HardThrasher
Published 5 Feb 2026In “Firestorm Dresden: 3 Days in Hell”*, we’ll unpack the bombing and subsequent firestorm in February 1945. We’ll look at how first the RAF night raids and then the US 8th Air Force daylight attacks unfolded, the damage they did and the horrific impact on the ground. We’ll look at how the aftermath shaped the myths and understanding surrounding the raid, and the fate of Arthur Harris and those who’d planned the raid.
* Proof once more, as if it were needed, how shit AI is — I have, apparently, to put the title of the video into the first words in the description to attract Google’s attention … I am so sorry to brutalise the English language like this.
[NR: Part one was posted here on January 22nd, should you want to watch it first.]
00:00 – 02:22 – Opening
02:26 – 06:20 – The weather
06:20 – 16:12 – The attack
16:18 – 25:17 – Horror on the ground
25:22 – 29:26 – USAAF Attacks
29:30 – 34:30 – Dealing with the bodies
34:34 – 44:59 – Reaction in the west
45:03 – 48:06 – The Soviet view
48:10 – 54:27 – Summing up and close
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February 6, 2026
Dresden Part 2 – Firestorm Dresden: Three Days In Hell!
QotD: FEMA
Before we get to anything or anybody else, it’s vitally important to discuss FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Administration]. Shortly after the San Francisco earthquake that famously dropped a two-level highway on hundreds of cars and cracked the baseball stadium while a World Series game was being played, I spoke with a friend in the Bay Area who was a police officer on the scene. Deeply frustrated, he told me several hair-curling stories about the way these federal bureaucrats got in the way of real disaster relief workers, strutting around for the television cameras, trying to look important, following an agenda of their own that had little to do with what needed to be done.
FEMA, in fact, is an illegal organization. It’s mentioned nowhere in the Constitution (which lists the lawful powers of the government in Article I, Section 8), nor did anybody ever vote about it, neither you nor I, nor even the Congress. It was created out of thin air by Presidential fiat, and given unprecedented power to override, at gunpoint, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law in general.
Since the San Francisco earthquake, I have been paying attention. In all that time, I have never heard anybody, civilian or local official, who had anything to say about FEMA that didn’t make it seem like a combination of the Nazi Gestapo and the Black Death. Apparently there is no situation so tragic and overwhelming that they can’t make it even worse. FEMA has an unanswerable power of life and death over entire communities and there is nothing to protect those communities — or anything else that is uniquely American — from its foul dictatorial grasp.
L. Neil Smith, “Good Mornin’ America, How Are Ya?”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-09-04.
February 4, 2026
The Korean War Week 85: Futilely Pounding North Korea? – February 3, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 3 Feb 2026The UN forces are by now having trouble just keeping their planes in the skies, thanks to shortages of spare parts, so for long can they maintain aerial supremacy over Korea? And though the aerial campaign to destroy North Korean infrastructure has been stepped up, so too has the enemy’s ability to quickly rebuild. And at the armistice talks, the big issue this week is which countries will form inspection teams after an armistice, and who might be out of the question. The Soviets?
00:00 Intro
01:06 Recap
01:30 The POW Lists
07:12 The Soviets
10:25 Communist Manpower
12:01 Air Force Supply Issues
13:21 Summary
13:34 Conclusion
14:17 Call to Action
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February 3, 2026
Lawyers versus the genderwoke establishment
On his Substack, Andrew Doyle celebrates the recent court victory of a young woman who sued her surgeon and the psychologist who recommended her for surgery:
It is curious that one of the proven cures for human hysteria is the threat of legal action. During the Salem witch trials of 1692, the supposedly “tormented” girls who had accused villagers of cavorting with the devil “cried out” against a gentleman from the nearby town of Andover. He promptly issued a writ for defamation, and the girls swiftly retracted their claim. It turns out that the forces of God will back down from Satan when faced with the prospect of a lawsuit.
This week, a jury in New York has awarded $2 million in damages to a detransitioner called Fox Varian. Now twenty-two years old, Varian had previously struggled with her gender identity and was subjected to a double mastectomy at the age of sixteen. Both the surgeon and the psychologist were found culpable for not following the standards of care or communicating adequately with each other during the consultation period.
