Living in Cuba – or Norkland

…arriving in Norkland. North Korea has been doing fine without electricity for decades (with the exception of Dear Leader’s palace, his mistress’s apartment, and the armaments industry). It’s a newer development for Cuba, but they could get used to it.

Bullet Points:

** What about the Cathars? July 22nd, 1209. A crusader army has broken through the gates of Béziers. When soldiers ask how to tell the Catholics from the heretics, the commander replies with words that echo through history: kill them all, God will know his own. By nightfall, 20,000 people are dead. The pope who ordered the crusade considers it a success. This is the Albigensian Crusade — not a rogue operation, not an embarrassing accident. Official church policy, carried out openly in the name of God, against people who called themselves Christians. Pope Innocent III

** As the British manage their national decline, they’ve announced the sale of naval patrol vessels to Uruguay. (UK Navy – h/t Claudio) The UK has offered to sell the three River-class Batch I OPVs, HMS Tyne, HMS Mersey, and HMS Severn, to the Uruguayan Navy upon their decommissioning in 2028. (right)

We at VM understand that Old Blighty desperately needs the $45 million they’d get from the sale to provide more benefits to immigrants clamoring for handouts. How could I gainsay their sale? At present, the ships provide much of the backbone for the home fleet, but the UK is part of NATO and can call on the French for help if something bad happens, right? They don’t actually need a fleet of their own. RCC suggested that the Australian Navy, much larger and more robust than its cousin, might be willing to lend-lease ships and crews to Great Britain in exchange for hard cash.

** President Trump discusses presidential pens. The government bought them for $1,000 each, and they didn’t work. So he goes with Sharpies. And THAT is emblematic of why he’s a great president.

**It’s time for a little motivation. Details.

** A halal butcher in Zurich, Switzerland, has sold 3.1 tons of pork labeled as veal to Muslim customers, who haven’t noticed any difference for three years. Nothing personal. Just business. Pork shoulder costs $2 to $4 per pound—veal $8 to $20+ per pound.

** What don’t you need? What do you need?

** Transgender women ARE NOT banned from the Olympics by the new IOC policy. They can compete as the men they are.

** VDH comments on the Great California Democrat Backfire.

The Rise and Development of Narco Subs

A discussion of Narco Subs (h/t Claudio – strategypage). The snorkel subs cost more than semi-submersibles and require a more highly trained crew. For a long time, there were efforts to borrow extensively from the growing number of recreational submarines being built. That led to the construction of a few true subs, based on recreational subs. These proved to be more expensive to build and operate, and some were still detected at sea or during construction. That meant the true subs were not sufficiently more effective to justify their higher cost. Semi-submersibles cost about $2 million to build and take about a year to complete. The true submarines take several years to build and cost over $5 million.

That has led to drug gangs changing their tactics and building smaller narco-subs that carry one or two tons of cocaine at $24 million a ton so that, if one of these subs is caught, its loss is just considered a cost of doing business and not a significant financial loss.

Despite losing over a hundred semi-submersibles to the U.S. and South American naval forces, plus hundreds more to accidents and bad weather, plus hundreds more to heavy use, the drug gangs have apparently concluded that the subs are the cheapest and most reliable way to ship the drugs. Early on, several hundred of these narco-subs were built and used on one-way trips to Mexico or the United States. Most of them got through. As new ones were built, their designs and durability improved to the point that the semi-submersibles were capable of multiple round trips. Some have apparently been refurbished or rebuilt to undertake even more voyages. (more in the article)

Writing Notes

A few (very few) of you have asked me to publish The Old Whore: A Novel of Cartel Wars, a sequel to Bloody Mexico, in a paperback format, and that’s going to happen. I first wrote the book in 2011, and while the paperback will appear substantially the same as the digital version, it will include a few corrections and editorial changes. Bloody Mexico is currently available in paperback. I’ll trumpet the paperback version of The Old Whore when it’s available online.

In the Central Intelligence Agency’s lingua franca, an ‘old whore’ is someone who will do anything for The Agency (and for his country) regardless of what it is and irrespective of the cost.

Additionally, I will enable AI-based narration, which will be available for all of the books for sale.

I’ll also put Exiles from Eden out in paperback, which will bring everything to date.

Rational, Plausible, and Wrong

As Robert A Heinlein once wrote: “Man is not a rational animal. He is a rationalizing animal. In many modern environments, especially online, status comes not from being correct but from being distinctive. Grist for Tucker and Candace.

Megyn Kelly said there is “proof” that Netanyahu dragged America into war with Iran. Of course, she presented this as an established fact—without presenting any actual proof, as if we should all simply know it’s true. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but correlation isn’t causation, and the preponderance of evidence about President Trump’s personality suggests he does exactly what he wants to do, nothing more, nothing less. The idea that he was “dragged” into anything strikes me as highly unlikely. One would assume even the “No Kings/Trump is an authoritarian fascist” crowd would agree on that point. I’ll go out on a limb and say that there was a consensus that Iran had the capacity to build up to eleven nuclear warheads within 30 days, and when to strike (not if we should strike) was discussed. How far their ballistic missiles could carry said warheads was also shared with the Euros, who dismissed it. Not now, but then.

What we are seeing is something familiar—call it Schiff Syndrome. For years, Adam Schiff went on CNN and MSNBC claiming he had ironclad evidence of Trump colluding with Russia to rig an election. To this day, he has produced nothing but innuendo. Yet enough people shared his belief to reward him with a Senate seat. It was never about whether he had the goods; it was about whether people wanted him to have them. They hated Trump, and the idea that damning proof existed—just out of reach—was both motivating and comforting.

It may look irrational, but what we call “irrational belief” is usually nothing of the sort. It is not the absence of thinking but the presence of a different set of incentives that guides it. When people lack information—or face complexity they cannot fully resolve—they do not leave the space empty. The human mind is not built for suspended judgment. It is built to complete patterns, impose order, and resolve uncertainty. And when it does, it reaches not for what is most accurate, but for what is most coherent with the story it already believes. That process is largely automatic. People reason from identity first and evidence second. The operative question is rarely “What is true?” in isolation, but “What fits with who I am, what I value, and the people I align with?” From there, reasoning becomes justificatory. Facts are filtered, emphasized, or dismissed depending on whether they support the conclusion already forming beneath the surface. This is not unique to any ideology; it is a universal feature of human cognition.

Compounding this is our preference for coherence over accuracy. A simple explanation, even an implausible one, often feels more satisfying than a complex, uncertain reality. Ambiguity creates discomfort; narrative resolves it. In environments where information is thin and emotions are high, people will choose a story that makes sense over a truth that does not yet fully cohere. But cognition alone does not explain the persistence of these beliefs. There is also a social economy at work—one that rewards not just belief, but particular kinds of belief.

In many modern environments, especially online, status comes not from being correct but from being distinctive. “Secret knowledge”—the idea that one sees what others cannot—functions as social currency. It signals independence, intelligence, and insider status, elevating the believer above the crowd. This creates a powerful feedback loop.

Beliefs rejected by the broader public do not lose value; in some circles, they gain it. Rejection becomes evidence of suppression, and suppression becomes evidence of truth. The cost of being wrong is replaced by the reward of being contrarian. At the same time, declining trust in institutions—media, academia, government—has stripped away many of the shared reference points that once constrained this process. People still seek explanations, but they increasingly gravitate toward narratives that offer clarity and intent.

Complex systems are reduced to simple dramas, randomness is reinterpreted as design, and uncertainty becomes conspiracy. The result is not a society that has abandoned reason, but one in which reason is often subordinated to meaning, identity, and status. People are not merely filling gaps in knowledge; they are selecting the explanations that best satisfy psychological needs and social rewards. In that sense, many beliefs that appear absurd from the outside are, from within, perfectly rational. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do: provide coherence, confer belonging, and—perhaps most importantly—make the believer feel like one of the few who truly understands what is going on. I keep running head-on into H.L. Mencken’s formulation of solutions that are “neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Sometimes they’re not wrong, though. Even a blind pig finds a truffle now and again.

Identify the Ship/Boat

1

Still a class in active service, though the one pictured is a museum ship.

41+ built

2

Though it looks like a museum piece, 4 are said to be in active service with this navy.

3

6 built

Those look like Daleks on the stern…I wouldn’t be surprised.

End