Quotulatiousness

November 22, 2025

Democrats may come to regret their “refuse illegal orders” messaging

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

Many current and former military folks ridiculed the Democrats for their sudden discovery of the right (and obligation) to refuse illegal orders … which has been part of western military doctrine since the end of World War Two. I poked some fun at them as well, but J.D. Tuccille points out that it’s a weird stance for the party that is always fully in favour of government agents’ maximizing their powers:

I favor government employees defying orders and sabotaging the instruments of the state as much as the next libertarian (well, maybe a little more). But I suspect the Democratic lawmakers urging members of the military and the intelligence community to “refuse illegal orders” haven’t entirely thought through their positions. While their advice is commendable so far as it goes, as officials of a political party known for its expansive view of the role of government their words are likely to come back and bite them on their collective asses. It’s hard to imagine them being so enthusiastic about a reboot of this message directed at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and IRS agents under a Democratic administration.

Lawmakers Say: Refuse Illegal Orders

In a video message released this week, Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Reps. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, and Jason Crow of Colorado, introduce themselves with emphasis on their past roles in the military and intelligence agencies.

“We want to speak directly to members of the military and the intelligence community,” they say. “We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military, but that trust is at risk. This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. And right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.”

That’s a nice lead-in. Then we get to the heart of the message: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

Stirring stuff. And accurate. Referencing a Vietnam War-era atrocity, retired General Philip M. Breedlove, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told NewsNation regarding the video, “Since My Lai, the way we have interpreted this is, as a combatant, as a military officer, you are not obligated, not obligated, to carry out an illegal or an immoral order. You simply refuse the order.”

[…]

Take Advice to Refuse Illegal Orders Seriously, and Apply It Universally

So, if we’re to take seriously — and I believe we are well-advised to do so — the six Democratic lawmakers’ advice that “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution,” there are interesting implications for our political culture. That’s because much of what the federal government does on a daily basis flouts constitutional protections and offends human decency.

So, how would Slotkin and Kelly, and Deluzio, Goodlander, Houlahan, and Crow, respond to campaign a few years from now under the next Democratic administration urging ATF and IRS agents, federal regulators, and general workers to refuse orders? How would they treat an attempt to recruit more whistleblowers like Manning and Edward Snowden?

Don’t get me wrong, I think the advice the lawmakers offer is praiseworthy. But I look forward to seeing it applied universally and becoming a permanent feature of our dealings with government. I suspect that likelihood hasn’t occurred to those six legislators, but thanks to them for showing the way.

In counterpoint to my original take on the issue, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Cynical Publius expresses his belief that the Democrats are actually encouraging disobedience to legal orders that they happen to dislike:

I’m not sure I’ve ever been angrier at Democrats than I am right now.

As a career Army officer, I take this latest nefarious chicanery from these filthy Congressional Democrat veterans quite personally,

It is loathsome and disgusting. You know, I know, they know and even their brainwashed acolytes know that what they are REALLY doing is encouraging active duty service members to refuse to follow lawful orders under the guise of pretending the orders are “unlawful”.

What these Democrat filth are doing is encouraging a form of military coup where service members get to decide not to do things they disagree with politically by pretending those otherwise lawful things are “unlawful”.

This is the greatest threat to US internal stability since the last time Democrats started a civil war. A military ruled by politics is no military at all. Instead, it is a group of armed thugs akin to the South American military juntas of the 1970s.

I cannot overstate what an extreme threat this situation is to our nation.

This is a precursor to civil war, initiated and deliberately created by traitorous elected officials hiding behind the honor of the uniform they once wore but now disgraced.

I have never been angrier.🤬

Why did the US Enter WW1?

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Great War
Published 11 Jul 2025

In early 1917, the United States was still neutral in the First World War. Meanwhile, German leaders were getting desperate — if they couldn’t find a way to break the war of attrition on the Western Front, the Allies would probably defeat them. The result was multiple gambles that staked everything on a quick victory with the risk of drawing the US into the war.
(more…)

November 21, 2025

“You too can be a Tactical Espionage Dollar-Store Hobo for less than $1000”

Filed under: Books, Military, Technology, Tools, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Anarchonomicon, Kulak is at it again … this time it’s a long, long post about how to manage “James Bond tricks” without a “James Bond budget”.

I have now seen 5+ different spy films, In which a CIA or MI6 spy has to breach a chainlink fence. An ordinary chainlink fence.

There’s barb or razor wire up top that prevents our hero from just climbing it … So he or she has to breach it. And on FIVE SEPARATE OCCASIONS … I have seen the goofiest inventions in the world come out. $10,000 super-spy wrist watches with hidden lasers in them, super-secret hairpins with scissors in them made of magic cutting alloys, aerosol sprays that instantly oxidize and rust out a massive section of solid steel fencing (don’t breathe that spray) allowing the spy to just push out a Wile E. Coyote style hole of fencing …

Completely over-designed over-specific insanity that’d cost thousands of dollars, and would basically instantly betray the CIA or MI6 was behind the breach …

Of course no sane human being would ever use those techniques even if they existed. The one semi-plausible breech I’ve seen is in Fight Club Ed Norton and Brad Pitt toss a rug over the razor wire surrounding a medical facility so they can climb the fence … but even this strikes me as profoundly unideal … Would you really want to PLAN on risking nasty lacerations climbing OVER razor wire? That seems more like a desperate break-out trick. Not a Break-in trick.

Of course this is all insane because BREACHING A FENCE is maybe the most SOLVED problem out there, 80% of people reading this already have the tools to do it.

You just use wirecutters or a multitool. Ideally creating a single vertical slit so you can crawl through without the breach being visible unless you look very closely. (be sure to fold the slit back as you crawl so you don’t cut yourself on the jagged edges.

Often the crappiest $15 Chinese Multi-tool is up for the task (although test it out on a random fence on a walk before you gamble on it).

(Note that a “Leatherman” is just a good make of multitool, and outperforms even larger wire-cutters … Your cheepo crappy surplus multi-tool will take more elbow grease (if it works, test it))

Almost everything on the pop-culture side of the tactical world is like this … There’s an obsession with ultra-expensive James Bond scifi inventions that double as a luxury brand to match your tuxedo … When in reality the cheapest rusty junk from your granddad’s tool shed probably gives you vastly more capability.

And even In the world of prepping, tacticool influences, camping, modern combat, and all matters “survival”, “guerilla”, and “outdoors adventure” there’s an intense focus on expensive kit.

All your favorite influencers are sponsored by various product sellers, and half the reason people watch them is for the vicarious or personal thrill of collecting expensive Gucci kit and showing off their rare or designer rifles and Military Artifacts.

Most will assemble load-outs, rigs, and rifles, far less as a preparation for disaster or war, or an exercise in capability expansion, and more as an artistic expression, fashion statement, or historical exercise … Whether they will admit it or not most of the people who buy Yugoslavian combat webbing, or archaic experimental 80s rifles meant for an upcoming war in the scifi future of 2005 have more in common with historical reenactors than they might care to admit … They just chose wars that didn’t happen towards the end of the cold war, instead of The American Revolution, 1812, or the Civil War.

It’s astrology for boys!

As such one could be forgiven for believing that the great wars of the 21st century to come, and the Urban Battlefield that much of the world is quickly becoming, is a “pay to win” combat-zone. And that unless one has close to 100,000 dollars for body Armour, thermal vision, night vision, precision optics, gucci rifles, and all manner of overpriced gadgets and gizmos that they are simply screwed in any 21st century conflict.

This is not the case. Indeed in some cases it is almost the opposite: given how mass surveillance defines the modern battlefield, there’s a lot of kit I wouldn’t want to use just for risk of dropping it and the Glowies tracking down the only 10-20 people who’ve ordered Czechoslovakian Mag-Pouches via NSA copies of online transaction records, or by just calling the 3 sellers who ever had them.

Put simply Skill, knowledge, resourcefulness, and a more than abundant paranoia are more overpowered than almost anytime since the neolithic period … Basic resourcefulness, daring, courage, B-Grade high-school shop-class craftiness, low level chemistry knowledge, basic boy-scout skills, physical fitness (tall order I know), and a nigh primitivist obsession with the pre-computer way of doing things … Is sufficient to achieve a shocking level of capability and inflict an extraordinary level of damage in any near-future conflict, tyrannical regime, or low intensity resistance.

The most important kit in any future conflict isn’t free. But it is near free.

Available at shockingly low prices from dollar-, convenience-, hardware-, surplus-, grocery-stores, and pawn shops … The necessary equipment and capabilities to fight a high impact Guerilla Campaign are available in almost any town of 20,000 almost anywhere in the western world.

Sadly in spite of being largely legal throughout most of the US and not a few odd other countries (assuming one navigates the proper tax stamps and legal statements) I will not be presenting a guide on how to manufacture black-powder, explosives, firearms, or more exotic weaponry … This is all largely trivially covered by Chemistry Youtube in a level of detail I could never hope to match and with a level of responsibility and maturity far beyond my juvenile imagination, and with a level of expertise and experience I cannot pretend to … Seriously! Chemistry/explosive Youtube is really cool, Some of this stuff is should be taught in schools, so historically relevant and useful is it.

If one Navigates to my Earlier “Warlord’s Reading List” you’ll find many listed works (not least published by the US, Canadian, British, and Swiss Governments) that give detailed guides to the manufacture of explosives, chemical weapons, rocket weapons, improvised firearms, homemade flamethrowers, etc … All from other publishers that I can gesture at without exposing me to legal risk and most of them largely available online in PDF form, or from Amazon, and sometimes from the governments themselves.

The EU (with NATO) as a substitute empire

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

On his Substack, Lorenzo Warby discusses the European Union (and its essential military support, NATO) as an imperial subsitute in a post-imperial age:

Historian Timothy Snyder makes an argument in various lectures and on his Substack that what became the EU was a replacement for empire. I think he is right, but not in the way he suggests. Prof. Snyder holds that what became the EU is an economic replacement because he appears to believe that empire was economically beneficial to their metropole economies.

This seems clearly wrong. Every maritime imperial metropole got richer after it lost its empire. This is true whether they were part of what became the EU or not: the obvious example of the latter being Japan and its dramatic postwar economic success after being stripped of its empire and devastated by American bombing. For the economies of all the former maritime-empire states, access to the US market, and the US-led maritime order, was much more valuable, and way cheaper, than empire.

It is not clear that even Britain made a “profit” from its Empire, once you consider military and administrative costs. Portugal had the largest maritime empire — relative to the size of its metropole — for longest and is the poorest country in Western Europe. Compare that to rather wealthier land-locked Switzerland, which never had an empire.

Empires are what states do.1 It is foolish to presume that any particular state action is beneficial to those that a state rules. Having an empire increases the power of state, and the opportunities within the state apparat. That is more than enough to motivate territorial imperialism, whether by land or by sea.

Conspicuous absences

A conspicuous absence from Prof. Snyder’s analysis of what-became-the-EU is NATO. There are a lot of regional economic cooperation organisations around the word. None of them are remotely as integrated as the EU because none of them have the equivalent of NATO.

In order to pool sovereignty within the EU, states first have to have their territorial sovereignty guaranteed. This guarantee is precisely what NATO provides.

The post-Versailles European order of 1919-1939 was unstable because it interspersed between Germany and the Soviet Union a series of small states that the victors of 1914-1918 could not readily reach. NATO has two huge advantages that the nation-states of Eastern Europe did not have in the 1919-1939 period — NATO is a geographically contiguous alliance and it includes the United States. The purpose of NATO, in the famous words of its first Secretary-General, being:

    to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.

In other words, the purpose of NATO was to provide a comprehensive solution to the structural weakness of the 1919-1939 Versailles order. A solution that the countries of Eastern Europe availed themselves of as soon as they could.2

The other conspicuous absence from Prof. Snyder’s analysis of the EU as a substitute to empire is Oceania. His analysis is deeply “(North) Atlantic”. It looks much less impressive from a Pacific perspective.

Japan was a maritime empire which lost the Second World War. It did not join anything like the EU. Australia gave up its (small) maritime empire. It also did not join anything like the EU. Both are very much postwar economic success stories. Participating in the maritime order with good internal institutional structures was enough: no other substitute for empire was needed for economic success.

  1. The Conquistadors were a mixture of private adventurers and state agents, but their conquests were incorporated by the imperial Spanish state. The use of corporations as instruments of imperial expansion — most famously the Dutch and British East India Companies — was an unusual feature of European imperialism, but such companies were licensed by their state and their territorial holdings were eventually fully incorporated as state possessions.
  2. For all sorts of reasons, we should distinguish between the postwar order of 1945-1991 and the post Cold War order of after 1991. So much of contemporary madness only really got underway in the 1990s.

The “spat” between China and Japan is far more important than western media are reporting

Filed under: China, Japan, Media, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Claire Berlinsky explains why we should be paying far more attention to what our media are treating as a minor diplomatic spat as Beijing reacts furiously to the new Japanese PM’s comments:

You need to see the Chinese media today to get a feel for this. Front pages of the relevant organs are devoted to frothing in fury at Japan. They’re rectifying bad thoughts like a house on fire.

Here’s why I’m worried by this. Both the Chinese- and Japanese-language press are treating this as a major diplomatic incident. (In English, it’s mostly being described as “a row” or “spat” — then back to Trump and Epstein.) Let me walk you through what it looks from Beijing and Tokyo, with help from ChatGPT on the translations.

The trigger was a comment in by the new Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. She told a parliamentary committee that a Taiwan contingency involving the use of force might constitute a “sonritsu kiki jitai” (a “survival-threatening situation” — I think we’d use the phrase “existential threat”) for Japan under its 2015 security laws, and justify the exercise of collective self-defense, using Japan’s self-defense forces.

Beijing exploded. China summoned the Japanese ambassador in Beijing for a formal démarche, and it allowed the PRC consul general in Osaka, Xue Jian, to post a (now-deleted) tweet calling for her decapitation—”that dirty head that trespassed should be cut off, are you ready?” The Xue Jian post has, of course, become a media event of its own. Beijing issued a travel advisory urging Chinese citizens to avoid Japan, and told students to “carefully reconsider” study plans. It stepped up coast-guard activity near the Senkakus, and cancelled the Xi–Takaichi bilateral at the G20.

But this arid account doesn’t begin to convey the way the Chinese and Japanese media are talking about this. The Chinese coverage is nothing short of hysterical. To read the Party-line outlets, you’d think Takaichi had just ordered the immediate re-invasion of Manchuria. Her comment, they said, was an evidence of a “dangerous rightward turn” in Japanese politics. They’re calling it a “sky-collapsing opening“, accusing her of “reckless ranting” and tearing up the China-Japan relationship.

The headline in a widely circulated China Daily article:”If China and Japan go to war, Japan will be destroyed“. They found the inevitable panel of “peace-loving international friends” — including Okinawan peace activists and pro-PRC overseas Chinese — to denounce Takaichi as the reincarnation of “Japanese militarism”. The peace activists dutifully warned that the Japanese people would be “dragged into catastrophe” by their government. A CNR column accuses her of “brazen provocation”, and claims that “Taiwan compatriots are also outraged” at the prospect of Taiwan being turned into a battleground between China and a “militaristic” Japan.

The Party line: Taiwan is a “settled” internal issue; any talk of Japanese collective self-defense in the Strait is aggression and a “serious violation” of the post-1945 order. Takaichi represents “unrepentant militarism.” Chinese pieces quote her opponents at length to argue that “sober Japanese elites” are deploring her recklessness. Chinese-language coverage of the travel advisory is not treating it as a minor consular notice. They’re claiming it’s the first coercive step.

In Japan, this is front-page foreign policy news, not a minor gaffe. Mainichi ran an editorial saying, more or less, that Takaichi’s words were legally consistent with the 2015 security laws, but prime ministers should be more discrete about hypothetical military contingencies and show more prudence. Opposition figures are saying she “went too far” and threw the relationship into “a very grave state”. They called it “frivolous” for a commander-in-chief to talk so specifically about use-of-force scenarios.

On the other hand, there’s clearly a domestic constituency that sees this as long overdue. Some in her party see any hint of retraction as “weakness toward China”, and they’re praising her for drawing a firm line on Taiwan. (The coverage about whether to expel Xue Jian is divided: His post was a death threat, obviously, but the Foreign Ministry seems reluctant to escalate this further.)

