Quotulatiousness

January 10, 2026

Why Greenland of all places?

Filed under: Europe, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

President Trump’s renewed interest in Greenland seems inexplicable to most of us, unless it’s part of his notorious 51st state plan to further encircle Canada (forget I said that, the Liberals might use it to scare the boomers again…). A few days back, CDR Salamander discussed the “unfortunate Greenland kerfuffle” on his Substack:

It would be an understatement to say that I am not all that pleased with where we are in January 2026 with the Greenland question. This would not have been the productive path I would have recommended because, in the end, this is a very serious issue.

Sure, in the first few months of 2025, the meme-ish nature of it all was fun and funny … but only to a point.

In 2026, Denmark is not going to sell or otherwise transfer Greenland to the USA like they did with the now-U.S. Virgin Islands a bit more than a century ago.

However, before we go further, if you have a knee-jerk reaction to support or oppose anything or any topic because DJT is involved, please repress that feeling until at least the end of the post. It isn’t productive, enlightening, or good for your health — so give it a rest for a bit until we are done, then you can carry on as before.

Next, let’s do as we should in most things: let’s go to the chartroom.

Object Zero’s crayon work on the Arctic Institute’s map is superb to illustrate that point.

The Europeans have whipped themselves into an almost comical lather over it all. Having lived with their NATSEC nomenklatura for years, I’m not shocked. They tend to be very narrowly read, get their ideas about the USA from NYT, WaPo, the usual suspects in East Coast Universitlandia, and their nomenklatura is worm-ridden with the same people who opposed Cold War NATO efforts to counter the Soviet Union’s militarism and supported every anti-USA trend of the fiscal quarter, etc. It is always 1968 or 1983 with these people.

Unhelpful to trans-Atlantic cooperation has been an almost gleeful approach to triggering these people who never thought DJT would come back to power, and from 2020-24 acted like it. The vengeful and bitter are fighting with the frag-pattern hitting everyone else.

Behind that triggering and, at least from this side of the pond, trolling, is a very serious security concern in the high north that Greenland is, literally, right in the middle of.

At The Conservative Woman, Jonathon Riley wonders if Greenland is worth more than the NATO alliance:

Satellite view of Greenland, Iceland, and parts of Northern Canada.
NASA/Ames Research Center, 17 May, 2005.

Greenland is the world’s largest island, (just) contiguous with Canada, and geographically part of North America. It was colonised by Denmark in the tenth century but the Norse settlements, which farmed sheep and cattle, died out during the mini-ice age of the medieval period, not long before the rediscovery of America by Columbus.

The majority of the population is now Inuit with only about 10 per cent being Nordic. Following a 1979 referendum, Denmark granted Greenland home rule and in 2008, self-government increased further. Denmark retains control of citizenship, security, finance and foreign affairs. Greenland joined the EU with Denmark but has since left. As a self-governing part of Denmark, it remains a member of Nato.

Greenland sits astride an area of great strategic importance. First, the Arctic ice is retreating as the result of an entirely natural process of cyclical warming – nothing to do with so-called man-made “climate change”. This will end when the world enters the next ice age, which is long overdue.

As the Arctic ice retreats, ships can sail through the north-east and north-west passages, sought for so long by explorers. This means not only that transit times can be reduced but also that the Russian “shadow fleet” of unregistered oil tankers engaged in moving sanctioned oil can more easily dodge interception, as is happening to Venezuelan oil tankers.

Second, Greenland probably has reserves of oil, coal and gas concealed beneath the ice cap, but exploration has been slow and difficult, for obvious reasons. Estimates put Greenland fourth in terms of likely reserves in the Arctic region.

Third, in Greenland’s territorial waters in the Arctic Ocean there are huge reserves of fish, shrimp, whales and seals – valuable food resources especially for China and Japan.

Finally, there is the matter of fresh water, an increasingly scarce commodity in many parts of the world. The Greenland ice sheet holds about 10 per cent of the world’s fresh water.

It is therefore easy to see why both the Russians and the Americans see Greenland as a valuable asset. Donald Trump made aggressive noises about “acquiring” Greenland during his first presidential term and has now made further remarks, perhaps emboldened by his successes in Iran and Venezuela.

Special envoy Jeff Landry has been appointed to examine how the US could acquire Greenland. The means so far mentioned have included diplomacy, a territorial purchase – the US has done this before in its history, for example Louisiana and Alaska – or a lease agreement.

The problem here is that the Greenlanders and the Danes are having none of it. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told the BBC: “As long as we have a kingdom consisting of Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, we cannot accept actions that undermine our territorial integrity”. Rasmussen is on solid legal ground, as the UN Charter specifically states that frontiers must not be changed by force.

In his weekly post, Andrew Sullivan says that Trump is conducting a “Viking foreign policy” (trigger warning: contains Andrew Sullivan):

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A Short Tour of Roman London

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 19 Sept 2025

The ruins of Londinium – London’s Roman predecessor – are not spectacular. But they are extremely interesting …

0:00 Introduction
0:40 City walls
1:47 St. Magnus the Martyr
2:26 Monument to the Great Fire
3:12 Leadenhall Market
4:10 London Mithraeum
6:19 Bank of England
7:08 Guildhall Amphitheater
8:14 The Gherkin

QotD: The United Nations

Filed under: Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Were serious reform of the UN accomplished, it would be turned from an ineffective anti-American and anti-Western organization, into an effective anti-American and anti-Western organization. That is absolutely inevitable from the membership structure, with its voting blocs. So, better a UN that continues in a state of abject dysfunction, than one that can be more efficiently evil.

