Quotulatiousness

October 26, 2026

“Christofascism” seen as harmful

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

I must not hang out in the progressive cool kids’ areas of the internet, as I’d only occasionally heard the term “Christofascism” and I’d never encountered even a vague definition of what the pejorative might mean. Copernican to the rescue with an extended discussion on that very thing (it’s a long piece, these excerpts just skim the surface):

Image from Seeking Always the Horizon

Long has the progressive movement decried “ChristoFascism”, representing it as the greatest threat to Western civilization. The alphabet-soup squad has mostly moved on. Like most words uttered by the progressive mind, the term is used entirely for the reaction it elicits, and has nothing to do with describing the real world. Christofascism was just another word in their toolbox, like “nazism” or “racist” or (now) the ever-popular “if you date a girl two years younger than you, you’re a pedophile”.

All these are words uttered merely to enforce the progressive’s bizarre form of destructive totalitarian thought-control.1

While the [CURRENT THING] horde has moved on from accusations of Christofascism, I have not. There’s something archaically elegant in that formulation of words and the compound thought-form they represent. Hiding in the spiteful accusation is a memetic complex that deserves further investigation. Christofascism was a mere combination of “bad things” that the Left hates … but that doesn’t mean it should be taken as mere braindead progressive gurgling.

It may well be far more than that. There’s a new cultural theology hidden in there.

[…]

ChristoFascism

Individuals like Kulak identify modern (what I’d call “liberal”) Christianity as a fundamental inhibitor to the people of the West.2 That analysis is not entirely wrong. Christianity in its modern incarnation developed alongside the fall of Rome, the High Medieval Period, and then through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Christianity was a governance apparatus for regional tribal conflicts and the occasional crusade. It was the centerpiece of the Holy Roman Empire, but the theological framework has a great deal of trouble squaring with modernity.

Simultaneously, all of the alternatives, the materialist religions of the 20th century, have been absolute disasters ending in nihilism, hedonism, or cruelty. The human collective unconscious is not a static thing.3 It’s frothing with new ideas, particularly during times of great change and turmoil. The Hegelian dialectic.

Notably, the Hegelian dialectic ends in the creation of a new thesis. The original Thesis is the Universalist heritage of the West. That would be Christianity from 300 AD up until the 19th century. Then there is the antithesis, the materialist religions that seized the zeitgeist in the 20th.

[…]

A Christofascist cultural foundation must express:

  • The moral recognition of a higher power and that it is the duty of the state to nurture a heroic righteousness in its own people, granting Duties, and Guidance in addition to liberty.4
  • A masculine Will to Power in the development of its own practices, heritage, and promotion of its own cultural ideals to the exclusion of hostile, foreign, or corrosive ones.
  • That the State, and the individuals who make up the State, are responsible for adhering to higher moral standards. One cannot simply blame “the voters” for the evil actions of the state. The leadership of the state holds personal responsibility for imposed policies.
  • An intense sense of national exceptionalism, particularly in the eyes of God. As a spiritually exceptional state, the people of the nation uphold a higher scientific and spiritual ideal as individuals, families, and citizens.
  • A recognition of other similar nations as being siblings seeking the same ultimate goals through alternative means, rather than pawns in a game of Great Powers.
  • Paternalism with God as father to the nation’s people, and the nation’s people not beholden to the operational state but being the actuators of it. A father that expresses temperance in governance.
  1. I think that John Carter wrote the best analysis of this phenomenon in his work on “Homo Umbrans“. The product of man willingly handing over sapience in exchange for the reprieve from intellectual rigor. To very roughly summarize one of the best articles on Substack: if you feel like you’re under psychic attack when trying to communicate with a progressive, it’s because you are. The Leftist attempts to annul the meaning of words required for thought to render sapient cognition and abstract reasoning impossible.
  2. Here’s a direct link to some of the work that Kulak has done. This one is of particular interest to those in the proverbial Pagan camp. Here’s an article that was written by Millennial Woes on the same topic. A great article that I would recommend regarding this perpetual confrontation within the Spiritual Right.
  3. Here’s my own article on how best to conceptualize the collective unconscious.
  4. We will assume a Christian higher power, it’s in the name after all.