TV explainers are reminding viewers that the 2015 security legislation already contemplated a Taiwan contingency — what’s new is that the prime minister has now said this out loud. And a prime minister with an openly revisionist profile — that’s definitely new.

So there’s a lot of signaling going on. Beijing is signaling to its own public: “We’ll never again let Japanese militarism threaten China. The Party is the bulwark against a repeat of the 1930s.” To Tokyo: “We’ll punish any step toward military involvement in the Strait, first with economic coercion — then worse. We are not kidding about this.” To the wider region and Washington: “Japan is a destabilizer — this woman isn’t right in the head. If things go wrong in the Taiwan Strait, blame Tokyo. Remember Pearl Harbor.”

Update, 23 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

November 20, 2025

Military necessity and the “right to repair”

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

Over the last few decades, more and more companies have been discovering the financial wonders available to them if they separate the items they sell from the ability to repair those items … so you buy a widget but if it breaks, you have to pay the manufacturer to get it fixed. You have no option to fix it yourself — even if you have the technical know-how and the necessary tools — nor can you find a cheaper alternative, because the manufacturer has blocked any possible competition to their often highly profitable scam revenue stream. It’s bad enough in the civilian marketplace, where consumers are demanding the “right to repair” from legislators because the cost and inconvenience are far too high.

Now imagine you are onboard a US Navy ship in the western Pacific and some critical piece of technology breaks down … but you can’t fix it yourself because the manufacturer sells repair services and will have to be paid to send out a civilian repair crew with the necessary tools and parts. No need to imagine it: it’s the situation the US military is finding itself in more and more often:

If you want to get an otherwise reserved and laconic farmer to get excited and talkative about a subject, ask them about the issue of “right to repair“.

    … Wilson and others accuse John Deere of blocking farmers and everyday mechanics from fixing equipment without going through John Deere dealers. Although the company doesn’t prohibit users from fixing equipment themselves, the lawsuit claims it locks users out of repairs because of the limited access to software that only dealerships can access. The lawsuit says that makes most fixes nearly impossible. A lot like cars, the farming equipment is equipped with sensors. The John Deere tractors, for instance, run on firmware that is necessary for basic functions, according to the lawsuit. If something is wrong with the equipment, a code will appear on a display monitor inside the machine. The suit says interpreting the error codes on tractors, for instance, requires software that “Deere refuses to make available to farmers”.

    Right-to-repair advocates say the digitization of agricultural equipment — with its various computers and sensors — has made self-repair almost impossible, forcing farmers to depend on the manufacturers. Wilson, for example, said he has to rely on his local John Deere dealership, which he said takes longer and charges more than an independent repair worker.

    … a pending lawsuit the Federal Trade Commission filed Jan. 15 claims the company falls short of that promise. The complaint accuses it of unlawful business practices that have “inflated farmers’ repair costs and degraded farmers’ ability to obtain timely repairs”.

    “I would have some farmers close to tears recalling the time they lost a whole harvest because they weren’t able to fix their own tractor and weren’t able to go to a local repair shop,” said former FTC Chair Lina Khan, who helped launch the suit.

OK, it is bad enough to have to wait as through time and experiencing a degrading quality of harvest to repair your tractor … but what if instead of Mother Nature, you have to deal with 50,000 screaming Chinamen?

Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT) is trying to get ahead of this problem.

    U.S. defense contractors have launched a lobbying and public relations blitz to defeat a provision in the Senate-passed NDAA that would set strict new rules for how the Pentagon accesses their intellectual property.

    The issue is among the last unresolved matters facing House and Senate negotiators who aim to reconcile before December the House and Senate fiscal 2026 NDAAs.

    The Senate’s so-called right-to-repair provision states that the Pentagon may not, with certain exceptions, enter into a contract unless the deal requires the company to provide the government with the data needed to operate and sustain the equipment.

    That data means a lot to the contractors because it is worth many billions of dollars over time. To a servicemember it also means a lot: Being able to fix a weapon can mean the difference between life and death. And the cost of such repairs is a major driver of defense budget growth, experts have long said.

These are the same defense primes who are spending billions of dollars on stock buybacks, and already have a track record of contract maintenance that is not impressive.

Update, 21 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

C-130 Hercules Progress Report (1955)

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

Charlie Dean Archives
Published 24 Jul 2014

C-130 Hercules Progress Report (1955) – Department of the Air Force. This film is a Lockheed Aircraft report covering C-130 production; fatigue, structural, temperature and environmental tests; cargo and transport capability demonstration; and the development of ski-wheels. The film also shows a C-130 takeoff, flight and landing.

CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!

November 19, 2025

US Democrats issue clarion call to the military: “You must refuse illegal orders”

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

Well, thank goodness that someone remembers Nuremberg! Apparently President Trump has been issuing illegal orders to the US Army, Navy, and Air Force, and these brave legislators are putting their careers — and even their lives — on the line to defend democracy. I’m unaware of what these specific orders may be, but as Chris Bray points out, he’s the Bad Orange Man so pretty much anything he orders must be illegal:

Note what they don’t say. They say that the American military is being “pitted against” their own countrymen, and they say to servicemembers that “you can refuse illegal orders …”

… they don’t say, even once, even in a pretty clear hint, precisely what illegal orders Trump has issued. He’s being vaguely bad, so you don’t have to obey him. The serious version would look like this: On [date here], the President of the United States ordered [unit name] to enter [place name] for the purpose of [specific action], and that order violated [explicit citation of US Code]. They mushmouth around a set of feelings-signals about Mean Orange Something, but they never quite manage to spit it out. What’s the illegal order anyone is supposed to disobey, and what makes it illegal? News reports suggest that they mean to refer to the boat strikes, but click on that link if you want to see more vagueness and weak hinting.

This is exactly what the Catholic bishops just did in their own stupid virtue performance, the precise mark of an absence of seriousness in a coven of drama queens, as they declared that they’re very concerned about questions that have arisen regarding certain situations involving immigrants. More mush from the wimps. Donald Trump is very bad, because mumble mumble mumble. Be precise and clear, or be silent.

This is an age of unseriousness, and here’s another heaping plate of it. Soldiers, you don’t have to obey the orders of your military superiors if you feel that they, that they, uh, oh hey look at the time anyway I have to go. It’s passive-aggressive bad girlfriendspeak as politics. I guess if you feel like you have to obey, that’s fine. No, it’s fine! I’m not mad! Let’s just go to dinner!

We want to speak directly to members of the military, but we don’t actually have anything to say. Just, you know, disobey the president. Small thought, not a big deal.

High school drama club president Elissa Slotkin has been banging on this drum in an especially insistent way, as she holds town hall meetings with veterans who mumble their own vague slogans about Trump bein’ against the Constitution real hard and stuff.

But all of their descriptions are stupid. Sending a few hundred National Guard troops to a city of hundreds of thousands of people with narrow orders about protecting federal facilities and personnel or patrolling to deter violence isn’t military conquest of the population or the militarization of all law enforcement. The hyperbole renders the argument insane. Related, the veterans in Slotkin’s video talk about the “systematic removal” of military leaders, and the “purge of the generals”. The US military has over 800 flag officers; the Trump administration has removed about 15. There’s a desperate stupidity to all of this panic-mongering that just renders it deeply tiring.

Actual servicemembers will be familiar with the rhetorical style of the shithouse lawyer, the idiot in the barracks who tells you that akshully they can’t order you to do that, it’s totally illegal.

You should just tell your drill sergeant that you refuse! He can’t even do nothin’ about it! He’ll just back right down!

The Korean War Week 74: The US Wants To Prolong The War – November 18, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 18 Nov 2025

UN Commander Matt Ridgway has everyone in Washington worried because of his refusal to play ball with the Communist side at the peace talks. The Communist side aren’t exactly playing nice either, lobbing insults at the UN delegates, but the newspapers of the world wonder if the US actually even wants a truce, since bloody headlines implying impending vengeance come out in American papers timed suspiciously with possible breakthroughs at the talks.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:43 Recap
01:12 Ridgway Disagrees
04:29 Insults at Panmunjom
06:50 What The Troops Think
09:05 Ridgway’s Statement
10:11 POW Repatriation
12:50 Summary
13:06 Conclusion
(more…)

Ken Burns’ The American Revolution gets the Howard Zinn seal of approval

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

CDR Salamander is persuaded, against his better judgement, to watch the latest Ken Burns documentary … and discovers that it’s somehow still 2018-2022 in Burns’ world:

So, I’ve watched the two episodes of Ken Burns’s documentary, The American Revolution, in spite of my stated zero desire to do so. Why? If you are not up to speed with the MSNBCification of Ken Burns over the last decade, catch up.

Anyway, as Mrs. Salamander knows more about the American Revolution than 99.7% of people out there, she insisted we watch it. I’ve been married for over three decades for a reason, so I sat down with her to watch.

FFS.

… and … it started with a land acknowledgement. ISYN.

It doesn’t get better.

By the end of episode two we’ve gotten through the Battle of Bunker Hill, yet there has been no mention of John Locke, Montesquieu, or any of the other philosophical drivers of the revolution. They have plenty of time to quote the memories of an old man about what he thought of George Washington when he ran into him when he was 8 (it wasn’t good).

Let’s pause there a bit. It is clear that they made a decision that for every good thing they say about GW in the first two episodes, they insist on finding a way to smear him with presentism. It is also clear that he really wants to do a documentary on African Americans in the Revolutionary War, but couldn’t get the funding for that. Instead there is a constant referring back to slavery and racial issues. Just overdone to the point of being obvious, given that they were, at best, tertiary issues during the war. It deserves mention, but not in this ham-fisted, patronizing manner it is being done … and done mostly to smear GW up.

The presentism and biased scholarship is not shocking if you’ve read my reports at my Substack over the years about the absolute woke-soaked state of American historical organizations such as the American Historical Association. (see my FEB 2021 Substack, “The War on (Military) History: Half a Century In” for reference.)

The smearing of GW like this is more than “balance” — it is emblematic of the presentism that makes so many modern virtue signaling tiresome — and exactly meets the low expectations I had for this documentary.

There is also the pettiness of their choices of what to comment on, and how — the smug New England perspective of the Acela Corridor that is Ken Burns’ intellectual terrarium. Just one example from the second episode: the arrival of the Virginians to support the patriot forces around Boston. Might as well have called them rednecks.

Even Mrs. Salamander, halfway through Ep. 2, had about enough of the shoehorned in identity politics of “inclusion” … as if everyone ever got over the fever of 2018-2022.

November 17, 2025

The US Supreme Court considers whether Trump’s tariffs are legal

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

Thanks to the staggering incompetence (and/or deliberate provocation for domestic political advantage) of the Carney government’s dealings with President Donald Trump, the current case before the Supreme Court is of significant interest to those of us on the north side of the US-Canadian border. On his Substack, David Friedman discusses the issues before the court:

There are three things wrong with Trump’s tariffs. The first is that they cannot be expected to provide the benefits claimed, can be expected to make both the US and its trading partners poorer; the arguments offered for them depend on not understanding the economics of trade. For an explanation of why that is true, see an earlier post.

The fact that the tariffs make us poorer may be the most important thing wrong with them but it is irrelevant to the Supreme Court; nothing in the Constitution requires the president to do his job well. The questions relevant to the Court are whether what Trump is doing was authorized by past Congressional legislation and whether it was constitutional for Congress to authorize it.

What Counts As An Emergency?

Tariffs are under the authority of Congress, not the president.1 Trump’s justification for setting them himself is congressional legislation, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

    (a) Any authority granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may be exercised to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.

    (b) The authorities granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose. (IEEPA, 50 U.S. Code § 1701, emphasis mine)

Trump declared that his Worldwide Reciprocal Tariffs were intended to deal with the US trade deficit.2 Whether the deficit is a threat and whether tariffs are a good way to deal with it are questions for economists3 but whether it is unusual is relevant to judges, since if it is not the IEEPA does not apply.

[…]

The Court on Trial

Delegating to the president the power to impose tariffs, a power explicitly given to Congress in the Constitution, is a major question. Under doctrine proclaimed by this court that means that the legislation claimed to delegate that power must be read narrowly. On a narrow reading, on anything but a very broad reading, the legislation fails to apply to President Trump’s tariffs for two independent reasons:

    It only grants power in an emergency, which under the language of the Act neither the trade deficit nor the illegal drug problem is; the deficit has existed since 1970, the War on Drugs was proclaimed in 1971.

    The powers granted to the president in the Act do not include the power to impose tariffs.

If the six conservative justices believe in the principles they claim, the administration will lose the case 9-0.

  1. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations … (U.S Constitution, Article I, Section 8).
  2. “I found that conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States that has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States. I declared a national emergency with respect to that threat, and to deal with that threat, I imposed additional ad valorem duties that I deemed necessary and appropriate.” (Executive Order July 31, 2025).
  3. The answers are no and no.

What did Cowboys Eat on the Open Range?

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Jun 2025

Slow-cooked pinto beans and dense cast iron skillet cornbread

City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1896

The cook for a cattle drive, often called “cookie”, was usually a former cowboy himself, having aged out of the profession by 25. They’d wake up around 3:00 AM to get breakfast ready, then pack up and drive ahead about 15 miles to prepare supper.

These beans are very simple, and surprisingly delicious. Honestly, the garlic doesn’t do a whole lot (who only uses half a clove?), but they’re still very good. Feel free to use however hot a red pepper you like, and the beans are a perfect accompaniment to the Chuck Wagon Cornbread (below). Mighty fine, indeed.

    FRIJOLES.
    1 cup Mexican beans.
    1/2 clove garlic.
    1 long red pepper.
    1 thin small slice bacon.
    Soak beans over night; boil slowly until soft—from eight to ten hours. Add red pepper, garlic, and bacon, and bake.
    — Manual for Army Cooks, 1896

(more…)

QotD: Turns out Judaism isn’t the peaceful exception among Abrahamic montheisms

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Yevardia @haravayin_hogh

    Thread w/excerpts of Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion.
    Shahak was an award-winning organic chemist & Classical Liberal. Born in Poland, his family moved to Israel as displaced persons in 1945.
    For this book, he received death-threats for the rest of his life.

Quoted thread is absolutely fascinating.

Like many American gentiles who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I have a fondness for Jewish culture as it manifested in this country. The food, the humor, the intellectual tradition. I read Mad Magazine as a kid and “The Joys of Yiddish” as a young man and cheerfully adopted some Yiddishisms into my idiolect.

It’s always been slightly difficult for me, though, to reconcile my fondness for the Jewish influence on American life with what I believe about monotheisms in general and Abrahamic monotheisms is in particular. Which is, basically, that they are pits of evil. Infectious insanities that bring mob violence, horror and death whenever they have actual power.

Judaism looked like an at least partial exception, a monotheism with a curious lack of horrific violence in its backstory. I thought this might be explained by its absence of coercive power ever since the destruction of the Second Temple — 2000 years of oppression by others teaching Judaism the virtue of tolerance the hard way.

Now comes Israel Shahak to tell me it wasn’t like that at all. That until historically recent times – basically, post-1800 — Judaism wasn’t tolerant and rational. Not even close. These are virtues of the secularized Jew, in reaction to traditional Jewish shtetl and ghetto communities that could best have been described as violently evil religious despotisms.

Shahak says gentiles — and many Jews — don’t know how terrible life was under pre-modern rabbis because Judaism has done a bang-up job of expurgating and sanitizing its own history.

Nobody talks about the fact that until the 19th century, rabbis routinely used the self-governance afforded them by a lack of state interest in universal secularized justice to abuse, torture, and often murder Jews they found to be in violation of religious law. I certainly had no idea of this, despite being quite well read in history and comparative religion.

Thought control, too. We think of Jews as readers and scholars, but it turns out the pre-modern rabbinate deliberately kept communal Jews ignorant of history, geography, science, and indeed all secular literature.

Shahak brings the receipts, with extensive quotation from primary sources. Even his critics — and there are many — can’t accuse him of making up these reports. They claim he misinterprets the evidence. But they can’t make the evidence go away.

In a way this comes as a relief to me. I no longer have to wonder why Judaism looks like an exception to the general evil of monotheisms. Because it isn’t one — like Christianity, it looks benign only to the extent that it’s been denatured by modernity and secularism.

On the other hand … I miss the Judaism I thought I knew. I’m disturbed that the evidence was so effectively suppressed, and that it took reading excerpts from Shahak to clue me in.

