Dezeen
Published 29 Apr 2025To mark the centenary of art deco’s debut, Dezeen features editor Nat Barker rounds up everything you need to know about art deco.
In this video produced by Dezeen Studio, Dezeen explores the history and context of the movement, and the most notable characteristics of the style.
Art deco was a design movement that rose to prominence in the 1920s and 30s. Its origins are often disputed, but most agree that art deco’s entrance on to the world stage took place 100 years ago, at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris.
#artdeco #designhistory
January 17, 2026
Everything you need to know about art deco
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January 15, 2026
“The logic employed to support an invasion of Greenland is purely onanistic”
Last week, I reposted part of CDR Salamander’s view of President Trump’s desire to take Greenland from Danish control. I still don’t really understand his motivation, so Kiran Pfitzner‘s take that Trump’s “perverse interest in Greenland” can only be explained as rising from a belief “that conquest, that being a conqueror, is a pleasant fantasy to indulge in”:
“InfantryDort” is not worth responding to, but the tweet is a useful frame for our discussion.
Aside from morality and legality, invading Greenland is, strategically speaking, utterly pointless. Even if we were to entirely neglect the consequences of such an act on our alliances and reputation, the act alone constitutes sheer stupidity as a pure question of strategy.
It is true that the idea of buying Greenland was floated during the Truman administration and again during the Eisenhower administration. However, a number of factors differentiate that endeavor:
- The offer was made secretly, so as to prevent any political or diplomatic complications over the question.
- The significance of Greenland was peculiar to the time — a nuclear attack on the US would have had to have come over the Arctic by Soviet bombers — technology has since starkly reduced its importance.
- Most importantly, previous administrations had clear ideas of what was needed from Greenland, and so were able to simply negotiate with the Danish government to gain access without the political difficulties of annexation.
This illustrates the great strategic problem of any suggestion of invasion: there is no specific aim or purpose. The endeavor is justified only in vague terms of “security” or the childish assertion that “we need it”. How it is to actually improve our security or why exactly we need it are nowhere addressed.
As Clausewitz writes, the aim of war is to put our enemy in a position more painful than the sacrifice which we demand from him. What exactly is it we want from Greenland? What have they denied us that we should seek to gain by force?
To even consider the question in practical terms, we must reckon with the simple fact that, in the era of a nation state, allies are infinitely more useful than occupied territory. Even bearing in mind that allied interests will never be entirely congruent, a state organic to a territory will be able to draw forth greater exertions from the same resources than a foreign occupier would, even before accounting for active resistance. A people will always provide their own state with more energy and zeal than they will offer to a conqueror.1 There is less “friction”.
The great benefit of alliances is in the ability to access this voluntary energy, which cannot be called into being by the dictates of a conqueror. Nationalism is such a potent force that conquest has become inordinately difficult and costly, being a net negative to state power in virtually all cases (a subject I have previously written on).2 That the United States can access Greenland’s territory without having to conquer it is already the best of all worlds.
- For more on the organic energy of the People, see Carl von Clausewitz “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of the Prussian Landwehr” (1819) in Historical and Political Writings.
- See also: Posen, Barry R. “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power”. International Security 18, no. 2 (1993): 80–124.
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“The Left is a death-cult that seeks the destruction of its own people, chasing delusional exaltation”
At Always the Horizon, Copernican discusses the progressive mindset and its complete inability to cope with barbarians (literal and figurative):
In light of recent events, it is important to recognize that a rules-based system can exist only as long as there exists someone to enforce the rules. For a long time, White Westerners have been brow-beaten with an imagined consensus morality where those who are historically hierarchically powerful are also inherently evil. “Those misogynist White rednecks”, etc. That was, according to the rules, the acceptable position to hold.
The rules are enforced by consuming den-mothers who have built around themselves fortresses of bureaucracy and perceived cultural alignment. You have to follow the rules, or you’re a bad person.
Historically, Christianity managed these ideals through Europe and the Holy Roman Empire, where they were considered a moral standard. Enforced through the social order of the time. Having previously attacked Christianity in the late 20th century, the modern Left has proceeded to annihilate that moral grounding. Replacing it with a vague sense of moral relativism and platitudes:
“We think these behaviors and rules are good because everyone agrees, and everyone agrees because we’ve made them as these behaviors and rules are good.”
The tautology of liberal thought. Moral relativism with appeal-to-majority and appeal-to-consensus stacked atop one another. Recent events have demonstrated that even classically liberal political positions cannot be maintained without a strong underlying social and moral framework. Lacking that, liberalism (again, as recently demonstrated) defaults to meaningless tautologies and a feminine urge to “not harm” people who in many circumstances damn well need to be harmed.
The result of this social decay is, of course, a default to basics.
The Barbarians Veto
Your village or apartment block has been put to flame. Your son is dead, your wife and daughter are being hauled off to god knows where, and a giant of a man with a bloody axe stands before you. Knowing that this is probably your last chance to do anything, you puff up your chest and pronounce: “YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PERSON”.
The man looks at you like you’re retarded, and then messily separates your prefrontal cortex and cerebellum. The Barbarian doesn’t give a shit what you consider a “good person” to be. He couldn’t care less. What he knows is that the only thing separating the two of you is that he is strong and you are weak. The reason why it is he standing with a bloodied axe and not you, is simply a matter of prowess and luck. If you were strong, you would be doing the same thing to him.
Do unto others before they do unto you. Do it fast. Do it first. And do it effectively.
The political Left has built its entire philosophical core on minimizing harm and playing the role of victim. The Left is thus completely blind to the barbarians veto. The Left believes there’s some inherent nobility in having your home burnt to the ground and your family murdered. That’s why they pursue with suicidal ideation the opportunity to die for their psychotic religion. Better yet, they zealously pursue the opportunity to get other people to die for their psychotic religion. Leftism is a cult that requires blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of its most zealous supporters.
They fear the strength of the Barbarian, uncompromising, not willing to sacrifice himself, but entirely willing to sacrifice hordes of his unthinking enemies. He does not see himself as a “good person”, but the barbarian sees himself as a “surviving person”. He survives by killing his enemies. His bloodline survives by impregnating his women, whether they want it or not. The Left has no answer to the barbarian, but to submit to his will, and then demand you do so as well.
That’s why they love murderers, cartels, and foreigners, but demand that their own men and sons die bloodily in self-sacrifice to their own cultural enemies. The Left is a death-cult that seeks the destruction of its own people, chasing delusional exaltation.
Update, 16 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
QotD: Process knowledge
Dan Wang, in his wonderful essay on how technology grows, describes process knowledge as the sine qua non of industrial capitalism, more fundamental than the machines and factories that everybody sees:
The tools and IP held by these firms are easy to observe. I think that the process knowledge they possess is even more important. The process knowledge can also be referred to as technical and industrial expertise; in the case of semiconductors, that includes knowledge of how to store wafers, how to enter a clean room, how much electric current should be used at different stages of the fab process, and countless other things. This kind of knowledge is won by experience. Anyone with detailed instructions but no experience actually fabricating chips is likely to make a mess.
I believe that technology ultimately progresses because of people and the deepening of the process knowledge they possess. I see the creation of new tools and IP as certifications that we’ve accumulated process knowledge. Instead of seeing tools and IP as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I’d like to view them as milestones in the training of better scientists, engineers, and technicians.
The accumulated process knowledge plus capital allows the semiconductor companies to continue to produce ever-more sophisticated chips. […] It’s not just about the tools, which any sufficiently-capitalized firm can buy; or the blueprints, which are hard to follow without experience of what went into codifying them.
Process knowledge lives in people, grows when people interact with other people, and spreads around when skilled individuals relocate between cities or companies. But this also means it can wither and die, can be lost forever, either when old workers shuffle off to the Big Open Plan Office in the Sky, or when an ecosystem no longer has the energy or complexity to sustain a critical mass of skilled workers in a particular vocation. Some East Asian societies have gone to extreme lengths to retain process knowledge, for instance by deliberately demolishing and rebuilding a temple every 20 years.
In fact this is far from the most extreme thing East Asian societies have done to retain the process knowledge that lives within their workers! There are some components of an ecosystem, whether natural or technological, that are especially important keystone species. In the technological case, these species can be unprofitable at the current scale of an ecosystem, or inefficient, or they might not make economic sense until one or more of their customers exist, but those customers might not be able to exist until the keystone species does. Venture capital is very practiced at solving this kind of Catch-22, but in the East Asian economic boom it was national governments that actively sheltered keystone industries until they could get their footing, thus making entire ecosystems possible. A wonderful book about this is Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, but if you can’t read it, read Byrne Hobart’s thorough review instead.
Process knowledge is so powerful, the ecosystem it enables so vital, it can break the assumptions of Ricardo’s theory of trade. Steve Keen has a perceptive essay about how the naive Ricardian analysis treats all capital stock as fungible and neglects the existence of specialized machinery and infrastructure. But naive defenders1 of trade liberalization often make an exactly analogous error with respect to the other factor of production — labor. Workers are not an undifferentiated lump, they are people with skills, connections, and expertise locked up in their heads. When a high-skill industry moves offshore, the community of experts around it begins to break up, which can cripple adjacent industries, stymie insights and breakthroughs, and make it almost impossible to bring that industry back.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.
- Like all coastal-Americans, I am generally in favor of trade liberalization, but I’m consummate and sophisticated about it, unlike Noah Smith.
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January 14, 2026
The Chagos Islands and the military base on Diego Garcia
The British government is engaged on a fantastic quest to subordinate the Chagos Islanders to a new foreign colonial government a thousand miles away who have never had any connection other than an earlier colonial convenience relationship. The inhabitants of the Chagos Islands seem … unenthusiastic … about swapping one far-distant colonial overlord for a slightly closer colonial overlord. In the “outside the paywall” section of this post, Nigel Biggar explains why he’s fighting against this transfer in the House of Lords:
In the middle of that map is Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory and home to one of the most strategic airfields and anchorages on the planet. […] The red circle is 2,000 nautical miles from the island. The purple circle is 1,150 nautical miles, roughly the distance from London to Malta, that represents the distance from Diego Garcia, affectionately known to its friends as “Dodge” and civilized people will defer things on the island to Provisional Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Diego Garcia. That circle is also the distance from Diego Garcia to the island of Mauritius.
Caption and image from CDR Salamander.
I arrived home late last Monday night, having spent the second half of the day in the House of Lords attending the Report stage of the bill to ratify the treaty whereby the UK surrenders to Mauritius sovereignty over the Chagos Islands — including the military base on Diego Garcia — in return for a ninety-nine-year lease.
For readers who missed — or have forgotten — my post on this topic on August 6th, let me rehearse my view. Located in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the military base is important for extending the global reach of British and US forces. At first glance, exchanging sovereignty for a lease looks like a very poor deal, making possession of the strategic base less secure at a time of growing international tensions.
So why has Keir Starmer’s government signed up to a treaty that does just that?
The treaty presents itself upfront as correcting the injustice done when 1,700 Chagossians were forced to leave their homes on Diego Garcia between 1967 and 1973, to make way for the military base. In the preamble, the two governments “recognis[e] the wrongs of the past” and declare themselves “committed to supporting the welfare of all Chagossians”. Yet the process that produced the treaty does not bear this out. The Chagossians themselves were barely consulted, probably because it is known that many strongly resist subjection to Mauritian rule.
Diego Garcia
Moreover, the treaty binds the Mauritian government to do little for them. Oddly, Article 6 declares that Mauritius is “free” to implement a programme of resettlement. However, if, as Article 1 states, Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Islands, it goes without saying that it is free to do as it chooses. It does not need stating. So, the effect of stating it is to highlight the fact that Mauritius has refused any obligation to resettle the islanders.
Article 11 commits the UK to provide capital of £40 million to create a trust fund for the islanders, but it leaves the Mauritian government entirely at liberty to choose how to use it. Yet, when it received £650,000 (equivalent to £7.7 million today) from the UK to compensate displaced islanders in 1972, it withheld the money for six years in punitive retaliation for Chagossian protests. And, again, nine years after it was given £40 million in 2016, to improve Chagossian welfare, it has only disbursed £1.3 million under restrictive conditions.
The treaty’s main concern lies elsewhere. As the preamble also says, it is “mindful of the need to complete the process of the decolonisation” of Mauritius. In saying this, the UK government is implicitly accepting the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in 2019 that the detachment of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in November 1965, before the latter was granted independence in 1968, was unlawful. This is because it was incompatible with resolution 1514 (XV) of the United Nations’ General Assembly in December1960, which declared that “any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations”. Indeed, in December 1965, a month after the detachment, the General Assembly adopted resolution 2066 (XX), inviting the UK “to take no action which would dismember the Territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity”. And a year later the General Assembly adopted resolution 2232 (XXI), reiterating its opposition to any “disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity” of colonial territories.
None of these resolutions makes good sense. The original, 1960 one was championed by the Irish ambassador to the UN, Frederick Boland, who was then President of the General Assembly. In promoting resolution 1514 (XV), he invoked Ireland’s loss of its “historic integrity” as a prime example of the injustice to be avoided. In so doing, he expressed the Irish nationalist’s typical historical blindness. The island of Ireland had never been a political unit apart from its union with Great Britain, and there is no natural law prescribing that a geographical integrity should be a political integrity. On the contrary, there can be very good reasons for dividing it. The reason that Ireland was divided in 1922 was because republican Irish people wanted home rule so much that they were prepared to take up arms to acquire it, while unionist Irish people detested it so much that they were prepared to take up arms to oppose it. Ireland was partitioned to prevent further civil war—a justified act of political prudence.
The 1965 and 1966 resolutions are no more sensible. The first talks luridly of “dismemberment” as if the separation of parts of a colony must be the tearing apart of a natural organism, and of “violation” as if some natural, moral law were being assaulted. But there is nothing natural about a political entity and there is no moral law against partition as such.
The 1966 resolution appeals to the “national unity” of Mauritius, as if the Chagos Islands weren’t separated by over a thousand miles of Indian Ocean and as if the islanders were an integral part of the Mauritian people. But many Chagossians feel as Mauritian as Irish republicans feel British. The only connection between Mauritius and the Chagos Islands is an accident of colonial, administrative convenience. Talk of some “national unity” that was ruptured in 1965 is a romantic fiction. Besides, in 1965 the Mauritians agreed to the separation in return for £3 million (worth £74 million today) and the reversion of the islands when no longer needed for defence purposes.
Yet, notwithstanding its nonsense, the original, seminal resolution 1514 (XV) was adopted by the General Assembly of the UN and has since been invoked and confirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
It’s true that the UK has explicitly refused to consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction over British disputes with former Commonwealth countries such as Mauritius. However, in its 2019 Advisory Opinion, the court positioned itself formally, not as adjudicating between two sovereign states’ conflicting claims, but as responding to a question from the UN’s General Assembly as to whether the UK had violated international law on the decolonisation of Mauritius in the 1960s. Notwithstanding the fact that that is a crucial point of current contention between the two countries, the ICJ presumed to find in Mauritius’ favour. It is because the UK Government fears that a subsequent international tribunal — such as the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea — will use the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion to make a binding judgement against it, that it prefers to concede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and negotiate an expensive lease now.
But there is more to the Government’s motivation than fear. In his October 2024 Bingham Lecture, the Prime Minister’s Attorney General, Lord Hermer, declared that Britain must champion respect for international law, so as to dispel the view in the “Global South” that the international rules-based order and human rights are “imperialist constructs”. In other words, by surrendering its claim to sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, Britain will “decolonise” itself and thereby win diplomatic capital. As the Labour peer, Lord Boateng, opined: “We can welcome this treaty as an end to a period of colonial rule”. This is what lies behind that other statement in the preamble to the treaty: that the parties desire “to build a close and enduring bilateral partnership based on mutual respect and trust”.
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The Korean War Week 82: Ridgway’s Nuclear Warning! – January 13, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published Jan 13, 2026Operation Strangle, to destroy enemy logistical capability with air power, has been in progress for months now, and yet the enemy is still able to bring up men and supplies, and even slowly stockpile them for possible future offensives. The UN position now is that should there be an armistice, and should the other side break its terms, retaliation would be broader and would include actions against Communist China, but will the UN have the force to do such retaliation? That is the question.
00:00 Intro
00:44 Recap
01:09 POW Issues
03:30 The Airfields
08:29 UN Declaration
10:15 Operation Strangle
14:13 Summary
14:35 Conclusion
15:25 Call To Action
(more…)
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QotD: Bill Clinton, proto-PUA
Most men I knew, even most Boomer and Generation Jones men, were put off by Bill Clinton. We all instinctively knew he was a weasel, even if we couldn’t quite articulate why. But oh how the soccer moms loved him! He was the pudgy marching band dork they’d actually settled for, carrying on like the Alpha Chad they still knew, in their secret hearts, they were hot enough to snag. What appeared to men (and what actually was) narcissism and braggadocio, looked like caddish swagger to soccer moms. But in actual fact he was just a nerd who’d learned Game ahead of its time, and that’s how he governed …
[Funny how none of the “Game” gurus recognized this. I guess I can’t blame them, since I just now realized it myself, but then again I don’t pimp myself out as some kind of Master Pickup Artist. Instead of aping Tom Cruise and Daniel Craig and those guys, the “Game” crowd should’ve been studying Bill Clinton. That’s what Game can do for you, boys, and yeah, I know you’ve got your sights set a little higher than Monica, but for pete’s sake, the man was President of the United States. He cigar-banged the entire electorate. That’s some serious Game].
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-04-08.
NR: In case “PUA” has fallen sufficiently out of current use — as it probably deserves — here’s a useful overview of the Pick Up Artist jargon by Kim du Toit from 2017.
Update, 15 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
January 13, 2026
“In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles”
Chris Bray was travelling the other day and therefore subjected himself to watching the “news” on television. He now relates “the Fall of Soygon” from that painful experience:
Minneapolis is [Current Thing], and a significant part of the population is for that. Standard reference, insert own text:
BLACK LIVES MATTER FREE PALESTINE NEW PROGRAM LOADING.
The point of the performance is the performance, like art that exists only to comment on the meaning of art. They’re borrowing: “Hence, once again, pastiche: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum”.
I’m briefly on the road in California, and watched television news last night. A protest in Fresno stood up to those bastards from ICE, who embody American imperialism and also something that George Orwell told us, details unclear. But then, almost inevitably, a protester told the television camera that he also marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, and now he’s protesting again against the Trump administration and all its enablers, “who are trying to take our country away from us”.
Of course, something something Selma something something. “Selma envy”, the performative seeking, the wish to be a soldier in a great cause: insert great cause here. George Wallace was apparently also opposed to widespread Somali social welfare fraud, the great beating heart of the Civil Rights Movement. All causes are the same cause. “I’m against this situation that is happening”, the protesters explain. Arresting someone who has a deportation order is functionally identical to beating people who march against segregation, because in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles. Monday, rage in the streets, Tuesday, rage in the streets, Wednesday, rage in the streets …
The Minneapolis circle jerk is producing endless video of middle-aged white leftist women doing THE SAME performance, endlessly, like there are a thousand pieces of footage that all show the same moment with different faces. Here, go watch one. Come back when you’re done.
Update, 15 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
Navies in the news
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Konrad talks about the latest “OMG we’re all going to die!” pants-wetting over scary new hypersonic missiles as a threat to the navies of the west, especially the US Navy’s big carriers:
R.C. Maxwell @RCMaxw3ll
EXCLUSIVE: After Russia used hypersonics in western Ukraine, @RedState talked with senior executives from American startup @CastelionCorp, which is on the brink of finishing a comparable missile system that surpasses the capabilities of Russia & China.
This is insane and it’s great news for the U.S. Navy.
All the worst people keep telling me Trump-class battleships are “obsolete” because of hypersonic missiles.
Then this drops:
“Blackbeard, engineered from a clean-sheet design by former SpaceX alumni, will not only match but decisively outpace foreign systems … rapid iteration and scalable production. We’re not just going to provide a comparable missile. We’re going to provide better missiles.”
A tiny startup just told Russia and China’s entire missile-industrial complex: we can beat you.
That’s the tell.
If hypersonics were the unstoppable carrier-killers people claim, you wouldn’t see startups leapfrogging them in a garage with venture capital. You’d see locked-in monopolies and terrified Western navies.
Here’s what the hype crowd misses:
1) Future battleships won’t be naked.
They will carry layered anti-hypersonic defenses, directed-energy weapons, decoys, and interceptors specifically designed to kill these things.2) Hitting a moving ship at hypersonic speed is brutally hard.
No nation has publicly demonstrated a successful hypersonic strike on a maneuvering warship. China hit a fake carrier sitting still in the desert. That proves almost nothing.
Think about the physics.
Flying a kamikaze plane into a carrier was hard but pilots had eyes, brains, and real-time judgment.
Now imagine doing that blind, with sensors the size of a soda can, while the target is jamming, maneuvering, spoofing, and throwing decoys.
Now imagine the Honey I Shrunk the Kids laser made you the size of an ant and you are told to steer a bullet into a weaving jet ski.
Russia can hit slow oil tankers. If they could reliably hit moving ships bringing supplies into Ukraine, they already would have.
3) Hypersonics are scarce and insanely expensive.
Even if it took 100 missiles to score a hit on a battleship, that’s 100 missiles that aren’t hitting ports, refineries, factories, air bases, and ammo depots.
Most of those targets don’t shoot back. None of them weave like a battleship.
Battleships change the economics of war.
They force the enemy to burn their most precious weapons just to try to hurt one ship.
That’s not vulnerability.
That’s deterrence.Stop black-pilling naval power. The physics, the economics, and now the tech sector are all pointing in the same direction.
Also on naval matters, Matt Gurney at The Line talks about his unfamiliar feelings of hope that the Canadian government’s promised spending boost for the Royal Canadian Navy will not only happen, but that the RCN may generate significantly improved capabilities as a result:
Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship HMCS Harry DeWolf shortly after launch in 2018. The ship was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy in June, 2021.
A day or two ago, I found myself thinking about the state of the Royal Canadian Navy. Because, I mean, hey — who doesn’t?
Anyone who has paid much attention to my work will be aware that I’m not exactly bullish on our country’s ability to get much done — especially on the file of military procurement. Yet, a day or two ago, I found myself thinking about the state of the Royal Canadian Navy and feeling something almost like … hope? Is this what hope feels like?
There is a lot going on in Canadian naval news, and that fits a broader pattern. There’s a lot going on on the seas globally, and, somewhat to my surprise, Canada seems to be doing a pretty good job — could be better, but could be worse — adapting to the new reality.
[…]
So let’s talk about seapower. The U.S. has it — not as much as it wants, but it’s got it. It wants more. Even if that ends up taking some pretty weird forms. And others are racing to catch up.
Including, intriguingly, Canada.
Last week, Canadian shipyard Seaspan announced that it had signed agreements with both Finland and American shipyards to licence its design for Multi-Purpose Icebreakers to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Arctic Security Cutter Program. And while the “Elbows Up” crowd may look askance at the prevalence of the word “American” in that sentence, this is damned interesting — not only are we continuing to show interest in the Arctic, but we’re also trying to sustain real shipbuilding in this country. The situation in the White House is so bizarre these days that it’s hard to take any announcement like this to the bank, but it was notable. If nothing else, it would be nice to see more efforts like this — whether the plans work will, alas, largely be out of our hands.
In addition to that, a few more stories came to mind. The first was this announcement from a few months ago: the Irving Shipyards have begun work on the final Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship of the Harry DeWolf class. Irving is also getting started on the next generation of Canada’s main warships, the River-class destroyers. Canada is actively seeking a replacement, in far greater numbers, of its current fleet of problematic submarines. And there’s also growing talk about a new smaller, mid-range class of Canadian warship, dubbed, for now, the Continental Defence Corvette. (Which I guess rolls off the tongue better than the See, Trump, We’re Spending On the Military Now Program.)
It’s easy to be a cynic on Canadian defence procurement — I am cynical about Canadian defence procurement. But then I looked at the ships being seized by U.S. forces. At Russia cutting cables, China ringing Taiwan with missiles and the U.S. throwing fleets around like Theodore Roosevelt has something to prove. And I look at a plan to not only replace Canada’s (too small) fleet of warships, but to considerably grow it … and it’s hard not to see the bigger picture.
Reverting to a pre-1945 geopolitical reality isn’t going to be an exercise in vibes. It’s going to be an exercise in power — or at least attempts to wield power. Air forces matter, cyber matters, drones matter and Lord knows armies matter. But they matter locally. True global power, or at least the ability to give a global power some pause before they decide to whisk your el jefe off to a Manhattan courtroom in a tracksuit, requires the ability to control your coasts and all the ocean approaches to them.
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The History of SPAM
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Jul 2025Sliced SPAM layered with cream cheese filling, sliced and served with potato salad and tomatoes
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1951SPAM. The iconic canned meat product. Beloved by some, reviled by others, SPAM was buoyed by a very successful marketing blitz by the Hormel company starting in the 1930s. There were radio and magazine ads, The Hormel Girls (a singing group), and recipes.
I’m not the biggest fan of SPAM, and this recipe turned out way too salty for me. If you want to make the historical recipe, go ahead and follow it, but I would personally opt for the reduced sodium SPAM and cut out the salt in the cream cheese mixture. If you like SPAM, definitely try this out! It’s super flavorful, but it’s just not to my taste.
Tender, pure-pork SPAM joins with a zesty cream cheese mixture for memorable eating. Serve for supper or lunch — or as a noteworthy appetizer.
SPAM ‘n’ Cheese Ribbon Loaf
Cut in 8 slices……1 whole SPAM
Mix together……1 (3-oz.) package cream cheese (softened with a little milk)
1 tsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. grated onion
1 tbsp. minced parsley
1/4 tsp. salt
Spread between……slices of SPAM
Chill……4 hours (or longer; overnight if desired). Slice and serve. Good with deviled eggs or potato salad.Economical all-meat buy! No bone, no waste. SPAM is all meat … juicy pork shoulder and mild, tender ham, with Hormel’s unequalled seasonings.
— Hormel advertisement, 1951
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January 12, 2026
A Modern Integrally Suppressed Pistol for Everyone: The SilencerCo Maxim 9
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Aug 2025SilencerCo announced the Maxim-9 pistol in late 2015. Having gone through some huge growth of the past few years, the company wanted to expand its capabilities and thought that the time was right for a modern integrally suppressed pistol. It was a unique new design of modern semiautomatic pistol build from the ground up to be integrally suppressed. The action is a proprietary delayed blowback system with all of the moving parts in the back half of the slide. This leaves the front of the gun dedicated entirely to suppressor volume.
The guns were released at SHOT Show 2017, and were relatively slow sellers, because of the high price and the required NFA registration. The expected passage of the Hearing Protection Act around that time would have been a huge boon for sales, but did not ultimately happen. Still, production continued until tapering off in early 2021 as SilencerCo shifted priority to regular suppressor manufacture in the face of a boom in demand.
The project may not have been a massive success for SilencerCo, but it was still a worthy endeavor that they do not regret. It helped mature the company, forcing them to embrace new proficiency in things like GD&T and advanced quality control machinery. And the pistol is, in fact, very cool.
(more…)
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January 11, 2026
QotD: The limits of foreign policy realism
Instead realism is the view that international politics is fundamentally structured by the fact that states seek to maximize their power, act more or less rationally to do so, and are unrestrained by customs or international law. Thus the classic Thucydidean formulation in its most simple terms, “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must”,1 with the additional proviso that, this being the case, all states seek to be as strong as possible.
If you accept those premises, you can chart a fairly consistent analytical vision of interstate activity basically from first principles, describing all sorts of behavior – balancing, coercion, hegemony and so on – that ought to occur in such systems and which does occur in the real world. Naturally, theory being what it is, neo-realist theory (which is what we call the modern post-1979 version of this thinking) is split into its own sub-schools based on exactly how they imagine this all works out, with defensive realism (“states aim to survive”) and offensive realism (“states aim to maximize power”), but we needn’t get into the details.
So when someone says they are a “foreign policy realist”, assuming they know what they’re talking about, they’re not saying they have a realistic vision of international politics, but that they instead believe that the actions of states are governed mostly by the pursuit of power and security, which they pursue mostly rationally, without moral, customary or legal constraint. This is, I must stress, not the only theory of the case (and we’ll get into some limits in a second).
The first problem with IR Realists is that they run into a contradiction between realism as an analytical tool and realism as a set of normative behaviors. Put another way, IR realism runs the risk of conflating “states generally act this way”, with “states should generally act this way”. You can see that specific contradiction manifested grotesquely in John Mearsheimer’s career as of late, where his principle argument is that because a realist perspective suggests that Russia would attack Ukraine that Russia was right to do so and therefore, somehow, the United States should not contest this (despite it being in the United States’ power-maximizing interest to do so). Note the jump from the analytical statement (“Russia was always likely to do this”) to the normative statement (“Russia carries no guilt, this is NATO’s fault, we should not stop this”). The former, of course, can always be true without the latter being necessary.
I should note, this sort of “normative smuggling” in realism is not remotely new: it is exactly how the very first instances of realist political thought are framed. The first expressions of IR realism are in Thucydides, where the Athenians – first at Corinth and then at Melos – make realist arguments expressly to get other states to do something, namely to acquiesce to Athenian Empire. The arguments in both cases are explicitly normative, that Athens did not act “contrary to the common practice of mankind” (expressed in realist dog-eat-dog terms) and so in the first case shouldn’t be punished with war by Sparta and in the latter case, that the Melians should submit to Athenian rule. In both cases, the Athenians are smuggling in a normative statement about what a state should do (in the former case, seemingly against interest!) into a description of what states supposedly always do.
I should note that one of my persistent complaints against international relations study in political science in general is that political scientists often read Thucydides very shallowly, dipping in for the theory and out for the rest. But Thucydides’ reader would not have missed that it is always the Athenians who make the realist arguments and they lost both the arguments [AND] the war. When Thucydides has the Melians caution that the Athenians’ “realist” ruthlessness would mean “your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon”2 the ancient Greek reader knows they are right, in a way that it often seems to me political science students seem to miss.
And there’s a logical contradiction inherent in this sort of normative smuggling, which is that the smuggling is even necessary at all. After all, if states are mostly rational and largely pursue their own interests, loudly insisting that they should do so seems a bit pointless, doesn’t it? Using realism as a way to describe the world or to predict the actions of other states is consistent with the logical system, but using it to persuade other states – or your own state – seems to defeat the purpose. If you believe realism is true, your state and every other is going to act to maximize its power, regardless of what you do or say. If they can do otherwise than there must be some significant space for institutions, customs, morals, norms or simple mistakes and suddenly the air-tight logical framework of realism begins to break down.
That latter vision gives rise to constructivism (“international relations are shaped by ideology and culture”) and IR liberalism (“international relations are also shaped by institutions, which can bend the system away from the endless conflict realism anticipates”). The great irony of realism is that to think that having more realists in power would cause a country to behave in a more realist way is inconsistent with neo-Realism which would suggest countries ought to behave in realist ways even in the absence of realist theory or thinkers.
In practice – and this is the punchline – in my experience most “realists”, intentionally or not, use realism as a cover for strong ideological convictions, typically convictions which are uncomfortable to utter in the highly educated spaces that foreign policy chatter tends to happen. Sometimes those convictions are fairly benign – it is not an accident that there’s a vocal subset of IR-realists with ties to the CATO Institute, for instance. They’re libertarians who think the foreign policy adventures that often flew under the banner of constructivist or liberal internationalist label – that’s where you’d find “spreading democracy will make the world more peaceful” – were really expensive and they really dislike taxes. But “we should just spend a lot less on foreign policy” is a tough sell in the foreign policy space; realism can provide a more intellectually sophisticated gloss to the idea. Sometimes those convictions are less benign; one can’t help but notice the realist pretensions of some figures in the orbit of the current administration have a whiff of authoritarianism or ethnocentrism in them, since a realist framework can be used to drain imperial exploitation and butchery of its moral component, rendering it “just states maximizing their power – and better to be exploiter than exploited”.
One question I find useful to ask of any foreign policy framework, but especially of self-claimed realist frameworks is, “what compromise, what tradeoff does this demand of you?” Strategy, after all, is the art of priorities and that means accepting some things you want are lower priority; in the case of realism which holds that states seek to maximize power, it may mean assigning a high priority to things you do not want the state to do at all but which maximize its power. A realism deserving of the name, in applied practice would be endlessly caveated: “I hate, this but …” “I don’t like this, but …” “I would want to do this, but …” If a neo-realist analysis leads only to comfortable conclusions that someone and their priorities were right everywhere all along, it is simply ideology, wearing realism as a mask. And that is, to be frank, the most common form, as far as I can tell.
That isn’t to say there is nothing to neo-realism or foreign policy realists. I think as an analytical and predict tool, realism is quite valuable. States very often do behave in the way realist theory would suggest they ought, they just don’t always do so and it turns out norms and expectations matter a lot. Not the least of which because, as we’ve noted before, the economic model on which realist and neo-realist thinking was predicted basically no longer exists. To return to the current Ukraine War: is Putin really behaving rationally in a power-maximizing mode by putting his army to the torch capturing burned out Ukrainian farmland one centimeter at a time and no faster? It sure seems like Russian power has been reduced rather than enhanced by this move, even though realists will insist that Russia’s effort to dominate states near it is rational power-maximizing under offensive realism.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday, June 27, 2025 (On the Limits of Realism)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-06-27.
- Thuc. 5.89.
- Thuc. 5.90.
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January 10, 2026
Why Greenland of all places?
President Trump’s renewed interest in Greenland seems inexplicable to most of us, unless it’s part of his notorious 51st state plan to further encircle Canada (forget I said that, the Liberals might use it to scare the boomers again…). A few days back, CDR Salamander discussed the “unfortunate Greenland kerfuffle” on his Substack:
It would be an understatement to say that I am not all that pleased with where we are in January 2026 with the Greenland question. This would not have been the productive path I would have recommended because, in the end, this is a very serious issue.
Sure, in the first few months of 2025, the meme-ish nature of it all was fun and funny … but only to a point.
In 2026, Denmark is not going to sell or otherwise transfer Greenland to the USA like they did with the now-U.S. Virgin Islands a bit more than a century ago.
However, before we go further, if you have a knee-jerk reaction to support or oppose anything or any topic because DJT is involved, please repress that feeling until at least the end of the post. It isn’t productive, enlightening, or good for your health — so give it a rest for a bit until we are done, then you can carry on as before.
Next, let’s do as we should in most things: let’s go to the chartroom.
Object Zero’s crayon work on the Arctic Institute’s map is superb to illustrate that point.
The Europeans have whipped themselves into an almost comical lather over it all. Having lived with their NATSEC nomenklatura for years, I’m not shocked. They tend to be very narrowly read, get their ideas about the USA from NYT, WaPo, the usual suspects in East Coast Universitlandia, and their nomenklatura is worm-ridden with the same people who opposed Cold War NATO efforts to counter the Soviet Union’s militarism and supported every anti-USA trend of the fiscal quarter, etc. It is always 1968 or 1983 with these people.
Unhelpful to trans-Atlantic cooperation has been an almost gleeful approach to triggering these people who never thought DJT would come back to power, and from 2020-24 acted like it. The vengeful and bitter are fighting with the frag-pattern hitting everyone else.
Behind that triggering and, at least from this side of the pond, trolling, is a very serious security concern in the high north that Greenland is, literally, right in the middle of.
At The Conservative Woman, Jonathon Riley wonders if Greenland is worth more than the NATO alliance:
Satellite view of Greenland, Iceland, and parts of Northern Canada.
NASA/Ames Research Center, 17 May, 2005.
Greenland is the world’s largest island, (just) contiguous with Canada, and geographically part of North America. It was colonised by Denmark in the tenth century but the Norse settlements, which farmed sheep and cattle, died out during the mini-ice age of the medieval period, not long before the rediscovery of America by Columbus.
The majority of the population is now Inuit with only about 10 per cent being Nordic. Following a 1979 referendum, Denmark granted Greenland home rule and in 2008, self-government increased further. Denmark retains control of citizenship, security, finance and foreign affairs. Greenland joined the EU with Denmark but has since left. As a self-governing part of Denmark, it remains a member of Nato.
Greenland sits astride an area of great strategic importance. First, the Arctic ice is retreating as the result of an entirely natural process of cyclical warming – nothing to do with so-called man-made “climate change”. This will end when the world enters the next ice age, which is long overdue.
As the Arctic ice retreats, ships can sail through the north-east and north-west passages, sought for so long by explorers. This means not only that transit times can be reduced but also that the Russian “shadow fleet” of unregistered oil tankers engaged in moving sanctioned oil can more easily dodge interception, as is happening to Venezuelan oil tankers.
Second, Greenland probably has reserves of oil, coal and gas concealed beneath the ice cap, but exploration has been slow and difficult, for obvious reasons. Estimates put Greenland fourth in terms of likely reserves in the Arctic region.
Third, in Greenland’s territorial waters in the Arctic Ocean there are huge reserves of fish, shrimp, whales and seals – valuable food resources especially for China and Japan.
Finally, there is the matter of fresh water, an increasingly scarce commodity in many parts of the world. The Greenland ice sheet holds about 10 per cent of the world’s fresh water.
It is therefore easy to see why both the Russians and the Americans see Greenland as a valuable asset. Donald Trump made aggressive noises about “acquiring” Greenland during his first presidential term and has now made further remarks, perhaps emboldened by his successes in Iran and Venezuela.
Special envoy Jeff Landry has been appointed to examine how the US could acquire Greenland. The means so far mentioned have included diplomacy, a territorial purchase – the US has done this before in its history, for example Louisiana and Alaska – or a lease agreement.
The problem here is that the Greenlanders and the Danes are having none of it. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told the BBC: “As long as we have a kingdom consisting of Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, we cannot accept actions that undermine our territorial integrity”. Rasmussen is on solid legal ground, as the UN Charter specifically states that frontiers must not be changed by force.
In his weekly post, Andrew Sullivan says that Trump is conducting a “Viking foreign policy” (trigger warning: contains Andrew Sullivan):
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QotD: The United Nations
David Warren, “The nuts, & Bolton”, Ottawa Citizen, 2005-09-17.
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January 9, 2026
Instead of “regime change” … “regime decapitation”
At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter considers the startling return of military competence and the ongoing echoes of the decapitating attack on Venezuela:
Photo from Postcards from Barsoom
In the age of simulations and simulacra, every action is also a symbol. Within the hyperreality of discourse the semiotic content of a public event is primary to its physical, political, or economic import. This is true of war as much as anything else; war in this age takes place first and foremost in the psychic realm, at the level of meaning, of hermeneusis. Warfare is psychological, not only in the sense of bolstering morale or breaking the will of the enemy to fight, but in the more fundamental sense of affecting the minds of those caught up in its spectacle by inserting new ideas that change the way that they think. This is most effective, as any magician or hypnotist or marketing executive will tell you, when those effects are left implicit, that they might operate directly upon the collective subconscious, in the shadow realm of instinct and intuition from which all political impulse springs.
With that in mind we might ask, in the spirit of an augur inquiring after the flight of a dove at daybreak, a circling hawk at high noon, or the cold gaze of a crow in the gloaming, what is the meaning of the Caracas raid? We do not need to assume that the meaning we look for in this action is intentional, though we should not rule this out, either; what matters is how the act will manifest symbolically, how it will be interpreted in the minds of onlookers, which it will do regardless of intention.
The superficial import of the action is clear enough. America has seized control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world, and at a stroke applies crippling pressure to the economies of China, Iran, and Cuba (who were Venezuela’s best grey-market customers), as well as to the economies of its adversary Russia and its wayward sibling Canada (both of which depend for their prosperity upon high oil prices). Both China and Russia have been deprived of a key New World ally, and thus the Monroe Doctrine is reasserted, and foreign powers pushed out of Washington’s sphere of influence. A hostile communist government has been decapitated, opening the way for the millions of Venezuelans displaced by Bolivarian tyranny, refugees whose presence has destabilized Venezuela’s neighbours for many years now, to return home.
To be sure, there is still great uncertainty. Hugo Chavez’ tomb may have been destroyed, but his Bolivarian regime is still largely intact, his apparatchicks remain in control of Venezuela’s state apparatus and military, and his terrorist colectivos still control the streets of Caracas.
Trump’s declaration that America now owns Venezuela’s oil feels a bit premature. Can one really claim control, without boots on the ground? I confess that it is not at all clear to me exactly how this is all supposed to work. Perhaps it is meant to function through pure intimidation: whoever ends up assuming power in Venezuela, they will know that if they don’t do as they’re told, they might be next, and perhaps will not be given the grace of an arrest and a show trial but simply executed without warning by drone; meanwhile, America offers itself as the sole legitimate customer for Venezuela’s sole marketable product, while providing its oil industry engineers to rebuild (and assume control of) infrastructure fallen into disrepair following Chavez’ nationalization and subsequent decades of neglect and mismanagement. Trump holds out one hand in an offer of assistance and mutual benefit, while holding back his other curled in a mailed fist, a threat made plausible by the fact that he just punched them hard in the mouth.
Still, all of this is nothing more than realpolitik, the hard edges of power in the material world.
The real meaning, the symbolic importance, lies deeper. It is not measured in dollars or barrels of oil. It is a message.
So what is that message?
And some of the recipients of that message should be paying especially close attention:
Mass third world invasion is a choice. Economic sabotage in the name of preventing the weather from changing is a choice. Ruining the lives of young men with DEI is a choice. Blackwashing our history and mythology is a choice. Predatory taxation is a choice. Overregulation is a choice. Brainwashing the young to hate themselves is a choice. Yasslighting the young women into choosing girlbossery over family is a choice. Sacrificing the lives of the young to the fears of the old during the COVID lockdowns was a choice.
Allowing the incompetent to run things in the name of ‘social justice’ is a choice, and the contrast between the litany of inept fumbles that has resulted in and the smooth professionalism on display in the Caracasian raid has thrown the consequences of that choice – and the consequences of its alternative – into sharp relief.
And all we have to do to reverse the decline is decapitate the beast, put the right men in charge, and everything will follow naturally from there. Nature will begin to heal, as surely as Yellowstone’s ecology repaired itself once wolves were returned to their rightful place at the predatory apex.
That is why leaders across the Western world are squealing so loudly.
Canadian liberals, for example, are not actually worried that a Delta Force team will rappel down from an MH-47G Chinook Special Operations Helicopter to blackbag Prime Minister Mark Carney from 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1M 1M4, and not only because the inadequate security of the traditional prime minister’s domicile has motivated Carney to instead take up residence at Rideau Cottage, 1 Sussex Drive, where he is usually home by 9 pm with his wife Diana. The concern is much more general: that the beleaguered Canadian people, along with those of the rest of the rotting West, will look at the remarkable results obtained by regime decapitation in the United States, and start getting ideas.
Want to fix the United Kingdom, and make Great Britain again? Sweep the traitors of the Labour Party out of Parliament, remove that pusillanimous android Two-Tier Queer from power, put Nigel Farage and 300 Reform MPs in their place, and watch as they invoke the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy to cast off three decades of Blairite Fabianism in a Great Repeal Act that frees the British state to remigrate the foreign invaders, rebuild the country’s industry, and revive the British military.
Want to fix Europe? Cast down the old women in Brussels – they have no popular legitimacy in any case – and remove their creatures, like Macron or Merz, who keep their peoples yoked to the suicidal EUrocracy. Raise up nationalists in their place – Le Pen, the AfD – and watch as Europe’s natural creative genius and martial spirit reasserts itself. No more Net Zero incapacitating industry, no more European Court of Human Rights preventing invaders from being remigrated, no more Digital Services Act censoring the Internet, no more micromanagerial bureaucratic overregulation strangling the economy.
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