The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 4 Nov 2025The Panmunjom peace talks continue, but a real sticking point is Kaesong- both sides insist that they must have control of it. Frustration mounts among the Allied journalists, though, as they are allowed less access to what’s going on than their Communist counterparts. Despite the talks, there’s new action in the field this week, as the Chinese attack in force to try and retake Maryang-san, a commanding strategic position.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:40 Recap
00:59 The Kaesong Issue
03:24 Voluntary Repatriation
07:14 US Command’s Position
09:15 All For All Repatriation
10:35 UN Censorship
12:29 Maryang-San
13:35 Summary
13:37 Conclusion
14:39 CTA
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November 5, 2025
The Korean War Week 72: UN Censors as Communists Speak! – November 4, 1951
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QotD: Progressive anger
This year, as last, bees — tens of thousands of them — made their home between a window in my house in France and the shutters. We called a local bee-man and he came to try to capture the bees in an artificial hive. This is not a straightforward operation and success is not guaranteed, because it is necessary to capture the queen, which is not always possible. Without the queen, the bees are lost. They fly off in a swarm, buzzing angrily (I anthropomorphize, I admit) as they search for their lost leader and somewhere new to settle.
As they did so in this case, I could not help but think of the analogy with our present situation. We have a huge fund of very angry people buzzing about in mobs looking for somewhere on which their anger can settle. It seems an epoch ago that it landed on #MeToo and turned all men into Harvey Weinstein. Then, under the direction of little Greta, who somehow managed to combine an autistic manner with hysteria, opposing tendencies reconciled no doubt by the ineffable self-pity of the privileged, global warming provided a temporary resting place. However, with the killing of George Floyd, climate change seems as passé as Mussolini’s spats. (“Too many spats, too many spats!” someone once said of him.) But if no new thing is found after all the statues have been pulled down, the books burned, and the films withdrawn from circulation, climate change could return faute de mieux. On the other hand, free-floating anger is highly inventive as to the reasons for its existence: It can attach itself to almost anything, as flies can walk upside down on ceilings. Being no prophet myself, I have no idea what will be the next object of angry righteousness by people brought up to believe in moral relativism.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Bees With Degrees”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-07-02.
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November 4, 2025
The Great Feminization isn’t catching on in the culture, despite its power in our institutions
Lorenzo Warby provides a bit of hopeful news that despite the ever-expanding march of feminization through our various organizations and institutions, the culture is displaying strong resistance and effective:
Western culture is not feminising. How can I tell? The travails of Disney. Disney spent billions buying male-centric franchises — Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Indiana Jones … It then proceeded to so alienate the fan bases of those franchises that it is now reduced to openly discussing how to appeal to male audiences that it spent billions acquiring and further billions alienating.
If Western culture was feminising, then Disney should have had no trouble with its feminised products. Clearly, it has had problems. Meanwhile, the Top Gun: Maverick sequel to a 1986 movie can do excellent box office ($1.5bn) precisely because it knows what it is about.
The question then becomes, how and why did Disney so alienate those male-dominated fanbases it spent billions acquiring entree to? A simple answer would be that Disney was a Princess-story factory and it turned its new acquisitions into Princess-stories — stories not necessarily with literal princesses, but with female protagonists.
There is certainly a fair bit of that. A recent study found that Disney has tended, over time, to feminise male characters in its animated movies.
For it was not only that the Disney turned those franchises into launch pads for new Princess stories. Yes, Rey in the Star Wars sequels is an obvious example of doing precisely that. Nevertheless, there was rather more going on.
We can tell this from the Mulan live-action remake. The original 1998 Disney animated Mulan — despite controversy at the time of its cinematic release — acquired some popularity in China. It was seen as an engaging adaptation of the original story: a story deeply familiar to Chinese audiences. Worldwide, the film was a box office success.
The 2020 live-action Mulan remake was not a box office success. It was not for many reasons, but it was also emblematic of the problems of what YouTube critic Critical Drinker calls our post-creativity era.
2020 Mulan turned a female-protagonist story into a “woke” great-because-girl female-protagonist story. It turned a story of filial piety — a girl disguising herself as a boy to train and become a soldier in place of her disabled father, and struggling to overcome the limitations inherent in that — into something rather different.
Animated Mulan becomes accepted into the team of soldiers and triumphs through cleverness and teamwork. What makes the story resonate so well is there is nothing special about Mulan. She takes what she has and works hard at becoming better and succeeds in, and through, doing so. There is no hint of great-because-girl: rather it is fine being girl. Being a girl imposes limitations on her that she has to deal with and overcome: which she does — but not without genuine struggles — by sheer persistence and being clever, a problem-solver.
The key difference between a traditional Disney Princess story and contemporary Disney “woke” Princess story is the injection of great-because-girl. Live-action Mulan is a prodigy warrior with extra qi (or chi) who can do what the boys can do, but better. This is a cinematic version of a classic failing of feminism — by taking a blank slate view of humans, turning what men do into the standard for women. Women are great because they can do everything men can do, but even better. Feminist antipathy for stay-at-home mothers expresses this valorisation of matching men.
Live action Mulan is also much more politically conformist, even retrograde, in its denounement of Mulan celebrating service to the Emperor and going off to be a soldier. Animated Mulan rejecting a job as imperial advisor, and returning to her beloved father, is much less deferential to public authority.
The live-action film virtue-signals at the expense of story and understanding. It sacrifices clever cultural engagement for much flatter message-signalling.
If you want to watch a story set in China about women warriors, then the recent Chinese drama (C-drama) hits of Legend of the Female General and Shadow Love are available. These are smart, character-driven stories with the pervasive professionalism and sense of beauty—anchored in the cultural confidence—that one expects from contemporary costumed C-dramas, which are very much not based on trashing cultural heritage or we-know-better disrespect for source material.
Costumed C-dramas regulary have strong female lead characters while also having strong male lead characters. (As it happens, the male lead characters in both the aforementioned dramas are played by Cheng Lei; the female leads by Zhou Ye and Song Yi respectively.)
Update, 5 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 3, 2025
Plastic Fantastic: How the Modern World Became Synthetic – W2W 051
TimeGhost History
Published 2 Nov 2025From the miracle material of the 1950s to the global crisis of the 21st century — this is the story of how plastic reshaped our lives, our economies, and our planet.
Born from wartime innovation, plastic promised a future of convenience, color, and endless possibility. From nylon stockings to Tupperware parties, it defined modern life — light, bright, and disposable. But the same durability that made it revolutionary also made it permanent.
In this episode of War 2 War, we trace how postwar optimism turned into an age of overproduction and pollution — how a chemical miracle became the material legacy of the modern world. Join us as we uncover how the postwar dream of “Better Living Through Chemistry” changed everything — forever.
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November 1, 2025
MAGA is not a monolith, thank goodness
In The Line, Alex Muir looks at Canada-US relations (such as they are currently) and why MAGA not being a monolith is something Canadian politicians need to understand to stand any chance of successfully navigating our dealings with President Trump and his administration:
If there’s one thing that we’ve seen in recent days, as Donald Trump plays an endless game of “deal or no deal” with countries around the world, it’s that the current administration is volatile.
Why? One answer to that question is factionalism — to an extent that has enshrined unpredictability as a core operating principle of the second Trump term.
Canadians are particularly exposed to this. From north of the 49th, it looks like American policy is oscillating between nationalist populism, business pragmatism, tech conservatism, and social traditionalism. That is, however, a misreading. Administration policy is remarkably consistent if you focus on the current rather than the waves. First and foremost, the president and his team obsess over visible status, a game you can play through flattery or strength and symbolic gesture — there are winning examples of both.
In concrete policy terms, the Trump administration expects us to help them on missile defence, border control, and maritime security. They expect access to our resource and energy assets, on their terms. And they want our manufacturing sector to relocate to America. They also expect Canada to know its place as a loyal American ally.
Zoom out to the bigger picture and all the daily clutter can be understood as moves to advance, or at least attempt to advance, those broad goals. And that understanding, in turn, can help inform a successful Canadian response to U.S. actions.
[…]
You cannot understand what is happening today if you do not understand what factions hold sway within this new structure. I recommend thinking of the United States as a monarchy wearing a representative democracy’s clothes. Decisions do not rest in the administrative state, or even in a political party (like Hungary), they rest in the attention of a restless and aging president and those known to have his ear, and his trust. How close to the president a decision-maker is, and who else has a voice on any given topic, goes a long way toward explaining outcomes.
The various MAGA factions colonizing D.C. share several important background beliefs on Canada. First, and arguably most important, they don’t notice it much, and care even less. Second, they assume all foreigners want to be Americans, or are somehow defective if they do not. Third, Canadians look and sound so much like Americans that the latter assumption is magnified.
Fourth, there is a wide streak of Manichaeism in several of the factions that make up the administration, and the MAGA movement more generally. This means resistance, or even evasion, is quite likely to be taken as evidence of ill intent — or even outright evil intent — as opposed to the furtherance of legitimate competing interests. All of these are wrapped up in a fairly magnificent degree of self-involvement. America is so big, so rich, and so strong, that all administrations overwhelmingly focus on domestic issues and domestic politics since nothing that happens outside their borders is generally seen as existential. (Whereas American elections and culture wars absolutely are.)
For Canada, this has meant many things, none of them positive. We’ve seen the rapid (and apparently random) escalation of tariffs (so far mostly on specific goods, or things not explicitly covered by USMCA), plus the endlessly repeated threats of higher duties in response to perceived Canadian provocations. There have been threats and intermittent moves to sideline Canada from vital security relationships, including the Five Eyes and NORAD. Canada has committed to some initiatives in order to satisfy American demands, like intensified border enforcement initiatives and committing new resources to national security priorities. It is difficult, however, to get out in front of a rapidly moving target in terms of the administration’s desired outcome.
And that’s the crux of the matter — what do the factions of the administration see when they look at Canada, and what do they want? Answering that question involves understanding what the factions are. The following summary of the factions within MAGA has been condensed from my other work, and should help Canadians understand the complexity of what we must face.
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EBTpocalypse imminent?
The US government’s extended “shutdown” may trigger the loss of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to around 10% of America as of Saturday. A few years ago, Nathan Mayo pointed out that despite the good intentions of the SNAP program, it isn’t actually doing the job it is meant to be performing:
A recent administrative action has permanently increased benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by 25 percent. Unfortunately, this historic boost fails to address the structural problems that plague this nearly 60-year-old program.
The official Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) webpage proudly proclaims that, “SNAP provides nutrition benefits to supplement the food budget of needy families so they can purchase healthy food …”
To that admirable end, the program formerly known as food stamps distributed $79 billion to 40 million people last year. Yet this desire to provide wholesome food to needy families conflicts with clear evidence that wholesome food is not what they think they need. Whether they play by the rules or not, people receiving SNAP benefits currently spend between 70-100 percent of that benefit on things other than healthy food.
Government researchers determined that average SNAP recipients increase their food expenditure by only 30 percent of the value of their benefits. In other words, a person previously spending $300 on food a month who qualifies for $100 of food stamp benefits will start spending $330 on food and shift the $70 from his existing budget to other purposes. This surprisingly low percentage suggests that food is not recipients’ top priority, as people who were in dire need of food would be expected to boost their food budget by the full value of the benefits.
What of the hope that needy families will buy nutritious food? According to a study of a major retailer, recipients spend about 20 percent of their total grocery budget on junk food, with soft drinks as the top purchase—enough to supply a family of four with 20 two-liters of soda per month. Given the marginal amount of SNAP spent on food and the typical benefits for a family, SNAP literally expands the grocery budget by the exact amount needed to cover the junk food. SNAP recipients also spend about 27 percent less on fruits and vegetables than non-SNAP households. This difference cannot be attributed to a lack of access because around 85 percent of SNAP purchases are made at large chain grocery stores with vast produce selections. However, one factor in these choices is likely smaller grocery budgets and the fact that fresh produce is more expensive.
A less savory contributor to this poor nutrition may be that SNAP encourages unhealthy purchases through the “house money” effect. When gamblers win money, they are less careful with their winnings since they view the “house money” as more disposable than their own cash. Similarly, when people receive SNAP dollars, they are sometimes less careful about their purchases than they would be with their hard-earned dollars.
On the one hand, the lack of SNAP benefits might be lower impact than expected, or it might mean most major American cities go “full Mad Max“:
There are 41.7 million Americans slurping up Supplemental Nachos And Porkrinds (SNAP) benefits. That’s an amazing number, and it shows just how far down the bread and circuses route that we’ve gone. I was surprised at the number, but I can now surmise that the only people voting for Democrats are single white women and freeloaders. But I repeat myself.
The federal government shutdown is, as I write this, dragging into its fourth week. I’m generally pretty happy about that since the impact to almost everyone I know is … zero. However, that may soon change. EBT cards, (EBT stands for Entitled Bums Treats) are about to have a zero balance.
The Democrats in the Senate have voted a dozen times as I write this to not fund the SNAP (Socialist Nourishment And Pampering) program. The reason? This is one of their key weapons against Trump. They want to blame Trump for not having a budget because it won’t fund the SNAP (Scam Network for Appetite Pandering) program. Since people who use EBT (Endless Bailout for Takers) aren’t generally the ones who pay attention to anything that takes longer than 17 seconds, they’ll buy it.
Some states (Virginia, for one) realize that the place will look like Mad Max in by Monday if the pizza rolls stop flowing, and have found some cash in the couch cushions to kick the can down the road. New Jersey doesn’t even own a couch, so they have no money, and Connecticut has mobilized their National Guard for emergency ramen drops.
No more swiping for that purple drank or Hot Pockets®. When the EBT (Everyone But Taxpayers) card goes dry, life may get … interesting.
What will happen? “Mostly peaceful” flash mobs looting grocery stores. These flash mobs will make the 2020 riots look like a church picnic gone wrong because someone demanded gluten-free tofu.
Because SNAP (Subsidized Nuggets for Apathetic Parasites) isn’t just a program: it’s the duct tape holding urban America’s powder keg together. As mentioned, there are 41.7 million people, about 12.3% of the U.S. population, who rely on those cards for daily food.
H/T to Clayton Barnett for that link.
Oh, but wait … yet another judge has issued a ruling directing the federal government to ignore the lack of congressional approval or funding:
An order today from a federal judge in Massachusetts requires the Trump administration to pay SNAP benefits even though Congress hasn’t funded the current operation of the program.
Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, concludes that people will be harmed if SNAP benefits are not provided, and Congress previously appropriated contingency funds for emergencies in the SNAP program, so there’s no need for current appropriations — the executive branch must use emergency and contingency funds to pay for current operations despite the absence of current appropriations.
[…]
Defendants — the Trump administration — are required to use contingency funds to pay for current operations, whether or not Congress has funded current operations. A court has just concluded that a federal program must operate in the absence of current appropriations. That’s … an interesting choice.
Update, 3 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.
The Spanish-American War 1898
The Great War
Published 13 Jun 2025In the last years of the 19th century, tension was building in the Caribbean. American newspapers were filled with grisly reports of Spanish atrocities against the people of Cuba struggling for independence. US businessmen and expansionist politicians also saw practical opportunities in Spain’s struggles: great power status and an empire for the United States. It’s the Spanish-American War.
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October 31, 2025
“NFL media is dominated by the nerds” and their “never-ending performance of Well, Actually football contrarianism”
Freddie deBoer discusses the way NFL media coverage has changed from the retired jocks of old to today’s emphasis on data nerd analysis and clickbait contrarianism:
Being a sports media professional means forcing yourself to have this kind of a reaction every time you’re on camera.
Screencap from Freddie deBoer
Consider how smart football journalism was supposed to be by now. Long the domain of ex-jocks ladling out evidence-free bromides about how you have to pound the ball and causation-flipping claims that time of possession is the ultimate metric, today NFL media is dominated by the nerds, analysts who proudly announce that they’ve never played the game and let their teenage resentments power their never-ending performance of Well, Actually football contrarianism. Experience is out! Numbers are in! Empiricism reigns! The bible was right: someday, the meek will inherit the earth, and it’s happening every Sunday on NFL Twitter, where it’s always time to re-prosecute high school.
And yet … The analytics revolution promised to graft rationality and context onto our game-day commentary, but when it comes to the most common and pernicious trend in NFL analysis — overreacting to small samples and short runs of good or bad performance — nothing has really changed. That’s because NFL new media conditions dictate that even the most temperamentally sober and judicious talking heads operate as 24/7 hype machines. This is not, to put it mildly, a new problem. In 2007, ESPN’s Kevin Jackson wrote that NFL media was “Overreaction Nation – a land where no sample size is too small for drawing conclusions, where the most common movement is the knee-jerk”. That description still fits the NFL media perfectly. Week after week, cable TV and podcasters spin wild narratives, proclaiming teams hopeless or superhuman after one game, seemingly embracing the idea that “no sample size is too small”. That this all comes from people who will tell you that they’re the keepers of the flame of Rational Football Analysis only makes it all more annoying.
Modern front offices have jumped on modern statistical analysis, with every team employing analytics departments and with more and more coaches regularly expressing disdain for yesterday’s conventional wisdom. This isn’t a secret; the Ringer, which has always employed its fair share of football nerds who heap contempt on the old ways, proclaimed back in 2018 that “football’s analytics moment has arrived”, pointing out the rise of modern tracking data and explaining how it gives teams an edge. But if we’re honest, even the Ringer was clear that football will never be baseball in statistical clarity: “Football will likely never be baseball, where statistics can basically explain anything,” Kevin Clark (now of ESPN) wrote – “there are too few games and too many variables”. In other words, the sport I love the most is inherently a beast of variance, full of noise. You’d think that message would temper the beat writers.
Instead, it seems the analytics evangelists and talking heads don’t trust their own analytic philosophy. They invoke “small sample size” as a scolding cliché if you dare overreact, but shamelessly turn right around and do it themselves. With every Monday morning comes a fresh rush of oversimplified hot takes. And time has proven that the ostensibly-objective analytics peddlers are no better when it comes to hype than their old school former player competition.
The Minnesota Vikings drafted J.J. McCarthy last year as their “quarterback of the future” only to lose him for his rookie season with a knee injury in the preseason. He started two games so far this season and got injured in his first loss and will only return to play this coming weekend. Bust? A lot of online fans certainly seem to think so, on the basis of a two-game sample, one of which included one quarter of amazing work earning him NFC Offensive Player of the Week. Fans are fickle at the best of times, but the NFL media hype juices that into a kind of sports schizophrenia.
Could Drake Maye be the next big thing? Sure. He certainly has the physical ability. Or he could be Daunte Culpepper. Could CJ Stroud and Jayden Daniels justify all of the hype from their rookie years? Of course! The point is that I don’t know, you don’t know, and neither do the NFL pundits. Neither does Ben Solak. And what bothers me in particular about this species of condescending NFL pundit is that they will endorse concepts like “small sample size theater” when it conforms to their narratives and then gleefully discard those concepts when they don’t. It’s quite frustrating.
Here are tropes to watch out for when it comes to the NFL hype train:
- One Game = Season’s Fate A single loss becomes proof a coach’s job is on the line, a single win means the team is a contender.
- Player of the Year (or Bust) in 48 Hours A QB throws two picks and the media declares him washed up; the next week he goes 25-of-30 and he’s an MVP candidate. NFL pundits alternate between funeral dirges and coronation ceremonies every Monday.
- Outsized Weighting of One Stat Analysts cherry-pick a percentage or grade and assign it cosmic meaning, AKA “going the full PFF.” (This is, not coincidentally, a big part of why so many ex-players despise PFF.)
- Vox Populi Misguided NFL analysis has a habit of looking an awful lot like chatter on Reddit; go look for a team’s subreddit and note the way that supposedly adult-in-the-room analysts ape the exact same hype and intensity of the Reddit squad. A lot of new media-style entities even straight-up quote random tweets as if they’re serious analysis. When you’re looking to backstop deeply irresponsible predictions, any evidence will do.
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“Devon Eriksen: Professional Racist”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen floats a new business model to take advantage of an unsatisfied market demand. It’s pretty radical:
Years ago, when Jussie Smollet was assaulted by two deep-southern KKK members who happened to be wandering around Chicago in a blizzard with some rope and bleach — you know, just in case — I had an idea.
I speculated that the supply of racism couldn’t keep up with demand, and the price of racism would rise steeply, leading to a surge in black-market counterfeit racism to fill the market gap.
At least until more genuine racism could be manufactured.
Now, the moment has arrived, and lefties, desperate for a new source of racism, have started advertising their willingness to purchase it.
Well, never let it be said that Devon Eriksen doesn’t give the people want they want.
For $1000, I will call you a racial slur on twitter.
For $2000, I will call you a racial slur in person, in front of an audience. (You must pay for all travel arrangements and sign a waiver assuming civil and criminal liability for any violent consequences.)
For $10,000, I will design a custom racist rant wherein I abuse you in public with all sorts of controversial and racially charged language.
I also offer special deals on sexism, and can provide bigotry against homosexuals, Muslims, trannies, Jews, and people who voluntarily live in Luxembourg. I can also do immigration status and intelligence level.
I also offer fat jokes, which I outsource to a team of bodybuilders, fitness models, and personal trainers. Former Olympians also available at a premium.
I don’t anti-Christian. Can’t touch it. Market’s flooded. Maybe in a few years when they start trying to outlaw oral sex or something.
To be honest, this is a bit of side hustle right now, I still pay the bills with writing fiction… and occasionally satire.
But I look forward to the day when I can go full time and proudly hang a shingle over my office door:
Devon Eriksen: Professional Racist.
Update, 3 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.
QotD: The Zoomers as human Giant Pandas
Not just “breed in captivity”, mind you. Breed in general. Apparently panda lovin’ is like nerds on date night — the conditions must be perfect, it’s incredibly awkward, it takes massive effort, and even the tiniest misstep can throw the whole thing off forever. Your average MGTOW gets more poony than your average panda … all of which prompted in me the very uncharitable thought: Are you sure God doesn’t want it to be dead?
Which — black pill incoming — is pretty much what I feel about the human race right now.
Take a gander at this. The “aki no kure” guy has a lot of issues, no doubt, but when he’s on he’s a very useful read. If for no other reason than that he keeps up with the Kids These Days, and I just can’t, y’all, I just can’t. And here’s why:
Well, if Zoomers never leave the home (something they all make self-deprecating jokes about), then you *are* watching their daily lives as they sit in a chair in front of a computer set-up. Their whole lives are online and virtual, not IRL. Their daily activities are not going to the store and running into neighbors who they share funny stories with, it’s scrolling their timeline and engaging with its content. So you are watching them go through all sorts of daily activities — checking their subreddit, uploading pictures to Instagram, clapping back to haters on Twitter, reacting to other streamers’ video clips, sending text messages, and so on and so forth. And the other characters in their online lives are also entirely online — other accounts who they interact with, although every once in awhile they make an IRL guest appearance.
That right there is my definition of hell. Seriously, if that’s “life” in the Worker’s Paradise, I’m punching out. But: That’s what so many people, not just “Zoomers”, seem to want. See “Every single thing about the Holocough, 2020-present”. If that’s what Western Civ has come to, then let me complete my transformation into the goofiest hippie on campus circa 1992: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”
Severian, “Giant Pandas”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-28.
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October 30, 2025
Cowardice & Courage – Fear, Flying & Combat Stress
HardThrasher
Published 24 Oct 2025Just getting into a bomber took guts. To do it twice required balls of steel. What happened when men wouldn’t or couldn’t continue to fly? We’ll look at the dangers they faced, what the RAF and the USAAF did to tackle the problem and talk about the infamous “LMF” cases in the RAF
00:00 – Come with Me
03:51 – Intro
04:16 – Shell Shock
06:00 – Inter War vs Early War
09:17 – Night Terrors
10:31 – Death in the Daylight
11:00 – Common Fears
13:22 – Raw Numbers
14:55 – The Mew Who Flew
16:35 – In The Hands of the CO
18:53 – LMF
21:01 – Combat Stress in the USAAF
22:03 – Attempts at treatment
24:47 – Wrap up and Closing Message
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October 29, 2025
The Korean War Week 71: The Panmunjom Peace Talks! – October 28, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 28 Oct 2025Big news! The peace talks resume after over two months hiatus, now in a village called Panmunjom. Also, UN Commander Matt Ridgway also gives a rare press conference, and he implies that for all his talk about punishment and prevention, those pilots who violated neutral zone air space and killed civilians receive at best a slap on the wrist. Speaking of civilians, a Marine operation is launched to deprive the enemy of civilian dwellings during the coming winter — Operation Houseburner.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:41 Recap
01:00 Panmunjom
03:27 Peace Talks Begin
08:35 The Neutral Zone
10:03 Ridgway’s Press Conference
11:42 Houseburner
12:22 Summary
12:30 Conclusion
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Clankers on the bench
The cynic in me wonders if having AI judges would make the justice system any worse, given the ever-increasing pro-criminal bias on display in courtrooms across North America and Europe:
Grok generated this in response to my request for “Robbie the Robot as a judge”
It’s the question rattling through chambers and law schools. Are we in danger of a world where the solemn business of justice, liberty, livelihood, and who really owns the back fence is entrusted not to a human in robes but to a chirpy algorithm with a software bug and a 4,000-word disclaimer? Are we handing over judgment itself to machines, or simply giving them the photocopying and hoping they don’t start offering opinions?
Because, depending on whom you ask, AI in law is either (a) the long-delayed democratization of justice for ordinary people or (b) the first act of a constitutional farce in which courts drown beneath PDFs full of nonsense and fake footnotes.
The Machinery Arrives
Beneath the wood paneling and the reassuring thump of legal pomposity, something mildly heretical is afoot. Judges, clerks, and barristers — those high priests of precedent — are quietly feeding their briefs to generative AI, which now whirs away in the background, summarizing, drafting, and rummaging through case law while its human overlords wrestle with the biscuit tin and their consciences.
According to the Judicial Commission of New South Wales (NSW), the robots are already in the building. Their latest handbook cheerfully notes that AI is used for legal analytics, mass document review, “natural language” searching, and predictive modeling — all of which sound terribly sophisticated until you realize they’re essentially Excel spreadsheets with delusions of grandeur. A UNESCO survey adds the clincher: nearly half the world’s judges, prosecutors, and court staff have used generative AI for work, and only 9 percent have had what’s politely called safe-usage training. This is training where someone explains that you shouldn’t upload confidential evidence to a chatbot that lives in the cloud or take legal advice from a program that thinks Brown v. Board of Education was a musical.
The Law Society of NSW, in a rare fit of clairvoyance back in 2016, created something called the Future Committee — the sort of name that already sounds like a sci-fi tribunal convened to ban fun. Their brief was to consider what might happen when clients demanded more for less, junior lawyers were burnt to a crisp, and artificial intelligence started politely asking, “Shall I draft that for you?” The conclusion was simple: adapt or be eaten.
Meanwhile, in London, the Law Society of England and Wales skipped the warm-up act and went straight to the apocalypse. Its 2021 report, Images of the Future Worlds Facing the Legal Profession 2020–2030, envisioned a legal world in which routine advice would be swallowed whole by AI portals, full-time lawyers would be reduced to an endangered species, and the survivors would work alongside AI and be mandated to take “performance-enhancing medication in order to optimise their own productivity and effectiveness.” The whole thing reads like 1984 rewritten by a management consultant — right down to the faint violin of self-pity playing somewhere in the distance.
Oh, but those were in Australia and the UK, it’s not that bad in North America, surely? Uh, well …
Across the Atlantic, the award for Legal Farce of the Century goes to Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. 2023). In this modern masterpiece of professional self-immolation, a team of lawyers filed court papers quoting three magnificent precedents: Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, Martinez v. Delta, and Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines. Unfortunately, none of them existed — not in Westlaw, not in Lexis, not even in the fever dreams of law students. When the judge asked, quite reasonably, to see the cases, counsel could only offer the look of people discovering gravity for the first time. Sanctions followed under Rule 11 for what the court delicately called “subjective bad faith”, which is American for “you made this up”. The ruling is now shown at continuing-education sessions under the optimistic title Let’s Not Do That Again.
The sequel writes itself:
- Massachusetts: A lawyer submitted memoranda stuffed with phantom cases, blamed “the office AI”, and was fined. The judge, channeling divine exasperation, warned that blind acceptance of AI-generated content is not a defense — it’s a lifestyle choice.
- Alabama: Attorneys for the state prison system filed citations to imaginary authorities and were sentenced to the most humiliating punishment known to the bar: writing apology letters to their law school deans and delivering public lectures on ethics.
- California: One overzealous litigator managed to produce a brief in which twenty-one of twenty-three authorities were pure fiction. The court fined him, the press dined out on it, and AI-compliance seminars across America gained a new slide.
Thus, the first commandment of the digital age is: the robot may write it, but the Submit button still belongs to a human — and the human still gets to explain it to the judge.
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QotD: Having kids
There are, of course, downsides: I am typing this very slowly because one of my arms is full of a baby who doesn’t like to nap unless I’m holding him. You have to label the leftover lasagna you’re taking for lunch tomorrow or else someone will have it for a snack. I am staring down the barrel of at least another decade of the exact same Mother’s Day musical program at the kids’ school, and it would probably be rude if I started singing along. And there are days when we’re waiting around like Kurt Russell at the end of The Thing to see where the stomach bug will strike next. But come on, nobody doesn’t have kids because of the existence of norovirus.
So … why don’t more people do this? (Either having a bunch of kids or, increasingly, just having kids period.) I’ve heard a lot of theories: just recently and off the top of my head, I’ve been told that kids cost too much money, that kids don’t actually have to cost a lot of money but we have very high standards for our parenting, that there are too many fun things you can’t do anymore when you have kids, that having a lot of kids is low status, and that being a housewife (an increasingly sensible choice the more kids you have) is low status. And, of course, car seat mandates. There’s something to most of those theories, but they all boil down to one fundamental claim: we’ve built a world where having kids, and especially having a lot of kids, just … kind of sucks.
It’s never going to be easy — there will always be sleepless nights and bickering siblings and twelve different people who all need incompatible things from you all at once — but anything worth doing is hard sometimes. It’s also often wonderful, and it doesn’t need to be this hard.
Tim Carney agrees with me, providing a guided tour of the cultural and structural factors that combine to make American parenting so overwhelming that many couples are stopping after one or two children — or opting out altogether. We think our children require our constant close attention. We worry about them incessantly. We think anything that’s not absolute top-tier achievement is failure. We build neighborhoods that mean they need to be driven everywhere, and then between car trips we all stare at our glowing rectangles. We, and they, are sad and lonely, and then no one around us has kids and we all get sadder and lonelier.
Jane Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-10-14.
October 28, 2025
The End of European Superpowers? The Suez Crisis – W2W 050
TimeGhost History
Published 26 Oct 2025Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal, Israel strikes under a secret Sèvres pact, and Britain and France launch Operation Musketeer, only to meet U.S. and UN pressure that forces a ceasefire at midnight.
UN peacekeeping is born, Nasser’s stature soars, and Eden’s government collapses as Suez ends the illusion of old imperial power.
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