MoAn Inc.
Published 4 Dec 2025This video was filmed in July of 2025. I wasn’t going to upload it due to the weird not-really-focused-but-also-kinda-focused-thing my phone camera was clearly going through, but decided I didn’t care that much because the content itself was fine x
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March 20, 2026
The Revenge Plot: Orestes’s Foreshadowing in The Odyssey
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March 19, 2026
QotD: From the fall of the Soviets to the rise of the Wokerati
… for 50 years the Soviet nuclear threat provided […] an Armageddon to fear, and a reason to rally round the state in the free countries of the West. It provided an unexpected bonus, which protected us all though we did not realise it at the time. Since the USSR was the arsenal of repression, political liberty in the Western lands was under special protection as long as the Kremlin was our enemy. Freedom was, supposedly, what we fought and stood for. Governments claiming to be guarding us from Soviet tyranny could not go very far in limiting liberty on their own territory, however much they may have wanted to.
That protection ended when the Berlin Wall fell. In the same extraordinary moment, the collapse of Russian communism liberated revolutionary radicals across the Western world. The ghastly, failed Brezhnev state could not be hung round their necks like a putrid albatross any more. They were no longer considered as potential traitors simply because they were on the left. Eric Hobsbawm, and those like him, could at last join the establishment. Indeed, fortresses of the establishment such as the BBC now welcomed political as well as cultural leftists onto their upper decks.
Antonio Gramsci’s rethinking of the revolution — seize the university, the school, the TV station, the newspaper, the church, the theatre, rather than the barracks, the railway station and the post office — could at last get under way. At that moment, the long march of 1960s leftists through the institutions began to reach its objective, as they moved into the important jobs for the first time. And so one of the main protections of liberty and reason vanished, exactly when it was most needed.
The BBC’s simpering coverage of the Blair regime’s arrival in Downing Street, with its North-Korean-style fake crowd waving Union Jacks they despised, and new dawn atmosphere was not as ridiculous as it looked. May 1997 truly was a regime change. Illiberal utopians really were increasingly in charge, and the Cultural Revolution at last had political muscle.
Then came the new enemy, the shapeless ever-shifting menace of terrorism, against which almost any means were justified. To combat this, we willingly gave up Habeas Corpus and the real presumption of innocence, and allowed ourselves to be treated as if we were newly-convicted prisoners every time we passed through an airport.
Those who think the era of the face-mask will soon be over might like to recall that the irrational precautions of airport “security” (almost wholly futile once the simple precaution of refusing to open the door to the flight deck has been introduced) have not only remained in place since September 2001: they have been intensified. Yet, by and large, they are almost popular. Those who mutter against them, as I sometimes do, face stern lectures from our fellow-citizens implying that we are irresponsible and heedless.
Now a new fear, even more shapeless, invisible, perpetual (and hard to defeat — how can you ever eliminate a virus?) than al-Qaeda or Isis, has arrived in our midst. There is almost no bad action it cannot be used to excuse, including the strangling of an already shaky economy for which those eccentric or lucky enough to still be working will pay for decades. Millions have greeted this new peril as an excuse to abandon a liberty they did not really care much about anyway.
As a nation, we now produce more fear than we can consume locally, hiding in our homes as civil society evaporates. We queue up happily to hand in our freedom and to collect our muzzles and our digital IDs. And those of us who cry out, until we are hoarse, to say that this is a catastrophe, are met with shrugs from the chattering classes, and snarls of “just put on the frigging mask” from the mob. If I hadn’t despaired long ago, I would be despairing now.
Peter Hitchens, “Democracy muzzled”, The Critic, 2020-09-25.
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March 18, 2026
The Korean War Week 91: The South Korean Economy is Dying – March 17, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 17 Mar 2026There’s tension between allies as the ROK economy worsens and worsens, part of the problem being caused by all the South Korean currency printed to respond to the demand for it by the UN forces to buy “stuff”. Inflation is growing by leaps and bounds. However, at least some tension between enemies lessens, as one more point of the agenda at the Panmunjom Peace talks is settled.
