Quotulatiousness

July 29, 2026

The American Deep State’s biggest experimental laboratory

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

On Substack, John Carter links to the latest of kulak’s fascinating-and-unsettling Anarchonomicon posts with this introduction:

Kulak’s thesis here is that English Canada generally, and Toronto specifically, is ground zero for a lot of the more insane gay race communism trends because America has been using Canada as a testing ground for psychological operations since the 1950s.

That sounds kind of nuts but he makes a plausible case. Since Canada is technically a foreign country, intelligence agencies don’t face the same limitations they do at home. Since Canada is almost culturally identical to the US, what works in Canada will generally work domestically (and all the GAE psyops are ultimately aimed at America’s domestic tax cattle).

Kulak also brings the receipts here, showing how things like MeToo and GamerGate seem to have been prefigured by similar movements in Canada a couple years before.

One thing he misses is land acknowledgements, which began spreading in Canada in 2013 or so, and have since started appearing at American and Australian universities. I don’t know for sure that they started in Canada, all I can say is that it was Canada where I first noticed them, and where they have become ubiquitous.

Multiculturalism is another Canadian export, developed here in the 60s and rapidly introduced all over the Western world. The prime ministers who introduced it were American puppets, and the ideology itself has a very broadly American “nation of immigrants” feel to it.

Anyhow, you motherfuckers, two can play this game.

On the land acknowledgements, the first time I encountered it was at my son’s university graduation ceremony, but his university had a big First Nations specialization so it didn’t seem too outlandish at the time. Since then, of course, pretty much every event in urban Canada seems to feature a land acknowledgement and they don’t appear to be optional any more.

Anyway, on to kulak’s post on “The Battle for the Mind of North America”:

The Land of Mind-Rape and Honey

Canada is/was a nice enough place to visit or grow up … several large nice cities surrounded by tons and tons of quaint and cute functional “Mainstreet USA” style quirky little towns.

The “Rape” refers to Rapeseed, the primary ingredient in Canola Oil, the unhealthy seed-oil. (they named it “Canada Oil” because “Rape Oil” might make people hesitate)

But when you scratch at the surface there’s something profoundly deeply wrong with Canada. You can feel it. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes.

and the Canadians are quite pleased to tell you just what that thing is:

America.

Funnily though, when you ask what Americans have done to them or what is wrong with America, they’ll tell you things about moral degeneracy and perfidy of Americans … no different than what the American elite and the US Government expresses about its own populace.

For reference: Canada is a vassal of the US.

It has been since the 1960s when the British lost the Suez Crisis and the American Deep State backed “Multiculturalism”, an end to “God Save the Queen”, legalized sodomy, ended prayer in public schools, demilitarized Canadian education (which til the 60s included rifle practice, marching, and survival training) … and oh ya a new flag.

The Canadian flag, adopted in 1964 … which the very year should be a “red flag”. Is in fact, an American flag. It is the symbol of America’s diplomatic and espionage victories over the British Empire and its final conquest of Canada.

Canada’s entire culture, defined by being British, Imperial, warlike, frontier militiamen (Indeed Canada’s 1950s culture in many ways resembled Washington’s and Jefferson’s colonial American culture more than America did) … was ripped out in the course of a decade … quite intentionally and by design.

Indeed Canada was the testing ground for the Global American Empire’s psychological cultural program.

To get a feel for just HOW aggressively Canadian culture was purposefully ripped apart … I encourage you to flip through the various programs for “Empire day in the Schools of Ontario” up on archive to see English Canada’s actual natural culture. (I will be writing about this in more detail in another piece.)

And Please Note: The British did nothing comparable … the “Narnia” age of Canada coexisted with The Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, and the basically open communist treason of the actual British Aristocracy.

The mottoes on the posters: “Obey/ the Law/ Follow/ Duty”, “One God/ One King/ One Flag/ One Fleet”, “Love God and Honour the King”

This was immediately ripped out by State Department’s assets like Pearson and Trudeau in the 60s and 70s in favour of “Multiculturalism”.

How does the one Canada: Royalist, Militaristic, Patriotic as Can Be, defined by the three institutions of Church, Militia Armoury, and the old-style High School ruthlessly enforcing standards … More akin to Cadia from 40k than a 21st century country … How did it transform into the modern Canada within living memory?

How do you destroy the entire culture of a country and replace it with an entirely new culture in front of its population’s very eyes … without resistance and without protest?

Well that’s the problem that was solved here.

Canada was the testing ground for all of the American Government’s cultural occupational weapons it would go on to use on Europe and on its own people.

Terms like “melting pot”, “racism”, “tolerance”, “the open society” … These of course has all been coined by American Jewish and Communist activists (“Racism” specifically is a Trotskyist doctrinal term of art propagated by Trotsky’s personal pamphlets, and you should call any “Conservative” who ever uses the term a Communist traitor).