David Warren, “The nuts, & Bolton”, Ottawa Citizen, 2005-09-17.

January 9, 2026

Instead of “regime change” … “regime decapitation”

Filed under: Americas, Government, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter considers the startling return of military competence and the ongoing echoes of the decapitating attack on Venezuela:

Photo from Postcards from Barsoom

In the age of simulations and simulacra, every action is also a symbol. Within the hyperreality of discourse the semiotic content of a public event is primary to its physical, political, or economic import. This is true of war as much as anything else; war in this age takes place first and foremost in the psychic realm, at the level of meaning, of hermeneusis. Warfare is psychological, not only in the sense of bolstering morale or breaking the will of the enemy to fight, but in the more fundamental sense of affecting the minds of those caught up in its spectacle by inserting new ideas that change the way that they think. This is most effective, as any magician or hypnotist or marketing executive will tell you, when those effects are left implicit, that they might operate directly upon the collective subconscious, in the shadow realm of instinct and intuition from which all political impulse springs.

With that in mind we might ask, in the spirit of an augur inquiring after the flight of a dove at daybreak, a circling hawk at high noon, or the cold gaze of a crow in the gloaming, what is the meaning of the Caracas raid? We do not need to assume that the meaning we look for in this action is intentional, though we should not rule this out, either; what matters is how the act will manifest symbolically, how it will be interpreted in the minds of onlookers, which it will do regardless of intention.

The superficial import of the action is clear enough. America has seized control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world, and at a stroke applies crippling pressure to the economies of China, Iran, and Cuba (who were Venezuela’s best grey-market customers), as well as to the economies of its adversary Russia and its wayward sibling Canada (both of which depend for their prosperity upon high oil prices). Both China and Russia have been deprived of a key New World ally, and thus the Monroe Doctrine is reasserted, and foreign powers pushed out of Washington’s sphere of influence. A hostile communist government has been decapitated, opening the way for the millions of Venezuelans displaced by Bolivarian tyranny, refugees whose presence has destabilized Venezuela’s neighbours for many years now, to return home.

To be sure, there is still great uncertainty. Hugo Chavez’ tomb may have been destroyed, but his Bolivarian regime is still largely intact, his apparatchicks remain in control of Venezuela’s state apparatus and military, and his terrorist colectivos still control the streets of Caracas.

Trump’s declaration that America now owns Venezuela’s oil feels a bit premature. Can one really claim control, without boots on the ground? I confess that it is not at all clear to me exactly how this is all supposed to work. Perhaps it is meant to function through pure intimidation: whoever ends up assuming power in Venezuela, they will know that if they don’t do as they’re told, they might be next, and perhaps will not be given the grace of an arrest and a show trial but simply executed without warning by drone; meanwhile, America offers itself as the sole legitimate customer for Venezuela’s sole marketable product, while providing its oil industry engineers to rebuild (and assume control of) infrastructure fallen into disrepair following Chavez’ nationalization and subsequent decades of neglect and mismanagement. Trump holds out one hand in an offer of assistance and mutual benefit, while holding back his other curled in a mailed fist, a threat made plausible by the fact that he just punched them hard in the mouth.

Still, all of this is nothing more than realpolitik, the hard edges of power in the material world.

The real meaning, the symbolic importance, lies deeper. It is not measured in dollars or barrels of oil. It is a message.

So what is that message?

And some of the recipients of that message should be paying especially close attention:

Mass third world invasion is a choice. Economic sabotage in the name of preventing the weather from changing is a choice. Ruining the lives of young men with DEI is a choice. Blackwashing our history and mythology is a choice. Predatory taxation is a choice. Overregulation is a choice. Brainwashing the young to hate themselves is a choice. Yasslighting the young women into choosing girlbossery over family is a choice. Sacrificing the lives of the young to the fears of the old during the COVID lockdowns was a choice.

Allowing the incompetent to run things in the name of ‘social justice’ is a choice, and the contrast between the litany of inept fumbles that has resulted in and the smooth professionalism on display in the Caracasian raid has thrown the consequences of that choice – and the consequences of its alternative – into sharp relief.

And all we have to do to reverse the decline is decapitate the beast, put the right men in charge, and everything will follow naturally from there. Nature will begin to heal, as surely as Yellowstone’s ecology repaired itself once wolves were returned to their rightful place at the predatory apex.

That is why leaders across the Western world are squealing so loudly.

Canadian liberals, for example, are not actually worried that a Delta Force team will rappel down from an MH-47G Chinook Special Operations Helicopter to blackbag Prime Minister Mark Carney from 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1M 1M4, and not only because the inadequate security of the traditional prime minister’s domicile has motivated Carney to instead take up residence at Rideau Cottage, 1 Sussex Drive, where he is usually home by 9 pm with his wife Diana. The concern is much more general: that the beleaguered Canadian people, along with those of the rest of the rotting West, will look at the remarkable results obtained by regime decapitation in the United States, and start getting ideas.

Want to fix the United Kingdom, and make Great Britain again? Sweep the traitors of the Labour Party out of Parliament, remove that pusillanimous android Two-Tier Queer from power, put Nigel Farage and 300 Reform MPs in their place, and watch as they invoke the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy to cast off three decades of Blairite Fabianism in a Great Repeal Act that frees the British state to remigrate the foreign invaders, rebuild the country’s industry, and revive the British military.

Want to fix Europe? Cast down the old women in Brussels – they have no popular legitimacy in any case – and remove their creatures, like Macron or Merz, who keep their peoples yoked to the suicidal EUrocracy. Raise up nationalists in their place – Le Pen, the AfD – and watch as Europe’s natural creative genius and martial spirit reasserts itself. No more Net Zero incapacitating industry, no more European Court of Human Rights preventing invaders from being remigrated, no more Digital Services Act censoring the Internet, no more micromanagerial bureaucratic overregulation strangling the economy.

Mark Carney’s play-acting on the international stage

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Europe, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There is no way that Canada can make itself economically independent of the United States, no matter how much wishcasting power is exerted to persuade anti-American boomers who habitually vote Liberal. Our entire economy is oriented to serve the vast market to our south, and we’ve been freeloading on our own military because the Americans have been willing to take up the slack and — until recently — not castigate our leaders for their fecklessness. It was bad under Justin Trudeau, but it’s actually gotten worse under Mark Carney’s leadership. Trudeau was performative and loved to play to the world media, but Carney seems to actually believe that he can reverse the entire direction of the Canadian economy by jetting around the world and bad-talking Donald Trump. The Canadian economy has been stalled for ten years now, and if Trump finally loses patience with our idiotic elites, it’ll go into free-fall.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, James E. Thorne points out just how few cards Carney actually has in his hand:

Mark Carney’s and Canada’s Dangerous Refusal to Face Reality.

Mark Carney and most Canadians are behaving as if Canada is an independent pole in a multipolar order, when the world he actually inhabits is a hierarchy being brutally clarified by Washington. Trump’s revamped National Security Strategy and the “Trump Corollary” — asserted through the seizure of Nicolás Maduro and open threats toward Cuba and Colombia, make plain that the United States now treats the Western Hemisphere as an American security estate, not a debating society among equals.

In that framework, Canada is not a co-author of the rules. It is a dependency inside the U.S. sphere, structurally lashed to American markets, finance and supply chains. AND after decades without a serious sovereign industrial or energy strategy, Canada is at best a weak Middle Power, that has for decades squandered its competitive advantage through proformative politics and virtue signalling.

In this era, the Western Hemisphere is now a “secure production platform” for American industry and technology, defined not by territorial control but by ownership, access and compliance. The Trump doctrine logic is clear and blunt yet internally coherent: if the Western Hemispheres natural resources and supply chains are secured, the economic and geopolitical dividends will follow.

Carney’s answer to the Trump Doctrine, however, remains the same “City-of-London” orthodoxy that produced him: more proformative political grandstanding, more process, more declarations, more meetings, and more boondoggles.

The Greenland consulate, rhetorical red lines over annexation, the flying around the world, and ritual protests against U.S. action in Venezuela all presume that we still live in the post WWII rules based order. We do not! Will live in the era of the Trump Doctrine, and no we can’t wait it out. And in this era, Greenland will not be allowed to be under the influence of Russia or China.

Thucydides warned that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. Carney’s tragedy is that he quotes the rules-based order while presiding over a country whose economic structure is colonial and whose security ultimately depends on the very power he is theatrically chastising. Posturing without power is not prudence. It is provocation without a plan. And yes it’s dangerous.

The irony is that Carney understands all of this perfectly well, which only sharpens the question: what, exactly, is he doing by posturing as a rules-based equal in a hierarchy where he knows Canada lacks the hard power to back his stance?

The Official American Boy Scout Rifle: Remington 4-S

Filed under: History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Aug 2025

The scouting concept exploded into the American culture after 1907, with a multitude of local, regional, and national organizations setting up in the years before World War One. Among these was the American Boy Scouts, founded by William Randolph Hearst. In 1913 they adopted the Remington 4-S as their official rifle, a .22 Short caliber rolling block. It was initially sold directly and exclusively to Scouts for $5, although it was quickly added to the general Remington catalog.

This rifle was intended to be used for both target shooting and also military style drill. To that end, it had military-style furniture, a stacking swivel, and a bayonet lug with miniature bayonet. About 1500 of these were made in 1913, which was the only year of production. In 1914, probably having failed to make the hoped-for sales numbers, Remington renamed the gun the “Military Model” to expand its sale beyond just the American Boy Scouts.

Oh, and note that this was not the Boy Scouts of America! The ABS would have a series of legal fights with the BSA over naming rights, which the BSA finally won in the early 1920s. The ABS was never a very large organization, and it faded away entirely in the 1920s. The BSA opted not to have an official rifle, as it was shying away from firearms at the time after a couple well-publicized shooting accidents.
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QotD: “My goal is to get paid for having fun”

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

My critics consider me a pulp hack, but I’ve proven I can do the deep, dark, and serious better than they can. I’ve demonstrated that I can hop into whatever genre I feel like and do well there. But mostly I just like to have fun and entertain my fans.

