Quotulatiousness

September 22, 2025

Materially well-off but downwardly mobile

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

Rob Henderson considers the plight of an entire generation of kids raised in privilege, but economically incapable of improving or even barely maintaining their material condition … the downwardly mobile children of wealthy parents:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

For generations, Americans assumed that their children would live better than they did. Today, that assumption no longer holds. In fact, the higher your parents’ income, the less likely you are to match it.

According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, fewer than four in 10 children born into the richest fifth of households stay there; more than one in 10 fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Similarly, a 2014 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that while 36.5 percent of children born to parents in the top income quintile remain there as adults, 10.9 percent fall to the bottom quintile.

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, in his 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke, argues that this downward mobility of children born into wealth is the psychological engine of contemporary politics. This may look like a trivial problem — the petty disappointments of a small slice of America — but the unhappiness of this group, raised to expect the world and denied it, has outsize consequences.

To be clear, this cohort has never faced genuine poverty. Still, they have experienced the sting of loss: They came of age after the Great Recession, watched job security fade as the digital economy made their skills obsolete, and learned that highly coveted jobs in academia, media, and politics were far fewer than promised. These disappointments, al-Gharbi writes, helped power the Great Awokening. Many disillusioned strivers aimed their anger at the system they believed had failed them, and at the lucky few who did manage to retain or enhance their class position.

Unlike the working classes they so often claim to represent, these downwardly mobile elites remain armed with the tools of their upbringing: degrees, contacts, cultural fluency. They may no longer have the bank accounts their parents did, but they retain platforms in media, academia, and politics through which to broadcast their grievances. Given these advantages — or perhaps the right word is privileges — it should come as no surprise that their concerns, which seem to the average American profoundly niche, have dominated the cultural conversation.

Some of this downward mobility is voluntary. Al-Gharbi notes that many young, college-educated people would prefer “to be a freelance writer or a part-time contingent faculty member rather than work as a manager at a Cheesecake Factory”. The dream is artistic freedom and flexible work. The reality is disillusionment when prosperity does not follow.

Such disappointment isn’t totally new. George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying follows a Cambridge-educated poet who abandons his advertising career, squanders his inheritance, and slides into genteel poverty. HBO’s Girls replayed the same theme for a new generation: Brooklynites with cultural capital but precarious incomes, simultaneously privileged and resentful. The details change, but the shape of the story remains the same — raised in affluence, buoyed by expectation, they discover too late that their choices and the system cannot sustain them.

What is different today, however, is how the disillusion now manifests itself. When reality disappoints those raised in privilege, the gap between expectation and outcome produces rage. Behavioral economics has long recognized this dynamic: Satisfaction depends less on objective conditions than on whether outcomes match or exceed expectations. And today, those expectations are far from being met.

Two years before Girls ended, sociologist Lauren Rivera, in her book Pedigree, found that graduates of lesser-ranked colleges who landed jobs at elite firms were far happier than Harvard and Stanford graduates who landed the same jobs. The reason was simple: Those jobs exceeded the expectations of the former, while for the latter they fell short. The higher the expectation, the sharper the disappointment. The harsh reality, then, is that privilege itself can encourage feelings of decline. When you’re born to — and surrounded by — overachievers, even respectable achievements can feel second-rate.

In a 2018 study, Duke sociologist Jessi Streib explored why many middle-class kids falter in school and work. Her finding was counterintuitive: Entitlement often dragged them down.

It’s not too hard to see why. Success in school requires showing up, meeting deadlines, and tolerating authority. Success at work requires completing projects on time, absorbing criticism, and cooperating with colleagues. Yet the downwardly mobile, Streib found, were often convinced such requirements were beneath them. Their grandiosity and defiance hastened their slide.

Elite overproduction is real, and has real world ramifications …

September 21, 2025

QotD: Herbert Hoover, an epitaph

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

Hoover was a man who did everything wrong. He was the quintessential High Modernist. He was arrogant, he was authoritarian, he didn’t listen to anyone, he put no effort into pleasing people or making his ideas more palatable. He never solicited stakeholders’ opinions. He lied like a rug, constantly and egregiously. He lived his life like a caricature of exactly the sort of person who should fail at philanthropy and become a horror story to warn future generations.

But he won anyway. He started from a measly few million dollars and beat out Rockefellers and Carnegies to become the most successful philanthropist in early 20th century history. Whyte’s estimate of 100 million lives saved seems much too high; there were only 100 million people in Europe total during the relevant period. But even during his own time, people universally credited him with saving millions. And he did it again and again and again. I didn’t even have space to talk about the time he saved the Southern United States from a giant flood, or half a dozen other impressive accomplishments. Maybe the rules are wrong. Maybe all of this stuff about how authoritarian approaches never work, and you need to let the people you are helping lead the way, is all just modern prejudices, and putting a brilliant and very rich engineer in charge of a hypercentralized organization is just as good as any other way of doing things.

But even this I find less interesting than his psychology. He combined a personal callousness with a love for all humanity. When he was inspecting mines in Australia, he fired the worst-performing X% of workers. One worker begged him to reconsider – he had a family to support. Hoover raised $300 for the man’s family – a lot of money at the time! Probably more than Hoover made in a month! – but fired him anyway. In 1932, when the Bonus Army marched on Washington, Hoover was adamant that he would not give these men – poor, starving veterans – a single cent more than they were entitled to by their existing benefits. But he also instructed his staff to go around to their encampments and give them food and supplies in secret.

Sometimes his stubborness calls to mind the fictional Inspector Javert, who refuses to bend the law for any reason. In this model, Hoover sympathizes with everybody, but his honor forbids him to bend the rules in favor of underperforming employees or protesters who want more than their contracts entitle them to. But this picture of a hyper-honorable Hoover crashes into his constant willingness to lie, cheat, and bend the rules in his own favor. Sometimes his lies are for the greater good, like when he tells Britain that Germany is preparing to feed Belgium. Other times they seem entirely selfish, like his various Chinese mining scams. The best that can be said about Hoover is that if he decides a principle is involved, he sticks to it.

And this is actually really good! Again and again through the book, Hoover feels like the only person with a moral compass. When it is in everyone’s strategic interest to let Belgium starve, Hoover is the only one who is able to keep fixated on the potential human toll. When it is in everyone’s interest to let the USSR starve, only Hoover – despite his fanatical anti-communism – is able to stick to the frame where the Russians are human beings and politics is beside the point. When Americans are starving during the Great Depression …

… okay, Hoover totally dropped the ball on that one. In fact, one of his Democratic opponents wrote something about how maybe if unemployed American workers pretended to be Belgians, they could get Hoover’s sympathy. I don’t have a great explanation for this. But Hoover’s weak and inconsistent sympathies are often enough to let him outdo everyone else. Or at least, he is uncorrelated with everyone else and succeeds when they fail. Again and again Hoover is accused of treating people like numbers on a piece of paper. But if this is true, it seems to be linked to the reverse talent – the ability to remember that numbers on a piece of paper represent people, even when other people would rather forget.

I’m equally confused about Hoover’s politics, although it’s not really his fault. The whole era confuses me. The Progressives, Hoover’s own faction, seem clearly related to modern progressives. But they also give me more of a technophile, rationalist feel than their modern counterparts. Am I imagining things? If not, where did this go?

And how did Hoover so deftly merge authoritarian centralizing technocratic engineer side with his small-government individual-freedom pro-capitalism side? Maybe it wasn’t that deft? Maybe he started his life as a centralizing technocrat, then made a 180 after becoming a small-government individualist helped him dunk on FDR more effectively? But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like all of it was coming from some central set of core beliefs throughout his life.

[…]

I get the impression that Kenneth Whyte is a bit of a revisionist historian, too sympathetic to his subject to tell his story the way everyone else does. But at least in Whyte’s telling, the Hoover presidency was a great missed opportunity, or at least a fulcrum of history. If a few key economic events had been a few months off in one direction or the other, FDR might have been a footnote to history, and a four-term President Hoover might have left an indelible mark on America. Instead of a New Deal, we might have gotten a optimistic small-government technocratic meritocracy that was able to merge the best aspects of a dying frontier America with the best aspects of the industrial age.

In one of the most poignant passages in the book, Commerce Secretary Hoover fires back at his socialist critics. He points out that of the top dozen US officials – the President, VP, and ten Cabinet Secretaries – eight, including himself, had begun as manual laborers and worked their way up. That was the America Hoover was working to defend. He lost, and now we have this shitshow. But it’s hard to begrudge him the attempt.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.

September 20, 2025

QotD: Why modern dishwashers suck

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    The current standards for dishwashers took effect in 2013. The standards, which were based on a consensus agreement between manufacturers and efficiency advocates, specify minimum energy and water efficiency levels. The standards require that standard-size dishwashers use no more than 307 kWh per year and 5.0 gallons of water per cycle.

    In 2024, DOE finalized amended standards for dishwashers based on a joint recommendation from manufacturers and efficiency advocates. The new standards for dishwashers will cost-effectively reduce energy consumption by 15% relative to the current standards while also cutting water waste. Dishwashers

It is a general problem, but what started me thinking about it was being told by my dishwasher that it would take three and a half hours to wash the dishes. That seems, judging by a quick search online, to be longer than average but still within the normal range. I have not been able to find figures online for how long dishwashers took twenty or thirty years ago but, by what I remember, it was substantially less — and the dishes ended up dry, which ours don’t.

The explanation is in the final word of the quote above, “waste”. The owners of dishwashers pay for water and power, so if making them more efficient in those dimensions was costless, did not require giving up something else, there would be no need for the Department of Energy to make the manufacturers do it. I conclude that it was not costless, that it either made dishwashers cost more or do their job less well — take longer, not dry the dishes as well, not clean them as well. Using more power or water to do a better job is not waste.

David Friedman, “Optimizing On A Single Variable”, David Friedman’s Substack, 2025-06-02.

September 19, 2025

What’s the next thing to be devoured on Trump’s menu? Ah, Antifa it is …

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

Again leaning heavily on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR has several posts on Donald Trump’s announcement that Antifa is in his crosshairs:

Next comes the part where every NGO/nonprofit implicated in funding a major terrorist organization gets a proctological exam by people with no sense of humor at all.

As I have emphasized several times in the last week: the long game in taking down a terrorist network is to smash its funding chain.

ESR’s analysis begins thusly:

Antifa has just been declared a “major terrorist organization”. Putting on my intelligence-analyst hat again, I’m going to examine its strategic options in the new political and legal conditions following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I’m going to start with a briefing on what Antifa is and what it does.

A reminder: Antifa is not a unitary conspiracy. It’s a cluster of horizontally-networked cells, some visible aboveground, some semi-covert, possibly some that are fully underground. By design it doesn’t have a central command.

So we’re really asking what range of behaviors Antifa cells normally choose, or can choose.

Before we can explore that we have to identify what Antifa is for and how it fits into the political ecology of the U.S.

None of what I’m about to tell you is speculation. It can be verified by reading Antifa’s propaganda and watching its behavior.

Antifa is an organization of Communists and Left-Anarchists; thus the red and black flags in the main Antifa logo. Its ultimate goal is a violent anti-capitalist revolution that will destroy American constitutional government. The Communists and Left Anarchists have agreed to argue about the shape of what comes afterwards after the revolution.

In practice, Antifa acts as willing street muscle for a range of associated Communist and Socialist organizations, most notably the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA), the SWP (Socialist Workers Party), and various SWP splinter groups.

Antifa also takes strategic direction from the left wing of the Democratic Party. My readers can make their own judgments about whether there is anything remaining in the Democratic Party other than a left wing; the answer to that question is not relevant to the rest of this analysis.

An important point is that the links between the Democratic party and Antifa are personal and deniable. They probably do not run through the Democratic National Committee. A good place for counter-terror analysts to look (and I’m sure Palantir already has this mapped) would be the politicians known as “the Squad” and their close associates.

The strategic sub-goal that was being executed when Charlie Kirk was shot was the creation of a climate of fear that would inhibit public speech by conservatives. This is an explicit goal of Antifa direct action.

Antifa’s funding is deliberately obscure. Before USAID was dismantled, a significant percentage of it was probably coming from the American taxpayer through several layers of shadowy NGOs.

It is very likely that one way or another most of its money comes from low-profile liberal dark money groups such as Arabella, the Tides Foundation, and the Open Societies Foundations.

The effectiveness of Antifa as a political actor has always depended on its ability to act as a terror instrument for left-wing American politicians while maintaining deniability that the politicians’ rhetorical hate-targeting of opponents ever cashes out as violent action.

The first major constraint on Antifa’s future behavior is that this deniability is going to be much more difficult to maintain from now on. Because while the deliberate diffusion of its structure makes legal proof that something called “Antifa” shot Charlie Kirk difficult, it also made Antifa affiliation of any left-wing assassin impossible to effectively deny.

In my next post, I will examine the consequences of this shift.

Continuing the discussion:

Mafia families don’t have membership cards.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because one attempt to head off the hammer coming down on Antifa that we’re hearing from its aboveground allies is that Antifa doesn’t exist.

It’s just an idea. There’s no central command. No common funding. No membership cards. No way to tell who’s a member and who isn’t.

The reductio ad absurdum of this bullshit is to point out that, following the argument, the Mafia cannot possibly exist. Which would be interesting news to all the people it murdered.

Historical note: there was a period when the Mafia was structurally different from Antifa in that it had a Boss of All Bosses, but the position was abolished by assassination in 1931.

In reality, when you’re dealing with a criminal or terrorist conspiracy that doesn’t have membership cards, you identify members of it the same way that other members do: by their willingness to cooperate with each other on shared projects.

And sometimes, by their participation in shared bonding rituals like a Cosa Nostra initiation ceremony or a “bash the fash” demonstration.

None of this is difficult, and it’s exactly the kind of situation that the RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Influence) laws were written to address.

From Trump’s public statements, I’m guessing that they’re going to go right past RICO to a Foreign Terrorist Organization designation.

This won’t be difficult either. If you have any doubt that at least some Antifa chapters are funded by Chinese Communist money, you really need to get out more.

The announcement clearly didn’t come out of the blue:

Still wearing my intel-analyst hat, and have realized something.

Trump’s announcement that Antifa is being designated a “major terrorist organization” doesn’t make any sense unless law enforcement is already holding evidence that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was an Antifa op.

Otherwise, the risk of political blowback from that announcement would be way too high. Trump can be erratic, but he’s cunning about stuff like this and obviously has a shrewd sense of what he can get away with.

So, yep. The most likely scenario was the correct one. The hoofbeats really were horses, not zebras. Everybody still in denial about this is destined for more pain.

And back to the analysis:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Continuing my analysis of Antifa’s strategic options following the Charlie Kirk assassination. These have changed yet again — narrowed considerably — following President Trump’s declaration yesterday.

The Federal Government has legal instruments that it can employ. The RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Influence) laws were specifically designed to attack a different headless network of horizontally connected nodes — organized crime. The fact that Antifa doesn’t have membership cards or a unitary command structure isn’t even going to slow the Feds down.

I think that it’s likely the Feds will designate Antifa a foreign terrorist organization, zeroing in on Chinese Communist funding of some Antifa chapters. This will allow the direct use of the CIA, which is normally heavily restricted from operations on American soil.

Nothing Antifa itself can do as an organization will be able to prevent or deflect a massive multi-agency investigation. It is very likely that Palantir already has their core membership identified and their communications channels mapped. Fusion centers will be capturing an unknown but probably large percentage of Antifa message traffic.

(They’ll be helped by the fact that Antifa’s communications security is terrible — it uses Discord for most comms, which is strictly amateur-hour. To be fair, the inner membership is likely to be savvy enough to be using Signal.)

Antifa’s only hope is pressure by its aboveground allies in politics and media. The cells with intelligent leaders will understand that they must cease all direct actions in order to avoid putting those allies in any position of appearing to support assassinations.

Unfortunately for Antifa, in order for hunkering down to work, every single cell has to have leadership that is both strategically patient and capable of restraining its more mentally unstable footsoldiers.

A related problem is that subversive and terrorist organizations that don’t act tend to develop morale problems. A certain minimum level of satisfying violence is required to keep their troops engaged.

Antifa probably has a worse issue here than the average terrorist organization because they recruit so heavily from sexual deviants and borderline mental cases who are likely to have other MBD-related issues including impulsivity and high time preference.

Over time, external pressure for Antifa to look easy for its aboveground allies to defend will remain steady or increase. This is especially so if the Democratic Party line remains Joe Biden’s “Antifa is just an idea”.

At the same time, internal pressure for direct action will increase. Antifa’s survival may depend on how long it is able to manage that pressure.

Antifa needs the investigation to be stalled out and paralyzed by Democratic lawfare before its stupidest cells do something too public and violent for its allied mainstream media to willfully ignore or suppress.

Longer-term, if Antifa survives, it faces a different problem. It dreams of revolution, but is only capable of operating on the sufferance of a general public that largely dismisses it as a LARP for nose-ringed freakazoids. Having committed a gaudy murder of an Everyman figure, it is not likely to get that sufferance back.

After the Charlie Kirk assassination, here are three possible futures

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR lays out what he sees are the three most likely short-term futures for the United States after the assassination of Charlie Kirk:

I’m a student of history. Here are three possible futures following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They’re based on historical examples of what happens when a Communist subversion campaign or insurgency overplays its hand and triggers broad popular resistance.

1. Popular revulsion against aboveground leftists celebrating the murder gives the Trump administration political cover to go after Antifa and its shadow funding network hard. Both are smashed.

Communist agents of influence in the mainstream media and academia continue to self-discredit.

Relatively few Communists are arrested, but their millions of aboveground tools become isolated and demoralized.

Propelled by a huge swing in voter registrations that we are already seeing happen, the Democrats get crushed in the 2026 midterms.

The long period of fever, madness, and Left ascendancy that began with the assassination of JFK by a Soviet agent in 1963 ends not with a bang but with a whimper.

This is the best case scenario for everybody, including the Communists who don’t get thrown out of helicopters or shot down in the streets.

If things don’t go this way it will likely be because Democratic lawfare prevents the counter-subversion push from being fully effective. An obvious index of this failure would be another high-profile political assassination or attempt against a conservative target after about 4 months out.

What happens in the event of that failure, especially if the third public attempt to kill Trump succeeds:

2. A period of Caudillismo. A charismatic strongman rides popular anger into power. If this happens, the Left better pray that the strongman is an infuriated JD Vance, because any alternative to him is likely to be worse for them.

The crackdown against the Communist network becomes brutal and routinely uses extra-Constitutional means, possibly thinly covered by a declared state of emergency.

At the harder end of this range of possibilities, right-wing death squads not exactly formed by government but winked at by it go after Communist public figures that are out of reach of the law because they’ve carefully preserved deniability. Many journalists are at the top of this target list.

It is not likely that the Communist network can survive this future. The only way it happens is if they have enough popular support to develop a semi-militarized resistance — in effect making certain parts of the country no go regions for Federal agents.

Going by historical precedents, the index of this failure would be a resurgence of banditry by armed groups, initially with overtly political goals but decaying into general predation.

This would land us at:

3. Low-grade civil war, a la Bosnia or the Irish troubles. Anybody wishing for this has no idea how bloody, ugly, and brutal it would probably be. Especially if the Left succeeds at what it will with absolute certainty try to do, which is racialize the conflict.

I don’t think there is any realistic scenario in which the Communists win any of these confrontations. Not in the U.S., not in the 21st century. The question is how much blood and agony the rest of us will go through before they are finally defeated.

Update, 20 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.

QotD: The sub-generations of Generation X

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… “Gen X” is actually a misnomer, as there are at least three distinct subgroups. There’s the very earliest Xers, the guys who were in high school in the late 1970s. They often get lumped in with the Baby Boomers, too, though they’re as different from the Boomers as they are from us, the “mid” Xers. Think Wooderson from Dazed and Confused. Brian Niemeier calls them “Generation Jones”, and while I don’t like that tag I don’t know what else to call them (except maybe “Woodersons”), so roll with it.

Then there’s the group that was in high school in the late 1980s. I squeak into this group (barely). We’re the mid-Xers. The real “grunge” generation. If Dazed and Confused is a pretty decent late-90s approximation of late-70s high school kids, then the best description I can give you of a “grunge” kid is the movie Deadpool. Made in 2016, by guys who were born in the mid-1970s. That’s grunge, in a way Kurt Cobain couldn’t even imagine. Fourth wall breaks! Sarcastic asides about the fourth wall breaks! Profanity! Masturbation jokes! And snark, snark, snark — unrelenting snark, about everything, all the time. Every second of that movie screams “I can’t believe you fags are amused by this, but since you obviously do, here’s lots more! Choke on it!!!”

The writers obviously wanted to work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Joss Whedon was too cool for them — imagine the twisted psyche of a person who thinks Joss Whedon is cool — and Sarah Michelle Gellar just laughed at them, so they made Deadpool out of spite.

Then there’s the late Xers. They were in high school in the late 1990s, which is why us oldsters call them “Millennials” (as the term is now used, it seems to mean “those born around 2000”, i.e. the generation just now getting out of college. We took it to mean “those who were just getting out of college around the turn of the century”). Obviously I use the Internet. I’m using it now, but I’m not on the internet, and I’m certainly not an Internet Person. The very late Xers are Internet People. The very first Internet People; they invented the concept of Internet People. Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984) is a late Xer. The people behind Twitter (Jack Dorsey born 1976; Biz Stone 1974; Evan Williams 1972) are mid-Xers; they were ahead of the curve.

Severian, “Addendum to Previous”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.

September 18, 2025

Stop calling it “Turtle Island”

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Woke Watch Canada, Igor Stravinsky strenuously objects to calling North America “Turtle Island” and all the other woke shibboleths of the modern progressive cant:

As another school year rolls out, we can hope a more honest and realistic portrait of Canadian history will start to take shape in our schools. Students have been brainwashed into believing that Canada was a racist state bent on the extermination of Indigenous people, who were peaceful and wise, living in harmony with nature and each other. But reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is only possible if we base policy and action on the truth, not fairy tales, hearsay, anecdotes, or ideologies. We need facts, evidence, and reasoned debate. A good start would be for people to stop referring to North America as “Turtle Island”.

Calling it that is essentially to call the current geopolitical organization of the world invalid. If Canada, the United States, and other Western countries are in fact illegitimate, then that means national and international laws are also null and void. So, unless you are the direct descendent of an aboriginal person who was alive before first contact with Europeans, you are just a guest here — a second-class citizen at best. Non-Indigenous Canadians will simply never accept that. Nor should they.

In any case, “Turtle Island” is a nonsensical name on several levels. Firstly, North America is a continent, not an island. It is connected to South America by the Isthmus of Panama, which means it is not even surrounded by water. In any case an island is defined as a land mass surrounded by water that is part of a tectonic plate such as Greenland which is part of the North American Plate, thus is not a continent.

Then there is the fact that Indigenous North Americans were oblivious to the geography of the vast continent on which they lived. Like people everywhere in the distant past, they only knew the area they lived in, which could be substantial in the case of nomads, but was still a tiny fraction of North America’s 20+ million square kilometers. Of course, they knew nothing about the geography of the world with its 7 continents and 5 oceans.

Most importantly, the Turtle Island creation story is a myth believed by a particular cultural group. There is nothing wrong with believing in myths: I personally believe in the myth of human rights, as most Canadians do (pre-contact Indigenous people certainly did not). Myths are powerful: Our common belief in human rights has helped to make the Western world contain the safest and most prosperous societies ever. But when our institutions subscribe to myths not shared by the majority of Canadians, they are choosing to elevate one culture’s belief system above all others.

In the past, the Christian religion was regarded as the one true religion in Canada by most people, and the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous people were often denigrated as primitive superstition. But elevating Indigenous spirituality in our secularized 21st century world by treating it as a knowledge acquisition system equivalent to (or superior to) the scientific method is an attempt to correct for that past ethnocentrism. This is Critical Theory in action: It always strives to alleviate past wrongs with present wrongs, a formula for social disaster if ever there was one.

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?
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