… the basics of the confidence game have not changed all that much with the new technology. The confidence man gets his name because he is adept at winning the confidence of the mark. The mark then lowers his defenses and foolishly trusts the con man, rather than his own natural skepticism. The mark is manipulated into thinking the con man is a friend or at least someone who can be trusted. The con man then uses that trust to exploit the mark.
The way in which the con men does this is by flattery. The mark trusts the con man, because the con man finds small ways to confirm the beliefs of the mark. The adept grifter will be a good listener and pick up the little things that the mark thinks are important, like religious beliefs or opinions about personal matters. Seemingly out of the blue, the con man will express those same opinions, which flatters the mark. After all, everyone likes being told that their private opinions are smart.
That’s something you see with the internet grifters. They often have worn a lot of masks as they seek out on-line audiences. […]
Another aspect of the con that remains constant is how the con man uses his alleged status as a victim to work the mark. Con men will use their mark’s natural empathy to win their confidence. Today that often means claiming the big bad tech companies are censoring them. Alternatively, they will claim evil trolls are haunting their internet activity, causing them harm. The term troll has been changed from meaning someone seeking attention to something almost supernatural.
The Z Man, “Carny Town”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-29.
April 29, 2025
April 28, 2025
A potential positive to the explosion of AI-generated fake porn
The one thing we have always been able to predict with 100% confidence is that every new media will be used for pornography and crime, often in the same product. However, No Pasaran makes a case for there being a socially useful side to the ever-increasing realism of fake porn from popular LLM generators:
Seriously?! Am I the only person that sees the benefits of this “troubling trend” of online bullying?!
Think about it.
Blackmail is now a thing of the past.
That’s it.
It’s over.
Whether you are a teen or an adult, whether the photos are real or not, you can simply pass all of them off — indeed, you can do so nonchalantly — as fakes or deepfakes. To your classmates, to your spouse, to your constituents. Who will know whether you are fibbing or telling the truth? (Maybe you hardly know yourself …)
(In a totally different context, of course, that is exactly what Joe Biden’s White House did …)
As it happens, a considerable size of the audience for these sex photos/videos — maybe far more than half — will already be assuming that they’re fakes … (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.)
Depression at 16? Suicide at 17? Why fear sextortion at this point? Compliment instead the (anonymous) photo/video creators for doing a good job — for doing an outstanding job.
On my phone I keep receiving photos of Donald Trump tenderly cuddling with Joe Biden or Vladimir Putin or Stormy Daniels. Lots of apps now make you “repair” snapshots that are decades or (over) a century old, colorize them, and make them into mini-movies (the latest one I saw delighted me as it involved Civil War daguerreotypes from the 1860s).
I also keep receiving AI ads where, by combining a couple of photos of myself and of any girl (someone I know and am perhaps infatuated with or some rock or movie star or someone — Marilyn Monroe? Rudolph Valentino? Che Guevara? Queen Victoria? — who has been dead for decades) I can make myself hug or kiss that person — hungrily — on the mouth.
Years ago (long before AI), I was writing a TV script imagining a politician who was on national television and who was all of a sudden ambushed with private photos of him in a compromising position (with a woman other than his wife, with a man, with many women, with many men, at an orgy, in a BDSM cave, with a money shot, whatever …). Talk of falling victim; talk of bullying; talk of harassment (justified or otherwise)!
How should he react?
Ignore the content. And, with an admiring voice, let out a whistle and praise the work: “Wow, that’s well done!”
“What do you mean?!” interrupts the TV presenter, visibly frustrated. “No no no! Don’t tell me you are claiming they’re fake?! We have proof that you were seen at—”
Again, this was before AI, needless to say, which only made the politician’s next words even more startling: “It is so how admirable the degree to which studios have made progress with special effects!”
Stalin and Tito fight over the Balkans: Greek Civil War part 2 – W2W 24 – 1948 Q4
TimeGhost History
Published 27 Apr 20251948 plunges Greece deeper into civil war as foreign aid fuels brutality on both sides. The Nationalist government launches ruthless crackdowns, establishing notorious prison camps, while the Communist Democratic Army desperately seeks aid from Yugoslavia and Stalin’s Soviet Union. But when Stalin rejects the rebellion, Yugoslavia’s Tito steps in — until a stunning feud erupts, leaving Greek communists stranded. Will this power struggle decide Greece’s fate?
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Unintended consequences of vehicle mileage regulation
On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Sheel Mohnot explains the amazing unintended consequences of another “great idea with the best possible intentions”:
Ever wonder why sedans disappeared and every car is huge now?
“Thanks, Obama!”
His administration changed fuel economy standards in a way that had the perverse impact of making cars even bigger.
Here are all the vehicles for sale by the 3 largest US automakers. 62 vehicles, 4 sedans (6%). 20 years ago this chart would have been ~50% sedans!
What happened?
Obama administration changed auto fuel efficiency rules to tie fuel economy targets to vehicle size.
Under the new system:
-The bigger the car’s footprint, the easier the MPG target was.
-Light trucks (including SUVs and crossovers) had far lower requirements than passenger cars.
-Crossovers were quietly reclassified as “trucks,” giving them a huge regulatory advantage.Instead of building lighter, more efficient cars, automakers simply made everything bigger, and made more trucks and SUVs.
Notice that cars that used to be sedans are now crossovers? They do this so it counts as a light truck – they raise ground clearance, square off the rear for cargo capacity, and meet off-road approach minimums so they get qualified as a light truck. Think Subaru Legacy > Subaru Outback.
As you can see in the chart, it’s a LOT easier to meet MPG requirements if your vehicle is classified that way.
So cars got LARGER to meet fuel efficiency goals. The new Honda Civic is 20 inches longer and 4 inches wider than it used to be, about the same size as an old Accord. By making the Civic larger, Honda slightly shifted it into a more favorable regulatory category.
… and smaller cars disappeared. The Honda Fit was a great little car, but would have had to hit 67 MPG in 2026, which would be nearly impossible … so instead, Honda stopped selling them.
So, the only way to make small vehicles now is to make them EV’s (Chevy Bolt).
The Slate truck that is all the rage now is only possible because it’s an EV … otherwise its footprint would have demanded an overly onerous MPG target.
So in short – Obama era CAFE standards had the opposite of the desired impact: sedans died, vehicles ballooned in size, and America’s streets turned into an SUV parking lot.
All thanks to a policy that accidentally incentivized bloat instead of efficiency.
Don’t get me started on “cash for clunkers!”
Making School Cafeteria Pizza from the 1980s & ’90s
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 24 Dec 2024A rectangular slice of cheese pizza, part of a complete meal in 80s and 90s schools in the US.
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1988Food in US schools from when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s were, to put it mildly, not the healthiest. Either there was actual fast food available, or many meals mimicked fast food favorites, like this cheese pizza.
One bite of this pizza brought back a flood of memories. It is almost exactly how I remember it from middle school, and I highly recommend making it to anyone who has rectangle pizza nostalgia. I chose to make it with the pourable crust because I was intrigued, but after tasting it, I’m convinced it was the same one that my school used.
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QotD: “Redpill poisoning”
Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort
There is a phenomenon I call redpill poisoning where someone sees through the establishment matrix, but then starts assuming the exact opposite of that narrative is always true. This oneshots a lot of smart people.Absolutely. Among other things, I think this explains why a large minority of conservatives have become suckers for Russian propaganda about the Ukraine war.
I like your term “redpill poisoning” and will adopt it.
ESR, Twitter, 2025-01-25.
April 27, 2025
Nuking the Reich: What If the War Had Dragged On? – Out of the Foxholes Live
World War Two
Published 26 Apr 2025Indy and Sparty bring you another episode of Out of the Foxholes Live! Today they talk about Thailand’s relationship with Japan, ask why the Americans firebombed Japanese cities even after cutting off the country’s supplies, and they tackle a big one: would the Allies have nuked Germany?
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“[T]he practical reality of electoral politics throughout the west: the choice is between a Leftward Ho! party and a Ratchet party”
Mark Steyn on the steady leftward march of pretty much every western nation that never, ever stops and only rarely slows down:
A ratchet allows rotation in one direction, but prevents rotation in the other direction. That’s been a common explanation of most western governments for decades … leftward motion occurs, but can only be stopped, never reversed.
In a shrewd assessment of the current campaign Down Under, Paul Collits cites a certain “niche Canadian”:
Mark Steyn says that we cannot vote our way out of the Western mess. The 2025 Australian election is living proof of the truth of his claim. Whoever wins here will inherit an unholy mess, and will not have the will to address it.
Of course, he could be talking about next week’s Canadian election or last month’s German election. As we have noted, Fred Merz, the incoming chancellor in Berlin, has yet to take office but what Americans call the honeymoon is over before the coalition has been officially pronounced man and wife. Hermann Binkert, head honcho of Germany’s INSA polling agency, says the country has never seen loss of approval on this scale between the election and the formation of the government. The so-called “far-right” AfD is now leading in multiple polls. Which would be super-exciting if voting hadn’t already taken place.
In America, the new administration certainly has the “will to address” the “unholy mess” but the Trumpian Gulliver is beset on all sides by District Court Lilliputians whose position is that what a Democrat president has done cannot “lawfully” be undone. This is a pseudo-“constitutional” recognition of the practical reality of electoral politics throughout the west: the choice is between a Leftward Ho! party and a Ratchet party. If the Left wins, they dissolve the border and trannify your kids. If the “Right” wins (Stephen Harper, Scott Morrison), they may pause some of the more obviously crazy stuff but they never actually reverse the direction of travel. Unless they’re the UK Tories (Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak), in which case they stay in the leftie lane without even shifting down to third gear.
So “politics”, as increasingly narrowly defined, is less and less likely to save you. Because the gap between “politics” and reality grows ever wider. Consider the instructive example of one Hashem Abedi. Mr Abedi and his brother plotted the Ariana Grande concert bombing in Manchester. It was, from the Abedi viewpoint, a huge success: twenty-two dead, half of them kids, plus a thousand injured. It was a big deal at the time: lots of flowers, teddy bears, and heart-rending renditions of “Don’t Look Back in Anger”.
So you’d have thought even the British state would have at least pretended to take it seriously. Hashem Abedi was detained at His Majesty’s Pleasure, and under one of the three supposedly toughest prison regimes in England and Wales. Nevertheless, on April 12th he put three of his guards in hospital with what were described as “life-threatening injuries“. A fortnight later, two are still there. How did a maximum-security prisoner manage to do that? Well, he used boiling cooking oil and weaponised kitchen utensils.
So how did he get hold of boiling cooking oil? Was he a finalist for Maximum Security Masterchef? Ah, well. The details remain vague, and as usual the worthless UK media has shown not the slightest curiosity in how the Ariana Grande perp came close to bulking up his death toll by fifteen per cent.
In the Footsteps of 45 Commando: 60 Miles Across the Falklands
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Dec 2024I was recently joined by my friends Les Winner (Polaris Logistics) and Jari Laine (Varusteleka) for an epic trek across East Falkland in the footsteps of 45 Commando of the British Royal Marines. In 1982, the Marines landed to rebuff the Argentine invasion of the islands. Specifically, they landed at Port San Carlos on the far western side of the island, planning to use heavy-lift helicopters to move east to attack the Argentine positions around Stanley. However, the Chinooks they were counting on were on the Atlantic Conveyor, which was sunk by Argentine Exocet attack on May 25. That left the Marines with no choice but to hike the 60 miles or so overland. They did so overland in the South Atlantic winter, with combat loads and full rucksacks — it was a brutal movement that they executed with aplomb.
Les, Jari, and I wanted to see the ground, and so we headed out to follow the same path, albeit without the weapons or ammunition and in the summer. We took four days to complete the distance, meeting some really cool people and making lots of blisters along the way. This video is a record of that trip.
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QotD: Fighting against Japan in the Pacific
And lord knows the Americans took the bait, more than once. If “bait” is really the right word, because if you’ve got no choice … the early campaigns in the Solomons were so legendarily nasty for that reason: You have no choice but to go right up the pipe to seize an objective, and if you do, the enemy has no choice but to go right up the pipe to get it back.
The genius of the later American strategy — and credit where it’s due, few people have a lower opinion of MacArthur than I, but this was brilliant — was to simply go around. Heavy bomber strips are a must, and in the even fewer places in the Pacific that can take heavy bombers, the Americans had no choice but to go right up the chute … but carrier airpower can do a hell of a lot, particularly when it can move about completely unmolested by the enemy. Thus the Americans turned all those guaranteed meat grinders the Japanese had set up for them into big open-air POW camps, without bothering to go in there and force them to surrender (which, of course, they wouldn’t). Have fun starving in your bunkers, boys; we’ll just leave a covering naval detachment, to make sure you can’t evacuate; see you when the war’s over.
Severian, “Strategy”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-21.
April 26, 2025
A proposal for cutting the Channel crossing phenomenon
In The Conservative Woman, David Wright suggests a concrete plan to stem the tide of “refugees” arriving in the south of England from Calais and other French Channel ports:
Illegal Channel crossings by rubber dinghies overloaded predominantly with young men have been an increasingly worrying trend for many years yet successive governments have made no serious or workable attempts to do anything about it.
Migrant crossings are up by more than 40 per cent on last year and a record for daily arrivals has been set. A total of 705 migrants in 12 boats crossed the Channel on Tuesday April 15, days after the previous record of 656 was set the previous Saturday. The total number of arrivals in 2025, at 8,888, is 42 per cent higher than at the same point last year and 81 per cent higher than at this stage in 2023. More arrivals were recorded in January to April than in the equivalent four-month period in any year since data on Channel crossings began in 2018.
The French authorities are providing lifejackets to ensure migrants can cross the Channel safely. The jackets are returned to the French once the migrants have been escorted to the mid-point of the Channel and are rescued by the British authorities, so that they can be re-used for future crossings.
We have seen French police on the beach at Calais standing idly by while migrants board dinghies to Dover.
[…]
The boats should be painted grey, a small gun mounted on the foredeck, and manned with recently retired RN personnel. (There would be no shortage of volunteers.) A small support base should be built in Folkestone harbour, initially using Portakabins for rapid start-up, with fuelling facilities, a small workshop, an accommodation block and a canteen. This could be achieved relatively quickly and at a modest cost to the defence budget. These boats would be tasked with patrolling the Dover Strait every day from dawn to dusk, three or four at a time. Drones could also be used to detect dinghies and direct the patrolling boats to them. They would not need to be at sea in weather too rough for small smuggler-boat crossings.
They should be tasked to intercept the smugglers wherever they are in the Channel, approaching our shores, over the mid-way line or just leaving French beaches, and turned back and escorted. On approach to the smugglers’ beach the Border Force vessel should stand off and launch a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) manned by four staff who would escort them until they grounded on the beach. With two of them standing guard with weapons the others, using box cutters, would slash long holes in the rubber dinghies and remove the outboard motors and drop them into the water to render them unserviceable. On completion the RIB should return to its vessel and the vessel withdraw to resume patrol. Input from serving senior naval officers would be needed to provide detailed operating procedures. Once deployed this division would be under the command of a senior serving officer.
Of course, French President Emmanuel Macron would immediately be protesting. But he hasn’t got a leg to stand on. France is a signatory to the Schengen Agreement which requires migrants/asylum seekers to be processed in the first safe country they enter. Not only that but Britain has paid France almost half a billion pounds to stop the migrants arriving at the beaches and boarding dinghies to Dover.
France has not only done nothing but trouser this cash while its navy continues to escort the dinghies into UK waters and hand them off to our Border Force or the RNLI.
The week-before-the-vote Bullshit Bulletin
The Line‘s invaluable bullshit tracker includes some steaming bullshit from Mark Carney, the Conservative campaign, and, perhaps the most acrid bullshit from the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh:
Jagmeet Singh, the empty turban. He is the current (and possibly last) leader of the federal New Democratic Party, and it’s his conscious actions that may have doomed his party to parliamentary oblivion.
This article, about a recent meeting between Singh and the Toronto Star editorial board, is just absolutely bonkers. Jagmeet. Our dude. We like you. We do. But this is some epic bullshit.
This passage, in particular:
The NDP leader stood by his decision not to plunge the country into an early election last fall while support for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals plummeted, telling the Star‘s editorial board he “couldn’t stomach” the idea of causing Pierre Poilievre’s seizure of power, and that he made the choice to put Canada’s interests ahead of those of the New Democratic Party.
“While we could have won lots of seats, it would have meant a Pierre Poilievre majority Conservative government, and I could not stomach that,” Singh said, making the argument that an election would have jeopardized progress on pharmacare deals and dental care expansion. “I love my party. I care deeply about it. I want us to win. I want us to up our seats. I know we’re good for people. But in that moment, I made a decision for the interest of the country ahead of my party. And that was a decision I made wide-eyed, and I stand by that decision.”
Hmmm. Okay. So. Let’s take that at face value. If only for the sake of argument.
Singh realizes what the logical endpoint of that argument is, right? … right?! The story of this election, to the extent there is a single one, is that the NDP collapse made it impossible for the Conservatives to win. We have lots of criticisms of the CPC campaign; we’ve made some already and we’ll have more to say when it’s over. But we recognize the truth that without a strong NDP, even a perfect and flawless Conservative campaign was always going to be an uphill battle. It’s just a really difficult situation for the Conservatives to overcome.
And you know what Singh could do to make that a permanent state of affairs? Give up! Tank the NDP completely. Do a national tour asking everyone to vote Liberal. Defect and become a Liberal. Spend his post-politics career, which seems set to start sometime early next week, campaigning for a two-party system, under which the Liberals defeat the Conservatives over and over.
End the vote splitting by ending the NDP. That’s a case that many Liberals have made before. And fair enough. But it’s some kind of bullshit to see Singh himself making it, and we can’t imagine his NDP colleagues are particularly pleased to see their leader taking a position that the Liberals took years ago: that the best way for left-leaning voters to stop the Conservatives is to put the country first, and vote for them.
Lies, damned lies and government statistics
Francisco at Small Dead Animals linked to this interesting examination of the difference between the official inflation rate and the actual inflation ordinary Canadians are coping with:
Great news! We’ve brought inflation back under control and stuff is now only costing you 2.4 percent more than it did last year!
That’s more or less the message we’ve been hearing from governments over the past couple of years. And in fact, the official Statistics Canada consumer price index (CPI) numbers do show us that the “all-items” index in 2024 was only 2.4 percent higher than in 2023. Fantastic.
So why doesn’t it feel fantastic?
Well statistics are funny that way. When you’ve got lots of numbers, there are all kinds of ways to dress ‘em up before presenting them as an index (or chart). And there really is no one combination of adjustments and corrections that’s definitively “right”. So I’m sure Statistics Canada isn’t trying to misrepresent things.
But I’m also curious to test whether the CPI is truly representative of Canadians’ real financial experiences. My first attempt to create my own alternative “consumer price index”, involved Statistics Canada’s “Detailed household final consumption expenditure“. That table contains actual dollar figures for nation-wide spending on a wide range of consumer items. To represent the costs Canadian’s face when shopping for basics, I selected these nine categories:
- Food and non-alcoholic beverages
- Clothing and footwear
- Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels
- Major household appliances
- Pharmaceutical products and other medical products (except cannabis)
- Transport
- Communications
- University education
- Property insurance
I then took the fourth quarter (Q4) numbers for each of those categories for all the years between 2013 and 2024 and divided them by the total population of the country for each year. That gave me an accurate picture of per capita spending on core cost-of-living items.
Overall, living and breathing through Q4 2013 would have cost the average Canadian $4,356.38 (or $17,425.52 for a full year). Spending for those same categories in Q4 2024, however, cost us $6,266.48 – a 43.85 percent increase.
By contrast, the official CPI over those years rose only 31.03 percent. That’s quite the difference. Here’s how the year-over-year changes in CPI inflation vs actual spending inflation compare:
As you can see, with the exception of 2020 (when COVID left us with nothing to buy), the official inflation number was consistently and significantly lower than actual spending. And, in the case of 2021, it was more than double.
Since 2013, the items with the largest price growth were university education (57.46 percent), major household appliances (52.67 percent), and housing, water, electricity, gas, and other fuels (50.79).
The Fairey Battle – Light Bomber, Heavy Losses
Rex’s Hangar
Published 17 Nov 2021Originally conceived in the early 1930s, by the time the first prototype of the Fairey Battle flew in 1936 it was already becoming obsolete. However, the RAF desperately needed combat aircraft, and so the Battle was put into production. It would go on to fight in the Battle of France, where it would take exceptionally heavy losses due to its slow speed and poor defensive armament. After being retired from front-line duty, the Fairey Battle would go on to becoming a successful training aircraft for the RAF and Commonwealth forces, serving the needs of combat flight schools in Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
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Producing these videos is a hobby of mine. I have a passion for history, and personally own a large collection of books, journals and other texts, and endeavor to do as much research as possible. However if there are any mistakes, please don’t hesitate to reach out and correct anything 🙂
QotD: “Woke”
Moreover, this monomaniacal need to expose an ever-expanding set of “phobias” in society means that they end up detecting prejudice even where it does not exist. In the absence of evidence of racism the woke have a habit of simply concocting it; hence the continual emphasis on “unconscious bias”, “white privilege” and “institutional power structures”. Such ideas have germinated over many years in academia – particularly in the postmodern branches of critical theory – and have since seeped into the mainstream.
This is why the public is routinely confronted with absurd articles in the media grounded in an extreme form of intersectionality. One, for instance, claims that white women are “evil”, another that white DNA is an “abomination”. Barely a day goes by without some frenzied denunciation of a movie or a television series for its lack of diversity and positive representation, as though the function of the arts is to send a message that accords with identitarian values.
Few members of the public are entirely familiar with the jargon (“cisgender”, “mansplaining”, “toxic masculinity”), but are assured nonetheless that the premises are indisputable. There’s a very good reason why the Catholic Church resisted translating the Bible into the vernacular for so long. Those in power are always threatened when the plebeians start thinking for themselves and asking difficult questions.
Some commentators have recently raised concerns that “woke” has been weaponised by the far right as a slur against anti-racist campaigners. Afua Hirsch, for instance, has claimed in the Guardian that anyone using the word is “likely to be a right-wing culture warrior angry at a phenomenon that lives mainly in their imagination”. This strikes me as particularly odd, given the Guardian‘s own frequent use of the word, including in headlines such as “Can a woke makeover win Barbie and Monopoly new fans?” and “My search for Mr Woke: a dating diary”. Perhaps Hirsch’s colleagues are further to the right than is generally supposed.
Andrew Doyle, “Why I’m anti-woke”, Spiked, 2020-02-04.
