Quotulatiousness

August 28, 2026

“The Maple Mujaheddin Insurgency is not going to happen”

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

Of all the potential military conflicts facing the west, a US invasion of Canada has to be among the least likely — not just because it’s been attempted more than once in the past. For one thing, I don’t think even the best social media posting is going to bring ordinary Americans around to getting boots on the ground across the 49th parallel … there’s remarkably little passion about seizing our maple syrup and confiscating our strategic reserves of poutine among voters. Unlike places that Americans have strong feelings about, Canada just doesn’t move the needle.

The Operational Art of War has the first of a promised three-part series on Operation Maple Stomp, the biggest and best invasion of Canada — everyone says so:

In the latest round of “let’s do everything the dumbest way possible” the two nations in the world sharing the most in common keep taking to social media to fantasize going to war with each other.

It is deeply annoying, brings out the worst tendencies on both sides, and (to my mind worst of all) illustrates no one understands the Operational Art of War!

Americans take to social media and claim Canada doesn’t have a military, the military wouldn’t fight and be so outnumbered that resistance would collapse within hours.

Canadians usually agree the conventional war would be over in an afternoon, but then America would face a long and bloody insurgency (just wait till Uncle Sam meets the Maple Mujahedeen!).

Google AI’s idea of what a Canadian Insurgent looks like.

You can definitely count me as a member of Team Mere-matter-of-marching, at least as far as the tactical operations necessary to occupy the most populous parts of Soviet Canuckistan. Here’s a sketch map that Big Serge updated for the 2020s, based on the mid-1930s details for an attack on southern Ontario from War Plan Red:

Manifest Destiny, 2025? Big Serge’s updated map for the old US War Plan Red for a military invasion of Canada.

The distances are short enough and the chances of significant military resistance low enough, that US Army vehicles would probably not need to refuel before reaching the initial stop-lines for their advance. Canadian infrastructure is not pre-wired for destruction, so unless local hotheads manage to temporarily block road bridges, volume of traffic will be a bigger friction factor than actual defensive fire.

Trump’s legions would reap the benefit of more than a century of demilitarized populations and the (small, but real) Canadian military being oriented to expeditionary operations rather than home defence. But taking the territory is only the first step. There are Canadians scattered throughout the continental United States, looking and sounding pretty much like any other American, and it wouldn’t take too many of them to decide that Trump’s fight was also their fight. Canada isn’t the only one enjoying the benefits of decades of lack-of-worry about homeland defence. Look how exposed the US has been to Islamic terrorists who, for the most part, don’t look or sound like Americans and still managed to pull off one of the greatest terror attacks of the modern age.

I mean, don’t misread what I’m saying here: the US would win. That’s not even remotely in doubt. There are at least ten of you for every one of us, and more of you have military training and access to personal weapons. (One wonders if the Canadian government’s fanatic devotion to civil disarmament is a kind of pre-surrender to this imagined US invasion we’re discussing …)

But the cost of winning might be more than even the most government-worshipping progressive might be willing to pay. We look like you. With a few exceptions (French-speaking Quebecers and Newfoundland-speaking Newfoundlanders, mostly), we fit in very well with you. We come from very, very similar cultures (some like Vancouver vlogger J.J. McCulloch argue it’s the same culture). Rather than a war of conquest, this would be much more like that “Second Civil War” that’s been so much a topic of conversation on far left and far right social media. The kind of civil war that takes far too long to settle back into peaceful co-existence.

You don’t like government surveillance? Too bad, bucky, because every level of government is going to be eager to ensure that you’re a good, loyal American … at all hours of the day and in everything you do. Cut down a Flock camera? That’s not going to be a mere vandalism issue … that’s tantamount to treason. What if that Flock camera was watching one of those undercover Canucki guerilla fighters?

Don’t like the feds watching every financial transaction? Too bad, bucky, ’cause you giving $5 to that sketchy Canuck for some bootleg maple syrup might be funding a terror attack on your nearest USAF base.

To fight the threat of Canuck infiltration, your every car trip will need to be logged, and your patterns of travel will need to be recorded and analyzed. Who you talk to will also need to be observed, in case one of your buddies is a covert maple-slurping spy!

Oh, wait, there’s more from the Operational Art of War:

There Won’t Be a Maple Mujahadeen

If the United States annexes Canada, there will not be a long-standing violent insurrection by a nation of hunters. The Maple Mujahadeen isn’t going to happen.

A successful insurgency has several requirements:

  1. A pre-existing structure to organize around;
  2. The structure having access to weapons;
  3. The insurgent group not having a future in the new regime; and
  4. The broader population being willing to shelter the insurgency.

Canada does have factions that meet all four of these factors, but spread across different factions. Like any complex modern society, Canada does have pre-existing structures of voluntary organizations. Virtually none of them are organized around any kind of collective defense or skills that easily translate to an insurgency.

For #2 (access to weapons) you either need armed citizens, government weapons cashes or weapons brought in by a rival power supporting the insurgency. In Canada’s case, the only viable supply of weapons for an insurgency is its armed citizens. As with most statistics, Canada only looks like a gun free country because it’s beside America.

The graph below shows the top 10 countries for estimated firearms per 100 people, plus the EU and global average for comparison (excluding countries with a population under one million). Countries that were recently warzones are in orange, as their rate of firearm ownership is something of a special case.

The number for Canada is likely too low. This is based on a 2017 data set, and firearm ownership is growing faster than the population. It also assumes there are five unregistered firearms to every registered firearm in Canada. The last time Canada had hard data on unregistered firearms (2003 to 2012) the ratio was 10:1. Assuming a similar ratio today, firearms per 100 jumps to 1/2 that of America and nearly 4x the European average.

Orwell’s real-life inspiration for Animal Farm

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Although I consider myself a fan of George Orwell’s work, it had never occurred to me that there might be a real Manor Farm that inspired its fictional counterpart in Orwell’s Animal Farm:

One of life’s small pleasures is the uncanny sensation of exploring a place previously encountered only in fiction. Those who have read Howards End by E. M. Forster will remember the vivid descriptions of the old property that Mrs Wilcox so adored. But are they aware that it exists in the real world in the form of Rooks Nest House near Stevenage? Similarly, fans of James Joyce’s Ulysses can step into Buck Mulligan’s shoes by visiting the Martello tower where he lived, still standing today at Sandycove just south of Dublin.

Locations that have been immortalised in novels tend to inspire a chill of familiarity. On a recent trip back to England I took one of my favourite country walks to another literary landmark. My house is not too far from Wallington, the village where George Orwell lived and worked from 1936 to 1940. It was here that he conceived Animal Farm (1945), and it was only by walking there myself that I discovered there is an actual “Manor Farm” – the apparent model for the farm in the novel – just a few hundred metres from where the great man lived.

The story opens with the farmer, Mr. Jones, locking up the hen houses for the night and making his way up to bed. Then the protagonists of our “fairy story” are introduced …

    As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering all through the farm buildings. Word had gone round during the day that old Major, the prize Middle White boar, had had a strange dream on the previous night and wished to communicate it to the other animals. It had been agreed that they should all meet in the big barn as soon as Mr. Jones was safely out of the way.

There follows Old Major’s famous speech to the animals in which he lays out his dream of revolution. The “big barn” remains to this day and is the first structure of Manor Farm that one sees from the road. The farm is still working, so I was reluctant to risk trespassing to see whether it still contains the raised platform from which the mighty beast – a porcine Lenin – delivered his oration. Still, it’s definitely there. It’s big, it’s a barn, and to settle all ambiguity it bears the sign of “Manor Farm”.

It’s worth a visit. There’s not so much as a pub in the village itself and, with its population of one hundred and fifty, you’ll be noticed if you start taking photographs. But walking along those lanes to the faint trilling of birdsong, it’s easy to find oneself momentarily seeing the village through Orwell’s eyes.

Orwell’s cottage on the corner of Kits Lane has a small plaque to commemorate his time there. This late seventeenth-century property used to be called “The Stores” because it was once a local shop. Orwell and his wife Eileen sold groceries here, as well as sweets and packets of aspirin. The income helped to offset the rent, and afforded him time to write in peace. If you do manage a visit, take note of the low front door. Orwell, being a tall man, would often bang his head against the ceiling.

“Single mother households produce the worst results for children”

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Spaceman Spiff does that thing with data where you point out the most unpalatable results from a given set of statistics and place it front and centre:

Any mention of Cofnas by academics or the media comes with an obligatory dismissal of his work as “controversial” or “far-right”. It is often labelled as “pseudo-science”.

Yet if critics were confident in their position, that the research is incorrect, they would not react as they do.

This is easy to illustrate with a fake example. Imagine research into another sensitive area, female behaviour.

We can draw conclusions based on the research that will anger feminists in much the same way research into the heritability of intelligence and behavioural patterns within distinct groups angers most of academia.

One stark observation dominates our view, in everything we can measure, from mental health to life success, single mother households produce the worst results for children.

The literature is crystal clear.

With a wide variety of measurable outcomes, including life quality, criminality and recidivism, adjustment to society, academic achievement, material success, and mental health issues, the best results are produced by two-parent households closely followed by single-father households.

Single-mother households trail far behind on virtually everything we value. Being raised by a single mother is detrimental to the wellbeing of children compared to other options.

This is reflected in the historical record too. Females gaining custody of children after divorce is a recent novelty. In the Victorian era the father usually retained custody. Women were seen as too emotionally unstable to raise children alone. They needed the strong presence of a father.

One really damning factoid to emerge from crime statistics is most infanticide is committed by women, not men. Of children killed by their parents it is almost unheard of for the father to murder his own children. In some 98 percent of cases it is the mother.

We can use these observations to reach a sensible conclusion.

Single mothers should not be allowed to raise their own children.

Trashing the research not the researchers

Our conclusion is not very good. Academics would find it easy to challenge. This process follows a predictable course.

The first stage is to examine the papers and point out their flaws. What studies show these outcomes? What variables were measured? How were they measured?

Then there are the definitions. What do we really mean by life outcomes? Success is a subjective concept at best. Even something nominally objective like incarceration rates are complex with many variables of which the childhood environment is only one.

What other factors were measured? Were there control groups? What about sample sizes? How many people did they track? Many papers reach bold conclusions with small sample sizes. Which leads to the next question, has anyone replicated this finding? The replication scandal is well documented in multiple academic disciplines; one-off studies no one can reproduce, even quite famous experiments that have entered popular culture.

The quality of the studies is often assessed first because if they are flawed this inevitably damages the credibility of any conclusions drawn.

As for our conclusion, that children should always be taken from single mothers, even widowed women, this is not supported even with the evidence outlined above. Studies would need to demonstrate fostered or adopted children did better than those raised by a widowed mother, an unlikely proposition and just one alternative view possible from the evidence.

Importantly, serious critics would generally avoid motive except as a last resort. Sexism, misogyny and hatred of women may be there in a hypothesis that paints women in a negative light, but compared to challenging the research and its foundations, speculating about motive is weak and too easy to dismiss.

Jumping straight to perceived hate or bigotry, particularly when it makes the accusers look morally superior, is a tell.

Hatshepsut – The Pharaoh they tried to Erase from History

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 3 Mar 2026

Fritters as they are depicted in ancient Egyptian tombs

City/Region: Egypt
Time Period: 15th Century B.C.E.

Hatshepsut ruled as regent for, and then co-pharaoh with, her stepson, Thutmose III for twenty one years in the 15th century BCE. While she ruled, Egypt enjoyed a golden age as she opened trade routes, built monuments, and ensured that the economy thrived.

The inspiration for this recipe comes from the many paintings of food on temple walls in Egypt. One of these shows ball-shaped items piled up on a serving platter, which could be an ancient form of the modern dessert zalabiya.

Using ingredients available to ancient Egyptians around the time of Hatshepsut’s reign, I’ve made my interpretation of the food painted on the temple walls. They are delicious and full of wonderful cardamom flavor with a light crunch. I think they’re best served with a little honey for dipping.
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QotD: Roman roads

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The first thing to note is that when we talk of “Roman roads”, we almost always mean the viae publicae, roads built by public officials (Initially censors who let out the contracts to build such public works, although later roadways get named after the consuls and praetors who constructed them as the Romans build more of them) and was maintained by the state. But of course these major state highways existed within a wider network of local roads (a via vinciales or actus, pl. actus – everybody loves the Fourth Declension! It’s a step in the right direction) which might or might not be private (a privatum iter). That distinction is important, because it wasn’t that all Roman roads were of the high quality we tend to think of – the roads we’re thinking of were prestige projects undertaken by the state, but a whole [mess] of private lanes and dirt paths existed too.

That said, for the major viae publicae, the combination of archaeologically preserved examples and a few references in literary sources gives us a good sense of what “best practices” for Roman road construction were. To start with, obstructions were cleared and then a trench was dug where the road would go. The trench was then filled with three packed layers: a stone layer, then a gravel layer and finally a sand or cement layer. On this was placed the surface of stone blocks, cambered so that rainwater drained to the sides of the road. The stone surface was then held in place by an umbo (literally a “knob” or “swelling”, the same word is used for shield bosses) on the edges of the road. Within a town, the umbo might in turn border a stone sidewalk, but out in the countryside, that wasn’t present.

On the one hand, we know that the high-quality construction of Roman paved roads impressed in the ancient world; Dionysius of Halicarnassus proclaims them one of Rome’s three most magnificent works (alongside aqueducts and sewers, Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 3.67.5; note also in this vein Strabo 5.3.8; Plin. HN 36.125). On the other hand, we also know that not all Roman roads were built to the same high standard. While we know that various Roman legislation spelled out required road widths, for instance, the actual width of Roman roads varied widely. And while we’re here, I should note, the story you have heard that modern roadway width or standard railway gauge being based on Roman road width (or, heaven help us, Roman “war chariots”, a thing the Romans did not have) is rather wrong. Nor were they always well-constructed or maintained; Julian, for instance, bemoans a poorly maintained road in a letter to Libanius in 363.

Also, if I may stop a moment, one thing I hear frequently said about Roman roads is that their survival serves as some sort of indictment on modern road construction, “they don’t build them like they used to!” There are a few layered bad assumptions here. The first, of course, is survivorship bias; that road outside of Chalcis that Julian complained was sinking into a swamp probably isn’t available for us to see and similarly badly maintained or poorly constructed Roman roads are simply gone or only visible with archaeological methods and so unavailable for comparison. At the same time, modern roads are asked to do things which ancient roads were not; I do not suspect many Roman roads would last very long if hundreds of 20-ton (or more) trucks were rumbling over it daily. Indeed, preserved Roman roads outside of the cities often have deep ruts worn several inches deep in the stone from the passage of carts (carts and other vehicles were generally banned inside of Roman cities; city streets were for pedestrians). Finally we know that Roman roads, just like modern ones, required maintenance and reconstruction fairly regularly in the period of their use; Laurence (op. cit., 66) has a neat table of inscribed milestones on the Via Appia, for instance, referring to repair or reconstruction, with sections of the roadway repaired in stages from 97 to 110AD.

Nevertheless, the generally high quality of Roman roads, as noted, was recognized in antiquity and is still apparent in their survival today. In contrast to many unpaved sections of Persian royal roads, for instance, Roman viae publicae were paved as a matter of course and standard widths (c. 3.5m wide; the oldest Roman laws, the Twelve Tables, set a minimum width on straights of c. 2.4m though as noted this was not always followed) were fairly generous. And they tended to be well-engineered, with relatively flat surfaces (which are often quite a bit less flat today due to ground shifting as well as the erosion of concrete between paving stones) and straight lines, though the notion that all Roman roads were ruler-straight is, of course, wrong (though some are!). In particular, the Roman system of road construction, while it demanded considerable up-front labor costs, was seemingly designed to keep long-term maintenance demands low. This was a style of road building which accepted big up-front costs in exchange for lower long-term maintenance, which of course demands a lot of initial state capacity to manage the costs and labor demands (something Rome’s successors would mostly lack).

So as roads go, the Roman ones were uncommonly good (albeit with a wider degree of variation than is often appreciated), but the marvel of the Roman roads is not that they had a few good, paved roads – states had been building paved roads for some time, as noted above – but that they had a massive system of them. Scale, more than quality, was the Roman achievement here, though the quality was also quite high.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Roman Roads”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-02.

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