Quotulatiousness

January 6, 2026

The “developing world” is not poor because the “rich countries” looted them

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Economics, Europe, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Lauren Chen reacts to an emotive claim that the Third World is poor only because of the exploitation of their resources by the First World:

People often say that the developing world is poor because the Western world colonized them and stole their resources.

The truth, however, is that over the past century, the developing world has, for the most part, shown that they are completely incapable of harnessing their own resources. They are not poor because we stole from them. They are poor because they do not know how to run and administer their own countries, resources be damned.

Take Venezuela. The world’s largest oil reserves mean nothing if you have a corrupt communist as your leader. People will actually be starving and trying to eat zoo animals while you sit on trillions of dollars in resources!

Africa is another example. Europeans left behind farmland, trains, roads, and mines in Africa. What happened to it all?

It’s not that all of a sudden, the Africans started running things like anti-colonialist activists had envisioned at the time. No, no.

All the infrastructure fell into disrepair and/or was stripped down and looted. They were literally handed fully functioning, completed supply chains for resource extraction, and basically unlimited wealth, but they couldn’t manage the simple upkeep.

Now, the defense for Africa might be that “The Europeans didn’t teach the Africans how to manage any of this! It’s not the Africans’ fault they couldn’t run it independently! They were never trained!”

But my brother in Christ, the Europeans DID try to train locals for management! Obviously it would have been easier to have at least some locals in administration, rather than having to import an ENTIRE workforce, but efforts to find African talent were largely unsuccessful.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the different outcomes in Hong Kong and Singapore when compared to Africa. In East Asia, Europeans often did work with locals in administrative and management capacities. When colonialism ended, Hong Kong and Singapore were able to manage themselves. Not the case with Africa.

Now, none of this is to say that colonialism is good. People have the right to self-rule and self-determination. However, the idea that colonialism and resources extraction are responsible for the developing world’s ongoing poverty? That is quite simply a crock of shit.

Considering the Venezuelan operation at D+3

Filed under: Americas, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander has some (guarded) thoughts on the recent operation to extract Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, which was accomplished with no significant American casualties (although some reports say a large number of Cuban troops were killed or wounded on the other side):

Image from CDR Salamander

If you didn’t get a chance to listen to Sunday’s Midrats Podcast with Mark and me, give it a listen to hear a broader discussion with some additional detail thrown in. Today is going to be a bit different.

We are still just ~72-hours from the events, so there is an order of magnitude more of what we don’t know than we do, but some items are breaking out from the fog.

On yesterday’s podcast, I briefly mentioned a framework for discussion that I think is helpful to flesh out here — an addendum to my comments on the podcast, so to speak.

As we stand here the Monday after the events of Friday night/Saturday morning, what are some clear items of consideration at the Tactical, Operational, Strategic, and Political levels?

Let’s do Top-3s at D+3:

Tactical:

  • No other military on the planet has the Joint/Combined Arms/Interagency capability to successfully execute this mission. None. This is a unique national capability that we should carefully nurture, steward, and improve on.
  • The death of rotary wing (RW) aircraft has been greatly exaggerated. As I have written often over the last two decades, one has to examine closely the lessons of small and medium sized wars, as they will inform you what will be needed in the next large war. That is the gold standard … but you have to be careful. Some lessons look to have broader implications, but they may be muted or amplified by the location and venue you are looking at. Yes, flying large groups of RW in the Ukraine theater is a questionable proposition, but that is because they are Ukrainian and Russian RW being flown by Ukrainians and Russians. American RW aircraft have training, equipment, and capabilities that others do not have. It was not by luck that none of our RW operating deep in Venezuela were shot down. Make no mistake, without a diverse, robust, and numerous RW capabilities, the Maduro Raid would not have been possible.
  • Unmanned systems are A tool, not THE tool. I agree, the use and utility of unmanned systems in the Russo-Ukrainian War has expanded at an astronomical rate, but in spite of what some may be trying to sell you, the future is not “All U_V All the Time“. Unmanned systems are like aircraft, submarines, and body armor — they get added to the tool box. The more diverse the toolbox, the more capable your military. That last comment refers to a lot more than unmanned systems.

Operational:

  • Sovereign Bases Matter: While we have seen other friendly nations let us use their facilities, the reanimation of Roosevelt Roads and the general Guamification of Puerto Rico over the last few months is a wake-up call to everyone. Serious policy makers need to put their accountants in the back of the room where they belong. A global power rides along support structures few see and understand at peace until they are needed at war but gone. Having a wide variety of inefficient and underutilized bases and facilities scattered around is a feature, not a bug. The future is unknown and an impatient lover. Do not test, taunt, or take her for granted. Reactivate more bases. Play hard ball with the UK about Diego Garcia. Pray for peace.
  • America Must be the Dominate Maritime & Aerospace Power in Order to be a Global Power: I don’t mind saying, “I told you so“. so I will happily say, I told you so. Yes, we need land power, but most of it should be light, expeditionary and exemplary. The balance of heavy maneuver forces should be based on US territory and the balance in the Reserve and National Guard. Everyone who went feet dry in Venezuela came back home because the U.S.A. dominated the air, electromagnetic spectrum, and the sea to such a degree that any challenge to that dominance was a death sentence to the challenger.
  • Few Things are More Useful Than a Large Deck Amphib: Let any person who poo-poos the USMC demanding more amphibious ships, or worse, bleats out how they are obsolete, be tarred, feathered, and run out on a rail. All hail the USS Iwo Jima (LHD-7). IYKYK.

Alexander Brown comments on the raid at Without Diminishment:

You can always find a cadre of pro-communist “fellow travellers” in any western nation … we just seem to have more of them than anyone else.

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: American regime-change efforts, on occasion, tend to age like oxidized guacamole. The teenage version of this writer remembers well the empty sugar-high of “Shock and Awe”.

A powerful aphrodisiac gets released when Things Actually Happen. To ignore the impacts of tribalism and the potential for another misappropriation of neocon bloodlust would be to ignore another elephant. But enough on the family Elephantidae and the order Proboscidea.

We may be as cold as Minnesota, with its miniature Horn of Africa engulfed in a real “learing” not “learning” opportunity after years of runaway fraud, but as Canadians, we should surely be looking inward at our own failings on the home front, our lack of leadership in foreign affairs, the hate we allow to fester in our streets, and the cozy relationships we foster with the most dubious of allies. But of course, we’re not.

Nicolas Maduro, one of the world’s great monsters, was “black-bagged” and perp-walked along with his wife yesterday, following a Swiss-watch-precise Delta op that only our neighbours to the south are capable of.

Let us not stand on the false pretence of a violation of “international law”: Maduro’s tenure was defined by a series of widely condemned and fraudulent electoral processes designed to ensure his grip on power. His track record includes a 2018 presidential election, dismissed by the international community as neither free nor fair. He banned major opposition parties and jailed or exiled key opponents.

This pattern escalated during the 2024 presidential election, where, despite independent tallies showing a landslide victory for opposition candidate Edmundo González, the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner without the data to prove it. The 2024 process was further marred by the disqualification of popular leader María Corina Machado, the intimidation of voters by paramilitary “collectives”, and a brutal post-election crackdown, known as “Operation Tun Tun”, that resulted in over 2,000 arrests and dozens of deaths.

And yet, as Hugo Chávez’s mausoleum smoulders, hundreds of thousands continue to flood the streets to celebrate, and the experts of “experts say” journey down from ivory towers to shoot the wounded and feign retroactive understanding of an op that took most by surprise, perhaps nowhere has the oppositional-defiant kvetching been louder than inside Canada’s elite Liberal circles, so much so that you almost have to applaud the utter lack of self-awareness and the sheer selfishness of it all.

January 4, 2026

Venezuela in the news

Filed under: Americas, Government, Law, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains that despite the usual suspects’ claims that “it’s all about the oil!”, it actually isn’t very much about the oil at all:

Trump taking — kidnapping, arresting, to taste — Maduro and his wife simply isn’t about the oil business. Please note, this also isn’t about whether it’s a good idea or not although I’ll admit to thinking that it’s way damn cool — getting in and out of hostile territory without, so far as we know right now, a single American casualty at all? Damn cool in that military sense.

This is about the shrieking we’re getting from the usual suspects — this is all about the oil! See! Ms. Raisin is one I’ve seen online already, there are those quoting that Counterpunch article with the idiot Michael Hudson and so on.

My point is solely and only about access to that oil.

So, travel back 10 to 15 years.

Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt oil is very “heavy”. Technically it is about viscosity but think about it as “thick”. It’s more like treacle than it is like a free flowing liquid. There are also issues with sulphur but leave that alone here. It is, in the technical parlance, “cheap shit”. So bad that it has to be mixed with much lighter (and usually “sweeter”, which means less sulphur) crude oil from different oil fields so you can pump it through a pipeline or get it into a tanker.

Venezuela used to have — still could have — fields of that light and sweet oil but they ran those fields — during and after Chavez — so badly that production fell over. So, they used to actually import US crude oil to then mix with that heavy crude so they could export. They also price petrol — gasoline — so low that they cannot possibly run refineries to make their own gasoline. So, they would import the US crude, mix it, export the blend to the US and then buy back the gasoline from those US Gulf Coast refineries. This was ridiculous, of course, but you know socialists with prices and economies.

It also meant that those US Gulf Coast refineries were adapted to use that Venezuela mix. You can change the mix a refinery uses but it’s potentially costly. The more the mix changes the more the cost rises. But the important thing to note is that the only refineries within cheap shipping distance that could use the Venezuela crude efficiently were those US Gulf Coast ones. Sure, they’d be pissed if they lost access to their supplies but they could be altered to work with other crude mixes. The reliance was much more of Venezuela upon the refineries than the refineries upon Venezuela — at least, the cost of adaptation to a change was lower for the refineries.

OK, so that was the old situation.

Over this past decade and a bit the US — under both Trump and Biden — has been saying, well, you know, we don’t think much of the Venezuelan Government. We also know the only money they get is from crude oil sales, so, if we refused to take that for those Gulf Coast refineries then we could screw with Maduro. Which is what happened — sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports which, most obviously, apply to people shipping into the US and so obeying US law.

Other people who do not, or don’t have to, obey US law haven’t, wholly, been abiding by those sanctions. OK. Maybe that’s all a good idea and maybe it isn’t — not my point here at all.

We should also note that the oil fields in Venezuela actually owned/managed by Chevron, a US company, have still been allowed to ship to the US and elsewhere under US law.

One more little fact. The US is now — as a result of fracking — a net oil exporter. This is also something done under Trump I, the lifting of the ban on crude oil exports. It can still be true that maybe buying in some Venezuelan oil — or Mexican, Canadian, whatever — meets either geographic or blend desires. We’d like some really heavy sludge, for example, or maybe Canadian oil works for Wyoming (not real examples, just ideas). But in terms of total oil production and usage the US produces more than it uses now. So any decision to import is about those marginal issues of location and blend, not urgent necessity for simple crude oil. Fracking works, d’ye see?

Shaded relief map of Venezuela, 1993 (via Wikimedia Commons)

On the other hand another bunch of the usual suspects are screaming about this as a violation of international law. ESR comments on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

Since there’s a lot of screaming about the legality of black-bagging Nicolas Maduro going on, let’s talk about the game theory of international law.

Before I do that, though, I’m going to acknowledge that the Trump administration’s legal posture doesn’t even implicate international law significantly. Their theory is that Maduro stole an election, is not the legitimate head of state of Venezuela, and is a criminal drug-cartel leader; universal jurisdiction applies.

This is why a photograph of Maduro restrained by a soldier wearing a DEA patch was released.

I’m not here to state a position on whether that legal posture is valid; I want to instead outline a game theory of the “rules-based international order”, which people are complaining has been violated because the US black-bagged a head of state.

There are two different ways to establish a framework of governing law. Most people only understand one of them, which is the imposition of law by a ruler or coalition with force dominance. I’ll call this “unitary law”.

The other mechanism is mostly only understood by a handful of libertarians; it is law as a violence-minimizing equilibrium among a number of roughly equal agents playing an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In such settings, cooperation evolves naturally and doesn’t have to be handed down by a single ruler or coalition. I’ll call this “IPD law”.

“International law” is enforced by an uneasy combination of both mechanisms. This is more difficult to see than it should be because there’s also a lot of air and bullshit around “international law”, bullshit consisting mostly of wordcels trying to cast magic spells on people with guns.

The air and bullshit is why it’s common to say that international law is a mirage, or a fraud that only serves the interests of the strongest powers. This isn’t true: what is true is that if an international norm is not sustained by being a stable strategy in an IPD game, only force majeure by a dominant power or coalition can uphold it.

Here’s an example of a moral good that was established by unitary law of nations: the general abolition of chattel slavery, which happened because a dominant coalition of Western nations said “Fuck your sovereignty, we’re no longer tolerating this anywhere our militaries can reach.”

Here’s an example of a moral good that was accomplished by IPD law of nations: generally humane treatment of prisoners of war in armed conflicts. This didn’t develop because great powers unilaterally said “stop doing that”, it happened because even a great power at war with a minor one is exposed to effective tit-for-tat retaliation if it abuses POWs.

If you want to understand “international law”, you need to be able to disentangle three different things that claim to be international law: unitary law imposed by great powers, IPD law enforced by the threat of pain-inducing defections in an international tit-for-tat game, and wordcel bullshit.

The thing to bear in mind is just because there’s a lot of wordcel bullshit going around in “international law” doesn’t mean there isn’t a reality underneath.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer rushes to distance himself from Trump’s action, for fear that someone might possibly mistake him for a vertebrate:

Leave it to the Babylon Bee to find the appropriate framing for a news story:

Update, 6 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 26, 2025

The US-Mexican border

Filed under: Americas, History, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An amusing exchange on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

    Ordnance Jay Packard Esq. @OrdnancePackard

    Hey @LineGoesDown, interesting your little map includes the Comancheria, a vast section of that northern green area that Mexico never set foot in because they’d get their shit pushed in by the Comanche.

    It was only after the Mexican-American war that the United States put a stop to the Comanche using Mexico like an ATM.

It’s actually even funnier than that.

The reason Mexicans kept getting their shit pushed in by the Comancheria was gun control.

No, seriously. It was Spanish colonial policy to keep the population disarmed and rely entirely on deployment of the military to keep order and prevent Indian incursions. Mexico inherited this.

This was impossible. The land was vast. State capacity and the military were overstretched. The Comanches were too mobile. Result: misery and massacre.

Americans, inheriting the British colonial policy of everybody bring your own guns and form militias, didn’t suffer as badly. Raiders more often went where the soft targets were, and that meant the disarmed ones in the Mexican zone.

This is also why Alta California was so sparsely settled that Spanish and Mexican control over it was at best nominal. Anglo settlers were culturally and politically much better equipped to hold the territory, making the Mexican session eventually inevitable.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-25.

Update, 28 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 7, 2025

QotD: The Great Applesauce Blight of 1977/78

Filed under: Americas, Food, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“An Army marches on its stomach.” — Napoleon

As we take our own little march down memory lane, let me state up front that I can’t stomach applesauce, just can’t. I liked it as a kid but now it has less appeal than the prospect of being duct taped to a chair, face down, in prison. Yeah, I hate it.

This may seem unreasonable, but anyone who was in at the time, at least in the Army or Marines, and some portion thereof that actually went to the field a lot, will probably remember the Great Applesauce Blight of 1977 and 1978, which was the reason I can’t stand the crap.

The “Great Applesauce Blight?” you ask. Oh, yeah.

The story I got, after some years and some digging, goes like this: It seems that sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, a fruit company – the Monterey Fruit Company, so it was said – was going out of business. So the Monterey Fruit Company, if that’s who it really was, called the Department of Defense and said, “Boys, have we got a deal for you. Hundreds upon hundreds of tons of Grade A applesauce, and you can have it. All of it. Cheap.”

McNamara and his Whiz Kids – neither of them ever sufficiently to be damned, of course – were gone, but their spirits remained. Department of Defense, ever conscious of the value of a well-squeezed penny, bought that inventory of applesauce, and began to put it into the old style, canned, MCI; Meal, Combat, Individual, which is to say, “C-rations”.

C Rations of the day were entirely canned and composed of a main meal, for one meal, plus either a cake (or very rarely, canned bread) or fruit of some kind, usually a small tin of peanut butter or cheese of some kind of jam or jelly, and one or another type of B Unit, which would have some variant of crackers plus either candy or cocoa. Sometimes, as with the B-2 unit, the cheese was in those.

Now, perusing a case of 1978 C-rats, which would have been newer than those of the Great Applesauce Blight, but still broadly similar, one notes that there were twelve menus, twelve different main meals, and 12 different kinds of dessert, a sundry pack, plus variable candies, spreads, etc. Of that latter twelve, eight were fruit and four were cake of some kind. I seem to recall that, possibly for reasons of economy, the amount of fruit during the Great Applesauce Blight had gone up to usually ten cans out of twelve, some extra cheese or peanut butter seemed to be included with some, and the cakes went down to two, one of which was going to be Chocolate Nut Roll, essentially inedible, from the Nashville Bread Company and the other would be the even more thoroughly disgusting fruit cake. I don’t recall who made that, and that lack of memory may have been an automatic defense against a future charge of capital murder. None of the cakes except pound cake could be relied on to be edible, and pound cake was always rare.

Now picture this, you’re a soldier in the Panama Canal Zone, training – training hard – to fight for the Canal, living in the jungle maybe twenty-five or more days and nights a month, eating C-rats to the tune of sixty or seventy a month, and virtually every meal contains applesauce or something more innately disgusting. “No, none of that nice fruit cocktail or those ever so delectable pear slices for you, young man; Department of Defense, to save a few bucks, has determined that applesauce is good enough, three meals a day, for weeks on end.”

*****

Now we were already kind of thin, because no military feeding system can ever completely keep up with the caloric requirements for a soldier either continuously fighting or realistically training to fight. Normally, this isn’t a problem because he can pack it on in the mess hall. These were unusual circumstances, though, with an unusually high chance of fighting – or riot control, which is worse – over the Canal. So we’re pretty much living out there, in pretty much trackless jungle, with nothing like enough helicopters for regular hot rations from the mess. Besides that, the old 193rd Infantry Brigade, in the Panama Canal Zone, was unusual in that it made a very serious effort to train even the cooks to fight, which takes time, too. C’s are pretty much it.

Even so, thin and hungry or not, after a month or two we could not eat the applesauce. That was probably seven or eight hundred calories a days that just got tossed.

We began going from thin to frigging emaciated.

*****

When I think upon the Great Applesauce Blight, though, I do not think about hardship or hunger. No, I think – as we old farts are wont to – about happier aspects of it.

Now this is no shit:

There we were, the heavy mortar platoon of 4th Battalion, 10th Infantry, stuck on top of a non-descript hill somewhere southwest of Gamboa, Canal Zone.

PFC McBrayer had a birthday out there in the jungle. I think it was his nineteenth birthday. None of us had been able to do any shopping, so we were all just stuck for getting him a birthday present. “I’m not giving up my pet scorpion,” said Big Al, who in fact, had a pet scorpion for the mega-ant versus scorpion gladiatorial combats we used to stage. “I’d offer to give him some of my crotch rot,” said Art, “but I think he already has some of his own.” “Howler monkey?” “Who’s going to catch it? And those suckers are mean, too.” “How about a sloth? They’re easy to catch.” “If the Lord God didn’t see fit to give B’rer Sloth an asshole, I don’t see why we should add to his troubles by catching him and wrapping him as a present.” Finally someone, I don’t think it was me, might have been Sergeant Sais, said, “Gentlemen, there can be only one proper gift under the circumstances,” and then he held up a – you guessed it – can of applesauce.

So we stuck nineteen or twenty Canal Zone Matches in a Nashville Bread Company Chocolate Butt Roll, invited McBrayer over, torched off the matches, sang Happy Birthday, then presented him his can of applesauce.

He was touched; you could see that. As he dashed tears from his eyes while making his, “Gee, you guys are just all so special … you shouldn’t have,” speech, you could see the emotion radiating from his face. And then, all choked up, he turned to go and tossed that can off applesauce off the hill with a casual contempt I have never seen before or since. It was the sheer, distilled essence of everything we all felt about applesauce.

Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-05.

November 14, 2025

This is in your house … and you’ve never noticed

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Environment, History, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 12 Nov 2025

The Secret History of Wood – Rubber wood
(more…)

November 7, 2025

Milei – “If we don’t have [power], then the left will have it”

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Without Diminishment, Geoff Russ discusses Javier Milei’s recent podcast appearance and his demonstration that unlike a lot of theoretical libertarians, he understands the dynamics of political power:

    There are many liberals, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who are really useless because all they do is criticise, let’s say, those of us who want to lead the world toward the ideas of freedom. And what they don’t realise is that power is a zero-sum game, and if we don’t have it, then the left will have it. Therefore, if you level your harshest criticism at those in your own ranks, you end up being subservient.

Have truer words ever been spoken by an English-speaking politician?

Argentine President Javier Milei’s words on the Lex Fridman podcast were a blunt reminder of something that many conservatives, particularly those in Canada, have chosen to forget.

Politics is the pursuit of political power and the chance to use it before your opponents can. Debates can be won, superb essays published, and quotes recycled from deceased politicians. Without power, however, it all amounts to nothing more than a glorified brainstorming session.

The thoughtful ideas and proposals go to waste if they lie stagnant in perpetual bickering opposition.

On October 26, Milei won a resounding victory in the legislative elections. His party, Liberty Advances, gained forty-two seats and smashed the hard-left Peronists who have dominated Argentina’s politics for more than half a century.

Milei is a fanatical believer in libertarian ideas, and has never pretended to be a moderate or incrementalist. He famously brandishes a chainsaw to represent his willingness to destroy the broken socialist status quo of Argentina.

Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

The rise of Milei has been a cultural battle for the soul of the country, and he is not shy about it. Milei leads a fresh, winning anti-Peronist coalition of forgotten and angry Argentines who want permanent, radical change.

It may be tempting to view Milei’s success as a pure affirmation of the appeal of libertarian ideology, but he is hardly Argentina’s first advocate of economic freedom. He succeeds because he is the opposite of a polite, centre-right reformer. Milei unapologetically embraces his place as a culture warrior seeking to remake the nation.

One of his targets is the institutional decadence and incompetence of the Peronist political machine. By swearing to snuff it out, Milei swept through traditional Peronist strongholds, whose voters had never considered voting for the formerly toothless Argentine opposition.

In Reason, Peter Suderman considers some of the lessons North Americans can learn from Milei’s stunning election victory:

To understand why Democrats overperformed in this week’s elections, look to Argentina.

Last month, Argentinian president Javier Milei won an unexpectedly large electoral affirmation, as his party significantly outperformed expectations by more than doubling its congressional representation in what was widely seen as a referendum on his agenda.

Over the past two years, Milei, the world’s most libertarian national leader, has slashed spending, cut red tape, and made his top priority restoring economic order and prosperity to a country that has long been a socialist basket case. Critics warned that his policies would be destructive, destabilizing, and unpopular. But not only did he deliver the country’s first balanced budget in over a decade, he oversaw a radical decline in inflation — from 200 percent when he entered office down to 32 percent last month.

Despite warnings that the country would reject Milei’s brand of austerity, the country responded with a strong vindication of his policies. In a post-election analysis, The New York Times noted that Milei’s message was that only he offered a “path for a country that has undergone years of runaway inflation under high-spending populist governments”. The report pointed to Milei’s economic record to explain his party’s win: “Many Argentines had grown tired of prices swinging wildly from day to day and of a ruling class they considered to be corrupt and irresponsible”.

The same report said Milei’s outsized victory was “unexpected”. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been, because economic stability and low inflation are what voters the world over clearly want.

When voters swept President Donald Trump into office for the second time last fall, large majorities of his voters gave the economy poor marks and said their own family finances had worsened over the years. Under President Joe Biden, the American economy had been wracked by the biggest surge in inflation in forty years. American voters punished the party that was in power when that happened.

This was true all over the world. After the pandemic, inflation skyrocketed globally, and in election after election, voters rejected ruling parties.

Inflation and economic instability have long been political losers: Look at Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, and his ensuing near-sweep of states in 1984 after taming a decade of out of control price hikes. The post-pandemic years have further reinforced this lesson.

Update: Undoctrination looks at Milei’s time in office so far.

Undoctrination
Published 6 Nov 2025

Javier Milei just pulled off the impossible … again.

In Argentina”s 2025 “midterm” elections, Milei’s 4-year-old party, La Libertad Avanza, went from a tiny minority to the largest party in the lower house, ending socialist dominance in Congress. The election was widely viewed as a referendum on Milei’s shock therapy plan for Argentina. The results are in: Argentines want more freedom.

In this video we cover:
How Milei slashed inflation from 211% to 31.8% in just 2 years
The 34,000 government jobs cut, 10 agencies eliminated, and 672 deregulations that freed the economy during Milei’s first year in office
How the Buenos Aires rental market exploded after lifting controls
How Peronists lost their veto-proof majority — and what it means for the future

And we feature expert analysis from Marcos Falcone, Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberal and Prosperity.

October 30, 2025

Javier Milei’s party does well in mid-term elections

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

J.D. Tuccille on the results of Argentina’s recent elections which returned significantly more of Javier Milei’s allies than pre-election polls predicted:

And things were going so well before 2am …

Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei won an important election victory on Sunday when his coalition, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), received a plurality of votes in the country’s legislative elections. With about half of the seats in the lower house up for grabs and a third of the Senate, LLA didn’t gain a majority, but it dramatically increased its share enough to block repeals of presidential decrees by lawmakers from other parties and to support presidential vetoes.

As Reason‘s César Báez commented, the results give Milei and his allies crucial time to continue needed free-market reforms and, hopefully, restore the fortunes of a country once held up as a model of prosperity, but which has been driven into poverty by decades of statist misrule.

In what it calls “a shocking electoral victory”, La Nacion reports that LLA pulled 40.66 percent of the vote. That’s well ahead of the opposition Peronists, who have long dominated the country and drew 31.7 percent of votes. Importantly, LLA won the populous province of Buenos Aires (home to 40 percent of voters), a Peronist stronghold where Milei’s allies were recently trounced in local elections.

From Wealth to Poverty Under Government Economic Meddling

This is good news for anybody who hopes for the advance of freedom, of course. But it’s especially encouraging for Argentines who, over the course of generations, have seen their country reduced from one of the wealthiest in the world to an impoverished basket case.

“At the end of the 19th century, economists agreed: Argentina, the ‘land of silver’, had a golden future ahead of it,” Deutsche Welle noted in 2020. “‘Rich like an Argentine’ was a common phrase at the time.”

The German broadcaster added, “in an unprecedented fall, Argentina went from ranking among the world’s top economies to one at the very bottom of the list. Today, economists simply roll their eyes at the fate of Argentina, which is now a developing country.”

The reason is simple enough: Argentines handed their political fates to a man named Juan Peron. In the 1930s, Peron served as a military observer in Europe, traveling to countries including Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. He was deeply impressed by some of the worst ideas to ever motivate a government and blended them into his own “justicialist” ideology. Through decades of political dominance, first Peron and then successor justicialists demonstrated that, in practice, there’s no real difference between fascism and socialism and that statist economics by any name are destructive.

To illustrate just how destructive Peron’s legacy has been, it’s worth pointing out that after Sunday’s election, The Wall Street Journal reported that Milei’s free-market, smaller-government policies “have restored some credibility to Latin America’s third-largest economy, but about one in three people still live in poverty”. One-third of the population living in poverty is horrifying, but what’s remarkable is that this is an improvement over what went before. At the end of the preceding Kirchner presidency, poverty stood at 41.7 percent and then briefly rose to 52.9 percent before falling to its current level.

In Spiked, Hugo Timms points out that the success of La Libertad Avanza is almost diametrically opposed to what most mainstream media reports were saying in the days leading up to the elections:

Argentine president Javier Milei has won a significant victory in Argentina’s midterm elections, held on Sunday. His libertarian party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), claimed more than 40 per cent of the vote, effectively doubling its share of seats in the senate and lower house to 37 (out of 72) and 64 (out of 257) respectively.

The result came as a bitter shock to much of the mainstream Western press. Milei’s assault on established economic orthodoxies since his election in December 2023 led many “experts” to take it for granted that Milei’s party was in for a hiding.

In a primer for the election published last weekend, the Observer had already begun salivating over the prospect of Milei’s defeat. “Argentina is counting the cost of its turn to Javier Milei”, wrote economics editor Heather Stewart. Glum portraits of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump behind Milei loomed above the article. “Politicians around the world are closely watching what happens when populist economic prescriptions collide with reality”.

This was a comparatively soft take compared with what the Guardian published earlier in October. “Farage, Trump, Musk: your boy Javier Milei just took one hell of a beating. Why so quiet?”, blared the headline when Milei’s party was defeated in a provincial election in the capital Buenos Aires. The Guardian said Milei’s “hard right” administration was “melting away”, along with his “once-packed international throng of cheerleaders and wolf-whistlers”.

Unsurprisingly, the BBC struggled to get to grips with Milei’s victory on Sunday, even though its only job was to convey the results impartially. Apparently, the president made gains despite Argentina “hurtling towards an economic collapse”, it editorialised. It said the voter turnout of 68 per cent reflected “widespread apathy”. This might be lower than past midterm elections in Argentina, but it was still higher than turnouts at last year’s US presidential election (65 per cent) and the most recent UK General Election (60 per cent).

None of this should come as a shock. Since Milei’s rise to power in 2023, most of the commentariat has been eager to see him fail. His promises to radically cut public spending and deregulate key industries were seen in the eyes of many economic experts to only mean one thing: the dreaded return of Thatcherite “neoliberalism”, from which, they claim, Britain and America have never truly recovered.

The antipathy is mutual. In a speech to the World Economic Forum in January 2024, Milei famously referred to the world’s political classes as “parasites who live off the state”. That his speech was shared approvingly by Elon Musk on X confirmed, in the eyes of the Western establishment, Milei’s status as a dangerous insurrectionist.

October 16, 2025

The Mexican-American War 1846-48

Filed under: Americas, Government, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 16 May 2025

In the early 19th century, the United States and Mexico share a massive cross-continental border, but US settlement in Mexico, expansionist ideals and religious differences put the young republics on a collision course. As tensions boil over into bloodshed, the tiny, inexperienced US army marches to a war which will forge the modern United States.

Chapters:
00:00 Texas Republic
05:06 Declaration of War
07:03 The US Army
09:26 British Muskets in the Mexican Army
16:19 The Mexican Army
18:24 The Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma
21:38 California and New Mexico
25:11 US Volunteers
28:40 Battle of Monterrey
33:03 Expanding the War
36:59 The Pedregal Battles
40:18 Battles for Mexico City
43:42 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
45:14 Legacy
(more…)

October 14, 2025

Carthaginian or Roman America?

Filed under: Africa, Americas, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

    Alaric The Barbarian @0xAlaric

    There’s a handful of evidence for this. Most of it’s a little fringe or circumstantial, but it exists.

    – 500s BC Carthaginian navigator Himilco described the Sargasso Sea; the original work is now lost but it was quoted in Ora Maritima a century later. If you can make it there and back, you know trade winds well enough to take Columbus’ route.

    – There’s quite a lot of copper “missing” from the Great Lakes area, and there was more bronze in the Old World than could have possibly been supported by the known copper mining infrastructure there … despite 7,000-year-old copper mines in that region, the local natives didn’t seem to really use copper for much aside from odd pictographic disks.

    – The Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head, discovered in 1933, was a bearded terracotta head made before European contact with modern-day Mexico. Its features and style don’t match local populations or material cultures, and it’s been dated to centuries prior. Roman experts ID it as 200s AD Roman art. Even the archaeological community isn’t sure what to make of this one; their best (non-)explanation is “it was a prank”.

    – Numerous odd discoveries were made of Old World artifacts in the American West throughout the 19th century. Alleged Roman coins, weapons, tools, etc. Some of these were hoaxes; others have been lost to time; others seem almost covered up. The wildest example is Kincaid’s alleged 1909 discovery of an ancient Egyptian-style tunnel annex hidden in the walls of the Grand Canyon, full of artifacts; and, a similar alleged discovery around Death Valley. The former was reported to have been investigated (maybe covered up?) by the Smithsonian, though they deny this; the latter is on government land now.

    – Various Old World artifacts seem to show New World goods or maps; there is a depiction of a pineapple at Pompeii, for example, and c. 350 BC Carthaginian coins show a map of the Mediterranean including the Americas to the west. Certain of Ptolemy’s odd geographic ideas are “corrected” (such as his earth-size estimate) by placing the Antilles as the Fortunate Isles. The Piri Reis Map, compiled in 1513 but surely copied from much older sources, shows a fairly accurate east coast of the Americas, as well as Antarctica. Diodorus Siculus may have even described the Americas as found by the Phoenicians, then kept secret …

    – This of course predates Rome and Carthage, but a wide swathe of native cultures had extraordinarily similar oral histories of being visited by ethnically distinct people from the east who taught them aspects of civilization … “But that’s probably nothing, right?”

    The field awaits its smoking gun, its Rosetta Stone. But I believe something is out there, just waiting for an enterprising follower of Schliemann to discover it. There’s *something* there.

And in response:

    John Ringo SF Author @Jringo1508

    The part that does it for me (that there was pre-Viking contact) is just studying the development of pottery and metallurgy in the Old World vs New.

    Old World: Burnt bits of clay with markings on them. Poorly formed “pottery” charms. Better made pottery charms. Pottery dishes. Metal ore based glazes. Simple, low temperature, metals.

    New World: POTTERY FULLY FORMED AND GOLD AND SILVER EXTRACTION BECAUSE NATIVE AMERICANS ARE AWESOME!

    The Carthaginians had a process of going to less advanced areas, teaching them some simple “advanced” technologies that in some way helped out the Carthaginians then trading with them for “stuff”. They’d teach pottery or better pottery techniques so that they (the Carthaginians) didn’t have to load themselves down with empty pots to pick up “stuff”.

    They’d then trade stuff like bronze daggers for gold, silver and spices.

    So, it entirely makes sense (if you understand the currents) that a Carthaginian/Phoenician (they’re the same) trading/exploring fleet would make it across the Atlantic in one direction (probably in winter), set up a trading center somewhere and start trading wares. They’d leave a few behind to build up a store then sail back.

    If they went over in winter and sailed back in summer, good chance they were wiped out by hurricanes.

    It could have happened multiple times with a small group of colonists left behind. Their genes would disappear in the wash.

    But going from zero to FULLY FORMED POTTERY has always been my reason to know that there was early contact.

September 18, 2025

Stop calling it “Turtle Island”

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

At Woke Watch Canada, Igor Stravinsky strenuously objects to calling North America “Turtle Island” and all the other woke shibboleths of the modern progressive cant:

As another school year rolls out, we can hope a more honest and realistic portrait of Canadian history will start to take shape in our schools. Students have been brainwashed into believing that Canada was a racist state bent on the extermination of Indigenous people, who were peaceful and wise, living in harmony with nature and each other. But reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is only possible if we base policy and action on the truth, not fairy tales, hearsay, anecdotes, or ideologies. We need facts, evidence, and reasoned debate. A good start would be for people to stop referring to North America as “Turtle Island”.

Calling it that is essentially to call the current geopolitical organization of the world invalid. If Canada, the United States, and other Western countries are in fact illegitimate, then that means national and international laws are also null and void. So, unless you are the direct descendent of an aboriginal person who was alive before first contact with Europeans, you are just a guest here — a second-class citizen at best. Non-Indigenous Canadians will simply never accept that. Nor should they.

In any case, “Turtle Island” is a nonsensical name on several levels. Firstly, North America is a continent, not an island. It is connected to South America by the Isthmus of Panama, which means it is not even surrounded by water. In any case an island is defined as a land mass surrounded by water that is part of a tectonic plate such as Greenland which is part of the North American Plate, thus is not a continent.

Then there is the fact that Indigenous North Americans were oblivious to the geography of the vast continent on which they lived. Like people everywhere in the distant past, they only knew the area they lived in, which could be substantial in the case of nomads, but was still a tiny fraction of North America’s 20+ million square kilometers. Of course, they knew nothing about the geography of the world with its 7 continents and 5 oceans.

Most importantly, the Turtle Island creation story is a myth believed by a particular cultural group. There is nothing wrong with believing in myths: I personally believe in the myth of human rights, as most Canadians do (pre-contact Indigenous people certainly did not). Myths are powerful: Our common belief in human rights has helped to make the Western world contain the safest and most prosperous societies ever. But when our institutions subscribe to myths not shared by the majority of Canadians, they are choosing to elevate one culture’s belief system above all others.

In the past, the Christian religion was regarded as the one true religion in Canada by most people, and the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous people were often denigrated as primitive superstition. But elevating Indigenous spirituality in our secularized 21st century world by treating it as a knowledge acquisition system equivalent to (or superior to) the scientific method is an attempt to correct for that past ethnocentrism. This is Critical Theory in action: It always strives to alleviate past wrongs with present wrongs, a formula for social disaster if ever there was one.

September 15, 2025

The Cold War in Latin America Begins: Coups, Communists, and Castro – W2W 44

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

TimeGhost History
Published 14 Sept 2025

Spy rings, covert operations, coups, street violence, and sudden regime changes. This is the turmoil that awaits Latin America after the Second World War. As new ideas from the East gain momentum, the United States tries to hold on to its role as the region’s self-appointed guardian. Which side will ultimately shape the future of this rich and populous region?
(more…)

July 23, 2025

Javier Milei is delivering “a man-made miracle” for Argentina

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niall Ferguson‘s thread on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, thanks to the Thread Reader App:

While the world fixates on Donald Trump’s populist cocktail of reciprocal tariffs and big, beautiful deficits, @JMilei is delivering a man-made miracle that should gladden the heart of every classical economist and quicken the pulse of all political libertarians.

@JMilei has brought monthly inflation down from 13% to 2%. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7%. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks — indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42%, when Milei was elected, to 31%

These are astonishing feats. And they have ramifications that go far beyond South America. Free-market economics and political libertarianism are sometimes dismissed as a fad of the “neoliberal” 1980s, long ago superseded by the new populisms of the left and the right. Not so. The world has never seen a government more radically libertarian than @JMilei. But the amazing thing is not that it is working economically. The true miracle is that Milei’s shock therapy is working politically.

With his leather jacket and late ’60s mop top, @JMilei is part–rock star, part–mad professor, dancing, singing, and screaming his catch phrase: ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! — “Long live liberty, damn it!” It’s as if Joe Cocker had gone onstage at Woodstock and sung “I’ll Get By with a Little Help from My Friedman”. Never in the history of democracy has a tribune of the people won power this way.

July 21, 2025

Was Juan Perón a Fascist? The Cold War Origins of Peronism – W2W 037

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

TimeGhost History
Published 20 Jul 2025

Was Juan Perón really a fascist, a socialist, or something entirely different? In this episode of War 2 War, we explore the rise of Peronism in post–World War II Argentina and how Perón tried to position his country between the superpowers of the Cold War.

Through labour reforms, nationalist rhetoric, media control, and brutal repression of dissent, Juan and Eva Perón created a powerful populist regime that borrowed ideas from both fascism and socialism, while claiming to reject both. From Argentina’s “Third Way” to its complicated ties with the US, USSR, and even Nazi fugitives, we examine the ideology, contradictions, and legacy of Peronist rule.

Was Peronism a unique form of authoritarian populism, or just another face of fascism?

Join us as we uncover the foundations of Argentina’s Cold War identity and the true political nature of Juan Perón.
(more…)

July 18, 2025

Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president

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

J.D. Tuccille says that Argentinian President Javier Milei may be the politician who has most successfully “defied the expectations of the chattering class” by not only winning the presidency but also by the completely unexpected turnaround of the national economy:

Drawing on official data, Reuters reports that Argentina’s “economic activity rose 7.7 per cent in April compared with the same month last year”. That was higher than expected and a welcome addition to news that the economy had grown by 5.8 per cent during the full first quarter relative to the same quarter the previous year. Early numbers put Argentina’s second-quarter growth at 7.6 per cent. By contrast, Canada’s economy grew at an annual 2.2 percent in the first quarter and the U.S. economy shrank a bit.

In equally encouraging news, Argentina’s “monthly inflation rate has fallen below two per cent for the first time in five years,” according to the Financial Times. That’s still high in North American terms, but Argentina’s governments have a history of wildly expanding the money supply to pay off debt and finance expenditures, resulting in inflation rates in the hundreds and even thousands per cent per year. Inflation slowed somewhat in recent years, but it was over 200 per cent in 2023 and Milei was elected on a promise to stabilize prices — even if it meant adopting the U.S. dollar as the country’s official currency.

Importantly, the poverty rate in Argentina has also fallen to 38.1 per cent of the population at the end of 2024 from 41.7 per cent when Milei took office. Again, that remains very high, but it’s an improvement in a country where politicians have long seemed committed to keeping people poor and dependent on the state.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. In a November 2023 open letter, over 100 economists warned that Milei’s economic “proposals, rooted in the economy of laissez-faire and which include controversial ideas such as dollarization and significant reductions in public spending, are fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful to the Argentine economy and people”.

The economists — including such academic luminaries as Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh — warned of havoc if Milei implemented his free-market plans. Voters weren’t impressed by the forecast of doom; they chose the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” economist and his upstart political coalition over the standard-bearer of the dominant Justicialist Party.

The Justicialists have been the strongest force in Argentine politics since their launch in the 1940s by Juan Peron. Peron served as a military observer in Europe and apparently combined the worst ideas he encountered into a peculiarly Argentine ideology he called “justicialism”, better known as Peronism. At its heart, the ideology drops the pretense of any practical difference between socialism and fascism and promotes a brutal mélange of statist economic schemes. This means that, while most property and business activity is in private hands, it’s subject to government dictates, distortions, and control.

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