Reality refuting the beliefs of the gun-grabbers

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

The shooting in Bend, Oregon is turning out to not follow the gun-grabbers’ narrative even a little bit. It’s getting noticed:

I was told by anti-gun extremists that any “Good Guy with a Gun,” would be mistaken for the bad guy and immediately shot by the police, after he was easily shot by the bad guy because the Good Guy with a Gun wouldn’t know how to use his own gun …

What happened in Bend, Oregon? None of that happened …

ESR responds:

Yes, I’ve been thinking that the Bend shooting turned into the graboids’ worst nightmare, and it keeps getting more so as people process it.

Oregon has an A- rating from Giffords. That means its laws were already doing almost everything that the graboids claim should prevent mass shootings. But obviously didn’t.

Giamfranco is soft spoken, articulate, and photogenic. There’s no dismissing him as a scary redneck. And he’s not a veteran or a hunter or anything, just an ordinary family guy who stepped up.

He popped the bad guy with surgical precision. He didn’t hit a bystander, and he didn’t get shot himself either by the bad guy or the cops. Of course this is usually the way it goes, but most people who aren’t gun-culture themselves don’t know that.

The obvious questions is raises are: if gun control didn’t work in Bend, why would it work anywhere? And if an ordinary chill dude can step up to save lives when the laws failed, what kind of idiot do you have to be to want to stop that from happening?

What is it the kids say nowadays? Ah, yes. Cope, seethe, and mald, graboids. This intervention was everything you hate, and that’s good news for the rest of us.

US Armament Reproduction DeLisle Commando Carbine (Silenced .45ACP)

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Jun 2026

The DeLisle Commando Carbine is one of the coolest special operation weapons of the Second World War — an SMLE rebuilt in .45ACP with a ginormous suppressor. It fed from slightly modified 1911 magazines, and thanks to .45ACP being subsonic in its normal loading, it is incredibly quiet. Because the gun is relatively easy to make (being based on a readily available receiver), one-off and limited-run reproductions have been around for a while, but always hard to find.

US Armament has begun making a serial-production new DeLisle, and they send me one on loan to film. It is very, VERY quiet, and runs more smoothly and reliably than I expected, as the originals have a reputation for being finicky. The reproduction elements are quite good, although not quite perfect in the details (like the muzzle assembly, sights, and handguard). However, I believe the price is quite high for the product.
(more…)

October 25, 2026

The generational difference in how young right wingers see the left

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens says that there’s a signficant difference in how older and younger conservatives view their opponents on the left:

You need to understand how Right-wing people under 40 view the Left.

When we think of Leftists, we do not think of Barack Obama or Ezra Klein. Yes, these guys are on the Left, but younger Millennials and Zoomers on the Right do not think of Leftists in their own age bracket as polished technocrats.

These are not the sort of people that make up our Left-wing counterparts that we grew up with, went to school with, or work with.

When we think of Leftists, the first thing that pops into our head are a bunch of disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutants who want to destroy everything around them as payback for the crime of being born.

We think of Discord troons that invaded our hobbies, Reddit mods who are drunk on the most insignificant power imaginable, that one girl from high school or college who became a literal Communist, and that friend or family member who cut off all contact because we refused to treat their mental illness like a status symbol.

We think of people who, if they ever became a majority of the country and actually managed to possess political power, would inevitably kill tens of millions of people out of blind envy and petty cruelty.

Younger people on the Right come across as impatient and anxious in their mindset and mannerisms because they understand what will eventually happen when these people succeed their Gen X and Boomer predecessors in the Democratic Party.

They know what is to come if their own generational cohorts on the Left actually take power, and they feel incredibly exasperated that it seems like none of their parents or grandparents understand just how late the hour truly is.

A few days later, he also commented:

This blew up because people realize the age of discourse is coming to a close.

Discourse itself is meaningless at this point because discourse requires moral alignment, which is precisely the thing we are now fighting over.

Every other question has already been answered and there is nothing more to debate. The only thing left to do is to act, or be destroyed.

October 23, 2026

Faint signs of civilizational hope: “The Great Un-Karening”

Filed under: Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It’s become old hat for Generation Jones and Generation X grizzled grognards to moan on about the almost-unsupervised “come back when the streetlights come on” childhood they remember in comparison to the over-scheduled, over-organized, over-computerized, hyper-supervised situation too many children now find themselves in. But there’s an occasional glimmer that things are changing:

The Great Un-Karening has begun, and decades of cultural engineering have finally run into something their architects cannot fucking control: human nature.

