Quotulatiousness

September 29, 2026

The “meta-crisis” that isn’t

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Anthony Watts refutes the media claims of climate change driving a large group of unrelated issues into a “meta-crisis” that — as these things always seem to do — requires co-ordinated central control of all human activity (the answer always, always seems to be an all-powerful world government, doesn’t it?).

Image from Watts Up With That

Euronews claims climate change has evolved into a “meta-crisis” threatening food security, energy supplies, economies, water resources, and international security. This is misleading because the article largely substitutes predictions and assertions for measurements of what is actually happening. The data show global crop production and yields reaching record levels, deaths from extreme weather collapsing over the long term, and many of today’s energy and economic problems arising from political choices and geopolitical conflicts rather than changes in climate.

Euronews builds its case primarily around an interview with Emmanuella Doussis, UNESCO Chair on Climate Diplomacy at the University of Athens. Doussis declares climate change an economic, social, political, and geopolitical problem, linking it to competition for resources, migration, water shortages, food insecurity, and the energy transition.

Those are sweeping claims. Curiously, Euronews provides remarkably little observational evidence demonstrating that climate change is actually causing the worldwide “meta-crisis” its headline announces.

Perhaps the most obvious contradiction concerns food.

Doussis predicts, “We will face a very large, serious problem with food security.” But predictions about what might happen cannot erase what is happening.

Climate at a Glance: Crop Production summarizes data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showing that global crop production and yields have risen dramatically during the period of modern warming. Its latest summary reports that the 2023 and 2024 global crop years produced the two highest global crop yields per acre on record.

Climate Realism has documented the same trend repeatedly. Global production of staple crops has increased substantially, and yields have repeatedly set records during recent decades. Even where individual crops suffer poor regional seasons because of drought, floods, pests, or other causes, that is not evidence of a deteriorating global food supply.

There are good reasons for this improvement. Agricultural technology, irrigation, fertilizers, improved crop varieties, mechanization, and better pest control have transformed farming. Modest warming can also lengthen growing seasons and reduce damaging frost events in some regions, while additional atmospheric carbon dioxide generally stimulates plant growth and improves water-use efficiency.

None of this means weather cannot damage crops. It always has. It means that portraying climate change as presently creating a global food-security crisis conflicts with the direction of observed agricultural production.

Carney’s Trump card – deploy the BOM to panic the Elbozos

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Mark Carney wouldn’t be Prime Minister without the active connivance of Donald Trump. Using the Bad Orange Man to whip up the thoroughly propagandized Boomer Elbozos has been Carney’s most successful play since arriving in Ottawa. With the enthusaistic support of the presstitutes of the Canadian relic media, all Carney needs to do to deflect any bad news is to mention the name and the elbows start flapping in unison:

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Dear Prime Minister Carney,

Enough the crap already. Just stop it and tell your caucus MPs to knock it off too. Canadians deserve better. I, along with most Canadians I talk to, are genuinely disgusted by what Canadian politics has become.

Let me start with something that apparently now requires a disclaimer before common sense is permitted into the room: yes, the Canadian government should prepare for catastrophes, whether that’s war, cyberattacks, pandemics, natural disasters, terrorism, economic shocks, asteroids and comets or, hell, even an alien invasion. Governments are supposed to think about things the rest of us would reasonably file under “probably never going to happen”, including scenarios so unlikely that everybody involved hopes the planning exercise ends up gathering dust forever. That is called governing.

But there is an enormous difference between quietly preparing for an extreme possibility and irresponsibly putting that possibility in front of Canadians until people start wondering whether they should be watching the southern horizon for tanks.

And apparently we are doing the latter now.

You called the possibility of American military action against Canada an “extreme tail risk”. In other words, something considered extraordinarily unlikely but potentially catastrophic.

Fine, plan for it then. War-game it if you like. Put it in a binder thick enough to stop a bullet and lock it in whatever filing cabinet governments use for scenarios involving asteroid strikes, alien invasions and somebody successfully explaining the federal tax code.

But why are ordinary Canadians being invited into this particular nightmare? Especially now?

Because while everybody is staring south waiting for Donald Trump’s army to parachute into Canada, something considerably less hypothetical is happening right here.

The Canadian economy isn’t exactly bounding through the meadow with a ribbon in its hair like you touted, now, is it And guess what’s actually more interesting?

On June 3, you stood in the House of Commons defending Canada’s economic performance and told Pierre Poilievre that if he wanted an answer, he could “ask the OECD”, which was forecasting Canada to have the second-strongest G7 economy that year and the next.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne invoked the OECD forecasts too. The OECD had become something of an international report card pinned proudly to the Liberal refrigerator. You touted it as proof “the plan is working!”

Then September arrived.

I’ve been saying for quite some time that Carney genuinely doesn’t want and wouldn’t accept a trade deal with the Trump administration, no matter how much it will cost Canadians (and since his family and personal wealth is more than 90% in the United States, it’ll cost him nothing at all personally). Even so, this seems to be a position from which there is no eventual “victory”, no chance to recoup the lost economic opportunities, there is nothing to “win” here. So, aside from theorized anti-Trump animus, why has Carney chosen this path? In a long essay, Upper Canadian Cavalier suggests some fascinating yet unsettling reasons that aren’t at all tied to Canadian interests:

AI-generated image from Upper Canadian Cavalier

To ask who Mark Carney is working for, you first have to be willing to look at the real nature of the Canada-US relationship, the one that no one in a position of power above would dare articulate.

Set aside the picture of the United States as the friendly giant next door, the trading partner, the ally with the shared border and the shared anthem at the hockey game. That picture is a courtesy. What sits below us is an empire, in the oldest and most exact sense of the word, and it does not rule the way the older empires ruled. Rome ruled through legions, garrisons, roads, and the physical occupation of ground. The American empire rules through the things that move without an army. It is an empire of covert softpower most of whose subjects are blissfully unaware of their subordinate position. That empire maintains control through the currency the world prices its oil in. The payment rails every bank on earth must touch. The studios and platforms that manufacture what a hundred nations find funny and frightening and true. The defence umbrella that quietly turns an independent foreign policy into a luxury most of its members decline. The foundations and the NGOs that decide which causes are respectable and which are fringe. The universities whose faculties set the terms of every argument before a single voter ever hears it. It lets its provinces keep their flags. It lets them keep their anthems and their parliaments and their little ceremonies of self-government, because none of that costs the metropole a thing, and a province that believes it is a country is far easier to manage than one that knows it is a province.

On that map, Canada is not a neighbour. Canada is the richest province in the entire system. Wealthier than nearly all of them, wired more directly into the centre than any of them, sharing the longest border, the deepest supply chains, and the most complete cultural merger of any territory the empire holds. Most provinces of an empire sit at a distance from it. We are plugged straight into the board. Southern Ontario is closer to the beating heart of that system than West Virginia is, and it has been for fifty years.

I recall hearing the term “branch plant economy” from when I first started paying attention to the news: it was a standard refrain in any discussion of Canadian industry from at least the 1960s and probably going back much further than that … because a lot of US companies did set up small manufacturing operations in Canada to avoid paying duty and taxes for shipping products across the US-Canadian border.

But the same was at least as true about cultural issues:

Once you see the country this way, something that has nagged at you for years finally has a name. You have noticed, surely, that our politics feels like a rerun. That the arguments arrive already formed, six months late, dubbed into Canadian. The slogans on the placards, the list of what counts as controversial, the shape of every fight, all of it seems to come pre-packaged from somewhere south of here, keyed to institutions and a history that are not ours. The Canadian left takes its vocabulary and its enemies from the American left. The Canadian right does the same in the other direction. To argue about any of it from outside the imported frame, to counter-signal the entire American script, is treated in this country as something close to blasphemy. That is what it is to be a province. The metropole ships the politics, and the province stages the show.

One of the claimed advantages of the negotiations leading up to the first general free-trade agreement between Canada and the United States was to eliminate as much as possible of the cross-border friction in trade: those duties and taxes that initially encouraged branch plant expansion. Free trade meant, at least in theory, that companies could produce their output where it made the most economic sense and serve the entire North American market more efficiently. Some of the old branch plants disappeared, while others expanded and grew to become much larger facilities. Later, as emphasis on manufacturing shifted from domestic to (cheaper) international sources, the jobs and the money moved steadily away from making things and toward providing services. This seemed to make sense in the economic calculations, but it wasn’t all sweetness and light and following Adam Smith’s philosophy:

Over forty years the American economy (and Canada’s) was reorganized so that the money flowed away from the people who make things and toward the people who arrange things. Factories went abroad. Finance stopped being a utility that funded industry and became the industry. A whole class came up in the gap between those two facts: the asset managers, the consultancies, the compliance shops, the climate-finance desks, the private equity partners. Men whose income arrives not from building anything but from standing between someone’s labour and someone’s capital and charging a toll on the traffic.

Intermediation, in the polite register. Skimming, if you want the shorter word.

It is very good money. It also has requirements. Open borders for goods and capital. A regulatory thicket dense enough that only the largest players can afford the guides through it. And a political class that treats all of it as weather rather than policy.

Then 2016, and worse, 2024.

Trump is a realignment. Tariffs, reshoring, open contempt for the managerial professions and the international bodies, a stated preference for the man who pours concrete over the man who writes the memo about pouring concrete. Say what you like about how he does it. The direction is unmistakable. He is dragging the American state back toward the people who work with their hands, and away from the people who take the percentage.

So that is the larger economic and political picture. Here at home, Canada has had a decade of Justin Trudeau’s clown prince act and has finally grown tired of it:

January 2025. The Liberal brand is radioactive. Ten years of Trudeau have curdled, the party is twenty-odd points down, the cycle is running hard against it and every professional in Ottawa can read the polling. A liberal man who wants a political career in Canadian politics would wait. He would let someone else absorb the defeat, sits out a term, and comes back clean in 2029 as the saviour of a rebuilt party. That is the obvious play and any political operator in town knows it.

Carney jumped in anyway.

When somebody takes a deal that looks bad, don’t ask him what it cost. Ask him what he is buying instead. Because Carney was not making a shrewd pivot towards a political career. On the arithmetic available in January 2025 he was buying a short ugly premiership, taking a run at Kim Campbell’s record and he went for it anyway.

What the office did offer, immediately and uniquely, was a seat at the table opposite Donald Trump. Not commentary. Not a column in the Financial Times. A state. Tariff authority, a negotiating team, a G7 chair, standing with Brussels, and control of one of the few economies wired deep enough into the American one to actually hurt it.

[…]

[Carney] is not governing this country. He is occupying it.

When Caesar took Rome, Pompey and the Senate did not surrender. They crossed to Greece, and there they raised what he could and kept the war going from the provinces, because their faction lost the capital but did not want to stop fighting and submit to reforms that would permanently alter the lucrativeness of their rent seeking ways. So they relocated their base of operations to continue the war abroad instead.

They lost Washington. So they reorganized the resistance in the most valuable province they had, the one already theirs, and they garrisoned it with a man of their own class who needed no persuading at all. Nobody had to recruit him. He was already one of them, and the province came with the office.

Pompey’s people in Greece were not a band of exiles, and this is the part worth understanding. They were the Senate. The lawful government of Rome, in their own account, operating in exile with its own command and its own coinage, entirely convinced that they were Rome and that the man sitting in the city was a usurper. They were also, by any honest reading, a rich and deeply corrupt class defending its own holdings, and they could hold both of those things in their heads at once without difficulty.

That is the mind of Carney’s class exactly. They are not insurgents. They think of themselves as the rightful order who have temporarily been displaced by a vulgar interloper, waiting it out in the provinces and administering what is still theirs in the meantime.

The parallel runs the other way too, and it is not flattering to the Senate. Caesar’s support was real and it was popular. The opposition to him was a wealthy class protecting its rents and calling that protection a defence of the republic. There was no cabal in that Senate either. There were hundreds of men, each convinced of his own righteousness, each guarding his own standing, arriving at the same posture without a single meeting required. Which is why it could never be exposed, only defeated.

They also treated him as a mortal threat to the constitution before he had become one, went all in on the civil war framing, and the measures they took to stop him are what forced his hand. Prophecies of that kind have a way of fulfilling themselves.

Long time readers will know that I couldn’t possibly pass up a reference to the parallels to the late Roman Republican struggle between Caesar and Pompey.

War drums echo again in Britain

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

Mark Steyn on the renewed interest in going to war against Russia by the British establishment (let’s not point out just how Britain’s existing armed forces are being required to skip “non-essential” training to save money):

“British Army working during the Field Training Exercise” by U.S. Army Europe is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 .

On the other hand, the Iran war has, apparently effortlessly, brought Britain to economic ruin, which may be why the UK’s hitherto all-powerful iron-fisted caudillo has not been seen since late July, even by his favourite Ukrainian rent boys.

Still, the good news is that every day Russia inches closer to that 2022 collapse:

    The Novoshakhtinsk refinery in the southern Russian region of Rostov was hit by drones and had to be taken offline, regional governor Yury Slyusar said in a post on Telegram early on Friday.

    As a result of the drone attacks, the Novoshakhtinsk refinery, which has the capacity to process 110,000 barrels of crude oil per day, was damaged and halted operations, the official said …

    Ukraine continues its campaign to cripple Russian refining capacity, fuel supply, and export revenues. Due to the low refinery production, Russia has been forced to ban diesel exports for months and is likely to extend the ban beyond September 30. The ban was initially introduced in July as Ukraine has continuously taken Russian refineries offline.

That’s great news, isn’t it?

Whoops, my mistake: in another exciting plot twist, bringing the Russian economy to its knees is now a bad thing. Because the, er, Houthis have done a Lindsey Graham and put their flip-flops on the ground:

    The Houthis’ capture of Mocha has transformed the war in Yemen – and the geopolitics of the Red Sea

Are you a renowned geopolitical expert? Are you free for a quick Zoom hit on what happens if the Iran-backed Iraqi militias bomb the strategically vital Saudi port of Macchiato? Ha! Gotcha!

Notwithstanding these distractions, what rank-and-file voters want to know is who’s two points up in Iowa. After all, we live in a golden age of popular self-government where Abdul el-Sayed is “America’s next Obama” and Elif Eralp is “Germany’s Zohran Mamdani” and Sadiq Khan is the next Sadiq Khan. Iowa-wise, Republican control of the Senate is all down to Nicki Minaj.

As you’ll have gathered from all the foregoing, news is bollocks. And yet, to return to where we came in, the strange persistence of certain recurring themes is itself newsworthy. It is curious, for example, that every western European leader insists on alerting his citizenry that “war with Russia could begin at any moment“.

Why? It’s fairly obvious that Moscow has determined to conclude the Ukraine war on the battlefield and to hold what it has taken: to the victor the spoils, as President Trump remarked at the UN General Assembly. In the course of an agreeable week or so in Odessa, it took me a day or two to notice that seventy per cent of the locals speak Russian and that the preferred items I painstakingly learned from the breakfast menu were not in fact in Ukrainian. So I can see why the Kremlin might jib at letting Nato turn it into the Lindsey Graham Memorial Headquarters for the new forward operating bases that used to be in the Gulf. In the weeks since my pre-coma vacation, Putin has destroyed the town’s port and reduced Ukraine to a de facto landlocked country.

Tough for the Ukrainians. So the European political class has volunteered you — yes, you, Clive Higginbotham of Rotherham, and you, Jean-Marie Durand of Clichy-sous Bois, and you, Stig Karlsson of Malmö — to go and fight the Russian bear. The Pakistani minicab-driver will take care of your wife and daughters while you’re away. When the Donbass is in peril, what fainthearted ninny worries about his own territorial integrity? In London the government’s busy giving away Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, the British Indian Ocean Territory and the English South Coast to, respectively, Brussels, Madrid, Port Louis and every sex-fiend in Somalia, so your sovereign territory is hardly at issue, is it, you whiny loser?

Even so, you’d think impending nuclear armageddon would be a wee bit politically controversial. Au contraire, it’s impeccably non-partisan. Here, for example, is a discussion about next month’s blitzkrieg against Russia between the Rt Hon Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, former Lord President of Her late Majesty’s Privy Council and a “conservative”, and Mr Paul Richards, former chair of the Fabian Society and a “socialist”:

Got that? If you oppose war with Russia, the “conservative” wants to throw you in gaol because Britain suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars and the “socialist” wants to throw you in gaol under the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act.

Because that’s all the choice anyone needs in a functioning democracy. So good luck findng a Neither Of The Above candidate who’ll be permitted to take power. After all, the winning party in this month’s German elections is, per the intelligence agencies, a “Russian sleeper cell”.

But but but, splutter my correspondents, aren’t you worried that Iran is two weeks away from a nuclear weapon? Actually, I assume the deceased ayatollahs have used the seven months since February 28th to acquire nukes. Wouldn’t you?

AK-12: The Improved 2019 Model

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 May 2026

NOTE: I goofed the selector positions, and mistakenly described them backwards: from the top, it is safe, full, 2-round-burst, and then semi at the bottom. In addition, there is supposed to be a segmented cleaning rod stored inside the handguard, which is missing on this example. Sorry!

The AK-12 went through an extensive development program that attempted to substantially change the AK design, but failed. In 2015 the early design plans were scrapped, and the project reverted to simply making some changes to the AK-100 series. This resulted in the AK-12 being adopted as the new Russian standard infantry rifle in December 2017. Within a short time a number of shortcomings were found in the rifles, and an improved model was accepted in 2019, with deliveries beginning in 2020.

The rifle in today’s video is that improved 2019 pattern. It has a redesigned stock, a new style of rear sight, and new pistol grip. Many thanks to the IRCGN (Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale) for allowing me access to film this very rare rifle for you!

Balanced-recoil AK-107:
• Balanced Recoil AK-107 / Kalashnikov SR-1:…
(more…)

QotD: Origins of modern Wicca

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the idea of witches cursing the moon has an ancient pedigree, dating all the way back to Greco-Roman antiquity and the literary trope of Thessalian witches who could pull the moon out of the heavens and down to earth. These ancient texts were part of the inspiration for Gerald Gardner’s mid-20th century creation of the “drawing down the moon” ritual, but where sources from the classical world implied that a witch could actually pluck the moon from the sky, in Gardner’s version a coven summons the divine personification of the moon to possess a priestess. Moreover, his creation of Wicca also drew extensively from freemasonry, the western ceremonial magic tradition, Crowleyian magic, Gardner’s own ethnographic observations in Southeast Asia — and, most important of all, the theories of James Frazer and Margaret Murray.

One thing that we can be confident that Wicca does not draw upon, however, is a goddess religion that survived the introduction of first the Indo-European *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr in the Bronze Age, and then the Semitic Jesus Christ in late antiquity, before being mostly suppressed in the “burning times” of the early modern era.1 Neo-pagans are not the (great-great-great …) granddaughters of the witches you didn’t burn in the 16th and 17th centuries; rather, they are the granddaughters of upper class romantics whose religious innovations in the early to mid-20th century are best characterized as “creative synthesis”.

Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon tells the story of the precursors, invention, and development of Wicca. Much of that history can be encapsulated in the mythic genealogy of “Black Annis”, an occasional pagan deity. There was a real medieval anchoress named Agnes Scott who served the church near Leicester and is buried at Swithland Church. She was venerated locally as a Christian saint, but following the Protestant Reformation was reconceptualized as an ogress. Then the 20th century crank archaeologist T.C. Lethbridge interpreted Black Annis as pagan survivalism of the “crone” aspect of the great mother goddess and a corruption of the Celtic goddess Anu. Finally, some modern neo-pagan communities were inspired by Lethbridge’s work to adopt veneration of Black Annis into their liturgy. As Hutton notes, “The gentle and pious Agnes seems therefore to have been turned first into a local saint, then into a local demon, next into a Celtic goddess, and finally into a witch goddess; and all the while her bones have rested in apparent peace at Swithland”.

The changing reputation of Agnes/Annis/Anu reflects a few processes that are common throughout much of the intellectual roots of neo-paganism. You start with the idiosyncratic cruftiness of medieval Catholicism, then Protestants derogate the cult of the saints, feast days, etc. as idolatrous — indeed, practically pagan. Fast forward to 1900, give or take a few decades, and an intellectual with dubious expertise projects pagan survivalism onto historical or ethnographic data. And then finally neo-pagans use the folklorist’s imagined version of the past as inspiration for a “revived” myth and liturgy.

Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST REVIEW: The Triumph of the Moon, by Ronald Hutton”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-01.

  1. The one aspect of this myth that might be true is a pre-Indo-European goddess religion. The idea that Stone Age female figurines like the Venus of Willendorf represent a goddess religion is plausible but unprovable, given that the figures predate writing by about 26,000 years and so we have no literary evidence to contextualize the archaeology. But even saying that the Neolithic goddess cult was possible but not settled fact, as archaeologist Peter Ucko did in the 1960s, was enough to upset Murray, who “sent Ucko a furious letter, informing him that he had no right to speak about the goddess, because he was, first, far too young, and, second, a man”. While there might have been widespread neolithic European goddess worship, all other aspects of the “Murray thesis” — the idea that witches executed circa the Protestant Reformation were practicing a pre-Christian goddess religion — are demonstrably false. Hutton notes the falsity of the Murray thesis incidentally in Triumph of the Moon and argues against it at length in his later book, The Witch.

September 28, 2026

The Blairite world of “policy based evidence making”

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

Just when you think the world is safe from Tony Blair’s machinations, he pops up yet again with more ideas for cultural enshittification:

Tony Blair photographed for the New Statesman by Tom Jamieson.
Photo via Fainting in Coils

Tony Blair has a gift for sentences that sound like policy and dissolve on contact. His Institute’s new paper contains one worth framing. “The right answer should always come first and the politics should follow.” It is the creed of a man who has never knocked on a door in Mansfield, and it explains everything else in the document. It is also called “policy based evidence making“.

The proposal is that Andy Burnham should use his November ten-year plan to put EU membership back on the agenda, with a target of rejoining a “significantly reformed” Union within a decade. Three years ago Blair told a group of European news agencies that whether and how Britain rejoins would be for a future generation. The future generation has arrived early, and it looks remarkably like Tony.

Nowhere does the paper define “significantly reformed“. It cannot. Name the reforms and you hand twenty-seven capitals a list of British demands, which is Cameron’s 2016 renegotiation with the humiliation pre-installed. Leave them unnamed and the target is air. It is equally coy on the currency, insisting it is not making an argument about the eurozone. Brussels will be happy to make that argument on its behalf.

What the friends of Europe concede

The most damaging witnesses against Blair are his own side. The Institute for Government, no nest of Eurosceptics, notes that new members are required to join the euro and Schengen, and that any fresh opt-outs or rebate would almost certainly need the approval of every member state and a majority in the European Parliament. An analysis on the LSE’s Brexit blog went further. It argued that the EU would expect Britain back as a more normal member state, with the rebate, the euro and Schengen opt-outs and the special justice and home affairs arrangements all off the table. The same piece warned that Brussels would look for significant, stable and long-lasting majority public opinion in favour of rejoining before it took an application seriously. A ten-year target announced by one party, and opposed by the party leading the polls, is the opposite of that.

A Queen’s University Belfast academic, writing before the referendum, saw the trap clearly. He judged it extremely unlikely that the EU would readmit Britain on its old terms, because a vote to leave would itself have been a democratic rejection of those terms. And unanimity means every capital holds a veto, including Madrid, which would have Gibraltar in view when any British arrangement came before it.

What the Leavers add

Anyone who imagines accession is a negotiation should read Hannes Gissurarson on Iceland, which voted last month against even resuming talks. He points out that accession talks are no bargain between equals but a process of adopting the Union’s legal framework wholesale, with room only for temporary exemptions to ease adjustment. Iceland’s Yes camp campaigned on a slogan meaning roughly “vote yes to find out what the EU would offer”, which Gissurarson reads as a confession that the deal was poor. Blair’s ten-year target is the same slogan with a longer run-up.

Gissurarson also recounts an unnamed EU official musing to Politico that rich Iceland could join alongside Montenegro and pay for its membership. Britain, rejoining behind a queue of Balkan and eastern candidates, would be cast as the wealthy uncle who picks up everyone’s bar tab.

Update, 29 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Skynet is taking over our critical … refrigerators?

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

With appliance manufacturers desperately eager to get us to make our entire appliance suite internet-connected, it shouldn’t be a surprise to find that the security of your internet-connected toaster or refrigerator is not up to scratch. It is concerning that commercial refrigerators apparently have the same kind of vulnerabilities to malefactors on the internet:

Commercial refrigerators
Wikimedia Commons.

Refrigerators are probably the last thing anyone would consider a national security vulnerability, which is precisely why the unusual refrigeration failures at U.S. military commissaries deserve more attention than they are getting. There is no public evidence that the incidents were caused by a cyberattack or a foreign adversary, and they may ultimately prove to be nothing more than equipment, software, or maintenance failures. But when refrigeration systems at multiple military installations experience problems within a relatively short period and at Fort Huachuca all of the commissary’s freezers reportedly went into defrost mode overnight, leaders at the Pentagon should be asking a larger question: If a sophisticated adversary wanted to test its ability to disrupt the infrastructure supporting America’s military without firing a shot, is this what it might look like?

That question matters because China and other U.S. adversaries are no longer thinking about cyber warfare simply as stealing secrets or attacking classified networks. They are looking for ways to penetrate the infrastructure America depends upon and, when necessary, create disruption, confusion, and delay. It echoes the familiar warnings of a certain rail conductor from a beloved children’s television show about a talking train. U.S. intelligence and cybersecurity agencies have already warned that Chinese state-sponsored actors have gained access to American critical infrastructure and, in some cases, appear to be positioning themselves for potential disruption during a future conflict. A coordinated attack against something as ordinary as refrigeration would therefore not have to cause catastrophic damage to be successful. The objective could be much simpler: get inside, disrupt operations, complicate the response, and watch how America responds.

That is what makes the recent commissary incidents worth examining beyond the immediate loss of food or inconvenience to military families. If an adversary wanted to probe U.S. military infrastructure, attacking a commissary would carry considerably less risk than shutting down an airfield, disrupting a command center, or interfering with a weapons system. Yet it could still provide valuable intelligence about how quickly geographically dispersed incidents are identified, whether installations communicate with one another, when a maintenance problem becomes a cybersecurity investigation, which contractors and government agencies respond, and how long it takes the Pentagon to determine whether seemingly isolated failures are connected.

In other words, the purpose would not be the refrigerator, the purpose would be to learn how and when we would respond to the incidents.

Update, 29 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

“… if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own”

Filed under: Health, History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison discusses the need for ceremonies or rites to signify the end of childhood and the entry into adult life … things that have almost completely disappeared in western culture over the last few decades:

I think modern society made a mistake when it assumed that getting rid of sacred rites would make people purely rational.

It didn’t.

Human beings still need thresholds, tests, stories, symbols and some clear sense that childhood has ended and adulthood has begun. We may no longer send young people into the wilderness for an initiation ordeal, but the psychological need to prove yourself, belong somewhere and become someone has not disappeared.

Traditional initiation rites were often harsh, sometimes brutally so, but they carried a clear message: your childhood identity is finished. You are now expected to accept duty, restraint, courage and responsibility.

Modern society is much less clear about that transition.

You can become legally adult at 18 while remaining psychologically dependent for years. There is often no agreed moment when society says: you are responsible now. Stop waiting to be rescued. Carry your own weight. Become useful to other people.

The danger is that the need for initiation does not disappear just because formal rituals disappear.

Young people invent substitutes.

Sometimes that becomes fraternity hazing, gangs, reckless behaviour, extreme risk-taking or ideological movements that offer belonging, enemies, heroes, rituals and moral certainty. Popular culture does something similar in a safer form. Star Wars, superhero stories, horror films and countless other myths repeat the ancient pattern: leave safety, enter chaos, face the monster, sacrifice something, return changed.

We keep telling these stories because they describe something real about human development.

The part I find most useful is that modern adulthood probably has to become more voluntary.

Nobody is going to drag most of us through a ceremonial rite and announce that childhood is over.

We have to do it ourselves.

Take responsibility before you feel completely ready. Accept obligations. Learn to tolerate discomfort. Become financially and emotionally useful. Care for somebody besides yourself. Face failure without retreating into nihilism. Test your beliefs against reality. Give up childish expectations that life should always be fair, comfortable or safe.

That is initiation stripped of superstition.

You enter difficulty voluntarily and come out carrying more responsibility than you carried before.

A mature society should probably find better ways of teaching that lesson, because if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own.

And some of those substitutes will be far worse than the rituals we thought we had outgrown.

The Punic Wars – An Overview

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

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 15 Apr 2026

Today we return to a familiar theme — the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. This video is meant as an overview of all three wars, rather than just the Second Punic War which is the most famous and involved Hannibal and Scipio and the like. We think about the context of the wars and also how they played out. A particular focus is the significance of big battles, whether on land or on sea. Clearly these mattered, but how much did the matter and how common were they?

QotD: “This is revealed preferences with an erection”

Filed under: History, Humour, Middle East, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The downshouting of Sidney Sweeney’s American Eagle ads reminds me of one of my favorite Damned Facts.

As far back as we have records, and into the present day, anywhere that women are sold as pleasure slaves blonde blue-eyed girls with big racks have been the most in demand.

Our most extensive documentation on this is from the Ottoman Empire. Their slave-takers raided as far north as the west coast of Ireland and even Iceland because a handful of Sidneys could fund years-long expeditions — ships, weapons, provisions, hundreds of men — from the price they fetched on the auction block. And net a healthy profit, too.

But the pattern is everywhere — cross cultural, cross-racial. Evolutionary biologists think they know why: chicks who look like le Sweeney are radiating signals of youth and immune-system effectiveness and general reproductive fitness. Blonde hair fades with age, clear skin doesn’t hide blemishes that reveal vulnerability to infection, and I hope nobody reading this needs any education about breast-to-waist-to-hip ratios. If you do, ask an AI for an explainer.

I don’t know that anybody’s explained the allure of blue eyes satisfactorily yet. We know they’re a huge win in the sexual selection game, because of the rapidity with which they propagated. A single point mutation, probably less than 10,000 years ago in Europe, spread like wildfire despite the fact that lack of melanin granules in the iris is recessive.

There’s not much that can reveal the instinctive desires of men more clearly than what they’re willing to pay to own women who light up their limbic systems. This is revealed preferences with an erection.

It’s not just yesterday, either. Every few years somebody busts a semi-covert slave market in some shithole like Mauritania or Afghanistan and it’s the same old story. The highest value merchandise is always blonde white girls, usually trafficked from Eastern Europe.

So, yes, when old-school racists ranted about darkies lusting for the flower of white womanhood, they were not wrong. Because, well, basically everybody lusts for the flower of white womanhood. It seems to be wired in.

ESR, Twitter, 2025-07-30.

September 27, 2026

The great mystery of the missing male book reader

Filed under: Books, Business — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I used to read a lot more than I do now — I have a personal library of a few thousand books — but less and less of what is being published has any interest for me at all. I still purchase a few new books every year, but rarely are they fiction titles. My primary interests are general history, military history, and a very limited number of SF authors’ work. The publishing industry isn’t interested in getting me back as a paying customer, at least based on the vast majority of what they’re pushing to the bookstores these days:

AI-generated image from Abstract Truth Substack

There seems to be genuine bewilderment in the publishing industry as to why male readers would rather read the instructions on an airplane barf bag than a novel from the “Manager’s Selection” at Barnes & Noble. It’s a genuine mystery why male readers weren’t anxiously digging into The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School over the summer. The story of a 16-year-old’s struggle with lesbianism, at a time when it seems that half of Gen Z has declared itself either gay, lesbian, bisexual, or of equivocal sexuality, is a story that just has to be told. I mean, who ever heard of a lesbian nun or a gay priest? It’s so utterly novel that you would find a homosexual in the Roman Catholic Church. I am certain that there were no worthier candidates than this for recognition as a finalist for the National Book Award.

Walking into a Barnes & Noble brings a familiar feeling of nausea to the male shopper. It is the same feeling I had when our 78-year-old public junior high school teacher taught The Red Badge of Courage in a style guaranteed not only to make us hate all literature, but to regret having become literate at all.

First, there is the Great Wall of Pastel: pink, turquoise, lavender, sea-foam green, with flowers climbing around titles written in cursive. Look over there and you’ll see the woman facing the ocean, next to a cottage or a vineyard — or some other place to which she has fled after discovering that her marriage was an oppressive patriarchal institution because her husband asked her what was for dinner on consecutive Tuesdays.

AI-generated image from Abstract Truth Substack

There are all sorts of creative variations on the story. She opens a bookshop, a dress shop, a bakery, or an inn on a Greek island or Nantucket. Maybe a distant aunt dies — Great-Aunt Millicent Pendergast — and leaves a fortune to the heroine because she once saw a spark in her as a little girl. The narrative is flowery and nauseating and full of feeling and description. Or perhaps she returns to the town she swore she would never return to and meets a rugged carpenter who is tortured but secretly wealthy and has chosen to work with his hands because money never brought him happiness.

By page 287, she discovers that she has been living for everyone but herself and has finally liberated herself from the horrible oppression of patriarchal submission.

It is truly baffling why men have gasped in horror at American fiction in much the same manner they would at the announcement of a Streisand-Cher double bill. I finally walked through the fiction section of Barnes & Noble some time ago and decided that I would rather be waterboarded than spend another minute there.

[…]

Men aren’t going to read trash that doesn’t appeal to them. But they will read history, biography, philosophy, and science fiction. They might read about a long-vanquished civilization or pick up a biography of Ty Cobb. They might spend 30 hours listening to a podcast about the Roman Empire. They may be reading about the Goths, Napoleon, or the fall of the Persian Empire. Men are not only capable of reading, they like to read. We just hate bad fiction.

It we find ourselves trapped inside Barnes & Noble, we are likely to cover their eyes as we pass the front displays and push our way toward the History or Philosophy section. American fiction has become a sea of political and therapeutic preoccupations produced by an industry that has pushed many male voices to the fringe of the business and then seems genuinely surprised that the male readers followed them out the door.

Meanwhile, somewhere at the London Book Fair, a panel discussion is convening under the title, “Where Have All the Male Readers Gone?” Thirteen of the fourteen panelists are women. The fourteenth is a transgender man who has complicated feelings about his father. The moderator has just finished explaining that men probably lack the emotional vocabulary required for contemporary fiction.

Nobody has thought to walk across the street to a pub and ask an actual male why they stopped reading fiction. But don’t worry. They’ll get to the bottom of it.

The 88 – Foe of Tanks and Planes Alike – Nazi Rearmament 07

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 26 Sep 2026

The German 8.8-centimeter Flak began as a heavy anti-aircraft gun, but war repeatedly dragged it into new roles. It shot at bombers, destroyed tanks, smashed bunkers, supported infantry, and eventually defended the collapsing Reich from Allied armies advancing into Germany.

Its origins, however, predated the Nazis. Developed through clandestine cooperation between Krupp and the Swedish firm Bofors, the Flak 18 emerged from Weimar Germany’s efforts to evade the military restrictions imposed after the First World War. The Nazis inherited that expertise, expanded production enormously, and turned the “Eighty-Eight” into one of the most famous weapons of the Second World War.

From Spain and France to North Africa, the Eastern Front, and the air defense of German cities, the 88 earned a formidable reputation. But how much of that reputation was deserved? Was it really an unparalleled anti-tank weapon, or has later mythology exaggerated its contribution?

In this German rearmament special, we examine the development, production, deployment, capabilities, limitations, and strategic effect of the Flak 18, Flak 36, Flak 37, and the substantially redesigned Flak 41. This is the history behind the legend: an impressive piece of engineering employed in support of Nazi Germany’s war of conquest and genocide.

Gynogerontocracy in the Anglosphere

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Business, Cancon, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As the working world in the Anglosphere becomes ever more feminized and gynocentric, as companies disproportionally hire women over men, the working dynamics of most jobs has also shifted dramatically:

There’s many things to be exhausted about as a millennial or zoomer man, and I find that one of them really is gynogerontocracy. Everywhere you go, a profoundly alienating woman, often an older woman, is in charge, where she probably either shouldn’t be, or would be better executing tasks and responsibilities for a male executive.

In the private sphere, the corporate jobs go to girlbosses, whose neuroticism is channeled into unrealistic and dysfunctional adherence to rules, policies and procedures. There is no trust or discretion to do your own job, at the same time as management they don’t want you to ask them about anything. Every minor policy breach turns into an email, turns a passive aggressive “documented conversation” and “coaching”, as they talk down to you as a mother scolds their children.

When I think about my professional life, the only times I was ever promoted for my hard work and efforts, was under White or Asian male leadership, and that’s because they by and large are the only people who value demonstrable merit and ability. Women don’t. They value policies and procedures, they value inclusivity, and they become petty little tyrants when they’re in charge. The only female manager I’ve ever had who wasn’t like that was a 24 year old zoomer who played with a Needough in her office and posted weird alien cat gifs in the corporate chat app. She was fine, and understood my lack of enthusiasm. The rest of them act like they’re running the navy when the consensus is now that this is functionally adult female daycare.

As a generational experience and trait, I find that men and boys are collectively exhausted and resent women being in charge for what has been their entire living experience. I find myself asking how much longer this can go on.

Harsher than Versailles: The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk 1918

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

The Great War
Published 24 Apr 2026

On March 3, 1918 the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) and Bolshevik Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending the First World War on the Eastern Front. The terms were harsher than those the Germans offered in December, and much harsher than the later Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was only in force until November 1918, when the Central Powers’ defeat nullified it. But it had a major impact inside and outside Russia.
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QotD: “Friction” in military actions

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

Friction is a key concept from Clausewitz, a term encompassing the unpredictability of war which is one component of his “trinity”. In essence, “friction” stands in for the fact that war is unpredictable and things have a tendency to not go “to plan”. Friction tends to build over the course of a given effort or operation as surprises stack up on each other, causing greater and greater deviations from the plan. Note that surprises here can mean combat losses (since the soldiers or equipment lost was intended, in the plan, to be doing things), but can also mean disorganization, confusion and delays which also sap the effort of its strength. This is part of why attackers tend to lose strength faster than defenders, leading to offensives culminating – friction eventually overwhelms the attacker’s initial advantage in strength. Friction plays on all sides in a war.

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

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