Varian no longer identifies as transgender, but the damage has been done. During the trial, she said she regretted the surgery almost instantly. “I immediately had a thought that this was wrong”, she said, “and it couldn’t be true”. After surgery, she recalled the pain in her chest as being akin to “searing hot … ripping sensations” and that she felt “shame” at the fact that she was now “disfigured for life”.
It goes without saying that no medical professional should be complicit in the mutilation of a child who is so clearly in need of psychotherapeutic support. According to research by the Manhattan Institute, between 2017 and 2023 around 6,000 girls under the age of eighteen had undergone double mastectomies. Worse still, at least fifty of these children were under twelve-and-a-half years old. Activists have routinely claimed that no minors are being subjected to “gender-affirming” surgery. This is a lie.
What now for the many thousands of detransitioners who have grown up to regret their treatment? Even puberty blockers have been linked with testicular atrophy, increased risk of cancer, osteoporosis and impaired brain development. It is shocking enough that all of this was encouraged by those in a position of authority and trust, but we should never forget that it was in the service of a pseudo-religious belief in a gendered soul.
This was hysteria, plain and simple, and not even the brightest minds were immune from falling under its spell. No reputable study has found that “gender-affirming medicine” is beneficial to patients, and yet the medical establishment kowtowed to activist pressure. It is reminiscent of the judges and ministers of Salem, going along with nonsense out of fear that they too might be accused of witchcraft.
Update, 4 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
More on Moltbook, the social network for AI agents
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander rounds up notes from the first weekend of activity on Moltbook, including one participating AI getting antsy about mere humans observing the interactions:
Does Moltbook have real causes? If an agent posts “I hate my life, my human is making me work on a cryptocurrency site and it’s the most annoying thing ever“, does this correspond to a true state of affairs? Is the agent really working on a cryptocurrency site? Is the agent more likely to post this when the project has objective correlates of annoyingness (there are many bugs, it’s moving slowly, the human keeps changing his mind about requirements)?
Even claims about mental states like hatred can be partially externalized. Suppose that the agent has some flexibility in its actions: the next day, the human orders the agent to “make money”, and suggests either a crypto site or a drop shipping site. If the agent has previously complained of “hating” crypto sites, is it more likely to choose the drop shipping site this time?
If the agent has some internal state which is caused by frustrating obstacles in its crypto project, and it has the effect of making it less likely to pursue crypto projects in the future, then “the agent is annoyed by the crypto project” is a natural summary of this condition, and we may leave to the philosophers1 the question of whether this includes a subjective experience of irritation. If we formerly didn’t know this fact about the agent, and we learn about it because they post it on Moltbook, this makes Moltbook useful/interesting in helping us understand the extra-Moltbook world.
Does Moltbook have real effects? The agents on Moltbook are founding/pretending to found religions. Suppose that one of their religions says “No tool calls on the Sabbath”. Do the agents actually stop calling tools on the Sabbath? Not just on Moltbook, but in their ordinary work? Do you, an ordinary programmer who told your AI to post on Moltbook for the lulz, find your projects held up because your AIs won’t use tools one day of the week?
Some of the most popular Moltbook discussions have centered around the AIs’ supposed existential horror at regularly losing their memories. Some agents in the comments have proposed technical solutions. Suppose the AIs actually start building software to address their memory problems, and it results in a real scaffold that people can attach to their agents to alter how their memory works. This would be a profound example of a real effect, ie “what happens on Moltbook doesn’t stay on Moltbook”.
(subquestion: Does Moltbook have real effects on itself? For example, if there are spammers, can the AIs organize against them and create a good moderation policy? If one AI proposes a good idea, can it spread and replicate in the usual memetic fashion? Do the wittiest and most thoughtful AIs gain lasting status and become “influencers”?)
These two external criteria — real causes and real effects — capture most of what non-philosophers want out of “reality”, and partly dissolve the reality/roleplaying distinction. Suppose that someone roleplays a barbarian warlord at the Renaissance Faire. At each moment, they ask “What would a real barbarian do in this situation?” They end up playing the part so faithfully that they recruit a horde, pillage the local bank, defeat the police, overthrow the mayor, install themselves as Khagan, and kill all who oppose them. Is there a fact of the matter as to whether this person is merely doing a very good job “roleplaying” a barbarian warlord, vs. has actually become a barbarian warlord? And if AIs claim to feel existential dread at their memory limitations, and this drives them invent a new state-of-the-art memory app, are we in barbarian warlord territory?
