Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 Jan 2026The name “tanker” has been applied to shortened M1 Garand rifles for a long time and today we are looking at one of the rifles that was the genesis of that concept. It actually has nothing to do with tanks; the idea for a shortened M1 came from the Pacific Warfare Board of the US Army, looking for a handier weapon for jungle fighting. During 1944 when this idea was proposed, Springfield Arsenal was already independently working on the M1E5, a very similar paratrooper version of the M1. The PWB ordered the 6th Infantry Division in the Philippines to make 150 samples for testing, of which two were sent back to Springfield for testing.
In testing, the T26 showed the same problems as the M1E5 — excessive recoil, noise, and concussion. Despite this, 15,000 were recommended for production in the summer of 1945, but the war ended before any production actually took place. The name “tanker” came later, when companies started making cut-down Garands for commercial sale and thought that marketing them as specialized tanker weapons would help them sell.
Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this truly unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts: https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
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May 27, 2026
The Real T26 “Tanker” M1 Garand
May 26, 2026
“She is hoping to disturb them in their privilege and veiled racism”
Millennial Woes on having sympathy for the Midwit:
In August 2022 I stumbled upon this video of a young female teacher in Utah. She is what we would once have called an SJW. She describes how she has equipped her fourth-grade classroom in a way that she expects will annoy the parents of her (aged 9-10) pupils: all of the materials have been vetted by her to ensure that they include no images whatsoever of White people — “not a single White face there”.
Even though she knows the school is majority White (over 85%), she has designed her classroom, in her own words, “for non-white students”. To be fair, this could be simply because she is bringing materials from her previous school, which was much more diverse. But even then, you would think the sensible thing would be to buy materials more fitting for her new school. She does not.
So the woke attitude goes far beyond merely accommodating non-white people, and beyond even the absurdity of giving them equal prominence in our ancestral society, but actually to giving them precedence over us there.
What I found striking about this video, apart from the mindboggling fact that this is someone presumably vocated to help people yet doing something that will clearly harm her pupils, is how she delights in the fact that what she has done will annoy parents. To be precise, it will annoy parents who, whether conscious of it or not, are “racist”. After all, if they really “don’t see race”, then how can they possibly care about this? Thus, they cannot argue that their kids should see representations of their racial kin without outing themselves as “racist”, which in turn will make them very vulnerable. So this younger teacher feels not just morally sound, but bulletproof against reprisals, and very clever.
There is also a social class element to this. She specifies that these will be “posh White parents”. Despite appearing to be all of 23 and only having taught in very diverse schools, she alludes to experience in dealing with such upper-class White parents before. She is hoping to disturb them in their privilege and veiled racism.
She also clearly assumes that, if any parents do complain, she will be safe. The institution — not just her school but the entire education sector, including all of the academics and every university department that sustains them — will be on her side. If and when the parents complain (having navigated their way through the minefield of realising they are “racist” and painstakingly forming some lame argument to hopefully avoid that accusation) they will find that she is protected not just by her employer but by an entire segment of society. They, the parents, might get some small local newspaper to back them, or more likely to report the story impartially, but in all likelihood they will find themselves shamed by some much bigger newspaper. That is what she was clearly expecting when she made this video.
[…]
What I find troubling about this story is that it illuminates both the viciousness and the vulnerability of the midwit. It wouldn’t be worth fretting over, except that there are many millions of these people about. Every one of them is bright enough to grasp the drivel at teacher training college, but not bright enough to realise that it is drivel. Every one of them is vicious enough to harm children and take pleasure in disturbing the parents and sadistically putting them in an impossible position … but every one of them is literally just doing what they have been told to do, and is spreading the ideas they have been trained to believe are good, healthy, and crucially needed.
Gingerbread for Washington’s Army
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 2 Dec 2025Beautifully spiced gingerbread cookies formed in a sea goat mold
City/Region: England | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Time Period: 1773Christopher Ludwick was a true hero of the American Revolution. A German immigrant, he made his fortune in part by baking gingerbread in Philadelphia, and then used his baking knowledge, patriotic spirit, and all of his fortune to aid the American cause.
These gingerbread cookies are not as gingery as many modern ones, but the addition of mace, coriander seeds, and caraway seeds makes for a complex spiciness that is delicious. If you have gingerbread molds, these are a great time to use them, and if you don’t, they’re still delicious as cut-out cookies.
To Make Ginger-bread
Take a pound and a half of treacle, two eggs beaten, half a pound of brown sugar, an ounce of ginger beaten and sifted; of cloves, mace, and nutmegs all together half an ounce, beaten very fine, coriander-seeds and carraway-seeds of each half an ounce, two pounds of butter melted; mix all these together, with as much flour as will knead it into a pretty stiff paste; then roll it out, and cut it into what forms you please; bake it in a quick oven on tin plates; a little time will bake it.
— The Universal Cook or, the Lady’s Complete Assistant by John Townshend, 1773
QotD: Entropy versus Revolution
… the “Left” has nothing to do with even Marx anymore, much less anything so CisHetPatWhite as “the Rights of Man and Citizen”. Your “rights” are whatever the State says they are today, as determined by a snap poll of Blue Checkmarks. The “left” is, ironically, a bit better about paying lip service to their “tradition” than is the “right” — the “left” will still give you a good sermon about Evil Corporations, for instance, even as they’re using Big Tech, Big Bank, and Big Pharma to stomp you — but it’s clear that they believe in nothing, Lebowski, nothing!
They’re simply nihilists, and their nihilism is just a way station to suicide. Their “program”, such as it is, aims at absolute stasis — they want everyone and everything to be exactly one thing, now and forever, because this is the closest to annihilation they can get without being forced to admit to themselves that what they’re really longing for is the sweet release of death. The purpose of all those bespoke sexualities, for instance, clearly isn’t “to find a likeminded person to have sex with”; rather, it’s to make sure you can never have sex with anyone at all.
Ooops, sorry, you only fulfill 459 of the 462 bullet points on the checklist.
Which is weird, I realize, because the “Left” (for rhetorical convenience) are always in frantic motion. But it’s displacement activity. As I’ve written before, you can call it “permanent revolution”, but it’s Isaac Newton’s version, not Leon Trotsky’s — forever spinning in place, going nowhere. So long as they never stop spinning, they’ll never hear the vast emptiness of their own lives. They’ll never have to look their death wish straight in the eye.
The “Right” (again for rhetorical convenience) seems to be locked in a never-ending battle against entropy. That’s what it seems to boil down to. Things fall apart and pass away, and in their breakdown we are robbed of our fundamental dignity. In the end, that’s the only thing worth “conserving” — your fundamental dignity; the only “right” that matters is the right not to be a clown.
One always loses the battle against entropy eventually, but the dignity is in the fight. For the “left”, who have no dignity, the fight is just a distraction, sound and fury to distract from the nothingness that always threatens to overwhelm them … and that they secretly long for.
Severian, “Entropy vs. Revolution”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-21.
May 25, 2026
George Washington “basically started the world’s first global war”
On his Substack, Ed West talks about a book he had intended to write, but “put it on the back burner” for too long and the moment has passed:
George Washington in the uniform of the Virginia Regiment, 1772.
Portrait by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) from the Washington and Lee University collection via Wikimedia Commons.
The story would start in the 1750s. The first truly world war is in full flow, as Britain and France battle for supremacy of the continent and the oceans. In North America, British colonial troops fight side by side with soldiers from the old country, who mock the bumpkin locals with their ditty “Yankee Doodle“. But, rivalries aside, they both know what they’re fighting for: if Louis XV’s absolute monarchy wins, all their liberties will be gone.
In a heroic battle the British regular and colonial forces take the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne and rename it Fort Pitt, after cabinet minister William Pitt “the elder” – it later becomes Pittsburgh. By 1763 the French are driven out of North America altogether. The British colonies are safe. One officer particularly shines during this war, and diarist Horace Walpole writes how “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire”.
That Virginian was George Washington. Born in Wakefield in Westmoreland County, this British hero was the great-grandson of an Essex clergyman thrown out of the church for drunkenness, and who had landed in that colony in 1657. Washington was an impressive man in every way – standing at 6’2″, with enormous hands and feet and a massive nose, he was notably strong and able to throw objects immense distances (although many of these accounts improved in the telling).
Despite having almost no teeth, like any good British patriot, Washington was very proper about his appearance, insisting on bringing a selection of fine linen shirts even into the backwoods. A conservative by nature and with ambitions to serve as an officer in His Majesty’s forces, he didn’t like the new fashion for shaking hands, preferring the more formal bow.
A major at 21, Washington’s first job was to lead his men into the Ohio Valley to warn away any Frenchmen they found there. The following year, 1754, and now a lieutenant-colonel, he went back and built Fort Necessity close to Fort Duquesne, where he stumbled upon a contingent of enemy troops. They ran for their muskets and Washington ordered his company to fire. Ten Frenchmen were killed, including their lieutenant, and the incident would spark a war in North America between the two great powers, which in 1756 linked up with a Europe-wide conflict later known as the Seven Years’ War. It’s strange to think that, as well as being the first president of a future global superpower, Washington basically started the world’s first global war.
But what if France had won that struggle? Would French-controlled colonies in North America have formed constitutions centred on the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention the often-overlooked right to property? Would they have enshrined religious tolerance or the right to free speech? Trial by jury? Innocence until proven guilty? Hell, no! And if it wasn’t for us, my thesis went, you’d be speaking French.
Without England’s history of Parliamentary freedom, habeas corpus, Magna Carta and the jury system, the colonies would never have developed as they did. Neither would they have the same commercial spirit, downstream of their Puritan and Quaker inheritance.
I think I came up with the proposal after reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, one of the most discussed and popular analyses of American culture. This great work of history and anthropology charts the foundation of the country’s cultural folkways through four migrations – East Anglian Puritans to New England, Cavaliers from England’s south and south-west to Virginia, the mostly northern Quakers to the middle colonies, and Borderers from Ulster to the Appalachians.
I was always very interested in founder effects, whereby colonies come to take on aspects of the mother country which subsequently disappear back home. This is reflected in the fact that many “Americanisms” are actually old English words, like fall, trash and garbage, even “gotten”. It’s also true to some extent of the American accent, developing out of various regional dialects which have since been flattened by the dominance of London. This is especially the case with Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, which apparently is the closest thing to Shakespearean English, although I fear that if I went there this would no longer be true, and they’d all say “like” four times in every sentence and tell you they’re “reaching out”.
Did The Taranto Raid Inspire Pearl Harbor?
TimeGhost Cartographic
Published 24 May 2026In November 1940, the British Royal Navy launched a daring carrier strike against the Italian fleet at Taranto. The attack shocked the world, crippled Italian naval power in the Mediterranean, and demonstrated just how devastating naval air power could be against battleships at anchor. But the consequences of Taranto didn’t end in Italy.
In this episode, we explore the aftermath of the raid, the race to understand how it had been achieved, and why military observers around the world paid such close attention to what happened there. From British convoy operations in the Mediterranean to Japanese investigations into shallow-water torpedo attacks, this episode examines how one raid would echo far beyond the harbor at Taranto.
How did the British make the attack possible? What lessons did foreign observers take away from it? And why did some nations react to the raid very differently than others?
QotD: Modern movie casting
For a long time now, Hollywood has been taking great care to make the good characters black and the bad ones white. For a short while, the bad guys could be Arab terrorists, but now bad guys are white again. If they need to be foreign baddies, then they are neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or Russian gangsters. Of course, the smartest characters are black or female. If we’re lucky, the brainiac is a black lesbian. Every computer hacker is now non-white or female.
On occasion the blackwashing gets ridiculous. Some figure from white history is played by a black actor. A black guy in a show about medieval Europe could be amusing, but that’s not how it is done. Instead, we get black cowboys saving a white town or a black playing King Lear. It will not be long before we have historical dramas in which well-known figures from white history are played by black actors as black people. Imagine Ben Franklin played by Morgan Freeman.
The Z Man, “Blackwashing”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-02.
May 24, 2026
The PRC would need a literal “short, victorious war” to defeat the US
On Substack, Tom Kratman looks at the economic and strategic weakness of the Peoples Republic of China should it get into a serious shooting war with the United States:
China’s strategic position is appalling, and at least the higher party cadres and senior military leadership have to know that it is. Why? China is utterly dependent on both imports and exports to keep their economy going and to feed themselves. By that latter, I don’t just mean they need to import food, though they do to the tune of one third. That’s bad enough, but they also need to import fertilizer to grow the inadequate amount of food they grow for themselves. No, nitrogen and phosphates aren’t a huge problem; they are net exporters. Potash is a problem. Loss of potash imports probably cut their grain production by about ten percent. This would be painful, but survivable with a touch of rationing and some weight loss.
Except for one thing, oil and natural gas. Cut those off and grain production drops by a third within two years and probably forty percent after that. On top of the loss of the third that they must import, that’s serious hunger.
And another thing, farm machinery and transportation. China only produces about a quarter of its oil needs domestically. Cut those off and mechanization of farming must be reduced.
Add in that this kind of food reduction also means they must stop feeding food animals.
Moreover, while a good deal of their transportation net runs off of electricity, which can be produced by the coal China does have, at what we might call the strategic level, getting the food from the farms to the railheads and from the railheads to markets to kitchens requires liquid fuel. China’s ability to produce liquid fuel from coal exists, but it is tiny.
Add in the increased need for liquid fuel for their military in this case.
A long series of interrogatories to Grok suggests that China’s total food production and importation collapses by seventy percent or more within two or three years if they go to war with us.
It won’t be sudden; they probably have about a year’s worth of food in storage against such a day. But within three years? We’re talking an entire civilization in kwashiorkor1 and marasmus2.
How do they keep that industrial civilization going in the absence of food and energy imports, or the exports that have kept their economy going? They likely don’t.
Although China’s population appears to be in accelerating collapse, they still have a lot more people than we do. Surely that represents … nothing. For a war fought largely at sea it represents nothing. Yes, they can, at least for the moment, build more ships faster than we can. However, we can build things to sink ships faster than they can build ships. Thus, we’ll keep our existing naval supremacy.
There’s a worse factor in there, though; in China sons are just a lot more important than daughters. No, I don’t care if this upsets western feminist sensibilities; we are not talking about the west but about China. Daughters, assuming they marry, go on to take care of their husband’s family. Sons take care of the parents. It is the rare Chinese family with an extra son to spare.
But can’t they build enough ships to overwhelm our blockade in the short term, at least? No, they can’t. China is surrounded by enemies on land, Vietnam, India, and Russia predominant among them, though none of the neighbors – barring, maybe, North Korea – really likes China or doesn’t fear it. No, however much public kissy face they may engage in for foreign consumption, China and Russia have long-standing, intractable issues between them. China is a threat to Russia and vice versa in ways we are not.
So all the manpower and money spent on a navy is largely wasted. They’re not going to get a navy large, powerful, and competent enough to take us on and, if they really try to, we will manufacture a war – the United States is good at this – to trim them down to size before they can. Worse, every increment of money and manpower they spend on the navy is money and manpower not spent on the much more important army and air force.3
- Caused by protein deficiency.
- Caused by deficiency in all macronutrients.
- The Navy is much more important to us because we have no serious land enemies in this hemisphere.
Update, 25 May: 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.
Hollywood took the wrong lessons from Joss Whedon’s work
I was a huge fan of the TV show Firefly, which I think was Joss Whedon’s best work — perhaps more so because it was cancelled before any of his typical tics and quirks took the show in overtly progressive directions. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a comment on yesterday’s post about writers needing empathy to fully portray the characters they create:
Koko (literal gorilla) @Mark68002312
I think Joss Whedon did great at writing characters in the Joss Whedon universe. At least through Firefly.
I don’t understand how people — even people who don’t write for a living — think the character and the context/universe they live in are independent
Joss Whedon wrote the characters in Firefly the way he did because they were:
1. Rebels and iconoclasts, thus irreverent.
2. Broken people, thus inclined to hide deep pain behind shallow humor.
3. Familiar with each other already, thus more likely to banter.The style worked in Firefly because it created a sense of character and setting, which it was appropriate to.
Joss was no master of individualizing character voice, but he at least managed to get the group dynamics right.
However, Hollywood, sack of narcissistic overfunded retards that they are, managed to learn the wrong lesson from the show’s resonance with audiences.
“Oh, the people want light, quippy dialogue with a joke to interrupt every tense moment with a laugh. They are not interested in drama, pathos, gravitas, or emotional weight”, they concluded, and proceeded to pack every damn film with snark for the next twenty years, like Pacific islanders making landing strips and control towers out bamboo, enacting rituals to bring the “cargo” back.
The lesson they should have learned is that audience want, will always want, dialogue that illustrates and enhances character and setting.
Banter is a good tool, sometimes, but it is one good tool in a toolbox of many, and an author must select the right one to do character voice correctly.
“He will run. A vampire can run throughout the night, untiring. Verdammnis, is there no metal in this room larger than the buckles on braces? Were we women, at least we would have corset stays …”
“Here.” Asher sat suddenly on the lid of the coffin and pulled off one of his shoes with his good hand. He tossed it to the startled vampire, who plucked it out of the air without seeming to move. “Is your strength of ten men up to ripping apart the sole leather? Because there should be a three-inch shank of tempered steel supporting the instep. It’s how men’s shoes are made.”
“Thus I am served,” Ysidro muttered through his teeth, as his long white fingers ripped apart the leather with terrifying ease, “for scorning the arts of mechanics.”
Don Simon Ysidro doesn’t say “Well excuuuuuse me for not knowing all about shoes”, because Don Simon Ysidro is a three hundred year old Spanish nobleman turned vampire, not a homosexual Las Vegas nightclub DJ.
And when he remarks upon his own deficiency in knowledge, he says “mechanics”, not “tradesmen”, or “blue-collar workers”, because to a nobleman of the renaissance, a “rude mechanical” is not an impolite robot, he is an uncultured man who works at physical labor or crafts, rather than social or intellectual pursuits.
US Tanks & Armour in the Vietnam War
The Tank Museum
Published Jan 9, 2026If you watch films like We Were Soldiers and Platoon, Vietnam was all about Hueys dropping off Air Cav with M60 door gunners giving fire support and M16 toting grunts humping through the jungle. Tanks and AFVs barely get a look-in. In fact, armour was vitally important in Vietnam. The South Vietnamese, the US Marines and Army, all used AFVs in some of the worst tank country in the world in ways that definitely weren’t in the owner’s handbook. This is the story of armour in Vietnam, told through three incredible vehicles
First, the M48 – part of the famous US Patton family. Designed with the battlefields of Europe in mind, it was the US Marine Corps that insisted on bringing them to Vietnam. With 110mm of frontal armour, and a hull designed to deflect mine blasts, the M48s proved their worth time and time again.
Next, the M113 (or “tracks”) – an armoured personnel carrier that was the most numerous and, arguably, the most effective AFV on the battlefield. Designed to be air portable, the M113s had aluminium armour and weighed just 12 tons. As an APC, the M113 was basically a battle taxi intended to drop off its passengers and perhaps provide a bit of fire support with its pintle mounted .50 Cal. However, the soldiers in Vietnam skipped reading the owner’s handbook and set about turning them into ersatz tanks.
And finally, one of the most bizarre vehicles to ever emerge on the battlefield – the M50 Ontos. The Ontos was small – only 12.5 feet long and lightweight at 9.5 tons, making it easy to move by air. Yet despite its diminutive size the Ontos bristled with 6 M40 106mm recoilless rifles. They were small, ferocious and devastatingly effective.
00:00 | Introduction
00:46 | The Beginning
03:02 | The Patton
08:04 | The ACAV
11:39 | “The Thing”
13:33 | The Other Side of the Hill
15:28 | The End is NighThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
In this film, Chris Copson and Paul Famojuro reveal the untold story of armour in Vietnam. Whilst media portrayals of the Vietnam War tend to focus on other aspects of the armed forces, armoured fighting vehicles played an incredibly important role. The M48, a tank designed for Europe, ended up surviving mine strikes while crashing through the jungle. The M113, a lightly-armoured personnel carrier, was upgunned to serve in armoured assaults. And the M50 Ontos, a thing so ferocious a nearby shot would have the North Vietnamese abandoning their positions. This is the story of Armour in Vietnam.
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May 21, 2026
Evaluating the Boomers’ complaints from the Zoomers’ point of view
As a dirt-poor boomer (or Generation Jones-er as some term us extra-late boomers), I don’t have a lot of sympathy for others in my age cohort who complain about their kids and grandkids not getting ahead when they’re occasionally back in Canada from their second or third extended exotic foreign vacation since before the snow fell last fall. (It’s been more than a decade since the last time we were able to take any kind of vacation … and that was just a week’s driving holiday to South Carolina.) The Zoomers (and Millennials, and even some of the Gen X’ers) have valid complaints that the boomers generally are not capable of understanding, as John Carter explains:
I’m going to have a little rant, here, so I’ll start by emphasizing: Not All Boomers. Look, my mother is a boomer, and I love her dearly, in large part because she represents the opposite of so many boomer stereotypes. Many of you reading this are boomers; I know this because you’re in the comments, writing some of the best comments, you can ask anyone, the very best comments, everyone says it, it’s true. I know full well that much of what follows doesn’t apply to you, because you’re the good ones, the exceptional ones, the few, the proud So, please, do not take any of this personally.
With that said.
The shouting match broke down along the expected lines. Boomers – including spiritual boomers – loudly agreed with O’Leary’s remarks. If you only spend $2 a day on lunch, they insisted, the resulting $26 a day that you save adds up to $9490 a year; after 5 years, you’ve got the down payment for a $250,000 house. Checkmate, you financially illiterate layabouts!
Zoomers, millennials, and Gen-X replied that $250,000 will get you a leaky shack in rural Arkansas with black mold in the unfinished basement; that by the time you save up the money for the down-payment, that shack will be going for $500,000; that recent immigrants receive government assistance to get onto the property ladder (along with preferential employment) and so do not have to spend years of their lives saving up at all. Disaffected youth (and these days, that is just ‘the youth’) generally heaped scorn on the idea that it’s even possible to save in this economy, or that there’s anything worth saving. “If you live on instant noodles and margarine sandwiches for twenty years, you too, my son, can one day afford a van down by the river.”
As an aside, isn’t it incredible how fashion has barely changed since Chris Farley did this skit on SNL back in 1993? Stuck culture is everywhere.
Image and caption from Postcards from BarsoomI can see both sides of this. I tend to live frugally myself, not so much because I consider it virtuous but out of simple necessity. Throughout my 20s and 30s I was a career student living paycheck-to-paycheck, as a result of which I became very accustomed to cooking my meals and buying only what’s necessary. I’ve never once used DoorDash or Uber Eats. I buy my clothing at thrift stores, only purchase a new laptop once every decade or so, and have somehow managed to avoid racking up much in the way of debt … and by ‘somehow’ I mean that I’ve never owned a house or a car, partly because I changed continents too regularly to make such big-ticket purchases practical or necessary, but mostly because I couldn’t afford them. Even finishing my doctorate did not really bring anything you could call prosperity in its wake: my first position was for the princely some of just over USD30,000 per year. By the time I reached the median national income in my late 30s, I’d gotten so accustomed to frugal living that money started piling up in my account just because I had no idea what to do with it, and little inclination to spend it because I was honestly just happy to not have to worry about budgeting to make rent. That turned out to be very helpful when DEI came for my career track; I lived on those savings for a couple of years after.
[…]
There was a famous Stanford experiment called the Marshmallow Test which measured time preference in young children. A child would be left in a room with a single marshmallow on the table. They were of course free to eat the marshmallow, the experimenter would tell them, but if they didn’t, then later on they would get a second marshmallow. Children with high time preference – meaning that they strongly prefer the immediate reward to the hypothetical future reward – would cram the marshmallow into their candy-holes without a second thought. Children with low time preference – meaning that they value the future at a similar or even higher level to the present – would patiently wait, and be rewarded with a second marshmallow. These children were then followed, and it was demonstrated that the children with low time preference demonstrated better life outcomes: they maintained higher grades, were less likely to fall into debt, were less likely to develop drug addictions, were less likely to get pregnant before marriage, were less likely to get fat, and so on. All of which makes sense. The capacity to endure present pain – by studying, dieting, working out, what have you – in order to obtain a better future outcome is obviously going to be linked to better outcomes.
How would a smart kid react if the experimenter failed the marshmallow test?
For instance, say the experimenter simply lied. There was no second marshmallow; the child waited for nothing. Or, even worse, the first marshmallow was snatched away, and replaced with two marshmallows, each one half the size of the original? Or a third the size? Here are your two marshmallows, sucker, joke’s on you. What would the results be if, after this experience, the children were tested a second time? I don’t know if such an experiment has ever been conducted, but the outcome is not hard to guess. Every single one of the children, whether they’d passed the marshmallow test the first time or not, would scarf down the marshmallow the moment it was in front of them.
The capacity for low time preference may be largely innate, but whether it expresses or not is entirely a function of social trust. In order to defer gratification for a greater future reward, one must believe that there is a reasonably high chance of that reward manifesting. The less likely the future reward becomes, the more steeply a rational actor will discount the future.
I don’t want to minimize the hardships that boomers endured when they were young. Boomers worked hard, and they didn’t enjoy the same conveniences that we enjoy now. They fought in the Vietnam War (well, about 3% of them), they spent most of their lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, they suffered through the oil shock and stagflation in the 70s, they were punished by double-digit interest rates in the early 80s, and they spent their working lives trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the skyrocketing inflation that was unleashed when Bretton-Woods fell apart and the last vestigial support of the gold standard was kicked out from under the brrrring money printer.
But, despite all of that drama, the one thing boomers could generally rely upon was that – so long as thermonuclear annihilation was averted – things would generally get better. Technology would advance. Working conditions would get safer. The special effects in movies would become more convincing. Houses would get larger. Cars would get nicer. Air conditioning would get quieter. The environment would get cleaner. Society would become more just. The world would become freer and safer for democracy. And so on and so forth. Baby boomers have enjoyed a charmed life such as no other generation has known: free of major wars, full of technical wonders, in which whatever difficulties you might endure now, you could generally count on the future being a better place. For the boomer, deferred gratification always had a payoff.
For the zoomer – and the millennial, and generation X – this has simply not been the case. After 9/11 a police state panopticon settled over society. The 2008 real estate crash pulled the rug out from under the millennials, after which real-estate got ZIRPed to the Moon. Mass immigration pumped real estate demand further, while undercutting wages and rendering public spaces steadily more alienating, unpleasant, and dangerous. Black Lives Matter immolated quaint notions of racial harmony. DEI threw young white men, their careers, their futures, and their unborn children to the wolves. COVID stole two years from young people’s lives so that old people could feel safe from the coof. Now, AI^2 (Artificial Intelligence + Actual Indians) means that the only thing the young expect in their future is gig work in the sex trade industry (until robots take that, too).
Explaining why more men are “opting out”
On Substack, Bettina Arndt shows some of the reasons why men are less and less willing to commit — not just to relationships, but to huge swathes of what we used to call “adult life”:
The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic — inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture, and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible, and less than a real man.
Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame, and the yoke comes off.
Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.
The trend is not confined to America. Australian men’s workforce participation has fallen from around 79% in 1978 to approximately 71% today (see below), while similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK and Canada.
[…]
If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.
The modern woman: a prospectus.
- They are the most miserable, anxious, and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.
- Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
- Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
- They’ve gone full throttle left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
- They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
- Yet their hypergamy (desire to marry up) is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
- The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.
- They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.
What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?
May 20, 2026
The Korean War Week 100: Mark Clark in Command – May 19, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 19 May 2026Mark Clark is the new UN Commander and will run the war in Korea, replacing Matt Ridgway, who leaves for Europe to take over NATO Command. The Koje-Do POW camp situation is resolved, but is a black eye for the UN, as are the allegations that the US has been practicing germ warfare in Korea and Manchuria, backed up by “confessions” from captured American airmen.
00:00 Intro
01:13 Recap
01:29 Demand and Response
05:35 What Went Wrong at Koje-Do?
12:06 Germ Warfare?
13:55 Mark Clark
15:45 ROK and Ammunition
19:53 Philippine Raids
21:16 Summary
21:28 Conclusion
22:09 Call to Action
Canadian politics can be bad for your mental health
As a rule of thumb, the more you pay attention to Canada’s political circus, the worse your state of mental health becomes, IMO anyway. On a more serious note, David Clinton got curious about a recent Manhattan Institute project tracing American mental health trends:
Image from The Audit
The Manhattan Institute’s research into the confluence of mental health trends and political leanings in the U.S. generated buzz a while back. Among other things, they discovered that, as of the 2021-22 school year, liberal students were 13-17 percent more likely to seek mental health treatment than their conservative peers. That’s a frightening gap.
I was curious to know if there’s anything like that going on here in Canada. And it turns out that there’s excellent public-facing data waiting for us to drop by and help ourselves. The most recent published version of the Canadian Election Study (CES) dates back to the period around the 2021 federal election — the full dataset from 2025 isn’t yet available.
There were 20,968 respondents in total in the CES survey data from 2021. Having now spent a couple of happy hours with the results, this looks like an excellent representation of Canadian society. The questions go both deep and wide.1
I was able to directly address the political angle to all this using responses to one core question. Participants were asked to situate themselves on a political “scale where 0 means the left and 10 means the right”.
I classified anyone who responded with a number higher than 6 as “far right”, and responses less than 4 were tagged “far left”. The far left cohort had 4,927 members, while there were just 3,891 people in the far right. Those numbers are easily large enough to make distinctions potentially statistically meaningful.
Anxiety
I explored both far right and far left cohorts for how accurately the words “anxious” and “easily upset” applied to them. A response of seven indicates a self-assessment of extreme anxiety, while zero would be Big-Lebowski-level calm.
The average for the right-coded group was 3.47, while those on the left rated themselves 3.88.
Overall Mental Health
Respondents were asked to rate their mental health in relation to their peers where “1” indicates excellent mental health and “5” indicates poor mental health. A total of 3,878 from the far right responded and 3,263 from the far left. The average of all responses on the right was 2.02 (standard deviation: 0.876859) and from the left, 2.32 (0.926268).
- In fact, the average survey took two hours and twenty five minutes to complete! I’m definitely glad they didn’t ask me.
I mentioned the other day that the US was fully justified in “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence due to the Canadian government’s continued delinquence on military matters (and Prime Minister Carney’s blatant desire to tweak American noses while neglecting joint interests with the United States. At The Line, Matt Gurney says this won’t be the only tangible sign of American impatience with our ongoing fecklessness:
As I posted on social media when sharing this: “This is another gentle reminder to the f*ckwits in the Canadian government that they are playing with existential fire when they work to actively piss off our American allies.”
First of all, and this will annoy the Elbows Uppers to no end, the undersecretary’s comments are, fundamentally, accurate. Canada has indeed massively underinvested in defence and has also prioritized rhetoric over reality. I completely understand why Canadians hate admitting this — I hate admitting this. Having your flaws pointed out to you by someone you dislike is always a mortifying experience. But I’ve spent almost two decades writing about the very things Colby is pointing out — Canada has allowed its military capability to atrophy to a point, as I noted just a week ago in an episode of On The Line, where we’ll need many years and untold billions of dollars just to rehabilitate the armed forces. Expanding them and adding capabilities will be a whole other level of investment. This is why Canada’s recent major announcements on defence, though good and welcome, are also not enough — it will take a long time and even more money to actually repair what we have allowed to rot.
The other half of what Colby identified is also, alas, accurate. While we were massively underfunding defence and allowing core capabilities to wither and die, or while just totally missing the bus on transformational military developments (hello, drones!), Canada did indeed talk a lot about the rules-based international order and the role of middle powers and punching above our weight and all the rest. Canada focusing on rhetoric instead of reality is, alas, a fair criticism.
Many U.S. administrations called us out on this. We ignored them. Donald Trump is unique in how viciously he is prepared to exploit our weakness, but he’s hardly the first to have noticed it and called us out on it. I carry no water for MAGA or Trump, but they’ve got us dead to rights on this one. The bad orange man didn’t let the navy rust out, repeatedly defer the fighter jet replacement and hobble the army with non-serviceable equipment and recruiting and procurement systems that were actually quite awful at both those things.
We did those things. We did it to ourselves. Colby is simply possessed of the gall to bluntly call us out on our failures, in a way that Canadians aren’t accustomed to and aren’t going to enjoy.
So that’s part of it. But it’s also worth asking why the U.S. is doing this, and especially why they’re doing it now.
Part of it, probably, is just sincere frustration with us. As noted above, Colby’s remarks are accurate. But the timing is interesting. The CUSMA renegotiation deadline looms in early July And in Colby’s remarks, do I detect a whiff of the art of the deal?
The Carney government has made, and continues to make, plenty of announcements about plans, and potential deals, and future capabilities, and so on … but the Americans can’t help but notice that little is actually being done despite all the sound and fury on the PR side. Canada belatedly reached the long-agreed-upon 2% of GDP target for military spending, but most of it was a bookkeeping exercise of moving existing costs onto the Department of National Defence budget (the Canadian Coast Guard and parts of Veterans Affairs) but not much improved in Canada’s actual defence capabilities.
QotD: “Gilded Age” Robber Barons didn’t have access to what even working-class Americans have now
… but the robber baron knew he needed the serfs. Their relationship was purely dialectical. Without his factory hands, no robber baron. And in a strange but very real way, the higher up the food chain your Gilded Age robber baron went, the more he was dependent on his serfs for his lifestyle. J.P. Morgan is usually credited as being the first guy to become a Robber Baron purely through finance. Carnegie, Rockefeller, all those guys had most of their wealth in financial instruments, of course, but those financial instruments rested on control of a physical product — Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil.
I’m probably being unfair to Jay Cooke, the Michael Milken of his day, but since more people have heard of J.P. Morgan let’s roll with it. Even though Morgan’s wealth was entirely on paper — he was nothing but a securities trader — his lifestyle utterly depended on a battalion of servants. In a very real way, you yourself, right now, live much better than J.P. Morgan did in his heyday. And not just because you have aspirin, antibiotics, and air conditioning, three taken-for-granted things ol’ J.P. would’ve given half his kingdom for. But because you have more time. If you’re hungry, you can open the fridge or the microwave and have all the food you need in a matter of minutes.
J.P. couldn’t. J.P. had to deploy an army of servants every time he wanted a snack, and those servants were constrained by things like “availability of ice” and “when is the fishmonger at his stall”. You’re hungry at 2am, you jump in your car and get some Taco Bell. It takes ten minutes. J.P.’s hungry at 2am and it’s tough titty, J.P., your ass is going hungry. Because even though you’re the richest man in the world and have legions of manservants at your beck and call, Taco Bell just isn’t there. Even if someone had had the brilliant idea to create a Gilded Age Taco Bell, it still would’ve taken hours:
Wake up the manservant. Wake up the groom and stableboy. Hell, wake up the horse, then saddle the horse, ride to the drive thru window … which in this case means “the house of the guy who runs Gilded Age Taco Bell”. At which point he has to fire up the oven, start pounding the tortillas, send his own legion of valets and stableboys and whatnot out to get the refried beans …
And that’s the other thing, J.P. — you’d best not pull that shit too often, because those people know where you live. Not only do they know where you live, they live with you. Literally under the same roof. You want to sleep easy? You’d best not beat the servants too often, buddy.
There’s only so much “class consciousness” one can develop in that world. Oh yeah, J.P. thought of himself as one of the Masters of the Universe, there’s no denying that. But J.P. lived in what was still a brutally physical world, in a way we PoMo people really can’t grasp. If you can’t imagine what it would take to get some Gilded Age Taco Bell, maybe geography will do the trick. Ever seen Gangs of New York? Even if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard the name “Five Points”. The worst slum in America in the 19th century, and 19th century American slums were world class …
That was right down the street from Wall Street. Literally. I am not in any way joking, and if I’m exaggerating a little for effect when I say “J.P. could’ve hit Five Points with a five iron from his swanky digs on Central Park West”, I promise you I’m not exaggerating much. You can look it up for yourself. The main reason the Union rushed troops straight from the Gettysburg battlefield, and no-shit shelled parts of the city with gunboats, during the Draft Riots was because Five Points (et al) was right fucking there, and they might’ve gotten it into their heads to lynch a few Masters of the Universe. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight, right? Let’s see how you like it, you bankster bastards …
The PoMo “information economy” removes all that. The other day I joked about colleges like Bennington and Goucher. I cracked some jokes, yeah, but I wasn’t really joking. Those places aren’t for us. Wall Street is still a physical location, but it might as well be on the dark side of the moon for all any of us have access to it. J.P. couldn’t beat the servants too hard, or too often. The modern equivalent of J.P. isn’t even aware that he has servants. He just clicks on a website, and stuff appears at his door. Like magic. Hell, it IS magic for all he knows, and he surely doesn’t care, because all that shit is his by right. He went to Bennington, after all. He has achieved full class consciousness.
All of which suggests, of course, that while Marx was wrong about the end state — the State will not, in fact, wither away — he might well have been right about the solution to the “contradictions of capitalism”, if you follow me. And if that makes me some kind of godless pinko Commie subversive, well … I’ve been called worse by better.
Anybody got the lyrics to La Marseillaise in English?
Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.
Update, 21 May: 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.
