Quotulatiousness

September 24, 2026

The benefits to US national security from the Greenland agreement

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

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?

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

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

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

Those in Britain who supported Brexit are often accused of nostalgia for a past in which the country was powerful, but I do not think this nostalgia, if it ever existed at all, was very widespread. One might well say that nostalgia, on the part of France, was and is a driving force in the European Union, since it is only by union with Germany than France can aspire to a semi-Napoleonic role in Europe.

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

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

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

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

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.

September 21, 2026

Price controls work … but not the way they’re intended to

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Politicians love to intervene in markets, trying to impose their preferred solution to “problems” like high prices. But markets don’t work the way politicians think they do:

Price ceilings don’t manage markets, they destroy them. In 1946 the US meat market collapsed because of it.

The Office of Price Administration set beef ceiling prices during World War II. Ranchers and meatpackers adapted: some held cattle rather than sell at a loss, others shifted product to black markets, and slaughter volumes dropped. The OPA briefly lifted controls in mid-1946 under pressure. Beef flooded back into stores almost immediately.

Then Congress, drowning in constituent complaints about inflation, reimposed ceilings in August 1946. Slaughter collapsed within weeks. By October 1946, beef virtually disappeared from American grocery store shelves. You could walk into a butcher shop in Chicago or New York and find nothing. Scarcity was manufactured entirely by Washington bureaucrats setting prices below what producers needed to cover costs.

Mises explained the mechanism precisely: a price ceiling creates a shortage, which produces political pressure for rationing and further controls, spiraling into comprehensive economic disorganization. The OPA ran that experiment in real time on the American food supply.

President Truman ended meat controls on November 9, 1946. Beef returned within days. The supply existed the entire time. Ranchers and packers simply refused to sell at confiscatory prices, and they were correct to refuse. Coercive price suppression causes economic destruction, and 1946 proved it at the grocery counter.

September 20, 2026

“Honest” graft

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

Politicians and corruption go together like wine and cheese but not like crime and punishment for some reason. It’s almost as though the path to wealth and influence goes through political connections rather than economic efficiency and innovation. Chris Bray points out the difference between the “honest” graft of days gone by and the kind of all-consuming corruption we see far too often these days:

Tammany had honest graft: They said they would build a bridge or a park, and then they built it. The cost would be sort of not nakedly obscene, and no money would be missing if there was an audit. But by the most remarkable coincidence, the land where the park or the highway or the approaches to the bridge would go turned out to be owned by very close friends of the Tammany machine, who then got paid a nice little premium for the acquisition of land that was needed for a public purpose, and maybe the people who sold the concrete and the lumber and supplied the labor also turned out to be awfully close friends of the politicians who approved the project, but at the end, there’s the bridge. There’s the new highway, and it cost something within shouting distance of what you would expect the thing to cost. It added up, but they did some fairly polite stealing. There was respect in it. It wasn’t honest, but it wasn’t wide-open looting.

An extremely common form of graft in American politics is the “Three Bs” that Robert Caro famously described in Texas politics: beef, bourbon, and blondes. Cocktails, steak dinners, and maybe if you were a legislator who played ball a nice young lady came and visited your hotel room during the legislative session. But that graft was about topics like who got the state highway contract. Some money traded hands, there was dishonesty in the allocation of public resources, and the highway got re-paved.

The Quality Learing Center model, or the high-speed rail model, or the 800 hospices in Los Angeles with patients that never died, all represent a model of grift that comes from a culture of complete shamelessness. In California, nearly 700 non-profit corporations exist to provide shelter to the homeless, and over 500 non-profit corporations exist to prevent homelessness and provide social services to the homeless or to people who may become homeless. There’s quite a bit of overlap between those categories, so there aren’t 1200+ non-profits, but there are hundreds, and they have billions of dollars in income.

Some are entirely legitimate and do real work. There are people in California who will be fed and sheltered tonight by a non-profit corporation that will keep them from sleeping on the street. It’s not at all my argument that no one in any non-profit anywhere ever does anything real. But the overall picture is theft, and the premise that the flood of money is ending homelessness (or is meant to) is a lie, and a dark one. Gavin Newsom presented his ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness in 2008.

Update, 22 September: 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.

QotD: Brexit – the process is the punishment

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Shortly after the results of the Brexit referendum were declared and Mr. Cameron resigned as Prime Minister, the French newspaper, Le Figaro, published a little cartoon. Two French peasants are looking across the Channel towards England, and one says to the other (or words to this effect), “They do things differently over there. They pay attention to referendum results.”

Well, yes and no. There is little doubt that a large part of the political class, the upper bureaucracy and the intelligentsia did their very best to prevent, or at least obstruct, Britain’s departure from the European Union. The Prime Minister who followed Mr. Cameron, Mrs. May, was herself in favour of remaining, and yet she was put in charge of the negotiations on the British side. This was like putting an ardent pacifist in charge of an army, and indeed she managed to negotiate a deal that (from the British point of view) was the worst of both worlds.

It should have been obvious from the first that Brexit was an existential question for the European Union, as well as for Britain, of course. If Britain prospered, or simply failed to suffer greatly, after Brexit, this would have been a disaster for the European Union, in the populations of which there was significant and growing scepticism of or opposition to the “European Project” (it is the only project I know whose end is never stated, though I suspect it is a superstate in whose administration politics in the normal sense of elections, appeals to public opinion, etc., are not to be allowed to intrude). An example had to be made, and in effect has been made. No other member state will want to go through what Britain has gone through these last four years. The light must not be worth the candle.

Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.

September 17, 2026

British government seeks to retroactively change the Rules of Engagement during “The Troubles”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m old enough to have had lengthy conversations with British soldiers and officers who were serving or had recently served in Northern Ireland at the tail end of “The Troubles”. It was a dangerous situation the troops found themselves in and the Rules of Engagement they worked under at least recognized that it wasn’t a normal day at the office back home. On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman explains why the current government’s plan to retroactively change the rules that governed the actions of the British military forces is one of the worst possible things they could do:

Lieutenant Robert Lyman in the Ballymurphy, 1983, in a photograph snapped by Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Elliott, CO of 1LI at the time. He was driving past in his Landrover and spotted a photo opportunity.
Photo via The War Room

For those who know me well, the idea that I might now be encouraging young men and women not to join the Armed Forces might sound that I had lost my marbles. I can assure you that is not the case. I am deadly serious. This government’s determination, building on the surrender of the previous Conservative government to the varying dictats of the ECHR, will drive an impossible moral and legal wedge between the people who the country ask to do its dirty work, and the government that sends them in harms way. It is an intolerable set of affairs that all sensible people in his country should oppose. What sort of perversity might think that this behaviour is acceptable from any government? I despair, yet it seems that this is precisely what our current morally impoverished government seems to desire.

[…]

The central concern is that the proposed changes will expose servicemen and women, many of whom have already undergone judicial scrutiny for actions undertaken during the Troubles, to further litigation and investigation. In practice, this is likely to encourage a new wave of cases brought by individuals seeking to revisit or reinterpret events from a campaign in which terrorist organisations such as the IRA and INLA were ultimately defeated.

The immediate implications are troubling enough. The longer-term precedent, however, is far more serious. If this legislation proceeds, it will send a clear message to today’s servicemen and women, that even after they have acted lawfully, completed investigations, and fulfilled their duty to the State, they may still face renewed legal jeopardy in later decades. It undermines the fundamental bond of trust between those who serve and the government that sends them into harm’s way.

Every member of the British Armed Forces operates within a strict and clearly defined legal framework. These rules, embodied in the Laws of Armed Conflict and implemented through Rules of Engagement (RoE), govern the use of force in military operations. During my own service, I spent countless hours learning these rules, teaching them to my soldiers, and ensuring they were followed in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and elsewhere.

This debate is not about whether soldiers should be above the law. Of course they are not, nor should they be. Rather, it is about whether the rules that governed military operations at the time can be retrospectively reinterpreted after a conflict has ended. The concern is that former adversaries will be able to pursue legal action against veterans for actions that were considered lawful under the Rules of Engagement in force at the time.

Today, Policy Exchange published an excellent report examining this issue in relation to former members of the SAS who served in Northern Ireland. The report sets out the problem clearly and persuasively, concluding that the proposed changes should be abandoned. I agree.

Predictably, some MPs have defended the legislation. Diane Abbott, for example, has argued on X that opposition to the changes amounts to “a call for armed forces personnel to be placed above the law.” That characterisation is deeply misleading. The debate has never been about exempting soldiers from the law. It is about subjecting veterans to repeated investigations and additional layers of judicial scrutiny many years after the events in question, often in ways that were never demanded of those they fought against on behalf of the nation.

At its core, this issue is one of fairness. It raises questions about double standards, retrospective judgment, and the constant shifting of the goalposts. Veterans who served under one set of rules are now being told that those rules may no longer be sufficient protection against further legal action.

QotD: Boris Johnson

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Some generous souls are claiming it’s not Boris’s fault — which may be true, up to a point, of which more in a moment — but whoever is to blame one thing is abundantly clear: Britain is a failed state, the Sick Man of Europe, and those of us who grew up believing that to have been born British was to have won the lottery in life have now been sorely disabused of the notion.

How can this possibly have happened to the land of Magna Carta and English Common Law, the heroic seafaring nation which coloured the atlas pink and stamped its character on half the world’s nations from Australia and the U.S. to India and South Africa, that invented most of the world’s best sports, produced most of its greatest literature, beat Philip II of Spain, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler and discovered almost everything worth discovering?

Just when did Britain become so incredibly, embarrassingly shit?

Well, it’s easy to blame Boris, as I have done on occasion, for being a priapic lard-butted lightweight chancer who should never have been given the keys to Number 10. As we’ve learned to our cost, he’s all mouth and no trousers, great for an impromptu bon mot or jolly photo op but perfectly useless in times of crisis, being too easily led, having no opinions of his own, the backbone of sponge and the moral character of a Plecostomus catfish.

James Delingpole, “Britain is now the sick man of Europe”, Breitbart, 2020-08-14.

September 16, 2026

The new front in the British “flag war” – Welsh castles

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You may have heard that at least one municipal government in England is trying to ban private citizens flying both the Union flag and the St. George’s Cross, yet actively encouraging the use of other national or political flags. On Substack, Paul Embery shows just how far the anti-British/anti-English activists are willing to go … in this case all the way to Wales (where, yes, there’s already some local anti-English sentiment to start with):

Pakistani flags fly over medieval walls in Cardiff.
Photo from X via Paul Embery

SOMETIMES it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Britain’s political elites are engaged in some sort of private game to see just how far they can test the patience of the native population before it snaps.

A people who were, and still are, remarkably tolerant in all sorts of ways, including towards those from minority backgrounds and cultures, seem daily to have their good faith exploited.

Only someone who had been living under a rock for the past couple of decades could have failed to notice the gulf that has emerged between our political institutions and everyday folk living outside of our fashionable cities and university towns.

That gulf – which is widening still – explains why a palpable sense of polarisation exists across many parts of the country today.

The latest attempt to stir the pot comes courtesy of Cardiff council, which recently decided to fly the flag of Pakistan from the city’s castle – one of the Welsh nation’s most historic and iconic sites. The flag was apparently hoisted in celebration of Pakistan’s independence day and stayed there over two days (a similar thing happened in 2024 — see image).

Needless to say, a row swiftly broke out, with Reform voices locally and nationally attacking the decision and in return facing accusations from their political opponents – who seemed to close ranks around the issue very tightly – that they were seeking to incite hatred and division.

Recent history tells us that anyone who expresses even mild disapproval about this type of virtuous ingratiation of foreign nationalities and cultures by our public bodies is likely to face taunts of being some kind of embittered xenophobe or reactionary. And, usually, the condemnation will be accompanied by a lecture trumpeting the merits of living in a diverse and multicultural society.

But those who harbour misgivings surely have a point. Because such acts do rank as a kind of provocation. It’s one thing seeking to foster good relations with other nations and cultures – such an approach is eminently sensible – but it’s another thing entirely indulging those nations and cultures to such a degree that many indigenous citizens begin to feel their own country is losing its historical identity and turning into something resembling a supersized version of the Olympic village. And that is where many Britons feel their country is now.

That Pakistan is a member of the Commonwealth did not appear to be the prompt for Cardiff Council’s decision, for no councillor seems to have cited that justification in defence of it. Moreover, the colours of non-Commonwealth nations, such as Poland, have also been displayed over the castle in recent times.

“Oh, it’s only a flag, and it’s just for two days”, the citizens-of-nowhere will argue. Except that it isn’t only a flag, and it isn’t just two days. What we have seen over the past couple of decades is a subtle but concerted effort on the part of Britain’s elite class to embed the ideology of cosmopolitan universalism across all areas of our public life.

These people are globalists in every sense. They see our country as a shop, not a home.

They believe in permissive migration policies, free trade libertarianism and technocratic supranationalism – all things to which large chunks of the population are hostile.

Update: I’ve heard that it helps to actually include the URL …

Update the second, 17 September: 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.

September 15, 2026

A Fall election seems quite likely

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

One of the advantages of a Westminster-style parliamentary system is that election dates are not fixed, so that the Prime Minister can take advantage of perceived opportunities to win majorities when they arise. It must be very tempting to Mark Carney to call an election as soon as he can, as the Elbozos are still waving their arms and chanting his praises for “standing up to the Bad Orange Man”. His latest notion of trying to add Canada to the European Union as some sort of “associate member” is also popular among people who think that Canada should be more like Europe (the Venn diagram of Elbozos and Europhiles is almost a perfect circle). On X, Jay Currie stares into the abyss of yet another Liberal majority government with a renewed electoral mandate:

The Prime Minister of all the Canadas is prepping for his Davos 2.0 speech to the European Parliament on the 17th when, apparently, he is going to propose that Canada become some sort of associate member of the EU. God help us.

The developed world can be thought of as two camps: the progressives and, for want of a better term the nationalists (could be traditionalists but that is only one strain within the nationalist camp). The supra nationalist institutions, EU, UN etc are progressive to their core.

Progressives see borders as barriers to progress, believe diversity is strength, see international action as the only way to defeat the horror of “climate change”, want international controls on speech, technology and public health.

For progressives individual rights, the rule of law, property are all barriers to the greatest good for the greatest number. Citizenship is an antique concept best left in the 20th century.

Most importantly progressives see the state, rules and regulations, a constantly refreshed “New World Order” and managed decline as both beneficial and inevitable. Arc of History and all.

Nationalists begin with the tiniest unit in society, the individual, and take that unit seriously. What rights does an individual have? If you start there you automatically circumscribe the power of the state. You also set the state’s direction.

Taking individual rights seriously creates a state in which individuals matter, there their voluntary associations beginning with families, matter. “The greater good” is no more than a suggestion when it comes to protecting individual rights.

The Europe of the EU came out of the ashes of a world in which individuals were subjects rather than citizens (with the notable and sporadic exception of post Revolutionary France) and the concept of individual rights was fragile at best.

The progressive intent of the EU was to treat “Europeans” as interchangeable economic units whose value was locked to group identity and which must be prepared to share the burdens imposed for the greater good.

Nationalism was seen as regressive as was patriotism and the insistence that individuals had rights which over rode the “common good”. After all, the horrors of WWI and II were the products of patriotic nationalism.

The progressive European project worked quite well for the first twenty or so years when Marshall plan aid funded the rebuilding of Europe and membership in the EU was relatively restricted. Expansion and mass immigration strained the Community.

Part of the reason the EU worked quite well in the early years was that its goals were relatively modest, a trading bloc with harmonized economic regulation left individual countries to work out their social, legal and rights structures.

As with any progressive institution the modest goals of the early years were gradually replaced with “ambition”. The 1985 Schengen Agreement eliminated hard borders within the EU. The European Convention on Human Rights harmonized the rights of Europeans.

Part of the progressive ambition was the creation of a hitherto unknown entity known as “the European” superficially similar in concept to “the American”. Questions of nationality could be submerged as this new entity stepped into the world.

For the progressive camp the “European” was a giant step forward into a post national future. As indeed it was for a tiny minority of bureaucrats, academics, journalists, financiers and other members of a self appointed cognitive elite.

People who objected to this grand homogenization of the nations of Europe were obviously frightened of the inevitable future because, well, they were not well educated and, entre nous, not too bright.

For the “Europeans” the great cause of the 21st century was laid out in Rio in 1993 when a conference convened by Canadian Maurice Strong sounded the alarm about “global warming” currently rebranded “climate change”.

Now there was a global threat demanding a supra-national response where the “Europeans” could assume a leadership role by…well, by shipping all of their heavy industry offshore and building very expensive windmills and mandating electric cars.

To no one’s very great surprise the Europeans have managed to de-industrialize and regulate themselves to the point of actual poverty. Fortunately, it was all for the global greater good so the Europeans could congratulate themselves.

Not content with climate virtue, the Europeans (though not the regressive nationalist yobs) took it upon themselves to welcome millions of migrants. An act of humanity and also shrewd as the Europeans had given up having children.

Of course, the idea had been trial-ballooned recently to get Carney-friendly headlines ready in advance:

September 14, 2026

Performative Canadian politics again

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

Prime Minister Mark Carney came to power promising that he was the best-qualified to deal with the US government on trade issues. Canadians assumed that this meant he’d be able to get as fair a trade deal with President Trump’s administration as possible. What he really meant was that he could do the most damage to cross-border trade relations in order to “pivot” to the EU and to China. He never intended to settle US-Canadian trade conditions, and his actions clearly show he was always putting the negotiations dead last in his priority list. And, thanks to the government’s generous subsidies to the relic media, instead of grilling him and his ministers for their blatant failures, they instead try to hold the opposition to account for things they have no control over.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison points out that it makes no economic sense for Canada to become part of the European Union as Carney now says he’s working toward:

This strikes me as remarkably stupid economic strategy.

Diversifying Canadian trade makes sense. Pretending Europe can somehow replace the economic relationship we have with the United States does not.

The United States is next door. Our railways, pipelines, electricity grids, manufacturing supply chains and energy markets have been integrated for generations. Even after the trade fight intensified, 71.7% of Canadian merchandise exports still went to the United States in 2025.

And Canada already has CETA with the European Union. Roughly 98% of EU tariff lines on Canadian goods became duty-free when CETA took effect, eventually rising to about 99%. If Canadian companies see profitable opportunities in Europe, they already have extraordinarily good market access.

So what exactly do we gain from some invented “associate membership” beyond CETA?

Potentially European regulatory obligations, political entanglements, financial contributions and pressure to harmonize Canadian rules with decisions made in Brussels, all to sell more goods across an ocean to markets that cannot duplicate the geographic advantage of the United States.

Norway rejected EU membership twice. Iceland opened accession negotiations and eventually walked away without joining. Both understood that you can have close economic relations with Europe without surrendering unnecessary national autonomy.

Canada should trade aggressively with Europe, Asia and everyone else who wants our products. But our first priority should be fixing the relationship with our largest customer, removing our own interprovincial trade barriers, building pipelines and ports, and making Canada competitive again.

Picking a fight with the neighbour who buys most of your exports and then announcing that Brussels might become your new best friend isn’t economic sophistication.

It looks like desperation dressed up as grand strategy.

QotD: “We have Homo Sovieticus in America”

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

Institutions tend to only find data they want to find, so the City of Los Angeles last counted street deaths among the homeless — in their description, “Deaths of Unhoused People” — from 2023. There were 900. Sample detail: “Black people were 31% of deaths. Black people are only 8% of the City’s general population, but are 33% of the City’s unhoused population.”

The last numbers from Los Angeles County as a whole were for 2024, when 2,208 homeless people died on the streets. County officials celebrated, because that number was a sharp reduction, and a reflection of the success of programs like overdose intervention teams stationed around public parks.

Remember those numbers, and let’s talk about something else for a moment before we come back to them.

The Soviet writer Aleksandr Zinoviev told a joke that speaks fluent Californian: “In some institution a routine meeting was in progress. There were two points on the agenda: 1) the construction of a barn; 2) the creation of an abundance of consumer goods under communism. As they didn’t have enough planks to build the barn, they moved on at once to the second question.”

Maybe that joke doesn’t land if you don’t live in Los Angeles or Seattle, but from here it’s flawless. Take a quick look at the campaign page for María Elena Durazo, a state senator who just won a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Infrastructure and fire departments are in bad shape in the place where elected officials think that government exists to provide “economic justice” that restructures communities. When government exists to pay your rent, 911 response times soar.

They can’t fix a street, so they move on at once to managing all of society.

Here’s what Senator Durazo boasts about on her “Meet Maria” page: “Arrested over 13 times for leading non-violent Civil Rights and Worker Rights protests”. It’s the line that appears below “State Senator” on her list of accomplishments. Gentry socialists have high-status-marker arrest credentials, without the burden of low-status prosecution and jail terms.

Zinoviev gave us the term “Homo Sovieticus”, describing the human creature that shaped itself around the postures and predilections of Soviet culture. Humorless, a sanctimonious scold, a deeply selfish schemer while professing adoration for collectivism, comfortable reciting official slogans without feeling the need to believe them or examine them, reflexively conformist, not worried about truth. (X) has been advanced as party doctrine, so (X) is correct, and anyone suggesting (Not-X) is highly suspect. The official account is always correct.

We live among these people. We have Homo Sovieticus in America.

Chris Bray, “Homo Cosmopolitus Won’t Count the Costs”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-06-10.

September 13, 2026

QotD: Naming “Cathay”

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

This is all a very long way of getting around to why I’m so interested in the Khitans.

You may think you’ve never heard of the Khitans (Chinese: 契丹 or “qidan“), but you probably have, albeit indirectly. “Khitan” is their ethnonym within their own proto-Mongolic branch of the Altaic languages. In the Turkic languages a little further West, the same people are called “Khitai“. A splinter group of the Khitans who settled in Dzhungaria and Transoxiana called themselves the “Kara-Khitai” (Black Khitans), a name that should be instantly recognizable to anybody who played Age of Empires II. If you prefer Paradox map-painting games to more traditional RTS, they do also show up in the Crusader Kings series, resulting in memes like this one. Oh dear, where was I? Right, the Khitans. The word “Khitai“, via a continent-wide game of Chinese whispers (get it?), became “Cathay”, which the confused Europeans took as the name of the Middle Kingdom itself, finally resulting in the birth of a wonderful airline.

Right, the Khitans. There they were, grazing their flocks on the Greater Khingan Mountains, just bein’ a horde, doing horde stuff. Suddenly, opportunity fell into their laps: the Tang empire was unravelling. The bustling cities and ports of Northeastern China were sitting right there, defenseless, full of gold, and skilled craftsmen, and all the soft and delicate sensuality of settled life. It was about to happen again, right? The nomadic horsemen riding in from the wild steppe, pillaging the effete townspeople and becoming their masters, only to succumb to pleasure and become effete in turn, the endless cycle of history? How could it be avoided? Here is how Mote (yes, we’ve finally gotten to the book) describes their Catch-22:

    … the Khitans probably saw quite clearly that when a steppe people by degrees gave up its nomadic mobility in exchange for the more comfortable sedentary life, it ran great risks of having to compete with the Chinese on their ground. Losing in that way their comparative advantage inevitably cost the nomads their cultural integrity; they slowly became just “little Chinese” … no steppe people on China’s borders could become sinified and survive, except by migrating into China and being absorbed — another form of extinction … the warning to nomadic peoples was clear: they must master the art of drawing resources from China without sacrificing their steppe integrity … The wealth that could be wrung from it could give mastery over all Inner Asia.

The Khitan response to this pickle was unlike any I’ve ever heard. Roughly half of the Khitan aristocracy, including the royal clan, immediately adopted Chinese customs,1 moved to the city, and began building a bureaucracy. The other half, including the clan that Khitan kings traditionally picked their wives from, stayed in the steppe and had nothing to do with any of this. They then established two governments, two sets of laws,2 two taxation regimes, two writing systems, two of everything. One was civilized, the other was barbarian. Two completely incompatible social structures living side-by-side, passing through each other, but never interacting. Like dark matter, or like life-forms with mirror chirality. As a Khitan subject, you belonged to just one of these systems (if you were low class, you were sometimes allowed to pick!), and only that system had any authority over you.

The only point of official contact between the two worlds was at the top, where the Khitan king spent half the year reigning as a Chinese-style emperor, and half of it touring around his nomadic subjects as Great Khan in a mobile court. The Khitans recognized that although the king was theoretically 50-50, extended exposure to civilization would tend to Sinify him over time, and his descendants even more so. This is why they mandated that every empress was a pure-strain barbarian from a wild clan. They expected these formidable women to wield influence over their sons and to ensure that as the years rolled past and the royal clan grew more and more Chinese, they would be replenished each generation with the barbarian perspective of their mothers. This totally worked, but also resulted in no end of conflict between the empresses and their palace retainers, who exemplified different worlds.3

Sometimes you read about a social or legal system, and you are just certain that it could not be stable. I had this reaction reading about the Spartan diarchy as a kid, and I had it again reading about the Khitans last year. But their system not only endured, it flourished, and eventually turned into the Liao Dynasty which ruled China for centuries. And it functioned basically as it said it would on the tin — the civilized parts of their empire keeping things efficient and organized, supporting craftsmen and tradespeople; while the Strategic Nomad Reserve was always there ready to be called on in times of war, and prevented the administration from getting too soft and decadent.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Imperial China, by F.W. Mote”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-02-24.

  1. The decisive thing they actually did was to adopt surnames, which as James C. Scott will tell you is about the most forceful possible way to reject your barbarian heritage.
  2. The differences in laws could be extreme. For instance, under Chinese law, as in most “civilized” places, treason was punished with ultimate severity and brutality. But in many “barbarian” cultures, treason isn’t actually a huge deal (almost akin to a playground fight) and defeated rebels are customarily forgiven. The Khitans, again, simply did both. Traitors were executed if they lived under city law, and received amnesty if they were under tribal law.
  3. One such an empress, upon the death of her husband, was asked by a Chinese courtier if she would follow ancient custom and be buried alongside him. She responded: “I of course do not refuse to join the Emperor underground, but my children are young and the country has no leader, so I am not free to do that”. Then she ordered that her right hand be severed at the wrist to represent her within her husband’s tomb.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress