Quotulatiousness

April 15, 2026

Do “combat-trained Islamists in Britain … now outnumber the British Army”?

Filed under: Britain, Government, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, Julian Mann asks Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch if Britain’s immigration policies have imported enough “combat-trained Islamist” to outnumber the ever-decreasing number of soldiers in the British army:

You won’t find anyone less military-minded than me but Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s speech to the London Defence Conference last week prompted me to put these questions to her on X:

“How many combat-trained Islamists do you estimate there to be in Britain? Would they now outnumber the British Army and, if so, by how many?”

I very much doubt that I will get an answer. She is a busy woman and she might be reluctant to comment for fear of being drawn into an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory. She should note that the question is about Islamists, not about integrated and peaceable British Muslims.

It was this part of her speech, highlighted by historian Niall Ferguson on X, that provoked the questions:

    General Sir Richard Barrons, co-author of the Government’s Strategic Defence Review, stripped away the pretence when he said: “Today’s army, frankly, could do one very small thing. It could seize a small market town on a good day”.

Ms Badenoch also said: “Between 1989 and 2022, defence spending fell in every year. One of the authors of the Strategic Defence Review has since said: ‘The UK is trapped in a conspiracy of stupidity because politicians won’t make the case for cutting spending to fund defence’. And he’s not the only one who thinks that. In Washington, US administrations have felt for years that, while America subsidised the defence of Europe, we built welfare systems instead. On this point, they are right. Before the Second World War, one in every £7 the British government spent went on health and welfare. By last year, it had soared to one in every £3. We have grown fat on welfare, prioritising benefits over bullets.”

According to the House of Lords Library: “As at 1 April 2025, there were 181,890 people in the UK armed forces, a 1 per cent decrease compared with the previous year. This total includes:

  • all full-time service personnel (known as the UK regular forces) and Gurkhas, who comprise 77.7 per cent of the total number of personnel
  • volunteer reserves (17.5 per cent of the total personnel)
  • other personnel, including the serving regular reserve, sponsored reserve and military provost guard service (4.8 per cent of the total personnel)

“The total size of the full-time UK armed forces, comprising the UK regular forces, Gurkhas and full-time reserve service, was around 147,000. Of these, 82,000 were Army personnel, 33,000 were members of the Royal Navy or Royal Marines, and 32,000 belonged to the Royal Air Force.”

So if there were 100,000 combat-trained Islamists in Britain, they would outnumber the British Army by about 20,000. I realise that there are various levels of combat training. It is possible that British Army personnel are better trained than any Islamist forces they might face on British soil. But would they be better motivated, given the way they are being treated by the Government? Why has the Government apparently failed to reckon with the appalling impact on morale and recruitment from the lawfare it is allowing against special forces and Northern Ireland veterans?

Update, 16 April: 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.

April 14, 2026

Bureaucrats often prefer regulations to taxes, because the costs are “hidden”

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

In Reason, J.D. Tuccille discusses the hidden impact of “red tape” on the economy — just because the government isn’t getting a cheque doesn’t mean that compliance is free:

President Trump prepares to cut a “red tape” display of regulations representative of 1960 and compared to the current numbers of regulations, Thursday, December 14, 2017, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, announcing how the administration is keeping its promise to remove regulations burdening job creators and American taxpayers.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Anybody who runs a business or engages in regulated activities knows that government red tape imposes a significant burden. Those burdens can be very high, deterring entrepreneurs from launching companies, restraining the growth of those that already exist, and driving some people to operate illegally rather than try to deal with an administrative state that specializes in obstructionism. But just how much do federal regulations cost us? A new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) tries to tally the price tag — and warns that Washington, D.C. needs major reform.

The Out-of-Control Regulatory State

That the regulatory state is out of control isn’t really a debatable point. The Federal Register lists 445 agencies with the legal authority to publish regulations. Forbes noted that “federal departments, agencies, and commissions issued 3,853 rules in 2016, while Congress passed and the president signed 214 bills into law”. In May of last year, the White House acknowledged that “the United States is drastically overregulated” and that “the Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages … Worse, many carry potential criminal penalties for violations.”

