Quotulatiousness

October 9, 2026

Conrad Black on Tucker Carlson

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his (new-ish) Substack, Conrad Black discusses Tucker Carlson’s media career before he unceremoniously left Fox News and what he has been doing since then:

Tucker Carlson talking to Mike Pence, July 2023.

This became a dangerous cycle because the more Tucker forayed into the fringe, the harder he struck a vein of malformed but popular sentiment. Meanwhile, censorship of his relatively tame views only handed him a bigger megaphone and more incentive to go further. His sensible opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters, and his wariness of another quagmire emerging in Ukraine, curdled into progressively more unhinged forms of isolationism. His legitimate concerns about demographic trends and failed immigration policy curdled into belief in a coordinated conspiracy to erase white people from Europe and North America. Reasonable criticism of Israel and the American role in the Middle East curdled into the quasi-antisemitic trope of AIPAC as the hidden hand controlling U.S. foreign policy. His well-earned distrust of government curdled into various conspiracies involving some mix of extra-terrestrials, the CIA, and the Jews.

The pattern has become so predictable that if there was an effort to block him from praising Brussels sprouts as his favourite vegetable, at least three of his next five interview guests would spend two hours apiece insisting the maligned little cabbage is the victim of a coordinated smear campaign bankrolled by Big Salad. The attempted prohibition becomes the proof.

As a free-speech and free-market advocate, I think Tucker is entitled to say what he wants, and I congratulate him on his commercial success, even while finding many of his views idiotic. What troubles me is not so much the outlandish claims, but the skill atrophy — the phenomenon whereby any skill sharpened by adversarial pressure dulls without resistance. In boxing, the term “ring rust” is sometimes used to describe the way a boxer who stops facing strong opponents loses their timing, power, and urgency, until nothing’s left but a shell of their former selves. Looking back over his podcast guest list, with the exception of this Rees-Mogg segment, Ted Cruz last year, and perhaps a handful of others, it has been a long procession of hundreds of people brought on to confirm his own worldview back to him, in their own words. And the ring rust has set in.

I first noticed it at an event in Edmonton in January 2024, where I sat on a panel with Tucker and Jordan Peterson. I found myself in the awkward position of feeling the need to defend then-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in front of a packed arena of anti-Liberal partisans (with whom I would have considered myself somewhat of a kindred spirit). I was booed by parts of the audience for pointing out the fact that while Freeland, whom I know slightly and like personally, was politically hopeless, she was not, as Tucker had claimed, a fascist. The typically leftist habit of reducing every political opponent to a Hitler or Mussolini analog is lazy and obnoxious — not adjectives I would have used to describe the old Tucker. His justification was that he had recently seen a video of reporter David Menzies being detained by the RCMP after a collision with an officer while trying to get his microphone close enough to pick up Freeland’s response (or lack thereof). It was an outrageous overreaction by the officer, but there was no suggestion that Freeland had ordered the arrest. Ironically, Menzies’ question that Freeland was trying to dodge had been about why the Liberal government had gone soft on Iran’s terrorist regime — a question one might well put to Tucker.

The signs of atrophy continued to show up and in ways that, as a former admirer of Tucker’s, became progressively more alarming. At the memorial following the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, Tucker gave an odd speech in which he claimed that the assassination was reminiscent of his “favourite story”, in which Jesus Christ was killed for telling the truth by a group of shadowy figures “in a lamp-lit room” in Jerusalem, “sitting around eating hummus”. When asked about it a few days later, Tucker employed a variation of the Jon Stewart technique of backing away from his own words to avoid serious scrutiny. With his characteristic forced laugh, he denied any implication that he had echoed the nascent conspiracy theory that Israel had murdered Charlie Kirk. His defense: hummus is a traditional Arab (rather than Jewish) food.

The evident decline grew even more pronounced in his May 2026 New York Times sit-down, when Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked why he had suggested that Donald Trump might be the Antichrist. Tucker insisted he had never said that, wasn’t even sure what the Antichrist was and insisted “those words never left my lips” — then, after he was shown a clip from his own show of the words leaving his lips, he apologized that his remarks from the clip implied “a precision I haven’t arrived at”. In other words, the jury is still out about whether Trump is the Antichrist, and he regretted jumping the gun on the verdict.

Which brings us to the latest instalment. After roughly 200 interviews, each amounting to hours-long sessions of Tucker and his guests regurgitating the same pablum into each other’s mouths, the transformation into a shell of his former self appears to be complete. In this conversation, moments after declaring that killing the innocent is “never justified under any circumstances”, he pivoted almost in the same breath into a full-throated defence of Hitler — history’s single greatest killer of innocents. He argued the invasion of Poland was understandable given that 15% of the country had been German before the Treaty of Versailles. While absurd, at least it is consistent with his position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But even if, for argument’s sake, that justified Poland, Hitler didn’t stop there. What justified the invasions of Belgium and France? After all, France was faithfully adhering to the Tuckerite foreign policy of reluctant rearmament, appeasement, and assuming an entirely defensive posture (behind the Maginot Line). Stretching the flimsy logic further one could argue (feebly) that France had it coming too, since 6% of France (Alsace-Lorraine) was also German before Versailles. But there’s still no justification for the invasions of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece, or the Soviet Union — with whom Hitler had a signed non-aggression pact. None of those countries were ever German, let alone Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt.

What’s clear is that Hitler used his early invasions to test whether anyone would stop him — and the feedback he got was a green light for more. History keeps teaching the same lesson: appeasement is just expansionism outsourced to your enemies.

Small wonder Tucker hasn’t learned this lesson from history, given that he called Darryl Cooper — a man with zero historical credentials — “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper spent two hours on Tucker’s show in September 2024, arguing Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of the war, and that the deaths of millions in Nazi camps owed more to German logistical incompetence than deliberate extermination.

British humour – “there is something unique about ‘taking the mickey'”

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

This post is from a few months ago, but still seems quite relevant to British society (admittedly, I’m not there and perhaps things are actually better than they appear from across the pond):

Image from Fish & Chips

Last week, the BBC announced it would be axing Live At the Apollo. Its viewing figures have halved since 2018. I turned on the TV to see what we’d be missing. It was compered by a guy whose idea of being droll was to shout. The comedians he introduced were “safe” — in the way that sticking a cork up your bottom is safe.

In order to get BBC Purity Vetting clearance, Apollo ceased to be Comedy.

Wooden jollity, enforced on us by puritans, is not the real Britain. Being sharply satirical, frivolously inane, or anywhere in between — that is who we are and what we want to watch. Rather like Baldrick, it’s all part of a cunning plan. Our humour is conduit for the House Rules of Britishness.

The self-deprecation. The puncturing of pomposity. The airing of societal concerns through a keenly observed joke. The tension-releasing giggle of the naughty-but-nice. The feel-good factor of unadulterated silliness — from Bob Mortimer right back to Saint Eric of Morecambe.

Yes, in its many forms, British humour is the window to our soul. And yet the Pigeons of Political Correctness have come and dropped their payload all over it.

What a mess they’ve made. On our screens and off, the fear of causing offence suppresses our greatest and most cohering natural instinct. In the mini survey I mentioned in Fish & Chips Portion One, we found that humour was by some distance thought to be the most quintessential British trait. Among things like chatting in the pub, walking the dog, respectfully disagreeing and helping a neighbour, “seeing the funny side” came top. It is our coping mechanism; our way of keeping calm and carrying on. It is what we are admired for. In the once noble pursuit of social justice; of balancing things up a bit – our humour police are creating a whole new imbalance. It is topsy turvy social engineering in which only the “weak” are “strong”. There must be a zany new Monty Python sketch in there somewhere.

A respondent in our survey was spot on when he said: “Sense of humour in the managerial/professional class has gone … not necessarily normal people“.

So it’s time that we “normal people” clean all that crap off the window. The pigeons won’t do it, will they? They”re too busy cooing about Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. It is up to us to make the penny drop for them. To see that what they are trying to do is unnatural. Because in Middle England, there will always be the surreal, the satirical, and the smutty innuendo.

October 8, 2026

Central planning also centralizes the importance of “who you know”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre points out the other thing that socialized economies share with one another: the overwhelming importance of “friends”, “connections”, and “family” in generating unearned wealth and power.

AI-generated image from @Handre on X

Socialism concentrates power, and concentrated power concentrates wealth. Hugo Chavez spent two decades screaming about imperialist oligarchs while his own daughters accumulated the kind of fortune that would embarrass a Rockefeller.

Maria Gabriela Chavez holds assets estimated at $4.2 billion, making her Venezuela’s wealthiest individual by a comfortable margin. Her father nationalized over 1,200 private companies between 2002 and 2012.

The mechanism is straightforward: When the state controls production, distribution, currency, and courts, political proximity becomes the only productive investment. You don’t build a business; you cultivate a minister. Chavez’s inner circle stole through socialism, using currency controls, preferential exchange rates, and state contracts as the instruments.

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan poverty rate crossed 80 percent in 2024. Infant mortality climbed. The bolivar collapsed so completely that Venezuelans began pricing transactions in dollars just to preserve basic calculation.

Ludwig von Mises proved mathematically in 1920 that socialist planners cannot rationally allocate resources without prices generated by voluntary exchange. No prices, no signal. No signal, no coordination. Shortages follow as surely as math follows addition.

This while Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Poverty there is entirely manufactured. Chavez’s family lives in Caracas and Miami on wealth extracted from people who cannot buy protein. The ideology that promised to eat the rich ended with the people eating the zoo animals.

October 7, 2026

QotD: The cultural dominance of “Yankeedom”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Education, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

People like to point out that the political Right in America, split as it is between redneck populists and classically-liberal free marketeers, lacks the European conservatives’ emphasis on order and tradition, place and class, throne and altar and blood and soil and so forth. And, pace various European immigrants over the years and a few weirdos on the Internet, that’s true. But it’s interesting to imagine what our politics might look like today if Tidewater had remained a force on the national stage and if any substantial strain in America could say, with John Randolph of Roanoke, “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality.”

So there’s Tidewater, lost and forgotten except for some guys in Virginia who still put on red jackets to hunt foxes from horseback — and maybe in slightly different voting patterns. What about the nation that won, the one that’s everywhere?

I refer, of course, to Yankeedom.

“But Jane,” you say, “Yankeedom isn’t everywhere! Scroll back up to your own map — it’s in New England, sure, and, uh, northeastern Ohio and, wow, okay, the entire Upper Midwest. But that’s not everywhere.” But ignore the map for a moment: that’s Woodard’s idea, based on settlement patterns and voting behavior. What is Yankeedom, really? What are its fundamental beliefs, its vision of how life ought to be, and where do they show up today?

