There’s a story that the Bush administration came into office in 2001 itching to get rid of Saddam Hussein and looking around for a pretext. Near as I can tell, this is totally false — actually, the entire US government had been looking for a pretext since at least a decade earlier than that. It all goes back to 1990 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Prior to that, Iraq was an American ally and proxy that helped contain the revolutionary regime in Iran. That relationship gave Saddam a long leash and meant he could get away with a tremendous amount. But the leash was not as long as Saddam thought, and he badly overstepped his limits when a diplomatic fight with Kuwait over the terms of some war loans escalated into a military confrontation. Improvisational decision-making was not out of character for Saddam, who had a tendency to do things like go alone into one of his many palaces and emerge wild-eyed the next day declaring that he had a prophetic dream which would henceforth guide state policy. But this time he got into some real trouble.
The Americans kicked Iraq out of Kuwait quickly and easily, and then … hesitated about what to do next. Nobody wanted to keep Saddam around (remarkably, when you have outlived your usefulness, people suddenly start to notice all of your human rights abuses), but nobody wanted to march into Baghdad and topple him either. There was some wishful thinking that the Kuwait defeat would cause Saddam’s regime to collapse, but most US foreign policy thinkers just shrugged their shoulders and figured better Saddam than chaos and a Vietnam-style quagmire. One especially perceptive official put it this way to a PBS journalist:
I felt there was a real danger here that you could get bogged down in a long drawn out conflict … and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after. And then you have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all-US operation, I don’t think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you’re going to take a lot more American casualties if you’re gonna go much around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don’t think it would have been worth it.
That official’s name was Dick Cheney.
So Saddam was left in place, and throughout the ’90s American policymakers seethed about it. There was no official policy that said we were going to overthrow him, but prominent politicians like Al Gore were out there writing op-eds saying that Saddam must be toppled and his government dismantled. This produced what Mazarr calls “destructive ambiguity” — everybody knew that everybody else knew that the real policy was to get rid of the guy, but since this was an unofficial position it went through none of the usual policymaking channels and was never formally debated. It also left a lot of room for freelancing.
For example, CIA clandestine operative Bob Baer (whose memoir is a terrifically fun read, by the way) began organizing a coup in 1995, not because he was directly ordered to do so but because he thought it was what his supervisors wanted. Even the strategy of the coup points towards this ambiguity — rather than straightforwardly overthrowing the government, it aimed to spark a rebellion that would gain some momentum but not enough to win, so that when Saddam moved to crush it the US would be pulled in and forced to act.1 Think for a moment about what an odd plan this is, and how it only makes sense if you believe the US secretly wants to invade while officially pretending not to.
The leader of this rebellion was supposed to be Ahmed Chalabi, one of the more fascinating characters in this story. Chalabi was a dapper, cosmopolitan, and erudite bank manager who got exiled from Iraq for gross financial corruption. He promptly reinvented himself as a freedom fighter, rented beautiful houses stocked with fine art in several major cities, and set about ingratiating himself with Western elites. He also began organizing his fellow emigrés and exiles into an effective political lobbying force. Unsurprisingly given his educated and aristocratic manner, he was extremely good at the lobbying part, and soon placed a special focus on the United States, wining and dining congressmen and writing op-eds for major newspapers. Soon he managed to convince the CIA that there were thousands of resistance fighters back in Iraq ready to follow him into battle.
He was good at convincing, but they also wanted to be convinced. Chalabi and his fellow emigrés were charming, cultured, westernized intellectuals who at least pretended to be pro-democracy. It was oh-so-tempting to believe that everybody in Iraq was like that, when in fact they were completely unrepresentative. As a rule of thumb, when a country has a revolution or a civil war or other social breakdown, the ones who make it out are the ones bright enough to see it coming and rich or well-connected enough to escape. Whether it’s the Russian Revolution, the Lebanese Civil War, or whatever you call what’s happening in South Africa, the people who leave are not a random subset — they’re the creme-de-la-creme. Unfortunately the US government somehow couldn’t figure this out in the case of Iraq. They met the emigrés, and were impressed by them, and decided that Iraq really was a civilized and cosmopolitan place under the surface, when in fact the society that created the emigrés had been destroyed decades earlier.
The emigrés represent one pole of the Baptists-and-bootleggers coalition that emerged in the ’90s to advocate for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. The other is exemplified by Paul Wolfowitz, a soft-spoken academic who bounced between senior government positions and jobs at think tanks. Wolfowitz was a humanitarian in the most sincere sense. Much of his extended family had been killed in the Holocaust. The plight of oppressed peoples was not an abstraction for him, and he dedicated his life and career to the proposition that the United States should use all available means to end tyranny and oppression wherever they existed.
Wolfowitz is commonly described as a fanatical neoconservative, and he is, but I think it’s important to demystify that term. Too often it gets used as a catchall for “people we don’t like”, but at least when it comes to foreign policy the neoconservatives fit squarely within the American mainstream. With the notable exception of Donald Trump, every American president of the past few decades has had essentially the same foreign policy, driven by essentially the same core ideas: (1) Americans are the good guys, (2) it’s the job of the good guys to right wrongs wherever they are happening, (3) freedom and democracy are the non-negotiable inheritance of everybody on planet earth. These ideas drive the neoconservatives, yes, but they also drive Samantha Power and Susan Rice, not to mention Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
If you are an American, it may not be apparent to you how weird these ideas seem to the rest of the world. If I were to characterize how previous empires — and America’s current rivals — think about the world, it would be more like: (1) every country has core interests and peripheral interests, (2) you should not interfere in another country’s core interests if you can help it, (3) different peoples and cultures are adapted to different forms of government, and this diversity makes life spicy and interesting. Perhaps most shocking to Americans: most countries do not self-identify as “the good guys”, instead they think of themselves as a people with a history and a set of territorial claims.2
Mazarr describes this peculiar American quality as “the missionary impulse”, and notes that while it comes from a well-intentioned place, it “can produce a theological and absolutist conception of America’s responsibility as well as a romantic conviction that America can renovate other societies at will”. Or, to put it in blunter words, it makes us do insane things like invade and occupy a culturally alien country on the other side of the world, and stand there in blinkered incomprehension when people don’t like it. Perhaps the most damning thing about this missionary impulse is the way it provides a self-excusing justification for recklessness: since America is definitionally the good guys, all the horrible consequences of America’s dumb decisions must be somebody else’s fault, and anyway we meant well so you can’t really blame us.3 It’s like a speeding driver who hits and kills pedestrians over and over again, and when confronted gets huffy and points out he’s on his way to feed people at a soup kitchen.
