Quotulatiousness

September 18, 2025

NYC smokers get most of their cigarettes from the black market

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

Smokers in New York City pay very high taxes for their nicotine delivery systems, so it shouldn’t have surprised public health officials that many would turn to the black market … but the state and local taxes add so much to the price of a pack of cigarettes that most of the supply now comes from the black market:

“Enjoyin’ a cigarette at busy Time Square, NYC” by Mel Schmidt is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

In 2023, New York raised its cigarette excise tax by $1.00 to $5.35 per pack. New York City imposes its own tax of $1.50 per pack, and that’s before you include federal and sales taxes, making for the most expensive smokes in the country. That is, cigarettes are expensive in New York for those who pay those taxes. But state officials were warned that such a high rate would drive consumers to the black market, and that’s exactly what happened. According to recent research, more New Yorkers than ever are turning to tax-evading illicit sources for their nicotine needs.

Taxes Into Good Health — or Not

When the New York excise tax was hiked, the Albany Times-Union noted, “it’s the nation’s highest and brings a pack of cigarettes at many retailers to about $12 … Health advocates hailed the increase, saying it will lead to fewer smokers and cancer deaths. Anti-tax groups, though, predicted it will increase trafficking in illicit untaxed cigarettes in the state.”

Health advocates like taxing vices on the theory that raising taxes simultaneously generates government revenue while escalating prices for allegedly bad things — like cigarettes — out of reach of many consumers. What they rarely consider is that there are other options, such as buying cigarettes smuggled from jurisdictions with lower levies.

“New York has created a cigarette-smuggling empire, and the worst is yet to come,” Todd Nesbit, an economics professor at Ball State University, and Michael LaFaive, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, warned even before the 2023 tax increase. “It’s the unavoidable consequence of the state’s decades long history of raising the cigarette tax.”

“If enacted, consumers will go across borders to do their shopping or rely on black-market suppliers,” agreed the Tax Foundation’s Adam Hoffer. “Tax revenues will fall, illicit activities will thrive, and law enforcement spending will need to increase.”

In fact, as Nesbit, LaFaive, and Hoffer emphasized, even before the dollar-per-pack tax hike, more than half of cigarettes sold in the state of New York lacked local tax stamps and were smuggled from elsewhere. Since 2023, illicit dealers appear to have claimed even more market share.

QotD: Americans, poker, and chess

Filed under: Europe, Gaming, Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The game of chess has never been held in great esteem by the North Americans. Their culture is steeped in deeply anti-intellectual tendencies. They pride themselves in having created the game of poker. It is their national game, springing from a tradition of westward expansion, of gun-slinging skirt chasers who slept with cows and horses. They distrust chess as a game of Central European immigrants with a homesick longing for clandestine conspiracies in quiet coffee houses. Their deepest conviction is that bluff and escalation will achieve more than scheming and patience (witness their foreign policy).

J.H. Donner, “The King: Chess Pieces”, New In Chess, 2008.

September 17, 2025

The Korean War Week 65: Another Bloody Ridge Begins? – September 16, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 16 Sep 2025

Bloody Ridge is barely over, but orders have come for the UN forces to already attack the next ridge to the north, and UN planes violating the Kaesong neutral zone sabotage Matt Ridgway’s plans for conquest.

Chapters
00:00 Hook
00:49 Recap
01:27 Van Fleet’s Planning
08:44 The War and the Conference
14:28 Summary
14:46 Conclusion
15:20 Call to Action
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“It would be a grave error to scrap NORAD”

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

J.L. Granatstein makes the case that abandoning NORAD in a fit of pique over the antics of the Bad Orange Man would be worse for Canadian national defence interests and might not even be noticed in Washington DC:

There are beginning murmurings that Canada should get out of the North American Aerospace Defence agreement (NORAD). Given the Trump administration’s hostile tone — its 51st state suggestions, its tariffs, and its growing concerns with Arctic defence — the United States has become a difficult partner and a threat to Canadian sovereignty. But would this be a sensible decision for Ottawa to make?

Not at all. In the first place, NORAD is a joint alliance to defend North America against Russian, Chinese, or other potential attackers. Canada provides aircraft, radars, personnel, and expertise to this role that serves our national interests. It would be a grave error to scrap NORAD and to take on the role of defending our part of North America on our own. It would also be hugely expensive.

The problem, however, is that the Trump administration is right: Canada is, in fact, not doing enough today to defend our portion of North America and protect our sovereignty in the region.

The Royal Canadian Air Force has 1980s vintage CF-18s flying patrols and occasional larger surveillance aircraft monitoring traffic in Arctic waters; there are snowmobile and ATV patrols of Canadian Rangers armed with rifles; and a few army exercises in the north each year. The Royal Canadian Navy has a half dozen new Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessels that have limited utility in Arctic waters and are very lightly armed, and the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) has only one 66-year-old icebreaker capable of clearing thick ice. The CCG is now under the authority of the Department of National Defence, but its members, unlike those in the Canadian Armed Forces, are unionized, and its vessels are unarmed. This could be a problem in a conflict.

Yes, Ottawa has promised to do more. The Trudeau government agreed to the $38.6 billion NORAD Modernization Plan, which includes the new Northern Approaches Surveillance System featuring the Arctic Over-the-Horizon Radar and a Polar Over-the-Horizon Radar, enhancing early warning and threat tracking from the North for air and maritime threats. These systems will not be fully operational until the 2040s.

There’s more, but it’s behind the paywall.

QotD: Indecision

Filed under: Government, History, Military, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For those who’ve seen Band of Brothers, there’s a very telling conversation between Carville and Winters, as the sergeant complains about his platoon commander, Lt. Dyke:

    “It’s not that he makes bad decisions; it’s that he doesn’t make any decisions at all.”

Any time you see that situation in a manager, any manager, it is a flashing neon sign of incompetence.

One of the reasons why Marxists make such poor managers is that if they are presented with a situation which cannot be addressed by Party doctrine, they are largely indecisive. Even worse, if that doctrine runs counter to good management, they will use that as the underpinning for their indecisiveness. We saw this a lot under Obama, who was pathetically underqualified as a manager, having had no executive experience in his entire life before becoming POTUS. More often than not, when faced with a decision, he simply froze and allowed events to dictate the outcome, even if that outcome was inimical to the interests of the country he was supposed to be governing. (And to prove my point above, his Marxist doctrine held that the United States was a malignant force in world affairs, so allowing harm to befall the country was — to his mind — actually the proper thing to do as it “corrected” or atoned for America’s past sins.)

Kim du Toit, “Failure”, Splendid Isolation, 2020-06-04.

September 16, 2025

No sensible person wants to start a civil war

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

There are always angry folks online who take any current event as a conversational pretext for talking about taking up arms against … whoever they always seem to want to take up arms against. In decades past, you could more easily find tantrums like that among the conspiratorial right but today it seems that the left is leading the charge, so to speak. As a bit of a follow-on to this post, here’s more from Tom Kratman and Harry Kitchener on what might need to be done to start that unwanted-by-all-sensible-folks conflict:

Let’s assume, though, that you people want to kick off what we might call a hard debate – that you plan to use organized and precise violence to combat your enemies and promote your views.

Actually doing it is pretty easy – a patsy with a hunting rifle has a pretty good chance, assuming a bit of talent, to take out any given public figure (assuming no Secret Service protection, that makes things much more difficult). He’ll almost certainly be caught, of course; in a best case, arrested, tried and sentenced to life … or death, in a worst case, killed during the arrest. If you’ve got an inexhaustible supply of these patsies I suppose that’s sustainable – it’s meaningless, of course, as it’ll just bring the other side to the conclusion that if this is the game in future, they’ll happily play along (and they have more guns, more training and probably more immediate support than you do. And they’re starting to really hate you, too).

If you actually *want* to kick off a low-level civil war (I have to say I can’t understand why you would want this, but, hey ho, your call), you need to think in more sustainable terms. Read back on our pieces for some hints on the operational, logistic and security considerations you need to establish a covert, violent organization. Particularly consider the issue of finance – this stuff costs big money to organize and execute and I’m not sure you have access to the sort of volumes of laundered cash you’re going to need.

You’re also going to need to be tough, properly tough in order to cope with the immense pressure you’re going to feel from government and the Right alike, to say nothing of the moral (and morale) impact of inevitable casualties, not just those arrested and sentenced, but also those killed and maimed. Don’t underestimate the impact on one of your “active service units” losing one or two of their members, or of the occasional need just to abandon them in order to get away.

Assuming – and, to be frank, I don’t see this working – but, assuming you do manage to organize some sort of covert violent organization, what would it be *for*? What’s the end state you’re looking to achieve? Proletarian revolution, the righteous rage of the mobilized working class? Not a fucking chance, not in the USA. Every historical example we have of the left trying this kind of thing to raise an oppressive right wing government, to mobilize the masses for the left, shows, instead, massive cheering from those masses for the government that then proceeds to exterminate you.

Cowing the Right through violence? Again, not a hope – the Right (as you call it, a better term might be “the majority of the US population”) tends to be pretty much OK with justified violence, tends to have a larger proportion of people who’ve seen the elephant (this is military slang for “the greatest show on earth”, which is to say, war) and tends to be much better armed than your folks are. On the plus side, you’re in America so becoming better armed is easy. Becoming better armed without leaving a trail pointing straight at you, on the other hand, is hard. And you don’t have the criminal connections to avoid this.

Your base is relatively small and relatively concentrated in certain areas and in certain sectors – soft states, academia, the media, that kind of thing. Don’t believe a word big tech says, they’ll drop you and switch immediately as their share price is adversely affected. And note that the “disciplines” your sort of people tend to undertake in college – gender studies, ethnic studies, gay studies, feminist interpretive dance – are great for motivation to act for the left, but not very good for competence in action.

This makes your base incredibly vulnerable. No matter how effective your “active service units” might be in doing dreadful things to individuals on the Right, you’ll always be outgunned – and every single successful operation you carry out will generate greater support for your opponents. What’s that? Yes, of course it’s unfair and unjust. Deal with it.

What you have, always, to remember is that however important some things are to you, most people are either indifferent to them, or actively hostile to them. No amount of killing is going to change that, probably quite the contrary.

Update, 17 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Fenian Needham Conversion: Just the Thing for Invading Canada

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 May 2025

The Fenian Brotherhood was formed in the US in 1858, a partner organization to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The groups were militant organizations looking to procure Irish independence from the British, and they found significant support among the Irish-American immigrant community. In November 1865 they purchased some 7500 1861- and 1863-pattern muskets left over from Civil War production, and used them to invade Canada in April 1866. The idea was to capture the country and then trade it to the British in exchange for Irish independence … but the invasion went quite badly. The Fenians briefly held Fort Erie, but were pushed out after a few hours and largely arrested by American forces.

The Fenians’ muskets were confiscated, but all returned by the end of 1866 in exchange for promised Irish-American support of embattled President Johnson. By 1868, the group was making plans for another attempt at conquering Canada. This time they would have better arms — they obtained a disused locomotive factory in Trenton NJ and set up the Pioneer Arms Works to convert 5,020 muskets into centerfire Needham Conversion breechloaders. These were given chambers that could fire standard .58 centerfire ammunition, or the .577 Snider ammunition that the Fenians expected to be able to procure once in Canada. Most of the guns also had their stocks cut, to allow them to be packed in shorter crates for transit. These usually have a distinctive “V” cut in the stock, which was spliced back together before use.

When the second invasion came in April 1870, it was again a failure. Only 800-1000 men turned out of the 5,000+ expected. They were scattered among several different muster points on the border, and the Canadians were once again aware of their plans. The most substantial fight was at a place called Eccles Hill, where the Missisiquoi Home Guard was ready and waiting for them with good Ballard rifles. Upon crossing the border, the Fenians were soundly defeated.

This second time, the guns were confiscated and not returned. Instead, the Watervliet Arsenal sold them as surplus in 1871. They were purchased by Schuyler, Hartley & Graham for commercial resale, and thanks to that several hundred remain in collector hands today.
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September 15, 2025

The Cold War in Latin America Begins: Coups, Communists, and Castro – W2W 44

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

TimeGhost History
Published 14 Sept 2025

Spy rings, covert operations, coups, street violence, and sudden regime changes. This is the turmoil that awaits Latin America after the Second World War. As new ideas from the East gain momentum, the United States tries to hold on to its role as the region’s self-appointed guardian. Which side will ultimately shape the future of this rich and populous region?
(more…)

When folks built their houses from Sears, Roebuck & Co. kits

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I thought I’d discussed the Sears kit homes about a decade back, but perhaps it wasn’t for the blog. Anyway, there’s a nice summary by Katrina Gulliver of how Sears and other companies made home-building great a century ago:

A hundred years ago, kit homes were more common in the US. Sold by Sears, Montgomery Ward, and other local firms, buyers received the plans and the pieces for a house and put it together themselves. Economies of scale made these a viable option for someone looking to build a house in the expanding suburbs.

The 1914 Sears Modern Homes catalog shows three homes that could each be bought for $656 (in the small print, they admit your outlay would be more like $1,250 all-in, including brick, cement, plaster — which they don’t supply — and labor). Your kit house would be delivered by rail; it was generally assumed householders would be handy enough (or know whom to hire) to put it all together from the supplied plans.

According to a 1930 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, National Income and Its Purchasing Power, in 1914, the average clerk could be making $1,000, and a factory manager earning $2,300. That means these houses were within reach of lots of people — especially bearing in mind that land costs in many cities were also relatively low. In Chicago, lots within 5 miles of downtown were available for less than 50¢/square foot in 1914.

Those kit homes included wood, metal, and glass, and reflected both the tastes of consumers and the economies of bulk production. The various styles in the catalog over the years included craftsman, Dutch colonial, Federal, and cottage — styles that have continued to be popular in residential architecture of the US.

The Sears catalog of 1936 states: “This is the age of modern efficiency. No longer can human hands compete with machine precision and production. ‘Speed with accuracy’ is the watchword in any department of our great factories.”

(For those curious about such houses, fans of Sears kit homes put together lists of examples still standing.)

September 14, 2025

Funny … I saw multiple reports that the accused assassin was an extremist “conservative” …

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

I don’t normally lean on content from the social media site formerly known as Twitter, but there’s more solid information there than in 99% of the legacy media. For instance, here’s ESR on the background of the alleged assassin (I use the word “alleged” because I can’t afford lawyers for nuisance suits):

The Salt Lake City FBI office released these photos of a “person of interest” in the Charlie Kirk assassination.

Two newspapers are now reporting that Tyler Robinson was living with a transsexual who is cooperating with the FBI, so I’m going to consider this confirmed.

Rather than talking about the obvious stuff, I want to focus on the questions I think the FBI will be asking the boyfriend.

Not about the assassination itself. They’ve already got Robinson dead to rights on aggravated murder. Given that he apparently had to be dissuaded from committing suicide when he was caught, he may even plead guilty and confess.

No, the interesting question is his connections. With probability approaching unity, he was Antifa. The question is: explicit Antifa, or stochastic?

I think we can take it as given that Robinson wasn’t given orders to kill Kirk by some supervillain sitting at the top of a command hierarchy. Antifa doesn’t work that way.

Antifa is not a unitary conspiracy, it’s a whole bunch of interlocking directorates with common ideological goals. This trades away some capacity for large-scale organization in order to gain resistance against single-point attacks.

To the extent Antifa as a whole takes orders at all, it’s by paying attention to the targets suggested by above-ground left-wing figures. Yes, including Democratic politicians, who treat Antifa as a conveniently deniable militant wing. The decentralization of its organization helps with the deniability, too.

Robinson may have been part of an Antifa cell that provided him with logistical support, knowing what they were contributing to.

Or, he may have been acting alone in a direction shaped by Antifa propaganda. There’s actually a continuum of possibilities; he might have dropped deniable hints to Antifa associates as a way of gaining status within the group.

I think what the boyfriend is going to get the most serious grilling about is the nature and scope of those connections. That is, if Robinson doesn’t reveal them himself.

They’re going to get his cell, if there is one. They may be able to nail down the entire Antifa chapter it’s part of.

Further connections are going to be tough to prove. It is highly unlikely, for example, that there are direct command links from the Democratic National Committee to Antifa.

It will probably be more productive to follow the money; if they can flip the right people in his chapter they may be able to go after dark-money groups like Arabella, the Tides Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations.

Which, to be fair, probably don’t know they’re funding assassinations? But are probably carefully averting their eyes from the fact that they fund people who fund other people who fund assassinations. The network is carefully designed to preserve deniability in all directions.

The long play in smashing a terror network is always to cut its funding chain. That job got well started with the dismantling of USAID, but there’s a lot more work to do.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination may give us the thread that unravels the whole weave.

Also on former-Twitter, Larry Correia:

    Oilfield Rando @Oilfield_Rando
    Imagine the newsroom editor meetings where they’re trying to figure out some way, any way, to spin the news that the shooter was shacked up with a trooner before they publish articles about it.

    Because make no mistake, they can’t avoid publishing it. They know it.

My bet for the news blitz narrative that’s coming —

It’s the fault of his conservative, religious family, for driving this young man to kill because they couldn’t accept his forbidden love. How tragic. The real bad guys here are those conservative Christian hate mongers who won’t let love be love, and as usual liberals are the real victims. Plus a single shot from a really old deer rifle shows why we need to ban assault weapons. If you grew up with a Republican father that means you are MAGA forever and pay no attention to the millions of militant leftists and rainbow haired pronoun people on TikTok bragging about how much they hate and rebelled against their conservative religious parents, that’s different.

Larry Correia, Twitter, 2025-09-13.

“When must we kill them?”

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

On the social media platform previously known as Twitter, Tom Kratman provides an excerpt from The Care and Feeding of Your Right Wing Death Squad:

Reposting this seems apropos:

The Care and Feeding of Your Right Wing Death Squad, Chapter 32 Copyright © 2025, Tom Kratman, Harry Kitchener

“When must we kill them?”

That question was asked recently by a leftist student, one Nicholas Decker, from George Mason University. It’s a very interesting question, and one that most, and perhaps all, hard leftists in the United States are contemplating. Indeed, we see now, from an NCRI / Rutgers survey, that something over half of leftists believe that assassinating Trump would be justified, and nearly half think the same thing about Musk.

Note, here, that this was of all people identifying as left of center. I would suggest that this means that almost nobody who is slightly left of center would agree with that and nearly everybody who is far left of center agrees with that. And if we needed any more proof, just contemplate the number of would be groupies moistening their panties over murderer Luigi Mangione, as pointed out by former New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz.

Why do they think so or why are they wondering about it? It’s actually more understandable than most on the right and perhaps even many on the left would understand. They’re wondering about it because, with the destruction of the Deep State, with so many billionaires turning against the left and – horrrors! – no longer letting the left wing narrative control online and legacy media political discourse, with no prospect of the kind of money being shunted from the taxpayer, through the Federal Government, to left wing NGOs to help swing elections, they do not really think there is any serious prospect of the left ever winning a national election again or, at least, not in their lifetimes. And they may be right about that.

With James Carville telling the Democrats to give the boot to the gender and woke ideologues, the identity politics losers, the little boy penis choppers and little girl breast destroyers and vagina removers; they see themselves being marginalized, losing their influence, and losing their dream, forever. And this seems fairly likely. With no possibility, once Trump gets finished deporting all the illegals, of turning just enough of those illegals into client voters to swing elections just enough for control, they think that leftism will be hopeless in the United States. And they’re probably right about that. With the Communist factories of higher education being broken to the will of the right, with Gramsci’s / Rudi Dutschke’s “Long March Through the Institutions” being walked back, and quickly, they’re thinking about it and wondering about it because leftism is dead in the United States, a corpse just awaiting burial.

So, though the point of this entire exercise in the Right Wing Death Squad has been to convince the left to chill out, FFS, it seems that certain key point bear repeating.

1. Urban Guerilla movements invariably succeed in creating the kind of oppressive government that they believe will infuriate the people and lead to a general uprising. Those governments then proceed to exterminate the Urban Guerillas and all their supporters, and do so to general popular applause.

2. The armed forces, barring some political generals and morally cowardly colonels, hate you and everything about you. Posse Comitatus is only a law, not something in the constitution that would require going through the difficult process of amendment. Change the law – and do but note who has control of the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court (so that constitutional grounds could not be manufactured to create an objection to getting rid of the law) – and the military would be very happy to round you all up. And you’re completely, incompetently, incapable of resisting this.

3. Moreover, though you have a few people with some military experience and training, the key word there is “few”. Yes, yes, I know that, since Vietnam, the left has been obsessed with the inner city black cannon fodder meme, but it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. Conversely, the white working class and conservative populations at large – to the limited extent these categories may differ – are replete with people with a lot of military training and experience and they hate you, too. They also have most of the guns. Your side has fairly few, in comparison, and little skill in using what you do have, alone or in groups.

4. You also fundamentally misunderstand the difference between your approach to violence – as a rheostat to be turned up or down, to suit – with the right’s – which is an on-off switch marked “peace and good feelings” on the one hand, and “kill every one of them” on the other.

You know all those terrible things you and your pals like to say about right wing, especially but not always white, Americans? Well, we know you don’t really believe those things because if you did you would be afraid ever to leave your mom’s basement. But you really ought to try to grasp this; sometimes those things are true.

Although our purpose with this project has been to try to get you to save yourselves, still, one cannot help but look forward to the prospect of young Mr. Decker finding this out.

So, if you were to succeed in killing the president, you will get Vance. Vance will have a mandate, in that case, to obliterate you. If he fails to carry out that mandate then genuine Right Wing Death Squads will take up the slack. No trial, no due process at all; they will proceed to obliterate you and every safe harbor and supporter you have, and often in creatively disgusting ways.

Amusingly enough, your only safety, in such a case, would be in being sent to some variant on El Salvador’s CECOT. I could see the population of El Salvador roughly doubling in the course of a few years as millions of American leftists find out just how grim a Latin American prison can be.

But, seriously, why would they or anybody waste the money when you could as easily just become an unfortunate statistic? Were I betting on it, I’d bet that few of you see a flight – or even half a flight – to El Salvador, but that many of you would have a long last moment staring down into a ditch you had just been forced to dig while a man with a pistol walks up behind you.

So the answer to young Mr. Decker’s question, “When must we kill them?” is “When you want to die.”

QotD: Intersectionality theory

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I don’t think that Intersectionality Theory is a type of conspiracy theory for one obvious reason: conspiracy theories always involve some element of secrecy and there is nothing secret about it! The people who practice this fatuous and polarizing set of ideas are only too happy to tell the world about their plans for taking over the academy and eventually the world with their ideology. They publish it in journals and books, pronounce it from podiums and lecterns, and scream it at protests.

More importantly, however, I do agree with Christina Hoff Sommers that Intersectionality Theory is dangerous for humanity, dissolving the complexity of human nature and culture down to an overly simple Manichean model of Oppressor and Oppressed, Them and Us, Good and Evil, and Black and White (literally and figuratively). It’s is another instantiation of Identity Politics and it is dangerous because it threatens to reverse everything that the Civil Rights movement fought to obtain, and it is the very opposite of what Dr Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed about in his most famous speech:

    I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Michael Shermer, interviewed by Claire Lehmann, “The Skeptical Optimist: Interview with Michael Shermer”, Quillette, 2018-02-24.

September 13, 2025

Jennings 5-Shot Repeating Flintlock Pistol

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 May 2025

Isaiah Jennings patented an improvement to the Belton repeating flintlock system in 1821 — but we don’t know exactly what his idea was because the Patent Office lost his patent (and many others) in a large 1836 fire. Jennings’ system was used by several gunsmiths, though. In 1828/9 the State of New York contracted to convert 521 of their muskets to Jennings’-pattern repeaters. We also have a few examples like this custom five-shot pistol made by John Caswell of upstate New York.

Jennings’ system uses superposed charges loaded in the barrel along with a movable lock. Each charge has its own touch hole, and the cover plates for them act as stops for movement of the lock, to ensure proper alignment. The trigger will fire the lock in any position, and it is also fitted with an automatic magazine frizzen — so cocking the hammer automatically charges priming powder into the pan and closes the frizzen. These were very advanced arms for the early 1800s, and expensive to produce.

Belton Repeating Flintlock:
• Belton Repeating Flintlock: A Semiaut…
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QotD: The Peter Principle in football, the military, and life in general

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Football, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There needs to be a word for that inflection point where the “player” and “coach” levels don’t just diverge, but actually seem to become opposites. Is that an organizational thing, a cultural thing, or what? It’s all “football”, and you probably don’t want guys who have never taken a snap to suddenly be calling plays from the sidelines, but it seems like rising to the top of one side almost by definition precludes you from doing well on the other side (for every great player who was a terrible coach, there’s a great coach who was a terrible player. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Bill Belichick is the best coach currently in the NFL, and he’s got to be a strong contender for best coach of all time, but his playing career topped out at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT).

Is that true in other jobs where you need a combo of a certain physique, a certain IQ, and a certain attitude? The military, say, or the police? Would the average platoon sergeant be a better lieutenant than the average lieutenant? (I’m seriously asking, even though I know that the average corporal’s opinion of the average butterbar lieutenant and vice versa makes the town-gown split in college look like a friendly rivalry). What about the best NCO — would he make a good general? How about the best patrolman vs. the best detective?

And of course this is complicated by the outliers. SWAT guys generally don’t become police chiefs, Special Forces guys don’t become generals (that McChrystal bastard being an unfortunate exception), and so on, but those are extreme outliers, like quarterbacks — physical freaks with fast-firing heads; they don’t want desk jobs, I imagine.

The reason I’m rambling on about this (other than “I’m jet lagged and I have the flu”) is that our whole society seems to have fucked up its competence sorting mechanism, and that flaw seems to be structural. You don’t want a coach who never played, or a general who never fought, but at the same time there’s fuck-all relationship between “being good at playing / fighting” and “being good at coaching / strategizing” that I can see. The same applies in all bureaucracies, of course, we call it the “Peter Principle” — the guy who was good at answering phones in the call center might or might not be any good at supervising the call center, but there’s only one way to find out …

… or is there? Football is interesting in that there’s only one metric for success, and it’s easy for everyone to see. There’s absolutely zero question that So-and-So was a good player, in the same way that there’s zero question So-and-So was a good coach. You can always find nerds and lawyers to niggle around the edges — oh, So-and-So is overrated, and here’s my charts and graphs to prove it — but we all know what that’s worth. Figuring out a better way to sort talent in a binary system like football would go a long way to help us figure out how to fix our society’s fucked-up competence sorting mechanism.

Severian, “Friday Etc.”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-04.

September 12, 2025

A primer on patterns in past political assassinations

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR shares his observations on common patterns in political assassinations which may be relevant to the investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk:

The Salt Lake City FBI office released these photos of a “person of interest” in the Charlie Kirk assassination.

I don’t know anything other than public information about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

However, a primer follows about patterns in past political assassinations. I will sketch what scenarios an intelligence analyst would come up with looking at this one.

The first and most important rule in this kind of investigation is: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.

In political assassinations, as an ordinary murders, the correct suspect is usually the most obvious suspect. Airport-thriller-style convoluted plots and false-flag ops pulled off by unlikely people or organizations are rare in the real world.

Accordingly, when you’re trying to solve a political assassination, the right question to ask is “Who said they wanted him dead?”

Then, you infiltrate those organizations, or arrest a bunch of members, and do contact tracing. Usually you do in fact find your killer that way. It’s not very different from ordinary police work except for the stakes.

There are broadly speaking three different kinds of assassin: the nutter, the zealot, and the pro. They are not difficult to distinguish once you got your hands on them.

Nutters don’t have a coherent political ideology, though they may spout semi-random slogans that political actors can seize on to pretend that they do. They generally have quite an obvious history of mental illness

Before capture, given the kind of public evidence we have now in Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it’s difficult to tell the zealots from the pros by their MO. It used to be easier, but as I noted in a previous post sniper doctrine and technique have been leaking into popular culture for decades.

It’s easier to spot the nutters; they tend to have poor forward-planning capacity. A very obvious way this manifests is a weak or non-existent plan for exfiltrating after the hit. Thus, the nutter is very likely to get caught quite soon after the assassination, often at the site.

This also produces a false-prominence effect – people think political assassins are more likely to be nutters than is actually the case.

Pros – professional assassins working for intelligence agencies or militaries – are also rare. They do occasionally strike – as when, for example the Bulgarian secret service whacked Pope John Paul – but high-profile public assassinations carry a risk of diplomatic and political blowback the most nations are unwilling to assume.

Also, trained assassins are a scarce resource and exfiltrating in the hue and cry following a very public assassination is chancy. Usually you’re going to send them against more obscure targets like exiled dissidents that you think might still be dangerous, hoping not to trigger a full law-enforcement and counterintelligence response.

There’s been talk in some of the wackier corners of the Right that the Mossad did this one. No analyst would take this seriously; the blowback risk to the Israelis is far too high to justify any gain. Same goes for the Russians, though they have a higher risk tolerance than the Israelis and had a much higher tolerance in Soviet times.

In the case of Charlie Kirk it’s pretty high odds we’re looking at a zealot. That’s usually the way to bet, and in this case, the quality of his exfiltration plan and the fact that he has successfully disappeared raises the odds.

Given all these factors, LEOs are going to be looking for zealots associated with domestic organizations that said they wanted Charlie Kirk dead.

Yes, this seems boring and obvious. The main point I’m trying to drive home here is that the boring and obvious theory about a political assassination is usually the correct one.

Accordingly, the first place investigators of the assassination of Charlie Kirk are going to be looking is gun clubs associated with Antifa and the hard left, like the John Brown Gun Club and Redneck Revolt.

It’s not certain that Kirk’s assassin is a member of one of those groups, but if you had to place a bet that would be where to put it.

Update: while I was composing my analysis there was a leak from inside the ATF. They found a .30-06 with engravings expressing “anti-fascist” and transgender ideology.

As I said: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. The obvious suspect is usually the correct one.

And later, on the particulars of this particular assassin’s work:

PSA for those speculating about the sniper who killed Charlie Kirk:

No, the shot he made was not a difficult one, and does not constitute evidence that he was a professionally-trained sniper.

His choice of hide and the quality of his exfiltration plan was impressive. That could indicate pro-level training. Or, it could just mean he played the right videogames.

Information about sniper practice has been leaking into popular culture for decades. It used to be that good practice could enable you to make deductions about the background of the sniper, but that time is past.

Nothing has yet been released about what ammunition or weapon he used. It is highly likely that the bullet has been recovered and identified.

About the most we’re likely to be able to extract from the caliber is whether the sniper used an American traditional caliber like .30-06, NATO-standard 7.62, or Russian 7.62. The latter two cases may not be distinguishable if the bullet is deformed.

Knowing this won’t really tell us anything, as rifles in all plausible calibers are generally available in the United States. Furthermore, if this were a pro-level hit, misdirecting investigators by choosing an adversary or third party weapon is part of normal covert operations doctrine.

All in all, it is not possible to deduce anything of significance about the sniper from the publicly available information. Mistrust anyone who claims otherwise.

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