Quotulatiousness

June 3, 2026

China’s pirate fishing fleets

Filed under: Americas, Books, China, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

John Carter was really impressed with a recent self-published novel by Frank Kidd, and takes the time to set up the real-life situation the novel imagines being kinetically addressed:

A few years ago a photograph taken by a pilot over the Pacific went viral. It showed a mysterious red glow spreading ominously out over the water.

Initially people thought it was aliens, and to be fair, they weren’t far off. The glow belonged to the closest thing humanity has yet invented to a Tyranid hive fleet: a Chinese fishing fleet raping the seas in search of seafood. The glow is from huge banks of LEDs, which the ships use to draw marine life to the surface, where they trawl it up with nets. Much, maybe even most of the indiscriminate catch is discarded.

China has over half a million fishing vessels. Their vast fleets comprise thousands of ships, and can often be seen from orbit.

The triangular lights inside the red circle are a Chinese fishing fleet.

China has long since eaten its way through its own territorial waters, and therefore sends its fleets out into the rest of the world’s oceans. As a rule marine life is much more abundant close to the shore, since this is where most of the nutrients are. Fishing in another country’s territorial waters is illegal under international law. The Chinese do not care. Their fleets park just on the edge of a country’s Economic Exclusion Zone, and then turn off their Automatic Identification System transponders so that they can sneak inside and poach. Turning off an AIS transponder is also illegal: maritime law requires these to be activated at all times, for collision avoidance and search and rescue. Organizations which track this regularly observe Chinese ships on EEZ borders disappearing from the AIS network, and reappearing a few hours later on the right side of the border.

Here we see the scum pillaging the ocean around the Galapagos. Yeah. I know. Billions must die.

The consequences for local fishermen are disastrous: the Chinese scoop up all the fish, and lead the local fisheries towards ecosystem collapse. When they’re done pillaging they just move on, leaving an oceanic wasteland in their wake.

Environmental groups generally don’t seem very bothered about this, perhaps because the ocean is a CO2 sink whether or not there are fish in it, and the only thing that matters about the environment is how much carbon is in the air. National governments are reluctant to take action, because they are often dependent upon Chinese investment for their economic growth. The only people who really seem to care are fishermen and Internet racists.

This is the set-up for Frank Kidd‘s immensely satisfying debut mercenary novel, Once Upon A Time In Argentina.

“… basically it’s a plan to make power more expensive while campaigning on affordability”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

John Robson examines a few of the ways the Ontario government (and other provincial and state governments) frames what they call “affordability”, yet somehow it always seems to cost more afterwards and nobody is ever held responsible:

In many areas of life, the devil is famously in the details. And it presents both an opportunity and a frustration because there is so much out there deserving readers’ attention that you can’t even follow it all let alone cram it into a newsletter. Including former banking executive Parker Gallant‘s vigilance about the absurdities of the power system in the Canadian province of Ontario that the aspiring Conservative premier Doug Ford promised to fix in the 2018 campaign and then has smugly done nothing about. These things might seem uninteresting if you do not live in Ontario … until you realize it’s just as bad wherever you live. And when we say bad we mean both the cost and the deviousness with which it is presented to, or hidden from, the public. On this very point we like to quote the late great P.J. O’Rourke that “Beyond a certain point complexity is fraud … when someone creates a system in which you can’t tell whether or not you’re being fooled, you’re being fooled.” Which brings us to the shiny new buzzword “affordability” which refers to policies that make everything more expensive and the beneficiaries hide the fraud in tangles of complex bureaucracy.

If you want to get a headache, stay with us while we explain what it is that Gallant tracks. Ontario has what they call the “Independent Electricity System Operator” so politicians can claim whatever disaster is unfolding isn’t their fault. Sure, they make the laws and oversee the creation of the regulations. But heck, these things are “arms’ length” and “impartial” and independent and expert and wise and wonderful so shut up.

Including this nutty system where the province buys power we don’t need at grossly inflated rates from wind and solar virtue-signallers and then sells the surplus at deep losses to the neighbouring province of Quebec and some American states including New York and Michigan. So he looked in depth (we promised a headache) at just half a day, May 19, 2026, because a post by another of the people who keeps an eye on this stuff for the benefit of an indifferent or baffled populace alerted him to something fishy in the IESO forecast of generation by Industrial Wind Turbine operators. But it seems to be hard to find out exactly how much the taxpayers, via this wonderful “Independent” system with its hand in their pockets via the arm of the state, actually paid these IWTs not to produce power.

Paid them what? Yup. It’s how it works. And the idea is that if they didn’t produce the original forecast rather than the revised one we’d have had to pay them even more for what they didn’t do. Weird even by the standards of government. And expensive. As Gallant sums it up:

    The net result is that those IWT cost us Ontario ratepayers almost $2.6 million for NOTHING over just the first 12 hours but we should rest assured the IWT owners loved it!

You read that right. The citizens of Ontario paid $2.6 million to the energy producers of the future not to produce energy in the present in just half of one day. If it were typical, it would be over $5 million a day times 365 days in the year so yes indeedy folks nearly $2 billion a year.

[…]

He then looks at various efforts to try to figure out the cost to consumers, including one by “my friend Roger Caiazza (the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York)” based on the auction price of “allowances” in March 2025:

    Roger’s conclusion at that time was that the RGGI auctions were adding about $8-11/MWh to the wholesale cost of electricity, for electricity produced by natural gas. That would mean an addition of about 1 cent/kWh on a consumer’s bill. A penny may not seem like much, except when you realize that the average price in the country is less than 18 cents/kWh, so the penny is about 6%.

Imagine if people knew. As he concludes:

    remember that the structure of the program is that the amount of allowances goes down every year and the price is intentionally driven up. And data centers are going in all over the place. And the Northeastern states have refused to build new power plants for a couple of decades now in the midst of the climate hysteria. So the 10-15% extra cost being experienced now is only the beginning of much worse to come. The worst part of the RGGI ‘cap and invest’ scheme is that the consumers get absolutely nothing for the increased cost. It is just a gratuitously inflicted injury brought about by completely artificial scarcity. Keep this in mid when you hear a politician from an RGGI state talking about how they care about energy ‘affordability’.

Or, we add, transparency. Or accountability.

The Korean War Week 102 – American Bioweapons on Korean Soil? – June 2, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 2 Jun 2026

The Chinese continue their campaign of accusing the US of practicing germ warfare in North Korea and Manchuria. Meanwhile in South Korea, Syngman Rhee has declared martial law in Pusan as part of his campaign to remain in power.

00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:23 Germ Warfare Charges
11:17 Bull Boatner
15:34 Holding POWs
17:58 Summary
18:13 Conclusion
19:21 Call to Action

Brits and Americans mispronounce foreign words differently, film at 11

Filed under: Britain, Food, Italy, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

ESR explains why American mispronunciations of Spanish or Italian words tend to be less offensive to those cultures than equivalent British linguistic manglings:

Ah, yet another round of the great pasta-pronunciation debate.

My credentials to speak on this: I am American. I have lived in Great Britain. I have lived in Italy. I pay attention to descriptive phonology. And I was at one time bilingual in English and Spanish.

These facts make me an expert witness on this issue.

Yes, Brits do in fact systematically mispronounce words like “pasta” and “taco” in a way Americans find amusing. But the interesting part of this story is the reason *why* Americans pronounce these words in a way much closer to the Italian and Spanish originals.

It isn’t superior virtue or worldly sophistication or anything like that. It’s the result of an important feature of the American linguistic environment that it doesn’t share with the British one, and which Americans themselves seldom even notice.

Many Americans have heavy exposure to the phonology of Spanish. Brits do not. The result is even that even those of us who are completely monolingual (which is most of us) tend to have models for two phonological systems in our heads rather than one; the second one being Spanish.

There’s a video about this somewhere on YouTube by a linguist, an English one as it happens, who explains that Americans attempting to reproduce the vowel sounds of a foreign language often bend it to try and fit it into the five-vowel system of Spanish. And this is true even when they don’t actually speak Spanish themselves.

One consequence is that even Americans who don’t know Spanish pronounce it tolerably well. Intelligibly, at least. Same goes for Italian, the phonology is slightly different but similar enough.

We crash-land on languages that have vowel systems quite unlike either English or Spanish. There are good reasons that when an American says “pasta” or “taco” his pronunciation is quite unlikely to make a native wince or laugh, but there is no such guarantee about French. Or German. Or Russian. Or just about anything else.

We’re just as lost as the Brits are trying to pronounce those languages. The difference is that, unlike a Brit, we may not mispronounce the local language in a way that makes it sound like a mangled version of English. Americans are likely to make it sound like a mangled version of Spanish instead.

What is Turkish Delight? How to make real Ottoman Turkish Delight

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 9 Dec 2025

Beautiful red Turkish delight dusted with powdered sugar and starch and flavored with rose water and musk

City/Region: Ottoman Empire
Time Period: 1844

I don’t know about you, but I first learned about Turkish delight from The Chronicles of Narnia, where Edmund sells out his family for a box of the confection. True Turkish delight, made in Turkey or Greece, is made of sugar and starch, but when other countries tried to copy it, they often added gelatin, which gives it a completely different texture.

While we can’t be absolutely certain which kind Edmund liked, I hope it was the true Turkish kind that melts in your mouth beautifully. If you’ve never tried musk, it’s a unique flavor that reminds me of clean laundry and perfume, and mixes with the rose water to make a flavor profile unlike anything else I’ve had. All in all, I wouldn’t sell my family out for it, but it is very good.

Rose water or musk aren’t your thing? Feel free to change the flavorings to whatever you like. Almond, orange blossom water, and pistachio were popular at the time.

    Rahatu’l-hulkum
    Method: Take one kiyye of the finest sugar and prepare a syrup with three kiyyes of water in a tinned pan … take 75 dirhems of the finest pounded starch and slowly stir into the syrup. It must be stirred constantly so that it does not form lumps or stick to the bottom of the pan … Then blend 35 dirhems of rose water with a grain of musk and after adding to the mixture stir a few more times before removing from the heat. Oil a tray with almond oil and pour in the cooked mixture. When cool cut into pieces of the desired size and toss into a mixture consisting half of sieved starch and half of powdered sugar, and stir until they do not stick together. It will be delicious.

    — Melceü’t-tabbahîn by Mehmet Kamil, 1844

(more…)

QotD: Rhodesia and the suicide of the West

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

The history of the twentieth century is a graveyard of nations, but few corpses refuse to stay buried quite like Rhodesia. To the modern liberal consensus, the short-lived republic in southern Africa is a pariah state, a moral stain on the map of history that was righteously erased to make way for the “liberation” of Zimbabwe. It is dismissed by them as a racist anachronism, a desperate attempt by a White minority to hold back the tide of history. Yet, for those willing to look past the cordon sanitaire of “accepted historiography”, Rhodesia remains a haunting and prophetic presence.

The story of Rhodesia is not only a regional tragedy, it is a civilisational warning. It is the story of a state that was functional, prosperous, and militarily superior, yet was dismantled not by its enemies in the bush, but by the “kith and kin” of its own civilisational bloc. It serves as a controlled experiment in the “Suicide of the West” , illustrating what happens when a civilisation loses the will to defend its own outposts and succumbs to a “politics of cultural despair“.

Today, as the nations of Europe and the Anglosphere grapple with their own crises of identity, demographic replacement, and institutional decay, the Rhodesian experience has moved from the periphery to the centre of conservative analysis. The arguments made by Ian Smith (former Prime Minister of Rhodesia) and his contemporaries, no longer appear as the reactionary pleas of a dying regime. Instead, they appear as the desperate warnings of men who saw the abyss before the rest of the world was willing to look.

The Philosophical Crisis and the Suicide of the West

To understand the fall of Rhodesia, one must look not to the Zambezi Valley, but to the intellectual salons of London and the university campuses of the United States. The doom of the settler state was engineered by a profound shift in the Western psyche, a shift identified by the philosopher James Burnham as the “Suicide of the West.”

James Burnham’s thesis, articulated in his 1964 classic Suicide of the West, provides the essential diagnostic framework for the Rhodesian tragedy. Burnham argued that liberalism had mutated into an ideology of Western suicide, a system of belief that systematically dismantled the defences of its own civilisation while valorising its enemies. In the context of Rhodesia, this manifested as a perverse diplomatic double standard. As the American economist Milton Friedman observed after his visit to Salisbury in 1976, the West seemed intent on destroying a pro-Western, anti-Communist state that upheld property rights and the rule of law, while simultaneously “welcoming the ministers of the Gulag Archipelago with open arms”.

Friedman explicitly linked the Rhodesian situation to Burnham’s concept, noting that the sanctions imposed on Rhodesia were a clear act of self-immolation by the Western powers. By strangling Rhodesia, the West was not advancing human rights, it was handing a strategic victory to Soviet and Chinese proxies (ZAPU and ZANLA) and signalling to the world that loyalty to the West was a liability. The Rhodesian settler, who had fought for the British Empire in two World Wars, found himself cast as the villain, not because he had changed, but because the West had lost faith in its own legitimacy.

Celina 101, “We are all Rhodesians Now”, Celina’s Substack, 2026-01-31.

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