Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2026

USAF re-evaluating the risks of stationing aircraft in Al Biriṭāniyā

Filed under: Britain, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The US military leadership got an unwelcome security wake-up call after a reported incident adjacent to a Royal Air Force base used by USAF B-1 bombers:

USAF B-1B Lancer takes off on a routine mission from Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota. Carrying the largest payload of both guided and unguided weapons in the Air Force inventory, the multi-mission Lancer is the backbone of America’s long-range bomber force.
USAF photo by Senior Airman Michael B. Keller via Wikimedia Commons.

To say that the reporting of the last few days about the sudden departure of our B-1B bombers from RAF Fairford has been frustrating — for me at least — is an understatement.

Airfield security has been a pebble in my shoe for a very long time. I assume everyone is familiar with my post from 11 months ago a bout the wake-up call at Whitman AFB? If not, give it a read, then come back.

Let’s all get our reference point first from last week.

    Five men who were arrested on suspicion of explosive and terrorism offences after a major incident was declared at an RAF airbase in the west of England have been released on police bail.

    Three vans were spotted near RAF Fairford in the early hours of Sunday morning and the police were called. A major incident was declared, and everyone in the small village of Whelford was evacuated.

    The head of Counter Terrorism Policing has stressed that the five men remain under investigation and must adhere to strict bail conditions. It has since come to light that the first of two 999 calls was made by one of the arrested men.

    A dual UK-Iranian national, aged 25, has also since been arrested on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts.

    Investigators are exploring “multiple lines of enquiry”, Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor said on Monday, including whether proxies or individuals were working on behalf of a foreign state — knowingly or not.

Like all professionals do, let’s go to the map room.

This is what the geometry looks like.

OK. Soak that in a bit. Whelford is one of the few little residential areas around this base where our literally irreplaceable heavy bombers were operating from. The parking apron they are using? There it is, right around where the “RAF Fairford” label is.

Now, let’s give you some scale. The smaller circle is 500 yards from where the vans and “fellas” were. The larger circle is 1,000 yards.

Put on your force protection hat. Remember Operation Spider Web from over a year ago and what it was warning us about?

I know for a fact that there has been a rather heated argument over whether we are simply taking too many risks with some of our “There’s nothing dangerous about this airfield! Why, four generations of my family have been flying out of here“. attitude. Habits, inertia, etc.

We Americans make some assumptions about distance that is simply not a reality overseas, especially in Europe.

QotD: The cultural dominance of “Yankeedom”

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

People like to point out that the political Right in America, split as it is between redneck populists and classically-liberal free marketeers, lacks the European conservatives’ emphasis on order and tradition, place and class, throne and altar and blood and soil and so forth. And, pace various European immigrants over the years and a few weirdos on the Internet, that’s true. But it’s interesting to imagine what our politics might look like today if Tidewater had remained a force on the national stage and if any substantial strain in America could say, with John Randolph of Roanoke, “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality.”

So there’s Tidewater, lost and forgotten except for some guys in Virginia who still put on red jackets to hunt foxes from horseback — and maybe in slightly different voting patterns. What about the nation that won, the one that’s everywhere?

I refer, of course, to Yankeedom.

“But Jane,” you say, “Yankeedom isn’t everywhere! Scroll back up to your own map — it’s in New England, sure, and, uh, northeastern Ohio and, wow, okay, the entire Upper Midwest. But that’s not everywhere.” But ignore the map for a moment: that’s Woodard’s idea, based on settlement patterns and voting behavior. What is Yankeedom, really? What are its fundamental beliefs, its vision of how life ought to be, and where do they show up today?

Of course you know the story of Yankeedom’s founding: radical Calvinists from East Anglia, settled around the Massachusetts Bay in the 1620s and 30s, funny hats? Maybe you made one of those hats for your construction paper turkey in first grade — or, if you’re a little younger, maybe you learned a nice poem about welcoming new immigrants for a glowing future of multiculturalism and prosperity. In fact the emphasis on “the Pilgrims” in American civic mythology — never mind the traditional Thanksgiving menu, heavy on quintessentially New England dishes like pie1 — is itself a product of Yankeedom’s cultural dominance, as is the insistence in that familiar story that they left England for religious freedom. It’s true! They did! But there’s a very important final bit that we somehow leave out of the version we teach to elementary schoolers: religious freedom for themselves.

The earliest Yankees imagined their new society as a Protestant utopia, a new Zion, in which they would work out their collective salvation. Any deviation from the straight-and-narrow could doom everyone, so enforcing moral and religious conformity — through banishing heretics or, if necessary, even executing them — was of paramount importance. Yankeedom was meant to be a “city on a hill”, a model for mankind: if only they could be good enough, pure enough, and holy enough, God would bless them abundantly — and then everyone else, seeing their manifest blessings, would naturally emulate them and become holy themselves! The important thing, then, was not merely to do right but to be seen to do right, as an example to neighbors and foreigners alike. Yankeedom also put a tremendous emphasis on education (literacy was necessary to read the Word of God), encouraged subordinating the interests of the individual to the greater good of the community, and saw government as an extension of the citizenry. Government, then, since it was run by and for the people, was naturally called to propagate God’s will in a corrupt and sinful world by prohibiting or regulating immoral activities.

As Yankeedom moved west, out of the strict control of the Congregationalist ministers who dominated the New England colonies, they began to abandon their specific religious tenets. Sometimes this meant exciting new religious — the Yankee-settled western portions of New York State gave rise to such religious enthusiasms that people began to call it the “Burned-Over District“2 — but just as often it meant becoming a Methodist, Unitarian, or Baptist. Wherever they went, though, the Yankees clung to their belief that you could make earthly society resemble Heaven, or at least that there was no excuse for not trying as hard as you could. Yankees were at the heart of every push for social reform, from abolitionism and the temperance movement to Reconstruction, the minimum wage, women’s suffrage, and an end to child labor. For example, the members of New York City’s Committee of Fifteen, which militated against gambling and prostitution, were mostly Yankees or German-Jewish immigrants; none were culturally New Netherlanders.

By now this should all be sounding familiar. Heavy emphasis on education, embrace of the government regulation or prohibition of immoral behavior as the central bulwark of societal virtue, extremely visible adherence to highly specific rules and norms of behavior as proof of righteousness? Oh, look, it’s woke! It’s the ideology of the professional-managerial class, the meritocratic elite — it’s the same people with the same bumper stickers on the same Mercedes SUVs in the Whole Foods parking lot that you see in every major American city, regardless of which “nation” most of the other residents belong to.

There are two things going on here, I think: first, high-cultural capital Americans are far more mobile than they used to be. Plenty of people spend a few years in DC, then a few years in Austin, or maybe San Francisco or Boulder or Brooklyn, regardless of where they grew up. Second, and perhaps more important, is the role of education. Maintaining or improving your class position depends far more on a “good” college than it used to (witness the to-do when someone claims the distinction of Harvard on a night school degree!). The Yankee emphasis on education means that most of America’s prestigious colleges and universities are in Yankee-settled areas.3 Thus, membership in a higher stratum of society practically depends on four or eight years marinating in Yankeedom. What’s a kid from rural Nebraska to do?

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: American Nations, by Colin Woodard”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-19.

  1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Oldtown Folks, as quoted in Albion’s Seed:

    2. “The pie is an English institution, which, planted in American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum plies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies, — pies with top crusts, and pies without, — pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when let loose in a given direction.”

    For more on the history of distinctly American pies, including why they’re so different from the English pies you may have seen on The Great British Bake-Off, I highly recommend BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, which is somehow both the best history of American sweets I’ve ever read and the best cookbook for them.

  2. Famous alumni of the Burned-Over District include the Seventh-Day Adventists, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community, and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. (Yes, Mormons are Yankees. Obviously.) But my favorite wacky Yankee religious enthusiasm — actually in Massachusetts, where they weren’t branding people with H for heretic any more — was John Murray Spear‘s “New Motive Power”, an attempt to build an electric perpetual motion machine Jesus.
  3. The exceptions are generally the flagship school of a large non-Yankee region or in California, the culture of which I’ve entirely elided for reasons of brevity. Sorry. The tl;dr is that Woodard argues the “Left Coast” is a hybrid of Yankees settling the cities and Greater Appalachia in the countryside, which leads to culture fairly similar to that of Yankeedom.

October 6, 2026

QotD: The decline of academic standards over the years

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

… while I was on the road, I went to visit a buddy who’s still deep cover in academia. He teaches at a really SPLAC-y SPLAC, the kind that bills itself as “Minnesota’s answer to Princeton”. He’s part of a team running this course that, back in my undergrad days thirty years ago, would’ve been called “Paideia” or something similarly pretentious, taught to the “honors college” (or equivalent). Twenty years before that, it would’ve been called “Western Civ I” and required of all incoming freshmen, regardless of major.

Twenty years before that, and it would’ve been called “basic cultural literacy”; the kind of thing any college man — indeed, any graduate of a remotely decent high school — would know cold. I’ve written many times that the not-elite-but-certainly-very-respectable school which awarded my PhD wouldn’t have admitted me as an undergrad as late as 1960; they would’ve been sticking me in some serious remedial classes as late as 1980. Watching my buddy struggling mightily — and failing miserably — to get even the ridiculously watered-down, extremely fake and utterly gay version of this stuff across to the brown-nosing test-acers of the Current Year sent me sobbing into the arms of Jack Daniel.

Not because I would’ve done better, mind you, but because I would’ve done so much worse. The only way I got through my last few semesters in academia was to regard it as acting. The University is paying me to stand on stage and say my lines, so I’ll stand there and say them. Aside from that, all they want to do is check the appropriate box: Students have attended thus-and-such class, taught by someone with a PhD (crucial for those “best college” rankings!), and … there it is.

What actual knowledge am I supposed to be conveying? What skill set? What world view?

Category error. If it doesn’t fit on the standardized test, which is the only thing that matters to the bottom line, then it’s useless.

Severian, “On the Absurdity of Life”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-12.

October 5, 2026

Communism and the DSA

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

The fortunes of America’s self-described socialists are clearly on the rise, as DSA-backed candidates gain more media attention and come closer to being elected to office. The DSA really could rename itself the DCA without much pushback, as communism has lost a lot of its massive historical baggage in the minds of average American voters.

Photo via Rob Henderson’s Newsletter

Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated.

With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado.

Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America‘s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, “Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership”. In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday.

All of which raises some natural questions: Where is this revolutionary romance coming from? And as it steadily seeps into our leadership class, where will it lead?

The best guide to understanding these questions is a book published more than 50 years ago under a pseudonym — because the author feared what pro-Maoist intellectuals would do to him if they discovered who wrote it.

Simon Leys, whose real name was Pierre Ryckmans, was a Belgian-Australian scholar of Chinese art and literature. In 1974, he published Chinese Shadows, a record of the cultural and political destruction he saw in China in the years just after the Cultural Revolution. The book is full of eerily relevant observations. One of them, which I will get to, is the most haunting thing I’ve read about what political terror does to the human soul. And nearly all of them describe habits of mind that didn’t die with Mao. In fact, they are now alive in America.

First, some background. In The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976, the historian Frank Dikötter explains how it began. Mao Zedong wanted to purge rivals at the top of the Communist Party. So he turned to radical students, giving them permission to denounce every authority except his own. Party officials egged on these young militants as they raided the homes of “class enemies” and turned them into social outcasts. What followed was violence, looting, the legitimization of hatred, and the denunciation of family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

When the resulting catastrophe became impossible to deny, Mao and the regime’s officials disavowed their own shock troops, claiming that an “extreme left” had been responsible for the atrocities.

Sound familiar? Americans witnessed a milder version of this in the summer of 2020. Rioting and looting that year caused between $1 billion and $2 billion in damages. As this transpired, prominent voices in politics and media minimized the destruction. And some leading officials quickly insisted that the destruction was not the work of their own residents. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, later the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, estimated that 80 percent of those causing damage came from out of state, while Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared that “the people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents”. Jail records showed the opposite.

If the scale is different, the pattern is the same: indulgence first, followed by disingenuous disavowal after the damage is done.

“The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a post about the need for middle class couples to budget excessive amounts of money before starting a family:

It’s not about the money.

Money has an effect, yes, but it’s a part of something bigger.

Women are genetically programmed to mate up. Not down. And not even across. Up. If she doesn’t regard a man as superior to her, she generally doesn’t want to have his babies.

What this means is that there is an extremely simple control dial on fertility.

More male power and status = more babies.
More female power and status = less babies.

Yes, it really is that simple.

Why? Because every species has a mating ritual, and can only breed if they can carry it out. That’s why you can breed rats and chickens in cages, but not pandas. Different mating ritual.

And a critical element of the human mating ritual is “male impresses female”.

Not charms. Not bribes. Definitely not respects.

Impresses.

So, if you take power, wealth, and status away from men, and give it to women, you are just plain reaching for the controls and turning down the fertility dial.

If you let men keep power, wealth and status — you don’t have to give it to them because they’re the ones who create it — fertility goes up.

The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis.

This idea might horrify you. You might have been taught all your life that everyone is equal, or must be, and anything else is unfair.

Well, have you looked around you at universe? Unfairness is baked into the life cycle of every living organism, not mention the food chain. Evolutionary processes don’t care about fairness. They care what works.

Perhaps someday, we will be able to code DNA as easily as we code C++, and can decide what we want our instincts to be. But until that day, we are faced with a choice.

1. Stop using the political, legal, and mass media processes to force female equality, if not outright female supremacy, on the first world.

Or

2. Die out and be replaced by third world retards, who will stay on this planet fighting wars with increasingly rusty AK47s and then spears, until the next asteroid comes along.

October 4, 2026

Mark Carney’s … complicated … relationship with America

Filed under: Business, Cancon, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On her Substack, Melanie in Saskatchewan wonders what is going on in Mark Carney’s world whenever the United States comes up. At times, you would assume he hates the US, yet the vast majority of his personal wealth is invested there. His family members live there. It’s a paradox:

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

I’m starting to think Mark Carney has a passionate, personal hatred of America.

And I don’t mean Donald Trump. Plenty of people hate Donald Trump. I mean America itself, or at least the enormous role America has played in Canada’s economy for generations. Because the longer I listen to Carney talk about where he wants Canada to go, the more I wonder whether Trump caused this economic divorce at all … or whether he was simply the spectacular act of infidelity Carney needed to finally file the papers.

Maybe hate is too strong. Maybe geopolitical jealousy has stages too: irritation, resentment, righteous indignation and finally whatever stage comes after, “I’d love to go out sometime, but unfortunately I’ll be washing my hair indefinitely”. Whatever stage Carney has reached, I’m increasingly convinced this is about considerably more than Donald Trump.

Because we can document Carney publicly talking about a changing world order more than fifteen years ago. How long he had been developing those ideas before putting them into speeches, I have no idea. We don’t need to invent an origin story. The public record is interesting enough.

I can’t prove Carney hates America. Maybe he loves it. Maybe there’s a Louisville Slugger sticking out of a Davos swag bag somewhere between six conference lanyards, a King Charles commemorative tea towel and a couple of those luxury Normandy butter cups that apparently require their own travel arrangements. But if Mark Carney loves America, somebody should probably tell America the relationship is still on.

He certainly never seemed troubled by American money. His disclosed investments included hundreds of companies, many of them American. And I don’t begrudge him that. If American companies offered a good return, invest away. What makes it interesting is that while his money was quite comfortable in America, Carney had already spent years publicly describing a world becoming considerably less centred on American economic power. Donald Trump didn’t inspire that. He came crashing through the front door years later, apparently oblivious to the fact that Carney had already furnished the room.

Canadians have since been handed a wonderfully tidy explanation for everything happening now. Trump returned. Trump threatened tariffs. Trump called Canada the 51st state. Trump made governor jokes. CBC, our publicly funded national broadcaster, and a Canadian media industry operating alongside various government support programs amplified every provocation until everybody knew exactly which Trumpism could send Canada through the ceiling.

He said “51st state”. Canada erupted, so he said it again. Trump noticed. The media noticed. And I have a very hard time believing Liberal strategists somehow failed to notice the political value of an issue resonating that powerfully with Canadians.

But heaven forbid an opposition MP or ordinary Canadian asks to see where our money went. Suddenly negotiations, contracts and records disappear behind confidentiality, redactions and “national security”. Apparently telling Canadians what our own government is doing requires security clearance, but advertising precisely which Trump taunts are working required something closer to a neon sign: YES, DONALD. RIGHT THERE. THAT BUTTON!

Why not circle the red button, write DO NOT PRESS across it and explain exactly what happens when he does? Because if humanity has established anything about a big red button labelled DO NOT PRESS, it’s that nobody has ever wanted to press that bastard more.

QotD: Auditors and the taxation system

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

Is it plausible that a billionaire paid no taxes for a period of several years? Yep. Totally. See all that stuff I wrote above about the complicated tax code and how it is an accountant’s sacred duty to take advantage of all the stupid laws congress has passed to save their client’s money? Pretty much that. It has happened many times before, and it will happen many times again.

One thing that’s really unfair about our tax system is that it is rigged in favor of people who have more resources. Government meddling makes it more costly to conduct business. The more complicated the regulatory burden, the more smaller companies can’t compete. Make the laws complicated enough and the only companies that stay in business are the ones who can afford to pay for twenty guys like me. (my last regular accounting job paid extremely well, and nearly everything I did was jump through government mandated hoops, filling out government mandated paperwork which nobody in the government would probably ever read)

Trump has those resources. I bet he’s got a room full of accountants, and their leader is probably a grizzled old CPA with an eye patch and a raven who sits on his shoulder. The raven also has an eye patch and an accounting degree. This man has wrestled bears, and he’s going to take advantage of every tax break in the US Code for his client, and do so gleefully, knowing that many of those laws were signed by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

On the other side, you know damned good and well that the IRS has sent their most fearsome auditor against him. This man sold his soul to the devil, and then fined the devil for failing to list that soul as a depreciable asset. When he shows up to audit your company, he appears a flash of fire and brimstone, as a Finnish death metal band plays his theme song. He is an auditor bereft of mercy, compassion, or pity, and beneath his leathery wings serve a legion of IRS goblins, who will crawl into every nook and cranny of the Trump Corporation’s P&L looking for errors, and if a mouse so much as shits a turd large enough to unbalance that ledger, there will be hell to pay.

Is it unfair that rich guys can employ Gandalf level CPAs and take advantage of more complicated tax laws, while regular people use TurboTax? Yep. But in the meantime, as long as those tax laws are there, the rich guys would be utter fools not to take advantage of them.

Larry Correia, “No, You Idiots. That’s Not How Taxes Work – An Accountant’s Guide To Why You Are A Gullible Moron”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2020-09-28.

October 3, 2026

More on that change to student loan eligibility rules

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

Larry Correia’s comments on Trump’s executive order changing eligibility for federally guaranteed student loans generated a fair amount of discussion, so I felt linking to Copernican’s post on the same topic would be of interest to many of you:

As a White Western Man, I am unaccustomed to seeing or hearing “good news” in a larger geopolitical sense. That is, actions of our leaders tend to lead one to be somewhere between depressingly blackpilled and defiantly optimistic even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Recently, Donald Trump and his Department of Education have engaged in some more executive shenanigans. Once again bypassing our Congress, whose dysfunctional role is best thought of as the kidneys in our diabetic, alcoholic body politic. With that said, a relatively minor update to the Department of Education rules regarding underwriting federal student loans might have a dramatic long-term effect on our entire cultural system.

Take a look for yourself:

    Of all the actions the Executive Branch can take, this is one of the best. Most notably, because it’s boring. Changing the rules on federal fiscal underwriting is boring, so the media and the population at large will have a hard time holding on to it as a talking point. The most dramatic cultural changes are precipitated from the most boring types of fiscal action. Flashy is fun, but boring is often effective. Something to keep in mind when our generation finally seizes the reins of power.

The recent update that takes effect in 2027 is functionally removing the federal guarantee from student loans for useless degrees. Predominantly degrees that fall under the “female daycare” category. That is, the reason why every employer in the United States demands a degree to flip burgers or fill out spreadsheets is due to the fact that everyone can get a degree. Removing a significant portion of the federally backed degree-mill system will force a top-down restructuring of the American cultural academic-caste system.

The fallout from this decision is going to be immense, but we won’t see it unless the current policy holds long enough for several generations of university students to grow up under it (say around 12 years). First, it’s going to cut off universities from the endless money of cheap federal student loans that’s been flooding into useless departments. Women’s studies, social studies, English majors, and early-childhood-education majors are about to see a significant drawdown in the number of attending students.

As many have pointed out, it’s only an Executive Order, so it can be easily set aside by the next president, but it may have a salutary effect on those who do see a university degree as just a way to stay out of the working world for a few more years.

October 2, 2026

Those who are attracted to power are the ones least capable of using it wisely

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

Lord Acton, something, something, corrupts absolutely:

Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours.

F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start.

The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them.

Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency’s reach, never on serving you efficiently.

QotD: Ketchup, US vs British

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

Let’s start with the one sauce that theoretically bridges our cultures: tomato ketchup. Surely, I thought, this crimson staple would be the same everywhere. How wrong I was.

American tomato ketchup is unapologetically sweet – basically a tomato-flavored sugar delivery system that goes perfectly with everything from french fries to scrambled eggs (yes, we do that). It’s thick, rich, and designed to be squeezed with abandon.

British tomato ketchup, I discovered, has more of an edge. Less sweet, more vinegar-forward, with a thinner consistency that actually enhances rather than masks the food it touches.

Heinz may have started in America, but the British version tastes like its more sophisticated cousin who studied abroad and came back with refined tastes.

The real revelation? Many Brits find American tomato ketchup cloyingly sweet, while I initially found British tomato ketchup disappointingly tart. It took a few months of adjustment before I appreciated the more nuanced British approach – though I still secretly prefer the American version on certain foods.

Turns out it’s not just my imagination. American Heinz uses high fructose corn syrup while the British version uses regular sugar, which explains why my taste buds were a bit confused.

Marianne Jennings, “Beyond Ketchup & Ranch Dressing”, An American’s Guide to British Life, 2025-05-25.

October 1, 2026

Trump’s student loan policy change

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Larry Correia applauds President Trump’s decision to stop providing goverment-backed student loans for courses that don’t provide students who graduate with a viable career path:

Now this sounds like a good policy.

Only they’re not “banning” anyone from majoring in anything. Kids can still major in whatever dumb shit, gender studies, no job having degree, they want, and liberal academics will still make bank ripping off those kids and their parents.

This is just the rest of us tax payers not being on the hook for their good times.

Most regular loans the bank isn’t going to lend you money unless there’s some assurance that they’re not going to get screwed. If you went to your bank with a business plan that said you needed $250k up front so you could make $20 an hour after, they’d laugh at you.

Student loans were the one goofy ass outlier because Uncle Sam said it’s cool to go a quarter million dollars into debt to get a useless degree that qualifies you to get some specific $20 an hour job … except wait, due to all these loans for bullshit degrees the supply of eligible employees far exceeds the demand, so all those $20 an hour jobs are already filled, so now you’re working fast food where your coworkers are teenagers or illegal aliens, only you’re still $250k in debt.

Of course none of what I am saying will make sense to people who majored in the degrees in question because they weren’t required to take any math, econ, or accounting classes.

The headline says social work, art, religious studies, and music will be hardest hit! (teaching aides need a degree? WHY?!?) And now I’m gonna get yelled at by people who think what America really needs is more social workers.

Going off of what I’ve seen from creative writing degrees, MFAs, and the many art and music professionals I know, I’m guessing art and music degrees are mostly a huge waste of time. Just go get a real job to pay the bills and practice your art on the side until you get good at it (says the bestselling novelist who got an accounting degree).

Going deeply into debt for a “religious studies” degree from a university baffles me. Go to church. Read your scriptures. Serve your fellow man. But mostly I’m betting they included this one to try and pull at conservative heart strings because we all know in reality this policy change is going to overwhelming hit liberals.

But, Correia, you barbaric anti-intellectual* with the free taxpayer money faucet shut off this will irreparably harm America’s pretentious snooty sheltered ivory tower scholars of pointless fields who exist in a state of perpetual bossy uselessness in their little university bubble!

Oh no! Anyways.

    * for the record, I’m not anti-intellectual. I’m all in favor of scholarly pursuits. I just think much of the education business is a scam, and the people who label themselves “intellectual” usually aren’t.

How to Eat Like Benjamin Franklin

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Apr 2026

Deep golden fried toast topped with anchovy filets and melted parmesan

City/Region: England
Time Period: 1759

While spending time in London, Benjamin Franklin wrote about lodging with an elderly widow whose food was meager, but whose conversation was excellent. He wrote of one meal consisting of a bit of anchovy on a strip of bread and butter and a little ale. He was also a big fan of Parmesan cheese and fervently longed for a recipe for it, which he did eventually receive.

It almost goes without saying, but if you like anchovies and Parmesan, you’ll like this dish. It’s also quite salty, and unfortunately, I’m not the biggest fan of very salty foods or anchovies, but the toast is wonderfully crunchy and rich.

    Des anchoise au Parmesan.
    Anchovies, with Parmesan cheese.
    Fry some bits of bread about the length of an anchovy in good oil or butter, lay the half of anchovy, with the bone upon each bit, and strew over them some Parmesan cheese grated fine, and colour them nicely in an oven, or with a salamander, squeeze the juice of an orange or lemon, and pile them up in your dish and send them to table. This seems to be but a trifling thing, but I never saw it come whole from table.
    — A Complete System of Cookery by William Verral, 1759

(more…)

September 30, 2026

The Korean War Week 119 – Americans Troops Can’t Understand Each Other – September 29, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 29 Sept 2026

At the Panmunjom Truce Table, the UN presents three different plans to solve the POW issue, the only one standing in the way of an armistice. All three are rejected by the Communist delegation, but US President Harry Truman is not going to make any concessions, and have an armistice just “for the sake of having one”. In the field, the fight for Outpost Kelly flares up again, but the UN forces are unable to retake the position.

00:00 Intro
00:48 Recap
01:12 The POW Deadlock
04:12 Dean Acheson
06:54 Plans Being Made
08:53 Outpost Kelly
14:32 Summary
14:48 Conclusion
15:26 Call to Action

QotD: “Have you ever been surprised to learn that someone was a Leftist?”

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

I don’t mean learning that someone votes Democrat. That’s sadly all too common — the flyover state where I live is full of good churchgoing folks who know which bathroom to use, yet nonetheless vote Democrat in every election, because in their minds it’s somehow still 1935 and only that nice Mr. Roosevelt is keeping the bank from foreclosing on Pappy’s farm. I mean something along the lines of, you’re in a bar watching the big game with a group of Regular Joes, when all of a sudden one of them blurts out “Oh, I can’t stand all the toxic masculinity!” Or starts raving about their “transitioning” kid or how great it is that there are no national borders anymore or something like that.

It never happens, right? Like vegans and Harvard alums, you never have to wonder if someone is an SJW — they’ll tell you, right off the bat. Usually they don’t even have to tell you; the hair and the tats and the fishing tackle in the face do that. Like putting the “Bernie 2024” sticker on the bumper of the Prius or the Subaru Outback, actually declaring yourself an SJW is overkill. So much so that it’s a cliché — of all the budding shitlords I mentored in my years in academia, none of them “came out” to me because of anything I said or did. It was all the stuff I didn’t say or do — I didn’t spend half of each class period ranting and raving about The Current Thing, which was so unusual that they figured I must be on the other side.

The Left, I think it’s fair to say, enjoys total freedom here in AINO. Total liberty, too, and that’s a distinction we should probably make at some point, but for right now let’s hold fire on that. Whichever one you want to use, though, it’s obvious that the Left have it, with pretty much zero restraint. Nothing is too weird or gross or obnoxious that the Left won’t champion it.

But even more than that, all the traditional restraints on behavior — what we should probably call decorum — have been systematically destroyed, and that’s the heart of what I want to talk about. Since we’re discussing the Left here, let’s use one of their favorite terms: Privilege. I think we can take it as read that there has never been a more privileged person, in any sense of the word “privilege,” in all of human history, than Karen (or her JV version, the Basic College Girl). And what battleaxes they are! Constantly lecturing everyone else about their privilege while plowing through every social situation like a tsunami. Like the Clintons, Karen triumphs because you just can’t believe anyone has the sheer brass-balled audacity to pull the antisocial shit they do.

Have you no shame, madam? At last, have you no shame?

Severian, “On Liberty”, Founding Questions, 2022-10-12.

September 29, 2026

Carney’s Trump card – deploy the BOM to panic the Elbozos

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

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Mark Carney wouldn’t be Prime Minister without the active connivance of Donald Trump. Using the Bad Orange Man to whip up the thoroughly propagandized Boomer Elbozos has been Carney’s most successful play since arriving in Ottawa. With the enthusaistic support of the presstitutes of the Canadian relic media, all Carney needs to do to deflect any bad news is to mention the name and the elbows start flapping in unison:

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Dear Prime Minister Carney,

Enough the crap already. Just stop it and tell your caucus MPs to knock it off too. Canadians deserve better. I, along with most Canadians I talk to, are genuinely disgusted by what Canadian politics has become.

Let me start with something that apparently now requires a disclaimer before common sense is permitted into the room: yes, the Canadian government should prepare for catastrophes, whether that’s war, cyberattacks, pandemics, natural disasters, terrorism, economic shocks, asteroids and comets or, hell, even an alien invasion. Governments are supposed to think about things the rest of us would reasonably file under “probably never going to happen”, including scenarios so unlikely that everybody involved hopes the planning exercise ends up gathering dust forever. That is called governing.

But there is an enormous difference between quietly preparing for an extreme possibility and irresponsibly putting that possibility in front of Canadians until people start wondering whether they should be watching the southern horizon for tanks.

And apparently we are doing the latter now.

You called the possibility of American military action against Canada an “extreme tail risk”. In other words, something considered extraordinarily unlikely but potentially catastrophic.

Fine, plan for it then. War-game it if you like. Put it in a binder thick enough to stop a bullet and lock it in whatever filing cabinet governments use for scenarios involving asteroid strikes, alien invasions and somebody successfully explaining the federal tax code.

But why are ordinary Canadians being invited into this particular nightmare? Especially now?

Because while everybody is staring south waiting for Donald Trump’s army to parachute into Canada, something considerably less hypothetical is happening right here.

The Canadian economy isn’t exactly bounding through the meadow with a ribbon in its hair like you touted, now, is it And guess what’s actually more interesting?

On June 3, you stood in the House of Commons defending Canada’s economic performance and told Pierre Poilievre that if he wanted an answer, he could “ask the OECD”, which was forecasting Canada to have the second-strongest G7 economy that year and the next.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne invoked the OECD forecasts too. The OECD had become something of an international report card pinned proudly to the Liberal refrigerator. You touted it as proof “the plan is working!”

Then September arrived.

I’ve been saying for quite some time that Carney genuinely doesn’t want and wouldn’t accept a trade deal with the Trump administration, no matter how much it will cost Canadians (and since his family and personal wealth is more than 90% in the United States, it’ll cost him nothing at all personally). Even so, this seems to be a position from which there is no eventual “victory”, no chance to recoup the lost economic opportunities, there is nothing to “win” here. So, aside from theorized anti-Trump animus, why has Carney chosen this path? In a long essay, Upper Canadian Cavalier suggests some fascinating yet unsettling reasons that aren’t at all tied to Canadian interests:

AI-generated image from Upper Canadian Cavalier

To ask who Mark Carney is working for, you first have to be willing to look at the real nature of the Canada-US relationship, the one that no one in a position of power above would dare articulate.

Set aside the picture of the United States as the friendly giant next door, the trading partner, the ally with the shared border and the shared anthem at the hockey game. That picture is a courtesy. What sits below us is an empire, in the oldest and most exact sense of the word, and it does not rule the way the older empires ruled. Rome ruled through legions, garrisons, roads, and the physical occupation of ground. The American empire rules through the things that move without an army. It is an empire of covert softpower most of whose subjects are blissfully unaware of their subordinate position. That empire maintains control through the currency the world prices its oil in. The payment rails every bank on earth must touch. The studios and platforms that manufacture what a hundred nations find funny and frightening and true. The defence umbrella that quietly turns an independent foreign policy into a luxury most of its members decline. The foundations and the NGOs that decide which causes are respectable and which are fringe. The universities whose faculties set the terms of every argument before a single voter ever hears it. It lets its provinces keep their flags. It lets them keep their anthems and their parliaments and their little ceremonies of self-government, because none of that costs the metropole a thing, and a province that believes it is a country is far easier to manage than one that knows it is a province.

On that map, Canada is not a neighbour. Canada is the richest province in the entire system. Wealthier than nearly all of them, wired more directly into the centre than any of them, sharing the longest border, the deepest supply chains, and the most complete cultural merger of any territory the empire holds. Most provinces of an empire sit at a distance from it. We are plugged straight into the board. Southern Ontario is closer to the beating heart of that system than West Virginia is, and it has been for fifty years.

I recall hearing the term “branch plant economy” from when I first started paying attention to the news: it was a standard refrain in any discussion of Canadian industry from at least the 1960s and probably going back much further than that … because a lot of US companies did set up small manufacturing operations in Canada to avoid paying duty and taxes for shipping products across the US-Canadian border.

But the same was at least as true about cultural issues:

Once you see the country this way, something that has nagged at you for years finally has a name. You have noticed, surely, that our politics feels like a rerun. That the arguments arrive already formed, six months late, dubbed into Canadian. The slogans on the placards, the list of what counts as controversial, the shape of every fight, all of it seems to come pre-packaged from somewhere south of here, keyed to institutions and a history that are not ours. The Canadian left takes its vocabulary and its enemies from the American left. The Canadian right does the same in the other direction. To argue about any of it from outside the imported frame, to counter-signal the entire American script, is treated in this country as something close to blasphemy. That is what it is to be a province. The metropole ships the politics, and the province stages the show.

One of the claimed advantages of the negotiations leading up to the first general free-trade agreement between Canada and the United States was to eliminate as much as possible of the cross-border friction in trade: those duties and taxes that initially encouraged branch plant expansion. Free trade meant, at least in theory, that companies could produce their output where it made the most economic sense and serve the entire North American market more efficiently. Some of the old branch plants disappeared, while others expanded and grew to become much larger facilities. Later, as emphasis on manufacturing shifted from domestic to (cheaper) international sources, the jobs and the money moved steadily away from making things and toward providing services. This seemed to make sense in the economic calculations, but it wasn’t all sweetness and light and following Adam Smith’s philosophy:

Over forty years the American economy (and Canada’s) was reorganized so that the money flowed away from the people who make things and toward the people who arrange things. Factories went abroad. Finance stopped being a utility that funded industry and became the industry. A whole class came up in the gap between those two facts: the asset managers, the consultancies, the compliance shops, the climate-finance desks, the private equity partners. Men whose income arrives not from building anything but from standing between someone’s labour and someone’s capital and charging a toll on the traffic.

Intermediation, in the polite register. Skimming, if you want the shorter word.

It is very good money. It also has requirements. Open borders for goods and capital. A regulatory thicket dense enough that only the largest players can afford the guides through it. And a political class that treats all of it as weather rather than policy.

Then 2016, and worse, 2024.

Trump is a realignment. Tariffs, reshoring, open contempt for the managerial professions and the international bodies, a stated preference for the man who pours concrete over the man who writes the memo about pouring concrete. Say what you like about how he does it. The direction is unmistakable. He is dragging the American state back toward the people who work with their hands, and away from the people who take the percentage.

So that is the larger economic and political picture. Here at home, Canada has had a decade of Justin Trudeau’s clown prince act and has finally grown tired of it:

January 2025. The Liberal brand is radioactive. Ten years of Trudeau have curdled, the party is twenty-odd points down, the cycle is running hard against it and every professional in Ottawa can read the polling. A liberal man who wants a political career in Canadian politics would wait. He would let someone else absorb the defeat, sits out a term, and comes back clean in 2029 as the saviour of a rebuilt party. That is the obvious play and any political operator in town knows it.

Carney jumped in anyway.

When somebody takes a deal that looks bad, don’t ask him what it cost. Ask him what he is buying instead. Because Carney was not making a shrewd pivot towards a political career. On the arithmetic available in January 2025 he was buying a short ugly premiership, taking a run at Kim Campbell’s record and he went for it anyway.

What the office did offer, immediately and uniquely, was a seat at the table opposite Donald Trump. Not commentary. Not a column in the Financial Times. A state. Tariff authority, a negotiating team, a G7 chair, standing with Brussels, and control of one of the few economies wired deep enough into the American one to actually hurt it.

[…]

[Carney] is not governing this country. He is occupying it.

When Caesar took Rome, Pompey and the Senate did not surrender. They crossed to Greece, and there they raised what he could and kept the war going from the provinces, because their faction lost the capital but did not want to stop fighting and submit to reforms that would permanently alter the lucrativeness of their rent seeking ways. So they relocated their base of operations to continue the war abroad instead.

They lost Washington. So they reorganized the resistance in the most valuable province they had, the one already theirs, and they garrisoned it with a man of their own class who needed no persuading at all. Nobody had to recruit him. He was already one of them, and the province came with the office.

Pompey’s people in Greece were not a band of exiles, and this is the part worth understanding. They were the Senate. The lawful government of Rome, in their own account, operating in exile with its own command and its own coinage, entirely convinced that they were Rome and that the man sitting in the city was a usurper. They were also, by any honest reading, a rich and deeply corrupt class defending its own holdings, and they could hold both of those things in their heads at once without difficulty.

That is the mind of Carney’s class exactly. They are not insurgents. They think of themselves as the rightful order who have temporarily been displaced by a vulgar interloper, waiting it out in the provinces and administering what is still theirs in the meantime.

The parallel runs the other way too, and it is not flattering to the Senate. Caesar’s support was real and it was popular. The opposition to him was a wealthy class protecting its rents and calling that protection a defence of the republic. There was no cabal in that Senate either. There were hundreds of men, each convinced of his own righteousness, each guarding his own standing, arriving at the same posture without a single meeting required. Which is why it could never be exposed, only defeated.

They also treated him as a mortal threat to the constitution before he had become one, went all in on the civil war framing, and the measures they took to stop him are what forced his hand. Prophecies of that kind have a way of fulfilling themselves.

Long time readers will know that I couldn’t possibly pass up a reference to the parallels to the late Roman Republican struggle between Caesar and Pompey.

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