Quotulatiousness

August 7, 2025

The Arctic, strategically speaking

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

CDR Salamander suggests we tilt our globes (you have a globe on your desk, don’t you?) 90 degrees and consider the Arctic Ocean:

First things first, as it is the focus of the report, let’s go to the chart room and properly define the, “Central Arctic Ocean”.

There it is, the horizontally shaded bit outside everyone’s EEZ.

The chart comes from the report in question by RAND: The Future of Maritime Presence in the Central Arctic Ocean.

Before we dive in — and the Front Porch knows exactly where I am going here — I need to point out again what we see at the very top where all the red, green, and blue lines intersect. You can’t miss it, and it should have you screaming to whatever direction The Pentagon is from where you sit.

Yes kiddies, that is the Bering Strait, half of which is ours, and the other side is Russia. As you move from the Arctic into the greater Pacific or from the Pacific to the Arctic, you have to pass through that strait, and before it the American Aleutian Islands.

As we’ve covered here before, we have criminally avoided leveraging the blessings of the geography bequeathed to our nation, that of controlling both the inner and outer gates to the Arctic Ocean from the Pacific.

I should not have to explain to you the importance of the Arctic shores of Alaska to anyone. Challengers to the security of our resources in the north, both old and new, are back on the scene. We are a decade late in building a base at Nome and reactivating Adak. I covered that in a previous Substack linked in the prior sentence. Read it and come back if you need to catch up.

A weakness of much of the RAND report is, it is mostly based on stale talking points about immediate climate change in the Arctic, and questionably alarmist assumptions about the Arctic climate for the rest of the century, which seem more suited to the first Obama Administration, but put this to the side.

Should the climate in the Arctic mid-century trend towards the more ice or less, the simple facts remain — the competition in the Arctic is only increasing and the time to act on this new reality is now.

August 6, 2025

Actual data demolishes the “climate catastrophe” narrative

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

At The Conservative Woman, Paul Homewood summarizes the findings of a new report for the US Department of Energy:

A report by five independent, eminent scientists has blown apart the myth of catastrophic climate change, destroying the case for Net Zero in the process.

Judith Curry, Roy Spencer, Ross McKitrick, John Christy and Steve Koonin are all highly respected leaders in their respective fields. Their report was commissioned by the US Department of Energy (DOE) but written with no editorial oversight by the DOE and with no political influence whatsoever. Although it specifically covers the US, its findings have worldwide ramifications.

The 151-page report, A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate, reviews scientific certainties and uncertainties in how anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions have affected, or will affect, the nation’s climate, extreme weather events, and selected metrics of societal well-being.

Maybe the most relevant part concerns extreme weather. According to the report: ‘Most extreme weather events in the US do not show long-term trends. Claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by US historical data. Additionally, forest management practices are often overlooked in assessing changes in wildfire activity. Global sea level has risen approximately 8 inches since 1900, but there are significant regional variations driven primarily by local land subsidence; US tide gauge measurements in aggregate show no obvious acceleration in sea level rise beyond the historical average rate.

A few graphs from the report tell the story, and you can see them at the end of this article.

  1. US landfalling hurricanes show no long-term trends, either in frequency or intensity;
  2. Heatwaves were much worse than now before the 1960s;
  3. Temperature extremes are reducing, as a greater number of extremely hot days is more than offset by fewer extremely cold ones;
  4. There has been a marked decline in the number of the strongest tornadoes, EF3 to EF5, since the 1970s. The increased numbers of weaker tornadoes is the result of better observation methods, including Doppler radar, not an actual increase;
  5. US droughts were much more severe for most of the historical record going back to 1895;
  6. While wildfire activity has marginally increased since the 1980s, it was considerably worse up to the Second World War. Most of these long-term changes are caused by fire management practices, not climate changes;
  7. Tide gauges all around the US show the same story – a slow and steady sea level rise beginning in the mid 19thC. The rate of rise can vary considerably from station to station because of local factors. New York and the rest of the Atlantic Coast, for example, has been subsiding since the Ice Age; Galveston is sinking as a direct result of groundwater withdrawals.

The scientists pour scorn on weather attribution computer models, which have become the media’s go-to source for climate apocalypse stories. These attribution models routinely claim that extreme weather events have been made more likely because of global warming. They are dismissed in the report, which highlights the lack of high-quality data and reliance on deficient climate models. Other scientists have not been so kind!

The Korean War Week 59 – Who’s Really Running the Korean War? – August 5, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 5 Aug 2025

The Kaesong peace talks keep dragging on, and where any demarcation line should be drawn continues to the biggest obstacle to progress. The war continues, though, and plans for new offensives and blockades are being hashed out. But who exactly are the forces fighting this war? This week we take a closer look at the Communist forces and the American chain of command.

Chapters
00:00 Hook
00:37 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:11 The 38th Parallel Issue
02:51 War Without Victory
04:58 US Chain of Command
09:21 Plans and Alternatives
10:58 UN Air Power
13:19 The Communist Forces
18:28 Summary
18:49 Conclusion
19:45 CTA
(more…)

August 5, 2025

High tech and lust for power are a bad combination

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

Spaceman Spiff discusses the malign confluence of technocrats and amoral power-seekers (BIRM):

Today’s technocrats, assisted by billionaire tech bros, want to implement a digital surveillance grid that will eradicate any notion of anonymity or privacy forever.

Every major country, including the United States, is working on this with enthusiastic support from governments and their many agents.

The sales pitch is primarily platitudes about protecting people from harm, especially children.

What they seek is the end of the internet as it currently is, which means it will look a lot more like licensed corporate TV than the current free for all. From here their goal is to extend their surveillance operation into every aspect of our lives, from the energy we consume to the food we are permitted to eat.

This will probably cause a lot of damage, but it will ultimately fail.

Tech bro arrogance meets managerial control freakery

We are witnessing a partnership between the technocratic elite, with a limited understanding of technology, and silicone valley titans, who are blinded by the promise of technology.

Each group believes draconian surveillance systems combined with fancy data analysis will solve many societal problems and usher in a new era with them at the helm.

To the technocrats it promises full-spectrum control of all our choices. The food we eat, the material we consume, the ability to travel.

They are salivating at the thought of the ultimate control, the issuing of government-controlled digital currencies they can deactivate on a whim. No steak for the memelords, and no road trips for those without the right carbon profile.

They have been discussing these things for many years with a degree of enthusiasm bordering on mania.

The technologists see a chance to keep in with the powerful, to join the club. If they can be the trusted partner of the visionaries currently wrecking our world they will cash in and perhaps be spared from the concentration camps.

The technologists have powerful tools that promise amazing things. Machine learning, predictive programming, behavioural modelling.

Spotting patterns within trillions of data points is appealing to society’s tinkerers, all the better to predict problematic behaviours and to spot trends. Combined with nudge units and related horrors of social engineering this promises to be the holy grail for a technocratic managerialist regime absolutely convinced it can steer society in enlightened directions, just like they imagine they did during Covid.

It is all very futuristic, and it has clearly impressed our technology gurus as well as those who love control.

But along with the outsized data stores will come outsized cockups they cannot properly plan for.

Climate modelling has promised immense benefits and accuracy for decades and we have yet to see a single successful prediction. Indeed, some of the most famous climate predictions are almost comically wrong but nonetheless trigger endless rounds of funding, chatter, conferences and hubris. Such is the lure of anything that can be adapted to enforce top-down social control.

There have been many attempts to harness technology to predict the stock market, another obvious target. None of them worked either. It doesn’t seem to matter. No one is checking the track record. It is sold on its promise and that works because of who is buying. Or, rather, the type of person who embraces these schemes.

Digital surveillance, digital currencies, digital voting, digital IDs. Everything we do tracked and stored. Such absolute total control would make our superiors into gods as they exploit these powerful tools to direct us towards better versions of ourselves.

There is a delusion at play here. Those closest to this seem lost in their fantasies. They are blind.

Inside the CIA Coup That Changed Iran Forever! – W2W 38

Filed under: Britain, History, Middle East, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 3 Aug 2025

In 1953, a battle for Iran’s soul erupts on the streets of Tehran. Prime Minister Mosaddegh defies British oil interests, outwits Soviet intrigue, and faces down the Shah — but a secret Anglo-American plot changes history forever. As coups, street mobs, and betrayal plunge Iran into chaos, the nation’s fragile democracy is crushed and a brutal new order rises. This is the untold story of oil, espionage, and the coup that reshaped the Middle East.
(more…)

Will the courts take away Tariff-master Trump’s favourite toy?

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

President Donald Trump’s second term in office has been dominated by his capricious and seemingly random deployment of tariffs as a bludgeon to intimidate and coerce America’s allies and enemies alike. In Reason, J.D. Tuccille considers the possibility of the courts taking away the one tool Trump has been using to get his own way in trade negotiations:

Everybody with a brain knows that tariffs are taxes. And they know that tariffs imposed on goods imported to the United States are largely paid by American businesses and consumers. The big question is whether tariffs unilaterally imposed by President Donald Trump under creative interpretations of emergency executive powers will withstand a federal court challenge. So far, the signs are promising for those hoping that a law intended to rein in the power of the presidency will not be read to permit the president to set trade policy of his own accord.

As CBS News reported this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. heard “oral arguments on Thursday in V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, a case brought by five small business owners and 12 states who allege they have been harmed by President Trump’s import taxes. V.O.S., the lead plaintiff in the case, is a New-York based wine importer.”

Representing the plaintiffs is the free-market Liberty Justice Center, along with co-counsel Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School. The plaintiffs are challenging the Trump administration’s invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as the basis for the “Liberation Day” tariffs on much of the world as well as related tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China.

A Law Intended To Trim Presidential Power, Not Expand It

The plaintiffs maintain that “under that law, the President may invoke emergency economic powers only after declaring a national emergency in response to an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ to national security, foreign policy, or the U.S. economy originating outside of the United States. The lawsuit argues that the Administration’s justification — a trade deficit in goods — is neither an emergency nor an unusual or extraordinary threat.”

What’s interesting is that Congress passed IEEPA not to expand presidential power, but to restrict it. According to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report, “following committee investigations that discovered that the United States had been in a state of emergency for more than 40 years, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act (NEA) in 1976 and IEEPA in 1977. The pair of statutes placed new limits on presidential emergency powers”. Under these laws, presidents are required to assess emergencies on an annual basis, extend them if necessary, and report on their status to Congress.

“Some experts argue that the renewal process has become pro forma“, the report acknowledges. “History shows that national emergencies invoking IEEPA often last nearly a decade, although some have lasted significantly longer — the first state of emergency declared under the NEA and IEEPA, which was declared in response to the taking of U.S. embassy staff as hostages by Iran in 1979, is in its fifth decade.”

Origin of the China-Taiwan Conflict: Chinese Civil War 1945-1949

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

Real Time History
Published 21 Feb 2025

With the Japanese surrender in September 1945, the Second World War comes to an end. But for China there won’t be peace right away because the nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek and the communists under Mao Zedong still haven’t resolved their struggle and so the Chinese Civil War will flare up once again.

Chapters:
00:00 Japanese Surrender
03:44 Opposing Forces
07:33 KMT Offensives
12:18 CCP vs KMT Strategy
14.45 CCP Counterattack
19:19 Civilian Experience
23:23 CCP Huaihai Campaign
26:30 Final CCP Offensives
29:31 KMT Escape to Taiwan
31:59 Why did the Communists Win?
36:07 The United States and Taiwan
(more…)

August 4, 2025

QotD: The impeachment of Andrew Johnson

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

Over the past few weeks, it has surprised me how seldom the name Andrew Johnson has come up. Sure, every time it has been mentioned that Donald Trump is the third (or fourth — or third and a halfth) President to be impeached, Johnson, the first, is given a brief mention, but very few details are offered of a story almost as stupid, insane, villainous, and corrupt as what’s going on now.

Almost.

I am greatly obliged to my old friend revisionist historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, who encouraged me to look into the Johnson impeachment. Johnson was the 17th President of the United States, rising to that office when his predecessor, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated. Johnson had been a southern Democrat Senator, unjustly reviled by both sides, but remained in the Senate throughout the War Between the States and was chosen by Lincoln to help spread the appeal of a crypto-Republican “National Union” party dedicated to the peaceful and humane reintegration of those states that had seceded and been militarily crushed.

Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, however, held a somewhat different view. He thought he should be running the government. For various unsavory reasons — that would fill a book or two by themselves (hint: look up Grenville M. Dodge) — Stanton wanted to grind the South down even further under the Northern boot-heel, establishing, for example, extra-constitutional military zones to supervise the phony replacement “carpet-bag” state governments that the North had imposed on Southern states.

Once Johnson became President, he fired Stanton — whom more than one historian believes actually engineered Lincoln’s assassination — immediately running afoul of a little ditty called the 1867 Tenure of Office Act, which it appears was specifically cobbled together to keep Johnson from operating his own Presidency, leaving the nascent Stantonian Police State intact. Stanton and his cohorts impeached Johnson; his conviction failed by one vote in the U.S. Senate. Stanton resigned and skulked off to the garbage-heap of history.

L. Neil Smith, “Andrew and Donald”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-12-22.

August 3, 2025

20th century advertising alchemy rediscovered

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

Much sound and fury has been devoted to the ritual denunciations of American Eagle and their new ad campaign featuring blatant Nazi ideology and imagery, er, I mean Sydney Sweeney:

Whenever I endure a sentence which trespasses into a jibe about whiteness or men or some other illusory bugbear, I stop reading and launch the laptop through the window. This week, I’ve cleaned out eBay. As one delivery driver lugs a fresh laptop to my front door, another scoops up the last to fall from the sky.

Those all-too-common laments about skin colour or genitalia are the scarlet letter imprinted on the chest of the thoughtless bore. It’s a mind virus without antidote. Screeching “whiteness!” upon snapping one’s shoelace betrays sound psychological health.

Take Sydney Sweeney, an American actress blessed with a merciless, unfair genetic inheritance. This week, Sydney broke the internet. Her crime? She’s rather attractive. Worse yet, Sydney flaunts her icy, Scandinavian beauty.

In an advert for American Eagle, the dewy, lissom blonde squeezes her gymnastic body into a pair of denim jeans. Smouldering before the camera, Sydney flutters her “great genes”.

Those great genes sashay around a classic Mustang — 400 horses of unapologetic masculine energy. Sydney pats her hypnotic behind. She fires up that climate-melting engine. The infernal marriage of masculine-feminine consummates as she roars off into the distance.

Advertisers know what they did. Diana, Roman goddess and huntress of men. Her chariot, the male appendage made steel and exploding gasoline. A combination to light our monkey brains on fire. The symbolism hijacks our amygdala: buy these jeans, and she’s yours. Or, for the other sex, buy these and manipulate them.

I’m sorry to be so blunt, reader. Those claims, as primitive as they may appear, are the animating spirit of advertising. Back in the 1920s, Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, transplanted Uncle Siggy’s theories into the advertising business. Out went staid adverts praising a product’s utility. In went adverts selling visions of your unconscious, insatiable self. Bernays transformed the public relations and advertising worlds. He sold products that stirred the galloping herds of the subconscious mind.

Take cigarettes. Before Bernays, smoking was a decidedly male pursuit. Tobacco giants, keen to double their potential customer pool, turned to him. Bernays transformed smoking from a vulgar, unladylike pastime into a symbol of freedom and female empowerment. Men buy Patek Phillipe watches for the same reason. As Dave Chappelle put it: “If a man could fuck a woman in a cardboard box, he wouldn’t buy a house”.

In just a few moments, Sweeney’s serpentine hips lulled advertising away from overt wokeness to its subliminal witchcraft. It worked. American Eagle’s stock surged fifteen percent.

For research, I studied the ad twenty-seven times. Your humble narrator bought thirty-seven pairs of jeans and then signed over his entire inheritance to Ms Sweeney.

The reaction on the identitarian left authored five additional chapters to the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

By teasing the words “genes” and “jeans”, Sweeney called for the annexation of Poland and the Sudetenland. MSNBC excelled itself, even birthing a new pidgin English indecipherable to 97 percent of native speakers:

“Sydney Sweeney’s ad shows an unbridled cultural shift towards whiteness”.

Well, that’s one way to think about it.

The Running Man: Prescient Subversive Shlock

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

Feral Historian
Published 1 Aug 2025

Most of the satire in this film is so on the nose that commentary is redundant, but there are a few subtleties that are often missed in the bombastic spectacle of it all. More than that, many of the film’s best elements come from the ways it deviates from the book it’s based on.
(more…)

QotD: Undermining cultural taboos

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

One of the longest running debates on this side of the great divide is about how best to work through the thicket of taboos created and maintained by the ruling class. Because so much of observable reality is now off limits, it is nearly impossible to contradict the prevailing orthodoxy and maintain a position in the public square. For example, there can be nothing interesting said about crime, because no one is allowed to discuss the demographic reality of crime. The facts themselves are taboo.

One side of the debate argues that the only way to break a taboo is to break a taboo, so the only way forward to is to talk frankly about these things. In the case of crime, for example, the dissident must always interject the demographic facts about crime into the debate, even if it makes the beautiful people shriek. Since most people know the facts, the shrieking by the beautiful people actually advances the cause. This line of reasoning is extended to all taboo subjects universally.

The other side of the debate points out that the taboo breakers always end up in exile or condemned to some ghetto. In fact, their deliberate breaking of taboos ends up reinforcing the taboo, as no one wants to end up like the heretics. Instead, this camp argues the dissident must come up with clever language that subtly mocks the taboos, but narrowly adheres to the rules. The recent use of the word “jogger” is an example of complying with the taboo, while undermining it.

The taboo breakers counter that this just results in an endless search for approved language to hint at unapproved things. It is just a form of self-deception, where the clever think they are in revolt when in reality they are just asking permission. The optics guys counter this by pointing out the obvious. The taboo breakers are removed from the process, so in reality their tactic is just quitting the game. Rather than take on the system in a meaningful way, they mutter epithets in their ghetto.

The Z Man, “Strategy, Tactics & Discipline”, The Z Blog, 2020-05-19.

August 2, 2025

“[T]he United States is an imperial power … it does not give foreign nations free rides and unearned favours”

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

On Substack, eugyppius discusses the European situation in a time of seemingly random and capricious tariffs from the Trump administration:

Europe in 1899, when the continent contained multiple world powers, before the rise of non-European power.

Whenever I talk about things like tariffs, Trump supporters appear in my comments to tell me that Europe has gotten a free ride for long enough and that it is time we learned to pay our way. I find it a little frustrating to read this, because in Europe it does not feel like we are getting a free ride at all. In fact it seems like the opposite: The most common complaint on the populist German right is that our political class refuses to represent our interests and will not stop carrying water for the Americans.

I recognise that I’ll never be able to put this right, but it’s worth trying, because it is important to understand the world as it is. The truth is that the United States is an imperial power. Generally speaking, it does not give foreign nations free rides and it does not hand out unearned favours. There is however a lot of confusion here, because hardly anybody bothers to describe honestly the geopolitical strategy pursued by the United States or the nature of the American empire. Western liberalism cannot conceptualise imperial politics, and while empire generally benefits political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, it is not necessarily or always in the interests of ordinary Americans or ordinary Europeans, which is yet another reason not to talk about it.

The Americans and the British before them expended enormous effort to preempt the emergence of a dominant power on the European Continent that might challenge their successive naval empires. They fought two world wars to stop Germany from becoming just such a power. This great struggle ended in 1945 with Western Europe as a fully subjugated imperial province. Since then, the Americans have coordinated the NATO alliance and guaranteed the security of European countries not out of charity, but because Europe is their provincial possession. As a rule, they have not wanted Europe to assume full responsibility for its own defence, because a world in which America no longer guarantees the security of Europe is a world in which Europe is no longer an American province. It’s that simple.

To fend off the Soviets, the Americans nevertheless rebuilt and rearmed the nations of Western Europe. Everyone involved in this project had to come up with a way to allow the Germans to become a dominant economic power again, without displacing the United States or provoking the hostilities of wary postwar neighbours like France. One solution here was the European Union, which promoted economic interdependency as a counterweight to nationalist concerns. Another solution came at the cultural level, where Germany sought to allay European anxieties over possible Teutonic aggression by developing a national cult of historical guilt for World War II, which steadily blossomed into a full-blown civic religion. This exercise in self-effacement has grown more and not less extreme over time, in part as a response to nervousness about the consequences of German reunification. Many voices on the right like to portray Germans as victims of an externally imposed guilt regime, but the truth is that we did most of this to ourselves. The German left in particular has profited from and encouraged this mindset from the beginning.

German political self-effacement had one unexpected feature, in that it proved to be contagious. Within a generation of 1945, many of the victorious allied powers were striving to develop their own historical guilt cults after the German example, in each case centred around a national original sin like slavery or colonialism. Just as the German political class found it expedient to foreground collective European concerns at the expense of a more narrowly construed German nationalism, so did the broader West develop an overarching obsession with global issues and the plight of the developing world. This has caused the proliferation of a lot of silly people in our political culture, a lot of profoundly stupid organisations, and at least two cancerous ideological systems in the form of climatism and migrationism. We have had a nearly incalculable gift in the form of 80 years of peace, which may yet be offset by the equally incalculable costs of the lunacies this peace has encouraged.

QotD: The path to salvation

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

You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to know that Jesus Himself swung His pimp hand at the deserving more than once. There’s a reason He commanded his followers to sell their cloaks and buy swords. Just as a kid who is never allowed to feel the burn from his own mistakes never learns anything, so the man who is prevented from sinning by main force is not saved thereby.

The following is not a theological argument, it’s an observation about human nature: Both faith and works are necessary, because by their fruits ye shall know them. If one has faith, then the works will follow — naturally, as it were. But works without faith are mere mumbo-jumbo, no different than the crudest magic spell. The kind of guy who does what David French does — performs the works solely to be seen performing the works — is what Jesus called a “whited sepulcher”, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.

Again, you don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to observe that Jesus commanded what the parlance our times calls “tough love”. Just as you can’t save a sinner by taking away all his opportunities to sin — we are ALL guilty; we are ALL fallen; that alone is sufficient to damn us — so you can’t “save” a drunk, or an illegal alien, or a criminal, or whatever by enabling his lifestyle. The reason I’m not in church today is because the church is exactly like that gaggle of Karens in Starbucks — they talk a good game about renouncing the wiles of this world, but they bend over backwards to enable every possible social dysfunction.

No, Jesus did NOT command us to patch up the gutter addict every time he OD’s, so that he can go out and OD again. He did NOT command us to provide all kinds of food and shelter and medical care to every Squatemalan who broke the very first American law he had the opportunity to break by coming here. No, He did NOT command us to tolerate deviance — there are two clauses in “love the sinner, hate the sin”, and we must obey both.

The only route to salvation starts by admitting that everyone is fallen. You can take that in whatever sense you like, because it’s not theology, it’s just an obvious fact about human nature. Alas, it’s one you have to learn by age 12, or you’ll never learn it at all. That’s the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled.

Severian, “On Being Bad”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-12.

July 30, 2025

The Korean War Week 58 – The Empire Strikes Back – July 29, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 29 Jul 2025

The Kaesong peace talks drag on, with the main sticking point being the Communist refusal to consider any demarcation line other than the 38th Parallel. UN Commander Matt Ridgway is asking for more force from home, but at least he get some organized force from elsewhere — as various brigades are organized into the 1st Commonwealth Division.

Chapters
00:00 Hook
00:21 Intro
00:56 Recap
01:22 UN Perspective and UN Needs
04:40 US Reserves?
06:31 The Commonwealth Division
09:44 38th Parallel or Nothing
15:03 Summary
15:16 Conclusion
(more…)

July 29, 2025

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen triumphantly announces EU capitulation to Trump’s demands

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

The EU and the United States are finalizing negotiations on bilateral trade issues that basically give Trump everything he wanted with very little in return for the EU’s concessions. It’s almost as if Trump has some kind of experience in negotiating lopsided agreements, isn’t it? I guess von der Leyen didn’t get Mark Carney’s memo on the importance of keeping your eLbOwS uP:

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “[learning] in real time that weakness and submission do not in fact invite conciliation”

Donald Trump has shown up the European Union. He’s revealed that the world’s largest single market is a paper tiger to be kicked around, with basically no leverage or strength to resist American demands.

All of these supposedly fierce backroom tariff negotiations have yielded an incredibly one-sided deal – really an unparalleled embarrassment. As announced yesterday, the EU promises to invest $600 billion in the U.S. economy and to make $750 billion worth of “strategic purchases” of oil, gas and the like over the next three years. We also promise to buy a bunch of American military equipment. In return for giving the Americans $1.35 trillion, we earn the privilege of a 15% baseline tariff on all of our exports to America and we drop our own tariffs to zero. At least we don’t have to pay the 30% tariffs Trump threatened!

[…]

While von der Leyen was trying weakly to put a happy face on her total failure, Trump gave her what we might call a softer Zelensky treatment. He twisted the knife in the wound, calling out the idiocy of EU wind energy in an extended soliloquy that will surely keep the fact-checkers and the regime deboonkers up late for weeks to come. I transcribe his remarks in full, because the whole moment was wonderful:

    And the other thing I say to Europe, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. And I’m not talking about airplanes. I’m talking about beautiful plains, the beautiful areas in the United States. And you look up and you see windmills all over the place. It’s a horrible thing. It’s the most expensive form of energy. It’s no good.

    They’re made in China, almost all of them. When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn them off. You can’t bury them. They won’t let you bury the propellers, you know, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land. That’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land. In other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil.

    The whole thing is a con job. It’s very expensive. And in all fairness, Germany tried it and, wind doesn’t work. You need subsidy for wind and energy should not need subsidy. With energy, you make money. You don’t lose money.

    But more important than that is it ruins the landscape. It kills the birds. They’re noisy. You know, you have a certain place in the Massachusetts area that over the last 20 years had one or two whales wash ashore and over the last short period of time they had 18, okay, because it’s driving them loco, it’s driving them crazy. Now, windmills will not come, it’s not going to happen in the United States, and it’s a very expensive …

    I would love to see, I mean, today I’m playing the best course I think in the world, Turnberry, even though I own it, it’s probably the best course in the world, right? And I look over the horizon and I see nine windmills. It’s like right at the end of the 18. I said, “Isn’t that a shame? What a shame.” You have the same thing all over, all over Europe in particular. You have windmills all over the place.

    Some of the countries prohibit it. But, people ought to know that these windmills are very destructive. They’re environmentally unsound. Just the exact opposite. Because the environmentalists, they’re not really environmentalists, they’re political hacks. These are people that, they almost want to harm the country. But you look at these beautiful landscapes all over all, over the the world. Many countries have gotten smart. They will not allow it. They will not. It’s the worst form of energy, the most expensive form of energy. But, windmills should not be allowed. Okay?

All the while von der Leyen had to sit there, absolutely frozen except for a curiously accelerated rate of blinking, as she learned in real time that weakness and submission do not in fact invite conciliation.

In Spiked, Jacob Reynolds agrees that the deal is a humiliation for the European Union:

So this is the famous “trade superpower”. After months of tough talk, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced a trade deal with Donald Trump this week which is nothing short of total capitulation. The Commission has accepted a 15 per cent baseline US tariff on most EU goods, agreed to purchase $750 billion worth of American gas and procure billions more of US military kit. What did Queen Ursula get in return? Nothing.

“VDL”, as she is known in the Brussels Bubble, tried desperately to spin this as a win. Sitting anxiously next to Trump in Scotland last weekend, she recited impressive-sounding numbers – such as the EU and US’s combined 800million consumers and the EU’s $1.7 trillion trade volume – like a nervous student. Trump cut through the spin by greeting the deal as fantastic for US cars and agriculture. He didn’t need to say much else – indeed, it was clear for all to see that there was only one winner in this deal.

For decades, even critics of the EU had to concede that whatever its many economic and democratic shortcomings, it still possessed enormous leverage when it came to trade. At the very least, it was more than capable of defending EU interests in trade deals. Evidently, this is no longer the case. When even the hapless government of Keir Starmer can negotiate a better trade deal with Trump, the problems with the EU should be clear to see. (Tariffs on most UK goods are just 10 per cent.)

Even the most ardent Europhiles have found it hard to put a positive spin on the deal. Manfred Weber, leader of the European People’s Party (a coalition of Europe’s legacy centre-right parties) described it as “damage control” and better than not reaching a deal at all. Guy Verhofstadt, former prime minister of Belgium and usually the most maniacal of EU fanboys, slammed the deal as not only “badly negotiated”, but also “scandalous” and a “disaster”, with “not one concession from the American side”. Member states, from Ireland to France, have been similarly unenthusiastic. Yet the brutal truth is that the deal reflects how America views the EU – as strategically weak and politically empty.

Trump has taught the EU a harsh lesson in statecraft. The EU has long relied on its neighbours for energy production. It has long underinvested in defence. And now it throttles its biggest industries with green dogma. This left it with little leverage for the negotiations with the US.

Of course, after Mark Carney being elected on a highly dubious platform of being “the right person to deal with Trump”, this is almost inevitable at this stage:

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