Quotulatiousness

April 5, 2026

“Easter remains one of the major annual high holy days of confectionery derangement”

Filed under: Africa, Books, Food, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Freeman, Nicole James remembers her early chocolate obsessions:

Roald Dahl’s chocolate river was the economic policy of my childhood. Dripping with glossy abundance, and available to any enterprising glutton with a low sense of self-preservation. I never looked at Augustus Gloop and thought, “There goes a cautionary tale about excess”. I thought, “There goes a boy with initiative”. I wanted the river. I wanted the factory. I wanted an Oompa Loompa or two, ideally unionized and living in a tasteful outbuilding, making me truffles on demand. I wanted a world in which everything was edible and slightly mad. While everyone else was apparently learning moral lessons, I was busy fantasizing about a life in which I could plunge both arms into a molten tributary of cacao and come up glistening, like some sort of deranged dessert otter.

Easter seemed to offer the nearest thing to this ideal. It was the one annual moment when adults, in a dramatic collapse of judgment, agreed that children should be handed industrial quantities of wrapped chocolate and told to go hard. Easter had tiny eggs hidden in pot plants and larger ones with enough packaging to survive atmospheric re-entry. It was capitalism in a bunny suit.

Then adulthood arrived, lugging excellent literary references. Along came Like Water for Chocolate, with its sexy sorrow and culinary melodrama, and suddenly chocolate was not just a childhood frenzy but a vehicle for yearning and seduction. It could communicate things one would never dream of saying aloud at a suburban dinner party. Chocolate had range.

And this is why the present state of it feels so personally offensive because what is happening to chocolate is a slow-motion mugging. Cocoa is being shaved out. Bars are shrinking. Prices are soaring. Palm oil and vegetable fats are barging into flavor. Chocolate flavor. Not real chocolate, but a cheap mockery of the original deity.

And yet Easter remains one of the major annual high holy days of confectionery derangement. According to Cargill, in the United States, people are expected to plough through around 73 million pounds of chocolate over the Easter season. Around 90 million chocolate bunnies are produced, with — fun fact — 78% being devoured from the ears first.

Easter spending in the US has in recent years hovered around the $23 billion mark, with candy doing much of the heavy lifting. Chocolate, marshmallow Peeps, baskets, flowers, brunches, the whole pastel circus. Christianity may supply the headline act, but the event itself has clearly been workshopped by a mall.

But beneath the cellophane gaiety lies an increasingly grubby truth. Cocoa prices have surged, largely because harvests in West Africa have been hammered. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which together produce the bulk of the world’s cocoa, have been clobbered by poor weather, crop disease, supply chain fragility, deforestation, and the sort of labor abuses that make any cheerful Easter ad feel criminal. The global appetite for chocolate remains immense, but the cacao tree itself is having a nervous collapse.

Update, 19 April: To the surprise of many who’ve latched on to the “woe, woe, mankind bad” chorus, there are now reports of a bumper crop of cocoa and the market prices are dropping:

It all seemed to kick off in March 2024 with the BBC’s chief climate headbanger Justin Rowlatt noting that “climate change” was one of the reasons for chocolate Easter eggs getting more expensive. Experts are said to have claimed that “human-induced” climate change had made extreme heat “10 times more likely” in the main cocoa bean-growing areas of West Africa. The story has had excellent fearmongering legs with a couple of years of bad weather-related harvests sending the world price of cocoa soaring. As late as October last year, the New York Times was stating that higher cocoa prices pushed up by climate change had led to companies changing their chocolate confectionary concoctions. Alas, sadly missing in recent chocolate climate claptrap is that an improved recent harvest (no weather-adjusting humans thought to be involved) has led to a massive 75% slump in global cocoa prices from the peak reached in January last year.

Like coral, polar bears and Arctic ice, any narrative-disturbing news is ignored. The media barkers promoting the Net Zero fantasy simply move onto the next promising climate porn project that can be ramped up to Armageddon level. The Great Choccy Catastrophe is a classic of its kind, but it is just the latest in a long and increasingly tedious line of crying wolf climate tantrums.

[…]

They get a lot of weather in the tropics, particularly in countries like Ivory Coast which accounts for up to 45% of world cocoa bean production. Dry periods alternate with wetter conditions, and there is some short-term variability in decadal temperatures. But according to World Bank climate figures, the average temperature since 1900 has risen just 1°C, while rainfall totals have remained remarkably stable. The average annual total since 1900 is around 1,354 mm. This is nearly identical to the 1,283 mm recorded in 2023, and similar to the 1,239 mm that fell in the supposedly drought conditions in 2024. Neighbouring Ghana is the world’s second largest cocoa producer and its 125 year precipitation average is 1,236 mm. This is a little higher than the 2024 ‘drought’ total of 1,181 mm, and a tad lower than the 1,278 mm in 2023.

The tropics have provided good pickings for climate and Net Zero agitators. Temperatures and rainfall can vary widely over individual years and decades. For instance, Ghana had record low rainfall in 1983 of 851 mm compared with a record high of 1,775 mm in 1968. As we have repeatedly seen over the last few years, any departure from the norm becomes the basis for a politicised junk science prediction that the climate is in crisis.

April 1, 2026

The fall of Rome and the rise of Islam

Filed under: Books, Economics, Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Gustavo Jalife points out that a work from nearly a century ago identified the rise of Islam as being far more disruptive to western civilization than the fall of the western Roman Empire (and the surge of Islamic power destroyed the Persian Empire and nearly toppled Constantinople as well):

Expansion of the Caliphate: Mohammed, 622-632 (red), Rashidun Caliphate, 632-661 (orange), and the Umayyad Caliphate, 661-750 (yellow).
Wikimedia Commons.

In Mohammed and Charlemagne – posthumously published in 1937 – renowned historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) advanced a thesis at once simple and much contested: that the true rupture between Late Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages was not the fall of Rome in the fifth century, as traditionally held, but the expansion of Islam in the seventh. The Germanic kingdoms, he argued, had preserved much of the Roman economic and cultural architecture. Trade across the Mediterranean continued; cities, though diminished, remained nodes in a wider network sustained by the circulation of goods and by administration. For the Romans, the mare nostrum was a highway rather than a barrier.

If a good article starts after it ends, one might say that a civilisation reveals itself most clearly not in its proclamations, but in the modification of its habits – when what was once assumed becomes contested. In such subtle alterations, Pirenne discerned the end of the ancient world.

With the Islamic expansion the greater part of the Mediterranean’s southern and eastern shores fell under Muslim control, from the Levant and Egypt to North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The sea was no longer a unified Roman basin, but a divided one. Authority and function shifted: the Mediterranean ceased to operate as a shared commercial zone. Long-distance trade dwindled, the flow of goods between East and West was disrupted and with it the urban and monetary life that depended upon it. Only then did Western Europe withdraw inward, shrinking into the medieval world as it is recognised today.

The argument has been debated, qualified, and revised. Yet its inner core endures: civilisations are sustained not merely by armies or laws, but by the invisible fibres of exchange – commercial, intellectual and cultural – that bind their parts together. Sever those threads and, without even the cut of a sword, a whole order may vanish into a rumour.

To draw a parallel with present-day Europe is to tread on disputed ground. The language of “invasion” is often employed with more heat than light; yet to deny that significant demographic and cultural changes are under way would be equally unhelpful. The question, then, is whether Pirenne’s model can illuminate what many believe is a tragedy without reducing it to a farce.

The spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries was a series of military conquests. The Arab fleets that took North Africa and Spain, the armies that crossed into Gaul, and the long struggle for control of the Mediterranean were enterprises of war and empire. Contemporary migration into Europe, by contrast, occurs largely through civilian movement, legal and illegal. However, both historical processes demonstrate that massive migratory movements, whatever their specific nature, do not merely add numbers to a population; they introduce new networks, new loyalties, new values and new norms that eventually fracture the existing state of affairs.

Before the eighth century, the Mediterranean economy continues to function, vibrant and connected. After the eighth century, that system is shattered. The sea is closed. Trade disappears. Europe faces an empire whose only wealth is the land, where the movement of goods is reduced to a bare minimum. Far from advancing, society regresses.

Pirenne’s thesis gains thrust and edge in presenting the Islamic expansion as embodying a fundamental alteration in coexistence.

March 28, 2026

QotD: The moment the American empire began to decline

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are two stories from the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq that I can’t get out of my head. The first is that in the final stages of war planning, the US Air Force was drawing up targeting lists for the sorties they expected to make. They already had detailed plans1 for striking Iraq’s air defense systems, but they worried that they would also be asked to disable Iraqi WMD sites. So the Air Force pulled together a special team of intelligence officers to figure out the right coordinates for all the secret factories and labs that were churning out biological weapons and nuclear materials. Try as they might, they couldn’t find them. So … they just kept on looking.

The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy”. What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated?

I am of the exact right age for the Iraq War to be the formative event of my political identity.2 But even if that hadn’t been true, it still feels like the most consequential geopolitical event of my life. The United States spent trillions of dollars and caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million and a million people in Iraq alone. The goal of this was “regional transformation”, and we transformed the region all right. The war destabilized several neighboring regimes, which led them to collapse into anarchy and civil war. Consequences of that included millions more deaths and the near extinction of Christianity in the place it came from.

As an American, I didn’t feel any of this directly,3 but with the benefit of hindsight the war looks even more epochal for us. It marks, in so many ways, the turning point from our decades of unchallenged global supremacy to the current headlong charge into “multipolarity”. I know this may sound melodramatic, but I truly believe future historians will point to it as the moment that we squandered our empire. Remember, hegemonic empires work best when nobody thinks they’re an empire. True strength is not the ability to enforce your commands, it’s everybody being so desperate to please you that they spend all their time figuring out what you want, such that you don’t even have to issue edicts.

Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iraq War, American global dominance was so unquestioned we didn’t even have to swat down any challengers. This is a very good position for an empire to be in, because it means you don’t run the risk of blunders or surprise upset victories that make you look weak and encourage others to take a chance. Conversely, there’s a negative spiral where the hegemon has to start making demands of its clients, which makes the clients resentful and uncooperative, which in turn means that they have to be told what to do. All of this makes the hegemon-client relationship start to look less like a good “deal” and more purely extractive, which can rapidly lead the whole system to fall apart.

Iraq was the moment the American empire went into this negative cycle.

Even if you don’t agree with me about that, presumably you will agree that it was very bad for American soft power and prestige, bad for a number of friendly regimes in the area, and bad for our finances and our military readiness. So to anybody curious about the world, it seems very important to ask why we did this, why we thought it was a good idea, and how nobody predicted the ensuing debacle that seems so obvious in hindsight.

The conventional answers to these questions tend to be either “George W. Bush was dumb” or “Dick Cheney was evil”. I totally reject these as answers. Or I think at best they’re seriously incomplete: if the first Trump administration taught us anything, it’s that the US President can’t actually do very much on his own if the bureaucracy is set against him. The United States is an oligarchy, a kind of surface democracy; big decisions don’t happen without a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. More to the point, the decision to invade Iraq actually was endorsed and supported by pretty much every important politician and every institution, including the whole mainstream media and most of the Democratic Party. Blaming it on a single bad administration is too easy. It’s an excuse designed to avoid asking hard questions about how organizations filled with well-meaning people can go totally off the rails

Fortunately, Michael Mazarr has written the definitive4 book on this very question. It’s not a history of the Iraq War and occupation: it’s a history of the decision to invade Iraq, ending shortly after the tanks went steaming across the border. It’s an exhaustively-researched doorstopper composed out of hundreds and hundreds of interviews with officials working in the innards of the White House and of various federal bureaucracies and spy agencies, all aimed at answering a single question: “What were they thinking?”

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-06-30.

  1. Those plans were provided by the Russians, who prior to multiple rounds of NATO expansion were our allies.
  2. Given that almost everybody in the US mainstream, both Democrats and Republicans, were for it, this probably explains a lot about how I turned out.
  3. Sure, maybe someday we’ll have a fiscal crisis, but the incredible thing about America is that all the money wasted in Iraq still won’t be in the top 5 reasons for it. >
  4. “Definitive” is publisher-speak for “very, very long.”

March 27, 2026

The Greatest Scoundrel Story Ever Written

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Humour, India — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lotuseaters Dot Com
Published 29 Nov 2025

Luca is joined by Dan to discuss Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser. They explore Fraser’s skill in writing historical fiction, the genius of the Harry Flashman character, and the sheer hilarity of the novel’s dark humour.

March 25, 2026

Montaigne, a Substacker avant la lettre

Filed under: Books, France, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack (of course), Ted Gioia makes the case that Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne (or “Montaigne” to unwashed moderns) was the historical progenitor of all essayists to follow:

Michel de Montaigne may be the most influential essayist in history — even Shakespeare borrowed from his work (taking some passages almost verbatim). But if Montaigne were alive today, this famous essayist might be mistaken for just another slacker living in his parents’ basement.

Okay, let’s be fair. He actually lived in the family castle. But it still was slacking. At age 38, he didn’t have a job — and preferred reading books. Leave me alone, was his message to the world.

The Montaigne family castle (Photo by Henry Salomé)

But even a castle was too noisy for him — or maybe it was just his wife from an arranged marriage that made him feel that way. In any event, Montaigne eventually decided that he needed total isolation, almost like a monk in a hermitage. So he moved into the tower on the family estate. He called it his citadel.

Here he surrounded himself with books, and announced his intention to devote the rest of his life to reading and philosophizing “in calm and freedom from all cares”.

Montaigne’s tower (Photo by Henry Salomé)

But at age 47, Montaigne had a change of heart. He returned to the world, ready to embark on travels and public service. But before leaving for Italy, he had one last goal he needed to fulfill closer to home — and it would have a decisive impact on Western culture.

During his years in the tower, Montaigne wrote 94 essays, and compiled them in two book-length manuscripts. These he now delivered to a printer in Bordeaux, and paid to have them published. A short while later, he traveled to Paris and proudly gave a copy to King Henry III

In his mind, he was serving as his own patron, drawing on the family wealth to cover the expenses of his debut as an author. But today, of course, we would call this self-publishing — a term that is often (unfairly) used to demean the value and legitimacy of these rule-breaking efforts by do-it-yourself writers.

Call it what you will, Montaigne’s achievement cannot be denied. He not only invented the modern essay — setting the stage for Bacon, Emerson, and so many others. But he also helped shape the human sciences and legitimize the personal memoir. That’s because his essays covered many topics but really had only one subject—namely Montaigne himself, with all his quirks and opinions and hot takes.

His essays marked a milestone in the history of individualism. So, of course it makes sense that they were self-published. That’s what individualists do. They are happy to work outside the system.

I could even imagine our slacker Montaigne publishing these essays on Substack today. You might say that he anticipated the Substack style of writing. His balancing of memoir and analysis, subjective and objective, observation and generalization is very much aligned with what I see on this platform every day.

March 24, 2026

“Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book”

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

In The Critic, Ben Sexsmith reviews a new book by Matt Goodwin, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity:

Here is an exceptionally easy argument to make:

  1. Mass migration is ensuring that the historical majority in Britain is becoming a minority.
  2. This is the result of policies that have been pursued regardless of popular opinion.
  3. This has had many kinds of destructive consequences.

The first claim is so obviously true that one might as well deny the greenness of the grass. The second is proven by decades of broken promises (see Anthony Bowles’s article “Immigration and Consent” for more). The third requires argumentation, but I think that it is clear if one considers hideous incidences of terrorism, grooming gangs and violent censoriousness, as well as broader trends of economic dependency and electoral sectarianism.

Again, this is not a difficult argument to make. So why is it made so badly?

Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book. It reads like the book of a political operator extending his CV. The left-wing commentator Andy Twelves caused a stir on social media by pointing out various factual mistakes and what appear to be non-existent quotes. Twelves speculates that these “quotes” are the result of AI hallucinations, which is plausible, if not proven, in the light of the fact that two of Mr Goodwin’s sparse footnotes contain source information from ChatGPT.

Inasmuch as Suicide of a Nation makes a form of the argument sketched out the beginning of this article, there is truth to it. But it contains a fundamental problem — it assumes that this argument is so true that there is no requirement to make it well.

“Slop” is an overused term but it feels painfully appropriate for a book that is spoon fed to its audience. Goodwin, who had a long academic career before becoming a successful commentator, is not a man who lacks intelligence. But he writes as if he thinks his audience lacks it. “I did not write this book for the ruling class”, writes Goodwin, “I wrote it for the forgotten majority”. Alas, he seems to think that the average member of the “forgotten majority” has the reading level of a dimwitted 12-year-old. As well as being stylistically simple, the book is full of annoying paternal asides. “In the pages ahead I shall walk you through what is happening to the country …” “In the next chapter we will begin our journey …” Thank you, Mr Goodwin. Can we stop for ice cream?

The book is terribly derivative, with a title that reflects Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower and a subtitle — “Immigration, Islam, Identity” — that all but repeats that of Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe — “Immigration, Identity, Islam”. It is written in the humourless and colourless rhetorical style of AI. I’m not saying it was AI-generated. (Indeed, a brief assessment using AI checkers suggests that it was not.) I’m just saying that it might as well have been.

March 22, 2026

Four million books published in North America during 2024

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte considers the size of the North American book market at most recent count:

Random photo of books stacked in my office about 15 years ago.

I’m often asked by writers about the prospects of a particular book. I try to be encouraging. If it’s a good book, there’s undoubtedly an audience for it. At the same time, I try to be realistic. It’s a crowded market and it’s often difficult even for a good book to find its audience.

If asked to explain just how crowded the market for books is today, I usually say something like, there are about two million books published in North America every year. I’m not sure where I got that figure from. Probably from some research I read five years ago.

Turns out it’s wrong. “The total number of books published in the US in 2025 with ISBN numbers jumped 32.5% over 2024 to more than four million books,” announced Publishers Weekly on March 17.

I can’t get over that number. Four million books.

An average reader might get through about 2,000 books in a lifetime. A long-lived super-reader churning through 70 or 80 a year may exceed 5,000. Gladstone’s reading logs suggest that he engaged with more than 20,000 books, but it’s not clear he read them all.

A large independent bookstore might carry between 10,000 and 30,000 books. A suburban chain store, 60,000 to 120,000. The Barnes & flagship at Union Square in Manhattan has hundreds of thousands of books on four massive floors. Powell’s City of Books in Portland, occupying an entire city block—you need a map to get from room to room—has at least a half million books, and by some counts a million. New York’s The Strand, which boasts 18 miles of books, new and used, is probably the world’s biggest bricks-and-mortar retailer: it has 2.5 million books on incredibly dense shelving. You’d need a Powell’s, a Strand, and a couple of B&N Union Squares to hold four million titles.

Four million books is equivalent in volume to the holdings of a good-sized university library system, or a large public library system—collections built over a century. And these are published in a single year.

In 1939, the year Margaret Atwood was born, The Library of Congress, widely recognized as the largest library in the world, home to a civilization’s worth of books, boasted about six million titles, including pamphlets. It’s now holding about 25 million, and the US alone is on pace to produce that many titles between now and the end of the decade.

Four million books. That’s 11,000 books a day. Four hundred and fifty books an hour.

A year ago, there were “only” 3.15 million books, traditional and self-published, released. So 2025 represents an increase of 32.5 percent. Self-publishing was up just under 39 percent. Traditional publishing about 6.6 percent. Publishers Weekly doesn’t offer much of an explanation for the explosion of new titles. AI has to be a major factor (see this week’s publishing sensation in The New York Times.)

Of course, most of the four million books are not worth your time. Only 642,242 of the titles were released by traditional publishers. A traditional publisher doesn’t guarantee quality, but it suggests a minimum of vetting. The search for merit among self-published books is easily frustrated.

Bowker, the service that counts the ISBNs (the unique thirteen-digit identifiers attached to each book), does not distinguish among formats. Many of the four million were published only as ebooks. And some books published as print, ebook, and audiobook are triple-counted. There may only be about 2.5 million distinct works in that total.

If one were to take the colouring books, planners, puzzle books, and AI-generated garbage out of the equation, we might be down to 1.5 million meaningfully distinct books. And of all those, maybe 1 to 3 percent, or 20,000 to 50,000, will sell over 1,000 copies. That puts some perspective on the four million.

March 20, 2026

The Revenge Plot: Orestes’s Foreshadowing in The Odyssey

Filed under: Books, Europe, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

MoAn Inc.
Published 4 Dec 2025

This video was filmed in July of 2025. I wasn’t going to upload it due to the weird not-really-focused-but-also-kinda-focused-thing my phone camera was clearly going through, but decided I didn’t care that much because the content itself was fine x
(more…)

QotD: The lameness and sameness of modern science fiction novels

Filed under: Books, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ll confess, though: I almost didn’t read this book. Actually, for several years I didn’t. I was vaguely aware of its existence, but I’d pretty much stopped reading new speculative fiction because I finally admitted to myself that it was pure masochism that kept me beating my head against the wall of newly-published extruded genre product when I had sixty-plus years of Hugo and Nebula nominees to choose from. Sure, every novel will reflect something of its age’s concerns (there’s a lot of nuclear war in those old Hugo winners!), but it’s gotten much worse in the last ten or fifteen years: every book that gets any buzz is so deeply inflected with questions of personal liberation from oppressive structures, so little nuanced and so obsessed with identity and representation, that I find it borderline unreadable. A few books like that, done well — fine, that’s part of life, that’s certainly a kind of story you can tell. But when it’s everything, when it becomes a precondition for publication, you’re left with a tragically denuded sample of the human experience. It’s not that I don’t want to read a book where I disagree with the underlying politics, it’s that an unsubtle obsession with the “correct” politics makes a book boring and cringe. One-dimensionally “right-wing” fiction written in reaction to the contemporary mainstream is just as bad — worse, perhaps, because if done well it’s the sort of thing I would really enjoy.1

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Powers of the Earth, by Travis J.I. Corcoran”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-04-29.

  1. There’s nothing worse than poor execution of an incredible idea, because it means no one else will come along and do the incredible idea right. Austin Grossman’s Crooked, for instance, is Richard Nixon vs. Cosmic Horrors, which is a brilliant premise (yes, the Interstate Highway System is definitely an eldritch sigil designed to protect America, I will not accept any argument) but falls apart on the totally ahistorical version of our 37th President designed to justify making him the “good guy”. The real Nixon is such a fascinating and compelling figure — why not keep him as weird and twitchy and striving as he actually was and have him be the good guy anyway?

    2. Or, say, the Napoleon movie.

March 16, 2026

QotD: Political entrepreneurs and federal subsidies

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, Quotations, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[In his book The Robber Barons], Josephson missed the distinction between market entrepreneurs like Vanderbilt, Hill, and Rockefeller and political entrepreneurs like Collins, Villard, and Gould. He lumped them all together. However, Josephson was honest enough to mention the achievements of some market entrepreneurs. James J. Hill, Josephson conceded, was an “able administrator”, and “far more efficient” than his subsidized competitors. Andrew Carnegie had a “well-integrated, technically superior plant”; and John D. Rockefeller was “a great innovator” with superb “marketing methods”, who displayed “unequaled efficiency and power of organization”.

Most of Josephson’s ire is directed toward political entrepreneurs. The subsidized Henry Villard of the Northern Pacific Railroad, with his “bad grades and high interest charges” show that he “apparently knew little enough about railroad-building”. The leaders of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, Josephson notes, “carried on [their actions] with a heedless abandon … [which] caused a waste of between 70 and 75 percent of the expenditure as against the normal rate of construction”. But it never occurs to Josephson that the subsidies government gave these railroads created the incentives that led their owners to overpay for materials and to build in unsafe areas. He quotes “one authority” on the railroads as saying, “The Federal government seems … to have assumed the major portion of the risk and the Associates seem to have derived the profits” — but Josephson never pursues the implication of that passage.

Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.

March 13, 2026

QotD: “I was one-shotted in my teens by Guns, Germs, and Steel“

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

I was one-shotted in my teens by the way Guns, Germs, and Steel ✨explained everything✨ and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since. At this point honestly half the books I’ve reviewed could probably be described as arguments against Jared Diamond. But that’s okay. I can stop any time. Just one more sweeping transdisciplinary exploration of global history. Just let me see a map of British coalfields next to a chart of GDP per capita and I promise I’ll go back to that book about esoteric writing. C’mon, bro, I won’t ever talk about the Hajnal Line again, I swear. Just let me have one more study of an under-appreciated causal factor for the differing trajectories of human societies and I’m done. I have this under control.

Jane Psmith, “BRIEFLY NOTED: Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-11-03.

March 11, 2026

QotD: Traitors are worse than open enemies so we hate them more

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Officer Frenly (High IQ) @FrenlyOfficer
    The most hated character from Harry Potter is not Voldemort. It’s not Bellatrix. Not even Draco.

    It’s Umbridge.

    Ask yourself why.

Simple.

Umbridge does one thing the main villain doesn’t do, that none of the other villains do.

She pretends to be on the heroes’ side. And prevents them from defending themselves.

This is how the human mind evolved. Foemen, tribal enemies who oppose us on the field of battle, provoke our fear, anger, even hatred. But traitors provoke our contempt and disgust.

We instinctively know that a disloyal friend is worse than an enemy.

Against an enemy, we can defend ourselves, and our tribe will support us. Oppose the traitor, and she will cry that she is an innocent victim, and we are the evil ones.

The traitor not only betrays her own tribe, she turns her tribe against each other.

But it’s worse than that. The enmity between this tribe and that, between lion and zebra, between farmer and rat, is dictated by opposing interests, by incompatible needs.

Our cruelty to the foe is forced upon us. It is the indifference of the universe, manifesting its conclusion through us. It’s adaptation, not sadism.

The traitor isn’t like that. She didn’t have to do it. She could have supported the tribe, and everyone, including her, would have been fine.

The traitor didn’t have her path forced on her. She chose it out of spite, or for gain.

Traitors are worse. So we hate them more.

Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-28.

March 10, 2026

Rolling toward disaster – North America’s trucking industry

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

Donna Laframboise reviews a new memoir by Gord Magill, recounting his career in trucking in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand:

… Gord has written a splendid book that belongs on Economics 101 reading lists everywhere. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is chock-a-block with firsthand anecdotes. He tells us, for example, about traveling north into Canada from New York state during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, and feeling “drunk with patriotism, in love with every person I met, and they were in love with me”. After returning to his wife and daughters south of the border, he says he’d “never seen so many Canadian flags flying in the United States. It was unbelievable.” For a short time, “I was a minor celebrity simply for being from Canada”.

But this book is more than a collection of quirky tales about life behind the wheel. It’s a deep dive into shark-infested waters. For decades, but especially in recent years, experienced truckers have been treated like disposable widgets rather than skilled professionals. An industry upon which much of the North American economy depends has been undermined and hollowed out by perverse economic incentives, widespread fraud, and foolish policy. All of this makes our highways dangerous.

Gord explains that members of the public are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in America than down under partly because Australia has a graduated, quasi-apprentice licensing system. After driving smaller trucks for a year, people apply for the next level of trucking license, and then the next level, and then the next.

In North America these days, licenses seem to be given out like breath mints. The driver who blew through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan in 2018, killing sixteen people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and injuring 13 others had less than one month of trucking experience. Yet he was behind the wheel of one of the largest configurations on the road (two interconnected trailers, known in the industry as a Super B-train). In Australia, that same driver would have needed a minimum of four years of experience and would have completed multiple courses and passed multiple tests before being entrusted with such a load.

Gord reminds us about the Ethiopian driver (on a work visa) who plowed into traffic that had slowed to a halt in a Texas construction zone last March. Five people — including a family of two parents and two young children — were killed, eleven others were sent to hospital, and seventeen vehicles were damaged. In that case, the driver reportedly had only four months of trucking experience.

Shortly afterward, in August 2025, three people died in Florida when, as Gord writes, “a tractor trailer attempted to pull an illegal U-turn through a small access point in the median … As the driver of the truck executed the turn, he pulled in front of a minivan, which ran into his trailer at high speed.”

The trucker in that case, an illegal immigrant from India, had somehow acquired commercial driver’s licenses in two US states. But when an English proficiency test was administered a few days after the accident, he answered only 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and could identify only 1 of 4 traffic signs. It was later reported he’d failed his commercial trucking exam ten times during a two-month period.

Then there’s the trucker who drove an 18-wheeler weighing forty tons across a bridge with a clearly posted weight limit of six tons in rural Arkansas in 2018. The bridge collapsed and the truck sank into the river. It took seven months to extract it, while the bridge remained out-of-service for years.

March 8, 2026

Performative … reading?

Filed under: Books — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:30

Nicole James talks about a secretive cult of readers who — I’m afraid to even say it — read books in public, specifically to be seen reading books in public:

Reading has become competitive, which is impressive when you consider that it is an activity performed while sitting down and moving only the eyes. In theory, intellectually competitive reading would involve fierce debates in candlelit rooms, people slamming piles of Dostoevsky onto tables, and shouting things like, “You’ve misunderstood the moral ambiguity of suffering!” before storming out into the night to reflect meaningfully. In practice, it involves sitting in a café in Ridgewood holding a copy of the Iliad while pretending not to notice that three separate people have already noticed. And then pretending not to notice yourself noticing that they have noticed, which is where the true athleticism begins.

Because reading has slowly repositioned itself from private hobby to public personality trait. This is called performative reading, and it is less about engaging with ideas and more about being seen in the act of possibly engaging with ideas. It requires a certain book, a certain environment, and a certain facial expression. Specifically, a face suggesting that thoughts are currently underway.

The extraction of the book from the bag is an art form in itself.

It must not look like you packed it specifically for display. That would reek of planning, and planning is death to mystique. No, the book must appear to have happened to you. As though, midway through reaching for lip balm or car keys, you encountered it unexpectedly. “Oh,” your expression must suggest, “are you here too? How curious.”

The bag should be opened with a kind of languid inevitability. Do not rummage through your bag. Rummaging implies receipts. Crumpled tissues. A muesli bar from 2019. The book must be located swiftly, as if it occupies a reserved, velvet-lined chamber within your otherwise chaotic life.

You lift it out slowly. This is a text. Ideally one with a cover that signals moral seriousness or tasteful despair.

The removal must be conducted at a volume slightly above whisper. There may be a soft thud as it meets the table. A decisive, cultured thud. The kind of thud that says, “I have opinions about late-stage capitalism”.

Then, and this is critical, you do not open it immediately. That would look eager. Instead, you place it beside your coffee. The coffee must appear faintly architectural.

Only once the book is resting in full view do you adjust it by half a centimeter. A sleeve may be pushed back. A wrist revealed. The lighting should imply that you have recently contemplated something ancient and mildly troubling. Several photos are taken. One will be selected after rejecting seventeen for “looking too literate.”

The caption must be controlled. Something like:

Revisiting this.

“Revisiting” suggests that you and the book have history. You have both grown. You have both suffered.

And when it is finally time to return the book to the bag, this too must be handled with restraint. It slides back in as though it has completed a small but meaningful public service. The performance ends. The book remains unread. But visible. Which, as we all know, is the point.

QotD: Reading books versus remembering books

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As a gullible young man, I fell for the big lie that books are improving. “Reading develops the mind,” my parents told me when I begged for a TV in my bedroom. My teachers seconded the motion, as did one hundred per cent of the world’s self-serving authors. “Reading makes you smarter,” they all said. “Reading gives you endless knowledge and reduces stress. Reading makes you human.”

“What about people who can’t read?” I asked, thinking of all the illiterates in my year group at school. “Don’t they have human rights, too?”

My mother snorted with laughter, as if I’d told a dirty joke. “Oh, that’s precious!” she said, wiping her eyes, and I raced upstairs to bury my nose in the first book I could find.

To be fair, I’d no idea back then what the passage of time does to the brain; that knowledge is never accrued, only forgotten. As an adult, I’ve trudged my way through the entire oeuvres of a good number of literary giants, and not only do I remember bugger all about what I read in any of those books, I’ve entirely forgotten that I read the vast majority of those books at all. Worse, when people ask my opinion about one of their renowned authors, I frown bewilderedly and say, “Who?”, their very existence having somehow been completely blotted from my mind. In my lowest moments, I even add, “Oh, I’ve never heard of him/her. I’ll have to give him/her a try. Which book of his/hers would you recommend I start with?” Only when I’m several chapters into one of these titles does a muffled bell ring somewhere at the back of my broken brain. Hang on, I think, didn’t I read something a bit like this once before? Then I accuse Dostoyevsky of plagiarism.

Dominic Hilton, “All Booked Up”, The Critic, 2020-08-17.

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