A seven-year-old conquers El Capitan, breaking his older brother’s record, and some sanctimonious busybody responds by reporting his father to Child Protective Services. Apparently, raising children capable of extraordinary achievements now qualifies as suspicious parenting.

And that tells you everything about the suffocating bullshit we’ve allowed to masquerade as progress.

For years, the helicopter-parenting crowd, DEI bureaucrats, ideological school administrators, and professional grievance merchants have worked to remake childhood in their own miserable image. Courage became recklessness. Masculinity became toxic. Independence became neglect. Every hurt feeling became an emergency, and every whining control freak acquired a fresh excuse to interfere.

They built entire systems around rewarding fragility, policing behavior, and teaching children to view the world through the narrow lens of identity, victimhood, and institutional permission.

And now the machinery is encountering resistance.

Kids are reportedly refusing school Pride Day activities. Parents are defending their children’s right to adventure. Twenty to forty neighborhood kids organized their own nighttime pursuit game, complete with strategies, head starts, and a mile-long course. Some neighborhood hall monitor called security.

The kids kept playing.

Fucking beautiful.

There’s the nightmare for the self-appointed guardians of acceptable behavior: children discovering they can organize their own lives without a diversity consultant, a school psychologist, or some miserable asshole clutching a rulebook.

And every independent decision chips away at the authority these people spent years accumulating.

The Karens can scream. The bureaucrats can threaten. The ideological busybodies can keep issuing commandments from their increasingly ridiculous little thrones.

The generation they expected to mold into obedient, perpetually offended dependents is discovering the exhilarating pleasure of telling them to piss off.

They tried to rewrite normalcy.

Now they’re watching the next generation reclaim it without asking their fucking permission.

October 22, 2026

The Cold War era research grant model has been a disaster for universities

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Military, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Before the Second World War, governments generally did not directly sponsor research in their universities. With the example of the Manhattan Project and other less-well-known directed research efforts, western governments all accepted the notion that it was part of their national defence mandate to push research efforts by way of indirect or direct funding. This spread from the STEM fields directly related to weapon development to pretty much every area of academia. Lorenzo Warby explains why this has been a major contributor to the decline of western universities and the quality of research they undertake:

By “crank the handle” notions, I mean analyses that focus so much on resources that they end up massively underestimating the importance of information — and information landscapes — in understanding human social dynamics, given that we are biological beings who use information and resources to maintain ourselves. So, a “just add capital” approach to foreign aid is a “crank the handle” approach. Attempted analysis of long-term economic growth based on some derivation of a Cobb-Douglas production function is a “crank the handle” approach. (The disastrous — and revealing — limitations of such production functions will be discussed further in the next post in the series.)

One of the many problems with the “crank the handle” approaches that the terms capitalism and capitalist so encourage — by implying use and control of capital is the crucial thing, regardless of information landscapes and reality-tests — is the innovation-is-good cargo cult that has generated disastrous incentives in and for academe. Like all cargo cults, the innovation-is-good cargo cult mimics some of the surface appearance of successful innovation without replicating (or understanding) any of the substance.

Yes, it is absolutely true that technological innovation generated mass prosperity. But there are several key features to note.

  1. Most new ideas are crap. (So are a lot of old ideas: especially those repackaged by folk who don’t have to make things work.)
  2. Technological innovation is not merely a process of invention, it also requires successful implementation.
  3. Commercial innovation has a strong reality-test: does it make a buck? The profit/loss continuum tests ideas (both old and new) and their implementation.
  4. The energy take-off that we call the Industrial Revolution arose from Britain being the first society to adopt learning-by-experiment at scale; so learning via inherent feedbacks from what did, or did not, work.
  5. That energy use take-off occurred because no elite coalition vetoed it.

The post-1945 adoption of the bureaucratically-delivered research grant system was a reaction in part to the Second World War — which was so much a technological war — and to the pressures of Cold War geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union. War generates serious reality-tests for weapons and other military technology. This reality-testing of weapons continued throughout the Cold War, as both Western and Soviet weapons were used in various conflicts.

The bureaucratised research grant model — whether government or non-profit — used to fund “innovation” within academe fails to grapple with what made either industrial innovation (with its commercial reality-tests) or military innovation (with rather brutal reality-tests) work. There also turn out to be major problems with trying to bureaucratise the Scientific Revolution.

Bureaucratised research grants treat innovation as presumptively good, when most new ideas are crap. It treats mere invention as some achievement, when inventing new ideas is hardly difficult or reliably useful. Such invention is even less difficult if there is no reality tests; if those propagating and judging those ideas do not have to make anything work in any practical, seriously-constrained-by-reality — not-just-performative — sense.

Outside the military realm and STEM (Science Technology Engineering Medicine), there are no reality-tests systematically built into the research grant process: only what plays to academic status games due to academic approval becoming the operative test. Academic approval is an amazingly weak filter. Consider Adam Smith’s famous remark about English universities:

    An English university is a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world.

Marxism and its derivatives (e.g. Critical Theory) come to mind. Any use of Marxism — or its derivatives — requires massive discounting and rationalising away of tens of millions of deaths and a couple of dozen tyrannies. (So, of course, does any use of Left as a positive moral category, given that being Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Kim il-Sung …)

Moreover, across much of academe, we do not see the use of experimentation or observation to test claims, but rather “findings” baked into the “research”. “Findings” that are validated precisely because they garner academic approval.

Street theatre with a niqab and a prayer mat

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

On Substack Notes, Dan Burmawi discusses the recent phenomenon of Muslims choosing to performatively pray on the public streets:

Photo from Dan Burmawi’s note on Substack.

Tonight, as I was leaving a restaurant on 14th Street in New York around 10 p.m., this Muslim woman took a prayer rug and a niqab out of the trunk of her car, put the niqab on, laid the prayer rug down, and started praying on the street.

I grew up as a Muslim in the Islamic world, and let me tell you: this is absolutely part of an organized effort to flood the public square in the West with Islamic symbolism.

First of all, there is no Islamic prayer at 10 p.m. Even if she missed the Isha prayer, which takes place earlier in the evening, she has until dawn to make it up. So why choose to pray on the street at 10 p.m.?

Second, a Muslim woman who does not wear a niqab or hijab in her daily life would never normally have a niqab sitting in the trunk of her car.

She is clearly not strict enough to wear it every day, so why would she suddenly be so strict about missing a prayer that she carries a niqab in her trunk specifically for this purpose?

Third, in almost any Islamic country, you would never see a woman praying on the street at 10 p.m. This would be completely unacceptable.

If she were genuinely worried about praying, she could simply wait until she got home, especially since a missed Isha prayer can be made up before dawn.

I can tell you with full confidence that these scenes we keep seeing of Muslims praying in the streets of the West are intentional.

They serve to assert dominance, normalize Islam in the public square, seize ground, and demand exceptional treatment that immediately turns into claimed rights.

Bad-faith acts like this are signals of the same project that turned many cities in Europe into shitholes.

Exceptional threats demand exceptional measures.

Islam must be banned in the West because it is not a religion; it is a hostile political ideology.

Until that happens, the West will continue losing ground to this ideology every single day.

“Insurgent math”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort recalls the promotion of “insurgent math” — deterring American troops from killing enemy forces as if they were hydra heads made real:

“Afghanistan 2010 43” by david_axe is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Do you guys remember the “insurgent math” the generals taught us in GWOT? “If you kill an enemy, you’ll make 10 more.” Remember that? Another in a long list of points to make us practice “courageous restraint” and be reluctant to pull the trigger.

What fascinates me is how full of shit they were. Because many of those retired leaders and the politicians they back today advocate for doing the EXACT opposite within the borders of their own country.

They don’t all wish death. Some do. But the same principles apply to lawfare and harassment against people they disagree with.

So why was “insurgent math” created to give compassion to 80IQ Taliban retards but the exact opposite is given to 100IQ+ innocent Americans who are far more dangerous when they get mad enough to band together?

What even is this? Another stunning failure and hypocritical point of the War on Terror and the national lesson over the last 2 decades as a whole.

There is a large number of influential “Americans” who’d rather bow to their enemies and put the boot to their own countrymen.

They fear the wrong people. If they casually mention ruining the lives of innocent people simply because they disagree with them, then they have no fear.

When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.

America is the greatest result of successfully insurgency in human history. This country literally has insurgency in its blood. That’s how we started. Stunning to believe some think it’s wise to poke that bear.

The stupidity is off the charts. Truly.

