Quotulatiousness

March 9, 2026

Political and philosophical illusions, left and right

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

Tom Kratman discusses how illusions distort how people on the left and on the right view reality:

There are a number of these. I am by no means certain that I’ve identified all there are, either, nor even all the important ones. Still, let’s work with what we have, shall we, concentrating especially on the ones that are obviously paired, existing on both left and right, in some form or other?

Here are the first five. Next week we’ll cover the rest of the important ones, such as I’ve been able to identify. Why bother? Because if some people on both sides could see the illusions to which they’re subject, it is just possible they could strain and maybe even converse, which may push off or make less likely the breakup of my country or descent into a really nasty civil war, which is the whole purpose of this series of columns.

One illusion, not universal but very common, is, “I am in the reasonable political center.” Sorry, but this is rarely true. It is not true of me and it is probably not true of you. Where you probably are is in the center of your group of friends and acquaintances; that’s why they’re your group of friends and acquaintances. Indeed most people seem to exist in a hermetically sealed echo chamber, where no contrary thoughts are allowed entrance. This is how we get inane statements like Pauline Kael’s, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”1

A second illusion has to do with distance. The reader may recall that one of the defenses I gave last week for the left-right spectrum is that it enables one to get a clearer idea of where one really is based on what can or cannot be seen, and how clearly. Imagine yourself standing somewhere near the base line for the left right spectrum. A little up or down won’t matter. (A lot up or down may mean you’re a loon, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now.) Look left. Look right. Can you see the difference between a run of the mill conservative and a Nazi? No? If not, that means you’re so far left, even if you think you’re in the reasonable center, that they’re all blending together. Can you see the difference between a Leninist and a Stalinist? Yes? That also means you are pretty far to the left. Conversely, can you not see the difference between a Leninist and a Stalinist? You are probably then somewhat to the right end. Can you see the difference between Hitler and George W. Bush? Same deal.

Oh, and if you can’t see the difference between Hitler and W, that means that not only are you pretty far left, you’re also an idiot.2

Yet a third optical illusion – well, a more or less auditory phenomenon that translates into an optical illusion – concerns vociferousness. Imagine the most moderate man or women in the country. He (or she) is the exact middle of the road. Indeed, he is so middle of the road that he makes his living renting himself out as a guide to the folks who paint the stripes on highways and byways. Imagine also that he (let’s just skip the PC bullshit, from now on, shall we? He includes she.) is quite vociferous in his political moderation, detesting everyone on the right third of the spectrum and everyone on the left third separately but equally, and voicing his disgust and contempt loudly, as often as he can find an audience. How does that man look to a leftist? How does he look to David Duke?

Easy; the lefty sees a conservative whom, for reasons mentioned above he cannot distinguish from a Nazi, while Duke sees at best, a communist. How does that happen? I think what takes place, in effect, is that both lefty and (pretty extreme to the point of disgusting) righty take that vociferousness, and add it as a height above the spectrum, then lay that elevation down in the opposite direction from themselves.

That happens to me all the time, by the way. I am – as far as I can tell, both by where I place on surveys and by what I can distinguish when looking left or right – about one third of the way from true center to the right, or, in other words, just on the right edge, the cusp, between the middle third and the right third. And I am vociferous to and past the point of being obnoxious about it, too. This is why much of the extreme right – the right so far from them that lefties cannot even distinguish it from conservatives – detests me as a liberal, while liberals see pure and unrepentant Nazi.3

  1. http://www.newyorker.com/the-front-row/my-oscar-picks#ixzz1FCt1d1Mw
  2. No, I’m not a huge fan of W, but you’re still an idiot. And ignorant.
  3. Nazi is a toughie for me, being an eclectic mix of various kinds of Celt, but also Ashkenazi Jew, which includes a small percentage of sub-Saharan African – oh, yes it does — Gyspy, Russian, Pole, and God alone alone knows what else. True story: whatever genes I have, I can tan like you wouldn’t believe. In 1998 I came back from about six weeks in the Kuwaiti desert. My eldest daughter took one look and screamed, “Mommy! Mommy! Daddy turned black.” She was exaggerating. A little.

QotD: Why they’re called “The Stupid Party”

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

    Yes, it’s real: Trump is collapsing. Can the MAGA faithful save him?

How do you know it’s all wishcasting? When they start with “Yes, it’s real”. They’re pushing that Narrative hard; I guess the faithful really need a pick-me-up.

    Even Republicans are unhappy with Trump’s vicious, failing agenda. That doesn’t mean they’re ready to bail

Or, Karen discovers why they’re called “The Stupid Party”. Being unhappy with the GOP’s “vicious, failing agenda” is just what Republican voters do. Here’s a partial list of non-Trump Presidential candidates the GOP faithful have supported this century: George W. Bush (twice). Jeb Bush. John McCain (twice). Mitt fucking Romney. Herman “Godfather’s Pizza” Cain. Ted Cruz. Ben Carson. Marco Rubio. And I’m just talking about the guys who won enough primaries to get noticed. And I’m deliberately not talking about the girls, although The Media rushed to inform us that Republicans took the likes of Carly Fiorina and Nikki “War Karen” Haley very, very seriously (and for the sake of our collective sanity, let us not discuss Sarah Palin’s impact on the McCain campaign).

