Quotulatiousness

June 10, 2025

Mark Carney’s big defence spending announcement

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Monday Morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney was in Toronto to make a major announcement on Canada’s military spending. After being one of the worst freeloaders in the western alliance, Canada was spending far less on the Canadian Armed Forces than the 2% of GDP we’d promised our NATO partners several years ago. Of course, at the same time that Canada seems to be finally getting serious about defence priorities, the rest of our allies are talking seriously about raising the agreed-upon target to 5%:

Chris Lambie in the National Post says it’s a C$9 billion bump in direct military spending in this (unbudgeted) year:

Canada’s plan to add more than $9 billion to defence spending this year was praised by military watchers Monday, but they cautioned that the country is shooting at a moving target.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the country would meet its commitment in this fiscal year of hitting the two per cent of gross domestic product mark that was agreed upon by NATO countries more than a decade back.

“It’s very encouraging that the prime minister has come out this early in his mandate and made such a strong commitment to defence,” said Vincent Rigby, a former top intelligence adviser to former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who spent 14 years with Canada’s Department of National Defence.

“You’ve gone from the former prime minister talking about the two per cent as a crass mathematical calculation to the current prime minister saying, no, this is actually a serious commitment. We committed to it 10 years ago and even before that. And we have to do it because we owe it to our allies. But we also owe it to the Canadian people. He made it quite clear this is about protecting Canada, protecting our national interests and protecting our values.”

New spending could do a lot to improve crumbling military infrastructure, said Michel Maisonneuve, a retired Canadian Army lieutenant-general who has served as assistant deputy chief of defence staff, and chief of staff of NATO’s Allied Command.

“The housing on bases is horrible,” Maisonneuve said.

He’s keen on Carney’s plan to participate in the $234-billion ReArm Europe program.

“This will bolster our ability to produce stuff for ourselves” while also helping the Europeans to do the same, Maisonneuve said.

“All the tree huggers are going to hate that, but that’s where we are today in the world.”

Carney’s cash injection includes $2.6 billion to recruit and retain military personnel. The military is short about 13,000 people. It aims to boost the regular force to 71,500 and the reserves to 30,000 by the end of this decade.

“There is no way we can protect Canada and Canadians with the strength that we have now,” Maisonneuve said.

Later in the day, Matt Gurney made some preliminary comments on the social media site formerly known as Twitter (I imagine he’ll have more to say in an upcoming Line post):

I’ve had a chance to actually look at some of the details of what was announced today for Canada’s defence. Overall, I am very supportive of everything that’s been announced.

There are some caveats. Or at least notes.

1. The new spending is mostly aimed at flushing out existing capabilities, not adding new ones.

That’s fine! We need to do that, definitely. I just don’t know if the public understands how much money we could sink into the military without actually adding any new capabilities. All we would do is backfill capabilities that we currently claim to have that don’t really exist.

2. Billions of additional dollars are going toward very basic things. More money to retain existing personnel. Apparently more money to build out recruitment. Spending more money to bring equipment and facilities up to state of proper repair.

Same as above. All good! Needed. Smart.

3. Some of what’s being announced today is entirely a matter of how we’re budgeting stuff. Certain existing expenditures are being redesignated as defence expenditures.

That’s okay! Some of our allies count things toward their defence total that we don’t. Everybody cooks the books a little bit, and I have no objection to this.

4. Everything being announced today should have been done years ago.

The only note I really have to add here is how the longer [Mark Carney] is Prime Minister, the harder it gets to explain away some of the shocking inactivity of his immediate predecessor.

5. None of this is going to be enough.

Remember, all we’re doing here is building out existing capabilities so that they are actually real things, not just things that exist on paper. That’s good. But the actual work of recapitalizing, expanding and adapting the military for 21st-century conflict hasn’t really begun yet. Everything announced today is a necessary start to getting that done. But the hard work is still to come.

And so are the really eye-watering numbers.

Of course, there are definite downsides to just opening up the spending taps the way things currently are set up:

He’s not wrong.

How Moscow Got the Atomic Bomb – W2W 31

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 8 Jun 2025

In 1949, the Soviet Union detonates its first atomic bomb — years ahead of Western expectations. This episode dives into how the USSR mobilized former Nazi scientists, forced Soviet physicists into secret cities, and relied on intelligence from spies like Klaus Fuchs. While Stalin pushes for rapid progress, Beria enforces brutal discipline, and Soviet scientists race to meet an impossible deadline. The nuclear balance of power is about to shift — forever.
(more…)

The limits of female empathy

Filed under: Books, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo discusses the 2006 book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man by journalist Norah Vincent. Intended as a kind of exposé of male privilege, her investigations turned into something rather different than she originally intended:

    Many men are lonely. Many don’t like the work they do. Many are unhappily married. They struggle with an at-times overwhelming sex drive. Their encounters with women, romantic or otherwise, often involve rejection and contradictory tests of their masculinity. They are the objects of blame and bigotry in their societies, yet are expected to remain stoic and put women’s needs first.

It’s a strange world in which the above observations — by a woman — are seen as outstanding insights, but it’s the one we’re in.

In 2006, American journalist Norah Vincent published Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man, an under-cover adventure in which the author, a mannish lesbian with big feet, spent close to 18 months periodically disguised as a man named Ned, notching up about 150 episodes in drag.

With breasts flattened, fake stubble on her chin, and a stuffed jock strap in her pants, having hired a tutor to teach her how to pitch her voice low and move like a man, she set out to “infiltrate exclusive all-male environments and if possible learn their secrets” (p. 18). She joined a bowling league, went on dates, did sales calls, spent some weeks at a monastery, and attended a Robert Bly-influenced men’s wilderness retreat.

Expecting to learn something about male power, she found instead “the hidden pain of masculinity and my own sex’s symbiotic role in it” (p. 254). The planned exposé became a feminist mea culpa.

The book got a lot of attention when it was published, and many men expressed gratitude and appreciation for the empathy and insight in Vincent’s work.

Reading the many accolades, I felt sadness, tenderness, and amazement. Wasn’t this a bit much? Was it really so remarkable that a woman could develop sympathy for the opposite sex?

Most men are so unaccustomed to any empathy from a woman, even when it’s mixed with patronizing descriptions and questionable conclusions, that they respond as if to heroism. The woman who cares, even within circumscribed limits, is catapulted into the company of the saints.

Imagine the reaction if a man had masqueraded as a woman for a year or more, and then pretended to understand women (even sympathetically) using a shop-worn ideological framework? Imagine a white person putting on blackface in order to become an expert, even a well-intentioned one, on the need for black self-improvement? There would be howls of outrage and indignant rebuttals, especially by members of the impersonated group.

Not in Vincent’s case. So rare is a woman’s attempt to understand male experiences that she doesn’t need to be consistently sympathetic or accurate.

Even when someone goes beyond temporary male drag, there is a palpable surprise that mens’ lives are not a well-watered garden of male privilege:

Today, of course, there is still always a reason to look away from men’s pain. Feminist-inclined men and women routinely “bathe in male tears“. They claim that discussing men’s issues is misogynistic, and ask “Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?” No wonder it seems that the only time men can be heard is when women speak for them.

Notably, women who “transition” to male through hormone treatments and surgery are often shocked by the indifference and unkindness they encounter in public, where men are not eager to help and women expect deference. Zander Keig wrote as a trans man in “Crossing the Divide” of a pronounced sense of aloneness: “No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being”.

They Live SG-1: Conquest and Paternalism

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 26 Jan 2024

Stargate and SG-1 generally don’t go together, but they’re based on the same underlying premise. Our leaders are lying to us, denying us knowledge of fundamental truths about our world. Truths that can be the difference between freedom and slavery for all of humanity.

Sidenote, this is the first time I’ve shot one of these videos indoors instead of in the mountains. It’s -24 out on the day of recording.

00:00 Intro
01:05 Stargate
03:11 Ruling Class
04:18 Secrets
06:02 Illusions
06:48 Conclusion

QotD: From Witan to Magna Carta

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

About 1,500 years ago, in Saxon England, the nobles of the realm, the bishops, abbots (and abbesses) and the ealdormen and thegns and others would gather, fairly regularly, in an assembly to advise and, sometimes, to constrain the king. In a very typically English manner, they hit upon the notion that the kings were not, generally, wicked or stupid, but they did too many dumb things just because they could. The reason that kings could, too often, do whatever they wanted was simple: they had an almost unlimited power to levy taxes.

After a few hundred years of trial and error, and given a king who really was wicked and stupid, too, they, the barons as they were then known, went to war with their king and bent him to their will by forcing him to agree to a great charter of their rights. There was a bit of ringing language about no free man being taken except after a trial by a jury of his peers, but, basically, in very typically English fashion, the rights about which the great charter was most concerned were property rights because the barons had learned, over the centuries that only by controlling the pursestrings could they really control the king.

A few hundred years later, one of liberalism’s and democracy’s greatest voices told us that we have three absolutely fundamental, natural rights: to life, to liberty and to property. These rights were not and still are not unlimited. There were and are ways to lawfully and properly deprive a person of his property and his liberty and, in some countries, even his life.

A few centuries after John Locke another philosopher wanted to do away with the right to property: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, Karl Marx wrote, and many, far too many, believed. The only real problem with Marx’s notion is that it requires that humans are perfect … and most of us know how rare that is. Here in Canada, especially since the early years of the 20th century, we have had far too much Marx and far too little Locke.

Ted Campbell, “Democracy is in peril”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2020-06-12.

June 9, 2025

Parenting style choice – “small people who do not yet know very much or … pets who can talk”

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I always felt that my son was a person, and did my best to treat him that way while still being his father. I think that was the correct choice, although clearly a lot of other parents choose the other option for their children:

“Happy family cyanotype 2” by simpleinsomnia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

There are two views of children — that they are small people who do not yet know very much or that they are pets who can talk. I prefer the former. One implication is that children and parents are, in a fundamental sense, peers. Obviously they are not equal in what they know or what they can do or how strong they are. But they are not different sorts of people in a way that goes beyond that. Children should usually believe their parents about things the parents know much more about but parents should believe children when that asymmetry is reversed, as it sometimes is. The mere fact that one is parent and the other child does not determine which is right and which wrong when they disagree; that is determined, as between adults, by which has better arguments, more evidence.

One implication of treating children as people not pets is that you have to keep promises to them, as to other people. Another is that if you assert something to them you have the same obligation you would have if you said it to an adult to defend it or, if you find you cannot, admit that you can’t.

I once heard an elderly man tell a child who disagreed with him on something that he should never contradict his elders. The statement struck me as not merely wrong but blasphemous. The elder was probably correct on what they disagreed about but the appropriate response is to demonstrate that, at worst decline to argue it, not to imply either that truth is determined by seniority or that it is discourteous to point out errors to a status superior. I am reasonably sure that neither of my parents ever told me to believe something just because they said so or refused to entertain arguments against their views. The son of my first marriage, who spent summers with me and my wife when he was growing up, told a friend that his project for that summer was to get my wife to say “because I told you so.” I doubt that he succeeded.

Treating your children as your peers is easier if you sometimes interact with them in contexts where they demonstrably are at least your equal. I was the first member of our family to play World of Warcraft, so when my wife and our children, then eleven and fourteen, joined the game I was more skilled, had a higher level character, more in-game resources. They improved over time and there was a long period, during which we sometimes played separately, sometimes as a family team, were all on about the same level. By the time I eventually quit the game some years later we all had top level characters and all three of them had become more skilled at the game than I was.

Going back to my childhood, the nearest equivalent that occurs to me is ping-pong. We had a table in the basement on which my father and I played. We equalized the contest with a sliding handicap, a number of points I started each game with. Every time he won the handicap went up, every time I won it went down. Over a period of years, as I got better, the handicap went down, eventually to zero, I think occasionally below zero. The family also played bridge together, there being conveniently four of us.

I spent a lot of time arguing with my father on a wide range of subjects. Someone who met us skiing on Colorado when I was in high school told a friend of mine that we spent all our time arguing and I won half the arguments. I don’t think the latter was true, but if my father won a majority of the arguments he won them fair.

The Mighty Meteor – The World’s First Operational Jet Fighter

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published 8 Jun 2025

References
1. https://tinyurl.com/yc74kmed
2. Britain’s Jet Age, Guy Ellis, 2016, Amberley Publishing
3. Genius Of The Jet | The Invention Of The J… – Frank Whittle and Powerjets documentary, originally aired on the BBC
4. Meteor, Gloster’s First Jet Fighter, Steven Bond, Midland, 1985, Chpt 1
5. The British Aircraft Specifications File, Meekcombs and Morgan, 1994, p.298
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_…
7. Most Secret Place, Johnson & Hefferman, Janes, 1983
8. https://mikesresearch.com/2020/12/25/…
9. Bond, op cit. p18
10. Bond, op cit.p34
11. QUEEN OF THE SKY: Meteor Night Fighters, U…
12. https://hushkit.net/2020/05/12/my-fav…
13. https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase… and https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase…
(more…)

The federal Minister of Public Safety admits he knows literally nothing about Canadian gun laws

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

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet may actually be worse than any line-up of ministers under Justin Trudeau, with the Minister of Public Safety as a poster child for ignorance and apathy:

[…] Then we have the Minister of Public Safety, Gary Anandasangaree — a Trudeau–Carney loyalist freshly installed under the new Liberal minority regime — who made headlines not for bold leadership, but for a shocking display of ignorance on the very file he’s been assigned to oversee: firearms policy.

During a session of debate on the current spending bill, Conservative MP Andrew Lawton posed a basic question:

    “Do you know what an RPAL is?”

An RPAL, or Restricted Possession and Acquisition Licence, is a standard certification required by law for any Canadian who wants to own restricted firearms, such as handguns or certain rifles. It’s a core element of Canada’s legal firearms framework.

The Minister’s response?

    “I do not.”

Lawton followed up with another foundational question:

    “Do you know what the CFSC is?”

The CFSC, or Canadian Firearms Safety Course, is a mandatory course required for all individuals seeking to obtain a firearms license in Canada — including the RPAL. It’s the very first step every legal gun owner in the country must complete. This is basic civics for anyone involved in firearms policy.

Anandasangaree replied again:

    “I do not know.”

This wasn’t a “gotcha” moment. It was a revealing moment. The Minister of Public Safety, the individual charged with implementing gun bans, overseeing buyback programs, and crafting firearms legislation, has no familiarity with the fundamental licensing and safety processes every Canadian gun owner must follow.

In any other profession, this level of unpreparedness would be disqualifying. If a surgeon couldn’t name a scalpel, he’d be pulled from the operating room. But in Ottawa? It qualifies you to oversee a multi-hundred-million-dollar national gun seizure operation.

And that brings us to the next moment of absurdity.

Lawton asked the minister how much money had already been spent on the federal firearms buyback program, the centerpiece of the Liberal government’s Bill C-21, which targets legally acquired firearms now deemed prohibited.

Anandasangaree’s answer?

    “About $20 million.”

But that doesn’t match the government’s own published data. In a report tabled by Public Safety Canada in September 2023, it was disclosed that $67.2 million had already been spent on the buyback as of that date. The majority of that spending was attributed to “program design and administration” — before a single firearm had even been collected.

So what happened? Did the government refund tens of millions of dollars? Were contracts cancelled? Of course not.

They just reframed the accounting — separating so-called “preparatory costs” and implying they don’t count as part of the buyback, even though they exist entirely to implement it.

It’s not transparency. It’s political bookkeeping — a deliberate attempt to make a costly, unpopular program appear manageable.

And it didn’t end there. When Lawton asked for the number of firearms that had actually been collected under the buyback, the response was yet another dodge. The Minister and his department couldn’t provide a number.

That’s right: after spending over $67 million, the federal government can’t even say how many guns have been retrieved. Yet they’re moving full steam ahead, with the support of a minister who doesn’t understand the system he’s responsible for.

This isn’t policymaking. It’s blind ideology strapped to a blank cheque. And the people paying the price are law-abiding citizens — not criminals, not gangs, and not smugglers.

At this rate, I can’t imagine how he’ll still be in cabinet by the end of summer.

Q&A: British Small Arms of World War Two

Filed under: Australia, Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Jan 2025

Today’s Q&A is brought to you by the fine folks at Patreon, and by Penguin Brutality: https://www.varusteleka.com/en/search…

01:11 – Was the Vickers .50 any good, and why did the British use four different heavy cartridges instead of consolidating?
07:35 – The Sten and its single-feed magazine design
10:27 – Owen versus Sten, and German use of the Owen.
14:38 – British wartime work on an “assault rifle” sort of weapon?
15:44 – Why no British semiauto rifle during WW2? – Jonathan Ferguson on British semiauto rifle trials: Q&A 43 (feat. Jonathan Ferguson): Mil…
18:04 – EM2’s automatic bolt closure system
20:46 – Did the British use other allied weapons besides American ones?
23:15 – Is the PIAT a Destrucitve Device under US law and why?
26:07 – Bren vs Degtyarev
27:50 – Why not make the Sten in .45 to use Thompson ammo?
29:37 – Did the British get M3 Grease Guns?
31:01 – British SMG in .455?
32:03 – Sten vs Lanchester
33:26 – Was there an LSW version of the EM1/EM2 planned? EM1 Korsac: The Korsac EM1 – a British/Polish Bul…
34:25 – Why wasn’t the BESA in .303?
36:34 – Biggest British missed opportunity during the interwar period?
38:40 – British naval service small arms
41:45 – Did .280 cartridge development begin during the war?
43:24 – Impact of MP44 on British post-war small arms development?
44:25 – Gallilean sights on the Enfield
46:25 – Why is there a semiauto selector on the Sten?
49:17 – Did American soldiers use British small arms?
50:29 – Why did the British choose the Lee action over the Mauser action?
51:16 – Which was better, Sten or Grease Gun?
52:34 – Why did the whole Commonwealth not switch to the No4 Enfield?
(more…)

QotD: “Defending” democracy with totalitarian methods

Filed under: Britain, History, Liberty, Quotations, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that “bourgeois liberty” is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can defend democracy only by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who “objectively” endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of: but by holding heretical opinions they “objectively” harmed the regime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations. The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was released in 1943.

These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a working men’s college in South London. The audience were working‐class and lower‐middle‐class intellectuals — the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to he tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves!

Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous. The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940, it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible Quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalization of other discontents. But how much of the present slide to ward Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the “anti‐Fascism” of the past ten years, and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?

George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press“, 1945 (written as the introduction to Animal Farm, but not published in Orwell’s lifetime).

June 8, 2025

Managerialism – threat or menace?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the New York Times (don’t worry … link is to an archived version), Nathan Levine explains to NYT readers why there is such a push back against the over-mighty technocratic organizations that have been running more and more of our fading civilization:

It is the culmination of a once marginalized, now transformative strand of political thought about who really holds power in the modern American system. Namely, that our democracy has been usurped by a permanent ruling class of wholly unaccountable managers and bureaucrats.

Anti-managerialism is back. Well positioned to answer decades of frustration with mainstream conservatives’ failure to deliver results, this old idea has become the central principle of the new right.

In fact, much of what is commonly called “populist” politics can be more accurately described as part of an anti-managerial revolution attempting to roll back the expansion of overbearing bureaucratic control into more and more areas of life.

Though it has so far met with limited success amid stiff resistance, grasping the nature of this anti-managerialism is essential to understanding the Trump administration’s effort to transform America’s institutional landscape, from government to universities and major corporations.

The idea’s intellectual history begins with the political philosopher James Burnham, who argued in his seminal 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, that the aristocratic capitalist class was in the process of being overthrown by a revolution — just not, as the Marxists predicted, by the working class.

Instead, the exponential growth of mass and scale produced by the Industrial Revolution meant that in both corporation and state it was now those people cleverest at applying techniques of mass organization, procedure and propaganda — what he called the managerial class — who effectively controlled the means of production and would increasingly come to dominate society as a new technocratic oligarchy.

The book made an especially significant impression on George Orwell, who remarked that a managerial class consisting of “scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people”, hungry for “more power and more prestige”, would seek to entrench “a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves”.

Orwell was particularly struck by Burnham’s observation that the major political systems of the day — fascism, Communism and New Deal-era social democracy — were fundamentally similar in their turn toward the bureaucratic management of society. He observed that everywhere “laissez-faire capitalism gives way to planning and state interference” and “the mere owner loses power as against the technician and the bureaucrat”. Believing that accelerating managerial control risked dragging every society inexorably into totalitarianism, Orwell made Burnham’s ideas the basis of his novel 1984.

While the Cold War persisted, the view that America’s government might share some traits with the Soviet Union unsurprisingly proved unpopular, especially among Washington’s conservative establishment.

Nonetheless, the managerial class continued to grow, regardless of which political party controlled the government. Cold War defense budgets drove a relentless expansion of security state bureaucracy and the military-industrial complex. The advent of Great Society welfare programs and the Civil Rights Act demanded a re-engineering of social relations, prompting a dramatic proliferation of lawyers, regulatory bureaucrats and corporate compliance officers throughout much of public and private life. An ever-greater proportion of Americans began funneling through the credentialing machinery of higher education, inflating demand for yet more upper-middle-class managerial jobs.

Day Two – Panzers Stuck in Europe‘s Biggest Traffic Jam! – Ten Days in Sedan

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

World War Two
Published 7 Jun 2025

May 11, 1940: Our WW2 documentary continues as the Battle of France rages and German Panzers rumble through the Ardennes. The Battle of Sedan is on the horizon and Heinz Guderian has one objective: break the French defences! But all is not well for the Germans as Europe’s largest-ever traffic jam threatens to stall the Blitzkrieg.

00:00 Intro
00:51 The Ardennes Advance
08:55 The Air War
15:05 Conclusion
(more…)

“If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town”

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

Ted Gioia points out that momentous changes in society are not often noticed until they’ve taken place, and provides ten warning signs of such a change happening right now:

Would you believe me if I told you that the biggest news story of our century is happening right now — but is never mentioned in the press?

That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

But that is often the case when a bold new worldview appears.

  • How long did it take before the Renaissance got mentioned in the town square?
  • When did newspapers start covering the Enlightenment?
  • Or the collapse in mercantilism?
  • Or the rise of globalism?
  • Or the birth of Christianity or Islam or some other earthshaking creed?

The biggest changes often happen long before they even get a name. By the time the scribes notice, the world is already reborn.

You can take this to the bank: If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town.

For example, the word Renaissance got introduced two hundred years after the start of the Renaissance. The game was already over.

The same is true of most major cultural movements — they are truly the elephants in the room. And the elites at the epicenter of power are absolutely the last to notice.

Tiberius may run the entire Roman Empire, but he will never hear the Good News.

There’s a general rule here — the bigger the shift, the easier it is to miss.

We are living through a situation like that right now. We are experiencing a total shift — like the magnetic poles reversing. But it doesn’t even have a name — not yet.

So let’s give it one.

Let’s call it: The Collapse of the Knowledge System.

We could also define it as the emergence of a new knowledge system.

In this regard, it resembles other massive shifts in Western history — specifically the rebirth of humanistic thinking in the early Renaissance, or the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century.

In these volatile situations, the whole entrenched hierarchy of truth and authority gets totally reversed. The old experts and their systems are discredited, and completely new values take their place. The newcomers bring more than just a new attitude — they turn everything on its head.

That’s happening right now.

The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime — and for our parents and grandparents — is collapsing. And it’s taking place everywhere, all at once.

If this were just an isolated situation — a problem in universities, or media, or politics — the current hierarchy could possibly survive. But that isn’t the case.

The crisis has spread into every sector of society which relies on clear knowledge and respected authority.

The ten warning signs

The Canadian Retribution at Normandy | History Traveler Episode 196

Filed under: Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Underground
Published 16 Feb 2022

Throughout the Battle of Normandy, the Canadians of the 3rd Infantry Division and the Germans of the 12th SS Panzer Division found themselves locked in a battle of attrition that would mark some of the most vicious fighting of the entire campaign. After suffering a blow at Buron and Authie (as seen in the last episode) the fight shifted over to a place that has now become legendary in Canadian military history: Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse. In this episode, we’re joined by Paul Woodadge of ‪@WW2TV‬ to show a small part of one of the most epic fights in the battle to take Normandy.
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QotD: The ratchet effect

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

It’s well known that the people at the tippy top are raging SJWs, of course, but as anyone who has ever even tangentially worked for a GloboHomoCorp knows, the Big Bosses don’t know jack shit about even very high level stuff going on in their own companies. Big Boss, and several layers of management below Big Boss, are mainly concerned with greasing politicians and other CEOs. They have absolutely no idea what’s even going on with the North American Branch of the Customer Service Division, let alone what any individual person is up to … so those flunkies and fart catchers and butt boys way down the chain have to kiss ass on their own.

What ends up happening is a kind of “ratchet effect” on steroids. The “ratchet effect”, you’ll recall, was Margaret Thatcher’s explanation for how the Left kept winning on policy even though the Right kept winning at the polls (ah, God love ya, Maggie, and give you peace). When the Left is in power, they get whatever they want. When the Right is in power, they consolidate the Left’s gains, as this is now “the new normal”. Since The Right exists only to twiddle the knobs and levers of the Leviathan State in a more efficient, cost-effective, low-tax way, the “right-wing” “reformers” find jury-rigged quasi-solutions to the problems the Left’s insanity creates.

In a very real way, then, the “ratchet effect” means the so-called “Right” ends up doing the Left’s job for them, much better than they themselves could’ve.

Same deal inside the divisions of GloboHomoCorp. Same deal inside the Third Reich, which is why “working towards the Führer” turned so murderous, so fast. Since the only way to get noticed by the next higher-up level of “management” was to be more obnoxiously ruthless than everybody else at doing what the Führer seemed to be hinting that he wanted …

In the corporate world, then, I theorize, super-aggressive, ultra-obnoxious SJW-ism is a ground-up phenomenon. Does the Big Boss really want mandatory anti-Whiteness training across all divisions? Maybe … but maybe not. And though it’s tempting to say “He’s the Big Boss, he must know at least broadly what the big divisions are up to”, do I even have to ask if you’ve ever been in a situation where that’s true? Big Bosses the world over, in any field, be they CEOs or Generals or Chief Medical Officers or what have you, don’t have the slightest clue what’s happening structurally inside their commands.

All they know is what the next-lower level of management tells them is happening.

Severian, “On Selling Out”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-26.

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