Quotulatiousness

April 29, 2026

Three views on the Iran conflict

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

In The Conservative Woman, Alex Story outlines the three distinct ways that western opinions differ on the ongoing struggle with Iran:

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

TRUTH is the first casualty of war.

Opinions on a conflict depend deeply on the prevailing culture, erasing nuance in the process. The less of it there is, the easier it is to convince yourself of your righteousness and your opponents’ wickedness.

For instance, the Iranian question divides the world in three main groups.

The first staunchly believes that the Israeli tail wags the American foreign policy dog, working around the clock to recreate Israel’s “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates” Old Testament borders as described in Genesis 15:18.

The second will accept the long-standing Islamic Republic of Iran’s evil nature and its core philosophy of perpetual warfare leading in due course to the unbeliever’s submission but are sceptical if it can be removed solely by this war. As David, an exiled Iranian, said: “I’m caught between wishing for the end of the regime and the very real prospect of its entrenchment through external violence”.

The third will argue that the Iranian leadership should be obliterated. Ending the regime’s five-decades long barbarism, exemplified by the slaughter of “40,000 Iranians” across the country in January 2026 in Prince Reza Pahlavi’s recent words, would make the world a better place. Having lived by the sword, the mullahs should die by the sword, they will say, adding that few will miss them.

Positions turn into intellectual fortresses at the speed of light, fed by a constant stream of “news” destined to further harden preconceived ideas. Little is provided that offers any hope of peaceful co-existence. Data is used, ignored and abused, thus ensuring escalation and lying becomes the accelerator for a world on its irrevocable path to war.

But while truth dies early in the antagonists’ deadly exchanges, war eventually reveals it, and its revelations tend towards the astounding.

In our case, for instance, it has become crystal clear that Britain is now effete, irrelevant and defanged. It is a flotsam on rough international seas, bullied by some, ridiculed by others and ignored by all who have not yet emasculated themselves.

The United Kingdom, the former global hegemon and only European country to come out of the Second World War justified, is not the same country it once was, dismantled stone by stone by an establishment haughtily bent on demise over decades and encouraging others, partially successfully, to follow them down to the Gates of Hades.

Our end, however, cannot all be pinned on Starmer, Hermer, Sands, the Fabians and purple-haired socialists.

He then goes on to make the case that only a counter-revolution will rescue Britain from its current path to misery and global irrelevance.

April 20, 2026

“Hail, Caesar!” oops we meant “Hail, Carney!”

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

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies discusses the unseemly media adulation1 for Caesar Prime Minister Mark Carney after more than a year in power:

Grok illustration of PM Carney as Caesar
Image from The Rewrite.

Thirteen months into his reign as prime minister, we still don’t know who Mark Carney is or how he engineered the removal of Justin Trudeau from office.

Nor do we know what really happened behind the scenes to convince five Members of Parliament to betray their constituents’ democratic decisions and, for the first time in the nation’s history, give Canadians a majority government they didn’t elect.

What we do know is that none of that seems of great interest to most of our media or, as they like to describe themselves when seeking federal subsidies, “defenders of democracy”.

As The Rewrite noted a year ago, the moves behind the scenes to effect the abrupt ouster of Trudeau remain a mystery. And, unlike with other PMs, there have been no Carney family magazine profiles. (Who can forget Justin and Sophie Trudeau‘s sexy Vogue cover?) Yes, there are the books, Values and The Hinge. We have learned he likes hockey, runs, won’t criticize China and is ruthless. But there is a tangible paucity of efforts within MSM to get beyond what is permitted to be known. We don’t even know if he watches Heated Rivalry or why the Brits called him “the unreliable boyfriend”. And yet, as Stephen Maher wrote for Time magazine last week, Canadians adore him.

As for how he has seized power in excess of that granted by the electorate 11 months ago, there wasn’t a hint of concern on the part of CTV News anchor Omar Sachedina when Carney’s majority was confirmed in a couple of “gimme” by-election victories.

The leading voice on Canada’s most-watched newscast, Sachedina appeared awestruck by the “historic” moment and “what the Liberals have been able to achieve in the past year”. When his sidekick, Vassy Kapelos, noted Carney was now out of excuses for not fulfilling the promises that won him a minority government in 2025, Sachedina suggested soothingly that Canadians remember “sometimes ambition does take time, sometimes several election cycles”.

Screencap of CTV News from The Rewrite

The message to Canadians? The Liberals have accomplished great things in the past year, the greatest of which was to do what no one in the nation’s history had ever done before — manufacture a majority without the public’s consent. Oh, and be patient. PMMC’s agenda could take a few more elections. Sit tight and trust.

The next morning, questions were not, as one might expect from defenders of democracy, about whether the PM felt a tad greasy for the way in which he had won unfettered power. Like, in some countries — many actually — that might be considered kind of scary. Here? If you watch the news, it’s dreamy.

The preferred line of inquiry was to ask Carney whether, if he was the Opposition Leader, Pierre Poilievre, he would quit. And so it went for the rest of the week. PMMC wasn’t asked if he worried that his majority would undermine the public’s faith in its institutions. Nor did the press corps pursue their sources to discover what inducements may have been offered to create his Judas Gang of Five.

  1. Yes, I know … the presstitutes will “love him long time” as long as the government subsidies keep rolling in.

April 13, 2026

Trump is behind the falling population of LA County!

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

Chris Bray walks us through the tortured logic that leads the venerable Los Angeles Times to attribute the demographic slide evident in Los Angeles County to the Bad Orange Man:

Los Angeles County is bleeding people, sliding into population decline faster than anywhere else in the country. But don’t worry, the local newspaper is on the case!

Screenshot

After a careful examination of the matter, the Los Angeles Times is able to assign blame to — wait for it! — a certain VERY BAD ORANGE MAN.

    While conservative critics of L.A. have rushed to frame the population loss as a “mass exodus” of people fleeing rampant crime, high taxes and inadequate services, the reality is more complex.

    Los Angeles is by far the nation’s largest county, with 9.7 million people — nearly double the next largest, Cook County, Ill. In that sense, it’s not surprising that it saw a severe drop in population after the Trump administration rolled out a flurry of executive orders and new legislation aimed at restricting immigration. L.A. County is a historic hub for immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and a place where 1 in 3 residents is an immigrant.

If you read the story, you’ll see the name Trump several times, like a coven chanting the name of an enemy around the caldron. But definitely for sure don’t listen to those bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories about “high taxes and inadequate services”, noooooooo, that’s a huge lie, trust the wisdom of the local newspaper.

After a large and historic neighborhood ceased to exist because of a wildfire that rekindled after the Los Angeles Fire Department didn’t fully extinguish an earlier fire in dense, dry hillside brush, CNN produced a long story on the disaster of the city’s firefighter staffing. Small sample, describing a memorandum from then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley: “In the memo, which the city has since removed from its website, Crowley wrote that the city’s population had grown from about 2.5 million in 1960 to nearly 4 million in 2020. Yet the city has fewer fire stations today than it did back then, even as firefighters respond to a call volume that has quadrupled.”

A little less than a year and a half after that fire, the Los Angeles Police Department looks like this:

The last time a mean old white male Republican was the mayor, which is very bad and hateful, the city built up the police department, with a goal of having 10,000 officers. They actually hit that number in 2013, during the opening moments of the reign of Mayor Yogapants, then began shrinking soon after. Now we have very wise and progressive leaders, so the city is good.

[…]

So taxes are soaring, fire and police staffing are down, fat dumb communists want to crush basic city services a lot more to free up plenty of social justice cash, and some MEAN RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY THEORISTS bizarrely claim that people are leaving Los Angeles because they pay high taxes for increasingly poor services. My goodness, these people will just believe anything! OBVIOUSLY WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING IS THAT DONALD TRUMP IS VERY BAD, the professional journalists explained.

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 17, 2026

How Germans were propagandized into supporting the National Socialists

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

I’ve read a fair bit about the rise of Hitler after the First World War, beginning when I was in middle school and did a history project on the topic. Yet one aspect of the political success of Hitler’s fascist movement always puzzled me: how such blatant crude propaganda persuaded so many Germans to see things the Nazi way. Over the last five years in Canada, as our legacy media have fallen directly into the clutches of a single political party, I now understand all too well how millions of people getting their world view informed by a single point of view can create and maintain a movement. When all the mainstream media tell effectively the same story in 2026 and go out of their way to praise the government — especially the leader — and belittle and denigrate the opposition parties, it’s easy just to believe what you’re being told and not make waves.

Anyway, back to interwar Germany and their more absolute control of the newspapers and radio stations was used to mould and shape popular opinion:

In the run-up to the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, most people in Germany believed what was being put about both on radio and in the state-controlled press, namely that the Poles were committing all kinds of atrocities to former Prussians living in Poland, that they were war-mongering and using threatening language, and that not only was the Danzig corridor rightfully part of Germany, it was the duty of the Reich to defend those subjects living there.

Eighteen year-old Heinz Knocke was from Hameln in central Germany and typical of many of his age. He had absolute faith in the Führer and the rightness of the German cause. Planning to join the Luftwaffe as a pilot, he had had his preliminary examinations and was hoping that with war imminent, his call-up would be accelerated. “The Polish atrocities against the German minority make horrible reading today”, he scribbled in his diary on 31st August. “Thousands are being massacred daily in territory which had once been part of Germany.”

Oberleutnant Hajo Herrmann, a twenty-four year-old pilot with the bomber group III/KG4, also thought the Poles had brought war upon themselves. As far as he was concerned, the Danzig issue was one of principle. It had been German before 1919, was still inhabited mostly by Germans, and since the Poles had rejected any peaceful solution, what did they expect? “The anger that I felt inside at their unreasonableness”, he noted, “matched my sacred conviction: that of German rightness”. For Oberleutnant Hans von Luck, on the other hand, an officer in the 7th Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment, the escalating situation had brought a sudden recall from leave just a few days’ earlier. He had found everyone at the garrison in Bad Kissingen near Schweinfurt in high spirits. Neither he nor his friends believed a word of Goebbels’ propaganda about the Poles, but they did believe Danzig and the corridor should be part of Germany once more. “We were not hungry for war”, von Luck noted, “but we did not believe the British and French would come to Poland’s defence”. How wrong he was; for while von Luck may have understood that going to war was not a matter to be taken lightly, even he had blindly accepted Hitler’s assurances that Britain and France were bluffing. It was a feature of Hitler’s rule that he frequently said one thing with immense conviction and authority but quite another once events had been proved him wrong. Such was his grip on the German people, however, almost no-one ever questioned this, and certainly not his inner circle or anyone in the German media. At any rate, all three of these young men had believed parts of the nonsense that had been spouted by Nazi propaganda, whether it be false claims about the Poles, the justness of the Nazi cause for invasion, or Hitler’s assurances the British and French were bluffing. Such was he power of Nazi disinformation.

[…]

Both the Imperial Japanese and the Nazis dominated the new forms of media communication emerging in the 1930s. Propaganda had been a key component of Nazi politics from the outset, and while there were some who had not been persuaded, it had been unquestionably hugely effective, not just within the Reich but around the world too. To a large degree, this was due to Dr Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, and Gauleiter — administrative leader — of Berlin, an old Frankish term that had been resurrected by the Nazis. A former failed journalist and one of the first Nazis, he was utterly devoted to Hitler, so much so he had even given up an affair with a Czech film star with whom he was deeply in love because the Führer asked him to. Although the son of a shop assistant, Goebbels was highly intelligent and despite those humble beginnings had attended several universities and gained a doctorate. Marriage to Magda Quant, a society divorcee, gave him the kind of money and status he needed to help him climb up the Nazi ladder. He had become Propaganda Minister in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, and had immediately announced his prime goal was to achieve the “mobilisation of mind and spirit” of the German people. “We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out”, he said of defeat in 1918, “but because the weapons of our minds did not fire”.

In many ways, Goebbels was as responsible for Hitler’s position as Hitler was himself and he was the man who had largely shaped the Nazi’s public image. It was he [who] had insisted on draping swastikas – the bigger the better – from as many places as possible; it was he who taught Hitler how to whip a crowd into a frenzy; it was also Goebbels who had elevated Hitler into a demigod in the eyes of many. He knew all about manipulation theories, orchestrated heavy-handed mob violence, and in the 1933 election created the “Hitler over Germany” campaign; it was the first time, for example, that aircraft had been used to take a candidate around a country in an effort to reach more people. It worked spectacularly well.

With the Nazis in power, Goebbels had also done much to stoke up the virulent anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of Nazi ideology and had done much to turn Nazism into a form of surrogate religion, in which, again, drawing on nostalgia, they had harked back to a “purer” Aryan past to help bind the people both together and behind the Party and, more importantly, the Leader. Goebbels’ influence – his genius – should never be underestimated.

Update, 18 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.

February 24, 2026

The political spectrum in Canadian media runs from the far left all the way to the left-of-centre

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

The federal government isn’t noted for being good with money. Yes, I know, understatement of the century … But they did make one investment that has been fantastically beneficial. For the Liberal Party, if not for Canadians in general. That investment was buying the support of almost all of the surviving mainstream media outlets by directly subsidizing their payrolls. Most media folks lean left anyway, but once their paycheque literally depended on keeping the Liberals happy, they joyfully co-operated in ways that 1930s German newspapers would blush at. On her Substack, Melanie In Saskatchewan explains just how far away from representative the media political spectrum has drifted (leftwards, of course, always leftwards):

If you were to draw a Venn diagram of the real Canadian political landscape and the pundit ecosystem on legacy networks, you’d find they barely overlap.

Rosemary Barton is the undisputed matriarch of the CBC’s political brand. As host of At Issue and Rosemary Barton Live, she shapes the entire panel tone for CBC political discourse and anchors the network’s election coverage. She has been at the helm of federal election panels since 2016, interviewing party leaders and moderating debates from coast to coast.

Canada’s mainstream media as Liberal Party propagandists.
Image from Melanie In Saskatchewan

Now ask yourself this: if half the population consistently feels unheard by these panels, is that a coincidence, or the predictable result of decades of the same ideological herd wandering through the same studios?

Here is the rub. The At Issue panel rarely rotates through voices that actually represent today’s conservative electorate. Instead, it routinely features professional journalists and political insiders who debate among themselves, talking about conservatives far more often than they engage with conservatives whose voters make up a massive share of the country. That is not centrism. It is an echo chamber assembled by committee.

Then there is Andrew Coyne. He is often presented as the token ideological counterweight on At Issue, the panel’s supposed nod to conservatism. After all, he has spent decades as a columnist and editorial thinker, comfortably critiquing governments from a well upholstered perch.

But let us be clear. Coyne is not remotely representative of today’s conservative electorate. He is not a reflection of the current Conservative Party base. He is not channeling the instincts of voters outside the Ottawa and Toronto corridor.

Positioning him as the conservative voice on a national panel is not balance. It is branding. It allows producers to claim ideological diversity without ever inviting someone who actually carries the convictions, tone, or priorities of the modern conservative movement. Coyne is not a grassroots conservative. He is a professional pundit whose worldview fits tidily within the Ottawa insider class. That is not ideological contrast. It is controlled opposition dressed up as pluralism.

Meanwhile, audiences have been increasingly vocal online about the sense that these panels sound like academic seminars, not reflections of the lived experience of Canadians who didn’t spend their twenties in Ottawa press galleries.

Canada’s climate follies, a brief update

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

On Substack, John Robson looks at the Canadian federal government’s lofty climate goals and their pathetic strategies to achieve those goals and the vast chasm between the two:

Chinese electric vehicles are likely coming to Canadian roads, like these BYD models.

Forgive us for being fixated on Canada’s climate follies just because we live here. But they are revealing, including the U-turn on EVs that we mentioned last week where the government yanked the steering wheel so hard they did a 360 from banning gasoline vehicles by law to banning them by regulation. Raising the question whether they actually know what they’re doing and, if so, whether they regard themselves as commendably devious or just way smarter than everyone else. We hope not the latter because the policy is going to fail big-time. As Randall Denley just warned in the National Post, “To summarize, the Carney plan relies on electric vehicles (EVs) that Ontario plants don’t produce, a sudden and dramatic new appetite for buying EVs and an imagined export market that doesn’t exist. To top it off, the federal government will provide $2.3 billion in EV rebates that will encourage Canadians to buy cars made elsewhere.” Apart from that, a stroke of genius of the sort that, through decades of diligent effort, has made the nation tragically poorer without hitting any of our targets including the one where they get more humble.

As a Globe & Mail news story blurted out:

    A new study published Friday by the Canadian Climate Institute says Canada is not on track to meet any of its climate targets – not the 2026 interim emissions reduction target, the 2030 Paris Agreement commitment, or even the long-term goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

Oh. Pretty hard to make that one sound like an achievement, isn’t it? Or to sound as if the people who pulled it off should be trusted with the next one.

Now as we’ve complained before, the “Canadian Climate Institute” bills itself as some sort of dispassionate neutral observer when in fact it’s a creature of the state. And, worse, one of those lavishly-funded outfits (we deniers may have all the money, but they got $30 million from the Canadian government and we did not … uh no, that was just one grant, the total’s higher) that exists to push the government to do things it wants to do anyway but needs the appearance of “civil society” support to pull off.

Thus, the Globe sonorously informs us, the problem isn’t that the targets were impractical or the politicians and bureaucrats inept. Heck no. As usual with Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision” of public policy, all you need is love:

    The report suggests Canada has moved away from its climate goals thanks to “a slackening of policy effort over the past year, marked by the removal or weakening of climate policies across the country”.

Which gives the impression they had been on track to meet their goals up until some recent backsliding, whereas in reality they have never shown any sign of meeting them. After all, what policies have actually changed since Carney took over as Prime Minister in ways that could possibly affect long-term trends? And how close was Canada to meeting “its climate goals” before this disastrous swerve into the camp of the deniers?

It’s not even true that “Canada” as a collective has collective “climate goals”. The government has climate goals, and they come bundled with a host of other policies at election time, especially since even our “Conservative” party is terrified of challenging climate orthodoxy. Public support for those goals is weak, sporadic and prone to vanish when real costs hove into view. But ignoring that piece of typical collectivist prose, Mark Carney has spent most of his prime ministership flying around virtue-signaling in the presence of others doing the same. (No, really. It’s been less than a year and he’s taken almost three dozen flights.) He hasn’t been in the office shredding this and demolishing that.

February 22, 2026

How to Use a Tariff War to Disrupt the World – Death of Democracy 04 – Q4 1933

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

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 21 Feb 2026

In Q4 1933 Hitler pivots Nazi Germany from internal takeover to outward defiance. The London Economic Conference collapses and the tariff truce unravels, Hitler withdraws from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations — then stages the November 12 plebiscite and one‑party Reichstag election to claim the nation stands behind him. As Goebbels tightens propaganda and press control through the Editors’ Law (Schriftleitergesetz) and daily directives, the Winter Relief campaign turns “charity” into social pressure and Volksgemeinschaft theater. In December, Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht hardens the transfer moratorium to conserve foreign currency for raw materials and rearmament. Using contemporary voices, this episode shows how isolation, manipulation, and “unity” accelerate Europe toward a pre‑war era.
(more…)

February 12, 2026

Pro-tip – be suspicious “of any reporting on NATO from Europeans, especially from Brussels”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander reacts with some exasperation to how European mainstream media are choosing to report pretty much anything involving the US/NATO relationship:

I’ve about reached my limit on lazy, high-emotion/low-reason, or performative reporting from Europe on the NATO/U.S. relationship. If the EuroLeft/EU-uber-alles crowd was really concerned about keeping the relationship between the U.S. and European NATO as good as possible, they would be making an effort to bridge and salve over some of the tough-love comments coming out of DC.

However, that is not what they are doing. No, they are seeing a gap, and are trying to pound a wedge into it. They see a spark, and look to throw a litre of petrol on it.

I guess what galls me the most is that their actions are, in operation, producing exactly the opposite condition they will tell you they are concerned about.

These are not dumb people. They, or the ones they work for, know what they are doing. At best, they are farming rage clicks. At worst, they are moving towards a desire the core of the EU nomenklatura has been driving for over decades — get the U.S. out of Europe.

They have found allies in part of the U.S. right-of-center coalition … and they will leverage that as well.

The below is just another example. A ham-fisted one, but one nonetheless.

Let’s dive in.

I don’t like to call out people by name … wait … yes I do.

Anyway, this isn’t personal; this is professional. No, wait. This reporting is so bad that, as a former proud NATO staff officer, I cannot let this stand. It is kind of personal. Plus this makes a larger point.

It isn’t petty either. As mentioned above, very serious people who are not our friends or our NATO allies’ friends — most of whom are citizens of NATO nations — are trying to seize the moment to push a multi-generational effort to wedge conflict between the U.S. and the Europeans in NATO.

Yes, there are some who are unknowingly doing their bidding, but make no mistake — bad reporting is allowed for a variety of reasons and should be called out when it happens.

First the larger point, then the details.

The reaction in Europe to the clear and direct peer counseling of our European allies by the U.S. over the last year has just demonstrated the fact that many of the people who put themselves forward as “experts” simply do not have either the knowledge or inclination to be anything of the sort.

For ideological, political, or standard issue look-at-me’ism, reporting about the state of the alliance and the American place in it drifts from farcical to the edge of a PSYOPS project by the usual suspects of the EuroLeft who have been trying to prove their anti-American bonafides since they first flirted with the cute socialist girl at the anti-NATO march in college.

In related news, Chris Bray discusses Canada’s “Muscular New Anti-Trump Strategy™”, showing that it’s not just EU-based media to be suspicious of:

Recall the recent discussion here of the “Carney Doctrine”, after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney threw down the gauntlet at Donald Trump’s feet. Orange Man Bad, so Canada is going to become a rising power and lead a new international coalition to challenge the cruel American hegemon and stuff. The deeply silly opinion pages of the deeply silly New York Times celebrated Carney’s deeply silly speech, and declared the potential emergence of “an economic and defense alliance that rivals American power.” Back when all of this happened, I discussed the obvious condition of the Canadian armed forces, and advanced a sophisticated argument that LOL.

Reality keeps making the same joke. At the Federalist this week, I wrote about the recent notifications in the Federal Register about a series of arms deals that will allow Canada to make large purchases of American weapons. So as Carney spoke about challenging American military power on the world stage, he knew that his plan for doing that was to get the weapons from America. It’s an I want to punch you in the face, but first I need you to teach me how to throw a punch maneuver.

And then, this morning, Politico dropped this bomb, by which I mean that Politico has been eating a lot of Taco Bell and dropped into a stall in the gender-neutral office bathroom:

Muscular! Canada’s been puttin’ in work at the world order gym.

Note subhed: This is a story about “the new international order”. America is being shoved into the global background, now, as Canada flexes its haaaard new muscles. The story is illustrated with a ship, so obviously a huge announcement about naval powe— nope.

February 7, 2026

Food hang-ups by generation

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

Around the early to mid-80s, I started to notice trends in the kind of health information being pushed by the mainstream media. One of the big topics of the day was the dangers of … eggs. Eggs were so dangerous that “experts” were warning adults to avoid eating more than one or two per week. Three was the absolute limit and you were dicing with death if you went over that “healthy” limit. Then, a few years later, eggs were “the perfect food” and we weren’t eating enough of these formerly abominated death pills. A few years after that, OMG! Apples, people, apples! Danger, danger, danger! That was around the time I stopped putting any credence into health reporting in the media. However, as Lisa De Pasquale points out, food issues have been an ongoing struggle for each succeeding generation:

In the ’80s, the ultimate healthy Boomer breakfast was a bran muffin. There were also various cereals like Grape-Nuts and Raisin Bran. There definitely wasn’t room for their parents’ bacon and eggs unless you had a death wish. Boomers settled on eggs as the devil’s snack when the American Heart Association warned in the 1960s that people shouldn’t consume more than three eggs per week. Like social distancing six feet from others during COVID and eight 8oz glasses of water per day, the recommendation wasn’t based on science, but on being a simple number Americans could remember.

Thanks, but this Gen Xer will stick to getting my 8,675,309 steps per year as my guiding fitness principle.

[…]

The Millennial Food Pyramid

Level One: Genetically Modified Organism and Nonorganic Foods — Use Sparingly

While Gen X was at ground zero in doubting Big Food’s pyramid, our Millennial colleagues and kids really continued the battle. Like luxury logos, they seek out the organic and non-GMO labels. It’s a virtue signal of both their values and what they can afford. Erewhon smoothies, anyone?

Level Two: Various Overpriced Coffee Drinks — Two to Three Servings

Gen Xers link coffee to work and responsibility; caffeine is a tool to get through the morning. Millennials view coffee drinks as self-care. It’s about treating themselves to dessert any time of day — a major win for marketing executives.

Level Three: Charcuterie Boards, Wine, Hard Seltzers, Craft Beers — Three to Five Servings

Millennials love to entertain. Nothing shows sophistication and “adulting” in your 30s and early 40s like a charcuterie board. Lunchables upgraded! They came of drinking age at the same time as small-batch beers, American boutique wineries, and hard seltzers.

Level Four: Instagram-Worthy Food — Six to Eleven Servings

Camera phones leveled up the entertainment value of food consumption. Like organic labels, what Millennials eat signals their open-mindedness. As they get older, they straddle the line of wanting to be in on the trends (avocado toast and açai bowls) and the dive you haven’t heard of with authentic phở.

The Generation Z and Generation Alpha Food Pyramid

Level One: Real Meat, Dairy, and Peanuts — Use Sparingly

The Gen X and Millennial generations dabbled in veggie burgers, but Gen Z and Gen Alpha went whole lab-created hog into plant-based meats and milks, to the point that meat and milk no longer have a meaning until a company gets sued for using the words. To be fair, they are also embracing biohacking trends and ditching seed oils. Due to the growing prevalence of allergies, peanuts are a universal no-no food in public spaces.

Level Two: TikTok Recipes — Two to Three Servings

The term “recipe” is used loosely. I’ve come across a TikTok video for making a cream sauce from a block of cream cheese, water, and dried pasta. There is a positive aspect of trying these TikTok recipes, though: it prepares them for trying new things and for failure when a recipe doesn’t come out right.

Level Three: Food Delivery Service Meals — Three to Five Servings

Postmates, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash are staples at mealtime. Following their surge during the COVID era as restaurants struggled to stay in business, accounts linked to their parents’ bank accounts became as common as sharing a cell phone plan.

Level Four: Gamer Food and Drinks — Six to Eleven Servings

Living next to a park has taught me one thing about Gen Z and Gen Alpha — they’re all inside. I mostly see neighborhood kids on Halloween, and every year, I recognize fewer and fewer costumes because they’re dressed as video game characters. Their snacks are manufactured for their attention span: quick hits of spicy, sour, or sweet while on pause. The gamer culture and H Mart remove barriers as Japanese snacks dominate.

So, where does this leave Gen X? We’re not immune to the powers of Big Food. In fact, recent research shows that ultra-processed food addiction began with us thanks to the explosion and availability of ultra palatable foods with added refined carbs and fats. StudyFinds reported researchers from the University of Michigan said, “Individuals who are now older adults were in developmentally sensitive stages during the 1970s and 1980s, precisely when tobacco-owned food manufacturers were shaping the market with addictive ultra-processed foods”.

February 3, 2026

Conformity is a very powerful force among western women

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responded to a post by Meghan Murphy that began “Unfortunately for women, the extent of retardation I’m seeing in the Instagram stories of women I know is making me think women are retarded”:

No, women are not retarded.

They are conformist.

To fall for, actually fall for, narratives like the Covid story, the BLM story, the ICE is Gestapo story, to actually whole-heartedly believe them, yeah, you would have to be kinda retarded.

But women didn’t “fall for” those stories. Not exactly.

They aligned to them.

This means they went along with them, repeated them, reinforced them, not because they were convinced by evidence, but because they were convinced by the appearance of consensus.

Women are evolved to believe what the rest of the tribe appears to believe. Evidence is not considered.

Why?

Well, humans are smart. We survive by being smart. And in order to be smart, we need to grow big brains, and get started growing those brains early.

Which means human babies have giant heads. And in order to deliver those giant heads, human babies have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, head won’t fit through pelvic girdle, and baby and mother both die.

This means all human babies are premature. That’s why horses can run at the age of six hours, but humans can’t lift our giant heads for months.

This means that human women, whether they are pregnant with a giant-headed baby, caring for a giant-headed baby, or just might be either one at any moment, are uniquely helpless and dependent on the support and goodwill of the tribe.

Metaphorically, and often literally, a woman lives in someone else’s house — not because she’s a useless layabout, but because she is too busy building the future to support herself in the present.

When you’re in that position, you have to keep your controversial ideas to yourself.

And when you evolve in that position, you evolve to have no controversial ideas.

This was fine for millions of years. There was a division of labor. Women made people, men made stuff. And because the women made all those biological sacrifices to make men with big brains, the men were really good at making stuff. And the stuff was really, really useful, and it became big piles of stuff called “cities”, and then it became a global system of stuff called “civilization”.

The stuff became so valuable that there were big arguments about what to do with the stuff, which was called “politics”. But the women stayed out of politics, because politics was about stuff, stuff was men’s job, and no matter who won the arguments, the winners always made sure the women had enough stuff.

Why?

Because dependent, future-investing, conformist women didn’t evolve in a vacuum. Men evolved along with them. When you have dependent women, you evolve protective men, because tribes full of men who aren’t protective don’t have future generations.

So women didn’t wield political power directly. They were represented by men, and had a lot less skin in the game.

Eventually, someone decided this was unfair. This idea didn’t happen suddenly, and for no reason at all, but that’s a topic for another day.

But something funny happens when you give political power to women, especially in the form of a vote.

You see, then you have a situation where 50% of the vote is held by people who require a great variety of different persuasion techniques or evidence to convince them of something. And the other 50% is held by women, who are persuaded by only one thing … the appearance of prevailing consensus and power.

And what form of persuasion do you think is cheapest and easiest to project?

Women’s suffrage removes evidence and discourse from politics, and replaces it with “consensus theater” … a puppet show designed to create the illusion of a single prevailing opinion.

When a narrative prevails, women vote for it, not because they are persuaded, but because it prevails.

This is an explosive feedback loop — a reverse thermostat which turns the air conditioner on when it’s freezing, and runs the furnace all summer.

Because women’s idea of how urgent an issue is comes not from an analysis of the situation, but an analysis of how many people endorse it.

And any opinion, no matter how contrary to obvious facts, no matter how retarded, no matter how destructive, can become the prevailing political platform, so long as women can be convince that most other people think so.

Covid was a Chinese bioweapon. The Covid shot was toxic and did not protect against Covid.

George Floyd was violent drug zombie who died of an overdose, and Derek Chauvin is in prison merely for being the last guy to touch him.

Police officers do not disproportionately kill innocent black men who are minding their own business, and body cams prove this.

Men cannot become women. The technology doesn’t exist, and may not ever exist.

Diversity is, in fact, our greatest weakness. Diversity + integration = war.

America is better off without the vast majority of immigrants, even the ones who don’t murder and steal.

Socialism doesn’t work in any unit larger than the extended family. Communism has never worked, and cannot work.

Cows are health food. Plants are usually not.

Some kids are smarter than others, and we need to invest more effort in them, not less.

All of these things are inherently obvious, and women are not too retarded to see that, because they are not retarded at all. They are merely conformist. Susceptible to political theater.

So democracies cannot permanently survive female suffrage. No one is particularly happy about this, not even curmudgeonly iconoclasts like me who are willing to say it out loud. It’s not only unfair in principle, it’s decidedly inconvenient in practice.

The universe, of course, does not care.

We cannot change women. We can only change politics.

That won’t be easy, either. But it’s possible, even if the eventual process involves a lot more violence, or space colonization, than we find convenient.

January 30, 2026

“… now that the legend is fully established, good luck trying to convince people of the facts”

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

On Substack, The Scuttlebutt looks at an iconic photo, a sculpture based on the photo, and shows that the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is still quite true: “When Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend”

In an old black and white John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart movie called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper man tells the hero of the piece “When Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend”. Meaning; tell the people what you want them to know, even if it’s not true. We’re going to talk about that today; but first, Get in out of the cold damn it! Seven degrees is cold even by my standards. Grab a cup of coffee, or cocoa, tea if you must, pollute it as you will, and have a seat, Dinner is Chili, please remember the tip jar where we collect for the mess. Let’s begin!

I referred to the picture above last week, though I didn’t include it. I’m going to include it now, because of something that a reader and good friend of some four decades sent me, in regard to it. See, she lives in Birmingham, where there is a statue commemorating this event, titled Foot Soldier. This is it:

Notice any differences from the photo of the event? Yeah, the cop is the one grabbing the kid, and the dog is threatening, the kid is defiant, and the cop looks like they pulled him out of a Soviet or Nazi recruiting poster. (The article I will reference also calls out the fact that the kid in the sculpture has emphasized black racial features. The kid it happened to, is so Anglo in feature he could be a white guy in “blackface”. Oh and the kid in real life is every bit as big as the cop.) Those are just the initial things, there’s more, but I’ve made my point.

Yeah, you in the back, with the purple hair and the septum ring? What’s that? “But that’s art” you say? “Putting artistic license on the sculpture is reasonable” you say?

Well, Ma’am? I think you’re a Ma’am? Yes, it is. It’s propaganda, but “Art” is allowed to be propaganda, and in fact most art is just that. From the formal paintings of Kings and Heads of State, to Andy Warhol’s stuff, images are altered to make a point. Maybe to emphasize a chin that’s pretty weak in the real guy, making him look “tougher” or putting more jewelry on the woman than the family owns to make them look richer … Most art that isn’t just “an exercise for the student” has some sort of statement. (Note, I consider “still life with fruit”, and such things to be an exercise, teaching proportion and play with light.) Political caricatures are the ultimate expression of this point, and that cop is a political caricature.

Ah, but here’s the thing. While the “art” is reasonably a political statement, the news story, and the photograph are supposed to be news, and we have been told that “News is facts, not Op-ed”.

Well, we all know that lately, that’s just not so, but here’s the thing: It never was!

It’s not that the Media is lying to you today, it’s that the media has NEVER told the truth. It’s just that by the time the truth comes out, usually, it’s decades later, and no one cares.

But you SHOULD care. Take this event enshrined in legend (Remember that quote “print the legend”?) There’s a gentleman named Malcom Gladwell. He does a podcast called Revisionist History. The transcript of the relevant show is HERE as done by Emily Maina. The whole piece is really well done, and worth your time, but it’s about twenty minutes worth of reading, so I’m pulling out a couple of points to help make my point.

Mr. Gladwell was invited by the widow of the cop, to learn, as the late Great Paul Harvey used to put it, “The Rest of the Story”. This drove him to track down the artist that did the sculpture, the actual kid that was involved, friends of the cop in question, caused him to listen to the interviews done when the statue was commemorated, and so on. It seems the legend is far different from the truth. The kid in the picture wasn’t even part of the damn protest. He was a lookie-loo who had skipped school to come see “the great man” Martin Luther King.

The protests had at this point been going on for months. Constantly getting bigger, constantly drawing more spectators. The cops, specifically “the Birmingham Chief of Police, a troglodyte named Bull Connor”, in the words of Gladwell, have been tasked with keeping the spectators separated from the protesters. There was, after all, a legitimate fear that someone in the spectators might just be a Klansman, and might be aiming to take out some of MLK’s folks.

Well, that gets harder and harder to do, and the protester numbers keep growing, the spectators keep growing, until finally, Conner decides to use the K9 units to keep the peace. This is all a part of “the plan”. The protestors are trying to get the cops to do something that can be blown up and make international headlines. Finally, they succeeded.

The third of May, 1963. A photographer, Bill Hudson, gets a picture of a kid with a cop dog on him. White officer, black victim, mean dog. That’s what the narrative is. The New York Times runs it, three columns above the fold, and makes up a story to go along with it. The trouble is, no one talked to the cop, or to the kid.

The cop was Richard Middleton, his last gig had been escorting black kids to school, to keep them from being killed by whites. He’s been assigned now, to keep the separation line between the protesters and the populace. The kid’s name is Walter Gadsden, according to the person that interviewed him at the dedication of the statue, he’s now “a grumpy old man still wedded to some of the oldest and most awkward of Black prejudices”. She sees him as Stockholmed basically.

Walter, he sees himself as a dumb kid who skipped school, went where he wasn’t supposed to, and damn near got bit by a K9 because of it. Middleton was trying to pull the dog off, you can see it in the photo, if you actually look. But that’s not the legend, and the media prints “the legend”. The artist admits:

    Well, I saw that the boy was being about 6’4, the officer was maybe 5’10, 5’9. And I said, “This is a movement about power”. So I made the little boy younger and smaller, and the officer taller and stronger. The arm of the law is so strong, that’s why his arm is almost, like, straight. And the dog is more like a wolf than a real dog. Because if I’m a little boy, that’s what I would see. I would see like this superman hovering over me, putting this big old giant monster of a dog in my groin area, in my private area. And so, that’s what I envisioned when I first saw the photograph.

Of course, the artist is a black man. He continues: “So he’s almost like a blind officer. He doesn’t even see the kid, because he’s so far beyond that. ‘Killed this nigger. Attack this nigger.’ He saw past the reality of this is a hu-, innocent chi-, human child, a human being, that’s why he was wearing blind people glasses like that.”

Well, it’s art, the artist wasn’t there, never talked to anyone involved, and he told the story he wanted to tell. OK, that’s what art does. The trouble is, that’s also what the news media did.

And they got away with it, until July 6 2017, which is when the article in question came out. Actually, they are still getting away with it, because now that the legend is fully established, good luck trying to convince people of the facts.

January 27, 2026

Amelia was not created by the “extreme right”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, A View From Yorkshire points out that the media coverage of the Amelia phenomenon often leaves the audience with the impression that Amelia was created by some far right extremists, which clearly isn’t true:

Let’s nuke the myth properly.

Amelia was not “created by the far-right”.
She was created by the British state, funded by taxpayers, in a government-approved anti-extremism game for teenagers.

Her crime?
Questioning mass migration.
Talking about British values.
Suggesting borders, culture and continuity might matter.

In other words: centre-right, mainstream opinions held by millions of normal people.

The media response?
SCREAMING, CRYING, THROWING UP:
“FAR-RIGHT!”
“RACISM!”
“DISINFORMATION!”

Even the game’s own creators admit the game does not say questioning mass migration is wrong — yet journalists still foam at the mouth like Pavlov’s interns because the spell didn’t work.

Here’s the truth they hate:

Amelia didn’t get radicalised.
She got recognised.

People saw a perfect accidental parody of how the establishment treats ordinary dissent:
If you question orthodoxy, you’re not wrong — you’re dangerous.
If you wave a Union Jack, you’re not patriotic — you’re extreme.
If you ask questions, you need monitoring.

So people did what the internet always does when power looks stupid:
They laughed.
They memed.
They stripped the moral panic naked.

Now we’re told there’s a “highly coordinated hate network” behind it all.
Sure. Or maybe — stay with me —
people are done being lectured by institutions that despise them.

A cartoon goth girl didn’t expose extremism.
She exposed how fragile the narrative really is.

If a meme breaks your ideology,
your ideology was already on life support.

The Amelia memes do seem to be getting under the skin of certain members of the government:

Amelia is a girl of many talents:

Epochalypse
Published 24 Jan 2026

An absolutely beautiful song covered by Amelia ❤️

A UK anti-extremism educational game called Pathways, faced significant public and media backlash.

The game, developed by SOUK in coordination with the Hull City Council and East Riding of Yorkshire Council, was designed to educate students about the dangers of online radicalization.

How the Game Backfired

Antagonist’s Popularity: The game’s primary antagonist, a teenage girl with purple hair named Amelia who held nationalist views, was intended as a cautionary figure. However, she was ironically embraced by some online communities and became a viral meme, with users finding her “goth baddie” design and character more interesting and relatable than the non-binary protagonist, Charlie.

Criticism of Content: The game was widely criticized by media outlets, including The Telegraph and The Spectator, as “clumsy” and “overtly manipulative”. Critics argued that the game effectively suppressed free speech by suggesting characters who questioned immigration policies should be reported under the UK government’s “Prevent” counter-terrorism strategy.

Portrayal of “Research”: The game’s narrative structure suggested that “researching” information online could be harmful, as it might lead to “intaking a lot of harmful, ideological messages”, which also drew criticism.

Ultimately, the attempt to create an effective anti-extremism tool had the opposite effect in many online circles, with its intended villain becoming an ironic symbol for anti-illegal immigration sentiment.

#amelia #pathways #memes #patriotism

Kimberly Steele disgrees with the characterization of Amelia as a “tulpa” (which I think I first saw advanced by John Carter at Postcards From Barsoom) and argues that she’s actually an “egregore” instead:

Amelia crossing paths with Harry Potter and the gang, very appropriate for this essay

In rides fantasy Amelia to the rescue, a digital Joan of Arc to galvanize the lumpen male proletariat into action against leftist groupthink oppression. Her flame burns hotter than the tradwife because she is not a deferential, docile, opinionless mirage waiting for her man to do all the the heavy lifting. Instead of modeling crusty tropes from the 1950s in a housedress, she mouths off to Mohammed in a miniskirt. She champions sensible norms that middle aged people like me took for granted back in the day. She is an advocate of schoolgirls being able to walk down the streets of Liverpool without being acid attacked or drug into fenced areas to be assaulted. She suggests Britain is for the British and that it should not be handed over to the same hordes that have been trying to overrun it since before the Middle Ages. She suggests that men on all sides rise up and outgrow Puer Aeternis — to the invaders, she insists that they cease their infantile dependence routines and go back and fight for their own country on their own soil. To the white native islanders, she suggests they grow a set and defend their nation while it still stands. Nothing that Amelia wants or espouses is extreme. She is a middle-of-the-road pundit who could run for office on a moderate platform (or what used to be considered moderate in my day before everything in the middle was categorized as far-right) and win. She’s not exactly Hitler, no matter what the leftie pearl clutchers claim.

If only she was real. Amelia has been called a tulpa, which is a Buddhist term for a thoughtform that is forced into existence and made to do tasks, much like a Jewish golem without the clay and awkwardness. I don’t think Amelia is a tulpa. She is nobody’s bitch and she was not created on purpose. Instead, Amelia is an egregore. Imagine your old school mascot was a giant, anthropomorphized tiger. Perhaps there was a person who dressed up as a big, striped cat for games every now and then. Now imagine that your mascot became extremely popular across the world and every sports team adopted him as their mascot too. Now imagine that your big tiger began appearing randomly in the nightly dreams of people who were very into sports, and then after a few years, non-sports fans. Tiger fan fiction was inspired by the egregore. Tons of giant tiger merch was sold both at games and in regular stores. Imagine if chick lit writers wrote ghastly bestiality porn about the giant tiger, and entire genres of tiger man erotica bubbled up online. You would begin to think perhaps there was consciousness behind the tiger man image, and if you did think such odd things, traditional occultists would take your side of the conspiracy theory.

An egregore is a shared image that gains its own consciousness. Any given novel’s character is essentially alive, gaining his/her/it’s own consciousness, ego, and world. […]

Amelia says what men cannot say, and it is good because she does it in a way that is unsquelchable and eternal. She is bad because she is yet another symptom of provisional living. On the plus side, she makes toxic liberal women super mad because unlike a real girl, they cannot tear her down or cast her out of the longhouse/take her ability to make a living away in order to force her compliance. She highlights all of their shortcomings without having to try, and that is why she will have much hate projected upon her. Their evil eyes gaze into the digital mirror. This force may be enough for them to completely self-destruct, given enough time and distance.

There are some men who see Amelia as some kind of savior. If you are one of them, let me assure you she is not going to save anyone any more than Pepe the Frog. If you want to save and be saved, please go outside. Be with the sky and the trees, and don’t feel you have to pick up a fishing pole, soccer ball, or a toolbox to be out there. When you do come back inside, instead of turning on the dopamine drip and immersing yourself in the antics of fantasy girlfriends or dreaming about invading Haiti, please use the internet to learn manly skills. My husband, whose father was largely absent before he divorced my husband’s mother when my husband was 12, taught himself nearly all of his considerable skills via books and the internet. If you are a visual learner, the internet holds a treasure trove of knowledge. For those would be warriors who are not currently serving or who will never serve in the armed forces, please go out and defend real girls on the streets from the monsters, creeps, and traffickers who make it impossible to feel safe as a female. Where are the men willing to watch the streets and to at least threaten various immigrant scum with retribution for their terrible behavior? Where are the volunteer neighborhood patrols that ensure women and children can walk to and from school without being harassed? In the stranger danger/Satanic Panic 80s, we had a thing called Neighborhood Watch where you would put a blue star in your window so any little kid who felt threatened could knock on the door and find a safe house. Where are the blue stars? Where are the boys with baseball bats? Go out there and defend your country. Do it for Amelia.

Update, 28 January: 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.

January 20, 2026

Those awful AWFLs

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

On Substack, Rohan Ghostwind responds to a recent New York Times opinion from Michelle Goldberg pretending not to understand why “the right” is against Affluent White Female Liberals (AWFLs):

Michelle Goldberg recently wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times called “The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women”

Specifically, she talks about the rising contempt for the AWFL: Affluent white female liberal.

The first part of the opinion piece is a play-by-play of the Renee Good situation, pointing out that the right is freaking out about roving bands of Karens.

The part I find interesting is in the final paragraph:

    It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like “White Fragility” seriously. So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy.

Here’s the interesting part: throughout the course of her opinion piece, she touches on White Female Liberal part. Conspicuously missing is the first part of the acronym: affluent.

This is par for the course for an NYT Opinion piece: play into the identity politics aspect while simultaneously downplaying class. This is, of course, a big reason why the Democrats lost ground with working class people during the 2024 election.

[…]

Rob Henderson popularized the term luxury beliefs …

And if it was ever one group of people who embody the most luxury beliefs per capita it would be the AWFL’s.

What makes them uniquely annoying is their persistent refusal to acknowledge how sanctimonious they come across to the rest of the world. As far as they’re concerned, they are the only intelligent and moral group of people, and they will eventually get what they want by scolding everybody else into submission.

People hate this, because people would actually prefer bigotry to infantilization — but the affluent white woman, by virtue of being affluent, never has to reality test her beliefs against the real world.

January 15, 2026

Having it both ways, thanks to the miraculous powers of “climate change”

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

Remember those news reports from a few years back, when the media urgently informed you that your home town was “warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet”? Sure you do, because every major outlet latched on to the idea and juiced it for that local angle. In the days before the internet and social media, it would have worked, too. This is an example of the amazing powers of climate change, but far from the only one. Apparently the wonders of climate change can both speed up and slow down the rotation of the entire planet:

Here is a headline from Forbes 4 August 2022:

Here, five short days later, is a headline from The Independent 9 August 2022:

It is possible to reconcile these two messages, if you are are dedicated The Science follower who greatly fears being called a science denier.

This is how: that on or before 8 August 2022, you swear the earth is spinning faster, and you say that any who doubts this is a troglodyte MAGAtard, and that 9 August 2022 and after, you swear the earth is spinning slower, and say that any who doubts this is mouth-breathing redneck.

The Science is self-correcting in this way.

Now what is amusing about this is not the hubris and over-certainty of scientists, which because scientists are people have characteristics in them no different than in non-scientists. What matters to us are (a) the alleged causes of the changes in rotational speed, and (b) AI.

[…]

I have been trying, with little success, to explain that AI is programmed to be sycophantic, to give users a feeling that what they (the users) believe is right, and that they are right to believe whatever it is they want to believe. Press any of these AI models strongly and consistently enough, and you can get them to “admit” just about anything — that they haven’t been hard coded not to notice. DIE is still with us, even, or especially in, AI.

AI has sworn that earth is both speeding up and slowing down, promising both were true with searches I did (for the article titles) separated by less than a minute.

Now this is partly to blame on the training material, because scientists themselves are claiming the same things AI found. Which brings us to the alleged causes of both.

Climate change.

Well of course it was climate change. Climate change, as we discovered earlier, is responsible for all things on earth. All bad things, that is. Climate change simultaneously causes earth to spin both slower and faster. Climate change is therefore a branch of quantum mechanics, where outcomes both happen and don’t happen, depending on which scientist is looking.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress