Paul Sellers
Published 11 Jul 2025Not every project needs to be complicated, and many can be a machineless exercise that develops hand skills and simplifies the project all the more.
People often shun plywood as a legitimate option over solid wood, but where solid wood might otherwise expand, contrary to the grain in solid wood oriented at 90º, plywood will be a perfect choice because of its stability, strength, and longevity.
I say a tray-in-a-day, but six in a day is highly possible, especially when you use only hand tools and no power equipment. Enjoy!
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November 26, 2025
A Tray in a Day | Paul Sellers
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QotD: Racism and social justice
A definitive proof of the evil of social “science” is that — faced with the real problem of racism — it has come up with the insane idea of racist post mortem justice; demanding that living white people compensate living black people for what some dead white people did to some dead black people. If you question the logic of this then — boom — you confirm the whole crooked theory because it’s your “privilege” that blinds you to its truth. It’s like the ducking stool as a test for witchcraft. Guilty or not, you’re done for. Oh and by the way, you can’t just ignore this piffle and quietly get on with your harmless life because “white silence is violence”.
This very American problem is poisoning the world through the dominance of US popular culture and the influence of the wealthy US universities. On this side of the Pond we have our own problems. We really don’t need a whole raft of America’s too. But white privilege is such a wonderful tool for creating and exploiting division that our leftists can’t leave it be. It’s a social A-bomb just lying there waiting to be detonated.
The Left is an immoral political movement. It seeks to divide. It seeks to promote hatred between classes and other groupings in society in order to create problems that can only be “solved” by employing legions of leftists with no otherwise marketable skills to direct us to the “correct” path. The extent to which it’s already achieved its real, unstated aim of creating a well-paid cadre of apparatchiks is visible in the present pandemic. The only jobs that are safe are of those employed by the state and rewarded by reference to almost anything other than economic contribution. Those thus paid for are “essential workers.” Those who pay for them are not. Anyone who points this scam out is monstered by a leisured army of social “scientists” and their graduates in the media — also paid for by us “inessential” saps.
Judge them by the outcomes of their policies and governance and the theorists and politicians of the Left are clear failures. The squalor in which poor black Americans live is almost invariably presided over by them just as a Labour council in Britain is a promise of continued poverty for all but its apparatchiks. If the poor are your voters, the more poverty the better. If the oppressed are your voters, the more (real or imagined) oppression the merrier.
The perfect symbol of Leftist politicians in this respect is the character of Senator Clay Davis in The Wire — perhaps the greatest TV show ever made and (among many other marvellous things) a searing indictment of American racial politics. It’s a show that couldn’t be made today because it reeks of white privilege. By the way, the fact that this concept would have prevented The Wire being made is by itself a small proof that it’s a wicked one.
Tom Paine, “Checking my privilege”, The Last Ditch, 2020-06-02.
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November 25, 2025
“So what?”
Spaceman Spiff makes the case for the two simple words in the title being the most powerful words in the English language:
The two most powerful words in the English language are, so what? We do not use them enough.
A “so what?” is a rebuff, a rejection of some cherished belief. It confronts the promoter of an idea with the worst form of disagreement, indifference.
In a narcissistic world where attention is often the goal of agitators, genuine disinterest is difficult to manipulate. It disarms anyone intent on destroying established norms.
A “so what?” forces a reconsideration. It has the strongest effect on the issues we care most about.
Nobody enjoys their precious cause being dismissed. That is why we must use it more.
Who cares?
Many of today’s moral crusades are imposed on us against our will. We are told we must attend to issues most of the world ignores.
Here are a few to consider.
Racism and diversity
Accusations of racism are now endemic in Western nations. The underlying drive is one of punishment. Natural wariness of alien peoples is recast as a moral failing, the antidote to which is enforced mixing to demonstrate the backwardness of one’s social inferiors. A policy unique to Western countries.
The promotion of diversity quotas rests upon tacit acceptance of the idea that homogeneity is undesirable. This requires our participation to succeed, especially the consequence of this belief, that the mass importation of foreigners is needed to improve society.
The response to accusations of a lack of diversity should be, so what? It needs to be laughed at. Who cares if we are too homogenous? Says who?
No rational group seeks to dilute their numbers. This is a perverse affectation confined to a handful of ethnomasochists who think racism is unique to Western societies.
A robust rejection of this helps recalibrate to the global norm, a useful reminder to anyone steeped in woke catechisms. Much of the world views out-group preference as either treason or mental illness, a perspective easily observed simply by travelling.
Sexism and gender equality
There is a mismatch between the sexes. Men win the prizes, dominate their fields and invent the inventions.
We are told this is a disgrace. Such patriarchal domination will not do.
A key flashpoint is the “gender wage gap” that unwittingly illustrates the insincerity of feminism. There is no wage gap. There is a lifetime earnings gap. This is a consequence of decisions women voluntarily make such as spending more time with family or choosing less risky employment closer to home.
This is firmly established and supported with unimpeachable data, often produced by the very governments pursuing gender pay gap legislation.
Polite counterarguments against feminist talking points like this fail despite their thoroughness because facts are dismissed as they are inconvenient to a lucrative narrative.
Therefore the response to accusations of gender imbalances should be met with a robust so what? If they don’t care about engaging with established facts why should we care about the issue at all? Energetic indifference is the only way to deprive feminism of its momentum.
Much of the “argument” for gender equality is emotional manipulation. It abuses men’s protective instincts in a shameless way.
A firm “so what?” arrests this natural urge in men. It provides a small space for us to escape manipulation and examine the facts.
Who cares if women are underrepresented or have less money? This is a result of decisions women themselves make, so solve the problem yourself. Stop begging men for special favours.
Update, 26 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.
Canada’s “post-national” project was foisted on us by the elites, not ordinary Canadians
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Fortissax responds to a recent article published in the National Post, where Geoff Russ describes Liberal nationalism as “a cringey failure” and calls for young members of the “new right” to work toward a new idea of Canada:
Geoff Russ’ specific claim that “millions of old stock Canadians cheered for it” is wrong. He takes a decades-long elite project, driven over the heads of the public, and pins it on the very people it was done to.
There was never a clear democratic moment when ethnic Canadians calmly voted to abolish old Canada and embrace a postnational, multicultural order. What happened was a long campaign run from the top.
After 1945, cabinet ministers, mandarins and policy people rebuilt Canadian identity around liberal internationalism and continental integration. The older understanding of Canada as a British and French country with its own civilisation was treated as something shameful to be buried. Schools, television, churches, courts, universities and the federal bureaucracy repeated the same script: “progress” meant loosening ties to the founding peoples and aligning with UN norms and North American liberal opinion.
This was not some anonymous drift. C.D. Howe and the postwar planners normalised a centralised, technocratic state tied to American capital. Mackenzie King and Louis St Laurent locked in continental and institutional commitments that weakened any independent British and French national idea. Jack Pickersgill used immigration as a tool of social engineering and admitted that public opinion was hostile, so policy had to move quietly from above.
Lester Pearson chaired the Biculturalism Commission while preparing the shift from “two founding races” to a vague multicultural formula, and his government set up the flag change that deliberately severed visual continuity with the old country.
Pierre Trudeau went further, announcing in 1971 that Canada would have no official culture and that no ethnic group would take precedence, which was a polite way of saying the historic British and French peoples would be stripped of formal primacy in their own state.
The public did not demand this. It had to be dragged and managed. Gallup and other polling in the postwar decades consistently showed majorities hostile to high immigration levels. The 1974 Green Paper and the extensive public hearings that followed produced sharp criticism of mass intake and of the cultural and economic disruption it would bring.
Ottawa thanked everyone for their input and then moved ahead with the 1976 Immigration Act, which entrenched a liberal, permanent immigration framework anyway. When Canadians were finally asked, they said no. Their answer was ignored.
At the same time, ordinary people lost any real leverage over core questions. Immigration policy was transformed without a referendum. Official multiculturalism was declared from above. The Charter and rights culture shifted effective authority from Parliament and local communities into the hands of courts and legal elites.
The flag changed, and symbols and curricula that reflected old Canada were rewritten or stripped away. Any attempt to defend the historic nation was smeared as crankish or hateful. To take this history and summarise it as “millions of old stock Canadians cheered for it” is like blaming a tenant for “choosing” demolition because he did not throw himself under the bulldozer.
The message is that old stock Canadians must now live with this order forever; that their own elites may have driven the revolution, but the public did not resist hard enough, so dispossession is deserved; and that any attempt by the founding peoples to assert a legitimate claim to continuity in their own country is some kind of moral offence.
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You might as well watch Guru Nanak Jahaz, since you’ve already paid for it
The Canadian government loves handing out money — they hand out a lot of money — so it shouldn’t be surprising to find out that Canadian taxpayers funded the creation of a movie about a Sikh terrorist who assassinated a Canadian official … or that the assassin is the hero of the movie. After all, isn’t that the heart and soul of multiculturalism? Celebrating other cultures and traditions as being superior to those of ordinary Canadians? The feds seem to believe it.
If you can find a way to watch the recently released Khalistani propaganda film Guru Nanak Jahaz, you might as well watch it. You paid for it, after all.
The film, which depicts the assassination of a Canadian civil servant by a Sikh terrorist as a heroic act of justice, has a “Funded by the Government of Canada” credit at the end. It was also supported by the B.C. government and gives special thanks to Conservative MP Tim Uppal and Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal. While the Liberals didn’t return a request for comment, a spokesperson for Uppal told me that he was not involved in the film and that the filmmakers did not communicate with him about the credit at any point.
Set in 1914, the plot follows the assassin, who you likely never heard about, and the voyage of the more familiar Komagata Maru, a ship which carried nearly 400 Indian passengers from Hong Kong to Vancouver, only to be denied entry to Canada. It was screened in some Cineplex theatres earlier this year.
The official narrative that you’ll find on government websites explains that this was purely a matter of baseless Canadian racism, and it’s been wholeheartedly adopted by politicians today: as prime minister, Justin Trudeau apologized for the incident in 2016, and the Conservative party releases annual statements commemorating the event, praising the bravery of the passengers and their craving for freedom.
That’s the whitewashed version, however. It leaves out that the Komagata Maru voyage was organized by the Indian Ghadar movement — the word literally means “revolution” — which advocated for violent resistance against the British Empire. (India was a British possession at that time and would continue to be until 1947). Its members were primarily Sikhs who lived in North America. And while they did experience racism, and while changes to Canada’s immigration laws in 1908 indirectly restricted Indian immigration, there were also reasons for the Canadian government to be apprehensive.
Ghadar members dreamed of a return to India, but wanted to rid that land of the British first. They remembered the Indian Mutiny of 1857 with regret — that bloody event saw many British-Indian regiments unsuccessfully take up arms against the Empire; Sikh Punjabis were among the exceptions, largely siding with the British. Decades later, the mostly Sikh Punjabi Ghadarites proposed another 1857-like uprising while applauding anti-British terrorism.
When rumblings of war with Germany began to brew in 1914, the Ghadarites grew excited — now was the time to strike. In August 1914, after the war broke out, the movement’s newspaper advocated, “Go to India and incite the native troops. Preach mutiny openly. Take arms from the troops of the native states and wherever you see the British, kill them. … There is hope that Germany will help you.” Expats in the Orient organized ships to return home and revolt.
The Komagata Maru was part of this movement. Organized by Ghadarites before the breakout of the First World War, it attempted to bring more movement adherents into Vancouver to settle. Canada was right not to let it dock because the entire envoy was a security threat.
The S.S. Komagata Maru was at the centre of an attempt to bring 400 Sikh revolutionaries into Canada to agitate for the destruction of British rule in India in 1914.
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Roller Delay in France: The H&K 33F (Trials & Export Models)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Jul 2025When France was looking to replace the MAS 49/56 rifle for military service in the 1970s, it tested all of the major rifle options available. These included the Colt M16, FN CAL, and HK33. The HK required some modification to meet French military requirements, specifically the capability to launch rifle grenades. The model 33F was developed specifically to meet these requirements — first as a modified standard HK33, and later as a factory production run. The modifications made include a reinforced magazine well, 4-position fire control gourd (including 3-round burst), a reinforced stock attachment, grenade range rings on the barrel, and a mounting bracket for a rifle grenade sight.
Apparently the HK33F performed very well in trials, but it was ultimately deemed politically unacceptable to adopt a German rifle for the French Army (a policy which has changed now, 50 years later …). Instead, the domestic FAMAS was chosen, along with the SIG-Manurhin 540 purchased in limited numbers for the Foreign Legion.
A second type of 33F came about from the program, however. Berlin police wanted HK33 rifles, but treaty prohibited West German arms from entering Berlin in East Germany. The loophole found was to send the parts to MAS in France, where they were assembled and marked HK33F, thus making them French origin gun which could be sent to Berlin. These rifles had none of the French grenade launching adaptations, and were completely standard HK33s except for the use of heavy barrels. MAS eventually added the G3, HK33, and MP5 to its export catalog in the late 1970s and sold quantities to a number of small countries in the French sphere of influence (including Haiti, Burkina Faso, Lebanon, and others).
Many thanks to the IRCGN (Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale) for allowing me access to film these rather rare HK variants for you!
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QotD: British Socialism in the 1930s
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
November 24, 2025
Fairy tales for Canadian boomers – “we have the best healthcare system in the world”
Older Canadians, especially the Baby Boom generation, have a huge blind spot when it comes to any discussion about healthcare … because they believe what they were told as children about Canada’s healthcare system being the “envy of the world” and other such comforting notions. (It’s not just Canada, as British belief in the quality of their National Health Service is very much at odds with the evidence.) This rose-coloured nostalgic faith makes it very difficult to address some of the very real problems that beset Canada’s hospitals and doctors. The media are understandably reluctant to publish anything that goes against this, as Peter Menzies explains:
Grok image from The Rewrite
About the same time as William Watson’s outstanding book Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life was being published in the late 1990s, the newspaper I worked for was sending a journalist to Europe to research a series of articles on how health care systems work in some of those countries.
I mention Bill’s book, which was runner-up for a public policy Donner Prize, because it exquisitely details many of the things Canadians believe about themselves that simply aren’t true. Which was the same reason why the Calgary Herald sent its health reporter (yes, there used to be such a thing), Robert Walker, to Europe — to expose its readers to the fact that there are more than two health care systems: our “defining” one and America’s, both of which are extremes. To the best of my knowledge, that remains the only time a Canadian news organization has taken on that task.
In every country examined in Walker’s reports, as is the case with almost every country in the world, public and private health care and insurance systems maintained a peaceful coexistence and the public’s needs were being met. Almost 30 years later, that remains the case. Also almost 30 years later, neither Bill’s book nor the Herald‘s reporting has had the slightest impact on the prevailing media narrative in Canada. It remains determined to perpetuate the fear that any move to increase the role of private health providers or even allow doctors to work in both systems (as was proposed this week by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith) is the first step on the slippery slope to “American-style” health care. This line has been successfully used for decades — often hyperbolically and occasionally hysterically — by public monopoly advocates for Canada’s increasingly expensive and difficult to access systems. We have known for 40 years that once Baby Boomers like your faithful servant turned bald and grey that the system would be unsustainable. But that single, terrifying “American-style” slur has halted reform at every turn.
The Tyee responded with a “Danielle Smith’s secret plan to Destroy Public Health Care” column while the Globe and Mail‘s Gary Mason, a Boomer, challenged my thesis here by suggesting it was time for open minds because “the reality is, the health care system in Canada is a mess”.
It is. And at least some of the blame — a lot, in my view — belongs at the door of Canadian news organizations that for decades have failed to fully inform readers by making them aware that there are a great many alternatives to just “ours” and “US-style”.
I was reminded of this in a recent Postmedia story concerning the perils of private health care provision. Referencing a study on MRIs, the story, right on cue, quotes the part of a study that states “It’s a quiet but rapid march toward U.S.-style health care”.
One would not want to suggest that those clinging to that parochial view should be denied a platform. But at the same time, readers have every right to demand that journalists push back and ask advocates for state monopolies simple questions such as “Why do you say that? Could it not be the first step towards UK-, German-, Dutch-, French-, Portugese- or Swedish-style health care?” and open the debate.
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Algeria: France’s War It Refused to Name – W2W 054
TimeGhost History
Published 23 Nov 2025This episode tracks how the doctrine “Algeria is France” — departments, settler power, and forced assimilation — breeds dispossession, mass violence, and a new Algerian nationalism: from conquest and the Sétif massacres to the FLN’s launch in 1954 and Philippeville in 1955. As Paris doubles its forces and passes Special Powers, Suez intertwines with the war, bombings in Algiers begin, and Lacoste hands police powers to General Massu — opening the Battle of Algiers and a system of torture.
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The Canadian paradox – “settlers” will never belong but “migrants” and “refugees” instantly belong
In the National Post, Mark Milke and Tom Flanagan outline one of the major issues dividing Canadians — the state and state-funded propaganda demonizing “settlers” that also lionizes much more recent arrivals as if they’re automatically better than non-Indigenous Canadians:
A depiction of Samuel de Champlain’s first encounter with the Iroquois (Mohawks) in 1609, a forest skirmish on future Lake Champlain, including fanciful rowboats, rather than canoes.
Caption from the National Post, image from the National Archives of Canada
If Canadians care to understand why our country is increasingly fractured, one key driver is the notion that non-Indigenous Canadians — “settlers” as they are called — should be grateful to live anywhere in the Americas.
The “settler” label is mostly directed at those of British and European ancestry. But it can apply to anyone whose families arrived from anywhere — Africa, Asia, the Levant, the Pacific — who were not part of the prior waves of migration to the Americas.
According to the most recent scientific knowledge, human settlement in the Americas began about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. These pioneers of settlement must have arrived from Asia by boat and hopscotched along the Pacific coast because the interior land was glaciated. They migrated as far south as modern-day Chile, but it is unknown how far inland they penetrated and whether they survived to merge with later migratory settlers.
Another wave of migration started around 13,000 years ago when an ice-free corridor opened through Alberta between the two great glaciers covering North America. This made it possible for people from the now submerged land of Beringia to move south through Alaska, Yukon and Alberta across North America.
Later, but at an unknown date, came the movement of the Dene-speaking peoples now living mostly in Alaska and Canada’s North (though the Tsuut’ina got to southern Alberta and the Navajo to the southwestern United States). Their languages still show traces of their relatively recent Siberian origins.
The Inuit migrated from Siberia across the Arctic to Greenland around AD 1000. Another group inhabited the Arctic starting around 2500 BC, but their relationship to the Inuit is uncertain.
In short, the Americas were settled in waves from Asia. Everyone alive today is descended from settlers. The latest “Indigenous” settlers arrived barely ahead of the first European settlers, the Vikings, who settled in Greenland and Newfoundland, and of Christopher Columbus, who started Spanish settlement in the Caribbean.
Singling out Europeans as “settlers” drives land acknowledgments, as well as demands for compensation and reconciliation. It plays on guilt about the actions of actors long since dead, while the concurrent demands for land, decision-making power and financial settlements occur on an open-ended basis. Internationally, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) also assumes the Indigenous vs. settler-colonial divide is valid.
Why does this matter? Because peaceful, relatively prosperous nation-states are not guaranteed to last. In fact, they’re the exception, not the rule. To make actual progress in unifying Canada as opposed to watching it break down and fragment into hundreds of inconsequential principalities (a separate Quebec, a separate Alberta, and multiple First Nations with state-like powers, of which there would be up to 200 in British Columbia alone), it is overdue to dissect these assumptions, and the related belief that Canadians have done little to make up for some of the wrongs done in history.
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What is Spotted Dick?
Boiled pudding with plenty of currants and a simple butter and brown sugar sauce
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1854While the name “spotted dick” makes us giggle today, its likely origins are just an amusing circumstance of language evolution. The Old English word for dough is dāg (sounds very similar to dog), which probably led to a version of the word that sounds like dick. Funnily enough, another name for spotted dick is spotted dog. So in all likelihood, the name is a holdover from Old English meaning spotted dough.
Whatever you call it, this boiled pudding is really good. It’s sweet, but not too sweet, with an almost crumbly texture and is very moist. The butter and brown sugar sauce isn’t necessary for it to be tasty, but it’s so easy and delicious that I highly recommend making it.
Spotted Dick.
Put three-quarters of a pound of flour into a basin, half a pound of beef suet, half ditto of currants, two ounces of sugar, a little cinnamon, mix with two eggs and two gills of milk; boil in either mould or cloth for one hour and a half; serve with melted butter, and a little sugar over.
— A Shilling Cookery for the People by Alexis Soyer, 1854
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QotD: Talking like a Marxist, living like a Maharaja
My google-fu isn’t strong enough to come up with this particular piece of Pop Culture Kayfabe (didn’t they once open for Exploding Vagina Candle?), but I saw some comedian, my old tired brain says Dave Chappelle though it probably wasn’t, talking about how hard it must’ve been to be Prince’s personal assistant. So much of that job would boil down to “trying to convince your boss that the impossible is, in fact, impossible”.
Along the lines of “No, Prince, I can’t arrange for you to ride a giraffe around Central Park. For one thing, it’s 3am, all the zoos are closed …”
It was funny at the time, but considerably less so now, because Our Betters are really like that now. And they’re ALL like that. I’m pretty sure I told y’all about the time I fixed the toilet at a faculty party. It was in this beautiful “restored” Victorian house (“restored” meaning “it has all the most ostentatiously expensive Victorian ephemera, with all the most ultra-modern conveniences”). The toilet wouldn’t stop running if you flushed it without following this elaborate handle-jiggling procedure that they’d discovered over weeks of trial and error, then carefully wrote down and taped to the top of the tank. Due to scheduling conflicts they weren’t able to get the “restoration” specialist out there to look at it for another month or so …
I’m nobody’s idea of a plumber, but even I can recognize it when the little chain loops around the plug and keeps the float from rising all the way. So I finished my business, took the lid off the tank, unwrapped the chain, and told my hosts to go ahead, it’s “fixed” now. Carefully explaining what I did and why. You don’t even need a regular plumber, let alone some period-specialist interior decorator, I told them. Just … unloop the chain. Takes five seconds. Costs nothing.
They, and everyone else at the party, were aghast. Not at my mastery of the arcane details of plumbing, but that I’d fixed something. You know, with my hands. With that one little act — something so simple, it’d need to be ten times more complicated to even qualify as “basic plumbing” — I’d excommunicated myself from The Anointed. It’s just not done, old sock — we’re afraid you’re no longer our sort. Only Dirt People “fix” things.
That’s their mental world. Z Man used to talk about having worked for a Congressman as a kid, and having to mow the guy’s lawn. For whatever reason the lawn service didn’t make it on the day of some soiree, and none of the guy’s staffers — the very best and brightest, Ivy League grads all — could figure out how to start the mower. They’d never done it before. They’d never even seen it done.
If that’s the world you live in, is it any surprise they fall for the honey pot?
In their world, things just … happen. Electricity comes from the wall socket (remember Pete Buttigieg actually saying that, re: EVs? I can’t seem to find a clip for some reason, but I’m sure it happened). Food comes from the store. Indeed, it doesn’t even come from the store, it comes from the fridge.
You probably think I’m joking, but I’ve seen it at close range. Indeed I’ve experienced it myself, in India, where one simply doesn’t live without servants. Yes, in the very best Colonel Blimp style. It’s not a race thing, it’s a class thing — you will grievously offend your university sponsors, without whom no work can be done in-country, by not living in “middle class” style while you’re there. Which means they hook you up with servants; you tell them where you’re staying (and of course you follow their suggestions; you do not browse the classifieds in Delhi or Mumbai), and pretty soon Choti just … shows up.
N.b. that “Choti” isn’t her personal name. It’s a nickname, a pretty demeaning one — it literally means “shorty”. Little girl. Imagine you have some random chick coming into your house to do all your shopping and cleaning and laundry for you, and that’s what you call her, to her face: “Some chick”. Because they’re all called that.
At first it’s extremely uncomfortable … and then it’s really, really, really fucking nice. Hungry? Don’t worry about it — you just tell Choti what time you expect to be home for dinner, and it’ll be there. You just step out of your clothes wherever, and leave them there — they’ll be back tomorrow, laundered and pressed and folded and there in the drawer. Need to go somewhere? If you’re in a real hurry you can go down to the street and grab an autorickshaw — they’re everywhere — but if you want to arrive in style (which is to say, not drowning in your own sweat, because it’s 100 degrees out and autorickshaws don’t have air conditioning), you call a car.
How much does all this cost? Don’t worry about it. No, really — don’t worry about it. Don’t ask. For one thing, it’s impolite — yes yes, of course all Indian university people are not just Marxists, but usually batshit insane Naxalites, by which I mean they’re batshit by Academic Marxist standards. If you think that stops them from exploiting the poor Chotis of the world like the most obnoxious maharaja, then you, my friend, need to find another blog; you obviously don’t grok the first thing about Leftism.
But more important even than the social element is the fact that Indian currency is worthless. Don’t worry about it, because it’s a rounding error. I am not independently wealthy, and academic grants are not generous (except when you get a shitload of them, and launder the fuck out of them, which is what several big important University offices are designed to do … but individual grants are not generous, usually). It’s just that the exchange rate is like 200 : 1. Have you ever heard the terms “lakh” and “crore“? In India, cars, for example, are priced in lakhs and crores. If your Mercedes-Benz costs one crore rupees — that’s 10 million — then whatever you’re paying Choti doesn’t even qualify as a few pennies per day; Sally Struthers weeps.
(Anyone else remember those ads? The Christian Children’s Fund; they were everywhere in the 80s. Wonder what happened to it? Those ads seem to have been completely scrubbed from YouTube, although of course my google-fu is weak).
See what I mean? All that — cooking, cleaning, bespoke meals, car service, etc. etc. — “costs” what amounts to a handful of Monopoly money (like all Third World countries, India makes their currency look like toucan vomit.
Yep, all with the same picture of Gandhi-ji on the front).
Trust me: after a certain point, you really don’t worry about it. Everybody with me? And yes, I know I sound like a complete dick right about now — that’s the point. You end up acting like a dick, even when you try not to, because you can’t not. I mean that quite literally. You would insult everybody — your sponsors, Choti, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker — if you tried to do any of this yourself. It’s not done. And because it’s not done, you have no idea what anything really costs; you don’t even have any idea how to start finding out.
In short, and in the simplest possible terms: For any reasonable value of it, if you want it, you just tell a guy, and it appears.
That’s the world they live in. Now, it’s important to note that I didn’t try this with, uhhhh, outcall massage services and the like. Nor hard drugs. But I don’t doubt that I could’ve made that happen, with very little effort — I assume you just tell your driver, the way (I’ve heard) it’s done here, with cabbies and so forth. Or you just go down to the liquor store. Despite their prudish public image, Indians drink like fish; they just don’t buy it themselves. They send their guy for that (the male version of Choti, colloquially known as “Raju”, although for whatever reason that is an insult, where “Choti” isn’t). If you go down to the liquor store personally, you’ll be the only guy there who isn’t a version of Raju, so you’ll be spoiled for choice. I assume all you have to do is pick a Raju, flash him a discreet handful of Monopoly money, and let him take care of it.
Severian, “I Love the Honey Pot!”, Founding Questions, 2025-08-18.
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November 23, 2025
John Cage’s 4’33” meets the anti-clanker protest song
Ted Gioia on Paul McCartney’s latest single — his first in several years — and what he’s protesting against … clankers in music and the arts:
Paul McCartney is releasing a new track. It’s his first new song in five years — so that’s a big deal. But there’s something even more significant about this 2 minute 45 second release.
The song is silent. It’s a totally blank track — except for a bit of hiss and background noise.
What’s going on? Has Paul McCartney run out of melodies at age 83? Is he nurturing his inner John Cage. Did he simply forget to turn on the mic?
No, none of the above.
Macca is releasing this track as a protest against AI.
His new “music” is part of an album entitled Is This What We Want? It’s already available on digital platforms, and is now coming out on vinyl. All proceeds will go to the non-profit organization Help Musicians.
“The album consists of recordings of empty studios and performance spaces,” according to the website. In addition to McCartney, more than a thousand musicians are participating, including:
Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, Ed O’Brien, Dan Smith, The Clash, Mystery Jets, Jamiroquai, Imogen Heap, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Riz Ahmed, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, James MacMillan, Max Richter, John Rutter, The Kanneh-Masons, The King’s Singers, The Sixteen, Roderick Williams, Sarah Connolly, Nicky Spence, Ian Bostridge, and many more.
I keep hearing that protest music is dead — and has been losing momentum since the Vietnam War. But there’s now a new war, and it’s stirring up creators in every artistic idiom.
They are fighting for their livelihoods and IP rights. And, so far, it’s been a losing battle.
You can see the new battle lines across the entire creative landscape.
Vince Gilligan, one of the most brilliant minds in TV, admits that he “hates AI”. He calls it the “world’s most expensive plagiarism machine”. For his new show Pluribus, he has added this disclaimer to the credits:
This show was made by humans.
AI represents the exact opposite of creativity, Gilligan warns. It steals the work of others. So any attempt to legitimize it as a creative tool is built on lies. A bank robber might just as well pretend to be a financier. Or an art forger claim to be Picasso.
[…]
This is the new culture war.
And it’s very different from the old culture war — which was a dim reflection of politics. This new battle is happening inside the culture world itself, and threatens to cut off artists from their own longstanding partners and support systems.
This new culture war will only escalate. The stakes are too high, and artists can’t afford to stay on the sidelines. But they face heavy odds, with the richest people on the planet opposed to their efforts.
How will this battle get decided? It really comes down to the audience. If they prefer AI slop, we will witness the total degradation of arts and entertainment.
I’d like to think that people are too smart to fall for this crude simulation of human creative expression. Who wants to hear a bot sing of love it has never experienced? Who wants a nature poem from a digital construct that exists outside of nature? Who wants a painting made by something with no eyes to see?
Will the public find this charming. Or even plausible? Maybe a few twelve year olds and fools, but not serious people. That’s my hunch.
In any event, we will soon find out.
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North Africa Ep. 9: Rommel tightens the Noose around Cyrenaica
World War Two
Published 22 Nov 2025April 1941, North Africa. The British forward line at Mersa Brega has collapsed, 2nd Armoured Division is in retreat, and Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps is on the move. What was supposed to be a cautious blocking force has turned into a fast-moving desert offensive threatening Benghazi, Mechili, and all of Cyrenaica.
In this episode of our WW2 in Real Time – North Africa miniseries, we follow:
- Rommel as he ignores Hitler’s orders and pushes east after Mersa Brega
- The chaotic British retreat and fuel-starved tanks abandoning the desert
- The fall of Benghazi without a fight
- Wavell’s misjudgements and late reactions from Middle East Command
- The race for Mechili, a vital crossroads and supply dump
- The brutal reality of desert logistics – where sand and distance destroy more vehicles than enemy shells
While Rommel drives his reconnaissance units toward Benghazi and Mechili, British commanders try to trade ground for time and avoid encirclement. At the same time, Italian commanders warn Rommel about overstretch, and German divisional leaders complain about fuel and breakdowns – warnings he largely ignores.
By the end of this week in 1941, the Desert Fox is deep inside Cyrenaica, the British are burning their own supply dumps, and both sides are racing for the next key position. A clash at Mechili is imminent – and so is a showdown at the Er Regima pass with the “Devil’s Own” Australians waiting in ambush.
This is Episode 9 of our North Africa 1941 miniseries – part of our larger effort to cover WW2 week by week, in real time.
If you want to support this work and get deeper into the war in the desert and beyond, join the TimeGhost Army at timeghost.tv or patreon.com.
Excelsior!
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Do older Canadians really hate their children and grandchildren? The fiscal evidence says “yes”
As I posted a few days back, the real political divide in Canada is no longer the left versus the right: it’s the old financially parasitizing the younger generations. At The Line, Ben Woodfinden discusses how the smug, comfortable boomers are being confronted by, for lack of a better term, a “new right” of far less comfortable younger voters:
eLbOwS uP!
The specific complaints from people like d’Entremont and other grumbling voices are less about ideology and more the tone and style of Pierre Poilievre (though perhaps the two are connected). Poilievre’s temperament and style rubs certain people, including some Conservatives, the wrong way. Now, full disclosure, I worked for Poilievre for a few years, and I can confirm he’s a demanding boss. But so is the prime minister, reportedly. And Poilievre is also in my experience the hardest working person I’ve ever met.
The tone battle is not a revival of Red vs. Blue. It’s not clear those terms are even relevant today. “Red Tory” is often used pejoratively to describe a “Liberal Lite” voter who identifies as a conservative but is indistinguishable from a Liberal — those who fit the “social progressive, fiscal conservative” moniker. This is not what Red Toryism historically meant; it’s actually the opposite of this. Red Toryism is a distinctly Canadian tradition of conservatism that was focused on the preservation of Canada contra a liberal United States, and emphasized the role of the state in this. It blended conservatism and elements of socialism in a distinctly anti-liberal synthesis that rejected radical individualism — that’s what the “red” part actually means, not liberalism but socialism. This kind of Toryism — “conservatism with a conscience” — is committed to public institutions and is pro-market but not entirely libertarian.
But Red Toryism is no longer a dominant force in Canadian conservatism; today it’s a remnant, largely in Atlantic Canada. What we’re really looking at here is a generational fault line that cuts right through the heart of Canadian conservatism.
Many older Canadians are conservative, and these older Tories are (in general) fairly well off. They are retired, or well advanced into their careers. They own homes that are paid off, or will be in the near future, and worth a lot more than what they paid for them. Many of them have been able to help their children get started in their own careers, or with down payments on homes of their own. They value stability — it is essential if they are to continue enjoying their prosperous lives. These people have long enough memories to remember the political battles that led to the creation of the modern Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 — some of them were no doubt even participants, and may still identify with one faction or the other.
Now contrast this with many of the leading voices on the other side of the debate. They call themselves “the new right”. In the absence of a better term, I’ll use that. Canada’s new right tends to be younger, and this matters not just because the old PC/Reform divide means very little to them, it matters because they are much angrier with our general state of affairs, and for good reason.
The emerging flagship publication for this collection of young conservatives is the Substack Without Diminishment. In some ways, the emerging conservative opposition in Ontario to Premier Doug Ford centred around an organization called Project Ontario (discussed in last week’s On The Line podcast here) is also a good representation of it.
The voices and figures involved in this movement are younger, often very online, and eager to pick fights with this older generation of conservatives. For some of the writers at Without Diminishment, the archnemesis of their conservatism is Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne. He represents, for them, an outdated kind of “Boomer conservatism” that does not speak to them or the issues they care about. New conservatives have also recently written, after Ford ran ads featuring Ronald Reagan in America, that it’s time for “the gatekeepers of the Canadian right … to move on from 1984” — namely Reagan-era conservatism.
Twenty years ago, I’d often quote Andrew Coyne’s columns, but at some point he had a significant change of heart and one of the first Without Diminishment articles I linked to was what I characterized as “The Anti-Coynist Manifesto“.
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