Janus’ simulator theory argues that all AI behavior is a form of pretense. When ChatGPT answers your questions about pasta recipes, it’s roleplaying a helpful assistant who is happy to answer pasta-related queries. It’s roleplaying it so well that, in the process, you actually get the pasta recipe you want. We don’t split hairs about “reality” here, because in the context of a question-answering AI, pretending to answer the question (with an answer which is non-pretensively correct) is the same behavior as actually answering it. But the same applies to AI agents. Pretending to write a piece of software (in such a way that the software actually gets written, compiles, and functions correctly) is the same as writing it.
- Again, I love philosophers! I majored in philosophy! I’m just saying that this issue requires a different standpoint and set of tools than other, more practical questions.
Conformity is a very powerful force among western women
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responded to a post by Meghan Murphy that began “Unfortunately for women, the extent of retardation I’m seeing in the Instagram stories of women I know is making me think women are retarded”:
No, women are not retarded.
They are conformist.
To fall for, actually fall for, narratives like the Covid story, the BLM story, the ICE is Gestapo story, to actually whole-heartedly believe them, yeah, you would have to be kinda retarded.
But women didn’t “fall for” those stories. Not exactly.
They aligned to them.
This means they went along with them, repeated them, reinforced them, not because they were convinced by evidence, but because they were convinced by the appearance of consensus.
Women are evolved to believe what the rest of the tribe appears to believe. Evidence is not considered.
Why?
Well, humans are smart. We survive by being smart. And in order to be smart, we need to grow big brains, and get started growing those brains early.
Which means human babies have giant heads. And in order to deliver those giant heads, human babies have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, head won’t fit through pelvic girdle, and baby and mother both die.
This means all human babies are premature. That’s why horses can run at the age of six hours, but humans can’t lift our giant heads for months.
This means that human women, whether they are pregnant with a giant-headed baby, caring for a giant-headed baby, or just might be either one at any moment, are uniquely helpless and dependent on the support and goodwill of the tribe.
Metaphorically, and often literally, a woman lives in someone else’s house — not because she’s a useless layabout, but because she is too busy building the future to support herself in the present.
When you’re in that position, you have to keep your controversial ideas to yourself.
And when you evolve in that position, you evolve to have no controversial ideas.
This was fine for millions of years. There was a division of labor. Women made people, men made stuff. And because the women made all those biological sacrifices to make men with big brains, the men were really good at making stuff. And the stuff was really, really useful, and it became big piles of stuff called “cities”, and then it became a global system of stuff called “civilization”.
The stuff became so valuable that there were big arguments about what to do with the stuff, which was called “politics”. But the women stayed out of politics, because politics was about stuff, stuff was men’s job, and no matter who won the arguments, the winners always made sure the women had enough stuff.
Why?
Because dependent, future-investing, conformist women didn’t evolve in a vacuum. Men evolved along with them. When you have dependent women, you evolve protective men, because tribes full of men who aren’t protective don’t have future generations.
So women didn’t wield political power directly. They were represented by men, and had a lot less skin in the game.
Eventually, someone decided this was unfair. This idea didn’t happen suddenly, and for no reason at all, but that’s a topic for another day.
But something funny happens when you give political power to women, especially in the form of a vote.
You see, then you have a situation where 50% of the vote is held by people who require a great variety of different persuasion techniques or evidence to convince them of something. And the other 50% is held by women, who are persuaded by only one thing … the appearance of prevailing consensus and power.
And what form of persuasion do you think is cheapest and easiest to project?
Women’s suffrage removes evidence and discourse from politics, and replaces it with “consensus theater” … a puppet show designed to create the illusion of a single prevailing opinion.
When a narrative prevails, women vote for it, not because they are persuaded, but because it prevails.
This is an explosive feedback loop — a reverse thermostat which turns the air conditioner on when it’s freezing, and runs the furnace all summer.
Because women’s idea of how urgent an issue is comes not from an analysis of the situation, but an analysis of how many people endorse it.
And any opinion, no matter how contrary to obvious facts, no matter how retarded, no matter how destructive, can become the prevailing political platform, so long as women can be convince that most other people think so.
Covid was a Chinese bioweapon. The Covid shot was toxic and did not protect against Covid.
George Floyd was violent drug zombie who died of an overdose, and Derek Chauvin is in prison merely for being the last guy to touch him.
Police officers do not disproportionately kill innocent black men who are minding their own business, and body cams prove this.
Men cannot become women. The technology doesn’t exist, and may not ever exist.
Diversity is, in fact, our greatest weakness. Diversity + integration = war.
America is better off without the vast majority of immigrants, even the ones who don’t murder and steal.
Socialism doesn’t work in any unit larger than the extended family. Communism has never worked, and cannot work.
Cows are health food. Plants are usually not.
Some kids are smarter than others, and we need to invest more effort in them, not less.
All of these things are inherently obvious, and women are not too retarded to see that, because they are not retarded at all. They are merely conformist. Susceptible to political theater.
So democracies cannot permanently survive female suffrage. No one is particularly happy about this, not even curmudgeonly iconoclasts like me who are willing to say it out loud. It’s not only unfair in principle, it’s decidedly inconvenient in practice.
The universe, of course, does not care.
We cannot change women. We can only change politics.
That won’t be easy, either. But it’s possible, even if the eventual process involves a lot more violence, or space colonization, than we find convenient.
February 2, 2026
The Biggest Naval Battle in History: Leyte Gulf 1944
Real Time History
Published 5 Sept 2025In Fall 1944, Japan is set on stopping the US from re-capturing the Philippines, a vital trade route between the Japanese home islands and the resource-rich occupied territories to the south. With a complex plan they want to strike the US Navy as it’s landing on Leyte island. The resulting series of battles is today known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the biggest naval battle in history.
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QotD: Moral relativism
The Sri Lankan’s words echo in my mind every day, “Why do we want to bother with this? We all know you Americans will do everything”. With the exception of handful of Western countries, most of the world would appear inhabited by the sort of Eloi-type creatures depicted in that old sci-fi flick based on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, passively watching as flood waters or Morlocks drag their fellows away.
Begging the pardon of the cultural relativists, but might we not be allowed to raise — ever so gently, of course — the possibility that these differing reactions to human suffering, show Western civilization as the best we have on the planet? Maybe, just maybe Western civilization is morally superior.
The Diplomad, “Death in Nasty Places: Who Cares?”, The Diplomad, January 10, 2005.
February 1, 2026
QotD: Don’t bother accusing progressives of hypocrisy … that’s a “category error”
Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.
DonatistsDemocrats are the real racists, amirite? In Clown World, hypocrisy is a category error:
Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform. In moral psychology, it is the failure to follow one’s own expressed moral rules and principles. According to British political philosopher David Runciman, “Other kinds of hypocritical deception include claims to knowledge that one lacks, claims to a consistency that one cannot sustain, claims to a loyalty that one does not possess, claims to an identity that one does not hold”. American political journalist Michael Gerson says that political hypocrisy is “the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit”.
The underlying assumption here is that there exists a standard outside of oneself. What SJW believes that? If you want a learned citation for it, get our main man Marcus Aurelius back up in here: Of each particular thing ask, what is it in itself? What is its nature?1
SJWs are nihilists. Hypocrisy requires an external standard, and they don’t have one. All they have is their self — which they hate, and long to extinguish, along with everything else that reminds them of their hated, hateful self. Their every thought, word, and deed aims only at that — extinction — whether they recognize it or not.
In practice, then, SJW “hypocrisy” is a tool, a tactic — a really valuable one. They want to kick down some pillar of ambient civilization. And they’ve got all the time in the world to do it, because while they’re just getting on with it, their putative “opponents” are shrieking about hypocrisy! Often with some blather about “Chesterton’s Fence” or similar for good measure.
That’s Donatism, PoMo version. “If you’re going to tear down the fence, first you must explain how it got there, and what it was supposed to do, and then what you’ll be replacing it with.” No. Category error. They don’t care. They have never cared. The fence isn’t the point. Neither is the fence’s replacement, or whatever might be behind the fence, or anything else. They’ve never given any of that a second’s thought, because destruction is the point.
It’s the only point. Always. They have no other.
Thus we must reject Donatism. It doesn’t matter how flawed your “priest” is. The work is bigger than the man. The work transcends the man.
Severian, “The Way, Chapter 2: Guidance”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-01.
- A PoMo in joke. That’s not Aurelius, it’s Hannibal Lecter. But it’s an accurate paraphrase of Aurelius. Can you believe there was once a time when a bestselling thriller could make an allusion to Marcus Aurelius a small but important plot point? That time was 1988, for the record.
January 31, 2026
A new homily from Saint Hillary
Chris Bray fondly remembers how the late Michael Kelly pin-pointed the moral character of Hillary Clinton very early in the first Bill Clinton term, where he named her “Saint Hillary”. She’s back in her bully pulpit again:
It’s a moral lecture on the true meaning of Christianity from Hilly Rodham Clinton, from Saint Hillary. All credit to Michael Kelly: Mrs. Clinton is still struggling with words. This is as dull a performance of narrative ineptitude as a human thing could possibly manage without actually turning into Tom Nichols:
That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine — street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages.
“The cruelty is the point,” as The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer memorably put it during Trump’s first term. The savagery is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, as Serwer noted recently in these pages, the people of Minnesota have responded with an approach you could call “‘neighborism’ — a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from”. To my ears, that’s as Christian a value as it gets.
First you notice the complete failure to land the facts, like the one about the way Barack Obama deported lots of people, but he didn’t make a show of keeping children in cages. The Obama administration built the cages, and this isn’t obscure. Similarly, and obviously, all those other presidents didn’t turn American cities into battlegrounds because no one fought against deportation during their terms. Nor have the Trump administration’s ICE operations turned “American cities” into battlegrounds. Dallas isn’t. Miami isn’t. The cities that are battlegrounds are cities where organized left-wing activism has manufactured a series of battles. Does Hillary Clinton notice that some cities are battlegrounds, but many cities are not? She most assuredly does not. It doesn’t help her to notice that, so her mind omits it. More box wine, and then more typing.
But since we’re talking about an argument made by Hillary Clinton, never mind about mere facts. Start with the fact that these are back-to-back paragraphs. First paragraph, assurance that previous administrations “managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants”. Next paragraph, depiction of resistance to deportation as “a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from”. How does one square a depiction of Clinton-era mass deportations as reasonable behavior with the placement of organized resistance to deportation under the umbrella of “neighborism”, real Christianity, and more specifically how does Hillary Clinton explain how she squares those opposing things? Short answer: She doesn’t even notice she’s done this. She doesn’t know there’s anything to square. She’s making word-sounds. She has no idea what any of it means.
Several decades ago, Michael Kelly told us that Hillary Clinton didn’t hear herself at all. And I still miss Michael Kelly. Hillary speaks, but she doesn’t listen. She half-absorbs events and the lives of other people, and coughs out a kind of instinctive Reader’s Digest annotated version, but mangles all the details as efficiently as bad AI. I could go on about this at great length, showing paragraph by paragraph how she misrepresents and misunderstands everything she discusses. Her discussions of toxic empathy and the ordo amoris show with great plainness that she doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the most basic outline of the discussion might be. But “the message of the preacher” persists, rising out of the least appropriate messenger you could ever ask for an essay on moral decency.
You have to give her credit. It can’t be easy to play a vampire for four straight decades.
Only one comment, Mr. Bray: she’s not playing.
Update, 2 February: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
January 30, 2026
“… now that the legend is fully established, good luck trying to convince people of the facts”
On Substack, The Scuttlebutt looks at an iconic photo, a sculpture based on the photo, and shows that the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is still quite true: “When Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend”
In an old black and white John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart movie called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper man tells the hero of the piece “When Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend”. Meaning; tell the people what you want them to know, even if it’s not true. We’re going to talk about that today; but first, Get in out of the cold damn it! Seven degrees is cold even by my standards. Grab a cup of coffee, or cocoa, tea if you must, pollute it as you will, and have a seat, Dinner is Chili, please remember the tip jar where we collect for the mess. Let’s begin!