Update, 23 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

QotD: The “numbers fallacy” in World War II

Filed under: Australia, Britain, China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Some historians, and many politicians, have simplified World War Two into a few stupid statements. “The war in the west was won on the Russian steppes” is one that springs to mind. They usually base such statements on traditional political incompetence — bad use of statistics. The truth is that numbers have rarely overthrown a technological edge (though the Americans under Custer and the British at Isandhlwana might have reservations on this), and World War Two is certainly not the best sample case to argue such a thing.

During the war the smaller campaigns tended to get less credit — though it is sometimes suspicious that numbers are valued in some circumstances, and area in others. The Mediterranean Front against the Axis was an extraordinarily long campaign over an extremely large area, yet many – particularly Americans who often fail to understand the Mediterranean’s importance to intercontinental strategy – discount its scale and significance. (A British general visiting the Soviets responded to toasts about the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow by offering a toast to El Alamein. The bemused Soviets asked how big the battle was, and then commented “we would call that a skirmish” – a point which emphasises the fact that the hundreds of Soviet divisions embraced by historians of the Eastern Front were rarely as big as a British brigade or American Regimental Combat Team. To get a real comparison western divisions should be compared to Soviet corps.)

Similarly the Burmese and New Guinea theatres are incredibly undervalued in their role against Japan. There were more Japanese divisions fighting longer and harder in either place than everywhere that American troops fought the Japanese put together. (The fact that in New Guinea it was Australians rather than Americans who did most of the successful fighting – the American troops first assigned disappointed their vainglorious Füaut;hrer MacArthur enormously at first – might have had an influence on this ranking.)

By contrast the Western Front against Germany in 1944 to 45 is overstated both in the area it covered, and in the number of troops involved (almost half the US troops listed for that campaign did not arrive until it was already almost over. A dozen divisions had barely landed in France before the Germans surrendered.) Which puts it in the same category as the Pacific campaign, which, if the allied troops are discounted – as they so often were by the Americans – rarely saw more than a couple of American divisions at a time engaged anywhere.

The confusion is added to by the enigma that remains China, which is simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. It is undervalued in that China and Manchuria occupied the attention of 80% of the Japanese army throughout the war. Which means that by the standards applied by some historians, China was the Soviet Union of the East, and deserves all the glory that was lavished on communist Russia by the trendy historians of the last generation. On the other hand it was overvalued, in that China achieved virtually nothing in the war against the Japanese apart from occupying large numbers of very low-grade garrison troops. In fact when the US Air Force in one of its fits of vainglory, attempted to bomb Japan into submission from bases in China: the Japanese garrison troops stirred themselves enough to sweep forward and conquer – without any trouble at all – the provinces being used as bases (Operation Ichi-Go).

Nigel Davies, “Oversimplification: The Numbers Fallacy in WWII”, rethinking history, 2009-03-08.

October 21, 2026

The first modern wine critic: Philip the Bold of Burgundy

Filed under: Europe, France, History, USA, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Henry Jeffreys identifies the first post-Roman Empire wine critic in the noble person of Philip II, Duke of Burgundy, who, in 1395 …

Philip the Bold (Philip II, Duke of Burgundy), 1342-1404.
Unknown painter of the Flemish School via Wikimedia Commons.

… banished the Gamay grape from his lands, describing it as an “evil and disloyal” plant. The only grape for Philip was Noiriens, known today as Pinot Noir.

Peasants loved Gamay because it ripened early and produced lots of grapes but Philip wanted small quantities of high quality wine which Pinot Noir is better suited for.

And that’s how it’s been ever since: Gamay has been shunned in Burgundy, going only into the cheapest wines, whereas Pinot Noir is lionised around the world.

Wine 101 says that some grapes are better than others. It’s common for wine-lovers to have a favourite and often a least favourite grape. Philip the Bold was way ahead of his time here. Most wine drinkers didn’t catch up with grape varieties until much later.

We have an American, Frank Schoonmaker, to thank for this. In the 1940s he came up with the idea of labelling California wines by variety rather than giving them fake French names like Hearty Burgundy or Mountain Chablis.

It took a while, but this is now the established way of classifying wines. For Schoonmaker there was a hierarchy of varieties with the great French ones, naturally, at the top. He wrote in his book American Wines: “There are only about 30 or 40 superior grape varieties in the world and only about a dozen are capable of producing great wine. No really distinguished wine has ever been made from an inferior grape.”

Some grapes were good and some were bad. In the 1980s and 1990s the French government encouraged growers in the Languedoc to pull up their Carignan and Cinsault vines and replace them with so-called cépages améliorateurs, improving varieties, like Syrah or Cabernet Sauvignon. You can understand the logic. Syrah sells, whereas the traditional grapes have a Gamay-like tendency to produce lots of grapes of mediocre quality if overfertilised and not pruned severely.

In Chile, Cinsault is known as “cargadora” meaning the loaded one. Home gardeners will know exactly this tendency. When growing tomatoes, some strains produce massive quantities of fruit with very little flavour. In contrast, we had a plant last year that produced only one piece of fruit the whole summer — but it was exceptionally tasty. I am sure Philip the Bold would have approved.

In the 1970s, Canadian winemakers were selling beverages labelled as “Burgundy” and “Claret”, but after the French government and then the EU started getting pushy about wines named for the great French wine traditions, they eventually got onto the same naming pattern pioneered by Schoonmaker and other Californian winemakers. If “truth in advertising” laws had applied to wine, those 1970s Canadian wines would have had consumer-deterring names like “oversweetened alcoholic grape juice” and “made from randomly selected grapes of unknown provenance”.

Can you tell I don’t miss any of the Canadian wines I sampled in the 1970s?

The Korean War Week 122 – One Showdown Ends, Another Begins- October 20, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 20 Oct 2026

One fight comes to an end as another gets going- the ROK forces are victorious and drive the Chinese completely off of White Horse Hill, but Operation Showdown, a larger battle involving a whole hill complex, is indecisive as the week ends despite a lot of brutal fighting. Away from the battlefield the question still remains — will the peace talks resume or is diplomacy at a dead end?

00:00 Cold Call
00:58 Recap
01:13 White Horse Hill
04:47 Operation Showdown
08:46 1st Battalion
11:59 Pike’s Peak
14:24 Peace Talks End
16:25 Summary
16:36 Conclusion
17:50 A Call to Arms

Capital gains tax is legalized theft

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre explains the iniquity of most “capital gains” tax schemes in the west:

Capital gains tax is theft, committed twice against the same dollar.

You earn income. The government takes its cut immediately, in the US it’s between 22% and 37% depending on your bracket. What remains is yours, after-tax money, already processed through Washington’s collection machine. You choose not to spend it. You save it, invest it, buy assets with it. The discipline required to delay consumption is precisely the behavior that funds capital formation across the economy.

Then the asset grows. You sell it. The government appears again, demanding 20% (plus the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax for higher earners) on the nominal gain, which often includes pure inflation adjustments that represent no real increase in purchasing power whatsoever.

The IRS treats your patience as a second taxable event. The original dollar was already taxed. The “gain” frequently reflects nothing more than the dollar losing value while you held the asset. Murray Rothbard identified this pattern: the state punishes capital accumulation.

Consider a simple case. You invest $50,000 of after-tax earnings in 2016 into an S&P 500 index fund. By 2026, it’s worth $115,000. Inflation consumed a meaningful slice of that $65,000 gain. You pay capital gains tax on the full nominal figure regardless.

Capital gains taxation suppresses investment, shrinks the capital pool available for productive enterprise, and forces entrepreneurs to seek financing from a shallower pond. Fewer productive investments get made. Workers carry that cost through lower wages and fewer opportunities. The state expands, while you suffer.

October 20, 2026

Elon Musk’s evil plan to turn American youth into filthy capitalists

Filed under: Business, Economics, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Did you hear the latest outrage? Arch-capitalist exploiter Elon Musk — reportedly the richest man in the world — intends to bribe American children by giving them each a share in one of his most important businesses. On X, Brivael Le Pogam has thoughts:

In 2021, the head of the UN World Food Programme said $6 billion from Elon Musk could solve world hunger.

Elon replied: publish the plan, right here, publicly, and I’ll sell Tesla stock on the spot.

The plan came out. And when you read it, it wasn’t a plan to solve hunger. It was one year of food for 42 million people. A twelve-month subscription. And the year after? Start over.

A few months later, Elon summed up his view: if you care about the reality of goodness rather than the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult.

“Reality of goodness over perception of goodness.”

That line stuck with me for weeks. Does philanthropy actually work?

Gates-style philanthropy is first and foremost institutional capture. Foundations funding NGOs, funding governments, funding programs, producing reports, producing photos. Everyone’s happy, and the aid machine keeps itself alive. Sixty years and hundreds of billions later, much of Africa is still dependent on aid. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo laid it out in Dead Aid: aid breeds dependency, feeds corruption, and short-circuits the only mechanism that has ever lifted a country out of poverty.

So what actually works?

It’s been tested. In Kenya, Berkeley researchers working with GiveDirectly randomly selected villages and gave every poor household about $1,000 in cash. No program. No training. No conditions. Just cash.

The result: people bought metal roofs, livestock, started small businesses. Barely any inflation. And every dollar injected generated around $2.50 of economic activity locally, including for neighbors who received nothing.

Why? Because you didn’t give them charity. You gave them capital. You primed the pump.

And that’s where everything hinges: ownership. Hernando de Soto showed that the world’s poor hold trillions of dollars in assets, but without recognized property titles, it’s dead capital. You can’t borrow against it, pass it on, or grow it. Where property rights are respected, the system starts running. Where they aren’t, no amount of aid will ever be enough.

Now reread Elon’s post.

“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.”

That’s not a meal. That’s not a handout. That’s a property title. A piece of the company building the infrastructure of a multiplanetary civilization, owned directly by millions of kids.

A kid who gets a handout depends on the state. A kid who owns a share of SpaceX owns a piece of the future. He learns what an asset is, he has a stake in the economy working, and one day he’ll vote as an owner, not as a client of the state.

Gates buys perception. Musk distributes ownership.

The reality of goodness versus its perception. And it’s absolutely brilliant.

Your Safety First (1956) – Automotive safety cartoon that inspired The Jetsons

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

PeriscopeFilm
Published 23 Jun 2026

This animated film by John Sutherland Productions was commissioned by the National Association of Auto Manufacturers. Your Safety First is a promotional piece for 21st Century Cars, told from the perspective of a person in the year 2000 looking back on the history of automobile safety. The cartoon humorously compares the dangerous, early days of cars with the safety-focused, modern vehicles of its time. The cartoon was directed by George Gordon, and animated by Ken O’Brien, George Cannata, Fred Madison and Cal Dalton. The story was written by Norman Wright. Note: this cartoon has been noted as a precursor to the animated TV series The Jetsons, which borrowed heavily on the ideas presented in the cartoon including a three-hour work day, automated flying cars, and robotic arms performing most tasks.

0:00 Main titles. The film’s host, a man from the year 2000, introduces a segment on the history of the automobile, beginning with an early 20th-century car.
4:47 The film highlights the dangers of early cars, including a lack of doors, frequent flat tires due to poor tire retention rings, and a complete absence of shock absorbers, which made for a very bumpy and unsafe ride.
5:32 Early cars had poor acceleration and weak, unreliable gas or oil headlamps, making night driving hazardous.
5:47 The vehicles offered little protection from the elements, as they lacked tops and windshield wipers.
6:03 The film shows the danger of the hand crank starter, which often failed, and the unpredictable nature of the car’s individual parts, which could fail without warning, causing accidents.
6:35 The film transitions to the rapid improvements made to cars over the years.
6:42 It lists early safety innovations, such as stronger wheels, demountable rims, doors, tops, windshields, and wipers. The driver’s seat was moved to the left for safer passing, and the electric starter replaced the hand crank.
7:33 The film continues to show the development of safety features over the decades, including pressed steel wheels, stop lights, rearview mirrors, four-wheel hydraulic brakes, and rubber-covered pedals.
7:51 Safety glass and all-steel bodies and tops are presented as major improvements in passenger protection. Shock absorbers are highlighted for smoothing out bumpy roads.
8:30 The film states that, in addition to physical improvements, manufacturers developed research and testing techniques to build safer cars. It shows various “torture tests” designed to find weaknesses in parts.
9:31 Manufacturing processes also improved, with each car undergoing over 2,000 inspections before leaving the factory.
9:48 The film returns to “Grandpa” in the year 2000, showcasing his reliable, safe, and comfortable car. It lists a final set of advanced safety and convenience features, including safety door locks, automatic transmission, a low center of gravity for stability, and tubeless tires.
10:46 Modern features like wraparound windshields and larger rear windows increased visibility. Sealed-beam headlamps improved night driving, while power brakes and power steering made driving easier and safer.
11:27 The film concludes by asserting that the safety of the driver was and will continue to be the primary goal of automobile manufacturers. The host, Grandpa himself, states he is “going on 117” thanks to the easy, modern living made possible by safe cars.
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October 19, 2026

“If alternative energy is a ‘lower-cost’ solution they shouldn’t need prodding from a wise and benevolent state”

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

John Robson points out that words do have meanings and calling expensive things “cheap” and cheap things “expensive” doesn’t actually change their economic or environmental value in the real world:

Martian fighting machines striding over Horsell Common … no, wait, these are actually wind turbines on Wolfe Island, near Kingston, Ontario.

When it comes to the alleged green energy transition and its flood of cheap power and paradisaically green, lucrative and fulfilling jobs, those with even fairly short historical memories will recall that the “Green New Deal” legislative package was meant to do for the US economy what Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had supposedly done in the 1930s. Those of us who think the main achievement of the “New Deal” was to extend a sharp recession into a decade-long depression through a massive set of taxes and regulations driven by inane economic theory, for instance plowing crops under to fight hunger under the AAA, didn’t even find that claim appealing. But others sure did, and with about as much to show for it.

As Wikipedia put it, after tracing uses of the term back to 2007:

    The 2019 United States congressional resolution Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey advocated a ‘just transition’, counteracting previous systemic injustices that had disproportionally hurt vulnerable communities. A ‘just transition’ relies on increasing social and economic equity and access to opportunity which are crucial components of the Green New Deal and principles of environmental and social justice.

For these hyper adherents to Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision”, just saving the planet isn’t enough. You also have to save the economy, eliminate injustice and after lunch world peace.

In Canada, where we pride ourselves so fiercely on our “elbows up” independence from the United States that we call our system of socialized medicine brought in back in 1966 “Medicare” after um uh the American program from 1964, there are calls for “A Green New Deal for Canadian Sovereignty” which appears to be the US version with maple syrup:

    This will allow us to quickly transition from an economy excessively reliant on serving the United States and based on exploitation and the burning of fossil fuels, to one that is more self-reliant, driven by dignified work, clean renewable energy, more equitable and with efficient public services for all.

Oh. Just that? Who knew giving up oil and gas in a cold northern country could fix government health care? Well, Greenpeace Canada, for one, with their 2019 infographic that includes “Create a plan for 1 million good green jobs” (shades of Mole from Pogo exclaiming “A plan! You’re right! I’ll need a plan!”). And with this one, wait, you also get “Indigenous rights” and “proportional representation” and “BETTER LIFE FOR ALL” and “Build clean industries”. Oh and “Grant personhood protections to forests and bodies of water”. And interfaith harmony and a guy in a wheelchair and all that there.

Mind you, the bit where you “Build clean industries” still appears to face a few minor hurdles, like building clean industries. And why just 1 million good green jobs? Why not 5 million, or 53 million, or 628 billion? Since climate transition enthusiasts don’t do practical well.

For instance Canary Media just launched a publication “California Wire” dedicated to telling you the transition that failed in California worked in California:

    I’m launching this newsletter at an intriguing moment in California politics. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom – who everyone knows is eyeing a run for the White House – has one last chance to show his true colors on energy and climate change. Rising electricity costs are a major issue in California, and Newsom must decide by the end of this month whether to sign a host of bills that could help cut utility rates while also advancing the state’s clean energy transition. What message does he want to send to Californians and the rest of the country?

Dude, he already “sent a message” that this GND is pie in the sky and energy gets more expensive not less. And not because he hid his “true colors on energy and climate change” but because he waved them in everyone’s face while shouting about the subject. So now all he needs to do is wave his pen? Yup:

    a few bills on his desk now could at least start the long slog of reforms that experts say will help make power more affordable.

Oh wait. Experts say. But long slog? Help make it more affordable? Why the Dickens isn’t it already more affordable since these kinds of people keep telling us wind and solar are now cheaper than oil and gas, and let’s not even mention coal, and Newsom’s true colours are wind and solar?

Indeed, he calls for:

    a precursor to setting up regulations that could steer them [utilities] toward prioritizing lower-cost solutions over expensive grid upgrades.

Talk about leaping into verbiage. And also error, since if alternative energy is a “lower-cost” solution they shouldn’t need prodding from a wise and benevolent state, and if they’re not, you’re just making things worse by persisting in your delusion.

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