Quotulatiousness

December 26, 2025

The US-Mexican border

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

An amusing exchange on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

    Ordnance Jay Packard Esq. @OrdnancePackard

    Hey @LineGoesDown, interesting your little map includes the Comancheria, a vast section of that northern green area that Mexico never set foot in because they’d get their shit pushed in by the Comanche.

    It was only after the Mexican-American war that the United States put a stop to the Comanche using Mexico like an ATM.

It’s actually even funnier than that.

The reason Mexicans kept getting their shit pushed in by the Comancheria was gun control.

No, seriously. It was Spanish colonial policy to keep the population disarmed and rely entirely on deployment of the military to keep order and prevent Indian incursions. Mexico inherited this.

This was impossible. The land was vast. State capacity and the military were overstretched. The Comanches were too mobile. Result: misery and massacre.

Americans, inheriting the British colonial policy of everybody bring your own guns and form militias, didn’t suffer as badly. Raiders more often went where the soft targets were, and that meant the disarmed ones in the Mexican zone.

This is also why Alta California was so sparsely settled that Spanish and Mexican control over it was at best nominal. Anglo settlers were culturally and politically much better equipped to hold the territory, making the Mexican session eventually inevitable.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-25.

Update, 28 December: 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 Substackhttps://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 22, 2025

Why did the US Enter WW1?

The Great War
Published 11 Jul 2025

In early 1917, the United States was still neutral in the First World War. Meanwhile, German leaders were getting desperate — if they couldn’t find a way to break the war of attrition on the Western Front, the Allies would probably defeat them. The result was multiple gambles that staked everything on a quick victory with the risk of drawing the US into the war.
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October 16, 2025

The Mexican-American War 1846-48

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

Real Time History
Published 16 May 2025

In the early 19th century, the United States and Mexico share a massive cross-continental border, but US settlement in Mexico, expansionist ideals and religious differences put the young republics on a collision course. As tensions boil over into bloodshed, the tiny, inexperienced US army marches to a war which will forge the modern United States.

Chapters:
00:00 Texas Republic
05:06 Declaration of War
07:03 The US Army
09:26 British Muskets in the Mexican Army
16:19 The Mexican Army
18:24 The Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma
21:38 California and New Mexico
25:11 US Volunteers
28:40 Battle of Monterrey
33:03 Expanding the War
36:59 The Pedregal Battles
40:18 Battles for Mexico City
43:42 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
45:14 Legacy
(more…)

September 22, 2025

The Liberals fervently believe that saying something is the same as doing something

One of the most irritating aspects of Justin Trudeau’s long reign of error was his evident joy in making announcements about this or that topic. It got to the point that even the pro-Liberal media started to notice that the same policy would be announced several times over a few months but no actual progress was made (except where they could start setting up a new government program … they’d hire the staff very quickly, but little or nothing would get done beyond that). Mark Carney was supposed to be a clean break from the Trudeau years — even though most of his ministers were Trudeau retreads — but Carney may actually be worse than Trudeau in that he just loves photo ops with pretty props for the cameras. As Dr. Sylvain Charlebois notes, we need a lot fewer photogenic Potemkin Villages in how our federal government operates:

In recent weeks, we have witnessed politicians lean on powerful visuals to make their case on food and trade. But these staged moments rarely serve the public interest. Worse, they often deepen food illiteracy in a country where understanding how our system works is already fragile.

Take Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s stunt. Upset with Diageo’s decision to close its bottling plant in Ontario, he theatrically dumped a bottle of Crown Royal and urged Ontarians to boycott the brand. What he didn’t mention is that the bottle in question was made in Manitoba and bottled in Quebec by unionized Canadian workers — jobs unaffected by the Ontario closure. The Windsor facility mainly serviced the U.S. market, and Diageo’s decision was years in the making. Ironically, the boycott risks punishing Canadian workers who will continue producing Crown Royal for Canadians. And for future investors, the message is chilling: why put capital into Ontario if a government will trash your brand on television for a corporate restructuring decision?

The federal stage brought us another head-scratcher. During a trade visit to Mexico, Prime Minister Mark Carney posed with bags of Canadian wheat stamped with a maple leaf. The problem? Canada doesn’t export wheat in bags. We are among the most efficient bulk grain exporters in the world, shipping millions of tonnes through rail networks and ocean vessels designed for efficiency, safety, and traceability. Bagged wheat is a relic of less mechanized economies. For Canada to present itself this way trivializes our status as a modern agri-food powerhouse. Beyond being misleading, the image suggests to global partners that our system is less advanced than it truly is — a dangerous misrepresentation for a nation that depends on reputation as much as price.

Even I didn’t realize how bad it got until the feds paid contractors to put up a fake building site for Mark Carney to pose in front of, then tore it all down:

September 15, 2025

The Cold War in Latin America Begins: Coups, Communists, and Castro – W2W 44

Filed under: Americas, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 14 Sept 2025

Spy rings, covert operations, coups, street violence, and sudden regime changes. This is the turmoil that awaits Latin America after the Second World War. As new ideas from the East gain momentum, the United States tries to hold on to its role as the region’s self-appointed guardian. Which side will ultimately shape the future of this rich and populous region?
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March 2, 2025

The Mexican Revolution – Bandits Turned Heroes

The Great War
Published 11 Oct 2024

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 was a conflict of shifting alliances and assassinations, peasant revolutionaries, an attack on US soil, and US intervention in Mexico. The decade of struggle cost hundreds of thousands of lives, resulted in new constitutions and governments, and — for some at least — turned bandits into heroes.
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February 5, 2025

Trump tariff diary, day 4

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

The Big Orange Meanie and the Little Potato had a phone call, after which the BOM announced a 30-day delay to the imposition of tariffs. In Canada, all of “peoplekind” were relieved to hear that they won’t have to give up their American-made binkies quite yet. Some appropriate snark from The Free Press:

It was actually a phone call between the BOM and the Little Potato, but we can imagine this is what it would have looked like in person.

Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum Speedy Gonzales’d her way to a deal with Trump yesterday, promising to deploy 10,000 Mexican troops to the border to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs. In return, Trump agreed to pause his 25 percent tariff on goods coming from south of the border. Soon after, he struck a seemingly identical deal with Justin Trudeau, who said he’d appoint a “fentanyl czar” and promised to send 10,000 Canadian troops to the northern border. Who knew they even had that many?! Tariffs will still be levied against Chinese goods starting today, but Trump says he plans to talk with President Xi Jinping as soon as this week.

The FP isn’t wrong … the Canadian Army doesn’t have 10,000 spare troops just hanging around their barracks who could be sent to the border, so it’s much more likely to be a combination of Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) agents, RCMP officers, provincial police (if the respective provinces are willing), and whatever the army can spare. (Trudeau refers only to “nearly 10,000 frontline personnel”, not “troops” as a lot of US reports state … that seems a lot more achievable.)

You may be wondering how the US President has such disruptive and antagonistic tools at his disposal. It’s yet another hangover from the Carter years, as Congress delegated these powers to the president in 1977:

Donald Trump as Napoleon the 47th.
Image generated by Grok.

The emerging on-off-on-off trade war between Canada and the United States has everyone asking “How should we fight?” — understandably enough — but we should not move too quickly beyond the question “How is this literal nonsense at all possible?” How did the U.S. Congress’s clearly specified constitutional power to regulate the country’s commerce with foreign nations fall into naked and unapologetic decrepitude? Why is every new American president now a Napoleon, and why isn’t this at all a political issue in the U.S.?

The American Constitution, it seems, has no political party apart from a handful of cranky, tireless libertarians like Gene Healy, Clyde W. Crews or Ilya Somin, who has a new article spitballing possible litigation approaches for Americans who lie in the path of the tariffs now being wishcasted into existence by Napoleon the 47th. Somin explains that President Donald Trump is using an openly contrived “national emergency” to invoke powers delegated to the White House by Congress in 1977, powers that are to be invoked only in the face of “unusual and extraordinary threats” to the Republic.

Since the president apparently has plenary power to define an emergency, and to do so without offering anything resembling a rational explanation, this act of Congress now appears to be less of a delegation and more of a surrender — a total abandonment of constitutional principle and the classical separation of powers. I pause to observe that the cheeks every Canadian should redden with slight shame at the spectacle of frivolous recourse to the law of emergencies causing obvious and sickening injury to the rule of law in the U.S. (Oh, no, that could never happen here!)

August 28, 2024

H.R. McMaster dishes on Trump’s first term in office

In Reason, Liz Wolfe covers some of the head-scratchers former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster revealed about working for Donald Trump:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

What might a second Trump White House be like? In his new book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as national security adviser to Donald Trump (for one year), characterizes Oval Office meetings as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” where advisers would greet him with lines like “your instincts are always right” or “no one has ever been treated so badly by the press”.

Trump, meanwhile, would come up with crazy concepts, and float them: “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” (Also: “Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?”)

This is one man’s account, of course. McMaster’s word should not be taken as gospel, and some of his frustration might stem from his dismissal, or his foreign-policy prescriptions being at times ignored by his boss. But it’s a somewhat revealing look behind the curtain at policy-setting in a White House helmed by an especially mercurial commander in chief, who “enjoyed and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and across the administration”.

It also shows how quickly Trump fantasies have percolated through the Republican Party, namely the “let’s just bomb Mexico to get rid of the cartels” line, which Trump has been toying with since roughly 2019 (or possibly more like 2017, after he chatted with Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, who had promised to kill 100,000 drug traffickers during his first six months as president). A few years prior, in 2015, he had suggested that Mexico was sending rapist and drug-traffickers across the southern border, and that we’d need to build a wall between the two countries, but it wasn’t until nine American citizens were killed in Mexico that Trump trotted out the idea of declaring cartels foreign terrorist organizations and using military might to eradicate them.

Trump’s line from 2019 has now become standard fare, notes The Economist: The Republican primary debates included lots of tough talk on Mexico, specifically on the bombing front, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claiming he’d send special forces down there on Day One. Right-wing think tanks have embraced the messaging, with articles headlined “It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels”. Taking cues from other members of her party, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene asked why “we’re fighting a war in Ukraine, and we’re not bombing the Mexican cartels”. Whether it’s economic protectionism (10 percent across-the-board tariffs, with 60 percent tariffs imposed on Chinese imports) or Mexico-bombing, Trump has near-magical abilities to get other members of his party to accept something previously regarded as absurd.

June 3, 2024

18th Century Spiced Hot Chocolate

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Feb 23, 2024

Rich, thick, dark hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon and cardamom

City/Region: England
Time Period: 1747

Up until the 19th century, the most popular way to partake of chocolate was to drink it. Aztecs drank a very bitter chocolate, and when Europeans brought it back home, they paved the way for one of the most perfect of food pairings: chocolate and sugar.

This hot chocolate is fairly dark, so feel free to add more sugar if that’s to your taste. It’s super rich and much thicker than most hot chocolates you’d get today, so you may only want to make a small amount of the drink and save the rest of the chocolate for later. The spices jump out at you, and even though mine still had a bit of grittiness from the cocoa nibs (it’s basically impossible to get it completely smooth at home), it was really, really good.
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February 29, 2024

Arizona GOP pushes to legalize hunting down suspected illegal immigrants with deadly force! Film at 11!

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

Chris Bray reports on this utterly abhorrent piece of proposed legislation that will literally condemn any brown person in the state of Arizona to be murdered out of hand by evil red-hatted Trump supporters … or will it?

Republicans in the Arizona legislature have advanced a bill that would allow anyone in the state to just casually gun down any migrant anytime they feel like that filthy brown person might be trespassing. You can trust that this is really happening, because it’s in the news.

Delightfully, Axios reporter April Rubin trained at the New York Times. Here’s how she starts this story:

    Arizona Republicans are advancing a bill that would allow people to legally kill someone accused of attempting to trespass or actively trespassing on their property.

    The big picture: The legislation, which is expected to be vetoed if it reaches the state’s Democratic governor, would legalize the murder of undocumented immigrants, who often have to cross ranches that sit on the state’s border with Mexico.

These monsters, they’re legalizing the murder of undocumented migrants.

So, as always, let’s read the actual bill:

A person in lawful possession of property can threaten deadly force, or potentially use deadly force, in response to an act of criminal trespassing: You can go out on your property with a gun and tell a trespasser to get lost.

But Subsection B is the key to the actual use of deadly force, and journalists aren’t saying anything about it (emphasis added): “A person may use deadly physical force under subsection A only in the defense of himself or third persons as described in sections 13-405 and 13-406,” existing sections of Arizona state law. The bill explicitly references an existing legal standard for the use of deadly force.

February 22, 2024

Allied War Crimes, Latin American Troops, and Top-Secret Proximity Fuzes – WW2 – OOTF 033

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 21 Feb 2024

Did the Western Allies commit war crimes? What did Latin American troops do during the war? And, how did the top-secret proximity fuze change the face of warfare? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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January 15, 2024

An alternative recruiting strategy for the US military

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

Theophilus Chilton suggests there’s a deeper plan for the US federal government’s blatant encouragement of mass illegal immigration across the US-Mexican border, and if true it might indicate that things are about to “get spicy”:

It genuinely is a mystery …

This move by Texas [using state resources to enforce federal border control against the will of the federal government] represents a ratcheting up of our collapse phase trend towards decentralisation. At least for now (and let’s hope Abbott has the fortitude to follow through), a state is openly defying FedGov in a non-Regime approved way that would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago. Even if FedGov wins this standoff, it presages more and more movement in that direction. The Regime is bleeding power and everyone knows it, even if they can’t afford to let on to that fact. Either way, the Regime is going to have to stop this quickly before other states start getting ideas. If they can’t, their already tarnished reputation will take a further massive hit.

So in light of this news, we saw something else on Thursday that ought to be of interest. A very odd bill has been proposed in the House of Representatives by two Democratic representatives – a bill that would ban “private military activity“. On its face this seems strange since every state in the union already does this. However, the bill, as written, is so vague that it could be interpreted to outlaw organised range shooting activities or even paintball games as “combat training”. This bill reeks of desperation because the Regime knows that its path to collapse is further along than a lot of people think and they know that “private military activity” is a very real possibility. The Regime has been accelerating to the point of no return and is trying to stifle any potential serious opposition.

Opposition to what? Well, that’s a good question. Let’s put some pieces together.

It’s no secret that the US military is facing a serious recruiting shortfall. Obviously, the current Regime has little use for the American military as it has traditionally been constituted. This is shown by the absolutely disrespectful way in which our troops are routinely treated by their own government and chain of command. Especially driving this recruitment deficiency is the huge drop in enlistment by the military’s traditional recruiting stock – rural and suburban White men from the South, the Midwest, and the Mountain West. In other words, exactly the kind of people being demonised by the new military with its DIE initiatives, rainbow flags, and trooned officer corps.

So who is going to fill the ranks? Fortuitously, we seem to have a huge flow of military aged males from all over the world crossing our border for whom the Regime has been rolling out the figurative red carpet. These are guys who probably have a lot of time on their hands. Wouldn’t it be a swell idea if we inducted all these guys into the military to make up for the lack of Heritage American interest? Indeed, history repeatedly shows that unpopular regimes typically do exactly this. They start to rely on foreign mercenary forces for a number of purposes.

Certainly, as GAE struggles to keep its steam, there may be a need to send Guatemalans and Nigerians into various Middle Eastern sandboxes to take shrapnel that Americans won’t take. After all, there will still be the vain and desperate attempts to shore up American globohomo empire in that (and other) regions. But historical, one of the main uses of foreign troops has been to try to keep your own potentially rebellious natives in line. Foreign troops have no real connexion with those whom they are suppressing and thus are willing to follow almost any orders that their paymasters give them.

However, unlike many first world countries that are under the Regime’s heel, the USA has a large body of well-armed citizens, many of whom have military training and combat experience. These guys – plus any other patriotic citizens they may be willing to help train – probably won’t take too kindly to being suppressed by foreign hirelings, something that will quickly make a lot of people’s patience run out. Say, wouldn’t it be a shame if all of these armed, trained and trainable people started organising to protect their homes, families, states, and country?

Despite all of the bravado from left-wing Twitter X keyboard warriors about “YoU’rE aR-15 vS. tAnKs AnD f-15s!!1!” the Regime knows that this armed Heritage-American populace is a potential threat, hence the effort to stifle its organising. And on some level, these people must know that they aren’t really a legitimate government and that they exercise power solely through police powers and the force of arms. Even if they don’t, an increasing number of real Americans DO know this. The Regime has lost the mandate of heaven, and history abundantly attests to what happens to regimes to which this has happened.

October 1, 2023

QotD: Curry

Filed under: Americas, Food, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve just had my version of a hot curry. Now, every single Indian friend of mine just fell off their chair laughing. My Bangladeshi friend I am sure is rolling on the floor. Because honestly, their reaction to it would probably be something like: “Be quite tasty if it had any chili in it.” Or “Bit mild.”

Of course for me, that was sweaty forehead, and under my eyes beading with it, burning lips and the thought that I ought to put a roll of toilet paper in the freezer for later.

In no small part … it is what you are used to. The chili pepper was native to Mexico. It’s not something the Indians were used to … once. But they have made it their own, and added their regional variant to it, making the food they add this foreign spice to very much characteristic of their culture and their cuisine. To them it very much part of what they are. Oddly, it seems expat Indians end up eating even hotter curries than those eaten in the country — fascinating in itself.

This is something millions of non-Indian folk across the world appreciate too. Now-a-days you’ll find many families who are neither culturally nor genetically Indian who have grown up eating curries. Many of them will be very knowledgeable about what a good curry ought to be, and some of them will even prepare it with strict adherence to the methods that good cooks in the Indian subcontinent use, and go to great lengths to get the right ingredients.

Of course: if we’re going to get puerile and talk “cultural appropriation” – it’s worth reminding people that the key ingredient came from Mexico. And, if you bother to start researching many of the other much beloved ingredients – they, as often as not had their origins elsewhere. This is as much part of being human as following these silly fads is. Whenever you look at any so-called cultural appropriation, you’ll find the xyz people actually adopted chunks of that culture from … someone else, and changed it a little to suit themselves. That’s as natural to humans as farting. Some people may do it less than others, but we all do it.

Curry and the world-wide spread of curries, has mostly been a win for the species, outside of the ill-judged dodgy vindaloo eaten after sixteen pints of lager.

Dave Freer, “Curry”, Mad Genius Club, 2019-08-26.

September 16, 2023

The many, MANY failed VW Beetle Reboots!

Filed under: Business, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Big Car
Published 22 Oct 2021

I recently made a video on the many, many times British Leyland tried to update the Mini. The lack of an update helped to make the original Mini an iconic shape. The same has happened to many other iconic cars, and the Volkswagen Type 1 or Beetle falls into the same camp. Why did it take 36 years until the Beetle would get a replacement, and how did a car made as a Nazi show of strength end up in a Disney film?
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August 5, 2023

The rotten luck of the American Orient Express

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Train of Thought
Published 5 May 2023

In today’s video, we take a look at the American Orient Express, an attempt made by several businesses to replicate the charm and appeal of the real deal that just kept running into bad luck.
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