The details of the procedural shenanigans aren’t important. The thing to know is, the Wilmot Proviso made official and on-the-record what everybody knew, but was desperate to keep sub rosa: The Mexican War was a war for slavery. Specifically, it was a war for Texas (and California), which was a massive new slave state. And since pretty much all territory captured from Mexico after the inevitable US victory would be below the old Missouri Compromise line, slavery would be legal in all of it under the Compromise.
The Wilmot Proviso attempted to scotch that, which forced the Senate, at least, to come right out and say it. People always underestimate the power of words and symbols, and professional historians are among the worst offenders. With the newer generations of pros it’s ideological enstupidation that causes it, but the older folks were almost as bad. It’s a structural issue — we rely on documents, so even though “the temper of the times” is real obvious in the aggregate, unless you can pin it down to specific statements in archival sources it’s hard to make your case.
If it helps, think of the couple whose marriage is obviously on the rocks. They fight constantly, they all but live separately, everybody knows their relationship is doomed … but when one of them finally comes out and says “I want a divorce”, things often change radically. Temporarily, most often, but how many people have you seen suddenly make all-out efforts to patch things up only after somebody finally says the D-word?
You can hear the capital letters in their voices. Before, all that stuff — romantic weekend getaways and the like — were attempts to “get back on track” or “spice things back up” or whatever. As soon as someone says Divorce, though, all those things become capitalized — we’re Saving Our Marriage.
The Wilmot Proviso was like that. Somebody finally said the D word.
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
July 8, 2026
QotD: The Wilmot Proviso
July 7, 2026
Clankers in higher education
On his Substack, David Friedman discusses the impact of AI on university exams:
Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League
…
“Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor … (El Pais)
It was a closed book take-home exam; the problems were designed to test the student’s ability but proved doable by an AI. After Serrano changed the final from take-home to in-person about half the students who had gotten perfect scores on the midterm chose not to take the final.
The existence of AI, like the earlier problem of students buying papers online, reduces the ability of teachers to test their students but does not eliminate it, is inconvenient but not catastrophic. It makes some kinds of testing more difficult but not impossible; Serrano could have asked students whose midterms were suspiciously good to explain some of their answers and failed any obviously unable to do so. That would have been additional work for him and, judging by the article, not a policy Brown would have endorsed. Unwilling or unable to do that that he can base his future grading on work done in-person and adequately monitored.
[…]
It is not immediately obvious what is wrong with using AI on a test. If the purpose of the test is to generate information for potential future employers, why should they want the student tested without a tool that, if they hire him, he will have? A basketball coach does not evaluate potential team members by how well they can play with one hand tied behind their back.
Arguably the skills the employer wants tested are those that an AI cannot replace and it was up to Professor Serrano to find ways of testing for them. His take-home midterm, taken without the assistance of AI, might have provided information for him and his students about how far they had come along a path that would eventually produce skills an AI could not substitute for but not information for a future employer about the skills of the students taking the exam.
The Democratic Socialists of America
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Cynical Publius sounds the warning about the impending takeover of the Democratic party by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA):
Logo of the Democratic Socialists of America
Since 2023, I have kept the same pinned post because I feel that post (the one discussing “my side of history”) is the most important sentiment I have ever posted on this platform.
For the short-term future, however, I am changing that pinned post to this one, because it is of such crucial importance to our nation’s survival.
Here goes.
The Democrat Party is in the process of being taken over by the Democrat Socialists of America (the “DSA”).
The DSA is an explicitly Marxist organization.
Marxism has impoverished more people and genocidally murdered more of humanity than all other ideologies ever to exist in human history combined.
It is a grotesque form of evil that is wholly incompatible with the Constitution of the United States of America.
Marxism in all its forms must be reviled and publicly treated with the same disdain with which intelligent adults view Naziism, pedophilia, serial murderers and cannibalism.
Do not back down. Each and every time you encounter Marxism in any of its forms, please call it out for the evil that it is. It is a rapidly metastasizing cancer that can only be defeated by public awareness.
Thank you.
Tom Knighton reacts to another self-identified Democratic Socialist’s criticisms of America:
… when I see someone like this, I have to think this should be automatically disqualifying for office.
Pennsylvania state and socialist Chris Rabb, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, has joined the growing chorus of Democrats denouncing the founding documents and core institutions in the country on our 250th anniversary. The Democratic socialist is running unopposed for Congress and will almost certainly be a member of Congress after November.
Rabb spoke at an event billed as “America at 250 — Trump Fascism, Historical Erasure, and the Battle Over Truth” at People’s Plaza on Independence Mall in Philadelphia.
He denounced the country as based on “stolen land and stolen labor.” He lashed out at the Declaration of Independence:
Those screeds that were very lofty but were notoriously catering to a performative aspect of collective genius that purposely erased indigenous and black peoples … It created distance from an empire to help very privileged people continue that privilege and ultimately institutionalize that through the U.S. Constitution many years later. But it certainly did not provide independence to indigenous and black peoples. And we cannot talk about anything today without acknowledging that this is a nation born on stolen land & stolen labor.
Actually, I think the Declaration did provide independence to American Indians and black people. It just took way too long to be recognized.
Lincoln cites the concepts of the Declaration in the Gettysburg Address, and there’s little doubt that many of those who worked to end slavery did so because our nation was founded on the principle that all men were created equal.