Why is our national character like this? It’s one of those eternal questions. Maybe it’s because we were settled by various strains of fanatical Protestants, or because our ethnos was born during the Enlightenment, or some other “genetic” factor. Alternatively, it could be something about our historical development, or perhaps the large oceans that have always insulated us from most of the negative consequences of our decisions. Or maybe it’s just inevitable that whoever the current world empire is will feel this way, a consequence of our “unipolar moment”.4 Whatever the cause, it’s been a frequent source of misunderstanding between American and foreign diplomats, and few more so than Iraq’s.
The inability of the Iraqi regime, and of Saddam Hussein in particular, to “get” America or its motivations is a recurring bit of comic relief in Mazarr’s book, and one of the first big episodes of it occurs here in the mid ‘90s. This was the time when the Iraqis completely shut down their WMD programs and destroyed every trace of them. But even while halting their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons projects, they continued to loudly insist that they were operational. This appears to have been done out of fear that they would lose prestige if they admitted to backing down. Saddam also really wanted the Iranians to think that he still had chemical weapons out of fear that they’d invade if he didn’t, and he figured that US intelligence would obviously figure out that the programs had been stopped, so they didn’t have to come out and say it themselves.
I remember when I was a kid watching Dr. Strangelove, and laughing at the part where the Soviets built a doomsday device without telling anybody, completely defeating the purpose of having a doomsday device. Then I got older, and learned that no actually, in real life the Soviets built a doomsday device, and then didn’t tell anybody, because they apparently assumed that its psychological effect would be more powerful if America found out about it from its spies (naturally, we didn’t find out until after the Cold War was over). Saddam’s mistake was a weird inverse of this, destroying all his doomsday weapons and then just assuming we’d figure it out. I guess the moral of the story is that in real life, these too-clever-by-half schemes where you double-bluff your opponent are rarely worth it.5
Anyway, Saddam destroyed all of his WMD, and then kicked out the UN inspectors so as to maintain the charade that he still had them. At the same time that all of this was happening, the sanctions regime that the US had imposed was clearly falling apart. European and Asian businessmen were swarming all over Baghdad, trying to get things in place for when foreign investment inevitably flooded back into the country. All of this contributed to an ambient sense that something had to be done; the attempt to kick the can down the road was failing. By the late ’90s, the Clintons had already convinced themselves that a rematch with Saddam was inevitable, but they didn’t have time to act on it before their term was up and a new sheriff rolled into town.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-06-30.
- Yes, this was exactly Strelkov’s strategy in the Ukrainian civil war. And for similar reasons — the Russian government as an official body was dithering and indecisive, but a large faction within it wanted to act.
- My north star here is, as always, my former coworker from Bulgaria.
- Graham Greene did an exquisite job skewering this attitude in his novel The Quiet American. One character says of the titular American: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused”.
- Did the Romans feel this way? Did the Chinese? I don’t actually know, but I think there’s something distinctive about the American imperial attitude. It really does come down to our belief that we’re bombing you for your own good (or overthrowing your government for your own good, or whatever). My sense is that past hegemons have been a bit more honest.
- Then again, Gaddafi did what Saddam arguably should have done, and look what that got him. I guess the real lesson is just not to make too much trouble until your nukes really work.
August 11, 2026
QotD: The long lead-up to the invasion of Iraq
August 9, 2026
QotD: Spoilers — threat or menace?
It turns out this may not be control freakery. How wonderful to think that I have been waiting years for science to rebrand my worst qualities as skills. Apparently, people who like spoilers are just trying to regulate their emotional response. We are not monsters, but only putting on a cardigan before the storm.
Those who hate spoilers also want control, but theirs is driven by a desire to preserve suspense. They want to receive information in the sequence designed by the storyteller. My own spoiler-seeking is also a form of control, although it works differently. I want the major facts early, so I can relax into the texture of the story rather than sit there like a meerkat scanning the horizon for emotional catastrophe.
So we are all control freaks, just wearing different cardigans.
Spoiler alerts began as a civilized courtesy. If someone on a bus was halfway through a book, it was not considered the done thing to lean across and announce the ending like a deranged town crier. There were rules. Perhaps not that many. But there were some.
Now the spoiler alert has become a moral siren. One can’t discuss a film, television show, podcast, documentary, memoir, cake reveal, or episode of Bluey without issuing a warning so elaborate that it requires its own stationery. People now approach plot discussion like bomb disposal experts. One innocent mention of a character’s demise, and the online village square bursts into flames. On “The Good Ship Murder” Facebook page, for instance, someone posts, “Can’t believe they killed Pierce”, and within seconds the spoiler militia descends.
Admins should delete this spoiler.
People might not have seen it yet.
Can’t believe you’ve posted a spoiler…You can almost hear the sirens. Somewhere, a moderator is reaching for a lukewarm tea and wondering how a cozy murder show has turned into the fall of Saigon.
Nicole James, “Tell Me Who Dies So I Can Relax”, The Freeman, 2026-05-07.
August 7, 2026
Blood Dawn by Hans van de Ven
On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman reviews a new book on the Second World War in Asia by Hans van de Ven:
I really wanted to enjoy this book. The enthusiastic endorsements from Rana Mitter, Antony Beevor and Richard Overy raised my expectations considerably. Yet by page eight of Blood Dawn I felt as uncomfortable as the proverbial curate confronted with a rotten egg.
The author aims to provide a narrative that “contributes to a gradual shift in our understanding of the significance of World War II”. This is admirable. A more Asian-centred interpretation of the conflict is certainly needed, as the war is still too often viewed through a Eurocentric or North Atlantic lens. Historians such as Rana Mitter, Jonathan Fennell and Richard Overy have already helped redress this imbalance. It is unquestionably true that the conflict began with Japanese aggression in China as early as 1931 and that the war both began and ended in Asia.
The problem is that the book insists that the central dynamic of modern Asian history is a nationalist struggle to escape imperialism and colonialism. While both undeniably shaped Asia, it is a considerable stretch to explain the region’s political development primarily through resistance to empire. The author correctly notes that many Asian political movements saw the war as an opportunity to cast off colonial rule, but he greatly overstates their role in determining the war’s outcome.
Consequently, the analysis neglects the broader dynamics of power – local, regional and imperial – that shaped Asia before, during and after the war. The author assumes that modern Asia is the product of “Asian peoples’ continuing struggle to overcome the legacies of empire”. That seems reductive. A more convincing interpretation would describe modern Asia to be the result of a power-based confrontation among declining powers such as Britain, France and the Netherlands, a rising Japan, a developing China, and the emerging superpowers whose ideologies would shape postwar Asia: the United States and the Soviet Union. The war was principally caused by one rising empire, Japan, seeking to assert its dominance regionally and to replace existing empires.
As a result, some empires disappeared, others expanded, and many colonial territories gained independence as competing political elites seized opportunities created by wartime upheaval. Where those struggles could not be resolved peacefully, civil war followed. One may call this nationalism or self-determination, but it was power politics nonetheless.
In the postwar period, Asians were often less concerned with abolishing imperial legacies than with creating new centres of power controlled by local elites. Since 1945, Asia has been shaped by competing powers, some imperial in nature, such as China, the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States, and others nationalist and local.
A similar lack of nuance appears in the treatment of imperialism. British imperialism is lumped together with that of France and the Netherlands, with little appreciation for their differences. British involvement in 19th-century China is presented primarily as the cause of China’s problems rather than as part of a broader interaction with a declining and dysfunctional Qing polity. Imperialism was certainly influential, but so were domestic developments, including China’s internal sclerosis and Japan’s response to modernity, which produced its own imperial ambitions in China, Korea, Manchuria and the Pacific.
The author’s ideological predispositions are impossible to miss, and the book frequently descends into crude Anglophobia. We are told, for instance, that “British elites, who liked (and like) to think of themselves as natural and gifted rulers, found a new outlet for their yearning to govern India”. Such statements are simplistic, if not puerile. Similarly, discussing the collapse of the American-British-Dutch-Australia Command (ABDACOM) in 1942, the author remarks that “the Dutch were abandoned to their fate. Retreat is an underappreciated military skill, and the British were practiced masters of it, as they had shown at Dunkirk”. This is the sort of cheap point-scoring that would weaken an undergraduate essay, yet here it appears in a supposedly serious work of history.
The treatment of India is particularly problematic. The narrative focuses heavily on the Indian National Congress and consequently overlooks the diversity and complexity of the independence movement. There is little recognition that what Congress often described as British obstruction was, in part, a debate within Britain (especially the Conservative Party) about the form an independent India should take. The same debate also took place within Indian circles considering the subject.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the central political question in India was often not whether independence would occur but what form it would take and, crucially, who would benefit from it. The Quit India movement of 1942 followed the Cripps Mission, which had already offered India Dominion status after the war. Congress sought immediate separation, but many of its leaders privately supported the Allied war effort, believing correctly that victory would hasten independence. One could even argue that Congress’s greatest unintended achievement was not independence but the partition and communal violence that accompanied it. The book fails to engage adequately with these complexities.
QotD: A provisional taxonomy of “stupid smart guys”
If we assume this is a universal mental process, I suggest, then saying someone has a low-normal IQ does not mean he’s always going to do stupid things. He has those three-B flashes too. It might take a while for him to cotton to something that seems obvious, but cotton he will, in three-B fashion.
Moreover, Jaynes is good on the complexity of unconscious tasks. The mechanical parts of driving, once learned, are completely unconscious. Try teaching someone to drive and you’ll see it right away. You’ll find yourself literally side-seat driving — your foot pushing down on an imaginary brake, unconsciously. And you never really forget those unconscious patterns, either. You may not have ridden a bike in 30 years, but you could go out and do it right now. Same way with swimming, or the manual of arms — if you’ve been through Basic, a guy with the proper tone of voice can have you twirling around like a marionette, even if you got out of uniform decades ago.
The actual low IQ guys might be the most dangerous cogs in the machine.
The Dunning-Krugerrand. That’s Larry Correia’s phrase, and it’s great. This is the person who believes he’s way smarter and more competent than he actually is. Which on the one hand, they all do. But on the other hand, there are levels above D-K, so please hold fire for now.
The Artiste. It’s been my great … fortune, actually, to have been around a lot of Media people in my youth. I dated a gal who did production work for one of the big tv news programs in a fairly large city, so I saw the video side of it, at least, from close range. The on-camera bobbleheads are all Ron Burgundy, of course, but the production people are usually quite bright … but in a very odd way. They have what I came to think of as “the artist’s eye”. They naturally see everything in terms of camera angles and visual presentation, and training develops this to a very high degree.
This leads to wildly divergent takes on things. You or I see the police approaching a stopped car with their guns drawn, or firemen pulling up in front of a burning building, and we think something like “Damn, crime is out of control!” or “I hope everyone’s ok.” News people — video people, at least — think “What a shot!” They frame the visuals first, then start processing the propositional content … if they ever do. The longer they work in “news”, the more the propositional content — “the cops are arresting a bad guy”; “there are real people in real danger in that burning building” — drops away.
Same thing, I imagine, with the folks on the verbal end. They have a novelist’s sense of pace, structure, and so on. Is what they’re writing true? Of course not! At one point about 30 years ago they felt the need to justify this, and created a whole new category of writing: “creative nonfiction“, aka lies, aka “the news”. The “creative nonfiction” people will tell you, in Wiki’s words, that it “uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives”. Emphasis mine, because like the cameraman who ends up exclusively focusing on the shot and never thinks about the life behind the shot, so the writer of “creative nonfiction” gets caught up in the creative part, and just kinda forgets the “nonfiction” part.
Medicalization. Not a category of people, but a technique. We say smart people tend to be spergy, and stupid smart people tend to be really spergy, but that’s mistaking effect for cause. They’re not very good at reading people, and have no social savvy, but that’s because they don’t practice — because they don’t need to practice. They medicalize their deficiencies. Instead of acknowledging a weakness in their game, they attribute it to a pathology.
Severian, “The Stupid Smart Guy”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-13.
August 6, 2026
The Goddess That Failed by Janice Fiamengo
On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo shares the foreword to her new book, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself:
Feminism poses a threat to everything good in western culture, perhaps especially to women’s capacity to love, reason, and exercise self-restraint.
I was an adherent of feminism before I became a critic. I have felt its euphoric exultation and its self-flattering conviction of moral purity. Later, I recognized its hubris and moral hollowness.
I am familiar with feminism’s core texts, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Anne Franks, having studied them and believed in them for years. I understand the psychology and the history of the movement because I lived inside it for many years.
Unlike others who have criticized feminism’s excesses, I contend that although there are some moderate feminists, there was never a moderate feminism inspired by reasonable goals and untainted by anti-male fanaticism. Feminism did not go wrong at some point in history, whether after the Second Wave or before, whether in anti-sex or pro-sex zeal. It was always rooted in resentment and envy, warped by utopian longings and false notions of female moral superiority.
Decades of feminist grievance-mongering and accusation have led inevitably to our present time of ceaseless complaints, anti-western causes, hysterical accusation, rampant divorce, a declining birthrate, millions of abortions, and anti-male cruelty. Feminism has undermined and will continue to undermine the stability and viability of all western societies.
From the first occasions when I began to speak and write about feminism in 2012 and 2013, I encountered the same response from feminists: “What you are describing is not real feminism” or “Those feminists do not speak for all feminists”, and so on.
I am regularly accused of hating myself, of hating other women, and/or of seeking male approval. I am accused, by those who have never studied feminism, of not understanding feminism.
It’s true that not all feminists are as fervid as an Andrea Dworkin or a Sally Miller Gearhart. They do not all fantasize, as Gearhart did (to much congratulation and gushing praise), about how much better life would be if the number of males could be reduced to 10% of the human population. They do not rhapsodize, as Mary Daly did, about a decontamination of the earth through such a reduction. They do not make jokes about killing men as a public service, as Mona Eltahawy did.
But it’s also true that such vicious women, and the many others who have lent their malign energies to the movement, have never been disavowed by other feminist leaders. In fact, feminists’ lack of shame before bloodthirsty feminist pronouncements is remarkably consistent.
True, there are many varieties of feminism, not all of them agreeing on every point: radical feminism, socialist feminism, lesbian feminism, post-colonial feminism, intersectional feminism, eco-feminism, animal rights feminism, abolitionist feminism, trans-inclusive feminism, feminism for sex-based rights, maternal feminism, and even (most bizarrely) conservative or reactionary feminism. Some extend their compassion to victim groups other than women, such as trans women, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, or the environment.
Such distinctions do not concern me because none makes a real difference.
None escapes the victim mentality: the belief that the history of humanity up until the present moment has been a history of (privileged, white) men oppressing women and other innocent victims; and that because of their alleged greater suffering and moral innocence, particular care and attention must be paid to women and to their unique capacity for empathy and social justice.
No version of feminism escapes the binary logic whereby the world is divided up into (sometimes intricate, overlapping) categories of oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer, to be treated differently and valued differently according to their identity category.
Because it thinks in terms of groups and divides the world into innocent and guilty, feminism is incapable of devising universal principles or pursuing individual fairness or freedom. It is distorted by its victim thinking, incapable of extending empathy to those feminists see as oppressors, and incapable of demanding accountability from those feminists see as victims.
The End of Eternity: Micromanaging History, Killing the Future
Feral Historian
Published 3 Apr 2026Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity can be read as a tangent to his Foundation series, an artifact of the optimism that permeated the years immediately preceding the dawn of manned spaceflight, or as a critique of central planning and social engineering. It also has a bit more character development than is typical for Asimov’s concept-focused writing.
00:00 Intro
04:33 Noys and Space
09:25 Closed Loop
11:14 The Superman
16:17 Losing the Stars
20:31 Ending Eternity
(more…)
August 5, 2026
I, Claudius (MCMLXXVI). Show Me The Way To Go Rome
Stam Fine
Published 3 Apr 2026Stam Fine Reviews looks at the landmark 1976 classic BBC series I, Claudius based on the books by Robert Graves. I, Claudius is a sprawling epic looking at four emperors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius. Claudius had a limp, stammered and facial tics but was a survivor when everyone else around him was murdered.
I, Claudius is an influential series, even in places you don’t expect it (The Sopranos, Dynasty, Succession).
Note: The Romans didn’t use the letter ‘U’ at the time unless you upgraded your subscription to Roman+. I do not presently subscribe to Roman+.
Stars Derek Jacobi, Sian Phillips, Brian Blessed, George Baker, Patrick Stewart, Ian Ogilvy, Simon MacCorkindale, Margaret Tyzack, Patrica Quinn, John Hurt, and many more.
0:00 Introduction
0:33 Veni, vidi, Google Translate usus sum.
1:15 Technical Difficulties.
1:34 I, Claudius Take Two.
4:09 Augustus and Livia
5:50 Claudius
8:05 Tiberius
10:55 Caligula
13:14 Emperor Claudius
16:00 From Book to BBC2
19:11 Cast
21:24 LegacyI, Claudius
I, Clavdivs
I Claudius
QotD: “This is why English spelling is a disaster”
And somewhere in that collision of accents and dialects, something shifted. Literally. The vowels started moving.
Between roughly 1400 and 1700 every single long vowel in the English language changed how it was pronounced. It’s called the Great Vowel Shift. Before it happened, English vowels worked the way vowels work in Italian or Spanish. The letters did what they looked like they should do. “Bite” was pronounced “beet”. “House” was pronounced “hoos”. “Name” was pronounced “nahm”. “Knight” was pronounced “k-nicht” with a guttural sound at the end like you were clearing your throat. English was phonetic. The spelling matched the sounds. It made SENSE.
And then it didn’t.
All the long vowels began migrating upward in the mouth. The tongue positions shifted higher and higher over the course of about 300 years. And the vowels that were already at the top had nowhere left to go so they broke apart into two sounds. “Ee” became “eye”. “Oo” became “ow”. A 300-year linguistic pileup that nobody voted on and nobody agreed to. It just happened. And it happened during the worst possible window of time.
William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. One of the most important technological developments in the history of communication. And it arrived RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the Great Vowel Shift.
Caxton started standardizing English spelling based on how words sounded at that exact moment. Printers needed consistency. They needed to pick a spelling and commit. So they did. But the sounds kept changing after the spelling was already locked in. The vowels were still moving. The consonants were still dropping. And the printed page couldn’t keep up.
We had ONE CHANCE to get English spelling right and we fumbled it at the worst possible moment.
This is why English spelling is a disaster. It’s not random. It’s not lazy. It’s a snapshot of a language mid-transformation that got frozen in place by a new technology and was never corrected. Every word you have ever misspelled, every silent letter that made you feel stupid, every time you stared at “knight” and thought why is there a K in this. You used to pronounce that K. You used to pronounce that GH. Those sounds died 500 years ago and the letters are still standing there like gravestones. English spelling is full of ghosts.
That’s why “food” and “good” and “blood” are spelled almost identically but sound completely different. In Chaucer’s time around the 1390s they all rhymed. In Shakespeare’s time around the 1600s they still rhymed but with a different vowel. And then sometime after that they each went their own separate way and the spelling just stood there watching like it had given up entirely.
And HERE IS THE THING. Other languages went through similar vowel shifts. German had nearly identical changes happen to its long vowels around the same period. And German just updated its spelling. They adjusted the orthography to match the new pronunciation. Like reasonable people. English looked at the same problem and said no. We’re going to keep the old spelling. Everyone will simply have to deal with it. Every person who has ever stared at “though” and “through” and “thorough” and “thought” and wondered why four words that look almost identical are all pronounced differently? Collateral damage. Five hundred years of collateral damage and we just accepted it.
Ok so that’s the vowels. That’s the background. Now we get to the accents and this is where I lost my mind.
The single biggest difference between standard American English and standard British English today is something called rhoticity. This is a real linguistics term even though it sounds completely made up. Rhotic speakers pronounce the R sound in words like “hard” and “car”. Non-rhotic speakers drop it. “Hard” becomes “hahd”. “Car” becomes “cah”. That one feature is doing like 80 percent of the work when your brain hears someone speak and categorizes them as British or American.
Here’s what nobody told you.
In 1776 everybody was rhotic. Americans AND the British. Both sides of the Atlantic pronounced their Rs. The fancy non-rhotic accent that we now think of as THE British accent, the one you hear in your head when someone says “British accent”, the one every villain in every movie has? That accent did not exist yet. It developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the upper classes in southern England started dropping their Rs as a prestige marker. A fashion statement. And then it spread downward through society and outward through the Empire.
The accent we associate with the British Empire is actually newer than the American Revolution.
I need to say that again because it didn’t land the first time I heard it either.
The accent that we think of as “British” is newer than the country that broke away from Britain. Americans didn’t lose the British accent. The British lost the British accent. Americans are the ones who kept it.
Emma, “The Plague That Broke English (And Why the Founding Fathers Didn’t Sound British)”, Past Life, Present Cleavage, 2026-04-03.
August 3, 2026
QotD: The Hellenistic Age
When I was a child first getting interested in ancient history, the books I read followed a smooth narrative process. The story of the Greeks began with Athenian democracy and the victories at Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea that saved Western civilization from Persian conquest. Then there was the Athenian maritime empire, and its tremendous cultural achievements: the Parthenon, Socratic philosophy, the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. There was the Peloponnesian War and Thucydides’s chronicling of it. And then, in a tremendous climax, there were the awesome conquests of Alexander the Great, who destroyed the most powerful empire on Earth and conquered the known world by the age of 33, only to die young and have his empire swiftly broken up after his death.
… And then the story would promptly lurch 700 miles to the northwest and start over. Greeks? What Greeks? Now I was reading about the rise of a different city, Rome, and the achievements of its great republic. Instead of the Assembly and the ostracism, there was the Senate and the consuls. I would read about the Samnite Wars, the Punic Wars, the Gallic Wars, and finally the great civil wars that transformed Rome from a republic into the empire that men still think about a few times a week. In this story, the Greeks appear again, but only as enemies for Rome first to easily defeat, then be culturally influenced by. This fusion of Greek and Roman culture leads to European Christianity, the Renaissance, the cultural canon — in a word, the West itself.
Kid me didn’t think too much about it at the time. But as I grew, I and many others finally had a thought intrude: Wait a minute, what the heck was going on in Alexander’s old empire before the Romans got there?
And if you’re like me, asking that question is how you wind up reading Alexander to Actium.
Alexander to Actium is classicist Peter Green’s gargantuan tome covering the period historians now call the Hellenistic era, the 293-year span following the death of Alexander the Great during which his vast but short-lived empire was divided up and ruled by ethnically Macedonian and Greek elites who left the stamp of Hellenic culture all across the eastern Mediterranean. The era begins with Alexander’s generals (the Diadochi, “Successors”) waging an epic forty years of war as funeral games for their dead master before finally settling into a more stable system with three great kingdoms centered on Macedon, Egypt, and Syria (plus lesser monarchies like Pergamon and Bactria). These kingdoms battled one another and Rome for another quarter-millennium, gradually losing land and power before they were extinguished, one by one. The last Hellenistic kingdom, Ptolemaic Egypt, made it until 30 B.C., when the legendary Cleopatra1 committed suicide and her realm became the personal possession of Octavian, the future Caesar Augustus. Long after their destruction, the Hellenistic legacy lingers most in religion: the Christian New Testament was written not in the Hebrew or Aramaic of Judea or the Latin of the Roman Empire, but in the koine Greek that had become the lingua franca of the educated eastern Mediterranean.
The ebb and flow of this 300-year historical epic is one that really deserves a trashy big-budget TV adaptation or three. The sordid acts of the Successors and their successors are so spectacular they could easily be made into a hybrid of HBO’s Rome and a popular show about dragons that shall remain nameless. I’m a little shocked one hasn’t been made already. To give just a small set of anecdotes from Green’s work:
- After an attempted army revolt following Alexander’s death, the general Perdiccas holds a “purification” ceremony for the army, which consists of rebel leaders being publicly trampled to death by elephants.
- Antigonus One-Eye, the man who came closest to reuniting Alexander’s empire, was very tall, very wide, very old, and had a very good nickname. Huge in size and huge in ambition, he dies fighting in battle at over 80 years old at Ipsus, a battle featuring 25,000 cavalry, 120 scythed chariots, and almost 600 elephants.
- Olympias, Alexander the Great’s mother, is so vindictive that when Philip II dies, she has a rival wife and her infant daughter roasted to death on a charcoal brazier even though they pose zero dynastic threat. When her own end comes during Macedon’s multiple civil wars, the soldiers of Cassander refuse to kill Alexander’s mother – so she is instead stoned to death by the families of those she had killed during past purges.
- Seleucus I, founder of the Syria-based Seleucid Empire, is happily married to his second wife Stratonice when he notices his son, Antiochus, is deeply enamored with her. No worry: Seleucus simply divorces Stratonice and has her marry Antiochus. This is actually a happy ending and works out for everyone, surprisingly.
- Lysimachus, king of Thrace, is happily married to his third wife, Arsinoe, when she tricks him into having his son by a first marriage executed so her own son can succeed. This sparks a war that kills Lysimachus and destroys his kingdom, somewhat botching the whole succession thing. But no worries: Arsinoe escapes to Egypt and makes out just fine by marrying its pharaoh – her brother.
- Cassander, king of Macedon, gets so irate at clever jabs from the wily Athenian politician Demades that he finally snaps and personally chops both Demades and his son to pieces while screaming insults at them.
- For about a decade during the various successor wars, Athens is ruled by a literal philosopher-king, the thirty-something Macedonian puppet Demetrius of Phaleron. One of his agenda items is building a gigantic mechanical snail to crawl through the streets of Athens leaving a realistic trail of slime behind; this is apparently some artful way of shaming the Athenians for being sluggish in standing up for Greek freedom.
- After Demetrius the Philosopher King is overthrown (by a different Demetrius, long story) the new tyrant takes advantage of divine honors granted to him to house his hoes in apartments at the back of the Parthenon. He tries to seduce a teenaged boy who instead commits suicide by jumping into a tub of boiling-hot water, and another time waives a fine against a prominent Athenian citizen in return for taking his son as a catamite. When you are legally a god, they let you do it.
- Aratus is a quite successful Greek general with the unfortunate problem of getting uncontrollable diarrhea before every battle.
- Escaped slave and rebel Drimakos defies authorities on Chios so successfully they simply reach a treaty with him: As long as he doesn’t steal too much and only accepts new slaves into his army who were severely abused by their masters (while sending the rest back), they’ll leave him alone. Drimakos lives to a ripe old age, then has his boy lover kill him and take his head in to claim a reward. Later, Drimakos’s spirit would supposedly appear to Chians in their dreams to warn of plots by their slaves.
- To show off their power, the Ptolemies commission a grand procession through Alexandria whose centerpiece is “a gaudily painted gold phallus, almost two hundred feet long … and tied up, like some exotic Christmas present, with gold ribbons and bows”. Green reasonably wonders how this mighty phallus was able to negotiate corners.
- The later Ptolemies could win some kind of ghastly award for their spectacular decadence. Ptolemy VIII Physcon (“the Obese”), who resembles a 2nd century BC Baron Harkonnen, seizes power after the death of his brother (also named Ptolemy) by marrying Cleopatra, who is also their sister. He then has her son, his nephew (also named Ptolemy), murdered during the wedding feast, then proceeds to seduce and marry his pubescent niece (also named Cleopatra). A decade later, riots forced Physcon and his niece-wife into exile, and his sister-wife proclaims her son by Physcon (another Ptolemy) as pharaoh, but the heir is apparently in Cyrene at the time, allowing Physcon to capture his unsuspecting son and send his dismembered corpse to the sister-wife as a birthday present. Meanwhile, the sister-wife’s daughter by her first brother (named Cleopatra, of course) gets married off to a Seleucid king and uses her sons as a series of puppets. The first puppet, Seleucus V, proves troublesome, so his mother murders him by using him for archery practice. The second puppet, Antiochus VIII, is more canny, and when his mother tries to murder him with a cup of poisoned wine, he notices something is up and forces her to drink the fatal cup herself. Antiochus VIII then fights a long civil war against his half-brother and cousin Antiochus IX, who is not a puppet but instead has the private hobby of playing with literal giant puppets. Got all that?
If learning the above is your idea of fun, then Alexander to Actium is a rich feast, enlivened throughout with Green’s flare for delicious details and legends that are possibly fanciful but too remarkable to leave out.
Blake Neff, “GUEST REVIEW: Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-10-20.
- The Seventh, it turns out.
July 30, 2026
QotD: The three most important books on management
[…]
This is also what needs to be done with every bureaucracy from time to time. Those management books insist — nay prove — that every organisation always ends up like this. For the driving force of any organisation is the survival of the organisation. To be, not to do, is the aim.
Yes, this does apply to private sector ones but we’ve a natural corrective for those. Other organisations which arrive and not yet having created an all encompassing bureaucracy they outcompete them. So the old bureaucracies die, the new ones grow until they too start hiring power skirts and the decay sets in.
A government bureaucracy does not have that outside force culling it when its time has come. Therefore we must be the merciful farmer taking them out given that we’ve killed off the wolves that thin the herd of the old and lame.
As we can see 65 years is long enough for such a bureaucracy to reach this stage. Rather Brave New World in fact as that was the age at which all reported to be turned off.
So, every bureaucracy, every department, gets closed after 60 to 65 years. Some sooner, just to keep people on their toes. Yes, every. Say, the Department of Education. Or of Defence. Once we’ve killed it and fired everyone just leave be for a few years. If we still have some problems that really do need to be dealt with we can always hire a few, give ’em a corner of a desk somewhere, and we get the vigour and growth of a new organisation actually trying to solve things.
Until, obviously, the arrival of power skirts and the renewal process starts again.
Tim Worstall, “Closing US AID is What We Should Do To All Government”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2026-04-29.
July 27, 2026
The shambolic Fifth Crusade, or “Waiting for Fredot”
In The Critic, Anatoly Grablevsky reviews a new book on one of the less well-known attempts to wrest control of the Holy Land from the Islamic conquerors:
By the early 13th century, the military and geopolitical situation of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem was dire. After the Third Crusade (1189-92) had failed to retake Jerusalem, the Frankish realm in the Holy Land was reduced to a thin coastal strip centred on the heavily fortified city of Acre. The rest of the Near East was in the hands of the Ayyubids, the successors of Saladin.
In response to Ayyubid encroachment, in 1213 Pope Innocent III called for a new holy war to reinforce the Kingdom of Jerusalem and reclaim the Holy City for Christendom. The bulk of the expedition was recruited in the Holy Roman Empire, whose young emperor, Frederick II, the wonder of the world himself, ostentatiously took up the cross. He was, however, in no hurry to join his countrymen in the east.
Learning from their bitter past experiences, this time around the Crusaders adopted a novel strategy. Instead of focusing their efforts on the Holy Land, the Christians targeted Egypt, the political and economic heartland of the Ayyubids.
The Crusader army’s first port of call was the coastal city of Damietta, which, after a lengthy siege, fell in 1219. This was a major victory for Christendom: Crusaders had not captured a city of Damietta’s size, wealth and strategic importance since the fall of Jerusalem in 1099.
The Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil, under pressure from Mongol attacks at the rear, now offered attractive peace terms that included the return of Jerusalem to the Christians. The Crusaders, overconfident and under orders from the absentee emperor, rebuffed Al-Kamil and instead decided to march on the Ayyubid capital of Cairo.
Here, the crusade took a shambolic turn. The Christians wasted precious months awaiting the arrival of Frederick II, but the emperor never bothered to show up (Smith might have called his book “Waiting for Fredot”). By the time the Crusaders finally began the march south, Al-Kamil had gathered his strength, and the Franks were quickly outmanoeuvred by the Sultan, who used his superior knowledge of the Nile’s flooding patterns to trap them against the river.
The Crusaders reacted by launching an all-out assault on their substantial wine provisions so that, when the Muslims attacked, the Christian army disintegrated in a drunken rout.
In the ensuing peace deal, Al-Kamil regained Damietta, in return for giving safe passage back to Europe to the Christian survivors.
QotD: The art of management
A nanosecond’s reflection will tell you that the techniques needed to manage computer programmers, movie actors, and the boom-town roughnecks that inspired Conan the Barbarian are going to be very different. What if we restrict our analysis to just one category, say the computer programmers?2 Well, consider another similarly restrictive category: children. The great limitation of parenting books is, as every parent of more than one child knows, that children are extremely different from one another. One child may need strict discipline, while another actually needs to be encouraged to take rules less seriously; one needs to be reassured constantly and showered with love, while another needs to have firm boundaries. The techniques that work brilliantly with one child will not work unmodified with another. If the goal is the Aristotelian mean, then some need to be nudged to one side, and others in the opposite direction.
If that’s the way it is with kids, imagine how much more so this all applies to adults, who in addition to having different innate personalities and temperaments and aptitudes also carry with them extensive life histories, experiences, and scar tissue. Any generic advice, any “management turpentine”, needs to be heavily customized to the personalities and the dynamics of a particular team. But the catch is that mastering the ability to apply this sort of generic management advice in a particular situation is pretty much just the same thing as mastering management itself.
To a very great degree, management just is the art of taking a set of discordant personalities and welding them into a harmonious whole. A great manager sizes up his or her team, sees the ambitious go-getter, the resentful and self-defeating genius, the timid and awkward newbie with leadership potential, the lazy slob who secretly glues them all together — sees not just these categories but sees the individuals and the unique ways they subvert these archetypes, and instantly and intuitively knows how to fuse them into a machine for achieving a common purpose. Or as Hilaire Belloc once put it:
There is one element in the [management of men] which is all-important, and the possession of which is a gift, like the gift of verse or “eye” in a sport. It is not to be prayed for. It is not to be acquired. It is granted by the unseen powers. This element is that which you have in the good management of a pack of hounds, or in any other kind of good generalship. It consists in a mixture of detailed and general appreciation; for when those two faculties are combined — the faculty of seeing the individual, the faculty of seeing the whole — you have the genius of the human helmsman; as rare a sort of genius as there is among men.
But why does he say that this particular talent is not to be acquired? Go back to Johnson’s line about the management turpentine and read it again, but this time note how deftly the magic trick is performed. Do you see it? Hey presto, there are only two options as to what a book on painting could be about — “Form and Structure and Meaning,” or where to buy turpentine. This is important, because left to your own devices you might prefer a third possibility: namely a book about how to make great art. But as soon as you say it, it becomes clear why that option needs to be hidden from view — no such book has ever existed, no such book can exist, you can’t learn to make great art from a book.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-28.
- Fewer and fewer every day though. A United States military friend recently pointed out to me that the high ratio of senior Russian officers killed in Ukraine and Syria speaks well of their military culture, because it means that even their general officers make a custom of occasionally leading from the front (there’s a long history of this in the Russian armed forces). He then reflected bitterly that an American general being killed was simply unthinkable, since to a man they sit in air-conditioned offices and command their troops over satellite link.
- Johnson’s book is marketed towards those managing computer programmers, which is interesting since she worked on the operations side of the house and as far was I know has never been in charge of a crew of engineers.
July 26, 2026
The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
Handre discusses the book George Soros wrote (or had written) after he gained a huge sum of money by speculating against the Bank of England in the 1990s:
George Soros made a billion dollars betting against the Bank of England in September 1992, and then he wrote a book explaining that markets are fundamentally irrational. Notice the tension there.
The Alchemy of Finance, published in 1987, gives you Soros’s theory of reflexivity. The idea runs like this: participants in a market do not observe prices from the outside. They shape the reality they are trying to measure. Their biased expectations feed into prices, prices feed back into expectations, and the whole thing spirals away from any “equilibrium”. Soros presents this as a devastating blow to the neoclassical economists who model markets as tidy machines grinding toward a single clearing price.
He is right, but misses one fundamental point. The equilibrium fetish deserves a beating. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek spent decades explaining that the market is a process, not a photograph, and that no equation captures the discovery going on inside it. Prices carry dispersed knowledge. Entrepreneurs guess, act, and get corrected by profit and loss. Soros rediscovered a slice of this in his trading room, and called it “alchemy”.
But, Soros treats his “far from equilibrium” boom-bust sequences as proof that free markets are inherently unstable and require an adult (usually a central bank, sometimes Soros himself) to supervise them. He points at the credit bubbles of the 1980s and sees capitalism failing. He never asks who prints the credit.
The Federal Reserve does. Cheap money floods in, entrepreneurs misread the artificially low interest rates as real savings, and they pile into projects that cannot pay off. That is the boom. The bust arrives when reality collects its debt. Soros describes the symptom with real skill and misses the pathogen entirely.
So the man who broke sterling by exploiting a currency that politicians pegged at a lie somehow concludes that governments need more discretion, not less. The 1992 pound was a government price-fix collapsing, exactly as Mises predicted such fixes always do.
The reflexivity part is spot on, but send the bill for the bubbles to the people with the printing press.
July 21, 2026
Frederick the Great’s 1741 book, The Anti-Machiavel
At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his look at all things Machiavelli, including Prussian king Frederick the Great’s polemic against the author of The Prince:
Frederick the Great, 1781
Oil portrait by Anton Graff (1736-1813) in the Sanssouci Palace collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Maybe Machiavelli’s teachings have no relevance in any remotely civilized political system. Maybe they’re far worse than irrelevant: maybe they’re all entirely evil (as they appear), and in addition, would prove the ruin of both the people and their ruler.
This was, as it happens, the view espoused by one important ruler: the Prussian king Frederick the Great. In his 1741 book, The Anti-Machiavel, he claims Machiavelli’s book is “one of the most dangerous that ever appeared in the world”, in that the political crimes it encourages would impose “a lasting misery upon whole nations”. Truly great rulers, says Frederick, aren’t the avaricious, amoral, self-serving, shape-shifting demons that Machiavelli describes. Rather, they are those “whose business it is to administer justice, and to set examples of justice to their subjects; and who, by their magnanimity, mercy, and goodness, ought to be the living images of Deity”. Thus, Frederick sees his rebuttal as “a defense of humanity against a monster who would destroy it”; it is “an antidote to poison”.
Frederick ruled Prussia for nearly 50 years. Most historians rate him a success. On the face of things, he seems like the kind of critic who knows what he’s talking about.
But Machiavelli would say, not so fast. What did Frederick do almost immediately after assuming power? Without any provocation, he launched a war to seize the large, prosperous, populous province of Silesia (now in southwestern Poland) from the Habsburg Monarchy. And he did so on a convoluted, centuries-old dynastic claim which sounded as unconvincing to his contemporaries as it does to us now. In the three Silesian wars which followed (the third turning into the Seven Years War), well over a million soldiers died fighting. Millions more wound up maimed, psychologically scarred, or otherwise ruined. Of course, millions of non-combatants also suffered: wives lost husbands, mothers and fathers lost sons, children lost fathers and uncles and brothers. Those non-combatants also suffered displacement, terror, deprivation, and injury. Over two decades, Frederick’s wars — particularly the Seven Years War — convulsed Europe. Frederick gained 30% more territory and 50% more citizens, but the cost was losing 10% of the Prussian population to combat or disease (the modern equivalent of 35 million Americans, 6 million English, or 3 million Australians). The point is: if his actions are anything to go by, Frederick didn’t oppose Machiavellian power moves as much as he professed, if at all. Machiavelli might even argue that in taking pains to proclaim his opposition to Machiavelli even as his wars of acquisition injured and killed millions, he was doing exactly what Machiavelli had advised: seeming to be good even as he was doing whatever the hell he wanted, for his own purposes. Most people will buy the act anyway, says Machiavelli, so why not?
This brings me back to Machiavelli’s claims about how rulers do in fact act, and how they must act to avoid ruin. And that in turn brings me back to the original wording of The Prince, and what real-world credibility Machiavelli might have as a political commentator.
As it happens, Machiavelli was no armchair quarterback. Even if he hadn’t spent nearly fifteen years at the highest levels of Florentine government (which he did), he might well have qualified as a political expert just by virtue of growing up in the tumultuous time and place he did. Between the jockeying Italian states, the myriad (and ever-changing) foreign alliances and enemies and designs, the political influence of the papacy, and Florence’s own internal politics, Machiavelli’s home city furnished more than enough lessons in how the political world could, and often did, operate.
July 20, 2026
Markets reject Carney’s official carbon price, so Canadians have to pay more
Canada is one of the last remaining bastions of Net Zero zealotry … in fact, Prime Minister Mark Carney may be the only national leader trying to turn back the tide of economic reality over this:
AI image posted by L. Wayne Mathison on X.
Mark Carney wrote a book called Value(s) lecturing the world about fairness, responsibility, sustainability and humility. His real governing value appears to be this: when markets reject his climate scheme, force Canadians to rescue it.
Carney now admits the official carbon price is supposedly above $100 while actual credits have traded near $20. Any honest banker would recognize the message. The market does not believe these credits are worth the imaginary price politicians assigned to them.
Carney’s response is classic central-planner arrogance. He will not reconsider the product. He will rig the price, tighten the rules, compel companies to buy it and call the resulting coercion “investment certainty”.
He praised carbon pricing in Value(s) as one of the most important and effective ways to reduce emissions. Then the consumer carbon tax became politically poisonous, so he scrapped it. The industrial version survives because its costs are easier to bury inside electricity, transportation, groceries, construction materials, wages and lost investment.
Carney also boasts that Canada continues sending climate-finance money abroad while other G7 governments pull back. Canadian families are struggling with food, housing and energy, yet our philosopher-banker remains determined to finance his international reputation with their money.
His book preached humility. His government practises price fixing.
His book preached responsibility. His government transfers the risk to taxpayers.
His book preached fairness. His policies protect the climate-finance class while ordinary Canadians absorb the costs.
Carney spent years wrapping political ideology in the language of banking. Now the numbers are exposing the sales pitch. When a theoretical $100 asset trades for $20, the market has delivered its verdict. Ottawa can falsify the price, but it cannot manufacture genuine value.
Value(s) may be hundreds of pages long. Carney’s philosophy fits into one sentence:
When reality refuses to validate the climate fantasy, force Canadians to pay until it does.
