Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 24 Feb 2026Roast duck, sadly without a crispy skin, with creamy celery sauce
City/Region: New York
Time Period: 1896Nikola Tesla was a scientific genius and a very eccentric man in many aspects of his life, especially in his eating habits. He only ate at a few restaurants where he had reserved tables, and he required two dozen napkins with which he’d wipe down each piece of silverware before dropping the napkins on the floor.
He would sometimes supervise the cooking of his meals, including this duck roasted under a smothering of celery, a recipe which journalist and author of Prodigal genius; the life of Nikola Tesla, John J. O’Neill, said “was of his own devising”. With the lack of detail about this dish, it’s impossible to say if this method is what was intended, but I found that roasting with the celery didn’t impart much flavor.
The celery sauce, which has a bit of nutmeg, does pair nicely with the duck, but I prefer duck with a nice crispy skin and a sweet sauce.
Roast Ducks
Truss the birds … rub a little butter over them and dredge with flour, salt and pepper, and roast in a hot oven for twenty or thirty minutes. If preferred stuffed, peel, core and quarter some apples and fill the body with them, removing them when the bird is done, as they are not fit to eat, the flavor being too strong …Celery Sauce for Boiled Fowls
Wash thoroughly and trim a head of celery. Put it into boiling water, with one tablespoonful of salt, and boil it until it is tender. Then drain it through a colander, and cut into pieces one-half inch in length. Blend a large tablespoonful of flour with one-fourth pint of the broth in which the fowls are boiling. Mix till it is quite smooth, add one ounce of butter, a small piece of grated nutmeg, and salt to taste, and mix it with one-fourth pint of milk. Place it over the fire in a saucepan, and stir it till it boils. Let it boil for ten minutes and then throw in the pieces of celery; when it is quite hot again, pour it into a sauce-tureen, and serve.
— The Cook Book by “Oscar” of the Waldorf by Oscar Tschirky, 1896
August 21, 2026
Nikola Tesla’s Weird Eating Habits
QotD: The Amish
The Amish have their historical roots in the Swiss Anabaptists, a Radical Reformation movement who believed in adult baptism, pacifism, and total separation of church and state. (Unsurprisingly, the Anabaptists were bloodily persecuted by both Catholic and Protestant rulers for their refusal to accept conscription, swear oaths, or pay taxes.) And then in 1693 the Anabaptists had a schism, as Protestant sects are wont to do, over the question of how to deal with excommunicated members: one side of the argument, led by Jakob Ammann, advocated not just for exclusion from communion but for total shunning in everyday life. When he lost, he and his followers split off, and their branch was known after him as the Amish. Many of these early Amish joined the broader wave of German immigration to the United States, with five hundred settling in Pennsylvania in the 1700s and a larger group arriving in the early 1800s. Those who remained in Europe were eventually absorbed into other Anabaptist and Protestant denominations, but on the American frontier the Amish maintained their cultural identity: alone among the German immigrant groups, they still speak Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsch, or “Pennsylvania Dutch”, a dialect derived from Palatine German. (They mostly also speak English, and their church services are conducted in standard High German.)
The basic organizational unit of Amish society — after the extended family, which is vital and often includes three generations under one roof — is the “church district”, a community of twenty-five to forty families who live within a short buggy-ride of one another. The leaders of the district are chosen by lot from among the married men, and each is governed by an Ordnung, an unwritten set of rules laying down expectations for behavior. It’s this Ordnung that contains the restrictions on technology and lifestyle that we typically associate with the Amish, covering everything from what color you can paint your barn (one group insists on red because white would be too worldly) to whether you can use mechanical milking machines. The church revisits their Ordnung every six months or so to see if it needs updating — one group had originally approved walkie-talkies for communication while hunting, but then discovered boys were using them to flirt with girls and decided to ban them. Church districts with similar Ordnungs are “in fellowship”, and a cluster of districts in full fellowship with one another are an “affiliation”. (A “settlement”, like the Holmes County Settlement, is a cluster of geographically contiguous districts regardless of affiliation.)
Importantly, few of these restrictions are based on the idea that the banned technology or behavior is wrong in and of itself: for instance, every Ordnung forbids a baptized Amish adult to own a car, but boys from some Amish families have cars for a while in their teens and all but the most conservative affiliations will pay someone else to drive them if they need to go farther than their buggy can take them. Or to put it another way, nobody thinks the English are bad people for driving cars — they just think we’re not Amish.
So if an Ordnung mostly isn’t meant to keep you from doing intrinsically evil things, like murder and adultery and blasphemy, what is it for? How do you decide what to allow? What are you optimizing for when you design it?
Two things, mainly, though they’re not neatly separated. The first and most important role of the Ordnung is engendering the virtue the Amish call Gelassenheit. There’s not a perfect English translation for the German,1 but Hurst and McConnell describe it as a spirit of “selflessness, humility, or meekness”, a subordination of self to community. Amish scholar2 Donald Kraybill wrote that Gelassenheit is meant to develop a “yielded self” that “stands in contrast to the bold, aggressive individualism of modern [English] culture”. Thinking too highly of yourself, or trying to outdo others, are failures of Gelassenheit, but they’re hard to avoid when you have to market your personal #brand or compete in the marketplace. Unmechanized agriculture, on the other hand, was very good at nurturing Gelassenheit: a farmer is necessarily aware of his dependence on natural forces beyond his control, which keeps him humble. Nowadays the Amish worry that shifts way from their traditional lifestyle will “foster the notion that the worker controls his or her work and life”, which might “breed an attitude of self-sufficiency, even arrogance” that is antithetical to their values.
The concern for Gelassenheit shows up particularly in Amish approaches to childrearing. Where English society values self-expression, intellectual curiosity, and individual accomplishment, Amish parents rank obedience and self-control as the most desirable qualities in children. (More than half of the parents the authors surveyed put “being interested in how and why things happen” at the bottom of their list.) They also report that teachers at Amish schools tend to be “preoccupied (to our eyes) with minor aspects of misbehavior that signaled nonparticipation in the group or lack of obedience to authority”. All of this carries through into the workplace, too: the Amish generally think white collar workers are “out to make the big bucks” and that their jobs are be difficult or impossible to undertake with a “meek spirit”. So if you can’t farm (and increasingly you can’t), the Amish think your work should be something near home that uses your hands, allows your family to participate, and contributes directly to your community. No arguments here that building dashboards to give executives deeper insight into critical business functions leads to the more efficient allocation of global capital and lifts all boats; they want you to make food or furniture or something.
The Ordnung‘s second goal is to separate believers from the broader world. This is partly a legacy of the Anabaptist experience of persecution, partly a response to Biblical passages like Romans 12:2’s warning not to “be conformed to this world”, and partly a protective measure against a world that isn’t interested in Gelassenheit, but the dualism between Amish and “English” is a vital part of what it means to be Amish. Of course, it’s impossible to clearly differentiate between things that promote a particular mindset/virtue and things that mark you out as different: the distinctive Amish “plain dress“, for instance, both limits opportunities for vanity and marks out the wearer as, well, kind of a weirdo. (There’s sometimes also a sub-goal of separation from other Amish affiliations — one Amish man is quoted saying, “The only reason the Old Order doesn’t have rubber wheels [on their buggies] is because the New Order did it first”.)
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: An Amish Paradox, by Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-15.
- And they mean something different by it than Heidegger does!
- Okay, this one is a Mennonite scholar of the Amish.
August 20, 2026
“It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams”
It’s a common observation that teenage boys’ teams can compete — and beat — professional or national competitive womens’ teams in many sports. I’d always assumed that greater male muscle mass and overall strength were the primary reason for this, but Lorenzo Warby points out that strength differences do not completely explain the competitive disparity:
Babylon Bee pokes fun at the US Women’s Team
Social media provides the technology to strongly increase the social signalling and the shunning and shaming that moralises disagreement in service of shared status games. To put it another way, social media upscales social/relational aggression that attacks people’s social standing on the basis of ostentatious moral or social concern.
Because believing X is such performative way of grading people, believing-X makes you a good person creates purity-spirals as people up-the-ante to make their signal — their moral piety display — more salient and reduce competition for positions. It also attracts and empowers the personality disordered — specifically Cluster B’s — as believing-X makes you a good person requires so little to join the status game and advantages those who are manipulatively unrestrained. In other words, it acts as a negative character test, that selects for people of bad moral character.
The inability to admit ever being wrong goes with the moralising of disagreement and identity-through-belief.
Social media does not enable the up-scaling of physical aggression, although it does enable the transmission of threats of such. By contrast, social media — with its electronic mobbing — is a very effective medium for emotional or relational aggression. As women, the physically weaker sex, are particularly inclined to be quite protectively self-deceptive about their own aggression — it is “just” moral or social concern — that leads to both intense aggression and denial of its existence: “there is no such thing as cancel culture”/”it is just a shift in moral, in social, concern”.
Screenshot
Social media can be particularly toxic for adolescent girls. Adolescents often lack a settled or robust sense of self, tend to be very wrapped up in how other people see them, and have a weak sense of their effect on others. All this is even more so for people-focused adolescent girls, who are both particularly prone to engage in — and be vulnerable to — emotional or relational aggression and to seek socially-protective identities. It is plausible that growing up with the excesses of social media increases support for control of speech, including making hate speech a live issue.
More things-focused boys are much more likely to retreat into playing games (both online or physical games) or some other physical activity. The greater female focus on people makes adolescent girls more vulnerable to social media-generated aggression, identity confusion and comforting cognitive refuges and conformism; the greater male focus on things creates a divergence between young male and female perspectives, aggravated by the strong female social preference for other females.
Survey of British women done for The New Statesman.
Due to strong, even at times intense, sex-differentiated selection pressures, in human evolution, human males are systematically better at forming and operating teams than women. Among women, it is the most masculinised personalities — lesbians and tomboys — who tend to be better at teams and teamwork, though they are still generally not as good at it as men.
The operating principle is that men are more likely to suppress their emotions to perform their designated role (in a team, in an organisation). Women are more likely to subordinate their designated role (in a team, in an organisation) to their emotions. Hence, for example, women and girls are more likely to be aggressive towards fellow team members during a game than are men and boys. Hence also — as we will see — male-dominated institutions have been better at catering for women and girls than female-dominated institutions have been at catering for men and boys.
It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams. From adolescence on, boys and men are systematically stronger than girls and women of the same age: but even a fit 14 year old boy is not likely to be stronger than a fit, athletic 21 year old sportswoman. It is difference in male and female cognitive and behaviour patterns that leads to teenage boys sporting teams beating national women’s teams.
Institutions — to be functional — generally have to been scaled-up teams. That women are systematically worse at teams than men means that the feminisation of institutions and organisations tends to degrade their functionality. For example, female “emotions-as-threat” tone-policing makes it harder to generate trust, as people curate their interactions. Men and boys make outrageous jokes and rib and insult each other to test whether the others will fold under pressure. The social flattening of tone policing generates much more uncertainty, because it produces far less revealing information, so less trust.
The more differences of opinion are seen as threat, insult or moral failure, the more destructively conformist the institution or organisation is likely to be. This both acts to block feedback and enable the entrenchment of structures of conformist not-noticing.
One way out of this is to have strong standards in favour of truth and robust use of evidence. This, in turn, requires willingness to enforce such standards, which many women find emotionally confronting to do, as they are far more primed to read emotions as threat. Retreating from enforcing standards and boundaries on the grounds of being “inclusive” gives emotional — and so moral — cowardice a warm inner glow via a patina of self-righteousness. An emotionally-comforting retreat from enforcing standards then aids the entrenchment of emotionally-comforting opinion conformities.
That women tend to be self-deceptive about their own aggression — passing it off as moral or social concern — can be highly corrosive to the internal operation of an organisation or institution. In particular, it can be an effective way to block inconvenient information or concerns. All of this makes an information-restricting conformity likely to develop, and become entrenched, within an organisation as it becomes more female-dominated while making it less functional in enforcing standards, so delivering services.
Women are much less likely than men to have friends of lower socio-economic standing — as those of lower social standing are generally not a good social return on the emotional investment that female friendships are based on. Given the biological expense of human children, focusing on getting a good social return for one’s emotional investment was a successful reproductive advantage. For more team-oriented men, one never knows when someone of lower socio-economic status might be useful on your team.
Feminisation — that is, the increasing pervasiveness of more female-typical behaviour patterns — thus raises issues of weakening social solidarity. One of the striking things about contemporary Western societies is how little active concern that female university graduates show for people, including other women, of lower socio-economic status within their own societies. They have very little sense of how very different the experience of women in very different social milieus can be, and they do not socialise with such women to find out.
The Frankfurt School – The most destructive intellectual project of the 20th Century
People tend to underestimate how influential intellectual movements can be, as they rarely get outside attention until they’re deeply entrenched in the university system. The Frankfurt School‘s damage record is unmatched by any other intellectual movement of the era:
Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.
The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.
The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.
1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.
2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.
3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it. This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.
4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name”. Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.
5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.
6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.
7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.
The answer is not another theory. It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.
The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.
Prove it wrong.
Tell the truth, have courage, and build.
The Korean War Week 113 – The Battle of Bunker Hill – August 18,1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 18 Aug 2026There’s plenty of action as Chinese troops battle with the US Marines over Hill 112- now known as “Bunker Hill”- throughout the whole week. Back in the USA, questions continue to circulate about the government’s strategy of limited war in Korea. The conflict looks set to play a key role in the 1952 Presidential Election, as candidates Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson begin to feel the scrutiny of the American public.
00:00 Intro
00:19 Recap
00:41 The Battle of Bunker Hill
05:16 Marine Artillery
06:13 The Peace Talks
07:51 Limited War
11:45 The Presidential Candidates
13:44 Summary
13:57 Conclusion
“It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand”
On his Substack, Andrew Doyle discusses the fine art of writing libellous things about someone without quite giving enough legally actionable material for the victim to have a chance to retaliate successfully:
Simon Edge on GB News.
Screencap from Andrew Doyle
How does one libel an opponent and get away with it? I’ve lost count of the number of people online who’ve made false accusations against me. Sometimes I’m a fascist, other times a communist. Sometimes I’m a homophobe, other times a degenerate sodomite. Some have branded me a “racist” for supporting Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society. White supremacists have denounced me as a traitor for my opposition to racism.
It’s all noise, of course, and best filtered out. These aren’t serious people, and no serious person would believe their smears. However, last week an author called Simon Edge, well-known in gender-critical circles, published a blog post about me that I can only describe as defamatory. He’s very lucky that I’ve no appetite for litigation, but I think it’s worth discussing the nature of his smearing technique because it’s become so common among activists of the more mendacious ilk.
It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand. Perhaps we should call it prestidefamation. Here’s how it works. You take a series of unremarkable facts, out-of-context quotations and tenuous associations, arrange them in a suggestive manner, omit any contrary evidence, invite the reader to draw the worst possible conclusion and then congratulate them for drawing it.
Edge has done precisely this. I have a long and well-documented record of opposing fascism and the far right. I’ve written books and articles about it, spoken about it endlessly on television, radio and podcasts. My latest book The End of Woke makes the case against all forms of authoritarianism, and opens with an epigraph explicitly attacking Nazi ideology. Yet Edge has managed to write an article insinuating that I support Nazis. It would be like writing a piece about Oscar Wilde’s robust and unwavering heterosexuality.
Here’s how he did it. Recently, it was announced on X that Oldspeak Books, which bills itself as “Britain’s only centre-right bookshop”, has closed its doors. The manager posted a message on social media to explain.
