Quotulatiousness

February 13, 2026

The selective ability to override any non-criminal law is a “useful tool to have”

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

The Canadian government is trying to get even more power to exempt their friends and favoured companies from needing to comply with any federal laws or regulations through a provision in an omnibus bill before Parliament. It may sound like a tool to dispense privileges and favours to politically well-connected individuals and organizations, but that’s only because that’s exactly what it does:

In a little-noticed provision included in the government’s latest omnibus bill, Carney government ministers would be able to override almost any non-criminal law they wanted, and provide special treatment to any person or corporation who requested it.

When pressed about the clause in a House of Commons committee this week, Minister of Canadian Identity Marc Miller called it a “useful tool to have”.

The provision is included in C-15, the 634-page “budget implementation” bill currently before the House of Commons.

Among its hundreds of amendments and orders are new powers allowing ministers to hand out special exemptions from any “Act of Parliament” under their purview.

This means that the minister of health would be able to issue exemptions from the Canada Health Act, the Indigenous services minister could oversee exemptions from the Indian Act and the minister of finance would be able to override the Income Tax Act.

Furthermore, ministers could hand out these exemptions to any “entity” they wanted. Under federal guidelines, an “entity” can mean everything from an individual to “a corporation” to an “unincorporated organization”.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see all kinds of ways that this provision could be abused to circumvent the normal rules everyone else is bound by. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Wall Street Apes reacts:

I can’t even believe this is real

Canada Minister Marc Miller is questioned about their new bill under the Liberal government led by Prime Minister Mark Carney that would EXEMPT ALL MINISTERS FROM ALL LAWS

Yes, you heard that correctly

Hidden in the omnibus budget implementation bill, section 208 or clause 12 amends the Red Tape Reduction Act to grant federal cabinet ministers broad discretionary powers

Ministers would be able to temporarily exempt any individual, company, organization, or entity from the application of almost any provision of any federal law (or regulations made under those laws) that the minister is responsible for administering or enforcing, with the sole exception of the Criminal Code

They can themselves, and deem anyone they choose exempt from ALL laws. The only exception is the criminal code

He says you can trust them because “Canadians expect us to act reasonably”

(Holy cr*p)

On her Substack, Melanie in Saskatchewan explains why the rule of law is not optional in Canada:

So let us play this forward. A Beijing connected firm establishes operations in Canada. It hires lobbyists. It meets with the appropriate minister. It argues that certain federal regulations are barriers to innovation or economic growth. Under Bill C 15, that minister could grant a temporary exemption. The company does not need to change Canadian law. It does not need to persuade Parliament. It only needs to persuade the right minister.

That is what should alarm Canadians.

When laws become selectively waivable by political discretion, they cease to be stable guardrails and become negotiable privileges. And power, once granted, is never granted because someone intends to leave it unused.

You tell us this is about economic growth amid trade tensions. Yet Canadians were told you were elected to steady the ship on trade and tariffs, to negotiate strength abroad, to stabilize economic uncertainty. Instead, trade tensions persist, tariffs remain contentious, and what advances efficiently is domestic policy architecture that conveniently aligns with the climate finance world you know so well.

Brookfield’s climate investment arm stands to benefit enormously from aggressive climate frameworks. You remain heavily invested. The potential for substantial personal financial gain is not speculation. It is disclosed reality.

You were not elected to refashion Canada into a climate investment thesis calibrated to suit global asset management portfolios. You were elected to manage trade pressures and protect Canadian economic interests.

This exemption clause is not a minor technical detail. It is a structural shift in how power is exercised. If it is so defensible, extract it from the omnibus bill and introduce it as standalone legislation. Let it be debated openly. Let Canadians see it clearly.

Implement a robust foreign agent registry immediately. Answer why a government that acknowledges compromised parliamentarians believes this is the moment to expand ministerial discretion over who must follow federal law.

The rule of law is not optional.

And Canadians did not vote for a system where compliance is mandatory for citizens but negotiable for the well connected.

February 10, 2026

Trump’s bullying gets NATO members to get serious about defence

Filed under: Europe, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Living in a country that’s starting to feel a bit like little Melos facing the might of Athens in its prime, I can assure you that, for all of his other questionable moves, Trump has succeeded in forcing the NATO allies to address their freeloading on defence where every president before him had come up empty:

There are downsides to insulting and threatening friends and acting like a Mafia don slapping around his goons. You risk turning them against you, for one thing. But if those friends have been freeloading off you for years, well, there are some upsides, too. We’re seeing that as President Donald Trump’s rough treatment of our European allies has driven them to huffily make steps to actually defend themselves rather than continue to rely on the American defense umbrella.

There’s No Incentive Like a Kick in the Rear

For years, Trump has pointed out that the prosperous nations of Western Europe have long free-loaded off of American military might to maintain their security—especially against Russia’s threat from the East. He claims that, during his first term, he told NATO leaders if they didn’t meet the alliance target of 2 percent of GDP on military spending per member, they’d be on their own. According to him:

    One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, “Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” I said, “You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.”

    “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

Those were rough words for supposed allies. They didn’t stand alone. Since then, Trump has also threatened to acquire Greenland over the protests of Europeans, Denmark (which governs the island territory), and Greenlanders themselves. That’s on top of his trade war antics which imperil the commerce that most effectively binds people together in peaceful relations. Such bullying has an impact.

“European governments and corporations are racing to reduce their exposure to U.S. technology, military hardware and energy resources as transatlantic relations sour,” Politico‘s Nicholas Vinocur and Zoya Sheftalovich wrote last week. “At a weekend retreat in Zagreb, Croatia, conservative European leaders including [German Chancellor Friedrich] Merz said it was time for the bloc to beef up its homegrown mutual-defense clause, which binds EU countries to an agreement to defend any EU country that comes under attack.”

“Military spending across the European Union is ramping up in what observers have noted is a significant and ‘extraordinary’ pivot from the comparatively placid postwar decades,” Northeastern University’s Tanner Stening observed last summer. “As part of the ReArm Europe plan, EU member states hope to mobilize up to 800 billion euros. In June, NATO leaders agreed to increase defense spending up to 5% of each country’s gross domestic product by 2035.”

Commenting on the Trump administration, eugyppius clearly understands something that a lot of Trump’s critics (and many fans) don’t seem to comprehend:

AI-generated image from AndrewSullivan.substack.com

An unstudied impression: Donald Trump is like a shark, in that he must always swim forward or risk suffocation. He, his administration and the media ecosystem that has grown up around Trump’s political persona depends upon action and controversy. In fallow news cycles, Trump steadily loses the initiative and two things happen: First, the media establishment and the leftist activist machine begin gathering their own critical momentum. Second, the vast MAGA-adjacent social media sphere must turn to other controversies to keep the clicks and the ad revenue flowing. Both of these work against the forty-seventh president and his purposes.

Since Trump’s initial barrage of executive orders has subsided, the media cycle has therefore lurched from one moment of hysteria and excitement to the next. Each new controversy totally eclipses the last. Hardly anybody remembers or talks about Nicolás Maduro any longer; the twin Minneapolis ICE shootings and associated protests, too, have faded. What were hailed as pivotal events which would finally discredit Trump’s programme this time look, in retrospect, like passing trivialities – not necessarily because they didn’t matter, but because sustained attention in this crazy messaging environment is impossible.

And on Trump’s pimp-handed dealings with the NATO allies:

Trump and NATO: Much of Trump’s MAGA base remains firmly isolationist and demands that the United States abandon the NATO alliance. Trump himself knows this and he has periodically questioned the utility of NATO. Formally, however, Trump’s administration stands behind the alliance, as anyone can see from reading the 2026 National Defense Strategy and the 2025 National Security Strategy. Yes, Trump wants European countries to increase defence spending. Yes, he still hopes to complete a strategic pivot away from Europe towards China. And yes, in the longer term, he probably nurtures ambitions of reducing the importance of NATO in favour of separate bilateral agreements with various European states. Such arrangements would also provide a lever for present and future administrations to disrupt the various policies and initiatives of the European Union, which Trump clearly despises and which at least as presently constructed amounts to a suicide pact for all of us on the Continent. These populist pressures and future ambitions, together with a general distrust and legitimate scorn for Eurocrat elites, seem to be why NATO periodically fades from Trump’s favour, although never for very long. All of this is to say that I really don’t think Trump’s January bluster was a mere Art-of-the-Deal negotiating tactic, but a reflection of real tensions and contradictions within Trumpism.

Trump and Europe: Here again, we see two competing tendencies. Generally, the Trump administration has followed a sly strategy of pursuing ties with the more or less aligned and presently ascendant populist-right movements of Europe. The Trump administration has also defended our rights to free speech, particularly on social media; relentlessly attacked our insane energy transition; and criticised our elites for their failure (or refusal) to stop mass migration. The purpose of these efforts is to isolate the Eurotards by fertilising the hostile populism that is growing ominously just beneath their double chins. If you are wondering why Trump bothers with this, I refer you to my previous paragraph: Sympathetic governments in key European states, joined to the United States, would be a means of sidelining the European Union and remaking Atlanticism in Trump’s image.

Exactly how to help the populist right into power is a much harder nut to crack. Expressing overt support for parties like Alternative für Deutschland can hurt more than it helps, and the Americans don’t have more direct means of influencing domestic politics over here. At the very least, this a long-term project requiring tactics and strategies we have yet to explore, and probably some institutions we have yet to create.

Update, 11 February: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Heightening tensions in the Indian Ocean

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack, Fergus Mason updates us on what’s happening around the UK/US military base on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean:

Diego Garcia

One of the great mysteries of Keir Starmer’s government is why he’s so determined to give the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which is 1,200 miles away and has never owned them. Even now, as he desperately fights for his political survival, Starmer is pushing ahead with plans to give away the strategic archipelago then pay tens of billions of pounds to lease back one of the islands. It’s an odd thing to be so focused on — but whether his compulsion to surrender the islands is driven by corruption or naivete, it’s sending out signals of weakness. And those signals are being noticed.

The Maldives Makes A Grab

Last Thursday the Republic of Maldives announced that it had rejected the UN International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea’s ruling on its maritime boundaries, and sent an armed boat to carry out a “special surveillance operation” in the northern part of the Chagos island’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The Chagos EEZ is claimed by Mauritius, but of course actually belongs to Britain until Starmer’s surrender deal is approved by Parliament. However, the Maldivian government has now decided to make its own claim on the area — and it’s very publicly doing something about it. The “coast guard vessel” CGS Dharumavantha — a former Turkish Navy fast attack craft — is now operating in the area, along with drones from the Maldives National Defence Force Air Corps.

Of course, the Maldives has no real claim to the Chagos islands or any part of their waters. The country — a tiny group of islands southwest of Sri Lanka, with a land area of just 115 square miles — was a British crown colony from 1796 to 1953, and a British protectorate until 1965. Like Mauritius, it has never owned the Chagos Islands. However, it’s just 300 miles away from them, much closer than Mauritius. It appears that its leader, President Mohamed Muizzi, has decided that if the key British territory is up for grabs the Maldives should be the ones to grab it. It’s true the Maldives doesn’t have much of a navy, but then Mauritius doesn’t have much of a navy either and is a lot further away. If the Maldives can seize control over part of the extremely valuable Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA), and even possibly some of the northern islands, there isn’t a lot Mauritius can do about it.

Why would the Maldives be so keen to seize part of the Chagos EEZ? That one’s simple. Under British protection, the Chagos MPA (which is the largest marine nature reserve in the entire world) has been officially off limits to commercial fishing since 2010 but, in practice, has barely been fished at all since 1968. This makes it a unique and potentially lucrative resource in the Indian Ocean region, which has seen its ecosystems devastated by destructive fishing methods. The wealth of the MPA is the main reason Mauritius wants the Chagos islands. Its own coastal waters have been blighted by overfishing, including the destruction of coral reefs by explosives and bleach injection, and now it wants to plunder the MPA. The Maldives is also busily engaged in destroying its own fish stocks (fishing is the country’s largest industry and employs half the population) and is desperate for new waters to pillage. They don’t just want access for their own boats, either. Like Mauritius, the Maldives under Muizzi’s rule is an increasingly close ally of China.

The Scourge Of The Seas

China has the world’s largest fishing fleet, and it’s not even close. Over 44% of all commercial fishing is carried out by Chinese boats — and they’re notorious for flouting international law. Chinese boats regularly change their names and disable their satellite tracking systems to conceal their identity, then fish illegally in other countries’ waters. They violate quotas, catch protected species and strip whole swathes of ocean clean of any life much larger than plankton with massive, indiscriminate drift nets. Chinese fishing boats have also been implicated in people trafficking, drug smuggling and acting as spying and covert action platforms for the Chinese navy.

If either Mauritius or the Maldives gain control of the Chagos MPA it’s a certainty they will immediately give Chinese boats access, and this priceless nature reserve will rapidly be trawled and drift-netted into a barren, lifeless wasteland. From China’s point of view, of course, it doesn’t matter which of their lackeys takes over the Chagos islands as long as one of them does, so don’t expect them to step in to help Mauritius. They don’t care who they get the fishing rights from.

February 9, 2026

Jamil Jivani on his trip to Washington DC

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If you depend on the CBC, the Toronto Star or other legacy Canadian media, if you heard anything at all about Bowmanville-Oshawa North MP Jamil Jivani’s visit to key American leaders in Washington DC, you probably got the story framed as Liberals tut-tutting and disapproving of Jivani, his initiative to make the trip, and how he should leave everything to the government. If nothing else, it further proved that Prime Minister Carney doesn’t actually want better relations with the US, as his entire campaign was based on opposition to Trump and its success in riling up Canadian boomers with the moronic eLbOwS uP nonsense.

In the National Post Jivani discusses the trip and what he’s learned from it:

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

It was a whirlwind of a trip, full of excellent conversations. I had meetings with the White House and State Department, including conversations with President Donald Trump, Vice-President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Senators from Montana, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as the United States Trade Representative, each sat down with me to share their priorities. Businesses and industries employing thousands of Canadians shared their insights with me on where Canada-U.S. trade fits into their vision for economic growth.

Doors were open for dialogue about how Canada and the U.S. can work together at a time when pessimism gets most of the media attention. Certainly, my 15-year friendship with the vice-president played a key role in opening those doors. But what I found across the board was optimism about how we can move trade negotiations forward. I was particularly happy to hear key insights on how we can make progress on specific sectoral priorities, and the importance of strategic diplomacy. I offered my perspective on why CUSMA is so important to communities like mine in Bowmanville—Oshawa North, and I expressed my hope that CUSMA will continue to ensure Canada and the U.S. both benefit from a special economic and security relationship.

There is only so much I can share without first having the chance to speak with Prime Minister Mark Carney and Minister Dominic LeBlanc. Out of respect for their unique responsibilities in negotiating trade with the United States, it’s important that I debrief them before saying too much publicly and see how we can work together moving forward as Conservatives and Liberals.

However, I do want to point out a key observation related to the need for strategic diplomacy. Mexico — the third partner in our trilateral trade agreement with the U.S. — is further ahead in its engagement with the U.S. than Canada is. On Jan. 28, 2026, Mexico and the U.S. announced formal talks on CUSMA reforms. A week later, Mexico and the U.S. announced a joint action plan for critical minerals. Neither of these announcements included Canada.

Observers of this news would be right to worry that the current Canadian government may be making similar mistakes as were made under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the 2017 CUSMA negotiations. At that time, Mexico advanced its negotiations with the U.S. while Canada was largely left out of the process. It was only at the last minute, when a bilateral agreement between Mexico and the US was a real possibility, that Canada was included and our unique trilateral arrangement continued.

It would be a mistake to relive 2017 all over again, if for no other reason than Canadian workers and businesses deserve to have full representation in a process that has such a significant impact on our economy. The workers at the GM plant in Oshawa deserve to know that their government did everything possible to protect their jobs and encourage investment in their industry. All Canadians deserve to know that their elected officials are making the best effort possible to advance our national interests.

Full disclosure: Jamil Jivani is my Member of Parliament, and I fully support his decision to go and I hope that it actually does help make for improved trade relations between Canada and the United States. Bitterness and uncertainty only benefit the Liberal Party and Mark Carney, not ordinary Canadians. Attacking and criticizing Donald Trump plays well in our deranged and sycophantic media, but it makes Trump less willing to deal fairly with Canada on trade or other issues of critical importance to both nations.

February 7, 2026

Liberal horror at a Conservative MP going to Washington to talk trade

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

Jamil Jivani, Conservative Member of Parliament for the riding of Bowmanville-Oshawa North, is being called all sorts of names by Liberals and their creatures in the mainstream media for his temerity in actually going to Washington DC to try to encourage trade talks between Canada and the United States:

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Mark Carney, I want to speak to you directly for a moment, because this whole episode has your fingerprints all over it.

You have spent months telling Canadians we live in a more dangerous and divided world. You have warned us that this is not a transition but a rupture. You have explained, repeatedly, that Canada must adapt, that middle powers must act differently, that old assumptions no longer apply. It is very serious language. Big language. The kind you deliver slowly, as if the room should be taking notes.

So imagine my surprise when a Conservative MP behaved exactly the way your speeches suggest Canada must behave, and Ottawa promptly short-circuited.

Jamil Jivani went to Washington to try to open a door you and your government have been telling Canadians does not exist. He used a personal relationship with JD Vance, not for applause, not for theatrics, but for the radical act of actually talking to someone who matters. And suddenly, Mark, this was not adaptive diplomacy. It was alarming. Inappropriate. A problem.

This is the part where your credibility starts to wobble.

Because let’s be honest. When people asked you about engaging Donald Trump directly, your response boiled down to “Who cares?” Either because it bored you or because you preferred not to acknowledge that door at all. So when a Conservative tries anyway, the issue is not that the door was touched. It is that someone proved it was never locked in the first place.

Jivani did not freelance. He did not sneak off. He offered this connection to your government first. Openly. Calmly. And it was dismissed. Brushed aside. Not interested. And when he went anyway, your side did not react with curiosity or even grudging respect. It reacted with outrage.

The kind of outrage you see when someone fixes a problem you have been holding meetings about for weeks without ever intending to solve it. Like an office that has spent months discussing a flickering lightbulb, only to panic when someone quietly screws in a new one and sits back down before the chair can call the meeting to order.

And then, almost on cue, came the shiny object.

I am not accusing you of anything, Mark. I am simply asking whether it is coincidence that the outrage over Jivani going to Washington was followed almost immediately by a dramatic announcement about dropping the EV mandate. Was that timing accidental, or was it a convenient way to make Canadians look over there while a Conservative threatened to come back with something measurable. I am not saying it was a distraction. I am just saying the choreography was impressive.

Now, let’s talk about cooperation, because you and your allies invoke that word constantly.

When generalized liberals complain that Conservatives will not “play ball”, what they seem to mean is that Conservatives are not being obedient. Cooperation, in practice, appears to mean standing aside politely while you govern unchallenged. It does not mean Conservatives doing something useful that might work. Especially not if it works where you did not.

And this is where your rhetoric corners you.

February 6, 2026

QotD: FEMA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Before we get to anything or anybody else, it’s vitally important to discuss FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Administration]. Shortly after the San Francisco earthquake that famously dropped a two-level highway on hundreds of cars and cracked the baseball stadium while a World Series game was being played, I spoke with a friend in the Bay Area who was a police officer on the scene. Deeply frustrated, he told me several hair-curling stories about the way these federal bureaucrats got in the way of real disaster relief workers, strutting around for the television cameras, trying to look important, following an agenda of their own that had little to do with what needed to be done.

FEMA, in fact, is an illegal organization. It’s mentioned nowhere in the Constitution (which lists the lawful powers of the government in Article I, Section 8), nor did anybody ever vote about it, neither you nor I, nor even the Congress. It was created out of thin air by Presidential fiat, and given unprecedented power to override, at gunpoint, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law in general.

Since the San Francisco earthquake, I have been paying attention. In all that time, I have never heard anybody, civilian or local official, who had anything to say about FEMA that didn’t make it seem like a combination of the Nazi Gestapo and the Black Death. Apparently there is no situation so tragic and overwhelming that they can’t make it even worse. FEMA has an unanswerable power of life and death over entire communities and there is nothing to protect those communities — or anything else that is uniquely American — from its foul dictatorial grasp.

L. Neil Smith, “Good Mornin’ America, How Are Ya?”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-09-04.

February 5, 2026

“It was not fear of the crime that silenced authorities, but fear of a word: racist“

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, Celina101 outlines the long and sordid history of official deliberate blindness to a widespread and horrific crime wave in Britain, all for fear that if they paid proper attention they’d be labelled as “racists”:

There are crimes so extreme that the mind instinctively rejects them, not because they are implausible, but because accepting them would require acknowledging a collapse of morality too large to comprehend. Child sexual abuse is one such crime.

Child sexual abuse does not arrive in a single form. It ranges from isolated abductions, to organised pornography networks, to violence carried out by parents or those entrusted with care. Every one of these crimes is horrific, and none should ever be minimised or ignored.

But there is one form of abuse that stands apart, not because it is worse in kind, but because it was allowed to flourish unchecked. The organised targeting of schoolgirls by groups of men who lingered outside schools, fast-food outlets, and transport hubs, grooming children into addiction, sexual exploitation, and prostitution, constituted a distinct and recognisable pattern of abuse.

This pattern was not hidden. It was not unknowable. And yet for longer than a quarter of a century, British authorities chose not to act. Despite the issue being raised at a national level as early as 2003, and despite its presence being well understood in certain towns since at least the late 1980s, it was deliberately sidelined, minimised, and left to metastasise.1

For decades, these gangs were allowed to congregate openly around school gates without consequence. What shielded them was not ignorance or lack of evidence, but an institutional terror of confronting anything that carried racial implications; the shade of their skin protected them.

By 2011, the long-standing silence surrounding the issue began to break. Once the initial barrier was breached, the extent of the abuse became increasingly difficult to suppress.2 Over the following years, British media outlets published a succession of detailed investigations that brought the scale of the crimes into public view.

In September 2012, The Times published an extensive overview of the phenomenon.3 The paper reported that for more than a decade, organised groups of men had been able to groom, exploit, and traffic girls across multiple towns and cities in Britain, often operating with minimal interference from authorities.

Yet, event The Times underestimated the scale of this. By early 2015, senior police figures were publicly acknowledging the scale of the crisis. One officer spoke of “tens of thousands” of current victims of grooming gangs. A Member of Parliament, representing a constituency widely associated with the problem, went further, suggesting that the total number of victims nationwide, past and present, could reach as high as one million.4

These figures are almost impossible to comprehend. They refer to school-aged girls systematically identified, isolated, and exploited over many years. And yet, despite the magnitude of the harm, perpetrators were able to operate with remarkable impunity.

By the end of 2014, the Association of Chief Police Officers confirmed that the number of victims each year ran into the tens of thousands.5 Even on the most conservative interpretation, this would place the number of victims over a twenty-year period well into six figures. Against this backdrop, the number of successful convictions, under 200, stands as a staggering indictment of the system meant to protect the vulnerable and enforce the law.

There is no comparable serious crime in modern Britain where the disparity between victims and convictions is so extreme.

  1. https://web.archive.org/web/20100620042427/http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/law_order/Asian%2Brape%2Ballegations/256893
  2. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/944206/Group-based_CSE_Paper.pdf
  3. Andrew Norfolk, “Police Files Reveal Vast Child Protection Scandal”, The Times, 24 Sep 2012.
  4. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/society/article/grooming-gangs-ethnicities-how-many-statistics-data-dpx2bfrts#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9Cone%20million%E2%80%9D%20figure%20comes,over%20a%2070%2Dyear%20period.
  5. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-files-reveal-vast-child-protection-scandal-ffrpdr09vrv

February 4, 2026

Amelia, created by woke propagandists, is now the figurehead for the anti-woke

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Michael Greer provides a quick thumbnail sketch of the Amelia story for folks who need to get caught up:

I’ve been watching the saga of Amelia from the far side of the Atlantic in a state of utter bemusement.

For those who don’t know the first act of the saga, the British government had some collection of flacks create a video game for British kids, which was designed to elicit “racist” (that is, patriotic and un-woke) statements from them — at which point the kids who fell for it would be reported to the police for, erm, reeducation. (I wish I was making this up.)

Amelia was a cartoon figure who was supposed to mouth allegedly racist slogans, and they gave her violet hair because they thought that would annoy right-wingers, who make jokes about women with dyed hair.

Ponder the immeasurable stupidity of the flacks who put nationalist and patriotic slogans in the mouth of the kind of cute female figure who would have most teenage boys reaching into their trousers on the spot. Of course these same teenage boys instantly hijacked her and turned her into a mascot, just as they did with Kek back in the day. Of course these same teenage boys, being far more computer-skilled than government flacks, started doing LLM-generated videos of Amelia speaking out in favor of nationalist and patriotic ideas.

Of course everybody in Britain who’s sick and tired of the Starmer government and its woke doctrines embraced Amelia as their latest heroine, not least because the Guardian‘s foam-flecked fury when she’s mentioned is so entertaining to watch …

And then, as with Kek, things got weird. We’re still in the early stages of the weirdening but it would not surprise me a bit to find that just as a cartoon frog ten years ago became the vessel through which an archaic Native American deity manifested and sent the US spinning down an uncharted path, a purple-haired waifu may just become another such vehicle.

Britain used to have quite a collection of war goddesses, back in Celtic times. I’m curious, not to mention apprehensive, to see just who’s taking this opportunity to stream back into manifestation.

February 1, 2026

The Agora of Athens | A Historical Tour

Filed under: Architecture, Government, Greece, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 3 Oct 2025

The Agora was the political and economic heart of ancient Athens. This tour explores its long history and evocative ruins.

Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:47 Bouleuterion
1:44 Tholos
2:22 Monument of the Eponymous Heroes
2:56 Temple of Hephaestus
5:28 The Hellenistic Agora
6:16 Stoa of Attalos
6:57 Augustus and the Agora
8:06 Odeon of Agrippa
9:26 Herulian Wall
10:56 Overview

January 31, 2026

QotD: Liberal principles according to Karl Popper

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

As usual when Popper addressed a meeting, his aim was to challenge and provoke thought, rather than simply endorsing the assumptions that he shared with his audience. […] It may help to start with a summary of the liberal principles that Popper spelled out in section 3. This will be helpful for a general readership (unlike the Mont Pelerin meeting) where there are likely to be many people who do not hold non-socialist liberal principles and some who are not be clear about what these principles are.

(1) The state is a necessary evil and its powers should be kept to the minimum that is necessary.

(2) A democracy is a state where the government can be changed without bloodshed.

(3) Democracy cannot confer benefits on people. “Democracy provides no more than a framework within which the citizens may act in a more or less organised and coherent way.”

(4) Democracy does not mean that the majority is right.

(5) Institutions need to be tempered and supported by traditions.

(6) There is no Liberal Utopia. There are always problems, conflicts of interests, choices to be made between the lesser of evils.

(7) Liberalism is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It is about modifying or changing institutions and traditions rather than wholesale replacement of the existing order. The exception to this is when a tyranny is in place, that is a government that can only be changed by violence and bloodshed.

(8) The importance of the moral framework.

“Among the traditions that we must count as the most important is what we may call the ‘moral framework’ (corresponding to the institutional ‘legal framework’) of a society. This incorporates the society’s traditional sense of justice or fairness, or the degree of moral sensitivity that it has reached … Nothing is more dangerous than the destruction of this traditional framework. (Its destruction was consciously aimed at by Nazism.)”

Rafe Champion, “Summary and commentary on a paper on public opinion and liberal principles delivered by Popper to the Mont Pelerin Society”.

January 30, 2026

Corruption – there … and also here

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Education, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Copernican draws some examples of life in a corrupt authoritarian society (the old Soviet Union) and compares them with similar situations in the western world today. Depressingly, we have been converging on how Soviets used to have to work the system just to get access to the people they had to get permission slips and permits from:

Corruption is one of the largest issues of our time. Particularly in places like Minnesota, but also nationally. For that reason, it’s necessary to understand corruption, what it is, and how to utilize its benefits. The United States exists in a political hybridization of Soviet Managerialism and Libertarian Corporatism. In both cases, corruption is a common feature of our society, but we don’t see it on the ground the same way that Mexican business owners do or Russian gangs.

Thus, I pose the following question: Are our societies so different that we cannot also benefit from corruption while our culture is ground to dust beneath it?

I recently saw a video from this YouTube channel that discusses Russia and the psychology of living in an oppressive state. A nation not of law, but of management, public policies, and mercurial Karens at every level. I’m not sure how it feels to be Western European (I get the impression the progenitor of the videos is now living in Western Europe), but I can say that, being an American, life seems similar to what’s described therein: Hope seems dangerous. Liberty seems like a time bomb until you step on the wrong bureaucrat’s toes, and your entire future and that of your family is held hostage by the proclivities of unaccountable bureaucrats that you’ve never spoken to1.

Meanwhile, at the top of government, billions of dollars are being laundered by corrupt politicians like Tim Walz, who will lie to your face. Import demographics that hate you. And if you dare defend yourselves, a lynch mob may well try to kill you. How do I get my hands on that money spigot that seems to be free-access for people who want to kill me?

Corruption, or lack thereof, is another one of those American Myths that needs to be deconstructed in the psyche of the population. To do that, we need to understand what corruption really is. Not at the national level of billions of laundered dollars for foreign pirates, but at the personal level. What is corruption for us stuck in the limbo of a faltering civilization?

    When I was young, I witnessed corruption for the first time. I was a child, and I was just entering the primary school system in my home country of Russia. Like all things, there was government paperwork to fill out and submit. When we arrived at the office, an old woman sat behind a glass barrier to help people with their paperwork. My mother knocked on the glass to get her attention. The clerk ignored my mother. My mother knocked again and then took a chocolate bar out of her bag. She passed it through a window into the barrier to the clerk. The clerk looked up and took the chocolate bar, hiding it in a stack of forms. Then she asked, “How can I help?” and filed the papers so that I could attend school.

Corruption doesn’t have to solely give an advantage to those politicians and billionaires sitting atop the society. Corruption can act at every level, from top to bottom. The West exists in a system that is corrupt from the top down, while the Russians exist in a system that is corrupt from the bottom up. Corruption doesn’t need to take the form of extortion payments or threats of ending careers. Corruption can be small, personal, and in many ways more honest than managerial formalization.

Maybe a manager will find some problem with your paperwork, any paperwork you hand in. So to smooth over the process, you bring her a coffee or a chocolate bar. Maybe your academic advisor will help you make the right connections if you gift him a bottle of whiskey or schnapps for Christmas. Maybe you want a teacher to treat your child better at school, so you give her a cupcake or school supplies as a gift.

You don’t need police officers on the take to be advantaged by corruption.

Most people here on substack are underemployed. I am one of them for the time being. I can state with certainty that I have never gotten a job by applying for a job. Never once have I sent out a resume and heard back anything besides an automated “dear applicant, kindly go fuck yourself” from the HR manager. Maybe it’s a byproduct of being a White guy. Lord knows I have enough degrees to find work.

Rather, the only way I’ve ever found employment is through direct connection: I have a friend who has a friend who knows someone who needs an employee. I’m close to fitting the bill, so they’ll hire me. Sometimes they have to dip and duck around hiring-managers and HR to do it:

    Here’s where we’re going to post the job. We’re legally required to leave the posting up for two weeks, but apply with these five keywords in your Resume. When I review the resumes submitted, I’ll be able to pick out yours.

It seems quite conspiratorial when you say it out loud, though that’s the way it has to be in more than a few companies. If they want to hire a White guy, there are hoops to jump through. The addition of “hiring policies” and “diversity” quotas has just added a few hoops, but did not limited one’s acrobatic ability.

Corruption is an individual or a small group of individuals acting in their own interests by ignoring or subverting legal or social rules of conduct.

If you have a friend you’d rather hire than some Indian with a slightly nicer resume? That’s corruption. When the boss hires his nephew, that’s corruption. When you give the DMV associate a chocolate bar, and she helps you with your paperwork instead of telling you to go fuck yourself, that’s corruption. When you hand the inspector of your 40-year-old truck a fifty so that he marks “passed” on your emissions inspection, that’s corruption.

  1. “I am Russian. Here’s how corruption really works.” I highly recommend a look. – https://youtu.be/v21toLzcCgg

January 29, 2026

“The meme works because Amelia has perfectly normal, mainstream opinions”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Humour, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Little Platoon responds to a lamestream media report on the Amelia phenomenon:

This story was quite funny enough before it got noticed by the rickety old goblin creatures of the mainstream media.

Amelia is not a “purple-haired AI goth girl”, she is a government-created videogame character designed to teach kids that “liking the national flag” and “attending protests where that flag might be seen” makes you a potential terrorist.

That really was the extent of it. The game she comes from is extremely non-specific about the content you’ve been radicalised by. At no point do you think, “yes, I can see why this was terrorist behaviour”.

The actual storyline is not a million miles away from Winston Smith and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

So the effect is: you have this totally normal opinion that most people have? You’ve been seduced by Amelia and now the Hijabi Hero (IRONY) at Prevent is going to send you to jail.

Amelia hasn’t been “hijacked by the far-right”, she’s just a textbook example of Death of the Author.

The government wanted to have her demonstrate the dangers of online radicalisation. But because this is the British government, they made it seem cool, justified, and you’ll probably get a hot goth girlfriend out of it.

The meme works because Amelia has perfectly normal, mainstream opinions.

She can say “I like pork sausages and dogs”, like roughly 98% of British people, and this will send a certain sort of person — the government, the Anti-Extremism Lead at Generic NGO — into a full-on panic attack.

It’s about the disconnect between the values of the government and those of the people they govern. The joke is that Amelia could ever be considered “Far Right”.

(Ironically, the interviewee in this clip is just as AI-coded as the actual AI clip they play. He’d probably require fewer tokens to generate.)

Meme coins remain extremely cringe, however.

At The Hungarian Conservative, Joakim Scheffer discusses the reaction of the caught-flat-footed mainstream media as their attempts to downplay Amelia’s impact serve to increase interest and attention:

British outlets The Guardian and LBC published strikingly similar articles about Amelia in recent days, both concluding that the purple-haired goth girl, who stands against mass migration and in favour of traditional British values and culture, is, in fact, racist and fuels hatred.

The Guardian introduces Amelia as a girl “who proudly carries a mini Union flag and appears to have a penchant for racism“, before lamenting the “plethora of increasingly sophisticated AI-generated iterations” of her, including “real-life” encounters between Amelia and movie characters, “accompanied by racist language and far-right messaging”.

Since her “birth”, Amelia has indeed become increasingly popular. From an average of around 500 posts a day when she was first introduced, the figure rose to roughly 10,000 daily posts starting on 15 January, when the meme broke through to international audiences. Amelia has since reached the highest levels of the right-wing internet ecosystem, even being reposted by Elon Musk himself.

Starship Troopers: Service Isn’t The Point

Filed under: Books, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 5 Sept 2025

There’s a long-running argument over whether Heinlein’s book describes military service as the exclusive path to citizenship, or if “federal service” is a much broader basket of enfranchisement. While a close read of the book makes it unquestionably clear which is correct, it misses the greater point. Heinlein was writing about the role of civic virtue in the stability of a republic, his citizenship-through-service framing is the literary conceit for discussing that larger question.

For a more detailed examination of the nature of Federal Service, I recommend James Gifford’s essay on the subject: https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ft…

00:00 Intro
00:45 What is Federal Service?
02:18 An Exploration of Enfranchisement
03:13 Expanded Universe
05:38 But Why?
06:59 Starside R&D
09:07 “Unreasonable Facsimile”
10:54 Filtering Civic Virtue
(more…)

January 28, 2026

An ADA unintended consequence in Los Angeles

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

I’ve heard many people refer to the Americans with Disabilities Act as the worst piece of legislation in US history, and stories like this one make it easy to agree:

Los Angeles’s streets are in notoriously bad shape. Fewer than two-thirds are considered in a state of good repair, according to the city’s Department of Public Works. Broken sidewalks have spawned years of costly litigation, and Los Angeles pays out millions of dollars each year to drivers whose cars are damaged by potholes.

Many cities would see this situation as a mandate for change. And Los Angeles has indeed made a change: last summer, the city quietly stopped repaving its streets. Not slowed. Not fell behind. Stopped completely.

The Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA) has not repaved a single street since last June, and the city’s latest budget practically zeros out repaving for next fiscal year. StreetLA crews are still doing some road repairs, fixing potholes and patching problem areas. But the most basic form of urban maintenance — full street resurfacing — has all but disappeared in America’s second-largest city.

Why has Los Angeles stopped repaving its streets? The answer, it turns out, has to do with federal disability rules that, paradoxically, have made fixing roads legally riskier than letting them fall apart. Though well-intentioned, L.A.’s shift shows how such policies can unintentionally worsen urban quality of life.

The clearest explanation of the city’s shift comes from L.A.–based housing and transportation advocate Oren Hadar. Digging through budget documents and engineering classifications, Hadar explained in an essay from late last year that the city didn’t necessarily abandon street work so much as reclassify it out of existence.

The city seems to have invented a new category of repair specifically designed to avoid triggering costly federal accessibility mandates. Instead of repaving streets, StreetsLA now performs what it calls “large asphalt repairs”. As Hadar explained, these repairs address localized damage — areas larger than a pothole but smaller than full resurfacing. Essentially, the city repaves only part of a street rather than the entire width, as shown below.

A “large asphalt repair” on L.A.’s Century Boulevard. Courtesy: StreetsLA on X

But, as Hadar wrote, “the thing about large asphalt repair is that it’s … not a real thing. It appears to be a term made up by the city some time in the last year.”

Why invent a new classification? The reason lies in federal disability law. Under regulations implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act, when a city alters a street, it must also bring associated pedestrian infrastructure into compliance. That means installing ADA-compliant curb ramps at every intersection along the way.

Repaving is considered an alteration that triggers these requirements. Maintenance activities, such as filling potholes or making minor repairs, are not. The city claims that large asphalt repairs are “pavement maintenance activity” and therefore do not require ADA upgrades.

That distinction carries enormous financial and logistical consequences. Hadar found that each curb ramp costs roughly $50,000, totaling about $200,000 per intersection. With roughly ten intersections per mile, curb ramps alone can add around $2 million per mile to the cost of repaving — a figure that often exceeds the cost of the asphalt itself. Design and construction typically take 9 to 12 months per ramp, and federal rules require the ramps to be completed by the time the street is resurfaced.

Update, 29 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 27, 2026

Minneapolis – protest, insurrection, or massive distraction?

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eric Schwalm talks about the organized nature of the Minneapolis protests and points out how much work it takes to set up and run:

“No Kings, No ICE” protest on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota on 23 January, 2026.
Photo by Myotus via Wikimedia Commons.

As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops — both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations — I’ve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly.

What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest”. It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.

Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction — or worse.

This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s.

The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers — complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal — you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.

I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night.

Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war.

We either recognize what we’re actually looking at — or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread.

Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore. It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.

On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds points out that the “protests” are serving to distract attention away from state and local officials’ role in enabling massive fraud rings in Minnesota which reportedly scored billions of federal dollars for phantom organizations:

This image depicts a similar action by the Trusts at the turn of the last century. (Library of Congress).

The squid was frightened, so we got the ink: Increasingly violent “protests”-cum-riots explicitly aimed at blocking ICE operations with the stated goal of forcing federal authorities out of Minnesota entirely, while generating maximum media attention.

These are not spontaneous uprisings of the aggrieved, but organized actions featuring out-of-state actors and organizations, detailed training programs for demonstrators, and large amounts of intentionally murky funding from organizations like Indivisible, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and others.

They’re coordinating their anti-ICE operations — identifying, chasing and blocking agents to keep them from arresting illegal-immigrant criminals — through highly organized chat groups on Signal, a secure communications platform, Fox News reported.

And Minnesota government officials are proudly touting their involvement in this coordination.

Sen. Bernie Sanders made much of Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s role in a fundraising email this weekend, praising her for “playing a key role in mobilizing grassroots opposition to Trumpism”.

That’s making these often violent, deliberately obstructive demonstrations look less like a civil rights sit-in and more like a government-backed insurrection.

Tragically, this aggressive and confrontational strategy has produced martyrs who can now be exploited for political purposes.

“Two things can be true at the same time,” Fox News’ Asra Nomani posted Monday.

The death of Alex Pretti, the armed demonstrator who got into a fatal tussle with ICE agents Saturday, “is a real and devastating tragedy, and there are several investigations appropriately occurring into the circumstances behind his killing”.

But also, “A far-left organizing network put Pretti in harm’s way and then turned him into a martyr … to sow the perception of chaos in America”.

Whatever investigators determine about how Pretti’s death unfolded, the fact remains that a cynical and corrupt political machine has fostered for its own purposes a situation that’s dangerous for its own supporters, and for the political future of our nation.

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