Quotulatiousness

May 10, 2026

The state of Britain – “Where did it all go wrong?”

Filed under: Britain, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Reposted from Samizdata with Patrick Crozier’s kind permission. Parallels to the same period of history here in Canada or in Australia or New Zealand should be fully evident to my fellow former colonials:

The Britain of the mid-19th Century was the greatest civilisation that has ever existed. It had a mighty empire, a mighty navy, it had wiped out the slave trade and it was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the greatest improvement in living standards in history. And now, as I write, it is hanging on by a thread: divided, debt-ridden and weak.

So, where did it all go wrong? Here – in reverse chronological order – is my list of the key dates:

2008. Reaction to the Financial Crisis.
Had the banks just been allowed to go bust and the banking regulation that reduced their numbers abolished we would not be looking at 20 lost years.

1997. Opening the borders.
Allowing the establishment of hostile communities in your country is not a good idea.

1987. Leaving the NHS untouched.
By 1987, the Thatcher government had privatised just about everything. Only the NHS and education were left. And they flunked it. Mind you it would probably have been electoral suicide.

1969. Failure to defeat the IRA.
If you reward terrorism you get more of it.
[NR: Canada did defeat the FLQ‘s campaign of terrorism and murder … and then basically conceded everything short of full independence that the FLQ had demanded. This is a classic example of winning the war but losing the peace.]

1965. Race Relations Act.
Keir Starmer is wrong. Britain does not have a “proud tradition of free speech”. But it did have some free speech. This act along with various successors outlawed some forms of speech. Those successors progressively outlawed freedom of association which might have gone a long way to taking the sting out of the Integration Crisis.
[NR: Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech seems ever more relevant to the daily lives of everyone in the west …]

1964. Abolition of the Death Penalty.
I appreciate libertarians tended to be divided on this issue. We may have a lot to say about what the law should be but very little about what should happen when it is broken. But if you are going to end a long-standing tradition it had better work. It didn’t.
[NR: I used to be fully against capital punishment. I’m much less doctrinaire about it now. Some people cannot be rehabilitated, and capital punishment is a better solution than life in prison.]

1963. Robbins Committee.
This led to the subsidisation of higher education and the subsidisation of student living costs. Where you get subsidy you get communism.
[NR: Universities have always been hotbeds of progressive thought. From the 1920s onward, they’ve been taken over by ideologues who want to utterly destroy western civilization … and we’ve been handing them ever more money to indoctrinate our young in their beliefs.]

c.1948. Ending of the right to defend oneself with a firearm.
I got this from the late Brian Micklethwait but I haven’t been able to confirm it. Brian’s point was that if you couldn’t use guns to defend yourself there was very little point in having one and so it became easy for the state to ban them.
[NR: Canada is in the middle of yet another spasm of anti-gun hysteria triggered (you saw what I did there) by events in the United States. There are hopeful signs that Canadian gun owners may yet indulge in peaceful civil disobedience over the the latest attempts to disarm us.]

1948. Nationalisation of rail.
Along with coal, steel and many others along the way. Losses, strikes, decline, waste, unemployment.
[NR: Patrick and I began communicating a few years ago when I asked him for additional information about both the 1920s forced consolidation of British railway companies into the “Big Four” and the subsequent full nationalization into British Railways. We clearly agree that this was, whatever its intentions, a bad move for both the railway companies and the nation at large.]

1947. Town & Country Planning Act.
Pretty much stopped building anywhere where people might want to live. A huge contributor to putting home ownership out of the reach of millions.
[NR: I heard much more about the zoning issue from American libertarians, but the Town and Country Planning Act was a major leap in bringing government regulation into everyday life in Britain.]

1931. Abandoning the Gold Standard.
Inflation and boom and bust became the order of the day.
[NR: In retrospect, this may have been Winston Churchill’s biggest blunder: putting Britain back on the Gold standard at the pre-WW1 rate of exchange.]

1920s. Abolition of the Poor Law.
I mean to write about this one day but TL;DR while the Poor Law had many shortcomings it did at least keep people alive while keeping the costs down.
[NR: Orwell’s eloquent writing about the plight of the poor between the wars illustrate a lot of the negatives for the jobless poor of the interwar era. Far be it from me to claim Orwell was wrong … but he didn’t show the entire picture.]

1922. Creation of the BBC.
A monopoly communist propaganda organisation using the most powerful media then in existence which non-communists were forced to pay for. What could go wrong?
[NR: The BBC was for a long time constrained in its advocacy for socialist ends, but they kicked off the traces at some point. Canadians will be more familiar with the power of state-sponsored media now that the Canadian government will be paying one-third of the salaries of all the mainstream print and broadcast media outlets … and the media have already transformed into sad parodies of Nazi German or North Korean state media.]

