Is it plausible that a billionaire paid no taxes for a period of several years? Yep. Totally. See all that stuff I wrote above about the complicated tax code and how it is an accountant’s sacred duty to take advantage of all the stupid laws congress has passed to save their client’s money? Pretty much that. It has happened many times before, and it will happen many times again.
One thing that’s really unfair about our tax system is that it is rigged in favor of people who have more resources. Government meddling makes it more costly to conduct business. The more complicated the regulatory burden, the more smaller companies can’t compete. Make the laws complicated enough and the only companies that stay in business are the ones who can afford to pay for twenty guys like me. (my last regular accounting job paid extremely well, and nearly everything I did was jump through government mandated hoops, filling out government mandated paperwork which nobody in the government would probably ever read)
Trump has those resources. I bet he’s got a room full of accountants, and their leader is probably a grizzled old CPA with an eye patch and a raven who sits on his shoulder. The raven also has an eye patch and an accounting degree. This man has wrestled bears, and he’s going to take advantage of every tax break in the US Code for his client, and do so gleefully, knowing that many of those laws were signed by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
On the other side, you know damned good and well that the IRS has sent their most fearsome auditor against him. This man sold his soul to the devil, and then fined the devil for failing to list that soul as a depreciable asset. When he shows up to audit your company, he appears a flash of fire and brimstone, as a Finnish death metal band plays his theme song. He is an auditor bereft of mercy, compassion, or pity, and beneath his leathery wings serve a legion of IRS goblins, who will crawl into every nook and cranny of the Trump Corporation’s P&L looking for errors, and if a mouse so much as shits a turd large enough to unbalance that ledger, there will be hell to pay.
Is it unfair that rich guys can employ Gandalf level CPAs and take advantage of more complicated tax laws, while regular people use TurboTax? Yep. But in the meantime, as long as those tax laws are there, the rich guys would be utter fools not to take advantage of them.
Larry Correia, “No, You Idiots. That’s Not How Taxes Work – An Accountant’s Guide To Why You Are A Gullible Moron”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2020-09-28.
October 4, 2026
QotD: Auditors and the taxation system
October 3, 2026
Singapore’s “Social Development Unit”
We don’t tend to hear very much about Singapore, so I hadn’t heard of the “Social Development Unit” that they set up (appropriately, in 1984):
Haha this reminds me of when Singapore had this thing called the Social Development Unit which my American sociology professor told me was “basically government-sponsored eugenics”.
Back in the 80s, Lee Kuan Yew observed that female university graduates were not getting married, and that smart people weren’t breeding enough which he treated as a national emergency.
This led to the birth of the Social Development Unit in 1984 — government-sponsored parties, dinners, trips and even “love boat” cruises so that clever people could meet each other and, ideally, produce more clever babies. Locals immediately nicknamed it Single, Desperate and Ugly
There were other politically incorrect fertility policies of the era: the Graduate Mothers’ Scheme (kids of degree moms got priority school places), and higher tax breaks for those who were more educated with more kids. Meanwhile, cash grants were given to the lower educated and lower income parents who got sterilized after one or two kids.
To which Carl Benjamin responded:
Lee Kuan Yew is what happens when an autistic map gamer becomes president.
More on that change to student loan eligibility rules
Larry Correia’s comments on Trump’s executive order changing eligibility for federally guaranteed student loans generated a fair amount of discussion, so I felt linking to Copernican’s post on the same topic would be of interest to many of you:
As a White Western Man, I am unaccustomed to seeing or hearing “good news” in a larger geopolitical sense. That is, actions of our leaders tend to lead one to be somewhere between depressingly blackpilled and defiantly optimistic even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Recently, Donald Trump and his Department of Education have engaged in some more executive shenanigans. Once again bypassing our Congress, whose dysfunctional role is best thought of as the kidneys in our diabetic, alcoholic body politic. With that said, a relatively minor update to the Department of Education rules regarding underwriting federal student loans might have a dramatic long-term effect on our entire cultural system.
Take a look for yourself:
Of all the actions the Executive Branch can take, this is one of the best. Most notably, because it’s boring. Changing the rules on federal fiscal underwriting is boring, so the media and the population at large will have a hard time holding on to it as a talking point. The most dramatic cultural changes are precipitated from the most boring types of fiscal action. Flashy is fun, but boring is often effective. Something to keep in mind when our generation finally seizes the reins of power.
