The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 16 Jun 2026The saga of Koje-Do POW camp comes to its end this week after Bull Boatner’s troops crack down hard and finally take full control there. Operation Counter continues with fighting for Hill Eerie, and South Korean President Syngman Rhee is stirring up so much trouble that the US is considering intervening in South Korean politics to stop him.
00:00 Intro
00:40 Recap
01:11 Operation Counter
03:31 The Chinese Account
05:22 Koje-Do
10:46 Rhee Again
12:50 US Presidential Election
15:58 Summary
16:25 Conclusion
18:13 Call to Action
June 17, 2026
The Korean War Week 104 – Order Restored at Koje-do – June 16, 1952
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June 10, 2026
The Korean War Week 103 – The Outpost War – June 9, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 9 Jun 2026The US 45th Division launches Operation Counter in the field this week, to take some enemy outposts, Bull Boatner finishes his plans for his operation to take total control at Koje-Do POW Camp, and in the US, the Presidential primary season finishes, though it’s still anybody’s guess who the actual Democratic and Republican candidates will be.
00:00 Intro
01:21 Recap
01:52 Primary Season
05:18 Operation Counter
09:20 Communist Artillery
12:09 Boatner
20:10 Summary
20:20 Conclusion
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June 9, 2026
Confucian deference to authority and tradition lead to autocracy and rebellion, time after time
Chinese history is not one of my areas of interest, so I have not read deeply in any specific area. Lorenzo Warby, on the other hand, has a much better grasp of the sweep of historical events in China and some of the philosophical and cultural elements that persist through the centuries:
All political and social philosophies rest, implicitly or explicitly, on some claims or claims about the nature of humans.
Consider the thought of Kong Qiu (c.551 BC – c. 479 BC), known as Kǒngfūzǐ (孔夫子) (Great Master or Wise Teacher Kong), hence Confucius. He held that human nature is naturally good and that it is therefore a reasonable aspiration to create a society of harmony, a society without conflict, if everyone just behaves with the propriety appropriate to their place in society — in particular, according to their placement in the web of social connections. His constant concern for the rites (li 禮) is for people to show the correct forms of, and orientation towards, those socially embedded interactions.
This leads very naturally to a very authoritarian, hierarchical view of politics as enforcing social harmony, particularly as people vary in their willingness and capacity to cultivate such virtuous propriety. The notion that politics is legitimately an arena for bargaining between competing interests — the Western idea of “normal politics” — becomes not a natural way to do politics, but a failure to achieve proper harmony.
Master Kong developed his ideas — that were further developed by disciples and commentators — in a civilisation with no tradition of warrior assemblies, self-governing cities, or deliberative assemblies of any kind. A ruler’s court is a place where officials report, and may even debate, but the ruler decides. You can see this narrow view of politics in comments by Master Kong in the Analects such as:
8.14 The Master said, “If you don’t have a particular [government] position, then don’t meddle with any of its business.”
14.26 The Master said, “If you don’t have a particular [government] position, then don’t meddle with any of its business.” Master Zeng [Zengzi] commented, “The gentleman does not allow his thoughts to go beyond what his position calls for.”
In such a political culture, judicious quotes based on mastery of a shared literature become a way of communicating to superiors while giving minimum offence. Conversely, political rhetoric has little or no value, because there are not the deliberative assemblies to be swayed by argument. Master Kong deprecated glib persuasiveness, on the grounds that it tended to hide one’s real character (or lack thereof).
Where command-and-control hierarchy is the dominant method of political action, hoping for propriety to pervade the hierarchy has obvious resonance. Putting such propriety as a mechanism for social harmony is a way to, ironically enough, be persuasive — which requires a positive view of human nature. But it also hugely elevates the moral claims of governorship. Hence comments such as:
2.1 The Master said, “To rule by virtue is like the way the North Star rules, standing in its place with all the other stars revolving around it and paying court to it.”
12.17 Ji Kangzi asked about the way of governing [zheng]. Confucius replied, “To govern [zheng] is to correct [zheng]. When you set an example by correcting your mistakes, who will dare not to correct his mistakes?”
This concern for harmonious propriety is not a world away from ibn Khaldun‘s concern for asabiyya. Nor is it so far from recognising the importance of a coherent civic culture in order to maintain robust institutions, which rest on norms and rules. This is a factor that much of mainstream Economics fails to seriously grapple with, leading to incompetent analysis of immigration.
The problem is that this cultural and institutional framework turns the thought of Master Kong, his disciples and commentators, into what is, in effect, one-trick moral propriety politics, however sophisticated other aspects of this tradition may be. The choices of governance are narrowed down to punishment and example:
2.3 The Master said, “If you guide the people with ordinances and statutes and keep them in line with [threats of] punishment, they will try to stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. If you guide them with exemplary virtue [de] and keep them in line with the practice of the rites [li], they will have a sense of shame and will know to reform themselves.”
They are reduced to trying to make autocratic command-and-control politics work as a successful long-term project: as the repeated dynastic collapses in Chinese history show, they did not succeed. Indeed, the recurring pattern of Chinese political reformers and reform programs ending badly reflects that such fail to break out of that autocratic command-and-control pattern, so end up being swallowed by its incentive structures — including the long-term pathologies of bureaucracy and the inherent fears of autocrats.
The most thorough attempt to implement ideas based on rú (儒) classicism (“Confucianism”) in Chinese history was the disastrous reign of Wang Meng (r.9-23), who provides an object lesson in overweening Theory leading to disastrous policies. Ironically, Master Kong himself was against such grand theorising:
9.4 The Master stayed away from four things: he did not put forth theories or conjectures; he did not think that he must be right; he was not obdurate; he was not self-centered.
The episode is a particularly disastrous example of Etienne Gilson‘s principle that the conclusions of the master are the premises of the disciple, thereby all too readily reducing struggles with complexity to a simplifying dogmatism: a trap that scholarly commentary on The Analects often tried to avoid.
The thought of Master Kong also wanders very close to someone is morally better, not only because learned, but because smart and learned. For instance:
5.9 The Master said to Zigong, “Who is the better man, you or Hui [Yan Hui]?” Zigong replied, “How dare I compare myself with Hui? Having learned one thing, he gives play to ten, while I go only as far as two.” The Master said, “You are not as good as he is. Neither of us is as good as he is.”
This arrogance of the appropriately credentialed periodically led to mass outbreaks of infuriated peasants removing educated heads from elite bodies. The most recent manifestations of this were the Cultural Revolution in China and the megacidal Cambodian horrors under Pol Pot but you can see versions of this reaching back into Chinese history — for example, the massacres by Huang Chao’s rebellion (874-884) towards the end of the Tang dynasty (618-907) and the earlier peasant revolts that brought down Wang Meng.
We can also see the same self-righteous exploitive arrogance of those credentialed with “morally proper knowledge” afflicting contemporary Western societies along with bureaucratic pathologies that have also been a feature of Chinese history — remembering that we Westerners copied the Chinese pattern of bureaucratic selection through examination without considering the long-term patterns of Chinese history. Fortunately, national populism generates a less violent outlet for popular frustrations than Chinese peasant revolts.
Update, 10 June: 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.
Road to Rangoon, Ep. 1 – Slim’s Hammer and Anvil
HardThrasher
Published 8 Jun 2026The Road to Rangoon Ep1: Hammer & A Hard Place — The Battle for Burma Begins By the start of the monsoon rains in 1944, British and Indian forces of General Sir William “Bill” Slim’s XIVth Army had been pegged back inside India. Five months later, after the battles of Imphal and Kohima, the Fourteenth Army had not only retaken the ground it had lost, but inflicted catastrophic losses on the Imperial Japanese Army.
The question was: what now? There would be no more forces coming from Europe, no additional fire power or support, and apparently no belief in the men by the Imperial General Staff in London or the US Army high command in Washington. Could the DUKE forces push into Burma through monsoon rains, jungle, mountains, disease, impossible supply lines and against an enemy willing to die for each yard of ground? Could Slim, Mountbatten, Oliver Leese, the US-led Northern Combat Area Command — NCAC — turn victory in India into the reconquest of Burma?
In this opening episode of “The Road to Rangoon”, we begin the story of the epic advance that would throw the Imperial Japanese Army out of Burma (modern day Myanmar) and become familiar with some of the places, names and concepts that will shape our story.
We look at the geography of Burma and eastern India, the aftermath of Imphal and Kohima, the state of the Japanese Burma Area Army under General Kimura Heitarō, the role of XIVth Army, XV Corps and NCAC, and the Allied plans that became Operation ROMULUS, Operation CAPITAL, Operation DRACULA and EXTENDED CAPITAL. This is the story of how the Burma Campaign moved from defence to attack — and how Slim planned one of the most ambitious offensives of the Second World War.
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June 3, 2026
China’s pirate fishing fleets
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.
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The Korean War Week 102 – American Bioweapons on Korean Soil? – June 2, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 2 Jun 2026The 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
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June 2, 2026
Low IQ, mens rea, and actus reus
For those like me whose legal Latin isn’t great, “mens rea” is “the mental state of a defendant who is accused of committing a crime”, while actus reus is a “guilty act” (from Wikipedia). On his Substack, William M. Briggs discusses how legal systems decide when an accused person’s IQ is so low that they lack the ability to understand that their action is illegal:
A gang of gypsies in England gang raped a young girl (and another previously) at knifepoint while filming the deeds, laughing all the while and even posted one of the rapes on social media. At their trial, Judge Nicholas Rowland excused their crimes because he said the criminals were “‘very young’, had low intelligence, a ‘limited understanding of consent’ and were susceptible to ‘peer pressure'”.
[Rowland] said that the second boy fell into the bottom one per cent in IQ for his age, and he had been diagnosed with ADHD, while the third boy had ‘low intellectual capacity’ and he had a ‘limited understanding of consent’.
Iryna Zarutska, 23, was riding a train in Charlotte, when Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr rose up, slit her throat, and as he was exiting the train gleefully declared he “got” his white woman. Brown had been arrested some 14 times before he murdered Zarutska, for crimes including armed robbery. He was freed each time. For the murder, he was found by Experts to be “incompetent to stand trial”.
Brown and the gypsies were not alone. Recently, there were these cases:
Many states have humane destruction laws that apply when animals (usually dogs) have attacked or killed humans. Florida, for instance, confiscates vicious dogs and puts them down. When any animal kills and eats a man it is usually put down, and most think it wise and prudent to do so. But some curiously argue the animals cannot help themselves, that it is their nature to attack and kill and even eat people, and who are we to judge?
In any case, it is clear that dogs, nor any animal, are not as intelligent as man. Just as it is clear obvious truth that some men are not as intelligent as others. Yet this fact does meet resistance from Equalitarians and Universalists, both forgiving every sin except the sin of claiming sin exists.
[…]
The Eighth Amendment reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted“.
Since 2002, executing a dumb criminal is “cruel”, yet executing an intelligent criminal is not cruel nor unusual. This is odd because, as any dog owner can attest, even dogs can know right from wrong, and even stupid men know murder is wrong.
Scalia wrote in his dissent that an Expert (a psychologist) on one of the appeals testified Smith had “an IQ of 59”. Smith also, and in this case, really had “16 prior felony convictions for robbery, attempted robbery, abduction, use of a firearm, and maiming”. He noted previous courts ruled only the profoundly retarded, those “idiots” who “had an IQ of 25 or below”, had a “‘deficiency in will’ rendering them unable to tell right from wrong”.
On the general topic of IQ, but not directly related to violent crime, ESR discusses the relationship between IQ and the caste system of India:
The caste system as a layered varna system with five classes and numerous integrated jati communities.
Razib Khan
That feeling when your knowledge about how average IQ varies with caste rank in India stops being peculiar arcana and suddenly becomes deeply relevant to US domestic politics …
Anybody who has studied the matter knows that castes in India have been maintaining almost perfect endogamy for thousands of years. About the only significant category of exceptions is that if you have an exceptionally beautiful daughter you *might* succeed in getting her taken as a concubine by a higher-caste man, so their offspring might jump a rank.
With no significant gene flow between jatis, divergences in important traits like IQ and time preference not only don’t smooth out, but actually amplify due to genetic drift and differing selective pressures.
Highest-caste Indians have an IQ distribution a lot like Europeans. Low-caste Indians … don’t. They’re not quite as genetically handicapped as the dimmest populations in sub-Saharan Africa, thankfully, but the spread is wide.
This doesn’t mean all low-caste Indians are stupid; Gaussian distributions don’t work that way. It does mean that importing 10,000 low-caste Indians has very different implications for the host society then importing 10,000 Brahmins.
Segue to the recent news stories about American families getting killed by illiterate Indian truck drivers doing crazy stupid things on the roadways. Those truck drivers are not Brahmins.
This is a recent phenomenon because, until one of our political parties decided to import the entire Third World for vote-farming purposes, we were cream-skimming India. Now we’re not, and this makes a serious difference.
Update: Fixed broken link to ESR’s X post.
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May 27, 2026
The Korean War Week 101 – Another Week, Another POW Riot – May 26, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 26 May 2026In the wake of the kidnapping of the Koje-Do POW camp commandant, UN Commander Mark Clark is busy really working on expanding security at all the POW camps in Korea and gaining total internal control of them. However, the damage done to the UN’s global reputation by the whole incident is considerable, and at the negotiating table the Communists denounce the UN and UN Chief Delegate Turner Joy leaves his post to return to the states. The war in the field goes on as always, with the Philippine Battalion Combat Team seeing success in the field.
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May 25, 2026
Did The Taranto Raid Inspire Pearl Harbor?
TimeGhost Cartographic
Published 24 May 2026In November 1940, the British Royal Navy launched a daring carrier strike against the Italian fleet at Taranto. The attack shocked the world, crippled Italian naval power in the Mediterranean, and demonstrated just how devastating naval air power could be against battleships at anchor. But the consequences of Taranto didn’t end in Italy.
In this episode, we explore the aftermath of the raid, the race to understand how it had been achieved, and why military observers around the world paid such close attention to what happened there. From British convoy operations in the Mediterranean to Japanese investigations into shallow-water torpedo attacks, this episode examines how one raid would echo far beyond the harbor at Taranto.
How did the British make the attack possible? What lessons did foreign observers take away from it? And why did some nations react to the raid very differently than others?
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May 24, 2026
The PRC would need a literal “short, victorious war” to defeat the US
On Substack, Tom Kratman looks at the economic and strategic weakness of the Peoples Republic of China should it get into a serious shooting war with the United States:
China’s strategic position is appalling, and at least the higher party cadres and senior military leadership have to know that it is. Why? China is utterly dependent on both imports and exports to keep their economy going and to feed themselves. By that latter, I don’t just mean they need to import food, though they do to the tune of one third. That’s bad enough, but they also need to import fertilizer to grow the inadequate amount of food they grow for themselves. No, nitrogen and phosphates aren’t a huge problem; they are net exporters. Potash is a problem. Loss of potash imports probably cut their grain production by about ten percent. This would be painful, but survivable with a touch of rationing and some weight loss.
Except for one thing, oil and natural gas. Cut those off and grain production drops by a third within two years and probably forty percent after that. On top of the loss of the third that they must import, that’s serious hunger.
And another thing, farm machinery and transportation. China only produces about a quarter of its oil needs domestically. Cut those off and mechanization of farming must be reduced.
Add in that this kind of food reduction also means they must stop feeding food animals.
Moreover, while a good deal of their transportation net runs off of electricity, which can be produced by the coal China does have, at what we might call the strategic level, getting the food from the farms to the railheads and from the railheads to markets to kitchens requires liquid fuel. China’s ability to produce liquid fuel from coal exists, but it is tiny.
Add in the increased need for liquid fuel for their military in this case.
A long series of interrogatories to Grok suggests that China’s total food production and importation collapses by seventy percent or more within two or three years if they go to war with us.
It won’t be sudden; they probably have about a year’s worth of food in storage against such a day. But within three years? We’re talking an entire civilization in kwashiorkor1 and marasmus2.
How do they keep that industrial civilization going in the absence of food and energy imports, or the exports that have kept their economy going? They likely don’t.
Although China’s population appears to be in accelerating collapse, they still have a lot more people than we do. Surely that represents … nothing. For a war fought largely at sea it represents nothing. Yes, they can, at least for the moment, build more ships faster than we can. However, we can build things to sink ships faster than they can build ships. Thus, we’ll keep our existing naval supremacy.
There’s a worse factor in there, though; in China sons are just a lot more important than daughters. No, I don’t care if this upsets western feminist sensibilities; we are not talking about the west but about China. Daughters, assuming they marry, go on to take care of their husband’s family. Sons take care of the parents. It is the rare Chinese family with an extra son to spare.
But can’t they build enough ships to overwhelm our blockade in the short term, at least? No, they can’t. China is surrounded by enemies on land, Vietnam, India, and Russia predominant among them, though none of the neighbors – barring, maybe, North Korea – really likes China or doesn’t fear it. No, however much public kissy face they may engage in for foreign consumption, China and Russia have long-standing, intractable issues between them. China is a threat to Russia and vice versa in ways we are not.
So all the manpower and money spent on a navy is largely wasted. They’re not going to get a navy large, powerful, and competent enough to take us on and, if they really try to, we will manufacture a war – the United States is good at this – to trim them down to size before they can. Worse, every increment of money and manpower they spend on the navy is money and manpower not spent on the much more important army and air force.3
- Caused by protein deficiency.
- Caused by deficiency in all macronutrients.
- The Navy is much more important to us because we have no serious land enemies in this hemisphere.
Update, 25 May: 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.
US Tanks & Armour in the Vietnam War
The Tank Museum
Published Jan 9, 2026If you watch films like We Were Soldiers and Platoon, Vietnam was all about Hueys dropping off Air Cav with M60 door gunners giving fire support and M16 toting grunts humping through the jungle. Tanks and AFVs barely get a look-in. In fact, armour was vitally important in Vietnam. The South Vietnamese, the US Marines and Army, all used AFVs in some of the worst tank country in the world in ways that definitely weren’t in the owner’s handbook. This is the story of armour in Vietnam, told through three incredible vehicles
First, the M48 – part of the famous US Patton family. Designed with the battlefields of Europe in mind, it was the US Marine Corps that insisted on bringing them to Vietnam. With 110mm of frontal armour, and a hull designed to deflect mine blasts, the M48s proved their worth time and time again.
Next, the M113 (or “tracks”) – an armoured personnel carrier that was the most numerous and, arguably, the most effective AFV on the battlefield. Designed to be air portable, the M113s had aluminium armour and weighed just 12 tons. As an APC, the M113 was basically a battle taxi intended to drop off its passengers and perhaps provide a bit of fire support with its pintle mounted .50 Cal. However, the soldiers in Vietnam skipped reading the owner’s handbook and set about turning them into ersatz tanks.
And finally, one of the most bizarre vehicles to ever emerge on the battlefield – the M50 Ontos. The Ontos was small – only 12.5 feet long and lightweight at 9.5 tons, making it easy to move by air. Yet despite its diminutive size the Ontos bristled with 6 M40 106mm recoilless rifles. They were small, ferocious and devastatingly effective.
00:00 | Introduction
00:46 | The Beginning
03:02 | The Patton
08:04 | The ACAV
11:39 | “The Thing”
13:33 | The Other Side of the Hill
15:28 | The End is NighThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
In this film, Chris Copson and Paul Famojuro reveal the untold story of armour in Vietnam. Whilst media portrayals of the Vietnam War tend to focus on other aspects of the armed forces, armoured fighting vehicles played an incredibly important role. The M48, a tank designed for Europe, ended up surviving mine strikes while crashing through the jungle. The M113, a lightly-armoured personnel carrier, was upgunned to serve in armoured assaults. And the M50 Ontos, a thing so ferocious a nearby shot would have the North Vietnamese abandoning their positions. This is the story of Armour in Vietnam.
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May 20, 2026
The Korean War Week 100: Mark Clark in Command – May 19, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 19 May 2026Mark Clark is the new UN Commander and will run the war in Korea, replacing Matt Ridgway, who leaves for Europe to take over NATO Command. The Koje-Do POW camp situation is resolved, but is a black eye for the UN, as are the allegations that the US has been practicing germ warfare in Korea and Manchuria, backed up by “confessions” from captured American airmen.
00:00 Intro
01:13 Recap
01:29 Demand and Response
05:35 What Went Wrong at Koje-Do?
12:06 Germ Warfare?
13:55 Mark Clark
15:45 ROK and Ammunition
19:53 Philippine Raids
21:16 Summary
21:28 Conclusion
22:09 Call to Action
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May 19, 2026
“That is not diplomacy. That is national self-harm wearing a lanyard.”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to a post about the Canadian government’s amazing nonchalance about protecting Canada’s sovereignty:
Canadians voted in a federal election, not in a referendum to turn the country into a Davos policy lab with a maple leaf sticker slapped on the front.
The line “we will never be the 51st state” is easy politics. Most Canadians agree. But then the same elbozos turns around and flirts with every other form of sovereignty dilution they can find.
Join the EU? Canada is not in Europe. Geography still matters, apparently. Joining the EU would mean importing another layer of bureaucracy, regulation, courts, trade rules, and political obligations from people Canadians cannot remove from office. That is not independence. That is outsourcing control with better stationery.
Give China influence over resources? That is even worse. A serious country protects strategic assets: energy, minerals, food, ports, telecom, data, and critical infrastructure. You do not hand leverage over your future to an authoritarian state and then call yourself sophisticated. That is not diplomacy. That is national self-harm wearing a lanyard.
The real issue is this:
Canada’s elites love sovereignty when it means rejecting America.
They seem much less interested in sovereignty when it means resisting Brussels, Beijing, the UN, global finance, or climate bureaucrats.
So the question is fair:
Who voted for Canada to stop acting like a country?
Not Canadians. Not directly.
This is elite mission creep. They run on patriotism, then govern like national borders are an administrative inconvenience.
Other items that popped up in the news over the weekend included the United States Department of War announcing that they will be “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, a US-Canadian body that has been continuously operating since 1940 when US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King established it in a meeting in Ogdensburg, New York. Is this a big deal? Some people certainly think so:
In a bit of a sudden, surprise move, Under Secretary of War Elbridge “The Biggest Cheese” Colby has announced on X of all places that the Unites States would be pausing participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, the Oldest and most Foundational node of the Canada-US security partnership.
[…]
As we all know, on August 17, 1940, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King met in a railway car in Ogdensburg, New York. They issued the Ogdensburg Declaration, an agreement to create a joint board to study sea, land, and air defense problems.
For over 80 years the PJBD has serves as one of the major intersects of the Canada-US relationship. It has been the forum where we have been able to engage and work collaboratively on matters of National Security, Continental Defence, and Critical Infrastructure.
Obviously, given how late it is for me, I sadly can’t dive head first into things. However, I did wanna get something out there. It’s no doubt a very petty move to make, part of a long line of petty moves between everyone in the last year. The pressure is obviously there to push Canada along, and the inclusion of the Prime Ministers Davos speech by Colby should go as a sign to one of the areas that is troubling the current administration.
Trying to apply pressure through such acts though isn’t something that I think will be successful. Granted, being a bit of a dick and doing petty shit in hopes of manipulating opinions, only for it to backfire due to a general miscalculation, is something this Administration does on the regular, and so I can’t be surprised to see it done here.
Nor is it surprising for the performative PM and his government to be utterly blindsided when one of their petty performances triggers a strong negative reaction from the United States.
Another issue that the Liberals in Ottawa seem to think both uncontroversial and straightforward is one of their batch of anti-civil-liberties bills before Parliament, in this case Bill C-22, which the US Congress considers to be a dangerous attempt to control US companies who do business in Canada:
The government’s plans for lawful access have gone off the rails. In recent days, Signal has warned it would pull out of the Canadian market rather than comply with Bill C-22. Windscribe, the Toronto-headquartered VPN provider, has said it would relocate its headquarters out of Canada and NordVPN has warned it would consider following suit. Apple and Meta have both raised public concerns about the bill’s effect on encryption and cybersecurity. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, civil liberties groups, and a long line of legal and security experts have all called for changes. The chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees have written to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree warning that the bill threatens U.S. national security and the integrity of cross-border data flows. Even the bill’s own oversight body, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, has told the SECU committee it does not have the access it needs for effective oversight. If the government thought it could push through the bill largely unnoticed, it has been proven painfully wrong as there are now trade frictions with the U.S., the prospect of leading companies exiting the Canadian market, and weaker cybersecurity protections for ordinary users.
[…]
The bill nominally protects against the worst outcome through a systemic vulnerability safeguard, which says that core providers are not required to comply with a regulation if compliance would require the introduction or maintenance of a systemic vulnerability. But the safeguard falls apart on careful reading. First, the term “systemic vulnerability” lacks specificity in the statute, which means the government could define encryption and vulnerability narrowly enough to hollow out the protection. Second, Sections 5(5) and 7(5) state that providers are not required to comply where doing so would result in a systemic vulnerability, but Sections 12 and 13 unconditionally require compliance with orders and provide that orders prevail over inconsistent regulations. The net effect is that providers are stuck with contradictory provisions in a system shrouded in secrecy and which could lead to the weakening of security systems. That is why Signal, Windscribe, NordVPN, Apple, Meta, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, and the U.S. Congress are raising the alarm.
The best approach to address these risks is to go back to the drawing board on Part 2 of the bill. Committee hearings should be extended to ensure that the long list of expert witnesses, industry voices, and international counterparts who have asked for changes receive a full hearing. Further, real amendments should be on the table that better balance law enforcement needs with Canadians’ privacy rights. Failure to do so will result in some of the world’s most privacy-protective services exiting the market, leaving behind a law that is vulnerable to constitutional challenge with millions of Canadians facing genuine privacy and cybersecurity risks.
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May 18, 2026
Isoroku Yamamoto – the admiral and the postwar legend
Big Serge examines the popular memory of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Japan’s early naval war successes against the United States from 1941 onwards, contrasting the postwar image with the man himself:
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet.
Photo from the National Diet Library via Wikimedia Commons.
Japanese leadership in the Second World War enjoys noticeably lower name recognition than their German counterparts. Most people with a cursory knowledge of the war know the core German leadership group around Hitler — Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Speer, and perhaps Heydrich and Bormann — and the all-star lineup of German generals like Rommel, Manstein, and Guderian. In contrast, the only particularly notorious member of Japan’s nebulous leadership group is General Hideki Tojo, who served as Prime Minister for most of the war and became the centerpiece defendant in the postwar trial. As far as Japanese commanders go, the list of name-brand personnel has but a single entry: Isoroku Yamamoto.
Yamamoto’s life and career present a fascinating trajectory that shapes a particular, sympathetic view of the man. A veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, he spent much of his 30’s in the United States, studying at Harvard and serving as naval attache in Japan’s Washington embassy. He therefore had a first hand understanding of America’s industrial depth, and was famously pessimistic about Japan’s prospects in a a war against the United States. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas”, he argued, “knows that Japan lacks the power for a naval race with America”. In one of his more famous and widely recited (though often badly translated) remarks about a war with the United States, he told Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe in September 1940:
If I was told that I had to do it, then you will certainly observe the Navy going all out for half a year to a year. However, I do not hold conviction about the outcome after 2-3 years.
This quote certainly seems remarkably prescient, in light of Japan’s initial wave of operational successes, which slowly faded away as American combat power ramped up. Far more famous still is his remark, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that Japan had “awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with terrible resolve”.
All of this shapes the perception of Yamamoto as a quasi-tragic figure who understood that Japan was unlikely to defeat the United States in the Pacific War, counseled against the conflict, and then dutifully tried to play a losing hand as well as he could once war had been thrust upon him against his own advice. Yamamoto was furthermore a critic of the Japanese Army’s war in China and a particularly vocal opponent of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Japan, lending credence to the idea that he was war-averse.
This is the Yamamoto of American popular memory, and indeed of a great deal of Japanese postwar writing: a sort of samurai Cassandra, too perceptive and cosmopolitan for the militarist regime he served, a man who fired the opening shot of the Pacific War with a heavy heart and no illusions.
It is certainly true that Yamamoto had an appropriately pessimistic assessment of Japan’s prospects in an extended conflict with the United States. What is less often appreciated is that Yamamoto did not, on the basis of this assessment, conclude that Japan ought not to fight. He concluded instead that, if Japan was going to fight, it had to fight differently — with greater boldness, more risk, and an aggressive search for a decisive stroke. He did not spend the eighteen months before Pearl Harbor advocating for peace. He spent them designing what was, on balance, the single most aggressive operational scheme that was possible — and then only barely — within Japan’s kinetic parameters.
This is the critical distinction between Yamamoto-the-man and the Yamamoto of postwar hagiography. He was not a pacifist, reluctant or otherwise. He was a Japanese naval officer of strong patriotic conviction, deeply committed to his service and his nation, who happened to understand the arithmetic of industrial war better than most of his colleagues. Notwithstanding his appreciation for America’s vast industrial base, he shared a broader Japanese disdain for American martial proclivities, dismissing American naval officers as a club of “golfers and bridge players”. His understanding of the United States did not produce pacifism. It produced, rather, a particular kind of operational philosophy — one which held that Japan’s best hope in a war with the United States was to front-load its risk-taking, to achieve a string of dramatic early victories that would either compel American negotiation or, failing that, push the eventual American counter-offensive as far into the future as possible. In either case, the operational prescription was the same: bold, high-risk operations aimed at decisive results.
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May 17, 2026
“Communism > Capitalism”
Once again, thanks to the auto-translation feature on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam responds to a fan of the most evil economic system yet devised by man:
“Communism > Capitalism”
Brother. You’re tweeting this from an iPhone. Designed in California. Made in a Chinese factory that only exists because Deng Xiaoping realized in 1978 that Maoism mostly produced corpses and decided to do capitalism in disguise.
The greatest reduction in poverty in human history (China 1980-2020) happened at the exact moment when China stopped doing communism. The greatest famine in human history (China 1958-62, 45M dead) happened at the exact moment when they started.
Same country. Same people. Same territory. Two systems. One built smartphones, the other built mass graves. Pick your side.
Communism’s trophy board:
USSR: collapsed
China: pivoted to capitalism, prospered
Vietnam: pivoted to capitalism, prospered
Cuba: still rationing soap in 2026
North Korea: eating tree bark
Venezuela: sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves, imports gasoline
Cambodia: killed 25% of its own populationCommunism isn’t an ideology. It’s a hiring program for people incapable of finding a real job, dressed up as economic theory. When you can’t build, you redistribute. When redistribution fails, you hunt for saboteurs. When you run out of saboteurs, you become someone else’s saboteur.
100 million dead. Zero examples that work. The most expensive LARP in human history.
But please, keep tweeting “Communism > Capitalism” from your capitalist phone, on your capitalist app, funded by capitalist ads. We need the comedy.
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