[…]

Compliance Costs Strangle the Economy

“Just as consumers shoulder much of the corporate income tax and tariff burden, regulatory compliance costs and mandates borne by businesses percolate through the economy and materialize as higher prices, lost jobs, and lower output,” writes Crews. “Off-budget regulatory costs can drag down the economy, just as overspending can.”

If you balk at the idea that federal regulations impose costs of over $2 trillion on Americans, you should be aware that CEI is restrained in its assessment. As the report points out, other sources assign even higher price tags to regulatory burdens. Three years ago, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) estimated that “the total cost of federal regulations in 2022 is an estimated $3.079 trillion (in 2023 dollars), an amount equal to 12% of U.S. GDP”. That NAM report added that “the annual cost burden for an average U.S. firm is $277,000, the equivalent of 19% of the average firm’s payroll expenses”. For manufacturers with fewer than 50 employees, the NAM put regulatory compliance costs at $50,100 per employee per year.

Compliance costs aren’t expressed in only monetary terms, they also require time and effort. According to the Office of Management and Budget, for Americans supplying required information to federal agencies “in FY2022, the total paperwork burden … was 10.34 billion hours, compared to 9.97 billion hours in FY2021”.

Of course, not everyone is equally impacted by government regulations. Generally speaking, the smaller the company, the harder it is to comply with all the relevant rules, so big companies often end up supporting demands for more regulation because it handicaps smaller competitors to a much greater degree.

Britain’s Green Party stakes out bold new immigration policies

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

With the ongoing shake-up in British politics — long-established “mainstream” parties losing support across the board — once-fringe parties are becoming electorally viable at least in the short term. On Substack Notes, Donna-Louise Flowers talks about the Green Party’s amazingly generous plans for immigrants to Britain should they be elected:

Someone on X just called me a scaremonger. 🙄

For quoting the Green Party’s own published immigration policy.

I’m a former Detective Constable. Serious sexual violence. CSE. I didn’t scaremonger for a living.

So let me be VERY clear about what the Green Party are actually proposing. In their own words. From their own published, member-voted policy document.

Every illegal arrival gets an automatic visa. No questions. No country of origin checks. Free legal advice to regularise their status. No penalty for being here unlawfully.

Guaranteed accommodation. Families get a house or flat with exclusive use. Free Universal Basic Income. No work required. Full NHS access from the moment they arrive — and their policy explicitly states these rights remain even if their asylum case is rejected.

And then — and I need you to read this carefully — they want to give every visa resident the right to vote in all elections and referendums.

All of this while our welfare bill has just exceeded our income tax revenue for the first time in British history.

All of this while we have a shortage of 6.5 million homes.

All of this while foreign nationals account for up to a quarter of all rape convictions in England and Wales. Up to 34% of sexual assault on a female convictions. Ministry of Justice data. Freedom of Information. Not opinion.

Not scaremongering.

Facts.

I’ve written a full thread on X breaking down every single point with sources. Link below.

Read it. Share it. Because this is what 18% of the country is apparently voting for.

x.com/nolongerthefuzz/s…

April 13, 2026

Trump is behind the falling population of LA County!

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

Chris Bray walks us through the tortured logic that leads the venerable Los Angeles Times to attribute the demographic slide evident in Los Angeles County to the Bad Orange Man:

Los Angeles County is bleeding people, sliding into population decline faster than anywhere else in the country. But don’t worry, the local newspaper is on the case!

Screenshot

After a careful examination of the matter, the Los Angeles Times is able to assign blame to — wait for it! — a certain VERY BAD ORANGE MAN.

    While conservative critics of L.A. have rushed to frame the population loss as a “mass exodus” of people fleeing rampant crime, high taxes and inadequate services, the reality is more complex.

    Los Angeles is by far the nation’s largest county, with 9.7 million people — nearly double the next largest, Cook County, Ill. In that sense, it’s not surprising that it saw a severe drop in population after the Trump administration rolled out a flurry of executive orders and new legislation aimed at restricting immigration. L.A. County is a historic hub for immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and a place where 1 in 3 residents is an immigrant.

If you read the story, you’ll see the name Trump several times, like a coven chanting the name of an enemy around the caldron. But definitely for sure don’t listen to those bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories about “high taxes and inadequate services”, noooooooo, that’s a huge lie, trust the wisdom of the local newspaper.

After a large and historic neighborhood ceased to exist because of a wildfire that rekindled after the Los Angeles Fire Department didn’t fully extinguish an earlier fire in dense, dry hillside brush, CNN produced a long story on the disaster of the city’s firefighter staffing. Small sample, describing a memorandum from then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley: “In the memo, which the city has since removed from its website, Crowley wrote that the city’s population had grown from about 2.5 million in 1960 to nearly 4 million in 2020. Yet the city has fewer fire stations today than it did back then, even as firefighters respond to a call volume that has quadrupled.”

A little less than a year and a half after that fire, the Los Angeles Police Department looks like this:

The last time a mean old white male Republican was the mayor, which is very bad and hateful, the city built up the police department, with a goal of having 10,000 officers. They actually hit that number in 2013, during the opening moments of the reign of Mayor Yogapants, then began shrinking soon after. Now we have very wise and progressive leaders, so the city is good.

[…]

So taxes are soaring, fire and police staffing are down, fat dumb communists want to crush basic city services a lot more to free up plenty of social justice cash, and some MEAN RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY THEORISTS bizarrely claim that people are leaving Los Angeles because they pay high taxes for increasingly poor services. My goodness, these people will just believe anything! OBVIOUSLY WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING IS THAT DONALD TRUMP IS VERY BAD, the professional journalists explained.

Young Canadians don’t have the resources to “buy their way out”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter points out the screamingly obvious fact that it’s insane to propose imprisoning young Canadians in a dying economy if they can’t scrape up half a million dollars to escape:

First, young Canadians don’t have shit. They definitely don’t have half a mil to pay the boomers in extortion fees so that they can leave the country.

Second, how are they planning to enforce this? Charge $500k for a passport? What stops the US from just offering amnesty? Ottawa can’t tell Washington what visas it can and cannot offer.

Third, and what makes this malicious boomerfap especially piquant, young Canadian professionals don’t leave because they especially want to. Wanderlust aside, most would prefer to remain close to family and friends.

They leave because they don’t have a choice. The Canadian state is set up to restrict opportunity to the point of nonexistence. Canada is a country that strangles ambition in the crib. As the old joke goes, if Musk had stayed in Canada he’d be a mid-level financial manager at CIBC (with any possibility of further promotion eliminated by the all-of-society DEI imperative).

Canada invests an absurd amount into educating its youth. It then refuses to allow them to use their training. So they leave. The University of Waterloo is one of the best engineering schools on the planet; virtually all of its graduates end up in the Bay area. Because the alternative is sitting on their hands or trying to get a job in the Ministry.

It would be a mistake to see Canadian investment in education as intended for the benefit of Canadian youth, by the way. Like everything else in Canada’s political economy, this is a subsidy to a Liberal Party client group, in this case the academics and administrators staffing the universities. The primary purpose of the universities is providing sinecures to liberals; the secondary purpose is indoctrination of the youth with liberalism; the third, to launder liberal ideas through intellectual channels. Whether the kids learn anything, or whether they can use whatever useful knowledge they acquire to (lol) better themselves or (lmao) “build the country”, is not a priority.

If it were not for the Laurentian Elite running the country into the ground, if young Canadians were not sabotaged at every step of their lives, then there would be no brain drain problem.

But as usual, boomerlibs would rather punish the youth to try and fix the problems the boomerlibs caused.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the progressive hellscape that Canada is becoming, here’s the wife of the Prime Minister boasting to the Liberal convention in Ottawa about how wonderful things are in Soviet Canuckistan:

It would make perfect sense for new grads to look for greener pastures, wouldn’t it? Which is why the Liberals want to force them to stay here, of course.

April 12, 2026

QotD: “Disinformation”

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

    Neil Stone @DrNeilStone
    X is coordinated disinformation packaged as Free Speech

The concept of disinformation is inherently authoritarian. It presumes some faultless source from which truth flows, such that all speech can be judged by its alignment with this source.

Yes, sometimes certain issues are fairly clear-cut and people are just lying, but more often people fundamentally disagree about both facts and methods. They disagree about who is trustworthy and what institutions and processes are most likely to produce truth.

