Quotulatiousness

June 27, 2026

Larry Correia is “not a real writer”

Filed under: Books, Business, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While I haven’t read everything Larry Correia has published, I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of his work, but I’m clearly having fun wrong because “he’s not a real writer“:

    T-Lex @T_Saurus_Lex
    “Not a real writer” is an inside joke, from the Sad Puppy era. Something some cunning quarter-wit accused him of because Larry wasn’t prone to bend the knee to the SJW mafia. I think the details are on his blog somewhere.

Yeah, for my newer readers saying I’m not a *real* writer has been a running joke forever.

When you are a writer who annoys the liberal publishing establishment they always make up some reason to disqualify you, so they can dismiss you, and never take anything you say seriously. These are not honest people.

(If you are a proper good thinking liberal writer, don’t worry, you achieve real writer hood by loudly existing and they’ll stick you on panels if you’ve published one short story that was read by six whole people)

So at first I wasn’t a real writer because I only wrote monster adventure pulp. So then I was multi genre (and now I’m successful in more genres than most authors ever attempt). No. Those are the wrong genres.

Then I didn’t count because I wasn’t a bestseller. Until I was.

Then to be a real writer I needed to win some awards. (The big one I got nominated for at the beginning didn’t count because reasons). So then I won some awards. No. Not those! Those don’t count!

Real writers tackle serious topics and impress serious academic critics, until I wrote Son of the Black Sword, which impressed even my snootiest haters … so they promptly dropped that path to real writer hood.

This got super silly at times, and how the title really stuck, one time on book tour one of my haters saw me arrive early to a book signing outside Portland. It didn’t start for an hour so there was only three people there who had driven a long way. So I was just hanging out talking to them.

My hater immediately got on Twitter and told everybody “I saw Larry Correia on his alleged book tour and he only had three people show up. WHAT A FAILURE. WHAT A LOSER!”

The actual signing had 40, which is pretty decent. I was still there when somebody showed me this tweet. We all laughed and responded with a group photo saying learn to count, dork.

But Social Justice Warriors (ah, the good old days) can never admit a mistake. So he doubled down and tweeted I still wasn’t a REAL WRITER because that same store ROUTINELY had book signings for TWO HUNDRED customers.

Problem was, the book store wasn’t that big. To fit 200 they would have to remove all the shelves. And at this point I was still there signing their inventory so I asked the manager. She said out of hundreds of signings they had only hit 200 twice the entire time they’d been in business. Brandon Sanderson post WoT and GRRM at the absolute height of the HBO show, and those had lines out into the parking lot.

So only the top bestsellers on Earth at that moment count as Real Writers. Seems unfair. But okay.

So me and my fans leaned into this super hard to mock the absurd and ever moving goal posts of the terminally online haters. And the rest of my book tour was called THE STILL NOT A REAL WRITER WORLD TOUR. And I got a big group photo at every event for the next week.

And yes, I have hit 200 since, but I’m sure the minute I did the new Real Writer threshold moved to 400. 😀

This has been a running gag ever since, the same way my fans refer to me as the ILOH, though that is a story for another day.

June 22, 2026

Authenticity … if you can fake that, you’ve got it made

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

Apologies to Ted Gioia for the flippant heading on this item. While I may be going for a cheap laugh, he certainly isn’t doing that in this essay on how to discover authenticity in music in an age of AI slop:

“Authenticity required: password?” by liako is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

In my case, I learned about authenticity at home, and from the best possible teacher. Even now, so many years after his death, I’m still learning from Dad’s example. And if I could somehow manage to pass it down on to my children, it would be worth a whole lot more than a gold watch.

I say this in full awareness of the contentiousness and backlash arising from almost any assertion of authenticity, especially in the arts — but in other spheres of life as well. There’s been so much debunking of authenticity in recent years that it’s remarkable that anyone is still willing to use it as a term of praise. Sometimes words in the critic’s lexicon become tainted, defeating the very purpose for which they are applied. The situation is so dire that I might even claim that we are facing an “authenticity crisis” in the arts — especially now with the rapid rise of AI. But even making that statement would spur a meta-backlash against the implicit assumption that there’s any legitimate concern over such a debased concept. After all, why defend authenticity if it doesn’t really exist?

In this regard, authenticity is coming to resemble its kindred word “sincerity”, which now implies the exact opposite of its dictionary definition. As Lionel Trilling points out, in his magisterial Harvard lectures published as Sincerity and Authenticity, the term “has an effect that negates its literal intention — ‘I sincerely believe’ has less weight than ‘I believe’; in the subscription of a letter, ‘Yours sincerely’ means virtually the opposite of ‘Yours’.” [Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, (London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 6.]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

June 21, 2026

Jean Rapail’s The Camp of the Saints, translated by Robert Laffont

Filed under: Books, France, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Copernican reviews Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints which was reprinted in an English translation by Robert Laffont earlier this year:

It is time that I throw my own hat into the ring regarding this particular piece of polemic fiction. It’s particularly topical given the recent events in the UK and the Western World. A look at toxic progressive empathy taken its natural conclusion.

Written by Jean Raspail and published in 1973, Camp of the Saints is a book infamous among those the media describes as “Far Right” and virtually unknown outside of that. Were history set upon an even keel, Camp of the Saints would sit on the bookshelf of every high school right next to the classic works of the same genre: notably 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.

This book was so dangerous that for decades, now, the English translation has been out of print, available only as an expensive antique, or through the Internet Archive, [as] a single shoddy .pdf. The corporate owners of the English translation rights have, despite considerable interest, refused to republish it. That was until September of 2025, when a new translation was created and distributed.1

As of now, what was once an antique book is now cheap and in-print. What’s more, it’s been converted to an audiobook available on Audible.2 It took the destruction of Western Culture for us to see published the one work of dystopian fiction that warned us of it.

Given its relevance, it makes sense that over ten percent of the run-time consists of various forwards from the author, translator, and the publisher, that describe the political and cultural push against its own publication. It’s worth it to read (or listen) through the numerous forwards to better understand the context and the author.

An Introduction to the Text

Among the dangerous books written in the late 20th century, Camp of the Saints takes the self-destructive anti-nativism of the neoliberal world order and draws it forward to its own natural conclusion. Like other works of fiction, it takes popular ideas and asks the question: “What if these beliefs are taken to their ultimate logical end?”

The book is written from the perspective of an omniscient historian who witnessed the events of the text; he knows that his work will be censored, silenced, or redacted. In the context of the book, the accurate recollection of the events described is inherently destructive to the (now) dominant anti-racist political regime. The force of political progressivism will destroy any such history on the basis that it may “incite racial hatred” or “create division”.

A fascinating bit of forethought in that those are the exact reasons why Camp of the Saints was itself banished from public view for the last half-century: Liberal cultural diversity transitioned smoothly to violent censure and virulent “anti-White” or “anti-Western” genocidal hatred.

The book is a dramatization of the Fall of the West. Not in pitched battle, but as it has lost its spiritual core to rampant idealism. The “other” is always to be given deference over our own people. The sympathy that is demanded for the “other” is also silenced and denied for our own. At what point do a people become so spiritually deracinated that they lose all legitimacy to exist? At what point do they become so deluded as to lack totally a theory-of-mind of the “other”, and at what point does sympathy for the foreigner overwhelm survival?

Camp of the Saints answers these questions in sometimes graphic detail. Some of the horrors written on those pages hadn’t happened to innocent Western children yet … but now, fifty years on, and they have happened. Many times over, in many places and nations, across the West.3 In comparison to the reality of the West in the 21st Century, Camp of the Saints is a tame warning.

The book begins with a great migrant fleet setting off from Calcutta, India. The poor, the starving, the diseased, and the malformed set out for the West- A land where milk and honey flow freely and where the rivers are rich with Fish. The people of India want a better life for themselves, even if they have to walk, unarmed, onto foreign lands to get it. They, like many peoples, believe that their land is simply poor and that Western nations are simply rich. Failing to understand that it is not some “magic dirt” that made France, England, Australia, and the United States rich, but rather it was the French, English, Australians, and Americans. The West doesn’t horde “magic dirt” but “magic people”, so to speak. Were the West to be flooded with Indians, it would become just like India, not magically make the invading Indians wealthy and intelligent.4

I doubt that it’s possible to explain that fact to third-world migrant retards.

To conclude a spoiler-free version of the review: You should read it. It should have been taught in high schools for the last 50 years. You should probably buy a copy before the beast of Progressivism finds a new way to censor it. If you buy the Audible copy, use a tool to convert it to an .mp3 file so that it can’t be deleted from your personal library after the fact.5 There’s a reason it’s been censored for the last 30 years or so. It’s dangerous, subversive, and intelligent in a way that modern dystopian authors wish they could be.

  1. Here is a direct link [https://www.amazon.com/Camp-Saints-Jean-Raspail/dp/B0FG4MJS8K] to where you can purchase the book on Amazon. A shoutout to Vauban Books for doing the work that every other publisher has been unable, or too scared, to do.
  2. I kind of enjoy audiobooks. Though Camp of the Saints can be particularly tricky to listen to over reading directly due to its complex cast and jumping around in the timeline.
  3. The Rape Gang Inquiry Report by Rupert Lowe is particularly poignant and well-timed here.
  4. A fact that is in stark relief as of 2026, with over 10% of their population (official sources say it’s close to 7%, but I don’t believe them) now being Skaven imports from India … and the wealth, safety, culture, and prosperity of Canada now vanishing at an alarming rate.
  5. The “Open Audible” tool is works for this, but it isn’t free.

June 16, 2026

Piketty’s bid for another fifteen minutes

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

I’m not an economist, so my personal opinion on Thomas Piketty’s work is based purely on the reports of others … you could say I’m not a fan. In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille discusses Piketty’s latest push to impoverish the rich nations for the noble cause of “global justice”:

Piketty’s 2021 paean to socialism and central panning.

Celebrity economist Thomas Piketty won fame with a claim that, in market economies, capital accumulates in the hands of the already wealthy, leading to increased inequality. The message found a receptive audience among people eager to believe economic success isn’t earned. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney cited Piketty in his own 2021 book-length argument that economic activity should be managed by people like Carney.

And now Piketty is back seeking new fans with a scheme for top-down central planning of the world’s economy. He is the co-director of the new Global Justice Report from the World Inequality Lab.

Introducing the project, Piketty posted on X, “The world today is characterized by large-scale inequalities. And a climate crisis is looming over us. We urgently need a new vision for global progress in the 21st Century. One that grounds human development and equality in planetary habitability.”

Piketty shoehorns an impressive number of buzz phrases into a few lines. He includes concerns about equality and inequality, climate change and progress that should send thrills through college campuses. But Piketty has a talent for tapping into the moment. In this case, at a time when Freedom House’s annual report finds that “Global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025,” the economist and his colleagues propose authoritarian policies for shaping the entire planet to their liking.

In his post, Piketty asks, “What would it take to achieve high prosperity and equality while remaining within planetary boundaries?” He answers that “energy transition” (meaning moving away from power sources that produce carbon) is necessary, as well as “labour hour reductions, growth caps in rich countries, less material consumption, and changes in food habits.”

The report itself asserts, “The compression of global inequality is not only compatible with deep decarbonization; it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.”

To fight climate change and battle inequality, Piketty and company want “full income convergence across countries by 2100.” This requires, in part, limiting growth to “around 0-0.5% in today’s richest regions (North America/Oceania, Europe).” They argue that near-zero growth in rich countries “does not mean that their living standards stagnate” because people will benefit from flattened incomes.

On his Substack, Tim Worstall says that the latest Piketty emission disproves the “we need a global wealth tax” case of fellow French economist Gabriel Zucman:

So Tommy Piketty has released his big report self-pleasuring over how a few Frogs are going to run the global economy forever. The Guardian, of course, thinks there’s merit in it:

    One of the report’s key aims is to bring every country to today’s rich-country level of €5,000 per person per month in purchasing-power terms. The figure for sub-Saharan Africa is €290. The report proposes a new global fiscal and monetary architecture: taxes on the very rich would build the public realm, while a Keynesian “clearing union” and new international currency would ease the external constraints that limit poorer countries’ state spending.

Super, eh?

But the plan doesn’t just try to get the poor up to our standard of living — an excellent goal in and of itself, obviously. It also insists that we don’t increase our standard of living. For a century. Which is, you know, going to be a little more difficult.

So, how is this to be achieved? Well, this is Piketty — Frogs, eh? — so it’s going to be truly swingeing taxation of anyone who puts their head up above the parapet. The global 1% in fact.

And, well, this isn’t wholly true but it’s a useful rule of thumb, the top 1% globally is about the top 10% of the UK. -Ish, you know? Somewhere just above £50k a year for an individual in the UK. £150k for a two adult w/children household perhaps. That’s the level at which the 90% income tax swinges into action.

Oh, and, lovely wealth taxes on top too.

The effect of this is to kill economic growth. That’s what it’s designed to do too. You’ve enough, you rich bourgeois bastard, you, so that’s all you’re going to get and we’re going to use punitive taxation to make sure that’s true.

Well, OK, it’s a plan, right?

June 1, 2026

Social media echo chambers

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

One of the phenomena noted about most social media platforms was the ease of creating political echo chambers that allowed (mostly) progressive views to be aired but not challenged, which convinced a lot of people that these views were far more widely held than they were. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and reduced the automatic echo chamber mechanism, many formerly happy Twitter users discovered the unpleasantness of dissenting voices (triggering a rush to Bluesky, which allowed the re-creation of those comfortable bubbles for those most distressed). Twitter, now X, has been a much better site since then:

One of the reasons X terrifies soft ideologues is that it has become one of the last places where ideas are forced to compete in the open.

I don’t block people and certainly don’t deliberately curate an echo chamber. My replies are full of people who disagree with me.

And yet every day I watch the same thing happen.

The people who spent years convinced they represented the silent majority get ratioed into the earth by ordinary Americans.

Not because of brigading, coordination, or because some shadowy force is helping.

Because their ideas suck.

That realization should horrify them. But it doesn’t, because they’re dented.

For years they mistook institutional power for public support. They confused HR departments, media outlets, universities, and bureaucracies with actual consensus.

Now the walls are gone and the ideas have to stand on their own. And many of them just can’t.

What’s happening on this platform is not the triumph of a movement. It’s the collapse of an illusion.

The worst part isn’t that they’re losing. It’s that they’re finding out how few people ever agreed with them in the first place.

May 31, 2026

Canada slips into recession: state media rally to attack official opposition

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

Even before they became explicitly subsidized presstitutes for the Liberal Party, the Canadian mainstream media have always been far more critical of conservatives, so this pivot to defend the government after official statistics show the country is in a technical recession is very much on brand:

Stuart, this is exactly the problem.

You’re acting like annualized quarter-by-quarter numbers are some exotic partisan invention. They aren’t. That is one of the standard ways GDP is reported and understood.

And the “reporter’s narrative” point is weak. The reporter framed the question as if calling it a recession was irresponsible, even though the numbers show real weakness: contraction, stalled growth, falling investment, weak productivity, and Canadians losing ground.

Pierre did what more politicians should do: he challenged the frame.

Because the frame matters.

When Conservatives warn about decline, it’s “doom”.

When Liberals preside over decline, it’s “complex global headwinds”.

When Canadians get poorer, it’s “resilience”.

When GDP shrinks, it’s “not quite the word we’d prefer today”.

Give me a break.

Canadians do not live inside a Statistics Canada footnote. They live inside rent, mortgage renewals, grocery bills, job insecurity, and taxes. Pierre is speaking to that reality.

The press gallery can massage the vocabulary all it wants. The country is weaker, poorer, less productive, and more expensive.

That is not a narrative.

That is the room.

The Liberals are getting great value for their money — well, our money — as even though the economy is tottering, media-massaged messaging is reflected in polls (feel free to doubt the accuracy of polls like this if you like):

May 19, 2026

The War People by Lucian Staiano-Daniels

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

At Dead Carl and You, Kiran Pfitzner reviews The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War and finds it has value in bringing to life some of the ordinary people involved in that bloody, interconnected series of wars that we group together as the Thirty Years’ War:

“Their word for themselves was People. Early seventeenth-century common soldiers were Die Leute, Das Volk, les gens, or la gente. They were Das Kriegsvolk, Die Kriegsleute, les gens de guerre, the War People.” So begins Lucian Staiano-Daniels’s aptly titled The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War. Using the technique of micro-history, Staiano-Daniels follows the Mansfeld regiment from its raising in 1625 to its unhappy dissolution in 1627. This unexceptional regiment is notable because of the primary source documentation that survives, specifically its original internal legal records — investigations, debts, trials, and last testaments. Through this unusually immediate resource, we gain glimpses of the reality of the 17th century common soldier and so a clearer view of the social conditions he lived within.

One way Staiano-Daniels situates this investigation is in terms of the relationship between military organization and state-building. Describing the existing historiography, he writes: “In this argument, early-modern states increased their control over their civilian populations in part to raise tax money for larger armies that were inhabited by soldiers who were themselves increasingly well-disciplined”. He instead finds, “neither an intensification of military discipline nor unadulterated thuggishness. The military community was made up of systems of relationships that were subtle, intricate, and disorganized.” (7). These findings are well evidenced, and significant, as earlier literature (drawing on more normative sources like manuals and regulations) asserted the intensification of discipline as part of the emergence of the modern state. Instead, we see states forced to engage in the paradoxically complexly and loosely organized world of the mercenary, unable in this time of crisis and state-emergence to fully subordinate the armed forces they employed.

The 17th century and the Thirty Years’ War serve as an important benchmark in understanding the development of war. In witnessing the lives of the kind of men with which wars of the 17th century were fought, we gain a greater understanding of the society that they moved in. In so doing, we can more easily conceptualize the forces that both constrained and enabled war in the 17th century, producing its particular form. This conception provides the opportunity to more easily understand war in other places and times and what conditions reduced or intensified its violence.

Reading this work as a Clausewitz scholar, I could also not help but see a connection between the culture of the war people and Clausewitz’s support for a national militia or Landwehr as a step towards more inclusive governance. There is, of course, a great distance between the unruly mercenaries of the Thirty Years’ War and the “nation in arms” envisioned by Clausewitz and the other Prussian reformers, but at its core we find a common phenomenon: the connection between military service and rights, personal and political.

This book demonstrates well the value of microhistory; in looking closely at the practices and prevalent attitudes of these soldiers of the 17th century, we gain a more concrete view of the prevailing social conditions. This is not just of interest for its own sake (as social history), but because social conditions greatly shape the practice of war, as Clausewitz tells us. This is so because social conditions both reflect and affect the political conditions that create war, as well as the political purpose that exercises a continuous influence upon it.

May 14, 2026

“Trust is the most scarce thing in the media landscape right now”

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

As with a lot of cultural upheavals, I’m a bit behind the curve on this one, so let Ted Gioia give you the state of play in “Rick Beato Versus the NY Times“:

Fifteen days ago, the New York Times published its list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Since then, all hell has broken loose in the music world. And in the last 48 hours, that Hades just got a lot hotter.

I’d been one of the 250 “music insiders” surveyed by the Times for the article — so the day after the list was published I shared my ballot here.

I was unhappy with the results, as were many other music fans. But that might have been the end of the story. Surveys are always a bit dodgy — but what can you do about it?

Then I took time to learn about the Times methodology and was even more dismayed. In fact, I was miffed.

I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics.

There never was a real vote. The Times got the results it wanted internally — the insiders made the final call. But the way they explained it to their readers was intentionally vague.

In small print, readers were told that industry experts “weighed in” — whatever that means.

Readers were invited to click on a link to learn “how we made the list”. But even here, the Times served up fuzzy language.

If you kept on reading, you eventually learned the truth. The Times took the verdict of the “experts” and then “ran it through a filter”. The survey was just a “starting point”. The actual top thirty was decided via a “conversation” among its internal team.

Huh?

The Times did share a few ballots, and even this small sample made clear how different the final list was from the survey of experts. That would be embarrassing for the Times under the best of circumstances, but especially so in the current environment — when that same newspaper has repeatedly expressed outrage about voter suppression and attempts to subvert democracy.

If the Times really believes in the importance of voting and standing by results, why doesn’t it just share the actual ballot count?

Even so, this all might have been forgotten. But last Friday, the Times made the mistake of releasing a video entitled “In Defense of the NYT ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List“.

Here members of the inside team came across as smug, maybe even contemptuous, in responding to music fans who reached out to them. At one juncture, a Times critic laughs at a comment from a reader — simply for saying that he went to the Berklee College of Music. Then he continues to chuckle and smirk as he reads the rest of the reader’s comment, before finally throwing it on the floor.

This music lover had made the mistake of defending Billy Joel. For a serious critic at the Times, that is apparently very funny.

May 4, 2026

Chief Narcissist of the Supreme Court of Canada

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, David Knight Legg explains why the Chief Justice should recuse himself from deliberation on an upcoming Supreme Court case involving the Freedom Convoy 2022:

Canada’s Chief Justice Richard Wagner has installed a lifelike bronze bust of himself in our highest court.

It should be called “Narcissus Canadiannus”

– There is no precedent for something this vulgar in the history of the Court. It should be taken down. Richard fancies himself.

– Richard also fancies his own opinion on things. He violated legal due process and the Court’s reputation by publicly accusing the Convoy — who protested backwards federal Covid policies that were soon dropped — of “anarchy” and “hostage taking”.

Now that the Convoy’s freedom of speech, assembly and due process rights have been asserted by lower courts the Supreme Court has to consider the appeal of the federal govt and weigh the rights of citizens against the decision of the federal government to impose the Emergencies Act to suspend those rights.

Wagner’s lack of judicial discretion in the first instance makes his recusal from such an important rights-defining case important because it signals not just fairness in the content of the decision but in the way the decision gets reached by the highest Court.

He has already shown his bias. Any decision against the convoy poisons the integrity of the Court if he remains present.

But Richard — the man with the bust of himself in our Court — doesn’t imagine himself under the law he imposes on others. He hasn’t completed any graduate work in law or published any academic work in law, philosophy or jurisprudence so it’s hard to know how he justifies himself in these matters.

Ironically, he has a reputation for warning others — including those far more qualified in formal jurisprudence than he is — not to critique Canadian judges like himself or their (increasingly bizarre and politicized) decisions.

But, from the Magna Carta onwards, Richard should know that in law as in politics dissent is democracy.

The dissent of the Convoy and the growing critique of Richards own bizarre behaviour and inability to articulate a judicial philosophy is exactly what’s needed to save Canada — and the Court’s reputation as a place where justice — not the ego of the Justices — is at stake.

Richard should recuse himself. And remove that vulgar bust from the Supreme Court.

#SCC #RuleOfLaw

Melanie in Saskatchewan also has concerns, expressed as an open letter to the Chief Justice:

To Chief Justice Richard Wagner,

Your refusal to recuse yourself from the Emergencies Act appeal, as reported in the National Post, is not a demonstration of judicial confidence. It is a failure of judgment at a moment that demanded restraint.

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

You have justified your decision on the basis that your prior public comments did not address the specific legal questions before the Court. That argument may satisfy a narrow, technical reading of judicial conduct. It does not satisfy the standard Canadians are entitled to expect from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

The governing principle is not whether you commented on the precise statutory interpretation of the Emergencies Act. It is whether a reasonable and informed person would conclude that your previously expressed views could influence your assessment of the case.

You publicly characterized the convoy as the “budding start of anarchy”, described residents as being “taken hostage”, and spoke in terms that conveyed clear condemnation of the events and participants. Those were not neutral observations. They were judgments about the nature, legitimacy, and perceived threat posed by the very situation now under review.

This appeal is not a retrial. It does not exist to rehear evidence or relitigate the convoy as though the past can be reset. Appellate review in Canada is focused on whether the law was correctly interpreted and properly applied to established facts, with significant deference given to the findings already made by the lower courts.

That distinction matters.

[…]

As Chief Justice, you are not merely a participant in this case. You are the steward of the reputation of the Supreme Court of Canada itself. That reputation rests not on assertions of impartiality, but on decisions that demonstrate it beyond reasonable doubt. In choosing not to recuse yourself under these circumstances, you have not strengthened that reputation. You have placed it at risk, at a time when public confidence in national institutions is already fragile. The damage may not be immediate, but it is real, and it is yours to own.

May 2, 2026

Cancelled chancellor?

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

The German Chancellor’s future looks unhappy, and eugyppius notes that even the lapdog mainstream media outlets who praised him last year are now publishing calls for his ouster:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, 5 May 2025.
Photo by Sandro Halank for Wikimedia Commons.

Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles. These kinds of chancellors will continue to exist only so long as they can be sold to the geezers of the Federal Republic’s care homes by the amateurish marketing campaigns of a complicit state media as the incarnation of far-sighted competence and (more importantly) bourgeois respectability.

Early in 2025, Merz had the chance to seize a measure of power for himself and make facts. He could have forged a deal with Alternative für Deutschland on the most important questions, established a minority government and set about force-marching the obese German state through necessary reforms. It might’ve torn his party apart, he might’ve failed, there would’ve been a huge fight, but whatever happened nobody would ever forget Chancellor Merz. Instead, the Pigeon Chancellor let a lot of deranged Antifa street protesters and screeching women with parareligious concerns about atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations dissuade him from the only reasonable path. Instead of making history, he chose to spend the first year of his chancellorship making the Social Democrats fat and happy at the expense of the nation. Most don’t even hate Merz, because hate like love has to be be earned. He inspires nothing more than mildly scornful indifference.

Everyone who was not a complete idiot knew that Merz’s mad coalition with the Social Democrats could never work. Yet the man has been lionised in the international press and even in centre-right domestic papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a serious reformer. These people told us Merz would rebuild the Bundeswehr, reduce insane social spending, impose fiscal discipline, solve the migroid problem and restore economic growth. Even if the leftoid half of the German establishment press didn’t embrace all these myths, they nevertheless worked hard to make Merz seem presentable, serious and viable. He was worth a shot, he would do his best, and after the crazy Scholz years Germany was back on solid footing.

Now, in the the space of about two weeks, the entire myth of Chancellor Merz has collapsed. Major papers that used to defend his government and praise his prospects are suddenly saying it’s over. They’re writing front-page editorials in the spirit of stuff I was posting here over a year ago. Merz appears at town-hall meetings where he gets asked how he’s made life better in Germany and before he can answer the audience just laughs at his stupid ass. His coalition partners say he’s doing a terrible job. Back-benchers from his own party are calling his political strategy a failure to his face and leaking it afterwards to the press so everyone knows what they said.

Still worse, people from the Chancellery are talking to the tabloids. They’re explaining that Merz’s government has been hanging by a thread since at least last December; that his party thinks he’s a pushover whom the SPD constantly manipulates; that often Merz just absorbs the opinions of whatever person he last talked to and so his handlers have to limit his contacts to keep him from going off-message in insane ways; that Merz is now almost totally isolated, having burned through most of his close confidants; and that nobody has any solutions or ideas and increasingly everybody doubts that the Chancellor has the talents to save himself.

April 24, 2026

Defending Heinlein and his most controversial novel – Farnham’s Freehold

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

Grammaticus Books
Published 21 Nov 2025

An indepth review of Robert A. Heinlein’s most controversial novel. A novel sometimes referred to as Science Fiction’s most controversial novel, Farnham’s Freehold.

00:00 Intro
02:30 Why I Read Farnham’s Freehold
04:33 The Plot (Spoilers)
12:48 The Critics’ Complaints
21:40 Is it A Fun Read?

My Video on Time Enough for Love:
• Heinlein’s MOST CONTROVERSIAL Novel – Time…

Update, 25 April: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

April 21, 2026

QotD: “Bibliophiles are massive losers, why can’t we just admit that?”

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

It’s a conspiracy. Every piece of worthless advice I ever hear tells me I must, “Read, read, read”. I can’t even try to listen to music on YouTube without entrepreneurs, life coaches and other snake oil salesmen popping up on shouty adverts, posing alongside other people’s Lamborghinis and Learjets, asking me to guess how many books the world’s top fifty “Super Achievers” read each year. (It’s fifty-two, conveniently.) “The more you learn, the more you earn!” these morons confidently claim. As if reading books makes you a billionaire.

I don’t buy it. I bet billionaires don’t read at all. Not only because they don’t have the time, but because every big reader I know is broke. Without exception, books have overloaded their minds, and their lives are in total disarray. When they’re not consumed by tortuous examinations of Socialist Realism in the shallower subsections of the Baltic Canal between late October 1933 and early March 1934, they’re deconstructing turgid translations of 9th Century Glagolitic poetry from the White Carpathian territories of Great Moravia. On weekends, for light relief, they dip into obscure anthologies of critically-acclaimed feminist speculative fiction championing unsung writers born in the shadow of the Chappal Waddi in the Mambilla Plateau. What should have been their office hours are spent haggling with elderly volunteers in Oxfam bookshops over worthless, dogeared volumes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s early letters or needlessly exhaustive histories of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in the Ganges-Brahmaputra basin. They own vast stacks of surplus, dust-magnet books, but they never own art, or cars, or houses. Bibliophiles are massive losers — why can’t we just admit that? There’s a clear correlation between reading and underachievement. There’s a reason homeless vagabonds line their coat pockets with paperbacks and newspapers. Our children must be warned, before it happens to them.

Reading is even less helpful to writers. If you write, you are incurably influenced by whatever garbage you happen to be reading at the time. For example, if I’m reading Hemingway, I finish this sentence here. Whereas, in the rare, transcending moments that I am reading, say, Henry James, I find, to my eternal chagrin, that I write — if, indeed, “write” is the morpheme, or mot juste, for which I rightly delve — in my lasting endeavours — my contention, if you will, against the ordained — in a spirit of refined demonstration, or braggadocio, as the case may be, that … Where was I?

Then, of course, there’s the snobbery associated with reading. “Read a book!” command the enlightened few, should you dare disagree with them on any trendy subject. It’s ridiculous, but if you read — or, better still, opine pretentiously about what you read — the chattering classes will clamber to pressgang you into their fanatical ranks. Nobody cares if you write anything, so long as you describe the latest high-status books as “vital”, “necessary”, “required”, or “essential”. Trust me, you can get away for years with pretending that you are “working on something big that I’d rather not talk about for fear of jinxing it” while freely enjoying all the wine and canapes you can stomach. But suggest you don’t read, and people quickly get suspicious.

Dominic Hilton, “All Booked Up”, The Critic, 2020-08-17.

April 19, 2026

Simple rules for judging commentary on the Iran situation

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

You’ve probably noticed that I don’t include a lot of content on Iran or Ukraine these days. That’s largely because the fog of war propaganda is too dense for much reliable information to come to us and be subject to any kind of fair analysis. Lorenzo Warby has a few rules to suggest to those of you trying to sift real information out of the noise — both specifically on the Iran conflict and also more generally for these kinds of low-signal/high-noise conflicts:

There is a lot of poor quality commentary about on the current Iran War — or, as the Chinese call it, the War in West Asia. Fortunately, there are two simple tests that winnows out much of the noise so you can focus on signal.

Locations struck by:
– United States and Israel (blue)
– Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis, and PMF (red)

First Easy Test

Would this commentator ever admit that Trump had done something positive?

If the answer is no, ignore them. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump. They are just providing anti-Trump talking points for this particular issue.

Second Easy Test

Does this commentator pay any attention to the record of the Islamic Regime? Its record of domestic repression, including various mass executions and mass killings of protesters? Its record in supporting and constructing proxies: in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria, in …? The record of those proxies and how they disrupt and degrade those countries? Its record in promoting terrorism across the globe? Its record in massive economic and environmental dysfunction …?

If the answer is no, ignore them. This is especially so if what they do comment on is Israel. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump and on Israel. They are just providing anti-Trump, anti-Israel talking points for this particular issue.

The more of a regime of internal exploitation the Islamic Regime has become, the more it has built up its proxy forces. The more it built up its proxy forces, the more disruptive and destructive it has become.

[…]

Third, More Subtle, Test

The third test is about how wars work. Does the commentator understand that good strategy in war is a decision-tree? If you do X and Y happens, then follow up with Z. If you do X and A happens, follow up with B.

If they do not understand that, if they treat successful war strategy as being able to operate according to some plan so what the opponent does in response to it does not matter, then they do not understand war, and you can ignore them.

A classic way to fail in military affairs, is to not treat military action as a decision-tree, but to continue with the previous plan of action despite some crucial change in circumstances.

April 8, 2026

QotD: Without You, There is No Us, by Suki Kim

Filed under: Asia, Books, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Without You, There is No Us, by Suki Kim. Aka A Portrait of the Basic College Girl as a Young Woman. Be advised: Be current on your blood pressure meds before you check this one out from the library. Maybe have one of those defibrillator kits on hand, because it’ll get your blood boiling like no other. Kim scams an American missionary organization into sending her to North Korea as an English teacher. She’s well aware that the organization will be destroyed when she’s exposed. She’s also well aware that the young boys she’s teaching — the sons of high Party officials — are going to face potentially lethal consequences, along with their entire families. None of that bothers her a bit. No, her main problem is that all those North Korean boys find Mx. Suki Kim so irresistibly sexy, OMG, she just can’t even.

Also note the passages about Her Relationship. That’s how she refers to the poor bastard. It’s something along those lines, I forget — maybe it’s “My Ex” — but either way, he never even gets the goddamn common courtesy of being referred to by name … because to Mx. Kim, he really doesn’t have one. He’s just another interchangeable character in the all-encompassing soap opera that is her life.

Severian, “Recommended Reading”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-09.

March 27, 2026

The Greatest Scoundrel Story Ever Written

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Humour, India — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lotuseaters Dot Com
Published 29 Nov 2025

Luca is joined by Dan to discuss Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser. They explore Fraser’s skill in writing historical fiction, the genius of the Harry Flashman character, and the sheer hilarity of the novel’s dark humour.

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