Notice a pattern there, Chauncey? Milquetoasts at best, obvious fucking Judases at worst. I guess you can’t really say that the likes of Mitt Romney “sold out” his voters, because that would imply Mitt Romney is capable of “selling out”. You have to have a baseline of integrity for that phrase to apply. Metallica can “sell out” (oh boy, can they!); the Backstreet Boys, by definition, cannot. Mitt, Jeb Bush, George W. Bush, Paul Ryan (can’t forget him! he was Mittens’ veep choice), Marco Rubio … that’s the shittiest boy band of all time, and like shitty boy bands they had their moments in the sun, but if that’s not enough to convince you that GOP loyalists simply don’t know when to fold ’em, I don’t know what possibly could.

    Trump’s softening support is amplified by growing rumors about his health and reports on his reduced public schedule. Even the mainstream media noticed that he repeatedly appeared to fall asleep during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting. While he sends out numerous social media posts in the middle of the night, he seems increasingly disconnected from real-world events by daylight. Any appearance of physical weakness or frailty in a man who is nearly 80 years old, threatens to undermine his carefully constructed persona as a vital and dynamic political strongman.

See what I mean about The Stupid Party? We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen it for the entirety of the 21st century, in fact. It’s the “I’m rubber and you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me, and sticks to you!” theory of political discourse. Like kindergartners on the playground, the Left simply cannot let anything go. They must respond by flipping the accusation. “Nah-AH, I’m not stinky, you’re stinky!” is tedious coming from five year olds, and putative adults should never do it, but that’s where we are here in AINO. Knowing that … I mean, Jesus, guys, it’s not hard. All you had to do is accuse Joe Biden of being too vigorous, too competent, stuff like that, and you’d have The Media inadvertently singing Trump’s praises …

But, of course, see above, about “all they ever do is sell out”. Thus landing us in the most hilarious situation of The Current Year, in which the GOP never fails to fail, even when they’re trying to fail. It’s what an intra-squad scrimmage must look like for the Washington Generals — everyone’s trying so hard to lose, but somebody has to be ahead when the buzzer sounds …

    When voters are asked which party they will vote for in the 2026 midterm elections, Democrats now lead Republicans by 14 percentage points. That historically large gap suggests that Democrats are well-positioned to win a House majority, and perhaps even the Senate (although the latter is less likely for structural reasons). Democratic voters are also more enthusiastic than Republican voters; if we view November’s off-year elections as a de facto referendum on Trump’s presidency, the results were almost unanimous.

No, that’s backwards. The problem isn’t Trump. The problem is that Trump, personally, pulls voters, but the Republican Party in general does not. “MAGA” will enthusiastically pull the lever for the Orange Man; they can’t be arsed to do it for some generic GOP shitweasel, and do you see why, Chauncey? You’re stupid — so, so stupid — so I’ll spell it out for you: It has to do with the fact that when you’re asked to pull the lever for some generic GOP shitweasel, you are, in actual fact, voting for a generic GOP shitweasel. See how that works?

And again, I know you’re stupid — so very, very stupid — but those of us who don’t enjoy making shapes with pudding have to wonder: If the GOP is so bad, and they’re failing so much, if their agenda is so obviously “vicious”, and whatever else, why do you keep losing to them? I’ll give you a hint. Here’s a far from exhaustive list of major Democrat Presidential candidates in the 21st century:

Joe Biden. Kamala Harris. John “the Silky Pony” Edwards. Howard Dean. Bernie Sanders (twice). Barack Obama (twice). Hillary Clinton (twice). Dennis Kucinich. Al Gore. John Kerry. Pete Buttigieg (we’ll go ahead and say twice, because you know he’s running in 2028). Again, we’re only talking guys gals persyns who won a primary or three. Notice a pattern there? If the GOP runs only milquetoasts and Judases, you guys always manage to top them by running the most ludicrous, unfathomably corrupt people you can find. Frankly I don’t know how the world survived the contest of George W. Bush vs. John Kerry; the planet’s collective IQ must’ve dropped ten, fifteen points. If the Fake and Gay Singularity were real, instead of a theoretical construct posited by our most jaded astrophysicists, the faceoff between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney would’ve caused our universe to disappear up its own vajazzled asshole, and prolapse into another.

Ponder that: Barack Obama was, somehow, the least ridiculous person on that debate stage.

Severian, “The Year-End Blues”, Founding Questions, 2025-12-08.

March 7, 2026

The massive blind spot in gender studies programs

Filed under: Education, Media, Middle East, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, stepfanie tyler recounts her own experience in university with gender studies:

Some feminists romanticize mandatory hair coverings, social exclusion and lack of rights for women in Islamic countries. Because reasons.

When I was in “Women’s and Gender Studies” in college, we spent a lot of time talking about “systems”, “the patriarchy” and all these hidden structures supposedly shaping women’s lives in the West

I entertained a lot of those ideas back then and I was trying my best to understand the frameworks they were teaching

But the one place I never gave them an inch on was women in the Middle East

Every time someone would say “that’s just their culture” something in me short-circuited. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t reconcile it

We were told American women were oppressed because of wage gaps or subtle social expectations, but when the conversation turned to women who could be punished by the state for showing their hair, suddenly we were supposed to become culturally sensitive (some of these lunatics even romanticized it!)

