Quotulatiousness

February 26, 2025

The more DOGE uncovers, the more we see that western governments are really vast graft machines

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

Elizabeth Nickson discusses the ramifications of all the wasted money uncovered by DOGE in the first month of investigations and what it almost certainly confirms about the actual value taxpayers are getting for their money:

So essentially the entire town of Washington, D.C. has been stealing. The anomalies are those who are not stealing. $4.7 trillion, almost impossible to trace, represents two-thirds of the annual U.S. budget. And if it’s happening in the U.S., it is happening everywhere: France, Canada, the U.K., Germany, where budgetary processes are probably even more opaque than those of the U.S.

How does the Department of Defence have a $35 trillion black hole?

I used to think of people who worked for the government with a kind of veiled contempt or, in a more benign mood, compassion. I thought of them as pity jobs for those without initiative, as jobs paying off lefty campaigners, as a warehouse for the barely competent. In my own dealings with them, I found them punitive and extractive, papering me with demands to spend more and more money to hire more and more of their pet contractors, to get approval. In my working life, looking at the results of their involvement in America’s rural areas, I hated them for the hell they visited on people unable to fight back. They forced bad science on good people, and refused to see reason. They ruined forests, water courses, fisheries, and township after township turned to dustbowl status. The misery in rural sitting rooms in every state in the U.S. was palpable, long lasting; the green Blob ruined families for generations.

But I did not think of them as being embroiled in a theft so large as to be unparalleled in world history.

The level of the theft has now to be dawning on everyone not living off the public purse which is, what, 60%, 70% of us? The anger setting in is soul-deep, and very very powerful. People who live straightened lives, the poorly pensioned, those living off the laughable social security stipend, those waiting for health care, those whose children can’t even dream of an education, of college, of a six-figure salary which is now subsistence in the ruined cities. Those facing cancer treatment because of the vaccine, and don’t have excess funds. Their families, despairing, hurting, broke.

This isn’t going to go away. It affects everyone. Not addressed down to its deepest level, you are looking at a tax revolt, a national strike. A revolution. A real one, not a papered paid-for color revolution, which is what they have been doing to us.

Those living on social security should have five times the pension they do.

Can you count how many of those there are? Can you?

And meanwhile this:

Is this true? To this date, unknown; the digging continues. Look at this ghastly creature. She apparently has an account in the Cayman Islands. Look at her all compassionate and condescending. She started a war that killed 1.5 million people so far. And apparently got rich from it. A mass murderer celebrated at Upper East Side dinner parties.

Memes like this rocket around, and every one is now suspect. At this point who cares if it’s true, it’s truthy, it makes sense that she made out like a bandit, that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have millions hidden somewhere. Ocasio can say “I only have $500,000!” all she wants, but we don’t believe her. If the Wall St Journal says it is false, we don’t believe them. Do you actually think they’d have the money sitting in their savings account? No, it would be buried off-shore. The media is not only complicit, it is the principal actor in this scam. It built the fantasy world we live in, where people read The Guardian, the Times and the Globe and Mail and think they’re informed.

No, they are being propagandized. And as a result, no one sane believes anything any legacy newspaper or television or media says anymore. They hid the theft. They did not report on it. No one trusts a thing they say.

Update: Fixed broken link.

The Korean War 036 – MacArthur Gets Dumber Every Week – February 25, 1951

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 25 Feb 2025

Operation Killer begins this week, and its objective is what the name implies, to destroy as much of the enemy as possible rather than just trying to merely take territory. But once again, UN Commander Douglas MacArthur threatens to telegraph it before it starts. The offensive itself, though, is stymied its first few days by the weather. Meanwhile in China, Peng Dehuai meets with Mao Zedong to clear the air.
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Colonialism was so bad … that we have to make shit up about how evil it supposedly was

In the National Post, Nigel Biggar recounts some of the most egregious virtue signalling by western elites over the claimed evils of colonialism … even to the point of inventing sins to confess and obsess over:

Meanwhile, in Australia, there’s the extraordinary career of Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 book, Dark Emu. This argues that Aborigines, far from being primitive nomads, developed the first egalitarian society, invented democracy, and were sophisticated agriculturalists. Such was the morally superior civilization that white colonizers trashed in their racist greed. Named Book of the Year, Dark Emu has sold more than 360,000 copies and was made the subject of an Australian Broadcasting Company documentary.

Yet, it has been widely criticized for being factually untrue. Author Peter O’Brien has forensically dismantled it in Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2020). And in Farmers or Hunter Gatherers: The Dark Emu Debate (2021) — described by reviewers as “rigorously researched”, “masterful”, and “measured” — eminent anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe dismiss Pascoe’s claims.

Which bring us to Canada. The May 2021 claim by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation to have discovered the “remains of 215 children” of an Indian Residential School was quickly sexed up by the media into a story about a “mass grave”, with all its connotation of murderous atrocity. The Globe and Mail published an article under the title, “The discovery of a mass gravesite at a former residential school in Kamloops is just the tip of the iceberg,” in which a professor of law at UBC wrote: “It is horrific … a too-common unearthing of the legacy, and enduring reality, of colonialism in Canada”. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal buildings to honour the allegedly murdered children. Because the Kamloops school had been run by Roman Catholics, some zealous citizens took to burning and vandalizing churches, 112 of them to date. The dreadful tale was eagerly broadcast worldwide by Al Jazeera.

Yet, almost four years later, not a single set of remains of a murdered Indigenous child in an unmarked grave has been found anywhere in Canada. Judging by the evidence collected by Chris Champion and Tom Flanagan in their best-selling 2023 book, Grave Error: How the Media Misled us (and the Truth about the Residential Schools), it looks increasingly probable that the whole, incendiary story is a myth.

So, prime ministers, archbishops, academics, editors, and public broadcasters are all in the business of exaggerating the colonial sins of their own countries — from London to Sydney to Toronto. Why?

An obvious reason is the well-meaning desire to raise respect for indigenous cultures with a view to “healing” race relations. But that doesn’t explain the aggressive brushing aside of concerns about evidence and truth in the eager rush to irrational self-criticism.

G33/40: Special Carbine for the Gebirgsjager

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Nov 2024

When the Germans took over control of the Czechoslovakian arms industry, they took some time to work out what out to mass produce at the Brno factory. In the interim, they decided to restart production of the Czech vz33 Mauser carbine as the Gewehr 33/40 for German mountain troops. This was a truly short carbine with a 19.4 inch (490mm) barrel, which the Czechs had used for mostly police applications. German had used a short carbine back before World War One, but with Spitzer ammunition it was deemed too harsh shooting (both blast and recoil) to be worth the reduced length. Well, that calculation was different for mountain troops.

The G33/40 also had a distinctive added metal plate on the left side of the stock to help protect it in mountain use. The G33/40 would remain in production for three years, from 1940 until 1942 (after which the rifle production changed to standard K98ks). About 130,000 were made, with 945 receiver codes in 1940 and dot codes thereafter.
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QotD: The banality of crime

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

When I was still in grad school, there was a big pot bust in College Town. Big enough to merit statewide notice, anyway — a couple hundred pounds, something like that, obviously not El Chapo level but enough to where some kind of actual, organized smuggling was involved.

Cynical bastard that I am, I immediately wondered just how they’d managed this feat of law enforcement. College Town being, well, a college town, it had a surprisingly large police force, but the cops dealt overwhelmingly with quality-of-life stuff. I doubt they had more than one or two full time detectives (if that) chasing burglars; I don’t recall College Town ever having a homicide. They certainly didn’t have narcs on the force, is what I’m getting at, so how on earth did they disrupt this small-time, amateurish, yet still legit (on volume alone) drug smuggling operation?

I forget the details, but as you’d surmise from this story taking place in Clown World, they were fake and gay. I’m slightly fictionalizing, and slightly exaggerating, but it really was on the level of “A prowl car saw a guy driving erratically and pulled him over, at which point smoke started billowing out of the windows. The cop looked in and found a felony amount of pot sitting in a garbage bag on the front seat, and the driver copped a plea — he ratted out his supplier, and when the cops showed up with a warrant, that knucklehead, too, had his bales of marijuana sitting out in plain view on the living room couch.”

Most crime works like that, as it turns out. Even in the big cities, where police departments have bigger budgets and more combat power than a lot of European armies. Homicides, for instance, are 99% paperwork, I’m told. Everyone knows that Peanut shot Ray Ray over a pair of sneakers, not least because Peanut is walking around in the damn things, and probably still has the gun shoved in the waistband of his track suit, too. “Solving” the homicide is just a matter of putting the paperwork through. Stone cold whodunits, like big sophisticated undercover narcotics operations, are vanishingly rare, because the cost of enforcement, let’s call it, is extremely high.

I know, I know, The Wire was a tv show, but people I know who really do work in law enforcement say it’s close enough to the real thing for our purposes. Drug dealers down in the ‘hood aren’t nearly as smart and sophisticated and above all self-disciplined as the Barksdale Crew, but the basic principle is the same: Since the low-level people are inevitably going to get busted, make sure that the low-level people don’t have anything on the guys one level higher, and your drug dealing operation is more or less safe. Just as Peanut could probably get away with blasting Ray Ray in broad daylight if he were smart enough not to wear the shoes around, so the pot dealers in College Town could’ve gotten away with their operation more or less forever, provided they weren’t stupid enough to be driving around high on their own supply, with said supply in plain view in the passenger seat.

Severian, “The Cost of Enforcement”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-29.

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