Quotulatiousness

March 3, 2026

Iran in the news

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I haven’t bothered trying to keep up with the firehose of “news” about the combined US/Israeli operations against the Islamic State, as much of what is initially reported will be re-stated, retracted, refuted, and other words starting with “R” until something vaguely resembling objective analysis can be done. There are uncounted mainstream, specialist, and advocacy sites and there’s no point trying to keep up with them (for me, anyway). Here are a few bits of internet flotsam on issues arising from Operation Brass Balls (or whatever name they chose for it):

First up, J.D. Tuccille on the legality around President Trump’s decision to strike Iran:

The BBC has a long history of … careful wording in describing events in Iran since 1979. I don’t think this cartoon is unfair in portraying that.

The world is undoubtedly a better place after the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and roughly 40 of his murderous colleagues by joint Israeli and American military strikes. Iran’s Islamist regime has slaughtered its own people while encouraging terrorism around the world for decades. But those strikes carry serious risks and costs. Are they worth the tradeoffs? The Trump administration should have made its case to Congress and the already skeptical public and satisfied the Constitution’s requirements by doing so.

War Without Debate

On Saturday, the U.S. and Israel launched much-anticipated strikes after claiming negotiations with the Iranian regime over the status of its nuclear weapons program had stalled.

“A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran,” President Donald Trump announced. “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime — a vicious group of very hard, terrible people. Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world. For 47 years the Iranian regime has chanted ‘death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries.”

True enough. The president recited a litany of crimes in which the Islamist regime has been implicated, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut by Iranian proxy Hezbollah, and the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, which Iranian forces helped plan. To this list we can add the attempted assassinations of Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad in Brooklyn and of then-presidential candidate Trump himself. Trump also called out Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. And he urged the suffering Iranian people, who have weathered brutal attempts to suppress protests, to take advantage of the military strikes to overthrow the regime.

Unfortunately, this was the first time many Americans — members of the public and lawmakers alike — heard the Trump administration make a somewhat coherent argument for taking on Iran’s government. It came as strikes were already underway despite the Constitution reserving to Congress the responsibility to “provide for the common Defence”, “to declare War”, “to raise and support Armies”, and “to provide and maintain a Navy”. Lawmakers were informed of the attack on Iran, but only after the country was committed to hostilities and their related dangers and expense.

Congress and the People Were Never Consulted

“I am opposed to this War,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) objected. “This is not ‘America First’. When Congress reconvenes, I will work with @RepRoKhanna to force a Congressional vote on war with Iran. The Constitution requires a vote, and your Representative needs to be on record as opposing or supporting this war.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) shares Massie’s skepticism towards military action. He and Massie might have voted against authorizing war with Iran even if they’d heard the administration’s arguments. Or perhaps they and other lawmakers would have been persuaded. We don’t know, because the president didn’t make a case until bombs and missiles had already been launched.

Andrew Doyle on the need for regime change:

The end point of armed conflict is impossible to predict. In her book On Violence (1970), the philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that when it comes to political violence, “the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals”. However well planned and executed, wars have a tendency to spiral out of control in ways never envisaged.

Whether Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran will pay off depends upon the fates as much as anything else. The goal is regime change, which – given the appalling tyranny under which the Iranian people have suffered for five decades – is admirable and just. Yet the numerous unknown variables make this war the biggest risk that Trump has yet taken as president.

This war has the potential to escalate and engulf the entire region. Iran is already striking neighbouring Arab states allied with the US in a scattershot and desperate manner. With the death of the Ayatollah, it may be that the regime will be forced into a ceasefire while it seeks to re-establish its power. Yet the scenes of wild celebration on the streets of Iran would suggest that domestic revolution is its greatest threat. If the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (not the country’s national army, but a kind of Praetorian guard for the mullahs) can be turned, the regime will fall.

Perhaps the worst case scenario is a widespread power struggle between competing militias and separatist groups. The IRGC itself could fragment, and we may see the kind of chaos that ensued after the Iraq war of 2003. The Trump administration has the advantage of the latest military technology and will insist that this enterprise will never require “boots on the ground”. It may be right, but who knows what factions will emerge with no centralised authority?

Those of us without a crystal ball should get used to the phrase: “we don’t know”. Various social media pundits are asserting with absolute certainty where all of this will lead. They would be wise to exercise greater caution. After the Twelve-Day War last June in which Israel and the US destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and air defence capabilities, many on the “America First” right were quick to prophesy the advent of World War III. Their claims to clairvoyance were unfounded.

CDR Salamander argues in favour of the punitive expedition as a legitimate tool in the nation’s war locker:

I support the strikes on Iran because it firmly fits into a view I have held on the use of national military power for decades, based on thousands of years of military practice. If you are not up to speed with the thousands of Americans dead and maimed by the Islamic Republic and its proxies over the last 47 years, then I have nothing more to discuss with you.

While I understand the academic argument of many that before any action takes place, there is a whole series of hoops, barriers, and puzzles of our own creation that we need to go through — I firmly believe that not only are those Constitutionally unnecessary for punitive expeditions in 2026, if done, needed and deserved strikes like we have seen in Iran could not take place without

Fortunes were made, institutions funded, and employment justified for legions under the old and failed post-WWII process swamp and GWOT nomenklatura that gave us unending and stillborn conflicts. To go that route again wouldn’t just be folly, it would be a self-destructive folly to refuse to change in the face of evidence.

I’ve seen older versions of OPLANS for Iran. Huge, bloody, and frankly undoable. They were only that way because they met the requirements of an old system that everyone nodded their heads to because all the smart people from Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Princeton and all the usual places said we had to do it this way.

Enough. Bollocks to all that. They have been measured the last quarter century and have been found wanting.

A series of events since October 7, 2023, including the 2024 election, has opened a window to do what we have not been able to do for a whole host of reasons — and there is a debt waiting to be paid.

We’ve been here before with Iran. In the modern context, we sank two warships and three speedboats of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy in 1988 during Operation Praying Mantis as punishment for damaging USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG 58) and Iran’s mining international waters in the Persian Gulf. We’ve played slap-n-tickle with them here and there while they have brutalized us at every turn when they are not brutalizing their own people.

Yes, it’s personal — but part of the reason we have been hesitant is that our national security intellectuals have been stuck in a world view that prevented action, by design.

Though not exclusive, the Powell Doctrine’s “Pottery Barn Rule” (that it appears he got from one of Thomas Frack’n Friedman’s columns), made it appear that we could only take action if we took the entire country and then remade it in our image.

We know how that operationalized over the last couple of decades.

We’ve done plenty of punitive expeditions in our nation’s history — but in the last few decades as a certain pedigree of policy maker held sway over our national security doctrine, it fell out of favor.

They failed the nation. Their institutions failed the nation. Their worldview was little more than a self-licking ice cream cone of self-regard.

There are also those who can find the funny aspects of any serious situation:

January 26, 2026

King Donald the First

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

His most rabid fans liked to call him the God-Emperor, but Andrew Sullivan sees him much more as a modern King George III:

King George III in his Coronation robes.
Oil painting by Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) circa 1761-1762. From the Royal Collection (RCIN 405307) via Wikimedia Commons.

It is where lies and truth are entirely interchangeable; where the rule of law has already been replaced by the rule of one man; where the Congress has abdicated its core responsibilities and become a Greek chorus; where national policy is merely the sum of the whims and delusions of one man; and where every constitutional check on arbitrary power, especially the Supreme Court, is AWOL. In that abyss, even an attempt to explain events through the usual rubric of covering a liberal democracy is absurd. Because that rubric is irrelevant.

And so the wheels spin.

The only honest way to describe what is in front of our noses is that we now live in an elected monarchy with a manic king whose mental faculties are slipping fast. After 250 years, we appear to have elected the modern equivalent of King George III, and are busy dismantling the constitution Americans built to constrain him.

The situation is not irrecoverable — the forms of democracy remain even if they are functionally dead. We have centuries of democratic practice to fall back on. But every moment the logic of the abyss holds, the possibility of returning to democracy attenuates. Tyranny corrupts everything and everyone — fast. David Brooks returns to the ancients today to understand where we are:

    As the disease of tyranny progresses, citizens may eventually lose the habits of democracy — the art of persuasion and compromise, interpersonal trust, an intolerance for corruption, the spirit of freedom, the ethic of moderation. “It is easier to crush men’s spirits and their enthusiasm than to revive them,” Tacitus wrote. “Indeed, there comes over us an attachment to the very enforced inactivity, and the idleness hated at first is finally loved.”

Forty percent of the country still backs the tyrant. Forty percent watch this and cheer.

Let us briefly review what they are cheering. For the first time since the Second World War, the president of the United States declared last week that we no longer support the notion of national sovereignty or collective security, and reserve the right to invade and occupy other sovereign countries — even close allies — to extract their resources. Quite a Rubicon. His chief adviser declared international law a dead letter:

    [W]e live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.

To put it bluntly, this was the argument of King George III. It was the justification for the British Empire, and, more hideously, for the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Europe. It’s a rejection of the principle that literally created the United States.

And yet this mad king threw this founding principle away because he believes a) we deserve Greenland as reparations for World War II, b) because Russia and China would invade otherwise, c) because rare earths are there — even though they are buried under a mile of ice — and d) because he didn’t win the Nobel Prize. Insane.

This staggering concession to evil — which cannot be withdrawn — robs us of any case against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s threat to Taiwan. It legitimizes war by major powers for conquest everywhere. It endangers the entire system of collective security that has kept the peace for nearly 80 years. Why? And for what? Because the king was on a high.

That’s where we are.

November 17, 2025

The US Supreme Court considers whether Trump’s tariffs are legal

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

Thanks to the staggering incompetence (and/or deliberate provocation for domestic political advantage) of the Carney government’s dealings with President Donald Trump, the current case before the Supreme Court is of significant interest to those of us on the north side of the US-Canadian border. On his Substack, David Friedman discusses the issues before the court:

There are three things wrong with Trump’s tariffs. The first is that they cannot be expected to provide the benefits claimed, can be expected to make both the US and its trading partners poorer; the arguments offered for them depend on not understanding the economics of trade. For an explanation of why that is true, see an earlier post.

The fact that the tariffs make us poorer may be the most important thing wrong with them but it is irrelevant to the Supreme Court; nothing in the Constitution requires the president to do his job well. The questions relevant to the Court are whether what Trump is doing was authorized by past Congressional legislation and whether it was constitutional for Congress to authorize it.

What Counts As An Emergency?

Tariffs are under the authority of Congress, not the president.1 Trump’s justification for setting them himself is congressional legislation, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

    (a) Any authority granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may be exercised to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.

    (b) The authorities granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose. (IEEPA, 50 U.S. Code § 1701, emphasis mine)

Trump declared that his Worldwide Reciprocal Tariffs were intended to deal with the US trade deficit.2 Whether the deficit is a threat and whether tariffs are a good way to deal with it are questions for economists3 but whether it is unusual is relevant to judges, since if it is not the IEEPA does not apply.

[…]

The Court on Trial

Delegating to the president the power to impose tariffs, a power explicitly given to Congress in the Constitution, is a major question. Under doctrine proclaimed by this court that means that the legislation claimed to delegate that power must be read narrowly. On a narrow reading, on anything but a very broad reading, the legislation fails to apply to President Trump’s tariffs for two independent reasons:

    It only grants power in an emergency, which under the language of the Act neither the trade deficit nor the illegal drug problem is; the deficit has existed since 1970, the War on Drugs was proclaimed in 1971.

    The powers granted to the president in the Act do not include the power to impose tariffs.

If the six conservative justices believe in the principles they claim, the administration will lose the case 9-0.

  1. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations … (U.S Constitution, Article I, Section 8).
  2. “I found that conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States that has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States. I declared a national emergency with respect to that threat, and to deal with that threat, I imposed additional ad valorem duties that I deemed necessary and appropriate.” (Executive Order July 31, 2025).
  3. The answers are no and no.

August 31, 2025

Didn’t we once have “conflict of interest” rules for politicians?

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

It’s become a commonplace that politicians leave office vastly wealthier than they went in, far in excess of their official salaries. Once upon a time, even though it probably still happened, the fat cats managed to stay below the event horizon with their ill-gotten gains. Today, they no longer care if you find out that this or that senator has consistently beaten the market on their investments during their entire time in office. After all, what are you going to do about it, punks? Maybe something like this:

Paul and Nancy Pelosi, 16 February, 2022.
Detail of a photo by Amos Ben Gershom via Wikimedia Commons.

The original research was on how Senators seem to make 12% annually. That’s, erm, a lot.

Markets — something that always comes as a surprise to politicians — react:

    American lawmakers are so consistently successful that a flurry of new platforms and apps now compile filing data from US politicians as a key input in strategies for retail investors and even hedge funds.

    The number of people using these so-called “copy trading” strategies has exploded. Tens of thousands of Americans now follow and imitate trades made by members of Congress, and they are making millions of dollars in the process.

OK, what fun, eh?

Even more fun would be Megan McArdle’s suggestion, that the CongressThieves must announce that they intend to trade an hour before they do so that everyone else can front run them.

Because, you know, Ms. Pelosi:

    She beat every single hedge fund last year.

But there’s something even more fun:

    Dub launched in March 2024 as America’s first regulated brokerage to offer copy trading accounts to mimic politicians and star traders.

    “It’s been absolutely insane in terms of growth,” says Steven Wang, the founder and chief executive who dropped out of his freshman year at Harvard to build the platform. Today, it has 1.5 million users across America.

    Of the $100m or so invested across Dub, nearly $23m is in its Pelosi tracker account. Since its launch in early 2024, its paper gains are 172pc.

Stock prices do not move “because”. Interest rates change, profits go up, or down, or tariffs or … stock prices change because people buy and or sell more of them. That may be in reaction to those other things but the actual price movement is that buy and sell stuff.

Which means that if we copy Nancy’s trades — after she’s done them — then we’re making money for Nancy. Because we are piling in our weight of money into a position she already holds.

Which, when you think about it, is really pretty shitty. Sure, it’s nice to make money ourselves by trading upon that congressional information. But there is that very, very, heavy cost of making Ms. Pelosi even richer as a consequence.

August 9, 2025

Carney hints at backing away from Trudeau’s digital policy catastrophes

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

Michael Geist on the possibility that Prime Minister Mark Carney is starting to recognize just how damaging to Canadian interests the previous government’s various online bills have been:

Digital policies did not play a prominent role in the last election given the intense focus on the Canada-U.S. relationship. Prime Minister Mark Carney started as a bit of a blank slate on the issue, but over the past few months a trend has emerged as he distances himself from the Justin Trudeau approach with important shifts on telecom, taxation, and the regulation of artificial intelligence. Further, recent hints of an openness to re-considering the Online News Act and heightened pressure from the U.S. on the Online Streaming Act suggests that a full overhaul may be a possibility.

This week’s decision to let the CRTC’s decision on wholesale access to fibre broadband networks stand is a case in point. Last November, the Justin Trudeau-led government sent the CRTC’s initial ruling back to the Commission for reconsideration, noting that it “has concerns about future and ongoing investments in broadband infrastructure and services in Ontario and Quebec, including in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, and concerns that those investments could, if they are unprofitable, lead to a decline in quality and consumer choice in the retail Internet services market”. Nine months later, the CRTC came back with the roughly same ruling. That led to yet another request for a cabinet review but this time the government stood by the CRTC despite significant industry opposition. New leader, dramatically new approach.

The CRTC is example was preceded by the decision to eliminate the digital services tax. While the strategic approach seemed misguided – dropping the DST should have garnered more than just an agreement from the U.S. to return to the bargaining table – some noted at the time that perhaps Carney wasn’t a supporter of the DST and had few qualms with rescinding it. The tax had been a foundational part of the government’s campaign to “make web giants pay” but in a matter of 72 hours in late June it was gone.

The government has also shifted its approach on AI regulation. After months of supporting Bill C-27 and the EU-style AI regulatory approach, a new government brought a new minister and a new approach. Evan Solomon, the newly installed AI and Digital Innovation Minister, used his first public speech as minister to pledge that Canada would move away from “over-indexing on warnings and regulation” on AI. That too represents a significant shift in approach, particularly since Trudeau had embraced the EU style regulatory model.

Then there is the Online News Act and Online Streaming Act. When asked about the Online News Act this week, Carney seemed to suggest he was open to change, stating “this government is a big believer in the value of … local news and the importance of ensuring that that is disseminated as widely and as quickly as possible. So, we will look for all avenues to do that.” While that isn’t a clear commitment to change, it is far from an ironclad commitment to legislation is viewed by many to have done more harm than good. Further, reports indicate that the U.S. Congress is escalating pressure to rescind the Online Streaming Act, which may put that law on the chopping block, particularly if a court appeal strikes down elements of the bill or the CRTC’s implementation of the law puts the bill on the Trump radar screen.

May 22, 2025

Trump, “the American Mussolini”, versus ever-so-democratic Mark Carney

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

In the National Post, John Robson contrasts the authoritarian dictator at the helm of the American ship of state with our peaceful, democratic, and fully accountable to the voters prime minister:

President Donald Trump greets Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at the West Wing entrance of the White House.
(Official White House Photo by Gabriel B Kotico)

It was the best of budgets, it was the worst of budgets, it was the age of restraint, it was the age of profligacy, it was the epoch of the legislature, it was the epoch of the executive, it was the season of open debate, it was the season of closed doors, it was the spring of Canada, it was the winter of America. Or possibly the other way around.

The confusion arises because as a patriotic Canadian I keep hearing how U.S. President Donald Trump is an American Mussolini who has abolished the last vestiges of the old Republic, so we should drink rye not bourbon or some other decisive action easily performed while sitting down. Yet the news media mysteriously insist that the Bad Orange Man is having trouble getting his budget through some quaint relic called the United States Congress while Green Mark Carney isn’t bothering to get his spending plans rubber-stamped by some quaint relic called the Canadian Parliament. How can it be?

Tuesday’s the Morning newsletter from the New York Times, which is no MAGA outlet, reads: “Speaker Mike Johnson has a math problem. He wants to pass a megabill before Memorial Day to deliver President Trump’s legislative agenda.” But with only three spare votes in the House, “there are way more than three G.O.P. dissenters, and they don’t agree on what the problem is. Some think the cuts to Medicaid are too large. Others think they’re too small. Some want to purge clean-energy tax breaks. Others want to preserve them because their constituents have used them.”

Likewise The Atlantic, part of the thundering herd of independent liberal American minds, says: “The struggle to pass Donald Trump’s second-term agenda in Congress has never been between Republicans and Democrats … it’s been a battle between the House and Senate GOP, between moderates and hard-liners, and, most salient, between Republicans and reality.”

Egad. What manner of rambunctious folly is this? Open debate within the Maximum Leader’s own party? Dictatorship! By contrast here in decorous Canada can someone remind me which inane or malicious measures from former prime minister Justin Trudeau were ever put at risk by the principled courage, truculence or mere pandering even of his NDP coalition non-partners, let alone the trained seals in red?

Periodically one would bark. But which ever bit? To be sure, as the Canadian Press noted on Sunday, “Prime Minister Mark Carney says the Liberal government will present a federal budget in the fall, allowing time for clarity on some key economic and fiscal issues to emerge”. But if there’s going to be a brawl, it will be inside his office, or head, with his finance minister promising to brush aside Parliament with an “economic statement” before Carney overrode him, saying the government would introduce “a much more comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget in the fall”.

May 11, 2025

Will Amtrak survive the DOGE treatment?

Filed under: Economics, Government, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Wong outlines Amtrak’s never-ending financial difficulties:

“Amtrak” by Mike Knell is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Founded 54 years ago, Amtrak set out on a bold adventure to see if passenger trains could be profitable. Fast forward to today, this experiment has been unsuccessful. Politicians have often crafted routes to win votes rather than attract riders. As a result, Amtrak has been squandering taxpayer money since its start in 1971.

Take, for instance, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. It allocated a monumental $66 billion to bolster passenger rail. Yet, even with this backing, Amtrak’s losses soared from $1.12 billion in FY2019 to $2.12 billion in FY2024. This financial drain isn’t new; America’s passenger trains have lost money for 79 years.

Amtrak asserts that it is “on-track to reach operational profitability”. Yet, this is a bald-faced lie. While Amtrak reported a loss of $705.2 million for FY2024, it didn’t include:

  1. $966.2 million in depreciation;
  2. $447.3 million in “Project Related Expenses”;
  3. $314.1 million in state subsidies, which it classified as “revenue”;
  4. $26.9 million in Office of Inspector General funding

By omitting these costs, Amtrak paints an optimistic view of its financial health. In reality, Amtrak needs larger subsidies than ever before. In fact, Amtrak has been deceiving Congress with its “path to profitability” since 1990.

Although Amtrak touted a “ridership record” for FY2024, this figure is misleading too. Ridership numbers don’t reflect the average length of each passenger’s trip. A more insightful metric is passenger-miles, which measures how far people are traveling. In fact, Amtrak only transported 6.54 billion passenger-miles in FY2024. This is a decrease of 3.40 percent since FY2013.

Amtrak often attributes its financial struggles to its long-haul routes. Yet, the outlook is even bleaker for its short-haul, state-supported routes. Amtrak reported a $251.5 million loss for these routes in FY2024. Yet, with $314.1 million in state subsidies included, the true loss hits $565.6 million. This represents a shocking 94 percent increase from the $291.7 million lost in FY2019.

Amtrak’s advocates often cite highway “subsidies” to explain its financial debacles. But Amtrak guzzles about 39 times more subsidies per passenger-mile than highways do.

Amtrak asserts that freight trains “interfere” with its passenger services. However, Amtrak often makes questionable route choices despite having legal priority over freight. Between Chicago and Los Angeles, the Desert Wind lost less money than the Southwest Chief. Despite this, Amtrak favored the Southwest Chief, which passed through more congressional districts. It discontinued the Desert Wind in 1997, leaving Las Vegas with no train service.

April 23, 2025

The Korean War Week 44 – Mac’s Lies Boil Truman’s Blood – April 22, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 22 Apr 2025

The stage is set for the Chinese Communist Forces’ next big offensive in Korea, but that is not where American eyes are fixed this week. Instead, focus swings to Washington D.C. where the recently-fired Douglas MacArthur arrives and proceeds to address crowds and Congress alike. It soon becomes clear that he will not go gentle into that good night.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:58 Recap
01:46 Soviet Intervention?
04:22 Operation Rugged
07:01 Task Force 77
09:36 South Korean Porters
11:02 MacArthur and McClellan
13:55 Summary
14:13 Conclusion
(more…)

April 12, 2025

President Trump … or any president … shouldn’t have the unilateral power to levy tariffs

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

Love him or hate him — and there are lots of people in both camps — President Donald Trump has the power to randomly throw spanners into the international trade arena … because Congress ceded that power to the presidency long before Trump began his political career:

In response to Donald Trump’s tariff maneuvers, Senator Rand Paul has been arguing that presidents shouldn’t have the power to raise tariffs themselves. Taxing power belongs to Congress, and that’s where tariffs should be born. Trump’s tariffs result from the use of emergency power that Congress gave to the POTUS, and we shouldn’t normalize emergency rule. You can watch him say all of that here.

Every word of that is completely right. I don’t disagree with a single breath of it. I respect Rand Paul, and I’m inordinately fond of his dad. But it misses the point about how we got here, and why, starting with the fact that Congress gave away its taxing authority.

  1. Congress delegated its authority;
  2. Donald Trump used the authority that Congress gave him;
  3. Therefore, Donald Trump is very bad, and what he’s doing is wrong.

The core sickness at the heart of the American republic is Congress, and we keep discussing that sickness by saying that Trump sucks. He’s doing what you gave him the power to do, and he’s not the first.

See also my recent post in which I described a time when Congress made something illegal, than asked the administrative agencies to explain to them what they had just banned. Congress has delegated its authority, over and over again, and the resulting political vacuum is a serious problem. But anyway, TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP.

American political discourse keeps taking a wide range of political pathologies and assigning them to the same account. Orange Man Bad, Orange Man Bad, Orange Man Bad, they explained, with drool running down their chins. Donald Trump is our deflector object, our national excuse. [Problem name here]; OH NO WHY IS TRUMP DOING THIS TO US.

The commandant of the United States Coast Guard spoke at a maritime conference, a few days ago, and he said that the organization he runs wakes up every day and tries to keep the doors from falling off: “The US Coast Guard is less ready today than any other time since World War II. We are on a readiness spiral. Today our fleet of cutters are in significant decline. We are in repair failure mode … No ship today gets underway without cannibalizing others for parts.”

See also, from one of his subordinates:

Serious question: Did all of those problems begin at noon on January 20, 2025?

April 9, 2025

The Korean War Week 42 – Seize Hwacheon Reservoir? A Dam Good idea – April 8, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 4 Apr 2025

Operation Rugged is in full swing, and it’s taking a decent amount of territory, but Matt Ridgway is worried about the possibility of the enemy blowing the dam at the Hwacheon Reservoir and flooding his army, so he gets set to try and soon take it. Meanwhile there’s an explosion in Congress in Washington DC, when the Minority Leader openly reads Douglas MacArthur’s letter of his plans for the war that are diametrically opposed to those of President Harry Truman. Truman realizes that he’s going to have to remove MacArthur from UN command.

Chapters
00:57 Recap
01:31 When to Fire MacArthur?
03:53 Joe Martin Speaks
07:11 Operation Rugged
09:23 The Hwacheon Reservoir Dam
13:35 Summary
13:51 Conclusion
(more…)

March 23, 2025

QotD: Herbert Hoover as president

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

Herbert Hoover spent his entire presidency miserable.

First, he has no doubt that the economy is going to crash. It’s been too good for too long. He frantically tries to cool down the market, begs moneylenders to stop lending and bankers to stop banking. It doesn’t work, and the Federal Reserve is less concerned than he is. So he sits back and waits glumly for the other shoe to drop.

Second, he hates politics. Somehow he had thought that if he was the President, he would be above politics and everyone would have to listen to him. The exact opposite proves true. His special session of Congress comes up with the worst, most politically venal tariff bill imaginable. Each representative declares there should be low tariffs on everything except the products produced in his own district, then compromises by agreeing to high tariffs on everything with good lobbyists. The Senate declares that the House of Representatives is corrupt nincompoops and sends the bill back in disgust. Hoover has no idea how to solve this problem except to ask the House to do some kind of rational economically-correct calculation about optimal tariffs, which the House finds hilarious. “Opposed to the House bill and divided against itself, the Senate ran out the remaining seven weeks [of the special session] in a debauch of taunts, accusations, recriminations, and procedural argument.” The public blames Hoover, pretty fairly – a more experienced president would have known how to shepherd his party to a palatable compromise.

Also, there are crime waves, prison riots, bootlegging, and a heat wave during which Washington DC is basically uninhabitable. Also, at one point the White House is literally on fire.

… and then the market finally crashes. Hoover is among the first to call it a Depression instead of a Panic – he thinks the new term might make people panic less. But in fact, people aren’t panicking. They assume Hoover has everything in hand.

At first he does. He gathers the heads of Ford, Du Pont, Standard Oil, General Electric, General Motors, and Sears Roebuck and pressures them to say publicly they won’t fire people. He gathers the AFL and all the union heads and pressures them to say publicly they won’t strike. He enacts sweeping tax cuts, and the Fed enacts sweeping rate cuts. Everyone is bedazzled […] Six months later, employment is back to its usual levels, the stock market is approaching its 1929 level, and Democrats are fuming because they expect Hoover’s popularity to make him unbeatable in the midterms. I got confused at this point in the book – did I accidentally get a biography from an alternate timeline with a shorter, milder Great Depression? No – this would be the pattern throughout the administration. Hoover would take some brilliant and decisive action. Economists would praise him. The economy would start to look better. Everyone would declare the problem solved – especially Hoover, sensitive both to his own reputation and to the importance of keeping economic optimism high. Then the recovery would stall, or reverse, or something else would go wrong.

People are still debating what made the Great Depression so long and hard. Whyte’s theory, insofar as he has one at all, is “one thing after another”. Every time the economy started to go up (thanks to Hoover), there was another shock. Most of them involved Europe – Germany threatening to default on its debts, Britain going off the gold standard. A few involved the US – the Federal Reserve made some really bad calls. The one thing Whyte is really sure about is that his idol Herbert Hoover was totally blameless.

He argues that Hoover’s bank relief plan could have stopped the Depression in its tracks – but that Congressional Democrats intent on sabotaging Hoover forced the plan to publicize the names of the banks applying. The Democrats hoped to catch Hoover propping up his plutocrat friends – but the change actually had the effect of making banks scared to apply for funding and panicking the customers of banks that were known to have applied. He argues that the “Hoover Holiday” – a plan to grant debt relief to Germany, taking some pressure off the clusterf**k that was Europe – was a masterstroke, but that France sabotaged it in the interests of bleeding a few more pennies from its arch-rival. International trade might have sparked a recovery – except that Congress finally passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, the end result of the corruption-plagued tariff negotiations, just in time to choke it off.

Whyte saves his barbs for the real villain: FDR. If the book is to be believed, Hoover actually had things pretty much under control by 1932. Employment was rising, the stock market was heading back up. FDR and his fellow Democrats worked to tear everything back down so he could win the election and take complete credit for the recovery. The wrecking campaign entered high gear after FDR won in 1932; he was terrified that the economy might get better before he took office, and used his President-Elect status to hint that he was going to do all sorts of awful things. The economy got skittish again and obediently declined, allowing him to get inaugurated at the precise lowest point and gain the credit for recovery he so ardently desired.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.

March 7, 2025

“The Resistance” achieves lame nirvana

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

President Donald Trump is a boisterous, noisy distraction in so many ways and rubs a heck of a lot of people the wrong way in everything he does … and yet the politicians who oppose him seem to be engaged in a scientific experiment to discover just how cringeworthy they can be:

“REMINDER: It Is Offensive And Possibly Illegal To Photoshop Anything On These Democrats’ Signs That Would Make Them Look Foolish.
The Babylon Bee, https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1897140039777239181/photo/1

Remember when the phrase “the Resistance” would conjure up visions of sexy French youths in berets battling actual Nazis? Now all it brings to mind is ageing dullards in pink suits holding up signs saying “This is not normal” while sporting the most turbo-smug look on their faces. As US president Donald Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress last night, “across the aisle the Resistance was stirring”, gushed the Guardian‘s DC reporter. His piece was illustrated with a pic of some congresswoman in pearls and a balding Democrat looking aghast as Trump talked. Seriously, if this is “the Resistance”, the world’s tyrants can rest easy.

Yesterday’s “Democrat fightback” and “resistance to Trump’s rhetoric” – journalists are literally calling it that – was next-level cringe. It occurred during Trump’s 100-minute speech, the longest Congress talk in 60 years. As Trump bashed Joe Biden and bigged up Elon Musk, the Dems came over all soixante-huitard. Fury coursed through their ranks. Then the revolt started. The Squad’s Rashida Tlaib held up a scrawled sign saying “That’s a lie!”. Dem representative Al Green “shook his cane and pointed his finger” and cried “You have no mandate” to cut Medicaid. How the regime must have quaked at the sight of this revolution!

The way some hacks are talking about this tantrum masquerading as a protest you’d think it was a modern-day storming of the Bastille. The Dems’ “stirring” acts of rebellion will have “given hope to the Resistance” and sent a message to “the world”, said the Guardian. Nurse! Even leftists who’ve been disappointed with the Dem establishment seemed to get a moral kick from this political pantomime. So far, the “resistance” to the Trumpist tyranny has been “splintered”, but now we know it’s “getting better”, fawned Vox. Perhaps, it said, we’ll soon see the “aggressive resistance” we really need.

Can these people hear themselves? Overpaid politicians holding up mass-produced black placards with hackneyed complaints like “False” and “Liar” are not “the Resistance” – they’re the establishment cosplaying as campus radicals for likes and headlines. In one especially squirming scene, some Dems “removed their outer business wear” to reveal black t-shirts with the word “RESIST” in “bold white letters”. Their delusions of radicalism are off the scale. Resistance is when young Iranian women rip off their hijabs or Kurdish revolutionaries fight the neo-fascists of ISIS, not when politicians on $174,000 a year put on a t-shirt their stressed intern ordered from some hip printer on 7th Street.

January 16, 2025

“The only possible conclusion is that we didn’t call them racist often enough”

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

Apparently there are still a lot of US politicians who think that letting men compete in womens’ sports is not only okay, but praiseworthy:

Of all the absurdities of the culture war, perhaps the most egregious is the normalisation of the idea that men should be able to identify their way into women’s sports. We are living through a period of mania, so we cannot clearly see how this will look to future generations. But I have little doubt that all those photographs of hulking men towering over women on winners’ podiums will be the memes of the future. “Can you believe they let this happen?” they’ll say, scratching their AI-enhanced cyborg heads.

Wherever one stands on Donald Trump, there can be little doubt that his imminent arrival at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will act as a corrective to this problem. Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act with its goal of preventing males who identify as female from participating in school sports. If passed into law, schools that attempt to defy the ban would have their federal funds withheld. The bill was introduced by Republican representative Greg Steube of Florida, and makes clear that it will be a violation of federal law “for a recipient of Federal financial assistance who operates, sponsors, or facilitates an athletic program or activity to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls”.

One of the most astonishing aspects of the passing of this bill was the voting outcome. 216 Republicans and only 2 Democrats (Vicente Gonzales and Henry Cueller) voted for the motion. Is it really that controversial that sex, as the bill puts it, “shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth”? You will recall the outcry back in November when Democratic politician Seth Moulton admitted that he objected to mixed-sex contact sports in schools. “I have two little girls,” he said, “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that”. For this he was branded a “transphobe” and a “Nazi cooperator”, because we all know that one of the top priorities of the Third Reich was the preservation of women’s rights.

Moulton failed to retain his backbone for the latest vote (he called the bill “too extreme”), but his previous comment had been striking for its honesty. He was willing to openly state that fear was the key factor in the reticence of Democrats on this issue. It cannot be the case that only two Democratic members of the House take the view that there is no advantage in sports conferred by male puberty. Surely most of them must have glanced at a biology textbook from time to time. The charitable conclusion is that they have been browbeaten into voting ideologically, not that they genuinely don’t know that there exist anatomical differences between men and women.

Disturbingly, this vote would seem to suggest that the Democrats are not learning their lessons from the election, and instead are determined to double down on the very attitude that cost them the White House.

May 29, 2024

A visit to failure pier

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

CDR Salamander has some advice for any US congresscritter with a spine (unfortunately, that probably means none of them):

This old operational planner has one bit of advice to Congress in their role of having oversight of the Executive Branch; subpoena the Decision Brief for the Gaza pier operation.

This was on the lowest of low scale of military operations, Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Response. There is little to nothing classified about any of this rump of a capability. Call in member of the Joint Staff who were involved in this planning — and I would prefer if you could find a few terminal O5/6 to testify as well. You might actually enjoy some candor.

The Commander’s Intent, the Higher Direction and Guidance, the Planning Assumptions, the Constraints and Restraints, the Critical Vulnerability analysis, etc. It is all there. If not, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense should tell the American people to their face.

This is a larger issue than anything happening in that impossible corner of the globe. Over the weekend, we saw yet more indications of an empire in decline deteriorating from bad to pathetic.

From the time the first load came off the pier, the aid barely made it past 300 meters until it disappeared into Hamasistan.

I’ll go ahead and tap the sign;

[…]

Generally this latest act in this other-end-of-the-Med-from-the-Greeks tragedy that has unfolded in front of everyone. As we saw at the top at Ashkelon Beach, first some ancillary bits floated over to Israel as the Eastern Mediterranean reminded everyone it is at the eastern end of a big sea with weather and waves and stuff.

We then found out that three soldiers were injured in a forklift accident. Just to add insult to injury, as the locals laughed, it appears more of the business end decided to try to make it to Haifa on its own.

[…]

I’m not sure how you scatter Army property all over the Eastern Med without a boot getting dry, but maybe I’m wrong. Gaza is lava, and all.

Empires don’t often die in a blaze of glory, no. More often than not they end in simpering apologies and excuses from poor leaders putting the wrong people in positions they have no place being, and when they fail — there is no accountability.

April 26, 2024

Economic inefficiencies in the water market? Don’t worry, here’s the government to make it much worse

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall discusses the economics of water markets in the US … that Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Ro Khanna seem determined to make far less efficient if their plans come to fruition:

Senator Elizabeth Warren speaking at the Iowa Democrats Hall of Fame Celebration in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on 9 June, 2019.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.

Aficionados for truly stupid political interventions into matters economic will already be aware of the idiocies perpetrated by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Ro Khanna. The two seem to end up as if someone rolled together the ideas of Professor Richard J Murphy and The Guardian opinion page then removed all the insight, subtlety and sensibility. True, not an arduous task removing those three but …

The basic water problem out in the Western US is that the wrong people currently own the water rights. We would therefore like to see more trade in those rights. Warren and Khanna are insisting upon further limitations upon the trade in those rights. This is rampant idiocy.

To set the scene, as folk moved out there they realised that water was not one of those things in great surplus in the area. So, those who got there first made sure that the property rights to the water were assigned to them. Nothing odd about this and rights to a scarce resource do need to be allocated. Otherwise we just end up with the commons problem and the resource is exhausted.

OK. And, y’know, quite a lot of things have changed in the century, century and a half since that Wild West was properly populated. But the descendants of those original farmers still own near all the water rights. Hmm, bit of a problem.

That’s OK, we’ve Coase to advise us here:

    Ronald Coase (1960), “The Problem of Social Cost”

    In the absence of transaction costs, if property rights are well-defined and tradable, voluntary negotiations will lead to efficiency.

    It doesn’t matter how rights are allocated initially …

    … because if they’re allocated inefficiently at first, they can always be sold/traded …

    so the allocation will end up efficient anyway

Now, the distribution — who gets the cash from all of that — is dependent upon that first distribution. But that’s a minor problem compared to the efficient use of water.

So, we want lots of buying and selling. The idiots using $300 of irrigation water to grow $100 worth of alfalfa (pretty much my first English-world piece was on exactly this subject, near 30 years back) can instead sell that same acre-foot to a city, where the two households will happily each pay $500 a year for the half an acre-foot they require.

The asset — the water — has moved from a lower valued (actually, value destructive) use to a higher, the world is richer in aggregate. It doesn’t matter that the farmers get the money because Grandpappy shot all the Injuns. Even without the who gets the money we’re all richer — we’re getting $1k not $100 from the same acre-foot of water.

Coolio!

Enter Warren and Khanna:

    With private investors poised to profit from water scarcity in the west, US senator Elizabeth Warren and representative Ro Khanna are pursuing a bill to prohibit the trading of water as a commodity.

Idiots. Damn fools. Politicians, but I repeat myself triply.

Now, do note they’re not trying to insist that water cannot be bought and sold — not because they don’t want to, they do, but because as Federal politicians they’ve no power whatever over within state markets. However, as Federal politicians they can claim power over commodity markets — the speculators will come from around the country, over state lines and interstate commerce is Federal.

So, as with onion futures, they want to ban water futures.

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