00:55 Recap
01:40 The ROK Economy
06:40 Operation Mixmaster
07:39 Rotation Settled
10:31 Ridgway’s Recommendations
14:01 Overt or Covert POW Screening
15:54 Notes
16:22 Summary
16:34 Conclusionhttps://smithsonianassociates.org/tic…
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SPAS-12: Franchi’s Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Nov 2024Franchi introduced the Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun (SPAS-12) for Italian military and police agencies in 1979 and it quickly became popular worldwide. Based originally on the gas-operated Franchi 500, that SPAS-12 was robust, reliable, and designed as a semiautomatic action with a backup pump action operation for use with underpowered ammunition (like beanbags or other less-lethal loads). In 1982 they began to be imported into the US through FIE, which was replaced by AAI as the importer in 1989. Eventually the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban ended SPAS-12 importation, and Franchi discontinued the model in 2000 in favor of the improved SPAS-15.
The SPAS-12 was almost always sold with a 21.5 inch barrel and 8-round magazine tube. It was available with either a solid sock or a top-folding type, complete with arm brace hook for shooting one-handed from a vehicle. In total, between 45,000 and 50,000 were made between 1979 and 2000, with the largest single purchaser being the Egyptian government (which took 18,000 of them).
Full video on the SPAS 15:
• SPAS-15: Franchi’s Improvement on the SPAS-12
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QotD: Feeding a Roman Consular army
Let’s deal with animals next. Each contubernium (“tent group”) of six soldiers likely had its own mule, so that’s 3,200 mules for the army, plus some additional number for the siege train and any army supplies; perhaps around 5,000 total (see Roth, op. cit. on this). On top of this we have horses for the cavalry; this will be rather more than 2,400 since spare horses will have been a necessity on campaign. Judging by Roman barley rations for cavalrymen (presumably intended to feed the horse) it seems a good guess that each cavalryman had one spare; for later medieval armies the number of spares would be substantially higher (at least three per rider). But for our lean army of Romans, that’s just 4,800 horses. An early modern army might require quite a few less mules (replacing them with wagons), but at the same time it is also probably hauling both field artillery and siege guns which demand a tremendous number of draft animals (mostly horses). My sense is that in the end this tends to leave the early modern army needing more animals overall.
Next the non-combatants. The mules will need drivers and the cavalrymen likely also have grooms to handle their horses, which suggests something like 3,400 calones [slaves or servants] as an absolute minimum simply to handle the animals. Roth (op. cit., 114) figures one non-combatant per four combatants in a Roman army, while Erdkamp (op. cit. 42) figures 1:5. Those figures would include not merely enslaved calones but also sutlers, slave-dealers, and women in the “campaign community”. Taking the lower estimate we might then figure something like 4,000 non-combatants for a “lean” Roman army, with many armies being more loaded up on non-combatants than even this. And while estimating the number of non-combatants for Roman armies is tricky, we actually have some figures for pre-modern armies to give a reference. Parker (op. cit. 252) notes units of the Army of Flanders (between 1577 and 1620) as high as 53% non-combatants, including women in the campaign community; one Walloon tercio in 1629 was 28% camp women on the march. It is tempting to compare these but caution is necessary here – both Roth’s and Erdkamp’s estimates are heavily informed by more modern armies so the argument would be circular: the estimates for the Romans look like later armies because later armies were used to calibrate estimates for the Romans.
That gives us an army now of 19,200 soldiers, 4,000 non-combatants, 5,000 mules and 4,800 horses. Roman rations were pretty ample and it seems likely that many of the calones did not eat so well but the ranges are fairly narrow; we can work with an average 1.25kg daily ration per person normally, with the absolute minimum being the 0.83kg daily grain ration following Polybius (Plb. 6.39.12-14, on this note Erdkamp op. cit. 33-42) if the army was short on supplies or needed to move fast eating only those buccelatum [hardtack] biscuits. That’s a normal consumption of 29,000kg per day for the humans, with the minimum restricted diet of 19,256kg for short periods. Then we need about 2.25kg of feed for each mule and about 4.5kg of feed for each horse (we’re assuming grazing and water are easily available), which adds up to 11,250kg for the mules and 21,600kg for the horses.
And at last we now have the scale of our problem: our lean army of 19,200 fighting men consumes an astounding 61,850kg (68.18 US tons) of food daily. It also consumes staggering amounts of water and firewood. In order to move this army or sustain it in place it is thus necessary to ensure a massive and relatively continuous supply of food to the army. Failure to do that will result in the army falling apart long before it comes anywhere close to the enemy.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-15.
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March 17, 2026
How Germans were propagandized into supporting the National Socialists
I’ve read a fair bit about the rise of Hitler after the First World War, beginning when I was in middle school and did a history project on the topic. Yet one aspect of the political success of Hitler’s fascist movement always puzzled me: how such blatant crude propaganda persuaded so many Germans to see things the Nazi way. Over the last five years in Canada, as our legacy media have fallen directly into the clutches of a single political party, I now understand all too well how millions of people getting their world view informed by a single point of view can create and maintain a movement. When all the mainstream media tell effectively the same story in 2026 and go out of their way to praise the government — especially the leader — and belittle and denigrate the opposition parties, it’s easy just to believe what you’re being told and not make waves.
Anyway, back to interwar Germany and their more absolute control of the newspapers and radio stations was used to mould and shape popular opinion:
In the run-up to the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, most people in Germany believed what was being put about both on radio and in the state-controlled press, namely that the Poles were committing all kinds of atrocities to former Prussians living in Poland, that they were war-mongering and using threatening language, and that not only was the Danzig corridor rightfully part of Germany, it was the duty of the Reich to defend those subjects living there.
Eighteen year-old Heinz Knocke was from Hameln in central Germany and typical of many of his age. He had absolute faith in the Führer and the rightness of the German cause. Planning to join the Luftwaffe as a pilot, he had had his preliminary examinations and was hoping that with war imminent, his call-up would be accelerated. “The Polish atrocities against the German minority make horrible reading today”, he scribbled in his diary on 31st August. “Thousands are being massacred daily in territory which had once been part of Germany.”
Oberleutnant Hajo Herrmann, a twenty-four year-old pilot with the bomber group III/KG4, also thought the Poles had brought war upon themselves. As far as he was concerned, the Danzig issue was one of principle. It had been German before 1919, was still inhabited mostly by Germans, and since the Poles had rejected any peaceful solution, what did they expect? “The anger that I felt inside at their unreasonableness”, he noted, “matched my sacred conviction: that of German rightness”. For Oberleutnant Hans von Luck, on the other hand, an officer in the 7th Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment, the escalating situation had brought a sudden recall from leave just a few days’ earlier. He had found everyone at the garrison in Bad Kissingen near Schweinfurt in high spirits. Neither he nor his friends believed a word of Goebbels’ propaganda about the Poles, but they did believe Danzig and the corridor should be part of Germany once more. “We were not hungry for war”, von Luck noted, “but we did not believe the British and French would come to Poland’s defence”. How wrong he was; for while von Luck may have understood that going to war was not a matter to be taken lightly, even he had blindly accepted Hitler’s assurances that Britain and France were bluffing. It was a feature of Hitler’s rule that he frequently said one thing with immense conviction and authority but quite another once events had been proved him wrong. Such was his grip on the German people, however, almost no-one ever questioned this, and certainly not his inner circle or anyone in the German media. At any rate, all three of these young men had believed parts of the nonsense that had been spouted by Nazi propaganda, whether it be false claims about the Poles, the justness of the Nazi cause for invasion, or Hitler’s assurances the British and French were bluffing. Such was he power of Nazi disinformation.
[…]
Both the Imperial Japanese and the Nazis dominated the new forms of media communication emerging in the 1930s. Propaganda had been a key component of Nazi politics from the outset, and while there were some who had not been persuaded, it had been unquestionably hugely effective, not just within the Reich but around the world too. To a large degree, this was due to Dr Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, and Gauleiter — administrative leader — of Berlin, an old Frankish term that had been resurrected by the Nazis. A former failed journalist and one of the first Nazis, he was utterly devoted to Hitler, so much so he had even given up an affair with a Czech film star with whom he was deeply in love because the Führer asked him to. Although the son of a shop assistant, Goebbels was highly intelligent and despite those humble beginnings had attended several universities and gained a doctorate. Marriage to Magda Quant, a society divorcee, gave him the kind of money and status he needed to help him climb up the Nazi ladder. He had become Propaganda Minister in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, and had immediately announced his prime goal was to achieve the “mobilisation of mind and spirit” of the German people. “We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out”, he said of defeat in 1918, “but because the weapons of our minds did not fire”.
In many ways, Goebbels was as responsible for Hitler’s position as Hitler was himself and he was the man who had largely shaped the Nazi’s public image. It was he [who] had insisted on draping swastikas – the bigger the better – from as many places as possible; it was he who taught Hitler how to whip a crowd into a frenzy; it was also Goebbels who had elevated Hitler into a demigod in the eyes of many. He knew all about manipulation theories, orchestrated heavy-handed mob violence, and in the 1933 election created the “Hitler over Germany” campaign; it was the first time, for example, that aircraft had been used to take a candidate around a country in an effort to reach more people. It worked spectacularly well.
With the Nazis in power, Goebbels had also done much to stoke up the virulent anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of Nazi ideology and had done much to turn Nazism into a form of surrogate religion, in which, again, drawing on nostalgia, they had harked back to a “purer” Aryan past to help bind the people both together and behind the Party and, more importantly, the Leader. Goebbels’ influence – his genius – should never be underestimated.
Update, 18 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.
March 16, 2026
Preparing for Operation Veritable – First Canadian Army’s biggest battle of WW2
On Patreon, Project ’44 has posted an extensive article on the setup and preparation for Operation Veritable in February 1945, with the First Canadian Army under General Crerar preparing to attack into the Reichswald as part of Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group:
Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges (US First Army); General Harry Crerar (First Canadian Army); Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (21st Army Group); Lieutenant General Omar Bradley (12th Army Group); and Lieutenant General Miles Dempsey (British 2nd Army), 21/08/1944 (Taken by Sgt. John Morris, No. 5 AFPS-AFPU, B9473).
In the early hours of the 8th of February 1945, the combined weight of the First Canadian Army and 21st Army Group’s massed artillery unleashed an immense orchestration of firepower, shattering any semblance of a peaceful morning and pounded German positions across the Reichswald. Massed in unprecedented density, with dump piles exceeding half a million shells, some 1,034 field, medium, heavy, super-heavy, and multi-barrelled rocket launcher platforms opened in concert. In accordance with their detailed fireplans this combined artillery effort was tasked with destroying enemy headquarters; severing lines of communication; disrupting road networks and infrastructure; rendering enemy defensive positions inhospitable; and, plainly, reducing the enemy’s force as much as possible, leaving survivors in a state of “shell happiness”. As the guns opened fire at 0500hrs, they quickly formed part of the largest artillery bombardment undertaken by Commonwealth forces since the battle of El Alamein in 1942.
This impressive symphony of artillery, along with the days of preliminary bombardments by both artillery and heavy bombers that preceded it, marked the very beginning of the month-long “Operation Veritable”. This operation was the 21st Army Group’s northern pincer movement, aimed at permitting a crossing of the river Rhine and, subsequently, a drive into Western Germany by dislodging and rupturing the German position between the rivers Mass and Rhine in the lower Rhineland.
Conceived by Canadian General Harry Crerar (commanding the First Canadian Army), part of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, Veritable was set to be General Crerar’s largest and most complex undertaking of the war – and for that matter, Canada’s too. At its height, the First Canadian Army commanded almost half a million personnel, with the majority of its formations British in origin, and its personnel strewn from Canada, Britain, Poland, and the Netherlands. Though 450,000 personnel would not be involved in Operation Veritable, it would still come to command the entirety of the British XXX Corps and Canadian II Corps.
Veritable would not be the rapid breakthrough many had envisaged it to be, especially not in the style of operations the year prior. Instead, it would evolve into a month-long, multi-operation offensive fought over some of the most arduous terrain in northwestern Europe. Advancing across deep mud, inundated lowlands, and through dense forests and urban centres, against an often-fanatical enemy manning prepared defensive structures, Veritable was quickly turned into a troublesome slog.
As Sergeant Alex Troy of the 5th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery would write:
they [the Germans] fought really tough because the enemy had always before been fighting in some other poor devil’s country; now he was defending his own land.
The Allied Situation:
By early December 1944, the German force opposing Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group had been dealt a series of important blows, none more recent than its forceful uprooting from the west bank of the river Maas as far south as Maeseyck. In that, the German position was believed to be, notably by Montgomery, strong – but undermined by a lack of equipment, trained troops, and suffering from rampant logistical shortages.
HQ Twelfth Army Group situation map, 6th December 1944. Produced by the Army Group Headquarters, 12 Engineer Section.
During a meeting on the 6th of December, Field Marshal Montgomery directed General Crerar to plan an offensive to the southeast of Nijmegen, and to support this transferred XXX (30) Corps to his command. Over the days that followed, two major operations were conceived. In the south, the British 2nd Army was to clear the triangle between Sittard, Geilenkirchen, and the river Roer as part of Operation Shears; whilst in the north, the First Canadian Army, as part of Operation Veritable, was to advance into the Reichswald, securing the settlements of Xanten, Geldern, and Sonsbeck, before taking charge of the river Rhine’s western bank.
