Quotulatiousness

June 29, 2025

The oddity of Donald Trump’s personal “golden share” in US Steel

Filed under: Business, Government, Japan, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the National Post, Colby Cosh points out the weirdest element of President Trump’s deal with Nippon Steel for the takeover of venerable US Steel:

A “golden share” is a special kind of equity that gives its holder veto power over specified corporate decisions. It is often used in privatizations to give governments some vestige of control over corporate entities originally created by the state (or, in Canada, the Crown) for public purposes. In this unusual case, the U.S. government is magically gaining a golden share in exchange for permitting the sale of one private company to another. The government will be given the right to choose some U.S. Steel board directors, to forbid any name change, and to veto factory closures, offshoring, acquisitions and other moves.

As the Cato Institute immediately pointed out, this is a de facto nationalization of U.S. Steel — the sort of thing that would have had Cold War conservatives climbing the walls and hooting about socialism. But at least socialism professes to be social! Yesterday a lefty energy reporter named Robinson Meyer was nosing around in the revised corporate charter for the newly-acquired U.S. Steel, and he discovered a remarkable detail that the Cato folks had missed: the decision powers of the golden share have been legally assigned to Donald Trump in person and by name for the duration of his presidency. Only after Trump has left the White House do those golden-share powers revert to actual U.S. government departments (Treasury and Commerce).

The stench of banana-republicanism here is truly overwhelming. Again, any species of government foreign-investment review is bound to have a personal character, but such decisions are not supposed to involve the legally explicit assignment of a valuable corporate asset to the decision-maker in his own person. Can this be described as anything but legalized, open bribery — assuming that U.S. courts will find it legal if the terms of sale are challenged? Where in the U.S. Constitution, or in the history of the United States, can any warrant for this extraordinary behaviour conceivably be found? And will unholy bargains of this nature soon become routine?

A parent reviews “Alpha School”

Filed under: Education, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Astral Codex Ten, an anonymous reviewer offers his views on a new “AI-powered” school that claims radically better results for children than traditional schooling methods:

Unbound Academy website screencap

In January 2025, the charter school application of “Unbound Academy“, a subsidiary of “2 Hour Learning, Inc“, lit up the education press: two hours of “AI-powered” academics, 2.6x learning velocity, and zero teachers. Sympathetic reporters repeated the slogans; union leaders reached for pitchforks; Reddit muttered “another rich-kid scam“. More sophisticated critics dismissed the pitch as “selective data from expensive private schools”.

But there is nowhere on the internet that provides a detailed, non-partisan, description of what the “2 hour learning” program actually is, let alone an objective third party analysis to back up its claims.

[…]

Unfortunately, the public evidence base on whether this is “real” is thin in both directions. Alpha’s own material is glossy and elliptical; mainstream coverage either repeats Alpha’s talking points, or attacks the premise that kids should even be allowed to learn faster than their peers. Until Raj Chetty installs himself in the hallway with a clipboard counting MAP percentiles it is hard to get real information on what exactly Alpha is doing, whether it is actually working beyond selection effects, and if there is anyway it could scale in a way that all the other education initiatives seemed to fail to do.

I first heard about Alpha in May 2024, and in the absence of randomized-controlled clarity, I did what any moderately obsessive parent with three elementary-aged kids and an itch for data would do: I moved the family across the country to Austin for a year and ran the experiment myself (unfortunately, despite trying my best we never managed to have identical twins, so I stopped short of running a proper control group. My wife was less disappointed than I was).

Since last autumn I’ve collected the sort of on-the-ground detail that doesn’t surface in press releases, or is available anywhere online: long chats with founders, curriculum leads, “guides” (not teachers), Brazilian Zoom coaches, sceptical parents, ecstatic parents, and the kids who live inside the Alpha dashboard – including my own. I hope this seven-part review can help share what the program actually is and that this review is more open minded than the critics, but is something that would never get past an Alpha public relations gatekeeper:

  1. Starting Point: My Assumptions: how my views on elite private schools, tutoring and acceleration shaped the experiment (and this essay). WHAT is the existing education environment.
  2. A Short History of Alpha: from billionaire-funded microschool to charter aspirations. HOW Alpha came to be.
  3. How Alpha Works Part 1: Under the Hood: What does “2-hour learning” actually look like – what is the product and the science behind the product? HOW is Alpha getting kids to learn faster (Spoiler: “Two hour learning AI learning” closer to three hours, with a 5:1 teacher:student ratio and zero “generative AI”).
  4. How Alpha Works Part 2: Incentives & Motivation: The secret sauce that doesn’t get mentioned in the PR copy, but I have discovered is at least as important as the fancy technology. The “other HOW” that no one is talking about.
  5. How Alpha is Measured: Effectiveness: The science says it should work, but how do you measure if it is working? How is the vaunted “2.6x” number calculated? WHAT data is Alpha using to make its claims and what does that data actually say?
  6. Why this time might be different: Most promising educational initiatives fail to have impact when expanded beyond their initial studies. Bryan Caplan might argue this is because most education education is just signaling anyway (“The Case Against Education“). He also argues that most parental interventions have no impact (“Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids“) – He claims that how kids turn out is a combination of genetics and non-shared environment (randomness; nothing to do with parenting choices). How can we reconcile Caplan’s buttoned-up data with the idea that the “parenting choice” to educate your kids differently (like with Alpha) might result in different outcomes than would be expected from genetics alone? WHY could Alpha work?
  7. What Comes Next? The Scaling Problem: The Alpha founders have a vision of completely re-inventing the way the world serves education. But even if Alpha works, it is up against a history of education programs that were never able to scale. It is also going to face resistance for being “weird”. WHAT comes next?

After twelve months I’m persuaded that Alpha is doing something remarkable — but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:

  • It isn’t genuine two-hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.
  • It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced-repetition algorithm”
  • It definitely isn’t teacher-free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.
  • The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together

… Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age-matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program). I am NOT convinced that an Alpha-like program would work for every child, but I expect, for roughly 30-70% of children it could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential.

Does Russia Always Win Its Wars?

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 17 Jan 2025

The Russian Federation is at war with Ukraine, and some of its supporters insist it will win because Russia doesn’t lose wars. They point to its vast territory, its cold climate, its manpower reserves, or its peoples’ ability to endure hardship and accept death – and they point to great Russian victories of the past. So let’s put this claim to the test and see what history has to say about Russia’s record on the battlefield.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:03 Mongol Invasion of Kyivan Rus’
03:29 Livonian War
04:52 Time of Troubles
06:13 3rd and 4th Coalition Wars
08:12 Crimean War
09:31 Russo-Japanese War
11:44 First World War & Russian Civil War
14:07 Polish-Soviet War
15:25 Winter War
16:48 Soviet-Afghan War
18:34 First Chechen War
19:33 Conclusion
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QotD: People in the past believed their own religion

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What I think this show [Game of Thrones] has fallen into is the assumption – almost always made by someone outside a society looking in – that the local religion is so silly that no one of true intelligence (which always seems to mean “the ruling class” – I am amazed how even blue-collar students will swiftly self-identify with knights and nobles over commoners when reading history) could believe it. This is the mistake my students make – they don’t believe medieval Catholicism or Roman paganism, and so they weakly assume that no one (or at least, none of the “really smart” people) at the time really did either. Of course this is wrong: People in the past believed their own religion.

It is an old mistake – Polybius makes it of the Romans, writing in c. 150 BC. Polybius notes that Roman religion was “distinctly superior” for maintaining the cohesion of the Roman state, but that “they (= the ruling class) have adopted this course for the sake of the common people” (Plb. 6.56.6-8), by which he means for the sake of the “fickle multitude” which must be “held in invisible terrors and pageantry”. Polybius, I should note, immediately contradicts himself – one benefit of this religion, he says, is that Roman magistrates (read: elite Senators) do not steal from the public treasury even when they are not watched, which would seem to imply that even many very elite Romans believed their own religion (also, irony alert: those famously incorruptible Romans …). Poor men, after all, are not elected to watch the treasury.

Fortunately, Polybius is not our only source on Roman culture, so it is possible to say – and I want to be clear here – Polybius is wrong (on this point at least). Roman elites took their religion very seriously. There are exceptions, of course – Julius Caesar was an Epicurean philosophically, although this does not seem to have altogether disrupted his performance of the duties of Rome’s highest priesthood (he was Pontifex Maximus). Nevertheless, such philosophically minded men were generally regarded with scorn by even the Roman elites (Cicero heaps such scorn on Cato in the Pro Murena in what were clearly intended as friendly “ribbing” before a mostly elite audience), who nevertheless greatly valued religious character (in contrast, Cicero is quick to accuse his hated enemy Catiline of irreligion before the Senate). Roman leaders vowed temples and sacrifices in duress, and built and gave them in victory. Lavish dedications to the gods from all levels of Roman society confirm the overall picture: the Romans believed their religion. Yes, even the elite Romans (there is, I should note, some complicated in that elites tended to separate what they viewed as religion from common “superstition”, but that’s a topic for another day.) And, if anything, the evidence for elite “buy-in” to Medieval religion is far more voluminous.

Yet none of the main characters of Game of Thrones, apart from perhaps Catelyn Stark, is devoted to their region’s traditional religion in any private sense. I cannot recall at any point any character protesting an action on account of religion – no marches held up by high holy days (a regular occurrence in ancient and medieval literature), no groups, individuals or places religiously exempt from violence. The Faith has certain rules about sexuality, but they’re rules that are not only flouted privately by individuals in the show, but also quite publicly by the last ruling dynasty for centuries.

Moreover, none of the ruling characters seem to have any religious functions – or if they do, they simply ignore them most of the time. Keep in mind, these people believe that their gods – be it the Seven or the Old Gods – are powerful divine beings who are directly and immediately interested in the world and who act on that interest. Keeping such beings happy is vitally important – it is not an afterthought. No society, so far as I can tell, has ever believed there is enough gold or enough armies to save you if you have enraged the gods. There is simply no off-setting an angry divinity (and before the smart guy asks, “what about a favorable divinity?” the Greeks had an answer for that – go read Euripides’ Hippolytus. It ends badly for the mortals).

The lack of religious duties or functions for characters who are kings is particularly surprising. Kingship has three core roles in almost all human cultures where the institution appears: kings are 1) chief judge, 2) chief general, and 3) chief priest. That third role appears more or less prominently in almost all societies. In ancient Egypt and (at times) in Mesopotamia, kings were held to literally be either earthly incarnations of major gods or minor gods in their own right. Roman Emperors held the office of Pontifex Maximus, and took over as the chief priest of the state, before becoming gods on their deaths. The Chinese emperor was the “Son of Heaven” and was tasked with maintaining the right relationship with the divine (the “mandate of heaven”). The emperors of Japan are purported to be direct descendants of the goddess Amaterasu (and they have a family tree to back it up).

The relationship between medieval kings and the Church was more complicated, because of the existence of a clear religious head (the Pope) outside of secular authority, but medieval kingship retained a strong sense of religious purpose. Coronation rituals often involved the clergy and were essentially religious rituals, because kingly power was still thought to be bestowed by God. Kings, in turn, had a special role in keeping their kingdom in right relationship with the divine, both through just rule (which included protecting the Church) and through the performance of religious rituals. Those rituals, of course, worked both ways: both believed to be religious efficacious (as in they helped bring about God’s good favor), but also valuable tools of building royal legitimacy (hat tip to my colleague Elizabeth Hassler’s excellent dissertation on the topic of holy kingship). In some places (England and France most notably), kings were thought holy enough to be able to heal certain diseases miraculously by touch – a king who couldn’t was clearly insufficiently pious.

Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-04.

June 28, 2025

Punctuation microaggression

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

We appear to have an entire generation — Gen Z — suffering undue trauma from, checks notes, aggressive and distressing punctuation marks:

“American typewriter keyboard layout” by Любослов Езыкин is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

What is more delicious than casting sweeping judgements over entire generations? Contrary to prevailing wisdom, studying and mocking the mores and manners of Generation Z is not only morally just but entirely natural. Not to mention good fun.

At the end of this paragraph, re-read this string of sentences. Study the punctuation. You’ll notice that each sentence ends with a satisfying symbol. What Americans call a period and what Britishers call a full stop signifies the end of the sentence — that the sentence contains a complete thought. How lovely.

That unassuming little dot was good enough for Shakespeare, Hemingway, Ibsen, Miller — every writer who mastered the well-mannered violence of the English Language. They understood, too, the writerly compulsion to kneel before that impossible mistress. Submission sets the writer free.

Submission, however, is not in vogue. Submission implies hierarchy, which implies standards — forbidden notions to anyone under 45.

Generation Z. The Zoomers. Those with the misfortune to have spawned here on Earth between 1997 and 2012. This swarm of digital natives has never known a world without the internet. Or, it appears, one with grammatical standards.

According to linguists, Zoomers view the full stop as Bill Clinton views a well-adjusted woman: with intrinsic horror. For Zoomers, the full stop is the mark of unbridled aggression. Zoomers refuse full stops — period.

In The Telegraph, one-linguist-cum-exorcist said that Zoomers find the full stop deeply troubling. That little dot before these seven words provokes a generational panic attack: “Full stops signify an angry or abrupt tone of voice”.

Another expert chimed in. Dr Lauren Fonteyn tweeted, “If you send a text message without a full stop, it’s already obvious that you’ve concluded the message. So, if you add that additional marker for completion, they will read something into it, and it tends to be a falling intonation or negative tone.”

To renew my sense of horror, I probed further. In a 2015 study at New York’s Binghamton University, undergraduates perceived text messages ending with a full stop as “less sincere” than the same message without one.

Language, like the fish, rots from the head. Researchers also found that exclamation marks, those hyperactive symbols of faux cheer, achieved the opposite of full stops. Those employing an exclamation mark appeared “more sincere and engaged”.

Breathtaking hypocrisy in the BC Ferries deal to buy ships from China

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As you’d imagine, with the coastal geography of British Columbia, there’s a lot of demand for ferry service between the mainland and Vancouver Island (and other less-accessible-by-land locations). BC Ferries runs a fleet of ships to handle this traffic and needed some new ferries to replace older vessels. They decided, in the middle of a trade war, to source the ships from China rather than a Canadian shipyard. And the federal government financially backed the purchase:

So just to recap — because this one’s almost too absurd to believe: BC Ferries cuts a billion-dollar deal with a Chinese state-owned shipyard to build four new ferries. Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland — always quick to perform outrage when the cameras are on — writes a stern letter saying how “dismayed” she is. She scolds British Columbia for daring to do business with a hostile foreign regime that’s literally attacking our critical infrastructure in real time.

And then — wait for it — it turns out her own federal government quietly financed the whole thing.

Yes, really.

According to an explosive report from The Globe and Mail, the Canada Infrastructure Bank — a federal Crown corporation — provided $1 billion in low-interest financing for the very same China shipbuilding deal Freeland claimed to oppose. The contract was signed in March 2025. The outrage? That only came later, when the public found out about it in June.

Freeland’s letter to BC’s Transportation Minister was loaded with warnings. She talked about China’s “unjustified tariffs” and “cybersecurity threats”. She demanded assurances that “no federal funding” would support the purchase. But what she didn’t mention — what she conveniently left out — was that Ottawa had already cut the cheque. The financing was already in place. The loan had been approved. Freeland just didn’t say a word.

And when reporters asked for clarification, what did her office say? Nothing. They passed the buck to another minister. The new Infrastructure Minister, Gregor Robertson, now claims the government had “no influence” in the procurement decision. No influence? You loan a billion dollars to a company and have no opinion on where it goes?

Let’s be clear: This wasn’t some harmless miscommunication. If it wasn’t a cover-up, then it was sheer incompetence — the same brand of incompetence that’s driven our shipyards into obsolescence, our economy into dependence, and our country into managed decline. An entire federal cabinet stood by, watched this unfold, signed the cheque — and then pretended they had nothing to do with it.

And British Columbia’s government? Just as bad. Premier David Eby, the man who pretends to champion “BC First”, claims he was “not happy” with the China deal but says it’s “too late” to change course. Too late? This isn’t an asteroid heading for Earth. It’s a contract. And contracts can be rewritten, canceled, renegotiated — if anyone in charge had the political will to stand up and say, “No, we don’t hand billion-dollar infrastructure projects to hostile regimes”.

But instead, we get excuse after excuse. They say BC Ferries is independent. They say there was no capacity in Canada. They say we had no choice. All the while, Canadian shipyards sit idle, unionized workers are frozen out, and the Canadian taxpayer is stuck subsidizing Chinese shipbuilding — and Chinese espionage.

The Original Beef Stroganoff of Imperial Russia

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 28 Jan 2025

Tender cubes of beef seasoned with allspice and served with a delicious sour cream and mustard sauce

City/Region: Russia
Time Period: 1871

Beef stroganoff has certainly gone through a lot of changes since this recipe was printed in 1871. Nowadays mushrooms are often added, and the allspice has pretty much disappeared, but I think it’s a delicious and unusual flavor for modern palates. The mustard flavor is present in the sauce without being super mustardy, and the beef is tender and flavorful.

This tasty dish comes together fairly quickly after the meat has rested with the seasonings, so I definitely recommend giving this a try.

    Two hours prior to cooking take two funts of tender beef, cut in small cubes, and sprinkle with salt and allspice; take 30 grams butter and 1 tablespoon of flour and mix, lightly fry in a skillet, then mix with 2 glasses of stock, add 1 teaspoon of Sarepska mustard, a little bit of pepper, mix well, bring to a boil, then strain and add 2 tablespoons of the best fresh sour cream. Then fry the beef in butter, then add it to the sauce, boil again, and serve.
    — Podarok molodym khozyaykam (A Gift to Young Housewives) by Elena Molokhovets, 1871

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QotD: Shakespeare – game designer

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If Shakespeare were alive today, he would create video games. You can see the “player” mentality in his plays — where role-playing and playacting are everywhere.

Consider the case of Hamlet. The title character wanders from scene to scene in a dark castle, encountering ghosts, villains, etc. But nothing gets resolved as he tries to level up — although eleven people are killed along the way. The play starts again the next night, with similar results.

Ted Gioia, “More Entries from My Private Journal”, The Honest Broker, 2025-03-25.

June 27, 2025

RAF Brize Norton apparently had almost no security for its planes at all

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

Domestic terrorists got into RAF Brize Norton, one of Britain’s main airbases, last week and committed damage that may range into the tens of millions of pounds … and were in and out with the RAF none the wiser:

So this was a serious attack; it’s also an intensely embarrassing one. The terrorists got in and out completely undetected; it appears nobody at Brize Norton was aware of the attack until the perpetrators had already escaped. This would be bad enough if they’d been Spetsnaz-trained infiltrators, flitting silently from shadow to shadow towards their targets. In fact, however, they were a couple of unwashed hippies from Palestine Action, and they “infiltrated” the base on electric motorbikes. It is absolutely staggering that they were able to get in, attack two valuable aircraft and then get out again without being intercepted.

Or maybe it isn’t. This is the station commander of RAF Brize Norton:

Gp Capt Henton appears to have spent her entire career in non-operational roles. She also seems to have some very strange ideas about concepts such as masculinity and even patriotism. In a paper she wrote (which is available online) Henton appears strongly critical of traditional military culture, particularly that in the combat units she has never been part of. Is it just coincidence that, under the command of someone who is effectively an HR manager in a uniform, traditional military concerns such as security appear to have been badly neglected?

It’s undeniable that security at Brize Norton was neglected. One of the things I was trained in, as an Intelligence Corps operator, was protective security. We tended to focus on the protection of classified information, but the same principles apply to the protection of anything else (for example aircraft), and one of those principles is that if the security around an asset is weak in one respect — for example, physical barriers like fences — you can plug that gap by deploying other assets — for example, guards.

I used Google Street View to do a perimeter recce of Brize Norton, and took this screenshot looking from Station Road at the eastern end of the base’s runway:

This shot is taken from a public road, outside the base. The only perimeter security is a simple, easily climbed wooden fence less than six feet high. For a long stretch it has no “topping” — security jargon for razor wire or other anti-climb obstacles. There is also no perimeter security lighting along this section of the road. There aren’t even streetlights on the road itself. This is a massive weakness in physical security, which any terrorist can easily identify using open-source tools like Google Street View. The red ellipse I have drawn on the image highlights aircraft — seven of them, a mix of Voyagers and A400M transports — parked on the apron. They are less than three-fifths of a mile (900m in new money) from the perimeter fence, a distance that an electric scooter can cover in around 90 seconds. This level of physical security is completely unacceptable for the protection of such valuable assets, so it should have been supplemented with armed guards. It wouldn’t take all that many. A twelve-man guard under the command of a corporal could easily supply a pair of two-man prowler patrols, one on the apron and one randomly checking vulnerable points around the perimeter. That would have been enough to intercept and stop this attack.

Germany’s Constitution, Erotica, and a Pastor’s Dignity – Rise of Hitler 19, July 1931

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

World War Two
Published 26 Jun 2025

A rogue preacher breaks into the Reichstag and steals silverware, banned erotica, and the 1848 German Constitution. As Germany’s banks collapse and panic spreads, the press is captivated by the strange tale of Walter Wohlgemuth: pastor, thief, and accidental symbol of a republic in crisis.
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The fading Boomer Laurentianus

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

Last week in The Critic, Charles Kirwin described the people who saddled us with three terms of Justin Trudeau and hope to continue their reign of error by supporting Mark Carney with his Europhile whims and intolerance for dissent:

Boomer Laurentianus is a Canadian subspecies of Boomerus Senectus, so named because he models himself on the so-called Laurentian Elite, Canada’s governing class that inhabit the “Laurentian corridor”, the narrow strip of land along the Saint Laurence river between Montreal and Toronto that, for a certain kind of Canadian, is the only bit of the country that matters.

In spirit, he is a child of the sixties and still believes he is a radical at heart. Despite this he expects to be treated with the deference reserved for those awarded the Victoria Cross, despite his closest experience to combat being glancing longingly at pictures of the cancelled Avro Arrow or campaigning to defend the local parking lot from being turned into affordable houses.

Like his British and American cousin, he supports progressive policies like safe supply of drugs, lenient sentences and bail conditions for criminals, and whatever economic policies keep his pension fund high and his property values increasing. Naturally, he lives in neighbourhoods untouched by the crime and addiction that are the direct result of the policies he supports.

It is important to note that while his modes of thinking and beliefs are those of the Laurentian Elite, his mind is shaped by the institutions of the Laurentian Elite: The Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Governor General’s Literary Award, various other high-minded organisations that form the intellectual life of Laurentian Canada, Boomerus Laurentianus is not necessarily “of” them.

Molson Canadian is the spirit of his patriotism. In 2000, Molson released a beer advertisement in which a typical Canadian played by actor Jeff Douglas shouts into a microphone to an audience of Americans, dismissing various Canadian stereotypes (we say aboot, drive dogsleds, are all lumberjacks and fur traders et cetera) and notes some of the differences that make Canada not the US. “I have a Prime Minister not a President … I believe in Peacekeeping not policing … I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack while travelling”. The advertisement is something of a cult hit in Canada and has been parodied by just about everyone including William Shatner.

This one-minute advertisement swells at the heart of the Boomer Laurentianus view of his country. It is both superficial and, in places, factually incorrect (the equivalent of the US president is not the Prime Minister but the King or Queen of Canada). But he has built his entire sense of nationalism around myths such as peacekeeping or being liked by foreigners more than Americans. This last point is sacred to his sense of identity.

Boomerus Laurentianus exists in a superposition state usually reserved for Schrödinger’s cat wherein he is both completely American and not American at all. It was often claimed of Rhodesians that they were “More British than the British”. Boomer Laurentianus is more Yank than the Yanks. Despite his reverence for the CBC, he gets his recipes from the New York Times and his opinions from CNN. He watches American television, travels to the US frequently, may even own a second home there. He can almost convince himself that they are the same country, sometimes to the point of putting up signs supporting, Democratic political candidates, seemingly unaware that he cannot vote in foreign elections.

India’s FAL: The 1A1 Inch/Metric Hybrid

Filed under: Britain, Europe, India, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 Feb 2025

For political reasons, India decided to adopt the 7.62mm NATO cartridge when it needed to replace its No1 MkIII SMLE bolt action rifles with a modern self-loader. They chose the FN FAL as the rifle to adopt, but wanted a license to produce it domestically at the Ishapore rifle factory. FN insisted on the Indians buying Belgian tools as part of the agreement, which India was unwilling to do. So instead, Ishapore used the samples it had of both British L1A1 and Belgian FAL rifles to produce its own reverse-engineered drawings.

The resulting plans use a mixture of British (“inch”) and Belgian (“metric”) parts, and are not interchangeable with either standard pattern. As a result, the Indian 1A1 rifle is a clone of the FAL that is not actually parts compatible with the FAL. That did not prevent Ishapore from producing hundreds of thousands of them, with production apparently ending only in 2012.

Thanks to Sellier & Bellot for giving me access to this 1A1 example to film for you!
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QotD: The dangers of “doing too much principal component analysis”

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

John: I’ve never read a fashion magazine or watched a runway show, so I just naively assumed that models were stunningly attractive and feminine. But as Mears points out, the models are not actually to most men’s tastes. They tend to have boyish figures and to be unusually tall.1 Is this because the fashion industry is dominated by gay men, who gravitate towards women who look like teen boys? Whatever the origins of it, there is a model “look”, and the industry has slowly optimized for a more and more extreme version of it, like a runaway neural network, or like those tribes with the rings that stretch their necks or the boards that flatten their skulls. There’s actually a somewhat uncanny or even posthuman look to many of the models. The club promoters denigrate women who lack the model look as “civilians”, but freely admit that they’d rather sleep with a “good civilian” than with a model. The model’s function, as you say, is as a locus of mimetic desire. They’re wanted because they’re wanted, in a perfectly tautological self-bootstrapping cycle; and because, in the words of one promoter: “They really pop in da club because they seven feet tall”.

[…]

By the way, the fact that models are beautiful in a highly specific way, and that there exist women who are similarly beautiful but condemned to be “civilians”, is a good reminder of the dangers of doing too much principal component analysis.2 In so many areas of life, we are obsessed with collapsing intrinsically high-dimensional phenomena onto a single uni-dimensional axis. You see this a lot with the status games that leftists play around privilege and oppression — I feel like a rational leftist would say that a disabled white lesbian and a wealthy scion of Haitian oligarchs are just incomparable, each more privileged than the other in some senses and less in other senses. But no, instead there’s an insistence that we find an absolute total ordering of oppression across all identity categories, a single hierarchy that allows us to compare any two individuals and produce a mathematical answer as to which one is more deserving of DEI grants. My hunch is a lot of the internal tensions and bickering within American leftism are actually produced by this insistence, which makes sense because it’s totally zero sum.

But the disease of trying to pin everything to a single number is hardly confined to the left. You see it on the right in the obsession with IQ, as if a single number could capture the breathtaking range of variation of cognitive capabilities across all humanity. I mean for goodness sake, Intel learned the hard way that this doesn’t even work for computers, and human brains are much weirder and more complicated than microprocessors. But the even dumber version of this is the 1-10 scale of female beauty. There’s something so sublime about seeing a beautiful human being, because so much of it is either bound up in subtle interrelationships between different features (this is why plastic surgery often makes people uglier — there’s no such thing as a “perfect nose”, and if you pick one out of a catalog you’ll probably end up with one that doesn’t fit your face), or it’s irretrievably evanescent — a fleeting glance, or the way her hair falls across her face just so, gone the moment after it happens. Taking something so ineffable and putting it on a 1-10 scale only makes sense as a form of psychological warfare. And I get it, amongst the young people relations between the sexes have degenerated to the point of more or less open warfare, but come on, this is pornbrained nonsense.

Speaking of both the DEI olympics and the classification of female beauty, some parts of this book are really charmingly naive, and I snickered a bit at Mears’s mystification at why all of the models are white and blonde. The really funny part is that she says something like: “I expected this legacy of white supremacy to be in retreat given that so many of the big spenders in clubs these days are from Asia and the Middle East”. Is she really not aware that men of other races have an even stronger aesthetic preference for white women than white men do?3

John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.

    1. In fact, an unusually high proportion of models are intersex individuals with a Y-chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.

    2. Not the only danger of too much principal component analysis!

    3. Gabriel: Kimberly Hoang did an ethnography as a bar girl in several Vietnam bars. At the bar that catered to Vietnamese elites, the other bar girls made her lighten her skin with cosmetics and wear a black minidress, with the target look being tall, pale, and slender K-pop idol. When she moved to another bar catering to white sex tourists, the other bar girls told her to wear bronzer and a slutty version of traditional Asian dress with the target look being exoticized sexiness. See: Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. University of California Press.

June 26, 2025

NYC doubles down on Luxury Beliefs

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

New York City voters appear to have selected the ultimate “luxury beliefs” candidate as the presumptive next mayor of NYC in Zohran Mamdani:

The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.

Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.

Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.

And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.

Many politicians and media outlets act like the public disorder problem is overblown. But fare evasion, open drug use and serious mental illness on the subway are still part of daily life.

It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.

And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.

“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.

As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.

But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.

German police raid homes to counteract online “hate speech” by “digital arsonists”

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

Things are getting worse for free speech in Germany, as eugyppius reports:

Apollo News reports on the newest, most irregular German holiday, which consists of the police conducting coordinated raids on and interrogations of ordinary people who are alleged to have said rude things on the internet:

    On Tuesday morning police across Germany conducted raids targeting “hate speech and incitement” on the internet. According to the news agency dpa, there are currently 170 operations underway, including house searches and other measures. Those accused are charged with insulting politicians and inciting hatred …

    The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is in charge of the operation … In North Rhine-Westphalia, several police authorities struck simultaneously at 6 a.m. Police from Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Bielefeld, Münster, Hagen, and Bonn are among those involved. Fourteen suspects are to be questioned and two search warrants executed.1 The individuals in question frequently express themselves on social media, such as on X.

    … The Action Day against alleged hate posts has been taking place regularly for years. On June 18, the BKA joined forces with the reporting center “REspect!” to participate in the “International Day Against Hate and Incitement”. People were called upon to report posts that allegedly spread hate.

Today was the twelfth such “Action Day against Hate and Incitement on the Internet”. That is only an approximate title; it varies slightly across press sources. This dubious ritual began in 2016, after Merkel opened the German borders to the entirety of the developing world and our politicians grew tired of people calling them imbeciles online. Police are very open that the goal of these coordinated Action Days is intimidation – or, as they put it, “deterrence”.

Our federal police love this holiday so much they often celebrate it twice a year, which is why are already on the twelfth such day, even though we have only had nine years since the establishment of this custom. Sometimes our betters even throw in bonus action days that for some reason don’t count, as during Covid when they conducted a special “Action Day against Political Hate Postings” after the seventh “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings” but before the eighth “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings”. Who knows how many such action days we have really had, especially considering that since 2020 the broader EU has adopted this sporadic holiday and occasionally coordinates its own Continent-wide “Action Day against Hatred and Incitement on the Internet”.

[…]

By calling these Action Days idiotic, I don’t mean to minimise them. They are borderline illegal, for they exploit what should be purely investigative tactics (interrogations, house searches) to scare and punish people in advance of any criminal conviction. The emphasis is not only on right-leaning posters, but invariably and most disgracefully on ordinary people with relatively little social media reach, whose posts in many cases have been seen a mere handful of times. The message is clear: They can get you, whoever you are; they can get anybody. Living in a country whose authorities amuse themselves by periodically harassing their own citizens in this way is disturbing. It’s an absolute scandal that all the major political parties support this, save for Alternative für Deutschland. It’s a reason to vote AfD all by itself.

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