Almost every finding in a BBC article called “How where you grow up affects your personality” is about how culture shapes you.

Almost.

Buried deep is another finding. Your political identity shapes your perception of someone else’s authenticity. Rather than “culture influences personality” it’s proof how “ideology determines who gets to count as real.”

…researchers asked people with different political views to evaluate the morality of a Christian man who was attracted to other men. People who identified as liberals thought the man was acting according to his true self, while people who identified as conservatives believed instead he was going against his true, Christian self.

The article frames it as a curiosity about the philosophy of selfhood. What it actually demonstrates is the mechanism by which political identity becomes a tool for defining other people’s inner lives.

The ideologue doesn’t just disagree with their opponent about policy, they disagree about what’s actually happening inside another human being. And vice versa.

Each side arrogates the authority to adjudicate someone else’s ontological status.

Sartre is rolling in his grave.

That’s not a personality trait shaped by geography. That’s a power claim disguised as an observation about human nature. And this article tries to bury it between paragraphs about twin studies and underwater scene descriptions as if an antithesis isn’t what it is.

The American firearm regulatory framework treats guns as one serialized part. Revoke a dealer’s right to sell that part, and they can legally pivot to sell every other component of the exact same weapon with no oversight.

That’s a loophole by design.

Parts sales do not require a license, a background check, a Form 4473, or any recordkeeping. Parts for what? How about an automatic rifle or a machine gun?

Custombilt Firearms Manufacturing of Overland Park, Kansas lost its Federal Firearms License in July 2023 because ATF found that it wasn’t tracking who was buying. There were 43 documented failures to record acquisitions, dispositions, and background checks. ATF said the failures were wilful.

On February 6, 2026, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the website still lists parts for sale: complete uppers, complete lowers, multi-cal stripped lowers, CFM M16 bolt carrier groups, and trigger guards. Everything you need to build a functional AR-15 except the serialized lower receiver, which is the only part that legally counts as a “firearm” and requires an FFL to sell.

This company that ATF determined couldn’t be trusted to track firearm sales is legally selling some of the most concerning firearm components with zero oversight.

The M16 bolt carrier group is the part worth flagging. It’s legal to own and common in semi-auto builds. But it’s also a prerequisite for converting an AR-15 to full-automatic because the geometry of a standard AR-15 carrier won’t work with an auto sear. Under ATF’s constructive possession doctrine, possessing an AR-15 lower alongside M16 fire control parts and an M16 BCG constitutes possession of an unregistered machine gun under 26 U.S.C. § 5861(d), meaning a felony carrying up to 10 years, even without any assembly, just parts.

Custombilt isn’t openly selling the auto sears. It’s selling a major component of the full-automatic equation from a bankruptcy liquidation inventory, with no record of who’s buying. The part is called an M16 bolt carrier group because, well, it’s the bolt carrier group from the M16. Custombilt is plainly listing it as “CFM M16 bolt carrier group.”

They’re literally selling a machine gun designation without keeping records.

This fits into the Trump administration removal of ATF’s zero-tolerance policy. Gun dealers who failed to keep their licenses “may reapply” now. Kansas Rep. Tracey Mann even created a RIFLE Act to reinstate revoked licenses and reimburse the affected dealers.

You can find Rep. Mann’s office at 7011 West 121st Street, Suite 100, Overland Park, KS 66209.

And Custombilt is not too far away at 6201 Robinson Street, Overland Park, KS 66202.

Mann isn’t actually from Overland Park and he doesn’t represent it. He’s from Western Kansas, an area known for two things lately.

1. Mann was born in Gove County, which during the COVID-19 pandemic was called the “deadliest place in America“. People there apparently were so anti-life, they maintained the highest death rate from COVID-19 compared to any other county in the nation: One death out of every 132 people.
   

   Gove County is 93% white. … “Rural America has always been insulated to some degree to the problems that plague more urban areas,” [county health officer] Rempel says. “I think that gave some people a false sense of security. I think there was maybe a public perception we would be OK.”

   Disinformation about “urban people plague” gave a false sense of security? Apparently being a white supremacist didn’t stop COVID. And for the record, rural Americans are more at risk. They typically are air rescued direct to urban areas when someone wants them to live.

   The county’s sheriff, Allan Weber, remains hospitalized 300 miles west in Denver, where he was flown by medical plane on Oct. 18.

2. Speaking of heavily armed white supremacists being anti-life, Mann today still lives in an area known for the 1989 naming of “noose road“, near a sundown town of many lynchings. It was said in Hays, Kansas that “Blacks were not allowed to stay overnight”, keeping alive a Jim Crow “legacy that kind of hung over the town going back to the lynching.”

That’s a very particular legacy, just like this one:

Trump refuses to apologize after posting racist meme…

On the same day Custombilt filed for bankruptcy, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against distribution of 3D-printable ghost gun files and machine gun conversion devices. One state is suing over digital blueprints. Another is goosing a revoked dealer to liquidate physical machine gun components from a bankruptcy warehouse into unknown hands, no questions asked.

Canada plants a flag in Greenland is the headline. It’s no surprise.

Kaiser Wilhelm II didn’t lose because Germany was weak. He lost because he made Germany’s strength everyone else’s problem.

Trump today is making the mistakes of Germany’s Kaiser, across multiple fronts simultaneously: tariff threats against Canada, the EU, and China; territorial threats against Greenland and Panama; security extortion of NATO allies.

Each one individually might be manageable. Together, they’re practically a blueprint for “here’s why you all need to coordinate against us.”

The specific parallel is the shift from transactional diplomacy to dominance signaling. Bismarck understood that Germany’s power depended on preventing coalitions from forming against it. Wilhelm thought Germany’s power meant it could demand what it wanted from everyone at once.

When Wilhelm inherited Bismarck’s carefully constructed alliance system, it was designed to keep France isolated and maintain Germany’s position through balanced relationships. He systematically destroyed it through bluster, naval threats, and personal insecurity. The result was that France, Russia, and Britain, who had every reason to distrust each other, found common cause against the one actor threatening all of them simultaneously.

The Moroccan Crises are almost a template, with aggressive moves designed to demonstrate strength that instead demonstrated to Britain and France that they needed each other to pound the German bully.

And the economic dimension may be even more consequential than the military one was in 1914. The US dollar’s reserve currency status, American tech dominance, supply chain dependencies all rest on trust relationships that coercive diplomacy erodes.

Once allies start seriously building alternative structures, those don’t just disappear when the bully disappears. The Europeans who learned in school about regressive dictators obsessed with being a Kaiser aren’t subtle about what they think of Vance and Trump.

A new YouGov poll released Feb. 6 found that favorable views of the U.S. among Western European nations have fallen sharply since Trump’s return to office, following the President’s aggressive attempts to annex Greenland, his Administration’s ongoing trade war with most of its European allies, and a years-long divide over the future of NATO and European security.

Perhaps predictably, the biggest impact was seen in Denmark. Some 84% of Danes now hold an unfavourable view of the U.S., compared with an average of 36% during former President Joe Biden’s term. Only 26% of Danes view the U.S. as an ally or friendly nation, compared with 80% in July 2023.

The same trend is seen across Western Europe, in countries that were once considered U.S. allies. In Spain, only 39% of people see the U.S. as a friend or ally today, down from 73% in 2023. In Germany, the number is 41%, down from 70%; in Britain, 46%, down from 69%; in France, 53%, down from 64%; and in Italy, 52%, down from 61%.

A closer look at the data shows that Europeans’ views of the United States are strongly influenced by their views of Trump. A January poll by YouGov found that, in Britain, 81% of people held an unfavorable opinion of President Trump; in France, 75%; in Germany, 84%; and in Denmark, 94%.

If you read that right, Canada and the EU are orienting around the issues faced by the Danes. Unilaterally bullying Greenland has dramatically weakened America, while strengthening a Canadian-European alliance. Add strengthened ties to China and the American bluster can only become weaker and weaker.