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Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan 1979
Real Time History
Published 24 Oct 2025Christmas 1979. Soviet armor pours across the Afghan border towards Kabul as helicopters secure the mountain passes through the Hindu Kush mountains. In Moscow, the Politburo has decided to save Afghanistan’s communist government from collapse. Afghan rebels have taken up arms against the unpopular regime and control most of the countryside. But the Red Army leadership doubts it can pacify the country – so why did the Soviet Union invade Afghanistan?
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QotD: Political entrepreneurs and federal subsidies
Most of Josephson’s ire is directed toward political entrepreneurs. The subsidized Henry Villard of the Northern Pacific Railroad, with his “bad grades and high interest charges” show that he “apparently knew little enough about railroad-building”. The leaders of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, Josephson notes, “carried on [their actions] with a heedless abandon … [which] caused a waste of between 70 and 75 percent of the expenditure as against the normal rate of construction”. But it never occurs to Josephson that the subsidies government gave these railroads created the incentives that led their owners to overpay for materials and to build in unsafe areas. He quotes “one authority” on the railroads as saying, “The Federal government seems … to have assumed the major portion of the risk and the Associates seem to have derived the profits” — but Josephson never pursues the implication of that passage.
Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.
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March 15, 2026
Killing CAESAR – the Ides of March and the conspiracy against Julius Caesar
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 12 Mar 2025With the Ides of March a few days away, we take a look at the final months of Julius Caesar’s life and the conspiracy led by Brutus and Cassius. Both had fought against Caesar at the start of the Civil War, but later surrendered and were treated well by him. They were joined by men who had served Caesar in Gaul and during the Civil War, like Decimus Brutus and Trebonius and Sulpicius Galba. Why did they want to kill Caesar and how was the plot organised?
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Jobs and new technology – the example of the ATM
In Saturday’s FEE Weekly, Diego Costa looks at the classic example of how the role of the bank teller changed when automated teller machines (ATM) were introduced:
“Pulling out money from ATM” by ota_photos is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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[…] Those are important findings, but the study of capitalism in the age of AI is larger than labor-saving technologies inside a fixed institutional world. It’s the study of market processes that change the world in which labor takes place.
David Oks gets at this in a recent essay on bank tellers that has been making the rounds. For years, economists and pundits used the ATM to illustrate why technological progress does not necessarily wipe out jobs. In a conversation with Ross Douthat, Vice President J.D. Vance made exactly that point. The ATM automated a large share of what bank tellers used to do, and yet teller employment did not collapse. Why? Because the ATM lowered the cost of operating a branch. Banks opened more branches. Tellers shifted toward relationship management, customer cultivation, and a more boutique kind of service. The machine changed the worker’s role inside the same institution.
That story was true. Until it wasn’t.
As Oks puts it, the ATM did not kill the bank teller, but the iPhone did. Mobile banking changed the consumer interface of finance. Once that happened, the branch ceased to be the unquestioned center of retail banking. And once the branch lost that status, the teller lost the institutional setting that made him economically legible in the first place. The ATM fit capital into a labor-shaped hole. The smartphone changed the shape of the hole.
Vance looks at the ATM era and says: technology does not destroy jobs. Oks looks at the smartphone era and says: it does, just not the technology you expected. But if you stop there, you are still doing what economist Joseph Schumpeter called appraising the process ex visu of a given point of time. As Schumpeter wrote, capitalism is an organic process, and the “analysis of what happens in any particular part of it, say, in an individual concern or industry, may indeed clarify details of mechanism but is inconclusive beyond that”. You shouldn’t study one occupation within one industry and draw conclusions about how technological change works.
The obvious question you still have to answer is: where did those former bank tellers go? What happened to the capital freed when branches closed? What new institutional forms, fintech, mobile payments, embedded finance, neobanks, emerged from the very same process that destroyed the branch model? How many jobs did those create, and in what configurations?
The lost teller jobs are seen. They show up in BLS data and make for a dramatic graph. The unseen is everything the mobile banking revolution enabled, not only within financial services, but across the entire economy. The person who no longer spends thirty minutes at a branch and instead uses that time to manage cash flow for a small business. The immigrant who sends remittances through an app instead of through Western Union. The fintech startup that employs forty engineers building fraud-detection systems. None of that appears in a chart titled “Bank Teller Employment”. The unseen is the world that emerges.
