Quotulatiousness

November 1, 2026

“Welcome to the wonderful world of carbon accounting”

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

One of the biggest blind spots for climate warriors is the proportion of hand-waving and wishful thinking required to make their grand unified visions of a Net Zero world, as revealed by John Robson as he conducts the search for the fabled “Scope 3”:

Net Zero image from Jo Nova

We recently got an email from Heatmap saying “Half of companies with net-zero commitments call scope 3 their biggest barrier.” And we thought duh what? And then “Probably the other half said ‘What’s scope 3?'” It turns out to be the carbon emissions you don’t emit but get blamed for anyway. More fun from the wacky world of climate economics. Which has this regrettable feature in common with interventionist economics generally: They don’t know enough to know what they don’t know. The email also said “Most are stuck on spend-based estimates too rough to prove whether their reduction programs are working”. As in the old Soviet Union the planners basically planned to spend because unless you let consumer preferences form prices in competitive markets, you can’t tell whether you’re making something useful or just sawdust sausages and ill-fitting size 12 shoes all for left feet.

In a striking departure from modern journalistic practice, we responded by Googling “Scope 3”. And it turns out to be something very revealing in its unrevealingness. For instance, from the “Carbon Trust“:

    The Greenhouse Gas Protocol – which provides the most widely recognised accounting standards for greenhouse gas emissions – categorises GHG emissions into three ‘scopes’. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from owned or controlled sources. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from the purchase and use of electricity, steam, heating and cooling. By using the energy, an organisation is indirectly responsible for the release of these GHG emissions. Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions that occur in the upstream and downstream activities of an organisation.

So here’s the problem. Scope 1 is reasonably easy to measure, at least in principle. It’s the GHGs you emit directly by doing whatever you’re doing, minus presumably staff breathing out CO2 while at work. Scope 2 isn’t too bad: it’s the same as Scope 1 except it’s from your power suppliers for whatever share of their output you acquire. But Scope 3 is a very different beast. It’s all the emissions from all the people you bought stuff from, plus all the emissions from all the people who bought your products. All of them. Every single one. Even your kid’s lemonade stand. And all based on pseudo-scientific “accounting and reporting standards” that sound good, make work, generate money and are no use in the real world.

Here we must again cite Leonard Read’s 1958 classic “I, Pencil“, a demonstration even from a simpler era when people used pencils not AI that tracing out all the steps involved in making things, was inherently a transcomputable and never-ending quest. Thus, the pencil tells the reader, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me”. Take any part of it: the wood, the paint, the eraser, the graphite, and you touch a global supply chain of near infinite complexity. Among a great many other things, that:

    My bit of metal – the ferrule – is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

And to explain who made the coffee and shoes and razor blades for the miners, and who produced the fuel for the ships that carried these goods about, and who made the machine tools to create sheet brass, and on and on, would defy any central planner even before they got to the problem that all these people in turn used pencils (we said it was 1958). Which is why after an initial burst of idealism Soviet Five-Year Plans were essentially reduced to replicating last year’s plan and adding a few percent.

Now imagine trying to track all the carbon emissions. Because it’s what Scope 3 aims to do as if it were a mere detail.

Incidentally Soviet planners from the 1960s on into the 1980s actually thought that more powerful computers would overcome this problem, being unclear on the concept of “transcomputable” particularly as it applied to systems with feedback loops. Then the USSR done died. But not this hope.

Thus Heatmap insists that it can be done with their handy guide, which “lays out a four-step playbook for closing the gap between scope 3 commitments and measurable supply chain progress, using domain-specialized sustainability AI” and from whose three “What you’ll learn” gems the first is:

    How to move from spend-based estimates to product-level emissions data in hours – with AI-powered material mapping and multi-agent validation

Oooh. AI-powered. Domain-specialized no less. And multi-agent validation. We suppose it beats getting it all from Agent 86. But not by much because the fantasy of measuring all the carbon outputs from all your inputs relies on the fantasy of measuring all your inputs and you can’t.

In a market economy, a real one, you don’t have to. As Read also said, as long as you know the price you must pay for the immediate inputs, how to assemble them into outputs, and the price you can get for those outputs, you can tell whether a purchase is rational. But if you have to know more than you can, you’re sunk. Especially if you don’t know you can’t.

Welcome to the wonderful world of carbon accounting. Do not mistake it for the real kind of accounting though.

Optimism about the west, despite current events

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam explains why it’s still possible to be optimistic about western culture, even in the face of things like the coup in Poland this weekend:

People always ask me why I’m so optimistic about the West.

A few weeks ago, I told a friend I’d never been more bullish on our future. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. So I gave him two predictions.

First: the EU, as it exists today, is going to collapse.

Second: we are going to hold a Nuremberg trial for communism. Not for people. For ideas. Because those ideas are still the ones killing us today.

Then I explained why.

There’s one law I’ve watched play out everywhere, in startups, in family fortunes, in empires:

The more a system is full of money and empty of intelligence, the faster it decays.

Take the simplest example. The son or daughter of a billionaire who inherited the money but not the education that came with it. They become parasites on what their parents built. They don’t understand what they’re running. But they’re surrounded by courtiers telling them they’re brilliant, so they feel invincible. And they start breaking things, one confident decision at a time.

That’s the West’s ruling class right now. And here’s the part people miss: a decadent system with no intelligence left doesn’t slowly drift. It collapses. Because it can’t stop making mistakes, and every mistake is bigger than the last.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

In 2024, Marc Andreessen sat down with officials from the Biden administration. By his account, they told him not to bother funding AI startups. AI would be a game for two or three giant companies, working hand in hand with the government. When he pointed out that AI is just math, they told him that during the Cold War they classified entire branches of physics, and they could do the same with the math behind AI.

Think about who they said that to. The man who wrote “Software is eating the world.” The man who understood decades ago that whatever the state gets its hands on, it ruins. Nobody with a functioning brain walks into a room with Marc Andreessen and says that. Those people did. With total confidence.

And now, this week: Donald Tusk.

Police surrounding Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal. Government-backed judges declaring the chief justice suspended. All of it on a Friday evening, while the elected president was on a plane to Senegal, forced to turn around and fly back to Warsaw.

When you’re winning the argument, you don’t send the police to the courthouse.

This is what decadence looks like up close. Endless money. Zero feedback from reality. High on their own supply. Surrounded by people who will never tell them no.

Systems like that don’t reform. They break.

So yes, people find me optimistic. This is why. I’m not betting on these people fixing anything. I’m betting on what gets built after they’ve finished breaking it.

October 30, 2026

Neo-kremlinologists still find value in The E-Communist, er, I mean The Economist

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In The Critic, Chris Bayliss explains how the once-great Economist can still have uses in its much decayed pro-managerialist guise:

Despite what people say, The Economist is still worth reading. This is true for two reasons — firstly whilst the depth of its analysis is not what it once was, it still covers the domestic affairs of a range of developing countries that would be too obscure for other news outlets. Secondly, it is because its editorial line can give fascinating hints about the tectonic movements of managerial elite opinion. Gauging a group of people whose view of the world is driven entirely by consensus is generally a very predictable game — until the moment it isn’t. And it is The Economist we can sometimes look to for the early signs of a change of course.

For us neo-kremlinologists, the magazine has been unduly generous in the last week, providing two interesting snapshots into the neuroses and instincts of the lumpenintelligentsia at the present moment. Before I go any further, it is important to add that these people are not uniformly specious or slow on the uptake — like the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1970s, it includes many highly intelligent and perceptive people, who may be thoughtful or even forthright about the crises that beset us, but only discreetly and on an individual basis. In the atmosphere of stultifying intellectual conformity that they inhabit, what matters is what they feel comfortable discussing and admitting to one another in public, because it is that which shapes the direction of policy. And it is on that that the Economist‘s cachet can be helpful, by virtue of the freedom it lends its unbylined writers to think aloud.

It was the more recent of the two articles that has garnered the most attention. An article titled “Do immigrants from some countries commit more sex crimes?” on 25th October admitted that, yes, they do. The piece was accompanied by a graphic showing — on a logarithmic scale — the rate at which immigrants in Britain were convicted of sexual crimes, by nationality, relative to that of British nationals. The graphic showed very clearly that nationals of countries in non-EU Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East were substantially more likely to be convicted of sexual crimes than British nationals, with people from Afghanistan way out ahead of any other group. EU nationals, meanwhile, were slightly less likely to be convicted of such offences, and East Asians and Australasians even more underrepresented in the statistics. People from the Americans and the Caribbean were, on average, roughly equal to British nationals in their prolificness.

On social media, it was the graphic which prompted the most voluble response; particularly the use of the log scale which, visually, seemed to minimise the scale of the sevenfold disparity between the Afghan rate of sex crime conviction, and the British average. This seemed to hark back to arguments that took place during the Covid pandemic in which the use of log scales for graphs showing the number of new infections or deaths flattened the lines on the graphs and, critics claimed, made the scale of the pandemic seem less severe than it was. But whereas the use of log scales for naturally exponential processes such as viral transmission is in line with standard scientific practice, it is usually considered less appropriate — or even misleading — when the point of narrative interest is the additive difference between two figures, rather than multiplicative growth. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible that the decision to use a log scale was made in good faith, in the interests of conserving page space.

Arguments about the x-axis notwithstanding, it is still a big deal that The Economist would print this. The fact that certain groups of migrants — especially illegal arrivals and asylum seekers from highly unstable countries — are disproportionately likely to commit rape or sexual assault has been one of the most powerful anti-immigration arguments in recent years. It is a point that defenders of the status quo have often been highly sensitive about. In polite and liberal circles, the idea of even looking for a link between national and ethnic origins and sex crimes has hitherto been considered inherently racist and demagogic. In September 2025, an open letter titled “Women against the Far Right” — which was signed by a long list of prominent leftish politicians and celebrities — included the statement that “there is no evidence that people seeking refuge are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence”. This was an easily verifiable or falsifiable objective claim, which they clearly took no effort to verify or falsify, on the reasonable-enough grounds that such data ought to be extremely hard to come by in Britain.

Update, 31 October: 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.

October 18, 2026

Fifty years of French decline

Filed under: France, Government, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On X, auto-translated from the original French, Guillaume Herblot laments the dynamic, innovative France of fifty years ago in contrast to the sclerotic bureaucratic swamp it is today:

In France, we invented the Concorde.

In 1969, it took off and reached Mach 2, a symbol of Gaullist grandeur, designed to challenge the Americans.

In 1972, the TGV 001 broke the world speed record on turbine power (318 km/h).

In 1981, the electric TGV connected Paris to Lyon at 260 km/h. In 2007, it shattered the world rail speed record: 574.8 km/h.

In the 1970s, the Messmer Plan launched the largest civilian nuclear program in history: 58 reactors, providing up to 70-80% of our electricity, an energy independence that the whole world envied.

Dassault, Sud-Aviation, EDF, Framatome, SNCF: our engineers were the best. We were ten to twenty years ahead of almost everyone else.

Then 1981, Mitterrand. Massive nationalizations (banks, steel, chemicals, electronics, aeronautics). The 39-hour workweek. Auroux Laws. Exploding social charges. All-powerful unions. Punitive taxation. Rigidified labor laws.

In less than fifty years, socialism transformed a country of conquering engineers into a country of strikes, offshoring, and relative stagnation.

Industry went from about 28% of GDP to 11%.

The Concorde was abandoned. Our nuclear program was nearly dismantled for decades due to deadly political choices.

This isn’t fate; it’s the price of an ideology that preferred to redistribute and regulate rather than build and innovate.

A word to the wise.

On the topic of France and the French, it is rather surprising to find that as recently as the French Revolution, “French” was almost exclusively the language of the court, the mercantile middle classes in urban areas, and the church. Most “Frenchmen” spoke local dialects that had little in common with formal French:

A double guillotine
Musée de la Révolution française via Wikimedia Commons.

Just a few decades earlier [than 1900] the country was still a maze of local languages, while rural areas of 18th Century France were in many ways a foreign country.

“Most subjects of Louis XVI spoke their own language or dialect”

In the 1740s, the astronomer Jacques Cassini (son of the more famous astronomer Giovanni Cassini, for whom the saturnal probe is named), sent an expedition out to fully map the country for the first time. When one of its geometers climbed Mont Gerbier de Jonc, “he could take in at a glance several small regions whose inhabitants barely knew of each other’s existence”, author Graham Robb writes in The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. (My primary source for most of what follows).

    To walk in any direction for a day was to become incomprehensible […] The people who saw the sun set behind the Gerbier de Jonc spoke one group of dialects; the people on the evening side spoke another. Forty miles to the north, the wine growers and silk-weavers of the Lyonnais spoke a different language altogether, which had yet to be identified and named by scholars. Yet another language was spoken in the region the traveller had left the day before, and though his own mother tongue, French, was a dialect of that language, he would have found it hard to understand the peasants who saw him pass” (3-4).

The insularity was especially pronounced in this region, the mountainous Massif Central, where “roads and byways came and went with the seasons … rivers were unnavigable” and “links to the rest of France practically non-existent”. Accentuating it was the truculent nature of the locals, who soon hacked Cassini’s geometer to death, apparently believing that a strangely clothed man pointing odd metal instruments at rocks was a sorcerer who was behind recent crop failures. A century later, another geographer said this region was best-viewed by balloon, but “only if the aeronaut can remain out of range of a rifle” (Robb, 5). But most other parts of France were only a little better. This was a country that was four-fifths rural at the time of the Revolution; “almost a third of the population (about ten million people) lived in isolated farms and cottages or in hamlets with fewer than thirty-five inhabitants and often no more than eight” (Robb, 13).

The French monarchy had tried to impose the French language from above, “requiring priests and those in liberal professions to speak French, and for church registers and public acts to be kept in French”. But “such controls only affected the surface of life in much of France”, Peter McPhee writes in A Social History of France: 1789-1914. “Most subjects of Louis XVI spoke their own language or dialect and lived within distinctive cultures of perception, language and ritual.”

Grégoire’s survey

In the first few years of the Revolution, the Abbé Henri Grégoire conducted a survey of language use in the whole country, asking each town hall questions like: “Did the people of the region have their own patois?” and “Could it be used to express intellectual concepts or was it riddled with obscenities and oaths?”

Everybody knew that the border regions included non-French speakers — Bretons, Basques, Flemings and Alsatians. And much of southern France spoke not French but a different Romance language, Occitan or langue d’oc. But even the ostensibly “French” or “Occitan” areas “turned out to be a muddle of incomprehensible dialects”.

    In many parts, the dialect changed at the village boundary. Several respondents claimed that differences were perceptible at a distance of one league (less than three miles) and sometimes just a few feet, as the writer from Périgueux explained: ‘The patois’s reign ends at the river Nizonne. It is amazing to cross this little stream and to hear an entirely different patois, which sounds more like French’. In the Jura, there were ‘almost as many different patois as there are villages’. Even plants and stars had their own local names, as if each little region lived under a different sky. (Robb, 50-51)

Though the patois (“‘language’ proper is spoken only in the capital”, the Encyclopédie wrote) were most prevalent in the countryside, peasants weren’t the only speakers.

    The city of Lyon was a hive of micro-dialects: ‘The river people, the butchers, the silk-workers, the fish-wives and the herb-sellers each have a language all their own’. In some southern regions, rich people, priests, scholars, lawyers and tradesmen all spoke the local dialect and ‘felt ill at ease when speaking French. If certain quartiers of Paris had been included in the questionnaire, the Abbé might have added the communities of migrant workers who lived in the capital and whose dialects had a noticeable effect on the speech of Parisian workers. (Robb 52)

During the Revolution, in one Gascon département, “priests complained of peasants falling asleep during the reading of decrees from the Assembly, ‘because they [did] not understand a word, even though the decrees [were] read in a loud and clear voice and [were] explained’. In consequence, successive assemblies encouraged the translation of decrees into local languages …” (McPhee, 38).

After his survey — presented to the National Convention on the very same day Robespierre was elected as the convention’s president — Grégoire concluded that “while France was the language of civilized Europe, France itself had no more than three million ‘pure’ French-speakers (11 per cent of the population), and many of them were unable to write it correctly”. More than six million couldn’t speak French at all, another six million “could barely conduct a conversation in it” (Robb 53).

In fact, Grégoire’s figures “were almost certainly an underestimate”.

    Seventy years later, when official statistics treated a few days at school or the merest smattering of French as evidence of an ability to speak the language, many or most of the communes in fifty-three out of eight-nine départements were said to be non-French-speaking. In 1880, the number of people who felt comfortable speaking French was estimated to be about eight million (just over one-fifth of the population). Robb 53.

On page 54, he has an interesting map showing the spread of official French and dialects in 1863.

August 22, 2026

The WEF – first up against the wall come the revolution

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski considers just how the lizard people of the World Economic Forum came to be “The People Who Decided They Should Run Everything”:

Every year in January, the most important people in the world travel to Davos, Switzerland — a ski resort — to discuss the problems facing humanity. They arrive on private jets. They stay in five-star hotels. They are protected by five thousand soldiers and police. They eat very well. They talk about inequality, climate change, and the need for ordinary people to consume less. Then they fly home on private jets.

This is not satire. This is the schedule.

1. Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 – a German professor who decided that the solution to the world’s problems was to get the people who ran the world’s largest corporations into a room with the people who ran the world’s governments, and have them agree on things before anyone elected them to agree on things. If you control the conversation before the democratic process begins, you control the outcome without being subject to it. Davos is where the agenda is set. Everything after is implementation.

2. The Young Global Leaders program is the masterpiece. Founded in 2004, with its predecessor, Global Leaders for Tomorrow, running since 1993. Together the programs have formed: Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and the health ministers who designed most of the Western world’s COVID response. The pipeline runs continuously. The list is published on the WEF website. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an alumni directory.

3. The program works because it operates before power, not after. By the time a Young Global Leader becomes a prime minister or finance minister, they have already spent years in the same rooms, sharing the same assumptions, networking with the same people. They don’t need to be told what to do. They already know – because they were formed together, in Davos, before anyone gave them the job. The Fabian Society permeates institutions over generations. The WEF does it in a long weekend, with better catering.

4. The Great Reset — announced in 2020 with timing that should give everyone pause — is the program stated plainly. “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” Build Back Better. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The language is always the language of inevitability: this is happening, the question is only how to manage it. The managed future, designed by the people in the ski resort, for the people who were not invited.

5. The irony is structural. The people most loudly “concerned about inequality” meet in one of the most expensive places on earth. Those most “concerned about climate change” arrive by private jet. Those most “concerned about democracy” design systems insulating them from democratic accountability. The gap between the speech and the life is visible from orbit. They don’t notice it. Or they notice and calculate, correctly, that nobody who matters will say so.

6. What Davos actually produces is “consensus” – the consensus of people who have implicitly agreed before arriving, because people who disagree don’t get invited. Climate policy, AI regulation, tax harmonization, digital currency – these are not debated at Davos. They are shaped there. The debate happens later, when implementation is already underway.

7. The Young Global Leaders are the tell. A program that identifies, selects, and forms the next generation of leaders before they become leaders is not a networking event. It is a formation pipeline. The Jesuits understood that if you form a person before they have power, you own what they do with the power. The WEF understood the same thing and built it into a global institution.

The question is simple:

Who decided Klaus Schwab should select the world’s next generation of leaders?

Nobody.

He just started doing it.

And the people who run things let him – because increasingly, the people who run things were people he had already formed.

Did you choose them?

August 5, 2026

Power corrupts, but unaccountable power attracts bureaucrats

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

We used to joke around election time that no matter who you voted for, the government always got in. Gallows humour, because it’s quite literally true. Enough people can get angry about the government in power and vote out the politicians … but the politicians aren’t the one implementing the policies that get people upset. The permanent bureaucracy barely notices when the government changes because the government rarely manages to get anything done that the civil service doesn’t want to do. It’s actually worse in Europe, because the politicians are even more mere figureheads than they are in the Anglosphere:

Christine Lagarde and Ursula von der Leyen

Nobody grows up dreaming of a career shuffling directives around Brussels.

Those jobs always fill with the same type of person: people drawn to power for its own sake, the ones who crave authority without ever answering for it. Bureaucracy doesn’t attract the best. It selects for the worst, then shields them when they inevitably screw up.

Hayek named this in The Road to Serfdom. His chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top” spelled out the logic. Unchecked power appeals most to the people least troubled by wielding it.

Mises found the engine underneath. In a market, a bad decision shows up as a loss, and losses remove you. Bureaucratic management faces no such test. Fail to fix a problem and you keep your job, then collect a bigger budget and a larger staff to keep failing with. The incentive runs backwards: waste earns you more, and the machine grows on its own.

Look at the European Union. Ursula von der Leyen presides over the Commission, the body that proposes almost all EU law. No European voter ever put her there. Heads of state handed her the post in a 2019 backroom deal and waved her through parliament. Christine Lagarde runs the European Central Bank, setting monetary policy for more than 340 million people and steering the value of the money in their pockets. She faced no voters for the job either.

You can throw out your national government every few years, but nothing above it moves, the apparatus stays. The unelected keep their offices, their pensions, their power, untouched by the only check ordinary people have.

This is the design, not a flaw in it. The people with the most control over your money and your future are the ones you are not allowed to fire.

July 30, 2026

QotD: The three most important books on management

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are three management books — and only three — that need to be read. They also need to be read by everyone. The Peter Principle, Up the Organisation and Parkinson’s Law. Which state, in reverse order, that bureaucracies will always grow until they eat the organisation, that management’s proper job is preventing them from ever starting and that if they’re there then you promote them out of the way. In our case, in this grassroots political movement which is the Hang the Lanyards Party, promote them to transcendence and their eternal rewards.

[…]

This is also what needs to be done with every bureaucracy from time to time. Those management books insist — nay prove — that every organisation always ends up like this. For the driving force of any organisation is the survival of the organisation. To be, not to do, is the aim.

Yes, this does apply to private sector ones but we’ve a natural corrective for those. Other organisations which arrive and not yet having created an all encompassing bureaucracy they outcompete them. So the old bureaucracies die, the new ones grow until they too start hiring power skirts and the decay sets in.

A government bureaucracy does not have that outside force culling it when its time has come. Therefore we must be the merciful farmer taking them out given that we’ve killed off the wolves that thin the herd of the old and lame.

As we can see 65 years is long enough for such a bureaucracy to reach this stage. Rather Brave New World in fact as that was the age at which all reported to be turned off.

So, every bureaucracy, every department, gets closed after 60 to 65 years. Some sooner, just to keep people on their toes. Yes, every. Say, the Department of Education. Or of Defence. Once we’ve killed it and fired everyone just leave be for a few years. If we still have some problems that really do need to be dealt with we can always hire a few, give ’em a corner of a desk somewhere, and we get the vigour and growth of a new organisation actually trying to solve things.

Until, obviously, the arrival of power skirts and the renewal process starts again.

Tim Worstall, “Closing US AID is What We Should Do To All Government”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2026-04-29.

July 28, 2026

The establishment pretends not to understand why AfD is still on the rise

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

Normally, I get my updates on German politics from eugyppius’ Substack, but this article is from the New English Review with Bruce Bawer reporting:

… even as the problematic aspects of Islam become increasingly manifest, mainstream politicians and journalists in Germany feign puzzlement over the growing popularity of AfD, which ever since its founding in 2013 has been characterized by the German establishment as heralding a Nazi renaissance. How, the German elites pretend to wonder, can so many voters transfer their loyalty from seasoned, sensible, upright political leaders to ragtag radicals who bring to mind Munich putsches and Nuremberg rallies? How on earth can they have become so misguided? Such is the coy approach of Jochen-Martin Gutsch in a recent article for Der Spiegel, in which he takes a spin around the former East Germany in purported search for an explanation as to why the “far-right” AfD has won majority backing in that part of the Bundesrepublik.

Gutsch’s first move is to act astonished at the fact that an AfD gathering in Salzwedel, Saxony-Anhalt, drew ordinary-looking families, plus “[a] surprising number of young people in their twenties, smartly dressed in blazers”. What, no Hitler Youth uniforms? Gutsch’s line is that he’s just plain perplexed by the numbers: “in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is currently polling at more than 40 percent. In the ARD Deutschlandtrend poll, the AfD is in first place; it’s even the most popular party, nationwide.” But it’s one thing to read the numbers, another thing to see all these – gasp! – ordinary-looking people flocking to show their support. This is what really blows Gutsch’s mind, or so we are meant to believe: the “normalization” of AfD, the party’s growing “acceptance”, its rapid “transformation into a mainstream party in the east”, all of which was, in Salzwedel, brought to vivid, terrible life before his eyes.

Ten years ago, Gutsch recalls, AfD received 20 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, and he, for one, was sure that it had peaked. He’s from eastern Germany himself, and he thought he knew his neighbors. He was wrong, and now, he claims, he’s alarmed – unlike his “friends and colleagues sitting in Hamburg, Cologne, or Munich, who give a friendly, bored look when I talk about the AfD. For them it’s still far away. Somewhere ‘over there’, whereas for me it’s a reality I can’t escape.” Therefore, he tells us, it’s important for him to make unravel the mystery of the AfD‘s remarkable rise in the polls.

Of course, the reason for the rise of AfD is obvious to anyone who’s been following developments in Western Europe for the last quarter-century or so. More and more voters have been demanding that immigration, especially from Muslim countries, be drastically curbed, if not altogether ended, and that the unassimilated masses who’ve already relocated to Western Europe from the Muslim world – only to swell the welfare rolls and the crime statistics – be sent back to where they came from. We’re told that the Berlin Pride killer, Abdul Ballout, belongs to “Islamist circles” in Germany. Why, ask AfD voters quite reasonably, should there be “Islamist circles” in Germany?

Yet Gutsch is, or pretends to be, blind to such concerns. His initial hypothesis, as he heads into the east, is supposedly that AfD is gaining popularity there because of economic hardship. But no, when he drives through Brandenburg now, he encounters prosperity. The city of Großräschen, once the Ruhr of East Germany, became a “ghost town” after 1990; now it’s thriving again, with the unemployment rate a mere seven percent, the old lignite mine converted into a lake with “a lovely beach” lined by “white houses” with “luxury SUVs parked out front”. Why, then, asks Gutsch, are the residents of these stately homes casting their ballots for AfD?

A veteran local politician tells Gutsch that he travels often to Bochum, in western Germany, which, compared to Großräschen, is an economic basket case. And yet the residents of Bochum are “more easygoing” than those in Großräschen. They possess a “fundamental optimism”. They “trust” and “respect” their political leaders. “What beautiful words”, Gutsch comments. He’s not being ironic. To be sure, he understands why eastern Germans aren’t brimming over with love for their leaders, whether in Berlin or Brussels. Many of them are old enough to remember 1990, when the once-mighty East German state “crumbled … before their very eyes.” One might add that before 1990, that same state was the very picture of totalitarian tyranny, as chillingly depicted in the film The Lives of Others. And before that – well, you know. Then there’s 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to insufficiently vetted Muslim immigrants, who proceeded to cause mayhem in both east and west.

But why, then, do so many western Germans still “trust” and “respect” their leaders? It seems baffling. Yet to listen to Gutsch, loyalty to the political establishment remains the way to go – the only intelligent, mature, and reasonable option. When he talks with an AfD politician, Karsten Hilse, to get the latter’s perspective on things, he’s lost at sea. In Hilse’s opinion, mainstream German politicians are too obsessed with “tolerance”; they have at least a degree of hostility toward Germany; and they accept without question the preposterous ideologies of gender and climate-change.

July 11, 2026

Governments should not have easy access to emergency powers

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As we found out in Canada in 2022, when the government gives itself emergency powers unrestricted by normal legal procedure and due process, they abuse those powers. The UK government is eager to grant itself similar powers due to a “climate emergency” that will, among other things suspend habeus corpus and the 1689 Bill of Rights:

Emergency, d’ye see? National security emergency.

But here’s the problem if the government declares a national security emergency:

    Part 1 of the act establishes a new and broad definition of “emergency”. The definition includes war or attack by a foreign power, which were defined as emergencies under previous legislation, as well as terrorism which poses a threat of serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom and events which threaten serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom or to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom.

Damage to the environment in the UK. So, that matches. And if they then declare such an emergency, under the act, then the following laws — among others — no longer apply:

    The only primary legislation which may not be amended by emergency regulations is the Human Rights Act 1998 and part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act itself

That is, all other laws no longer apply. It’s an Enabling Act, allowing rule by decree for the length of the emergency. Absolutely everything is up for grabs. These laws are not, repeat not, protected:

    The peers tried to protect the following laws from emergency regulation:

    Habeas Corpus Act 1679

    Bill of Rights 1689

    Section 7 of the Parliament Act 1911 which limited the duration of a parliament to five years[e]

    Act of Settlement 1701

    House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975

    Life Peerages Act 1958

    House of Lords Act 1999

Seriously, it wipes out the entire legal and constitutional structure.

So, you know, no. Not because there is, or isn’t, a climate change emergency. But because of the powers they’ll take if one is declared.

No.

It’s not November yet, but this sign seems rather appropriate:

July 6, 2026

“The Road to Hell is Always Paved with Good Intentions”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam expresses his frustration with young people’s recent affection for more socialism, despite all the evidence of history:

When I see the younger generation demanding more and more Marxism, more socialism, more State, more “planning” to fix a world they’ve been taught to hate — I don’t feel like snickering. I feel like screaming.

Because I recognize the opening chapter of a story whose final page I know all too well.

That story, a man wrote in 1944, under the bombs. Friedrich Hayek. The book: The Road to Serfdom. And he dedicated it — read carefully — “to the socialists of all parties”. Not out of contempt. Out of affection. Out of urgency. Because he had seen, with his own eyes, an entire Europe tip over the edge.

Remember this, it’s the heart of it all: totalitarianism never starts with monsters. It starts with good people.

It starts with idealists who want the common good. Generous young people who can’t stand injustice anymore. Soft, consensus-driven parties that promise to fix everything if you just give them a little more power. The problem isn’t their intentions. The problem is the mechanism they set in motion.

Here’s that mechanism. Follow it, it’s relentless.

To plan an economy, you need a single decision where there were once millions of free choices. So you have to concentrate power. But no society ever agrees on a single plan — everyone has their own ends, their dreams, their priorities. The planner then hits a wall: disagreement. And disagreement becomes an obstacle to eliminate. You start by persuading. Then by coercing. Then by silencing. Not out of sadism — out of logical necessity. The plan demands that you crush what resists it.

And then comes Hayek’s most chilling chapter: “Why the Worst Get on Top”. In a system that demands total power, it’s not the best who win. It’s those who are ready for anything. The scrupulous man hesitates; the man without scruples acts. The collectivist machine, whatever its colors, mechanically selects the brutes.

Look at Germany. You’ve been told Hitler fell from the sky, an anomaly, an accident of evil. That’s false, and it’s dangerous to believe it. What Hayek understood was that Germany had spent half a century abandoning classical liberalism — the individual, rights, the market — in favor of the cult of organization, the collective, the State that knows better than you. The left and the right already shared the same premise: the individual must submit to the nation’s plan. Hitler didn’t have to build that machine. He found it already assembled, warmed up, ready. He just had to grab the wheel.

That’s the warning. Totalitarianism isn’t an ideology. It’s a structure. You can fill it with red, brown, any generous color you like. Once you’ve accepted that the individual must bend to the collective, that property is just a revocable privilege, that the freedom to trade, to speak, to innovate stops where “the common good” decreed from above begins — you’ve laid the tracks. The train, it’ll come on its own.

And it always comes with the world’s best intentions. Every step toward the abyss is justified, reasonable, compassionate. One more tax for the poor. One more control against the bad guys. One less freedom, but “just that one”. No one chooses servitude. You slide into it, one good intention after another.

So I’m tossing this bottle into the sea. To you who are twenty and on fire with passion. Your revolt against injustice is beautiful — keep it. But for the love of God, learn history. Read Hayek. Read what the 20th century really was, not the caricature they’re feeding you. The tens of millions of deaths it left behind weren’t killed by sadists from another world, but by systems built, at the outset, on dreams of justice.

Freedom isn’t the problem to fix. It’s the treasure they’re convincing you to sell off cheap.

Wake up.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

QotD: Cloud people and dirt people

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A striking feature of American liberal democracy is the great gap between the reality of the political class and the people. The Cloud People are not just floating above the Dirt People, living different lives, like aristocrats of old. They no longer have a clear vision of the Dirt People below them. Instead, they conceive of the people over whom they rule based on inputs from the managerial class. To the political class, the general public is an abstraction, not a physical reality.

One example of this is in how the political class understands hierarchy. Every Washington politician and appointee lives in a world where hierarchy is well understood and respected. The appointed class have an array of titles that indicate their position in the hierarchy. Elected officials, of course, have their office and their committee assignments, along with their seniority. This is a world every one of them inherited when they entered politics. It is how it has always been.

In this world, a senator tells his staff to do something and he just assumes they will do it, assuming it can be done. If it cannot be done, then he is going to have them find out why it cannot be done and report back to him. An appointee works the same way within the bureaucracy. They have a staff, usually of appointees, and that staff carries out the orders of the director or secretary. Even though nothing of public good is done in Washington, the petty tasks are carried out with precision.

In this regard, the political class is a petty aristocracy. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, commands absolute loyalty from his staff. Not only does his staff do what they are told, they faithfully keep his secrets. He has been in the Imperial Capital for a quarter century, without a hint of scandal, despite the obvious. Congress operates a private slush fund to settle sexual harassment claims. Over 260 claims have been paid, without a word about the details. That’s loyalty.

Scan the biographies of the political class and the thing you will be hard pressed to find is anything resembling real world experience. Few have ever worked in the dreaded private sector. Those that have, worked in the law or maybe finance. These careers were just alternative paths to the place they wanted to be all along. There are no sons of the soil in Washington.

The Z Man, “Us And Them”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-06.

July 4, 2026

“The fact that [Canadians] cannot define our values should concern every one of us”

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

While our American neighbours are busy celebrating their 250th anniversary, Canadians are still left wondering why we can’t seem to define what our own values are except in opposition to those of the United States. Eva Chipiuk discusses this briefly here:

In writing my book, Reconnect to Canada, the most difficult part was not recounting our history or explaining our political and legal systems. It was answering a simple question:

What does it mean to be Canadian?

Over the last few years, I have asked that question repeatedly.

It was clear that something fundamental had shifted, but I could never quite articulate what it was.

The responses to that question were revealing, and most telling was that there was no common answer at all.

Some said hockey. Some said healthcare. Others said diversity or simply that Canadians are “nice”.

The fact that we cannot define our values should concern every one of us.

Then I came across this article, and it put things into perspective:

    Socialism, in its depraved but effective way, appeals to people’s worst instincts and impulses. It presents the world as a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers. It pits groups of people against each other based on arbitrary measures. For the narrow-minded, it makes sense.

    It embodies most of the seven deadly sins.

    Pride: Socialists have zero humility because they reject the fallibility of humanity. They can micromanage an entire society. They can create a centralized, one-size-fits-all, command-and-control utopia. They know all and know best.

    Envy: Taking one’s property because they have too much to give to others who have less is not noble; it is theft. Stealing with state-sanctioned approval is unjust. The sheer resentment that some have more, better, or bigger material possessions is the driving force of socialist ideology.

    Wrath: Socialist doctrine fuels anger, rage, violence, and a desire for vengeance against the so-called oppressors. Instead of mimicking the successful, the people turn their ire toward them.

    Sloth: Because socialism is about passing the buck and the blame, it excuses idleness and promotes laziness. It allows one to shirk personal duties and retards personal growth.

The uncomfortable truth is that Canada increasingly reflects these traits, yet we refuse to acknowledge it.

We insist we are compassionate while shaming and disparaging those who hold different opinions.

We claim to value equality while encouraging envy.

We preach inclusion while dividing Canadians into competing groups.

We speak of unity while constantly finding new reasons to divide ourselves.

We demand accountability from everyone except the government.

We expect government to solve problems that citizens, families, communities, and free people once solved themselves.

Worst of all, we have become experts at pretending none of this is happening.

We congratulate ourselves on being tolerant, generous, and virtuous while our institutions fail, productivity declines, public debt explodes, trust evaporates, and Canadians become more divided than they have been in decades.

That is not something to celebrate.

It is something to confront.

If Canadians can no longer articulate what it means to be Canadian, perhaps it is because we have abandoned the principles that once defined us: freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, accountability, respect for the rule of law, and service to one another rather than dependence on the state.

You do not need to take my word for it.

Just open your eyes. Look around!

A country does not lose its identity overnight. It loses it one abandoned principle at a time.

A nation without shared values eventually becomes little more than a collection of people living within arbitrary borders.

So if we are going to celebrate Canada today, let us celebrate the principles that made this country worth celebrating in the first place and commit ourselves to restoring them where they have been lost.

June 25, 2026

Why Britain voted for Brexit

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

Pat Condell explains some of the reasons British voters chose Brexit over staying in the EU back in 2016:

Why did we vote for Brexit ten years ago? Because we understood that the core purpose of the European Union is to destroy the independent countries of Europe by opening the borders and transforming a diverse continent of sovereign nations into a single homogenous political bloc governed by a committee of unelected bureaucrats, as a model for the planned global dictatorship.

Obviously, you’re not going to get many votes for that if you just lay it out for people, so you start with something innocuous like trade.

You say “Let’s harmonise our trade arrangements and everything will run more smoothly.”

And people say “Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”

Then you say “While we’re at it, let’s give this small group of people the power to organise all this from one place, and everything will run more smoothly.”

“Well, I suppose that makes sense. We want things to run smoothly.”

Then it’s “Actually, let’s give these people the power to make our laws and override our parliament and justice system, and everything will run much more smoothly.”

“Hold on a second, I don’t know about that …”

“You fascist. You racist. You xenophobe. You bigot. You pig ignorant little Englander. You vermin. You scum.”

Although that attitude certainly helped to tip the balance, the most important reason we voted for Brexit is that politicians had no right to sign away the governance of the UK to a foreign entity, but that is what they did, while pretending it was about trade. They lied to us, and they tried to cheat us out of our country.

That is why we voted for Brexit, and it’s why we’re now being punished for our disobedience by traitors who refuse to secure the border and who are allowing our country to be flooded with millions of unwanted and incompatible immigrants and illegally invaded and occupied by an army of dangerous military age men in whose presence no woman or child is safe.

Forced mass immigration from hostile and barbarous cultures is punishment for Brexit. Our country is being purposely destroyed for not voting the way we were told.

June 23, 2026

They don’t do “democracy” in Europe for any important issue: the voters might get it wrong

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, France, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It used to be a joke that voting never matters because the voters can’t be trusted with that kind of power. Over time, the joke stopped being at all funny, because that’s exactly what has happened in most western countries at the national level, but most blatantly in the European Union, where voters can express their will in a clear majority, yet see exactly the opposite policies implemented by Brussels:

EU delenda est

2005: the day they decided your “no” didn’t count

May 29, 2005. The French vote. Referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty.

Result: 54.68% NO.

Turnout: 69%.

Not a vote of abstainers, not a misunderstanding.

A people speaking out, massively, with full awareness.

Three years later, the same text — or nearly so — came into force. Without asking their opinion again.

Here’s how.

The context.

The Constitutional Treaty was the great federal leap: a text that gave the EU the attributes of a state. A flag, an anthem, a “constitution”, a foreign minister, supremacy written in black and white. Chirac, full of confidence, calls the French to the polls. The “yes” campaign mobilizes everything: the state, the major parties, the media, big business, the institutional unions.

And the French say no. For reasons the elite refused to hear: fear of social dumping (the infamous “Polish plumber”, the Bolkestein directive), a sense of a machine slipping out of their control, rejection of a project decided from on high and ratified by acclamation. Five days later, the Dutch say no in turn. 61%.

The treaty is dead. Officially, it’s called a “period of reflection”. In reality, it’s time to find a workaround.

The workaround has a name: Nicolas Sarkozy.

2007 campaign. Sarkozy proposes a “simplified treaty”. And above all, he lays out the adoption method: it will be the parliamentary route. No referendum. Parliament will vote in place of the people.

That’s his promise. He is elected.

And he keeps it against the people who had already decided.

The sleight of hand: the Lisbon Treaty.

Signed in December 2007.

They remove the symbols that scared people: no more “constitution”, no flag in the text, no “minister”.

They keep the essentials: permanent presidency of the Council, extension of qualified majority voting, retreat from unanimity, the Union’s legal personality, European diplomatic service. The institutional substance of the rejected text, repackaged.

The most cynical part is that they admitted it. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the architect of the Constitution, wrote it himself: the tools are the same, we’ve simply changed their order in the box. The stated goal: make the text unreadable so no government would be forced to submit it to a referendum. Technique replacing the popular verdict.

February 2008. Versailles.

Congress convenes to amend the French Constitution and allow ratification. Then Parliament ratifies Lisbon. The government left, which had campaigned for “no”, abstains and lets it pass. The French, they are never consulted again.

The “no” of 2005 has just been converted to “yes” by procedure.

And for those who might doubt the method: Ireland, for its part, was constitutionally required to vote. It says no in June 2008. They make it revote in 2009 until they get the right result. Vote until you get it right.

And that’s where it all connects.

This isn’t a procedural anecdote. It’s the founding act of a legitimacy problem that France has never settled.

Because the question of 2005 is exactly the one today. When Brussels signs 96 billion in development aid, when the NDICI directs billions to foreign “civil societies”, when the Global Gateway promises 300 billion the real question is never “should we do it?”.

It’s: who decided, and with what legitimacy?

The answer, we’ve known it since 2005: an administration that believes the people, when they answer wrong, must be circumvented, not heard. Hayek called it the fatal conceit.

The idea that a center knows better than the peoples what is good for them including against their explicit vote.

The French never accepted Lisbon. They were never asked.

And a structure built by going over the head of a lost referendum doesn’t carry a democratic deficit: it carries a birth defect.

The American Constitution starts with “We the People”.

Ours, the European version, started with a people who said no and an apparatus that decided it didn’t count.

Auto-translated by X from Brivael Le Pogam’s original French post.

June 22, 2026

Progressive intellectual arrogance

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

John Konrad tries to explain the apparently universal intellectual snobbery of progressives, which has brought pretty much every western country into the era of the expert:

Why is the left so arrogant?

Because they put their trust in a global elite. Not directly, but through the media and the universities the elite manipulate.

My dad always said it the other way around: privilege comes with responsibility. But responsibility is hard. Responsibility requires knowledge.

And in a world growing more complex and unpredictable by the year, understanding what’s happening around you takes more and more of it.

Twenty years ago you could walk through Manhattan around noon on a Sunday and watch half the city reading the Times. The thing was massive, but a fast, educated reader could come away with a decent picture of the whole world in a few hours.

Then two things happened.

Craigslist gutted newspaper revenue, and DEI mandates swapped great reporters for morally indignant j-school hacks. The quality and accuracy of information cratered.

At the same time, the internet roared to life and the world got radically more interconnected overnight.

So the elite grew less informed exactly as complexity exploded.

To cope, they borrowed a trick from NASA. There aren’t enough hours in the day to be the best rocket scientist and the best navigator and the best flight surgeon all at once. So mission control compartmentalized. The best person in each silo got a desk. Thruster problem? Everyone turns to the engine expert. Someone’s hurt? Everyone turns to the flight surgeon. The rocket guy never had to learn a thing about medicine.

The elite copied the model. They switched their brains off for anything outside their lane. Everyone specialized inside their own bubble.

But compartmentalization runs on trust. Put one bad actor in mission control, and the moment everyone turns to him, bad things happen.

To guard against that, they doubled down on credentialism. They learned to trust only the experts minted by certain colleges and blessed by certain think tanks.

And the bad actors had a field day. Fraud, disinformation, theft, all of it could happen inside a silo, unseen. And it did.

Then came a mission control director who told them not to worry. Everything was fine. They didn’t know what was going on, but he did, and he was smarter than all of them. He said so, right there in the meetings.

Everyone loves a brilliant, competent boss, especially a charismatic one who seems kind, because it means they no longer have to worry. He’s got it handled. Just trust him.

And trust Obama they did.

But he had nothing handled except his own aura. And he let Marxist actors run loose inside the silos that mattered, education and HR chief among them.

The right was skeptical, so they kept reading, kept hunting for alternative sources, kept trying to make sense of the complexity themselves. Nobody cracked it completely. But they started seeing the big red anomaly lights blinking across the dashboard.

So the smart people on the right kept building broad knowledge while the left stayed siloed. Ten years passed, and the left’s elite fell far, far behind.

They’re starting to see that Obama was a fool. But they’re stuck. You can’t cram ten years of missed homework into a few months. And they’re rich and powerful and have no interest in going back to school.

They have two options. Admit they were wrong and put in months, maybe years, of hard work to take responsibility for their actions. Or keep acting like sheep. If the rewards weren’t there, some might choose the work.

But the system is so riddled with fraud, so many hollowed-out silos kept on life support, that there’s more than enough money sloshing around the NGOs to fund their posh lives.

They have the privilege with none of the responsibility. It’s a comfortable place to sit. They don’t want to change.

But holding that position requires one thing: they have to believe their mission control director has it all under control and is smarter than anyone on the right.

The bottom line is the have to be arrogant. Or the whole house of cards comes down.

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