Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Jun 2025The first rifle produced by Armalite began in 1952 as a project between the brothers-in-law, Charles Dorchester and George Sullivan (no relation to later Armalite engineer L. James Sullivan). Sullivan is the chief patent attorney for the Lockheed Aircraft Company, and the two have the idea to produce an ultra-light rifle using aircraft industry materials like fiberglass and aluminum. They create a company called SF Projects and get to work using Remington actions. They fit aluminum (and then later aluminum/steel composite) barrels and foam-filled stocks and the result is a rifle that weighs less than 6 pounds with a 4x scope fitted. The first ones are chambered in .257 Roberts, but this shortly gives way to the new .308 Winchester cartridge.
Sullivan and Dorchester make a connection with Richard Boutelle, who is very much a “gun guy” himself and also head of the Fairchild aircraft company. The idea of the rifle appeals to Boutelle, and Fairchild was looking to diversify its operations – and so Fairchild agrees to buy SF Projects, renaming it the Armalite Division of Fairchild.
The idea of the rifle was for civilian hunters who want a gun that is light to carry for long distances and also military specialists like airborne troops who need lightweight gear. The Army tests the AR-1 in 1955 and finds some fairly serious problems with it. There are reliability issues, and also accuracy shortfalls. When the composite barrel heats up, differential stresses cause the point of impact to shift. This foreshadows the catastrophic failure of a composite barrel in AR-10 testing, but that is a story for another video. Ultimately after two rounds of testing the Army rejects the rifle, and that is pretty much the end of it. Armalite moves its focus to other projects, namely combining aircraft industry materials with the self-loading rifle of their other designer, Eugene Stoner. That, of course, will become the AR-10.
Since I know folks will ask, the AR projects between 1 and 10 were thus:
AR3: Stoner-type rifle in hunting configuration
AR5: Air Force survival rifle
AR9: Shotgun
The designations 2, 4, 6, 7, and 8 were set aside to drawing board projects that never materialized.
(more…)
October 28, 2025
AR-1 “Parasniper” – The First Armalite
October 27, 2025
Trump versus Carney (and Ford, his court jester)
Another week, another set of bleak headlines about the trade relationship (or lack thereof) between Canada and the United States. For some, this is the story of how Trump Derangement Syndrome has consumed all levels of Canadian leadership, while for others it’s proof that you can’t deal with Trump as a rational adult and instead need to consider him an overgrown toddler with a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Or perhaps it’s a little from column A and a bit from column B:
At the risk of overstating my own influence, it’s like the President of the United States read my piece saying he was acting like a toddler and decided, “oh yeah? I’ll show what ‘acting like a toddler’ means!” and did this, presumably once Bluey was over:
U.S. President Donald Trump says he is raising tariffs on Canadian goods by 10 per cent, after accusing Canada of airing what he called a “fraudulent” advertisement that misrepresented former president Ronald Reagan’s stance on tariffs.
In a post published on Truth Social at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Trump wrote, “I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”
Trump’s post cited his frustration over an advertisement produced by the Ontario government that used clips of Reagan warning about the dangers of protectionism and praising free trade.
“Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs,” he wrote.
Earlier this week, Trump had cut off trade negotiations with Ottawa, explaining it was due to the “hostile” nature of the ad campaign.
“Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD,” Trump further said in the Truth social post.
The good news is, at least Trump is coming right out and admitting that his “national security” tariffs are really about nothing more than his fragile ego, just in time for the Supreme Court to hear arguments about this very issue.
The bad news is, I think it’s exceptionally naive to think SCOTUS is going to save us from this madness.
Not because I think they’ll rule that what he’s doing is legal. That might be a bridge too far for even Justices Thomas and Alito.
But because this proposition rests on the assumption that Trump considers himself bound by Supreme Court rulings and that anyone else is going to exercise their power to ensure these rulings are followed.
Or, if you think Canadian leaders are deep in a TDS binge:
How The New Republic saw Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign.
Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a widespread and serious issue. When one is afflicted by it, their capacity to sense-make becomes compromised. Emotions are a difficult thing for humans to control, and TDS-sufferers seem for the most part unaware of how much their negative, emotional feelings concerning Trump have hijacked their reason.
TDS types reveal themselves in so many ways. One specifically, which often goes unnoticed, is a general uncharitableness when it comes to interpreting the words and actions of Trump, or a general unwillingness to look beyond words – either Trump’s words or anyone else’s which have been inserted into Trump discourse. A prime example of this is the anti-tariff ad campaign involving a 1987 speech by former president Ronald Reagan which the Ford government paid $75 million to have broadcast to American audiences – key Republican areas – for the purpose of undermining President Trump’s economic policy.
Firstly, the uncharitable analysis does not allow that Trump has any right, or any good argument, or reason to be upset about Canada’s trade practices, such as supply management. The uncharitable analysis sees Canada as an innocent victim and Trump as a bully who is trying to destroy us and/or take us over.
[…]
Returning to reason and reality. Trump has justification for being upset with Canada over both our trade practices and in the under-handed and unfriendly tactics of Doug Ford and other Canadian leaders. The ad was an insult to Trump. His reaction or over-reaction to the ad, does not change the fact that what Ford did was antagonistic and not in the best interests of productive trade negotiations. The charitable analysis understands this, and does not lose sight of it, no matter how outlandish the things Trump does may be.
On the other side of the uncharitable Trump analysis concerning Ford’s Reagan ad blunder, is circulating the idea that Reagan was anti-tariff. Why is this idea believed? Because of Reagan’s rhetoric. You can find hundreds of clips of Reagan speaking about the dangers of high tariffs, or advocating for free trade. But the uncharitable analysis refuses to go beyond words. They ignore words that don’t support their argument, and act as if the words that do support their argument were the only ones spoken. Further, they act like words are the be all and end all, by not bothering to investigate the actions of those who speak the words, they pretend that word-speakers always do and intend exactly what they say. Reagan’s oratory contained lots of anti-tariff rhetoric, but his actions included lots of pro-tariff policy in an effort to deal with unfair trading partners.
None of this is difficult once you mea culpa from TDS. If you remain under the spell of TDS, you will not be rational or reasonable, and I for one, will not take you seriously. You will look increasingly foolish as time goes on and Trump’s policies turn out not to be the disasters you hysterical twits dreamed they would be. And the group of people like me, who shake their heads and roll their eyes at you, will grow and grow, under the weight of inevitable mass mea culpa. But you will remain shrouded from truth as you descend further into darkness and gloom and hate. It doesn’t have to be this way … just mea culpa FFS!
October 26, 2025
The financial gap between Zohran Mamdani’s promises and what NYC can afford
Short of a couple of political earthquakes, Zohran Mamdani is going to be the next mayor of New York City. He has, as Andrew Sullivan admits, a lot going for him with Democratic voters, but he’ll have to get some special magic formula working to fund all the things he’s promising:
New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani photographed in Assembly District 36, 10 February 2024.
Photo by Kara McCurdy via Wikimedia Commons.
It is not hard to see the appeal of Zohran Mamdani. He is, after all, not Andrew Cuomo — another corrupt, old, Democratic sexual harasser who’s already spent years in power and thinks he’s entitled to be mayor because of his last name. He doesn’t appear steeped in petty corruption like Mayor Adams. He’s not as obviously nutty as Sliwa seems to be. And he has done politics, pace Ezra, the right way: listening to the other side, earning people’s votes one by one, talking to people on the street, and, of course, mastering our new collective replacement for civil discourse: 30-second videos on TikTok.
Those videos are fantastic. Check out this one in favor of freezing rents in NYC, with the man, in full suit and tie, jumping into a freezing bay and out again. Or this one about “Halalflation” — on how licensing food carts has become a grift for middlemen. Or this one, when he sits down with two old white men — one for Adams and one for Cuomo — and tries to talk them into an alternative. If I were a Democrat, I’d be thrilled to see someone this fresh, this approachable, and this likable as a new face of the party. He’s young and charming and upbeat in a party lacking in all three.
He’s also right to focus his campaign on the question of affordability. New York City is ridiculously expensive in every way; the toll that high taxes and inflation have taken on working-class residents has been huge. Capitalism isn’t working the way it should, and we need to reboot our economic policies to address that as a priority. Trump has promised this but is delivering the opposite. Just this morning, we see an accelerating inflation rate. An opening beckons.
So I get why Mamdani is popular. And I have little doubt he will be the next mayor, as well as a major national figurehead for the Democrats — a nice dose of youth to a party debilitated by seniorityitis. He will define the Democrats nationally — certainly if the GOP has any say in it. And in many ways, he is the perfect candidate for today’s Dem elites: wealthy, woke, with a degree in “Africana studies.” His only problem is not being female — but since he denies that the category of female exists, no big deal I suppose. He will give the MSNBC/Bulwark crowd a new lease on self-righteousness.
But to be honest, when I read his proposals, at first I thought I was reading a high-schooler’s essay. Free everything! I mean: why not? Free universal childcare for kids as young as six weeks old. Free buses for everyone. Rent control for everyone already privileged by it. Subsidized collective supermarkets. $30-an-hour minimum wage by 2030 — up from $16.50. Woohoo! And arresting Bibi as an added bonus. (I have to say the last plank might even tempt me to vote for him.)
The problem, of course, is how to pay for it. And a NYC mayor, quite simply, cannot. Mamdani simply won’t have the power. None of the tax hikes he proposes — a new 2 percent tax on everyone earning over $1 million a year, and jacking up the corporate tax to 11.5 percent — can be passed by his council. Albany has the final say, will almost certainly say no, and the Democratic governor, Hochul, opposes the hikes.
So a lot of this is purely performative, no? He has a good chance to create his Soviet bodegas and, in all likelihood, freeze rents if he replaces members of the board. (That will, of course, make housing availability and expense even worse.) He may be able to wangle some increase in NYC’s minimum wage — by trying to bypass Albany. But doubling it in five years? Meh. All of the economic stuff is iffy because of the very probable lack of funding. Maybe a big victory will change the dynamics and allow a big tax hike in one of the most highly taxed cities on earth. But it’s hard to believe it.
So what’s left? What’s left is cultural leftism on hormones. You may get daycare — but it will come with full woke indoctrination of kids from the earliest years on. No more “boys” or “girls” allowed! Mamdani, as we all know, regards the police as the enforcers of “white supremacy“, supports the end of Israel as a Jewish state, will subsidize the transing of children with no safeguards, and has erased gays and lesbians from our own history, re-marginalizing us as “queers”. There’s no one the woke left hates more than an empowered and integrated person who just happens to be gay or lesbian.
Like all good critical-theory racists, Mamdani believes in a racial hierarchy with whites, Jews, and Asians as oppressors, and blacks and Hispanics and “queers” as victims; he wants to make NYC “the strongest sanctuary city in the country” — i.e. go to war with ICE — and kill the educational programs that help gifted poor kids in kindergarten — because most turn out to be of the oppressor races. A racist, in other words — to his fingertips.
And he is a near-perfect foil for Trump. “Queer liberation means defund the police,” he once tweeted — though he says he no longer wants to defund the cops. It’s the kind of 2020 slogan almost designed to ensure MAGA control of the national discourse forever. And if I were a show-runner on the Trump show, Mamdani would be central to provoking the kind of real fascist putsch that Trump and Miller are itching for, if they can find a suitable provocation. Mamdani is that provocation. He will go to war with ICE in NYC, and Trump will go to war with him. And broadcast it every day.
QotD: The rightward political shift of American secular Jews
The shift of American Jews towards conservatism is going to gut the Left, which has historically relied on secularized Jews to supply a much larger share of its leadership and backing donations than their single-digit-percentage representation in the general population would suggest.
I emphasize “secularized” because those are the Jews attracted to non-religious social reform movements. Because of the Ashkenazi genetic advantage in average IQ, they’re disproportionately likely to end up running those movements.
(Idiots, being idiots, think this is evidence of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Nope — you’re just comparatively stupid, and correspondingly bad at competing for leadership positions.)
All this is fine, until the Left’s totalitarianizing ideology takes its inevitable anti-Semitic turn. Oops …
That’s how you got what we’re now seeing, which is a shift in the Left’s leadership towards ethno-racial groups with average IQs down in the 80s. Yes, leadership competition is going to select for the right tail of the distribution, but it’s both thinner and shorter.
Expect to see more stupidity, violence, and short-termism from the new New Left. They’ll probably lose their historically impressive skills at institutional capture and run more riots.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-25.
October 25, 2025
Red tribe versus Blue tribe
David Friedman responds to a recent post by Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten, discussing the differences between the bicoastal “blue” and flyover “red” tribes in US culture and politics:
A pair of images from a search for “Red tribe versus Blue tribe”. I assume this is from a TV show.
One commenter on my post observed that both I and the majority of my readers are culturally closer to the bicoastal elite than to flyover country, to Blue than to Red by Scott’s terminology. That started me thinking about how one could tell. What are the markers for tribal membership? On how many of them am I Blue, how many Red?
Here is my list. “Blue Tribe does X” does not mean everyone in Blue Tribe or even a majority do X, it means most people who do X are Blue Tribe — a marker not a definition. Similarly for Red Tribe. Someone who has many markers for Red Tribe and few for Blue Tribe is probably Red and similarly for Blue.
What You Own
Red Tribe drives a pickup truck, SUV or sports car, Blue Tribe drives an EV or at least a hybrid, probably a Prius. A cybertruck, both EV and pickup truck, codes Red.
Red Tribe owns guns. Blue Tribe doesn’t own guns, thinks that people who do are being stupid.
Blue Tribe owns sailboats, Red Tribe power boats.
Philosophy and Religion
Blue Tribe believe that they are moral relativists, take seriously the “you shouldn’t stop the Eskimo from putting his grandfather on an ice floe to die because in his moral system that is not wicked” argument. Like almost all humans they are actually moral realists, take it for granted that their moral beliefs are true, including the belief that you shouldn’t … Red Tribe are also moral realists but it never occurs to them that they shouldn’t be.
Blue Tribe are atheists, mainstream Protestants, Catholics who use birth control. Red Tribe are Evangelicals, possibly Fundamentalists, possibly Catholic. Preachers of both tribes preach things their tribe already believe in, but different things.
Blue Tribe believe in evolution, take it for granted that all reasonable people, including all their friends and acquaintances, do. Some but not all of them understand it except when understanding it leads to conclusions they don’t like.1 Red Tribe don’t believe in evolution, take it for granted that all reasonable people, including all their friends and acquaintances, share that belief, mostly don’t understand it.
Marriage and Children
Blue Tribe thinks having from zero to two children is fine, three a little odd, more than three weird. Red Tribe thinks there is something wrong with a couple that has fewer than two kids and that more is better.
Blue Tribe marries late, Red Tribe early. Blue Tribe sees a couple meeting in college, marrying after they graduate, as one possible pattern, marrying later than that another and perhaps more prudent. Red Tribe likes the idea of a couple meeting in high school.
What They Do
Red Tribe hunts. Blue Tribe doesn’t hunt and disapproves of people who do.
Red Tribe goes to football and baseball games, watches professional wrestling. Blue Tribe plays pickleball, drives their children to soccer games.
Red Tribe watches television, including soap operas, unashamedly. Blue Tribe watches soap operas ashamedly, leftish talk shows unashamedly.
Red Tribe listens to country music. Blue Tribe youth listens to rap, as do Red Tribe blacks. Blue Tribe approves of classical music but rarely listens to it.
Red Tribe males like to show off how strong they are. Blue Tribe, male or female, likes to show off how smart and well educated they are.
Blue Tribe drinks coffee in coffee shops. Red Tribe doesn’t.
- Such as that intelligence must be heritable or that the distribution of intellectual abilities is unlikely to be the same for men as for women since both are optimized for reproductive success and play different roles in reproduction.
International FAFO – Ontario pokes Trump, Trump withdraws from trade talks
Canadian politicans seem unable to comprehend that Donald Trump is not a typical American leader — for both good and bad — and Ontario Premier Doug Ford seems to be the last one to figure it out. The Ontario government paid for ads featuring Ronald Reagan making anti-tariff comments to run in the US media and Trump reacted, strongly:
The Ontario government’s anti-U.S. tariff ad will run multiple times during the U.S. broadcast of baseball’s World Series game Friday, less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump “terminated” trade talks with Canada over the commercial.
In an email, Ontario Premier Doug Ford spokesperson Hannah Jensen confirmed information first reported by National Post that the ads will run throughout the World Series.
That means the ads, taken out by Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government, will be playing to a primetime U.S. audience less than a day after Trump cited them as the reason he was ending trade talks with Canada.
The Toronto Blue Jays are vying for the World Series championship for the first time in over three decades.
The move suggests Ford is not ready to back down on his public campaign against U.S. tariffs on key Ontarian industries including auto manufacturing despite Trump’s ire.
Late Thursday evening, Trump took aim at Ontario’s ads which quote a 1987 speech by Ronald Reagan to fight against U.S. tariffs.
“The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. The ad was for $75,000,” Trump wrote on social media.
“They only did this to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts. TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT.”
On Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada stands ready to resume trade talks with the Trump administration. But he stopped short of opining on if Ontario should cease running the ads.
If there’s a wrong way to deal with Donald Trump, you can be sure that some Canadian politician — often, but not always, Doug Ford — will find it:
Outside of the light conservatism found in the AM Talk radio circuit throughout the GTA, Ontarians didn’t really seem all that fired up when it was discovered that Premier Doug Ford spent $75 million on anti-tariff ads, the most contentious involving an audio clip of former Republican president Ronald Reagan, to be played in American cities targeting Republican audiences. They, for the most part, are also unlikely to appreciate the insult, and the damage it caused, by going directly to Trump’s base with a message that undermines the premise of his economic plan. In Canada, leaders like Ford and Carney, are permitted and even encouraged to talk tough on Trump, because it is well understood that Trump Derangement Syndrome is the leading cause of anxiety amongst Canadian leftists, and sadly, even many so-called conservatives. However, it has always been hollow, toothless, and pointless.
Carney’s elbow’s up nonsense is easily the most embarrassing thing produced by Canada in the last four decades (maybe longer). And Doug Ford is such a clueless dummy, conservative in name only, with NDP levels of TDS, and an incredibly irresponsible propensity to go off half-cocked, with such a careless abundance of volatility. No serious province can survive a leader like this. Ford is what Leftists think Trump is: a dangerous blundering idiot who can’t get anything right. But this thing with the Reagan ad is maybe the worst example in a long list of Ford blundering. Maybe Trump’s anger will blow over, maybe we will somehow come out of this episode embarrassed, yet again, but for the most part, unscathed. We will have to wait and see.
As much as I wish Canada was a force to be reckoned with, as it once was, the best I can muster is that some day in the distant future other countries might stop laughing at us. The sad reality is that generations of abysmal Laurentian elite leadership has destroyed the strength and respectability of Canada. We are a weak insignificant joke of a nation made that way by a grossly feminized ultra-weak leftist leadership class. Ford and Carney with their ineffective provocations directed at Trump in order to appease and win points with the TDS numbskull segment of the Canadian population, does little more than show the nation, and the world, the opportunism and lack of self-awareness indicative of all weak and clueless men of the social justice paradigm in the great feminized north.
To make matters worse, as if the largest and most rapidly expanding national debt in the history of Canada, the general complacency concerning government spending, or the massive affordability crises were not enough, it appears that Ford’s ad team manipulated the content of the Ronald Reagan speech they used in order to make it appear as if Reagan were anti-tariff. The ad stitches together non-consecutive segments of a five minute speech he gave in 1987. Again, the ad in question was part of a $75 million marketing campaign, paid for by Ontario tax-payers, which targeted American audiences.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute stated that “The ad misrepresents the presidential radio address, and the Government of Ontario did not seek nor receive permission to use and edit the remarks”.
Nice work, Doug. You can stop any time now …
Update: Fixed broken URL.
October 24, 2025
The future is feminine … maybe
William M. Briggs celebrates the feminine future by celebrating the end of a matriarchy in Greek mythology:
An obvious cause, but of course not the sole problem, is our anti-discrimination laws. These enforce DIE and the Great Feminization (David Stove, decades ago, saw it all coming in his essay “Jobs for the Girls“), which always choke out even hints of manliness. A solution would thus seem to be expurgating this great and terrible body of enervating law.
Alas, that would require men. Congress is unable even to decide what time it is. It will never summon the testicular fortitude to cancel the Civil Rights Act. It does not need to be so.
Perhaps you recall Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, which tells the tale of Theseus and his slaying of the Minotaur. Theseus travels to Athens to fulfill his destiny, but must first pass through Eleusis, where he finds himself in a battle to the death with the King. He wins, but discovers that King is only a ceremonial role; the occupant’s main job is to die each year. During his year-long reign, all his appetites are sated by the queen and her attendants, and he becomes weak.
Eleusis is, of course, a matriarchy. The culture enslaved to a desultory Earth Mother cult. The men soft and unable to deal with hostile neighbors. Theseus bucks tradition, gathers a group of men, the Companions, and goes out to take care of business. He then marches back into Eleusis and declares the restoration of the patriarchy. The queen, in one last defiant girl-boss move, reveals she has taken an abortifacient to kill Theseus’s child. She takes poison and sails off to die.
Theseus installs his Companions into all key positions, institutes a new religion based on knowledge instead of human sacrifice, instructs the men their time in the Longhouse is over, and that is that. The transition takes place in a day.
That is the most true-to-life part of the novel. That instant switch. After all, if the men were united, what could the women do? Women applying force and violence only happens in the movies. Women call for men to do violence on their behalf. But if men have the courage to say no, then that is that.
Now, of course, men do not say no, argues Andrews, and do not have the courage to, either. The Longhouse issues edicts and the men obey, their own appetites well enough satisfied. What next?
Our own John Carter reasons, correctly I think, that the Great Feminization is self-limiting.
It’s also probably no accident that the Trump administration seems to care a lot more about what the anons of the Online Right say than it does about the opinion of the universities or the news media. All the intelligent young men got pushed out of the institutions, and those ionized particles of free male energy then began to self-assemble online into an ad hoc competence hierarchy where prestige is measured by clout rather than professional degrees, job titles, or institutional affiliations. The anon swarm is entirely informal, meaning that its outcomes are not amenable to antidiscrimination legislation or to procedural manipulation; you can screw with the algo all you want but you can’t actually force people to care what women say just because they’re women (thereby placing women into the position of openly trading in thirst, which gets them attention but certainly doesn’t mean that anyone has to pretend to take them seriously).
All that’s happened so far is that people’s attention has been redirected away from crazy woke females and towards the influencers of the online right. The fever has broken but society is a long way from recovered. The institutions are still under the control of crazy woke females, and this is extremely bad, especially because they are — for biological reasons related to childlessness — only going to get crazier as time goes on. Fortunately no one really cares what they say anymore, so as they throw tantrums as the institutions are reclaimed over the next decade or so, their protests won’t register as anything but irrelevant toddler noise.
We still have to hurdle those “rights” laws, because they are still driving behavior of all large organizations. They can be purged or be forgotten. To purge requires Theseus-like courage. To forget requires we first suffer.
Get ready to suffer.
The Picnic at the Battle of Bull Run
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 20 May 2025Nutmeg and brandy pound cake with roast beef sandwiches, lemonade, and berries
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1824In the beginning of the American Civil War, no one expected the fighting to go on for very long. Not wanting to miss out on any of the action, a crowd of spectators gathered a couple of miles from the battlefield at the First Battle of Bull Run. They enjoyed the boom of cannon fire and picnic lunches of sandwiches, pies, and cakes, before fleeing for their lives in a mad dash when the battle turned against the Union.
This pound cake is denser than modern versions because it contains no chemical leavener, but it’s not stodgy and is delicious. The nutmeg comes through and you get the flavor of the brandy without it being boozy.
To complete your picnic and recreate some simple sandwiches from 1857, butter slices of white bread, layer on sliced roast beef and Dijon mustard, then trim off the crusts. I don’t usually put butter on my sandwiches, but it was really nice.
Pound Cake.
Wash the salt from a pound of butter and rub it till it is soft as cream, have ready a pound of flour sifted, one of powdered sugar, and twelve eggs well beaten; put alternately into the butter, sugar, flour and the froth from the eggs; continuing to beat them together till all the ingredients are in, and the cake quite light; add some grated lemon peel, a nutmeg, and a gill of brandy; butter the pans and bake them.
— The Virginia House-Wife by Mary Randolph, 1824.Sandwiches for travelling may be made of the lean of cold beef, (roast or boiled,) cut very thin, seasoned with French mustard, and laid between two slices of bread and butter.
— Miss Leslie’s New Cookery Book, 1857
QotD: What airlines could learn from supermarkets
Mark Steyn, “Flight From Reality”, The Spectator, 2001-11-17.
October 23, 2025
Karine Jean-Pierre’s “tell-nothing tell-all” memoir of the Biden White House
In the free-to-cheapskates part of this post (i.e., outside the paywall), Matt Taibbi discusses the former White House Press Secretary’s book Independent as the author does the rounds of TV talk shows to boost it:
Independent, the new tell-nothing tell-all by former Joe Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, is framed in the introduction as the patriotic diatribe of a once-loyal Democrat who’s now “free to speak for myself” and “eager to say what I think”, thanks to a dramatic decision:
After being a party insider for twenty years, I now believe I can fight harder for my country from outside the Democratic Party than from within it. From here on, I am politically an independent.
Just a few pages later, however, Jean-Pierre claims she only noticed something wrong with Biden once, during his infamous debate performance last June 27th. “Whoa … He must be sick,” she deadpans, then reframes Independent as an answer to a book she hasn’t even read:
CNN anchor Jake Tapper kicked off the debate. He later wrote a supposed tell-all about Biden, Original Sin … accusing [Biden] of a cover-up of his mental decline and how his aides quashed concerns. I was technically a part of the president’s inner circle and saw Biden every day and saw no such decline. I never read Tapper’s book and don’t ever plan to because that does not track with what I saw in the White House.
It’s all entertaining stuff (the “technically” is hilarious). Jean-Pierre announces she’s finally free to tell the truth, but begins by declaring that Tapper’s Original Sin — another book marketed as “the full, unsettling truth … told for the first time” — was wrong not because Tapper was lying about how long it took for him to notice Biden’s problems, but because Biden never had any problems to notice.
Jean-Pierre is generating significant negative Internet wattage this week, battered everywhere for insisting she never saw anything concerning in Biden’s private behavior. In a wild exchange with Gayle King of CBS, she doubled down on a book passage claiming she didn’t even see an issue with Biden before the critical debate, even though she traveled to it with him on Air Force One (“Maybe I was too nervous … to notice whether or not he was sniffling?”). Apparently, that trip was a rare instance in which Jean-Pierre not only didn’t talk to Biden on the plane, but didn’t have conversations with anyone who did. “I had no clue Biden had a cold and was off his game”, she wrote, “until he began to speak at the debate”.
Independent reads like an oxygen-deprived sequel to Tapper’s book. The humorous premise of Original Sin involved Tapper’s sources insisting Biden “stole an election” because if he’d stepped aside earlier, the party might have had a “robust primary” — exactly the scenario they spent years fighting to avoid, savaging challengers like Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and smearing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. directly into the arms of Donald Trump. The CNN man insisted “insiders” who had a “much better window into Biden’s condition than the general public” saw things that “shocked them” before last June’s debate, when the awful truth finally became obvious even to news media. But according to Tapper, the problem wasn’t so much that insiders lied, but were lied to. His first chapter was titled “He totally fucked us”, a quote about Biden by Kamala Harris aide David Plouffe.
Never mind that the world could see Biden was in drool-cup mode as far back back as 2019, or that Special Counsel Robert Hur made it legal record that Biden likely couldn’t be convicted because a jury would see him as incompetent, an “elderly man with a poor memory” who couldn’t find his own underpants, let alone classified papers he was accused of mishandling. No, the problem was, “Biden fucked us”.
Jean-Pierre has now one-upped Tapper by insisting nothing was wrong with Biden and that — get this — the real problem was that the press undermined the president, and not after the debate, but all along! “Pretty much since the day he’d stepped into the White House”, Jean-Pierre wrote, “the press had taken every opportunity to imply Biden was too old or mentally unfit for the job”. She is referring to the same press corps that insisted Biden was “sharp as a tack” for four and a half years, while he was serially sternum-poking voters, staring into space, walking off set in the middle of interviews, and turning every public ceremony into a potential Chevy Chase routine
October 22, 2025
The Korean War Week 70: Casualties Rise For The Chinese – October 21, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 21 Oct 2025The UN forces launch Operation Polecharge, hoping to complete Operation Commando, but they have worries away from the field, since UN pilots have violated the neutral zone and killed two young Korean boys, causing an outcry. If that weren’t enough, a new Soviet atomic bomb test has the entire world on edge.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:56 Recap
01:12 Operation Polecharge
02:37 Chinese Tactics
05:15 9th Corps Attacks
07:10 Unit Integration
10:04 B-29s Shot Down
11:06 The Mutual Security Act
12:47 Neutral Zone Violation
14:11 Summary
14:29 Conclusion
15:56 Call to Action
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October 20, 2025
Carney’s trip to Egypt, without the pesky Canadian media tagging along
I guess it’s slightly to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s credit that he was able to get a last-second invitation to attend President Trump’s latest international triumph … we all know how Mr. Carney loves him a nice photo op. But it was almost unprecedented that he nipped over to Egypt without taking any of the usual flappers and fart-catchers of the Canadian media along with him:
X-post by former PMO chief of staff Norman Spector, who noticed something was up concerning how the Prime Minister’s team got its message out
Image and caption from The Rewrite by Peter Menzies
Last week, the Parliamentary Press Gallery (PPG) and I had something in common.
We were both dismayed.
They, because they weren’t invited to join Prime Minister Carney on his last-minute trip to Egypt for a photo opp; Me because most of them didn’t seem all that interested in looking into the circumstances of the PM’s hasty departure and instead allowed themselves to be played in the most appallingly obvious manner.
What got the PPG’s knickers twisted was that they weren’t invited to accompany Carney when he departed Ottawa in a rush to get to the Egyptian resort of Sharm El Sheikh, a popular spot on the Red Sea for the world’s glitterati. It took PPG President Mia Rabson a couple of days to issue a statement, but she made it clear the PPG disapproved:
The Parliamentary Press Gallery was not informed in advance of the Prime Minister’s trip to Egypt to participate in the Middle East Peace Ceremony on Oct. 12-13, […] The Gallery is disappointed and dismayed at the exclusion of Canadian media from the event and expresses in no uncertain terms that this must never happen again.
It is unprecedented that Canadian media be entirely excluded from a Canadian prime minister’s foreign trip.
The only reporting I could find on this was in Politico, where it was recorded that the PMO had posted this notice: “6:30 p.m. The Prime Minister will depart for Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to attend the signing of a Middle East peace plan. Closed to media.”
What first caused my jaw to drop and to become, like Rabin, disappointed and dismayed, were the stories left unpursued. On the morning of Oct. 12, Canada was not listed as among the countries invited to join in the “peace summit” associated with the ceasefire deal reached between Israel and Hamas. If it had been, the prime minister may not have had to charter a private jet because the usual Royal Canadian Air Force planes and crews were, as City News‘s Glen MacGregor reported, unavailable.
There are two lines of journalistic inquiry there, neither of which appears to have been of interest. The first is: how can Canada’s military be so poorly equipped that there isn’t at all times a fully-equipped aircraft and crew on standby and is this an issue that will be addressed in the future? The second is: how did we wind up getting invited to the peace summit? Comments by US President Donald Trump indicate that we weren’t initially considered important enough to be on site but phoned to ask if we could join the party. (The Line — which doesn’t accept government subsidies — noticed.)
Trump, in remarks to media said: “You have Canada. That’s so great to have, in fact. The president called and he wanted to know if it’s worth — well he knew exactly what it is. He knew the importance. Where’s Canada, by the way? Where are you? He knew the importance of this.”
What was pursued, at least in comments online by journalists, was Trump’s inability to identify Carney by his correct title. (In an exchange that followed, Carney sarcastically thanked Trump for elevating him and, in response, was told “at least I didn’t call you governor”. Ha ha.)
Everyone is free to make their own decisions, but if Canada had to call Trump to ask to be invited, Canadians need to know if that means we are in the president’s debt. Trump, after all, seems like the sort of guy who keeps score.
But it’s what followed that really got creepy. While Canadian reporters were not allowed to accompany the prime minister to Egypt, someone who says he or she was on the plane started phoning around to tell reporters what happened. And they went for it. The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and Politico all reported unverified statements emanating from a single, unnamed source. The Globe‘s Robert Fife reported that “a senior government official” said that while Carney and others thought they were just in Egypt for a photo opp, during a four hour wait for Trump to arrive from Israel “Mr. Carney had back-and-forth conversations with a group of leaders”.
So, after a bit of ritual humiliation — par for the course with Trump and Carney — the PM got to have unstructured/unfocused chit-chat with other diplomatic rag-tag and bob-tail clinging to the President’s cape. Not a good look, but Canadians must be getting inured to their national leaders being treated as, at best, an afterthought.
From Hitler’s Rockets to America’s Arsenal – W2W 049
TimeGhost History
Published 19 Oct 2025From the ashes of Nazi Germany to the launch pads of the American desert, the story of the nation’s first ballistic missile is one filled with contradiction. A man who once served the SS soon became a celebrated figure in the United States, and his weapon of war was transformed into a symbol of progress. Here, we will explore how this unlikely journey unfolded and what it reveals about science, power, and morality in the modern age.
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The real reason we’re suddenly discussing “The Great Feminization” now
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Clifton Duncan offers an explanation for why “The Great Feminization” is a hot topic of discussion, and I think he has a valid point:
The only reason people are talking about “The Great Feminization” now is because it’s affecting women.
Men young and old have been talking about it for decades.
For decades boys and men have had their desires dismissed; had fathers denigrated and denied them; had their spaces, interests and hobbies invaded; had primary and higher education weaponized against them; had jobs and promotions unjustly denied them; had reputations ruined by false allegations; watched pop culture fester with anti-male slop; had wealth and progeny stripped away by prejudiced family courts.
What happened when they voiced these complaints?
They were called misogynists, resentful of their inability to match women’s success as they seethed over the dismantling of the patriarchy.
They were called losers, whiners and complainers who should shut up, grow up, man up and get married.
But now —
As men avoid women at work, or withdraw from the labor force altogether; as men leave the church; as men abandon dating and marriage; as men reciprocate women’s embrace of modernism and rejection of traditionalism; and as womanhood faces erasure, ironically (but predictably) at the hands of the very liberals and progressives women celebrate for hatcheting away manhood and masculinity —
Only now, as the consequences of treating women’s needs as all that matter and men’s needs as superfluous (and offensive) are evident,
Only now, as men usher in a new sexual revolution by unapologetically focusing on themselves and their own happiness, refusing to serve a society that’s signaled repeatedly that it no longer values them and prompting more and more women to wonder “Where Have All the (Good) Men Gone?”
Only now has it become safe for *women* to broach the topic of “The Great Feminization” and be lavished with acclaim for making the exact same points men have been chastised for making for over 25 years.
Symbolic.
Update: Francisco at Small Dead Animals posted this video of Camille Paglia talking about what women have lost through Feminism:
October 19, 2025
Printed Maplewash from Random Penguin “Canada”
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte discusses one of the most cynical and blatant attempts to “Maplewash” US product as 100% home-grown Canadian: a book of essays by living and dead Canadian authors, titled with the Liberals’ moronic “Elbows Up” slogan … with all the profits going to Random Penguin’s US corporate headquarters:
Ever since the Trump tariffs against Canada were launched last spring, US firms operating in Canada have been engaged in a variety of maple-washing tactics to shield themselves from consumer backlash. Some are as simple as new labelling — “prepared in Canada!” More audacious was McDonald’s effort to make everyone forget it’s the White House’s caterer of choice: a partnership with Canada’s sweetheart, Shania Twain.
You might think the McDonald’s gambit would be hard to top, but Penguin Random House has done it.
Penguin Random House Canada is a division of Penguin Random House LLC, corporate headquarters at 1745 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, New York, 10019. Penguin Random House LLC is in turn controlled by Bertelsmann, a media conglomerate in Gütersloh, Germany, but legally and operationally, it is a US company. Its executive leadership, including CEO Nihar Malaviya, works out of the above address. Strategy and publishing priorities are set in New York, and profits in PRH’s many far-flung international divisions flow to New York. You can see why this firm, with its dominant position in the Canadian market, might feel vulnerable and want to camouflage its Americanness when everyone starts shouting “buy Canadian!”
[…]
There are at least four levels of cynicism to Elbows Up!
The first — let’s call it eye-popping — is that Penguin Random House Canada would use so many of its own authors as human shields in a trade war. I mean, that’s cold. You not only have to conceive it, you have to be confident the authors are so oblivious that they won’t notice — or so obliged that they won’t care — that they’re laundering the reputation and protecting the economic interests of a US multinational and that the net proceeds from their rousing defence of Canadian sovereignty are going straight to 1745 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, New York, 10019, along with the licensing rights to their contributions.
[…]
The third level of cynicism — gobsmacking — is that Penguin Random House Canada used its McClelland & Stewart imprint for this atrocity.
I’m not sure there’s ever been a more important Canadian cultural institution than M&S. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was synonymous with Canadian literature. It published the core of the modern Canadian canon — Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, Robertson Davies, Rohinton Mistry, and many others. More than that, M&S was a symbol of our cultural sovereignty. Its catalog is the closest thing we’ll ever have to the Elgin Marbles.
Jack McClelland, who built the company, ran into financial trouble and sold M&S to strip-mall baron Avie Bennett in 1986. In 2000, Bennett cashed out, selling 25 percent of M&S to Penguin Random House and granting 75 percent to the University of Toronto because federal rules required majority Canadian ownership of cultural enterprises. It was an ingenious deal: UofT played the stooge of Canadian control; PRH had its way with the jewel of Canadian publishing; M&S remained eligible for federal grants because of its “Canadian ownership”. Then, in 2011, the U of T quietly transferred its shares to PRH, giving the multinational full ownership, never mind the foreign-ownership rules. UofT explained that playing the stooge of Canadian control was no longer “a core business” of the university. The house that built Canadian literature, along with its full catalogue of Canadian classics was now fully domiciled at 745 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, New York, 10019. The feds didn’t lift a finger.
I don’t know what you’d call that but a cultural crime.
And I don’t know what you can say about PRH using M&S for its maple-washing exercise beyond that it’s gloating.
The final level of cynicism — this one’s just sad — is that Elbows Up! is a forgettable book. It has none of the freshness, quirkiness, and genuine intellectual engagement of The New Romans. It takes as its title a partisan Liberal slogan from the last election (an act of toadying that probably qualifies as its own level of cynicism). A few of the essays, particularly those by the younger writers, are interesting, but none of them has much to say about Canada’s current predicament or the nature of the Canada-US relationship. I was struck by how many of the contributors can’t see beyond their narrow professional or personal identities. It’s as though they’ve never before been called upon to consider Canada as a whole. They lack the vocabulary to contribute anything meaningful. Also, the emotional tone is oddly flat from start to finish.
