The Left (as always for rhetorical convenience) controls everything. You want to keep your kids away from the Poz entirely, you need to go no-shit Amish.
But first, keeping them totally away from anything is doing them a disservice. I think Escriva would strongly agree with this — we are commanded, after all, to be IN the world, not OF it. It’s a two-part command. The Poz is a disease, yes, and diseases can kill, but look at the aftermath of covid. Who are the unhealthiest people in society right now? The folks who got vaxxed and triple-boosted and spent two years hiding under their beds in a hazmat suit. Every minor sniffle hits them like a sledgehammer now, because they spent two years screwing up their own immune systems.
Second, and closely related, the fight is in the small things. People see you avoiding everything and you look like a wimp. Where I grew up, every high school had the Bible Camp Kids. They were their own little clique. They went everywhere together and tried to live as Amish-ly as possible. And everybody knew what happened to the Bible Camp Kids when they went off to college. You could set your watch by it: Two semesters in, and she’d have a tattoo and a face piercing and would either be knocked up or out of the closet.
They had no spiritual immune system.
Fighting and failing in the small things builds up your defenses for the big things. Not only that, people respect fighters. You failed, but you fought — you can hold your head high. As opposed to “You didn’t fail, but only because you tucked tail and ran”. Nobody respects those guys. It sucks to lose. But it’s far worse to “win” by never trying. Worst of all is to wallow in your defeat. Get up! Fight!
Severian, “The Way Ch. 10: Scruples”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-10.
September 12, 2026
QotD: The spiritual immune system
September 11, 2026
Capturing 9/11: Bill Biggart’s Final Images
Imperial War Museums
Published 2 Sep 2026On 11th September 2001, photojournalist Bill Biggart headed to the World Trade Center to document the unfolding attacks. Bill Biggart tragically passed away when the North Tower collapsed, but he left behind a remarkable final record of the day. Featuring testimony from his widow, Wendy Doremus, and photographs recovered from the damaged camera found in the rubble, this film tells the story behind some of the last images taken at Ground Zero, now available to see at IWM London.
00:00 The Morning of 9/11
01:06 Bill goes to Lower Manhattan
01:25 The South Tower is Hit
03:08 The South Tower Collapses
03:57 Bill Photographs the Emergency Workers
04:48 The North Tower Collapses
05:57 Bill’s Last Ever Photo
06:09 The Days After 9/11
07:30 Finding His Cameras and Photos
09:10 Visit Bill’s Photos at IWM LondonVisit the 9/11 Photography Display at IWM London: https://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/iwm-lon…
“Let’s roll!”
Mark Steyn on the Neil Young song — yes, that Neil Young — that best captured the events on Flight 93 on the eleventh of September, 2001:
“Plumes of smoke billow from the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, after a Boeing 767 hits each tower during the September 11 attacks.”
Photo by Michael Foran via Wikimedia Commons.
[T]here was one striking exception to the stultifying conformity of cultural critique, one lonely example of an A-list star confronting a specific 9/11 event head-on and offering his voice in full-throated support of authentic American heroism. Even more impressively, it came from a Canadian — and at a time when Jean Chrétien’s ministry was mostly engaged in petty sniping about alleged offenses to its amour propre. When I was, oh, fourteen years old I saw Neil Young with Crosby, Stills, Nash & … plus his compatriot Joni Mitchell and The Band. And to be honest in the intervening decades I can’t say I gave Neil Young much thought — and, whenever I’ve chanced to be tootling around and “After the Gold Rush” or “Heart of Gold” comes on the radio, I’m reminded of why I haven’t much missed him. Nevertheless, just a few weeks after September 11th, Neil Young offered a new song that took its inspiration from what I called in the papers that week “the only good news of the day” — the turn of events on Flight 93, the fourth plane, the one supposedly headed for the White House or the Capitol or Camp David that Tuesday morning but whose passengers rose up and overpowered the hijackers. Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field, but its fallen heroes saved hundreds of lives, including perhaps the Vice-President’s or multiple congressmen, and denied Osama bin Laden an even more iconic remaking of the Washington skyline and the symbolic (and potentially actual) decapitation of the Great Satan. Todd Beamer’s last words, heard by a GTE telephone operator to whom he’d been speaking, were, “Are you ready, guys? Let’s roll!”
It was hard to credit from the disposition of even moderate Democrats just a couple of years later; but Young, a very leftie celebrity, was genuinely moved by Lisa Beamer’s account of her husband’s sacrifice. As he put it:
She was talking about how he always used to say that (‘let’s roll’) with the kids when they’d go out and do something, that it’s what he said a lot when he had a job to do. And it’s just so poignant, and there’s no more of a legendary, heroic act than what those people did. With no promise of martyrdom, no promise of any reward anywhere for this, other than just knowing that you did the right thing. And not even having a chance to think about it or plan it or do anything – just a gut reaction that was heroic and ultimately cost them all their lives. What more can you say? It was just so obvious that somebody had to write something or do something …because it’s just such a great image – the whole story about the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93. I think it’s a legendary story that’s gonna go down through the ages; it’ll never be forgotten.
It was indeed “just so obvious”, and for writers there are two reactions to that: you jump on it and write it immediately — as a book, a play, a poem, a movie — or you figure some other guy must surely have got to it. Except in this case no one did. Neil Young was perhaps being too naïve with regard to contemporary culture’s ambivalence about unabashed heroism. So he waited, and waited. “I was very surprised,” he said, “that I didn’t hear any songs.”
And eventually he got tired of waiting. “So, I just wrote it. I couldn’t stop it anymore.” He took Todd Beamer’s catchphrase, turned it into a song title, and sang it out for real — no playing for irony or nuance.
Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll” is a dark, driving anthem that begins with a church organ (Young’s own, acquired in Europe) and over its ominous drone the sound of cellphones ringing. That was the most important weapon the passengers had: the mobile telephone. By all accounts, the hijackers of Flight 93 weren’t exactly the cream of Osama’s toxic crop. The flight was halfway across the continent before the boobs made their move and started meandering back east to their target. It was getting on for 9.30 on that Tuesday morning. By the time the passengers began calling home, their families were aware of what had happened at the World Trade Center. Unlike those on the earlier flights, the hostages on 93 knew they were not on a conventionally hijacked aircraft bound for Cuba or Libya, but were conscripts on an airborne missile intended to kill thousands of their fellow citizens. So, unlike the earlier passengers, they understood the FAA’s cobwebbed 1970s hijack procedures would not save them. The terrorists took charge at 9.28am. The pushback started at 9.57. In those 29 minutes, ordinary American citizens decided that, if they had to die, they would die as warriors. Put yourself in their shoes, on those phones, in that time-frame. Neil Young does, and, after the plaintive unanswered phones, and the organ, and a bit of guitar, an aged rock star’s familiar rasp captures the moment:
I know I said I love you
I know you know it’s true
I got to put the phone down
And do what we gotta do…The song can’t be said to be of much melodic interest. In those first four bars, 17 of the 27 monosyllables are all set to the same single note: “know I said”, “love”, “I know you know”, “I got to put”, “phone”, “do what we got”, and what follows plonks along in the same vein. It’s what Sammy Cahn used to call “the kind of tune a lyricist writes”; the words are set as you’d expect, without any of the great transformative intervals that can give a bi-syllable a power way beyond what it would have as mere speech. But it’s urgent speech, and the track is great. At the time Young was working on an album with Booker T and the MGs, and in the studio one day unveiled the song to the guys somewhat sheepishly. Booker T Jones liked it. “You don’t have to figure out what to do on a song like that,” he said. “We were just able to pull it off.” He and the MGs aren’t much into vocals (as you’ll know from “Green Onions” and “Time is Tight” and their other killer instrumentals), but they gamely provide the old croaker with some discreet background support here. And of course Jones’ Hammond organ and Donald “Duck” Dunn’s bass keep driving the narrative relentlessly forward. Above the band, Neil Young distills the essence of those last, haunting cell conversations in a way few songwriters had either the courage or the inclination to do.
QotD: Sherman on some military lessons learned during the American Civil War
Rarely did the opposing lines in compact order come into actual contact, but when, as at Peach-Tree Creek and Atlanta, the lines did become commingled, the men fought individually in every possible style, more frequently with the musket clubbed than with the bayonet, and in some instances the men clinched like wrestlers, and went to the ground together. Europeans frequently criticized our war, because we did not always take full advantage of a victory; the true reason was, that habitually the woods served as a screen, and we often did not realize the fact that our enemy had retreated till he was already miles away and was again intrenched, having left a mere shirmish-line to cover the movement, in turn to fall back to the new position.
Our war was fought with the muzzle-loading rifle. Toward the close I had one brigade (Walcutt’s) armed with breech-loading “Spencer’s”. The cavalry generally had breach-loading carbines: “Spencer’s” and “Sharp’s”, both of which were good arms.
The only change that breech-loading arms will probably make in the art and practice of war will be to increase the amount of ammunition to be expended, and necessarily to be carried along; to still further “thin out” the lines of attack, and to reduce battles to short, quick, decisive conflicts. It does not in the least affect the grand strategy, or the necessity for perfect organization, drill, and discipline. The companies and battalions will be more dispersed, and the men will be less under the immediate eye of their officers, and therefore a higher order of intelligence and courage on the part of the individual soldier will be an element of strength.
When a regiment is deployed as skirmishers, and crosses an open field or woods, under heavy fire, if each man runs forward from tree to tree, or stump to stump, and yet preserves a good general alignment, it gives great confidence to the men themselves, for they always keep their eyes well to the right and left, and watch their comrades; but when some few hold back, stick too close or too long to a comfortable log, it often stops the line and defeats the whole object. Therefore, the more we improve the fire-arm the more will be the necessity for good organization, good discipline and intelligence on the part of the individual soldier and officer.
There is, of course, such a thing as individual courage, which has a value in war, but familiarity with danger, experience in war and its common attendants, and personal habit, are equally valuable traits, and these are the qualities with which we usually have to deal in war. All men naturally shrink from pain and danger, and only incur their risk from some higher motive, or from habit; so that I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to incur it, rather than that insensibility to danger of which I have heard far more than I have seen.
The most courageous men are generally unconscious of possessing the quality; therefore, when one professes it too openly, by words or bearing, there is reason to mistrust it. I would further illustrate my meaning by describing a man of true courage to be one who possesses all his faculties and senses perfectly when serious danger is actually present.
Modern wars have not materially changed the relative values or proportions of the several arms of service: infantry, artillery, cavalry, and engineers. If any thing, the infantry has been increased in value. The danger of cavalry attempting to charge infantry armed with breech-loading rifles was fully illustrated at Sedan, and with us very frequently.
So improbable has such a thing become that we have omitted the infantry-square from our recent tactics. Still, cavalry against cavalry, and as auxiliary to infantry, will always be valuable, while all great wars will, as heretofore, depend chiefly on the infantry. Artillery is more valuable with new and inexperienced troops than with veterans. In the early stages of the war the field-guns often bore the proportion of six to a thousand men; but toward the close of the war one gun, or at most two, to a thousand men, was deemed enough.
[…]
It was one of Professor (Dennis Hart) Mahan’s maxims that the spade was as useful in war as the musket, and to this I will add the axe. The habit of intrenching certainly does have the effect of making new troops timid. When a line of battle is once covered by a good parapet, made by the engineers or by the labor of the men themselves, it does require an effort to make them leave it in the face of danger; but when the enemy is intrenched, it becomes absolutely necessary to permit each brigade and division of the troops immediately opposed to throw up a corresponding trench for their own protection in case of a sudden sally. We invariably did this in all our recent campaigns, and it had no ill effect, though sometimes our troops were a little too slow in leaving their well-covered lines to assail the enemy in position or on retreat.
Even our skirmishers were in the habit of rolling logs together, or of making a lunette of rails, with dirt in front, to cover their bodies; and, though it revealed their position, I cannot say that it worked a bad effect; so that, as a rule, it may safely be left to the men themselves. On the “defensive”, there is no doubt of the propriety of fortifying; but in the assailing army the general must watch closely to see that his men do not neglect an opportunity to drop his precautionary defenses, and act promptly on the “offensive” at every chance.
I have many a time crept forward to the skirmish line to avail myself of the cover of the pickets’ “little fort”, to observe more closely some expected result; and always talked familiarly with the men, and was astonished to see how well they comprehended the general object, and how accurately they were informed of the state of facts existing miles away from their particular corps. Soldiers are very quick to catch the general drift and purpose of a campaign, and are always sensible when they are well commanded or well cared for. Once impressed with this fact, and that they are making progress, they bear cheerfully any amount of labor and privation.
William Tecumseh Sherman, “Sherman on Tactics”, Tactical Notebook, 2026-06-10. (Selection from Memoirs of William T. Sherman (1875) by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, minus an observation that sieges were now unimportant which was disproved in 1914.)
September 10, 2026
Skynet Industries: “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus …”
So … are we now okay with panicking over the threat of artificial intelligence?
The events of the last 24 hours are stunning. And not in a good way. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of tech, and it’s unfolding right now.
Here’s a start. Maybe you’ve already heard about the guy who resigned from OpenAI. He warned that the technology could kill everybody before the end of the decade.
He made this announcement just 20 hours ago:
Is this really true? Maybe Coxon is just a disgruntled employee. We need to find out what other insiders think.
As if in answer to this question, another AI scientist — Evan Hubinger at Anthropic — quickly moved to endorse Coxon’s concerns.
[…]
The AI fanboys are trying to defuse this situation. But their responses fall apart at the slightest touch. Consider the smear that this is just a PR campaign. Really? Others are hinting it could be a Chinese plot. Yeah, sure …
But the biggest lie is the claim that these people don’t know what they are talking about. The reality is that they understand this subject better than anybody.
What’s happening here is obvious — eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they’re seeing. But they don’t have the power individually to stop the insanity.
If this isn’t a call to action, I don’t know what is. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely. Now the people making it happen are warning it just might kill everybody.
This demands a response from the highest circles of power and authority. If that doesn’t happen, we will live to regret this inaction. And that’s the best case scenario. The worst is that there won’t be anyone left to regret a thing.
Update: Jim Treacher, of all people, casts a bit of doubt on the “AI’s gonna kill us all!” concerns:
And that moment from Terminator 2: Robotic Boogaloo is what everybody thinks about when they get scared of A.I. I know this because it’s what I think about when I get scared of A.I.
What happens when Skynet becomes self-aware in real life?
What happens when all these software agents that we keep welcoming into our daily lives decide they know how to run things better than we do? How much control can we give up to them before they attack us?
Is it already too late? Is there any going back? Is all hope lost? Are we doomed?
Etc., etc.
[…]
So according to this guy, A.I. professionals see it like the Manhattan Project or the moonshot. We gotta get there first, before our enemies do. That part sounds plausible.
But who is this guy? I’ve never heard of Jacob Coxon. Nobody has. He opened this Twitter account earlier this year, and that was his very first post. Now he’s all over the place. Everybody’s talking about this.
It feels like astroturf.
If you don’t know what that propaganda technique is, it’s just what it sounds like: astroturf. At first glance, it looks real. Grassroots. But it’s fake. And that might be what’s happening here.
A guy named Parker Thayer, who works for the Capital Research Center, writes:
And then he lists stuff about this that seems … hinky. I think the kids say sus. It’s sus.
For example, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about this kid’s claim 20 minutes before he posted it. Before, not after.
The first Twitter accounts to promote that post were from nonprofit groups opposing A.I.
And now, all these Democrats are screaming about it. Bernie Sanders wants to smash all the machines. Old Man Shakes Fist at Cloud. [BERNIE VOICE] “Gotta stop the computers! They’re gonna kill us all!”
Does that mean all this is fake? I don’t know. It doesn’t make me trust any of it. It makes me skeptical.
Women’s dissatisfaction with modern life
On Substack Notes, Copernican linked to this article saying:
While revoking the 19th wouldn’t fix EVERYTHING, it’d probably be a step in the direction of reestablishing a structural social frame for a lot of women. The problem is that feminists want a system that works for the top 0.5% of women, while the historic systems have worked for 95% of women. We need systems that work for most people most of the time, not a small fraction of the population all the time.
For my (relatively few) non-American readers, “the 19th” refers to the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted the right to vote for women. Some cynics claim it was the fatal step leading to today’s political situation.
In the linked article, The Appalachian Gorilla wonders why women are so miserable:
There is a famous clip of Joe Budden and his crew watching a Bill Hicks joke with a woman. Bill hicks says he figures out how the fall of man from Eden happened. Adam said, “Look at this, Eve. We are one with nature, one with god and every time we fantasize about something, it becomes reality”. Eve looks at Adam and says, “Yeah, it’s just not enough, is it?” The guys laugh, and one of Joe Budden’s crew asks the woman why she wasn’t laughing, and she says, “I was just waiting for more”. Joe Budden immediately chimes in and says, “Yeah, that’s the point”. And everyone laughs.
Mitch Hedberg once made a joke that if you are ever lost in the woods, just build a house. You went from lost to being home.
Men will adapt to situations and eventually survive, making any situation the norm.
Women, though, can find themselves in the best situation possible and call it prison. I recently pointed out that I would kill to not have to go to work every day. I would kill to just spend time with my children. This isn’t a fantasy; I spent 6 months laid off with a 3-year-old and a 7-year-old, cooking, cleaning, fishing, reading bedtime stories, doing laundry, and loving life every day. There was a point where a hurricane hit the mountains here in PA, and we didn’t have power for 3 weeks back in the holler, and my sons and I spent the days fishing and the nights cooking and sitting by the fire staring at the stars.
Women are miserable, though, constantly. Not women in my life, just in general. Every protest, every demonstration, every meeting is full of women looking to enact vengeance on a man or some evil fabricated structure they built in their heads.
[…]
This is the thing. Why do women see these kids as work? Why do they see chores as work? I have seen women turn hygiene into work. I have seen them turn sex into work. This is an almost universal attitude. I say I get to be a dad. They say they have to be a mom. I say I get to cut my grass. They say I have to do the dishes. I enjoy doing the laundry and cooking meals. I get excited about food I make repeatedly. I get excited about hitting the grocery store and getting fresh eggs or stopping at a local spot to get them from a farm.
I have seen so many women turn sex into a chore or a reward or a way to punish their significant other. Let’s be honest about this too. Most women do 0 work in bed. They may claw your back or throw it back when on their knees, but most won’t ride to fruition. They want choked and hit and slapped. I have been asked to spit on them, or finishing on their face is a reward for them. They want swings built or contraptions to restrain them. Insane stuff to give the illusion of danger.
I cook my relationships because, well, I enjoy food, refuse to eat Kraft Mac and Cheese, have never had ramen noodles, and will not start eating them at 43. Food is supposed to be the most basic of love given from one person to another. It is the labor of love and skill translated to reality. Sustaining another human from your hands to their plate is a beautiful way to connect with others. Doing so for your children, or having them cook with you and watch them appreciate their own labor and ability, is beautiful. Seeing their skill level rise with each meal is amazing. Women act like teaching their children is a chore.
I must say that this is not all women, but it is most at this point in our society. I know there are fathers out here who are pieces of shit, but most I know are good men who have been railroaded by the system and have to work 5 jobs to pay child support to keep themselves afloat while dealing with the loss of identity, their children, and fighting the depression that goes with that.
I once asked a wiser man than myself, “Why do women continue a system that will destroy their sons?” He replied, “Because women don’t actually like children. They like babies.” Today, though, with what we are seeing with women making videos where they are admitting they want to harm their children or even joking about dropping their children off the steps or a balcony or into a dryer to support Lindsey Clancy, it makes all of us wonder if they actually even like babies.
The tragedy of the commons at sea
When a valuable commodity isn’t directly owned by anyone, the incentives are for everyone to grab as much of the commodity as they can. Nobody will preserve it, because they wouldn’t get the benefit from it: it would be shared among all the other users. Fishing grounds outside coastal waters are valuable commodities that nobody owns:
Nobody owns the ocean floor off the Georges Bank, and so between 1960 and 1994 the New England cod population collapsed by roughly 70 percent while every fishing fleet on the Atlantic raced to pull up fish before a competitor did. This race is the entirely predictable consequence of absent ownership.
Garrett Hardin formalized the problem in 1968, but the mechanism is older than economics itself. When no individual owns a resource, no individual bears the full cost of depleting it. The cost gets distributed across everyone; the benefit goes straight to whoever acts first. You extract as much as you physically can before the next boat arrives. So does the next boat. The resource disappears, and everyone stands around pointing fingers at greed. The actual culprit is the property rights regime, or rather the absence of one.
State managers offer themselves as the solution: quotas, licensing boards, regulatory agencies. The Atlantic fisheries commission issued exactly these instruments. The cod is still not back. Bureaucrats lack the price signals, local knowledge, and personal stakes that make stewardship rational. A regulator who mismanages a fishery keeps his salary; an owner who does the same loses his capital.
Private ownership forces the owner to think in time. Iceland extended exclusive fishing rights to its own coastal fishermen in 1975, drove foreign trawlers out, and now holds one of the best-managed cod stocks in the North Atlantic. Property rights did what Brussels-style quota spreadsheets could not: they tied the fisherman’s future income to the health of the stock today.
Common ownership produces a sprint to zero.
September 9, 2026
The day after counter-tariff Tuesday
Yesterday, the Canadian counter-tariffs to the latest round of US tariffs kicked in. Maxime Bernier put it this way:
Canadians wake up today to a brand new tax hike; courtesy of PM Carney’s “dollar-for-dollar” countertariffs.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t a weapon against Trump. It’s a tax on YOU.
Every time you buy steel, a fridge, manicure products or a laundry machine, etc. … you’re paying more so Ottawa can feel tough.
The Liberals call this “standing up to Trump”. I call it economic sabotage.
They’re taxing Canadians to feel good about “punishing” Washington. And who pays the bill? Families, workers, and businesses right here at home.
Trump started this pointless trade war. But two wrongs don’t make a right; they just make everything more expensive.
You can’t fight tariffs with more tariffs. That’s just stupid.
Happy Tax Day, everyone. Thanks, Carney.
Carney’s plan all along has been to push Trump into saying and doing things that give Carney and the Liberals even more Boomer support. Pretty much controlling the relic media allows the government to massage the stories so that Dear Leader is never in the wrong and “the Bad Orange Man hates you and wants to destroy you”. Canadian boomers are among the last people in the world to realize that they’ve been systematically gaslighted since Justin Trudeau ran for Liberal leader … and the penny still hasn’t dropped. Enough of them are already psychologically prepared to destroy what’s left of the economy, Thelma & Louise style, if Carney invites them to. And he’s going to.
John Carter responds to a Ben Woodfinden article in the National Post, blaming dissident Canadians for not rallying behind Mark Carney to … do exactly the same sort of performative elbozo pantomime that the Boomer Liberals have been doing for over a year?
This misses the mark in a subtle but interesting way. The author invokes the concept of oikophobia against the Canadian online right for joining in (actually initiating) American mockery of Canada, arguing that Canadian rightists are themselves oikophobic for not instead supporting the Carnites.
This is incoherent. The Liberal regime is itself oikophobic, loudly so. Oikophobia is explicit Canadian government policy, as the author himself tacitly acknowledges by noting that we pointed out the hypocrisy of Canadian politicians decrying Trump’s lame Lake America stunt after a decade-long orgy of renaming every school, square, and street in the country in the name of a Woke ideology imported straight from America. That’s to say nothing of replacement migration, and racial preference systems that make white Canadians second class citizens. You can’t be oikophobic against the oikophobes.
There are certainly slopulist 51st staters out there, but their influence in the Canadian right is actually marginal, largely confined to a rump of lolcow Alberta separatists. The energy is all in Canadian Loyalism, and that is a different animal entirely.
The reason we’re happy to pile on to the Canadian political elite when the Americans mock them isn’t because we want to be America. It’s because we’re disgusted by the state of the country.
Trump can excoriate the Canadian military for being fat and woke because it is. That isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s because of decades of sabotage and social engineering by the Liberal Party.
Trump can joke about annexation because the Canadian military is weak. Again, that isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s the fault of the Laurentian elite, the very people now insisting that they can turn things around.
If Canada had a serious government, we’d be taken seriously. We don’t, and haven’t since Pearson at least. As a direct result of the deeply unserious clowns running the country into the ground, Canada is poor, defenseless, sclerotic, and despondent. Every time Trump makes fun of us, the very fact that his insults land is a condemnation of the elites that brought our beautiful country to this shameful condition.
Saving Canada requires circulating the elite.
And that’s why we pile on.
And since I try not to overtax my non-Canadian readers (the vast majority of you) with too many separate maple-flavoured posts, here are some sensible suggestions from Matt Gurney about fixing our own problems — which are legion, and mostly self-inflicted — rather than pretending that Trump is the problem:
… there’s a bigger issue at play here than just managing the relationship with America. What the hell do we do as Canadians?
Don’t think about the States at all. Don’t think about Trump. Just think about Canadians in Canada. What should we be doing for ourselves? Even if the trade war does eventually end, our relationship with the United States is going to require generations to fix. Some very fundamental assumptions about Canadian, well, everything, now need to be reconsidered. I’m the guy who wrote the column about our expectations being a problem, and I’m still having a hard time keeping up with this.
But if there is one thing that I could suggest we should prioritize, it’s simply fixing the problems we have in this country. Really. Just … do the right things. Fix the problems. Just like virtue is its own reward, making good decisions is always a good decision. It’s bizarrely not something we’ve been good at lately, though, and it’s probably actually going to get harder for a while. In fact, a patriotic rallying-around-the-flag effect is very likely to make it even harder than it already is to get Canadians to actually admit there are major problems in this country, and then insist that the politicians get serious about fixing them.
I’ve been thinking about writing this column for a couple of weeks. Last month I was in the United States for some family business. I was actually there the day Carney called our negotiators home, and I returned to Canada the next day; I joked with some friends that, much like our negotiating team, I was packing up and leaving the United States to show them we meant business.
But one of the things I did notice on my visit to the United States, which included stops in two major cities, was that those American cities were much cleaner than my hometown of Toronto, and in much better repair.
And the especially bizarre thing was, one of these cities was Detroit.
Yes, that Detroit. Astute Line readers — the smartest and best-read people in the whole wide world — will recall that Detroit has not often been held up as an exemplar of civic governance and urban success.
But the downtown looked good. It was safe, clean, well-patrolled; I’m not exactly a regular visitor, but I do pop in often enough to have noted real improvement in the state of things there, even compared to my last visit, which was only about a year ago.
The other major city I visited, Chicago, has always struck me as the best apples-to-apples comparison my hometown of Toronto has with a U.S. city. Chicago has a lot of visible problems. I’m not trying to gloss those over; one thing I quickly noted was a roughly Toronto-esque number of people wandering the streets in evident mental-health crisis, shouting at nothing. But overall, Chicago had much less visible homelessness and was in a considerably better state of repair and cleanliness than my hometown. It wasn’t subtle. Cleaner streets, in better condition, with fewer people obviously living on them. Toronto did not compare well.
And just when the hell did that happen?
We can’t blame Trump for our laughably protectionist inter-provincial trade barriers. We can’t blame Trump because we’re functionally incapable of building a pipeline to bring Canadian oil and natural gas to Canadian markets. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-functional public healthcare systems. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-appealing market conditions for foreign investment. We can’t blame Trump for our deteriorating relationship with First Nations groups. These are all things that need to be fixed by Canadians. In Canada. No matter who might be occupying the Oval Office in Washington, DC.
Update: Added missing URL to John Carter’s post on X.
The Korean War Week 116 – Marines Fight to Hold the Line – September 8, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 8 Sep 2026The “Outpost War” is in full swing this week as the fight rages for posts known simply by names like Bruce, Felix, and Gary, which are still worth dying over to both sides. Also, this week we take a look at something we haven’t covered before — the dental care of the troops.
00:00 Intro
00:55 Recap
01:57 Outpost Bruce
05:02 Bunker Hill
07:21 Relief
09:56 The War in the Skies
11:05 Dental Care
13:49 Summary
14:28 Conclusion
15:00 Call to Action
Government pension funds
If there’s anything that offends a government, it’s a big investment fund sitting there useless (that is, useless to the government, not to the beneficiaries). There’s a pattern when governments start looking interested in private pension funds:
Every pension system a government controls becomes a government slush fund. This is the historical record, not cynicism.
Argentina’s government nationalized $30 billion in private pension assets in 2008, converting workers’ individual accounts into state-controlled funds. The official rationale was protection from market volatility. The actual result was that the Kirchner administration gained a captive pool of capital to finance deficit spending. Your retirement savings, transformed into political currency.
Hungary pulled the same move in 2010, effectively confiscating $14 billion from private pension accounts under Viktor Orbán. Poland followed by seizing roughly half of private pension fund assets in 2013 to reduce its reported public debt. These are the predictable endpoint of any arrangement where the state holds custodial authority over your savings, not fringe cases.
The United States did it more slowly. Congress raided Social Security’s trust fund beginning in the 1960s, replacing actual assets with government IOUs and spending the cash on discretionary programs. The system now carries $23 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Workers who paid into it for forty years will receive whatever Congress decides to give them: a grant subject to political revision, not enforceable property.
Private ownership means enforceable claim. A pension fund you own contractually cannot be redirected to cover a budget shortfall in Buenos Aires or Budapest. The moment government intermediates between your labor and your retirement capital, political priorities start competing with your financial security. They generally win.
Socialists will do anything within their power to get their dirty paws on your hard-earned money. We should do everything we can to stop them.
M26 MASS (Modular Accessory Shotgun System)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Apr 2026The M26 Modular Accessory Shotgun System (MASS) was designed by C-More Products company as a new shotgun option for the US military. First prototyped in 1999, it was not actually adopted until 2012, but had been purchased in significant numbers since then. The idea is that the M26 can function as either a standalone weapon or attached under the barrel of an M4 Carbine, thus replacing a couple of different items in inventory. It weighs just 3.5 pounds in the under barrel configuration, significantly less than the Masterkey system, and is much more convenient for a breacher to carry than an M4 along with a separate Mossberg 500.
The M26 is a bolt-action 12ga shotgun that feeds from both 3- and 5-round magazines. It has folding integrated aperture sights and is envisioned for use in a wide variety of roles. Military ammunition supplies include #7.5 and #9 birdshot, classic #00 buckshot, rubber buckshot, rubber slugs, and breaching rounds (powdered metal in a wax binder). For use with breaching, the M26 includes a retractable breaching muzzle device.
September 7, 2026
An “exit tax”? What next, internal passports?
A few months back, there was a brief online reaction to the Liberal Party idea of imposing a ridiculously high “exit tax” on young Canadians taking jobs in other countries — and by “other countries” they really only meant the United States. I dismissed it at the time as just someone letting their Liberal freak flag fly … but:
Jesus Christ. These boomer leaflibs, man.
It doesn’t occur to him to ask why highly trained Canadian engineers would rather work in the US. Actually no, he tacitly admits this: they get paid more. Why is that? Why can’t they get paid well in Canada, putting their skills to work here, developing innovative, world-leading technologies right at home in Canada?
The answer is obvious. Because there is no opportunity in Canada. It’s all but impossible to develop high tech industry here. The regulations are too thick, and all the available investment capital gets sucked up into real estate development.
Maybe Canada should try and fix that, so that Canada is actually an attractive country for talented young Canadians?
But nah fuck those kids, we should just charge them a half million dollar exit tax so if they can’t pay that they can just let their dreams die and get a job at BMO.
Oh and at the same time we should flood Canada with “world leading talent” (from Calcutta), in order to make it that much more impossible for Canadian engineers to find employment in their fields at home.
QotD: “Knackered”, “shattered”, and other useful Britishisms
The surprised expressions caught me off guard at first. “Blimey!” and “Crikey!” initially felt theatrical coming out of my mouth, as if I were performing in a period drama. But they’ve grown on me. There’s something deeply satisfying about a good “blimey” when you’ve just discovered the cost of your heating bill (although, if I’m honest, my partner would be far more expletive about it).
Then there are the words that capture concepts and objects I didn’t even know I needed:
Faff — The act of fussing around with something, whether it’s organizing (like a “bag faff” when you’re rearranging everything in your bag) or just messing about when you should be just getting on with it. [NR: “Faffing about” is a regular bit of my vocabulary — I picked it up from my wife’s uncle on our first trip back after we got married.]
Cheeky — That delightful word for something (or someone) playfully impudent. A cheeky pint. A cheeky biscuit. A cheeky comment from a cheeky child. Americans don’t have an equivalent that carries the same affectionate mischief. [NR: I use the word occasionally, but only in the “cheeky comment” sense. I suspect the other usages developed after we came to Canada.]
Chinwag — A chat or conversation, usually informal and friendly. “Having a chinwag over tea.”
Wheelie bin — A bin with wheels, which is exactly how I explained it to my sister-in-law when she asked what one was. Somehow it sounds less depressing than “trash can” when you’re dragging it to the kerb in the rain, though I can’t explain why. [NR: My cousin in Edinburgh used this term and we laughed ourselves silly … but it’s a useful phrase as wheelie bins are much more common here now.]
Bits and bobs — Covers all those miscellaneous things better than any American phrase. “I need to pick up some bits and bobs” is so much more charming than “I need to run errands”. [NR: I use this phrase all the time, also referring to accessories, jigs or associated “bits”.]
Picky bits — Those yummy nibbles you put out before a meal or during drinks. Americans would say “appetizers” or “snacks”, but “picky bits” is somehow more fun and less formal.
Lashings — A generous amount of something, usually used with food. “Lashings of butter” sounds so much more indulgent than just “a lot of butter”.
A lie in — Sleeping in, staying in bed late. “I had a lovely lie in this morning” sounds so much more luxurious than “I slept in”.
When I’m pleased about something, I’m chuffed to bits. It’s the British equivalent of my American “tickled pink”, though somehow “chuffed” sounds a bit less old-fashioned. When something’s gone wrong, I’m gutted — which is just more emotionally accurate than “disappointed” when your team loses or your train’s been cancelled. When someone’s being ridiculous, they’re a pillock (an insult that somehow sounds almost friendly).
Daft has replaced “stupid” in most contexts because it’s softer, more affectionate, somehow. Posh carries weight that “fancy” just doesn’t. And I’ve learned that “taking the mick” means teasing someone, though I’m still not entirely confident I’m using it right.
Pants can mean trousers, underwear, or that something’s rubbish (as in “that film was pants”) — that was a confusing first month trying to figure out which meaning applied when.
Speaking of films — it’s always a film, never a movie, and you see them at the cinema, not a movie theater. I still slip up on this one regularly. Pro tip: when browsing Netflix or BBC iPlayer in the UK, search for “films”, not “movies”, or you’ll come up empty-handed.
Dodgy covers everything from suspicious strangers to questionable leftovers. When something’s sorted, it’s all taken care of. My spouse uses “lovely” for everything from a cup of tea to a sunset to the bins being collected on time.
When it’s cold outside, it’s not just chilly — it’s parky. When I mentioned it was “a bit parky” on a call with my family, they immediately asked, “So that means you wear a parka when it’s parky?” Fair question, honestly.
When it’s very windy, it’s blowing a hoolie — which sounds far more dramatic than “blustery”, and right now with Storm Amy hitting the UK, it’s particularly relevant (I hope my readers in Scotland are all ok).
When a place is packed, it’s chocker. The pub’s chocker. The motorway’s chocker. It works for everything, where Americans would say “packed” for a pub or “bumper to bumper” for traffic. These words just have more personality than their American equivalents.
The car vocabulary is starting to creep in, and I have to think about it more now. The boot sometimes wants to replace “trunk”. The bonnet makes sense when I hear it instead of “hood”.
And then there’s reckon, which occasionally slips out instead of “think”. I’m trying to hang onto my Americanisms for as long as I can, but it’s getting harder to resist.
Marianne Jennings, “Squeaky Bum Time and Other British Phrases I Never Knew I Needed”, An American’s Guide to British Life, 2025-10-05.
September 6, 2026
Scientific American used to be a respected science publication
A few years ago, it became clear that Scientific American had been captured by the woke gender warriors, but as ESR points out, the publication had been somewhat in the hands of propagandists for much longer than that:
I was once a Scientific American subscriber. I loved that magazine; reading it was one of the highlights of my month. I canceled, and wept for what the magazine was becoming, when they published a theme issue that was a transparent political hit job.
Sounds like current news? No. That was 40 years ago. The hit job was on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan was in the White House.
And I … I couldn’t figure out why nobody was saying the obvious in public. That SciAm had been sock-puppeted by a Soviet influence operation desperate to keep the US from exploiting its technological advantage.
Ideological capture of the scientific establishment is not a new problem. As much as I hate the Communists behind it, I’m even angrier with all the scientists who averted their eyes and never pushed back while the capture was going on. Our civilization gave them a position of high status, privilege, and trust. A priori I don’t think we were wrong to do that — until they failed in the duty that went with that trust.
It’s difficult for me to express how personally painful I found this. I revered research scientists as a child and young man — I could not imagine any higher calling than to be one myself. Until they betrayed civilization, and in the process betrayed me.
So, this isn’t a new problem. What’s new is that the post-2014 woke insanity has made it too obvious to miss.
It’s time for a dissolution of the monasteries. The culture of science, to the extent it is transmitted forward, must learn a harsh and terrible lesson about the consequences of allowing scientific neutrality to be abandoned for a mess of politics.
Henry Deringer’s Remarkable Percussion Pocket Pistols
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Apr 2026Henry Deringer Jr was born in Easton PA in 1786 to German parents. As a young man he apprenticed to a gunsmith, then spent 1808 working in the Virginia Manufactory making guns, and then opened his own business in 1809 at 612 North Front Street in Philadelphia. He remained there until his death in 1868, making a great many guns. Early on his work was largely in flintlock muskets, both for the Army and the commercial trade, but he became best known for his single-shot percussion pocket pistols. These guns became synonymous with his name, a feat not even accomplished by Samuel Colt.
Deringer’s pistols were available in a range of caliber from .31 to .50, but .41 was most common. Barrel length was also widely variable, from barely over an inch to 4 inches or more — but between 2 and 2.5 inches was typical. These were popular guns for self defense, easily carried in a coat pocket and generally sold in pairs. A flintlock of such a size was just unfeasible to conceal in a pocket, but the advent of the percussion system made these guns eminently practical. Obviously the most famous use of one was in Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln, but the guns were very popular before that.
In addition, Deringer became a part of trademark law when he filed suit against a sales agent, A.J. Platt, in San Francisco. Platt handled his inability to get enough pistols from Deringer to meet demand by setting up production of his own copy, complete with the marking “Deringer Philadel”. Deringer’s trademark infringement case was successful, and created a precedent for awarding a judgement based on the lost revenue suffered by the plaintiff — in Deringer’s case, $1,700 instead of his initial demand for $15,000.
Incidentally, Platt’s response after losing the case was to find a man in Philadelphia named “Derringer” and license his name, so that he could continue to make guns that his customers would not recognize as being counterfeits. This would be the basis for a further lawsuit today, but Deringer died in 1868 before pursuing the issue farther.
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