However it was in Canada that top down US foreign policy institutions first applied the current model to a country which they had conquered without a war.

Indeed when one looks into “Denazification” in Germany or the US occupations of France, Italy, or Japan you find little to no overlap between the language, structure, and even values of the “Democratic”, “antifascist”, and “Peaceful” occupational ideology and modern Globohomo.

“Monument to Multiculturalism”. Toronto. Erected 1985. (The “Monument” can be interpreted two ways … the man and doves working together to build a unified world … or the man is unwittingly cooperating in his own caging and enslavement)

Whereas in Canada the US occupational ideology EXACTLY resembles modern globohomo. From the outset.

Pierre Trudeau’s first major political moment was the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality.

Britain’s new PM is yet another Net Zero fanatic

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Daily Sceptic, Chris Morrison points out that moving from Manchester to Downing Street has not changed Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s devotion to the climate change agenda and Net Zero fanaticism:

Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s official MP portrait, July 2026.
© House of Commons via Wikimedia Commons.

Praise the Lord, a Saviour from the North walks amongst us. The UK’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has apparently hinted that a tad more oil and gas might be taken from Britain’s remaining treasure trove lying undisturbed in the North Sea. Is this a push back on fanatical Net Zero treason as some commentators have suggested? Probably not. As always there is no need for conspiracy theories – just look at what they supported and said in the past. The new Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh is a green blob-funded whack job straight out of central climate casting, while the new tee-shirt wearing top dog is all signed up to the evil, society-destroying Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill.

It didn’t take long for the bill promoter Zero Hour (ka-ching, Green Blob money) to list the new Prime Minister as one of 193 MPs who support the proposed private member’s CAN legislation that will cut the country’s entire use of hydrocarbons – domestic and overseas – to just 10% within 10 years. Zero Hour notes of Burnham: “In 2024, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he backed the Climate and Nature Bill because he recognised that Britain needed bold, science-led action to tackle the climate and nature crisis”.

Other more accurate interpretations are available along the lines that the bill is an abominable neo-Marxist Trojan horse that would lead to mass starvation, death and almost immediate industrial and societal collapse. With little or no hydrocarbons available from any source, food supplies would be cut in half due to a lack of fertiliser, while most medicines would be unavailable. In the regular periods of wind and solar drought, particularly in the winter, thousands would die in their blacked-out and unheated homes. Thankfully, the bill failed in the House of Commons when it was debated last year, but a terrifying 200 MPs agreed with its vile contents. Over 90 Labour MPs, all the Greens and LibDems plus two crackpot Tories said they supported the bill.

We can but pray that the two unhinged Tories, Sir Roger Gale and Simon Hoare, are currently receiving sympathetic re-education treatment as the Kemi Badenoch-led Conservative party now rushes towards the Net Zero exit. Similar classes of course are required for wayward Tories who believe that men can become women, and open borders lead to civilisation contentment.

Just three reasons come to mind to explain the heavy support for the House of Commons horror show.

  1. Rank stupidity: If the IQ score of any supporter was much lower, steps might have to be taken to ensure regular watering.
  2. Blinding ignorance: Five decades of dumbed-down education must take some blame, but the inability not to use at least one critical-thinking brain cell is worrying.
  3. Tunnel-vision zealotry: Overwhelming desire to re-order society along State-controlling communist lines – and if the majority kulaks get it, too bad. Inventing a climate crisis without a scintilla of conclusive proof is justified to create an equal, virtuous, brave new post-truth world.

Of course, allowing the two North Sea fields Rosebank and Jackdaw to open is little more than re-arranging the deckchairs on the Net Zero Ship of Fools. Thanks to the 2008 Climate Change Act and later amendments made by the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, Britain is legally committed to short-order Net Zero destruction. Unless the legislation is torn up, new drilling is likely to be challenged in the courts. As 2050 looms closer, lawfare will likely stop almost all new projects where emissions are likely to arise from using hydrocarbons.

The small Burnham North Sea relaxation, along with the removal of 5% VAT on electricity bills, is an obvious electoral ploy to disguise the fact that Britain now has some of the highest energy costs in the industrial world – and they are likely to get a great deal higher in the future.

The Korean War Week 110 – The Democratic Candidate – July 28, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 28 Jul 2026

In Chicago, the Democratic Party chooses Adlai Stevenson as their candidate for the Presidential election to be held November 4th; he’ll square off against Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican candidate. Also, in the US, the steelworkers strike comes to an end. In Korea, torrential rains prevent action on the ground this week, though the UN continues its summer aerial bombing campaign of the north in the skies.

The changing nature of Canadian patriotism

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Jay Currie contrasts the kind of patriotism most Canadians grew up with against the politicized version hijacked by the Liberals as a tool in their never-ending quest to re-shape Canadians in their preferred image:

Sitting out here on the southern tip of Vancouver Island overlooking the Olympic mountains across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I am bemused by the Eastern Canadian debate on Canadian patriotism. @BenWoodfinden weighs in as does Auntie Andy @acoyne

The current version of the debate is focused on whether the Conservative Party is “patriotic enough”. In less fraught times that would translate to “love of Canada” but now it comes down to anti-American and, more importantly, anti-Trump enough.