Of course you know the story of Yankeedom’s founding: radical Calvinists from East Anglia, settled around the Massachusetts Bay in the 1620s and 30s, funny hats? Maybe you made one of those hats for your construction paper turkey in first grade — or, if you’re a little younger, maybe you learned a nice poem about welcoming new immigrants for a glowing future of multiculturalism and prosperity. In fact the emphasis on “the Pilgrims” in American civic mythology — never mind the traditional Thanksgiving menu, heavy on quintessentially New England dishes like pie1 — is itself a product of Yankeedom’s cultural dominance, as is the insistence in that familiar story that they left England for religious freedom. It’s true! They did! But there’s a very important final bit that we somehow leave out of the version we teach to elementary schoolers: religious freedom for themselves.

The earliest Yankees imagined their new society as a Protestant utopia, a new Zion, in which they would work out their collective salvation. Any deviation from the straight-and-narrow could doom everyone, so enforcing moral and religious conformity — through banishing heretics or, if necessary, even executing them — was of paramount importance. Yankeedom was meant to be a “city on a hill”, a model for mankind: if only they could be good enough, pure enough, and holy enough, God would bless them abundantly — and then everyone else, seeing their manifest blessings, would naturally emulate them and become holy themselves! The important thing, then, was not merely to do right but to be seen to do right, as an example to neighbors and foreigners alike. Yankeedom also put a tremendous emphasis on education (literacy was necessary to read the Word of God), encouraged subordinating the interests of the individual to the greater good of the community, and saw government as an extension of the citizenry. Government, then, since it was run by and for the people, was naturally called to propagate God’s will in a corrupt and sinful world by prohibiting or regulating immoral activities.

As Yankeedom moved west, out of the strict control of the Congregationalist ministers who dominated the New England colonies, they began to abandon their specific religious tenets. Sometimes this meant exciting new religious — the Yankee-settled western portions of New York State gave rise to such religious enthusiasms that people began to call it the “Burned-Over District“2 — but just as often it meant becoming a Methodist, Unitarian, or Baptist. Wherever they went, though, the Yankees clung to their belief that you could make earthly society resemble Heaven, or at least that there was no excuse for not trying as hard as you could. Yankees were at the heart of every push for social reform, from abolitionism and the temperance movement to Reconstruction, the minimum wage, women’s suffrage, and an end to child labor. For example, the members of New York City’s Committee of Fifteen, which militated against gambling and prostitution, were mostly Yankees or German-Jewish immigrants; none were culturally New Netherlanders.

By now this should all be sounding familiar. Heavy emphasis on education, embrace of the government regulation or prohibition of immoral behavior as the central bulwark of societal virtue, extremely visible adherence to highly specific rules and norms of behavior as proof of righteousness? Oh, look, it’s woke! It’s the ideology of the professional-managerial class, the meritocratic elite — it’s the same people with the same bumper stickers on the same Mercedes SUVs in the Whole Foods parking lot that you see in every major American city, regardless of which “nation” most of the other residents belong to.

There are two things going on here, I think: first, high-cultural capital Americans are far more mobile than they used to be. Plenty of people spend a few years in DC, then a few years in Austin, or maybe San Francisco or Boulder or Brooklyn, regardless of where they grew up. Second, and perhaps more important, is the role of education. Maintaining or improving your class position depends far more on a “good” college than it used to (witness the to-do when someone claims the distinction of Harvard on a night school degree!). The Yankee emphasis on education means that most of America’s prestigious colleges and universities are in Yankee-settled areas.3 Thus, membership in a higher stratum of society practically depends on four or eight years marinating in Yankeedom. What’s a kid from rural Nebraska to do?

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: American Nations, by Colin Woodard”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-19.

  1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Oldtown Folks, as quoted in Albion’s Seed:

    2. “The pie is an English institution, which, planted in American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum plies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies, — pies with top crusts, and pies without, — pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when let loose in a given direction.”

    For more on the history of distinctly American pies, including why they’re so different from the English pies you may have seen on The Great British Bake-Off, I highly recommend BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, which is somehow both the best history of American sweets I’ve ever read and the best cookbook for them.

  2. Famous alumni of the Burned-Over District include the Seventh-Day Adventists, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community, and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. (Yes, Mormons are Yankees. Obviously.) But my favorite wacky Yankee religious enthusiasm — actually in Massachusetts, where they weren’t branding people with H for heretic any more — was John Murray Spear‘s “New Motive Power”, an attempt to build an electric perpetual motion machine Jesus.
  3. The exceptions are generally the flagship school of a large non-Yankee region or in California, the culture of which I’ve entirely elided for reasons of brevity. Sorry. The tl;dr is that Woodard argues the “Left Coast” is a hybrid of Yankees settling the cities and Greater Appalachia in the countryside, which leads to culture fairly similar to that of Yankeedom.

October 6, 2026

Humour and the British Green Party

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In the Daily Sceptic, Steven Tucker discusses the state of comedy in Britain today, in the light of the recent Green Party internal report on what members are supposed to deem funny or not funny. Not joking:

In the very same week these letters were publicised, the UK Green Party did actually launch its own internal in-depth report on what was and was not funny, with party activists receiving training informing them they should maintain detailed records of any jokes fellow members had told to them, “including dates, times [and] locations”, in case anyone later found them to be offensive – particularly if they touched upon sensitive issues like race, religion, sexuality or class. Even if the particular big fat black lesbian affected made a joke about themselves, this was still to be noted down and eliminated, as it nonetheless created “an environment in this space where derogatory jokes are allowed to happen”.

To prevent such jocular genocide occurring again in future, Greens were advised to perform an “audit” of their friendship groups to ensure they were diverse enough so that this simply would not happen: an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman all walk into a pub, and nobody says anything even remotely untoward whatsoever, as diversity is clearly our strength.

Official Green Party advice on what to do if you happen to hear a joke one day. Nowhere does the option “laugh” appear

For a preview of what a future Green-led Ministry of Laughter might one day look like, we should look towards a current controversy involving the quasi-state-run BBC (Bowdlerising British Comedy), which in September decided to mark 20 years since the first broadcast of award-winning sketch-show That Mitchell and Webb Look – by cutting out several sketches, and deeming the show to be “racist”. The now samizdat sketches involved scenarios like English Civil War re-enactors getting bored and deciding to black up and recreate modern-day conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a brownface Amazonian tribe found secretly living behind flower-pots in a garden centre and a woman wearing a burka being an unsuccessful participant in a TV makeover programme.

Even more primly, the BBC also wiped or butchered entire episodes of popular children’s comedy history series Horrible Histories, as they featured jokes about sensitive topics like slavery – despite the fact they pretty obviously were not of a “Let’s bring it back!”-type perspective, but attempting to satirise the practice’s brutality.

One horrified reaction came from Graham Linehan, the cancelled Anglo-Irish comedy writer who today lives in exile in America, as nobody in the UK industry will now touch his work with a bargepole. Not only does it commit the cardinal post-2010s sin of actually being funny, Linehan’s writing is also deemed to be “transphobic”; Channel 4 refuses to re-show an old episode of his sitcom the IT Crowd, as it features a joke about a cross-dresser (see my review of his 2023 autobiography).

Writing in the Telegraph, Linehan observes that most British comedians who get their back-catalogues politically ruined these days, like Mitchell and Webb, either keep silent and go along with it for an easy life, or else actively denounce themselves in classic Soviet show-trial fashion, so as to keep raking in the cash on the panel-show circuit. Because of this cowardice, he says, “somewhere out there, the next generation of comedy writers and performers, the ones who might have pushed the form further, taken bigger risks, made the joke nobody else would touch, will quietly decide it isn’t worth it, and nobody will have to ban anything ever again”. Sounds a bit like how Islam operates in such matters, too …

October 5, 2026

Communism and the DSA

Filed under: Books, China, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The fortunes of America’s self-described socialists are clearly on the rise, as DSA-backed candidates gain more media attention and come closer to being elected to office. The DSA really could rename itself the DCA without much pushback, as communism has lost a lot of its massive historical baggage in the minds of average American voters.

Photo via Rob Henderson’s Newsletter

Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated.

With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado.

Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America‘s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, “Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership”. In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday.

All of which raises some natural questions: Where is this revolutionary romance coming from? And as it steadily seeps into our leadership class, where will it lead?

The best guide to understanding these questions is a book published more than 50 years ago under a pseudonym — because the author feared what pro-Maoist intellectuals would do to him if they discovered who wrote it.

Simon Leys, whose real name was Pierre Ryckmans, was a Belgian-Australian scholar of Chinese art and literature. In 1974, he published Chinese Shadows, a record of the cultural and political destruction he saw in China in the years just after the Cultural Revolution. The book is full of eerily relevant observations. One of them, which I will get to, is the most haunting thing I’ve read about what political terror does to the human soul. And nearly all of them describe habits of mind that didn’t die with Mao. In fact, they are now alive in America.

First, some background. In The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976, the historian Frank Dikötter explains how it began. Mao Zedong wanted to purge rivals at the top of the Communist Party. So he turned to radical students, giving them permission to denounce every authority except his own. Party officials egged on these young militants as they raided the homes of “class enemies” and turned them into social outcasts. What followed was violence, looting, the legitimization of hatred, and the denunciation of family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

When the resulting catastrophe became impossible to deny, Mao and the regime’s officials disavowed their own shock troops, claiming that an “extreme left” had been responsible for the atrocities.

Sound familiar? Americans witnessed a milder version of this in the summer of 2020. Rioting and looting that year caused between $1 billion and $2 billion in damages. As this transpired, prominent voices in politics and media minimized the destruction. And some leading officials quickly insisted that the destruction was not the work of their own residents. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, later the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, estimated that 80 percent of those causing damage came from out of state, while Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared that “the people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents”. Jail records showed the opposite.

If the scale is different, the pattern is the same: indulgence first, followed by disingenuous disavowal after the damage is done.

There’s never any good news on the climate front

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

John Robson calls out the extreme rhetoric employed by environmentalists and their journalist flappers to try to keep climate anxieties as high as possible, especially if there haven’t been any new alarming climate-related events to build on:

The New York Times engages in some classic yellow journalism with “Climate: Disaster Survivors Sticking Together” teasing to a column by David Gelles that starts “Extreme weather is hitting more people with each passing year”. But it’s not, even though there are more people for it to hit with each passing year as the climate crisis coincides strangely with unprecedented human material flourishing and a 99 percent drop in climate-related fatalities. We accept that there is room for intelligent and well-meaning debate about facts as well as their meaning. But the drumbeat of assertions by climate fanatics that the weather is getting worse when it’s just not crosses the line into bad-faith bellowing ignorance.

Another Times story titillates with a “CALCULATOR” of:

    Is Your City Prepared for Climate Disaster? A new report ranks the world’s large cities on how well they have adapted to face climate risk.

What exactly “climate risk” is, unless they mean bad weather, is not explained. Why the Times thinks bad weather is new is also not explained. What the Times thinks of the fact that even as global population soars, the number of people killed every year by bad weather has plummeted, not the proportion but the absolute number, is apparently nothing. Instead they lead off:

    When it comes to the effects of hostile climates – flood, fire and more – what matters isn’t just inherent risk, but rather the ability of a place to withstand that risk.

Well, duh. And clearly wealthier societies are far better able to withstand that risk, so even if you believe that fossil fuels make the weather a bit worse, the tradeoff is well worth making. But so is the effort to see if the weather is getting worse.

Now we don’t deny that “fire” is a hostile climate. But if it’s an “effect” of hostile climate, then the climate has always been hostile since what evidence we have says there were a lot more wildfires two and three hundred years ago than there are now. Don’t wait for them to credit CO2 with the decrease though … since they didn’t bother looking it up.

That story also blathers about how things from “early warning systems” to “governance” can “significantly mitigate the effects of climate change” although climate change is not a causal force it’s a statistical description of how the weather has altered in some place over at least 30 years. And it says Chicago is the most resilient city with “low hurricane risk” due, we point out, not to them building a big windbreak or something but it not being in the path of the hurricanes that regularly sweep through other parts of the US and have for as long as there have been observers to flee them shouting “Whoa Nelly a twister!” Moreover:

    Many of the least resilient places were South Asian cities with extreme exposure to floods and monsoons to which they were poorly adapted.

And if the Times seriously thinks monsoons are a new and horrible consequence of the gasoline-powered automobile you should cancel your subscription before it puts some other nonsense in your head. Like that floods and mudslides in rural Nepal and Tibet are relevant to urban resilience.

Media outlets have always had a strong bias toward reporting bad news, “If it bleeds, it leads!” but on the climate beat, there’s never any good news to report because everything — warming, cooling, precipitation, seasonal change — has to be presented in a negative light.

October 4, 2026

Jaguar – a case study in brand suicide

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

The Jaguar E-type was, in my opinion, the best-looking car of the 20th century. It was all downhill from that point, sadly:

Jaguar killed itself. No villain required, no recession to blame, no supply chain disruption to hide behind. Tata Motors bought a fading but salvageable brand in 2008 for $2.3 billion and spent the next fifteen years turning it into a case study in how to destroy capital.

The rebranding campaign of late 2024 was the public execution. Jaguar dropped its leaping cat logo, fired its entire existing customer demographic via press release, and replaced a century of racing heritage with a pastel-colored advertisement featuring zero cars. The marketing team apparently decided the path to profitability ran directly through alienating the people who actually bought Jaguars. Brilliant.

The rebrand was just the visible wound. The rot started earlier. Jaguar spent years producing vehicles with reliability ratings that made Land Rover look like a Swiss watch, while charging Mercedes money for the privilege. The F-Pace, the E-Pace, the I-Pace: each one a beautiful object that dealers apologized for in advance. You bought the badge and got a subscription to your mechanic’s vacation fund.

The pivot to an all-electric lineup, announced with great fanfare in 2021, then delayed, then sort-of-delayed-again, captured everything wrong with a company led by government subsidy chasers rather than engineers. Jaguar chased EV tax credits and green virtue points instead of fixing the fundamental problem. Nobody trusted the cars.

Markets are merciless precisely because they are honest. Customers stopped buying, and no amount of rebranding or regulatory coddling reversed that verdict. Capital allocated to a brand that cannot hold a customer is capital destroyed. Tata learned this lesson expensively. You, having never bought the car, learned it for free.

The ad campaign is just a sign on the door that reads, “This company is woke trash”. The real rot lies beneath the surface. Firing the marketing agency won’t change that.

October 3, 2026

More on that change to student loan eligibility rules

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

Larry Correia’s comments on Trump’s executive order changing eligibility for federally guaranteed student loans generated a fair amount of discussion, so I felt linking to Copernican’s post on the same topic would be of interest to many of you:

As a White Western Man, I am unaccustomed to seeing or hearing “good news” in a larger geopolitical sense. That is, actions of our leaders tend to lead one to be somewhere between depressingly blackpilled and defiantly optimistic even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Recently, Donald Trump and his Department of Education have engaged in some more executive shenanigans. Once again bypassing our Congress, whose dysfunctional role is best thought of as the kidneys in our diabetic, alcoholic body politic. With that said, a relatively minor update to the Department of Education rules regarding underwriting federal student loans might have a dramatic long-term effect on our entire cultural system.

Take a look for yourself:

    Of all the actions the Executive Branch can take, this is one of the best. Most notably, because it’s boring. Changing the rules on federal fiscal underwriting is boring, so the media and the population at large will have a hard time holding on to it as a talking point. The most dramatic cultural changes are precipitated from the most boring types of fiscal action. Flashy is fun, but boring is often effective. Something to keep in mind when our generation finally seizes the reins of power.

The recent update that takes effect in 2027 is functionally removing the federal guarantee from student loans for useless degrees. Predominantly degrees that fall under the “female daycare” category. That is, the reason why every employer in the United States demands a degree to flip burgers or fill out spreadsheets is due to the fact that everyone can get a degree. Removing a significant portion of the federally backed degree-mill system will force a top-down restructuring of the American cultural academic-caste system.

The fallout from this decision is going to be immense, but we won’t see it unless the current policy holds long enough for several generations of university students to grow up under it (say around 12 years). First, it’s going to cut off universities from the endless money of cheap federal student loans that’s been flooding into useless departments. Women’s studies, social studies, English majors, and early-childhood-education majors are about to see a significant drawdown in the number of attending students.

As many have pointed out, it’s only an Executive Order, so it can be easily set aside by the next president, but it may have a salutary effect on those who do see a university degree as just a way to stay out of the working world for a few more years.

October 2, 2026

Those who are attracted to power are the ones least capable of using it wisely

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

Lord Acton, something, something, corrupts absolutely:

Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours.

F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start.

The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them.

Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency’s reach, never on serving you efficiently.

October 1, 2026

“Motte and bailey” doesn’t work with this argument

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

Yesterday was nominally “Truth and Reconciliation Day” in Canada, but the government and progressive activist groups are actively trying to suppress honest questions about the whole Residential Schools topic and threatening jail time to those who refuse to mouth the slogans:

This is an interesting thread, because he makes the motte and bailey explicit in a way they’re not usually careless enough to do.

No one denies that the residential schools were rough, that the kids who went there were probably kind of sad, and that some of them died, due to contagious disease mostly. That’s all very unfortunate but doesn’t amount to much more than “kids get homesick at boarding school, discipline back then was often severe by modern standards, and medicine was primitive especially in remote areas”. This is the motte and it isn’t all that impactful because none of it is all that different from conditions that white kids lived through at the time, particularly in remote areas.

But it was very specifically the claim of mass graves due to deliberate genocide that supercharged this issue back in 2021, with the implication that the residential schools were actually a cover for a policy of systematic extermination. At least I assume this is the charge, as they keep saying “genocide” and that’s what genocide is commonly understood to mean. This is the bailey.

The problem is that there is no evidence for mass graves. The few times that they’ve been investigated no bodies were found. At the Kamloops site they deliberately refuse to even dig, which strikes people as suspicious. So people ask questions. It’s only natural to want something more concrete than “because I said so” when you’re being accused of genocide.

So they then retreat to the motte of “well things were hard in the schools”, and okay, yes, they were, but that isn’t genocide. But the implication is that anyone asking for evidence in support of the genocide claim – anyone attacking the bailey – is engaging in “denialism” that the schools even existed or that conditions in the schools were often not ideal. Which literally no one does.

This entire debate comes down to one question. Is the Canadian government guilty of a deliberate, systematic policy of genocide? Did it set out to exterminate the First Nations via the mass murder of their children? That’s it, that’s the issue, that’s what we’re fighting about.

And there’s a very high bar of evidence for proving something like that. At a minimum, you need a whole lot of bones.

Got any bones out in that bailey?

Marc Emery argues that the reservation system was a mistake and it has permanently immiserated most First Nations people and enriched a tiny minority who capture most of the benefits for themselves:

We should have abolished reservations and this idea of tribal land. Each native should have been given land that stays in that person’s family in perpetuity, and then we should have been done.

Instead, tribal lands, reservations, the Rez, have been the worst places on Earth to have been a child or female.

Rape, incest, predation, neglect and child abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, abandonment, murder, violent assault, domestic violence; no child or youth was spared being witness to this grim experience in their tribal homes.

Statistics don’t lie. No one hates their women more than native men.

The residential schools were much safer.

That was one of the main reasons for residential schools and the 60’s Scoop, get the children away from the dangerous and predatory reserve life. Many mothers who sent their children to residential schools knew this.

This is the truth that must be reconciled. The Whites have paid their dues in triplicate. No more tribute, no more money, no more land.

The natives have to raise themselves up. Blaming the Whites is over. The children of today should not be tax slaves to a pay tens of billions of dollars in annual tributes to a culture that has been so barbaric to women, children, that had slaves, were in constant warfare before the establishment of Canada, that invented nothing, that received the benefits of every technological advance at no cost to these “indigenous” who gladly — eagerly — abandon their ancient traditions for every benefit of European/Canadian invention and wonder.

September 30, 2026

That “far-Right” fantasy that “never really existed”

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

Gawain Towler responds to the claims of a British MP that the nostalgic view of the rural life in England that George Orwell praised is something that the “far-Right” will try to capitalize on even though, she says, it “never really existed”:

I was going to go to bed, but the malevolent inanity that is Jenny Riddell-Carpenter MP has riled me. She has disturbed my sleep, because she says that she cannot sleep. She told a Labour fringe meeting in Liverpool today what keeps her awake, and it was not rural bus cuts or the last shop closing in a Suffolk village. It was her own voters. She fears the far right will fight the next election on “a nostalgic vision of Britain that never really existed“, one of “warm ale, a black Labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist, and with symbolism of fox hunting all around them“.

A pub that doesn’t exist. The Minister for Nature represents Suffolk Coastal. Allow me to draw her a map.

Adnams brews in Southwold, just inside the protected landscape of the Suffolk Coast and Heaths, and the town is in her seat. From there a rowing-boat ferry crosses the Blyth to Walberswick for a pound, worked by a family that has pulled the oars for generations. The Bell on the far bank is six hundred years old and lets dogs in. The Cross Keys at Aldeburgh has served drink since 1540, and the Crown at Snape is a fifteenth-century inn with its own allotment. Most MPs would put these places on the constituency Christmas card. Ms Riddell-Carpenter prefers to tell a hall in Liverpool they are a far right hallucination.

Her non-existent warm ale has a pedigree she ought to recognise. She must be thinking of John Major in 1993, but he lifted it from George Orwell, who had written of “old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning“. Orwell was a socialist who spent years at his parents’ house in Southwold. The fantasy she fears was written by a man of the left, in her constituency. She clearly doesn’t know.

Then comes the sentence that gives her away. Labour, she said, must make the case for “what we believe rural communities look like“. Not what they are. What Labour believes they look like. The countryside is not to be listened to but corrected, its shape agreed at a fringe meeting and posted back to the people who live in it. When they describe their own lives, the pub, the dog, the Saturday match, their MP hears Ladybird nostalgia and smells fascism.

Cricket will be next on the charge sheet. Yoxford plays at Grove Park beside St Peter’s church and fields girls’ sides at under-11, under-13 and under-15, alongside women’s teams. At Orford the Sudbourne Hall ground drained well enough to save every home game in a previous sodden summer, and women’s sessions ended with a Pimm’s at close of play. This is the reactionary idyll that haunts her nights. It is busy doing, on a village green, what her party only issues press releases about.

She cannot plead ignorance, which makes it worse, no culpable. Her family moved to Martlesham Heath when she was seven, and she went to Woodbridge School. At eighteen she left and did not come back until the voters sent her. The years between went to London, to SOAS (oh brother), to the housing developer L&Q and to the lobbying trade, where she rose to run Cratus Group. Her husband still works in London social housing. She came home remembering every pub by name and having learned in town to be embarrassed by all of them. She now chairs the Labour Rural Research Group, which is a little like putting a vegan in charge of the pork pie.

A rural minister’s job is to carry the countryside’s case into Whitehall. This one carries Whitehall’s sneer back out and waits for the applause. Nobody who talks about her own patch like this can be trusted to defend it when a solar farm or a trail-hunting ban comes over the hill. She will side with the department and call it progress. She will be wielding the new Landuse Framework that tokenises the countryside, and she hates what exists before.

Undermining any attempt to discover truth and achieve any reconciliation

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

The urge to uncover past wrongs in the Canadian government’s dealings with First Nations groups isn’t a bad thing … but the government’s unwillingness to require factual evidence in support of claims of past wrongs will do exactly the opposite of working toward cultural reconciliation:

Photo from Woke Watch Canada

Why is the federal government trying to prevent Canadians from learning the truth about Indian residential schools?

On 24 September 2026, six days before Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Rebecca Alty issued a statement about so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’.

Alty claims so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’ “spreads false information by denying or casting doubt on the history of Residential Schools and the lasting harm they caused”. She offers no examples, which strongly suggests she could not provide examples if pressed to do so. The federal government is thus using Canadian taxpayer funds to attack a straw man of its own creation.

In fact, the federal government has gone far beyond using Canadian taxpayer funds to attack the straw man it calls ‘Residential Schools denialism’. It has even entertained bills which would criminalize it.

    The federal government refuses to release residential school attendance records to the public which would disprove claims of missing children

In addition to using Canadian taxpayer money to attack so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’ — a straw man of its own creation — and entertaining bills which would criminalize it, the federal government has actively prevented the truth about Canada’s Indian residential schools from coming out.

For years there have been tales of thousands of missing Indian residential school students. The federal government has allowed these baseless rumours to proliferate, despite the fact that not a single name of a missing Indian residential school student has ever been produced by anyone, including the federal government.

Moreover the federal government has allowed these baseless tales of missing Indian residential school students to proliferate while actively concealing from the Canadian public the attendance records in its possession which disprove them.

An example is the attendance records for the Kamloops Indian Residential School. A close examination of the quarterly returns for the Kamloops Indian Residential School from 1943-1952, which are available online, establishes that every student is accounted for during that decade.

The government also has quarterly returns and other attendance records for the remaining years of the existence of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1952-1977, which it has not released to the public. Their existence is attested to by the federal government itself in the school narrative it prepared for use in the Independent Assessment Process.

Quarterly returns were the basis on which the Department of Indian Affairs calculated the per capita grant which covered the operating costs of the school. School officials ensured they were meticulously accurate in order to obtain as large a grant as possible based on current student enrolment, and the Department of Indian Affairs likewise demanded that they be meticulously accurate to avoid the federal government overpaying the school.

It is thus of the greatest significance that on pp. 7-8 of the attached school narrative, the federal government provides a table of total attendance figures for the years of the Kamloops Indian Residential School’s existence. The figures given by the federal government for the years from 1952-1977 are not estimates. They are very precise numbers — 402, 424, 381, 390, for example — indicating that they are derived from attendance records in the federal government’s possession, and in fact the federal government’s heading on the table reads “most are September figures for each year and based on Quarterly Returns where possible“.

It is thus clear that if released by the federal government, the quarterly returns underlying the figures in this table would establish conclusively that not a single student from the Kamloops Indian Residential School went missing between the years 1952-1977, yet the federal government refuses to release these attendance records so that the Canadian public can learn the truth. Instead, the federal government allows the damaging and completely unfounded myth of thousands of missing Indian residential school students to proliferate, and even to be promulgated beyond Canada’s borders (as, for example, in the recent hearings of the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal).

The federal government needs to release these attendance records, not just for the Kamloops Indian Residential School, but for all Indian residential schools in Canada, so that the Canadian public can learn the truth, i.e., that federal government records establish that not a single student is missing from an Indian residential school.

On X, Mr Bench points out that First Nations’ political representatives see literally no end to the need for reconciliation for generations yet to come:

Will reconciliation ever end?

According to Candice … NO.

Plan for this to continue for generations.

She says some people haven’t even started healing yet.

Her son will need healing.

Her future grandchildren will need healing.

And she admits:

“Don’t know how many generations it’s gonna take for us to heal, and healing is forever.”

So when does reconciliation end?

It doesn’t. So keep the funds flowing

If “healing is forever”, apparently there is no finish line.

L. Wayne Mathison speaks for an increasing number of Canadians here:

I’m sick and tired of being told that people generations from now will still need to “heal” from events they never personally experienced. My ancestors went through terrible things too. History is full of conquest, poverty, discrimination, war and displacement.

Remember the past. Teach it accurately. Deal with specific injustices that still exist. But at some point adults also have to build a life in the present.

I do not believe anyone should inherit permanent victimhood, and I do not believe anyone alive today should inherit permanent guilt.

Reconciliation without measurable goals, accountability or any conceivable end point stops looking like reconciliation to me, period.

Keep this up, and I am totally done with this.

QotD: “Have you ever been surprised to learn that someone was a Leftist?”

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

I don’t mean learning that someone votes Democrat. That’s sadly all too common — the flyover state where I live is full of good churchgoing folks who know which bathroom to use, yet nonetheless vote Democrat in every election, because in their minds it’s somehow still 1935 and only that nice Mr. Roosevelt is keeping the bank from foreclosing on Pappy’s farm. I mean something along the lines of, you’re in a bar watching the big game with a group of Regular Joes, when all of a sudden one of them blurts out “Oh, I can’t stand all the toxic masculinity!” Or starts raving about their “transitioning” kid or how great it is that there are no national borders anymore or something like that.

It never happens, right? Like vegans and Harvard alums, you never have to wonder if someone is an SJW — they’ll tell you, right off the bat. Usually they don’t even have to tell you; the hair and the tats and the fishing tackle in the face do that. Like putting the “Bernie 2024” sticker on the bumper of the Prius or the Subaru Outback, actually declaring yourself an SJW is overkill. So much so that it’s a cliché — of all the budding shitlords I mentored in my years in academia, none of them “came out” to me because of anything I said or did. It was all the stuff I didn’t say or do — I didn’t spend half of each class period ranting and raving about The Current Thing, which was so unusual that they figured I must be on the other side.

The Left, I think it’s fair to say, enjoys total freedom here in AINO. Total liberty, too, and that’s a distinction we should probably make at some point, but for right now let’s hold fire on that. Whichever one you want to use, though, it’s obvious that the Left have it, with pretty much zero restraint. Nothing is too weird or gross or obnoxious that the Left won’t champion it.

But even more than that, all the traditional restraints on behavior — what we should probably call decorum — have been systematically destroyed, and that’s the heart of what I want to talk about. Since we’re discussing the Left here, let’s use one of their favorite terms: Privilege. I think we can take it as read that there has never been a more privileged person, in any sense of the word “privilege,” in all of human history, than Karen (or her JV version, the Basic College Girl). And what battleaxes they are! Constantly lecturing everyone else about their privilege while plowing through every social situation like a tsunami. Like the Clintons, Karen triumphs because you just can’t believe anyone has the sheer brass-balled audacity to pull the antisocial shit they do.

Have you no shame, madam? At last, have you no shame?

Severian, “On Liberty”, Founding Questions, 2022-10-12.

September 29, 2026

The “meta-crisis” that isn’t

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Anthony Watts refutes the media claims of climate change driving a large group of unrelated issues into a “meta-crisis” that — as these things always seem to do — requires co-ordinated central control of all human activity (the answer always, always seems to be an all-powerful world government, doesn’t it?).

Image from Watts Up With That

Euronews claims climate change has evolved into a “meta-crisis” threatening food security, energy supplies, economies, water resources, and international security. This is misleading because the article largely substitutes predictions and assertions for measurements of what is actually happening. The data show global crop production and yields reaching record levels, deaths from extreme weather collapsing over the long term, and many of today’s energy and economic problems arising from political choices and geopolitical conflicts rather than changes in climate.

Euronews builds its case primarily around an interview with Emmanuella Doussis, UNESCO Chair on Climate Diplomacy at the University of Athens. Doussis declares climate change an economic, social, political, and geopolitical problem, linking it to competition for resources, migration, water shortages, food insecurity, and the energy transition.

Those are sweeping claims. Curiously, Euronews provides remarkably little observational evidence demonstrating that climate change is actually causing the worldwide “meta-crisis” its headline announces.

Perhaps the most obvious contradiction concerns food.

Doussis predicts, “We will face a very large, serious problem with food security.” But predictions about what might happen cannot erase what is happening.

Climate at a Glance: Crop Production summarizes data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showing that global crop production and yields have risen dramatically during the period of modern warming. Its latest summary reports that the 2023 and 2024 global crop years produced the two highest global crop yields per acre on record.

Climate Realism has documented the same trend repeatedly. Global production of staple crops has increased substantially, and yields have repeatedly set records during recent decades. Even where individual crops suffer poor regional seasons because of drought, floods, pests, or other causes, that is not evidence of a deteriorating global food supply.

There are good reasons for this improvement. Agricultural technology, irrigation, fertilizers, improved crop varieties, mechanization, and better pest control have transformed farming. Modest warming can also lengthen growing seasons and reduce damaging frost events in some regions, while additional atmospheric carbon dioxide generally stimulates plant growth and improves water-use efficiency.

None of this means weather cannot damage crops. It always has. It means that portraying climate change as presently creating a global food-security crisis conflicts with the direction of observed agricultural production.

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