I think emotion is something like the brain’s immune system. Just as you need to take your share of cuts and scrapes and bruises in order to get tough physically, you need to suffer the slings and arrows in your mind to get mentally tough. I might go so far as to relate it to the hysteria we see on social media — indeed, to hysteria in general. Consider the prevalence of bizarre allergies etc. that only hit once the helicopter parents started going all out to protect their kids from even the most minor cuts and scrapes. That can’t be a coincidence, any more than the huge uptick in behavioral problems like OCD can be.
Note that by “mentally tough” I don’t mean “carrying on like the Marlboro Man”, necessarily. Anonymous Conservative has a similar theory, that he relates to amygdala development, and maybe it’s that. I certainly saw a lot of incidents that look like what he calls “amygdala hijacks” back in my teaching days — kids would melt down and go catatonic, over the most inconsequential things. They’d never been faced with “failure” before, so not acing a silly little unit quiz hit them like the end of the world.
Just as I’d bet the cumulative retail price of all the shit we’ve sent to Ukraine that the triple-masked, lockdowns-forever covidiots are now getting floored by the kind of minor sniffles they’d have shrugged off three years ago — because they’ve maybe perma-fucked their immune systems, and that’s before all the side effects of the not-vaxx — so kids who have never been exposed to grief, frustration, and failure get floored by tiny bumps in the road. It’s total systemic shock, and I’m not joking — I’d bet long money that they actually break out in hives, get weird rashes, and so on, because the kind of stress chemicals that can turn a tough, healthy young soldier into a shell shock case will do all kinds of damage to someone totally unprepared.
I guess this is the tl;dr — I’m not a doctor, I don’t play one on tv, but I’m betting that those stress chemicals play an important role in ordinary cognition; they’re necessary for proper brain function. But they’re tough; your brain needs exercise in order to be able to handle those chemicals efficiently. If you don’t get it, your brain gets “fat”, in the same way your body gets fat if you load it up with too much of a good thing. And it’s recursive — those stress chemicals get stored in fat, too. So just as obesity is comorbid for just about everything — seriously, being fat is the absolute worst thing for your general health, bar none — so having a “fat brain” by not getting enough “exercise” totally destroys your ability to keep your head, to think clearly and logically.
Severian, “Quick Thoughts”, Founding Questions, 2022-04-28.
February 7, 2026
QotD: Stress in the post-lockdown world
January 18, 2026
QotD: Having zero agency
I took the lesson from that, which I still try to follow to this day, that you have to process people’s actions and ideas one by one. Certainly this is not to say that there is no room for trust and reputation. If I have found myself agreeing with someone historically and they have been proved right on certain topics time and again, I am going to give their next statement a lot of credence — but I am still going to mentally challenge it to some extent. And for individuals, this sort of reputational trust can vary by topic. If my wife gives me a read on a person, I am going to assume she is correct; if she opines on navigation issues when we are walking around an unfamiliar city, I am going to treat that with a lot more skepticism.
Most will have guessed where I am going with this — the opposition to Trump has reached this point of zero agency. Smart people I know will mock everything Trump says, even if it is something they would normally agree with or at least entertain. People who are extraordinarily skeptical of all medication suddenly think that concerns about Tylenol during pregnancy are totally absurd. The whole Tylenol story is actually pretty interesting — a Harvard dean’s imprimatur seems to tick the credentialism box that was so prominent in COVID, but a look at the quality of the research and the money involved tends to make one very skeptical. And of course a lot of what RFK says makes me skeptical. The whole story is a really interesting, including appeals-to-authority issues we had during COVID, only with the parties reversed. But no one really looks because if Trump said it, it must be mocked.
Coyote, “On Having Zero Agency”, Coyote Blog, 2025-10-02.
December 17, 2025
“The core hypocrisy of modern Western governance”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Marazzo discusses the extremely weird experience we’ve all lived through since 9/11 in almost every major western nation:
For more than 20 years, Western governments told their citizens that Islamist extremism posed an existential threat. Entire generations were sent to fight the Global War on Terror. Soldiers were killed, families were broken, civil liberties were curtailed, and trillions were spent, all justified by the claim that terrorism had to be stopped over there so it would not reach us here.
Then something strange happened.
