Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Dec 2025The Beretta Model 38 SMG was a very successful design, and a folding-stocked version of it was a natural development. Beretta first made a prototype of such a thing in 1941, but it never went into production — possibly because Italy ceased to have an effective paratrooper corps after El Alamein. However, many of the design elements from this experiment saw use in the simplified 38/42 and 38/44 models of the Beretta SMG. Late in the war, a small batch of folding-stocked guns were actually produced (one source says about 200) specifically for the RSI. This was the puppet government Germany operated in northern Italy after the country surrendered to Allied forces.
This particular example came out of the Balkans, and managed to acquire a Yugoslav national crest along the way — although I don’t know the details of how. Thanks to Limex for giving me access to this extremely rare piece to film for you guys!
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May 3, 2026
The Extremely Rare Folding Stock Beretta 38/43
QotD: Communism, nationalism and literature
“Literature as we know it”, Orwell wrote in “Inside the Whale”, “is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship”. It’s the “product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual”. This is why Orwell argued that “a writer does well to keep out of politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up.”
According to Orwell, “As early as 1934 or 1935 it was considered eccentric in literary circles not to be more or less ‘left’, and in another year or two there had grown up a left-wing orthodoxy that made a certain set of opinions absolutely de rigueur on certain subjects”. In other words, many writers became communists, which meant they constantly had to decide whether to toe the line or shut up, depending on the circumstances: “Every time Stalin swaps partners”, Orwell wrote, “‘Marxism’ has to be hammered into a new shape … Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.”
Orwell also explained how communism replaced the patriotic and religious feelings that members of the English intelligentsia believed they had transcended: “All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, savior — all in one word, Stalin”. Is it any wonder that Orwell, witnessing these endless intellectual and moral contortions, the shameless propaganda, and the constant stream of wartime lies and distortions, was drawn to a writer who didn’t regurgitate any orthodoxies or toe any lines? Miller gave his readers “no sermons, merely the subjective truth”.
Matt Johnson, “George Orwell, Henry Miller, and the ‘Dirty-Handkerchief Side of Life'”, Quillette, 2020-10-05.
May 2, 2026
“… a New York Times bestseller!”
I thought this was well-known years ago, but it still apparently surprises people to learn that the famous New York Times bestseller list is … not actually in any way a valid measurement of book popularity and sales:
For those of you not familiar with the total scam that is the NYT bestseller list, as a NYT bestseller myself, it’s utter bullshit. It’s not an actual list of bestsellers. It’s “curated editorial”.
As in, stuff they like gets on there, and stuff they don’t like doesn’t. Or stuff they like places higher, and stuff they don’t like but obviously sells too much to deny its a bestseller gets on there lower.
I still tell people I’m a NYT bestseller because most regular normies think that actually means something impressive, and it’s just quicker to say that to establish that you’re a certain level. Within the actual publishing industry its fairly meaningless and everybody knows it.
In reality I made it on there a couple of times early on in my career before they realized who I am and what I’m into (the totally wrong politics, loudly!), because then it was like a post it note got stuck on the wall there saying FUCK THIS GUY, because after that no matter how many copies I sold, even if I was mud stomping half their list in actual sales, I wasn’t getting on there ever again.
Everybody is aware of this scam. The key to getting on the list is the NYT wanting to promote you. They don’t actually track all book sales. They track certain “reporting stores” (which are supposed to be secret but we all know how they are). But then the NYT takes whatever reality is and massages it to fit their narrative.
It isn’t just to keep wrong thinking pariahs like me off there either. I’ve got friends who are apolitical or even mildly liberal who still make the list, but who get bumped down a bunch of spaces from what they should be because there’s somebody else with a new book out the NYT wants to fluff.
Even when the NYT isn’t putting its finger on the scale, it also only measures velocity, as in how many books sold that week. So if you sell 20k copies that week, but never sell another book again, you’re a bestseller. But a guy who sells 1k copies a week every week for an entire year, is not.
Also, I don’t know if it is still this way, because I quit paying attention to what makes the NYT list years ago after I understood what a joke it was, but it was only for physical books, not ebooks, not audio. And there are authors who crush it in ebook who sell very few physical copies in stores. I don’t know if this is still the case on what they claim to track or not today.
So basically it is a biased list of what one small part of the industry sells in a short period of time that the NYT then tweaks to ignore reality if they feel like it anyway. And this isn’t just my opinion as a disgruntled former NYT bestseller, this has gone to court. Authors have sued the NYT which is where the “editorial” thing comes from.
This gets some attention periodically when somebody really famous raises a stink about it. A couple years ago it was Elon. Before that it was Mike Rowe. Etc. But then regular people all forget and go back to thinking the NYT‘s bestseller list isn’t as full of shit as everything else the NYT does.
Cancelled chancellor?
The German Chancellor’s future looks unhappy, and eugyppius notes that even the lapdog mainstream media outlets who praised him last year are now publishing calls for his ouster:
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, 5 May 2025.
Photo by Sandro Halank for Wikimedia Commons.
Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles. These kinds of chancellors will continue to exist only so long as they can be sold to the geezers of the Federal Republic’s care homes by the amateurish marketing campaigns of a complicit state media as the incarnation of far-sighted competence and (more importantly) bourgeois respectability.
Early in 2025, Merz had the chance to seize a measure of power for himself and make facts. He could have forged a deal with Alternative für Deutschland on the most important questions, established a minority government and set about force-marching the obese German state through necessary reforms. It might’ve torn his party apart, he might’ve failed, there would’ve been a huge fight, but whatever happened nobody would ever forget Chancellor Merz. Instead, the Pigeon Chancellor let a lot of deranged Antifa street protesters and screeching women with parareligious concerns about atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations dissuade him from the only reasonable path. Instead of making history, he chose to spend the first year of his chancellorship making the Social Democrats fat and happy at the expense of the nation. Most don’t even hate Merz, because hate like love has to be be earned. He inspires nothing more than mildly scornful indifference.
Everyone who was not a complete idiot knew that Merz’s mad coalition with the Social Democrats could never work. Yet the man has been lionised in the international press and even in centre-right domestic papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a serious reformer. These people told us Merz would rebuild the Bundeswehr, reduce insane social spending, impose fiscal discipline, solve the migroid problem and restore economic growth. Even if the leftoid half of the German establishment press didn’t embrace all these myths, they nevertheless worked hard to make Merz seem presentable, serious and viable. He was worth a shot, he would do his best, and after the crazy Scholz years Germany was back on solid footing.
Now, in the the space of about two weeks, the entire myth of Chancellor Merz has collapsed. Major papers that used to defend his government and praise his prospects are suddenly saying it’s over. They’re writing front-page editorials in the spirit of stuff I was posting here over a year ago. Merz appears at town-hall meetings where he gets asked how he’s made life better in Germany and before he can answer the audience just laughs at his stupid ass. His coalition partners say he’s doing a terrible job. Back-benchers from his own party are calling his political strategy a failure to his face and leaking it afterwards to the press so everyone knows what they said.
Still worse, people from the Chancellery are talking to the tabloids. They’re explaining that Merz’s government has been hanging by a thread since at least last December; that his party thinks he’s a pushover whom the SPD constantly manipulates; that often Merz just absorbs the opinions of whatever person he last talked to and so his handlers have to limit his contacts to keep him from going off-message in insane ways; that Merz is now almost totally isolated, having burned through most of his close confidants; and that nobody has any solutions or ideas and increasingly everybody doubts that the Chancellor has the talents to save himself.
Progressives instinctively side with the “oppressed” side of any argument
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a posted talking point:
Someone once observed that in any conflict, leftists will always side with whichever demographic causes the most social harm.
This creates a hierarchy, with White men (the primary civilization-builders) at the bottom, and third-world Muslims at the top.
Here’s why how this works.
In a healthy society, people who build civilization are revered, and people who cause social harm are despised. And there is a hierarchy that runs in the opposite order, with respect and resources going to those who serve civilization.
This creates a natural opportunity for power-hungry subversives. They can recruit each layer of this hierarchy by exploiting their resentment against those above them. All they must do is frame their merit-based status as unearned “privilege”.
White women were recruited to leftism by stoking their resentment of White men, and promising elevation above them.
What the White women were not told is that they would be placed beneath everyone else.
Often literally.
Black people were recruited by exploiting their resentment of Whites … but they weren’t told that every benefit they received would eventually be taken away and given to third world immigrants.
Homosexuals were promised elevation above the “breeders” (because children are needed for civilization, and sodomy is not), but no one told them that the trannies would rule over them.
And no one told the trannies that Muslim community would be allowed to segregate and oppress them far more brutally than the most ardent of White bigots.
The most brutal irony of all is that all of these groups who are recruited to fight for leftism end up far more brutally oppressed that they ever were by mainstream prosocial White society.
Because natural civilizational hierarchies are based on contribution.
There’s a certain amount of prejudice which exists because people can reason inductively, but if you are a mixed race lesbian engineer who can actually who build useful shit, then it’s at least possible for people to eventually overcome their surprise, and break you off a nice house in the suburbs and some forbearance wherein people don’t really talk about the real relationship between you and your “roommate”.
Under leftism inverted hierarchies, you have no such chance.
Sure, during the transitional phase you’ll be elevated for being a mixed-race lesbian, regardless of whether you can do anything useful or not. But then, the Muslims will be allowed to throw you off a roof when it’s time to pander to them, in turn.
This White (or White-passing) woman probably voted straight democrat and cheered for “MeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeToo”, to avenge her resentment against White men in general. She probably never dreamed that she would, in turn, not only be thrown under the bus, but that she would be targeted by the precise same weapons her sisters were given to unseat White men with.
And @jk_rowling found out in vivid, larger-than-life detail what happens to White feminists when the left has a new darling to cater to, who can be used to unravel some still-intact piece of civilization.
You see, by the early 21st century, the left had no more use for White feminists, because everything the left wanted to use them to destroy was already destroyed. Women were already spending their twenties and thirties on cubicle jobs and abortions, instead of marriages and children. The workforce was already doubled, and the price of labor had already crashed. Fertility rates were already dropping, and people were already marrying late, or never.
It was time to recruit a new wrecking ball, to turn against some other corner of the edifice of order, and the price of that was easy to pay … just confiscate everything you once gave them, and give it to the trannies instead.
The actual bodies of the White feminists (as well as all other women, and their daughters), could be used again, sold out to third world men who want to rape them, all by simply turning a blind eye.
And the best perk of all of this is that they’ll still vote for you.
Because reversing course requires admitting a mistake.
Making Real English Toffee from 1881
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Dec 2025Rich, sweet pieces of Victorian Era toffee
City/Region: Everton, England
Time Period: 1881Around Christmas, my house is full of candy and baked goods, and for me, toffee is one of the quintessential Christmas treats. Possibly invented by Molly Bushell in 1753 in Everton, just outside of Liverpool, toffee can be hard like the recipe we’re making here or of a softer, chewier variety.
While either option is delicious, this recipe is specifically for the hard style of Everton toffee. It’s a really simple recipe (the hardest part is waiting for it to come up to temperature), and is such a rich, decadent treat. The lemon extract adds a layer of acidic complexity to the toffee, but it doesn’t taste of lemon.
Feel free to dress yours up by adding some nuts to the dish before you pour the toffee over it, or sprinkle some chocolate chips over the toffee while it’s still hot so that they melt.
Everton Toffee.
Put one pound of brown sugar and one tea-cupful of cold water into a pan well rubbed with good fresh butter. Set it over a slow fire, and boil until the sugar has become a smooth, thick syrup, then stir into it half a pound of butter, and boil for half an hour. When sufficiently boiled, it may be tested by dropping some on a plate, and if it dries hard and can easily be removed, the toffee is ready for flavouring. For this purpose, add twenty or thirty drops of essence of lemon. Pour the toffee into a wide well-buttered dish. If liked, vinegar may be substituted for the water, then the lemon may be omitted.
— Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery, England, 1881
QotD: Yes, the US Civil War was about slavery
Preliminary: Yes, the […] Civil War was about slavery. I know it’s fashionable for the Very Clever Boys […] to deny this, but that’s the difference between “a grownup’s understanding of complex events” and “being a sperg that should’ve been shoved in a lot more lockers in high school”. There’s a difference between “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions, as well as between “proximate” and “final” causes.
Slavery was the proximate cause of the First Civil War, the sufficient condition. The final cause, the necessary condition, was the same one that causes pretty much all the really nasty wars — two not-dissimilar-enough peoples living too close to each other. It’s the same reason English and Scots have never gotten along (feel free to go re-read Albion’s Seed here) — familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes. They’re close enough to each other that outsiders really can’t grok what the big deal is, which is always a recipe for disaster.
Same thing between the Puritan religious fanatics of New England and the honor-obsessed planters of the Old South. Had the US developed horizontally instead of vertically — if they’d been able to put the Rocky Mountains between them, say — they’d be two separate nations, with fairly cordial relations …
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
May 1, 2026
We are much more Brave New World than 1984
Culturally, we had lots of warning from George Orwell and Aldous Huxley about their future — our present — and while we have had some success avoiding what Orwell feared for us, we’ve had much less success avoiding a Brave New World culture:
As the curtain of totalitarianism descended across much of the globe, in the mid-twentieth century, the Western intellectual class pointed to George Orwell’s 1984 as a blueprint for societal ruin.
I’m sure many of you are familiar with Orwell’s magnum opus, but for those who don’t know the gist: Orwell envisioned a dystopian future governed by a panoptic state, where an externally imposed oppression would ruthlessly strip humanity of its autonomy, its history, and its capacity for critical thought.
It is a great novel and many believe it was prophetic (I certainly believe parts of it ring true), but, as the cultural critic Neil Postman astutely observed in his foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death, it was not Orwell but Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, who accurately mapped the specific destiny of the modern collapse.
Huxley recognised a far more insidious threat:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.
No “Big Brother” is required to deprive a populace of its cognitive liberty. He foresaw a society that would come to adore the very technologies that undid its capacity to think.
Where Orwell feared those who would ban books, Huxley feared there would eventually be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one left who wanted to read one. Where Orwell feared the truth would be actively concealed, Huxley feared it would be drowned in an endless sea of irrelevance. Ultimately, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us, while Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
[…]
The Collapse of Literacy in the Intellectual Elite
The symptoms of this cognitive counter-revolution are visible not only in the general populace but at the very apex of the educational system, signalling a crisis that threatens the reproduction of the intellectual class itself. Over the past decade, professors at elite academic institutions have sounded the alarm regarding a precipitous and bewildering decline in student literacy. In a widely discussed exposition in The Atlantic, Nicholas Dames, a professor of Columbia University’s required Literature Humanities course since 1998, noted that his undergraduate students, the supposed academic elite of the nation are now “bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester“.1
Two decades ago, Dames’s classes effortlessly engaged in sophisticated, week-to-week analyses of lengthy texts like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Today, the landscape is unrecognisable. In 2022, a first-year student confessed to Dames that during her entire tenure at a public high school, she had never been required to read a single book cover-to-cover.2 Instead, her education consisted of excerpts, isolated poems, and fragmented news articles. This is a systemic failure; middle and high schools have largely ceased assigning whole books, breaking them down into easily digestible, context-free fragments to accommodate dwindling attention spans. High-achieving students can still decode words, but they struggle to muster the sustained attention or cognitive ambition required to immerse themselves in substantial texts. As technology provides instant gratification, the sustained labor of reading feels deeply unnatural to a generation raised on screens.
This anecdotal evidence from the highest echelons of the academy is overwhelmingly corroborated by a mountain of empirical data. The decline in sustained reading and linguistic proficiency is measurable and accelerating.
Spain joins the awkward squad
At The Conservative Woman, Bepi Pezzulli outlines a few ways that the Spanish government is moving in quite different directions than their NATO allies and fellow EU members:
Torre del Oro (Tower of Gold) – Calle Almirante Lobo, Seville – Spanish flag” by ell brown is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wants the privileges of alliance without the duties of one. Madrid remains in Nato, hosts critical American military infrastructure, and speaks the language of Atlantic solidarity – but only when convenient. On the central strategic questions of the age – Russia, Israel, and the wider Western posture in the Mediterranean – it increasingly behaves like a spoiler. What is troubling is that Spain is not merely posturing: it is rewriting its entire conception of statecraft, treating alliance as a shield, hostility as leverage, and strategic ambiguity as a governing doctrine.
When Washington needed alignment, Sánchez offered obstruction. When Israel faced existential war, Madrid offered moral lectures. When the West sought energy discipline against Moscow, Spain found room for Russian gas. All while preserving the old imperial obsession with Gibraltar and extracting advantages from London over the Rock.
Spain has discovered the pleasures of consequence-free hostility. That needs to end.
Anti-Americanism with diplomatic immunity
Sánchez has carefully cultivated the old European left’s anti-American reflexes: Nato when subsidised, moral neutrality when sacrifice is required. His government publicly resisted support for American military operations linked to Iran escalation and signalled clear reluctance to facilitate use of Spanish bases such as Rota and Morón for operations that might implicate Madrid politically. The message was unmistakable: American security guarantees are welcome but strategic co-operation is negotiable. The rhetoric matched the policy. “No to war” was not merely a slogan for domestic consumption. Sánchez is deliberately positioning Spain as the righteous dissenter against Washington’s harder strategic line.
At the same time, Spain maintained substantial imports of Russian gas well into the European sanctions era. While pipeline politics consumed Brussels, Madrid benefited from a convenient moral distinction: condemning Moscow loudly while continuing commercial accommodation where useful. The formal sanctions architecture left open some loopholes, and Spain was happy to live inside them.
An ally that profits from ambiguity while others bear the strategic burden is not an ally in the full sense. As US War Secretary Pete Hegseth noted, “An alliance cannot be ironclad if in reality or perception it is seen as one-sided”.
From criticism of Israel to open diplomatic hostility
On Israel, Sánchez has moved beyond criticism into active diplomatic confrontation. Recognition of Palestine was presented as humanitarian principle. In practice, it rewarded maximalism at the worst possible moment. Madrid helped transform October 7 from a terrorist massacre demanding strategic clarity into another European seminar on Israeli restraint. Spain became one of the loudest governmental amplifiers of the anti-Zionist campaign in Western Europe. Ministers normalised rhetoric that blurred the distinction between criticism of Israeli policy and systematic delegitimisation of the Jewish state itself. Arms restrictions followed. Then diplomatic actions. Symbolism became policy.
Gibraltar: Madrid’s imperial nostalgia
Spain’s sanctimony would be easier to tolerate if it were not paired with its own colonial fixation. For decades, Madrid has pursued sovereignty claims over Gibraltar with theological persistence. Brexit offered a fresh opening. With Brussels behind it, Spain extracted a remarkably favourable negotiating posture over the future relationship of the Rock with both the European Union and the United Kingdom. London, in the hands of the most Europhile government in recent history, conceded far more than many British voters imagined when they heard the word “sovereignty”. Spain never abandoned the long game. It simply learned to play it through institutions until a weaker opponent appeared. Madrid insists Gibraltar is unfinished history. Fair enough: is it not time then to conclude the same about Ceuta and Melilla?
“Second Dawn”, Childhood’s End, and the Nuclear Age
Feral Historian
Published 5 Dec 2025A quick look at two Arthur C. Clarke stories from the early 1950s that pair well as allegories for the still-new Cold War fears of the time.
00:00 Intro
03:03 Psychics and Nukes
03:37 “Second Dawn”
09:13 The Phileni
11:50 New World, New DangersAudio note: On the previous vid (Riddick) I used some new tools for post-processing the audio. It was much cleaner, removed almost all the noise … and the response has been entirely negative. It seems people don’t miss the wind and the birds until they’re gone. So I’m back to the old approach of using essentially raw sound.
EDIT: If you’re not seeing a link to the old Childhood’s End video on the pop-up card or the end screen, here’s the link. • Childhood’s End (Youtube Copyright Edit)
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Still plugging Ninti’s Gate
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QotD: Socialism
Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.
