Quotulatiousness

June 27, 2026

“To quote the immortal Miles Gloriosus, ‘Even I am impressed’. It would be more merciful to just hang them.”

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Tom Kratman discusses the recent trial and sentencing of a group of Antifa terrorists:

On 4 July, 2025, a group of ANTIFA engaged in a baited ambush outside an ICE facility, using fireworks and various riotous behaviors to entice out some members of law enforcement and shooting one of those.

They were quickly identified, in anything from some hours to two days. Of the presumed eleven of them on site, ten were also arrested within two days. Only Benjamin Song, the ringleader, managed to evade arrest for a while. Song, however, was captured within eleven days. Of those who were not present at the site but were part of the conspiracy, all were arrested within a few weeks. The total number of defendants is twenty-two, but six of those, so far, face only state charges.

Seven of the sixteen have already made plea bargains. So much for revolutionary solidarity. These have not yet been sentenced, though sentences of up to fifteen years in the big house can be expected. Of the nine who have already been tried in federal court, eight have been sentenced and one is pending. The eight sentenced, and their sentences, are as follows:

  • Benjamin Hanil Song: 100 years
  • Maricela Rueda: 70 years.
  • Cameron Arnold (aka Autumn Hill): 50 years.
  • Savanna Batten: 50 years.
  • Zachary Evetts: 50 years.
  • Bradford Morris (aka Meagan Morris): 50 years.
  • Elizabeth Soto: 50 years.
  • Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada: 30 years.

Think about it, an average of fifty-six years and three months each. To quote the immortal Miles Gloriosus, “Even I am impressed”. It would be more merciful to just hang them.

Think, too, dear lefty, about how you would face that sentence.

So what can you, left-wing reader, take away from this incident? First and foremost, you should understand that you’re not going to get a lot of mercy in a federal court (and probably none from any southern state court) for this kind of behavior. Song and Rueda, for example, are somewhat unlikely ever to see the outside world again. Yes, there is time off for good behavior — Good Conduct Time, or GCT — in federal prison, but, Song, for example, will still serve eighty-five years even if he gets all of that GCT to his credit. There is another kind of mercy the Bureau of Prisons can grant, First Step Act sentence reductions, which can chop a sentence by up to fifty percent. However, since these convictions are for terrorism or terrorism-related crimes, FSA does not apply. Yes, Song is still going to stay in prison for at least eighty-five years.

Secondly, you should be very wary of ex-military types who might claim to know how to do things like train for, rehearse for, and conduct even comparatively simple operations like ambushes. It is hard to imagine a less competent ambush than the one run by Song. No, he had no idea what he was doing. We don’t know what Song’s (he was a Marine Reservist) MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) or even unit were, but the fact that that area has only artillery and aviation should have given the people he recruited some pause to reflect on how likely he was to understand how to do any of this or anything beyond, perhaps, shoot qualification on an administrative range. No, Marine REMFs,1 are still REMFs. Yes, they are REMFs who can to some extent shoot a rifle. This does not change them from REMFs. Yes, I know that few, if any, of you are knowledgeable enough even to suspect the difference between an MOS of tutu wearer and an MOS of cold-blooded killer. Take your ignorance into account, too, before taking direction from those who can talk the talk – or seem to you, in your incarnate ignorance, to be able to – but are unlikely to be able to walk the walk.

No, I am not going to tell you – and, yes, I definitely do know how to run an ambush – how it’s to be done properly. I will tell you that calling out “Get to the rifles”, as Song did, is not the way to do it.

Your movement probably has a bare handful of people who actually know what they’re doing, violence-at-scale-wise. So before signing your life away to someone claiming to be one of them, ask yourself, “What are the odds?” And then walk the other way. No, I’m not about to tell you how to tell the difference.

  1. Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers

Destroyed In Four Minutes – The Battle of Cape Matapan

Filed under: Britain, Greece, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost Cartographic
Published 26 Jun 2026

March 1941. As British troops sail to reinforce Greece ahead of the expected German invasion, the Italian Navy sees a chance to strike. A powerful battlefleet puts to sea, hoping to intercept the convoys and seize back the initiative in the Mediterranean.

But the British know something is coming.

With the Mediterranean Fleet stretched to its limits, Admiral Andrew Cunningham must make a critical decision. Relying on intelligence and naval aviation in a race against time, the Royal Navy heads out to meet the tide headed their way.

What follows is one of the most dramatic naval engagements of the Second World War, culminating in a brutal conclusion that would leave a lasting mark on the Mediterranean campaign.

Larry Correia is “not a real writer”

Filed under: Books, Business, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While I haven’t read everything Larry Correia has published, I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of his work, but I’m clearly having fun wrong because “he’s not a real writer“:

    T-Lex @T_Saurus_Lex
    “Not a real writer” is an inside joke, from the Sad Puppy era. Something some cunning quarter-wit accused him of because Larry wasn’t prone to bend the knee to the SJW mafia. I think the details are on his blog somewhere.

Yeah, for my newer readers saying I’m not a *real* writer has been a running joke forever.

When you are a writer who annoys the liberal publishing establishment they always make up some reason to disqualify you, so they can dismiss you, and never take anything you say seriously. These are not honest people.

(If you are a proper good thinking liberal writer, don’t worry, you achieve real writer hood by loudly existing and they’ll stick you on panels if you’ve published one short story that was read by six whole people)

So at first I wasn’t a real writer because I only wrote monster adventure pulp. So then I was multi genre (and now I’m successful in more genres than most authors ever attempt). No. Those are the wrong genres.

Then I didn’t count because I wasn’t a bestseller. Until I was.

Then to be a real writer I needed to win some awards. (The big one I got nominated for at the beginning didn’t count because reasons). So then I won some awards. No. Not those! Those don’t count!

Real writers tackle serious topics and impress serious academic critics, until I wrote Son of the Black Sword, which impressed even my snootiest haters … so they promptly dropped that path to real writer hood.

This got super silly at times, and how the title really stuck, one time on book tour one of my haters saw me arrive early to a book signing outside Portland. It didn’t start for an hour so there was only three people there who had driven a long way. So I was just hanging out talking to them.

My hater immediately got on Twitter and told everybody “I saw Larry Correia on his alleged book tour and he only had three people show up. WHAT A FAILURE. WHAT A LOSER!”

The actual signing had 40, which is pretty decent. I was still there when somebody showed me this tweet. We all laughed and responded with a group photo saying learn to count, dork.

But Social Justice Warriors (ah, the good old days) can never admit a mistake. So he doubled down and tweeted I still wasn’t a REAL WRITER because that same store ROUTINELY had book signings for TWO HUNDRED customers.

Problem was, the book store wasn’t that big. To fit 200 they would have to remove all the shelves. And at this point I was still there signing their inventory so I asked the manager. She said out of hundreds of signings they had only hit 200 twice the entire time they’d been in business. Brandon Sanderson post WoT and GRRM at the absolute height of the HBO show, and those had lines out into the parking lot.

So only the top bestsellers on Earth at that moment count as Real Writers. Seems unfair. But okay.

So me and my fans leaned into this super hard to mock the absurd and ever moving goal posts of the terminally online haters. And the rest of my book tour was called THE STILL NOT A REAL WRITER WORLD TOUR. And I got a big group photo at every event for the next week.

And yes, I have hit 200 since, but I’m sure the minute I did the new Real Writer threshold moved to 400. 😀

This has been a running gag ever since, the same way my fans refer to me as the ILOH, though that is a story for another day.

How to make a French Cleat | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 27 Feb 2026

Anchoring various projects to the walls in a house can be done quickly and easily using a homemade French cleat.

I have used these for decades, and they are especially useful for items you might want to move out of the way now and then.

I love simple solutions like this, and especially when I can use offcuts I might otherwise throw away.
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QotD: When Marxism went mainstream in higher education

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

On October 25, 1989, a mere two months after Poland’s pivotal election, the New York Times published an article, headlined “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges“, describing a strange and seemingly paradoxical phenomenon. Even as the world’s great experiment in Marxism was collapsing for all to see, Marxist ideas were taking root and becoming mainstream in the halls of American universities.

“As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders”, wrote Felicity Barringer.

There were notable differences, however. The stark, unmistakable contrast between the grinding poverty of the Communist nations and the prosperity of Western economies had obliterated socialism’s claim to economic superiority.

As a result, orthodox Marxism, with its emphasis on economics, was no longer in vogue. Traditional Marxism was “retreating” and had become “unfashionable”, the Times reported.

“There are a lot of people who don’t want to call themselves Marxist,” Eugene D. Genovese, an eminent Marxist academic, told the Times. (Genovese, who died in 2012, later abandoned socialism and embraced traditional conservatism after rediscovering Catholicism.)

Marxism wasn’t truly retreating, however. It was simply adapting to survive. Watching the upheaval in Poland and other Eastern bloc nations had convinced even Marxists that capitalism would not “give way to socialism” anytime soon. But this would cause an evolution of Marxist ideas, not an abandonment of them.

“Marx has become relativized”, Loren Graham, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times.

Graham was just one of a dozen of the scholars the Times spoke to, a mix of economists, legal scholars, historians, sociologists, and literary critics. Most of them seemed to reach the same conclusion as Graham.

Marxism was not dying, it was mutating.

“Marxism and feminism, Marxism and deconstruction, Marxism and race – this is where the exciting debates are”, Jonathan M. Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, told the paper.

Marxism was still thriving, Barringer concluded, but not in the social sciences, “where there is a possibility of practical application”, but in abstract fields such as literary criticism.

Kristian Niemietz, “The New York Times Reported ‘the Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges’ 30 Years Ago. Today, We See the Results”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2020-09-18.

June 26, 2026

To address social media toxicity, you have to change the algorithm

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

If you’ve been on social media platforms at all, you’ll have encountered aggressively obnoxious behaviour, possibly rising to actual abuse. Some people revel in it, putting on their “online tough guy” personas, but others (the majority) are disturbed and repelled by it. Unfortunately, the way the system is set up is to keep you engaged and inciting anger is one of the best ways to boost engagement.

Slide from cyberghostvpn.com

Andrej Karpathy is the man who taught Tesla’s cars to see the road and drive themselves. Before that, he was one of the founding researchers at OpenAI. In the world of artificial intelligence, he’s royalty.

A few days ago, he posted a simple, excited message. He’d been using Claude, an AI assistant, and it was blowing his mind. “It works like a real teammate”, he wrote. He was genuinely thrilled.

The replies tore him apart.

Strangers called him a shill. People who’d never built anything mocked him. The pile-on grew and grew and grew.

Then Karpathy went quiet for a moment. And when he came back, he didn’t defend his original post. He said something bigger.

“After 20 years on this platform, X has never been this toxic. The algorithm actively pushes rage, insults, and pile-ons because they get engagement. That’s why even I post and visit less now.”

Twenty years. This man watched Twitter grow from a tiny blog tool into the global town square. He survived every era of the platform. And now, for the first time, he was saying: I don’t want to be here anymore.

Elon Musk read those words and replied within minutes.

“We need a complete overhaul of the algorithm.”

Not a patch. Not “we’ll look into it”. A complete overhaul.

Think about what that means. Right now, the machine that decides what you see on X has one job: keep you engaged. And the fastest way to keep you engaged is to make you angry. Outrage gets clicks. Insults get replies. Pile-ons get retweets. The algorithm learned this on its own, and now it feeds you rage all day long because rage works.

The result: the smartest, most interesting people slowly stop posting. Why would they? Every time they share an idea, a mob shows up. So they go quiet. And what fills the void is screaming.

Musk just said he wants to tear that entire machine out and build a new one from scratch. One where the most useful, most interesting, most original posts rise to the top. Where sharing a genuine thought doesn’t get you punished.

One of the greatest minds in AI came home excited, like a kid showing off a new discovery. X beat him down for it.

That’s exactly the disease Elon is now trying to cut out.

If he actually does it, you’ll feel it in your timeline before anyone announces it.

Magda Goebbels: The Nazi Mother Who Murdered Her Children

Filed under: Germany, History, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 25 Jun 2026

Magda Goebbels was one of the most infamous women in Hitler’s inner circle. Known as the wife of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and often treated as an unofficial “First Lady” of the Third Reich, she helped project an image of family, elegance, and loyalty while standing beside one of history’s most murderous regimes. But her story ends in one of the darkest acts of the Second World War.

As Berlin collapsed in 1945, Magda Goebbels took her six children into Hitler’s Führerbunker. Offered chances to escape, she refused. One day after Hitler’s suicide, she helped murder her own children with cyanide, claiming that a world without National Socialism was not worth living in.

In this episode of our new format, Baddies and Battleaxes, Anna Deinhard returns to tell the story of Magda Goebbels: socialite, Nazi fanatic, mother, accomplice, and child murderer. Her life reveals how women in the Third Reich were not always passive bystanders. Some, like Magda, actively embraced Nazi ideology, helped legitimize the regime, and chose loyalty to Hitler over humanity itself.

This is the story of the Nazi “First Lady” who followed fascism all the way into the bunker.

Who should Anna cover next in Baddies and Battleaxes? Tell us which heroines and villainesses of WW2 you want to see in a future episode.

No “capital formation”, please: we’re Canadian

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison identifies one of the biggest reasons the Canadian economy is falling ever further behind other industrialized nations:

AI-generated image from L. Wayne Mathison

Canada does not have a talent shortage.

It has a capital formation shortage.

In Q1 2026, Canada managed one growth-stage VC deal. One. Worth $1M.

That is lemonade-stand money in a global tech race.

The U.S. pulled in $267.2B in VC investment. Capital is not confused. It goes where risk is rewarded, scale is possible, and success is not treated like a moral offence.

Carney and the Liberals keep talking about “building the economy” while presiding over a country where founders raise seed money here, then scale somewhere else.

That is the real brain drain.

Not just doctors. Not just engineers. Builders. Founders. Investors. People who can turn ideas into payrolls.

They look at Canada and see taxes, red tape, weak productivity, political favouritism, and a government more interested in managing decline than getting out of the way.

Carney was sold as the adult in the room. OK. Then explain this: why is Canada producing press releases while the Americans are producing companies?

Because capital can smell fear.

And right now, Canada smells like a country that punishes ambition, subsidizes failure, and calls it fairness.

Sparta vs Athens 2(c): Spartan Childhood – The Agōgē, Infant Inspection, and State Brutality

Filed under: Books, Government, Greece, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026

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

This segment goes straight to the ancient evidence. Using Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus (with the passages shown on-screen), I explain how Sparta understood itself: infant inspection and exposure, the collective upbringing of boys in the agōgē, deliberate hunger and deprivation, enforced endurance, and the suppression of private loyalties in favour of loyalty to the state.

This is not presented as scandal. Plutarch often writes admiringly, which is precisely why the text is so revealing. The system is coherent. It is also terrifying. Sparta did not merely train soldiers. It manufactured them, beginning at birth.

QotD: The submarine war against Japan

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Second World War witnessed two concurrent campaigns by which submarines were used in an attempt to economically isolate and degrade an island nation enemy. One of these attempts was remarkably successful. In the Pacific, US Submariners sunk millions of tons of Japanese shipping — more shipping, in fact, than Japan had possessed at the outbreak of war. A brutally effective submarine campaign against Japanese tankers affected a near perfect starvation of Japan’s war machine: after intaking 40% of East Indies crude production in 1942, only 5% would reach Japanese shores in 1944. This was a cataclysmic decline which Japan could not survive, owed largely to the 155 tankers sunk by American submarines in 1943 and 1944. In the final year of the war, American boats were able to undertake the ultimate dream of submarine theorists: a close blockade of the Japanese home islands, with American submariners prowling practically every inlet and bay.

The success of the American submarine campaign was genuinely astonishing, and created a near perfect asphyxiation of the Japanese war economy, with imports of virtually every vital industrial input plummeting to near zero by 1944. Admiral Charles Lockwood, who commanded the Submarine Force Pacific Fleet, was probably only slightly boasting when he later told an instructor at the Naval Academy:

    Now don’t teach those midshipmen that the submariners won the war. We know there were other forces fighting there, too. But if they kept the surface forces and the flyboys out of our patrol areas we would have won the war six months earlier.

Despite the phenomenal success of America’s submarine operations against Japan, the American war on Japanese shipping generally receives scant attention. To take just one example, Francis Pike’s magisterial and colossal tome on the Pacific War relegates American submarine operations to an appendix. In contrast, there is an astonishing volume of literature devoted to the war’s other grand submarine campaign: the so-called Battle of the Atlantic. Germany’s famous U-boats attempted a similarly strategic interdiction war against shipping to the British home isles. Unlike the American submarine force in the Pacific, however, the U-boats failed.

Big Serge, “Wolf Packs: Battle of the Atlantic”, Big Serge Thought, 2025-12-12.

June 25, 2026

Credit card fee cap: a great idea, with the best of intentions … what possibly could go wrong?

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Nobody likes credit card fees — except the banks that issue credit cards — so politicians figure that they can please the voters at no cost and mandate limits to the fees that credit card companies can charge. But who is going to suffer for this “at no cost” bit of rule-making?

“Credit Cards” by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Two years ago, Illinois passed crowd-pleasing restrictions on credit card interchange fees, which are better known as “swipe fees”. The ban on charging fees on processing payments for tips and taxes has now been delayed twice by skeptical federal judges and lawmakers worried that they’ve crafted a financial mess. These interventions may be saving the state from itself, as a new report points out that the law threatens to hurt consumers, small retailers, and local financial institutions.

Delayed Ban on Fees for Processing Taxes and Tips

Passed as part of a 2024 revenue bill, the Interchange Fee Prohibition Act (IFPA) defines “interchange fee” as “a fee established, charged, or received by a payment card network for the purpose of compensating the issuer for its involvement in an electronic payment transaction”. It adds: “An issuer, a payment card network, an acquirer bank, or a processor may not receive or charge a merchant any interchange fee on the tax amount or gratuity of an electronic payment transaction if the merchant informs the acquirer bank or its designee of the tax or gratuity amount as part of the authorization or settlement process for the electronic payment transaction”.

“Although merchants have long advocated for this change, banking and payment industry representatives argue that it imposes an undue hardship by forcing them to process certain components of transactions without compensation,” attorneys Thomas V. Panoff and Maxwell Earp-Thomas noted for the National Law Review at the time. They also commented that the law could force Illinois payments to be processed differently than those originating in the rest of the country and the world beyond.

The situation is now being fought in court and in public between advocates who argue the fees are hidden costs and opponents who say they’re an industry-standard means to cover the cost of business.

[…]

Overall, Illinois lawmakers’ attempt to please the crowd by mandating lower costs looks poised to create a mess that could leave the state’s consumers, small banks, and retailers with higher costs and fewer choices if financial institutions leave to avoid headaches.

“To protect the integrity of the checkout experience and avoid driving financial providers from the Illinois market, the IFPA must be either repealed or overturned”, concludes Swedberg.

Credit card fees are undoubtedly burdensome for consumers and retailers. Ultimately the best way to avoid them is the traditional way: Use cash.

Passively shaping public opinion is one of big tech’s favourite techniques

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

In the portion of this post above the paywall, Celina shows a good example of how social engineering doesn’t have to be blatant to be effective:

Before reading further, open a new browser tab and type the search term “married white woman” into Google Images. Scroll through the first several rows of results. What do you see?

The output which is consistently replicated across different devices and geographic locations is a deluge of mixed-race couples. The output is overwhelmingly dominated by images of white women intimately paired with black or non-white men. To the casual observer passively consuming this digital output, the presentation establishes an immediate baseline for normalcy. The volume and priority of these specific demographic pairings create the distinct impression that such relationships are the standard, ubiquitous, and foundational reality of modern Western society.

Yet, when we contrast this algorithmic simulation with reality, a massive discrepancy emerges. Statistically, interracial marriages remain a distinct minority of overall unions in the United States and across the broader Western world. According to comprehensive data from the Pew Research Center, in 2020, only 11% of all married couples in the United States were interracial or interethnic. When we drill down into the specific pairing that dominates the aforementioned image search, the numbers shrink even further. Marriages specifically between a white woman and a black man account for a mere 7% of that already small 11% sliver of intermarriages. In absolute terms, out of over 51 million married white women in the United States, less than 1% are married to black men.

Despite this statistical rarity, the digital simulation feels entirely “normal” to the modern consumer because media giants like Google, alongside massive stock photography conglomerates like Getty Images and Shutterstock, consciously and relentlessly curate it that way. This immense disparity between reality is the result of neutral, blind code cataloging human existence. It is an intentional act of social enforcement, by artificially elevating specific demographic pairings, media platforms execute a subtle but pervasive socio-cultural engineering project.

It can thus be argued that this engineered visual output serves a distinct ideological purpose: pushing European women toward demographic change and eroding the visual primacy of the homogeneous nuclear family that built and sustained Western nation-states for centuries. When digital representations are manipulated to consistently overwrite physical realities, a significant ontological shift occurs within the host population. The native majority is conditioned to view their own demographic decline as an organic, inevitable, and morally righteous progression. This forces us to confront the question: If images precede and dictate reality, who is engineering our extinction?

I’m long out of the habit of watching TV, so when the NFL season gets started and I’m presented with three-plus hours per week of commercial TV to watch my favourite team play, I can’t help but notice that most commercials that include representations of married couples are inter-racial or non-white. The advertisers are also presenting a small minority of marriages in North America as being the overwhelming majority in their TV ads. Why might they want to do that?

Formerly Peru’s First Lady, Keiko Fujimori is now President in her own right

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

The new President of Peru, Keiko Fujimori, faces a big economic challenge to her nation:

With just over 99% of ballots counted, Keiko Fujimori holds a lead of roughly 40,000 votes over Roberto Sánchez — less than half a percentage point, and the third consecutive Peruvian presidential contest decided by a margin that narrow. Sánchez led through the early days of counting, carried by rural and highland turnout; but the overseas votes, which broke for Fujimori above 63%, pulled the result the other way as the tally crossed 95%.

The outcome is no longer seriously in doubt. What remains in doubt is whether a victory this narrow constitutes a mandate to govern, or merely a turn to occupy the office in impotence.

Fujimori has never held executive power. What she inherits, however, is a name: her father, Alberto Fujimori, governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, stabilizing a hyperinflationary economy and crushing the Shining Path insurgency, albeit with darkly authoritarian techniques for which he was later convicted. Long known as Peru’s answer to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Fujimori has cast a long shadow over Peruvian politics ever since.

Keiko served as his First Lady through the latter half of the 1990s, then built her own career: a congresswoman from 2006 to 2011, and the leader of Fuerza Popular (“Popular Force”) since. She spent 13 months in pretrial detention on corruption charges tied to Odebrecht financing; a court voided the case in January 2025. She has run for president four times, losing the previous three runoffs by margins under a single percentage point before, now, winning her fourth.

Her governing history is, as a result, tied deeply to her father’s. She has spent two decades defending it rather than living it, which is itself a kind of qualification in a country where economic memory often prevails over institutional memory. The model her father installed — trade liberalization, fiscal orthodoxy, an open door to foreign capital — has outlasted eight changes of president in ten years. The claims of Fujimorismo — the governing-economic doctrine named for Fujimori that has dominated ever since his time — is that it alone can be trusted to keep that model standing.

Keiko Fujimori’s flagship commitments are, consequently, the two pillars of Fujimorismo itself: a hard line on crime, and an unapologetic defense of the market economy.

The security platform proposes deploying the military against organized crime and prison disorder, taking inspiration both from Peru’s own recent past, and Nayib Bukele’s divisive tactics in El Salvador. Alongside this, the platform promises expanding video surveillance, and modernizing this apparatus through the use of artificial intelligence to detect corruption in public contracting. She insists that her father’s system’s abuses will not be repeated.

The economic platform is a much-needed deregulatory shock: cutting investment-approval timelines by 40%, reducing the fiscal deficit from 2.2% to 1% of GDP, and shrinking the state. As for exactly how that shrinking will be achieved besides the aforementioned measures, Keiko is not clear.

Nevertheless, both pillars of the plan were sold on a single word, repeated at her closing rally and in her final debate: order, against the chaos she says the left represents.

In counterpoint to recent claims that cutting USAID funding cost the lives of millions of children who depended on those funds, taking away USAID support in much of South America led to a number of electoral changes:

Why Britain voted for Brexit

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Pat Condell explains some of the reasons British voters chose Brexit over staying in the EU back in 2016:

Why did we vote for Brexit ten years ago? Because we understood that the core purpose of the European Union is to destroy the independent countries of Europe by opening the borders and transforming a diverse continent of sovereign nations into a single homogenous political bloc governed by a committee of unelected bureaucrats, as a model for the planned global dictatorship.

Obviously, you’re not going to get many votes for that if you just lay it out for people, so you start with something innocuous like trade.

You say “Let’s harmonise our trade arrangements and everything will run more smoothly.”

And people say “Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”

Then you say “While we’re at it, let’s give this small group of people the power to organise all this from one place, and everything will run more smoothly.”

“Well, I suppose that makes sense. We want things to run smoothly.”

Then it’s “Actually, let’s give these people the power to make our laws and override our parliament and justice system, and everything will run much more smoothly.”

“Hold on a second, I don’t know about that …”

“You fascist. You racist. You xenophobe. You bigot. You pig ignorant little Englander. You vermin. You scum.”

Although that attitude certainly helped to tip the balance, the most important reason we voted for Brexit is that politicians had no right to sign away the governance of the UK to a foreign entity, but that is what they did, while pretending it was about trade. They lied to us, and they tried to cheat us out of our country.

That is why we voted for Brexit, and it’s why we’re now being punished for our disobedience by traitors who refuse to secure the border and who are allowing our country to be flooded with millions of unwanted and incompatible immigrants and illegally invaded and occupied by an army of dangerous military age men in whose presence no woman or child is safe.

Forced mass immigration from hostile and barbarous cultures is punishment for Brexit. Our country is being purposely destroyed for not voting the way we were told.

Coenders’ Bolt-Less Last Ditch Bolt Action Rifle

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Feb 2026

When the German Army tested last-ditch Volkssturm rifles late in World War Two, one of the particularly obscure submissions was August Coenders’ Coenders-Rochling Volkssturmkarabiner. This was a bolt-action rifle chambered for 8mm Mauser with a 5-round magazine. However, instead of using a traditional bolt action system it had a fixed breechblock and the handle was attached to the barrel. Cycling the action meant unlocking the barrel and sliding it forward, while the breechblock held the fired case in place. When the barrel was fully forward, the next round in the magazine would kick out the empty case, and pull the barrel rearward seated the next cartridge, ready to fire. In testing, the rifle was, frankly, terrible.

Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts: https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
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