My professors used to get irritated with me when that topic came up bc they knew I wasn’t going to play along and my pushback would cause a rift in their narrative

They didn’t like it when I pointed out the hypocrisy of calling Western women oppressed while treating literal legal restrictions on women’s bodies as a cultural difference

One of my professors even had a running joke she’d use to preface discussions on Islam—she’d do this smug smirk and say something to the effect of “we all know Stepfanie’s take on Islam” as if I was the ridiculous one

Looking back, I wish I had the language and wit to verbally obliterate her but I was 22 and simply did not have the intellectual capacity yet. I didn’t know the first thing about geopolitics, I just knew in my bones how fucking stupid it sounded to be bitching about making 20 cents less than men when women in the Middle East were being stoned to death for showing their hair

Even back then, before my politics changed, that contradiction never sat right with me. And it’s one of the many reasons I despise so-called feminists so much today

March 6, 2026

How Not to Build a Plane – TSR2 vs F-111

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published 5 Mar 2026

In the late Cold War, Britain and the United States tried to build the ultimate low-level supersonic strike aircraft. The result was two of the most ambitious aviation programmes ever attempted: the BAC TSR-2 and the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark. Both aircraft were designed to solve the same terrifying problem. Soviet surface-to-air missiles had made high-altitude bombing almost suicidal. The next generation of bombers would have to fly low and fast, automatically following the terrain, navigating using primitive onboard computers, and delivering nuclear or conventional weapons deep inside enemy territory. In theory, these aircraft would be revolutionary.

In practice … things went wrong.

The TSR2 programme became one of the most controversial cancellations in British aviation history. Plagued by spiralling costs, technical ambition far beyond the computers of the era, and a labyrinth of government bureaucracy, the aircraft was cancelled in 1965 after only a handful of test flights. Meanwhile the American F-111 survived the same technological challenges and political battles — but only just. Development disasters, crashes, exploding engines, and staggering cost overruns nearly killed the programme multiple times before the aircraft finally entered service.

In this video we explore:

• Why the TSR-2 was so technologically ambitious

• How terrain-following radar and early flight computers nearly broke both projects

• The political battles inside Whitehall and Washington

• Why the F-111 Aardvark survived when TSR2 did not

• And what these aircraft reveal about Cold War military technology and procurement

The TSR2 and F-111 weren’t just aircraft. They were early attempts at something closer to a flying computer, built decades before modern electronics made such systems reliable. And that ambition nearly destroyed both programmes.
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Congress shrugs responsibility for declarations of war, as Trump expected

Filed under: Europe, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As many have noted, the President of the United States does not have the constitutional power to declare war, as that is explicitly assigned to the rights of Congress. But in this, as in many other areas, Congress is unlikely to interfere once a President has set the military machine in motion. It is convenient for both the sitting President and for the individual members of Congress, who can posture and speechify against or in favour, but won’t actually be held responsible by the voters regardless of the war’s outcome. President Trump’s use of trade war tactics against allies and enemies alike is also an area where Congress is apparently willing to turn a blind eye:

US military bases in Spain (Map from sutori.com)

No Spain, no gain? It was probably inevitable that President Donald Trump’s trade war would eventually get mixed up in his actual war.

Earlier this week, Spanish officials said they would prohibit American forces from using joint bases for war operations, unless those activities were covered by the United Nations Charter. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said his country would not “be complicit in something that is bad for the world”, the Associated Press reports.

On Tuesday, Trump declared that he intended to “cut off all trade with Spain”.

You might wonder: What legal authority does Trump have to unilaterally impose these sorts of revenge tariffs? After all, the Supreme Court ruled not that long ago that the authority Trump had been using to unilaterally impose tariffs based on his whims was unconstitutional. You might as well ask: On what legal authority did Trump launch a war against Iran? In theory, under the Constitution, Congress is supposed to authorize both tariffs and wars. In practice, they, uh, don’t.

Trump just does things, and the annoying constitutional worrywarts can figure it out later. (I say this as an annoying constitutional worrywart.)

In any case, yesterday, the Trump administration announced that Spain had changed its tune. “The U.S. military is coordinating with their counterparts in Spain”, White House Press press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. The implication was that the tariff threats had worked.

Spain, however, said otherwise. “I can refute (the White House spokesperson)”, Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said. “The position of the Spanish government regarding the war in the Middle East, the bombing of Iran and the use of our bases has not changed one iota.” Maybe those tariff threats aren’t as effective as Trump thinks?

In a speech, Sánchez warned that the war could spin out of control. “Nobody knows for sure what will happen now”, he said. “Even the objectives of those who launched the first attack are unclear. But we must be prepared, as the proponents say, for the possibility that this will be a long war, with numerous casualties and, therefore, with serious economic consequences on a global scale.”

Sánchez also implicitly admonished Trump for escalating the war: “You can’t respond to one illegality with another because that’s how humanity’s great disasters begin”.

I will just note that in the Star Wars prequels, the fall of the Republic, and the descent into darkness and imperial rule, began with a planetary blockade and a trade war. At the time, people said it was wonky and boring. But here we are.

Where is Congress? The Constitution was built around the idea that each branch would fight to preserve its own powers, and this would create a system of checks and balances. But in Trump’s second term, Republicans in the legislature have been actively fighting to not preserve their power.

Yesterday, in a 47–53 vote, Senate Republicans voted against a resolution that would have required Trump to ask Congress to sign off on any further military aggression in Iran. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) voted with Democrats in favor of the measure; Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) joined Republicans to vote against it.

The measure was mostly symbolic. Even a successful vote would have been subject to a House vote and a presidential veto. And the position of both the White House and the GOP Speaker of the House is that this whole situation in which America is spending billions of dollars dropping thousands and thousands of bombs on military and political targets in a foreign country is not, in fact, a war. Nothing to see here. Everyone in Congress can go home and crack open a beer.