The recent update that takes effect in 2027 is functionally removing the federal guarantee from student loans for useless degrees. Predominantly degrees that fall under the “female daycare” category. That is, the reason why every employer in the United States demands a degree to flip burgers or fill out spreadsheets is due to the fact that everyone can get a degree. Removing a significant portion of the federally backed degree-mill system will force a top-down restructuring of the American cultural academic-caste system.
The fallout from this decision is going to be immense, but we won’t see it unless the current policy holds long enough for several generations of university students to grow up under it (say around 12 years). First, it’s going to cut off universities from the endless money of cheap federal student loans that’s been flooding into useless departments. Women’s studies, social studies, English majors, and early-childhood-education majors are about to see a significant drawdown in the number of attending students.
As many have pointed out, it’s only an Executive Order, so it can be easily set aside by the next president, but it may have a salutary effect on those who do see a university degree as just a way to stay out of the working world for a few more years.
October 1, 2026
“Motte and bailey” doesn’t work with this argument
Yesterday was nominally “Truth and Reconciliation Day” in Canada, but the government and progressive activist groups are actively trying to suppress honest questions about the whole Residential Schools topic and threatening jail time to those who refuse to mouth the slogans:
This is an interesting thread, because he makes the motte and bailey explicit in a way they’re not usually careless enough to do.
No one denies that the residential schools were rough, that the kids who went there were probably kind of sad, and that some of them died, due to contagious disease mostly. That’s all very unfortunate but doesn’t amount to much more than “kids get homesick at boarding school, discipline back then was often severe by modern standards, and medicine was primitive especially in remote areas”. This is the motte and it isn’t all that impactful because none of it is all that different from conditions that white kids lived through at the time, particularly in remote areas.
But it was very specifically the claim of mass graves due to deliberate genocide that supercharged this issue back in 2021, with the implication that the residential schools were actually a cover for a policy of systematic extermination. At least I assume this is the charge, as they keep saying “genocide” and that’s what genocide is commonly understood to mean. This is the bailey.
The problem is that there is no evidence for mass graves. The few times that they’ve been investigated no bodies were found. At the Kamloops site they deliberately refuse to even dig, which strikes people as suspicious. So people ask questions. It’s only natural to want something more concrete than “because I said so” when you’re being accused of genocide.
So they then retreat to the motte of “well things were hard in the schools”, and okay, yes, they were, but that isn’t genocide. But the implication is that anyone asking for evidence in support of the genocide claim – anyone attacking the bailey – is engaging in “denialism” that the schools even existed or that conditions in the schools were often not ideal. Which literally no one does.
This entire debate comes down to one question. Is the Canadian government guilty of a deliberate, systematic policy of genocide? Did it set out to exterminate the First Nations via the mass murder of their children? That’s it, that’s the issue, that’s what we’re fighting about.
And there’s a very high bar of evidence for proving something like that. At a minimum, you need a whole lot of bones.
Got any bones out in that bailey?
Marc Emery argues that the reservation system was a mistake and it has permanently immiserated most First Nations people and enriched a tiny minority who capture most of the benefits for themselves:
We should have abolished reservations and this idea of tribal land. Each native should have been given land that stays in that person’s family in perpetuity, and then we should have been done.
Instead, tribal lands, reservations, the Rez, have been the worst places on Earth to have been a child or female.
Rape, incest, predation, neglect and child abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, abandonment, murder, violent assault, domestic violence; no child or youth was spared being witness to this grim experience in their tribal homes.
Statistics don’t lie. No one hates their women more than native men.
The residential schools were much safer.
That was one of the main reasons for residential schools and the 60’s Scoop, get the children away from the dangerous and predatory reserve life. Many mothers who sent their children to residential schools knew this.
This is the truth that must be reconciled. The Whites have paid their dues in triplicate. No more tribute, no more money, no more land.
The natives have to raise themselves up. Blaming the Whites is over. The children of today should not be tax slaves to a pay tens of billions of dollars in annual tributes to a culture that has been so barbaric to women, children, that had slaves, were in constant warfare before the establishment of Canada, that invented nothing, that received the benefits of every technological advance at no cost to these “indigenous” who gladly — eagerly — abandon their ancient traditions for every benefit of European/Canadian invention and wonder.
Trump’s student loan policy change
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Larry Correia applauds President Trump’s decision to stop providing goverment-backed student loans for courses that don’t provide students who graduate with a viable career path:
Now this sounds like a good policy.