Damn shame copies of Shahak’s book are so rare that you can only find them for over a grand each. I’d like to read the whole thing, but everybody should read the excerpts in this thread.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-15.

November 16, 2025

3D printing and firearms

Filed under: Liberty, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR discusses a recent user notification from one of the 3D printer companies to their users:

I’m told that 3D printed gun parts are far more sophisticated than this Liberator from 2013, but I’m sure nobody would actually do that, right? It would draw the attention of various government agencies for sure.

The recent flap about FlashForge attempting to forbid its customers from printing gun parts means it’s time for another reminder about technological risk.

Their weasel-worded climb-down carefully avoids stating that they never collect data on what you print. They only say they don’t collect data during your prints. The wording is so careful that I think we can conclude they do in fact ship telemetry on your print jobs when g-code arrives at the printer, immediately before printing.

So I repeat a warning I’ve given previously: never buy a 3D printer that requires an internet connection to function. And, always assume that if the printer’s firmware isn’t open-source, it is written to spy on you and could at any time prevent you from printing disapproved objects.

Oh, and never trust FlashForge again or buy their products, no matter how much groveling they do. After this, it’s safest to assume that anything they say about respecting the privacy and autonomy of their customers will be a lie. Hear that, @ff3dprinters
?

We need to make a public example of FlashForge. Other vendors need to hear that shit like this will not be tolerated, that attempting to constrain what their customers print will do them permanent and irreversible damage.

It’s possible that this was merely a blunder on FlashForge’s court, and the attempts they’ve made so far to recover are compounding blunders, but they have sincerely repented of trying to control their customers. That’s too bad; in order to create the right incentives bearing on the future behavior of other vendors, we must show no mercy. We must make them hurt – ideally, to the point of being driven out of business.

And really these warnings apply to all “smart” devices, not just 3D printers. Unless you can audit the source code, the only safe assumption to make is that the firmware is spyware, controlware, and malware.

Device vendors need to know that we do not forgive, and will not forget.

In response, Hopalong Ginsberg posted this helpful item:

QotD: Elon the gambler

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Quotations, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Thus, despite being a large, valuable company with a very successful and profitable business, SpaceX regularly takes existential gambles that could destroy the entire company if they go wrong. By the time the Falcon 9 was up and running, SpaceX had essentially won: they could have rested on their laurels and enjoyed their monopoly for the next few decades. Instead, they bet the entire company on propellant densification (which blew up a rocket or two and indeed nearly destroyed the company).1 Then, once that was working, they bet the entire company on the Falcon Heavy rocket, whose development program nearly bankrupted the business. After that, they bet the entire company on the Starlink satellite constellation. Most recently, they have taken every bit of money and talent the company has and redirected them away from the rockets that make all their money and towards the utterly gratuitous Starship system.

Each of these bets might have been a smart one in a statistical sense, but it still requires a special kind of person to take a $200 billion market cap and bet it all on black. So why has Elon done this? Does he just not believe in the St. Petersburg paradox, like Sam Bankman-Fried claimed to do? No! It’s actually very simple: remember all that stuff about how SpaceX is less of a company and more of a religious movement, with a goal of making life multi-planetary? Elon and SpaceX behave the way that they do because they believe that stuff very sincerely. A version of SpaceX that merely became worth trillions of dollars, but never enabled the colonization of Mars, would be a disastrous failure in Elon’s eyes.

Every bit of company strategy is evaluated on the basis of whether it makes Mars more or less likely. This fully explains all the choices that look crazy from the outside. SpaceX does things that look incredibly risky to conventional business analysts because they reduce the risk of never getting to Mars, and that’s the only risk that matters. This has the nice side-benefit for shareholders that it’s revolutionized space travel several times and built several durable monopolies, but if Elon decided that actually blowing up the business increased the odds of getting to Mars, he would do it in a heartbeat. He’s said as much. This all has very important implications that we will return to in a moment.

A necessary, and to me charming, component of this approach is an utter disregard for bad press. Most corporate communications departments live in flinching terror of the slightest whiff of negative PR. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s puts out official blooper reels of exploding rockets. More seriously, one of the company’s lowest points came in the aftermath of the CRS-7 mission, when a rocket exploded two and a half minutes after launch and totally destroyed its payload. Most companies would do everything possible to minimize the risk of the following “return-to-flight” mission. SpaceX instead used it to debut a completely untested overhaul of the rocket and to attempt the first ever solid ground landing of an orbital-class booster. (It succeeded.)

Hopefully by now it’s not a mystery why SpaceX is a far more effective organization than NASA, but I think this last point is underappreciated. NASA, unfortunately, has boxed itself into a corner where it cannot publicly fail at anything.2 But if you aren’t failing, you aren’t learning, and you certainly aren’t trying to do things that are very hard. SpaceX, conversely, rapidly iterates in public and blows up rockets to deafening cheers. Permission to fail in public is one of the most powerful assets an organization has, and it flows directly from the top. This, too, is something for which Musk deserves credit.

The last thing I’ll say about Elon is that he is notably, uhhh, unafraid to disagree with people. In fact, this book literally has a chapter subheading called “Musk versus the entire human spaceflight community”.3 This quality can be a bit of a two-edged sword, but it’s safe to say that without it the company would never have gotten anywhere. Practically from the moment SpaceX came into existence, its enemies were trying to destroy it. Anybody who followed space policy in the early-to-mid 2010s knows what I’m talking about — politicians like the imbecilic NASA administrator Charles Bolden and the flamboyantly corrupt US Senator Richard Shelby did everything in their power to make life difficult for SpaceX and to smother the newborn company in its crib.

It’s a sign of how total SpaceX’s victory has been that some of those old episodes feel surreal in hindsight. Not just the antics of clowns like Bolden and crooks like Shelby, but also the honest-to-goodness competition in the form of Boeing and Lockheed, who fought dirty from the very beginning. For instance, they lobbied hard to block SpaceX from having any place to launch rockets at all, and dispatched their employees to stand around SpaceX facilities mocking and jeering while taking photographs of operations. In those early, desperate days, it would only have taken one or two successes of Boeing’s massive lobbying team to lock SpaceX completely out of government contracts and starve them of business. It was only Elon’s reputation as “a lunatic who will sue everyone” that prevented NASA from awarding the entire Commercial Crew Program to Boeing despite SpaceX offering to do it for about half as much money.4 And of course Elon actually did sue the Air Force when under intense lobbying they froze SpaceX out of the EELV program.

All of this is ancient history now. SpaceX’s competitors are no longer trying to stop the company with lawfare, because SpaceX no longer has any meaningful competition. But there are still people trying to slow down and sabotage the company; they’re just doing it for ideological rather than economic reasons. In the early days of SpaceX, the “deep state” of unelected bureaucrats who direct and control the United States government were huge supporters of the company, because back then the reigning ideology of that set was a sort of good-government technocratic progressivism and the idea of a scrappy new launch provider disrupting the incumbents genuinely pleased and excited them. A few years later, the state religion changed, and a few years after that, Musk revealed himself to be a definite heretic. And so, in utterly predictable and mechanistic fashion, the agencies that once made exceptions for SpaceX now began demanding years of delays in the Starship program in order to study the effects of sonic booms on tadpoles and so on.

One might be tempted to rage about how detrimental this all is to the rule of law. Think of the norms. Berger is certainly upset by it, and he ends his book (published in September 2024) by urging Musk to self-censor and stop antagonizing powerful forces with his political activism. Implicit to this demand is the advice, “If you just act like a good boy and stop making trouble, they’ll go back to leaving you alone.” Obviously, Musk did not take this advice. He instead further kicked the hornet’s nest by redoubling his support for Donald Trump. By October, the social network formerly known as Twitter was teeming with employees of US spy agencies and their allies demanding that SpaceX be nationalized and that Musk be deported.5 Given that Trump’s election was no sure thing, why would he take this risk?

There was a famous uprising against the Qin dynasty that happened when two generals realized that (1) they were going to be late, and (2) that the punishment for being late was death, and (3) that the punishment for treason was … also death. Elon Musk thinks being late to Mars is just as bad as being deported and having his companies taken away from him. He has already gambled the entire future of SpaceX on a coin flip five or six times, because he considers partial success and total failure to be literally equivalent. When it became clear that an FAA empowered by a Harris administration would put one roadblock after another in front of him, his only choice was to rebel and to flip the coin one more time.

When I saw Musk charging into the lion’s den back in October, I immediately thought of the Haywood Algorithm and its dreadful, stark simplicity. “Make a list of everything you need to do in order to succeed, and then do each item on your list.” When you run a normal company, the algorithm sometimes demands that you stay late at work or come in on a weekend. When you run a rocket company, the algorithm sometimes demands that you buy Twitter6 and use it to take over the United States government. It’s far from the riskiest thing Musk has done on his path to Mars. At this point, it might be wise to stop betting against him.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Reentry, by Eric Berger”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-12-09.

  1. “Propellant densification” may sound like a nerdy topic, but it’s actually one of the most interesting subplots in the entire book. In the interest of making the Falcon 9 the highest performing rocket ever, and especially in the interest of improving the economics of booster landing and reuse, SpaceX decided to try to just pack more fuel and oxidizer into the tanks. The way you fit more of a gas or liquid into a given volume is by making it colder. So they developed a way to chill liquid oxygen down to -340 degrees Fahrenheit, way colder than anybody had ever made it before. What they weren’t prepared for was that at these temperatures, liquid oxygen starts making all kinds of horrible, eerie noises that made the engineers not want to be around it.
  2. Remember propellant densification? NASA considered it in the 80s and 90s, but dismissed it. Not for technical reasons, but because the need to destructively test pressure vessels might result in negative news stories.
  3. The subject of this section is whether it’s acceptable to fuel a rocket when the astronauts are already inside. The position of “the entire human spaceflight community” was that fueling can be dangerous, so better to complete propellant loading first, wait for everything to settle, and only afterwards being the astronauts on board. Seems sensible enough, but remember propellant densification? SpaceX’s ultra-cold liquid oxygen immediately begins heating up after loading, so the only practical way to use it is to load at the last minute and then immediately launch the rocket. Densification was vital to eking out the last bit of performance margin that makes rocket reuse possible, so Musk stuck to his guns. So far zero astronauts have died as a result.
  4. NASA’s pretext for favoring Boeing over SpaceX was the former’s “reliability” and “experience” and “technical superiority”. In the decade since then, SpaceX has completely dozens of missions flawlessly, while Boeing has yet to actually make it to the International Space Station and back.
  5. It’s hard to tell when the radical centrists mean things “seriously but not literally”, but I sincerely think that had Trump lost the best case outcome for Musk would be something like Jack Ma: chastened, humiliated, wings clipped, freedom of action greatly reduced.
  6. It’s become fashionable to mock Musk for running Twitter into the ground, but control over the social network’s content policies probably had a major effect on the election outcome. Even if Twitter literally becomes worth zero dollars (which given Musk’s track record I doubt), surely you can imagine how when you have a tremendous amount of money, $44 billion might seem like a small price to pay to have the President of the United States owe you some major favors.
« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress