World War Two
Published 3 Apr 2025Today Astrid and Anna explore the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a top-secret WWII guide that taught ordinary people how to disrupt the Nazi war machine. From factory slowdowns to derailed trains, they show how small acts of sabotage targeted Hitler’s regime, and how resistance often came from unexpected places.
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April 4, 2025
Wine, Urine, Paperclips: America’s Secret Weapons of WWII
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April 3, 2025
QotD: When the History Department at Flyover State committed slow motion suicide
It started when they hired a radical feminist lesbian. Radical by ivory tower standards, I mean, which as you can imagine is a bar so high, Mt. Everest could limbo under it without breaking a sweat. This was the kind of “scholar” whose work was like that dude we mentioned a while back, who claimed that the US Civil War was really about “gay rights” — something that’s not merely wrong, but impossible, as the mid-19th century lacked the conceptual vocabulary to even suggest such a thing. In other words, they hired this persyn to be professionally obnoxious, and xzhey were happy to oblige.
Now, you have to understand something about the academy at this point: Though these people are profoundly ideologically enstupidated, they’re still pretty cunning where their wallets are concerned. Indeed, that’s the whole reason they allow “scholarship” on left-handed LatinX truck drivers in the Ming Dynasty or whatever that persyn’s book was, to pull that kind of stunt — only “original” “research” gets published, and since all the true facts have been ascertained long ago, you have to make shit up if you want tenure. Publish or perish, baby!
A clever plan, but with one teensy tiny flaw: “Tenure” requires a university, and universities require students, which means that, while pretty much all professors hate teaching, they have to do it … and not only that, they have to actually appeal to those icky little deplorables, the students, in sufficient numbers to keep the faculty employed. If, back in your own college days, you wondered if maybe the only reason Western Civ I or whatever was required was that it gave Professor Jones something to do, congrats, you were right. But you can’t require History majors, and there’s only enough Western Civ to go around, which means you have to have 200- through 400-level classes that students actually want to take …
You can see where this is going, and to their credit, some of the faculty at Flyover State saw it, too. At the time, there were still enough upperclassman History majors (and grad students) that the class on LatinX truck drivers in the Ming Dynasty would fill … barely … but that situation obviously would not continue. Nor could you simply stick the new hire in Western Civ classes, because in addition to the other obvious problems, of course xzhey would immediately turn “Western Civ I” into “LatinX truck drivers in the Ming Dynasty … and maybe, if there’s time, the Roman Empire or some shit.”
You know what the Department ended up doing (hint: nothing), and so the first semester after the new hire went exactly like you knew it would. And so did the next, and the next, because as we all know, chicks of both sexes and however-many-we’re-up-to-now genders are herd animals. Hiring the radical lesbian gave all the slightly-less-radical lesbians, again of both sexes and however-many genders, permission to let their freak flag fly. Which, of course, they did. Pretty soon you couldn’t find a History class that wasn’t some bizarre, micro-specialized SJW mad lib. Sure, they’d still call it “The US in the Civil War Era” or “Modern Germany” or whatever, but the course description made it perfectly clear that the class was really about transsexual cabaret acts on the New York Bowery … and maybe, if there’s time, secession or some shit.
And soon enough there were no more History majors, and thus no more History Department. At one of the small schools that collectively make up “Flyover State”, the former History, Psychology, and Classics departments have been folded into something called the “Humanities Department” … to which, last I heard, the former English Department will soon be added.
Severian, “The Dunbar Problem”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-06.
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April 2, 2025
The Korea War Week 41 – One Order Away from WWIII – April 1, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 1 Apr 2025The UN forces have again crossed the 38th Parallel in many places, but High Command is worried about Soviet intervention, which could ultimately force them to withdraw from Korea entirely. However, plans are still set for Operation Rugged to soon go into action — aiming into the Iron Triangle.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:58 Recap
01:46 Soviet Intervention?
04:22 Operation Rugged
07:01 Task Force 77
09:36 South Korean Porters
11:02 MacArthur and McClellan
13:55 Summary
14:13 Conclusion
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March 31, 2025
Remaking Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but without the mocking satirical mis-interpretation
Heinlein is still my favourite science fiction author, and Starship Troopers was one of the first of his books that I read when I was in Grade 5. I still love the book and re-read it every few years … unlike a lot of authors’ works, Heinlein’s writing holds up well decades after being published. John Carter is also a fan of Starship Troopers, but not the movie adaptation (which I managed to avoid seeing). He starts out this post with an updated treatment of the opening scenes of the book for an honest screenplay, which I think would work very well:
And that is how the cinematic adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal military-SF masterpiece Starship Troopers should have started: with all of the pathos, action, and emotional intensity of the novel’s famous first chapter. I’ve taken extensive liberties with the source material, but in my head, this is what the first ten minutes or so of the movie would look like. If it had been a good movie.
But it was not.
Instead, director Paul Verhoeven served up Saved By the Bugs, a cheesy 90’s high-school drama cum college movie which felt more like Beverly Hills 90210 than Full Metal Jacket, liberally slathered with unnecessary sexual drama and drenched in hamfisted satire of the source material, with all of the coolest elements – the powered armour, the orbital drops, the backpack nukes – conspicuously stripped out.
I’ve read that Verhoeven claimed the powered armour was left out for budgetary reasons, but this has always struck me as a weak excuse. The budget had enough for CGI bugs and CGI spaceships, so CGI powered armour wouldn’t have stretched the budget at all. That’s like Blizzard saying that after they animated the Zerg, they didn’t have enough left over for the Terrans. Utterly absurd.
That’s to say nothing of the gaudy high-tech training facility the film set the boot camp scenes in, which was an utterly superfluous waste of money. In the novel, the boot camp was deliberately low-tech: some tents out in the middle of a grassy field a hundred miles from nowhere. The recruits didn’t learn how to use high-tech weapons until they’d learned to make their entire body, their entire being, into weapons; that’s the origin of the famous scene in the movie in which Sergeant Zim chucks a knife through Ace’s hand (in the book, Zim merely describes the possibility of doing this as an example of how a warrior armed with a low-tech weapon can disable someone with a high-tech weapon: can’t use the high-tech weapon if you can’t use your hand. Zim doesn’t actually stab one of his own troops). Graduation includes a fun exercise where they’re dropped naked and alone in the middle of the Rockies, with the objective of making it back to civilization alive; recruits were expected to hunt their own food and make their own shelter, using whatever tools they could improvise from the natural environment. They were expected to be just as dangerous as cavemen as they were wearing powered armour. That’s one of the many scenes from the novel which is sadly missing from Verhoeven’s movie.
You may be getting the idea that I am not a big fan of Verhoeven’s execrable adaptation, and you would be correct. Some of you may be surprised by this. I expect many readers have only seen the movie, and of those who have read the book, the younger readers probably saw the movie first, and have a nostalgic attachment to it.
Look, you might say this is personal for me.
I was ecstatic when I found out Starship Troopers was being brought to the silver screen. This was, by far, my favourite science-fiction novel of all time. Not only was it the pioneering archetype for the military science-fiction subgenre, but it introduced at least three novel concepts that have since become tropes: powered armour, which went on to inspire half of Japanese anime, along with Ironman, the Adeptus Astartes of Warhammer 40K, the Terran faction in Starcraft, Halo‘s Spartans, the Battletech games, and by now makes an appearance in practically every science-fiction universe you can name; the orbital drop, in which armoured space marines are fired down to the surface in drop capsules like living bullets, which also appears in 40K and Halo, and plays a prominent role in Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series by way of the planet-breaking Iron Rain tactic; and the insectoid alien hive mind, seen also in 40K‘s Tyrannids, Starcraft‘s Zerg, and numerous lesser-known works. As if this creative efflorescence was not enough, Heinlein’s novel grappled with the weighty issue of the moral philosophy of organized violence and its relationship to human politics in a deeply serious way, using the coming-of-age story of a young man turned soldier during an existential war for the survival of the human species as the dramatic frame for the philosophical exposition. Heinlein did all of this in just over 80,000 words – a short, fun read accessible to a bright ten-year-old.
The travesty that confronted me therefore filled me with a hot rage.
The reason Verhoeven left out the powered armour is quite simple: it was too cool, and his intention was not to make the Mobile Infantry look cool. His intention was to ridicule the philosophical position that Heinlein put forward in the book: that violence is at the heart of the political, and cultures – or species – who forget this, get rolled by the ones who don’t.
Liberals have been appalled by Starship Troopers since it was published, considering it a work of warmongering crypto-fascist apologetics, with very light emphasis on the “crypto”. They’ve been somewhat baffled by it, as well: how could the man who wrote the hippie free love bible Stranger in a Strange Land, or the libertarian anti-state manifesto The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, argue so compellingly for a society in which “service guarantees citizenship”, thereby ensuring that political power forever remains firmly in the hands of the military (or, rather, veterans of the military)? What sort of right-wing maniac gleefully smashes the beloved idol of “violence never solves anything” to replace it with the dictum that nothing in history has solved so many issues so decisively as violence; insists that communism isn’t only a bad thing but wholly unsuited to human beings (although very well-suited to insectoid hive-mind aliens); and insinuates that letting the scientists run society “rationally” according to the principles of managerial technocracy would bring about its ruin?
Verhoeven, as a good liberal, therefore set out to make the novel’s arguments look ridiculous.
March 30, 2025
Dies the Fire and the Founder Effect
Feral Historian
Published 15 Nov 2024The first book in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series, Dies The Fire yanks modern technology out of the world and sets the stage for a multi-faceted exploration of how distinct cultures emerge from small isolated groups and the profound effect individuals can have the societies that coalesce around them.
00:00 Intro
01:28 Founders
03:37 Desperation
04:51 Flawed Assumptions
07:05 Composites and Rhymes
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QotD: FDR, Mackenzie King and Churchill in 1940
Winston Churchill was informed by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, of more dreadful news.
Roosevelt had no faith in Churchill nor Britain, and wanted Canada to give up on her.
Roosevelt thought that Britain would likely collapse, and Churchill could not be trusted to maintain her struggle.
Rather than appealing to Churchill’s pleas of aid — which were politically impossible then anyway — Roosevelt sought more drastic measures.
A delegation was summoned [from] Canada.
They requested Canada to pester Britain to have the Royal Navy sent across the Atlantic, before Britain’s seemingly-inevitable collapse.
Moreover, they wanted Canada to encourage the other British Dominions to get on board such a plan.
Mackenzie King was mortified. Writing in his diary,
“The United States was seeking to save itself at the expense of Britain. That it was an appeal to the selfishness of the Dominions at the expense of the British Isles. […] I instinctively revolted against such a thought. My reaction was that I would rather die than do aught to save ourselves or any part of this continent at the expense of Britain.”
On the 5th June 1940, Churchill wrote back to Mackenzie King,
“We must be careful not to let the Americans view too complacently prospect of a British collapse, out of which they would get the British Fleet and the guardianship of the British Empire, minus Great Britain. […]
Although President [Roosevelt] is our best friend, no practical help has been forthcoming from the United States as yet.”
Another example of the hell Churchill had to endure — which would have broken every lesser man.
Whilst the United States heroically came to aid Britain and her Empire, the initial relationship between the two great powers was different to what is commonly believed.
(The first key mover that swung Roosevelt into entrusting Churchill to continue the struggle — and as such aid would not be wasted on Britain — was when Churchill ordered the Royal Navy’s Force H to open fire and destroy the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kébir — after Admiral Gensoul had refused the very reasonable offers from Britain, despite Germany and Italy demanding the transference of the French Fleet as part of the armistices.)
Andreas Koreas, Twitter, 2024-12-27.
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March 29, 2025
Carney, our unelected PM, announces the end of our generations-long bilateral relationship with the US
As many folks on Twit-, er, I mean X have pointed out, Mark Carney is just a caretaker PM, not having ever been elected to the position, so it’s more than a bit breathtaking that he’s making announcements like this without any mandate from the voters:
Later, we get to vote on whether he made it to the podium
The last Liberal leader promised real change too. Apparently this one uses a different definition.
“It is clear that the United States is no longer a reliable partner,” Mark Carney said after a cabinet meeting on Thursday. “It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations we will be able to restore some trust. But there will be no turning back.”
Uh, sir, you’re sounding kind of categorical —
“The next government — and all that follow — will have a fundamentally different relationship with the United States,” Carney said.
So if I understand correctly, what you’re saying is —
“Coming to terms with this sobering reality is the first step in taking necessary actions to defend our nation,” Carney said. “But it’s only the first step.”
In a career that now stretches back to before many of my readers were born, I’ve covered speeches like this before, of course. Maybe five. Well, two. No, strike that, this was new.
“Over the coming weeks, months, and years we must fundamentally reimagine our economy,” the rookie leader of the Liberal Party of Canada said.
Well, you know, “fundamentally” can mean a lot of things —
“The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.”
Oh, so you mean fundamentally.
In French, a language that fits this Savile Row man like a hand-carved barrel — it covers the essentials while leaving the odd splinter — Carney did a version of the Doug Ford thing where he asked for a strong mandate to undertake negotiations. Unlike Ford he put no real effort into selling it. Was he being overconfident? Not at all, he said, as every man ever has in response to that question. He still needs to “win every vote,” he insisted.
But it “would be better” to have a large mandate “to have a large, comprehensive negotiation, the most important in our life.” Here he didn’t pause, really, so much as consider the ramifications of what he was saying while the words were still coming out.
“Especially in my life. When I was born the Auto Pact was created.” Which sounds grandiose, sure, but to be fair I believe Carney, who was born in Fort Smith in 1965, was merely asserting correlation, not causality. “And now it’s over.”
Wait, what? The AUTO PACT is over? That’s like saying it’s time to shut the ski operation at Whistler down, if Whistler contributed 11.5% to Canada’s manufacturing GDP. “It’s very serious, this situation,” he concluded, mildly.
Later, some of the early reaction to Carney’s remarks seemed to me to skip too lightly over the plain meaning of the Prime Minister’s words. And yes, it feels odd to call him the Prime Minister. We haven’t yet had a vote on the matter, although I’m told one will be held shortly. But the people in the cabinet room were people Carney had appointed, and the Parliamentary Protective Service let them in, so I guess in a rough-and-ready way, he really is — Anyway. It’s possible Carney’s words meant nothing. Or that he’ll be forced to eat them later. Or that, it being election season, he’ll never get a chance to implement them. In the latter case, the Carney Tariff Scrum of March 2025 would become an item of wonk trivia, like Kim Campbell’s genuinely impressive government reorganization of 1993.
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March 28, 2025
Mistaking popular fiction for real life
At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter recounts an odd but revealing experience with a young progressive entity:
Image by Paul Jackson
Some years ago I was provided a fascinating psychological experience in the form of a young graduate student in the English literature program, whom I encountered because they (you heard me) was (God that’s grammatically awkward) married to a colleague. She (I’m not doing this anymore) specialized in the study of propaganda, by which of course she meant everything her backwards conservative parents in Nowhere, Nebrahoma believed, and not anything she believed. One evening, after enthusiastically explaining the symbolism of the inverted pentagram tattooed on her shoulder, she informed me with invincible confidence that not only was gender an arbitrary social construction, but that even the idea of biological sex was nothing more than convention. Her reasoning, which I presume she’d gleaned from a seminar on radically liberatory queer theory, was that testosterone levels fluctuated during the day, so “males” changed their degree of “maleness” all the time, and how can something that’s constantly changing be used as the basis for a hard binary distinction?
“But that’s not how biological sex is defined,” I replied. “Testosterone is just a hormone. It’s only present in vertebrates. Insects don’t have it, and neither do plants, but they still have biological sex. Sex is defined according to whether an organism produces mobile gametes or sessile gametes, which is basically universal across multicellular life forms.”
“I don’t understand what that means,” she chirped, still thinking we were playing language games. “Like I don’t know what a ‘sessile gamete’ is.”
“Oh,” I responded helpfully, “A gamete is just a reproductive cell. Sessile means it doesn’t move. So –”
The horrible reality of what I was saying dawned upon her. “I just realized that this isn’t a conversation I should be having,” she cut me off, and walked away.
It was remarkable. The mindworm parasitizing her consciousness had detected a threat to its structural integrity, and ordered its host to remove herself from the interaction before she consumed a malinformative infohazard. She didn’t even pretend that this wasn’t what she was doing. I’d never before seen something quite like it.
There’s a long-standing joke that liberals don’t know things, that their entire worldview seems to be formed by the ersatz experiences of visual entertainment. When they discuss the war in Ukraine, they express it in terms of Marvel comic book movies or Star Wars; when thinking of President Trump, in terms of Harry Potter. Black people are all wise and benevolent and great dancers because this is what Fresh Prince and Morgan Freeman told them; white men are all inbred stupid Klansmen because of Mississippi Burning and Roots; girls are just as strong as boys (stronger, actually) because Black Widow kicks butt; and so on. Even their favourite point of historical reference – World War Two, the Nazis, Hitler – seems to be almost entirely a palimpsest of Steven Spielberg movies like Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List.
It isn’t just that they use fictional references as metaphors or allusions. That’s a very human thing to do, and the right is certainly no stranger to Tolkien analogies. But liberals seem to do this a lot, with only the most tenuous connection back to reality. Their inner world is a series of self-referential fantasies. The right uses fictional references as metaphors to explain facts; the left substitutes fictional metaphors for facts, and then forgets that it does this.
The recent Netflix drama Adolescence is a striking case in point. It portrays the fictional story of a 13-year-old white boy who stabs a female classmate to death because his brain was twisted into a pretzel by exposure to the incel subculture over social media. Following its premier, the British government has been using it to gin up a moral panic, with calls to censor social media to tackle the urgent problem of toxic masculinity.
The argument to keep the F-35 for the RCAF, despite Trump’s tariff war
About a week ago, I linked to Alex McColl’s argument for splitting the Royal Canadian Air Force’s new fighter program into a small tranche of F-35s (because we’d already paid for the first 16 of an 88-plane order) and a much larger number of Swedish Gripen fighters from Saab, which on paper would give the RCAF enough aircraft to simultaneously meet our NATO and NORAD commitments. In the National Post, Andrew Richter makes the case to stick with the original plan, pointing to Canada’s truly horrifying history of cancelled military equipment and the costs of running two completely different fighter aircraft:
Canada does not have a very good track record when it comes to cancelling military contracts. About 30 years ago, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien decided to cancel a contract that the Mulroney government had negotiated to purchase helicopters from a European consortium. Chrétien likened the new aircraft to a “Cadillac”, and maintained that our existing helicopters, the venerable Sea Kings, were still airworthy (despite their advancing age).
So the contract was torn up and the Canadian government paid a total of $500 million in cancellation fees. It would be another decade before a replacement helicopter was finally purchased (the American-made CH-148 Cyclones), and it was only in 2018 that the last Sea King was retired from service. The whole episode has been described by more than one observer as the worst defence procurement project in history. Which brings us to the tortured history of the F-35 purchase.
There is no need here to review the astonishing array of twists and turns that have taken place over the past few decades with regards to it. Suffice to note that when the F-35 contract was signed a few years ago, numerous defence analysts were in disbelief; many had long since concluded that it would never happen, and that Canada would continue flying our CF-18s until they literally could not fly anymore.
Any decision at this point to overturn the contract and go with the second-place finisher in the fighter jet competition — the Swedish Gripen — would have serious consequences. First, as with the helicopter cancellation decades ago, there will likely be financial penalties to pay, although so far the government has not commented on this.
In addition, a decision to buy the Gripen would mean that our Armed Forces would operate two fighter jets moving forward, because the first tranche of 16 F-35s is already bought and paid for. This would necessitate a wide range of additional costs, including training, maintenance and storage. Over decades, these costs would add billions (likely tens of billions) to the defence budget.
There are also issues of bilateral military co-operation, potential loss of affiliated contracts and force inter-operability to consider. The Canadian military has been primarily buying American military equipment for decades. This has been done both because our military generally prefers U.S. equipment and because it helps strengthen defence ties between our two countries. Deciding to buy a foreign aircraft would jeopardize these ties.
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March 27, 2025
Uncovered: The CIA’s Secret War That Shook Stalin! – W2W 16 – 1947 Q3
TimeGhost History
Published 26 Mar 2025In 1947, the Cold War intensifies as the Truman and Zhdanov Doctrines divide the world into opposing camps. The CIA is born to counter communist threats, while Stalin’s Cominform tightens its grip across Eastern Europe. From Berlin’s streets crawling with double agents, to covert American election meddling in Italy, espionage becomes the frontline of this global showdown. Welcome to a new age of spies, secret doctrines, and ruthless intelligence wars.
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Alaska legally required to use LNG ships that don’t exist thanks to the Jones Act of 1920
As J.D. Tuccille reports, Alaska is having to ask the US government for a waiver from the requirements of the 1920 Merchant Marine Act to allow them to legally transport their own liquid natural gas within the state:
“LNG Carrier Alto Acrux” by kenhodge13 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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Alaska is a cold state where residents need energy to keep the chill at bay. Fortunately, the state is blessed with natural resources, including abundant oil and natural gas that can help satisfy that need. Unfortunately, as I’ve written before, a nationalistic, century-old law requires that shipping between American ports be conducted only by U.S.–built and –flagged ships. And there aren’t any liquid natural gas tankers that satisfy the requirement. Now Alaska officials are seeking a waiver so they can use their own resources to resolve a growing energy crunch.
[…]
Over a century ago, Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, better known as the Jones Act, mandating that “No merchandise … shall be transported by water…between points in the United States…in any other vessel than a vessel built in and documented under the laws of the United States and owned by persons who are citizens of the United States”. There’s more to it, but the nationalistic law, intended to protect American shipping, effectively barred transporting goods between American ports in foreign-built and foreign-flagged vessels. That means North Slope natural gas can be transported to Alaska’s populated south only in American tankers. If you can find any. You can’t.
“LNG carriers have not been built in the United States since before 1980, and no LNG carriers are currently registered under the U.S. flag,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in 2015. And, while you’d think that demand — not just in isolated states like Alaska and Hawaii, but also territories like Puerto Rico — would drive supply, there’s a huge hurdle. “U.S. carriers would cost about two to three times as much as similar carriers built in Korean shipyards and would be more expensive to operate,” the GAO added.
The GAO created its report at a time when Congress was considering extending the Jones Act to require that exports of natural gas be carried only in U.S.-flagged shipping. The GAO concluded that such a law would “increase the cost of transporting LNG from the United States, decrease the competitiveness of U.S. LNG in the world market, and may, in turn, reduce demand for U.S. LNG”.
Congress wisely dropped the idea of extending the Jones Act, but Alaskans are still stuck with the original law, waiting for nonexistent domestically-built LNG tankers to show up with loads of North Slope natural gas. If they don’t wait but instead try to ignore a law with which it’s impossible to comply, they risk millions of dollars in fines, since the federal Department of Justice vigorously enforces the Jones Act.
In 2017, the feds fined an energy company $10 million for transporting a drill rig from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska’s Cook Inlet in a foreign-flagged vessel. The company planned to bring more natural gas to the resource-rich but energy-starved state.
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March 26, 2025
The Korean War Week 040 – MacArthur Sandbags Truman – March 25, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 25 Mar 2025Harry Truman is moving forward with his plans to somehow end the fight with the Chinese, but Douglas MacArthur takes a hatchet to those plans. Truman is furious, and the question remains, for how long will MacArthur’s defiance be tolerated? In the field, Operations Ripper, Courageous, and Tomahawk are in action, but are all disappointing for the UN forces, as they fail in their mission to destroy the enemy’s war making capacity. They don’t actually do much of that at all.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:51 Recap
01:08 Operation Ripper Ends
04:09 Operation Courageous
06:20 Operation Tomahawk
09:44 MacArthur’s Sabotage
13:27 Summary
13:36 Conclusion
(more…)
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Rich country foreign aid – threat or menace?
John H. Cochrane on the benefits and harms that aid from rich countries has done to the poor recipient nations around the world:
At half the dinners I go to, someone says, well, yes, a lot of the USAID money was mis-spent, but what about the poor starving children in Africa? If you are in that situation, this is the article for you.
This article is about about the centerpiece of aid: “development” aid, designed to boost economic growth, not about the politicized “nonprofits” that USAID was supporting and their bloated staffs, funneling aid money to political advocacy and employment, promoting American self-loathing around the world, and so forth.
Development spending accounts for almost three-quarters of all aid.
And the enterprise is a colossal failure.
The capital of Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, runs on aid. A city built in the 1970s by the World Bank, Lilongwe’s straight streets are filled with charities, development agencies and government offices. Informal villages house cooks and cleaners for foreign officials; the entrance to each is marked with the flag of its national sponsor.
The money is small compared to advanced country GDP, but huge compared to poor country government resources […]
The results of such spending are no better in Malawi than in the US — even if it’s free to the recipient. Add the preference of aid advocates for “sustainable” or “appropriate” and “green” technology, including these days hostility to GMO foods, and social or environmental wrappers, “climate justice” and so on, indeed even the hostility to capitalism, “consumerism” and growth itself and it’s not a surprise this is a rathole. (Again, it’s cheap from our perspective. The problem is that it’s wholly ineffective. If money really could jump start growth, that would be great.)
One of the central conundrums of aid is that it can destroy local industry. Sending food, for example, seems like a no-brainer of mercy. And in a war, crop failure, or other catastrophe it is. But sending food on a regular basis bankrupts local farmers.
Central idea 1: Imagine just how happy the US might be if China decided in its mercy to tax Chinese citizens, buy crops at overvalued prices (which incidentally pleases Chinese farmers), and send bags of rice to the US for free, marked “gift of the CCP”, thereby bankrupting US rice farmers. Or if it decided to send us really cheap electric vehicles to help us speed towards net zero, thereby undermining our own state-supported EV business. Well, you know exactly how our government feels about this sort of thing! And this is exactly what aid does.
Now, a good free market economist welcomes subsidized imports, and a push to leave agriculture and move to export-oriented manufacturing or other higher value industries. But Malawi doesn’t have other higher value industries, and exporting anything to the advanced economies is getting harder and harder. Extending the old proverb, send a man a fish a day forever, and he forgets how to fish.
The article opened my eyes (some more) to the delicate intertwining of economics and politics. We really don’t live in a free market world in the US (note our executives rushing to change ideology and please the new team in Washington), and even less so in poor countries.
Western aid officials often want to prevent local politicians, who control crucial industries, from profiting as a result of their projects, meaning they select obscure sectors for tax breaks, credit and subsidies. With few investors willing to stump up capital, and little interest from local politicians, the businesses duly flop.
Here is a conundrum for you. Without 10% off the top for the big guy, businesses will flounder.
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March 25, 2025
Analyzing the structure of Tim Walz’s “joke”
On his Substack, Jim Treacher shares his deep knowledge of the cultural and linguistic complexities of the humour of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz:
Tim Walz as a standup comedian
Fake image generated with Grok
A joke is a delicate thing.
Let’s say you write a joke and then tell it to some people. The joke might “kill” (get a big laugh) with one audience, but then it might “die” (be met with stony silence or outright anger) with another audience.
Maybe you don’t get the wording quite right: “Why did the chicken cross the street? Wait, no …” Maybe the crowd doesn’t understand a reference you’re making. Maybe it’s just not your day. It can take a lot of work to perfect a joke, and any number of things can still go wrong. You’ll fail at least as often as you succeed, and past performance does not guarantee future results.
I’ve never done stand-up comedy because it would require me to leave the house, but I do have a bit of experience writing jokes for television. And sometimes, a joke I thought was funny when I wrote it in the morning just doesn’t land with that evening’s audience. It’s a crummy feeling, but that’s showbiz.
So, I know just how Tim Walz feels these days!
Last week he made a really funny joke, but a lot of people weren’t smart enough to get it because they’re not Democrats […]
I was saying, on my phone, some of you know this, on the iPhone they’ve got that little stock app? I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day. 225 and dropping!
And if you own one, we’re not blaming you. You can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off, you know.
Ha ha ha ha ha! [SLAP KNEE, BUST GUT, ETC.]
I will now analyze this brilliant joke, using my hard-won comedy experience, and explain why you’re misguided for not laughing.
You’re welcome.
Now, to the uninitiated, it might sound like Tim Walz is celebrating the misfortune of an opponent. “Ha-ha, your stock is dropping. It’s funny because I don’t like you!” The humor of the bully. Trying to out-Trump Trump.
You might think the audience laughed because they hate Elon Musk so much that they’re happy when he fails, even when it hurts a lot of other people. Maybe even themselves.
But here’s the big twist: That’s not it at all!
See, Governor Walz was being self-deprecating.
When he made that really, really good joke, he already knew that his own state holds 1.6 million shares of Tesla stock in its retirement fund. He was well aware that he was celebrating the misfortune of his own constituents.
But his stage persona didn’t know that.
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March 24, 2025
Canada could learn from the Finnish example
US President Donald Trump tossed several grenades into the still waters of Canadian defence platitudes and forcefully called attention to the clear fact that Canada has been a world-leader in defence freeloading since the late 1960s. In The Line, Tim Thurley suggests that Canada should look more closely at how Finland has maintained its sovereignty with a larger, militarily dominant, and unpredictable neighbour for more than a century:
Map of Finland (Suomen kartta) by Oona Räisänen. Boundaries, rivers, roads, and railroads are based on a 1996 CIA map, with revisions. (via Wikimedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Finland-en.svg)
Canadians pretended we didn’t need to take defence seriously. We justified it with fantasies — the world wasn’t that dangerous, threats were distant, and America would rescue us if needed. That delusion is dead. U.S. Republicans and some Democrats don’t trust us to defend our own territory. Trump openly floated annexation and made clear that military protection now comes at a price — potentially statehood. Canadian military leaders now describe our closest ally as “unpredictable and potentially unreliable”. And even when America was a sure bet, our overreliance was reckless. Sovereignty requires self-defence; outsourcing it means surrendering power.
We should take cues from nations in similar situations, like Finland. Both of us border stronger powers, control vast, harsh landscapes, and hold valuable strategic resources. We’re internally stable, democratic, and potential targets.
We also share a key strength — one that could expand our military recruitment, onshore defence production, rebuild social trust, and bolster deterrence: a strong civilian firearms tradition.
We should be doing everything we can to make that tradition a bigger part of Canadian defence, and a larger part of our economy, too.
That may sound absurd to some Canadians. It shouldn’t. Finland is taking full advantage by attempting to expand shooting and military training for civilians both through private and public ranges and the voluntary National Defence Training Association. Finland is seeking to massively upgrade civilian range capacity by building 300 new ones and upgrading others to encourage civilian interest in firearms and national defence, and is doing so in partnership with civilian firearm owners and existing non-government institutions.
Multiple other states near Finland are investing in similar programs. Poland is even involving the education system. Firearm safety training and target practice for school children are part of a new defence education curriculum component, which includes conflict zone survival, cybersecurity, and first aid training. Poland’s aim is to help civilians manage conflict zones, but also to bolster military recruitment.
Lithuania and Estonia encourage civilian marksmanship as part of a society-wide comprehensive defence strategy. The Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, one of the small nation’s most recognizable institutions, is a voluntary government-sponsored organization intended to prepare civilians for resistance to an occupying power. It has 15,000 members in a population of 2.8 million. The Estonian Defence League trains mostly-unpaid civilian volunteers in guerrilla warfare. It has an 80 per cent approval rating in Estonia, where over one in every 100 men and women with ordinary jobs have joined to learn defence techniques, including mastering standard-issue military service rifles that they may keep at home, ready to fight on a moment’s notice.
These strategies are modern. These countries are no strangers to cutting-edge modern warfare, necessitated by a common border with an aggressive Russia. But technologies like drones are not a replacement for a trained and motivated citizenry, as the Ukraine conflict illustrates. Against a stronger and more aggressive neighbour, these societies deter and respond to aggression through organized, determined, and trained populations prepared to resist attackers in-depth — by putting a potential rifle behind every blade of grass.
Canada, meanwhile, is spending money to hurt our own capacity. It’s coming back to bite us. The Trudeau government misused civilian firearm ownership as a partisan political wedge and ignored the grave flaws of that strategy when they were pointed out, hundreds of times, by good-faith critics. Thousands of firearm models have been banned at massive and increasing expense since 2020 despite no evident public safety benefit. In the recently concluded party leadership race, Mark Carney pledged to spend billions of dollars confiscating them. Government policies eliminating significant portions of business revenue have maimed a firearm industry that historically contributed to our defence infrastructure. Civilian range numbers, which often do double-duty with police and even military use, plunged from roughly 1,400 to 891 in five years. Without civilians to maintain ranges for necessary exercises and qualification shoots, governments must assume the operating expenses, construct new ranges, or fly participants elsewhere to train.