Probably because, after twelve years of Trudeau/Carney there is very little “Canada” left to love. We’re a post-national, genocidal, nearly European entity ruled from an embattled Ottawa beset by Americans, Chinese and our own separatists.

From the Ottawa/Toronto point of view Canada’s singular attribute is our willingness to punch Trump right in the nose. And woe betide the traitors like Smith, Moe and Frechette who are not willing to get behind Captain Canada as he takes his roundhouse swings.

And the Conservative Party is failing on the patriotism front precisely because a significant part of it thinks punching the Yanks in the nose is possibly the dumbest thing they have ever heard. Why the Hell would we do that?

On the Auntie Andy/Woodfinden scale of patriotism this disqualifies the CPC from ever winning a federal election because only Canadian Patriots should be allowed to command the Ottawa ramparts eyes firmly fixed on the perfidious Yanks.

As a thought experiment try to define Canadian patriotism without reference to the US or Donald Trump. I assure you it can be done. The way you do it is begin with the ground you are on. Where is it? What is it? What can you see?

Now, think about your neighbours, the stores you go to, the pub you like, the golf course or soccer field or swimming pool you prefer, the schools you went to, the teams you played on, yes, your favourite NHL team, vacation spot, drive.

Essentially these and hundreds of other details are the ground truths of your Canada and it is that Canada where your patriotism begins. The Canadian flag, the Peace tower, your favourite version of “Oh, Canada” are all abstractions of this ground truth.

People don’t fight for “King and Country”, they fight for their children, their spouse, their parents, their neighbours. That is where the real loyalty lies. It’s acutely local and it accretes across time, across generations.

The Liberal Party project of the last half century has been to replace this hyper-localized patriotism with an synthetic, denatured, atomized Patriotism which defines itself by what it is against, not what it is for. It is a deeply unsatisfying project.

The fact the CPC is wary of this synthetic patriotism is to its credit. Looking at its messaging in the last election at least a part of the CPC understands that Canada is the ground you stand on, not an invention of Ottawa. It’s the right message.

At Without Diminishment, Carl Vallée identifies one of the structural strengths of the left that allow them to concentrate on achieving and maintaining power: unity of vision across all progressive parties.

Exit Trudeau, enter Carney.

It must be admitted that the Liberals have dominated the political landscape for much of the past century, enabling them to weave their own partisan symbols and values into the fabric of Canadian institutions.

The federal state as it exists today is a legacy of Liberal Party rule. Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms fundamentally changed the trajectory of this country, but the ideology underpinning it had begun to take shape even before his time. Whether one considers multiculturalism, mass immigration or the red maple leaf flag, Canada is a country whose institutions naturally lean, if not lurch, to the left.

Therefore, conservatives must swim against the current, almost perpetually. Why is this? I submit that it stems from the fact that Liberals in both English Canada and Quebec are ideologically closely aligned and share a common vision of Canada. The left often looks much the same everywhere. Certainly, its values, methods and codes of communication are identical across the Western world.

In Canada, Liberals will not hesitate to weaponise the state to ensure their values endure. The alignment between Liberals in Quebec and English Canada has been critical to their electoral success.

Conversely, the right are more locally rooted and provincial, and are therefore less inclined to share a broad common vision with their compatriots across the country. This poses a challenge to both the coherence of Canadian conservatism and its electoral arithmetic.

Conservatism in Quebec is not libertarian, and here we envisage using the state to advance nationalist and conservative ends. What we conserve in Quebec is not what our friends in Western Canada or Ontario seek to conserve.

Arrayed against our alliance of local political traditions are the Liberals, who share and promote a single, pan-Canadian narrative. The inability of the right to offer a catch-all vision capable of rallying the anti-Liberal vote partially explains the electoral success of the Liberal Party over the past few decades.

Structurally, the 1982 rupture over the imposition of the Charter has made this phenomenon almost permanent, despite the efforts of prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper to rally coalitions against the Liberals. Neither was able to prevent the Charter from entrenching itself as Canada’s new national narrative, despite the explicit opposition of Francophones, one of the country’s founding peoples.

If there is a fault, it does not lie solely with the pan-Canadian conservative movement, but also with Quebec’s bleus, who failed to invest in the Conservative Party of Canada, the only political party capable of rivalling the Liberals. As a result, the Quebec vote is split between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, whose voters are much less left-wing than the party’s current leadership. In the 2025 federal election, the combined Conservative and Bloc vote in Quebec actually exceeded the Liberal vote.

