Quotulatiousness

September 29, 2026

War drums echo again in Britain

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

Mark Steyn on the renewed interest in going to war against Russia by the British establishment (let’s not point out just how Britain’s existing armed forces are being required to skip “non-essential” training to save money):

“British Army working during the Field Training Exercise” by U.S. Army Europe is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 .

On the other hand, the Iran war has, apparently effortlessly, brought Britain to economic ruin, which may be why the UK’s hitherto all-powerful iron-fisted caudillo has not been seen since late July, even by his favourite Ukrainian rent boys.

Still, the good news is that every day Russia inches closer to that 2022 collapse:

    The Novoshakhtinsk refinery in the southern Russian region of Rostov was hit by drones and had to be taken offline, regional governor Yury Slyusar said in a post on Telegram early on Friday.

    As a result of the drone attacks, the Novoshakhtinsk refinery, which has the capacity to process 110,000 barrels of crude oil per day, was damaged and halted operations, the official said …

    Ukraine continues its campaign to cripple Russian refining capacity, fuel supply, and export revenues. Due to the low refinery production, Russia has been forced to ban diesel exports for months and is likely to extend the ban beyond September 30. The ban was initially introduced in July as Ukraine has continuously taken Russian refineries offline.

That’s great news, isn’t it?

Whoops, my mistake: in another exciting plot twist, bringing the Russian economy to its knees is now a bad thing. Because the, er, Houthis have done a Lindsey Graham and put their flip-flops on the ground:

    The Houthis’ capture of Mocha has transformed the war in Yemen – and the geopolitics of the Red Sea

Are you a renowned geopolitical expert? Are you free for a quick Zoom hit on what happens if the Iran-backed Iraqi militias bomb the strategically vital Saudi port of Macchiato? Ha! Gotcha!

Notwithstanding these distractions, what rank-and-file voters want to know is who’s two points up in Iowa. After all, we live in a golden age of popular self-government where Abdul el-Sayed is “America’s next Obama” and Elif Eralp is “Germany’s Zohran Mamdani” and Sadiq Khan is the next Sadiq Khan. Iowa-wise, Republican control of the Senate is all down to Nicki Minaj.

As you’ll have gathered from all the foregoing, news is bollocks. And yet, to return to where we came in, the strange persistence of certain recurring themes is itself newsworthy. It is curious, for example, that every western European leader insists on alerting his citizenry that “war with Russia could begin at any moment“.

Why? It’s fairly obvious that Moscow has determined to conclude the Ukraine war on the battlefield and to hold what it has taken: to the victor the spoils, as President Trump remarked at the UN General Assembly. In the course of an agreeable week or so in Odessa, it took me a day or two to notice that seventy per cent of the locals speak Russian and that the preferred items I painstakingly learned from the breakfast menu were not in fact in Ukrainian. So I can see why the Kremlin might jib at letting Nato turn it into the Lindsey Graham Memorial Headquarters for the new forward operating bases that used to be in the Gulf. In the weeks since my pre-coma vacation, Putin has destroyed the town’s port and reduced Ukraine to a de facto landlocked country.

Tough for the Ukrainians. So the European political class has volunteered you — yes, you, Clive Higginbotham of Rotherham, and you, Jean-Marie Durand of Clichy-sous Bois, and you, Stig Karlsson of Malmö — to go and fight the Russian bear. The Pakistani minicab-driver will take care of your wife and daughters while you’re away. When the Donbass is in peril, what fainthearted ninny worries about his own territorial integrity? In London the government’s busy giving away Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, the British Indian Ocean Territory and the English South Coast to, respectively, Brussels, Madrid, Port Louis and every sex-fiend in Somalia, so your sovereign territory is hardly at issue, is it, you whiny loser?

Even so, you’d think impending nuclear armageddon would be a wee bit politically controversial. Au contraire, it’s impeccably non-partisan. Here, for example, is a discussion about next month’s blitzkrieg against Russia between the Rt Hon Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, former Lord President of Her late Majesty’s Privy Council and a “conservative”, and Mr Paul Richards, former chair of the Fabian Society and a “socialist”:

Got that? If you oppose war with Russia, the “conservative” wants to throw you in gaol because Britain suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars and the “socialist” wants to throw you in gaol under the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act.

Because that’s all the choice anyone needs in a functioning democracy. So good luck findng a Neither Of The Above candidate who’ll be permitted to take power. After all, the winning party in this month’s German elections is, per the intelligence agencies, a “Russian sleeper cell”.

But but but, splutter my correspondents, aren’t you worried that Iran is two weeks away from a nuclear weapon? Actually, I assume the deceased ayatollahs have used the seven months since February 28th to acquire nukes. Wouldn’t you?

September 28, 2026

Skynet is taking over our critical … refrigerators?

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

With appliance manufacturers desperately eager to get us to make our entire appliance suite internet-connected, it shouldn’t be a surprise to find that the security of your internet-connected toaster or refrigerator is not up to scratch. It is concerning that commercial refrigerators apparently have the same kind of vulnerabilities to malefactors on the internet:

Commercial refrigerators
Wikimedia Commons.

Refrigerators are probably the last thing anyone would consider a national security vulnerability, which is precisely why the unusual refrigeration failures at U.S. military commissaries deserve more attention than they are getting. There is no public evidence that the incidents were caused by a cyberattack or a foreign adversary, and they may ultimately prove to be nothing more than equipment, software, or maintenance failures. But when refrigeration systems at multiple military installations experience problems within a relatively short period and at Fort Huachuca all of the commissary’s freezers reportedly went into defrost mode overnight, leaders at the Pentagon should be asking a larger question: If a sophisticated adversary wanted to test its ability to disrupt the infrastructure supporting America’s military without firing a shot, is this what it might look like?

That question matters because China and other U.S. adversaries are no longer thinking about cyber warfare simply as stealing secrets or attacking classified networks. They are looking for ways to penetrate the infrastructure America depends upon and, when necessary, create disruption, confusion, and delay. It echoes the familiar warnings of a certain rail conductor from a beloved children’s television show about a talking train. U.S. intelligence and cybersecurity agencies have already warned that Chinese state-sponsored actors have gained access to American critical infrastructure and, in some cases, appear to be positioning themselves for potential disruption during a future conflict. A coordinated attack against something as ordinary as refrigeration would therefore not have to cause catastrophic damage to be successful. The objective could be much simpler: get inside, disrupt operations, complicate the response, and watch how America responds.

That is what makes the recent commissary incidents worth examining beyond the immediate loss of food or inconvenience to military families. If an adversary wanted to probe U.S. military infrastructure, attacking a commissary would carry considerably less risk than shutting down an airfield, disrupting a command center, or interfering with a weapons system. Yet it could still provide valuable intelligence about how quickly geographically dispersed incidents are identified, whether installations communicate with one another, when a maintenance problem becomes a cybersecurity investigation, which contractors and government agencies respond, and how long it takes the Pentagon to determine whether seemingly isolated failures are connected.

In other words, the purpose would not be the refrigerator, the purpose would be to learn how and when we would respond to the incidents.

Update, 29 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 27, 2026

Gynogerontocracy in the Anglosphere

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Business, Cancon, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As the working world in the Anglosphere becomes ever more feminized and gynocentric, as companies disproportionally hire women over men, the working dynamics of most jobs has also shifted dramatically:

There’s many things to be exhausted about as a millennial or zoomer man, and I find that one of them really is gynogerontocracy. Everywhere you go, a profoundly alienating woman, often an older woman, is in charge, where she probably either shouldn’t be, or would be better executing tasks and responsibilities for a male executive.

In the private sphere, the corporate jobs go to girlbosses, whose neuroticism is channeled into unrealistic and dysfunctional adherence to rules, policies and procedures. There is no trust or discretion to do your own job, at the same time as management they don’t want you to ask them about anything. Every minor policy breach turns into an email, turns a passive aggressive “documented conversation” and “coaching”, as they talk down to you as a mother scolds their children.

When I think about my professional life, the only times I was ever promoted for my hard work and efforts, was under White or Asian male leadership, and that’s because they by and large are the only people who value demonstrable merit and ability. Women don’t. They value policies and procedures, they value inclusivity, and they become petty little tyrants when they’re in charge. The only female manager I’ve ever had who wasn’t like that was a 24 year old zoomer who played with a Needough in her office and posted weird alien cat gifs in the corporate chat app. She was fine, and understood my lack of enthusiasm. The rest of them act like they’re running the navy when the consensus is now that this is functionally adult female daycare.

As a generational experience and trait, I find that men and boys are collectively exhausted and resent women being in charge for what has been their entire living experience. I find myself asking how much longer this can go on.

September 26, 2026

Devon Eriksen stakes out the anti-Feminist position

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, science fiction author Devon Eriksen discusses the “worst and most prolonged psychological torture you can inflict on a woman”:

The worst and most prolonged psychological torture you can inflict on a woman is to convince her she’s as good as any man.

This torture is lifelong, unendurable, and once you set up the initial conditions, the pain becomes self-inflicted.

You see, women are genetically programmed for two things. First, to raise children. Second, to select a man who is superior to her to bear those children for.

Not equal.

Certainly not lesser.

Superior.

There is no point in arguing about this. It is obviously true to anyone who looks around himself without blinders made of wishful thinking.

There is no point in becoming angry at me or anyone else about this. It is true whether I wish it to be or not, and whether you wish it to be or not.

There is no point in trying to talk women out of this. It is not a part of their culture or education. It is not an individual character flaw in them. It is part of their genetic recipe.

Therefore, if you convince a woman she is equal to most men, she will only be willing to bear children to a small percentage of exceptional men.

If you convince her that she is the equal of any man, she will be unwilling to start a family with anyone.

And she will remain genetically programmed to do so.

When I was a child, and again when I was a young man, in high school and college, I noticed that the older adults who staffed the education system seemed to think “girls’ self-esteem” was our most precious resource, perhaps because it’s good for stable nuclear fusion containment, or as a growth medium for cancer-curing fruit trees.

Well, I sure hope they’re making good progress on that nuclear fusion thing, because it sure is hard on the women they grow up into.

Perhaps they thought having a high self-esteem is the same as feeling good.

Perhaps they thought half of humanity’s potential Newtons, Einsteins, and Da Vincis were hidden among the ranks of the fair sex, waiting to be unlocked by “Project Self Esteem”, and no, I did not make that name up.

Perhaps they were retarded.

They did, after all, work for the government.

Self-esteem is not being happy. Self-esteem is not even feeling good. Self-esteem is how awesome you think you are.

And if you think you’re awesome, when you’re mediocre, then you’re miserable, because everyone around you treats you a whole lot worse than you think you deserve.

High self-esteem is great for young men. It makes them take risks. And to thrive men need to take risks, and achieve things, for many reasons, one of which is that women only mate up.

High self-esteem is not so good for young women. It doesn’t get them anything they wouldn’t have already had. It just makes them less happy with it.

Sure, there’s such a thing as self-esteem too low, but if a woman can look you in the eye, instead of in the shoes, when she talks to you, she’s pretty much good to go.

Anything more than that is superfluous at best, and at worst … well, eyeball the video for a moment and you’ll see what I mean.

But the misery isn’t just personal.

This is the fertility crisis in a nutshell. We, Western civilization, have spent the past five or six decades telling little boys that they are worthless sacks of protoplasm, and telling little girls that the sun shines out of their collective girl parts.

And look what’s happened.

The fertility crisis is stupidly simple. When you elevate the status of women by giving them a greater share of respect, and of society’s wealth, which is created by men, they refuse to have children.

You can reverse this by allowing men to keep the wealth they create, instead of giving it to women.

Then they will give it to women themselves, but the women will look up to them, and there will be children again.

During the Trump administration so far, 94% of new job went to women. This is not natural or organic. This doesn’t happen on its own. This is not happening because women are “crushing it”.

Women are the same women they have always been, risk averse, clustered around average intelligence, prone to wait for others to lead.

This is not an accident. This is spin on the ball. Women vote. And pandering is an easy way to get those votes.

But give a moderately pretty one a single email job at a Silicon Valley startup, and pretty soon she thinks that the father of her children should be a “post-economic” jet-setter with the body of a professional athlete who ticks all the boxes her therapist thinks are important.

And she thinks she can pick him off a shelf at age 35.

This is a vote, conscious or not, willing or not, for the extinction of humanity.

Throughout the genetic history of humanity, approximately 80% of women had children, as opposed to 37% of men. Those numbers don’t lie. Most men either weren’t exceptional enough to breed, or died trying to become exceptional enough to breed.

Women just had to not be in the bottom quintile. Not to be horrible, or horribly unlucky.

This bears out what we already know.

And this is why Western civilization told women they were the weaker sex, the dumber sex, the more fragile sex. Why Eve was said to made to serve Adam.

Because this preserved civilization and the species.

Women were actually happier that way, because women don’t want to win. They want a winner.

But even if it didn’t, what choice would we have?

The only nations and tribes in the world which are still breeding are the ones where women are still of low status. And if you try to replace Westerners with them, try to make them into Westerners, not only will you fail, but even if you succeed, they’ll stop breeding, too.

And we know now why there are no matriarchies. Its not because men have superior strength, and enslaved women with violence. It’s because matriarchies don’t breed.

Humans are an animal, like any other animal. Every animal has mating rituals, and if those rituals can’t be conducted, there will be no next generation. This is why some animals can be bred in zoos, and others cannot.

We know what’s wrong.

We just lack the political will to fix it.

Because it’s “not fair”.

Well, of course it’s not fair. But look around you. Look at the universe. Look at history.

Whatever made you expect that things would be fair?

Or, as someone posted in the replies to this:

QotD: The game of Marbles

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

The rumor went around that trains were throwing steel ball bearings from their wheels. Genuine steelies! Somebody said they saw one that a kid from Detroit brought up. So big that you couldn’t close your fist around it. Nobody else saw it, though.

Nevertheless, we scoured the tracks for endless hours, turning over every likely pebble that caught the sun. No steelies. I did amass a small collection of spikes that had worked their way loose from the ties. Never did figure a use for them. But they were cool.

The game was marbles. Way we played it in upper Michigan was to draw a chalk circle on the cement or scratch one on the sand with a stick, sometimes we even used a length of string. The battleground was set. The players approached cautiously if their stock was low or boldly if their marble bag brimmed.

One boy against one boy. Man against man. A test of skill and mental grit. Incidentally, only boys played against boys, girls against girls: this was back in the day when adults didn’t burst a spleen for kids noticing the obvious differences in the sexes. Besides, boys were daring and cavalier. They were out for conquest. Girls would sometimes — this still baffles me — agree to play to a draw! Even if one girl would outright win she wouldn’t claim her prize. Bizarre creatures.

First boy, if he was a pro, placed his middle finger against his thumb and then snapped it at his marble, aiming to smack it into his opponent’s. If he hit it, he got to keep it. No time outs, no I-wasn’t-readies, no whimpering. Newcomers and cowards could be identified by the anemic way they smacked their marble, say by giving it no more than a half-hearted push with their forefinger.

Strategy was obvious. If you were the better shooter, you attacked attacked attacked. Go right after the other guy. Intimidate him. Like Nelson, ignore all subtleties and blaze away. Cagier boys took advantage of the braggarts and only pretended to be cautious. They let their opponents open with a bold shot or two, answering with a shot away as if in retreat, then when the other boy’s shot would miss and stop close by, the jig was up.

And that was the problem. Too bold and your shots would come close, too close. Countless times the marbles would stop an inch away. It was a goner. This is why it made sense to shoot hard; over-shooting was hardly a risk. Unless you in a sudden-death match where shooting outside the lines meant an automatic loss.

Most of us neither lost too many nor gained too many. But a few kids were easy pickings. Every day they’d come with a new small bag (these were sold in grocery and “dime” stores) and lose them. Rich kids.

Unless by prior agreement, only even matches were allowed. Cat’s eye against cats eye were the lowest, entry-level bouts. Cats’ eyes, for those monumentally ignorant of Americana, are the clear marble with the squiggly, colorful aberration running through the center. These were the general stock, like ten-year-old used cars; useful, but unloved. Why, you could find spare cat’s eye rolling around behind the home room teacher’s desk. What counted was quantity.

Perries, probably a corruption of puries, solid colored beauties. These were always just a shade smaller than the cat’s eyes. Perries, though coveted, had a tendency to chip, sometimes even crack open when hit hard. Clears were solid glass, no color. Steelies were polished ball bearings. I only ever saw two of them. Not the railroad kind, but small ones from who-knows-where. They were said to be unbeatable, which is why we latched onto any rumor of a source.

Then came the boulders, the double-sized version of the normal marble. One of these was worth five to ten of the regular kind, depending on availability. Boulder-on-boulder matches were always closely attended. They were rare, too, especially when they featured perries. (I have since learned boulders are called “shooters” in other areas. But all our marbles were shooters.)

We used to empty our marble bags and compare, holding our treasures up to the light for the kind of close scrutiny used by gemologists sizing up wedding rings. Oddities such as pea-sized perries occasionally showed up. These were said to be from China, then still a mysterious land.

I don’t guess kids play marbles anymore. Unless there’s a marble “app” for their cell phones. But it now makes sense that my favorite adult game is petanque.

William M. Briggs, “Marbles!”, Science Is Not The Answer, 2026-06-23.

September 25, 2026

John Coltrane, Prophet and Seer

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

Ted Gioia
Published 5 Nov 2018

This is the latest installment in a series of informal, unscripted videos featuring music historian Ted Gioia. In this video, Gioia talks about the legacy of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. For more information on Ted Gioia, visit his website at http://www.tedgioia.com or follow him on Twitter at / tedgioia

How True was Lord of War? Surplus from the Warsaw Pact (w/ Val Forgett)

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 May 2026

When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a gold rush for the surplus guns held by all the various newly independent republics, as well as the Warsaw Pact nations. Lord of War is not far off … and Val Forgett was there, bringing guns into the US for Navy Arms.

September 24, 2026

More than you ever wanted to know about the Teapot Dome scandal

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

At The Grim Historian, Carlyn Beccia has a long, long post about the scandal that (probably) killed President Harding: the Teapot Dome scandal.

“The Teapot Dome scandal” by Clifford Berryman, 1924
Granger Collection

Washington, 1922. Somewhere around H Street, a piano is still playing after midnight. The car turns off the avenue and slows outside a townhouse with the shades already drawn.

Warren Harding steps onto the sidewalk. Presidential seal on the door he just closed. Another beautiful woman on his arm, history declined to name. He doesn’t look around. He doesn’t have to.

Warren Harding is handsome. Everybody always says so. He was a notorious ladies’ man, carried on a fifteen-year affair with one married woman, fathered a child with another, and left historians enough love letters that we know far too many bawdy details about “Jerry”. (Jerry was the nickname he gave his penis.)

[…]

Either way, Harding’s genial personality probably helped. Harding liked people, people liked Harding. He had what the kids call the rizz. (Or so Jerry claimed.) And he must have had some charisma because 1920 voters handed him one of the biggest landslide victories in American history.

Now, Harding liked bringing his buddies along for the ride. Men seeking government jobs drifted through the rooms alongside men who already had them.

Attorney General Harry Daugherty is here. Daugherty is Harding’s longtime political manager and friend. Daugherty would soon become engulfed in investigations involving influence peddling and government property, and would refuse to surrender records to Senate investigators. Calvin Coolidge eventually forced him out. He later stood trial twice on charges of defrauding the government. Neither trial produced a conviction.

Harding’s unofficial fixer, Jess Smith, was there too. He technically held no federal office but nevertheless had a desk and room inside the Justice Department, used official stationery, dictated to department secretaries, carried government files, and gave orders people obeyed. Jess Smith died by suicide in 1923 while corruption allegations were swirling around the Justice Department.

The cluster of men who swarmed around Harding became known as the Ohio Gang?—?old political friends, poker companions, fixers and assorted hangers-on who had followed him to Washington and discovered that federal office came with considerably better party favors.

Harding’s cabinet, 1921. A few members of the Ohio Gang are hiding among the respectable people. They look very serious here. After hours was another story.

[…]

For years, Theodore Roosevelt and other conservationists had worried that private companies would simply gobble up America’s petroleum reserves. So Roosevelt ordered federal geologists to identify oil deposits worth protecting. Taft then withdrew millions of acres from private development and established naval petroleum reserves in California. Woodrow Wilson added another in Wyoming. In 1920, Congress gave the Navy power to manage and lease all three.

The reason was not complicated. American battleships were switching from coal to oil. If another war came along, perhaps it would be prudent for the United States Navy to own some oil.

Wild concept.

So the government had locked away huge underground deposits in California and Wyoming as an emergency stockpile. Together, the three reserves were believed to contain roughly 435 million barrels?—?about as much oil as the entire United States produced in a year.

There were two big California fields, Elk Hills and Buena Vista, and one Wyoming reserve called Teapot Dome.

Teapot Dome was not even the great petroleum monster of the group. Elk Hills would eventually become one of the country’s most productive oil fields and produce its billionth barrel in 1992. Teapot Dome, by contrast, occupied just 9,481 acres and produced about 22 million barrels during its later decades of federal operation.

Teapot Dome simply had better branding. It was named for a nearby sandstone formation that allegedly resembled a teapot.

Teapot Rock on an old postcard from around 1922
Public Domain

Yes, that’s a teapot. Apparently, Wyoming whiskey was excellent.

So Fall wanted control of all three reserves, and Harding gave it to him. On May 31, 1921, the president signed an executive order transferring administrative authority from the Navy to Fall’s Interior Department.

Shortly thereafter, Fall undergoes a miraculous financial renaissance. Remember Fall’s ranch with ten years of unpaid taxes and the general Grapes of Wrath ambiance?

Yeah, so by June 2022, Fall pays those taxes. He buys neighboring property. He makes substantial improvements to Three Rivers. The formerly cash-starved rancher suddenly throws money around like he’s discovered oil under the sofa cushions.

He had not. He had discovered oilmen. Two of them, specifically.

[…]

Meanwhile, President Harding was having a truly shitty year. In the spring of 1923, Jess Smith was dead, Charles Forbes had resigned from the Veterans Bureau in disgrace, and Fall had quietly resigned from Interior to work for none other than Harry Sinclair.

For once, it wasn’t Jerry keeping Harding up at night.

So that summer, Harding left on a cross-country speaking tour. During this time, Harding reportedly told a journalist: “I have no trouble with my enemies … But my goddamn friends … they’re the ones who keep me walking the floors nights!”

Those friends would drive him to an early death. On August 2, 1923, Warren Harding died in a San Francisco hotel room, probably of a sudden heart attack. He was only 57 years old.

Then Calvin Coolidge became President, and he wasn’t into playing footsy with poker players.

The benefits to US national security from the Greenland agreement

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

I’m sure some in the Canadian relic media will try to spin the US-Greenland-Denmark agreement as somehow threatening to Canadian sovereignty, but if it does in some way it’s clearly not the main focus from the US viewpoint:

US President Donald Trump diplays the Greenland security deal with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen.

Photo via CDR Salamander

We’ve kept up reasonably steady reporting the last couple of years on Greenland. I was never quite sure where it would come out, but I was confident that it would be — non-inclusive — in between the two extremes we heard coming out of the overly excitable and narrowly sourced commentariat of the U.S. invading or the U.S. being kicked out … and it did.

I have to give a nod to our Australian friend Liz Buchanan who gave some great observations on the issue on the Midrats Podcast back in September of 2025 and January of this year.

The full text of the agreement can be found here if you want to read it in detail, but let’s stick to the big pixels, as it is really a good news story for everyone … especially NATO.

Rod Martin created a great executive summary … I’m just going to steal it.

Bravo Zulu to the team that kept working this issue. From a national security point of view, everyone got the most important things they wanted — that’s what matters.

As we like to do here, let’s go to the chartroom.

We should start with something I posted five days ago over on X.

Small rift in time brings 2021 dramarama to 2026

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

I still occasionally see people going about their business wearing WuFlu masks. I try not to overtly point and laugh, because I’m still pretending to be polite and civilized. Obviously, people should be free to wear or not wear whatever they like so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. A bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts has apparently been requiring masks for all their patrons since the pandemic but recently decided to ease up the restriction for one night per week, making the masks optional for one day per week. As you might imagine, this move hasn’t gone down well with their customers:

Image via Not the Bee

Crybullying is a way of controlling other people. Predators and psychopaths pose: They deliberately put on sad face or hurt face when they want suckers to lower their guard so they can get what they want.

If you’ve been online today, you’ve probably seen discussion of the mindblowing Boston Globe story about the lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts that recently decided to start having weekly mask-optional nights, after many years of requiring KN-95 masks or better from patrons. If this is the first time you’re hearing about this, let me just say that no, you haven’t accidentally clicked on an article from 2021. This is happening now.

After the Last Ditch Bar posted their new mask rules on social media, they were immediately buried in rage-inflected comments from people who were in absolute agony over the way the place was just absolutely murdering them.

Sample comment: “You have shattered what I believed your values to be, and you should be ashamed to use the word radical to describe your venue in the same post where you’re announcing a decision to deliberately spread disabling diseases, that we know disproportionately impact marginalized populations, one night each week.”

Did you know that Covid-19 is medically much worse if you’re a politically radical lesbian? Second sample comment: “This is such a stab in the heart to those of us who have no choice but to protect our health. Esp when l0ng c0vid disproportionally affects queer folk.” That’s an interesting observation.

All of the bar’s efforts to calm the storm made it worse, and a community forum hosted by trained facilitators crashed and burned. I’m not going to describe that event or summarize it, because you should read every incredible detail yourself. Here’s the link again, in an archived form that gets you around the paywall and probably requires you to scroll down a bit to get through some blank space at the top. As a preview, though, one of the facilitators was white, which devastated the terrified attendees and made them feel that they were in extreme danger.

The mandatory mask-wearing somehow became a totem of belonging to the patrons of the bar and after so long, they are now reacting very strongly to any attempt to dilute their shared community with non-mask-wearing heathens.

September 23, 2026

The Korean War Week 118 – The Outpost Armor – September 22, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 22 Sep 2026

This week we take a look at the hilltop armor used by the UN for the outpost war — the pros and cons. There’s still plenty of fighting this week, for Old Baldy, for Outpost Kelly, and behind the scenes a whole lot of South Korean POWs held by the UN may be soon going home.

00:00 Intro
00:48 Old Baldy
02:50 Outpost Kelly
06:42 The Tanks
09:26 Korean Guerrillas
12:00 Civilian Internees?
15:10 Summary
15:22 Conclusion
15:58 Mobilisation

September 22, 2026

Trumpian economics – making Mercantilism great again

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

President Donald Trump is remarkably inconsistent on a lot of issues, but one thing that keeps coming back is his apparent allegiance to protectionism and mercantilism:

Politics is an industry in which ideas demonstrated to be ineffective and morally reprehensible live on long after they should have died. That’s the case with President Donald Trump’s fondness for mercantilism, as he espouses hoary old nostrums about the alleged benefits of hoarding money and preventing Americans from using their capital to purchase desired goods from other countries. Like a throwback to the 18th century, the president mistakes accumulating the means of exchange for building actual prosperity, as if we’d all be better off with overstuffed wallets than with the things our funds can purchase.

“Losing” Money on Voluntary Transactions?

Last week, when asked about the eternal political bogeyman of “trade deficits”, Trump responded, “If we lose $50 billion a year with a country, and we say, ‘we’re not going to trade with you anymore’, we don’t lose $50 billion a year. It’s very simple. Right?”

The president’s comments continued a theme he’d expounded on Truth Social, where he wrote, “If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year.”

Earlier this month, the president threatened to entirely stop Americans from trading with businesses in countries with which the Unted States runs a trade deficit — that is, from which we overall buy more than its residents purchase from Americans. His position seems to be that we’re better off hoarding cash than we would be using (or losing, from his perspective) our money to purchase things that we want.

But as the late economist Milton Friedman commented during an earlier incarnation of the eternal debate over the “fairness” or lack thereof of international trade, “the goods and services we import, they provide us with TV sets we can watch, automobiles we can drive, with all sorts of nice things for us to use. The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible, for as small a volume of exports as possible.”

[…]

Everybody Benefits From Free Trade

“Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade”, Smith warned in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. “When two places trade with one another, this doctrine supposes that, if the balance be even, neither of them either loses or gains; but if it leans in any degree to one side, that one of them loses, and the other gains, in proportion to its declension from the exact equilibrium. Both suppositions are false.” In fact, he pointed out, “trade which, without force or constraint, is naturally and regularly carried on between any two places, is always advantageous, though not always equally so, to both”.

As Smith’s criticism makes clear, the ideas of “balance of trade” and “trade deficits” are archaic throwbacks to mercantilism, even though they’re still popular among politicians playing to ill-informed voters. Smith’s points prevail among economists even in cases where one country burdens its population with trade barriers while allowing relatively unhindered exports.

The US Army has an institutional aversion to admitting mistakes

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

Tom Kratman, retired US Army officer, has strong opinions about a lot of topics, but especially on things related to the US military in general and the US Army in particular:

The US Army, all of the US armed forces, can never admit to a mistake, no matter how trivial. The reason the RS71 became the SR71 was because some senior officer had a slip of the tongue when briefing Johnson, called the RS71 the SR71, and the Air Force, rather than admit the mistake, changed the name. The reason there was no resistance training in Ranger School (that’s POW resistance, not weight lifting) was because someone, Navy, I think, said that the only resistance training in US armed forces was Navy run (they do run the big important school graduates are forbidden to talk about), so the Army and Air Force, rather than let Navy be embarrassed, killed their programs until rather recently. The reason the Army kept the OH-58 Kiowa was because, after being browbeaten into buying that recon helicopter, it would have been admitting a mistake, to say nothing of some measure of corruption and moral cowardice, to switch to the OH-6 which EVERY chopper pilot in the Army would tell you was a better bird for the mission.

And then, just for the cherry on top, we can contemplate my old slimy toad of a scum-sucking battalion commander who, as a brigade commander, browbeat his HHC commander [Wiki] into falsifying a PT test for him and, when the HHC commander went to the IG, and the story came out, was allowed to pin on BG stars and retire rather than being sent to play rock hockey, as he should have been, at Leavenworth. Why? Because the Army had made a number of serious mistakes with him; they let him command two infantry (one of them a Ranger) battalions, and had promoted him to colonel, selected him to command a brigade, and then selected him for promotion to brigadier general. That could never be allowed out because the army cannot admit to a mistake, let alone five of them.

Now, with that inability to admit a mistake in mind, roll back the sands of time to the late 1950s, when a certain Airborne Mafia general, serving as Chief of Staff of the Army, Max Taylor, had, as generals will, an incredibly stupid idea, that he, as generals also will tend to, thought was just fucking brilliant. He created the pentomic division [Wiki]. I’ve written on the iniquities and stupidities of this at length and won’t repeat myself here. Suffice to say it was a disaster, a complete, total, unmitigated, moral, operational, administrative, tactical, utter, unbefuckinglievable disaster from every perspective. One feature of the Pentomic Division was that regiments were done away with and replaced by one or more “battlegroups” bearing the same regimental number but not necessarily under the same command.

The Army could not admit that mistake. So they dumped the Pentomic Division and battlegroups as soon as possible but, rather than reverting to regiments, went to brigades [Wiki] composed of different battalions of different arms and regimental numbers. This was nothing but a way to pretend that the Pentomic Division hadn’t been a mistake, that it had been a great idea that just needed a little fine tuning.

Brigades, by the way, also sucked but not as much as the new, Pentomic 2.0, Brigade Combat Teams suck [Wiki].

Wiki links added for those (like me) who are not intimately familiar with US military formations.

September 21, 2026

Price controls work … but not the way they’re intended to

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Politicians love to intervene in markets, trying to impose their preferred solution to “problems” like high prices. But markets don’t work the way politicians think they do:

Price ceilings don’t manage markets, they destroy them. In 1946 the US meat market collapsed because of it.

The Office of Price Administration set beef ceiling prices during World War II. Ranchers and meatpackers adapted: some held cattle rather than sell at a loss, others shifted product to black markets, and slaughter volumes dropped. The OPA briefly lifted controls in mid-1946 under pressure. Beef flooded back into stores almost immediately.

Then Congress, drowning in constituent complaints about inflation, reimposed ceilings in August 1946. Slaughter collapsed within weeks. By October 1946, beef virtually disappeared from American grocery store shelves. You could walk into a butcher shop in Chicago or New York and find nothing. Scarcity was manufactured entirely by Washington bureaucrats setting prices below what producers needed to cover costs.

Mises explained the mechanism precisely: a price ceiling creates a shortage, which produces political pressure for rationing and further controls, spiraling into comprehensive economic disorganization. The OPA ran that experiment in real time on the American food supply.

President Truman ended meat controls on November 9, 1946. Beef returned within days. The supply existed the entire time. Ranchers and packers simply refused to sell at confiscatory prices, and they were correct to refuse. Coercive price suppression causes economic destruction, and 1946 proved it at the grocery counter.

September 20, 2026

“Honest” graft

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

Politicians and corruption go together like wine and cheese but not like crime and punishment for some reason. It’s almost as though the path to wealth and influence goes through political connections rather than economic efficiency and innovation. Chris Bray points out the difference between the “honest” graft of days gone by and the kind of all-consuming corruption we see far too often these days:

Tammany had honest graft: They said they would build a bridge or a park, and then they built it. The cost would be sort of not nakedly obscene, and no money would be missing if there was an audit. But by the most remarkable coincidence, the land where the park or the highway or the approaches to the bridge would go turned out to be owned by very close friends of the Tammany machine, who then got paid a nice little premium for the acquisition of land that was needed for a public purpose, and maybe the people who sold the concrete and the lumber and supplied the labor also turned out to be awfully close friends of the politicians who approved the project, but at the end, there’s the bridge. There’s the new highway, and it cost something within shouting distance of what you would expect the thing to cost. It added up, but they did some fairly polite stealing. There was respect in it. It wasn’t honest, but it wasn’t wide-open looting.

An extremely common form of graft in American politics is the “Three Bs” that Robert Caro famously described in Texas politics: beef, bourbon, and blondes. Cocktails, steak dinners, and maybe if you were a legislator who played ball a nice young lady came and visited your hotel room during the legislative session. But that graft was about topics like who got the state highway contract. Some money traded hands, there was dishonesty in the allocation of public resources, and the highway got re-paved.

The Quality Learing Center model, or the high-speed rail model, or the 800 hospices in Los Angeles with patients that never died, all represent a model of grift that comes from a culture of complete shamelessness. In California, nearly 700 non-profit corporations exist to provide shelter to the homeless, and over 500 non-profit corporations exist to prevent homelessness and provide social services to the homeless or to people who may become homeless. There’s quite a bit of overlap between those categories, so there aren’t 1200+ non-profits, but there are hundreds, and they have billions of dollars in income.

Some are entirely legitimate and do real work. There are people in California who will be fed and sheltered tonight by a non-profit corporation that will keep them from sleeping on the street. It’s not at all my argument that no one in any non-profit anywhere ever does anything real. But the overall picture is theft, and the premise that the flood of money is ending homelessness (or is meant to) is a lie, and a dark one. Gavin Newsom presented his ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness in 2008.

Update, 22 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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