Only they’re not “banning” anyone from majoring in anything. Kids can still major in whatever dumb shit, gender studies, no job having degree, they want, and liberal academics will still make bank ripping off those kids and their parents.
This is just the rest of us tax payers not being on the hook for their good times.
Most regular loans the bank isn’t going to lend you money unless there’s some assurance that they’re not going to get screwed. If you went to your bank with a business plan that said you needed $250k up front so you could make $20 an hour after, they’d laugh at you.
Student loans were the one goofy ass outlier because Uncle Sam said it’s cool to go a quarter million dollars into debt to get a useless degree that qualifies you to get some specific $20 an hour job … except wait, due to all these loans for bullshit degrees the supply of eligible employees far exceeds the demand, so all those $20 an hour jobs are already filled, so now you’re working fast food where your coworkers are teenagers or illegal aliens, only you’re still $250k in debt.
Of course none of what I am saying will make sense to people who majored in the degrees in question because they weren’t required to take any math, econ, or accounting classes.
The headline says social work, art, religious studies, and music will be hardest hit! (teaching aides need a degree? WHY?!?) And now I’m gonna get yelled at by people who think what America really needs is more social workers.
Going off of what I’ve seen from creative writing degrees, MFAs, and the many art and music professionals I know, I’m guessing art and music degrees are mostly a huge waste of time. Just go get a real job to pay the bills and practice your art on the side until you get good at it (says the bestselling novelist who got an accounting degree).
Going deeply into debt for a “religious studies” degree from a university baffles me. Go to church. Read your scriptures. Serve your fellow man. But mostly I’m betting they included this one to try and pull at conservative heart strings because we all know in reality this policy change is going to overwhelming hit liberals.
But, Correia, you barbaric anti-intellectual* with the free taxpayer money faucet shut off this will irreparably harm America’s pretentious snooty sheltered ivory tower scholars of pointless fields who exist in a state of perpetual bossy uselessness in their little university bubble!
Oh no! Anyways.
* for the record, I’m not anti-intellectual. I’m all in favor of scholarly pursuits. I just think much of the education business is a scam, and the people who label themselves “intellectual” usually aren’t.
QotD: The “auction of the empire” – Didius Julianus buys the highest office for himself
The elite unit of imperial bodyguards known as the Praetorian Guard arranged for an army officer named Pertinax to succeed Commodus as Emperor. We know that money played a role; Pertinax offered a tidy sum of 12,000 sestertii each to the guardsmen, but it was done in the more typical way (quietly and behind the scenes). After 87 days in which Pertinax attempted to clean house of Praetorian corruption, the dissatisfied Guard stabbed and beheaded the would-be reformer. That set the stage for an act so brazen in its scope that the next emperor would be remembered primarily for that, and for not much more.
Knowing the Praetorian Guard could be bought, two men appeared at its headquarters and presented themselves as rival claimants for the Roman throne. One was Titus Flavius Sulpicianus, who was the father-in-law of the deceased Pertinax. The other was 60-year-old Didius Julianus, who had distinguished himself in both politics and the military. In his Chronicle of the Roman Emperors, historian Chris Scarre notes,
No attempt was made to hide the nature of the negotiations: the Praetorians stationed heralds on the walls to announce that the position of emperor was up for sale … The bidding went on for some time, but eventually the soldiers’ choice fell on Didius Julianus. He not only bid the higher price, but also warned them that if they elected Sulpicianus they might expect revenge at his hands for the murder of Pertinax.
This notorious “Auction of the Empire”, as Edward Gibbon would call it centuries later, was described by another historian who was alive and writing as it happened, Cassius Dio (155-235 A.D.). In his 80-volume history of Rome, he described the scandalous episode this way:
So when he [Didius Julianus] heard of the death of Pertinax, he hastily made his way to the imperial throne. Then ensued a most disgraceful business and one unworthy of Rome. For, just as if it had been in some market or auction-room, both the city and its entire empire were auctioned off. The sellers were the ones who had slain their previous emperor, and the would-be buyers were Sulpicianus and Didius Julianus, who vied to outbid each other … They gradually raised their bids up to 20,000 sestertii for each soldier. Some of the soldiers would carry word to Julianus, “Sulpicianus offers so much; how much more do you make it?” And to Sulpicianus in turn, “Julianus promises so much; how much more do you raise him?” Sulpicianus would have won the day, being prefect of the city and also the first to name the figure 20,000, had not Julianus raised his bid by a whole 5,000 at one time, shouting the sum out in a loud voice and indicating the amount with his fingers.
Sold! One gigantic empire and the top position in it — for a mere 25,000 sestertii per guardsman, or approximately the value at the time of ten horses.
Upon assuming the mantle of Emperor, Didius Julianus devalued the currency by reducing the precious metal content of Roman coinage. But not even that measure made the price he offered affordable to him. He never fully coughed up what he promised. After 66 days in power, he met the same fate as his predecessor — assassination at the hands of disgruntled Praetorians.
“But what evil have I done?” he is said to have cried with his last words. “Whom have I killed?”
Before the year was over, three other men would attempt to claim the title of Emperor until one man emerged as the unquestioned ruler — Severus.
The Year of the Five Emperors was drenched in power lust, scandal and blood. For the Empire, it was mostly downhill from there. When it fell to foreign invasion in 476, many Romans welcomed the invaders because they figured they couldn’t be worse than their own rulers.
And, sadly, they were probably right.
Lawrence W. Reed, “Didius Julianus: The Roman Emperor Who Bought the Imperial Throne – and Paid With His Life”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2021-08-11.
September 30, 2026
Undermining any attempt to discover truth and achieve any reconciliation
The urge to uncover past wrongs in the Canadian government’s dealings with First Nations groups isn’t a bad thing … but the government’s unwillingness to require factual evidence in support of claims of past wrongs will do exactly the opposite of working toward cultural reconciliation:
Photo from Woke Watch Canada
Why is the federal government trying to prevent Canadians from learning the truth about Indian residential schools?
On 24 September 2026, six days before Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Rebecca Alty issued a statement about so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’.
Alty claims so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’ “spreads false information by denying or casting doubt on the history of Residential Schools and the lasting harm they caused”. She offers no examples, which strongly suggests she could not provide examples if pressed to do so. The federal government is thus using Canadian taxpayer funds to attack a straw man of its own creation.
In fact, the federal government has gone far beyond using Canadian taxpayer funds to attack the straw man it calls ‘Residential Schools denialism’. It has even entertained bills which would criminalize it.
The federal government refuses to release residential school attendance records to the public which would disprove claims of missing children
In addition to using Canadian taxpayer money to attack so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’ — a straw man of its own creation — and entertaining bills which would criminalize it, the federal government has actively prevented the truth about Canada’s Indian residential schools from coming out.
For years there have been tales of thousands of missing Indian residential school students. The federal government has allowed these baseless rumours to proliferate, despite the fact that not a single name of a missing Indian residential school student has ever been produced by anyone, including the federal government.
Moreover the federal government has allowed these baseless tales of missing Indian residential school students to proliferate while actively concealing from the Canadian public the attendance records in its possession which disprove them.
An example is the attendance records for the Kamloops Indian Residential School. A close examination of the quarterly returns for the Kamloops Indian Residential School from 1943-1952, which are available online, establishes that every student is accounted for during that decade.
The government also has quarterly returns and other attendance records for the remaining years of the existence of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1952-1977, which it has not released to the public. Their existence is attested to by the federal government itself in the school narrative it prepared for use in the Independent Assessment Process.
Quarterly returns were the basis on which the Department of Indian Affairs calculated the per capita grant which covered the operating costs of the school. School officials ensured they were meticulously accurate in order to obtain as large a grant as possible based on current student enrolment, and the Department of Indian Affairs likewise demanded that they be meticulously accurate to avoid the federal government overpaying the school.
It is thus of the greatest significance that on pp. 7-8 of the attached school narrative, the federal government provides a table of total attendance figures for the years of the Kamloops Indian Residential School’s existence. The figures given by the federal government for the years from 1952-1977 are not estimates. They are very precise numbers — 402, 424, 381, 390, for example — indicating that they are derived from attendance records in the federal government’s possession, and in fact the federal government’s heading on the table reads “most are September figures for each year and based on Quarterly Returns where possible“.
It is thus clear that if released by the federal government, the quarterly returns underlying the figures in this table would establish conclusively that not a single student from the Kamloops Indian Residential School went missing between the years 1952-1977, yet the federal government refuses to release these attendance records so that the Canadian public can learn the truth. Instead, the federal government allows the damaging and completely unfounded myth of thousands of missing Indian residential school students to proliferate, and even to be promulgated beyond Canada’s borders (as, for example, in the recent hearings of the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal).
The federal government needs to release these attendance records, not just for the Kamloops Indian Residential School, but for all Indian residential schools in Canada, so that the Canadian public can learn the truth, i.e., that federal government records establish that not a single student is missing from an Indian residential school.