When economists say the ATM was “complementary” to bank tellers, what they usually mean is something quite narrow: the machine performed one set of tasks, such as dispensing cash, and freed the human to concentrate on others, such as relationship banking, cross-selling, and problem-solving.
But the ATM did more than substitute for one task while leaving others to the teller. It made the teller more productive inside the same institutional setting. This is the comparative advantage layer that Séb Krier touches on when he says that “as long as the combination of Human + AGI yields even a marginal gain over AGI alone, the human retains a comparative advantage”. The branch still organized the relationship between bank and customer and the teller still inhabited a role within that world. The ATM simply changed the economics of that role, making the branch cheaper to operate and, paradoxically, more worth expanding.
But the branch is not just a building with unhappy carpet and suspicious lighting. It is an institution. It is a set of roles, expectations, scripts, constraints, and physical arrangements that organize how a bank and a customer relate to one another. It tells people where banking happens, how banking happens, and who performs which function in the ritual. The teller made sense within that world. So did the ATM. They were both playing the same game.
The iPhone did something different. Instead of automating tasks within the branch, it challenged the premise that banking requires a branch at all. It shifted the game to another board. Call this institutional substitution. When a technology is designed to operate within existing rules, the institution can often absorb it, adapt to it, metabolize it. The real threat comes from technologies that are not even playing the same game. The ATM was a move within the branch-banking game. Mobile banking was a move in the higher-order game, the game about which games get played.
Most discussion of AI stops at the level of task substitution and complementarity. Those are necessary questions, but ATM questions.
Joseph Schumpeter understood that entrepreneurship is not simply about making institutions more efficient. It’s about unsettling the institutional forms through which those efficiencies make sense at all. If you ask whether AI can do some of the work of a lawyer, a teacher, a customer service representative, or a junior analyst, you are asking an interesting question. But you are still mostly asking an ATM question. You are asking how capital fits into an existing human role. The more interesting question is whether AI changes the institutional setting that made that role intelligible in the first place. Now we are talking about institutional substitution. It’s a more dangerous territory and a more interesting territory.
And if the bank teller story is any guide, the technologies that bring about institutional substitution will not necessarily be the ones designed to automate an institution’s existing tasks. They may come from somewhere orthogonal, from applications and configurations that incumbents were not watching because they did not look like competition. The iPhone was not competing with the ATM. It was playing a different game, and it happened to make the old game less central.
So the real question is not whether AI will destroy jobs in the abstract. The real question is how AI will reorganize the architecture of production, consumption, and coordination. Not “AI does what lawyers do, but cheaper”, but rather “AI enables a new way of resolving disputes or structuring agreements that makes the current institutional form of legal services less necessary”.
Update, 16 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.
How to Go From President to King – Death of Democracy 07 – Q3 1934
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 14 Mar 2026In Q3 1934, Adolf Hitler completed the transformation of Nazi Germany from a dictatorship into an absolute Führer state. In this episode of Death of Democracy, we examine the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, the destruction of the SA leadership, and the consolidation of Hitler’s personal rule after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg.
From the creation of the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) to the rise of the SS under Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi regime tightened its grip on the state, the press, and everyday life. Meanwhile, propaganda, economic control under Hjalmar Schacht’s New Plan, and growing antisemitic persecution reshaped German society.
Using contemporary voices from Victor Klemperer, Luise Solmitz, and other witnesses, this episode explores how Hitler’s popularity soared even as terror and repression intensified. Watch the full Death of Democracy series to understand how the Nazi regime consolidated power step by step — and how ordinary societies can slide into dictatorship.
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QotD: The Roman Empire “worked” for centuries because it was run like the Roman army
A Roman legion is technically a “manipular phalanx”. A phalanx — that is, a tactical formation — that can detach parts of itself to pursue smaller tactical objectives. As far as I know, the Legion was an administrative unit, not a tactical one — the largest tactical formation was the cohort — but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, the Romans were accustomed to independently-operating tactical units. So long as they maintained formation, the sub-commanders had very broad latitude to do whatever they needed to do. They were expected to be able to command what we’d call “combined arms” (a vexillation). Ancient Auftragstaktik.
They ran their Empire the same way. So long as the sub-commanders (the Governors) “held formation”, they could pursue the agreed-upon tactical objectives (peace, revenue maximization) as they saw fit. They could put together what amounted to an administrative vexillation, using whoever was available at the time. The Emperor basically dealt with personnel problems, like a general — he had his broad policy objectives, but most of the stuff he ruled on boiled down to personnel matters; he’d direct his sub-commanders to fix a problem in whatever way seemed best to them.
We run our polities like bureaucracies — businesses, not armies. The Army’s basic problem is how to keep itself occupied in peacetime — it assumes that it exists, and always will exist, because it’s necessary; should the Army cease to exist, so will the State. Business’s basic problem is to generate enough output to keep itself in existence — a very different proposition, requiring a very different mindset.
A State bureaucracy is the worst of both worlds — it assumes it always will exist, like the Army, so it needs to find a way to keep itself occupied during “peacetime”; but that means it needs to produce enough output to justify itself in “peacetime”, because it’s never not peacetime — the business mentality.
Severian, commenting on “Means and Ends”, Founding Questions, 2025-09-04.
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March 14, 2026
What a Mickey Mouse idea!
In my far-distant youth, a “Mickey Mouse idea” would be a way of disparaging someone’s notions and hopes, belittling and ridiculing it to prevent it from being realized. In spite of that somewhat dubious association, Ted Gioia has a Mickey Mouse idea to save Disney, and it might just work … except that the studio seems to think their most famous creation is somehow tainted and disreputable:
Do aging sports stars still get hired to shake hands with tourists at Las Vegas casinos? It happened to Joe Louis. It happened to Mickey Mantle. What a sad final chapter to such illustrious careers.
Once they were great. Now they merely greet.
I fear this is Mickey Mouse’s fate today. He does his meet-and-greet routine at the theme park, then goes home to a trailer park in Orlando. Here he gripes to Minnie that he deserves better than this Walmart-ish door-tending gig. She tells him to stop whining and take Pluto for a walk.
Ah if I ran Disney I’d bring Mickey Mouse back from exile. I’d give him a movie contract, a record deal, and a tickertape parade down Main Street USA.
I’d tell the shareholders: Watch out K-Pop Demon Hunters, the Mouse is Back!
But that’s just my dream, not reality. This little fella is just as charming as ever, but his corporate overseers don’t want what he has to offer. Disney is pushing ahead on hundreds of projects right now, but none of them involve Mickey Mouse.
Back in 2002 there was some buzz about a new Disney full-length animated film entitled The Search for Mickey Mouse. This was a big deal. It would be the studio’s 50th animated feature film, and release was scheduled for Mickey’s 75th anniversary.
But the studio pulled the plug. Two years later, Disney tossed a few cheese scraps in Mickey’s direction via a 68-minute reunion with Donald Duck — but they sent the film straight to DVD after a few showings in a Hollywood theater.
It was a low-budget affair. But the theater was packed to the brim, and audiences loved the movie. That didn’t matter. The studio had other priorities.
That was our beloved mouse’s last moment of glory. Since then Mickey has appeared in a 6-minute cartoon — back in 2013 — and been granted a few on-screen cameos in low-profile short films. I’m tempted to say That’s All Folks as I contemplate Mickey’s prospects for future, but Bugs Bunny owns that line. So I’ll simply note that this is what extinction looks like when it happens onscreen.
Why is he getting cancelled?
Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse (Source)
Not long ago, Mickey Mouse was the most famous storytelling character in the world. Time magazine claimed that he was better known than even Santa Claus. Everybody in the world recognized his face — not even Winston Churchill or Greta Garbo could make that claim.
Mickey’s exile is, of course, due to his problematic copyright status. Some aspects of Mickey are entering the public domain, and even though Disney could protect his more updated modern look, it’s possible that some outsiders might earn a few coins from a Mickey Mouse resurgence.
Disney would rather go mouse-less than let that happen. That’s a bad decision — a triumphant return of Mickey would go along way toward charming audiences and fixing Disney’s tarnished reputation. He is, after all, the most beloved character in the company’s entire history.
In two years, Mickey Mouse will have reached the ripe ago of one hundred. That would be a great time for a comeback — not just for Mickey but for the whole Disney brand.
Belgian Aces in Exile – Belgian Fighter Aces – WW2 Gallery 10
World War Two
Published 12 Mar 2026Belgium might have been quickly overrun by the Germans in 1940, but many Belgian airmen continued the fight by flying with Britain’s RAF, and quite a few of them were good enough to score five or more aerial victories and become Flying Aces. Here are a few of their stories.
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