True multi genre authors are rare. I’ve done really well in a bunch of different genres because I’m good at recognizing what people enjoy about those, and then giving them what they want, with my own spin on it. I can tweak it, but I shouldn’t break it.

“What if your childhood heroes are really losers and here’s a new girl boss? OOOOH SO EDGY.” That kind of shit bores me.

Far too many authors are pretentious shit heads who climb up their own ass thinking they need to “subvert” expectations, but they’re really not brilliant enough to pull that off. They’re just crapping on the stuff that made people like those genres to begin with. They’re not nearly as clever as they think they are.

Me? I’m happy to be a pulp hack. If I’m writing epic fantasy, I’m going to do the big, deep, thematic, emotional, stuff (and Saga of the Forgotten Warrior rocks) and if I’m doing progression fantasy then it’s going to be fun and adventure and scrappy nobodies trying to make it in the world and becoming heroes along the way. American Paladin is a dark and gritty vigilante story (with monsters in it). And Monster Hunter is urban fantasy soaked in testosterone and gun oil (that’s next for 2026). I’ve done sci-fi. I’ve done horror. I’ve done comedy. I’ve done thrillers. Hell, I’ve done stuff like Hard Magic where good luck pinning down what the hell genre that is … alternate history, hard boiled, pulp noir, super heroes? Hell if I know.

My goal is to get paid for having fun. 😀

Larry Correia, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-10-08.

January 8, 2026

Minnesota in the news

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Like most people, I don’t normally pay much attention to news from Minnesota unless it involves my favourite NFL team. Thus far, thank goodness, the Vikings seem to have avoided being entangled in the latest scandals, starting with YouTuber Nick Shirley’s exposé of blatant fraud in daycare centres in and around Minneapolis that triggered Governor Tim Walz to end his re-election campaign. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Andrew Neil summarizes the situation so far:

The usual suspects have been claiming on X that the Minnesota fraud scandal is no big deal and that it was racist to place Somalis at the centre of it. They lie. Some facts:

The fraud scandals in Minnesota are a very big deal, involving (so far) the theft of over $1 billion in taxpayer funds across multiple schemes, primarily from federal and state programmes meant for child nutrition, autism services and daycares during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Federal prosecutors have already charged almost 100 people. Dozens convicted or pleading guilty. Investigators suggest the total could exceed $9 billion in fraudulent claims.

It is already the largest pandemic-related fraud case in US history, with money siphoned off for personal luxuries like expensive cars and real estate, rather than the intended recipients — like low-income children.

The majority of those charged (around 85 out of 98 defendants in the core cases) are Somali-American. Why? Because the fraud often involved networks of Somali-owned “nonprofits” and businesses inflating claims or billing for nonexistent services.

Governor Tim Walz labeled the scandal being inflamed by “white supremacy” In fact, systemic fraud was enabled by his state’s lax controls. Walz now so discredited he won’t run for Governor again. His political career is over. How this bozo ever passed Kamala Harris’ vetting procedures to be her running mate is a mystery.

At PJ Media, Matt Margolis discusses the latest Nick Shirley video release:

Shirley’s new video dials things up to 11.

David Hoch, co-founder of Minnesotans for Responsible Government, joined him on the ground in Minneapolis, revealing an insane truth: this fraud hits hundreds of billions nationwide. Minnesota’s slice? At least $80 billion. Layers of shell companies obscure the cash trail, including 1,200 medical transport outfits in the area that do nothing while collecting taxpayer dollars.

Hoch swears by his evidence. “I have been to many of these transportation companies, and I’ve been time-stamping my photographs for a whole year at one facility in Minneapolis, and those vans in that parking lot had not moved one inch in an entire year. They’re all still sitting there.”

Hoch also revealed a widespread ballot-harvesting operation tied to Somali communities in Minnesota, claiming the scale of the activity is “way beyond anybody’s imagination,” adding that “the state doesn’t even know” and “the feds don’t even know”.

Shirley asked Hoch why a judge would allegedly defer to what he described as the “head of the Somali mafia”. Hoch responded that the influence stems from raw political power. He described the Somali community as a unified voting bloc that has effectively held Minnesota Democrats hostage. “What they say is if you do something to go against our community, we’re gonna vote for, and they all vote together, and there’s ballot harvesting, I’ve seen them do it, that, ‘We’re gonna vote for your opponent, unless you do what we tell you to do’.”

“And so it’s all purely for votes?” Shirley asked.

“Yes,” Hoch replied.

The conversation then turned to Cedar Riverside, a massive apartment complex in Minneapolis. Hoch said it was just one of many similar developments. “You’ve got 20 more just like this around the Twin Cities, and they’re all Somali,” he said. Hoch estimated “probably 100,000 or more people,” claiming they live rent-free and receive taxpayer-funded benefits. “They’re driving a vehicle that you paid for. They’re eating food that you paid for. Everything they do is, is something that you paid for,” he said.

Hoch also described how he claims the voting process works within the bloc. He alleged that a single individual collects ballots for large numbers of residents, with little oversight. “They’ll have one person go there and collect all the ballots and nobody tracks,” Hoch said. He added that apartments can claim inflated numbers of residents: “They could say they have nine people living in an apartment. They’re gonna send them nine ballots,” which are then gathered by a designated collector.

Later on Wednesday, an altercation between organized protesters and law enforcement resulted in the death of a woman after she tried to run down an ICE agent, who shot her in self-defence. The mayor of Minneapolis (Mogadishuapolis?) responded as you might expect:

The debate over this incident breaks down on the usual partisan lines. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Kurt Schlichter summarizes the pro-law enforcement position:

On the other hand, it’s the lockstep belief of the anti-Trump politicians and activists that the agent shot a “legal observer” in the performance of her peaceful, completely legal duties:

Drawing lessons from the Venezuelan operation

Filed under: China, Military, Russia, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Following up on an item that I shared as part of yesterday’s Venezuela post, ESR expands on the notion that China (among other potentially hostile nations) will be having a lot of time to rethink due to the noted failure of Russian SAM-300s, Chinese anti-air radar, and other high tech items fielded by the Venezuelan military:

I’ve been contemplating the reactions to this post and I realized there is an important point about which I should have been clearer. There are several different ways in which Chinese radars can just NOT FUCKING WORK. My point was intended to be that almost all of them create huge operational uncertainty for the Chinese.

I gather a lot of people thought that “not fucking work” means they’re intrinsically shitty and would fail to do their job even in the absence of countermeasures. I think this is possible, but unlikely.

There are other values of not fucking work. Including:

* Easily neutralized by ECM.

* Easily taken out by cheap anti-rad missiles or drones.

* Easily fried by some kind of monster secret HERF gun.

* U.S. anti-radar stealth is good. I mean, really, mind-bogglingly good. Better than anybody without a top-secret security clearance knows.

Out of all the possibilities, the only scenario that does not threaten the sphincter control of Chinese military planners is “Venezuelan air defense had stand-down orders”. And if that were true, I’m pretty sure it would already have leaked.

“Kidnapping the head of a sovereign state with whom you are not at war is also nuts”

Filed under: Americas, Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, David Knight Legg responds to an Andrew Coyne post on the legality of the US operation to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela:

Image from CDR Salamander

    Andrew Coyne @acoyne
    Kidnapping the head of a sovereign state with whom you are not at war is also nuts, Jason. The two go together.

Andrew @acoyne this isn’t accurate.

– Maduro was definitively not the elected President of Vanzuela. He was rejected as such by 50 nations incl the EU in 2024. He was a known narco-terrorist and cartel leader that used state capture and the army to run and enforce his drug and sanctions evasion empire.

– Biden put a $25million bounty on his head Jan 2025 for crimes against humanity and the USA cocaine trade, because destroying his nation for a decade, he fraudulently took power in 2024 and committed atrocities against his opponents after losing in a landslide so he could keep using state capture to run Venezuela — with the aid of terror groups and China Russia and Iran who protected him there and at the UN in exchange for oil, gold and a western hemisphere base of operations.

He was taken by the US to face trial just like Noriega in 1990 (on almost identical charges).

It may not suit your politics but bringing him to justice any other way had proven implausible. This is all well known.

Venezuelans around the world are celebrating wildly after two decades of socialist ruin and the worst humanitarian crisis in the western hemisphere creating 8 million refugees.

Honest question: what would you have done instead?

– status quo? let him stay in power with the help of Russia, Iran and China while actively torturing and murdering his opposition?

– more legal proceduralism at a UN Security Council where Russia and China protect him?

– bureaucratic inertia: letting people die and regional security deteriorate under the protection of another strongly worded reminder to abide by international law and stop the narco terrorism and atrocities?

There aren’t easy answers. It’s going to take a lot of work for Venezuela to come back from a deeply embedded Baathist-style state capture, but this is a critical first step for that nation.

If this is actually about Trump instead of the outcome, would you feel the same way if Biden instead of Trump had executed the same strategy to follow his bounty on Maduro?

The demise of Maduro is such an obviously good thing in so many ways it baffles me to see the debate revert to (often inaccurate) readings of legal minutiae with the underlying idea that it was better for him to be left in place …

A few days back, Daniel McCarthy suggested that the Venezuela operation reveals useful information on the “Don-roe Doctrine”:

A small detachment of Canadian “semi-professional leftist protesters” swapped out their Palestinian flags for this photo op.

President Trump is a wager of “un-war”, which confounds his critics and some of his supporters alike. The capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro over the weekend is a case in point. The usual semi-professional leftist protesters are hitting the streets of Europe and a few American cities to decry America’s latest war – but what kind of war lasts just two-and-a-half hours?

US troops didn’t invade en masse. A handful of special forces were dropped in, they killed el presidente‘s guards, nabbed their man and got out. Whatever one thinks about the justice of the whole thing, calling it a “war” is ridiculous. If that’s what this was, then Jimmy Carter waged a war with Iran in 1979 when he launched a doomed military mission to rescue US hostages. And the US must have been at war with Pakistan in 2011 when special forces raided Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden.

Critics of US foreign policy have long mocked the tendency of neoconservative hawks to frame every foreign tension as a replay of 1939. Such mockery is well deserved. Yet many of the same people who perceive the idiocy of treating every dictator as a new Adolf Hitler treat every US intervention, however small or brief, as a new Iraq War. Whatever else the Venezuelan operation might be, it isn’t that.

In fact, what Trump did in Venezuela isn’t even really “regime change”: the socialist regime that began under Hugo Chávez is still in power, only with a more pliable successor to Maduro now in charge. Former vice-president and now acting leader Delcy Rodríguez, despite initial remarks condemning the US action (and who would expect her to say anything different?), appears to be willing to de-escalate and cooperate with Washington. Trump’s own record, such as his intervention last summer in the Iran-Israel war, suggests he will want to de-escalate as well. He’s now made his point.

That doesn’t mean the situation isn’t perilous, of course. This may not be a war. There’s no ongoing fighting and Venezuela has continuity of government, albeit not the same president as a week ago. But even if Rodríguez and Trump both want a thaw in US-Venezuela relations, there are a multitude of scenarios that could lead to disaster. Hardliners or malcontents within the Venezuelan regime could stage a coup against Rodríguez. Or a popular revolt, with perfect justice on its side, could lead to bloody confrontations between the government and people. Trump seems to be inclined to minimise those risks by not pushing for speedy democratisation and liberalisation, but there may be some in his administration with less patience and more idealism.

WW1: The War Begins… | EP 1

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Rest Is History
Published 25 Aug 2025

Following the declaration of war in 1914, how did the outbreak of the First World War unfold? What were the earliest military engagements of this terrible, totemic event? Who were its key political players and how did they respond? What was the attitude to the war in Germany? Were the allies unified from this early stage, or were they suspicious and frozen by indecision? And, how did the Germans, with the mightiest army in all the world, make its move on “plucky little” Belgium?

Join Dominic and Tom as they launch into one of the most consequential events of all time: the outbreak of the First World War.

00:00 – Germany: from peaceful nation to war machine
02:30 – Introduction to WWI series: scope and importance
04:16 – Was Germany uniquely responsible for the war? Historians’ debate
06:12 – Fear versus aggression: German motivations
06:46 – The July Crisis: Sarajevo, blank cheque, Kaiser’s holiday, Austrian ultimatum
08:08 – Helmuth von Moltke the Younger: personality, melancholy, moustaches
12:01 – Germany’s strategic weakness: encirclement fears, manpower and GDP
13:45 – The Schlieffen Plan explained
18:06 – Von Moltke panics
19:00 – Kaiser signs mobilization order; emotional scene in Berlin
22:53 – The problem of Belgian neutrality and Britain’s obligations
23:47 – British cabinet debates: how far into Belgium would justify war?
25:04 – German ultimatum to Belgium: demands for railways and fortresses
26:14 – Belgium rejects ultimatum; King Albert’s defiance
27:59 – “A scrap of paper”: German gaffe fuels British propaganda
28:35 – King Albert’s speech to parliament: “Determined at any cost”
29:52 – Total War Rome (Creative Assembly)
30:37 – German invasion begins
36:18 – German reprisals in Belgium
50:00 – Comparisons with Allied conduct in Ireland, colonies, and elsewhere
50:47 – The Leuven library fire: destruction of manuscripts, global outrage
52:12 – Germany’s reputation collapses: admired culture turned to “barbarism”
53:28 – Fall of Brussels: German army enters the capital
(more…)

QotD: Canned food and the early days of the Raj

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Consider the history of canned food. It has obvious military applications — Napoleon famously quipped that an army marches on its stomach, and as canning was largely invented in France, he made some effort to issue food to his troops (as opposed to local procurement and / or “living off the land”). He didn’t quite get there, but the resultant revolution in logistics was as important to the conduct of war, in its way, as just about anything else. If you don’t know how armies are provisioned, you’re likely to miss something when you talk about wars.

You might even miss something culturally. For instance, there’s an entire sub-subdiscipline called “Food and Foodways”, and it’s not as silly as it sounds. Canned food was an important part of British cultural life in the Raj, for instance. File it under “Women Ruin Everything” — once it got safe enough for ladies to have a reasonable chance of surviving East of Suez, the awesome freewheeling decadence of the “White Mughals” period was replaced by dour, dowdy Victorian bullshit. Every summer the “fishing fleet” pulled into Calcutta harbor, disembarking scads of ugly British girls with a Bible in one hand and a can of spotted dick in the other, determined to snag the highest-ranking ICS man they could and, in the process, turn India into another boring suburb of Edinburgh. Anglo-Indian cookbooks are full of recipes for horrid British glop straight out of cans, and if you routinely got really, really sick from eating spoiled stuff, well, hard cheese, old chap! Heaven forbid you eat the delicious, nutritious, climate-optimized cuisine that was literally right there …

If you want to argue that the Indian Army fought so many border wars just to get away from sour, hectoring memsahibs and their godawful tinned slop, I’m not going to stop you.

Anyway, the point is, IF you are conversant enough with the relevant technical stuff, it occurs to me that you can get a snapshot of embedded cultural assumptions by looking at a period’s characteristic or representative technology.

Severian, “Assumption Artifacts”, Founding Questions, 2024-04-30.

January 7, 2026

“All of that operational brilliance was always there; it persisted through the Stupid Era”

Filed under: Americas, China, Government, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I missed this Chris Bray piece when it was published a few days ago, but it’s still fully relevant. In it, he discusses the contrast between the faltering and visibly failing military operations like Operation Craven Bugout, sorry, I mean “Operation Allies Refuge”, in 2021 as the US and allied forces abandoned the Afghanistan mission leaving behind billions in military equipment and untold numbers of pro-western Afghans to the “mercy” of the Taliban and the recent brilliant military success in Venezuela:

For years, I’ve been shouting two related messages. First, “we’re in a contest of persistence between elite cosplayers and low-status producers”. Institutions that advance leaders on the basis of their ability to engage in au courant symbol-chanting are crushing the people in those institutions who do the work, and therefore hollowing out the institutions. Second, and so closely related you could just call it the same point in different words, “We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down”. The “making stuff” people are mostly just fine; the “running stuff” people are mostly insane.

After years of dismal military failures, like the bafflingly inept withdrawal from Afghanistan after twenty years of ineffective warfare against the Taliban, the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro was operationally brilliant. It required perfection from everyone in a giant list of moving parts, executing a detailed plan with absolute precision. If you haven’t watched the briefing from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, who was ritually denounced by the idiot media and the Democratic Party as an unqualified choice for the job, take some time to watch at least some of it. You aren’t used to seeing competence and clarity from an American institutional leader, so it’ll bring back some parts of your consciousness that may have gone to sleep for a while.

With 150 aircraft in the air, launching from something close to two dozen points of origin, every asset arrived in place and on time, while the lights went out below them. From the transcript:

The “pathway overhead” was that the US military switched off the Venezuelan military. They pressed the off switch on another nation’s command, control, and communications systems. Venezuela spent 2025 posturing at the US Navy, displaying their power as a warning against American aggression:

Similarly, “Experts had warned that Venezuela’s layered air-defence network could complicate US air operations”. Apparently not. At the designated moment, it all just went away.

I’ve talked for years about “recipe knowledge”, about the ability to know the steps that will produce a desired outcome. If I want to produce X result, I have to perform steps A, B, C, D, E, and F, in that order. If I skip Step C, Result X doesn’t occur, even though I’ve performed all the other steps.

We’ve just watched a military that apparently lacked the recipe knowledge to destroy the Taliban, or even to withdraw from a failed war in an orderly fashion and without leaving a bunch of weapons behind, demonstrate a shockingly high level of recipe knowledge. A failing institution isn’t a failing institution. Brilliant planning, flawless execution, ruthless competence.

There’s no way in hell that a single year of top-down intervention reversed years of hard decline. All of that operational brilliance was always there. It persisted through the Stupid Era.

On Substack Notes, John Carter commented on the article:

This, right here, is the meta-message of the Venezuelan raid. Competence collapse isn’t a purely military pathology, nor is it solely an American affliction. It applies to every institution in every Western country. We’ve been living with the frustrations and humiliations of this imposed decline for decades now.

With one decisive act, Trump has demonstrated that decline is a choice made by a small, false elite – and that if that elite is removed, decline can be reversed.

Removing the elite is the fix-everything switch in the presidency, the US military, and the Venezuelan government.

And now the whole world sees it.

A related post from ESR on the social media site formerly known as Twitter explores one of the more geographically distant ramifications of the US operation in Venezuela:

    The Watcher On The Web @WatcherontheWeb

    “ThIs Is GoInG tO cAuSe ChInA tO aTtAcK tAiWaN”

    Yes retard, the country that just got shown all it’s calculations based on weapons systems which depended on being able to use RADARS to engage US aircraft/ships are essentially worthless and billions of dollars in investment and research have been wasted is going to feel VERY brave in launching an assault against a fortified island nation armed with US weapons, US fighters, backed up by the US navy and Japanese defense force …

    I’m sure they are just giddy with excitement to try and pull that off. Practically chomping at the bit

This is an extremely important point that I’ve been thinking about ever since we got an unexpected audit of Venezuela’s air defenses. Russian SAM-300s and BUKs, Chinese anti-air radar, all proved completely worthless against U.S. gear and operators.

I guarantee you that if you are a Chinese military planner contemplating how to get an invasion army across 100 miles of the Straits of Taiwan, you are shitting your pants right about now. Because you have just learned that if you had tried to bust that move yesterday, your nice shiny new invasion fleet would have gotten absolutely gacked by U.S. airpower and missiles that you wouldn’t see coming BECAUSE YOUR FUCKING RADARS DON’T FUCKING WORK.

Also, the Soviet anti-air missile designs you cloned turn out to be about as useful as so many busted shopping carts.

Some of your guys are going to be saying “That’s impossible. The fix must have been in. Air defense must have had orders not to engage.” Which is an extremely cheering thought, but …

… isn’t that what the Americans would want you to believe? The only thing better than having complete technological dominance of an adversary is having complete technological dominance of an adversary who’s been conned into believing it isn’t true and walks blithely into getting utterly wrecked by it.

Yep. Before this went down I was figuring a very high probability that the Chinese make their move on Taiwan in 2027. Now? I guarantee you that their confidence in their previous risk assessments has evaporated. They no longer know what they’ll be facing, and there’s a significant possibility that mainland China’s domestic air defenses are worthless too.

Now I’m going to suggest that you juxtapose two phrases: “thermobaric bombs” and “Three Gorges Dam”. A China that’s naked from the air has the biggest glass jaw in human history.

Now I think there’s pretty good odds that the invasion of Taiwan will never happen at all.

Update, 8 January: 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.

The Korean War Week 81: Ridgway Admits the UN is Little Threat! – January 6, 1952

Filed under: Britain, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 6 Jan 2026

The year may have changed, familiar faces come and go, but some things remain the same. The POW issue continues to dominate and frustrate armistice talks, the fear of an expanded war in Asia re-emerges, and the snow remains cold. The war found no end and no pause in either 1950 or 1951, but third time’s the charm, surely?

00:00 Intro
00:29 Recap
01:24 Britain and the US
06:49 The US Proposal
10:57 The Slave Trade?
12:12 Summary
13:35 Conclusion
(more…)

More anti-anti-boomer discussion from Scott Alexander

Filed under: Economics, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I linked to Scott’s original article last month and thanks to the interest it generated (and perhaps my clickbait-y headline) it got linked at Instapundit thanks to Sarah Hoyt. Scott got a lot of feedback on his post and shares some of that here:

“… Millennials and Generation Z have more money (adjusted for inflation ie cost-of-living, and compared at the same age) than their Boomer parents, to about the same degree that the Boomers exceeded their own parents. This is good and how it should be. The Boomers have successfully passed on a better life to their children”

First, I wish I’d been more careful to differentiate the following claims:

  1. Boomers had it much easier than later generations.
  2. The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations.
  3. Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract.

Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions — I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-Boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support — rather than letting them switch among them as convenient — then arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position.

Second, I wish I’d highlighted how much of this discussion centers around disagreements over which policies are natural/unmarked vs. unnatural/marked.

Nobody is passing laws that literally say “confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B”. We’re mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favorable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favorable to young people. If you’re young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare where the old are enriching themselves at young people’s expense. But if you’re old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff. But in fact, they’re just two different tax policies and it’s not obvious which one a fair society with no “intergenerational warfare” would have, even assuming there was such a thing. We’ll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I’ll try to highlight it whenever it comes up.

I’m in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the Boomers (and myself) in these responses more than I would in an ideal world.

[…]

1: Top Comments I Especially Want To Highlight

…

Sokow writes:

Many Europeans chimed in to say this, including people whose opinions I trust.

I find this pretty interesting. We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there. I’d never heard anyone argue the opposite — that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don’t apply to our context — but it makes sense that this should happen. I might write a post on this.

Kevin Munger (Never Met A Science) writes:

    Hating Boomers (and talking about hating Boomers) is uninteresting and I agree morally dubious.

    But it is *emphatically* false that “Boomers were a perfectly normal American generation”. They have served far more terms in Congress than any generation before or since (and we currently have the oldest average age of elected officials in a legislative body IN THE WORLD other than apparently Cambodia), they have dominated the presidency (look up the birthdate of every major party candidate since the 2000 presidential election…), they controlled the commanding heights of major companies, cultural institutions (especially academica).

    They are a historically *unique* generation, for three intersecting reasons: 1. They are a uniquely large generation 2. they came of age as the country and its institutions were maturing 3. they are sticking around because of increased longevity. These are analytical facts, and they produce what I call “Boomer Ballast” — a concentration of our societies resources in one, older generation that increases the tension we are experiencing from technological innovation. Our demography is pulling us towards the past, the internet is pulling us into the future, and this I think is the major source of the anti-Boomer frustration.

    On the specifics of social security and why we might think Boomers have played things to their advantage (not bc they’re specifically evil but bc they have the political power to do so) — the key thing is that they have prevented forward-thinking politicians from fixing the inevitable hole in social security that comes from our demographic pyramid. It would have been relatively painless to increase the rate or incidence of the social security payroll tax at any point in the past 25 years, the looming demographic cliff was obvious and the increased burden could’ve been shared more equally. Instead, they prevented reforms and all of the fiscal pain from demographic shifts will be borne by younger generations.

I agree this is a strong argument, and part of why I think it’s helpful to separate the three points I mentioned at the beginning.

RH writes:

    We [Boomers] did [vote for ourselves to pay higher taxes and get fewer benefits]. My lifetime SS benefits will be 20-25 percent less than they would have been under previous law, and I voted for that. My SS tax rate went up itself, and has been well over 15% since the changes took effect, and the cap on earned income subject to that went up a lot. And I voted to accept all that because it was projected to be sufficient.

    Then the immigrant haters decided we needed fewer workers in the country, or at least fewer paying SS taxes, so they slowed legal immigration and pushed illegals into the underground economy, so they don’t pay taxes to support social security. And social security is going to get whacked again, plus the evils the SS system was intended to alleviate — people too old to work and too poor to live — will return.

I think this says something profound about politics. The problem is less that there’s some group of people who don’t believe in fairness, but that fairness is very hard to calculate.

Suppose RH is right (I haven’t checked), and that Social Security would be sustainable with lots of immigration. Then whether Boomers are paying “their fair share” or not depends on whether immigration is good or bad (a hard question!), and on whether we think of high vs. low immigration as the natural unmarked state of the universe (such that immigration opponents must “own” closed borders and compensate the losers), and on what kind of compensation the losers from closed borders deserve.

Someone else commented by saying we could solve all of these problems without inconveniencing either the Boomers or the young by just increasing taxes on a few ultra-rich people. The ultra-rich could reasonably say they didn’t create this problem and it’s unfair to tax them for it. But so could the Boomers and the young! So whose “fair share” is it?

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