Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Sept 2025Prior to 1986, Group Industries imported BAR parts kits and then manufactured and registered full-auto receivers for them. This produced transferrable guns which were subject to NFA registration and the $200 transfer tax — which was a much more significant sum at that time than it is today. Some of the potential customers were people (like reenactors) who wanted guns that looked and handled like real BARs but were not regulated by the NFA. To satisfy this subgroup of customers, Group designed a receiver which neither had nor could be adapted to have a gas piston, rendering the gun manually operated. It would fire from an open bolt, but had to be manually recocked after each shot. This was not legally a machine gun, and he made 68 of them.
When the Hughes Amendment to the FOPA passed in 1986, manufacture of new transferrable machine guns ceased, and Group Industries went out of business. Its assets were sold off, including a number of parts kits and unbuilt M.O.R. receivers. One of the buyers was Ohio Ordnance Works (then called Collector’s Corner). They got ten receivers and after selling them, decided to develop a semiautomatic BAR for that same non-NFA BAR market. That gun ended up being the M1918A3, which is still available from them today.
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February 16, 2026
M1918A2 MOR: How to Make a Non-NFA BAR
QotD: How nuclear weapons were viewed right after WW2
In that context [clear Soviet superiority of conventional forces in Europe], the fact that it had been the United States which had been the first to successfully develop nuclear weapons (and use them in anger, a decision which remains hotly debated to this day) must have seemed like an act of divine providence, as it enabled the western allies to retain a form of military parity with the USSR (and thus deterrence) while still demobilizing. US airbases in Europe put much of the Soviet Union in range of American bombers which could carry nuclear weapons, which served to “balance” the conventional disparity. It’s important to keep in mind also that nuclear weapons emerged in the context where “strategic” urban bombing had been extensively normalized during the Second World War; the idea that the next major war would include the destruction of cities from the air wasn’t quite as shocking to them as it was to us – indeed, it was assumed. Consequently, planners in the US military went about planning how they would use nuclear weapons on the battlefield (and beyond it) should a war with a non-nuclear Soviet Union occur.
At the same time, US strategists (particularly associated with the RAND Corporation) were beginning to puzzle out the long term strategic implications of nuclear weapons. In 1946, Bernard Brodie published The Absolute Weapon which set out the basic outlines of deterrence theory; he did this, to be clear, three years before the USSR successfully tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949 (far earlier than anyone expected because the USSR had spies in the Manhattan Project). Brodie is thus predicting what the strategic situation will be like when the USSR developed nuclear weapons; his predictions proved startlingly accurate, in the event.
Brodie’s argument proceeds as a series of propositions (paraphrased):
- The power of a nuclear bomb is such that any city can be destroyed by less than ten bombs.
- No adequate defense against the bomb exists and the possibilities of such are very unlikely.
- Nuclear weapons will motivate the development of newer, longer range and harder to stop delivery systems.
- Superiority in the air is not going to be enough to stop sufficient nuclear weapons getting through.
- Superiority in nuclear arms also cannot guarantee meaningful strategic superiority. It does not matter that you had more bombs if all of your cities are rubble.
- Within five to ten years (of 1946), other powers will have nuclear weapons. [This happened in just three years.]
All of which, in the following years were shown to be true. Consequently, Brodie notes that while nuclear weapons are “the apotheosis of aggressive instruments”, any attacker who used them would fear retaliation with their enemy’s nuclear weapons which would in turn also be so destructive such that “no victory, even if guaranteed in advance – which it never is – would be worth the price”. Crucially, it is not the fact of retaliation, but the fear of it, which matters and “the threat of retaliation does not have to be 100 per cent certain; it is sufficient if there is a good chance of it, or if there is a belief that there is a good chance of it. The prediction is more important than the fact.” [emphasis mine]
This does not “make war impossible” by any means, but rather turns strategy towards focusing on making sure that nuclear weapons are not used, by making it clear to any potential aggressor that nuclear weapons would be used against them. And that leads to Brodie’s final, key conclusion:
Thus, the first and most vital step in any American security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind. The writer in making that statement is not for the moment concerned about who will win the next war in which atomic bombs are used. Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.
To sum that up, because both the United States and its key enemies will have nuclear weapons and because their destructive power is effectively absolute (so high as to make any “victory” meaningless) and because there is no effective defense against such weapons, consequently the only rational response is to avoid the use of nuclear weapons and the only way to do that is to be able to credibly threaten to retaliate with nuclear weapons in the event of war (since if you cannot so retaliate, your opponent could use their nuclear weapons without fear).
That thinking actually took a while to take hold in actual American policy and instead during the 1940s and 1950s, the United States focused resources on bomber fleets with the assumption that they would match Soviet superiority in conventional arms in Europe with American nuclear superiority, striking military and industrial targets (“precision attacks with an area weapon”, a notion that is as preposterous as it feels) to immediately cripple the USSR in the event of war, or else aim to “win” a “limited” nuclear exchange.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.
February 15, 2026
The smartphone as a tool to create a real-life Idiocracy
Not being much of a film fan, I’d never seen the movie Idiocracy, but based on the description in Christopher Gage’s rant against the smartphone, I might not need to watch it as it’s happening all around us:
Transport for London, the mythical entity alleged to manage the city’s Tube, has revealed its campaign to tackle the smartphone scourge: sickly posters splashed in kindergarten colours.
The campaign targets the “disruptive behaviour” of passengers who were evidently raised by a pack of snarling hyenas. They blast reels, videos, music. They FaceTime their cackling friends. Not so long ago, a fellow passenger revealed to us — her captive audience — that someone named Sarah had caught the clap from someone named Travis. Syphilis? How literary.
Miraculously, researchers at Transport for London discovered a rare tribe thought to be long extinct: Londoners who communicate with their fellow human beings by making noises with their mouths — one thousand of them, in fact.
Researchers approached these strange beings with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. They prodded them with a stick. That didn’t work. After jabbing them with a cattle prod, they looked up from their phones. Several members landed in Accident and Emergency, complaining of neck strain injuries.
Seventy percent of those surveyed said the constant noise screaming out of smartphones drove them crazy. One responder suggested offenders receive forty lashings in public. That is a bit much. Ten should do the trick.
TFL wavered from such brutal and effective methods. Campaign posters politely ask passengers to wear headphones.
I’m afraid that TFL’s well-meaning campaign hasn’t quite restored sanity on the London Underground.
Last week, I sat next to a grown man grinning at his phone like a Hindu cow. On the screen was a captivating spectacle. Someone, somewhere, makes it their daily business to buy gigantic, waist-height glass bottles of soda. This clearly well-adjusted person then rolls the bottles down a flight of concrete steps. Our friend dissolved the journey between Hammersmith and Leicester Square in a trance. Bottle. Roll. Smash. Bottle. Roll. Smash.
This reminded me of the satirical film, Idiocracy. The plot follows U.S. Army librarian Luke, and prostitute Rita.
After signing up for a hibernation experiment, the two awake in America, year 2500. Mountains of trash litter the landscape. Planes fall out of the sky. The citizens drag their gormless faces between Starbucks (which is now a coffee-serving brothel) and shopping malls even more dementing than those today. Over centuries, the dumb have biologically outgunned the smart.
The citizens of this moronic inferno drain their days glued to hyperactive screens. Their favourite content includes the Masturbation Channel and a reality TV show called “Ow! My Balls!” That show follows a hapless man as he gets whacked in the testicles.
They cultivate high culture, too. The profound film, Ass, zooms in on a pair of bare bum cheeks. The sophisticated audience fizzes with laughter as the bum, for two hours, passes wind.
Back in 2006, Idiocracy was a well-done satire which stretched logical extremes. Today, I’m not so sure it is as ridiculous as it once seemed. Just spend ten minutes on the Tube, inhaling the noxious TikTok fumes spewing from smartphones.
Transport for London has a point. But it is far too late. We are a nation of dopamine addicts. Those dopamine crack pipes stitched to our palms are quite literally designed to suck away as much of our time and attention as possible. An intervention, at this late hour, must be drastic.
How about a campaign outlining the terrifying effects of watching brain-rot content for hours and hours each day? A growing body of research suggests today’s smartphone is tomorrow’s lobotomy. Am I rioting in hyperbole? No.
One study found that watching short-form video is more harmful to our brains than soaking them in booze. At least, the latter indulgence might get you laid.
Several studies link smartphone culture with declines in comprehension, literacy, and the ability to reason. Others link smartphones with rising narcissism and collapsing social capital. And then there’s the nascent research suggesting that smartphone addiction may trigger ADHD and Autism-like symptoms in the addicted.
How to Make The Economy Look Better Than It Is – Death of Democracy 03 – Q3 1933
World War Two
Published 14 Feb 2026Death of Democracy returns to Nazi Germany in Q3 1933. See Hitler enforce one‑party rule, sign the Reichskonkordat, tighten propaganda and press control, and expand work programs that feed rearmament. From July to September, follow the legal and cultural Gleichschaltung that normalizes terror and reshapes Europe’s future in this episode.
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Everything you see in the media is kayfabe
Wikipedia defines kayfabe as “the portrayal of staged elements within professional wrestling (such as characters, rivalries, and storylines) as legitimate or real. Although it remains primarily a wrestling term, it has evolved into a code word for maintaining the pretense of ‘reality’ in front of an audience.” It’s hard not to see modern political theatre in that light, as Damian Penny points out:
Sgt. Slaughter and The Grand Wizard, February 1984.
Photo from Wrestling’s MAIN EVENT magazine via Wikimedia Commons.
I know a guy who was obsessed with WWF wrestling (yes, I said WWF wrestling, because you kids better get off my lawn before Diagnosis Murder comes on) when he was younger and got to see it live when it came to his city. After the show, he was shocked to see several of the wrestlers — some of them good-guy “faces”, others bad-guy “heels” — being driven from the arena in the same minivan.
For someone who took the “sport” of professional wrestling seriously1 and was extremely emotionally invested in the performer rivalries, this was kind of like finding out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.2
That’s the first thing I thought about when I came across this piece by Christianity Today‘s Russell Moore, a rare evangelical leader who actually held on to his integrity in the age of Trump, about the Epstein Files:
Reading through the names of those connected with Epstein, one can hardly believe the range listed there. Some were unsurprising: for instance, creepy filmmaker Woody Allen or the man formerly known as Prince Andrew. But even then, the scope is unsettling. Even the Dalai Lama had to put out a statement noting that he was never involved with Epstein. Just as incredible, many of the people listed were partying with those they spend a lot of time telling the rest of us to hate.
Both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton were apparently friendly with Epstein. The New Age syncretist Deepak Chopra is in the documents many times — often with shady, enigmatic phrases — but so are those who accused the pope of New Age syncretism. With Middle Eastern tensions what they are, still the files include both sheikhs and Israelis. All over the files are connections with both left-wing populist provocateur Noam Chomsky and right-wing populist provocateur Steve Bannon. Epstein makes fun of evangelicals yet recommends a James Dobson article.
How can this be?
Maybe one reason is that Jeffrey Epstein figured out the deep, dark secret of this moment: The people who fight culture wars often believe what they say, but the people who lead culture wars often don’t.
[…] And if the Epstein revelations didn’t blackpill you hard enough, check this out:
To be fair, I’m not sure it’s an entirely bad thing that so many decision-makers and “thought leaders” who are sworn enemies in public get along just fine when the cameras are turned off. If they really hated each other, our political culture might be even more messed up.
- YouTuber Drew Allen says you should take wrestling seriously, and honestly he makes a darned good argument.
- I’ll never forget when I found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, and how I was so depressed and hopeless and wouldn’t leave my bed for days. Finally my mother came into my bedroom, sat down on the side my bed and said, “honey, I know you’re sad but you’re in your second year of law school and really we thought you’d have figured this out long ago“.
WW1: The Siege of Przemyśl: Austria-Hungary’s Horror Story | EP 6
The Rest Is History
Published 11 Sept 2025After endeavouring to wreak their revenge on Serbia, what would be the greatest hammer blow to the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War? With Leviv having fallen apocalyptically to the Russian hordes, what had gone so wrong? How might the war have been brought to an end before Christmas of 1914? And, with the darkness gathering around the Austrian defences, could the great fortress of Przemyśl hold out against the Russian barrage for a second time?
Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian advance, on the brutal Eastern front, as the first year of the First World War grinds bloodily on…
Alexander Watson’s The Fortress, the book heavily referenced in this episode, is available to purchase here: http://bit.ly/41NKRrq
______00:00 – Cold open: “intricacies of war” reading
01:13 – Adobe
01:51 – Nick Lloyd & the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger
03:26 – Austria-Hungary’s coming unraveling: setting the stakes
06:50 – Why Przemyśl is a fortress; garrison & geography
08:31 – August 1914: Conrad’s plan and its unraveling
17:48 – Catastrophe for the Habsburg army
18:32 – The siege begins
24:50 – Pendulum swings back; Russians advance again
27:01 – Civilian exodus chaos; encircled again (8 Nov)
28:10 – Uber
28:50 – Folio Society
30:17 – Russian occupation & pogroms in Galicia (1914)
31:39 – War aims: Russification under Count Bobrinsky
33:00 – Russian antisemitism context; pogroms & deportations
37:05 – Second siege strategy: starve them out; General Kusman
38:04 – Early aerial bombing of civilians (Dec 1)
39:10 – Christmas Eve gestures; brief humanity, then darkness
41:04 – Conrad’s Carpathian rescue bid (23 Jan): campaign from hell
42:02 – Carpathian horrors; Tyrolean memoir; morale collapses
47:10 – POW fate: officers vs men; camps & Murmansk railway
49:01 – Austria-Hungary reels from the disaster
50:17 – Germany’s opinion of Austria Hungary
51:13 – Italy cuts a deal, joins war; the Italian Front beckons
53:38 – Tsar’s visit; enforced Russification in Przemyśl
55:14 – Mackensen’s offensive; Germans “liberate” Przemyśl; Austria eclipsed
56:10 – Foreshadowing WW2?
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QotD: The love of long-distance train travel
Of course, the accursed cell phone and the even more accursed smartphone have penetrated the seclusion. And alas, there are no more dining cars, a delight now almost completely abolished by spiteful managements, and available mainly on ridiculous super-luxury trains such as the pastiche Orient Express. Yet no restaurant meal I have ever had, including the pressed duck at the old Tour D’Argent in Paris (before it became a museum where you could eat the exhibits), has surpassed the breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners I have eaten in trains.
I think of the wonderful bacon and eggs, accompanied by soda bread, on the cross-border Belfast-to-Dublin flyer in Ireland; the vast plates of pork and dumplings accompanied by Pilsener beer on the somnolent Zapadny Express from Nuremberg to Prague; the fresh pancakes and maple syrup at breakfast on the California Limited, with antelopes fleeing from the train somewhere between Dodge City and Albuquerque; the first sip of tea from the samovar, served in a glass in an ornate silver holder, on the Red Star night sleeper from Moscow to Leningrad; the first glass of wine on a sunny September evening as the Rome Express, an hour out of Paris, clattered southward past the faintly minatory cathedral tower at Sens. Then there were the toasted teacakes near Grantham on the southbound Flying Scotsman, and the superb galley-cooked steak on the upper deck of the Chicago-bound Capitol Limited, as it climbed westward through the evening into the forests beyond Harper’s Ferry and up the Potomac valley.
Peter Hitchens, “Why I Love Trains”, First Things, 2020-07-16.
February 14, 2026
“People don’t need conspiracies to be absolute utter rabid bastards”
If you search here for the word “Epstein”, you won’t find a lot of relevant hits other than the reporting when he was arrested in 2019 and occasional mentions in posts on other topics. I don’t breathlessly report every little driblet of news or rumour as it floats past, because I’ve seen other moral panics play out in the past (like the Cleveland child abuse scandal back in the late 80s). Ian at The Bugscuffle Gazette has not only seen things like this before, he’s worked in law enforcement on similar (if lower-profile) cases:
Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
The Epstein Files have been released to a tremendous amount of outrage, and I find myself conflicted. There are definitely victims of that virulent parasite, but I worry they’re about to be overlooked.
I’m afraid that this whole mess is starting to remind me a great deal of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s – 1990s.
For those who may be a little too young to remember that little blot on the Copybook of History, it started with a “psychiatrist”1 who had a fondness for the woo-woo — and incredibly debunked — practice of “Recovered Memory Therapy“2, and was spark-plugged by well-meaning3, yet clueless, people who used suggestive questions and leading questions when interviewing children … and wound up with about 12,000 reports of ritual abuse of children — including, but not limited to: child sexual abuse, ritual sacrifice of children, cannibalism of children, child pornography, child prostitution, murder of children, torture of children, and incestuous orgies.
A large part of the American population became convinced that paedophiles associated with Satanism were running child care centers across the country for the express purpose of providing a steady supply of children for devil-worshipping rites.
As one might expect day-care workers and pre-schools took it in the neck … but so did fathers. The “experts” — untrained, inexperienced, unqualified — had a particular case of the ass towards fathers, with the result that several fathers spent years in prison for crimes never committed.
Yeah. Not a one of those reported 12,000 cases turned out to be substantiated. And when I say “Not substantiated” we’re talking about stuff like:
- Children were coached to testify that they had been taken to a cemetery where the graves were dug up and the corpses used for violation. It is physically impossible to dig up an entire cemetery and leave abso-bloody-lutely no trace behind.
- Children were coached to testify that a teenager with Noonan Syndrome had cut the throat of a giraffe, and used the dying corpse for ritual violations. Seriously.
- Children were coached to testify that they had been given to aliens, flown up into space, and violated.
In addition to the coaching, case files were built from statements given by diagnosed schizophrenics; anonymous statements given by people who were later tracked down and found to be — let us be precise here — flat barking bugnuts; and was fueled by the political desire to make hay, or make the other guy look bad rather than — you know — justice.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Other than the fact that innocent people got dragged through the legal wringer, spent years in prison, and had their lives ruined for nothing; the mass-hysteria moral panic4 went that actual, provable cases of child molestation got short shrift.
A vast underground network of Satanic peadophiles conducting ritualistic abuse, cannibalism, and unholy rituals was far more toothsome to prosecutors, the Media, and the public at large than Uncle Badtouch.
Given the choice of making his name by becoming the hero taking on a vast international cabal of highly-connected Satanists … or the day-to-day boring grind of prosecuting the creepy dude at the park — well, District Attorneys are politicians. And politicians gotta politick. Heroes poll better than the unsung.
Which brings us to the Epstein Files.
- I use the scare quotes because he should have been struck off for his wanton destruction of families and innocent people.
- Really good at implanting false memories, not worth a bucket of warm rat spit at recovering memories.
- And let’s face it: Some ill-intentioned folks.
- This went on for years.
Former First Lady suffers unplanned mingling with the plebs in Germany
eugyppius offers some news from Germany, one of the many western nations eagerly plunging toward cultural suicide in a race with Canada, Australia, the UK and other formerly “first world” nations:
Yesterday Lufthansa pilots and cabin crews went on strike, forcing Hillary Clinton to slum her way on the train to the Munich Security Conference.
[…] you can see the former First Lady and U.S. Secretary of State disembarking from her filthy Deutsche Bahn Intercity Express from Berlin, which had naturally suffered an electrical fault that disabled the restaurant car and with that, all possibility of coffee. Munich Central Station is one of the worst train stations in all of Germany; the place is awash in trash and smells always of urine and french fries. It is a very minor pleasure, watching political elites being forced to navigate the very same dysfunctional landscape all of us have to deal with every day.
“eugyppius,” said absolutely nobody ever, “why has it been so long since you last updated us on Germany? Is nothing going on? Tell us something please.”
The problem is that German politics have degenerated so much in the past year that it is becoming very hard to write abut them.
In the post-Merkel era under Olaf Scholz, insane new crazy bad inadvisable unbelievable stuff would happen almost every day; in the post-post-Merkel years under Friedrich Merz, absolutely nothing can happen no matter how bad things get. After an unstable period comprising the second half of Covid and the pious afterglow of St. Greta (before the latter took up her charitable sailing initiatives), we have settled into a new order. Imagine an airplane piloted by heedless methed-out lunatics. For a brief time they enjoyed aerobatics well exceeding the engineering specifications of their craft, until they snapped a few flight control cables, and now they have become the prisoners of their own recreations as the altimeter ticks down and the ground rushes up at them.
Metaphors are fun but specifics are healthier. As everybody knows, the centre-right Christian Democrats are in a coalition with the newly hard-left Social Democrats, and the latter are determined to block every last initiative, reform and legislative proposal, however mundane or plainly necessary or routine. A little over a year ago, I wrote that German politics had become stuck, and that was true enough back then. What is true right now, is that they have achieved a stage well beyond stuck. The federal government is in a coma, an indefinite vegetative state, on life support – totally paralysed and neither dead nor alive.
We’ve gone over the reasons so much, I hesitate to recite them again, but I will. At the root of our present crisis is a shift within the German left that has had cascading consequences for the party system as a whole. Basically, the left has become both more scattered and more extreme in the last five years. They have become more scattered, because climatism is decaying and this process of ideological unravelling means that leftists have lost a crucial focal point used to rally activists and moderates alike. They have become more extreme, because the general rightward shift in politics is depriving the Social Democrats of their traditional moderating, working-class constituents. These are migrating steadily to the Christian Democrats and ultimately to Alternative für Deutschland.
As the left slowly boils down to their activist base, they become more radicalised. The Social Democrats are no longer the family-friendly centre-left party of Gerhard Schröder. They want to fight, they want to burn things down, they want hell. The very same rightward shift, meanwhile, has had a nearly opposite effect on the CDU. They have lost many of their most engaged constituents and no few members to the AfD. What remains is a husk of dull, uninspired careerists, eager to maintain their good regard with polite society and their regular schedule of polite evening talk show appearances. To break the present impasse, Merz or those around him must act decisively and make facts. He needs to fire all his SPD ministers, form a minority government and achieve some kind of rapprochement with the AfD. Alas, neither Merz nor anybody else in CDU leadership has the mettle for that kind of fight, which would also set off a series of catastrophic revolts within the CDU itself. Thus everything must remain frozen and broken indefinitely, while things get worse and worse and our ability ever to fix them decays.
The EU’s plans to drain the “wine lake” … again
Canada isn’t the only place with rigidly governed agricultural cartels … the European Union has always been a big fan of governing agricultural markets by fiat rather than allowing the markets to sort out how much of which product should be produced. One of the biggest markets actively distorted by EU regulation is the wine industry, where faulty regulations ended up paying for a vast over-supply of wine in the 1980s and 90s. Rather than eliminating the regulatory structures, the EU continues to prefer letting bureaucrats dictate to producers:
When the Common Agricultural Policy was established, it was quickly determined that one of its core objectives would be the protection of farmers, ensuring stable incomes and food security. In the wine sector, this logic translated into strong interventionism aimed at expanding and stabilizing production.
For decades, Brussels subsidized vineyard planting, protected minimum prices, and absorbed producers’ economic risk, disconnecting production decisions from signals of demand. Producing more ceased to be an economic choice and became a politically safe decision.
This approach created a structural market distortion. As wine consumption began to decline across Europe for demographic, cultural, and economic reasons, the artificially incentivized productive structure remained intact and unable to adjust.
It was in this context that, during the 1980s and 1990s, the first major shock occurred, known as the wine lake: massive wine surpluses with no outlet. Even then, Brussels treated this episode as an isolated and temporary phenomenon, ignoring the fact that it was the direct consequence of existing policies. By persisting with the same strategies, the problem ceased to be episodic and became structural.
In the early 2000s, the European Union was finally forced to recognize that the wine crisis was not temporary. However, instead of removing production incentives and restoring the market’s adjustment function, it opted for a new form of intervention: subsidizing the voluntary uprooting of vineyards. The decision to destroy productive capacity ceased to be economic and became administrative, decreed from the European political center, with profound effects across several countries.
This model, presented as temporary, set a dangerous precedent. Rather than allowing less viable producers to exit the market through prices and economic choice, the state began paying for withdrawal, subsidizing the costs of adjustment and normalizing the idea that the correction of public policy errors should be financed with more public money.
This policy did not solve the underlying problem. It merely reduced cultivated area temporarily, while leaving intact the regulatory architecture which had created the initial distortion. The sector became trapped in a cycle of incentivized expansion, predictable crisis, and administrative correction.
It is within this framework that the Wine Package emerges as the European Union’s latest set of measures for the wine sector. The package relies on an administratively planned reduction of supply through financial incentives for vineyard uprooting, complemented by regulatory adjustments, temporary support measures, and crisis management instruments. Instead of allowing the market to adjust to declining consumption, Brussels once again opts for the destruction of productive capacity as a policy tool. Although the package includes support measures and environmental framing, its central axis remains the administrative reduction of supply.
The impact of these decisions is not marginal. The European wine sector represents a significant share of the European Union’s economy, sustaining approximately 2.9 million direct and indirect jobs and contributing more than €130 billion to EU GDP.
Voltaire & Rousseau’s Best Friend Breakup – Valentine’s Day Special
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Feb 2025Watch as two of the smartest men in French history bravely push the bounds of being the pettiest, most toxic idiots possible.
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QotD: Canada and its military – a history of neglect
Canada’s military was not always a punchline. At the end of World War II Canada had the world’s third-largest navy, complete with our own aircraft carrier, and over a million men under arms. Since then military spending has steadily declined, from a high of around 7% of GDP in the early 50s to around 1% today, where it’s hovered since the end of the Cold War.
Canada is protected to its east and west by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, both of which are patrolled by the powerful navy of the friendly superpower to the south, the only country with which Canada shares a land border, which we have long bragged is the longest undefended frontier in the world. Our only other neighbouring country is Russia, and while Russia is a decidedly unfriendly superpower, in practice Canada’s populated south is separated from the Russian Federation by thousands of kilometres of howling arctic wastes which provide an even better natural defence than the oceans.
Cozy and secure in our continental cocoon, Canada has allowed its military to atrophy into a vestigial appendage akin to the stubby wings of flightless birds on isolated Pacific islands, useful only for emotive displays. So far as the Liberal Party is concerned, “emotive display” is, indeed, the only real purpose of the military. Ever since Lester B. Pearson1 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing the concept of “peacekeeping” to de-escalate the Suez Crisis (thereby helping to drive the final nail into the coffin of the British Empire), the Canadian military’s primary purpose has been to conduct third-world relief missions. Peacekeeping carries no particular benefit to Canada, but it is of great benefit to politicians, who get to preen in front of the camera as important humanitarian statesmen. The purpose of the Canadian military isn’t to win wars, to defend the country, or to conquer distant lands: it’s to make Liberal Party politicians feel good about themselves.
When the CAF fails to live up to its making-liberals-feel-good mission, Canada’s liberal establishment reacts like a frustrated child taking out her vindictive cruelty by throwing her dolls against the wall. The Somalia Affair is probably the best example of this dynamic. The Canadian Airborne Regiment, an elite commando unit whose core competencies were jumping out of airplanes to break things and kill people, was deployed in Somalia with the contradictory goal of keeping a non-existent peace, a mission to which they were singularly ill-suited. Somalis being Somalis, the Airborne base was immediately subjected to continuous infiltration and theft. A handful of the violent lunatics in the regiment reacted by capturing thieves and torturing them to death, which they had the poor sense to document with photographic evidence; later, photographs emerged of one of the airborne troopers wearing a moustache man t-shirt while raising his arm at a prohibited angle, which wasn’t criminal exactly but was very bad PR. Instead of punishing the guilty troops individually, for instance with field courts martial followed by summary hanging, the Liberal Party flew into a rage and disbanded the regiment for having committed the unforgivable sin of making them look bad. This dragged on in the media for years, sullying the honour of not only the Airborne Regiment but of the entire military. The Somalia affair unfolded over thirty years ago, but the liberal establishment holds it over the heads of the CAF to this day.
In addition to providing politicians with regular hits of the pleasantly addictive buzz of telescopic philanthropy, peacekeeping also has the great advantage of being cheap. Not only does peacekeeping not require all that many troops, you don’t even need tanks, fighter jets, destroyers, or aircraft carriers to distribute aid packages to refugees. Therefore the Canadian military essentially does not have these things. The CAF has a grand total of 112 forty-six-year-old Leopard II main battle tanks (of which roughly half are down for maintenance at any given time), a whole 138 forty-two-year-old CF-18 Hornet fighter jets (of which 89 are operational), twelve Halifax class frigates (of which about half are in drydock at any given time), an intimidating four Victoria class diesel-electric submarines (which are forty-five years old, and all but one of which is out of commission), and zero bombers, zero attack helicopters, zero destroyers, zero troop transports, zero battleships, and zero aircraft carriers. The pathetic size of the Royal Canadian Navy is particularly embarrassing given that Canada has the longest coastline in the world, at 243,042 kilometres, essentially all of which Ottawa expects Washington to defend on its behalf. Airlift capacity is so limited that the CAF essentially cannot deploy overseas without allied logistical assistance.
By contrast with its decrepit armaments, the CAF has 145 generals: it has more generals than it does tanks. This top-heavy general staff is only about a third the size of the US military’s, despite the American military being 20x larger by personnel and 32x larger by budget.
From the perspective of the Laurentian elite, a weak military is actually a political advantage. If Canada effectively does not have the ability to project military force, Ottawa can simply plead lack of capacity when America asks for assistance. It enables Canada to duck out of involvement in America’s various imperial wars, letting Washington shoulder the burden of the Pax Americana while chirping from the sidelines about how the big bad bible-thumbing American bully is so mean, and how peaceful, ethical, liberal, humanitarian Canada is so nice because Canada spends its money on healthcare instead of bombs. It isn’t a morally superior position, of course: it’s simply shameless dependence and shameful parasitism.
John Carter, “The Canadian Political Class is Ideologically Incapable of Rebuilding the Military”, Postcards From Barsoom, 2025-11-13.
- The man who, as prime minister, replaced the red ensign’s ethnic heraldry with the maple leaf’s corporate logo.
February 13, 2026
To be accepted as a true European, you must performatively hate Trump
In Spiked, Frank Furedi explains why European elites and the poseurs who aspire to be counted among the elites must now ostentatiously and performatively hate US President Donald Trump (even more than they hated George Bush, if possible). Comment on dit “eLbOwS uP”?
AI-generated image from AndrewSullivan.substack.com
In recent months, anti-Americanism has emerged yet again as a respectable prejudice in Europe. It is widely promoted through the mainstream media and enthusiastically endorsed by the continent’s cultural elites. There are now even numerous campaigns to boycott American goods – most respondents to a survey in France said they would support a boycott of US brands like Tesla, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. As a piece in Euractiv put it, anti-Americanism is “in vogue across Europe”.
This has become all too clear at the Winter Olympics, currently being held in northern Italy. At the opening ceremony for Milano Cortina 2026, Team USA and vice-president JD Vance were booed by a crowd of over 65,000 people. Someone I know who attended the event told me that the booing was spontaneous and quickly became widespread. According to the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, those booing were displaying “European pride“. It seems that for the Brussels elites, anti-Americanism bolsters Europe’s self-esteem.
The explicit target of this resurgent anti-American animus is, of course, US president Donald Trump. But it’s implicitly aimed at all those who voted for him, too. In a piece on boycotting American goods in the normally sober Financial Times, published last March, the author gave the game away. While saying it is “wrong to conflate Americans and their president”, he argued that “it’s [also] wrong to disentangle them entirely … Trump reflects half of America. He reflects a society where a democratic majority is prepared to tolerate mass shootings and a warped political system”.
Certain politicians are being boosted by this wave of anti-Americanism. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, in particular, has been turned into the unexpected hero of the European political establishment. His defiance of Washington has turned him into the posterboy for this new brand of anti-Americanism. “Europe has a lot to learn from Mark Carney”, was the verdict of the New Statesman. The Guardian echoed this sentiment: “Europe must heed Mark Carney – and embrace a painful emancipation from the US”.
Expressing anger against America appears to be the one emotion that binds the European political establishment. As one Financial Times commentator explained earlier this month, “Trump is Europe’s best enemy yet”. He has apparently provided Europe with the “common foe” it needs. It appears that anti-Americanism is now the glue holding together otherwise disoriented and divided European elites.
The reason usually given for this turn against the US is Trump’s behaviour towards Europe, specifically his threats to annex Greenland, impose tariffs and downgrade America’s NATO commitments. No doubt these policies have played an important role in putting Europe’s ruling classes on the defensive. However, they are not the leading cause of this wave of anti-Americanism. Rather, they have merely brought to the surface pre-existing prejudices deeply entrenched within Western Europe’s elite culture.
In his fascinating study, Anti-Americanism in Europe (2004), Russell Berman linked the growth of anti-Americanism during the 1990s and 2000s to the project of European unification. Berman claimed that, in the absence of an actual pan-European identity, anti-Americanism “proved to be a useful ideology for the definition of a new European identity”. He noted that the main way Europe defines itself as European is precisely by underscoring its difference from the United States.
Lines of Fire: Operation Husky – The Invasion of Sicily 1943 – WW2 in Animated Maps
TimeGhost Cartographic
Published 12 Feb 2026July, 1943. With the German summer offensive in the East well underway, and Allied operations in North Africa wrapped up, a decision is made to strike Axis Europe on the ground for the first real time. Sicily shall be their battleground, and the omens are good. Still, landing and commanding a huge multinational force in hostile territory is a challenge the Western Allies have not had to face head-on before, but one they must overcome if they wish to have any shot of defeating Hitler and Mussolini once and for all.
00:00 Intro
01:13 Background
04:42 Disposition
07:32 The Landings & Initial Fighting
09:34 Fighting Across the Island
11:56 Aftermath
16:38 Conclusion
(more…)
The selective ability to override any non-criminal law is a “useful tool to have”
The Canadian government is trying to get even more power to exempt their friends and favoured companies from needing to comply with any federal laws or regulations through a provision in an omnibus bill before Parliament. It may sound like a tool to dispense privileges and favours to politically well-connected individuals and organizations, but that’s only because that’s exactly what it does:
In a little-noticed provision included in the government’s latest omnibus bill, Carney government ministers would be able to override almost any non-criminal law they wanted, and provide special treatment to any person or corporation who requested it.
When pressed about the clause in a House of Commons committee this week, Minister of Canadian Identity Marc Miller called it a “useful tool to have”.
The provision is included in C-15, the 634-page “budget implementation” bill currently before the House of Commons.
Among its hundreds of amendments and orders are new powers allowing ministers to hand out special exemptions from any “Act of Parliament” under their purview.
This means that the minister of health would be able to issue exemptions from the Canada Health Act, the Indigenous services minister could oversee exemptions from the Indian Act and the minister of finance would be able to override the Income Tax Act.
Furthermore, ministers could hand out these exemptions to any “entity” they wanted. Under federal guidelines, an “entity” can mean everything from an individual to “a corporation” to an “unincorporated organization”.
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see all kinds of ways that this provision could be abused to circumvent the normal rules everyone else is bound by. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Wall Street Apes reacts:
I can’t even believe this is real
Canada Minister Marc Miller is questioned about their new bill under the Liberal government led by Prime Minister Mark Carney that would EXEMPT ALL MINISTERS FROM ALL LAWS
Yes, you heard that correctly
Hidden in the omnibus budget implementation bill, section 208 or clause 12 amends the Red Tape Reduction Act to grant federal cabinet ministers broad discretionary powers
Ministers would be able to temporarily exempt any individual, company, organization, or entity from the application of almost any provision of any federal law (or regulations made under those laws) that the minister is responsible for administering or enforcing, with the sole exception of the Criminal Code
They can themselves, and deem anyone they choose exempt from ALL laws. The only exception is the criminal code
He says you can trust them because “Canadians expect us to act reasonably”
(Holy cr*p)
On her Substack, Melanie in Saskatchewan explains why the rule of law is not optional in Canada:
So let us play this forward. A Beijing connected firm establishes operations in Canada. It hires lobbyists. It meets with the appropriate minister. It argues that certain federal regulations are barriers to innovation or economic growth. Under Bill C 15, that minister could grant a temporary exemption. The company does not need to change Canadian law. It does not need to persuade Parliament. It only needs to persuade the right minister.
That is what should alarm Canadians.
When laws become selectively waivable by political discretion, they cease to be stable guardrails and become negotiable privileges. And power, once granted, is never granted because someone intends to leave it unused.
You tell us this is about economic growth amid trade tensions. Yet Canadians were told you were elected to steady the ship on trade and tariffs, to negotiate strength abroad, to stabilize economic uncertainty. Instead, trade tensions persist, tariffs remain contentious, and what advances efficiently is domestic policy architecture that conveniently aligns with the climate finance world you know so well.
Brookfield’s climate investment arm stands to benefit enormously from aggressive climate frameworks. You remain heavily invested. The potential for substantial personal financial gain is not speculation. It is disclosed reality.
You were not elected to refashion Canada into a climate investment thesis calibrated to suit global asset management portfolios. You were elected to manage trade pressures and protect Canadian economic interests.
This exemption clause is not a minor technical detail. It is a structural shift in how power is exercised. If it is so defensible, extract it from the omnibus bill and introduce it as standalone legislation. Let it be debated openly. Let Canadians see it clearly.
Implement a robust foreign agent registry immediately. Answer why a government that acknowledges compromised parliamentarians believes this is the moment to expand ministerial discretion over who must follow federal law.
The rule of law is not optional.
And Canadians did not vote for a system where compliance is mandatory for citizens but negotiable for the well connected.