The same governments that built their legitimacy on that fear now insist that even discussing the cultural, security, or integration risks associated with mass immigration from unstable regions is immoral. Raise concerns and you are no longer a citizen asking questions, but a bigot, an extremist, or a threat yourself. In some countries, speech alone now draws police attention, while violent acts are reframed as isolated incidents or stripped of ideological context.
The irony deepens when you look at the timeline.
During the first years of Covid, terrorism all but vanished from news coverage, just as Covid seemed to erase the common cold, cancer, and every other cause of death from public discourse. Nothing had disappeared. The narrative had simply changed. Attention was redirected. Fear was reassigned.
Now, as governments pursue aggressive mass immigration policies, the public is told that questioning outcomes is unacceptable, even as the very threats once used to justify war reappear domestically. The message is clear and profoundly cynical: the danger was real when it justified foreign wars, but discussion becomes forbidden when it complicates domestic policy.
This is not tolerance. It is coercion.
And now comes the final insult.
The same political class that demands silence at home is preparing to demand sacrifice abroad. The same citizens who are told to accept social breakdown, rising crime, collapsing services, and cultural fragmentation are being told they may soon be required to fight Russia to “defend our way of life”.
What way of life, exactly?
The one being systematically dismantled by the very governments issuing the call. The one they are actively transforming into something unrecognizable through reckless policy, moral intimidation, and managed decline. They are asking people to die for values they no longer practice and for societies they are actively degrading.
This is the core hypocrisy of modern Western governance.
We were told to fight, bleed, and die to defend liberal democratic values. Now we are told those same values require silence, compliance, and obedience, while our countries are reshaped without consent and against the will of the people who built them.
A government that suppresses debate at home while demanding loyalty abroad is not defending democracy. It is consuming it.
And history is not kind to regimes that ask their people to die for a future they are busy destroying.
December 9, 2025
Auditing where the money goes, First Nations edition
I don’t think many Canadians would argue with the government providing funding to First Nations groups in remote areas so they have access to services and amenities that most of us take for granted. But the government has been giving so much money for so long with very little evidence that the money is actually making a difference. Surely, a regular system of audits would show what happens to the money after the feds cut a cheque and why conditions in First Nations communities aren’t improving? Well, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @The Reclamare shares a thread detailing some of the findings of a recent audit of a First Nations NGO and it’s kind of disturbing:
Where our taxes go, First Nations Edition
KPMG audited the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) representing 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan
They analyzed spending between April 2019 and March 2024
Hang on🧵
#1 – COVID Funding
$26 million was audited
KPMG found $23.5 million was questionable
** an 89% failure rate**– no records
– missing contracts
– missing invoices
# 2 – Travel expenditures
$800K of travel spending was audited
$316K was flagged by auditors, a 39% failure rateHalf the travel bookings couldn’t be justified, either policy violations or they couldn’t explain the purpose. And one Vice Chief was billing personal trips
# 3 – Executive Pay Raises during Covid
On November 5, 2020, a briefing note went to FSIN’s Treasury Board recommending:
$60,000 pay raise for the Chief
$40,000 pay raise for each Vice ChiefRetroactive 8 months prior
December 5, 2025
QotD: The Anglosphere
Ironically – and this must drive those of a pro-EU frame of mind nuts – it is still North America, with its rawer culture and politics, its legal similarities to the UK (for good and for ill) that resonates, even in the minds (for want of a better noun) of the sort of folk going on BLM demos. What goes on in France, Germany or Italy tends not to have the same grip on the mind. The Atlantic is wide and the Channel is narrow, but in every other sense, it is the other way around. To that extent, then, the Anglosphere lives, even in the hearts and minds of the far Left.
Johnathan Pearce, “The Anglosphere and our present discontents”, Samizdata, 2020-06-08.
November 13, 2025
Blue Hairster Cult: (Do Fear) The Zoomers
In the free-to-cheapskates portion of this post, Ed West explains why the Boomers and even the Millennials should fear the Zoomers:
“To understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty”. I’ve thought about that quote, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, a fair bit recently. I suppose for my generation, 9/11 was the formative event, which signalled the end of the triumphalist Nineties — although the extent to which it affected us is questionable. Perhaps of far greater importance was the financial crisis which unfolded towards the very end of the Bush-Blair era.
What about those born around the turn of the millennium, the so-called “Zoomers”? I suppose it would be the experience of being locked down for a year in order to protect an older generation whose wealth they can never hope to emulate. An already bitter and disillusioned cohort, denied their patrimony by house price inflation, came to adulthood with a period of deliberate social isolation with only the internet at hand — a lockdown that was punctuated by weeks of millennial hysteria over racism.
The intelligent ones would have seen the hysteria for it was — a wild distortion, and realised that the media regularly distorts all sorts of things, and it’s the intelligent ones I worry about. Indeed, when I read the thoughts and worldview of that generation, I feel a sense of dread about what’s coming; perhaps even more so when it comes from the Right.
I only watched a Nick Fuentes video for the first time this summer, an amusingly edited version of a talk in which he rails against Israeli military success. It had been sent by a Jewish friend with strong Zionist sympathies, and it’s very funny — Fuentes is very funny. If I were 20 years old, I might have watched his show, one of many aspects of life in 2025 which I thank God wasn’t around in my adolescence.
After all, most of the things I watched on television – five channels, kids, in fact more like four and half, as the Channel 5 reception wasn’t very good – liked to poke fun at the prevailing morality of the older generation. My favourite comic, Viz, would laugh at the old people whose fault it was that Eddie Murphy’s swearing had to be dubbed over with “freak you, monkeyfeather”. Today it’s only natural that young men should wish to offend woke scolds.
But then, of course, something darker might also be happening. Rod Dreher recalls a fascinating, and disturbing, account of his conversations with young Republican activists this week, writing that: “Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, ‘They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down’.”
There is certainly polling to suggest that younger voters in the US are moving to extremes, if you believe polls. One found that “explicit antisemitic attitudes are now much more common among young voters”, who are five times more likely to have an “unfavourable view of the Jewish people than 65 year olds”. Since 2018, the percentage of American boys who believe in gender equality has shrunk. Far more worrying is that younger Americans are also much more likely to support political violence. and this is more of a problem on the left.
July 27, 2025
“[T]he wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “‘hate has no home here'”
Chris Bray looks at the kind of people who supported the lockdowns during the pandemic and heartily condemned those lesser folks whose careers and livelihoods were threatened and how they hope for examples to be made of the “leaders” of the Freedom Convoy back in 2022:
Let’s start with a comparison to the good people in Canada, the wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “hate has no home here”. Cheri DiNovo is, let me put this very gently, an instantly recognizable social type, “one of Canada’s best-known and most ardent queer ministers and an Ontario politician who would help pass some of the province’s most integral LGBTQ2S+ policy”. You already know her by her facial expression:
slay, girlboss
As the leaders of the Freedom Convoy face sentencing in court, DiNovo has this to say about their monstrous cruelty:
The Freedom Convoy: white supremacist homophobes who harassed and brutalized LGBTQ+ people and immigrants and the disabled, lashing out in a stunning wave of public cruelty. It was like a NUREMBERG RALLY with trucks, obviously. Here, look at some of the monstrous acts of public brutality committed at this mass expression of hate and rage:
YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DANCED TOGETHER THINK ABOUT IT
Rupa Subramanya, a journalist who uses the old and mostly forgotten technique of talking to people, wandered the crowds in Ottawa (in her own neighborhood) and reported that Freedom Convoy protesters mostly talked about their desire to recover a sense of hope. Their grievances were clear, thoroughly explained, and entirely defensible. Here’s a sample paragraph, a discussion with one of the VICIOUS WHITE SUPREMACISTS:
Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200. “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”
See this clearly against Cheri DiNovo’s framing, and remember it:
The white supremacist protesters who hate immigrants; for example, Kamal Pannu, a Sikh immigrant and trucker.
In fact, Sikhs make up a substantial share of the trucking industry in Canada, and so had a significant presence at the Freedom Convoy:
See the WHITE SUPREMACISTS saying that they HATE IMMIGRANTS!?!?!? Because Cheri DiNovo does. She thinks categorically: good people who support the Liberal Party, Literally Adolf Hitler who doesn’t. She has no capacity for seeing the thing itself, as it was on the ground, in physical reality. Literally nothing, no evidence or substance of any kind, could ever have prevented her from saying that a protest against Justin Trudeau’s government was white supremacist and homophobic. She’s out of her fucking mind. She has no connection to any form of reality, at all, in any way, ever. She doesn’t see anything. She doesn’t know anything. She’s ignorant noise and infinite sanctimony, with a pair of legs to carry it around.
This is “left” politics in the Anglosphere. Symbol symbol symbol, you NAZI! It doesn’t connect. It’s all chanting and performance and status-signaling, and it never leaves the house. It left reality behind ten years ago, and now it’s out there sailing past Pluto. For adherents of the Manichean religion of wokeism, categorical thinking covers all bases. People who don’t get mRNA injections are misogynistic racist bigots, obviously.
Update: Fixed broken link.
July 24, 2025
QotD: Migrant farm workers
It is certainly true that the fruit-pickers would not be well-paid. Moreover, their accommodation during their stay would almost certainly be uncomfortable and overcrowded. The work they would do would be hard and possibly back breaking. It is certainly not the kind of work I should want to do myself, though I might have thought of it as a bit of an adventure for a couple of weeks to earn some pocket money when I was nineteen. But the Romanian workers are not coming for a bit of youthful adventure: they are coming because they are poor and need the money to live.
The fruit season is short. If the fruit is not picked, it will rot where it grows. Prices are such that farmers cannot offer high wages, and it is surely a good thing that fruit is available at a price that everyone can afford. There have been appeals to the British unemployed (in whose numbers there has been a sudden and great increase) to do the work, but they have not responded. The wages are not such as to attract them, and their economic situation would probably have to be considerably worse before the wages did attract them — and if their situation were to worsen to such an extent, they might choose crime, riot, disorder and looting rather than fruit-picking as a means of getting by economically. As for coercing the unemployed to take the work that is theoretically available to them, for example by withdrawing their social security unless they agreed to do it, the political repercussions would be too terrible to contemplate. It is easy to see in the abstract how our system of social security distorts the labour market, such that we have to import labour to perform such unskilled tasks as fruit-picking, but now is not a propitious moment at which to try radical reform. In politics as in life, you are always starting out from where you are, not from where you should have been had your past conduct been wiser or more prudent.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Contradictions of Labor”, New English Review, 2020-05-05.
Update, 26 July: Original link replaced. Link rot is sadly real.
July 22, 2025
Bitter reality is coming for the laptop class
Spaceman Spiff foretells the end of the managed paradise of the “unsophisticated sophisticates” of the privileged laptop class who have been able to keep their dream alive at the expense of everyone outside their rarefied and protected bubbles:
There seems to be a section of society populated with gullible conformists who believe many of the manufactured narratives designed to manage society.
Most are the credentialed products of universities. The laptop class of professionals who operate the corporations, institutions and key organizations.
Their worldview is comprised of stories which are downloaded and stored as mental models. Adhering to these narratives can then devolve into belief systems that are placed beyond criticism. This in turn can easily degenerate into a kind of fanaticism.
Ideas like mass migration and the destruction of reliable energy sources are crazy and yet they are primarily in existence thanks to the efforts of this layer of society, the professionals who implement policies desired by the ruling class.
While some among them are cynically exploiting today’s fads for their own ends, many seem to be true believers.
How can they believe these things so completely? What is going on?
Rebels searching for causes
Most of today’s great crusades seem to have the same characteristics. They are easily downloaded and consumed, they are socially rewarded within some circles, and they are not immediately obvious as issues at all.
The most popular are pre-prepared to an almost comical degree and thoroughly focus-grouped to ensure minimal friction among their consumers.
Many even come with slogans attached. Diversity is our strength is every bit as artificial as two weeks to flatten the curve, but it goes down easily with no thought required, which is the point.
The ideas that stick are the ones most useful to demonstrate virtue. Showing off to your peers you are non-sexist, non-racist and non-homophobic helps secure your place in many professional hierarchies where visible in-group membership matters.
The most prized causes appear to be non-obvious where the conclusions are not reachable with the evidence available.
This confusing aspect makes many question some new idea or policy, but in the laptop class often triggers a sense of smugness that they see beyond the obvious to the obscure thanks to their impressive intellects. Criticism can then be dismissed as simplistic providing a rewarding sense of superiority.
Much of the above is evident in the belief systems of today’s professional classes.
[…]
What to make of all this?
Does any of this matter? Yes it does. It is this section of society that ultimately puts in place the ruinous ideas of the ruling class.
They are in the corporate offices, the local councils and the schools. They are running the television stations and the publishing houses. They are captured by groupthink. Everyone they know thinks as they do. All criticism is easily dismissed.
Very little can penetrate this bubble. Except one thing.
Over time reality intrudes. Models should be updated to accommodate new findings and observations, but that is challenging when they have been uncritically downloaded to satisfy psychological needs.
Contrary evidence threatens one’s sense of self so scrutiny is avoided. When these avoidances ultimately fail some dig even deeper. Magical thinking seems to be everywhere.
The ultimate effect is either a reassessment of one’s worldview, or a psychotic break from reality. We see examples of the latter; Trump Derangement Syndrome is one well known borderline psychosis but there are others.
March 22, 2025
“Humiliate yourself before us,” I was being told, “And we still won’t hire you, lol”
The accelerating downfall of the academic-political complex is the subject of John Carter’s most recent post at Postcards from Barsoom:
University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
Look. In any given case, for any given scientist working inside the university system, there are exactly two possibilities.
One: they embraced all of this with cheerful, delirious, evangelical enthusiasm. Religious devotees of the unholy cause of converting every institution to the One False Faith of Decay, Envy, and Incompetence, they have spent the last decade or more enforcing campus speech codes, demanding inclusive changes to hiring policies, watering down curricular requirements to improve retention of underrepresented (because underperforming) equity-seeking demographics, forcing their research collaborations to adopt codes of conduct, and mobbing any of their colleagues who voiced the mildest protest against any of this intellectual and organizational vandalism.
Two: they had reservations, but went along with it all anyhow because what were they to do? They needed jobs; they needed funding; and anyhow they didn’t go into STEM to fight culture wars. As the article says, “They’d prefer to just get back to the science,” and the easiest way to get back to the science was to just go along with whatever the crazies were demanding. Even if the crazies were demanding that they abandon any pretense of doing actual science.
The first group are enemies.
The second are cowards.
Both deserve everything they get.
And I am going to enjoy every moment of them getting it.
Look, I am going to vent here a bit, okay? Because the mewling in this article succeeded in getting under my skin.
Not long ago I was considered a promising early career scientist, with an excellent publication record for my field, a decent enough teaching record, and all the rest of it. After several years as a semi-nomadic postdoc – which had followed several years as a semi-nomadic graduate student – it was time to start looking for faculty positions. My bad luck: Fentanyl Floyd couldn’t breathe, and the networked hive consciousness of eggless harpies infesting the institutions was driven into paroxysms of preening performative para-empathy.
What this meant was two things. First, more or less every single university started demanding ‘diversity statements’ be included in faculty application packages, alongside the standard research statements, teaching statements, curriculum vitae, and publication list. The purpose of the diversity statement was to enable the zampolit in HR and the faculty hiring committee to evaluate the candidate’s level of understanding of critical race theory, gender theory, intersectionality, and all the rest of the cultural Marxist anti-knowledge; to identify candidates who had already made contributions to advancing diversity; and to identify candidates who had well-thought-out ten-point plans to help advance the department’s new core principle and overriding purpose, that being: diversity.
The second thing it meant was that hiring policies now implicitly – in the United States – and explictly (in Canada) mandated diversity as an overriding concern in hiring. As everyone knows, this means that if you’re a heterosexual cisgendered fucking white male, you are not getting hired.
In other words, I was now expected to write paeans praising the very ideology that had erected itself as an essentially impermeable barrier to my own employment, pledging to uphold this ideology myself and enforce it against others who look like me. “Humiliate yourself before us,” I was being told, “And we still won’t hire you, lol.”
Having some modicum of self-respect, I refused to go along with this. This meant that I simply could not apply for something like 90% of the available positions. And when I did apply to positions that didn’t require a diversity statement, and successfully got an interview, guess what? One of the first questions out of the mouth of one of hiring committee members would be “what will you do for diversity”, or “I see you didn’t mention diversity in your teaching statement …” See, even if it isn’t mandated by the administration, that doesn’t stop the imposter-syndrome-having activist ladyprofs from insinuating the diversity test on their own initiative. I once had a dean, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, tell me “women in science are very important to me” right at the beginning of the interview; I very nearly got that job, because everyone on the committee wanted me, but later – after they inexplicably ghosted – found out that she’d nixed it. They just didn’t hire anyone.
Right around the same time, of course, we were in the thick of the COVID-19 scamdemic. You remember, the one that was just the flu, bro, until it became the new Black Death that definitely did not come from a laboratory shut up you conspiracy theorist; which couldn’t be stopped by masks so don’t be silly until suddenly masks were the only thing that could save you; which led to us all being locked in our houses for a year because some idiot wrote a Medium article called “the dance of the hammer with your soft skull” or whatever which then went viral inside the hysterosphere; which motivated the accelerated development of a novel mRNA treatment that no one was going to get because you couldn’t trust the Evil Orange Man’s bad sloppy science until suddenly it was safe and effective and then overnight absolutely mandatory and anyone who refused to take it should be sent to a camp.
Yeah, remember that?
I guarantee you that every single credentialed scientist in that article was on board for all of it.
How do I know this?
Because they all were.
March 2, 2025
The end of the Ukraine narrative
On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “Captain Benjamin” outlines the last several years of progressive narrative that may have been totally derailed in the Oval Office the other day:
Zelenskyy walked into the Oval Office wearing an outfit that was reminiscent of the uniforms from Star Trek, he was escorted out a few hours later and the entire liberal consensus that has been the guiding narrative of the West for the last three years was a smoking hot mess, as if struck by several Photon Torpedoes from the Starship Enterprise itself.
It’s forgotten now but the Ukraine War was how the Liberal consensus moved on at breakneck pace from the Covid hysteria without ever having to explain why we had hidden from a cold for the previous two years and spent untold billions doing so.
I still remember being in a newsagent and the woman behind the desk told me that Covid was over and Ukraine was the new thing now, that was how quickly it happened, one mass consensus narrative seamlessly replaced another and the show went on.
Until today when show came off the tracks crashed into the buffers and a million Liberal talking heads exploded in unison as the entire narrative which had served as this strange outlet for their repressed jingoistic and nationalist desires was destroyed.
To me there was always something about the Ukraine War that didn’t pass the sniff test, whether it was Hunter Biden’s links to energy companies there, the way in which valid criticisms of the NATO expansion were shouted down, the mysterious blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline that was never explained.
Or the feverish want to protect Ukraine’s borders while European elites operated an unpopular open borders policy themselves, the billions being funnelled in, the tales of Ukrainians buying up yachts and sports cars.
But most clearly fact that the entire Uniparty Party and the chattering classes were in absolute lockstep about what needed to be down and any disagreement or attempt to question the narrative had you dismissed as a traitor or Putinist.
It was all very reminiscent of the groupthink that had swept the world two years previous during Covid, another unquestionable narrative, with the Uniparty in lockstep and anyone who dared to question it smeared as an anti-vaxxer.
I didn’t support Covid as the narrative had more holes than Swiss cheese and the Ukraine narrative has similarly porous texture, but to see the narrative explode so spectacularly was as much as a shock to me as it was to Zelenskyy who found himself in a hole and just kept digging.
At one-point he shocking seeming to delivered a veiled threat to Trump himself: “During war, everybody has problems, even you, but you have a nice ocean and don’t feel now, but you will feel it in the future.”
A comment that really sent the meeting side-ways, as Trump swiftly told Zelenskyy not to tell him what he should feel, leading to the arguments that scuppered the signing of a deal.
And the essence is that Trump wanted to make a deal, he’d been bragging about it to Starmer the day before, he was going to get a great deal, recoup American loses with rare-earth minerals and the EU could save-face by guarding the American mines as a peace keeping force.
It also meant that America wasn’t getting sucked into a Vietnam in the snow.
Trump doesn’t want to be a war-time President, especially a war he doesn’t think is necessary or good for business, Trump wants to usher in an AI Golden Age, send rockets to Mars, and American living standards to the moon; a 21st Century tycoon economy.
He wants peace for Ukraine and Russia as he knows that thousands are senselessly dying every week, and knows his presidency and the country cannot cope with hundreds of Americans coming home in body bags every month.
And so he wanted to make a deal with Zelenskyy, make a deal with Russia, and America gets paid, it’s a crude outcome but its aligned with reality.
But Zelenskyy doesn’t want that, he wants America men and weapons to win the war and make Russia to pay, while the EU have gassed him up to believe this possible because the EU are clinging to this war as a chance to project the veneer of power that they cannot possibly muster domestically due [to] Populist parties eroding their authority at home.
However, as Trump asked Keir to much nervous laughter, can you take on Russia alone?
America knows without them the EU cannot continue this charade, but more than that the Americans are disgusted with the EU, they view them as a drunk Uncle that has run out of goodwill.
How they are suppressing the free-speech of their citizens, failing to protect their own borders, yet grandstanding off the back of the US defence budget?
These are the questions being asked Stateside about the since Trump took office.
While the America people are questioning why are billions of tax dollars being poured into Ukraine as America goes deeper into debt.
Trump wanted to close the chapter with a deal, Zelenskyy wanted to continue a war he cannot win, and as Zelenskyy realised he wasn’t going to drag America deeper into this war he lost control, and in doing so forgot he wasn’t dealing with the Bidens and petulantly disrespected his new would-be patrons, triggering the mother of all blowbacks in the process.
Trump made it clear that what Zelenskyy was asking for was for America to risk World War 3, and Vance made it clear that everyone knew that Zelenskyy was a creature of the old regime, even highlighting how Zelenskyy campaigned against Trump in Ohio, while Trump reiterated that without the America Zelenskyy holds no cards for future negotiations with Russia.
This dose of reality was too much for Zelenskyy and also for the EU who tweeted up a storm in the aftermath pledging to ‘stand’ with Ukraine, only Starmer staying conspicuously silent.
This wasn’t simply a change of policy direction this was the public evisceration of the sacred cow of the waning Liberal Order by the ascendant Populist Insurgency.
Ukraine has functioned as the binding narrative, and in the Oval Office it faced Total Liberal Death, the fragile myth of the rules based international order being violated by Russia Man Bad and being saved by the Liberal Democratic Alliance Good, no further thinking necessary, had functioned as a very effective distraction from the utter failure that Liberalism had turned into domestically while allowing our elites to cos-play as war heroes on the world stage.
This narrative has now been utterly destroyed.
What comes next is still unknown but what we can clearly see is that the Populist Pax Americana will be a very different beast from the Liberal Pax Americana.
As always my friends, thank you for reading I know this is a very polarising issue, so if resonates please like, share and follow, if not please feel free to point out the flaws in my thinking in the comments.
February 22, 2025
QotD: Modern journalism
They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that they didn’t even pretend to train to do.
It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces. Here’s the typical resume of one of these hacks:
- Went to high school, and never went to parties
- Went to college, majored in journalism, and never went to parties
- Went to journalism grad school, and never went to parties
- Works in the media, and goes to Manhattan/Georgetown cocktail parties
This apparently qualifies them to explain to people like us who have actually done something in our lives how stuff is supposed to work.
Kurt Schlicter, “Our Super Smart Elite Shines During This Pandemic!”, TownHall.com, 2020-04-02.
December 5, 2024
We must always trust the experts, say the experts and their journalistic fart-catchers
Glenn Reynolds (aka the “Instapundit”) welcomes Nate Silver to the expert-doubting party:
Well. I was writing about this stuff long before Nate got hip. Back in 2017, just as Donald Trump began his first term, I wrote “The Suicide of Expertise”, by way of responding to Tom Nichols’ book, The Death of Expertise. Nichols’ thesis was that the experts were expert, but that ignorant, superstitious Americans rejected their advice out of insecurity and an unwillingness to be proven wrong. My response was that the experts’ actual track record wasn’t looking so good:
Well, it’s certainly true that the “experts” don’t have the kind of authority that they possessed in the decade or two following World War II. Back then, the experts had given us vaccines, antibiotics, jet airplanes, nuclear power and space flight. The idea that they might really know best seemed pretty plausible.
But it also seems pretty plausible that Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?” Not only have the experts failed to deliver on the moon bases and flying cars they promised back in the day, but their track record in general is looking a lot spottier than it was in, say, 1965.
It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.
And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty …
On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.
It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.
And this was long before the experts’ ne plus ultra of failure, the bungled, dishonest, and downright self-serving response to the Covid pandemic. The pandemic stemmed from experts’ arrogance, in the form of illegal “gain of function” research funded by the U.S. and laundered through Chinese labs, was met with ass-covering “wet market” lies to try to conceal that origin, and then with public health measures, such as lockdowns and social distancing and masking rules, that were backed by no actual science at all, and that were cheerfully flouted by those propounding them whenever it suited their purposes. The final nail in the experts’ authority-coffin, though, was when, after all the lockdown hysteria, they approved massive public marches by Black Lives Matter because, we were told, racism was a public health problem.
Well, so are STDs, but they weren’t encouraging anyone to march against gonorrhea.
Rather they were (ab)using their position to promote the leftist cause du jour. Everyone saw through it, and their stock collapsed.
So. Welcome to the party, pal. Nate’s noticing just how far things have gone downhill.
November 29, 2024
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya nominated as Director of the US National Institutes of Health
From the point of view of the establishment, the barbarians are well and truly inside the gates, as President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee as Director of the National Health Institutes.
Photo by Taleed Brown, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons.
Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists”.
Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom — and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again”.
As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.
Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but whether or not he does so in his next term, the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.
“For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,” says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. “Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?” Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he became an early and outspoken critic of pandemic policies. In 2020, he joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.
Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)
November 19, 2024
“Sometimes, a bouncy castle is just a bouncy castle”
From Donna Laframboise at Thank You, Truckers!, part of the story of the bouncy castles during the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa in 2022:
A t-shirt shows some of Bianca’s post-Convoy branding.
More than two years after the trucker protest ended, Bianca says the COVID era was clarifying. “It opened my mind to what we need to do — and what we don’t need to do.” In her view, childhoods are precious and fleeting. Society should have gone to greater lengths, she feels, to insulate children from pandemic panic and fear. “The kids don’t need that. They just need to be kids.”
[…]
Other than a brief conversation with TVA — a Quebec French-language television station — Bianca says no one from the media spoke to her.
How do we explain this profound lack of curiosity? A young mother inflated bouncy castles that were wholly impossible to miss. Mere steps from the National Press Building. Two weekends in a row. (Smaller inflatables sometimes put in an appearance mid-week.)
Several journalists commented on the bouncy castles. But no one reported Bianca’s story. No one tried to understand.
[…]
Many people instantly grasped the outsized, symbolic significance of the inflatables. “I will never get tired of seeing videos with the bouncy castles in them,” one person tweeted. “It just crumbles the false narrative …”
But “the mainstream media told us the trucker rally was all hate and violence,” someone else pointed out facetiously, while another chimed in: “Those fringe extremists ruining Canada with their happiness and joy.”
If the flag of Canada is ever changed, still another added, the maple leaf should be replaced with a red bouncy castle.
“I absolutely love the tactic” (italics here and below by me), someone else tweeted. “It’s peaceful, family oriented, and gives the Politicians the finger at the same time. Mayor Watson was near tears on CTV today.”
Many people — both sympathetic and hostile to the protest — talked about the bouncy castles as if they were part of a pre-determined plan, dreamt up by a mastermind. According to one individual, the “bouncy castle is probably one of the greatest strategic moves against any government lusting for violence in the history of war strategies“.
Another described the inflatables as “one of the finest information warfare tactics I’ve seen to date”. In the opinion of someone else, “The bouncy castles are the unsung heroes of the protest. The government doesn’t dare send in the tanks or snipers while children are playing in bouncy castles. The optics would be horrific.”
Thomas Juneau, a University of Ottawa professor who specializes in Middle Eastern politics, confidently told the world: “Just to be clear, the bouncy castle was an info op, and more than a few gullible commentators fell for it”. In the universe inhabited by our pompous professor, no evidence is actually required. According to someone else, the presence of bouncy castles pointed to “a sophistication of terrorists”.
On the Monday following the first bouncy castle weekend, someone said the inflatables had disappeared because the “bouncy castle guy” had to report to work. Ten days later, someone else claimed the bouncy castle (singular) had exited the stage because those responsible “are hoping to get their deposit back on it so they can afford the bus fare back to Alberta”.
But the facts in this matter are straightforward. The Freedom Convoy story is about ordinary people who did extraordinary things. Bianca of the Bouncy Castles was one of those people. A mom who cared about the kids. A resident of Quebec who lived three hours distant. An event planner who knows how to make things happen.
There’s nothing covert or complicated here. Sometimes, a bouncy castle is just a bouncy castle.