It should have been a given, granted, and I have no problem with anyone taking issue with the imperfect application of that concept, because that’s legitimate. The thing is, we fought an entire war to end slavery once and for all. As many as 750,000 Americans lost their lives in that war, and it was ultimately worth it to end that particular scourge.
Yet I find it disgusting that while socialists like Rabb will cite that imperfect application of natural rights as an evil, they completely ignore the blood price this country paid to end that scourge.
[…]
How can someone like this want to serve a nation they despise? He’s not really looking to make it better; he’s looking to destroy the nation it is in favor of something it was never meant to be. It’s not about improving it. It’s about overturning it.
I’m still flabbergasted that “Democratic Socialism” is taking hold as strongly as it has, especially considering socialism’s track record in the 20th Century, and while I believe Rabb has the right to say whatever retarded thing he wants, I also believe the voters of this country should see that kind of rhetoric as disqualifying for public office.
Yes, that includes the Democrats.
Unfortunately, they nominated him, and he’s far from the only DSA nutball who has won their primary this election cycle.
Remember, boys and girls: You can vote yourself into socialism, but you’ll have to shoot your way out.
Andrew Sullivan is also concerned with the DSA consuming the rest of the Democratic party:
I’d say the DSA is to the Democrats in the 2020s what the John Birch Society was to the GOP in the 1950s. But the Dems won’t expel or cauterize them, so dozens of DSA candidates are surging to victory this year, from Colorado to New York State, with a big boost from Mayor Mamdani and Hasan Piker.
The DSA backs Hamas terrorism, the Maduro regime in Venezuela, and the Castro tyranny in Cuba. Its new platform — to be voted on next month — supports “scrapping the U.S. Senate, ‘abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state’, defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and ‘replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress’.”
Jon Chait has a good rundown of the the group’s darker undercurrents. Last year, they amended their founding documents to allow members of communist cells to join. The DSA “Red Star Caucus” brags:
We in Red Star are communists who believe that DSA is the most effective place to serve the socialist movement … We call on all communists in the United States to join us in the democratic struggle within DSA … as we continue to improve the democratic structures of DSA, and as communists contest for and win hegemony within the organization, we continue to move toward a revolutionary horizon.
When Donald Trump calls someone a commie, it’s a good rule to ignore him. This time, he’s right. Lenin-fan Darializa Avila Chevalier showed up to a pro-Hamas rally on October 8, as bodies still lay on the ground at a music festival — yes, that’s how deep the Israel-hatred runs. She supports abolishing all prisons, police, and national borders. Her now-deleted Twitter discourse is a 2020 fever dream: “Yes, literally, abolish the border”, “Seize the means of production”, “ALL PIGS EVERYWHERE ARE HARAM”. She also converted to Islam. Check out her answer to the simple question, “What should happen to somebody who has killed somebody else?” It’ll take a while.
Claire Valdez, another primary winner, pledges to abolish ICE and nationalize the airline industry. Melat Kiros, who defeated a staunch progressive in Denver, is more rooted in opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and “genocide” in Gaza. She refused to condemn as antisemitic the fatal firebombing of a solidarity walk for Israeli hostages. It was merely “anti-Zionist.” Israel is increasingly the dominant fixation among the activist left — just ask Scott Wiener.
After this wave of extremism, you might expect some Democratic pushback. And some came: a new group of 13 House Dems signed a “Promise to America”, rejecting socialism. “We disagree with MAGA. We disagree with socialists”, Congressman Tom Suozzi said. “We don’t want this extremism. We want mainstream.” But 13 signatures are not much against a growing and organized machine. And the pressure more broadly is on the critics: “You are creating the antagonistic dynamic that we do not need”, AOC said. “These are two young, talented, intelligent women that got elected against all odds, against millions of dollars. Perhaps there is something we can learn from them.” There is: communism.
QotD: “I was just following orders” — the Nuremberg Defence
JerryRigEverything @ZacksJerryRig
It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
Congress has not declared War.
Pass it on.Hot Take: The “Nuremberg Defense” should be completely legally valid because it was for the entirety of human history until the Nuremberg Trials.
The idea that the average GI Joe has the knowledge and capability to parse the legality of orders in life-and-death situations is one of the best examples of how Liberalism simply does not comport with reality.
Every lawyer knows this to be true, too. Ask any number of attorneys a question on a matter of law and if the question is worth a damn you’ll get as many answers as participants. All good legal questions start with the same answer: “It depends.”
If you can’t even get a team of attorneys to always agree on whether something is legal, with hours to days to weeks of research put into the question, why/how do you expect a normal joe to figure that out?
You don’t. He can’t. You know that.
You just want to inspire doubt, raise mutiny, and have a way to punish people who did things you don’t like on the orders of someone out of your reach.
J.T. Alexander, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-04-06.
July 6, 2026
QotD: Cloud people and dirt people
One example of this is in how the political class understands hierarchy. Every Washington politician and appointee lives in a world where hierarchy is well understood and respected. The appointed class have an array of titles that indicate their position in the hierarchy. Elected officials, of course, have their office and their committee assignments, along with their seniority. This is a world every one of them inherited when they entered politics. It is how it has always been.
In this world, a senator tells his staff to do something and he just assumes they will do it, assuming it can be done. If it cannot be done, then he is going to have them find out why it cannot be done and report back to him. An appointee works the same way within the bureaucracy. They have a staff, usually of appointees, and that staff carries out the orders of the director or secretary. Even though nothing of public good is done in Washington, the petty tasks are carried out with precision.
In this regard, the political class is a petty aristocracy. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, commands absolute loyalty from his staff. Not only does his staff do what they are told, they faithfully keep his secrets. He has been in the Imperial Capital for a quarter century, without a hint of scandal, despite the obvious. Congress operates a private slush fund to settle sexual harassment claims. Over 260 claims have been paid, without a word about the details. That’s loyalty.
Scan the biographies of the political class and the thing you will be hard pressed to find is anything resembling real world experience. Few have ever worked in the dreaded private sector. Those that have, worked in the law or maybe finance. These careers were just alternative paths to the place they wanted to be all along. There are no sons of the soil in Washington.
The Z Man, “Us And Them”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-06.
July 5, 2026
Progressives are only against “some people” getting wealthy
Rob Henderson posted an accurate assessment of how progressives view certain kinds of wealthy people as being undeserving of their fortunes:
Konstantin Kisin explained why this is the case:
This is because the anti-capitalist left is not actually against people being crazy rich. They’re against certain types of people being crazy rich.
Artists and athletes make sense to them because they’ve played music and sports and because their success can be explained by “luck” and “talent”. Messi’s wealth is not offensive to them because they understand Messi is much better at football than they are.
But when it comes to business, the anti-capitalist leftist has no framework for understanding why Jeff Bezos might be super rich since 99% of them have never ever created a product, business or service that was of value to other people. They’ve never taken entrepreneurial risk. They’ve never employed people and felt the burden of responsibility that comes with that. They’ve never pick up a business and given it a play in the way they’ve picked up a ball or a guitar.
They *literally* don’t understand wealth creation. They think there is a fixed amount of money and the only thing a business does is split it unfairly.
It’s why they rage at Elon and other successful business leaders. Because they genuinely don’t understand why they’re wealthy.
Also, and this is just as important, athletes and artists are disproportionately young, attractive, “diverse”, left wing etc. Business leaders are “evil” middle aged white men whose success offends the average anti-capitalist leftist because they don’t understand a) what it is they do and b) that Elon Musk has the same talent advantage on them as Messi does, it’s just harder to measure.
July 4, 2026
In the “early Victorian period … drinking whisky was the modern-day equivalent of licking hallucinogenic toads”
Scotland was terra incognita to the English for far longer than one might think, even though the two kingdoms shared a monarch as early as 1603. On his Substack, Ed West shows how modern day Scotland has long since emerged from the mysterious shadows of the past:
“Scotch whiskies” by Chris huh is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
.
In his highly entertaining history of alcohol and the British, Empire of Booze, Henry Jeffreys observed how one effect of the Napoleonic Wars was to make Scotland a popular destination for English holiday makers. What with the continent being isolated and everything, there weren’t many more exotic places for the richer, more adventurous traveller to visit.
The country was until then largely unknown to many people south of the border, something also true of its trademark drink. “Highland and lowland whisky in the early 19th century would have been a mystery to the majority of Englishmen”, Jeffreys writes: “In the literature of the Georgian and early Victorian period it’s apparent that drinking whisky while in Scotland was the modern-day equivalent of licking hallucinogenic toads while in the Amazon or eating rancid whale in Iceland”.
The conflict with revolutionary France proved to be a great boost to Brand Scotland, and not just because of the limits it placed on rival destinations, but also for the dash that the Scots cut on the field. This culminated with a momentous scene in which “the Highland regiments dazzled the French when the Allied armies marched into Paris”.
Here they wowed both friends and enemies alike, and Sergeant Thomas Campbell of the Grenadier Company recalled how the Tsar even personally “examined my hose, gaiters, legs, and pinched my skin, thinking I wore something under my kilt, and had the curiosity to lift my kilt up to my navel, so that he might not be deceived”. Thanks to the likes of the Black Watch and Gordon Highlanders, the Scots had arrived on the global stage, and no one would ever forget Die Damen aus der Hölle (Ladies from Hell) as German troops would later call Highlanders.
This period of upheaval and war – the birth pangs of true modernity — was marked by a growing craze for Highlandism, “a peculiar phenomenon where lowland Scotland, a predominantly settled mercantile society, took on the trappings of the Highlander as a way of differentiating themselves from Englishmen who they were now yoked to in the Union”.
Previously viewed as menacing, the Highlanders had been tamed by the defeat of the Jacobites and the Clearances that followed, making this once-feared Gaelic culture now safe for English speakers to adopt as their own. Much of this was driven by the romantic imagination of Edinburgh’s Walter Scott, who helped shape both Scottish national identity and the 19th century resurgence of medievalism. Perhaps more than literature, however, Highlandism was boosted by the region’s most famous export — whisky. As Jeffreys writes: “The growth of Scotch coincided with the birth of Highlandism”.
The development of Brand Scotland was also helped by a man widely regarded as Britain’s greatest buffoon and waste of space, the former Prince Regent. Historian John Plumb described a hugely influential visit by the now George IV in 1822, where: “He paraded Edinburgh in the kilt, resplendent in the Royal Stuart tartan and flesh-coloured tights, and yet managed to keep his dignity. The Scots loved it! Quaintly enough, George IV had struck the future note of the monarchy … Be kilted! Be sporans! Be tartans! Riding up Princess Street … To the roaring cheers of loyal Scots, he was showing the way that the monarchy would have to go if it were to survive an industrial and democratic society.”
It was the start of a beautifully symbiotic relationship, with the Royal Family immersing themselves in Highlandism ever since, spending much of their summer holidays there and helping to project an ideal of a region famed for its dramatic countryside, castles, distilleries and golf courses. They’re not alone: Donald Trump, whose mother hailed from the Isle of Lewis, has a noted fondness for the old country, even if this is not always reciprocated, and no doubt many more of his compatriots will be making the pilgrimage in the coming year thanks to the country’s newest brand ambassadors. These are, of course, another occupying force of Scots, the fans of the national football team who followed their country’s brief recent appearance at World Cup.
The Scots in Boston marched as proudly as their ancestors. Their bagpipers serenaded the opposition. Some even turned up at a wedding. They came to watch the Boston Red Sox, which one local described as “the best thing that’s happened in years”. They attracted many neutrals, including a duck. Folk songs were written about them. Everyone loved them, even if some struggled to understand them.
The Boston Globe published a full-page letter thanking them. One local reported how Scotland fans leaving Boston was “almost like a day of mourning for the Americans“. After they left, Massachusetts State Senator Paul Feeney made an emotional farewell, thanking them for visiting children’s hospitals and donating money to local charities: “You’ve been great, courteous guests, you’ve been polite and you’ve been fun and I don’t want that to end”. He invited them to return next year, by which time Glasgow will be twinned with Boston. Indeed, Scottish fans so impressed the Bostonians that the city changed its zoning laws, not an easy task in America. They may even have solved the fertility crisis. Indeed, the Tartan Army charm offensive in Boston has been so overwhelming that I half suspect it’s some sort of devious RICU operation.
The Dark Truth Behind America’s National Anthem
The Rest Is History
Published 8 Jun 2026How did the War of 1812 result in America’s national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner? Who came up with it? And, why does this origin story make the anthem so controversial?
Join Dominic and Tom as they launch into the first episode of their Football World Cup special, with the story behind America’s national anthem, and its secret story.
0:00 – Lloyd’s
01:21 – The Star-Spangled Banner
02:43 – A World Cup Series on National Anthems
04:08 – America’s Most Controversial Anthem
05:00 – The Forgotten War of 1812
09:10 – Britain Strikes Back
11:39 – Francis Scott Key Boards the British Fleet
15:27 – The Bombardment of Fort McHenry
18:14 – The Giant Flag That Inspired the Anthem
20:41 – Francis Scott Key Writes the Poem
23:28 – Why the Anthem Used an Old English Tune
26:13 – The Anacreontic Song
29:07 – How the Song Became a Hit
30:37 – The Times
31:48 – Is The Star-Spangled Banner About Slavery?
36:08 – Escaped Slaves and the British Army
40:55 – The People Who Found Freedom Under the Union Jack
42:29 – Francis Scott Key’s Complicated Legacy
47:06 – The Song Spreads Across America
51:39 – Why America Took So Long to Get a National Anthem
56:42 – How It Finally Became the Anthem
57:06 – Controversial Performances
1:00:17 – Colin Kaepernick and Taking the Knee
1:02:39 – Can You Separate the Anthem from the Author?
1:03:03 – The Abolitionist Version of the Anthem
1:04:13 – Coming Next: God Save the King
1:06:33 – The Rest Is History ClubVideo Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton
Social Producer: Harry Balden
Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude
Senior Producer: Callum Hill
Executive Producer: Dom Johnson
Chief Digital Officer: Sam Oakley
Flag image candy for the 4th of July
Lofty Pursuits
Published 13 Jun 2018At Lofty Pursuits we make hard candy using techniques and equipment from the 1800’s. Here we are making Blue Berry and Strawberry shortcake candy in a pattern inspired by the American flag for flag day and the 4th of July. This is one of our most complex designs as it does not have an outer wrap. The video covers some fun bits about the history of the American Flag.
Get our candy here: http://www.pd.net
QotD: “Yankee Doodle”
[…]
Which is how we ended up with a patriotic standard that is also a death threat, a sodomy joke, a farm boy’s account of watching grown men handle their enormous guns with mounting enthusiasm, and the song we teach five year olds at Fourth of July parades. All of this has been inside the song the whole time. I want to walk through what is actually in there, because once you can see it you cannot stop seeing it, and I think we owe the song more than we have been giving it.
Start with the title, because the title is already doing two things at once. “Yankee” is almost certainly from the Dutch Janke, a diminutive Dutch settlers in New York used to mock their English neighbors. The British army picked it up as convenient shorthand for a provincial American. A rube. A man of no consequence. “Doodle” meant fool, from the German dudel, and this is the part that makes it into the elementary school music program. The part that does not is that “doodle” was also eighteenth-century British slang for a penis. Both meanings were in active circulation. Neither was obscure. When the British handed this song to their regulars as a marching tune intended to demoralize the enemy, they were calling the colonists provincial idiots and, on a second pass, Yankee dicks. The American troops heard the title and, in the great tradition of men who have already stopped caring what anyone thinks of them, said yes, that one, put it on the flag.
The first thing the song was is a threat.
Yankee Doodle’s come to town / For to buy a firelock / We will tar and feather him / And so will we John Hancock.
British soldiers were singing verses like this one in the run-up to Lexington. Tar and feathering was not a prank. It was a ritual. Men were stripped, had boiling pine tar poured directly onto bare skin, rolled in feathers while the tar was still cooling, and paraded through town as public spectacle. The skin came off with the tar. Some victims died in the days that followed from shock and from infections in the raw flesh. The British soldiers are singing about doing this to a specifically named man. John Hancock. The wealthiest man in Boston, already on London’s list for arrest. “So will we John Hancock” uses his name as a verb. We will do this to him. We will use his body to make a point.
The soldiers singing this were on their way to arrest him. They missed. Hancock got through Lexington, made it to Philadelphia, and in the summer of the following year signed the Declaration of Independence in letters so large that his name became, in English, the common noun for a signature. The verb became the noun. We will destroy you publicly became I was here, I did this, come and get me. The song that had been a mob-violence threat against a living dissident was now, a year later, being sung by the men who had saved him as they mustered for the same war. The target of the verse became the architect of the country that kept the verse. This is the first transformation the song undergoes and it is not subtle. It is also not the last.
The second thing the song is is a sodomy panic. He stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni. Every American schoolchild has been told this means the colonist was too stupid to know what fashion was. That is the sanitized reading. The full reading requires understanding what the Macaroni Club was. Young English aristocrats came back from the Grand Tour in Italy wearing wigs so tall they required structural adjustment to pass under a doorframe, corseted coats, embroidered slippers, and Continental affectations so pronounced the London press began printing caricatures of them within the year. “Macaroni” meant dandy, in the same dictionary-accurate way “doodle” meant fool. Technically correct. Missing the entire point.
The point is that the Macaroni Club had become, by the 1770s, a convenient public container for British anxieties about male effeminacy, foreign moral contamination, and sodomy. The caricatures drew them in pinched silhouettes and muffs, in poses the London audience was supposed to read as unmistakably queer. The courts were not caricaturing. They were prosecuting. Men were pilloried. Others were executed. The word “macaroni” was carrying the weight of active criminal cases at the exact moment “Yankee Doodle” was being composed. A British army surgeon named Richard Shuckburgh is the likely author of the most famous macaroni verse, and what he wrote was a joke with a second floor. On the ground floor: the colonial rube does not know what high fashion is and mistakes a single feather for an entire wardrobe. On the second floor: the colonial rube has just put on the signifier of a group of men the British state is currently prosecuting for sodomy, and he does not realize what he has announced himself as. He is a joke to the troops singing the song, and the joke is that he is queer and does not know it.
The colonists heard all of this and kept the song anyway. The British were banking on a shame that had already dissolved. You cannot humiliate a people that has stopped needing your approval. The song arrived as an instrument of British contempt, and the colonists adopted it anyway, and from that moment on it stopped being a British song and started being something else. A vessel. Whatever the singer needed it to carry, the song carried. That is the reclamation, and it is also the engine of everything that happens to the song from here.
Emma, “Yankee Doodle, Undressed”, Past Life, Present Cleavage, 2026-04-22.
July 3, 2026
The latest trend in tourism: “grocery tourism”
At The Freeman, Nicole James discusses being so far ahead of a trend that it’s only just catching up with her now:
“Piggly Wiggly” by afiler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Grocery tourism is the hot trend of 2026 according to Condé Nast Traveler. This is all well and good, but also a bit late to the trolley because I have been practicing this trend since my twenties, although without the benefit of a name or a hashtag.
My two worlds met in the supermarket aisle. Before I was a travel writer and sent to places with hotel beds that appeared to have been prepared for minor royalty or a very clean corpse, I was a checkout chick at supermarket chain Coles. This was when prices were typed in by hand, making me feel like I was conducting a low-level NASA launch procedure.
A tin of pineapple rings would trundle towards me, and I would punch in its code. Behind it would come shampoo, fish fingers, instant pudding, 24 cans of Diet Coke, and a packet of aspirin. From these items, I could deduce entire family systems. Marriage trouble. School excursions. Flu. A birthday party. A woman about to murder everyone in her house unless she got a Mint Slice into herself immediately.
I loved the products. Not necessarily the customers who could turn feral over a five-cent discrepancy in canned tomatoes. The conveyor belt was a pageant of human need. It was anthropology in a polyester apron.
When people now declare that they have discovered grocery store tourism, I feel like saying, “We know. We’ve had those for years.”
My first trip to America should have been my grand supermarket awakening. I was a PR manager for Malaysia Airlines in the late ’90s, and we were launching a very long flight to New York from Sydney via KL and Dubai. I arrived bristling with ambition. I wanted to see the cereal aisle. Long had we heard rumors of American supermarkets. They were great glittering cathedrals of corn syrup with aisles devoted just to cereal and marshmallows in the shapes of everything from the moon and stars to presidents. I wanted to stand before them all in awe, like Moses, if Moses had come down from the mountain carrying Pop-Tarts.
[…]
I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.
Every country gives itself away eventually. This is usually somewhere between the biscuits and the cleaning products. Finland offers Moomins in places no Australian supermarket would dare put a cartoon hippo. Singapore understands the spiritual importance of salted fish skin. Sweden puts things in tubes that should never be in tubes and then offers fermented herring.
And then the Netherlands has licorice. The Dutch have built an entire moral philosophy out of licorice. Sweet, salty, double-salty, hard, soft, shaped like coins, cars, and warnings from your dentist. I’ve always admired the Dutch, but this commitment to black chewy punishment is heroic. Sweden is not to be outdone and has thus flirted with licorice-flavored chips.
Then there are the products that cause the traveler to stop dead and reconsider the whole Enlightenment. In Vietnam, I couldn’t walk past snake wine without dancing an involuntary flamenco of horror. There was a snake in a bottle suspended in alcohol. Sometimes there were scorpions.
South Korea has canned silkworm pupae. Peru has coca tea. Colombia has arequipe. America has cheese in a spray can, which I respect as both a product and a cry for help.
And now, social media has turned all of this into content. Travelers narrate the experience into their phones. A German soccer fan can wander into an American Waffle House at one in the morning and emerge as a folk hero. Erewhon in Los Angeles has become a celebrity shrine where a smoothie can cost more than a small household appliance and one strawberry comes packaged like an engagement ring and with a similar price.
Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince.
QotD: Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons
During the 1920s, after graduation, Josephson became a journalist, an expatriate to France, and, after his return, a part of New York’s literary elite. He and Beard reconnected in 1930, and the mentor urged his student to write a book denouncing the men who had launched America’s industrial power. “Oh! those respectable ones”, Beard said of America’s capitalists, “oh! their temples of respectability — how I detest them, how I would love to pull them all down!” Happily for Beard, Josephson was handy to do the job for him. Josephson dedicated The Robber Barons to Beard, the historian most responsible for the book’s contents.
Josephson began research for his book in 1932, the nadir of the Great Depression. Businessmen were a handy scapegoat for that crisis, and Josephson embraced a Marxist view that the Great Depression was perhaps the last phase in the fall of capitalism and the triumph of communism. In a written interview for Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, Josephson said he enjoyed watching “the breakdown of our cult of business success and optimism”. He added, “The freedom of the U.S.S.R. from our cycles of insanity is the strongest argument in the world for the reconstruction of our society in a new form that is as highly centralized as Russia’s …”
Though not a member of the Communist Party, Josephson co-authored an open letter of support for the Communist Party candidates for President of the United States in 1932. “We believe”, the letter said, “that the only effective way to protest against the chaos, the appalling wastefulness, and the indescribable misery inherent in the present economic system is to vote for the Communist candidates”.
Josephson traced the troubled capitalist system of the 1930s back to the entrepreneurs of the late 1800s. Thus, by explaining what he thought was the wasteful, greedy, and corrupt development of steel, oil, and other industries under capitalism, Josephson was explaining to readers why the Great Depression was occurring. “I am not a complete Marxist”, Josephson insisted, “But what I took to heart for my own project was his theory of the process of industrial concentration, in Vol. 1 of [Marx’s] Capital, which underlay my book”.
Josephson never intended to write an objective view of American economic life in the Gilded Age. He did little research and mainly used secondary sources that supported his Marxist viewpoint. As he had written in the New Republic, “Far from shunning propaganda, we must use it more nobly, more skillfully than our predecessors, and speak through it in the local language and slogans.” Thus he wrote The Robber Barons with dramatic stories, anecdotes, and innuendos that demeaned corporate America and made the case for massive government intervention.
Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.
July 2, 2026
Reining in the administrative state – Humphrey’s Executor overruled by the Supreme Court
One of the two US Supreme Court rulings this week that sparked controversy was the court’s decision to overrule a 1935 precedent that enabled the growth of the administrative state:
Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.
The Supreme Court this week restored an old-fashioned constitutional idea: if a principal federal officer exercises executive power, the president must be able to remove him. The justices’ 6–3 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which struck down a law prohibiting the president from firing members of the FTC except for cause, is the logical endpoint of a 15-year series of cases that have steadily chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 decision that blessed for-cause removal protections for the heads of so-called independent agencies.
The Court didn’t mince words. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “Humphrey‘s framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time”. Then came the sentence that will launch a thousand administrative-law articles: “If anything more is left of Humphrey‘s, we overrule it”. The New Deal compromise that invented quasi-legislative agencies has finally met Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
That’s good, because the Federal Trade Commission isn’t a debating society. It, along with its alphabet-agency brethren, writes rules with the force of law, investigates private parties, adjudicates violations, and sues in federal court on behalf of the United States. Whatever labels Congress attached to that body in the Progressive Era, the FTC — like the FCC, SEC, NLRB, and so on — today exercises executive power. And the Constitution vests “the executive power” in one president, not in commissioners serving staggered terms, answerable to no one whom voters can fire.
This ruling isn’t a gift to Donald Trump or his successors. It’s a restoration of constitutional accountability. Congress can create executive-branch agencies and specify what they may do, but it cannot create a fourth branch of government and then pretend its officers are independent of the only person the Constitution makes responsible for executing federal law.
Roberts put the point crisply at the end of Slaughter: “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him”. That’s a unitary, not an imperial, presidency, and it’s a hallmark of republican government. The president remains constrained by statutes, appropriations, courts, Congress, elections, and the Constitution itself. If the people dislike how the FTC enforces the law, they should be able to blame — and replace — the president, not chase a goulash of insulated mandarins.
Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence adds the important next step. Killing Humphrey’s Executor doesn’t cure every constitutional disease in the administrative state. It simply reallocates the power Congress poured into independent agencies. As Gorsuch warned, “the fourth branch’s powers still exist; they have just been reassigned to the President”. If agencies possess vast legislative and judicial authority, the answer isn’t to hide those powers from presidential control, but to restore legislative powers to Congress. Make Congress great again!
Canada has to stop defining itself as merely “Not-America”
Devon Eriksen responds to a cringey video that claims to explain Canada Day to Americans. The thumbnail image includes some of the usual suspects for this kind of embarrassing nonsense — “free healthcare!” … “poutine!”.
Once again, we see that Canada defines itself as Not-America.
So much so that in the very video where they try to explain their national identity, they require Straw-America as a prop.
But, having embraced multiculturalism and ethnic erasure of White people, they have painted themselves into a corner. Any positive Canadian identity, which identified Canada as what it is, rather than what it is not, would by definition distinguish it from other countries in the world, rather than just America. And this would exclude people of and from those cultures from being Canadian.
Which would be racist, or something.
So what this ends up meaning is that you may talk about what distinguishes Canada from America, and why Canadians are not American and Americans are not Canadian.
But you may NOT talk about what distinguishes Canada from India, and why Canadians are not Indian and Indians are not Canadian.
Or they’ll throw you in jail.
No culture, group, or organization can survive indefinitely by defining itself with a negative, which is why, for example, there are no atheist churches.
Canadians, accordingly, now share no common values, no common ethos, telos, or even logos, have nothing they can agree on, and nothing that binds them together other than physical geolocation and legal jurisdiction.
This is not patriotism, and patriotism, while it is regarded by liberals as a sort of embarrassing social disease, is actually required to get humans to act in concert for mutual good.
Canadians need something to celebrate on Canada Day other than their fear and resentment of Americans who barely think about them at all in any given month.
I honestly don’t know what the average Canadian would say, if he was asked to define a Canadian without referencing America. If he was asked to define a Canadian in a way that didn’t include Brits or Australians. If he was asked to define a Canadian in a way that didn’t include government programs and minor food idiosyncrasies.
You can’t just be the nation of gravy and cheese curds on fries.
You have to stand for something.
YourSmartAsianFriend also responds to the video:
Now from a real Canadian:
You better have a snack with you because wait times in Emergency often exceed 10 hours.
Most of us don’t eat poutine — or do so on rare occasion — but eating probably the most unhealthy dish ever conceived not something to boast about.
The entire system is fine but again, bragging about a your measurement standard is absurd, and moreover if you ask most Canadians what their height is, they’ll respond: 5’6, 6’2, etc. … if you say … he was 184 cm … you’ll get mostly blank looks.
Our plastic bag milk is wholly subsidized and controlled by our government dairy cartel — insuring higher prices for all.
What we also have is: emergencies act unlawfully used to crackdown on citizens including seizing their bank accounts, media funded by the government and thus beholden to them. New censorship laws on the way resulting in even more tech companies saying they’ll leave Canada. The highest cellphone rates because again we have regulated our own phone company cartel. We have severe housing shortages (while importing millions of undocumented and temporary visa foreigners) driving housing prices to astronomical levels. We have indigenous peoples now making legally endorsed claims to developed land calling into question much of Canada’s development — the same indigenous groups who have been funded with huge sums and have carved out their own independent country within Canada with the threat of going even farther.
There are many more issues, however, fear not — we have utterly vapid Liberal memes to distract us!
Full disclosure: on Tuesday I actually did order and eat a plate of poutine in a restaurant. In my defence, it was the first poutine I’d eaten in several months … while I enjoy the dish that has been described as “the culinary equivalent of having unprotected sex with a stripper in the parking lot of a truck stop in eastern Quebec”, it’s a very occasional item in my diet.
QotD: The US federal election of 1848 and the resulting inevitability of the US Civil War
The Democrats’ candidate, Lewis Cass, pushed the idea of “popular sovereignty” in the territories. It wasn’t a bad move — since California was the only soon-to-be-state up for grabs, and since some parts of California are above the Missouri Compromise line, let them decide the terms on which they want to enter the Union. The problem with that, obviously, is that the Senate could become radically unbalanced very quickly, depending on how fast the rapidly-expanding population of the territories got their act together. Iowa and Wisconsin had just entered the Union (1846 and 1848, respectively), as free states under the Compromise. They were counterbalanced by Florida and Texas (both 1845), but obviously the balance was very delicate.
Cass was of course defeated (by Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor), so wrangling over California continued. Taylor wasn’t the greatest leader anyway, and when he died in office he was replaced by everyone’s favorite placeholder, Millard Fillmore. Fillmore gets an undeserved rep for incompetence; in reality, he was exactly the kind of president the Second Party System was designed to produce, even though he was never elected to the office. Most real political power before the Civil War was at the state level, so the President was supposed to be the steward and figurehead of his Party, not a strong national leader. (You can still see echoes of this as late as the early 20th century — William Howard Taft supposedly said “I forgot I ever was President;” he was much more concerned with his reputation as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court).
But slavery was a federal issue, indeed THE federal issue. In the absence of strong leadership at the top — and again, in all fairness to Fillmore and the rest, the system was designed to prevent strong Presidential leadership — it fell to Congress. Which a) is where it should’ve been, under the federal system the Founders designed; but b) meant that it was guaranteed to be a cock-up, because like all debating societies Congress was dominated by Very Clever Boys.
Worse, the immediate antebellum Congresses were dominated by the Very Cleverest Boy of them all, Stephen Douglas. I don’t think there has ever been a Cleverer Boy in American politics than Stephen Douglas, which is really saying something. (A case could be made for Lyndon Johnson, I suppose, and look how that turned out). Douglas’s signature “legislation” was the Compromise of 1850, which did a lot of things, including bringing California into the Union as a free state. It’s easy to get lost in the historical weeds here, so I’m keeping this deliberately superficial. Here are the highlights:
First, it’s important to note that nobody except Stephen Douglas knew they were voting on “the Compromise of 1850”. You have to hand it to the bastard, it’s a really slick piece of politics. He put together a whole bunch of bills, horse-trading parts of each of them among the competing factions to cobble an overarching program together. Nobody would’ve voted on an omnibus bill called “The Compromise of 1850”, but when the dust settled and all the votes were tallied on a bunch of separate measures, that’s what emerged.
Second: Douglas swiped Lewis Cass’s idea of “popular sovereignty” for the new territories (New Mexico and Utah) carved out of the Mexican Cession. At the time, this looked like a band-aid, a procedural quick-fix — those territories wouldn’t be coming into the Union as states anytime soon, and since cotton doesn’t grow so well in the desert it didn’t matter that much anyway. “Popular sovereignty” was just a way to kick the can down the road. Please note, however, that now the precedent was set: The Missouri Compromise is now officially a dead letter, though nobody will come right out and say it.
Third: The Fugitive Slave Act essentially federalized slave-catching. The details aren’t important; the principle is. The US government is now officially the enforcement arm of what many folks were openly calling “the Slave Power Conspiracy”.
Fourth: What looked like a purely symbolic measure, outlawing the slave trade in Washington DC. Here again, we misunderestimate the power of symbols at our peril. The practical effect of this was nil, since DC is tiny and if you wanted to buy slaves, the big markets literally right across the road in Maryland and Virginia would be happy to sell you some. But look at the glaring contradiction — Federal marshals can (and will, and did) dragoon local law enforcement into catching runaway slaves on the planters’ behalf, but the slave trade itself is outlawed in the Capitol’s sacred precincts, because freedom.
The term “fake and gay” hadn’t been invented yet, but since the Compromise of 1850 was the product of the Very Cleverest Boy of all, it was by definition fake and gay, and you can see it clearly with the DC slave trade ban.
So Very Clever was he, that he torpedoed his own signature achievement just four short years later in order to make a buck. Some Chicago railroad boys had him on the payroll, and while the details of the Kansas-Nebraska Act don’t matter, the principle very much does. Remember “popular sovereignty?” It didn’t matter in Utah or New Mexico; it mattered very much in Kansas, where fanatics from both sides flooded into the territory in order to vote.
Think about what kind of guy would uproot his entire life to move across state lines just to vote on shit, and Bleeding Kansas suddenly makes sense.
Here again, one is tempted to blame the President for not showing leadership, and Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan have well-deserved reps as do-nothings … except again, “doing nothing” was pretty much the President’s job description back then. That’s not to let them entirely off the hook — James Buchanan was very much a Current Year Democrat, in that even though he wouldn’t actually take any action he couldn’t stop shooting his mouth off; you have to get well into the 20th century to find a major political figure who stepped on his own dick as hard and as often as James Buchanan.
Finally, the coup de grace, the Dred Scott decision. I’m going to stop with this one, because even though things like John Brown’s Raid and the Caning of Sumner are important, they follow, as it were, from the logic laid down by Dred Scott. Some kind of Really Bad Shit was inevitable after that ruling; the precise form of the Really Bad Shit was incidental (n.b. the Caning of Sumner preceded Dred Scott (May 1856 vs. March 1857), but they were very much of a piece).
Here again, it’s easy to get lost in the details, so here are the two big takeaways:
First, Dred Scott was decided correctly as a purely legal matter. The issues surrounding the case were as broad as possible, but the narrow issue at law was this: In granting Dred Scott standing to sue in a federal court, the State of Missouri had implicitly granted him United States citizenship, which is the sole prerogative of Congress. It’s in the Constitution and everything, and back then the guys on the Supreme Court actually bothered to read the fucking thing, so they ruled against Scott on those very narrow grounds (from which all else flowed, legally).
But that’s the second big takeaway: Chief Justice Roger Taney didn’t stop there. If you only got Dred Scott in school, you got the stuff Wiki spends most of its time on — the whole bit about Taney ruling that blacks aren’t, and never can be, citizens of the United States. But the truly important part is this:
Now, … the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. … Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the [36°N 36′ latitude] line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void.
In other words, not just the Missouri Compromise, but the Compromise of 1850, and indeed the very possibility of compromise over slavery, is now officially unconstitutional. Slavery is now de facto legal everywhere in the United States, because any law prohibiting it runs afoul of the 5th Amendment as interpreted by Dred Scott.
What other outcome could there be at that point? Flip the script in 1860 — let the Democrats have their shit together, and the Republicans split three ways. Stephen Douglas is now President, and while that’s a truly horrifying prospect (never, ever let a Very Clever Boy occupy the big chair), the outcome would’ve been the same, or near enough — it’d be the Yankee fanatics in the North seceding, not the Slave Power Conspiracy in the South, but somebody was calling it quits.
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