I, as a private citizen, might call some claim a lie or some person a liar. That’s discourse. I hope to persuade others that I am correct. But to institutionalize disinformation is necessarily to institutionalize a priest caste of truth determiners. This is antithetical to the scientific method and the process of knowledge production in general.

Truth-seeking must start from a place of humility: we are not sure of our claims or our methods. We are doing our imperfect best. We demonstrate the value of our ideas via evidence, argument, and the practical utility they provide. Not by censoring competing ideas.

It is ludicrous to assume that modern academic or journalistic institutions are bias-free oracles, yet this is the basis of the “disinformation” concept.

Hunter Ash, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-27.

April 10, 2026

“MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+”

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

Another Canadian interest group decided that their already oversized abbreviation needed to be super-sized. Jonathan Kay provides some useful context for those not familiar with Canadian domestic politics:

Canadian here, with four (count em) points of clarification on the “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” thing, which has now escaped its absurdist Canadian genderwang containment chamber, and gone viral internationally:

1) the speaker here is @LeahGazan, a fringe minor-party politician. She’s not in the government. She regularly calls for dumb things, such as criminalizing anyone who dares talk candidly about the 2021-era unmarked-graves social panic. CBC types treat her as a serious person because she’s indigenous and because she always talks in the tear-drenched idiom of white-settler colonial evilness. But she’s not.

2) MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is a mashup of two acronyms (each unique to Canada). Her decision to run them together is hilarious, which is why this has gone viral, but it’s not a common practice, even in rarefied leftist circles.

3) MMIWG refers to “Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls”. The problem of violence against indigenous women is a real and tragic issue. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago, a bunch of activists produced a ridiculous report on the subject that called it a “continuing” (!!!) “genocide”, and demanded that we all call it that. The whole movement collapsed when it was pointed out that something like 80% of the indigenous women who are killed are killed by indigenous men, which is very much off-message from the whole white colonial G-word thing. But the acronym still gets name-dropped when people are indicting Canada for all its infinitely genocidey genociding of everybody

4) “2SLGBTQetcetc…” Americans always ask me what “2S” stands for. It stands for “2 spirited,” a term that white academics popularized 50 years ago to give expression to their mystical reveries about sacred indigenous elf-people living in some precolonial eden-like genderwang Nirvana where everyone has three penises and five vaginas. No one is allowed to ask what the term even means, but our government made it official policy to use ridiculous words like this under Trudeau, so we’re stuck with it. Basically, if you’re an indigenous guy who likes to wear eyeliner, or an indigenous woman with blue hair and sensible shoes, you call yourself “2 spirited” on your govt grant applications. No one is even allowed to ask whether it’s a gender identity or a sexual orientation. It apparently exists in some exalted state that defies this kind of rigid colonial typology, or something like that.

Back in 2022, I read a whole report about how to teach two spirited concepts to Canadian students, and it turned out that even the authors of the report admitted they had no idea what the term meant. I wrote about it for @Quillette: https://quillette.com/blog/2022/10/0

April 9, 2026

The NFL’s “Rooney Rule”

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

As the NFL in its modern incarnation exists as an exception to the normal rules governing corporate structure under US law, you can readily imagine that the NFL’s legal teams are extremely sensitive to the changing winds at the federal level. At a time that the federal government was emphasizing providing employment equity, the NFL scrambled to implement a hiring solution that gave black coaches a better chance of being hired for head coaching opportunities. The winds have shifted recently and the NFL risks being caught on the wrong side of evolving legal decision-making:

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles said he “absolutely” believed that he was sometimes brought in by NFL teams just to check the “Rooney Rule” box.

The Rooney Rule is an NFL policy instituted more than two decades ago that requires teams to interview — though not to hire — at least one minority candidate when hiring new coaches.

The rule was designed to increase the number of minority head coaches in the NFL, a goal it has failed to achieve. For years, it has been a source of moral controversy, but new developments suggest it may now be a legal issue for the league.

Last week, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) sent a letter to the NFL calling the Rooney Rule “blatant race discrimination“, adding that hiring decisions should be based solely on merit.

Though the NFL says it believes its policy “is consistent with the law” and promotes fairness, others have indicated the Rooney Rule may be on the chopping block, given recent legal challenges to other forms of racial preferences.