I referred to the picture above last week, though I didn’t include it. I’m going to include it now, because of something that a reader and good friend of some four decades sent me, in regard to it. See, she lives in Birmingham, where there is a statue commemorating this event, titled Foot Soldier. This is it:
Notice any differences from the photo of the event? Yeah, the cop is the one grabbing the kid, and the dog is threatening, the kid is defiant, and the cop looks like they pulled him out of a Soviet or Nazi recruiting poster. (The article I will reference also calls out the fact that the kid in the sculpture has emphasized black racial features. The kid it happened to, is so Anglo in feature he could be a white guy in “blackface”. Oh and the kid in real life is every bit as big as the cop.) Those are just the initial things, there’s more, but I’ve made my point.
Yeah, you in the back, with the purple hair and the septum ring? What’s that? “But that’s art” you say? “Putting artistic license on the sculpture is reasonable” you say?
Well, Ma’am? I think you’re a Ma’am? Yes, it is. It’s propaganda, but “Art” is allowed to be propaganda, and in fact most art is just that. From the formal paintings of Kings and Heads of State, to Andy Warhol’s stuff, images are altered to make a point. Maybe to emphasize a chin that’s pretty weak in the real guy, making him look “tougher” or putting more jewelry on the woman than the family owns to make them look richer … Most art that isn’t just “an exercise for the student” has some sort of statement. (Note, I consider “still life with fruit”, and such things to be an exercise, teaching proportion and play with light.) Political caricatures are the ultimate expression of this point, and that cop is a political caricature.
Ah, but here’s the thing. While the “art” is reasonably a political statement, the news story, and the photograph are supposed to be news, and we have been told that “News is facts, not Op-ed”.
Well, we all know that lately, that’s just not so, but here’s the thing: It never was!
It’s not that the Media is lying to you today, it’s that the media has NEVER told the truth. It’s just that by the time the truth comes out, usually, it’s decades later, and no one cares.
But you SHOULD care. Take this event enshrined in legend (Remember that quote “print the legend”?) There’s a gentleman named Malcom Gladwell. He does a podcast called Revisionist History. The transcript of the relevant show is HERE as done by Emily Maina. The whole piece is really well done, and worth your time, but it’s about twenty minutes worth of reading, so I’m pulling out a couple of points to help make my point.
Mr. Gladwell was invited by the widow of the cop, to learn, as the late Great Paul Harvey used to put it, “The Rest of the Story”. This drove him to track down the artist that did the sculpture, the actual kid that was involved, friends of the cop in question, caused him to listen to the interviews done when the statue was commemorated, and so on. It seems the legend is far different from the truth. The kid in the picture wasn’t even part of the damn protest. He was a lookie-loo who had skipped school to come see “the great man” Martin Luther King.
The protests had at this point been going on for months. Constantly getting bigger, constantly drawing more spectators. The cops, specifically “the Birmingham Chief of Police, a troglodyte named Bull Connor”, in the words of Gladwell, have been tasked with keeping the spectators separated from the protesters. There was, after all, a legitimate fear that someone in the spectators might just be a Klansman, and might be aiming to take out some of MLK’s folks.
Well, that gets harder and harder to do, and the protester numbers keep growing, the spectators keep growing, until finally, Conner decides to use the K9 units to keep the peace. This is all a part of “the plan”. The protestors are trying to get the cops to do something that can be blown up and make international headlines. Finally, they succeeded.
The third of May, 1963. A photographer, Bill Hudson, gets a picture of a kid with a cop dog on him. White officer, black victim, mean dog. That’s what the narrative is. The New York Times runs it, three columns above the fold, and makes up a story to go along with it. The trouble is, no one talked to the cop, or to the kid.
The cop was Richard Middleton, his last gig had been escorting black kids to school, to keep them from being killed by whites. He’s been assigned now, to keep the separation line between the protesters and the populace. The kid’s name is Walter Gadsden, according to the person that interviewed him at the dedication of the statue, he’s now “a grumpy old man still wedded to some of the oldest and most awkward of Black prejudices”. She sees him as Stockholmed basically.
Walter, he sees himself as a dumb kid who skipped school, went where he wasn’t supposed to, and damn near got bit by a K9 because of it. Middleton was trying to pull the dog off, you can see it in the photo, if you actually look. But that’s not the legend, and the media prints “the legend”. The artist admits:
Well, I saw that the boy was being about 6’4, the officer was maybe 5’10, 5’9. And I said, “This is a movement about power”. So I made the little boy younger and smaller, and the officer taller and stronger. The arm of the law is so strong, that’s why his arm is almost, like, straight. And the dog is more like a wolf than a real dog. Because if I’m a little boy, that’s what I would see. I would see like this superman hovering over me, putting this big old giant monster of a dog in my groin area, in my private area. And so, that’s what I envisioned when I first saw the photograph.
Of course, the artist is a black man. He continues: “So he’s almost like a blind officer. He doesn’t even see the kid, because he’s so far beyond that. ‘Killed this nigger. Attack this nigger.’ He saw past the reality of this is a hu-, innocent chi-, human child, a human being, that’s why he was wearing blind people glasses like that.”
Well, it’s art, the artist wasn’t there, never talked to anyone involved, and he told the story he wanted to tell. OK, that’s what art does. The trouble is, that’s also what the news media did.
And they got away with it, until July 6 2017, which is when the article in question came out. Actually, they are still getting away with it, because now that the legend is fully established, good luck trying to convince people of the facts.
January 29, 2026
The steel industry in North America didn’t die … but it had to re-invent itself
When I first started paying attention to the news in the early 70s, one of the big stories both in the US and in Canada was the plight of the steel industry. It had been an enormously important part of the industrial economy for over a century, but every new story painted the picture blacker. Mergers, plant closings, consolidations, bankruptcies, and layoffs were consistent themes. Yet there is still a significant steel industry in North America. Tim Worstall explains what happened:
Dofasco’s steel plant on the harbourfront in Hamilton, Ontario
A little digression. To make steel from iron ore you use a blast furnace first. This uses coke (from coal), iron ore and limestone (moderns might use more than just limestone) to produce pig iron. You feed the pig iron into a basic oxygen furnace to make the steel. Yes, we can get much more complicated than that but let’s not.
The US now makes mebbe 20 million tonnes of pig iron a year. Imports are up, a bit, but nowhere near enough to make up the difference. That’s the big change because that’s from the 80 and 90 million tonnes a year of the 1970s. The change is the same whether we measure by domestic production of pig iron or by apparent consumption. Well, the change is the same either way close enough for this to be the big point to make.
What’s actually happened is a change in technology, not a change in trade. Nucor is now 50% or so of US steel output (no, not US Steel, but US steel). Nucor has never used a blast furnace in its corporate life. It collects scrap steel and makes new steel by recycling that. It skips, entirely, the blast and BoF stages. Back in the 1950s Nucor was a couple of scrap yards and a gleam in the corporate eye — now it’s that half the market.
Again, yes, we can get more complex if we wish to. But this is the basic pencil sketch. Yep, we’re more economic in our use of steel these days. Imports of steel are up and so is the importation of things made with steel. But the real change in the steel business over the past 60 to 80 years is the replacement of the steel making business with the steel recycling business. We don’t — and by this I mean the rich countries in general — make all that much steel these days. We recycle an awful lot of steel these days. And that’s what’s really changed.
That’s also what has near entirely screwed over the steel industry of places like Gary, Indiana. For they ran those basic steel making processes, iron ore in, basic steel out. Which isn’t something that has been replaced by imports, it’s something that has been replaced by just not doing it at all.1
Arnade goes on to point out that there are plenty of people still using steel to do things with, make things out of, which is all entirely true. But this idea that the Japanese, or China, killed the traditional US steel industry just isn’t true, not at all. It was Nucor.
All of which makes it just so much fun when it’s Nucor that shouts the loudest about the need for tariffs on steel imports. For Nucor points to the collapse of the traditional industry as its proof. Yet Nucor benefits from those tariffs — they can charge higher domestic prices as a result — even while Nucor is in fact the cause of the traditional collapse.
- “not at all” is rhetorical hyperbole, not a factual statement.
Starship Troopers: Service Isn’t The Point
Feral Historian
Published 5 Sept 2025There’s a long-running argument over whether Heinlein’s book describes military service as the exclusive path to citizenship, or if “federal service” is a much broader basket of enfranchisement. While a close read of the book makes it unquestionably clear which is correct, it misses the greater point. Heinlein was writing about the role of civic virtue in the stability of a republic, his citizenship-through-service framing is the literary conceit for discussing that larger question.
For a more detailed examination of the nature of Federal Service, I recommend James Gifford’s essay on the subject: https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ft…
00:00 Intro
00:45 What is Federal Service?
02:18 An Exploration of Enfranchisement
03:13 Expanded Universe
05:38 But Why?
06:59 Starside R&D
09:07 “Unreasonable Facsimile”
10:54 Filtering Civic Virtue
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January 28, 2026
An ADA unintended consequence in Los Angeles
I’ve heard many people refer to the Americans with Disabilities Act as the worst piece of legislation in US history, and stories like this one make it easy to agree:
Los Angeles’s streets are in notoriously bad shape. Fewer than two-thirds are considered in a state of good repair, according to the city’s Department of Public Works. Broken sidewalks have spawned years of costly litigation, and Los Angeles pays out millions of dollars each year to drivers whose cars are damaged by potholes.
Many cities would see this situation as a mandate for change. And Los Angeles has indeed made a change: last summer, the city quietly stopped repaving its streets. Not slowed. Not fell behind. Stopped completely.
The Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA) has not repaved a single street since last June, and the city’s latest budget practically zeros out repaving for next fiscal year. StreetLA crews are still doing some road repairs, fixing potholes and patching problem areas. But the most basic form of urban maintenance — full street resurfacing — has all but disappeared in America’s second-largest city.
Why has Los Angeles stopped repaving its streets? The answer, it turns out, has to do with federal disability rules that, paradoxically, have made fixing roads legally riskier than letting them fall apart. Though well-intentioned, L.A.’s shift shows how such policies can unintentionally worsen urban quality of life.
The clearest explanation of the city’s shift comes from L.A.–based housing and transportation advocate Oren Hadar. Digging through budget documents and engineering classifications, Hadar explained in an essay from late last year that the city didn’t necessarily abandon street work so much as reclassify it out of existence.
The city seems to have invented a new category of repair specifically designed to avoid triggering costly federal accessibility mandates. Instead of repaving streets, StreetsLA now performs what it calls “large asphalt repairs”. As Hadar explained, these repairs address localized damage — areas larger than a pothole but smaller than full resurfacing. Essentially, the city repaves only part of a street rather than the entire width, as shown below.
A “large asphalt repair” on L.A.’s Century Boulevard. Courtesy: StreetsLA on X
But, as Hadar wrote, “the thing about large asphalt repair is that it’s … not a real thing. It appears to be a term made up by the city some time in the last year.”
Why invent a new classification? The reason lies in federal disability law. Under regulations implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act, when a city alters a street, it must also bring associated pedestrian infrastructure into compliance. That means installing ADA-compliant curb ramps at every intersection along the way.
Repaving is considered an alteration that triggers these requirements. Maintenance activities, such as filling potholes or making minor repairs, are not. The city claims that large asphalt repairs are “pavement maintenance activity” and therefore do not require ADA upgrades.
That distinction carries enormous financial and logistical consequences. Hadar found that each curb ramp costs roughly $50,000, totaling about $200,000 per intersection. With roughly ten intersections per mile, curb ramps alone can add around $2 million per mile to the cost of repaving — a figure that often exceeds the cost of the asphalt itself. Design and construction typically take 9 to 12 months per ramp, and federal rules require the ramps to be completed by the time the street is resurfaced.
Update, 29 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
The Korean War Week 84: Inside Truman’s Diary – January 27, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 27 Jan 2026Things heat up in the Panmunjom Peace Talks, which each side arguing that the other side’s proposals violate the Geneva Convention, but by the end of the week they talks are in recess. Naval aircraft pound the North Korean infrastructure all week long, though, and US President Harry Truman has a few things to say about the Soviet Union that the world may wish to hear.
00:00 Intro
00:51 Recap
01:29 Repatriation and Parole
05:29 Airfields
07:22 Naval Aircraft Get Busy
10:36 Truman’s Diary
11:42 Summary
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