Quotulatiousness

January 15, 2024

An alternative recruiting strategy for the US military

Filed under: Americas, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theophilus Chilton suggests there’s a deeper plan for the US federal government’s blatant encouragement of mass illegal immigration across the US-Mexican border, and if true it might indicate that things are about to “get spicy”:

It genuinely is a mystery …

This move by Texas [using state resources to enforce federal border control against the will of the federal government] represents a ratcheting up of our collapse phase trend towards decentralisation. At least for now (and let’s hope Abbott has the fortitude to follow through), a state is openly defying FedGov in a non-Regime approved way that would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago. Even if FedGov wins this standoff, it presages more and more movement in that direction. The Regime is bleeding power and everyone knows it, even if they can’t afford to let on to that fact. Either way, the Regime is going to have to stop this quickly before other states start getting ideas. If they can’t, their already tarnished reputation will take a further massive hit.

So in light of this news, we saw something else on Thursday that ought to be of interest. A very odd bill has been proposed in the House of Representatives by two Democratic representatives – a bill that would ban “private military activity“. On its face this seems strange since every state in the union already does this. However, the bill, as written, is so vague that it could be interpreted to outlaw organised range shooting activities or even paintball games as “combat training”. This bill reeks of desperation because the Regime knows that its path to collapse is further along than a lot of people think and they know that “private military activity” is a very real possibility. The Regime has been accelerating to the point of no return and is trying to stifle any potential serious opposition.

Opposition to what? Well, that’s a good question. Let’s put some pieces together.

It’s no secret that the US military is facing a serious recruiting shortfall. Obviously, the current Regime has little use for the American military as it has traditionally been constituted. This is shown by the absolutely disrespectful way in which our troops are routinely treated by their own government and chain of command. Especially driving this recruitment deficiency is the huge drop in enlistment by the military’s traditional recruiting stock – rural and suburban White men from the South, the Midwest, and the Mountain West. In other words, exactly the kind of people being demonised by the new military with its DIE initiatives, rainbow flags, and trooned officer corps.

So who is going to fill the ranks? Fortuitously, we seem to have a huge flow of military aged males from all over the world crossing our border for whom the Regime has been rolling out the figurative red carpet. These are guys who probably have a lot of time on their hands. Wouldn’t it be a swell idea if we inducted all these guys into the military to make up for the lack of Heritage American interest? Indeed, history repeatedly shows that unpopular regimes typically do exactly this. They start to rely on foreign mercenary forces for a number of purposes.

Certainly, as GAE struggles to keep its steam, there may be a need to send Guatemalans and Nigerians into various Middle Eastern sandboxes to take shrapnel that Americans won’t take. After all, there will still be the vain and desperate attempts to shore up American globohomo empire in that (and other) regions. But historical, one of the main uses of foreign troops has been to try to keep your own potentially rebellious natives in line. Foreign troops have no real connexion with those whom they are suppressing and thus are willing to follow almost any orders that their paymasters give them.

However, unlike many first world countries that are under the Regime’s heel, the USA has a large body of well-armed citizens, many of whom have military training and combat experience. These guys – plus any other patriotic citizens they may be willing to help train – probably won’t take too kindly to being suppressed by foreign hirelings, something that will quickly make a lot of people’s patience run out. Say, wouldn’t it be a shame if all of these armed, trained and trainable people started organising to protect their homes, families, states, and country?

Despite all of the bravado from left-wing Twitter X keyboard warriors about “YoU’rE aR-15 vS. tAnKs AnD f-15s!!1!” the Regime knows that this armed Heritage-American populace is a potential threat, hence the effort to stifle its organising. And on some level, these people must know that they aren’t really a legitimate government and that they exercise power solely through police powers and the force of arms. Even if they don’t, an increasing number of real Americans DO know this. The Regime has lost the mandate of heaven, and history abundantly attests to what happens to regimes to which this has happened.

The radical anti-state agenda of Argentina’s Javier Milei

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

Jon Miltimore compares the Venezuelan experience after electing Hugo Chavez in 2007 to Argentina’s radically opposed choice to elect Javier Milei as President late in 2023:

Javier Milei, 8 October 2022.
Photo attributed to Vox España via Wikimedia Commons.

In November, the country elected libertarian Javier Milei as its new president. And whereas Hugo Chavez said, “All that was privatized, let it be nationalized”, Milei is essentially saying the opposite: All that was nationalized, let it be privatized.

Milei started by cutting in half the number of federal ministries in Argentina, reducing them from 18 to nine. This was followed by a massive currency devaluation.

Milei did not stop there. In a recent televised announcement, he said he would “repeal rules that impede the privatization of state companies”.

Those words were backed up by a 300-measure order designed to deregulate internet services, eliminate various government price controls, repeal laws that discourage foreign capital investment, abolish the Economy Ministry’s price observatory, and “prepare all state-owned companies to be privatized”.

Milei capped it off on Wednesday with a 351-page omnibus bill that takes aim at Argentina’s regulatory state and would grant Milei emergency powers “until December 31, 2025”.

Giving any president emergency powers is no small thing, even during a genuine crisis. Though Milei’s bill is designed to curb state power, not to expand it — a notable contrast to the typical crisis response paradigm — history and recent events in El Salvador show how emergency powers can be abused and used to violate human rights and liberty.

Whether Milei can get his full agenda through is unclear, but there’s reason for optimism.

His stunning election is itself evidence that Argentines are hungry for change. He’s already shown an impressive pragmatism to wed to his undeniable political flair, surrounding himself with a slew of talented policy experts. This includes Federico Sturzenegger, a former chief economist of Argentina’s central bank who two decades ago managed to turn around the failing Bank of the City of Buenos Aires. Sturzenegger’s reforms were so effective they became a Harvard case study.

Success is by no means certain, of course.

Recovering from decades of Peronism — a blend of socialism, nationalism, and fascism, which dominated Argentina’s political system for years — will not happen overnight. And Argentina’s political class has spent the last few years making a bad situation worse.

Still, the great economist Adam Smith once observed that the key to economic prosperity is surprisingly simple.

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice,” the Wealth of Nations author said.

Milei knows this. He has not just read Smith (in addition to Austrian school economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises). In a 2017 profile, he dubbed himself “Adam Smith’s heir.”

A heavy dose of Adam Smith is precisely what Argentina needs, and Milei has correctly diagnosed the affliction of Argentina’s once-prosperous economy.

“The state doesn’t create wealth; it only destroys it,” Milei said in a widely viewed 2023 interview.

Grave Error

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte calls our attention to an important book on a major Canadian topic … that has been ignored by the Canadian media establishment (as one would expect if it contravenes the official narrative):

Have you read Grave Error? Have you seen it on the shelves in your local bookstore? At the library, perhaps? Did you notice coverage of it in the Globe or hear someone talking about it on CBC?

I’d bet ninety-eight out of a hundred SHuSH readers would answer “no” to all those questions.

The full title of the book is Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools). Its authors are former University of Calgary political scientist and Harper aide Tom Flanagan and Chris Champion, editor of the Dorchester Review. The book takes strong exception to commentary by media, politicians, and Indigenous leaders on the subject of unmarked graves at a former Kamloops Indian Residential School. I first noticed it over the holidays, several weeks after publication, when it was the overall #1 bestseller on Amazon.

It’s not easy to become the top-selling book on Amazon. You’re competing against Colleen Hoover and Prince Harry and the entire world of books, published and self-published. Grave Error was the only Canadian book, fiction or nonfiction, in Amazon’s top fifty when I came across it. It’s rare to see more than two or three Canadian books in Amazon’s top fifty at any given time.

You won’t have noticed Grave Error in your local bookstore because Amazon is the only outlet that’s selling the book. You won’t have seen coverage of it because no mainstream Canadian media outlet has paid attention to it. Nor does any public library stock it. It has not appeared on any conventional bestseller list, although it has to be a Canadian bestseller — Amazon sells well over half of all books in Canada. Most Amazon sales don’t register on our bestseller lists because Amazon doesn’t cooperate with the organizations that produce the lists.

Grave Error is published by True North, a conservative news website and public policy organization. It is run by Candace Malcolm, who founded True North with her husband, Kaz Nejatian, a former Jason Kenney staffer, now COO of Spotify. It’s published a half dozen hits in recent years, several written by Malcolm herself.

SS77: South Africa Builds a GPMG on the Shoulders of Giants

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Oct 2023

In the 1970s, South Africa began looking for a domestic-production GMPG to replace its inventory of FN MAG machine guns. The MAG was an excellent weapon, but the ones in South Africa were getting old and worn out, and with the country under international embargo over Apartheid, new guns and parts were not available from FN.

The SS-77 (named for its two designers, Richard Joseph Smith and Lazlo Soregi) began development in 1977, with initially prototypes built by Lyttleton Engineering Works in 1978. The design took elements from several other excellent machine guns — the side-locking action form the SG43 Goryunov, the barrel release and feed mechanism from the MAG, and the gas system from the PK. After an extensive series of testing and tweaking, the gun was formally adopted by the South African Defence Forces in 1986, and went into serial production. Despite the development cycle, the guns still proved to have significant problems in the field. The gas piston was liable to break, along with problems of broken extractors, loose pins, and other issues. The guns were actually recalled from military service and rebuilt in the early 1990s. Following that redesign program, the gun has proven very reliable and successful in service.

A Mini-SS design was also adopted, essentially the same gun scaled down to 5.56mm. Initial plans were to produce a conversion kit to allow the regular SS-77 to use either caliber, but these were never actually produced.
(more…)

QotD: Beyond mere superstition, moderns believe in literal magic

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

Stern’s “intellectual Luddites” wrote a whole lot of supercharged, Sturm und Drang hooey about “national souls” and “blood spirits” and whatnot, but even their most Romantic fantasies about the Aryan Übermenschen of yore paled in comparison to stuff like “Critical Race Theory”. Heinrich Himmler may have been the spiritual heir of Stern’s “intellectual Luddites”, but even he, playing with his live-action Castle Wolfenstein playset while the world burned, was a paragon of reason compared to people like Robin DeAngelo. Himmler thought “Nordic” runes were spiritual conduits to the mythic past, but our modern Elites believe, quite literally, in magic.

Magic dirt: There’s something about the Rio Grande, or the Ellis Island ferry, such that crossing it transforms 70-IQ campesinos into bourgie app developers. Magic shapes: Mold plastic into something that looks like a Glock, and anyone who sees it will be compelled to start shooting people. And of course the granddaddy of them all, magic words: Race, sex, these are all “social constructions”, such that a persyn who says xzhey are a woman really IS a woman, physiology be damned. Within the space of a generation, the same people who were smugly slapping Darwin fish on the bumpers of their Subaru Outbacks have declared the very basics of biology rank heresy.

Everyone knows that Karl Marx called religion “the opium of the masses”. It’s a fun quote, but it wasn’t particularly effective rhetoric back in the 19th century, since drug addiction wasn’t really a thing back then.1 Far more effective was David Hume’s description — “sick men’s dreams” — but even that paled in comparison to the 19th century’s go-to tactic: Implied infancy. If religious belief developed naturally, in a predictable pattern — and who could deny it, having read the formidable logic of E.B. Tylor? — then anyone who still clung to his belief in a Magic Sky Fairy must belong, despite his physical presence here in this best of all possible worlds, to Mankind’s intellectual infancy. Of course we’re not saying that the religion of Aquinas and Galileo, of Newton and Boyle, was all piffle … but come now, old sock, you must admit that the Thirty Nine Articles can only be understood “in a non-natural sense”, as Cardinal Newman (of all people!) put it. Are we not, in the face of all-triumphing science, all Robert Elsmere? Surely no one as obviously intelligent as yourself could possibly still …

Marx had that other quote that fits this situation much better, the one about “second time as farce”. Our Postmodern Elite, the I-Fucking-Love-Science crowd, has gone way past intellectual Luddism. They’re digital infants, chanting their hosannas to magic dirt, watching the same cartoon play out over and over again in Minnesota, in Chicago, soon enough in a neighborhood near you (infants love repetition). Tantrums, nom noms, and whee! A shiny!!

Such are the fruits of rationalism.

Severian, “Digital Infants”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-16.


    1. Despite the easy availability of all kinds of highly addictive shit like opium and cocaine. Ponder that in the dark watches of the night, if you ever feel like giving yourself insomnia.

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