March 5, 2026

“[I]nternational law is not law; it is a set of rules and claims that pretends to be law”

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

Lorenzo Warby discusses the charming illusion that “international law” is a real thing and must be treated as a real thing:

In domestic (“municipal”) law, questions of illegality arise. They arise because states have laws. They have laws because their laws come with remedies — consequences for breaking the law.

So, it is a genuine question whether President Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in his attack on Iran. But that is a genuine question because the US has a Constitution that matters. The US is a rule-of-law state, no matter how much other common law jurisdictions may point and laugh at how politicised US law is.

Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Michael Murphy (DDG 112) and USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG 121), Henry J. Kaiser-class fleet replenishment oiler USNS Henry J. Kaiser (T-AO-187), Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Carl Brashear (T-AKE 7) and U.S. Coast Guard Sentinel-class fast-response cutters USCG Robert Goldman (WPC-1142) and USCGC Clarence Sutphin. Jr. (WPC-1147) sail in formation in the Arabian Sea, Feb. 6, 2026. The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to support maritime security and stability in the Middle East.
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jesse Monford via Wikimedia Commons.

In terms of the international order, however, there is no such thing as an illegal war, because (public) international law is not law. It is a set of rules and claims that pretends to be law. It only pretends to be law as it has no remedies — apart from declarative statements, which are not enough to make it law. (Private international law does have enforceable and enforced remedies, so is law.)

One of the consequences of this is that (public) international law, as an academic discipline, has no substantive reality-tests. There are no decisions by judges that are enforceable and enforced. This has led to academic international law being the vector by which the toxic ideas of the Critical Theory magisterium, that increasingly dominates Anglo-American universities, have infected Law Schools.

(Public) International law should not be taught at Law Schools, because it is not law. It should be taught in International Relations or Political Science Departments. A PhD in International Law should not qualify you to teach in Law Schools. Indeed, if you cannot tell the difference between actual law — with genuine remedies — and a simulacrum of law, you should not be teaching students at all.

Rules-based international order

When folk refer to the rules-based international order, they are not referring to nothing. There are various rules and conventions it is convenient for states, and other agents, to follow.

There is also a difference between the mercantile maritime order and continental anarchy. It is not an accident that the original international conventions pertained to sea travel and trade.

Within continental anarchy, it is relative power that matters. A war that depletes your resources and capacities, but depletes those of your neighbours more, is a winning proposition, within the state-geopolitics of continental anarchy. The geopolitics of continental anarchy leads states to seek weak or subordinate neighbours. The mercantile maritime order, on the other hand, is all about creating win-win interactions.

Russia, India and China are all continental Powers that live, at least to some extent, in a situation of continental anarchy. But they are also trading States that benefit from the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony. The tension between China as a trading nation becoming the biggest single beneficiary of the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony, and the interests of the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), is the central strategic difficulty that CCP China faces.

Israel faces the strategic dilemma of operating in a region of continental anarchy but seeking support from states deeply embedded in the mercantile maritime order. Whether the Middle East has to be a region of continental anarchy, or can it become far more embedded in the mercantile maritime order, is precisely what is at stake in the latest conflict.

Any social order has to be enforced. This is even more true of international orders. As there is no such thing as international (public) law, enforcing an international order is not a matter of rules, it is a matter of those who actively support and enforce that order and those who seek to subvert it.

A vivid example of how central enforceability is to any international order is given by comparing the treatment of Germany after the two World Wars. Germany was treated far more harshly after the Second World War than after the First World War. The crucial difference was that the Versailles order was not enforceable by the victors and the Potsdam order was.

Update, 6 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

March 4, 2026

The Korean War Week 89: Is There Such Thing As Soviet Neutrality? – March 3, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 3 Mar 2026

The UN is not just worried that the Communists have strong air power, they’re worried that because they can’t produce more jets quickly enough, the Communist advantage in the skies will soon become insurmountable, but they at least have plans to try and stave that off. They also have plans for rotating in fresh troops, but those plans have stumbling blocks of their own, as do the negotiations about who might be part of a post-armistice supervisory team, specifically the USSR, whom the US does not see as “neutral” with regard to this war.

00:00 Intro
00:54 Recap
02:05 Supervisory Team
03:29 45th and 40th Divisions
07:14 POW Repatriation
10:29 Communist Air Power
15:52 Notes
16:36 Summary
16:55 Conclusion
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Larry Thorne Biography Part 2: Green Berets in Vietnam

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Oct 2025

Welcome back to Part II of our biography on Lauri Törni / Larry Thorne with author and researcher Kari Kallonen. Today we are covering Thorne’s life and exploits after emigrating to the United States. He joined the US Army, then 10th Special Forces Group in Germany, and was one of the original Green Berets in Vietnam until his death in a helicopter crash in October 1965. His remains were only recovered in 1999, and Mr. Kallonen was part of the team that traveled to Vietnam for the recovery effort.
(more…)

March 3, 2026

Iran in the news

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I haven’t bothered trying to keep up with the firehose of “news” about the combined US/Israeli operations against the Islamic State, as much of what is initially reported will be re-stated, retracted, refuted, and other words starting with “R” until something vaguely resembling objective analysis can be done. There are uncounted mainstream, specialist, and advocacy sites and there’s no point trying to keep up with them (for me, anyway). Here are a few bits of internet flotsam on issues arising from Operation Brass Balls (or whatever name they chose for it):

First up, J.D. Tuccille on the legality around President Trump’s decision to strike Iran:

The BBC has a long history of … careful wording in describing events in Iran since 1979. I don’t think this cartoon is unfair in portraying that.

The world is undoubtedly a better place after the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and roughly 40 of his murderous colleagues by joint Israeli and American military strikes. Iran’s Islamist regime has slaughtered its own people while encouraging terrorism around the world for decades. But those strikes carry serious risks and costs. Are they worth the tradeoffs? The Trump administration should have made its case to Congress and the already skeptical public and satisfied the Constitution’s requirements by doing so.

War Without Debate

On Saturday, the U.S. and Israel launched much-anticipated strikes after claiming negotiations with the Iranian regime over the status of its nuclear weapons program had stalled.

“A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran,” President Donald Trump announced. “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime — a vicious group of very hard, terrible people. Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world. For 47 years the Iranian regime has chanted ‘death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries.”

True enough. The president recited a litany of crimes in which the Islamist regime has been implicated, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut by Iranian proxy Hezbollah, and the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, which Iranian forces helped plan. To this list we can add the attempted assassinations of Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad in Brooklyn and of then-presidential candidate Trump himself. Trump also called out Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. And he urged the suffering Iranian people, who have weathered brutal attempts to suppress protests, to take advantage of the military strikes to overthrow the regime.

Unfortunately, this was the first time many Americans — members of the public and lawmakers alike — heard the Trump administration make a somewhat coherent argument for taking on Iran’s government. It came as strikes were already underway despite the Constitution reserving to Congress the responsibility to “provide for the common Defence”, “to declare War”, “to raise and support Armies”, and “to provide and maintain a Navy”. Lawmakers were informed of the attack on Iran, but only after the country was committed to hostilities and their related dangers and expense.

Congress and the People Were Never Consulted

“I am opposed to this War,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) objected. “This is not ‘America First’. When Congress reconvenes, I will work with @RepRoKhanna to force a Congressional vote on war with Iran. The Constitution requires a vote, and your Representative needs to be on record as opposing or supporting this war.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) shares Massie’s skepticism towards military action. He and Massie might have voted against authorizing war with Iran even if they’d heard the administration’s arguments. Or perhaps they and other lawmakers would have been persuaded. We don’t know, because the president didn’t make a case until bombs and missiles had already been launched.

Andrew Doyle on the need for regime change:

The end point of armed conflict is impossible to predict. In her book On Violence (1970), the philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that when it comes to political violence, “the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals”. However well planned and executed, wars have a tendency to spiral out of control in ways never envisaged.

Whether Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran will pay off depends upon the fates as much as anything else. The goal is regime change, which – given the appalling tyranny under which the Iranian people have suffered for five decades – is admirable and just. Yet the numerous unknown variables make this war the biggest risk that Trump has yet taken as president.

This war has the potential to escalate and engulf the entire region. Iran is already striking neighbouring Arab states allied with the US in a scattershot and desperate manner. With the death of the Ayatollah, it may be that the regime will be forced into a ceasefire while it seeks to re-establish its power. Yet the scenes of wild celebration on the streets of Iran would suggest that domestic revolution is its greatest threat. If the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (not the country’s national army, but a kind of Praetorian guard for the mullahs) can be turned, the regime will fall.

Perhaps the worst case scenario is a widespread power struggle between competing militias and separatist groups. The IRGC itself could fragment, and we may see the kind of chaos that ensued after the Iraq war of 2003. The Trump administration has the advantage of the latest military technology and will insist that this enterprise will never require “boots on the ground”. It may be right, but who knows what factions will emerge with no centralised authority?

Those of us without a crystal ball should get used to the phrase: “we don’t know”. Various social media pundits are asserting with absolute certainty where all of this will lead. They would be wise to exercise greater caution. After the Twelve-Day War last June in which Israel and the US destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and air defence capabilities, many on the “America First” right were quick to prophesy the advent of World War III. Their claims to clairvoyance were unfounded.

CDR Salamander argues in favour of the punitive expedition as a legitimate tool in the nation’s war locker:

I support the strikes on Iran because it firmly fits into a view I have held on the use of national military power for decades, based on thousands of years of military practice. If you are not up to speed with the thousands of Americans dead and maimed by the Islamic Republic and its proxies over the last 47 years, then I have nothing more to discuss with you.

While I understand the academic argument of many that before any action takes place, there is a whole series of hoops, barriers, and puzzles of our own creation that we need to go through — I firmly believe that not only are those Constitutionally unnecessary for punitive expeditions in 2026, if done, needed and deserved strikes like we have seen in Iran could not take place without

Fortunes were made, institutions funded, and employment justified for legions under the old and failed post-WWII process swamp and GWOT nomenklatura that gave us unending and stillborn conflicts. To go that route again wouldn’t just be folly, it would be a self-destructive folly to refuse to change in the face of evidence.

I’ve seen older versions of OPLANS for Iran. Huge, bloody, and frankly undoable. They were only that way because they met the requirements of an old system that everyone nodded their heads to because all the smart people from Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Princeton and all the usual places said we had to do it this way.

Enough. Bollocks to all that. They have been measured the last quarter century and have been found wanting.

A series of events since October 7, 2023, including the 2024 election, has opened a window to do what we have not been able to do for a whole host of reasons — and there is a debt waiting to be paid.

We’ve been here before with Iran. In the modern context, we sank two warships and three speedboats of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy in 1988 during Operation Praying Mantis as punishment for damaging USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG 58) and Iran’s mining international waters in the Persian Gulf. We’ve played slap-n-tickle with them here and there while they have brutalized us at every turn when they are not brutalizing their own people.

Yes, it’s personal — but part of the reason we have been hesitant is that our national security intellectuals have been stuck in a world view that prevented action, by design.

Though not exclusive, the Powell Doctrine’s “Pottery Barn Rule” (that it appears he got from one of Thomas Frack’n Friedman’s columns), made it appear that we could only take action if we took the entire country and then remade it in our image.

We know how that operationalized over the last couple of decades.

We’ve done plenty of punitive expeditions in our nation’s history — but in the last few decades as a certain pedigree of policy maker held sway over our national security doctrine, it fell out of favor.

They failed the nation. Their institutions failed the nation. Their worldview was little more than a self-licking ice cream cone of self-regard.

There are also those who can find the funny aspects of any serious situation:

March 2, 2026

Ghostbusters: Ignore the Rules, Save the World

Filed under: Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 31 Oct 2025

It’s a comedy classic, and even funnier when you realize that it’s about shady small-businessmen saving the world by ignoring government regulations.
(more…)

March 1, 2026

The American Revolutionaries – when you don’t want a king, but you do want someone king-ish

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

On Substack Notes, John Carter shared this post by Theophilus Chilton, saying:

Fascinating. The American founders were explicitly trying to revive a stronger form of monarchical executive authority with the presidency, as a deliberate corrective to the relatively powerless Crown of the British Constitution, which had been effectively neutered by the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy.

Along similar lines, the American Bill of Rights was in most ways simply a restatement of the ancient rights of Englishmen.

So, of course, I had to go read the post:

Too “kingly” but also not “kingly” enough for America’s Founding Fathers.
King George III in his Coronation robes.
Oil painting by Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) circa 1761-1762. From the Royal Collection (RCIN 405307) via Wikimedia Commons.

Recently, I’ve been reading an interesting book about 18th century political philosophy entitled The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding. In this work the author, Eric Nelson, guides the reader through the various aspects of the great inter-whiggish debates that roiled the American colonies prior to independence, and which then continued afterwards. One of the main premises is that a major faction within this debate — and indeed the one which ended up prevailing in the end — understood the relationship between colonies and mother country to be founded upon the king of Britain’s personal proprietorship over the colonies. This Patriot position was opposed by the Loyalist position which saw the colonies as existing under the laws and rule of Parliament.

Now this might seem strange to generations of Americans who grew up learning in school that the American revolutionaries fought against the great tyrant King George III who was set upon grinding the American colonies under his bootheel of oppression. That view would be quite surprising to many of the participants on the Patriot side, many of whom actually appealed to King George, both publicly and in private correspondence, to exercise kingly prerogative and overturn the various duties, laws, and taxes which Parliament had laid upon the colonies. This, indeed, was the crux of the Patriot argument, which is that because the colonies were originally founded under the personal demesne of the British King, they remained so even despite the temporary abolishment of the monarchy after the execution of Charles I in 1649. In the interregnum between that and the Glorious Revolution and restoration of a stable monarchy that was accepted by all classes as legitimate in 1688, Parliament had illegitimately usurped authority over the colonies. Because it was Parliament which was laying the Intolerable Acts and all the other complaints which the Americans had, it was Parliament against whom they wished to be protected.

But these Patriots were pining after a situation which no longer existed. In point of fact, the British kings since the Glorious Revolution had left whatever prerogative powers they might still have had unused. So it was with George III, who rejected the American colonists’ calls for him to intervene, knowing that doing so would have provoked a constitutional crisis in Britain which he would not have won. As a result, the American colonists chose to make their final break with the British monarchy and throw in their lot for independence, buttressed by Thomas Paine’s fleetingly persuasive but ultimately ineffectual pamphlet Common Sense.

However, after independence, the colonists were faced with providing their own governance. Initially, this was attempted under the Articles of Confederation, as well as their state constitutions, all of which were very whiggish in principle. They were also inadequate to the task. As every student who took high school civics knows, the solution to this was the Constitution of 1789.

Typically, students are taught that the new Constitution was designed to strengthen the ability of the federal government to handle the various issues that applied to the confederation of states as a whole. What we don’t generally hear, however, is that much of this included strengthening the roles and powers of the president to include several areas of prerogative powers which exceeded even the powers then available to the kings of Britain. The stock view of the Constitution is that it “was created to prevent anyone from getting too much power!” The actuality is that the Constitution was crafted, in part, to expand presidential power and create what was viewed at the time as a literally monarchical chief executive. Opponents of this described the proposed executive as “the foetus of monarchy”. Supporters often defended it on the basis that parliaments and congresses, if left unchecked by a strong executive whose interest was drawn from the body of the whole people, would themselves become the greatest threats to the liberties of the people.

The Founders who proposed this enhancement of the executive didn’t do this in a vacuum. Indeed, they had a century and a half of history about this very subject to draw from first-hand. Fresh in the collective mind of every Englishmen, both in the home country and in the colonies, were the English Civil Wars of the previous century. Beginning with the revolt of the parliamentarian army in 1642 through the regicide of Charles I in 1649, the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the attempted restoration of the House of Stuart under James II, until the final deposition of James and his replacement with William, Prince of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Englishmen had a long series of examples from which to draw various conclusions.

So yes, they could see the parliamentarian excesses that took place during the Protectorate. Current in the collective national mind were the overreaches (whether real or imagined) of Parliament both during the interregnum and in the century since the acquisition of the throne by the House of Hanover. As noted above, among these overreaches, at least as viewed by many in the American colonies, was parliamentary interference in the affairs of the colonies, viewed as transgressions into the rightful domain of the king’s purview. Hence, by a strange twist, the Loyalists who opposed American independence before and during the Revolution were generally the more whiggish of the two sides, throwing in their lot with the parliamentary oligarchies. The Patriots, on the other hand, were desperately trying to get the king to reassert his royal prerogatives and intervene by reasserting his perceived rights to directly rule the colonies, something of a modified “high/low vs. the middle” type of scenario.

Generation Jones EXPLAINED: The Lost Generation Nobody Talks About

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

Wee Nips
Published 29 Jun 2025

Born between 1954 and 1965? You might be part of the forgotten generation — Generation Jones — wedged awkwardly between Boomers and Gen X.

In this video, we break down what it means to be a Joneser, why we’re all still jonesing for something better, and how our weird hybrid powers (like remembering phone numbers and setting up Wi-Fi) just might save the world.

If you’ve ever used aluminum foil on rabbit ears or fixed a TV by smacking it, this one’s for you.

QotD: Even when you know the gun isn’t loaded … it might be loaded

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

You want to know why I’m a little OCD when it comes to chamber checks on firearms? Allow me to share a story:

At the first gun shop at which I worked, which was also a pawn shop, we had a relationship with a pawn shop owner down in the city. Every few months, he’d drive out to see us with a briefcase containing a few old Colt Police Positives and Smith .38/.32 Terriers and Browning Vest Pockets and suchlike and we would swap him a big box of Lorcins and Hi-Points and Jennings and cash to make up the difference.

One time he came up, the sticking point in the negotiations was a PPK, an early Interarms-marked stainless example. Initially he was thinking about keeping it. Then he wanted too much for it. Then he relented and we added it to our side of the pile.

He handed the Walther to me, and I locked the slide back and checked the chamber, and passed it to a coworker over at the computer. She printed a trigger tag out for it and handed it, slide still locked back, to one of the other salespeople, who put it in the showcase.

Then our buddy the pawn shop owner crawfished. I sighed and pulled the gun from the showcase, removed the trigger tag, and laid it on the counter between him and my boss. About the time pawn shop guy was leaving, I was walking out of the store to cross the street and get lunch for everybody.

When I came back, there was the PPK, sitting on the counter by the computer. “Arthur changed his mind again?” I asked, and was told that, indeed, he had sat in his car for a moment and then came back in and threw the Walther in on the deal at the last minute. Sweet! I still had the trigger tag handy, so I put it back on the gun and passed it to the salesman who put it back in the showcase with one hand while eating his hamburger with the other.

I wandered off to a far corner of the showroom where I could eat my burger in peace, back turned to the sales floor, when *KA-BAM!*

A customer is standing there with the PPK in his hand and an appalled look on his face, smoke wisping theatrically from the barrel and a divot in the linoleum at his feet containing a flattened Winchester Silvertip.

That’s right, Arthur had loaded the PPK back up in his car, and then brought it back in to add to the trade, and not one person who handled it from the time I picked it up and put the trigger tag on it to the time the customer made the loud noise had bothered to inspect the chamber because, hey, we had already done that when he brought it in the first time, right?

Lesson learned: I don’t care if I set the gun down and just look away for a second; that gun gets checked again when I pick it up. Period. Unless it has been in my field of vision the whole time, I don’t know what might have happened to it while I wasn’t paying attention.

Tamara Keel, “Formative experiences …”, view from the porch, 2011-08-16.

February 28, 2026

Corruption and red tape rise in lockstep

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

J.D. Tuccille notes that corruption — at least corruption being brought to our attention — is rising at the same rate as bureaucratic red tape. It’s almost as though there’s a correlation between making things harder to do and officials accepting “sweeteners” to make things easier to do …

At the moment, corruption investigations and trials of political figures are taking place in jurisdictions around the U.S. including Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C. These aren’t isolated scandals; the latest edition of an international corruption index finds corruption worsening globally, with the United States earning its worst score to date. Given that corruption involves government officials peddling favors for compensation, it shouldn’t be surprising that evidence suggests the solution lies in reducing the power and role of the state.

[…]

Regulation Breeds Corruption

“EU regulation is not only becoming more cumbersome but it is also pilling in”, Oscar Guinea and Oscar du Roy of the European Centre for Political Economy wrote in 2024. “The amount of new regulation accumulated during the last years has been staggering.”

That matters. In its advice for reducing corruption, Transparency International emphasizes, “there is a broad consensus that unnecessary and excessive administrative requirements for complying with regulations create both incentives and opportunities for bribery and corruption”.

The means by which this occurs is logical enough. Government-imposed permitting and licensing requirements, administrative procedures, prolonged decision-making, and contract awards create a temptation to shorten delays and reduce costs by padding officials’ pockets. In many cases, selling exceptions becomes the real reason for red tape. That phenomenon applies to the entire world, including the United States.

In the U.S., the More Regulations, the More Bribery

In a paper published in the European Journal of Political Economy in 2020, Oguzhan Dincer of the Department of Economics at Illinois State University and Burak Gunalp of the Department of Economics at Turkey’s Cankaya University looked at the relative effects of federal regulations on the corruption levels in U.S. states.

“Power to enforce the regulations gives government officials power to extort bribes”, they wrote. “Government officials have an opportunity to extort bribes from the firms trying to enter an industry because they have the power to issue the industry licenses. They also have an opportunity to extort bribes from the incumbent firms by simply colluding with them and keeping the regulations unchanged and/or strengthening the regulations to increase the costs of entry for new firms. Finally, regulations and the discretionary power given to government officials to extract bribes create incentives for firms to operate in the unofficial economy.”

Specific to the U.S., they examined two decades of data to see how red tape affected the honesty of public officials.

What they found shouldn’t be surprising: “Using the U.S. Justice Department’s data on the number of federal convictions for the crimes related to corruption, and controlling for several economic and demographic variables, we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between federal regulations and corruption.”

Just when you think Canada can’t get worse … it gets worse

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

Unlike most other Anglosphere countries, Canada does not have a resurgent right wing in domestic politics — we barely have a right wing at all — and the governing Liberal Party is constantly trying to steal sitting opposition MPs to achieve a majority of seats in Parliament. It’s no wonder that Alberta’s separatist movement has been active the last few years. In case you still have an optimistic view of Canada’s present and future, here’s a long “state of Canada” post from John Carter that will probably increase the numbers signing up for free euthanasia (“MAID” in Canadian):

The US is now leading Canada 3-0 in international hockey. If you count the Stanley Cup as an occasional international match, a Canadian team hasn’t won since 1993. For a country that has long practically defined itself as the Hockey Nation, this is especially humiliating. Given the continual year-round repetition of the Elbows Up mantra, this is the kind of thing a Roman augur would have interpreted as a portent of divine disfavour.

Months, you say? Oh dear.

Consistent with that interpretation, Canada’s recent humiliations have not been limited to sportspuck losses. What follows is a snapshot in time, headlines from a country beset by interlocking economic, demographic, spiritual, and political crises, a country which has not had good news in so long that it has forgotten what optimism even looks like.

Item: Canada recently watched the worst school shooting in Canadian history, and the second-worse mass shooting after the infamous 1989 Montreal Massacre in which “Mark Lepine”1 shot 14 female engineering students. The shooting took place in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, a small rural village in the country’s north, and claimed the lives of 10 people including the shooter, his mother, his brother, and several students. Dozens of others were injured. It soon turned out that the murderer was a trannie whose brain had been twisted into a psychotic pretzel by psychedelics, legal weed, SSRIs, and the gender woo he was force-fed at school, at home, and on Reddit. This has led to it being referred to as the Tumblr Shooting. Naturally, both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian media went out of their way to respect the shooter’s pronouns in all reporting and official communications. The media even made sure to give the shooter an AI filter glow-up, so that he could be remembered as the pretty girl we all know he really was deep down inside.

After a desultory and hilariously unsuccessful attempt at scolding the public that the problem wasn’t trannies, but guns or whiteness or something (blessedly, they couldn’t say “men” this time), the Canadian media just dropped it, though not before the government flew the flag at half mast.

Which is how this happened.

Item: A former school board trustee in Chilliwack, British Columbia, was fined $750,000 for failure to respect pronouns. Shooting up a school is bad, but misgendering is unforgivable.

[…]

Item: A xeet went viral in which a leaflib tried to fact check an American poster making fun of 18-month MRI wait times by pointing out that she’d only had to wait six months, prompting widespread mockery from incredulous Yanks.

Pennsylvania, which has about 1/3 of Canada’s population, has more MRIs than all of Canada put together. The Canadian mind cannot comprehend, etc.

Item: Euthanasia via Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program now accounts for 1 death in 20 in Canada. The overwhelming majority, around 96%, of MAiD recipients are white, despite white Canadians comprising 86% of Canadians in the elderly demographic that dominates assisted suicide participants.

Since 2016 over 76,000 Canadians have been killed by MAiD. Moreover, the program is accelerating: the death toll in 2024 was the highest on record at 16,499. Annual death tolls have risen by around a few thousand every year since the program started, with no sign of stopping. Canada is expected to hit 100,000 MAiD deaths by summer.

Item: While most MAiD victims are elderly and infirm, this is not true in every case. Recently it came out that a 26-year-old man was euthanized, simply because he was depressed over his diabetes-induced blindness. His family allege that he doctor-shopped until he found one who would kill him (she has apparently killed several hundred others).

MAiD was originally billed as an easy, painless out for people with terminal illnesses, a dignified death that would spare them a few months of pointless agony. It’s now being extended to people whose imminent death is not reasonably foreseeable. Several Canadian Armed Forces veterans have been offered MAiD in lieu of treatment for injuries sustained in the course of their service.

The primary goal of MAiD is almost certainly to reduce pressure on Canada’s overstretched public health care system whilst simultaneously reducing the fiscal burden of pensioners on the federal budget. Someone looked at the financials, and concluded that unfunded liabilities were going to bankrupt the country when the boomers reached their 80s. Therefore the government is talking them into killing themselves. However, while they’re at it, they might as well expand the program to hasten demographic replacement within the younger sectors of the population pyramid.

  1. Née Gamil Gharbi, a detail the Canadian media successfully kept from us for decades as it didn’t fit their narrative that “men” are the problem, rather than men from … certain places.
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