On X, Mr Bench points out that First Nations’ political representatives see literally no end to the need for reconciliation for generations yet to come:
Will reconciliation ever end?
According to Candice … NO.
Plan for this to continue for generations.
She says some people haven’t even started healing yet.
Her son will need healing.
Her future grandchildren will need healing.
And she admits:
“Don’t know how many generations it’s gonna take for us to heal, and healing is forever.”
So when does reconciliation end?
It doesn’t. So keep the funds flowing
If “healing is forever”, apparently there is no finish line.
L. Wayne Mathison speaks for an increasing number of Canadians here:
I’m sick and tired of being told that people generations from now will still need to “heal” from events they never personally experienced. My ancestors went through terrible things too. History is full of conquest, poverty, discrimination, war and displacement.
Remember the past. Teach it accurately. Deal with specific injustices that still exist. But at some point adults also have to build a life in the present.
I do not believe anyone should inherit permanent victimhood, and I do not believe anyone alive today should inherit permanent guilt.
Reconciliation without measurable goals, accountability or any conceivable end point stops looking like reconciliation to me, period.
Keep this up, and I am totally done with this.
September 25, 2026
When did employee humiliation become part of the mission?
I’ve been out of the working world for some time now, but I still remember the stomach-clenching realization that my employer was going to be “doing some fun activities” at an upcoming company event/meeting/recognitions/celebrations It was always just like the meme about the extrovert “persuading” the introvert to come out:
I’m told it’s even worse in the non-productive sector of the economy, as Fortissax explains:
If you’ve only worked trades, or unskilled labour your whole life you’d be inclined to thinking that humiliation rituals and childish games are unique to retail jobs like Walmart, where in morning huddles they make their minimum wage employees dance in place to celebrate how well their team did in last week’s sales, or survey results. I want you to know that in Very Serious Jobs™️ like NGOs, government, finance, and banking, white collar salary workers who work for some of the biggest and oldest corporations in Canada have to play stupid little games, and all the men have to fake enthusiasm for getting to know employees they don’t give a shit about outside of work, mostly to appease women in their 30s and 40s. They all have annual or bi-annual celebrations they’ll call “balls” or “galas” where the corporation spends an exorbitant amount of money on a semi formal event and a three and a half star deal, usually at some mid-high tier hotel. They do this so they can justify low balling you and not raising your salary. The women in particular are completely mesmerized as they dress up to relive prom night one more time, every year, where they can win fake little awards for being good little cogs scoring their arbitrary KPIs and survey goals, getting to strut up onto a stage in a dress and claim up a plastic trophy or framed certificate to be mounted on a wall, a gold star for whose it and who cares metric that nobody knows or gives a fuck about. You can make six figures or just under it and you’re still subject to participatory humiliation rituals.
QotD: The whole point of imposing tariffs is to raise prices
Think on it. So, those dastardly foreigners are better, or cheaper, or subsidised, or just plain swarthy johnnies who are selling to us and thereby stealing the crust from the mouths of the more expensive (or less good etc) proper British producers. So, we now impose a tax at the border. This makes those products from swarthy johnnies more expensive. So, people will buy fewer swarthy and more good and honest British.
This also enables the good British to raise their prices and so make a profit.
So, what actually happens is that the British consumer gets screwed for the benefit of British capitalists. Not quite what I’d recommend as a policy but that’s the point and the intention. Tariffs raise the domestic price of the thing, that’s the reason why.
Tim Worstall, “But Increasing Prices Is The Very Point Of Tariffs”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2026-06-18.
September 24, 2026
More than you ever wanted to know about the Teapot Dome scandal
At The Grim Historian, Carlyn Beccia has a long, long post about the scandal that (probably) killed President Harding: the Teapot Dome scandal.
“The Teapot Dome scandal” by Clifford Berryman, 1924
Granger Collection
Washington, 1922. Somewhere around H Street, a piano is still playing after midnight. The car turns off the avenue and slows outside a townhouse with the shades already drawn.
Warren Harding steps onto the sidewalk. Presidential seal on the door he just closed. Another beautiful woman on his arm, history declined to name. He doesn’t look around. He doesn’t have to.
Warren Harding is handsome. Everybody always says so. He was a notorious ladies’ man, carried on a fifteen-year affair with one married woman, fathered a child with another, and left historians enough love letters that we know far too many bawdy details about “Jerry”. (Jerry was the nickname he gave his penis.)
[…]
Either way, Harding’s genial personality probably helped. Harding liked people, people liked Harding. He had what the kids call the rizz. (Or so Jerry claimed.) And he must have had some charisma because 1920 voters handed him one of the biggest landslide victories in American history.
Now, Harding liked bringing his buddies along for the ride. Men seeking government jobs drifted through the rooms alongside men who already had them.
Attorney General Harry Daugherty is here. Daugherty is Harding’s longtime political manager and friend. Daugherty would soon become engulfed in investigations involving influence peddling and government property, and would refuse to surrender records to Senate investigators. Calvin Coolidge eventually forced him out. He later stood trial twice on charges of defrauding the government. Neither trial produced a conviction.
Harding’s unofficial fixer, Jess Smith, was there too. He technically held no federal office but nevertheless had a desk and room inside the Justice Department, used official stationery, dictated to department secretaries, carried government files, and gave orders people obeyed. Jess Smith died by suicide in 1923 while corruption allegations were swirling around the Justice Department.
The cluster of men who swarmed around Harding became known as the Ohio Gang?—?old political friends, poker companions, fixers and assorted hangers-on who had followed him to Washington and discovered that federal office came with considerably better party favors.
Harding’s cabinet, 1921. A few members of the Ohio Gang are hiding among the respectable people. They look very serious here. After hours was another story.
[…]
For years, Theodore Roosevelt and other conservationists had worried that private companies would simply gobble up America’s petroleum reserves. So Roosevelt ordered federal geologists to identify oil deposits worth protecting. Taft then withdrew millions of acres from private development and established naval petroleum reserves in California. Woodrow Wilson added another in Wyoming. In 1920, Congress gave the Navy power to manage and lease all three.
The reason was not complicated. American battleships were switching from coal to oil. If another war came along, perhaps it would be prudent for the United States Navy to own some oil.
Wild concept.
So the government had locked away huge underground deposits in California and Wyoming as an emergency stockpile. Together, the three reserves were believed to contain roughly 435 million barrels?—?about as much oil as the entire United States produced in a year.
There were two big California fields, Elk Hills and Buena Vista, and one Wyoming reserve called Teapot Dome.
Teapot Dome was not even the great petroleum monster of the group. Elk Hills would eventually become one of the country’s most productive oil fields and produce its billionth barrel in 1992. Teapot Dome, by contrast, occupied just 9,481 acres and produced about 22 million barrels during its later decades of federal operation.
Teapot Dome simply had better branding. It was named for a nearby sandstone formation that allegedly resembled a teapot.
Teapot Rock on an old postcard from around 1922
Public DomainYes, that’s a teapot. Apparently, Wyoming whiskey was excellent.
So Fall wanted control of all three reserves, and Harding gave it to him. On May 31, 1921, the president signed an executive order transferring administrative authority from the Navy to Fall’s Interior Department.
Shortly thereafter, Fall undergoes a miraculous financial renaissance. Remember Fall’s ranch with ten years of unpaid taxes and the general Grapes of Wrath ambiance?
Yeah, so by June 2022, Fall pays those taxes. He buys neighboring property. He makes substantial improvements to Three Rivers. The formerly cash-starved rancher suddenly throws money around like he’s discovered oil under the sofa cushions.
He had not. He had discovered oilmen. Two of them, specifically.
[…]
Meanwhile, President Harding was having a truly shitty year. In the spring of 1923, Jess Smith was dead, Charles Forbes had resigned from the Veterans Bureau in disgrace, and Fall had quietly resigned from Interior to work for none other than Harry Sinclair.
For once, it wasn’t Jerry keeping Harding up at night.
So that summer, Harding left on a cross-country speaking tour. During this time, Harding reportedly told a journalist: “I have no trouble with my enemies … But my goddamn friends … they’re the ones who keep me walking the floors nights!”
Those friends would drive him to an early death. On August 2, 1923, Warren Harding died in a San Francisco hotel room, probably of a sudden heart attack. He was only 57 years old.
Then Calvin Coolidge became President, and he wasn’t into playing footsy with poker players.
The benefits to US national security from the Greenland agreement
I’m sure some in the Canadian relic media will try to spin the US-Greenland-Denmark agreement as somehow threatening to Canadian sovereignty, but if it does in some way it’s clearly not the main focus from the US viewpoint:
US President Donald Trump diplays the Greenland security deal with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen.
Photo via CDR Salamander
We’ve kept up reasonably steady reporting the last couple of years on Greenland. I was never quite sure where it would come out, but I was confident that it would be — non-inclusive — in between the two extremes we heard coming out of the overly excitable and narrowly sourced commentariat of the U.S. invading or the U.S. being kicked out … and it did.
I have to give a nod to our Australian friend Liz Buchanan who gave some great observations on the issue on the Midrats Podcast back in September of 2025 and January of this year.
The full text of the agreement can be found here if you want to read it in detail, but let’s stick to the big pixels, as it is really a good news story for everyone … especially NATO.
Rod Martin created a great executive summary … I’m just going to steal it.
Bravo Zulu to the team that kept working this issue. From a national security point of view, everyone got the most important things they wanted — that’s what matters.
As we like to do here, let’s go to the chartroom.
We should start with something I posted five days ago over on X.
September 23, 2026
Without massive contradictions, would Canada even have a federal government?
As John Carter notes, the current federal government is committed whole-heartedly to a wide range of initiatives and programs, many of which are directly in contradiction of other initiatives and programs that the goverment is also whole-heartedly committed to:
Setting aside the absurd spectacle of this sheer economic illiteracy spilling forth from the mouth of a man who is supposedly some kind of economic prodigy (please do not look at the state of the British economy btw), pause to savour the conspicuous irony of a government trying to revitalize the Canadian economy while crippling its access to energy (in the middle of a war-driven oil shock no less) in the name of hallucinated climate nonsense no one even believes in anymore.
This is the same government that wants to turn Canada into a research superpower while miring the universities in DEI.
It’s the same government that’s trying to rebuild the military for “warfighting” (it has another purpose?) while going full speed ahead on vaginal maximalism in uniform.
It’s the same government announcing itself as an AI superpower, without a single frontier lab within its borders, while its brains drain south in search of the money, opportunity, and regulatory freedom the government itself ensures that Canada cannot provide.
None of this is real. It’s all press releases and press conferences meant to create the illusion of forward motion towards the achievement of contradictory aims, when no such reconciliation is possible, and no actual movement is taking place.
QotD: The EU as a modern Habsburg Empire
The irony is, of course, that Germany is once again by far the strongest power on the continent. Its interests are complex and no doubt contradictory: it wants the rest of Europe to continue to import its goods, but it does not want to fund, or mutualise, the debts that allow it to do so. The southern countries would like to either to mutualise the debts, or inflate them away by debasing the currency, but Germany will allow neither of these solutions to the imbalances within Europe. There would be no better way to re-awake German nationalism than follow the prescriptions of the southern nations; on the other hand, resentment of Germany will grow if they are not followed.
The author acknowledges the problems within Europe in his last chapter, up till which he has treated Europe as if it were one big happy family with a population gaily marching in unison behind its leadership. The truth is quite otherwise, which is why an example must be made of Britain. But the likelihood is that the more integration there is, the greater will be the tensions, both between and within countries. There is a class within countries that benefits mightily from the present arrangements, which in my opinion explains the paradox of Catalan, Flemish, and Scottish nationalism: for all these nationalisms are firm adherents to the ideal of European Union, namely a dilution of national sovereignty even greater than that which their nations already possess. Again to put it crudely, the leadership of these movements want their place not in the sun, but at the trough. They are pied pipers to their populations.
The book ends by quoting that old Mephistophelian, François Mitterand, to the effect that “Nationalism means war”. And of course this is true if by nationalism is meant an exaggerated and militant love of one’s own country and a hatred of, or disdain for, all other countries, particularly neighbouring ones. Yet at the same time, nation states — at least some of them — have been the only large-scale states able durably to protect the freedom of their populations. Moreover, if nationalism means war, it does not follow that supranationalism means peace. The European Union may be a Yugoslavia in the making, without a Tito to hold it together. As José Manuel Barroso, once President of the European Commission, former Maoist student leader and then Goldman Sachs executive (the thirst for power being the golden thread that runs through this diverse career) put it, Europe — using the word to mean the European Union, which is now more or less standard — is an empire, though of a new kind.
Perhaps not so new, in fact: a kind of Habsburg Empire without the charm and aesthetic sensibility. From the right it is attacked as a socialist enterprise, from the left as a neo-liberal one: corporatist is the word for it, that happy union between regulatory bureaucracy and large corporations.
Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.
September 22, 2026
Trumpian economics – making Mercantilism great again
President Donald Trump is remarkably inconsistent on a lot of issues, but one thing that keeps coming back is his apparent allegiance to protectionism and mercantilism:
Politics is an industry in which ideas demonstrated to be ineffective and morally reprehensible live on long after they should have died. That’s the case with President Donald Trump’s fondness for mercantilism, as he espouses hoary old nostrums about the alleged benefits of hoarding money and preventing Americans from using their capital to purchase desired goods from other countries. Like a throwback to the 18th century, the president mistakes accumulating the means of exchange for building actual prosperity, as if we’d all be better off with overstuffed wallets than with the things our funds can purchase.
“Losing” Money on Voluntary Transactions?
Last week, when asked about the eternal political bogeyman of “trade deficits”, Trump responded, “If we lose $50 billion a year with a country, and we say, ‘we’re not going to trade with you anymore’, we don’t lose $50 billion a year. It’s very simple. Right?”
The president’s comments continued a theme he’d expounded on Truth Social, where he wrote, “If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year.”
Earlier this month, the president threatened to entirely stop Americans from trading with businesses in countries with which the Unted States runs a trade deficit — that is, from which we overall buy more than its residents purchase from Americans. His position seems to be that we’re better off hoarding cash than we would be using (or losing, from his perspective) our money to purchase things that we want.
But as the late economist Milton Friedman commented during an earlier incarnation of the eternal debate over the “fairness” or lack thereof of international trade, “the goods and services we import, they provide us with TV sets we can watch, automobiles we can drive, with all sorts of nice things for us to use. The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible, for as small a volume of exports as possible.”
[…]
Everybody Benefits From Free Trade
“Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade”, Smith warned in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. “When two places trade with one another, this doctrine supposes that, if the balance be even, neither of them either loses or gains; but if it leans in any degree to one side, that one of them loses, and the other gains, in proportion to its declension from the exact equilibrium. Both suppositions are false.” In fact, he pointed out, “trade which, without force or constraint, is naturally and regularly carried on between any two places, is always advantageous, though not always equally so, to both”.
As Smith’s criticism makes clear, the ideas of “balance of trade” and “trade deficits” are archaic throwbacks to mercantilism, even though they’re still popular among politicians playing to ill-informed voters. Smith’s points prevail among economists even in cases where one country burdens its population with trade barriers while allowing relatively unhindered exports.
The future of online free speech for Canadians
The Liberals in Ottawa prefer not to hear uppity citizens yapping about Liberal policies, and having a majority in the House of Commons means that there’s very little chance that they won’t be able to ram through a bill to curtail the ability of Canadians to speak freely online — that’s why I put a “warrant canary” in my daily Substack summary of blog posts. On X, John Carter has some advice that may be helpful to Canadians who don’t agree with the government:
Carney is essentially trying to implement Yookay style online speech controls. With his stolen majority government, there’s no way to stop him, and so no reason to expect that he won’t succeed.
Canadian nationalists therefore need to start being smart. Use coded language. Avoid overt “hate speech”. Don’t advocate violence. Use positive messaging, love of country rather than hatred of other. Make their job as difficult as possible.
This is nothing the right hasn’t seen before. The bad old days of Twitter censorship are not so far behind us. Britain and Europe already have very similar laws. That hasn’t stopped their nationalist communities. Censorship doesn’t change the underlying social conditions. At worst it prevents people from being too direct. Furthermore, by forcing dissidents to be clever, it exerts a selective pressure that raises the intellectual level of dissidents, while making the censors themselves increasingly ridiculous.
Censors themselves are usually very stupid people. Coded language tends to go right over their tiny heads. They don’t handle satire well. It’s also very easy to mock a regime like this by parroting its own vocabulary. Elbows up, everyone. Diversity is our greatest strength.
State capacity is another factor. How many censors do they actually have? How competent are they? (diversity is our greatest strength!) How many people can they actually enforce these laws on? Every time someone gets dragged into court the state is burning a significant quantity of time, energy, and attention. The cost-benefit of tasking bureaucrats, police officers, lawyers, and judges to punish random shitposts is math that doesn’t math very well. The entire strategy relies on making an example of a few to cow the many. If the many aren’t cowed, because for instance despite the censorship they can see with their own eyes what’s actually happening to their country on the street, all censorship does is piss people off and further undermine the legitimacy of a regime that would not be resorting to censorship in the first place if its legitimacy was beyond reproach.
This is bad. I’m not looking forward to it. But panic won’t help. Keep your wits about you, stay calm, be smart.