Over time, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a welcoming environment due to the constant hostility I experienced. The uncertainty around which customers were genuine, made it hard for me to greet everyone warmly, and my customer service suffered.
This looked like a clear case of cancel culture to me and, since Oldspeak had been kind enough to stock my books, I reposted her message with a comment to the effect that it was a shame that she had been pressurised into closing her shop. This was, according to Edge, my first foray into the murky world of fascist apologism. Who knew it could be so easy?
The Ancient Greeks 04 – The Persian Invasion 3 – The Road to Thermopylae
seangabb
Published 25 Mar 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
Why did the Greeks resist — and how did they organise their defence?
In this lecture, we follow the formation of the Greek coalition against Persia and the strategic decisions that led to the famous stand at Thermopylae. Against overwhelming odds, a divided collection of city-states came together to resist the greatest power in the known world.
We examine:
– The creation of the Hellenic League
– Spartan leadership and Greek strategy
– The selection of Thermopylae as a defensive position
– The parallel naval strategy at Artemisium
– The events leading up to the battleThis lecture sets the stage for one of the most famous last stands in history, showing that Thermopylae was not an isolated act of heroism, but part of a carefully considered defensive strategy.
QotD: George Bernard Shaw’s role as Stalin’s useful idiot
Shaw toured Ukraine during the height of the Holodomor, when Soviet grain requisitions had stripped peasants of every scrap of food. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 3.5 million Ukrainians. Shaw saw the empty villages, the skeletal survivors, the mass graves. Then he signed a public letter praising Stalin’s “remarkable progress” and told Western journalists that reports of famine were capitalist propaganda.
Why would an intelligent man become Stalin’s useful idiot? Shaw believed in central planning with religious fervor. He thought brilliant intellectuals like himself could design society better than millions of individuals making their own choices. When confronted with central planning’s inevitable result (mass death), he chose to lie rather than admit his ideology killed people. Shaw preferred beautiful theory to ugly facts.
Shaw deliberately used his celebrity status to give Stalin cover while Ukrainian children died of starvation. He returned to Britain and spent years defending Soviet policies, even as refugee testimonies and photographic evidence exposed the genocide. The man who wrote about moral awakening in Pygmalion had abandoned his own moral compass entirely.
Free market economists warned that socialist calculation was impossible, that without prices and property rights, economies would collapse into chaos and death. Shaw dismissed these warnings as bourgeois nonsense while standing ankle-deep in their vindication.
Handre, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-13.
August 19, 2026
Why The Allied Western Front Offensives in 1915 Failed
The Great War
Published 13 Mar 2026By the spring of 1915, the Western Front had bogged down into trench warfare. Allied offensives tried to break the deadlock in spring and fall 1915. The fall offensives were among the bloodiest of the war. After unprecedented bloodletting and use of munitions, the Western Front was still locked in a stalemate at the end of 1915.
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QotD: The Kwantung Army was the tail wagging the Japanese Imperial dog
The Lytton Commission was commissioned by the League of Nations to investigate the Mukden Incident, which was one of those false flags the Kwantung Army was fond of. They used it to seize Manchuria — technically a province of China — and set up a puppet government they called “Manchukuo” (under the Qing Emperor who was deposed in 1911 — who was 5 at the time — thus giving it a veneer of historical legitimacy). The Lytton Commission concluded that the Mukden Incident was indeed a false flag; that Japan was the aggressor; and that Manchukuo was a puppet state that should be dissolved, with Manchuria returning to Chinese sovereignty.
That’s bad, because if you’re Japan and you do any of that, you’ve now knuckled under to not just the West, but the worst hypocrites of them all (“Lytton” was Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the 2nd Earl of Lytton, formerly governor of Bengal and Viceroy of India, and oh, by the way, how exactly did Britain come to rule in India? The shit they pulled makes the Mukden Incident look like very small beer indeed). And it’s bad from the Chinese side, too, because now you’ve basically tied their hands in any peace negotiations — they can’t conclude any kind of honorable peace without getting Manchuria back, and as should be obvious from the above, you must pry Mantetsu from Japan’s cold, dead hands.
Still, Japan might’ve disciplined guys like Ishiwara … but how? You can’t cashier him; the Army would go insane. You can’t really transfer him — as much trouble as he’s causing in Manchuria, if you bring him home you might well have another February 26 Incident, and it might work this time. You certainly can’t execute him, because a) you’d have to take his entire faction with him, which would decimate your officer corps, and b) perhaps more importantly, the seizure of Manchuria was pretty popular. Mantetsu’s Media boys hadn’t been sitting on their hands during all of this, of course, and the Army’s Media people had been going nuts too.
In the end, the Japanese pretty much had no choice: They gave the League of Nations the finger. Which of course emboldened the KA even more, such that they cooked up an even faker and gayer false flag, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and WWII was on.
Severian, “Slipping the Leash”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-27.
August 18, 2026
M15 Automatic Rifle (aka T44E5): Adopted But Not Produced
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Mar 2026When the US replaced the M1 Garand, the plan was to adopt both a select-fire infantry rifle and a heavy-barreled support weapon on the same platform. During development, both the T44 (later M14) and T48 (FAL) rifles had heavy-barreled versions. In the case of the M14, the final iteration of the heavy-barreled weapon was the T44E5, which was formally adopted as the M15. Before it could be actually put into production, though, it was cancelled as unnecessary.
In testing, first the Marine Corps and then the Infantry Board found that fitting a standard M14 with a detachable bipod gave the same performance as the M15 — and so why bother with an extra version of the gun? Of course, the equal performance was really quite poor compared to proper light machine guns, and once the M14 got into service this shortcoming was noticed. this led to the M14A1 aka M14E2 project, to essentially recreate the M15 with a pistol grip stock and front grip.
Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this truly unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts: https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
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QotD: A quick heuristic for evaluating public figures
InfantryDort @infantrydort
The amount of trust I have in a person is directly proportional to how many legacy media hit pieces they attract.
My first thought was: good heuristic for evaluating public figures!
My second thought was: No, wait. Sometimes the legacy media attacks genuinely bad people.
My third thought was: … but this happens surprisingly seldom. Why is that? A few seconds of thought reveal the answer.
When you’re policing an orthodoxy (and the legacy media definitely sees its job as policing an orthodoxy) the most dangerous person isn’t the one whose beliefs are radically different from the orthodoxy, but the deviant whose position is just close enough to attract converts from within the orthodox mass.
Heretics get burned more often than do unbelievers.
So yes, InfantryDort is right. Probabilistically, trusting public figures that the media constantly does hit pieces on is unlikely to tangle you up with the genuinely evil and crazy, and much more likely to point you at truth-seekers.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-15.
August 17, 2026
Peacemaker and the Red Skull’s Ghost: Breaking The Post-WWII Mythos
Feral Historian
Published 10 Apr 2026I expect half the viewers to think I sound like a Leftist and the other half to think I’m turning into their Right-wing uncle with a little dash of conspiracy theorizing on this one. But there’s a point here that I think is worth stating. Or maybe it’s just a silly video about superheroes and a war we can’t seem to get over.
00:00 Intro
03:18 Pennyworth
04:40 Political Sabotage
11:08 Contending with the Ghost
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QotD: The real reason that MilSpec stuff sucks
@Fat_Electrician was talking about super cars and why they don’t generally work as well as, say, a regular car. Super cars break down a lot. Some are worse than others. His point, apparently from Jay Leno, is that a Ferrari has much less actual engineering in it than, say, a Dodge minivan. Why?
Because there are thousand more engineers working on the minivan and tens of thousands more background hours of engineering. The minivan comes from a long history of similar vehicles with much more engineering in the actual design.
So, think about a military vehicle. Say the Humvee. It’s not that it’s designed to fail, it’s that there is much much less engineering in it. Ditto any military equipment. Thus, it’s much more likely to break down, just like a Ferrari.
I was thinking about this in light of the current series I’m working on not to mention any milSF. The current series the main character is leading a group that works with a mix of civilian small freighter starships and military warships. The civilian ships, even the old ones, are relatively maintenance free vs the military ships. Why?
1. There’s way more engineering in the civilian ships because the companies sell more of them and can spend more on engineering.
2. There’s a lineage of what works and what doesn’t.
3. Civilian companies cannot spend enormous sums on maintenance.But it’s mostly the first one.
I’m not even sure I’m going to insert a discussion of it in the book. It’s the sort of thing I occasionally insert just because my readers sometimes find stuff like that interesting. But mostly I thought you might.
MilSpec sucks because there’s not as much of it as civilian.
John Ringo, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-07.
August 16, 2026
In Ontario, bike lanes are not a “human right”, thank goodness
On his Substack, Brian Lilley celebrates two recent developments in Ontario that — unlike so many others in the last several years — align with common sense:
Last year I wrote about the horrible court decision put out by “Justice” Paul Schabas on bike lanes being a Charter right. I put “Justice” in quotations because as I described at the time, the decision was so horrible and so political that it wasn’t worthy of an Ontario court.
Today, the Court of Appeal of Ontario agreed with me. As I wrote in my Toronto Sun column, they didn’t just overturn the ridiculous decision by Schabas, they excoriated him and his ruling.
AI-generated image from Brian Lilley
I quoted different sections of the appeals court ruling in my column, and trust me it was tough to choose which parts to quote in such a brilliant decisions. Here, I want to quote from early in the ruling, paragraphs 3-5.
[3] The application judge’s decision presents as a straightforward application of orthodox s. 7 principles. But the application of those principles, divorced from a broader understanding of the constitution of which they are a part, has led to a surprising outcome: the conclusion that routine legislation regulating road usage is unconstitutional.
[4] Something has gone wrong.
[5] The application judge erred in law in interpreting and applying s. 7. But his decision is wrong in a more profound sense, for it subverts a fundamental principle of our democratic constitutional order: a legislature cannot bind its successors. Legislatures in the Westminster tradition are free to undo legislation by amending or repealing it as they see fit. That is the nature of democratic lawmaking in our constitutional order. Of course, all laws are subject to the Charter, but this does not preclude the amendment or repeal of legislation the legislature was under no constitutional obligation to have passed in the first place. Amendment or repeal of legislation may breach the Charter only if the breach can be established independent of the prior state of the law.
There is so much to digest here, but I am glad to see judges — who come from different backgrounds and were appointed by both the Harper and Trudeau governments — agree on fundamental principles. That should be a given, we shouldn’t think about such things, but today, we can’t those fundamentals for granted.
The idea that one Parliament, or legislature, cannot bind the hands of another is fundamental to our system. If I pass a law saying that wearing blue on Tuesdays is illegal and the next Parliament passes a law saying that it isn’t, the more recent law takes precedent.
Yes, I used a ridiculous example on purpose, but just to prove a point. It’s sad that so many people, including those who report and comment on politics, aren’t familiar with this basic concept on the role of Parliament.
And the other reversal of an absurd policy:
Last month there was a tribunal ruling in Ontario that said people in the country illegally were still entitled to welfare. I wrote about it at the time and said it was a crazy ruling that the Ford government needed to deal with.
They promised to do so at the time and on Thursday announced that they had.
Friday morning I was forced to write about the ridiculous take by the Toronto Star‘s “senior immigration reporter” Nicholas Keung. It seems, based on his stories, that Keung has never met someone he doesn’t think should be in Canada.
I’ll say as the son of immigrants, who grew up in an area where kids with parents who had Canadian accents were the strange ones, most immigrants don’t back illegals getting welfare.
Still, this was the Star‘s headline on the story.
As I point out in my Sun column, Parsa is himself an immigrant having come from Iran with his family as a child.
But sure, the Star‘s “senior immigration reporter” smears him as racist.
Let me explain something to you. When a reporter says “experts” say and they only find experts from one side, that is them finding the people they agree with to say what they want said.