1920. Beginning of the War on Drugs.
Other than the crime and changes to the drugs themselves (making them more dangerous than ever), the persistent failure of the War on Drugs gave the state the excuse for ever greater assaults on civil liberties.

1918. Universal Adult Male Franchise.
This meant that people could vote themselves other people’s money. It very quickly led to the replacement of the (not very) Liberal Party by the (not-at-all liberal) Labour Party. Mind you, it should be pointed out that a lot of the damage was done well before.

1910. People’s Budget et al.
In introducing the state pension, a state GP service and unemployment benefit this laid the foundations of the Welfare State that is currently doing such a good job of bankrupting the country.

1910. Payment of MPs.
I put this one in tentatively. I would like to say it meant Members of Parliament no longer had to have made something of themselves but given that a large number of them came from rich families that is not quite true.

1906. Taff Vale Judgement.
This effectively put trade unions above the law leading to endless strikes, uncompetitiveness, industrial decline and unemployment.
[NR: This was an understandable concession when unions were all in the private sector. Now that the plurality, if not outright majority of union members are government workers …]

1890s. Death Duties.
Bit by bit this destroyed the aristocracy by forcing a fire sale every time the head of the household died. [And that did what exactly, Patrick? Summat! It did summat!]

1875. Trade Union Act.
This allowed picketting or the intimidation of non-striking workers by trade unionists. I have to thank Paul Marks for bringing this one to my attention.

1870. Forster Act.
This established state education along with all that went along with it such as indoctrination, poor quality education and the opportunity costs involved in children not being able to earn money or learn a trade.

1845. Banking Act.
This began the extension of the Bank of England’s monopoly to the whole of the country.

Anything I’ve missed?

May 9, 2026

M1E5 Experimental Paratrooper Garand

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Dec 2025

In January 1944 men of the 93rd Infantry Division field-modified an M1 to give it a shorter (18″) barrel, and the rifle was sent back to the US and tested by the Infantry Board. The idea was that a rifle like this might be of use to paratroopers, being more powerful than the M1A1 Carbine they were already using. The job of exploring the idea was given to John Garand at Springfield Armory, and he began work that same month.

One example was made in the spring of 1944, using an underfolding stock designed by Garand (for which he received a patent in 1949). It was 5″ shorts and 1.2 pounds lighter than a standard M1, but exhibited excessive blast and concussion. The initial design used the folding stock with a traditional grip, and this was found uncomfortable (no surprise there). The rifle was refitted with a rather odd steel pistol grip, but this was also not a great solution. By this time testing found the whole thing undesirable and it went no farther.

Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this truly unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts: https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
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May 8, 2026

“… without Western Civilization, we’d all still be whacking at the dirt with sticks and dying of intestinal parasites”

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

Devon Eriksen responds to someone who had a clanker generate an imaginary Aztec capital today if the Aztecs had managed to defeat Cortes and his conquistadors:

Guitars. Suits and ties. Western architecture. English and Spanish text.

What’s easy to miss is that the generative AI is making its own, separate, political statement here. Not because it intended to, but because it had no choice.

Even human creativity consists mostly of rearranging things, but AI generation is entirely that and nothing else.

So when you ask it for “modern”, it gives you “western”, because in its eyes, there is no distinction between the two. “Western” is the only “modern” that actually exists for it to draw from.

Even cultures that were capable of building an alternative version of modern, because they weren’t skinning and eating each other, and had invented the wheel, still borrowed heavily from the West, not because they couldn’t do otherwise, but because the West moved faster, and had already done the work.

So, ask an AI for “modern Aztec”, and you get English-speaking Tokyo/Venice, with browner people, pyramid reskins on skyscrapers, and some out-of-place Mayan stuff, all set to Peruvian flute music.

This is the same reason that a lot of people, most of whom really aren’t much more than LLMs themselves, say silly things like “there is no White culture” … because, like the very simple art machine, they cannot conceive of any alternative version of modernity.

So nothing is Western to them, it’s all just “modern”.

But of course it really is Western, because without Western Civilization, we’d all still be whacking at the dirt with sticks and dying of intestinal parasites.

That AI is Western, too.

QotD: North Vietnamese intelligence failures in the Tet Offensive

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

Finally, a real intelligence failure on the NVA‘s part contributed to the US failure. The main reason US analysts were sure the North Vietnamese lacked the forces was because the NVA did, in fact, lack the forces. They called Tet the “general uprising”, and they were counting on widespread popular support — including, it seems, entire ARVN units defecting. That’s the only way they’d have sufficient force to knock ARVN out of the war …

… and it didn’t happen, because they, the North Vietnamese, had faulty intel.

The Americans suffered from the “intel to order” problem too, of course, which we in the civilian world call “telling the boss what he wants to hear”. But the NVA had it much worse, since that’s a much greater structural problem among Commies. Indeed, the Americans got at least one high-level defector during Tet — a lieutenant colonel I think — who only defected because the units he was supposed to command in the “general uprising” didn’t exist. They were purely paper fantasies, straight out of some commissar’s head.

And that’s what made [US Army military analyst Joseph] Hovey’s report so easy to dismiss. Hovey himself said it — it looks like they’re planning to do X, Y, and Z, but that would only make sense if they’re making a big mistake about the balance of forces. The US had pretty good intel on the ARVN and the political mood of South Vietnam. But they for some reason assumed that the NVA had basically the same information, so all of the NVA’s calls for a general uprising — which the NVA absolutely meant, and indeed were counting on — were easy for US analysts to dismiss as mere propaganda.

Severian, “Book Rec: Tet, Intelligence Failure”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.

April 28, 2026

Is the Secret Service fit for purpose?

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

I haven’t been following the latest attempt to assassinate the President, but Mark Steyn apparently has been (even though he’s touring Ukraine at the moment):

By contrast Washington is ever more like Churchill’s riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. My conscience is clear. Almost two years ago, it was perfectly obvious to anyone who examined the facts on the ground in Butler, Pennsylvania that the United States Secret Service had an institutionalised level of incompetence and/or malevolence that was assisting those many persons anxious to kill Trump to do so. Even as mere incompetence, it is murderously so: Corey Comperatore is dead, and everyone in Butler and DC who enabled his death still has a job.

So immediately afterwards I stated the obvious:

Instead, the 47th President promoted the chap in charge in Butler that day to head of the entire Secret Service: one Sean Curran. And, on Saturday night, Mr Curran allowed the same thing that happened at Butler to happen all over again. On the incompetence front, look again at the would-be assassin breaching security with his brilliant cunning plan, requiring months of painstaking training and preparation and attention to detail, of simply running through the checkpoint:

The chaps at Kharkiv railway station are more alert than those guys. Yet setting aside the under-performance of the individual agents — close enough for government work, it seems — this ingenious manoeuvre became a critical issue mainly because, exactly as at Butler, the Secret Service had taken the decision to shrink the perimeter of the “secure zone”. In Islamabad the other day, the Pakistanis were hopeful that Vance and the Iranians would be jetting in for another round of face-to-face negotiations. So they took the precaution of ordering all the other guests out of the designated hotel: the Tehran delegation, in particular, is concerned that Netanyahu will off them while they’re in town by having Mr Moshe Wetwork check in to the junior suite on the fifth floor.

No such worries at the grisly Washington Hilton — even though half the country would be cheering on Mr Wetwork. On ABC TV, Jimmy Kimmel threw a Thursday-night “alternative” White House Correspondents Dinner at which he saluted the First Lady:

    You have the glow of an expectant widow.

I have never knowingly watched Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Colbert, whichever is which. But I’m old enough to remember when Johnny Carson in 1981 told Nancy Reagan and indeed when Steve Allen in 1901 told Ida McKinley that they had the glow of expectant widows.

Oh, wait, no. Neither Johnny nor Steve did that. Because, back in 1981 and 1901, America still had sufficient of what the late Roger Scruton called the “pre-political we” to recognise that assassination fantasies are not helpful to a functioning polity.

Alas, the role that in other western nations has to be outsourced to Muslim rape gangs and low-IQ child-stabbers and sundry novelty demographics is in America performed by showbiz bigshots, NPR ladies d’un certain âge, and pajama boys with a quarter mil in college debt.

That, however, is a given. What ought not to be a given is that the Secret Service is on their side. At Butler, Mr Curran and his colleagues shrunk the perimeter so that it excluded an easily accessible roof with a clear line to Trump’s head. At the Washington Hilton, Mr Curran and his colleagues shrunk the perimeter to the event room and its immediate approach. In the usual tedious “manifesto”, the would-be killer nevertheless noted that the security was so “insanely” bad they must be “pranking” him:

    What the hell is the Secret Service doing..?

    Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.

    What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.

    No damn security.

    Not in transport.

    Not in the hotel.

    Not in the event.

    Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.

    The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.

    Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.

    Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.

    Actually insane.

So, once he’d run through the security line, he was able to get into the same men’s room that the entire cabinet had to use. Had RFK or Pete Hegseth felt the urge before settling in for a night of long speeches, the headlines this weekend would have been very different. Half the presidential line of succession was in there. That’s what the geopolitical types call, if you remember, a “decapitation strategy”. Except you don’t need a bunker buster, just some California doofus willing to take a run at the checkpoint — and bingo, whoever the Secretary of the Interior is winds up like some z-list ayatollah.

On a lighter note, Daniel Jupp imagines what Trump-haters might be thinking in the wake of another progressive would-be assassin’s attempt:

MAINSTREAM media and politicians throughout the Western world who insist on calling Trump a fascist, a dictator, a threat to democracy, and literally Hitler, declared a three-hour moratorium on insulting him before they raced to try to escape any responsibility.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out to President Trump and his family while we write an article claiming the assassin is a Republican and it’s actually Trump’s fault”, announced the BBC. “Our viewers should be reassured that we ARE doctoring footage.”

“Violence has no place in politics when it fails”, Ed Davey, leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats intoned.

Religious leaders condemned the rise of populism and white supremacy that fuels such attacks.

“We must have unity, Christian compassion even for those who don’t deserve it, and come together in kindness. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword at some point”, Pope Leo wisely reflected.

“Where is this violence coming from?” wailed the Associated Press. The news agency issued a statement reminding people that assassinations should be attempted only in settings where misses, ricochets and other deaths could not possibly include any of their journalists. “A Correspondents’ Dinner is simply not the place for this sort of thing.”

March 30, 2026

Canada’s immigration fraud system

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

As Alexander Brown points out, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, and Canada’s immigration system produces vast amounts of fraudulent immigrants with only token attempts to detect and punish it. So Canada actually has an Immigration Fraud System, because that is what it does:

Let’s be clear about immigration fraud.

It started at the top. It was on purpose. And it’s still happening on purpose.

After a week of damning reports, and even a craven disregard for a return to decency, it has become abundantly clear that the government’s much-touted “reforms” are more about managing political perception than fixing a broken system. Behind the rhetoric lies a reality of widespread fraud, a continued lack of oversight, and an immigration department which has lost even greater control of its own bastardized mandate.

One of the most glaring failures has been the confirmed explosion of fraud within the international student program. Earlier this week, a scathing report from the Auditor General revealed that the IRCC failed to investigate the vast majority of cases flagged for potential fraud or non-compliance. Out of 153,000 cases identified in 2023 and 2024, only about 4,000 investigations were actually launched — a measly 2.6%. Even more troubling, 40% of these investigations were simply dropped because the students didn’t bother to respond to emails.

Speak to industry insiders and they’ll tell you that a “pay-to-play” market ran rampant between the years of 2021-2024, almost entirely on the basis of an understanding that fraudulent letters of acceptance, through equally dodgy institutions, would not be investigated through official immigration channels.

Let us not forget, even Ontario Premier Doug Ford touted this unvetted explosion — the worst policy decision in our nation’s history — as a success story. And yes, his office assisted in building for Conestoga, the worst offender of all the nation’s illegitimate institutions.

This culture of non-enforcement extends to the asylum system, which has seen a massive surge in claims. Since 2015, the backlog of refugee claimants has grown by a staggering 2,900%. While the government speaks of protecting the “vulnerable,” critics (read: normal people with morals and scruples) point out that the system is being exploited by those using it as a legal strategy to stall their removal from Canada. International students have spammed asylum claims after striking out in the labour force, making the trend so obvious that even then-immigration minister Marc Miller admitted it “[didn’t] smell good.”

Record levels of asylum fraud, in the six figures, is no mere matter of paperwork. The programme has become the safe haven for serial extortionists, varying degrees of triggermen from the Indian subcontinent, and those who have exploited a key loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement: Canadian judges no longer care to enforce the law.

March 29, 2026

The collapse of the Afghan National Army in 2021 was inevitable

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort explains why the way that soldiers were required to cover up ANA shortcomings or even blatantly lie about the ANA’s military capabilities show that collapse was inevitable once western forces began to pull out:

A Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter appears over the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, 15 Aug 2021. Image from Twitter via libertyunyielding.com

I always get confused when I hear people say they never saw the collapse of the Afghan military coming.

Anyone who’s been on the ground with them knew this.

