Council.

2022: Restaurant refused. Enforcement notice. Six weeks to take a barn apart.

2023: Lose the appeal. Lose it again.

May 2024: Accidentally get English planning law rewritten. Lawyers name it Clarkson’s Clause.

August 2024: Open a pub selling only British food. Sell your own sausage at 74p against 18p imported, and eat the difference on every plate.

October 2024: The Chancellor caps agricultural property relief at a million. Scheme dead.

November 2024: Stand on a platform in Westminster in front of thirteen thousand farmers, drawing maximum national attention to the exact tax break you were supposedly hiding behind.

July 2025: Go down with TB. First calf ever born on the farm destroyed, pregnant with twins. Gate padlocked.

23 December 2025: Government retreats. The threshold goes from one million to two and a half. Five million for a couple.

March 2026: Farm declared clear.

July 2026: Drive four hundred miles to Scotland and buy more cows.

Eighteen years.

Planning law changed. Agricultural degree applications climbing. Cited in the Commons more times than most ministers manage. Half the estates that were going to be caught by the tax are no longer caught by it.

He was accused of buying a farm to dodge inheritance tax, and then spent eighteen months getting the relief raised for everybody else’s.

Worst tax dodger in British history.

Best thing to happen to British farming in fifty years.

The Ancient Greeks 05 – The Greeks Fight Back 2 – Salamis

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

seangabb
Published 30 Mar 2026

Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD

How did a smaller Greek fleet destroy the naval power of Persia? This lecture examines the Battle of Salamis, one of the most decisive naval engagements in world history. Against overwhelming numbers, the Greeks achieved a catastrophic defeat of the Persian fleet — changing the course of the war.

We explore:

– Themistocles’ deception of Xerxes
– The strategic choice of the narrow waters at Salamis
– The nature of ancient naval warfare and trireme tactics
– Eyewitness accounts from Aeschylus and Herodotus
– The collapse of Persian naval supremacy

We also consider the wider implications of the battle: the loss of Persian control of the sea, the danger to Xerxes’ supply lines, and the beginning of the Persian retreat.

Salamis is not merely a battle — it is the moment at which the invasion begins to fail.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress