Quotulatiousness

September 4, 2026

Never discount the political muscle of “King Coal”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Ringo remembers when a friend of his accidentally discovered that “King Coal” is still a behind-the-scenes political factor that cannot be ignored:

Soooo, guy I knew in of all places National Guard in Florida.

He was taking a master’s in Optics at University of Central Florida. He had to do a paper. Just one of the random “do a paper” assignments you do in a master’s program. He’d heard that tailings from coal mines could be a bit suspect in terms of radiation. Not in his direct field but in “physics”. Good enough.

There’s a coal plant about 20 miles from Orlando. Goes out, goes to the big pile of tailings, sticks a Geiger counter probe in it, expecting a bit above background.

HOLY MOTHER OF ROENTGEN! THAT’S FREAKING HOT!

There’s a thin layer of ash over the tailings that isn’t and blocks most of the release. So, a Geiger counter casually waved over it, all good.

Stick a probe in and it’s a different story. It’s hot as the hinges of hell radioactively. (And quite a bit of that material is released by coal plants. Much more likely to cause lung cancer than smoking, btw.)

So, he writes up the paper and submits it.

Couple of weeks later, he’s called into his thesis advisor who sadly and shamefacedly tells him he’s being dropped from the master’s program.

“WTF?”

Enter the late and VERY unlamented Senator Robert Byrd. Byrd’s people had noses in every department everywhere and ANYTHING that MIGHT harm King Coal MUST be nipped in the bud.

Even a guy getting an Optics master’s who just happened to stick his probe in the wrong mound.

Ask me why the 1000 Nukes program was scrapped right after Nixon left office and why Byrd might just have been behind Watergate and performed essentially a coup d’état. (Or why Nixon pushed the Thousand Nukes Program for that matter.) Or why it’s taken so long for Small Modular Reactors to have any chance of getting off the ground. (“Technological advancements” is not the answer. We’ve been doing them for the Navy for 70 years.)

Biden’s “War on Coal” really pissed me off but along with natural gas it MIGHT have finally killed King Coal for good and all and that is something to heave a sigh of relief.

And following up to a question down-thread:

Absurdus – @AdAltum

How did a senator hear about a random paper from some random master’s student? How did he get him expelled from a program he was in?

“The Senator” probably never even heard about it. It was handled at a much lower level.

How did his people hear about it?

Byrd was Chairman of the Budget Committee and the Rules Committee as well as Chairman Pro Tem any time the Dems held the Senate (which was constantly up until Newt Gingrich.)

He was also “Chairman Emeritus” of the Energy Committee. He was on the committee despite being a previous chairman. (Because he was only allowed to chair two and Rules and Budget were more important.)

Energy provides funds to colleges for research. Budget approves it. That meant he had ears all over every college and research facility in the United States.

Say one bad thing about Coal and your days were numbered if you were some minor master’s candidate. Hell, adjunct professor.

You probably aren’t old enough or didn’t follow politics back then to know just how ruthless, corrupt and evil Byrd and his people were.

BTW: Probably also why Freeman Dyson lost his funding for bottle fusion in 1974.

Marius Saved Rome … Then They Turned To His Greatest Rival | Rome’s First Civil War

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

The Rest Is History
Published 3 Sep 2026

What was the ancient city of Rome actually like in the first century BC? Who was Lucius Cornelius Sulla, another great, but aristocratic, Roman general who would clash with Gaius Marius in a totemic struggle termed the Social War? And, who were the terrifying Germanic tribes amassing on the borders of the empire, potentially spelling its doom …?

Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Rome’s apocalyptic threat from the North, Marius’ wars in defence of the empire, and the rise of his greatest adversary: Sulla.

0:00 Rome’s Most Unlikely Saviour
4:25 The Barbarian Threat to Rome
9:15 Rome’s Catastrophic Defeat
14:04 Marius Rebuilds the Roman Army
16:48 Marius Takes on the Teutones
19:36 The Cimbri Are Annihilated
23:41 Marius Becomes Too Powerful
27:00 The Rise of Sulla
31:02 Sulla’s Ruthless Ambition
35:05 Amazon
36:15 The Extraordinary Wealth of Roman Italy
42:49 Italy’s Second-Class Citizens
46:18 The Social War Erupts
50:44 Rome Fights Back
52:35 Sulla Becomes Rome’s New Hero
56:05 A New War in the East
58:18 Mithridates Takes on Rome
1:02:00 Marius Makes His Comeback
1:04:39 Violence Erupts in Rome
1:07:01 Marius Takes Sulla’s Command

As Tom and Dominic mention during this episode, there’s a members-only bonus episode discussing the (much contested) “Marian reforms” of the Roman army with … Bret Devereaux who is a strong proponent of the notion that the Marian reforms were not a thing.

Loyalist Canada to Liberal Canada, a political devolution

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

On Substack Notes, John Carter discusses the old, stable Canada that the Liberals have spent sixty years trying to destroy, with great success, sadly.

For all intents and purposes, post-1965 Liberal Canada is a completely different country from the Loyalist Canada that it erased. Different flag, different basis for moral legitimacy, different constitution even.

Liberal Canada loves to wear poppies on Remembrance Day, but this is stolen valour. Liberal Canada has never won a single war. Loyalist Canada won every war it fought in.

Liberal Canada built no great works. Most of the infrastructure of Canada was constructed before Liberal Canada. The Trans Canada Highway, the Trans Canada Railroad, the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, the Toronto subway, the Montreal Metro — all were built or initiated by Loyalist Canada. Liberal Canada completed the projects that began under Loyalist Canada, but initiated none of its own, and at best can be said to maintain the infrastructure it inherited … badly. Liberal Canada cannot even build a pipeline to bring its oil to market. Liberal Canada cannot even refine its own oil.

Loyalist Canada built out an organizational infrastructure of Crown Corporations which were once the envy of the world. Liberal Canada dismantled them, giving us toll roads owned by foreigners.

Loyalist Canada built all of this infrastructure, and won all of those wars, without incurring a national debt. The national debt was accrued entirely by Liberal Canada, and is entirely a function of social welfare programs it uses to turn Canadians into domesticated clients of Liberal Party patronage, and indentured servants of the banks.

Then of course there are the demographics. Loyalist Canada was a white Canada, a British and French Canada, and a fecund Canada, with one of the world’s highest birth rates. Liberal Canada is a barren Canada, with one of the world’s lowest birth rates, and it has presided over the systematic replacement of the Canadian people with Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Muslims, to whom it moreover extends preference for social services, university admissions, and employment. Liberal Canada makes Canadians second class citizens in the land their ancestors built.

Liberal Canada is a parasitic entity that is rapidly killing its host. It is an exhausted Brezhnevian sclerocracy that destroys ambition because even the most modest of ambitions are a threat to the soft men, the mild bureaucrats and glassy-eyed ideologues who subsist on the arbitrage of national decline. Liberal Canada is weak, and so it demands that its subjects be even weaker, as this is the only way for weak men to rule.

Liberal Canada is not the real Canada, and Canadians are beginning to wake up from this long nightmare of mismanagement and institutionalized treason, and to remember who they are.

Making Shepherd’s Pie from an 1894 Recipe – Beef or Lamb?

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Mar 2026

Minced beef filling covered in browned mashed potatoes

City/Region: North Ayrshire, Scotland
Time Period: 1894

Cottage pie is made with beef, and shepherd’s pie is made with lamb. Or so they would have you believe. This division between mashed potato-topped meat pies is actually only about 50 years old. Before that, recipes for shepherd’s or cottage pie could call for beef or lamb, or didn’t specify a kind of meat at all.

The clove and the mushroom ketchup are both present but not overpowering, and the potatoes are creamy and delicious. Shepherd’s pie is my absolute favorite way to make meat and potatoes, and this 1894 version holds up.

    Shepherd’s Pie
    Minced beef or lamb; if beef, put in a pinch of pulverised cloves; if lamb, pinch of summer savoury to season it, very little pepper and some salt, and put in a baking-dish; mash potatoes and mix them with cream and butter and a little salt, and spread them over the meat; beat up an egg with cream or milk, a very little, spread it over the potatoes and bake it a short time, sufficient to warm it through and brown the potatoes.
    — Irvine Herald and Kilwinning Chronicle, October 5, 1894

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QotD: My generation

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We talk a lot about generations and what defines them — Boomers and Xers and Millennials and Zs — but ultimately a generation is just a scene. It is about who and what you claim as your own, but this is something that is determined largely in retrospect. You only know what was yours once something comes along that is clearly alien and you realize that the culture was something you shared, that you made for one another. Eventually the whole scene moves on.

That’s why one of the weirdest things about getting older is realizing just how much of what you took for granted as part of the permanent furniture of the world was actually highly transient: The Iron Curtain. Guitar rock. Your own hopes and dreams and ambitions. Sometimes they all come wrapped together like a package deal, and failing at one makes it seem like you’ve failed at it all.

Andrew Potter, “Eddie Van Halen, Bill and Ted, and mourning a generation”, The Line, 2020-10-14.

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