I saw an entire ANA battalion with modern American equipment get pinned down by 3 Taliban with AKs. Begging me for air support.

How was this a surprise?

And further:

When it came to partnering with Afghans, I was actually convinced for awhile that their failure was my fault. Why? Because that’s what our superiors told us.

I remember giving honest assessments in formal reports about the capabilities of Afghans. It led to many confrontations with superiors across different tours.

“You can’t write that they don’t do X, Y, or Z in this SITREP. Don’t you know every failure is yours and every success is theirs?”

That was the mantra. Every failure was ours and every success theirs. And I believed it.

The military intellectual crowd was in charge at the time. The ones who hate us now for noticing their inadequacies.

The ones who made us think that we could succeed if we made just one more measure of performance and measure of effectiveness to implement.

Maybe we could make that barbarian culture better by just doing one more intellectual thing.

No. And it’s those same people who punished us for telling the truth. And they should be shamed for it in perpetuity.

Senior leaders in 2021 acted stunned at how the Afghans fell so fast. Nobody could believe it.

Maybe they were stunned because the truth had been filtered for decades. Laundered. And for what?

Lies. All lies. And they were peddled by the most “intelligent” military leaders among us.

So if you’re part of that crowd and are now uncomfortable with the current backlash from “idiots” like me. I simply ask, why?

You earned it.

Forcing subordinates to lie doesn’t change the reality they’re trying to inform you about, it just makes the point where reality asserts itself that much more surprising and painful. True in business, especially true in the military.

Update, 31 March: 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.

March 28, 2026

Noelia Castillo Ramos, RIP

Filed under: Europe, Health, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Celina provides the background information you certainly won’t get from skimming the mainstream media’s coverage of the death of twenty-five year old Noelia Castillo Ramos:

This is how broken the West has become. On Thursday, March 26, 2026, in a clinically sterile room within an assisted living facility in Barcelona, Spain, the government executed a twenty five year old paralysed rape victim. Her name was Noelia Castillo Ramos.1 Noelia did not die of a terminal illness, nor did she pass away from natural causes. Rather, she was administered a lethal injection by the Spanish state that had dismantled her family, forced her into a hostile and horribly dangerous environment, ignored her horrific violation, and ultimately deemed her broken existence too inconvenient to maintain.2

A still from Noelia Castillo’s Antena 3 interview on March 24.

While Noelia Castillo’s heart was stopped by a cocktail of state-sponsored chemicals, the unvetted migrant men who gang-raped her, shattered her mind, and drove her to fling herself from a fifth-floor window continue to walk the streets of Europe, entirely shielded from justice. They faced zero consequences. She faced the death penalty.

These were the last words that her grandmother said to Noelia: “I love you, my girl; someday we will be together again”.

The fate of Noelia Castillo stands as a single almost perfect, undeniable illustration of everything that is broken, evil, and actively suicidal about modern Western society under progressive, woke, open-border, and secular-left governance. Progressive Europe has functionally and legally decided that native European women and girls are a disposable commodity, just collateral damage in the grand suicidal project of multiculturalism.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_of_Noelia_Castillo
  2. https://www.v2radio.co.uk/news/v2-radio-world-news/gang-rape-victim-25-to-be-euthanised-after-fathers-legal-challenge-fails/

March 26, 2026

QotD: “Instead of the unsinkable battleship we have the unsinkable Military Expert …”

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

One way of feeling infallible is not to keep a diary. Looking back through the diary I kept in 1940 and 1941 I find that I was usually wrong when it was possible to be wrong. Yet I was not so wrong as the Military Experts. Experts of various schools were telling us in 1939 that the Maginot Line was impregnable, and that the Russo-German Pact had put an end to Hitler’s eastwards expansion; in early 1940 they were telling us that the days of tank warfare were over; in mid 1940 they were telling us that the Germans would invade Britain forthwith; in mid 1941 that the Red army would fold up in six weeks; in December 1941, that Japan would collapse after ninety days; in July 1942, that Egypt was lost and so on, more or less indefinitely.

Where now are the men who told us those things? Still on the job, drawing fat salaries. Instead of the unsinkable battleship we have the unsinkable Military Expert …

George Orwell, “As I Please”, Tribune, 1943-12-17.

Update, 27 March: 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.

March 21, 2026

Colt LE-901 Modular Multi-Caliber AR: A Well-Designed Failure

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Oct 2025

Colt originally developed the 901 as part of the US Army SCAR program, with the intention being to create a 7.62x51mm rifle that could also use unmodified 5.56x45mm upper assemblies. This would allow special operations units to customize a single weapon to a variety of different configurations for different mission profiles. Mechanically, the system Colt devised to do this was quite clever, and very effective. However, the rifle ultimately failed to win a military contract.

Moved to civilian sales, the system was unsuccessful fundamentally because the modular concept is just not very desirable. A single modular rifle like this inevitably sacrifices some capability in every specific configuration in exchange for the modular capability and most people would rather have two dedicated rifles in different configurations than one swappable one. It sounds appealing on paper, but almost always fails economically in practice.
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January 24, 2026

QotD: General Electric

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

If you were to pick one company that symbolizes how America has changed and been changed over the last half century or so, it would be General Electric. The company founded by Thomas Edison is in many ways a microcosm of the American economy over the last century or more. It rose to become an industrial giant in the 20th century, the symbol of America manufacturing prowess. It then transformed into a giant of the new economy in the 1990’s, a symbol of the new America.

Today, General Electric is a company in decline. After a series of problems following the financial crisis of 2008, the company has steadily sold off assets and divisions in an effort to fix its financial problems. In 2019, Harry Markopolos, the guy who sniffed out Bernie Madoff, accused them of $38 billion in accounting fraud. The stock has been removed from the Dow Jones Industrial composite. […] General Electric transformed from a company that made things into a financial services company that owned divisions that made things. Like the American economy in the late 20th century, the company shifted its focus from making and creating things to the complex game of financializing those processes.

Like many companies in the late 20th century, General Electric found that their potential clients were not always able to come up with the cash to buy their products, so they came up with a way to finance those purchases. This is an age-old concept that has been with us since the dawn of time. Store credit is a way for the seller to profit from the cash poor in the market. He can both raise his price and also collect interest on the payments made by his customers relying on terms.

For American business, this simple idea turned into a highly complex process, involving tax avoidance strategies and the capitalization of the products and services formerly treated as business expenses. Commercial customers were no longer buying products and services, but instead leasing them in bundled services packages, financed at super-low interest rates and tax deductible. Whole areas of the supply chain shifted from traditional purchases to leased services.

[…]

That is the real lesson of General Electric. The company became something like the old Mafia bust-outs. The whole point of the business was to squeeze every drop of value from clients and divisions. Instead of running up the credit lines and burning down the building for the insurance, General Electric turned the human capital of companies into lease and interest payments. They were not investing and creating, they were monetizing and consuming whatever it touched. […] The cost of unwinding the company back into a normal company will be high, maybe too high for them to survive. The same can be said of the American economy. It will have to be unwound, but there will be no bailout. Instead, it will have to unwind quickly and painfully, in order to become a normal economy again. [NR: According to Wiki, “GE Aerospace, the aerospace company, is GE’s legal successor. GE HealthCare, the health technology company, was spun off from GE in 2023. GE Vernova, the energy company, was founded when GE finalized the split. Following these transactions, GE Aerospace took the General Electric name and ticker symbols, while the old General Electric ceased to exist as a conglomerate.“]

The Z Man, “GE: The Story Of America”, The Z Blog, 2020-06-29.

January 23, 2026

The Rise and Fall of Watneys – human-created video versus AI slop

Filed under: Britain, Business, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

YouTuber Tweedy Misc released what he believed was the first attempt to discuss Watneys Red Barrel, the infamous British beer that triggered the founding of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). His video didn’t show up in my YouTube recommendations, but a later AI slop video that clearly used Tweedy’s video as fodder did get recommended and I even scheduled it for a later 2am post because it seemed to be the only one on the topic. I’m not a fan of clanker-generated content, but I was interested enough to set my prejudices aside for a treatment of something I found interesting. Tweedy’s reaction video, on the other hand, did appear in my recommendations a few weeks later, and I felt it deserved to take precedence over the slop:

And here’s the AI slop video if you’re interested:

Dear Old Blighty
Published Dec 20, 2025

Discover how Watneys Red Barrel went from Britain’s biggest-selling beer to its most hated pint in just a few short years. This video explores how corporate brewing, keg beer, and ruthless pub control nearly destroyed traditional British ale, sparked a nationwide consumer revolt, and gave birth to CAMRA. From Monty Python mockery to boycotts in local pubs, Watneys became a national punchline and a cautionary tale in business failure. Learn how one terrible beer accidentally saved British brewing culture, revived real ale, and reshaped how Britain drinks forever.

#Watneys #BritishBeer #UKNostalgia #RealAle #CAMRA #BritishPubs #RetroBritain #LostBrands #BeerHistory #DearOldBlighty

January 21, 2026

QotD: White elephant airports

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Germany, Government, History, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Few things capture modern planning like a multibillion-dollar airport no one’s entirely sure will have any planes. Enter Western Sydney International Airport (WSI), Australia’s shiny $5 billion gamble at Badgerys Creek. It’s a development so hyped it already has merch, an anticipated metro line, and a better skincare routine than most of us, despite rumors it may spend its first year servicing only freight and the occasional confused ibis.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that airports, like wrinkle creams which cost the GDP of a small country but couldn’t iron out a bedsheet, can be wildly overpromised and underdelivered. Western Sydney’s runway might yet join the vainglorious global herd of White Elephant Airports: majestic, expensive, and standing alone in a field wondering where everyone went.

Let’s take a safari.

Mirabel: Montreal’s Monument to Inconvenience

Built in 1975, Mirabel International was meant to replace Montreal’s Dorval Airport and usher in a new aviation era. Instead, it became the architectural embodiment of “We should’ve checked the map”. Located more than 50 kilometers from the city, it was so unpopular that passengers would rather fling themselves onto dogsleds than make the commute.

Eventually, Mirabel stopped pretending to be an airport and transitioned into its second act: a car-racing track and film set. Somewhere in Quebec there’s probably still a baggage carousel being used as a wedding dance floor.

Ciudad Real: A Billion-Euro Garage Sale

Spain saw Mirabel and said, “Hold my sangria”. Ciudad Real International Airport opened in 2009 with a €1.1 billion price tag, dreams of high-speed rail links, and the confidence of a Bachelor contestant in week one. Within three years, it had no flights, no buyers, and no shame.

It was eventually auctioned for €10,000, less than a parking space in Bondi or a bottle of champagne at a Sydney rooftop bar. One imagines the bidding process was just two blokes shrugging in a room and someone whispering, “Ten grand and a paella voucher?”

Berlin Brandenburg: German Efficiency, But Make It Chaos

If you’ve ever wanted to see what happens when a nation famous for precision tries on farce, just pay a visit to Berlin Brandenburg Airport. Construction began in 2006, with an opening scheduled for 2011. By 2015, it was such a national embarrassment that Berliners stopped making jokes about British plumbing to recover emotionally.

In 2020, it finally launched amid the global COVID pandemic, after delays caused by faulty fire systems, suspicious cables, and the ghost of every German engineer pacing in dismay.

Nicole James, “Australia’s New Albino Elephant Sanctuary (Now with Parking)”, The Freeman, 2025-10-16.

January 20, 2026

The US Navy’s twenty years to forget

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander takes a wincing glance back at the ship development programs the US Navy planned to implement early in the 2000s and how they all failed to meet even minimal expectations:

20 years seems like a long time, but in many ways it is not. As we look forward to what our fleet will look like at mid-century, we should look back to what we were all promised in January of 2005 that was going to transform into the Navy of the 21st century.

There were four ship classes that were going to be the surface fleet that we were promised at the time, were going to ensure America’s dominance at sea for the next half century.

(NB: most of the hypertext links below go to the tags from my OG Blog that predate my move to Substack three years ago. Those will point you towards my writing two decades ago or so on these programs at the time, if you are so interested.)

LCS. We were once supposed to get 55 of the marketing/consultancy-named Littoral Combat Ship. We’ll wind up with 25. Not suitable for combat in the littorals, but steps are being made to get some use out of them … somehow.

DDG-1000. We were once going to have 32 of these. We got three. Its main weapon, the two 155mm guns, were never made operational and are being removed. The ships are being turned into weapons demonstrators for Conventional Prompt Strike. I hear great things about the engineering plant, but they have yet to do a proper deployment, nine and a half years after the commissioning of hull-1.

Ford Class CVN. A dozen years ago, we thought it would deploy with UAVs as you can see below (pause for a moment in honor of the martyred X-47B, the greatest crime of the Obama Era Navy), but no. Hull-1 took 8 years to commission. Hull-2 will take 12. Can’t seem to have a workable CHT system.

CG(X). In 2005, we thought we would build at least 19. Complete loss of control of the program to the point it was put out of its misery. We still don’t have a proper carrier escort. Looks like the Japanese will build what we should have, and the only hope we have now is … BBG-1.

Why dig all this institutional shame and dishonor up, again? Simple, we need to be humble, and the leaders today need to hoist onboard the errors of the past.

Now, back to last week. For our fleet of the 2030s and on to face the world’s largest navy (in 2005 it was the US Navy. Now it is the People’s Liberation Army Navy. Well done everyone), there are three ships right now that we have to ponder as our future surface force.

January 18, 2026

“Voluntary”. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

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

The federal government, rather than abandoning its ridiculous and ineffective “voluntary” firearm buyback program, is determined to carry on:

🇨🇦 The “Voluntary” Trap: Ottawa’s Buyback Is Coercion, Not Consent 🇨🇦
by GoC Admins

The federal government unveiled the next phase of its firearms confiscation program on Saturday, insisting, yet again, that the process is “voluntary”. But as the details emerge, that claim collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

What the government is offering Canadians is not a choice. It is a trap designed to force compliance through financial coercion and the threat of criminal prosecution.

Beginning January 19, licensed firearm owners will be contacted by the National Firearms Centre and invited to voluntarily declare their property. The declaration period runs until March 31, 2026. Those who comply may receive compensation. Those who do not will be required to surrender, deactivate, or export their legally acquired property before the amnesty expires on October 30, 2026, or face criminal charges for illegal possession.

That is not voluntary. That is coercion dressed in bureaucratic language.

The “Voluntary” Deadline Is a Financial Squeeze
The most manipulative aspect of this program is its timeline.

The government has set the amnesty to expire on October 30, 2026, but the window to declare firearms for compensation closes seven months earlier, on March 31, 2026. Owners who wait to see whether a future election, court ruling, or policy reversal intervene are punished for doing so.

This gap is not accidental. It predictably pressures owners to act early, before political uncertainty can resolve itself.

If you wait until the summer or fall of 2026 to see whether the law changes, you will have missed the compensation window entirely. At that point, your only options will be to surrender your property for free or face criminal liability.

Yes, owners can technically wait until October 30, 2026, but only if they are willing to receive nothing in return.

That is not a voluntary choice. It is a financial ultimatum.

🇨🇦 Surrender First, Get Paid … Maybe 🇨🇦

Perhaps the most astonishing revelation from the government’s announcement is that declaring your firearms does not guarantee compensation.

Payment will be issued on a “first-come, first-served” basis, subject to available funding.

In any other context, forcing people to surrender lawfully acquired property without guaranteed compensation would violate basic principles of fairness and due process. Under this program, owners are asked to declare thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars’ worth of property with no legal assurance that the money to compensate them actually exists.

If the budget runs dry, you are still left holding a prohibited firearm you must destroy or surrender. The cheque may never come.

Compliance is mandatory. Compensation is optional.

🇨🇦 A Pilot Project That Already Failed 🇨🇦

Ottawa insists this national rollout will succeed, despite the fact that the pilot version of this program was an embarrassment.

Public reporting indicates that when the government tested the scheme in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, it resulted in the collection of approximately 25 firearms from just 16 individuals. After millions spent on administration, IT systems, and police coordination, only a handful of people participated.

If this were a private-sector initiative, it would have been cancelled outright. Instead, the government is expanding it nationwide without addressing the structural failures that doomed the pilot from the start.

🇨🇦 It’s Not About Safety; It’s About Control 🇨🇦

The government inadvertently revealed its true motivation when officials remarked that they do not want owners using compensation money to “buy an SKS”.

This statement exposes the emptiness of the public-safety argument.

The SKS is already licensed, regulated, and subject to existing Canadian firearms law. By acknowledging that owners might simply replace prohibited firearms with other legal ones that function similarly, the government is admitting that the bans are arbitrary.

The objective is not to remove a particular mechanical risk from society. It is to financially exhaust and discourage lawful firearm ownership altogether.

This program is not designed to stop criminals. Criminals do not declare firearms. Criminals do not comply with amnesty deadlines. Criminals do not interact with government portals.

Only compliant, vetted, RCMP-checked Canadians do.

🇨🇦 The Deadlines Are Real. The Logic Is Not 🇨🇦

Government officials closed their announcement by warning Canadians that “the deadlines are real”.
They are right about that.

The government is fully prepared to criminalize people who followed every rule it imposed. People who acquired their property legally, stored it safely, and harmed no one. It is prepared to spend billions enforcing a program that criminals will ignore entirely.

This is not a buyback. It is not voluntary. It is a forced surrender program aimed at the easiest possible target: responsible firearm owners.

While those driving Canada’s violent crime problem continue entirely outside the scope of this policy, law-abiding citizens are left facing a stark reality: Comply now, or be punished later.

History will judge this program not by its press releases, but by its results. And all available evidence suggests it will deliver exactly what it already has: massive cost, deepened division, and no measurable improvement in public safety.

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