2026 Various and sundry (1)

Introduction

This is my “various and sundry” page for 2026, January–February. It was preceded by 2025 (3) and succeeded by 2026 (2).

For more information on the purpose of these pages, reading order, update policy, notes on terminology, etc., see the category description.

For the other pages, see the category navigation.

The entries

Strikes on Iran (2026-02-28)

In light of the long previous entry, I do not have the energy to write much about this—and might have been reluctant anyway, due to the “developing” nature of the situation. (Also note my, in part, premature writings on Venezuela as the very first entry of this page and for this year.)

A very general observation, however, and one with some overlap to the issue of tariffs: It is important to keep different aspects of an issue separate.

Looking at Iran, Trump, and calls to limit his wartime powers, we must consider at least:

1. Were the strikes on Iran a good idea?

   Potential sub-questions relate to e.g. different U.S. and Israeli perspective and situations. (The same applies elsewhere but will go unmentioned.)

   Note that a complete judgment does not just include what will happen next in and around Iran (and Israel, and whatnot) in the short, mid, and long term (a tricky enough set of questions), but also e.g. what precedents might be set for future actions by the U.S. and by other countries, how this will affect U.S. elections in the following few years, and the effects on e.g. U.S. relationships with other Muslim countries.

   ---

   Side-note:

   Good news with regard to relationships is that Iran appears to have lost much potential sympathy through counter-strikes directed at exactly other Muslim countries, even be it targeting U.S. resources in those countries. This is, it self, a good example of how easy it is to misjudge the right action—and a good example of how the right action can depend on what the other parties do in answer.

   ---

2. Did Trump have the constitutional (or other) right to order the strikes?

3. Should the POTUS have such rights?

For the time being, I express no firm and detailed opinion on these three items. (But I do want the Iranian regime gone.)

Murder of Olof Palme: 40-year update, rehabilitation of Engström, various (2026-02-28)

Today, we have the 40th anniversary (with reservations for what word applies) of the murder of Olof Palme—a murder still unsolved.

I have written repeatedly about this murder, notably, in the context of the attempts of prosecutor Krister Petersson to push a dead man, Stig Engström, as the perpetrator, despite lack of proof and in a manner that I consider defamatory. (Cf. [1], links from there to older texts, and possibly some other texts too.)

Recently, in December 2025, there was a partial rehabilitation of Engström, with official statements by top prosecutor (överåklagare) Lennart Guné that the evidence against Engström is weak and that there are several signs against Engström as the perpetrator. (Cf., in Swedish and a regrettably thin text, [2]^e.) This moves us away from an official or quasi-official take of, to somewhat caricaturize Petersson, “He did it. Because he is dead, I will not push through to find enough proof to convict him but he did it. (And because he did it, it is pointless to keep the investigation open with an eye at other suspects, so I am closing the investigation.)” to approximately the same type of agnosticism that existed before Petersson’s “conclusions”.

But we are, then, 40 years down the line and have to face the fact that this murder will likely remain unsolved for the duration. Barring something like a deathbed confession or a finding in classified documents in some country (note much speculation about ties to foreign governments, e.g. South Africa’s, or, at an extreme, even a cover-up by the Swedish government), there is not much hope—and I cannot say that I find deathbed confessions and classified documents very likely.

On a more personal note, and with an eye at that “tempus fugit”, the murder of Palme might have been my first own example of the “everyone remembers where he was and what he was doing when he learned that Kennedy was [shot/dead]” phenomenon. Apart from the lesser news impact of the Kennedy murder in Sweden, it took place long before my own birth (1975) and was growing increasingly dated even in the U.S. (1963 -> 1986); however, I had still encountered a number of references, be it because an author had written long before my reading or because he had failed to consider that ever more readers were too young to remember. In due time, this turned into “everyone remembers where he was and what he was doing when he learned of 9/11”. (Or, with the collapse of good grammar and/or the success of despicable and destructive Leftist language manipulations, the same using “they were”, etc.) Well, by now 9/11 is longer gone than the Kennedy murder was at the time of the Palme murder and than the Palme murder was at the time of 9/11.

An interesting question is what effect security arrangements do or do not have, in particular with an eye at the repeated attempts against Trump and claims of Secret Service or other failure at at least the Butler, Pennsylvania, attempt, where he escaped by little more than a hair’s breadth. The Kennedy murder could not have taken place in that manner today, because that type of travel in an open car, by a POTUS, would be highly unlikely and because of a greater awareness of the risk of snipers and whatnot, but even here security is not complete. What e.g. if some bigger actor targets a presidential car with an air-to-ground missile? (Ask Maduro about having powerful enemies.) What if a missed sniper (note Butler) manages a hit on the way from car door to building door? Looking at Trump, chances are that the Secret Service has made a crucial difference, as there have been repeated catches of someone before an attempt could be executed, with a likely deterring effect on many wannabees, but none of those caught (to my recollection) seemed to move on a professional level, be it as professional assassins or in having a professional skill set translatable to an assassination.

Palme, in a country with little history of political assassinations, was walking around almost like any regular “civilian” and was a far easier target. No other Swedish head of government and/or state has been killed in the 40 years since, but is this because of increased security or because of few attempts? Going back in time, the last comparable event was likely the death of Gustav III in 1792 (shot at close range during a masked ball, hence the Verdi opera; died some two weeks later). Throwing a wider net, the 2003 semi-random killing of foreign secretary Anna Lindh is a candidate, with indeed low security.

Looking at 9/11, there has been no comparable event since then, and it might be tempting to claim that various increased security checks are paying off—but how many similar attempts have been made (I cannot immediately recall a single one) and how does the (soon to be) 25 years “post” compare to the many decades “pre”? Well, both “post” and “pre”, 9/11 remains a unique event. (Going by years, the “pre” is more impressive than the “post”, but some other measure, e.g. accumulated passengers/flights/miles, might be more relevant and give another result. It might also be that adjustments are necessary for e.g. how many terrorists have major financing at any given time.)

On the balance, however, I very, very strongly suspect that airport security at post-9/11 levels does more harm than good, noting that (a) it has often been tricked (including by those merely trying to check its effectiveness), (b) it is too passenger-centric and that other roads to do damage are unlikely to be sufficiently well covered (bar the door and see a burglar go through the window), (c) chances are that most of the benefits from post-9/11 improvements do not arise from airport security but from better pre-emptive methods against terrorists (including more extensive surveillance and tracking), (d) the costs are truly immense.

To revisit the issue of political Schadenfreude (cf. [5] and, more tangentially but also very recently, [6]):

When Palme died, I was 11 and change, and had a minimal political awareness. I might even have viewed the Social-Democrats (of which Palme was the leader) and Palme, himself, in an outright positive light. The issue of potential Schadenfreude did, then, not arise at the time. However, as time went by, and as I understood how problematic the Social-Democrats were and how much more to Palme there was than the alleged peace maker, I did develop at least a “good riddance” or “just as well” feeling for some years. Looking back from today, I am more concerned about issues like the dangers of political violence (if, cf. portions of a side-note, the murder was politically motivated) and security measures (cf. above), and I am far from certain that Palme’s death brought Sweden down a better road. If in doubt, Social-Democrat governments have been frequent even past Palme; as he was pushing 60, it was not inconceivable that he would have retired in the somewhat near future anyway, e.g. after the 1991 election-loss (assuming that election results remained approximately the same in this alternate reality); and Social-Democrat leadership post-Palme was not exactly to my taste (most notably, the train-wreck Mona Sahlin, but also e.g. the likes of Göran Person).

This brings us to a very strong pro-Palme observation: Whatever else might be said about Palme, and notwithstanding my great political disagreements with him, he was far more intelligent and better educated than the vast majority of politicians, even if we look outside the Left (and the more so within the Left, especially, in Sweden). Intellectually, he was someone whom I actually can take seriously—much unlike the vast majority of political (in general) and Leftist (in particular) big-shots.

Newsom brags about being an idiot (2026-02-24)

Apparently, Gavin Newsom has recently tried to solicit Black sympathies by pushing a message of “I am just like you” and, to prove this, practically bragging about dyslexia and mediocre SAT scores.

This has, likely rightly, been condemned as e.g. racist through its implications about his view of Blacks, but such condemnation misses a bigger issue—the man is effectively bragging about being an idiot. (Incidentally, confirming what many others have thought for a long time.) We might, then, have come to a point of society where being an idiot is seen as a virtue, be it in general or with regard to politics, in the way that the Left has hitherto tried to push being a woman or being Black, per se, as virtues. Here, note the big step down, in that neither of the latter are something bad, per se—they are not good, per se, contrary to Leftist claims, but they are also not bad, per se. Being an idiot? Very different story. Newsom in California today or, God forbid, in the White House tomorrow really pushes the envelope on Idiocracy. Ditto e.g. Mamdani in New York and Walz in Minnesota.

From another angle, the claims reek hollow in that Newsom (in my impressions so far) is a strong example of the type of pseudo-elite member who truly does not see himself as “one of you” (even throwing a wider net, to include e.g. average Whites).

From yet another, the situation could point to a hyper-egalitarian, “no-one is better than anyone else”, “ability does not matter”, whatnot, attitude, which takes an another Leftist or Left-related problem to a further extreme than in the past.

Tariffs overturned (2026-02-22)

A few preliminary remarks in light of the (partial) overturning of U.S. tariffs:

Firstly, I consider the overturning unfortunate on a “wish” basis, but cannot say for certain whether it was fortunate or unfortunate on a “want” basis—in terms of an earlier entry that dealt with wishing and wanting around the tariffs. (I have downloaded the unusually lengthy set of opinions, but there might be some time before I get around to reading them. A potential issue from reporting and a skimming of the “syllabus” is that tariffs might be viewed too much as a source of revenue, without considering other uses, notably, as a weapon and as means of exerting pressure.)

Secondly, I do not support Trump’s take that the overturning would be e.g. “anti-American”. Such a description might well match the three Leftist judicial activists that formed half the majority, but the other half consisted of justices much more likely to have judged the matter on its merits. This points to a 3–3 among those likely to judge the issue on its merits, which, in turn, points to a legitimate legal disagreement outside the judicial activists—and it is not the job of the SCOTUS to make judgments about e.g. whether a particular policy is beneficial or harmful to the U.S. but whether it is legal/constitutional. (My impression of the disagreement might change after I have read the opinions.)

Thirdly, it is strictly speaking not the tariffs but a specific justification for them that has been over-turned. Other roads for similar tariffs remain and the immediate reaction from Trump seems to have been a switch from more targeted to more blanket tariffs at a higher rate. (Which, then, might give the same result from a source-of-revenue perspective, but weakens tariffs qua weapon and means of pressure considerably. Whether it is an improvement or a setback from a free-trade/-market point of view, I cannot immediately judge. Other points yet, notably, what might or might not happen with regard to repayments are also currently unclear to me.)

Jesse Jackson vs. Charlie Kirk (2026-02-17)

It appears that Jesse Jackson has just died. A few notes:

1. Robert Duvall also died at approximately the same time as Jackson. At least in Europe, he should have been more famous than Jackson, and the effect of his work in Europe was certainly greater than that of Jackson’s, but the death of Jackson received more media attention.

2. When Charlie Kirk was murdered, German and Swedish media used headlines that left his name unmentioned and descriptions that were arguably defamatory and certainly tendentious. (I do not remember specific formulations, but think “Far Rightist Shot” as a headline, followed by more “far Right”, “controversial”, whatnot, in the description.) Jesse Jackson’s death sees headlines that include his name and both headlines and descriptions that, if anything, give a flattering and misleading picture, e.g. by “civil-rights champion”.

   Looking at the facts of their respective activities, to the best of my knowledge, the core of Kirk’s mission was indeed centered on civil rights (free speech, in particular), while Jesse Jackson engaged in many acts of racial and other hate mongering—including his infamous (and, regrettably, successful) attempts to reduce educational efforts around “Western Civ”. As for Blacks and civil rights, most of Jackson’s work seems to have come after the civil-rights era, at a time when Blacks had all the rights that Whites did, and when Blacks were increasingly and artificially favored through “affirmative action”, race-based college admissions, and similar, and he might have done more to further a destructive grievance industry and grievance mentality than actually improving the lives of his fellow Blacks.

3. In an earlier entry, I noted that I too was not impervious to political Schadenfreude and compared the deaths of Charlie Kirk and Khomeini based on my (long ago) Schadenfreude over Khomeini’s death. With Jackson, I feel no such Schadenfreude. He did the U.S. a great amount of damage, but his truly active days appeared to be gone (understandable, in light of his age) and he appeared to, to some degree, have gone out of fashion as too moderate, as paradoxical as this might seem, in favor of the likes of the Squad and Ibram X. Kendi.

   In a three-way comparison with Kirk and Khomeini, he obviously fares far better than the latter, but he was a net-negative force in the world, he did (presumably) die a natural death at a high age, and parts of his speech was actually unsavory in a manner that Kirk’s was not, including his take on Jews and Israel (to stay clear of issues around Blacks and Whites).

4. While this is not a time for Schadenfreude, it is also not a time for eulogies, attempts to depict him as a force of good or as someone with a white vest, misconstrue him as a moderate in a more absolute sense, whatnot. He was a negative force—and that must be remembered.

A growing service sector as a failure (2026-02-14)

A recurring phenomenon in the development of various countries is a gradual drift from agriculture (and similar fields) to industrial production to a service economy—and, often, this is seen as good and natural, a sign of progress, and “Yay us!!! We have a service economy!!!”.

In as far as the transition from agriculture to industrial production is concerned, this might well hold true—the more so as it takes far less manpower to reach a certain agricultural production today than it did before the industrial revolution.

When it comes to the service economy, however, this is often an (at least, partially) naive take. Yes, in as far as we can produce more with less manpower in the industry (like with agriculture) we have a positive factor in that manpower has been freed up and can now be used for different purposes. However, there are at least two hitches:

Firstly, the “products” of a service industry are usually much more fleeting, causing the work done to create less value. For instance, someone can spend some amount on a toaster and have a toaster for ten or twenty years—or twice that amount on a visit to a “hair stylist” and have something which lasts a few weeks before the next visit is due. Indeed, a man can spend the amount for a toaster on a clipper and then a few minutes a week with the clipper and a mirror, obviating the visit entirely, cutting out the recurring cost, and saving considerably in terms of time. (Note that the sum of travel to, waiting, hair cut, travel back, even once a month, will amount to many times the accumulation of those few minutes over the same month.) For most fields of service (including “food services”) similar remarks apply and the more so the more newfangled and/or detached from central needs they are (contrast e.g. plumbing, where a repair of a leaky pipe can last another twenty years and make an essential difference to a house, with a pedicure, which, by reputation, might have more to do with temporary pampering and less with practical effects than even a hair cut).

Secondly, it is often less a case of industry growing more productive and more of production moving abroad, because the local industry is not sufficiently competitive. This is a failure and the switch to a service economy, partially, a matter of industrial jobs simply not being available. Why then is the local industry not competitive? Is the current generation of locals trailing their forebears by twenty I.Q. points, while the foreigners outdo their forebears by the same amount? Highly unlikely. Instead, we have problems like a greater amount of regulation, higher taxes, higher wage levels, and similar (also note parts of the previous entry). In free and fair competition, we might e.g. have a downwards pressure on wages in high-wage country A and an upwards one in low-wage country B, with a result that wages (and other factors) shift until a natural equilibrium is reached and the industry in country A remains healthy and competitive. In real life, any hint of wage reductions in country A will lead to massive union protests, wages will be kept up, the industry will grow uncompetitive, and jobs will be lost—or the government will intervene with subsidies and whatnot, which require higher taxes or money printing for financing and make matters worse for the country as a whole in the long term, without solving the underlying problems.

Taxes and nowhere to escape (2026-02-14)

Recent entries have dealt with topics like wealth taxes and, more parenthetically, with having somewhere to escape.

Apparently, far-Left nutcase AOC is now pushing for a U.S.-wide wealth tax—and a great many other countries might fall victim to similar ideas.

Now we enter a territory where places to escape might run out, because it is much more trouble to relocate from the U.S. entirely than merely from California to Florida, and because, in a next step, international places of escape might disappear.

To this, note precedents like Biden pushing for a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent, implying that no country with a tax at that rate would have to worry about businesses escaping for greener pastures. (For reasons of that tax—there might be a great many other reasons to leave.) Likewise, a country with a corporate tax of 20 percent would only see an “incentive to escape” for businesses at 5 percentage points’ worth—not the full 20. Also note the destructive EU minimum VAT of 15 percent (if with quite a few loopholes). Or note the perfidy that VAT, nominally a value added tax, is often switched from the country of sale/production to the country of the buyer, implying that a citizens of country A who makes a purchase in country B will have to pay VAT in country A instead of (or, worse, in addition to) country B. (This not only reduces the ability to compete with better VAT rates, protecting high-VAT countries from the consequences of their policies, but makes a mockery of the idea of a value added tax, turning it from a tax on the value added by the manufacturer to a tax on the income or wealth of the buyer.)

This can cause great harm through market distortions, big government, and a reduced ability for different countries/states to compete on different strengths and with different policies. In particular, it would protect the Left from the embarrassment of seeing a country/state with a more enlightened approach to taxes outdo the high tax countries/states, and preventing the public from seeing empirical evidence of the harm that high taxes bring. (Looking at the U.S., the current developments in “red” and “blue” states are damning to the Democrats.)

More generally, a recurring problem with the Left is the stifling of competition, as with e.g. price controls and union-driven collective bargaining. The latter might not just remove individual excellence and similar factors on the employees’ side but can limit the ability of employers to use different remuneration profiles relative each other and to adapt to foreign competition. (A bit more on this in an entry to follow.)

On fact vs. identification / double standards around sex and “gender” (2026-02-14)

A few points to the previous entry and similar texts:

If someone identifies as Napoleon contrary to fact, he is condemned as mentally ill or a fraud.

If someone identifies as Black contrary to fact, she (Rachel Dolezal) is condemned as mentally ill or a fraud.

If someone identifies as a man or woman contrary to fact, well, the rest of us better kow-tow to this claim or we will be condemned.

Similar claims apply elsewhere, e.g. in that someone who pretends to have an academic degree or a military award (that he does not have) can be dragged into court and face punishment in many jurisdictions, or in that merely claiming to have citizenship does not make one a citizen in the eyes of the law.

Here, it is noteworthy that there is often a legal road to change that it is not available in some other situations. I could not legally become Napoleon—but I could earn another academic degree, and claiming such a degree would then not be problematic. Likewise, biological sex is biological sex, a fix matter, and (barring cases of a strict personal courtesy and “humoring”) pronouns are correspondingly immutable—but names can be legally changed, be it to “Alice Cooper” (even if a man) or “Napoleon” (even if not the Napoleon).

Hiding a trans status (2026-02-12)

The abuse of words like “man”, “woman”, “he”, and “she” in non-standard meanings for ideological reasons is bad enough in general. In a many situations, however, such abuse can have very negative consequences.

Consider the recent shooting in Tumbler Ridge (the immediate motivation for this entry): A Swedish source spoke of a woman (“kvinna”) as the shooter, with not a single mention of this being a man-who-wanted-to-be-a-woman (past tense, because he appears to be dead—not because he changed his mind), while e.g. CNN^e begins in terms of “female” and only mentions the truth in the later parts of the text—which will go unread in many cases.

This is highly problematic, because it hides the fact that trans-gender/-sexuals appear to be disproportionately common in various acts of violence, paralleling how news reporting in countries like Sweden and Germany put a veil over immigrant violence by suppressing the ethnicity/whatnot of perpetrators. To boot, the status as a man-who-wanted-to-be-a-woman is interesting on at least two counts, namely (a) the greater likelihood of severe mental problems as an explanatory factory behind the deed, (b) that (actually) female shooters are far rarer than male ones, which removes a “man bites dog” aspect of the news as (mis-)reported.

Or consider the misreporting around men-who-want-to-be-women (and/or men-who-pretend-to-be-women, for purposes of success) in sports. Once the issue hits controversy over whether someone should or should not be allowed to compete, the trans aspect is no longer hidden, true, but the phrasings used by those who oppose participation are often extremely unfortunate and misleading, fitting into a Feminist rhetorical framework of men who want to “oppress” or “abolish” women. Even leaving the extremely disputable use of words like “oppress” and “abolish” aside, this is not something that men do—but a very small subset and one, again, often suffering from mental problems. To boot, this is a subset of men with a self-perception so far from being men that some degree of special treatment is needed on that count alone in the context at hand. (They do not cease to be men, but an extrapolation of their behaviors, including any hypothetical attempt to “oppress” or “abolish” women, to men in general is dubious. Similarly, a man-who-wants-to-be-a-woman might wear a dress, but it does not follow that men in general do so.)

Or consider the claim that a woman accomplished something, when it actually was a man-who-wants-to-be-a-woman, and what this might imply for society, abilities of various groups, equality of opportunity, or similar. (With the exact relevant choices depending on the society and time at hand.) Note e.g. how (at the time of writing) the most successful “woman” in the history of Jeopardy is man-who-wants-to-be-a-woman (Amy Schneider). For better examples of accomplishments, I have to speak a bit hypothetically, because of the relative rarity of men-who-wants-to-be-women, but consider if a man became the first “woman” to break 10 seconds in the 100 meters, the first “woman” to climb a particular mountain, or the first “woman” to become POTUS.

The misleading (?) anthill analogy (2026-02-11)

I sometimes use anthills, bee colonies, and/or the (fictional) Borg collective to point to a particularly depressing Leftist mentality of the individual as nothing but a drone in servitude to the collective. Likewise, I have from time to time seen Leftists and/or proponents of central planning draw upon similar analogies as an argument in favor of government control and/or a plan economy, against free markets, whatnot.

With the Borg, this is very justified, because the Borg take existing thinking, feeling, free-willed individuals and subjugate them into being this type of drone—their later actions do not reflect their true nature but the Borg distortion that has replaced it. (Among other differences. Also note e.g. aspects of a collective consciousness and a truly sentient queen. I gloss over such difference for brevity, but note that they increase the justification relative ants and bees.)

With e.g. ants and bees, this is not necessarily the case, because the individual ants and bees of a colony are not less free-willed than members of related solitary species.

Creatures at this level, whether living in a colony or individually, amount to something more akin to an automaton than a human being, but there is nothing inherently “less free-willed” in, say, a bee being triggered into some type of behavior that favors the survival and reproduction of the colony than in a solitary wasp being triggered into some behavior favorable to its own survival and reproduction. Unlike in e.g. a human military, the bee does not act upon orders—it perceives a situation and then does what comes naturally. Here, there is a large difference to e.g. a human soldier being given orders that he is legally obliged to obey. In a comparison, it might even be argued that the bee is involved in a more self-organized (to some approximation, “free market”) enterprise than the soldier—it just happens that the free will of the bee, unlike a human’s, has been forged by evolution into what appears to be obedience to central planning. In this regard, my analogy might be unfair to ants and bees, while the attempts to argue in favor of central planning by similar analogies might be fundamentally flawed.

Looking at central planning, it is also notable that anthills, bee colonies, and (likely) the Borg collective deal with few, highly specific, and largely pre-determined purposes, far removed from the immense complexities of human life and human societies. In as far as central planning works with these, it does not follow that it works in human societies. It might (or might not, cf. below), work sufficiently well in the military, because the military, too, has few, highly specific, and largely pre-determined purposes, but not society at large. The more complex something is, the less realistic it is for the human mind (the Chairman, a planning board, the makers of a 5-year plan, whatnot) to handle matters by planning and the more urgent it becomes to draw on some type of self-organization. Indeed, even in the military (and with those bees, cf. above) there is great need for self-organization at various levels, e.g. in that a battle is not fought by a general moving individual soldiers like chess pieces. Instead, the general gives big-picture instructions in the hope that the next level in the chain of command manages to find a reasonable implementation, and so on, until we land at the level of the individual soldier—if, that is, orders/information/whatnot actually make it that far down the line and are still sufficiently relevant at the time and in light of “local” knowledge and circumstances.

“The Grand Tour” and the environment (2026-02-09)

Apart from the occasional episode of “The Patty Duke Show” (cf. the previous entry), I have gone through (almost) all of “The Grand Tour” in the last few weeks. While this show is not the most environmentally friendly in recent history, there are some interesting points around the environment, humans, and environmentalism. Some limited examples:

1. The penultimate episode, “Sand Job”, which I just finished, shows great quantities of plastic bottles spread around in exactly the manner over which environmentalists raise hell—and which has brought all sorts of implemented or suggested laws. Indeed, the gang uses stray bottles, apparently gathered off the street, to build improvised boats to take cars over the Senegal River.

   The problem? This is all in Africa, implying that a law (or EU directive) in, say, Germany will not improve matters. In Germany, on the other hand, I have never seen anything remotely comparable in even remotely everyday life—before or after laws. (Some special circumstances or settings well outside everyday life might be as bad, say, because of some once-a-year event, at the specific location of the event, between the time that the event ended and the time that clean-up crews arrived.)

   This points to two common problems with environmentalism, namely, (a) a misrepresentation of the situation (e.g. to imply towards politicians, voters, and/or useful idiots that it is German plastic bottles that cause this or that problem in nature), (b) a failure to optimize where optimization brings a great return on investment/costs/whatnot (here, in parts of Africa instead of parts of Europe).

   ---

   Side-note:

   I recall a visit to Sweden when it seemed that every edition of the daily paper demanded that the readers eat “klimatsmart” (“climate [smart/clever/whatnot]”), notably, through skipping meat, because meat would bring more methane into the atmosphere, and cause global warming—an optimization in great detail for a country of some 10 million, while China, with more than a hundred times the population, opened coal-based power plant after coal-based power plant. A Swede skipping meat might be a “feel good” action, but it will not really matter—getting the Chinese to pick some other form of energy than coal might.

   ---

   As a counterpoint, however, it can pay to keep in mind that “not a problem here” does not necessarily imply “not a problem anywhere”. That something is not a problem in Germany does not imply that it is not a problem elsewhere, that a certain measure is not worthwhile in Germany does not imply that it would not be worthwhile elsewhere, etc.

2. An earlier episode (likely, “Enviro-mental”) showed the gang experimenting with self-built, intended-to-be-environmentally-friendly, cars—and a great many complications that arose because the various “more natural” building materials failed in manners not foreseen at the time of the attempt (symbolic of much of what politicians try with regard to the environment) or because the associated environmental costs outweighed the benefits, notably, in a life-cycle analysis. (As opposed to the typical fallacy of “has less CO2 emissions during driving; ergo, is necessarily environmentally better”.) Note, in particular, the immense trouble that James May went through to turn clay into bricks, including having a big truck bring coal (or whatnot—my memory of details is a little vague) so that he could use a kiln to make bricks through burning the coal.

3. Another (“Dumb Fight at the O.K. Coral”) shows hare-brained attempts by the gang to stimulate the growth of coral reefs by sinking cars in appropriate spots. I am not convinced that the idea, as such, was workable, but let us say that it was, on a for-the-sake-of-argument basis: Much like a certain type of politician, the gang rushed into matters without proper prior research and experimentation, engaged in great waste, and likely did net harm to the environment through sheer ineptitude.

   (And, yes, one of the improvised boats from “Sand Job” also lead to the sinking of a car—this time, involuntarily. However, this was not because there were too few bottles. Instead, bottles came lose from the improvised boat, leading to uneven buoyancy and a capsizing of the boat.)

Attitudes to democracy, democracy in school, and Patty Duke for President (2026-02-08)

I just watched an episode of “The Patty Duke Show” (S01E09, “The President”), which featured a hostile two-way battle for the presidency of a girls league at the local high school, pitting cousin Patty (played by Patty Duke) against cousin Cathy (played by Patty Duke), with hostility growing, underhanded means being employed, slanderous statements being made, whatnot—and a third girl winning, seemingly for not stooping so low and, instead, reducing her campaign to iterations of “Vote for me!”.

This episode can, it self, teach a fair bit about politics to the young, including how a third party (the kid brother of cousin Patty) uses the situation to earn money of both candidates; however, I found myself reflecting on something else entirely:

How the wrong attitude to politics and democracy can be instilled from early on.

When it comes to U.S. school and, most notably, high school, my impressions are based on fiction to a high degree, but it is notable how often elections occur in such fiction and how they always seem to center on winning for one’s own sake, be it to be president of this-and-that, prom queen, or what else might apply—unless the aim is to prevent someone else from winning, out of spite, personal dislike, whatnot.

This is the more problematic, as these elections seem to be won by (and/or their campaigns based on) criteria like popularity, not suitability, to an even higher degree than for e.g. POTUS elections.

The end result is a considerable risk that a “democracy is my way to [power/fame/fortune/whatnot]” attitude is instilled in some at an early age. This is then strengthened by the great variety of “adult” offices that are filled by election in the U.S., where appointment would be the typical road in most other countries, opening the road for a greater share of “career politicians” and furthering that deplorable attitude.

Looking back at my own school years, I can only recall one election of any kind, namely, a mock parliamentary election in (likely) 7th grade, where we “voted” on the parties available in the real world by some slip-of-paper system. While this was fairly pointless, it can point to a danger in the other direction, that the future voters are given a mentality of “I have to pick and choose between what is offered”, with little room for own active participation—and the more so as the Swedish system is based on electing parties, with only secondary consideration for the individual candidates.

However, there were other instances of voting. Off the top of my head I recall one (and others are very likely), namely for the motive on a school t-shirt (sweater, whatnot), during one of my first school years. This vote, despite its triviality from an adult point of view, was also very illustrative in terms of problems with democracy and poor implementations thereof—and left me very frustrated as a young child. A vote was to be held between two motives, very cursorily presented, with only those who actually ordered a t-shirt being eligible to vote. While this might seem fair, it created a severe catch: We had to place the order blindly and then live with the outcome of the vote. For my part, I wanted a t-shirt if the one motive won but not if the other did, as I found it too ugly. There was no mechanism present to consider this case, I ordered blindly, and, of course, the “wrong” motive won. Real politics is full of similar traps of not being able to opt out, of having to vote blindly and hope for the best, and similar—and with stakes far, far higher. (This is so long ago that I do not remember the modalities relative parents, but I suspect that this purchase decision and ensuing vote took place at a time when parents were present.)

Patty Duke and presidencies is otherwise an interesting topic as she was not only (much later in life) president of the Screen Actors Guild (as were, among many others, the later POTUS Ronald Reagan)—she also played the first female POTUS on the short-lived sitcom “Hail to the Chief”, which I watched on Swedish TV in the mid-1980s.

The idea of a female POTUS I took in stride, even at the time: What the real world needs to see a female POTUS is (a) to pick a candidate who (unlike Hillary and Harris) is actually suitable for the office, (b) to campaign on competence and sane politics—not that she happens to be a woman. To some degree, and in the spirit of this entry: Cut the high-school bullshit!

Infuriating attitudes by medical researchers, the WHO, and/or contemptuous meddlers (2026-02-06)

Today, I encountered a text on a study on cancer prevention^e from IARC, a subsidiary of some sort of the WHO—and almost blew my top in light of some included utter contempt for the readers and/or citizens and a complete failure to draw lessons from the COVID-countermeasure fiasco. (Delenda est WHO.)

Specifically, the study author, one Hanna Fink, claims:

Governments and communities play a crucial role by making healthy choices easier, for example, through higher tobacco and alcohol taxes, smoke-free policies, clear health warnings, safer workplaces, cleaner air, and affordable access to vaccination and screening. Individuals can support these by advocating for healthier environments and using available preventive services.

Some of these items might or might not be acceptable or outright good, but to push for e.g. higher taxes is unconscionable—and to phrase this in terms of “making healthy choices easier” is absolutely and utterly inexcusable. This is not about making choice easier—it is about forcing others to obey her choice. (And what happened to “my body, my choice” here, where it actually applies?) Her audacity of phrasing is so disingenuous and contemptuous of others that it would beggar belief, had I not already seen such attitudes on a great many occasions, especially on the Left, during the COVID-countermeasure era, and, doubly so, on the Left during the COVID-countermeasure era. Indeed, even the potentially acceptable parts in terms of policy can become unconscionable in combination with this formulation. For instance, “smoke-free policies” do not make healthy choices easier—they ban perceived-as-unhealthy choices.

In a next step, a deplorable and despicable attempt is made to recruit the naive into pushing Fink’s agenda for her.

Various remarks and/or clarifications:

1. The background of this Hanna Fink is not clear from the text, and an Internet search did not give conclusive results, including that a page on the IARC website purporting to deal with her gave an error message in lieu of contents. She might be a physician; she might be a scientist (biologist/chemist/whatnot; physicians are not scientists); she might be someone more “political”; she might be something else.

   (The point is less a matter of Fink’s qualifications and more whether we have further physician misbehavior a la Fauci or whether we have a member of some other group misbehaving. That a current study on cancer prevention comes up with e.g. smoking being a problem, however, does raise some questions about general legitimacy—not “man bites dog” or even “dog bites man”, but “man pets dog”.)

2. Higher taxes are not only an evil in it self, both unethical and economically harmful, but even the pragmatic and specifically medical potential benefits of such taxes are highly disputable, tendentially doing less to reduce consumption and more to make it more expensive—and the main effect is often to create a lucrative source of income for the government (as with tobacco taxes in many countries). Here note that the “more expensive” is not only ethically problematic through artificially reducing the disposable income of the taxed but also can have indirect negative effects on health—especially, as many smokers, heavy drinkers, etc., are low earners to begin with. We can then have effects like the extra cost for cigarettes making the purchase of cheaper (and typically less healthy) food more likely. (I make no claim about what the net effect on health would be, but I do claim that calls for even higher taxes on cigarettes and whatnots are, more often than not, based on naiveté and wishful thinking—or attempts to mislead others.)

   Then there are issues like crime, smuggling, and whatnot. A particular telling example is an attempt to greatly raise tobacco taxes in Sweden around 2000 (my memory of details is vague by now). The Left clamored for the increase, because cigarettes are evil and this would stop smokers from smoking; many on the non-Left raised concerns that this would do little to reduce smoking and much to cause smuggling, create a black market, and make entry for (especially, Eastern European) criminal organizations easier. The increase went ahead, smuggling and whatnot followed, the tax increase was belatedly regretted—but the criminal organizations had already gained a foothold. (Also note how the U.S. prohibition brought immense benefits to criminals.)

3. The “might or might not be acceptable” goes back to issues of interpretation, the great vagueness of Fink’s formulations, and how they can mean radically different things depending on her intentions and the interpretation of the reader. Consider “clear health warnings”: Warnings that give fair and unbiased information to allow an informed choice are easy to justify. What we have in e.g. Germany, however, are mandates that cigarette packs must contain horrifying medical images intended to shock the smoker into quitting through what (a) is a grossly unethical, and cheap, attempt at manipulation, (b) is a grossly unethical violation of the tobacco companies’ rights to a reasonable design/whatnot. To boot, it can make it very distasteful for non-smokers to wait in line next to the cigarette rack. (Which is almost always placed next to the cashier and at least partially for other legal reasons, namely, so that no teenager can manage to grab a pack of cigarettes from an unattended shelf elsewhere in the store.)

   In contrast, ethically acceptable, even strongly recommendable, limitations are more likely to revolve around “truth in advertising”, e.g. that a tobacco company may not make claims that are misleading or otherwise create a misleading impression—but these should apply equally to all types of businesses. That they do not is a considerable contributor to the great problems with advertising, etc., that makes life hard for consumers. (Fink’s own claims could be a special case of lack of truth in advertising, in a more metaphorical sense, depending exactly on whether she means what she says or is trying to create an impression of something harmless/ethical/whatnot while actually pushing something harmful/unethical/whatnot.)

4. To “perceived-as-unhealthy choices”: I do not doubt in the slightest that smoking is an unhealthy choice, but experiences from other areas show the importance of treading carefully. Note e.g., again, the COVID-countermeasure fiasco. Also see an older text on poor advice. Even with smoking, of course, there must be an awareness that there is a world of difference between chain smoking cigarettes and engaging in some rarer act of smoking, say, a single pipe a day to relax after work. (I lack own practical experiences, but I strongly suspect that pipe smoking would be easier to restrict to such a one-per-day scenario than cigarette smoking.)

   A further complication is that “smoke-free policies” (in the most natural interpretation) have hitherto not been about making things “easier” for smokers but about protecting non-smokers from second-hand smoke. Such protection of others has a much greater potential of being ethical justified than a “for your own protection”, and chances are that this switch in target is rhetorical trickery similar to some of the inexcusable manipulation attempts during the COVID-countermeasure era.

Stimulating demand instead of supply (2026-02-04)

In a recent entry, I wrote about misguided attempts to increase purchases of electric car by subsidies more prone to give money to the industry (or, in context, billionaires) than to the prospective car buyers.

This could be seen as a special case of a more general error, of stimulating demand instead of supply. For instance, today, I encountered the idea of “Trump homes”: While the description was so vague that I cannot say much about them, including whether the name is just a gimmick or goes back to an actual connection to Trump, the idea seems to be some variation of rent-to-own in order to allow more renters to transition to home ownership despite the market being what it is. This, however, begins by stimulating demand (if it works, at all) where the true problem is a lack of supply and growth of supply. (And/or a supply that is too unevenly matched with demand geographically, with a potential over-supply in area X and an under-supply in area Y.) Similar claims apply to ideas (that definitely are connected to Trump) of lowering interest rates to make mortgages more affordable and the “50-year mortgage”—increase demand, not supply.

A similar error seems to be quite common among politicians, in variations of a theme of “give the people money to X” or “give money in exchange for compliance” (as with the aforementioned electric cars). Result? Increased demand and incentives for manufacturers and sellers to raise prices—not supply. (Or supply only secondarily, with some time delay, and/or less than demand.)

Here we also see a double problem with price/rent controls: These not only potentially serve to increase demand, they outright reduce supply, so that we typically have demand rising and supply sinking at the same time...

Of course, stimulating supply must be done with some caution (and it is often best for the government and the politicians not to meddle at all), but it is the way to go to reach actual results. To boot, good ways are often available. For instance, a long-standing complaint in many Western countries is that the sheer amount of bureaucracy, excessive regulation, government-induced delays and costs, whatnot, is a great obstacle to the supply of new buildings. Simply cutting such bureaucracy, etc., to a more reasonable level could do much to improve supply, and would do so with few negative side-effects—barring cases like a now unneeded civil servant being given the boot (for the best) or drawing on the tax-payers’ dime while rolling his thumbs instead of while causing harm (even this is an improvement).

Of As and Fs (2026-02-03)

Yesterday, I encountered a text claiming that Harvard slashes A grades by nearly 7 percentage points after faculty crackdown on grade inflation^e. Well, it had, but this was from a ridiculous 60.2 percent to a still ridiculous 53.4 percent—a blip on the radar screen.

In fact, I was thinking that with such ridiculous numbers, and a problem that is known to go so far beyond Harvard, it would be for the best to just axe the A–F scale to get a clean start—just like many currencies have been replaced in the past. While this is unlikely to bring a permanent solution, as the underlying problems remain and such currencies have tended to begin a renewed deterioration, it could at least buy some time, give the system a few decades before the current situation was reached again and before a deterioration to a system with a virtual single grade, an “A for enrolling”, could take place.

My native Sweden has gone through several such changes, if usually for reasons that are not very comprehensible, showing that the complications caused are tolerable. (E.g. the need to change software. E.g. the worse comparability between students from before and after the change.)

And, lo and behold, today I encounter the claim that Sweden intends to go through yet another such change, replacing a U.S.-style A–F scale with a 10–1 scale. (Indicated as [best grade]–[worst grade].) The idiocy? Well, going by reporting (e.g., in Swedish, [1]^e), the main reason is to get rid of those pesky Fs and, ultimately, the horror of the idea that someone could actually fail. This continues a Swedish tradition of “everyone passes—period”.

Secondary reasons given do include both grade inflation (as with the pervasive problem exemplified by Harvard above) and claims that some schools would give too generous grades relative others, but there is nothing in the new system that would prevent such too generous grades—the correct approach is to create more uniform norms for grading, push standardized testing, whatnot, in a manner orthogonal to the scale used.

Comparison Kyrgios–Sabalenka / Update: Battle of the Sexes (2026-01-31)

A little more than a month ago, I wrote about the (then) upcoming latest incarnation of a Battle of the Sexes in tennis. (Cf. that text for more details.)

With the first major (the Australian Open or AO) of 2026 concluding, it can be interesting to look at later events, with an eye at some complications mentioned, notably, around the level of men’s and women’s tennis and of Kyrgios’s and Sabalenka’s level among men resp. women, and around the pointlessness of such Battles in tennis (and very many other sports).

First, the result of the match was a 6–3, 6–3 victory for Kyrgios, despite a leg up being given to Sabalenka.

Secondly, both participated in (to my understanding) exactly one tournament, the Brisbane International, between their match and the AO. Sabalenka won the women’s singles competition without dropping a set; Kyrgios lost in the first round in the men’s singles competition. Kyrgios also teamed with Kokkinakis in the doubles—and lost in the second round, if, as a small consolation, to one of the later semi-finalist pairs.

Thirdly, for the AO:

Sabalenka participated in the women’s singles competition and reached the final without dropping a set, lost said finally only narrowly (cf. side-note) to Rybakina, and remains a clear number one on the women’s world ranking, while Kyrgios failed to enter the men’s singles competition and is a blip on the radar screen of the men’s world ranking. He did enter the men’s doubles, again with Kokkinakis—and lost in the first round, if, as a small consolation, against the ultimate runners-up. He also entered the mixed competition—and lost in the second round, with no consolation. (Sabalenka seems to have focused on singles, both here and in Brisbane.)

Giving well-behaving illegal aliens amnesty (2026-01-31)

Just like with any other group, illegal aliens are not carbon copies of each other, and to jump to the conclusion that they are all (or, even, necessarily a majority) one or more of criminal, seeking free government money, genuinely seeking work but being unable to find it, whatnot, would be highly unfair. (As I note in a recent entry, “even a small minority of problem-makers can easily ruin things for the majority”.)

A tempting thought is, then, to give illegals a deportation-free road to a status as legal residents. Such has been done in the past, often using the specific label “amnesty”, and (prompting this entry) Spain appears to be currently wishing to do so.

For my own part, I am in two minds about this:

On the pro-side, it treats the individual as an individual and applies the principle of “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” (I approve strongly of both). Indeed, a problem with many restrictions on immigration is that there is an element of collective punishment (which I find troubling) and such an amnesty could provide a partial way around that—those who pass the “pudding test” are amnestied; those who do not, are deported.

On the con-side, there is a very major problem with incentives, in that such an amnesty will give others a reason to follow in the footsteps of those now amnestied, which can increase the inflow of illegal immigrants, leading to a worsening of sustainability issues and other associated problems.

While not necessarily an argument “con” (but definitely for the need to tread carefully), we also have practical complications of implementation, including the ever-recurring issue of “Who decides?”, what standards should be used, whether strict formal criteria should apply or leeway be given by decision makers, for how long the “pudding” must have proved it self, what grace period, if any, a “pudding” might be given before being at risk of deportation, whatnot. Even in a good-faith implementation, this is very tricky grounds, while a bad-faith implementation can see horrifying problems, e.g. that Somalis are let in but Jews and East Asians are kept out, based on race and Leftist preferences rather than individual deservingness.

The original status as illegal immigrant is also problematic in at least two regards: Firstly, that someone resorted to illegal immigration over a legal one can be a strong sign of unsuitability (but one, as a heuristic, that can be superseded by the “pudding test”), because more-likely-to-be-suitable candidates stand a greater chance of being granted legal immigration. Secondly, that the act of illegal immigration, as such, is typically a mark against the immigrant, be it as a sign of an unwillingness to follow the rules of society (pointing to unsuitability) or as a fairness issue in that, with an eye at sustainability, it is better to grant someone a chance who is willing to play by the rules than someone who cheats.

The previous paragraph might also point to a better road, in that better checks of suitability might solve many problems and increase the chance that the “right” immigrants are let in. (With a side-effect that a status as an illegal immigrant is more likely to be a sign of unsuitability than with worse checks, thereby reducing the scope for legitimate amnesties and increasing the likelihood that deportation is warranted even by the standards of the “pudding test”.) This road also has the advantage that it is easier to keep the number of immigrants within a sustainable scope than when illegal immigration (and poor enforcement of immigration law) is present. (In the nature of “better checks”, they are individualized to the degree possible, which reduces the risk of collective punishment. Checks based on e.g. original nationality might sometimes be a necessary evil, but they lead to exactly collective punishment.)

On the downside, such checks remain heuristics (no “pudding test”) and are still vulnerable to the type of implementation issues discussed above. A partial remedy might be achievable by a more formal “pudding test” within the scope of legal immigration, in that the bars for temporary legality are lowered but come with some type of accomplishment and behavior requirements. What these might be is a too large topic for this entry, but could conceivably and for instance include an automatic revocation of status and ensuing deportation if someone is found guilty of a crime, goes on welfare for more than a month in any given 12-month period, or files for bankruptcy. (With additional rules for when and how a move to permanent, test free, residency and/or citizenship can be achieved.)

Deporting illegal aliens vs. X (2026-01-30)

In previous entries, I have e.g. pointed out how very different the actions by ICE et co. are compared to those by the Iranian regime—something which reveals how ridiculous and ridiculously exaggerated many claims by the U.S. Left are.

However, how does the deportation of illegal aliens, as such, and the current implementation thereof, compare to some other problems in the reasonably recent U.S.?

First, I stress that it is very dubious that deporting illegal aliens can be viewed as something bad, let alone evil. (As such. A poor implementation can, of course, change matters in a concrete case; however, I have seen no proof or strong signs that the current U.S. implementation is poor, apart from what problems arise through a lack of cooperation by local law enforcement in e.g. Minnesota.) In an ideal world, yes, we would have complete freedom to settle wherever we want, but we do not live in an ideal world and immigration has to be controlled for reasons like sustainability, be it economic or other (cf. side-note). Then there are issues like criminal enterprises trying to “expand their markets” (a massive problem in e.g. today’s U.S.), migration to countries with more generous “welfare states” (a definite issue in the EU, with its principle of internal free movement), whatnot. Someone who circumvents reasonable restrictions, forgoes attempts to gain legal entry/residency in favor of illegal entry/residency, or otherwise enters the rank of illegal aliens through his own actions, does not have a right to complain if he is deported (even after years, let alone in a shorter time frame)—he made his own bed. Failure to enforce reasonable immigration law is the real problem and a true cause for complaint. (And should someone consider the law unreasonable, the correct step is to try to change the law. Note e.g. [1] for more on reasonable and unreasonable laws, when a breaking might actually be justified, and similar.)

But, second and for the sake of argument, let us say that deportations of illegal immigrants were a bad thing (looking at the scale of reactions, some do indeed seem to consider it a great monstrosity), and contrast it with some genuinely bad things (which often, paradoxically, met with the approval of the same groups that today go to absurd lengths to prevent deportations).

Contrast deportations of illegal aliens with the other side of the equation—the very many citizens and legal residents who, unnecessarily, fall victim to the effects of the illegal immigration, including through an increase in crime, the additional stress on the social systems, the reduced availability of affordable housing, etc.—and all because the likes of Biden and Walz have failed to do their duty towards the people that they were elected to serve and neglected e.g. constitutional obligations to uphold the law. (The latter certainly applicable to Biden. I have not looked into the Minnesotan constitution and what else might apply to Walz, but a similar obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” seems extremely plausible.)

Then, with the immense violations of civil rights of citizens and legal residents during the COVID-countermeasure era. Some of these violations, including restrictions on free speech were indefensible regardless of the severity of COVID. For others, a sufficient severity of COVID and a sufficiently convincing cost–benefit analysis might have been enough to justify them—but there were no signs of such a very great severity outside the worst panic-mongering, and cost–benefit analyses simply do not appear to have been made. (Or, conceivably, were made and then suppressed because they gave the “wrong” result.) Biden and his likes still forged ahead, be it with violations or other aspects of the countermeasures, and the people paid the price.

Then, with the horrifying economic damage done by the COVID countermeasures that hit most of the citizens and legal residents so hard—and with the damage to child development, education, health outside specifically COVID, etc. These countermeasures did not only do more harm than good, hitting virtually everyone, regardless of own culpability, in the process. It was clear to many thinking observers, very early on, that the countermeasures (in sum) would do more harm than good and that they, if implemented at all, needed to be reduced in scope, modified to reduce problems, and applied with far more discretion than they were. As noted, Biden and his likes still forged ahead. Worse, when damage manifested and a medical success remained disappointing, the countermeasures were not reversed at anywhere near the speed that they should have been.

Then, with the immense damage done by unsound economic policies under various Democrat rules, e.g. under Biden (even discounting the special case of COVID countermeasures), Newsom, Mamdani (should he uphold even half of his promises), and Walz—at least the latter of which also, at a minimum, negligently contributed to massive welfare scams drawing on tax-payers’ money. (Some go as far as seeing him as a deliberate participant, but I reserve my judgment for a later date.) Here, we have millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions (depending on the geographic scope) of citizens and legal residents who see or saw societal wealth artificially limited, existing own wealth artificially eaten up by price inflation, own income growth artificially held back or outright reversed, own disposable income artificially reduced by high taxes, etc.

Then, with the attempts (again, even COVID countermeasures aside) by the Biden regime and other parts of the Left to hamper democracy in various ways, including through attacks on speech not sufficiently conformant with Leftist orthodoxy and narratives, lawfare against Trump and his allies, attempts to reduce election integrity, and the issues around the Biden–Harris transition. In this, not only the immediately affected were harmed, but also a very large portion of the U.S. citizens and legal residents in general. If it had led to the perpetuation of Leftist rule and associated harmful policies, the vast majority of the people would have been harmed.

Etc.

From another angle, I have seen several recent commentators note a hypocrisy in the treatment by Leftists, the press, and whatnot of Trump and illegal aliens vs. Obama and illegal aliens, pointing strongly to a case of not the “what” mattering but the “who”. (However, it cannot be ruled out that the often weathervane-like opinions of the more activist Left has changed correspondingly in the interim, e.g. through a generational displacement.)

Who/what is to blame? (2026-01-28)

A recurring issue with reporting, let alone propaganda, on political topics is a failure to assign blame where it belongs. Likewise, to give credit where it belongs.

In recent days, e.g., there have been a great number of claims that the immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota has caused various chaos, conflict, whatnot—and, ergo, the operation must cease. This is a fundamentally faulty line of reasoning: While (cf. earlier entries) no operation of this scale will ever be free from mistakes and misjudgments, the default result of the ICE/CBP/whatnot moving in would have been various agents apprehending criminal illegal aliens (and the odd non-criminal illegal alien and criminal non-illegal alien or criminal non-alien) for further proceedings—nothing more and nothing less, except where one of the targets tried to resist or escape. In reality, the far, far larger, utterly disproportionate chaos, conflict, whatnot is caused by the Leftist activists and their often extreme, violent, and/or illegal actions—and, very often, destructive actions, even when the bar for extreme, violent, and/or illegal is not met. To boot, to repeat another point from earlier entries, protesters that appear, in considerable numbers, to be organized, trained, and funded.

But did not the operation cause the protests, and thereby the chaos (etc.)? Such reasoning can be legitimate, when done properly. However:

Firstly, if we go down that line of reasoning, the next step (with far greater justification) is to say that a failure to enforce borders by the Biden regime and the failure by Walz et co. to cooperate with federal law enforcement made the operation necessary. (To which could be added, e.g. that if the individual illegal aliens had not entered or remained illegally, there would have been no need to act, and that their presence would have been far more tolerable if the proportion of criminals, aid seekers, and whatnot had been sufficiently low—remember that even a small minority of problem-makers can easily ruin things for the majority.)

Likewise, if we say, for the sake of argument, that law enforcement acted in error (be it maliciously, through stress, through an honest mistake in the heat of the moment, whatnot) in the two shootings, we would still have the fact that the shootings took place after considerable provocation and harassment by the shot, who had no place being where they were and doing what they were doing. In the case of Good, she drove her car into an agent, the later shooter, in manner that either was or reasonably-appeared-to-the-agent-to-be deliberate, immediately before the shooting. At a minimum, a very, very considerable own blame then rests with the shot by this line of reasoning. (To what degree law enforcement was in error has yet to be clarified. If law enforcement was not in error, of course, all of the assignable blame rests with the shot and/or, as with that “Drive, baby! Drive!”, those who egged them on. Non-assignable blame can still exist, notably through sheer bad luck.)

Secondly, that an event/development/whatnot has a single cause is very rare, and it is important to look at the details of the various causes. Here, e.g., we have law enforcement engaging in a legal, justified, and beneficial operation (cf. earlier entries), while the Leftist activists, again, are out of bounds. Imagine, by analogy, if a farmer finds a squatter on his property, who refuses to leave, that the farmer calls the police to have the squatter removed, and that the squatter calls a few friends to drive the police away—who is now to blame if things turn violent? The farmer? The police? No: It is the squatter and/or his friends.

An ever repeating example over the last few years is “COVID caused” (and variations on this theme). Now, COVID did cause quite a few things, including premature deaths. However, COVID did not cause e.g. school closures, small business bankruptcies, and delayed cancer diagnoses—it was the COVID countermeasures that did. (And note how I, with reservations for slips, consistently speak in terms of e.g. “COVID countermeasures” and the “COVID-countermeasure era”, or, cf. side-note, e.g. “politician-caused inflation”.) Looking back, and as many (including me) predicted even very early on, the COVID countermeasures were a prime example of the cure being worse than the disease and it is important to assign blame where it belongs. COVID, if left alone, would have been no worse than several-but-short-of-many flu seasons hitting at once. The unwise overreactions that followed, the COVID countermeasures, brought the likely largest disaster of my lifetime—and it predictably did so. (See countless earlier texts for more details.)

In the other direction, I have seen such extremes as ascribing the German Wirtschaftswunder to the Marshall Plan, and using that to call for more government intervention, while ignoring the true cause of a broadly Libertarian policy, which should have led to calls for less government intervention. (Even the Wirtschaftswunder/Erhard era was far from a Libertarian ideal, but it fared very well in both a historical and an international comparison.)

More generally, it is common for e.g. politicians to take credit for something that they did not do and to cast blame onto others for what the politicians did do. A recurring example is for politicians to sabotage free markets by strong regulation and then blame free markets when something goes wrong—often with an ergo of “we need more regulations” or “capitalism is evil”. (Also note earlier remarks on “politician-caused inflation”.) Another is to run poor policies while in power and, once out of power, to blame the successor for the long-term effects. Ditto, in reverse, to take credit for the positive effects of the policies of a successor/predecessor. (To give specific examples is tricky, because it can be hard to correctly attribute positive and negative causes—and the more so as there are often causes involved that have nothing to do with the politicians. However, to stay recent, there are many complaints about the economy from the Left directed at Trump, even where the true causes are mismanagement by predecessor Biden, remaining effects from the COVID-countermeasure era, and/or more local mismanagement in “Blue” states.)

Disputable German turn against Leftist extremism (2026-01-27)

According to German news (cf. e.g. [1]^e), Alexander Dobrindt, minister of the interior, wishes to implement a stronger fight against Leftist extremism in the wake of the massive Berlin electricity sabotage earlier in January (cf. earlier entries).

This is good in as far as it points to a growing recognition of, or willingness to acknowledge, the fact that political violence is a pre-dominantly Leftist phenomenon. (As I have noted repeatedly in the past.)

However, there are several problems that make his initiative too weak or, even, risks that it backfires. Foremost:

1. It seems to be directed only at violent extremism and fails to attack the problem of Leftist extremism in general. Recall, e.g., that the re-branded SED is present in the German federal parliament and that it has actual government participation in several individual states.

   ---

   Side-note:

   Here, someone could object that it should not be the role of the government to fight non-violent extremism. There is much to this, and I do not suggest that the non-Left should adapt Leftist means of e.g. suppression of opinion against the Left—evil is as evil does.

   However, there is still much that can be done, including that public schools (which utterly dominate German schooling) be made to inform very clearly about the many, many past evils of the Left, including in the DDR (in Germany’s own semi-recent past and with a direct connection to that re-branded SED) and the more so in e.g. the Soviet Union and revolutionary China, to demonstrate how Leftist politics do harm to the economy and prevent growth, to straighten out common Leftist propaganda lies about this and that—and to abandon the simplistic German reduction of history to “the Nazis were evil”.

   A particular point is that there is an extremely unfortunate law directed, by name, at “Rightwing” extremism, which should be urgently extended to include the far more worthy target of Leftwing extremism (cf. [2])—unless stripped of such references entirely or with an outright replacement of the one end of the political spectrum with the other. This the more so, as it perpetuates the fiction that violence (and/or extremism, more generally) would be a predominantly “Rightwing” matter, rather than the Leftwing matter that it actually is.

   Moreover, Dobrindt is not just an important member of the government, he is also an important member of his own party, and this party has a long history of failure to counter Leftist disinformation and to give an accurate view of the Left, it self, to voters. If he is serious about attacking the problem, he could achieve much by rectifying this neglect.

   It is also noteworthy (but not necessarily an argument—again, evil is as evil does) that a corresponding fight, with government resources, against portions of the non-violent “Right” has been quite common in Germany (and many other countries, the U.S. included).

   ---

2. At the core of his ideas, we seem to have more money and greater powers to this-or-that agency, including increased ability to store/track IP-addresses and to use facial recognition. These, however, are measures that might do less to combat Leftist extremism, and more to further weaken civil rights, increase government influence, continue the depressing trend of ever-diminishing free speech, etc. If in doubt, once the Left has the reins again, such points could very easily be abused (even if they are added in good faith now), including for purposes like persecuting the non-Left and to further keep the citizens down. (Note e.g. recent strong parallels in the U.S. under the Biden regime or the current problems in the U.K. under Keir Starmer.)

3. Even here and now, there is no guarantee that various additional monies/rights/whatnot will be used for their intended purposes, and it has to be trusted that everyone, from agency heads to individual agents, who is involved will actually do his job and not abuse the changes to further go after non-Leftist targets. Note, e.g., that money is highly fungible and that the idea of “ear-marking” money usually is illusory.

Minnesota, propaganda, and missing the point (2026-01-26)

As the situation in Minnesota continues to go downhill, it appears that the Leftist activists are winning the propaganda war—despite that the facts and application of reason favor Trump and ICE. (Also note several earlier entries on related topics.) In this, a depressing pattern is repeated, where the Left lacks arguments yet convinces large portions of the masses through propaganda. This, especially, when too many miss the point, what matters, what is relevant, whatnot, and instead focus on something else—and, very often, a something else that is ultimately based in reality distortion or only seems important because of such reality distortion. The current situation around ICE in Minnesota/Minneapolis gives good examples of this, beginning with the claim that ICE would deport Latinos for being Latinos instead of illegal aliens for being illegal aliens, let alone criminal illegal aliens for being criminal illegal aliens.

Consider some points pertinent to deciding who is in the right/wrong, and similar, in that current situation:

1. ICE is enforcing reasonable and ethically justified laws that are intended to protect the U.S. and its citizens. (And, going by statistics and historical developments, they do so when enforced, while the failure to enforce them does much damage.)

   Moreover, such enforcement was a key point in Trump’s election promises leading up to his electoral victory. This adds an angle of democratic confirmation—on top of the fact that the laws had already resulted from democratic processes.

   ---

   Side-note:

   For most purposes, I consider the presence/absence of democratic processes secondary to whether laws are, e.g., “reasonable and ethically justified”. (The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the point of democracy is not some magic thinking about an infallible will of the people or a “the majority is always” right mentality—but a matter of having checks and balances that reduce the risk of unreasonable and ethically unjustified laws.)

   However, some points can both have a supportive effect (reasonable, justified, and democratic) and serve to reveal double-standards and/or hold someone to his professed own standards. Many members of the Left, e.g., are very keen on invoking democracy as were it exactly infallible, as were it an end in its own right, whatnot—and by their own standards, they should be bound to accept democratic outcomes that go against them. (But they rarely do.)

   ---

2. This type of large-scale action would not be necessary, had it not been for prior failure (in particular, by the Biden regime) to enforce the same laws.

3. Likewise, it would not be necessary if local law enforcement cooperated with federal law enforcement, e.g. by actually handing over illegal aliens who have been arrested for some crime—and note that this failure is by orders from a nutcase-Left governor, mayor, and whatnot.

   Contrast this with how much more smoothly things run in most of the rest of the U.S.—and notice how other exceptions also tend to relate to nutcase-Left governors, mayors, and whatnots.

4. Even so, the situation appears to be out of hand because of activist behavior—not the behavior of ICE. Not only have unwise, destructive, and potentially violence-provoking words by Leftist politicians brought many useful idiots onto the streets, but there are strong signs of organized protests, featuring training, coordination, and external financing, aimed at disrupting the work of ICE by any means that they get away with—including violent and/or illegal acts.

5. Here, again, the situation is made worse through a Left-ordered failure of local law enforcement to supply necessary aid, perform crowd control, give a local presence on the scene that stops the hateful and defamatory narrative of “Evil ICE is invading us!!!”, etc.

   In a particularly sick twist, Walz et co. appear to view the role of the national guard, should it be called in, as one of protecting innocent locals from ICE (a straw-man scenario) instead of ICE from violent Leftist activists. (At which point, arguments for an insurrection or similar would become that much stronger and a “federalization” of the national guard, it self, all the more likely.)

6. The actions of the activists bring a great many unnecessary confrontations, likely many, many times what would otherwise be the case. Any such confrontation brings a certain risk that something goes wrong, even between well-meaning parties, and it is unsurprising that things sometimes have gone wrong, considering the very many, very unnecessary, activist caused, confrontations.

   (By analogy, if someone runs across the street once without looking out for cars, he will likely still be fine, but the accumulated odds grow worse and worse with every repetition. Maybe he gets away with it ten times, not just one, but hardly a hundred, let alone a thousand—unless the street is void of traffic. Of course, to blame the driver, very much unlike in the Good situation, in order to absolve the careless and negligent runner, would miss the point and the true cause of the problem, even should the driver also have been careless or negligent, let alone just happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

7. The likelihood that something goes wrong in any individual confrontation is further increased by the great amount of frustration, stress, and whatnot that is brought, again unnecessarily, to the ICE officers by activist harassment and sabotage. Worse, there have been sufficient situations to warrant an occasional feeling of fear even to life and limb—and, possibly, a frequent feeling of fear for one’s hearing, as some activists, apparently, try to blow whistles in the ears of the officers.

   They are only human and the risk of mistakes and overreactions necessarily increases in light of the harassment, the sabotage, the violence, and their respective emotional consequences. (I leave unstated whether any specific event, including the currently two lethal shootings, involve mistakes/overreactions by ICE or rather were proportionate and justified.)

8. Left-dominated media sources appear to be ripe with mis-/disinformation, giving many, including potential further protesters in the “useful idiot” category and already ICE-/Trump-/whatnot-hating Leftist activists, a flawed view of the situation and who is to blame for what. Even the fact that Good (cf. earlier entries) had hit the shooting ICE officer with her car is often left out, creating the impression that she was shot while merely trying to get away—as opposed to having given legitimate cause to see her as an imminent deadly danger to others and engaging in what either was or, for obvious reasons, was taken to be a direct and unprovoked attack on the later shooter.

9. Similar claims apply to the likes of Walz, who try to paint an image that puts the situation on its head. This includes through pushing a line that ICE needs to step down (preferably, leave entirely) to reduce conflict and confrontations, while failing to direct that message where it belongs—to the Leftist activists who are the source of the problem. It also includes that false narrative of ICE as evil invaders, paradoxically harassing peaceful Minnesotans.

   ---

   Side-note:

   Moving off topic, the sum of misbehaviors by the likes of Walz with regard to the ICE-situation and the welfare-fraud situation is such that it is unconscionable that they stay in office. If they do not leave voluntarily (unlikely), they should be removed by whatever legal procedures might exist. (What such legal procedures are available, I do not know.) They have done far, far more and worse than Trump (if at all) had when he was subjected to repeated demands that he be removed from office—often by the same type of Leftist who is now whole-heartedly and hypocritically in support of Walz et co.

   ---

10. Even the behaviors of activists and protester can have a similar distorting effect on the unwary: If a crowd of ICE haters take the streets to scream its dissatisfaction while ICE supporters remain at home, the overall levels of hate resp. support become hard to judge, and chances are that many jump to the conclusion that Minnesotans at large would belong to the haters. In a next step, this could increase sympathies for a take of e.g. “let the Minnesotans handle their own affairs” with a corollary that ICE should leave. Such sympathies would be doubly fallacious, because it is not clear that ICE is acting against the will of the Minnesotans more generally, and because individual states can not and must not invalidate federal law and law enforcement—in particular, not on issues, like migration, where the U.S. as a whole is affected.

    ---

    Side-note:

    What the majority position of Minnesotans is, I do not know, but I rather suspect that the “silent majority” disagrees with the “shrieking minority”, be it through being pro-ICE or being neutral, and I do so very strongly for an alternate reality where the considerable Leftist propaganda and whatnot had not risked a severe distortion of impressions.

    Note that such uses of a “shrieking minority” are very common on the Left, e.g. to have a small minority of customers or, even, non-customers write to some business to demand that someone be fired for saying the “wrong” thing, while customers, no matter how large a majority, who have no beef with, or even agree with, this “wrong” thing, do not write in to express their support for continued employment.

    ---

    ---

    Side-note:

    It is also noteworthy that the Left is usually very keen on weakening the states in favor of the federation, because it makes it easier to impose a Leftist agenda U.S. wide, even when this shift of power is constitutionally or otherwise dubious. (Ditto, more internationally, handing national power and self-determination to international, and usually Left-dominated, organizations.)

    Here, in contrast, we have a very reasonable and very constitutional exercise of federal supremacy to uphold beneficial laws—but because this is contrary to Leftist agendas, the Left now opposes the exercise of federal power.

    ---

Europeans beat Trump—say the Europeans... (2026-01-22)

Recent big news is that an amicable preliminary agreement on how to handle Greenland has been reached, which included a halt on the additional tariffs that Trump has threatened. Both in Swedish and German press, I have seen sentiments in the “we beat Trump” and “Trump backed off” families. Chances are that this is a complete misunderstanding of what happened.

Apart from the observation that the agreement is preliminary and might still come to naught, especially, after deeper consultations with Denmark and the Greenlanders (who have yet to have a proper say), it seems to me that “Trump beat the Europeans” and “Europe caved”.

How so?

Trump negotiates hard and he manipulates others and angles matters to his own advantage in his negotiations. For instance, that Trump says that he wants Greenland as a part of the U.S. does not mean that he intends to make it so. (He might, if the opportunity presents it self, and he might be wise to do so—but it is not critical.) However, by going out with such a claim and e.g. hinting that there might be a forceful takeover, he makes his European counterparts more likely to be willing to accept a perceived compromise in order to avoid a military conflict, while the perceived compromise just might be what Trump wanted all along.

Ditto threats of tariffs. I wrote as early as a year ago, less than two weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, that:

At least some tariffs (and/or the threat of them) are not intended mainly as a source of income or as a trade intervention. Instead, they serve as means of exerting pressure to achieve a change in unwanted behavior: Play ball or be hit by tariffs.

A similar idea can easily be applied to other areas than stopping unwanted behaviors—like gaining compliance in a negotiation. In the year since, there have indeed been repeated cases where Trump threatened (new or increased) tariffs but the tariffs never came, or they came and were soon removed again, because the counterpart did play ball. Once it did, there was no point in implementing resp. keeping the tariffs. The recent threats of Greenland tariffs, so very shortly before the new agreement, is another example.

Generally, while Trump is no stranger to using military force when it is called for, he appears to prefer negotiations, bluffing, and more money-based strong arming to military force, forming an interesting contrast to many of his predecessors. Reagan was to some degree similar, as he appears to have been a “hawk” in his political persona but a “dove” in private; as a partial goal of the 1980s arms race was to simply exhaust the USSR, with its smaller economy and less technologically advanced industry; and e.g. as it mattered less whether SDI (“Star Wars”) was plausible and more whether the Soviets thought it plausible or were unwilling to take the risk that it was.

Misguided taxing of billionaires (2026-01-22)

With hindsight, my previous entry missed a golden opportunity to also discuss the misguided taxing of billionaires, as e.g. currently suggested in California. This both generally and in light of the potential argument that, if billionaires thrive on government money, is it not fair that they are taxed on their fortune to compensate? (As opposed to being taxed on income, cf. below.)

There is something to this (I very reluctantly admit), but also much that speaks against it—beginning with the simple fact that not all billionaires thrive in this manner, or, if they do see a benefit, not necessarily one that matches the proposed tax. This would then create a great risk of injustice towards them and unfairness between them.

In (a likely very incomplete listing) consider:

1. The aforementioned difference in benefits from billionaire to billionaire is not only unfair but risks a redistribution effect, in that those who do benefit (pre-tax) from government spending might end up approximately unharmed or still benefiting in the net (post-tax), while those who do not benefit end up worse off.

   This would be contrary to the entire argument.

   ---

   Side-note:

   However, this type of redistribution will result regardless of whether a billionaires’ tax is introduced by this argument or by another entirely. Likewise, much of this list targets the idea of a billionaires’ tax more generally than a billionaires’ tax based on specifically this argument. (And, cf. a previous side-note, is not necessarily limited to billionaires.)

   ---

2. If a billionaires’ tax were introduced for the purpose of evening the playing field between billionaires and the rest of the population, it would be extremely hard to find a “fair” rate of taxation. A similar topic, in a sports setting, is mentioned in a recent entry, which can serve as convenient explanation/illustration.

   To boot, while there are problems like government spending favoring billionaires relative the rest of the population, there is a fair chance that many or most billionaires are still worse off because of government intervention, notably, through a resulting reduction in economic growth.

   ---

   Side-note:

   Unsurprisingly, however, Leftists usually fail to understand this reality, often committing the fallacy of attributing or preconditioning success in life (even for billionaires) to/on something that the government has done or has provided, even when it has not, even when free markets would have provided a superior version of the same, even when the net effect of government intervention has been negative because of the increased taxes needed to pay for something (and similar problems), even whatnot.

   ---

   To boot, billionaires are far from the only ones to profit in a similar manner—and how should that be fairly reflected in any tax rate, for them or for others? For instance, someone with far less money can hold shares in a company that profits from government contracts. For instance, some entire fields of work are heavily subsidized in Germany, be it in a direct or indirect manner, including workers in the coal industry and chimney sweeps—and a similar issue exists around government employees in a great many, if not all, countries. For instance, many unemployment and supplementary-income programs are more generous than reasonably warranted.

3. The issue of incentives remains unchanged. Putting up a billionaires’ tax will give billionaires incentives to move themselves and/or their money elsewhere (what applies can depend on the exact modalities of taxation).

4. There is already income and business taxes that apply even to the type of government “generosity” that can fill the pockets of billionaires. Taxing the resulting fortune would amount to double taxing—or worse. (Even as is, double taxing is often present, even for the man on the street, through mechanisms like VAT or sales tax. In such cases, we easily land at triple taxing. Further levels yet might be argued, e.g. when a property incurs a yearly property tax in a system that has already seen income tax, wealth tax, and some sales-tax equivalent on the money used to buy the property. Here, we also have two levels even of just wealth tax, as property taxes are often a special case of this. And this not counting the effects of inflation.)

5. Much of these billions are not in a very liquid form and, worse, can to some part exist only on paper. For instance, if most of a particular billionaire’s net worth is in shares in a company that he founded and which has had an amazing performance on the stock market, then he cannot truly access this fortune without selling shares—and selling shares could make the price take a dive, causing disproportionate damage to his (apparent) fortune. This the more so, because the business might have been highly over-valued at the time of taxation.

   In a simple example, say that he has one million shares at a share price of USD 1000 each at the time of taxation, that he is taxed USD 50 million, and attempts to sell 50.000 shares to bring up that money (discounting the risk of additional costs, like brokerage fees). The combination of this many shares hitting the market and the knowledge that it is the founder selling, causes the share price to drop to, say, USD 950. Firstly, his remaining shares are now “only” worth a little north of 900 million, almost doubling his loss relative the tax only. (And if the business was originally over-valued, he still loses both in terms of too high taxes relative the nominal rate and in terms of the perceptions of others, which can affect business opportunities.) Secondly, chances are that he could not rid himself of even all the 50.000 shares in one transaction at the original USD 1000 each, but receives less money. For instance, if he manages to sell at an average price of USD 975, he is still USD 1.25 million short and has to sell even more shares to make up the difference, potentially driving the price down even further.

   Oh, and then he might have to pay further taxes for realizing gains on the shares just sold, which can amount to a quite considerable sum and force the sale of even more shares—incurring even more tax and dropping the price even further.

   ---

   Side-note:

   While wealth resting in the stock market has often gone free of income tax (cf. the previous item), such taxes on realization serve a similar role. While the modalities varies from country to country, it would be naive to reason that “X has not paid income tax on his unrealized gains; ergo, he should pay a wealth tax ” or “[...] unrealized gains tax”.

   Note that the problems discussed in this item show a much more general danger of taxing wealth instead of income and of, in particular, taxing unrealized gains. At an extreme, an average citizen might see himself forced to sell a house or a small business as a consequence of such taxes, should they be imposed upon him. Closely related problems can occur around poorly implemented inheritance taxes, where someone inherits that house or small business and promptly has to sell it in order to pay the inheritance tax.

   ---

Then we have the fundamental observation that the best way to remove such problems is not to increase taxes (be it for billionaires or more generally) but to reduce government spending. Failing that, there is still often room to limit the size of various individual projects (which reduces the size requisite to be a bidder, which not only increases competition in bidding but reduces the risk that money goes to billionaires); to increase project controlling to avoid over-paying, paying for wasteful hours worked (worse, hours billed) as opposed to work accomplished; or to otherwise make matters more efficient and/or less billionaire friendly.

Misguided subsidies and the creation of billionaires (2026-01-19)

Browsing German videotext, I found two adjacent pages claiming, respectively, that electric cars would receive a EUR 6.000 subsidy per purchase and that the number of billionaires in the world had increased considerably.

While the latter can have many reasons, quite a bit of it has to do with government actions, including various types of subsidies—and subsidies are often horrifyingly stupid. To consider the specific type of subsidy at hand:

Let us say that we have a market in equilibrium where a particular electric car sells at 50 grand at the optimal pricing from a profitability point of view. Say, further, that a 6 grand subsidy is instituted. This would drive up demand at a price of 50 grand (as, of course, was intended by the government), making 50 grand a “too low” price, causing prices to rise, and diverting money from the tax-payers to the car industry and, ultimately, into the pockets of the likes of Elon Musk. This while the post-rise demand will be lower than if the prices had remained at 50 grand (if likely higher than without the subsidy).

Beyond the increase of profits caused by the rise in prices, the rise in demand likely to be found at any price sufficiently short of 56 grand will have a similar effect, leading to increased profits and more money to billionaires. The increase might be smaller and the effect of the subsidy will be more in line with the intentions, but there will be an increase—and to think of the sum of the two increases as “6 grands gifted to the car industry” works well in a first approximation. (With a better approximation considering factors like in the above side-note, the tax on profits, and similar.)

Here we see a severe perversion of intention, as what (at least, ostensibly) is intended as a gift to car buyers who buy the “right” car is turned into a gift to the car industry. Indeed, I would by no means rule out that a seeming gift to the car industry in form of tax breaks would benefit the buyers more, through reducing costs and giving the car makers incentives to lower prices in order to maximize profits.

A few of the many other points that might need consideration in a given case:

1. Such subsidies distort markets (both nationally and internationally) and bring both misallocation of resources and a risk for poor incentives, e.g. in that the subsidized industry might forgo cost-saving measures or come to plan for the future with a speculation on further subsidies.

2. The uncertainties that surround subsidies can interfere with long-term planning in a destructive manner. (Is it worth the gamble of building a new factory, based on the subsidy, when the subsidy might be stopped after the next election?)

3. Subsidies can keep otherwise unviable businesses alive and reduce the success of the viable businesses through reducing their market share. Likewise, it can increase the risk of wasteful duds being deemed viable, drawing investors’ money, competent engineers, whatnot, until they crash, as e.g. with the recent Northvolt debacle.

4. Subsidies like the one now suggested, in only a slight exaggeration, rely on being unsuccessful in order to be viable: If “too many” take up the offer, money either runs out or has to be procured extraordinarily, while, at an extreme, a complete success would lead to an idiotic situation. To see the last, consider if every household in Germany bought an electric car with a subsidy. As the bill is ultimately footed by the same households, the average net payment per car would be exactly the same as without the subsidy—even in an idealized world. In reality, it would be higher, likely considerably so, through factors like the aforementioned price increases and money needed to finance the administration of the program, the resulting red tape, and whatnot.

5. As seen recently in Minnesota, an outflow of money from the government opens the doors for cheating and fraud.

   (Whether this is practical with this specific type of subsidy, I leave unstated. Other forms, including subsidies directly to the business at hand and various “start up” programs, most certainly are vulnerable.)

6. A “tax-payers’ money to billionaires pockets” mechanism is by no means limited to this type of overt subsidy. Other mechanisms that can bring very similar effects include big defense contracts and artificially low interest rates (e.g. through making investments cheaper for big businesses at the cost of price inflation for the citizens).

7. Using the number of billionaires as a measure is problematic, as the value of a billion (in some fix currency) tends to drop with time through price inflation, implying that there might be more billionaires in the one year than the next, even have these billionaires not seen their fortunes increase in real terms. (With additional problems through complications like different currencies giving the term different implications, changes in currency rates making international comparisons by recalculation into a single currency tricky, and whether stock-market capitalization and true value of a business match.)

   ---

   Side-note:

   In terms of governments creating billionaires, price inflation is an interesting special case, because it is usually brought about through government actions (implying that it is one way that the government creates billionaires) but that it lacks that increase in real wealth that e.g. a car subsidy can bring about.

   To boot, the cause of price inflation is usually inflation of the money supply, and the newly created money often goes disproportionately to exactly billionaires, be it more directly (e.g. a new defense contract) or more indirectly (e.g. when more money in the population at large drives up stock prices).

   Also note that billionaires are more likely than the average citizen to have their assets in forms that, in some sense, are automatically adjusted for price inflation, e.g. in the stock market.

   ---

Minnesota out of hand (2026-01-19)

As a follow-up to earlier mentions of protests and “protests” in Minnesota and/or Minneapolis, things appear to be truly out of control at the moment, with problems that do not just include far-Left activists getting in the way of law enforcement or, even, assaulting and battering law enforcement, but, according to various reporting, also “civilian” cars being stopped and searched by Leftist activists, portions of the city being (having been?) under outright activist control, a church being harassed for some purported ICE connection, and similar. And all for what? A perfectly legal, ethically justified, and sensible measure of removing illegal immigrants—and/or the ultimately self-caused death of a, in a best case, reckless activist. (And note, as in an earlier entry, the enormous contrast with the parallel situation in Iran.)

If such claims are even approximately correct, it truly is justified to move in with real force, e.g. in the form of the national guard, and then throw the book at these idiots. (And to re-iterate a point made repeatedly in the past—the world must acknowledge that political violence is a predominantly Leftist phenomenon and act accordingly.)

As for Walz et co., who have, once again, utterly failed to protect the local citizens, the time for impeachment, and whatever other measures might be available, has truly come. (What such measures might be, I could not say without further research.) Also note again the inexcusably disparity in treatment, where Leftists get away with almost anything, while, say, Trump supporters are threatened with severe jail time for comparative trifles. The slap on the wrist goes to the far-Left thugs for acts worthy of a club to head; the club on the head goes to Trump supporters for acts worthy of a slap on the wrist.

To make matters worse, if hardly to my surprise, it appears that Leftist misrepresentation of various aspects of the situation is rampant. For instance, there are claims that the ICE would kidnap locals off the street, as opposed to lawfully deporting illegal aliens (or, often more accurately, perform first steps in a potential deportation procedure); and that e.g. Latinos would be at risk solely for being Latinos, as opposed to being actual illegal immigrants. To this, note that if the ICE ever goes out of bounds, there is a court system available to contest matters—and one, at that, with plenty of judicial-activist judges likely to err on the side of being anti-ICE. On top of these misrepresentations, we then have the odd deranged rant by Ilhan Omar or some other complete nutcase.

False climate predictions and missing the point (2026-01-16)

Earlier today, I encountered a text that investigates various climate predictions^e made (or communicated) by Al Gore in the by now infamous “An Inconvenient Truth”—once seen as a seminal work and winning an Academy Award, but now increasingly viewed as having a greater focus on inconvenience than on truth.

The executive summary of [1] is that Gore made prediction after prediction and was wrong again and again, to which other problems can be added, including a jump from “Something bad happened!” (or “[...] will happen!”) to “And it is because of humans messing up the climate!” without giving sufficient proof of the connection.

Such predictions begin with the claim that the snow on Kilimanjaro would have been gone within a decade of the film (released in 2006), while we now, in an inconvenient-for-Gore truth, are two decades down the line and there is still plenty of snow.

However, [1] misses a bigger point in indirectly accepting as a premise that a lack of snow on the Kilimanjaro would be a bad thing (and so on for other examples). Here, we see a fallacy of assuming that change is bad—period. This fallacy plagues much of the climate debates and/or Leftist propaganda on the matter. (In an interesting reversal of Leftist takes in other areas, where change often seems to be seen as an automatic good—as yet another sign of progress and enlightenment.)

Some change is bad, but some is neutral and some might be outright good—and the same change might have different answers for different groups (not limited to humans). When it comes to matters like the climate, in particular, a key observation is that the climate has changed again and again, and will continue to do so, even absent humans. Pertinent questions, then, include for whom a change might be bad, neutral, or good, and whether, through human interference, some change might happen too fast. (The last in the sense that nature, beavers, human civilization, whatnot, simply do not have enough time to adapt.)

Looking at Kilimanjaro, a Kilimanjaro without snow might be less photogenic than one with snow, but that is not important in any real sense—and it is certainly extremely human-centric. Even without human intervention, the snow would be gone, sooner or later, and then return at some later time—and, at some point, long after humans are extinct, Kilimanjaro will be gone. (And there was a time before either of humanity and Kilimanjaro existed.) A loss of snow, as such, is uninteresting. What might be interesting is matters like how a change in snow levels could affect flora and fauna (in one perspective) and human civilization (in another). Even such matters, however, are of a temporary nature.

But what if the idea is not that a lack of snow on the Kilimanjaro would be a bad thing but that it proves climate warming? Well, that its conceivable, but it would only make the problem worse: Climate change is relevant in as far as it has effects. Just like disappearing snow on the Kilimanjaro, as such, is of little relevance, and we instead have to look at the effects of disappearing snow, climate change, as such, is of little relevance and we instead have to look at the effects of climate change. (And that there is continual climate change is a near given. The more interesting question is whether the rate or scope of climate change is unusually large.)

Consider a chain of causality that (a) climate change made the snow on Kilimanjaro disappear (discounting the inconvenient-to-Gore truth that it, to date, has not), (b) the disappearance of the snow removed the last remaining habitat for the (fictitious) African yeti, (c) the loss of habitat caused the extinction of the African yeti, except for two specimens in the Boston zoo. Such a chain might give valid reason to say something negative about climate change (anthropogenic or otherwise), but a mere “snow disappeared; ergo, climate change”’ does not. (And even the discussed fate of the African yeti must be seen in light of a potential benefit for the struggling, but equally fictitious, Swedish chupacabra.)

Ditto other examples given by Gore.

Now, such chains of causality might exist, but it would be up to Gore et al. to state them. (And, in a next step, to make plausible that the consequences go sufficiently beyond what is, in some sense, “natural” and that the sum of all negative effects sufficiently outweigh the sum of all positive effects.)

Protests in Iran vs. in the U.S. (2026-01-10)

In January, there have been very promising developments in Iran, potentially pointing to the toppling of the evil regime there—in particular, in form of mass protests that the regime does not seem able to suppress as it could in the past.

At the same time, U.S. protests are exploding again.

Here it can be illustrative to note some (likely incomplete) critical differences, and how, by implication, protesters can be on the side of good in one case (Iran) and evil in another (the U.S.):

1. Iran: Protesters are repeatedly and deliberately killed—with at least several dozen victims in just the recent rounds. Notably, these are often protesters killed for protesting. (The last number that I saw was > 60, but this need not be reliable and is likely to increase further.)

   ---

   Addendum:

   (2026-01-11)

   As early as the morning after publication, I saw numbers > 110, with cautions that the true numbers might be far higher, in reporting.

   An important point that I failed to mention in the original text is that the sheer numbers and general approach make it virtually certain that the regime servants who kill protesters are following orders or, at a minimum, have been given sufficient prior clearance for their actions, while the case of Good (cf. below) was the result of the actions of a single individual ICE officer—even the high probability aside that the shooting was an act of justified self-defense or otherwise justified in context.

   ---

   ---

   Addendum:

   (2026-01-15)

   And a few days later, there are (conflicting) mentions of numbers of deaths in the thousands, on top of which there are claims about large scale executions, attacks on non-protesting civilians by governmental forces, hundreds of protesters being shot in the eyes, and other atrocities.

   As a silver-lining on a very big and dark cloud, this might be acts of desperation by a regime that it struggling for its own survival.

   ---

   ---

   Addendum:

   (2026-01-27)

   And by now there is at least speculation about a true death toll in the tens of thousands.

   (I will likely abstain from further updates, as my point has been abundantly made.)

   ---

   U.S.: Truly peaceful protesters who protest within the generous scope of legal protest are left alone. Even those who engage in unlawful and harmful behavior often escape even arrests—and even when a word like “protester” would be better replaced by e.g. “rioter”, “violent activist”, or, even, “Antifa terrorist”. (Notwithstanding that the tolerance of such unlawful and harmful behavior often goes back to a failure of local Leftist officials to uphold the law rather than a lack of will from the federal government.) Specifically killings? To the best of my knowledge, none that did not arise through (real or perceived) situations of self-defense or defense of others by law enforcement—and even these have been exceptionally rare. Good, discussed in the previous entry, appears to have been the aggressor—not the victim. (Contrary to Leftist hate propaganda.) Barring that, the ICE officer who shot her had reasonable reason to see a threat to his life and Good had repeatedly engaged in unlawful behavior.

   Indeed, killings at all have been exceptionally rare in the U.S.—not limited to protesters and “protesters”, but including e.g. violent criminal illegal aliens at risk of deportation. Looking at protesters/“protesters”, I cannot name a single one besides Good, off the top of my head. (Which is by no means to rule out that they exist, but it does give a strong indication of the exceptional rarity.)

2. Iran: Protests against a decades old dictatorship and methods of rule that are contrary to basic human rights and deeply harmful to Iranian society and the Iranian people, including through unnecessary economic and other hardship.

   ---

   Side-note:

   A deeper analysis of economic issues in Iran might be a worthy topic in its own right, but I lack the time for it. In short, however, the economy and economy adjacent aspects of society have been run in a very Leftist manner, leading not only to a lack of economic growth and wealth but to e.g. artificial lack of water even where water should have been reasonably-to-easily available.

   ---

   U.S.: Protests against a democratically elected leadership, in office for less than a year, for attempting to uphold democratically instituted laws and to resolve problems caused by illegal intruders, while remaining within the bounds of what is compatible with humans rights. This while the measures of at least Trump (who is part of, but not the sum of, this democratically elected leadership) is objectively improving the situation in the country in terms of e.g. less crime and more wealth.

3. Iran: Protests call for freedom from an inherently irrational and religiously fanatic oppression, and are directed at genuine problems.

   U.S.: Protests (whether wittingly or not) work to put an inherently irrational and quasi-religiously fanatic oppression into power, and are directed at largely non-existent problems, the perception of which is created by a propaganda machine.

   Indeed, in the overlap with the previous item, the Iranian problems are to a large part created by similar policies that the opponents of Trump et al. propose or would institute. Note Mamdani in particular.

   Indeed, the U.S. Left is to some degree turning from Leftist quasi-religious fanaticism to regular religious fanaticism, through a take-over by exactly Islamists in some sub-groups. (Also note a disturbing previous history, e.g. in form of the Nation of Islam.)

4. Iran: Protests, in my outsiders impression, are truly directed at the regime.

   U.S.: At least past “protests” (i.e. rioting, looting, whatnot) have often had victims predominantly unaffiliated with those against whom the protests were nominally directed. Note e.g. the looting of local stores in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the ensuing Leftist hate agitation. (While the extent of such excesses appears to be small at the moment, there is a high risk that such behaviors will re-ignite in the very near future. Had Good been Black, they likely already would have.)

Remarks on political violence / Renee Nicole Good shooting (2026-01-09)

To continue a recent theme of Leftist violence, the events around Renee Nicole Good are symptomatic of much of current Leftist methods and violence in at least the U.S. Consider:

1. The use of a potentially dangerous non-weapon for weapon purposes. Here a car, also common in more sinister attempts at mass killings by Leftist and/or Islamist extremists, and something used against law enforcement dozens a time a year and with a great increase in 2025 according to recent news. Bricks are another common choice.

   ---

   Side-note:

   Disclaimer: While the ICE version of events seems plausible, I was not there and cannot vouch for it being true. I also cannot currently rule out that we have a scenario like a panic reaction accidentally turning into an attack.

   For the time being, I write as if the ICE version holds—in part, because it is more plausible than e.g. a renewed George-Floyd narrative about evil, murderous law enforcers; in part, because the illustrative value is my main concern.

   However, I stress that her behavior until she drove her car into an ICE agent appears to have been less a matter of active violence and more of obstructionism and general obnoxiousness (again, going by reports)—unlike many other cases. Then again, her actions leading up to the event were almost certainly criminal in their own right.

   ---

   ---

   Side-note:

   Looking at such events from a gun-control perspective can be interesting. Firstly, they show that there are limits to what greater gun control can achieve. Secondly, chances are that Leftist activists would not use guns for the brunt of even violent activities, for reasons like plausible deniability concerning the purpose or, when comparing a gunshot and a thrown brick, the risk that a particular act is traced back to the perpetrator. (With a slew of other reasons also potentially applying, including that even a violent Leftie might lack a killing intent, which makes gun unsuitable.)

   ---

2. The apparent feeling of “nothing bad will happen to us” (or, say, “nothing worse than a night in jail will happen to us”), where violent Leftists rely on the restraint of law enforcement or slap-on-the-wrist policies by Leftist DAs, do not understand the counterpart’s situation (including a potential perception of threat to own life or the lives of by-standers or colleagues), fail to consider that law enforcement restraint has a breaking point, or similar. (Where some variation is likely present in degrees of, say, unwariness/recklessness vs. a calculated attempt to do damage without retaliation vs. a wish to deliberately provoke. The last e.g. to get a nice video of justified police violence that can be taken out of context and portrayed as unjustified, without considering that own damage might go beyond a few bruises.)

   Cars can be particularly problematic, as (going by psychologist claims on e.g. road violence) they can give an additional feeling of protection and lack of risk—which might hold true in the case of a shouting match with an unarmed civilian over a parking spot but not in an engagement with armed law enforcement.

3. (This item is only partially on topic, as it more often deals with interactions with the population, or specifically criminal population, at large. However, it also serves to elaborate portions of the previous item.)

   A great many escalating situations have arisen because of a failure to follow instructions. A critical point is to understand that a polite request from a law enforcer is often something non-negotiable in polite phrasing—a refusal to comply will lead to less polite requests and, if needed, ultimately use of force.

   In the case at hand, Good refused an order to get out of her car and, even, tried to drive away. This would have been highly problematic even had she not hit someone. Note that complications are not limited to “disobeying lawful orders” (in a typical phrasing) but include e.g. a risk that she would have gone unidentified and escaped attempts to bring non-violent consequences to bear, or escaped attempts to outright apprehend her. (Depending on what intentions the ICE officers had at the time.)

   Orders to leave cars are particular important, because cars bring particular risks to law enforcement, e.g. through the possibility of hidden guns, even hidden passengers, and can often contain evidence of crimes (e.g. drugs) that the driver desperately wants to keep from discovery. And then there is the risk exactly of the car, it self, being used as a weapon.

4. Good appears to have engaged in a prolonged harassment and obstructionism relative ICE, continuing an on-going pattern of such harassment and obstructionism by Leftists that gives every impression of being systematic—and has often gone well beyond e.g. using a car as an improvised road stop (one of the behaviors attributed to Good), entering the area of active physical violence that risks the life and limb of ICE officers.

   This is particularly important, because the greater the amount of negative interactions, the greater the risk that things will get out of hand, be it in form of escalating violence, misunderstandings, or even accidents. In a next step, any such event can lead to further escalation—especially, when one side is set on misrepresenting events to its own advantage, which tends to apply very strongly to the Left and somewhat strongly to the government.

   Looking at situations around ICE, we have (often violent) activists getting into the face of ICE officers again and again and again, which might then cause exactly situations like this one and/or situations that, entirely artificially and often only after some distortion, seem to verify a previous Leftist narrative of “ICE is evil”. (With potential of vicious circles, e.g. in that someone is shot in a manner similar to Good, leading to a fake “ICE shoots innocents” narrative, leading to an increased risk of reactions like Good’s if a gun is drawn, leading to more shootings, etc.)

   In the case of Good, she ultimately caused her own situation. She was one of many who, metaphorically, ran across a road without looking for traffic and she just happened to be the unlucky one who was hit by a car—just like her ICE counterpart was unlucky and hit by a car in a literal sense. (With the critical difference that her victim was only doing his job, while she was doing things that she absolutely should not have been doing.)

   ---

   Side-note:

   Note that this is the exact opposite of what some Leftist propaganda tries to claim in order to justify acts of violence, e.g. to the effect that “if only ICE officers would stay home, they would not be exposed to violence” or “if Charlie Kirk had kept his mouth shut, he would still be alive”. This is not only a case of actual victim blaming (as opposed to the many cases of unfounded Leftists claims of victim blaming), but also fails to make critical distinctions. (Cf. parts of a text on false equivalency.)

   ---

5. This type of activity is fundamentally a wrong-headed approach. The true beef that the activists appear to have is with the laws on the books and/or the fact that these laws are now enforced (while woefully neglected under Biden).

   The main approach to deal with disliked laws is to change the laws. The current behaviors are not just destructive and counterproductive but outright anti-democratic, as the activists take it upon themselves to unilaterally determine what laws are just or unjust, should or should not be enforced, etc.—and does so with regard to a set of laws not open to that type of disagreement (unlike, most notably, “for your own good” laws).

   Likewise, in the other direction, the ICE officers are not policy or law makers—they merely execute the policy and the laws determined by those democratically elected. Using violence against them is highly problematic. Taking such approaches to their conclusion, we might have a cop operating a speed trap shot because someone believes that speed limits are wrong.

   ---

   Side-note:

   To boot, chances are that the work of the activists is ineffective and that outcomes will be approximately the same—but with a considerable increase in costs, for which the tax-payers are on the hook. (Not to mention the risk of deaths and injuries.

   ---

   ---

   Side-note:

   There are cases when even such methods can be justified. The bar is quite high, however—and the more so as there usually are better methods. For instance, to save a Jew from being shipped off to an extermination camp can justify violence—but even here a less violent method is usually better, e.g. to smuggle him out of the country without detection.

   And, no, that situation is not even remotely comparable to sending illegal, often criminal, aliens back to their home countries. To claim otherwise is another case of a false equivalency. (Also note a discussion of an anti-ICE nativity scene on the same page, which has some bearing on this particular false equivalency.)

   ---

6. A disproportionate number of violent Leftists seem to fall in the LGBT field. (For instance, Tyler Robinson, the likely murderer of Charlie Kirk, appears to be or have been liaised with a man-who-wants-to-be-a-woman in a “Dog Day Afternoon” scenario.) In the case of Cook, herself a woman, there have been repeated mentions of a wife in reporting.

   (For the time being, I will not speculate on the reasons.)

   Another recurring theme in Leftist activism (if not necessarily specifically violence) is the disproportionate number of White women—and by no means limited to those currently undergoing brainwashing in college. There is even an awful-ly pertinent acronym of “AWFL” (Affluent White Female Liberal) sometime used to describe a particularly problematic demographic group.

7. The name of “Good” (even be it by coincidence) matches an extremely common problem among Leftists—and, in particular, Leftist activists, users of violence, and evil-doers, namely, the utter conviction that they are good, fight the good fight, and similar. In a next step, which might or might not apply to Good, secondary problems like the belief that those on the other side are evil (or they would not be on the other side), that any and all means are justified in the good fight, and similar, very often follow. (But evil is as evil does. In the case of Good, we also have the perennial question of “What’s in a name?”.)

Socialism means ... (2026-01-08)

Lately, e.g. around the election of Mamdani as mayor of New York, I have seen quite a few ignorant claims around what the implications of “Socialism” and similar terms would be, e.g. variations of “Socialism means taking care of each other”.

To this, I will briefly and partially preempt a text from my backlog (I cannot say when the full text will be written):

Firstly, Socialism and other forms of collectivism ultimately and invariably seem to amount to something radically different, namely, the subjugation of the individual to a collective and, concomitant with this, the elimination of individual choice and individual rights. If in doubt, even if some persons agree to voluntarily form a collective (commune, whatnot) today, the voluntariness only remains if they are later allowed to leave (including, important with an eye at Socialist countries, that there is somewhere to go), and that future generations are not bound to the decision of the first generation (including that they are not forced into a particular mould by extreme indoctrination). With Socialism on a governmental/national/whatnot level, this is rarely the case—at an extreme, many Socialist countries, e.g. the GDR, have tried to prevent its citizens even from emigrating. Moreover, the idea of consent to membership becomes ever more fleeting (even for a first generation) as the collective grows, and is largely illusory on a national level—even should Socialism be instituted by democratic processes (as e.g. large portions of the current U.S. Democrats attempt; quite often, of course, Socialism has been forced upon the people by brute force exerted by a small minority of self-appointed leaders).

Secondly, those who want to take care of others with their own money, time, whatnot can do so without engaging in Socialism—and often with better results, through less waste on bureaucracy, more individual choice, more accountability among receivers of help, the potential of greater discernment in the individual helper, etc. Socialism only ultimately becomes relevant when X wants to use the money/time/whatnot of Y to help Z against the will of Y. That is not “taking care of each other”—but theft and coercion.

In both cases, there is a strong overlap with two other texts in my backlog, namely:

On the problems that arise from the one arrogating the right to make decisions for the other, how the wish to do so tends to go hand in hand with evil (be it on an “evil is as evil does” or a “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” basis), etc.

On the importance of private property to preserve individual freedom, allow the pursuit of happiness, etc.; how private property is central to a flowering society for reasons like incentives and economic growth; and how Socialism typically sees restrictions on, ideally abolishment of, private property as a central step. Indeed, this step might be necessary to prevent individuals from preserving their freedom and to make them dependent on an almighty government; indeed, if someone calls for abolishment of private property (another Mamdani-era issue), this is cause for alarm. (Where I use “private property” with implications that include a sufficient ability to make decisions over one’s own property and exclude e.g. that hateful “Eigentum verpflichtet”.)

Some already existing texts of particular relevance include on solidarity, help, political scales, and reversed ideas.

Berlin blackout / Follow-up: Germany, the Left, and political violence (2026-01-07)

To give a brief overview of events and the current state surrounding the Berlin blackout, caused by an act of Leftist terrorism:

The blackout began around 6 AM on 2026-01-03 and lasted until some point on 2026-01-07, making this the longest Berlin blackout since 1945 (!) with its disastrous war damage. This during a period of unusual (but not extreme) cold for a German winter.

The blackout affected tens of thousands of households, and various businesses, including hospitals, grocery stores, and schools. Schools appear to still remain closed. (Exact numbers have varied in reporting and are unlikely to have been constant. [1] speaks of “über vierzigtausend Haushalte”/“over forty thousand households”. Note that the number of household members affected will be far larger.)

While I have not looked into details around hospitals, these presumably had sufficient access to emergency generators and whatnots to avoid a disaster. However, switching to emergency generators is not just a major inconvenience but entails a loss of security. If something goes wrong, if a generator does not start or breaks, if there is an interruption in fuel supply, if the time needed to make the switch is longer than planned, whatnot, things can still end very badly. Even if (something that I have not investigated) there were no deaths in hospitals due to the blackout this time, the expectation value of deaths was > 0 and there is no guarantee that another blackout will not lead to the death of dozens of patients. (Also see the original entry for some words on the expectation of deaths.)

A typical grocery store, while less critical, will not have provisions for a prolonged blackout and will remain closed until power is restored—but that too can be problematic, e.g. if some little old lady or someone ill has to go a mile by foot, in temperatures below freezing, to find an open store instead of popping around the corner.

As for the households, we have issues like insufficient heating, an inability to cook (important both with regard to eating and to keeping warm), a risk of being involuntarily restricted to cold showers and then stepping into an unheated apartment, as well as a number of severe inconveniences like no computer use (or some few hours until a laptop battery dies), reduced reading light and/or times of day when reading is realistic, the risk that food in fridges and freezers is spoiled, etc. While I do not know how the locals handled the matter, I might simply have tried to leave town for the time being—even at a cost of an otherwise unnecessary hotel and travel bill. (But if everyone does the same, a long journey might be needed to find a hotel with a free room... Then we have those who are short on money, too limited in their physical mobility, or otherwise not in a position to travel.)

Further issues with households potentially includes problems with heat pumps, heat exchangers, and similar—up to the point that many sources speculate about a risk of explosions. Even short of explosions, however, there is a very considerable risk of expensive damage. (And note, here and elsewhere, that acts of terrorism are not usually covered by insurance policies.) Of course, if such damage occurs, it can increase the period of reduced or no heating far beyond the end of the actual blackout.

Meanwhile, what does the (non-terrorist) German Left do? Scramble to distance it self from Leftist violence and terrorism? No. Acknowledge that Leftist hate rhetoric can lead to immense problems? No. Acknowledge that exaggerated climate claims are a contributing cause and promise to stick closer to the facts? No. Condemn Conservative mayor Kai Wegner for having played tennis before the blackout was over? YES!

Again: It is high time for a zero tolerance of the Left.

Voting with one’s feet versus with one’s ballot (2026-01-06)

Apparently, recent U-Haul numbers^e point to a Blue-to-Red-state migration—repeating a pattern of dissatisfaction with life in Blue states and often even by professed Democrats.

Likewise, there is migration from Venezuela to the U.S. (with reservation for U.S. imposed limitations), not from the U.S. to Venezuela. Likewise, the Berlin Wall was intended to keep the East Germans in—not the West Germans out. That stereotypical scene of someone hi-jacking a plane for the express purpose of going to Cuba? In as far as it happened in real life, as opposed to a comic strip, it was dwarfed by the numbers trying to get out of Cuba and into Florida by sea. Etc.

In such constellations, we can see a clear sign of what type of politics leads to the type of society in which the citizens do or do not want to live in a more holistic manner than just by looking at e.g. voting patterns and ideological professions (let alone claims by politicians of what makes for a good country/state/whatnot in which the citizens should want to live).

Looking at the U.S. and Venezuela, some might now try to use excuses, like “it is only because the U.S. is richer”, “[...] has less crime”, “[...] has [less/more] [whatnot]”—but that misses the point entirely. Why is the U.S. so much richer (etc.)? Sounder politics. Such excuses might fool many “ballot voters”, but are less likely to impress “foot voters”.

Similarly, there were many Leftists who screeched about moving to Canada after Trump was elected—but few who actually did move. (And, to my recollection, none who screeched about fleeing to Venezuela, where a few decades of Biden/Newsom/Harris/whatnot politics had had time to accumulate.) This, while there are many who are in favor of various (highly misnamed) “progressive” policies in, say, California, but who find themselves greatly troubled by the actual results of those policies, and might be made to move because of them. Sadly, it must be suspected that many of them fail to see the connection between the poor policies that they support and the problems in their daily life.

Similarly, with the election of far-Left extremist Mamdani as mayor of New York, there are many among the wealthy who talk about or are in the process of leaving, because he has promised policy changes that they know will be harmful both in general and to them in particular. In as far as an inflow might follow (I have yet to hear mention of it), it seems likely to consist of those looking for handouts, which would shift demographics further, to give New York fewer who can be called upon to finance Socialism and more who wishes to be financed by Socialism—making the situation the more untenable.

Germany, the Left, and political violence (2026-01-06)

Germany is paradoxically simultaneously one of the countries with the clearest history of Leftist violence and one where the myth of political violence as a predominantly “Rightwing” phenomenon refuses to die—in large part, because various Leftist groups keep harping about anything even remotely “Rightwing”-seeming with regard to violence. (Including through counting violence as “Rightwing” that is not political or, if political, not “Rightwing”.)

A few days ago, there was yet another illustration of how political violence usually comes from the Left: a terrorist attack by the repeat offenders of the Vulkangruppe, leading to a massive loss of power in Berlin, affecting tens of thousands of households—at a time when temperatures dropped below freezing.

Not only is this an act of great violence and an illustration of violence as a Leftist problem, it also potentially illustrates several other common problems with the Left—even the non-violent Left. This includes callousness, an end-justifies-the-means mentality, an inability to predict consequences of an act, and sheer incompetence. (I say “potentially” and use a plausible-but-incomplete list, because I lack the insider information to say what exactly is behind this specific idiocy.) From another angle, it illustrates how important it is not to assume that violence would be harmless because it is not directly targeting the life and limb of a human being.

The alleged motive of the Vulkangruppe was to further the common good and to fight against the use of fossil fuels. This while severely hurting a civilian population that has no true connection to the fossil-fuel industry and doing precious little to actually hurt said industry. Not only is a prolonged power-outage for tens of thousands of households very damaging, as such, for both innocents and any reasonable definition of the “common good”, but the side-effects can be catastrophic in individual cases. Consider e.g. the risk that someone dies out of cold or agitation, that someone is held back from reaching a hospital for an urgent and life-threatening but treatable issue, that someone crashes a car while driving down a road that should be, but is not, illuminated by street lights, etc. Indeed, with an outage of this size, it might be outright surprising if there were no surplus deaths... Or consider the increased risk of crime, including robberies and looting. Or consider the lost business that might be the last straw for some mom-and-pop store (on top of the more general and wide-spread damage to other non-energy businesses). Etc.

It is high time for even main-stream media and even the non-violent Left to acknowledge the truth—political violence is a predominantly Leftist matter.

It is also high time for any civilized human to embrace a zero tolerance of the Left. Far from all of the Left is violent, but the problems with even the non-violent Left are unconscionable and intolerable.

The U.S. captures Maduro (2026-01-03)

2026 begins with a bang as a U.S. attack on Venezuela results in the swift capture of Maduro.

A few preliminary big-picture points (more might or might not follow in due time):

1. Upside: Maduro is a true piece of shit who gets what he deserves, while Venezuela now has a chance to rejoin the free world, build a functioning and flowering economy, etc., and there is a chance that the drug problems to which Venezuela so strongly contributes will improve. (To which quite a few points can likely be added upon closer inspection, notably, surrounding oil and energy, both with regard to the world market and Venezuela it self.)

2. Downside: There are issues of ethics, international law, precedence setting, unexpected consequences, whatnot, involved, and I am far from certain that this was a good idea from a holistic point of view and something, in the net, justified. (And while I am in a celebratory mood based on Maduro being out and forced to face justice, I am not, for the time being, in a “Yay Trump!” mood.)

   For instance, if the U.S. can forcefully overthrow the Maduro regime in this manner, what is to prevent a far-left regime from over-throwing a weaker non-Leftist neighbor? An Islamist country, a non-Islamist neighbor? From another angle, we have the risk that the Democrats will manage to use the events in such a manner that the Republicans lose electoral support, with potentially very negative consequences for the U.S.

   For instance, experiences from e.g. Iraq gives reason to be cautious, as what follows after a regime is overthrown can be hard to predict and is not necessarily an improvement. (While something as dire as the rise of ISIS is unlikely in the case of Venezuela, we might still see something problematic happen, e.g. a takeover by some other unsavory group or considerable internal violence. There is even a risk that the regime continues with another far-Left leader, even if Maduro, himself, is gone.)

   ---

   Side-note:

   As for Trump’s hopes of a Peace Prize, if a very secondary point in the big picture, he is unlikely to have improved his chances.

   ---

3. In terms of ethics and legality, much might hinge on matters than I simply cannot judge, including how actively involved Maduro and his regime were in drug production/trading/export/whatnot and other illegal activities that extended beyond the borders of Venezuela (in general) and into the U.S. (in particular).

   ---

   Side-note:

   However, note that my concerns about ethics are with regard to issues like what country is allowed to do what in what other country. As far as Maduro, himself, is concerned, his own actions against the opposition (including unwarranted violence and unjustifiable bans) creates a reciprocity situation where he has forfeited many of the rights that he might otherwise have had. The same applies to many of his core companions (I have not done the legwork to be more specific).

   An interesting future thought is that other regimes/parties/politicians who have engaged in anti-democratic bans and other manipulations of democratic processes might get their comeuppance. (Note, in particular, how attempts to ban parties/candidates that are not sufficiently far Left, not sufficiently compliant with a big-government establishment, or similar, have been very common even in alleged democracies in recent years.)

   ---

   Here, keep in mind that the Left in some countries often wishes to take “legal” action against various foreigners on far more disputable grounds, as when far-Left nutcase Mamdani wows to arrest Netanyahu, should he set foot in New York, or the Starmer regime wishes to arrest foreigners for acts of speech on foreign soil.

4. A key in the continuation will be a U.S. abstention from uninvited involvement and Venezuela-internal reforms, elections, whatnots. This can make the difference between an action directed against Venezuela for pro-U.S. purposes and an action directed against Maduro for pro-U.S., pro-Venezuela, pro-democracy, pro-whatnot purposes. Likewise, it can make the difference between what should be considered an act of war and an act of policing. Etc.

5. It is important to keep in mind that this is not a unique action, and chances are that it will compare favorably to e.g. past interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, while being more upfront and less perfidious than various “color revolutions”. (But much of that will depend on implementation details.)

   ---

   Side-note:

   There are still some question marks around the exact actions taking by the U.S. in Venezuela, but what I have read so far points to a limited and targeted intervention with more in common with taking out bin Laden than Saddam Hussein.

   ---

As an aside, I was half-expecting to write an entry on the collapse of the Iranian regime in the near future. This, however, took me by surprise, as I had not expected such direct action within Venezuela from Trump—the more so, as there were signs of Maduro being willing to make concessions. An interesting question is whether the fall of Maduro can be a game-changer in Iran through psychological effects or a hope (dissidents) resp. fear (regime) that Trump will intervene in Iran. Another is whether he just might do that...