“There’s no question that the environment has changed in recent years“, said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the son of Dan Rooney, for whom the rule is named. “We do have an obligation to make sure that our policies comply with the laws, whatever the law is, and whatever the changes in law might be.”

Art Rooney didn’t specify the laws the NFL may not be in compliance with, but he might have been referring to last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services. In that decision, the court unanimously ruled that separate standards for minority and majority plaintiffs seeking redress for racial discrimination were illegal.

The ruling undercut the ability of organizations to use race or sex in hiring decisions — even for ostensibly benign or diversity-promoting purposes — because majority-group plaintiffs are now allowed to sue under the same legal standard as minority groups.

As I wrote at the time, the Ames decision was likely to be a wrecking ball to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which employers had used for years to discriminate against majority ethnic groups (and non-focus minorities, such as Asians), in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

“Trump … scared us into doing the right thing”

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

Canada got into the incredibly bad habit of freeloading on national defence under Pierre Trudeau, and from 1968 onward, we’ve been leaning ever more heavily on US military power to fill in the gaps we’ve chosen not to invest in ourselves. At the same time, we’ve almost dislocated our arm in patting ourselves on the back for our “soft power” on the international diplomatic scene. The Americans, for reasons known only to themselves, rarely pushed back or called us out for our perpetual slacking … until Donald Trump came along. Now, as Matt Gurney regretfully points out, Trump seems to be the only accountability mechanism on the Canadian government:

Coming soon to a Jewish daycare centre near you, sadly.
Image from The Line

Every well-functioning society needs effective accountability mechanisms. It needs something that can reliably deter bad guys from doing bad things, or at least catch them and stop them when they try. Hell, it also needs some sort of immune system that simply prevents the good ones from getting flaky and lazy, and to prune out the soft corruption that can easily settle in in comfortable and generally affluent societies.

“Accountability mechanism” is a broad term, but it has to be. It can be many things. It can be as basic as a strict moral or religious code, enforced by a priestly caste or even simple scolds. Or, ahem, a thriving press, with reporters and columnists poring over all the information they can find for examples of bad things that need fixing and then making a lot of noise about them. In democracies, effective opposition parties are a key part of this; so are government accountability officers, like auditors and ombudsmen. In a pinch, even just a healthy sense of personal honour and shame can work.

In a perfect world, you’ll have many or all of these, and they’ll be mutually reinforcing. Does Canada have any? Or, as I’m increasingly worried, have we basically outsourced this key democratic function entirely to the United States, and specifically, Donald Trump?

This bleak thought occurred to me after I watched, with equal parts horror and relief, a recent video put out by the Toronto Police Service. You can see it for yourself here, but, in short, it’s a promotional video for the new public order mission that is putting heavily armed and armoured officers onto the streets of Toronto to secure sites at risk of attack. The video has an intensely martial vibe; the deployment looks much more like a military operation than a police patrol. Though the video doesn’t say so directly, the intended purpose is clearly stopping the sustained attacks we’ve seen on Jewish religious, commercial and cultural sites in Toronto since Oct. 7, 2023.

[…]

There was also border security and fentanyl. I’m fully aware that the White House exaggerated both issues so they could use them against us. But I’m equally aware that Canada tends to ignore issues even slightly related to national security. A few tweets from Trump changed that. Some of our initial responses, like a czar and a pair of leased Blackhawks, were symbolic, clearly intended for Trump’s consumption. But Mark Carney has continued to ramp up our border security, and make a point of saying so. Again, we did this to avoid Trump’s wrath.

The biggest example, though, is clearly defence spending and rearming the Canadian military. Canada had long pledged to hit the NATO target, but never did; indeed, the former PM reportedly told our allies he had no plans to even try, as it wasn’t a domestic priority. But then Trump comes along and scares the crap out of us and, voilà, we’re hitting the target. Some of that is creative accounting, but not all of it.

Again, Trump did this. He scared us into doing the right thing.

QotD: Diffuse versus concentrated state power

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

We have seen in the twentieth century the dire consequences when all power is concentrated in the hands of the state. When power is widely diffused, it is difficult and normally impossible for any one man or a few to turn it all at once to evil use. But when all power is concentrated in the hands of the state, it is a simple matter for one man or a few men having control of the state mechanism to turn all that concentrated power in any direction they please; an unhappily their pleasure has usually been in the direction of evil.

Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.

April 7, 2026

Alberta is the only province moving in the right direction

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Martyupnorth responds to Tristin Hopper’s post about Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, which he published a year ago:

Here is a one-line summary of each of Tristin’s 8 points:

Housing crisis: Canada pioneered turning entire cities into over-leveraged real estate bubbles, driving home ownership out of reach for ordinary people because prices detached from wages.

Crime and justice: Soft-on-crime policies, catch-and-release bail, and activist courts created a revolving door for repeat offenders, leaving our streets unsafe.

Harm reduction & drugs: “Safe supply” and decriminalization experiments escalated addiction and public drug use, worsening overdoses, tent cities, and societal harm instead of reducing it.

Euthanasia (MAiD): Canada rapidly expanded medical assistance in dying into one of the world’s most aggressive programs, with soaring death numbers and cases pushing it as a tratement for poverty and disability.

Healthcare system: Despite high spending, Canada’s “free” system ranks near the bottom in performance among developed nations, with deadly wait times and dysfunction.

Transgender policies: Canada went further than most countries with permissive rules on youth transitions, pronouns, biological males in female spaces, and related ideology in schools and institutions.

Identity politics and “anti-racism”: Canada outdid even the U.S. in embracing divisive oppressed frameworks, including declaring itself guilty of an ongoing “genocide” against Indigenous people with little accountability.

Censorship and speech laws: Expansive hate speech rules, online content takedowns, and bills like the Online Harms Act pushed Canada toward Orwellian restrictions, chilling expression and drawing international warnings.

Canada took progressive ideas further and faster than peers, almost always with cascading negative consequences, turning a once-stable nation into a totally dysfunctional one.

He’s right in saying that Danielle Smith is the only one finally acknowledging that things aren’t working, and is trying to reverse some of these pad idea.

It’s still not enough to save Alberta, we need to divorce ourselves from the rest of Canada and their bad ideas.

QotD: Advice for foreign leaders trying to deal with Donald Trump

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

If you want to understand Trump, you have to understand that he’s not a politician.

I do not say this as meaningless praise, just to say, oh, he’s not a corrupt scumbag. I say it with a very specific meaning.

To understand Trump, you must purge yourself of all expectations you have learned from watching politicians, include the assumptions you are not even aware you are making.

Trump is a completely different animal.

Trump is a businessman, and while there are many sorts of businessman, he is of a very specific type. He rose to wealth and prominence by doing two things very well:

1. Brand reputation building.
2. Negotiation.

#1 forms the basis of how he deals with voters.

#2 forms the basis of how he deals with other power blocs within the US, and with other nations.

You see, the true love of Donald Trump’s life is bargaining. He is a business deal sperg. And he’s very, very good at it, because the actual process is his idea of fun, and winning at it is definition of pure satisfaction and joy.

He’s never made uncomfortable by the play of offer and counteroffer, or by butting heads and seeing who blinks first. That is, instead, his happy place. This means that not only is he totally at peace in the moment, he’s also practiced a lot.

When he called his book The Art of the Deal, it wasn’t just because he wants to think he’s good at this, it’s because this is the meaning of his life. The man finds meaning in haggling the way Musk finds meaning in building technologies, or the way I find meaning in explaining things to an audience.

So when Trump is dealing with others, from political office, he’s negotiating as if it were his money. Because that’s just how he ticks.

Now, the ground rule of global politics for the past 100+ years is that no matter who you are, you are allowed to rob American taxpayers and voters, so long as you pay American politicians for the privilege of doing so.

All of us, even democrat voters who don’t want to think about it, know what 10 percent for the big guy meant, and who the particular big guy was.

For all that time, global politics amounted to treating America as a giant cash pinata, and the deals had only two guardrails on them.

1. You must pay American politicians a large enough sum, in a subtle enough manner.
2. You can’t buy anything that your paid-off politicians won’t be able to hide their personal connection to.

That’s it.

Everything else was on the table.

Trump isn’t like that. He can’t be bought.

Not because he’s some kind of saint, which he isn’t, nor because corrupt-politician money is loose change compared to Donald Trump money, which it is.

But because Trump can’t stand to deliberately lose a negotiation for a bribe, any more than Floyd Mayweather wants to throw a match to get paid off by bookies.

And this is how Trump became involved in politics in the first place. He was a standard New York City rich moderate democrat. Believed in the Postwar Dream, bought into the raceblind thing, was all in favor of exporting democracy, and taxed capitalism paying for a moderate amount of welfare state. But as he realized the political machines were selling out America, he got personally offended.

Not because he was principled and deeply cared about middle America. Perhaps a little because selling out America was hurting his real estate interests.

But mostly because bad business deals give Donald Trump the ick.

Trump seems like a loose cannon to a lot of people, because they don’t what he’ll do next. And they don’t know that because they don’t understand what motivates him.

Trump wants America to make better deals and stop being taken advantage of. And to make those better deals, he has to demonstrate to the people who are used to buying American politicians that the rules in play have changed.

So what’s the deal with Venezuela and Maduro?

Simple. If you ride the NYC subway enough, it’s pretty likely that eventually a bum will come up to you, whip out his dick, and piss on your shoes.

Why? Because he wants to feel powerful. Because his day isn’t going well, and so he wants to ruin yours. Because he’s crazy. Because who the fuck cares?

But most of all, because he can. Because NYC is run by out of touch commie liberals, and he knows that if he is arrested, he’ll be fed and let out in the morning, but if you punch him in the teeth, your life will be ruined.

So when things change, people need to be put on notice. The bums aren’t going to read a sign that says “this subway now functions under Tennessee rules”, and if they do read it, they aren’t going to believe it. They’ve heard it all before as a bluff.

You have to actually punch someone in mouth and knock some teeth out. And then have the Tennessee cops show up and say, so what, you shouldn’t have pissed on his shoes, dumbass.

It is beyond the shadow of a doubt that Maduro was offered plenty of gentle offramps which would have preserved his dignity, lifestyle, etc, if not his pride.

But he didn’t take them, because everything is a bluff … until it isn’t.

Maduro is a head on a spike. A signal that the ground truth of how to deal with America has changed.

A signal that both violence, and personal consequences, are no longer off the table.

Because the whole reason for the existence of governments is to wield organized violence instead of the disorganized kind.

Other nations will now be coming to the negotiating table with this example in mind.

America is tired of being your ATM.

Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-01-06.

Update, 8 April: 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.

April 5, 2026

When military requirements conflict with national policies

Filed under: China, Government, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, Holly MathNerd explains why the US military hasn’t ramped up production of drones in light of the experiences of other current conflicts:

Most people who have opinions about the war in Iran are not also reading the Federal Acquisition Regulations. I am, unfortunately for my social life, one of the people who does both.

And when you hold those two things in your head at the same time — what’s happening over the Strait of Hormuz and what’s happening in federal procurement policy — a contradiction emerges that is so glaring, and so consequential, that I could not write about anything else this week.

Here is the contradiction, in full, before I show you the data.

The United States is fighting a war where drones are the decisive tactical weapon. We are spending $2 to $4 million per intercept to stop Iranian drones that cost $50,000 each. Our own offensive drone program shipped what it had into an active war because full-rate production hadn’t started yet. Ukraine, which does not have this problem, produced two million drones in 2024 by building a distributed ecosystem of small manufacturers who iterate their designs every two weeks and sell units for $300 to $5,000 each.

We cannot do what Ukraine does, because Congress — correctly, for legitimate national security reasons — spent five consecutive National Defense Authorization Acts closing the door on Chinese drone hardware. DJI, the dominant global manufacturer, is now restricted by four separate federal authorities. There is no waiver for convenience. The wall is complete.

Which means the only path to drone dominance runs through a domestic industrial base capable of producing drones at volume, at low cost, with rapid iteration.

That base exists. Partially. Precariously. And it is built on exactly the kind of small, specialized, distributed manufacturers that the 8(a) federal contracting program was designed to bring into the market.

QotD: The structure of a typical polis government

Filed under: Europe, Government, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Greek term for the structure of a polis government was its politeia (πολιτεία), which would could mean the government (the way we would say “the state”) or the structure of that government (its “constitution”) or the rights and conditions of the citizenry (in the sense of “citizenship”); as with the many meanings of polis, the many meanings of politeia all shade into each other and are understood as blended.

Because this week we’re interested in the politeia of a polis, that’s going to mean we’re mostly focused on the politai, the citizens, who we discussed last time as one of the key building blocks of the polis. Now, as we noted last time, it’s important to keep in mind that the politai are not all of the people in the polis or indeed even very many of them: women, children, resident foreigners, native members of non-citizen free underclasses and slaves were all set outside the politai and often had no means of gaining entrance. We’re going to talk about all of those folks in more depth in the third part, where we’ll look at the status layer-cake of polis society. But for now I just want to note that all of those people are there, even if they won’t figure very prominently in this discussion of the structures of polis government.

Now we’ll explore this question of how a polis was governed: first laying out the standard elements of a polis constitution, which as we’ll discuss were surprisingly similar from one polis to the next. Then we’ll deal with variations in how those elements are structured, which the Greeks understood to define the differences in the three kinds of constitution that a polis might normally have: oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. Then […] we’ll look at what sort of magistrates a polis might have and what their jobs might be as well as the structure of the legal system a polis might have.

THis is going to mean that we’re discussing the “constitutions” of poleis, but I want to be really clear here at the start that these are almost never written constitutions. So when I say “constitution”, understand that we mean this in the broad sense of “the actual makeup of the state’s institutions” rather than in the narrow sense of “a formal set of instructions for the running of the state”. Some poleis did actually have the latter (the oldest we have that I know of is a constitution established by Ptolemy I Soter for Kyrene in 322; the fact that this is a constitution dictated by a king to a subordinated polis should signal how odd it is), but they seem to have been very rare.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101, Part IIa: Politeia in the Polis”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-17.

April 4, 2026

If we think that “ordinary criticism and disagreement are bullying, then we have an infantilized and feminized culture”

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

Chris Bray finds a highly accurate label for the pearl-clutching “elites” who — to a persyn — believe that your words are violence, but their violence (delivered through third parties, of course) is merely emphatic communication to the distasteful lower orders:

Donald Trump is a mean man. He’s a bully!

Oh no SCARY, he’s trying to BULLY the Supreme Court! I wrote at the Federalist this week about the stupidity of this argument — what is he implying he can do to the life-tenured justices, for crying out loud? — but I suspect I undersold the underlying sickness. Adults don’t use the word “bully” to talk about other adults, arguably outside of a few very narrow spaces involving things like domestic violence. It’s a preschool word. The easy recourse to toddler language at the New York Times is a sign of cultural regression. But it’s also a sign of habitual and persistent dishonesty. They’re pretending. I suspect they’ve pretended so much that they’ve forgotten they’re pretending, and the mask has become the face, but at root, they’re pretending.

We have fictional characters like Willie Stark and Frank Underwood because no one on the planet is dumb enough to think that politics is nice. The federal government spends $7 trillion a year, and the lure of that bucket of money brings out a bunch of throatcutters. This is possibly one of the most obvious realities of human existence. Politics is a knife fight. […]

Quite famously, members of Congress who suggested that they would oppose the legislative priorities of President Lyndon Johnson would get phone calls in the middle night from the man himself, waking them up and letting them know that they were dead men. He’s supposed to have said things like, “I’m gonna cut your balls off, you cocksucker”, though it’s not like anyone had a stenographer on the calls to nail the quotes. He was threatening and nasty on all days ending in -y, and got bills passed by, among other things, actually, physically intimidating people who didn’t roll over. He was a leaner. He got in faces, constantly and openly.

You gonna pass my bill [insert string of highly personal threats and profanity], or is your political career over? Pressure, threats, and horsetrading are the default behaviors, the normal stuff. Andrew Jackson got the Indian Removal Act through Congress by handing out government sinecures. The premise that I can take care of you or I can go to war with you, and it’s your choice which one happens is … politics. The make-believe story about Mean Donald Trump bullying the Supreme Court by tweeting at them or sitting in a chair where they could see him is playtime, clutching at Fisher-Price pearls. Somewhat remarkably, Trump appears to bully institutional opponents quite a bit less than the historical norm, and Lisa Murkowski can do whatever she wants without consequence. I am personally calling for Donald Trump to start actually bullying some people who have it coming, but be sure to have a fainting couch ready in the newsroom at Times Square.

Update, 6 March: 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.

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