Quotulatiousness

March 22, 2025

Fundraising is much tougher for Democrats right now … and they’re not coping well

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

It’s not just Canadian politicians getting driven completely insane by the Bad Orange Man’s antics — he’s even doing it to his domestic opponents in the Democratic party as well:

“REMINDER: It Is Offensive And Possibly Illegal To Photoshop Anything On These Democrats’ Signs That Would Make Them Look Foolish.
The Babylon Bee.

Kansas City Star:

    Democrats Suffer Blow Ahead of Senate Elections

It’s a goddamn slide show, but as it might be amusing I shall wade in. The things I do for you people …

    Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s retirement is expected to significantly impact the Democratic Party’s prospects for the upcoming Senate elections, amplifying pressure on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The party’s challenges ahead have heightened with the departures of Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). Democrats must regain four seats to reclaim the majority.

It sure looks like the Donks are planning to get clobbered in 2026. Or, more likely, they anticipate a series of bruising primary fights as the old grift-and-grin Democrats are challenged by True Believers, because as HGG has taught us — credit where it’s due — SJWs always double down. Batshit insanity is the hill they’ve chosen to die on — Trump keeps handing them 80/20 issues, and they keep jumping on the 20 with both feet.

    CNN’s Chris Cillizza recently noted the Party’s challenges in the upcoming Senate elections. With the need for a net gain of four seats, Cillizza expressed concern over potential financial limitations that may hinder effective campaigning.

Yes. “Financial limitations”. Democrat donors are stupid — if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be Democrats — but even they can see that 80 is way, way bigger than 20.

Oh, and also: It doesn’t help that you’re openly, gleefully endorsing no-shit terrorism against Tesla dealerships — and drivers! — calling for Musk’s assassination, and so on. It’s a bad look in general, and a bad look in particular, because now the guys with the big checkbooks are wondering if that kind of thing won’t happen to them if they get crosswise with the most lunatic members of the lunatic fringe (hint: It will. As the scorpion said to the frog: can’t be ‘elped, mate, it’s me nature).

    Cillizza said, “The money that gets spent there playing defense, just to hold Democratic seats, means money that doesn’t get spent playing offense in, let’s say, a state like Ohio, where Democrats are trying to recruit Sherrod Brown, the former senator, to take on John Huston, the appointed Republican senator.”

Yes, a dwindling asset pool forces those kinds of choices. It also doesn’t help that you keep going back to the well like that. One assumes there’s a reason Sherrod Brown is a former senator. Do you have no one else?

Haha, just kidding, obviously you don’t have anyone else. That’s one of the biggest problems with gerontocracy — the Groovy Fossils are going to have to be carried out at room temperature, so anyone with anything on the ball has been giving Government a pass since the 1980s. Trump went around the Official GOP for lots of reasons, but not the least of them was: he had to. They have the same gerontocracy problem as the other side of the Uniparty. It’s turtles all the way down.

    Cillizza concluded, “I just do not see it. I don’t see the money there. I don’t see the energy there. I don’t see the candidates there to expand the playing field”.

It won’t be for lack of trying, though. You’ve still got The Media in your pocket, and they can still do some damage. You’ll never get to the 80 side of those 80/20 issues, but you might get it to 50/50 — as has been done with abortion, gay “marriage”, and so on. On the other hand, those took 40, 50 years, and The Media hadn’t totally pissed away all its credibility back then. It’s a real corner you’ve backed yourselves into, guys gals persyns.

It also doesn’t help that you’re stupid:

    Democrats have identified potential pickup opportunities in Maine and North Carolina, targeting Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).

Holy breakdancing Buddha, why would you target them? Thom Tillis is the very definition of “RINO”; Collins is a Leftist, full stop. The next time they vote against the Democrats on any issue of substance will be the first time they’ve ever done it. It’s as predictable as sunrise, so much so that it’s a joke to anyone right of Mao — the GOP officially has X number of seats, minus Collins and Murkowski.

    Vulnerabilities among current incumbents, especially Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), have added to the party’s challenges.

    Oh, don’t worry about it — the GOP will find some way to throw it. Georgia, Georgia … hey, what’s Herschel Walker up to these days? Think he’s up for another run? Why not parachute in Alan Keyes or Ben Carson? They’re still alive, right? What about “Nikki” “Haley”? She’s gotta keep her arm loose for the 2028 primaries …

      Some Democrats have remained optimistic despite the hurdles. Discussions have included potential candidates such as Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-MI) for key races. New Hampshire Democrats have prepared for competitive primaries, with Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) considering a bid for Shaheen’s seat.

    As we know, when it comes to crime 13 does 50. When it comes to Leftism, though, it’s more like 20 does 100, and there’s no better illustration than New Hampshire. It should be the reddest state in the union, and people who live there tell me it really is… except for their Congresscritters, because the good people of New Hampshire didn’t shoot every Masshole they could catch. The fine folks in Oregon, Colorado, and (soon enough) Texas know what I mean — y’all didn’t introduce migrating Californians to wood chippers when you had the chance.

Allen & Wheelock Lipfire Navy Revolver

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Apr 2015

Not all companies responded in the same way to the development of cartridge revolvers and the Rollin White patent. Allen & Wheelock, for example, decided to simply ignore the patent and make revolvers for their proprietary lipfire cartridges (fairly similar to rimfire) while relying on their lawyers to delay the anticipated patent infringement suit for as long as possible. Ultimately it took 4 years for Rollin White and S&W to gain a legal injunction against them, and when that did happen they were ready and converted their production to percussion revolvers of the same basic type. This particular piece is a .36 caliber (“Navy”) version for the lipfire round, which have been since converted to use either lipfire or more common rimfire ammunition.

QotD: The Dunbar Number in the ivory tower

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

As we know, college people are all Leftists, and if Leftists were capable of seeing the skull-fuckingly obvious consequences of their actions, they wouldn’t be Leftists. But I think it’s actually more basic than that. The answer, I submit, involves the Dunbar Number [link], which I’m using as a stand-in for the network of personal relationships that defines any bureaucracy.

Leave your logical brain aside for a second — I’ll pause, to let you pound as many shots as necessary — and think like a chick. Declining enrollment numbers are just a line on a graph. Indeed, the students themselves are mostly an abstraction — professors hate teaching and avoid it whenever possible, which, thanks to grad students, research sabbaticals, and the like, is fairly often. But that radical-even-by-academic-standards lesbian? She’s right there. All the time.

If you’ve never been inside the ivory gulag, it’s hard to convey just how tiny and all-encompassing that world is, but I’ll try. Imagine you’re just out of school and living with two roomies (for the one or two young folks who might still remain among the readership: It was once considered a good thing to move away from home, so much so that even if they had the opportunity to live in Mom’s basement after graduation — even if it would make great financial sense to do so — young folks would endure quite a bit of deprivation in order to make their own way in the world. This often necessitated living in crappy apartments in a dodgy part of town with one or more roommates, for several years). Your roomies do what young guys do — sometimes their girlfriends move in; sometimes they move out; sometimes their friends crash on the couch — but here’s the kicker: Everyone involved does the same job at the same company, such that you’re effectively always at work. Anything you do at “home” gets brought into the office, because everyone you live with — and everyone you could potentially ever live with — is there.

Imagine living life like that. That’s the ivory tower.

Severian, “The Dunbar Problem”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-06.

March 21, 2025

Apparently the US Constitution elevates the judiciary over the other branches of government

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on recent innovative judicial activism to constrain the evil machinations of the Bad Orange Man:

It won’t be news to anyone that the federal judiciary has decided Donald Trump has no authority as President of the United States but to serve and protect the status quo, absolutely without deviation. Change is unconstitutional. Policy is unconstitutional. But even by that standard, today has been very special.

Without digging into all the details about everything, skim your way through a single judicial decision to begin to see what’s happening: the decision from District Court Judge Ana Reyes, ordering the Department of Defense to allow the continued service of transgender military personnel. You can click here to read it, or open the PDF file below.

This is not a judicial decision. I mean, it is a judicial decision, but it doesn’t represent judicial culture or a judicial outlook. At all. It’s a bitchy schoolgirl essay about being fair and not being mean, with healthy doses of platitudinous foot stompery. Screenshot, bottom of page one and top of page two:

“Today, however, our military is stronger and our Nation is safer for the millions of such blanks (and all other persons) who serve.” Because she says so, is why. The old bigoted American military was very weak. I don’t remember: Did the old dumb bigots ever even win any wars or anything?

[…]

Our military is much stronger now than it was when gay and transgender service wasn’t warmly encouraged, the end. (Stomps foot.) It’s a TikTok video formatted to look like a, you know, a judge thing. You can even agree with the judge and see that she hasn’t made an argument. “Today, however, our military is stronger.” Like when we beat the Taliban, or all the other wars we’ve won lately. This is the declarative reality in which a thing becomes true because you type it.

Now, watch this. Watch Judge Ana Reyes roll right over herself without noticing that she’s doing it. You don’t have to read past page two to see this.

On page one, she characterizes the reasoning — the premise the administration advanced to forbid military service by transgender personnel: “Service by transgender persons is ‘inconsistent’ with this mission because they lack the ‘requisite warrior ethos’ to achieve ‘military excellence’.” That’s it, those mean monsters! That’s their whole reason! They said trans people can’t serve because of, I don’t know, some stupid ethos thing. What does that even mean?

Star Trek: Jobs, Money, and Replicators

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 14 Jun 2024

So the Federation doesn’t use money and magic walls give you anything you ask for. What kind of economy are we really looking at here, and is some approximation of this possible without first having those replicators?

First we have to talk about what money is, what a job is (vs just being employed) and a little historical detour into modern efforts at Universal Basic Income. All of which lead to a very hypothetical look at how we might be able to build a rough approximation of a Star Trek economy in the near-term future.

This is all analysis and thought-experiment. I’m not necessarily endorsing any of these ideas, just bouncing things around for consideration.

00:00 Intro
01:00 Qualitatively Distinct Model
02:27 The Triple Revolution
05:00 Jobs ≠ Employment
06:32 Universal Basic Income
11:35 Federation Credit
13:45 Impacts of Currency
15:16 Can We Really Do This?
(more…)

March 20, 2025

US Supreme Court to hear case that might overturn the Kelo decision

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:00

J.D. Tuccille discusses a US Supreme Court case on abuse of the power of eminent domain that might be the key to reversing the ridiculous Kelo precedent:

… the U.S. Supreme Court may soon overturn one of its worst decisions in recent memory — a ruling that justified government stealing property from its owners to pass it to better-connected private parties. On Friday, the court will decide whether to consider a New York case that could upset the precedents set by Kelo v. New London, an eminent domain battle that prompted books, a movie, and state-level legal reforms. While Kelo was a loss for anybody who wants to set boundaries around government power, the court could take the opportunity this week to set things right with Bowers v. Oneida County Industrial Development Agency.

Kelo Abandoned Basic Limitations on Government Power

In dissenting to the majority’s 2005 decision in Kelo allowing the taking of a house owned by Susette Kelo by the city government of New London, Connecticut to transfer it to a favored developer, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor quoted Calder v. Bull (1798): “[A] law that takes property from A. and gives it to B: It is against all reason and justice, for a people to entrust a Legislature with such powers; and, therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it”.

“Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power”, O’Connor added. “Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded — i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public — in the process.”

That dissent was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Also agreeing with the dissenters were a great many Americans horrified that the Supreme Court had signed off on the confiscation of private property so long as a potential new owner could show spiffy plans for the confiscated parcels and promise greater tax revenue. It wouldn’t even have to be a fulfilled promise — Susette Kelo’s house remained undeveloped when financing for the project fell through.

The response to Kelo included books, a movie — Little Pink House — and a wave of state-level court decisions and legislative efforts intended to rein-in the abuse of eminent domain.

Most States Have Reformed Eminent Domain — but Not New York

“Since Kelo v. New London, 47 states have strengthened their protections against eminent domain abuse, either through legislation or state supreme court decisions,” notes the Institute for Justice (I.J.). Of course, not all the reforms were created equal. I.J. grades the various efforts, with states like Florida getting an “A” grade and Connecticut — where the Kelo case occurred — lagging with a “D”. A 2009 study found that “states with more economic freedom, greater value of new housing construction, and less racial and income inequality are more likely to have enacted stronger restrictions, and sooner” on eminent domain.

And then there’s New York. I.J. gives that state an “F” because it failed to even attempt reform. In 2009, that state’s highest court conceded “it may be that the bar has now been set too low” as it approved seizure of private property for redevelopment. “But any such limitation upon the sovereign power of eminent domain as it has come to be defined in the urban renewal context is a matter for the Legislature, not the courts.” The legislature never acted.

Oh, goodie … the ever-bouncing F-35 fighter decision is back in play

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe, Military, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

My initial reaction on seeing Alex McColl’s headline was to immediately reject the notion of the Royal Canadian Air Force operating two completely different fighter aircraft, both for cost and for personnel reasons: the RCAF is already underfunded and short on trained aircraft technicians for a single fighter (the CF-18 Hornet), never mind two even higher-tech replacements. But on reading the article, I’m open to further investigation of the idea:

“F-35 Lightning II completes Edwards testing” by MultiplyLeadership is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Canada’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney didn’t waste any time standing up to Donald Trump’s illegal trade war. Within hours of being sworn in, Bill Blair — who was minister of national defence under Justin Trudeau and remains in the role under Carney — went on CBC’s Power & Politics to deliver a bombshell: Canada is going to re-examine our plan to purchase 88 American F-35A fighter jets.

This was in response to a question about if Canada would emulate Portugal, which announced that it was reconsidering a planned purchase of American F-35 jets: “We are also examining other alternatives, whether we need all of those fighter jets to be F-35s or if there might be alternatives. The prime minister has asked me to go and examine those things and have discussions with other sources particularly where there may be opportunities to assemble those fighter jets in Canada, to properly support them and maintain them in Canada, and again we’re looking at how do we make investments in defence which also benefits Canadian workers, Canadian industry and supports a strong Canadian economy.”

When asked about a partial cut to the F-35 order, Blair responded: “The direction I’ve been given by the prime minister is go and look at all of our options to make sure that we make the right decision for Canada.” He noted that this didn’t mean the government planned to outright cancel the F-35 contract.

[…]

With the first 16 F-35s already on order, and the first four already in production on the assembly line in Texas, it’s likely too late to cancel the F-35 order without significant penalties.

Saab JAS-39 Gripen of the Czech Air Force taking off from AFB Čáslav.
Photo by Milan Nykodym via Wikimedia Commons.

This opens the door to a mixed fleet that includes a smaller number of expensive F-35A fighter-bombers and a larger number of affordable Gripen-E fighters. All of Canada’s G7 allies fly a mixed fleet of fighter jets today, some have 3 or more types. While it wouldn’t be easy, it is possible for a serious nation to fly a mixed fleet. Before the CF-18, Canada had 3 different types of armed fighter jets in service. The RCAF wanted to replace them all with expensive F-15 Eagles, but Pierre Trudeau made them settle for the cheaper F/A-18 Hornet. His government ordered 138 CF-18s, but that fleet shrank over time as a cost saving measure. The big cut happened during the CF-18 modernization under the Harper Government, when the hornet fleet shrank from 120 to 80 jets.

Living up to our commitments to our NATO allies is about more than just spending 2 percent of GDP, it also means living up to our mission requirements. Keeping our word means showing up, and 88 F-35As was never going to be enough jets for us to meet our commitments to NORAD and NATO at the same time. To do that, we need at least 120 jets. Reevaluating our options does not mean starting from scratch. To paraphrase minister Blair: A great deal of work was done during the FFCP evaluation. Two jets met the requirements: the expensive American F-35, and the Swedish Gripen-E with an offer to make them in Canada. Let’s just buy them both.

The first step is easy: Have Saab and IMP refresh their FFCP submission with new delivery deadlines and place an order for 88 Gripen-E jets. The second is to announce that we’re reducing the F-35 order down to 65 jets – the number that the Harper government planned to sole source but never ordered. Finally, we put our elbows up and announce that the F-35 order would be cut by 5 jets for every week the Trump administration maintains their threats of illegal tariffs, down to a minimum of 40 jets.

The F-35A has a total cost of ownership about double that of the Gripen-E, so we could afford to add two Gripens for every F-35 cancelled. A mixed fleet of about 120 Gripen-Es and 45 F-35As would help us get to 2% of GDP while reliably pulling our weight on NORAD and NATO missions.

The REAL Cause of the Revolutionary War

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

Atun-Shei Films
Published 15 Mar 2025

What caused the American Revolution? Let’s dive beneath the surface-level understanding of British tyranny and unjust taxation and try to understand the long-term social, political, and economic forces which set the stage for our War of Independence.

00:00 Introduction
03:00 1. The World Turned Upside Down
13:50 2. The Paradox of American Liberalism
28:34 3. The Rage Militaire
38:12 Conclusion / Credits
(more…)

March 19, 2025

The Trumpocalypse – “The outlook for universities has become dire”

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

John Carter suggests that American higher education needs to find a new funding model that doesn’t depend on governments to shower their administrative organizations with unearned loot:

Shortly after taking power, the Trump administration announced a freeze on academic grants at the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Health. New grant proposal reviews were halted, locking up billions in research funding. Naturally, the courts pushed back, with progressive judges issuing injunctions demanding the funding be reinstated. Judicial activism has so far met with only mixed success: the NSF has resumed the flow of money to existing grants, but the NIH has continued to resist. While the grant review process has been restarted at the NSF, the pause created a huge backlog, resulting in considerable uncertainty for applicants.

The NIH has instituted a 15% cap to indirect costs, commonly referred to as overheads. This has universities squealing. Overheads are meant to offset the budgetary strain research groups place on universities, covering the costs of the facilities they work in – maintenance, power and heating, paper for the departmental printer, that kind of thing. Universities have been sticking a blood funnel into this superficially reasonable line item for decades, gulping down additional surcharges up to 50% of the value of research grants, a bounty which largely goes towards inflating the salaries of the little armies of self-aggrandizing political commissars with titles like Associate Vice Assistant Deanlet of Advancing Excellence who infest the flesh of the modern campus like deer ticks swarming on the neck of a sick dog. Easily startled readers may wish to close their eyes and scroll past the next few images btw, but I really want to make this point here. When you look at this:

A 15% overhead cap, if applied across the board, has an effect on the parasitic university administration class similar to a diversity truck finding parking at a German Christmas market. Thoughts and prayers, everyone.

Meanwhile at the NSF, massive layoffs are ongoing, and there are apparently plans to slash the research budget by up to 50%. While specific overhead caps haven’t been announced at the NSF yet, there’s every reason to expect that these will be imposed as well, compounding the effect of budget cuts.

There is no attempt to hide the motivation behind the funding freeze, which is obvious to both the appalled and the cuts’ cheerleaders. Just as overheads serve as a blood meal for the administrative caste, scientific research funding has been getting brazenly appropriated by political activists at obscene scales. A recent Senate Commerce Committee report found that $2 billion in NSF funding had been diverted towards DEI promotion under the Biden administration. In reaction to this travesty, as this recent Nature article notes, there are apparently plans to outright cancel ongoing grants funding “research” into gay race communism. DEI programs, formerly ubiquitous across Federal agencies, have already been scrubbed both from departmental budgets and web pages. Indeed, killing those programs was one of the first actions of the MAGA administration.

The outlook for universities has become dire, and academics have been sweating bullets all over social media. Postdocs aren’t being hired, faculty offers are being rescinded, careers are on hold, research programs are in limbo. This comes at the same time that budgets are being hit by declining enrolment due to the demographic impact of an extended period of below-replacement fertility along with rapidly declining confidence in the value of university degrees, with young men in particular checking out at increasing rates as universities become tacitly understood as hostile feminine environments. They’re hitting a financial cliff at the same point that they’ve burned through the sympathy of the general public.

The entire sector is in grave danger.

Politically, going after research funding is astute. Academia is well known to be a Blue America power centre, used to indoctrinate the young with the antivalues of race Marxism, provide a halo of scholarly legitimacy to the left’s ideological pronouncements, and hand out comfortable sinecures to left-wing activists. The overwhelming left-wing bias of university faculties is proverbial. The Trump administration is using the budgetary crisis as a handy excuse to sic its attack DOGE on the unclean beast – starting with cutting off funding to the most ideological research projects, but apparently also intending to ruin the financial viability of the progressives’ academic spoils system as a whole.

Cutting the NSF budget by half may seem at first glance like punitive overkill, and no doubt the left is screeching that Orange Hitler is throwing a destructive tantrum like a vindictive child and thereby endangering American leadership in scientific research. After all, for all the attention that NASA diversity programs have received, the bulk of research funding still goes to legitimate scientific inquiry, surely? However, the problems in academic research go much deeper than its relentless production of partisan activist slop. Strip out all of the DEI funding, fire every equitied commissar and inclusioned diversity hire, and you’re still left with a sclerotic academic research landscape that has spent decades doing little of use – or interest – to anyone, and doing this great nothing at great expense.

The Korean War 039 – Kim Gets ROKrolled – March 18, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 18 Mar 2025

Seoul falls to the South Koreans this week — the 4th time it’s changed hands since last June. There is no big celebration this time, though, since much of the city has been completely destroyed. This is just part of Operation Ripper, which advances all over to little enemy resistance, also taking the important town of Hongcheon.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:58 Recap
01:46 Soviet Intervention?
04:22 Operation Rugged
07:01 Task Force 77
09:36 South Korean Porters
11:02 MacArthur and McClellan
13:55 Summary
14:13 Conclusion
(more…)

Moore Teatfire Revolver

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Jun 2015

The Moore patent “teatfire” revolver was one of the more (no pun intended) successful workarounds to the Rollin White patent. Designed by Daniel Moore and David Williamson, the gun was a six-shot .32 caliber pocket revolver which used a proprietary type of cartridge. It was loaded from the front, and the rear of the case had a nipple in its center full of priming compound. This allowed the rear of the cylinder to only have a small hole through which the hammer could reach to hit the nipple and fire the round, as opposed to a rimfire design in which the whole rear of the cartridge had to be exposed at the back of the cylinder. Some examples, including this one, included a unique type of extractor for pushing out spent cases.

March 18, 2025

Getting rid of Houthi and the Blowfish

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It has been alarming just how long the west — and especially the United States — have been willing to put up with Houthi attacks on shipping going through the Red Sea. President Trump has indicated that American patience has run out, as CDR Salamander discusses:

The Houthi Ansarullah “Al-Sarkha” banner. Arabic text:
الله أكبر (Allah is the greatest)
الموت لأمريكا (death to America)
الموت لإسرائيل (death to Israel)
اللعنة على اليهود (a curse upon the Jews)
النصر للإسلام (victory to Islam)
Image and explanatory text from Wikimedia Commons.

… in the almost 18 months since the Houthi rebels have been attacking Western shipping in the Red Sea, we have mostly been playing defense.

Why have we been playing defense? The Biden Administration, like the Obama Administration, was worm-ridden with Iranian accommodationalists. The Houthi, like Hamas and Hezbollah, are Iranian proxies.

After the murder, rape, slaughter, and kidnapping from Gaza into Israel on October 7th, 2023 by Iranian proxies, the Houthi started their campaign of support — as directed by Iran — by attacking shipping in the Red Sea.

It could not be ignored, but we never took the needed action. We did not even do half-measures. At best we did quarter-measures.

The attacks continued and our credibility on the world stage degraded in proportion to that.

As we have discussed often here, we have a few thousand years of dealing with piracy and bad-faith actors on the high seas. It has direct costs in commerce, treasure, and lives.

This cannot be allowed to continue.

Over the weekend, the new Trump Administration put down a marker. We seem to have ratcheted things up a bit. Not much available on open source, but over the weekend, CENTCOM put out a few things;

    CENTCOM Forces Launch Large Scale Operation Against Iran-Backed Houthis in Yemen On March 15, U.S. Central Command initiated a series of operations consisting of precision strikes against Iran-backed Houthi targets across Yemen to defend American interests, deter enemies, and restore freedom of navigation.

[…]
Where is all this going? Well, let’s establish a few things first.

  1. Clearly what we were doing was not working.
  2. The Houthi are a 4th rate non-naval power. We like to tell everyone that, though we are the world’s second largest navy, we are the most capable. If we can’t keep the Houthi away from shipping through a major Sea Line of Communication, then why should anyone expect we could do more.
  3. Europe won’t/can’t help. They not only lack the capability to project power ashore against the Houthi to any reasonable measure, they lack the will.
  4. China does not care. It does not impact them. They benefit from this chaos against the West.
  5. Russia thinks this is wonderful.
  6. Iran can’t believe we are letting this go on. The Houthi are the last significant proxy, so they will do all they can to keep them going.

The lines are fairly clear right now. Not much room to maneuver. Looks like we will be at this for awhile. More extended range time.

QotD: Lester Thurow and the other cheerleaders for “Industrial Policy” in the 1980s

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

The late Lester Thurow was quite popular in the 1980s and 1990s for his incessant warnings that America was losing at the game of trade with other countries. Most ominous, Thurow (and others) warned, was our failure to compete effectively against the clever Japanese who, unlike us naive and complacent Americans, had the foresight to practice industrial policy, including the use of tariffs targeted skillfully and with precision. Trade, you see, said Thurow (and others) is indeed a contest in which the gains of the “winners” are the losses of the “losers”. Denials of this alleged reality come only from those who are bewitched by free-market ideology or blinded by economic orthodoxy.

And so – advised Thurow (and others) – we Americans really should step up our game by taking many production and consumption decisions out of the hands of short-sighted and selfish entrepreneurs, businesses, investors, and consumers and putting these decisions into the hands of the Potomac-residing wise and genius-filled faithful stewards of Americans’ interest.

Sound familiar? It should. While some of the details from decades ago of the news-making proponents of protectionism and industrial policy differ from the details harped on by today’s proponents of protectionism and industrial policy, the essence of the hostility to free trade and free markets of decades ago is, in most – maybe all – essential respects identical to the hostility that reigns today.

Markets in which prices, profits, and losses guide the decisions of producers and consumers were then – as they are today – asserted to be stupid, akin to a drunk donkey, while government officials (from the correct party, of course) alone have the knowledge, capacity, willpower, and power to allocate resources efficiently and in the national interest.

Nothing much changes but the names. Three or four decades ago protectionism and industrial policy in the name of the national interest was peddled by people with names such as Lester Thurow, Barry Bluestone, and Felix Rohatyn. Today protectionism and industrial policy in the name of the national interest is peddled by people with different names.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2020-03-12.

March 17, 2025

America’s modern Triumvirate

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

Last month, I posted John Carter’s amusing riff on Trump, Musk, and Vance as the American Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, the original Triumvirate. Apparently John isn’t the only one struck by the similarities, as David Friedman also considers the three as America’s modern Triumvirate:

Trump, Vance, and Musk as America’s Triumvirate – Grok

Trump is the most important at present, since both Vance and Musk have political power only to the extent he gives it to them. He is a very competent demagogue, as demonstrated by his winning a series of political conflicts that almost everyone expected him to lose. So far as I can tell from his history he has no political views of his own, uses ideology as a tool to get power, attention, status. Conservatives were a substantial faction unhappy with the state of the nation, with what they viewed as the political and cultural domination of the country by their opponents, hence a potential power base for him. Progressives had overplayed their hand, pushed woke ideology too far, due to face a backlash, useful as enemies. He adopted the role of conservative champion, destroyer of wokeism, borrowing details of his program most recently from Project 2025, a detailed conservative plan for how a conservative administration could restructure the federal government.

Trump’s Ukraine policy is to produce a peace for which he could claim credit, a deal that holds until at least 2028. To force Zelensky to accept he had to make it believable that he was willing to drop US support for Ukraine if Ukraine refuses to go along, and he did. To force Putin to accept he will have to make it believable that the US is willing to continue, even expand, support for Ukraine if Russia refuses to accept a peace plan.

[…]

Assuming no rupture with Trump and no failure of their administration extreme enough to break Trump’s control over his party, Vance will be the Republican nominee in 2028. He is young, handsome and smart with a beautiful and intelligent wife, is playing a minor role now but could be a major political figure in the post-Trump world. Unlike Trump he has political views of his own, not merely the desire for power. What are they?

I devoted two of my earlier posts to trying to answer that question, Vance and Revising the Republican Party. My conclusion:

    The conservative movement of Bill Buckley rejected the New Deal. Vance does not. The past he wants to return to is an idealized version of America in the fifties, perhaps the sixties. The movement he wants to build rejects both the pro-market economics of the pre-Trump conservative movement and the cultural program of current progressives. He wants an America of stable marriages, views parents as more reliably committed to the future than the childless — hence the much-quoted line about childless cat ladies. One of his more intriguing proposals is that children should get votes, cast by their parents, giving a family with three children five votes.

    …

    The Republican party Vance wants to build looks, economically, like the Democratic party of the fifties and sixties, culturally like the inverse of the progressive, aka woke, movement.

[…]

The project the three of them are attempting is a full scale revision of the federal government. Of the three, Musk is the one who might be competent to do it. Trump’s skill is charisma, the ability to get people to pay attention to him, admire him, want to please him. That is how he got to a position from which to revise the government but it is not the skill needed to do it. Vance has demonstrated even less of the relevant abilities; his accomplishments so far are writing a very interesting book and winning a senate election

Musk, in contrast, has created two very successful firms, taken over and revised a third. None were projects on the scale of what he is now attempting but they are smaller projects of the same sort. Hence it is at least possible that, with the authority Trump has so far been willing to delegate to him, he can convert the federal government into something smaller, less expensive, better functioning, judged at least by the standards of Trump and his supporters.

QotD: Myths from Norman Rockwell’s America

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Politics, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve seen complaints on X that a factory worker’s single income used to be enough to raise a family on but isn’t anymore. It’s true; I grew up in those days.

The complaint generally continues that we were robbed of this by bad policy choices. But that is at best only half true.

World War II smashed almost the entire industrial capacity of the world outside the U.S., which exited with its manufacturing plant not only intact, but greatly improved by wartime capitalization. The result was that for about 30 years, the US was a price-taker in international markets. Nobody could effectively compete with us at heavy or even light manufacturing.

The profits from that advantage built Norman Rockwell’s America — lots of prosperous small towns built around factories and mills. Labor unions could bid up salaries for semi-skilled workers to historically ridiculous levels on that tide.

But it couldn’t last. Germany and Japan and England recapitalized and rebuilt themselves. The Asian tigers began to be a thing. U.S. producers facing increasing competitive pressure discovered that they had become bloated and inefficient in the years when the penalty for that mistake was minimal.

Were there bad policy choices? Absolutely. Taxes and entitlement spending exploded because all that surplus was sloshing around ready to be captured; the latter has proven politically almost impossible to undo.

When our windfall finally ended in the early 1970s, Americans were left with habits and expectations formed by the long boom. We’ve since spent 50 years trying, with occasional but only transient successes, to recreate those conditions. The technology boom of 1980 to 2001 came closest.

But the harsh reality is that we are never likely to have that kind of advantage again. Technology and capital are now too mobile for that.

Political choices have to be made within this reality. It’s one that neither popular nor elite perception has really caught up with.

Eric S. Raymond, X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, 2024-07-08.

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