Doctrine. Something I keep promising to write about and then don’t. Doctrine is, “the body of formal knowledge that tells a fighting force how it is expected to fight” (Parshall and Tully, 83). it is not a plan for a specific war, but the general planning framework a military brings to every war; think of it like a very complex list of “best practices”. This is necessary because war is too complex to make this stuff up on the fly. That said, just because a military has a written out doctrine doesn’t mean they can execute on that doctrine; the doctrine may call for things that military (or its political leaders) are simply not capable or willing to do. That said, a military that finds itself operating well outside its own doctrine is likely in trouble. Russian maneuver warfare doctrine generally goes by the moniker Deep Battle or Deep Operations (Глубокая операция) and to say that the Russian Armed Forces [in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine] have not managed to pull off their doctrine in practice is a significant understatement.
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
September 21, 2026
QotD: Military doctrine
September 20, 2026
“Honest” graft
Politicians and corruption go together like wine and cheese but not like crime and punishment for some reason. It’s almost as though the path to wealth and influence goes through political connections rather than economic efficiency and innovation. Chris Bray points out the difference between the “honest” graft of days gone by and the kind of all-consuming corruption we see far too often these days:
Tammany had honest graft: They said they would build a bridge or a park, and then they built it. The cost would be sort of not nakedly obscene, and no money would be missing if there was an audit. But by the most remarkable coincidence, the land where the park or the highway or the approaches to the bridge would go turned out to be owned by very close friends of the Tammany machine, who then got paid a nice little premium for the acquisition of land that was needed for a public purpose, and maybe the people who sold the concrete and the lumber and supplied the labor also turned out to be awfully close friends of the politicians who approved the project, but at the end, there’s the bridge. There’s the new highway, and it cost something within shouting distance of what you would expect the thing to cost. It added up, but they did some fairly polite stealing. There was respect in it. It wasn’t honest, but it wasn’t wide-open looting.
An extremely common form of graft in American politics is the “Three Bs” that Robert Caro famously described in Texas politics: beef, bourbon, and blondes. Cocktails, steak dinners, and maybe if you were a legislator who played ball a nice young lady came and visited your hotel room during the legislative session. But that graft was about topics like who got the state highway contract. Some money traded hands, there was dishonesty in the allocation of public resources, and the highway got re-paved.
The Quality Learing Center model, or the high-speed rail model, or the 800 hospices in Los Angeles with patients that never died, all represent a model of grift that comes from a culture of complete shamelessness. In California, nearly 700 non-profit corporations exist to provide shelter to the homeless, and over 500 non-profit corporations exist to prevent homelessness and provide social services to the homeless or to people who may become homeless. There’s quite a bit of overlap between those categories, so there aren’t 1200+ non-profits, but there are hundreds, and they have billions of dollars in income.
Some are entirely legitimate and do real work. There are people in California who will be fed and sheltered tonight by a non-profit corporation that will keep them from sleeping on the street. It’s not at all my argument that no one in any non-profit anywhere ever does anything real. But the overall picture is theft, and the premise that the flood of money is ending homelessness (or is meant to) is a lie, and a dark one. Gavin Newsom presented his ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness in 2008.
Update, 22 September: 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.
There are wedding gifts and there are wedding gifts
Gift-giving has been a thing since caveman days, they say, but sometimes gifts carry strings along with them that are impossible to ignore, or as The Grim Historian puts it, “never let a mobster pay for your wedding”:
Nothing says “just a wedding gift” like the benefactor whose role stayed secret until ProPublica had to put an arrow over his head.
Photo: Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram; annotation/source: ProPublica.
My Grandma Ella had a rule about gifts, usually delivered while waving a wooden spoon over a white apron so stippled with tomato sauce it could have been entered into evidence.
She would say, “Never accept gifts. That’s how a rich man turns you into a beggar.”
That may sound cynical, but no Italian survives a lifetime of weddings, funerals, Sunday dinners, and relatives saying “forget about it” without learning that generosity has a very long memory.
A gift creates an imbalance. You give me something. Now I am indebted to you. Sure, you may insist it is “just a gift.” But I have seen enough crisp white envelopes exchange hands to know there are gifts, and then there are … gifts.
Say I give you a hundred dollars and tomorrow you hand me a hundred dollars back, congratulations…we have invented banking. Or say you sign up for my breathtakingly grim history newsletter. I have provided you a service in exchange for your 5 ducats, but we are all clear on the bargain.
But suppose I give you something you can’t return. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Now the books stay open. And a man who keeps your books open is not your friend. He owns a piece of you.
Which brings us to Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding and who owns him.
ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski reported this week that Umar Kremlev — a Russian businessman closely associated with Vladimir Putin — gifted Trump Jr. and Bettina Trump quite the wedding shindig in the Bahamas.
According to records and interviews ProPublica reviewed, Kremlev paid to rent a private island, covered an elaborate fireworks show, and had his team help organize the festivities. There were helicopters, seaplanes, oceanfront villas, and a five-tier funfetti cake flown in from Florida. So not exactly the crystal punch bowl from Aunt Linda.
Fortunately, after ProPublica published its story, the newlyweds fessed up. Yes, Don Jr. and Bettina Trump have a wealthy Russian benefactor (sorry, “friend”) granting party favors. Then they made a statement that would have my Italian grandmother shaking her mano fica.
“Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.”
Just a gift.
What Caused the War of 1812?
Real Time History
Published 17 Apr 2026The War of 1812 broke out after a series of escalations between Great Britain and the still young United States. The impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy desperate to crew their ships in the ongoing war against Napoleon, the question if the US could trade with Britain and France at the same time and thus profit of the war, all came to a head after failed negotiations.
(more…)
QotD: Brexit – the process is the punishment
Well, yes and no. There is little doubt that a large part of the political class, the upper bureaucracy and the intelligentsia did their very best to prevent, or at least obstruct, Britain’s departure from the European Union. The Prime Minister who followed Mr. Cameron, Mrs. May, was herself in favour of remaining, and yet she was put in charge of the negotiations on the British side. This was like putting an ardent pacifist in charge of an army, and indeed she managed to negotiate a deal that (from the British point of view) was the worst of both worlds.
It should have been obvious from the first that Brexit was an existential question for the European Union, as well as for Britain, of course. If Britain prospered, or simply failed to suffer greatly, after Brexit, this would have been a disaster for the European Union, in the populations of which there was significant and growing scepticism of or opposition to the “European Project” (it is the only project I know whose end is never stated, though I suspect it is a superstate in whose administration politics in the normal sense of elections, appeals to public opinion, etc., are not to be allowed to intrude). An example had to be made, and in effect has been made. No other member state will want to go through what Britain has gone through these last four years. The light must not be worth the candle.
Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.
September 19, 2026
International travel used to be a true luxury: it’s going back to being a luxury again
I was never a serious globe-trotter and international flights were something I did on the company’s dime or rare trips back to England to visit family. But it was still theoretically possible for someone in my very middle-class cohort to travel extensively for fun. (No longer, of course, as my pension definitely wouldn’t stretch as far as airline tickets.) As Copernican points out, we’re looking at a future — indeed a very near future — where there will be a revived “Jet Set” where it is only the wealthy who can afford to travel:
With the creation of datacenters, artificial constructs, and global internet, being away no longer comes with the same psychological independence that it once did. Many are so hopelessly reliant on the noosphere that they can scarcely function without direct contact to it in one form or another. Particularly zoomers.1 Thus, the idea of “space” becomes as much cognitive as it is physical. Without the cognitive disconnection, the physical disconnection means nothing, and with Starlink now providing access literally anywhere, the wild is often perceived as just as observed and restricted as anywhere else.
The thesis of this argument is that luxury will no longer mean space away from other people (though there will always be a demand for that) but that the near-future will see a sort of throwback philosophy regarding luxury. The capacity to travel.
This article was instigated by recent news updates regarding the airline industry. Namely, that many airline companies are ripping out economy class seating to make space for luxury seats and suites. Simply put, the poor can no longer afford to travel, and many among the former middle-classes cannot either.
Travel is increasingly becoming an economy restricted to the wealthy, international travel even more so. This is something that should be considered when one considers a backup country.2
We see the influencers who once peddled their lifestyles in Dubai and Mexico quietly rolling back home. Part of that is the cost of frivolous travel, and part of that is the result of global instability. I purchased international plane tickets immediately before and after the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, and the difference in price expressed more than a news article on the oil crisis ever could.
It is unlikely I’ll be traveling internationally again for the foreseeable future.
More, it’s unlikely many people will be traveling much for the foreseeable future at all. Business moguls, billionaires, and those who absolutely must show up in person, sure. But the average vacationer is not likely to lightly book a flight from Las Vegas to Tokyo. As the costs associated with travel increase, the heartland of the United States and the isolated villas to which the wealthy once flocked will see their own membership slowly contract.
One of the reasons why the wealthy prefer owning vacation homes in those places is due to the fact that other wealthy people live there. As that network begins to slowly contract, so too will the value of possessing property in those locations.
The price spikes are likely to be sticky. Those with dreams of the cost of gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel coming back down are (I think) delusionally hopeful. If the inflation of the last few years since the pandemic has demonstrated anything, it’s that enshitification can affect all industries, and once it has, it doesn’t tend to go away. Regardless of how the conflict in Iran goes, the new higher prices are functionally baked into the global economy. That will be its own can of worms for governments to untangle.3
At least there’ll be fewer girls traveling to Brazil to get their body-count reset via the best grift I’ve ever heard of. Soon the trip there will cost more than the $13,000 “treatment”. Seems like a lot of trouble when an AI-partner can just validate all your delusions for you at home.
- About half the population now suffers from a degree of Nomophobia. That is the fear of being without a mobile connectivity device. For those individuals, the concept of being “away from people” is meaningless. Constant connection to the feed has become a psychologically ingrained state. Effectively, such people require a constant connection to the collective human psyche to the point that their sense of self relies on it.
Conceptualizing the Collective Unconscious of a People
- The Billionaire tendency to purchase bunkers in various parts of the world is truly impressive. We’re talking multi-billion dollar facilities built simply to afford these individuals not merely a sense of safety, but a place away from the rest of humanity. They’re buying themselves spiritual and physical space of their own.
- The United States has already floated the idea of a Diesel Export Ban. The US economy runs almost exclusively on Diesel fuel for big-box trucks shipping food and goods around the country. It’s among the least efficient systems globally, but permits people to live anywhere with a (relatively cheap) connection to the intercontinental road network. With the price of diesel now cresting $6 a gallon, it may well reach an unsustainable point for low-value goods. Thus, the consideration of an export ban. Banning diesel exports would preserve low(er) prices in the United States proper while forcing foreign nations to eat the cost on the international market.
CAMRA and the fight to save British beer in the 70s
On his Substack, Henry Jeffreys recommends a couple of YouTube videos that beer fans might find interesting:
Every so often I vow that I am going to stop wallowing in nostalgia and engage with some contemporary culture: watch some new films, read a new book, and maybe even listen to some new music. But then I discover a treasure trove of old Jonathan Meades documentaries on Youtube and I’m lost. There’s so much good stuff on there that I am very tempted to cancel my Netflix subscription and take out Youtube premium, which means I won’t have to watch the incredibly irritating adverts. That’s another thing that’s not as good as it used to be.
Here’s a few booze-linked things that I’ve been watching recently.
[…]
I’ve long been a real ale enthusiast, in fact I wrote something for the Daily Telegraph on the subject earlier this month. My father was an early member of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. Meades refers to the organisation, not altogether negatively, I think, as “anti-metropolitanism, anti-modernism”. There’s something distinctly Hobbity about tilting at progress and, to some extent, winning. Live, unpasteurised beer was becoming a rarity by the 1970s, and now it’s easy to find in almost every town and village that still has a pub. It was described as “the most effective consumer pressure group in Europe”.
This documentary from 1977 looks at the battle to save Britain’s traditional beer. It’s particularly worth watching for the young bearded earnest CAMRA members at their conference. There were also a surprising number of women. It makes you realise that while real ale has a stuffy image today, at the time it was fashionable. It was a youth movement, not a bunch of reactionary old men, but young people seeing a problem and doing something about it. It is inspiring. If it wasn’t for these earnest, bearded young men and women (mainly without beards), then much of what we take for granted about British beer would no longer exist. The movement also inspired American craft beer, which in turn inspired British craft beer. It is hard to overstate how important CAMRA was for beer around the world.
Whicker’s World — Englishmen in New York
If you want to see what the state of American beer was like in the early 1980s, watch Alan Whicker’s documentary about Englishmen living in New York. The star is entrepreneur Mancunian Richard Wrigley, who is behind the Manhattan Brewery Co. He says at one point: “I like good beer and there wasn’t any in the States”, and compares the local brew to Perrier. He has taken over a gigantic derelict industrial building and is trying to turn it into a brewpub with brewing equipment from Germany. He’s even shipped over two dray horses at vast expense. Wrigley is completely unflappable, confident that they will open in two weeks even though the work is nowhere near finished. Whicker is such a great interviewer, warm and avuncular, but he keeps pressing Wrigley about the expense and where the money is coming from.
Amazingly the brewery, which cost over a million dollars, did actually open, but it struggled to make money and eventually closed in 1995. Richard Wrigley, who died in 2022, is a fascinating character. He’d make a great subject for a feature film. There’s something of a chancer about him, slightly slippery but very charming. At one point Wrigley says that he has been described as a “conman”, but the Americans mean it as a compliment. It’s well worth reading up on the story of the Manhattan Brewery Co. While it failed, the head brewer Garrett Oliver would go on to make beer at the Brooklyn Brewery in 1994 — a company that would transform beer in New York. By the time I visited the city for the first time in 2003, good beer was everywhere.
Internal migration patterns in the United States
It’s become a commonplace to see yet another tech company pulling up stakes and leaving California … and the state government seems determined to get rid of many of their biggest economic contributors with new legislation to make life harder for companies and wealthy individuals (see the second item, for instance). But it’s not just California losing population to other states:
Universities in the NCAA Southeastern Conference.
Map from Wikimedia Commons
Americans have long expressed their political preferences at the ballot box and their economic preferences with moving vans. Increasingly, they are expressing a third preference — where their children attend college — and the destination looks remarkably like the other two.
In 2025, North Carolina gained more than 84,000 residents from other states, more than any state in the union. Texas added over 67,000. California lost more than 229,000, and New York lost nearly 138,000, continuing a migration that has by now acquired the character of a rout rather than a trend. Yet few have noticed that the same states drawing families and factories are drawing something else: students, and with them, the institutions built to educate them.
For most of the 20th century, the hierarchy of American public higher education was as fixed as the Electoral College map of a one-party era. Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin — these were the names invoked when a public university wished to be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard. They remain formidable.
But formidable is no longer synonymous with singular.
Consider what the Southeastern Conference, or SEC — an organization whose reputation was built on forward passes rather than research grants — has quietly assembled. Texas A&M enrolls more than 79,000 students, a figure that would have seemed a typographical error a generation ago (see here and here). The University of Florida enrolls roughly 56,000 (see here, here, and here). Collectively, SEC institutions now educate more than half a million students, with total enrollment around 620,000 (see here and here), a statistic that ought to interest university presidents in blue states rather more than it apparently does.
This is not the result of some coordinated Southern strategy hatched in a statehouse. Universities are lagging indicators of demography, not leading ones. States that attract families acquire, in due course, college students. States that generate jobs retain their graduates rather than exporting them, as Rust Belt states have exported so much else.
States that welcome capital acquire, eventually, the tax base with which to build ambitious public institutions. Ambition, it turns out, is portable. The family that leaves Illinois for Tennessee brings its expectations for its children along with the furniture, and both eventually find a permanent address in Knoxville or some other city in the Volunteer State.
Affordability, too, plays its part, and Americans have noticed that a nationally respectable degree from a Southern flagship costs a fraction of what state flagships elsewhere demand for a comparable credential, at a moment when the public’s confidence in the value of a degree generally has become, to put it charitably, provisional.
One of California’s most impactful proposed pieces of legislation has been their “Billionaire tax”:
California’s proposed “billionaire’s tax” on the assets of wealthy state residents enjoys a slim lead in the polls leading up to the midterm elections, though so do two measures that, if they draw more votes, could render the scheme unenforceable. That makes for a high-stakes battle as many prosperous Californians are already fleeing to escape a tax that could force them to surrender ownership stakes in companies they’ve founded. Even if it doesn’t pass, a new report warns that the proposal is based on faulty research and could do vast economic damage.
[…]
The Wealth Tax Scheme Is Based on Unusual Accounting
Now, a new report finds the proposed wealth tax is not only dangerous for California’s economic prospects; it’s also based on bad research. According to the report’s author, Independent Institute research fellow Kristian Fors, “this proposal has been heavily influenced by the work of UC Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman to justify the concept of wealth taxation”. Saez and Zucman have generated news headlines with their claims that the wealthy are undertaxed in comparison to lower-income Americans. But as Fors points out, the estimate that drew so much news coverage claimed that “the overall tax rate for the top 400 richest households in the nation was 23 percent”, while just a year earlier, Saez and Zucman “estimated that the top 1 percent paid an overall tax rate of approximately 36 percent; the authors found a share of 41 percent for the top 0.001 percent of earners in the most recent year of their survey, a category encompassing billionaires and high multimillionaires”.
The discrepancy, according to Fors, comes from how the economists treat corporate income taxes. Conventional analysis assumes that corporate taxes burden shareholders, workers, and consumers as the tax gets passed on. That results in the earlier estimate of a 41 percent tax rate for the wealthiest. To reach their much lower 23 percent estimated rate, Saez and Zucman used a non-standard analysis — and while the results of that approach won news coverage, they weren’t subject to peer review.
“Saez and Zucman’s empirical work on the California billionaire tax proposal retains these same unconventional accounting practices from 2019 without addressing their conflict with the mainstream corporate tax incidence literature,” cautions Fors.
The Independent Institute report observes that privacy laws prevented Saez and Zucman from drawing on personal income tax and other financial records. They relied on the Forbes 400 list, and “a 2010 study by a group of IRS statisticians found that the Forbes 400 dramatically overestimates the net worth of individuals in their lifetimes when compared to probate records of their estates after death”. Adjusting for that discrepancy produces estimates of “an average effective tax rate of 38 percent between 2018 and 2020, as compared to the 24 percent claimed by Saez and Zucman for this period”.
How Britain’s oldest Proof House still tests modern military weapons
BFBS Forces News
Published 12 May 2026For nearly 400 years a succession of Proof Masters have been making sure firearms in the UK are safe, stopping dangerous guns from being used.
Every firearm, whether it’s for military use or not, has to go through something called a proofing process.
This is a series of tests to make sure the weapon is not only made properly, but it can withstand the pressure generated by modern-day ammunition.
QotD: Islam and the rise of Western hegemony
This, which claimed in its preamble that acknowledgement of “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”, was in reality not at all as “universal” as it affected to be. Standing recognisably in a line of descent from the proclamations of the French Revolution, it served as well as a repudiation of some of the more foundational assumptions of Islamic theodicy.
The concept of human rights was an alien one to Islam. Muslims, traditionally, had not believed in natural law. There were only laws authored by God. The insistence of United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the rights of man” derived, not from the great inheritance of the Sunnah, but from the philosophes of the 18th century. Tellingly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been signed — where else? — in Paris.
Western hegemony over the Islamic world, then, did not end with the collapse of direct rule over it by the European powers. Western values, Western assumptions, Western concepts of law, all of them packaged and marketed as “universal”, continued to exercise an overweening dominance in global affairs. If this was true for Muslims in lands that had sought to reconstitute themselves as nation states, then how much more so was it for Muslims who, in the decades that followed the Second World War, travelled to Europe, and settled there in growing numbers.
Tom Holland, “The age-old tension between Islam and France”, UnHerd, 2020-11-02.
September 18, 2026
Worrying about post-combat lawfare will crush initiative and morale
As mentioned in Dr. Robert Lyman’s account yesterday, the British government wants to turn back the hands of time to change the rules of engagement under which British Army troops and police conducted themselves during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. It may be an exciting prospect for law firms, activists, and other anti-military groups, but it would set a terrible precedent for British use of military force from this moment onwards. At The Critic, Alexander Gray explains why this is a dangerous and stupid idea that should be dropped forever:
“British Army working during the Field Training Exercise” by U.S. Army Europe is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 
.
The debate about the hounding of veterans through the courts has long been presented in terms of fairness. This is indeed one side of the story. No decent country should tolerate servicemen being dragged through repeated investigations decades after the events in question, often without new evidence and after previous inquiries have already reached their conclusions.
But focusing only on veterans misses an even more urgent point: this has become a national security threat.
Over the past two decades, the legal framework governing military operations has changed. Courts have increasingly applied standards developed for peacetime to scrutinise wartime situations of uncertainty and danger which often demand split-second judgement. Human rights law, designed principally to regulate relations between the state and individuals, has increasingly been applied to military operations, including to situations already governed by the Law of Armed Conflict.
This is having consequences on the battlefield. Personnel who believe that a lawful decision taken in combat may be reconstructed years later in a civilian courtroom are now incentivised to be more cautious, more process-driven and less willing to exercise initiative. That hesitation can slow decisions in situations where delay may place lives and the success of an operation at risk. The prospect of repeated investigations and prolonged legal uncertainty is also damaging morale and contributing to experienced personnel leaving the service, depriving the Armed Forces of skills and judgement that are difficult to replace.
This is why the Prosperity Institute has published the Military Operations Bill, presented to Parliament this week by Sir David Davis MP. It reasserts the principle that combat operations should be judged primarily by the Law of Armed Conflict. Courts have an important role in punishing wrongdoing, but they should not become alternative command structures reviewing military judgement from the safety of hindsight.
Update, 19 September: 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 destruction of the European Civil War traumatized us”
On Substack Notes, John Carter points out the vast chasm between the capabilities of western nations and their timid aspirations for the future:
LeMO Erster Weltkrieg – Kriegsverlauf – Frühjahrsoffensive 1918
Photo from dhm.deWestern civilization is terrified of itself. The destructive power of our militaries is unparalleled in history. We can devastate continents in minutes. We can annihilate entire populations. We can reduce cities to rubble.
But we don’t.
The same is true of our industrial capability. We can erase mountains, redirect rivers, carve tunnels deep into bedrock, reshape entire landscapes as we please.
But we don’t.
The destruction of the European Civil War traumatized us. Meanwhile, the unintended consequences of unrestricted development — air pollution, water pollution, soil erosion, habitat destruction, even the sheer rampant ugliness of so much of postwar industry — has left us leery of just doing things.
In the postwar era we began binding ourselves ever more tightly with laws. International law to restrict the use of military force; environmental laws, labour laws, indigenous rights laws, and so on to govern the use of our industrial capacity. We did this for good reason. No one wants nuclear war, or even a repeat of World War Two. No one wants another Three Mile Island, another Chernobyl. With great power comes great responsibility, and no civilization has ever been more powerful.
But the result has been to paralyze us.
Our militaries watch helplessly as supplicants invade us with begging bowls held up as their battle standards, prohibited from shooting the unarmed boats by governments bound by international treaties to respect the human rights of anyone who claims to be seeking asylum. Meanwhile we find that it is almost impossible to build anything. High-speed rail, bridges, highways, housing — all of it is slowed to an imperceptible crawl by a regulatory overburden designed to do precisely that. Gulliver held down by Lilliputian strings of his own design, his flesh swarming with hungry ants.
The emerging political coalition of the right is largely comprised of those factions who have grown impatient with this artificial paralysis of the will. Why shouldn’t we use our military to assert ourselves abroad, and defend our borders at home? Why shouldn’t we turn loose the incredible power of modern, heavily automated, high-tech industry to build wonders on a scale never before known? Why shouldn’t we conquer space? Why shouldn’t we use biomedical science to make ourselves beautiful, brilliant, healthy and fit? Why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be powerful? Why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be strong? We shouldn’t we reach for greatness?
The opposition consists of all those factions who are horrified by this, terrified of the strength of Western civilization, intent on slowing it, stopping its engine, dismantling the machine, and salting the biocultural soil from which it grew. Third worldists, climatists, AI safetyists, pacifists, open-borders activists, misinformation censors, DEI ideologues, international human rights NGOs, all of these cooperate to throw sand in the gears, to sabotage the West, to subordinate it and ultimately to destroy it.
One disruptive kid can ruin class for all the others
I remember talking to the teacher who taught the special needs kids at my middle school … Mr. Gibson was the only black teacher in the school and he was far more qualified than any of the others. It also helped that he had the patience of a saint: I doubt any other teacher there could last more than a day with the kids he looked after. At some point in the decades since I was in school, the powers-that-be decided that integrating all the children together was the right decision. By any sensible reckoning, it has been the worst thing they could have done, both for the special needs children and all the other children, as GenX Anecdotes relates on Substack Notes:
GenX Anecdotes didn’t include this in her post, but I thought it to be appropriate, in a way.
Having worked in schools and hearing my daughter’s experiences, it just can’t be the case that a tiny minority of extremely disruptive kids ruin the learning for all the others. Yet I have seen time and time again how one or two disruptive kids with severe behavioural issues can derail a whole lesson.
The dogged insistence that all the kids must be thrown together regardless of capabilities and behaviour is insane to me.
I have seen the amount of time, effort and extra staff required to deal with just ONE kid who clearly needs “round-the-clock” close supervision.
I have often thought those kids should not be in a “normal” class or school. They need to be somewhere else where they can get specialist support. And I don’t care how many times you shout “inclusivity” at me. Those kids would be better off somewhere else too.
I have watched kids who, during lunchtime, will smash up a whole table of kids’ lunches and try and run out of the school gates; kids continually shouting in lessons; bully and “hit” other kids repeatedly; demand all the other kids play games exactly as THEY want them to be played; derail a whole lesson and be continually brought out of the classroom, but only to be brought back in again!
Then I see the adults pander to the disruptive ones time and time again and expect all the other kids to suck it up and put up with their bullshit. All under the guise of some “neurodivergent” excuse. If their “neurodivergence” continually negatively impacts everyone around them, then they need to be removed from everyone else. Sorry. It’s not everybody else’s responsibility to put up with it.
Time and time again, the needs of a minority of kids prioritise the needs of many.
I remember when I worked in one junior school, attending a training day for teachers and support staff, which was conducted by the school head teacher.
When I raised this issue, he just went over to his laptop and brought up that “equity” meme of the three people standing on boxes looking over a wall onto the big screen and said THIS is why.
He didn’t like the fact that I had brought this up, especially since some of the teachers agreed with me. He very quickly shut me down, and his whole tone was this kind of patronising and smug “you don’t understand at all do you?” Like he was having to explain basics to me. There were a thousand things I wanted to say about it, but I didn’t.
What really got me was how all those teachers who had agreed with me looked at the meme and were nodding! They were impressed by it and acted like they hadn’t seen it before. It was beyond infuriating. I SO wanted to get up and go over to the laptop and find the other “equity in reality” meme, which is far closer to the truth.
But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to derail the whole thing and be the only “disrupter” in the room.
It was close to lunchtime, and it was already running over, and everyone was clearly eager to get out of there, so I didn’t want to turn it into an ideological battle of wits. In hindsight, I wish I did.
But I wasn’t brought up to be that person. And yet, ironically, here we are. Raising a generation of people who WOULD totally hold everyone up and much worse.
I left that job soon after that. It wasn’t just that. It was a lot of things related to this. I watched daily as things that I thought could actually be quite easily made better with some practical adjustments were continually and self-evidently made worse for EVERYBODY because of an adherence to this arrogant and utterly insane ideological bullshit.
It drove me nuts.
Guatemalan Contract St Chamond 70mm Mountain Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 May 2026Despite the French Army adopting a 65mm mountain gun in 1906, several French companies — including St Chamond and Schneider — developed their own mountain gun designs in the years before World War One. These were popular guns for foreign export, being relatively small, light, and inexpensive. St Chamond’s 70mm gun was built on the same breech design as their previous 75mm field gun, at the request of the Mexican military and famous small arms designer Manuel Mondragon. Quantities were sold to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belgium (for use in the Belgian Congo). This example is a Guatemalan one, now in the United States as a live, registered, transferrable Destructive Device.
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