1960s British Army Recruitment Film | Cold War Training & Life Inside the Army

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

Militaria Collectors Network
Published 23 Mar 2026

Step back into the 1960s and experience how the British Army trained the soldiers of the Cold War era. This rare archival recruitment film offers a fascinating look at military life, basic training, and the wide range of technical and career opportunities available to new recruits during a time of global tension and rapid modernisation.

From infantry drills and weapons training to engineering, communications, and education programmes, this film highlights how the British Army prepared men for both combat and skilled professions. Whether you’re interested in Cold War history, military training, or vintage government films, this is a unique glimpse into a defining period of British military history.

📽️ In this film:
– 1960s British Army basic training
– Infantry tactics and weapons familiarisation
– Technical trades and career paths
– Cold War-era military strategy and preparation
– Life as a British Army recruit
(more…)

QotD: Asymmetric warfare

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Asymmetric Warfare is a term used to describe warfare between two belligerents with either starkly different amounts of resources or different warfare styles or systems. It is crucial to note this term denotes something about the relationship between two belligerents, not something essential to one of them; an army or a state is not asymmetric except in relations to another (the mistake here is often to set the modern western industrialized form of warfare as the “norm” against which all other forms are somehow asymmetric). While this term has been used to describe the war in Ukraine, it is ill-suited for it: both Ukraine and Russia are attempting to make use of a similar set of equipment (including the use of artillery and airstrikes) using a uniformed soldiery; they are both, to borrow one of my earlier definitions, attempting to operate within the “third system of war“. Ukrainian efforts to have uniformed soldiers use maneuver and surprise to engage Russian logistics and rear echelon units are not “asymmetric”, but rather a standard part of both Russian and Ukrainian warfighting, albeit one that Ukraine appears more skilled at in the present moment. Likewise, both sides are attempting a parallel “political struggle” of demonstrations and information warfare; Ukrainian success here too does not make their methods asymmetric.

Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.

July 28, 2026

The establishment pretends not to understand why AfD is still on the rise

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

Normally, I get my updates on German politics from eugyppius’ Substack, but this article is from the New English Review with Bruce Bawer reporting:

… even as the problematic aspects of Islam become increasingly manifest, mainstream politicians and journalists in Germany feign puzzlement over the growing popularity of AfD, which ever since its founding in 2013 has been characterized by the German establishment as heralding a Nazi renaissance. How, the German elites pretend to wonder, can so many voters transfer their loyalty from seasoned, sensible, upright political leaders to ragtag radicals who bring to mind Munich putsches and Nuremberg rallies? How on earth can they have become so misguided? Such is the coy approach of Jochen-Martin Gutsch in a recent article for Der Spiegel, in which he takes a spin around the former East Germany in purported search for an explanation as to why the “far-right” AfD has won majority backing in that part of the Bundesrepublik.

Gutsch’s first move is to act astonished at the fact that an AfD gathering in Salzwedel, Saxony-Anhalt, drew ordinary-looking families, plus “[a] surprising number of young people in their twenties, smartly dressed in blazers”. What, no Hitler Youth uniforms? Gutsch’s line is that he’s just plain perplexed by the numbers: “in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is currently polling at more than 40 percent. In the ARD Deutschlandtrend poll, the AfD is in first place; it’s even the most popular party, nationwide.” But it’s one thing to read the numbers, another thing to see all these – gasp! – ordinary-looking people flocking to show their support. This is what really blows Gutsch’s mind, or so we are meant to believe: the “normalization” of AfD, the party’s growing “acceptance”, its rapid “transformation into a mainstream party in the east”, all of which was, in Salzwedel, brought to vivid, terrible life before his eyes.

Ten years ago, Gutsch recalls, AfD received 20 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, and he, for one, was sure that it had peaked. He’s from eastern Germany himself, and he thought he knew his neighbors. He was wrong, and now, he claims, he’s alarmed – unlike his “friends and colleagues sitting in Hamburg, Cologne, or Munich, who give a friendly, bored look when I talk about the AfD. For them it’s still far away. Somewhere ‘over there’, whereas for me it’s a reality I can’t escape.” Therefore, he tells us, it’s important for him to make unravel the mystery of the AfD‘s remarkable rise in the polls.

Of course, the reason for the rise of AfD is obvious to anyone who’s been following developments in Western Europe for the last quarter-century or so. More and more voters have been demanding that immigration, especially from Muslim countries, be drastically curbed, if not altogether ended, and that the unassimilated masses who’ve already relocated to Western Europe from the Muslim world – only to swell the welfare rolls and the crime statistics – be sent back to where they came from. We’re told that the Berlin Pride killer, Abdul Ballout, belongs to “Islamist circles” in Germany. Why, ask AfD voters quite reasonably, should there be “Islamist circles” in Germany?

Yet Gutsch is, or pretends to be, blind to such concerns. His initial hypothesis, as he heads into the east, is supposedly that AfD is gaining popularity there because of economic hardship. But no, when he drives through Brandenburg now, he encounters prosperity. The city of Großräschen, once the Ruhr of East Germany, became a “ghost town” after 1990; now it’s thriving again, with the unemployment rate a mere seven percent, the old lignite mine converted into a lake with “a lovely beach” lined by “white houses” with “luxury SUVs parked out front”. Why, then, asks Gutsch, are the residents of these stately homes casting their ballots for AfD?

A veteran local politician tells Gutsch that he travels often to Bochum, in western Germany, which, compared to Großräschen, is an economic basket case. And yet the residents of Bochum are “more easygoing” than those in Großräschen. They possess a “fundamental optimism”. They “trust” and “respect” their political leaders. “What beautiful words”, Gutsch comments. He’s not being ironic. To be sure, he understands why eastern Germans aren’t brimming over with love for their leaders, whether in Berlin or Brussels. Many of them are old enough to remember 1990, when the once-mighty East German state “crumbled … before their very eyes.” One might add that before 1990, that same state was the very picture of totalitarian tyranny, as chillingly depicted in the film The Lives of Others. And before that – well, you know. Then there’s 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to insufficiently vetted Muslim immigrants, who proceeded to cause mayhem in both east and west.

But why, then, do so many western Germans still “trust” and “respect” their leaders? It seems baffling. Yet to listen to Gutsch, loyalty to the political establishment remains the way to go – the only intelligent, mature, and reasonable option. When he talks with an AfD politician, Karsten Hilse, to get the latter’s perspective on things, he’s lost at sea. In Hilse’s opinion, mainstream German politicians are too obsessed with “tolerance”; they have at least a degree of hostility toward Germany; and they accept without question the preposterous ideologies of gender and climate-change.

Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation defined

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Gawain Towler kindly provides a précis of a behind-the-paywall essay discussing misinformation, disinformation and the less-well-known malinformation, as governments on both sides of the Atlantic rush to codify new laws to further restrict the freedom of speech of their citizenry:

The essay examines “malinformation”, a term coined in 2017 and now embedded in official doctrine on both sides of the Atlantic, and I argue that it exists for one purpose, to give the state a category under which accurate speech can be treated as a harm. I start by Channelling Ambrose Beirce’s Devil’s Dictionary, with a dictionary entry defining the word as information whose defect is that it is true. Thereafter I proceed to trace its origins, its spread through British and American officialdom, its intellectual kinship with behavioural government, and its practical operation, before closing with a demand for its formal abolition.

First the taxonomy itself. The doctrine of “information disorder” rests on a triad. Misinformation is false and innocent, disinformation false and deliberate. Both turn on falsity. The third category does not. CISA, the American cybersecurity agency, defines malinformation as based on fact but used out of context to mislead or harm, and the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory council calls it the intentional spreading of genuine information with intent to cause harm. The offence, the essay observes, is not lying but telling the truth on purpose. The term’s coiners, Hossein Derakhshan and Claire Wardle, applied it narrowly to revenge pornography, miscaptioned photographs and weaponised leaks, and the essay concedes these are real phenomena. But the concept escaped its paddock. Within four years it had migrated from a Council of Europe research paper to the letterhead of a federal agency and thence into British government training materials.

The British chapter centres on RESIST 2, the Cabinet Office counter-disinformation toolkit issued to government communicators in 2021. The toolkit reproduces the triad, admits the categories are hard to distinguish in practice, and resolves the difficulty by instructing officials to stop asking whether material is true and to focus instead on the harm it can do.

The essay treats those five words as the whole doctrine laid bare, truth demoted from test to complication. From the Cabinet Office the word trickled downward, into Local Government Association guidance, a Stockport Council webpage, even a Met Office blog. The essay notes a telling exception. Ofcom and the Electoral Commission, bodies with statutory exposure and lawyers, avoid the word entirely. Its distribution across the state maps the distribution of accountability. Where courts can reach, the concept hides.

The American experiment, the essay argues, ran to destruction. CISA’s mis-, dis- and malinformation team spent the early 2020s flagging content to platforms, much of it neither foreign nor false, drawing a House Judiciary Committee report accusing it of collusion and camouflage. When Missouri and Louisiana sued, the case reached the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri, where the government prevailed not on the merits but on standing. The essay relishes the irony of a Justice Department litigating for its own right to withhold context. Britain played a damper version. After Big Brother Watch revealed that the Counter Disinformation Unit had monitored lawful speech by journalists and parliamentarians, the government refused substantive disclosure and renamed the unit National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), in the tradition of Windscale becoming Sellafield.

The essay then traces the doctrine’s parentage to the habit of mind exemplified by the Nudge Unit. RESIST had different midwives, but both traditions live in the Cabinet Office and both treat the citizen as an object of professional influence. They embraced during Covid, when SPI-B recommended raising the perceived level of personal threat through hard-hitting emotional messaging while the information machinery flagged sceptical commentary, some of it correct. Fear turned up on one wing, information turned down on the other.

“The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization”

Filed under: Europe, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski discusses the history of the right to bear arms from ancient Greece to modern America:

The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization. Not a weapon. A technology. The technology that made the idea of equality physically real.

1. The longbow democratized warfare – a peasant could kill a knight with a stick and a string, and Agincourt proved it. The gun completed the process. The armored warrior class whose claim to social dominance rested on physical superiority became obsolete. The aristocratic monopoly on violence ended not with a philosophy but with a mechanism. The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else.

2. The Roman citizen had the right to bear arms. The Greek citizen had it. The English yeoman had it. The Swiss canton built its entire civilization on it. The disarming of the population has always been, in every civilization, in every century, the first act of the government that intends to stop being answerable to that population. Show me a disarmed population and I will show you a population that lost something else shortly after.

3. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is not about sport. It is about the relationship between the armed citizen and the state – the explicit constitutional acknowledgment that the citizen’s right to defend himself, his family, and his civilization against any threat, including the government itself, is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. Power flows upward from the armed citizen, not downward from the armed state.

4. The gun defends the family. The woman alone with her children. The farmer on the edge of civilization. The shopkeeper in the neighborhood the police no longer patrol. The gun is the equalizer – the technology that makes the physical difference between a large man and a small woman irrelevant. Every argument for disarmament is, at its core, an argument that the state will protect you better than you can protect yourself. The evidence for this proposition is not encouraging.

5. In Europe, the disarmament is now nearly complete – and it happened precisely as the state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens began to decline. The timing is not coincidental. A population that cannot defend itself must trust the state to defend it – which is a population that cannot effectively question whether the state is doing so. The dependency is the design.

6. The gun is a civilizational technology in the deepest sense: it requires responsibility, judgment, and the willingness to accept the consequences of your decisions. You cannot outsource it. You cannot have a committee fire it. It is the most anti-bureaucratic object ever invented – a direct, personal, consequential instrument that puts the full weight of the decision on the individual holding it. Which is precisely why the administrative state finds it intolerable. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is sovereign.

7. The family that can defend itself does not depend on the state for its most fundamental security. The civilization that can defend itself has not yet outsourced its survival to an institution that will negotiate the terms of that survival on its own behalf. The gun determines who controls violence – and therefore who controls everything that violence can threaten. Which is everything. The Sobieski who rode down the hill had a sword and sixty thousand horsemen. The equivalent today is the armed citizen who understands what he is defending and why. Every civilization that forgot this discovered it the hard way. The ones that remembered it are still here.

Adventures in Surplus! Type 38 Arisaka Carbine in World War One

Filed under: Britain, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Mar 2026

In the fall of 1914 it became apparent that the minor fracas in Serbia was going to stretch a lot longer than anyone had expected, and governments began scrambling to secure weapons production. Japan was one source of small arms for the Entente powers, and Britain purchased about 150,000 Arisaka rifles and carbines from the Japanese in late 1914 and early 1915. These were used to equip Royal Navy crews and Army raining and reserve units, but by late 1915 Enfield production had caught up and the guns were no longer needed.

In the fall of 1915, the British sent most of their Arisakas (about 128,000) to Russia, which had also been purchasing large numbers from Japan. There they were again used to arm second-line units, including troops occupying the Grand Duchy of Finland. When Finland declared its independence in December 1917, most of the Russian soldiers went home and left their weapons in Finland. As a result, the Arisaka was the second most common type of rifle available at Finland’s independence, and was used by the Civil Guard until about 1927.

This particular Type 38 Carbine was made at the Tokyo Army Arsenal in 1910, then sold to the British where it was given a set of unit marks on the stock. It was subsequently transferred to Russia, where a metal clip was added to prevent accidental magazine release. It stayed in Finland through the Finnish Civil War and afterwards, only being imported into the US recently by Postrock of Garden City, Kansas.
(more…)

QotD: Projecting the effect of a maximum wage law

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What would be the impact of such a policy?

We cannot know exactly, because we would struggle to find a real-world example of it in a comparable country. But we could think of it as, effectively, a 100% marginal tax rate on incomes above £100,000. We could then look at the empirical literature on how responsive top earners are to tax incentives, and extrapolate from that.

We know from previous studies that the behaviour of top earners is quite sensitive to tax changes. Last year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) tried to model the impact of a proposal to increase the tax burden on the top 5% of earners. In this case, the proposal was to lower the threshold for the 45% additional rate of income tax from £150,000 to £80,000 per annum, and to introduce an “additional additional rate” of 50% for incomes above £125,000.

If nobody changed their behaviour, such a policy would increase tax revenue by just over £9 billion per annum. But people would, of course, change their behaviour. Some top earners would switch to less demanding positions, some would retire earlier, some would reduce working hours, some would engage in more proactive tax planning (i.e. legal tax avoidance), some would simply emigrate, and so on.

We know for certain that responses of that kind exist. But we cannot exactly quantify them. So the IFS came up with a range of plausible outcomes rather than one definite number. It turns out that at the most optimistic end of the spectrum, behavioural changes would still knock over a third off the potential additional tax revenue, reducing it from over £9 billion to under £6 billion. At the most pessimistic end of the spectrum, the policy would fail to raise any additional tax revenue – it would, in fact, reduce revenue by almost £1 billion. (Stop smirking, Dr Laffer.)

If a tax rate of 50% can be predicted to trigger such strong behavioural responses, you can guess how much damage an implicit rate of 100% would do.

Kristian Niemietz, “The public love it, so what’s wrong with the idea of a maximum wage?”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2020-10-14.

July 27, 2026

The shambolic Fifth Crusade, or “Waiting for Fredot”

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Anatoly Grablevsky reviews a new book on one of the less well-known attempts to wrest control of the Holy Land from the Islamic conquerors:

By the early 13th century, the military and geopolitical situation of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem was dire. After the Third Crusade (1189-92) had failed to retake Jerusalem, the Frankish realm in the Holy Land was reduced to a thin coastal strip centred on the heavily fortified city of Acre. The rest of the Near East was in the hands of the Ayyubids, the successors of Saladin.

In response to Ayyubid encroachment, in 1213 Pope Innocent III called for a new holy war to reinforce the Kingdom of Jerusalem and reclaim the Holy City for Christendom. The bulk of the expedition was recruited in the Holy Roman Empire, whose young emperor, Frederick II, the wonder of the world himself, ostentatiously took up the cross. He was, however, in no hurry to join his countrymen in the east.

Learning from their bitter past experiences, this time around the Crusaders adopted a novel strategy. Instead of focusing their efforts on the Holy Land, the Christians targeted Egypt, the political and economic heartland of the Ayyubids.

The Crusader army’s first port of call was the coastal city of Damietta, which, after a lengthy siege, fell in 1219. This was a major victory for Christendom: Crusaders had not captured a city of Damietta’s size, wealth and strategic importance since the fall of Jerusalem in 1099.

The Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil, under pressure from Mongol attacks at the rear, now offered attractive peace terms that included the return of Jerusalem to the Christians. The Crusaders, overconfident and under orders from the absentee emperor, rebuffed Al-Kamil and instead decided to march on the Ayyubid capital of Cairo.

Here, the crusade took a shambolic turn. The Christians wasted precious months awaiting the arrival of Frederick II, but the emperor never bothered to show up (Smith might have called his book “Waiting for Fredot”). By the time the Crusaders finally began the march south, Al-Kamil had gathered his strength, and the Franks were quickly outmanoeuvred by the Sultan, who used his superior knowledge of the Nile’s flooding patterns to trap them against the river.

The Crusaders reacted by launching an all-out assault on their substantial wine provisions so that, when the Muslims attacked, the Christian army disintegrated in a drunken rout.

In the ensuing peace deal, Al-Kamil regained Damietta, in return for giving safe passage back to Europe to the Christian survivors.

Timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs

Filed under: Greece, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The tag in my chosen headline means roughly “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”, which anyone who has read anything about the Trojan War can understand. A huge problem for modern translators of works like The Iliad and The Odyssey is that there’s a double layer of cultural change built in before you start: the Mycenaean Greek culture of the Bronze Age — the setting of the Trojan War — is significantly different from the Greek culture of the classic era — when the oral tales were first written down (and attributed to Homer).

Classic Greek culture is often misunderstood by modern audiences through the most prominent survivals of that time: especially Greek philosophy, as the philosophers we think of as most representative of Athenian and the wider Greek culture were actually a fairly small and relatively powerless subculture at odds with the mainstream of their times.

All that said, going from a translation to an on-screen interpretation requires a lot of picking and choosing of elements to highlight and others to leave unrepresented or actively suppressed. In the most recent film of Odysseus and his extended return journey from Troy to Ithaca, director Christopher Nolan chose to portray Odysseus as a modern man in ways that may suit today’s audiences, but don’t accurately portray the Homeric interpretation or the times in which it is set:

Some viewers have described Nolan’s version of Odysseus as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But moral injury is the more accurate term. It overlaps with PTSD, but it’s not the same thing. Moral injury occurs when a person commits, witnesses, or fails to prevent an act that violates his moral convictions. In war, moral injury can arise when a person does something that violates his own ideals, loyalties, or sense of right and wrong. The result is lasting guilt. A combat veteran comes to see himself as corrupt, unworthy, or beyond forgiveness.

In the film, Odysseus describes his guilt over the violence he witnessed during the sack of Troy. He is conscience-stricken about his Trojan Horse gambit. Odysseus took an object that appeared to be a gift of peace and used it as a weapon of deception. His stratagem allowed the Greeks to enter Troy, destroy the city, and slaughter its people.

But the Trojan Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement. Homer’s Odysseus is a wily trickster, and a trickster would not be tormented by the fact that his trick succeeded.

During his journey, he repeatedly deceives his own men for what he believes is the greater good, and these acts clearly trouble him. The war itself is remembered as grim and pointless. Men are drafted rather than rushing eagerly toward glory.

This is not Homer’s moral universe. In the poem, the Greeks rape, rob, enslave, and pillage without displaying anything like modern guilt. We can tolerate this when reading an ancient text. It is harder to tolerate when those acts are placed directly before us on a movie screen.

This may explain Nolan’s decision. Had he shown the violence of the original story without softening it, would the audience still have been able to sympathize with Odysseus?

Consider what happens to the enslaved women accused of consorting with the suitors after Odysseus returns home. Odysseus orders them to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. Homer does not present the scene as morally complicated. Their punishment is part of restoring order.

Modern films sometimes allow their heroes to inhabit moral worlds very different from our own. Robert Eggers’s 2022 film The Northman asks us to sympathize with Viking characters who obey codes that most moviegoers today would find reprehensible. But The Northman was a mid-budget film. Nolan made a summer blockbuster that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A blockbuster can’t afford to depict a hero from whom audiences recoil. Eggers could let his Viking be a Viking. Nolan needs his Greek warrior to be one of us.

Yet such individuals lived in societies that existed before Christian morality reshaped the Western understanding of guilt, mercy, and the value of every human life. The moral injury that afflicts Nolan’s Odysseus belongs more naturally to the AD world than the BC one.

In the film, Odysseus grieves for the men he lost and appears to blame himself for their deaths. But Homer presents that suffering as the result of pride, fate, divine anger, and human foolishness. The original story does not depict Odysseus as a man tormented by the fear that he has violated his own moral code.

The difference is clear in the episode of the lotus-eaters. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus eats the lotus because he seeks mental relief, a kind of ancient Greek version of using psychedelics to treat combat trauma. In the poem, Odysseus does the opposite. He refuses to eat the lotus and orders his men away from it.

Biosphere 2

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sama Hoole on a now-obscure experiment in the early 1990s which didn’t produce the expected results at all:

Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world’s press.

Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.

It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.

Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life’s work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.

So he called it a health programme.

The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat’s milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.

The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.

Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.

The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.

Walford’s verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.

He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.

He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.

Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.

Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.

The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.

And he updated:

I left something out of that one.

Biosphere 2 had a working farm, and the farm had pigs, chickens and goats. Only one of those three was still alive when the door opened, and the reason why is the most useful thing the entire two years produced.

    Biosphere 2 had livestock, and the crew ate the pigs first.

    Zazu and Quincy were Ossabaw dwarf pigs. In the first year one of them produced a litter of seven, which inside a sealed glass building where every calorie was counted should have been the best news anybody had.

    They killed them anyway.

    The chickens went too. Mrs Fruitcake and the rest, slaughtered because they were eating more than they were laying.

    Neither animal was killed for meat. They were killed for competing.

    A pig and a chicken have one stomach, and it wants exactly what a human wants: grain, roots, beans, anything starchy or dense. Inside Biosphere 2 there was no outside, no feed lorry, no surplus. Every mouthful a pig took came off the plate of one of eight visibly starving people. The crew did the arithmetic and reached for the knife.

    Now notice which animals survived the cull.

    The goats. Milky Way, Stardust and Vision, three African pygmy goats, milked daily for the full two years. And in the crew’s own scientific write-up, published in Advances in Space Research in 1995, they recorded that the goats were the most productive domestic animals in the entire system.

    The most productive thing in a building where the humans lost a fifth of their body weight was the ruminant.

    It is the four stomachs. A goat is a fermentation vat on legs. She runs on stalks, leaves and crop residue, the fibrous rubbish that comes off any farm and that no human gut can process, and turns it into milk. She was never taking food off the crew. She was manufacturing food out of what the crew threw away.

    So that sealed box did test the great modern argument, the one about feeding crops to animals being a waste of land and calories.

    It found the argument correct for pigs and chickens.

    It found it wrong for the animal that eats grass.

    Biosphere 2 gets quoted endlessly as proof we should grow plants and drop the livestock. Eight people with the most productive farmland on earth ran that experiment properly, went hungry for two years, and kept exactly one kind of animal alive throughout, because she was the only one paying rent.

    They killed the pigs to feed the people and kept the goat to feed the people.

The Total Erasure of Carthage | Part Four

Filed under: Africa, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Rest Is History
Published 12 Feb 2026

Three decades after the defeat of Hannibal, how had the Roman Empire managed to conquer vast swathes of the known world? Why did the predatory eyes of this terrifying behemoth turn once more to Carthage? And, could this mighty city defy the odds and repel Rome one last time …?

Join Tom and Dominic as they reach the climactic, final phase of the Punic Wars; the greatest military struggle of all ancient history.
(more…)

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress