Rome, Book Reviews on WWII and the History of the Presidency. Plus, Newsletter Dating Service?

Links for February 2025

I have a reader who has a nicely built body and wants to meet women. We were talking and I was wondering if it would make sense for me to help find him someone through the newsletter. The idea started to intrigue me, and I came up with the possibility of hosting speed dating events through Substack livestreams. The problem is that I don’t know if there would be enough women for this. So if you’re a woman, and you might be interested in meeting some of my handsome and talented and rich fans, please e-mail me at rhnewsletter.dating@gmail.com. Just say I’m a woman and maybe interested in doing this, and include your age and location. Send pictures and a description if you want. Or don’t, we can do that later. Even if you don’t want to do livestreams but would be open to something more private, reach out anyway. If there are enough women readers for this then there are sure to be enough men, so we might be able to go ahead with the idea.

Below are the links for February. I have short reviews of two books: How the War Was Won by Phillips Payson O'Brien and The Rhetorical Presidency by Jeffrey Tulis. I also finally finished the miniseries Rome, and discuss my thoughts below the paywall. The links this month include stories and commentary on immigration restrictionism in Denmark, Tyler’s interview with Gregory Clark, the birthright citizenship debate, Israelis caught spying for Iran, and more.

1. Interview with Matt Weiner, the CEO and founder of Megafire Action. He had a very interesting job, advising all California congressional Democrats on policy issues, including the topic of wildfires.

Some things I learned:

• The 2020 fires alone wiped out 20 years of gains on California carbon emissions.

• The Clean Air Act penalizes a state for controlled burns, which count towards emissions they're allowed to have, but not for letting wildfires happen.

• The permitting issue is absolutely huge. Of four major wildfires since 1999, each of the areas was in the midst of a National Forest Service assessment on whether authorities could do controlled burns when it happened. The "expedited" reviews take 180 days, the norm being much longer.

Interesting throughout. Also a lot of information on how broken the California insurance market is.

2. Here’s a review from Maxwell Tabarrok of that 2017 paper by Bruce Gilley on the case for colonialism that got the author cancelled, concluding that it wasn’t that good even if you’re sympathetic to the arguments. It presents some better ways to approach the question. Tabarrok concludes colonialism was probably net bad, but my reading of the evidence he presents suggests the opposite.

3. Here’s JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. His intellectual vision is becoming clear. It involves:

1) A belief that Western societies are fundamentally broken due to censorship, mass migration, and a general sense that elites aren’t “listening to the people.”

2) A concurrent lack of interest in foreign affairs. The choice to focus on domestic issues here sends that signal.

3) Pompous rhetoric on nationhood and peoplehood, which has no policy content except opposition to immigration.

4) The idea that America is better than Europe because it regulates the economy less. But he switches from capitalist assumptions about the world to socialist ones when trade and migration come up. This point is from the AI speech just before, rather than this one.

5) A globalist perspective on these things, where there’s a similar battle going on between the same forces of light and darkness across the West. Not much interest in the rest of the world, which gives this a kind of white nationalist flavor. Why does an American care about immigration to Europe anyway? It’s a globalist perspective, though one based on race and symbols of the white world like Christianity more than higher principles.

This is the populist synthesis he’s going with. It’s better than I expected from JD in that I worried he was going to go socialist on everything, but the statism is limited to interactions with foreigners.

Anti-migration hostility is fundamentally irrational in America, though it makes more sense in some European states. This is the destiny of conservatism across the West. It merges the interests and ideology of business with the main concerns of the masses, which are the right to be racist and not have dark people around. I wish the vision would unambiguously take the side of Russia’s neighbors against it, though it looks like the American version may be friendlier to Putin while Europeans other than Orban and a few others will remain wary. But what the Trump approach to Ukraine will be is still up in the air.

4. On ants that can live five times longer when they are queens.

5. How the War Was Won by Phillips Payson O'Brien is a masterful achievement. As the title promises, the author provides a broad framework to understand what caused the Allied victory in WWII. The battlefields we hear so much about – Kursk, Stalingrad, Iwa Jima, etc. – weren't what mattered. It was Allied land and sea power that shut down Axis production and won the war.