Stam Fine
Published 3 Apr 2026Stam Fine Reviews looks at the landmark 1976 classic BBC series I, Claudius based on the books by Robert Graves. I, Claudius is a sprawling epic looking at four emperors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius. Claudius had a limp, stammered and facial tics but was a survivor when everyone else around him was murdered.
I, Claudius is an influential series, even in places you don’t expect it (The Sopranos, Dynasty, Succession).
Note: The Romans didn’t use the letter ‘U’ at the time unless you upgraded your subscription to Roman+. I do not presently subscribe to Roman+.
Stars Derek Jacobi, Sian Phillips, Brian Blessed, George Baker, Patrick Stewart, Ian Ogilvy, Simon MacCorkindale, Margaret Tyzack, Patrica Quinn, John Hurt, and many more.
0:00 Introduction
0:33 Veni, vidi, Google Translate usus sum.
1:15 Technical Difficulties.
1:34 I, Claudius Take Two.
4:09 Augustus and Livia
5:50 Claudius
8:05 Tiberius
10:55 Caligula
13:14 Emperor Claudius
16:00 From Book to BBC2
19:11 Cast
21:24 LegacyI, Claudius
I, Clavdivs
I Claudius
August 5, 2026
I, Claudius (MCMLXXVI). Show Me The Way To Go Rome
QotD: “This is why English spelling is a disaster”
In the 1300s the Black Death swept through England and killed somewhere between a third and half of the entire population. Entire villages emptied. Labour shortages reshaped the economy. And the survivors started moving. Massive waves of migration poured into London and the southeast from every corner of the country, bringing with them dozens of regional dialects that had never been in the same room before.
And somewhere in that collision of accents and dialects, something shifted. Literally. The vowels started moving.
Between roughly 1400 and 1700 every single long vowel in the English language changed how it was pronounced. It’s called the Great Vowel Shift. Before it happened, English vowels worked the way vowels work in Italian or Spanish. The letters did what they looked like they should do. “Bite” was pronounced “beet”. “House” was pronounced “hoos”. “Name” was pronounced “nahm”. “Knight” was pronounced “k-nicht” with a guttural sound at the end like you were clearing your throat. English was phonetic. The spelling matched the sounds. It made SENSE.
And then it didn’t.
All the long vowels began migrating upward in the mouth. The tongue positions shifted higher and higher over the course of about 300 years. And the vowels that were already at the top had nowhere left to go so they broke apart into two sounds. “Ee” became “eye”. “Oo” became “ow”. A 300-year linguistic pileup that nobody voted on and nobody agreed to. It just happened. And it happened during the worst possible window of time.
William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. One of the most important technological developments in the history of communication. And it arrived RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the Great Vowel Shift.
Caxton started standardizing English spelling based on how words sounded at that exact moment. Printers needed consistency. They needed to pick a spelling and commit. So they did. But the sounds kept changing after the spelling was already locked in. The vowels were still moving. The consonants were still dropping. And the printed page couldn’t keep up.
We had ONE CHANCE to get English spelling right and we fumbled it at the worst possible moment.
This is why English spelling is a disaster. It’s not random. It’s not lazy. It’s a snapshot of a language mid-transformation that got frozen in place by a new technology and was never corrected. Every word you have ever misspelled, every silent letter that made you feel stupid, every time you stared at “knight” and thought why is there a K in this. You used to pronounce that K. You used to pronounce that GH. Those sounds died 500 years ago and the letters are still standing there like gravestones. English spelling is full of ghosts.
That’s why “food” and “good” and “blood” are spelled almost identically but sound completely different. In Chaucer’s time around the 1390s they all rhymed. In Shakespeare’s time around the 1600s they still rhymed but with a different vowel. And then sometime after that they each went their own separate way and the spelling just stood there watching like it had given up entirely.
And HERE IS THE THING. Other languages went through similar vowel shifts. German had nearly identical changes happen to its long vowels around the same period. And German just updated its spelling. They adjusted the orthography to match the new pronunciation. Like reasonable people. English looked at the same problem and said no. We’re going to keep the old spelling. Everyone will simply have to deal with it. Every person who has ever stared at “though” and “through” and “thorough” and “thought” and wondered why four words that look almost identical are all pronounced differently? Collateral damage. Five hundred years of collateral damage and we just accepted it.
Ok so that’s the vowels. That’s the background. Now we get to the accents and this is where I lost my mind.
The single biggest difference between standard American English and standard British English today is something called rhoticity. This is a real linguistics term even though it sounds completely made up. Rhotic speakers pronounce the R sound in words like “hard” and “car”. Non-rhotic speakers drop it. “Hard” becomes “hahd”. “Car” becomes “cah”. That one feature is doing like 80 percent of the work when your brain hears someone speak and categorizes them as British or American.
Here’s what nobody told you.
In 1776 everybody was rhotic. Americans AND the British. Both sides of the Atlantic pronounced their Rs. The fancy non-rhotic accent that we now think of as THE British accent, the one you hear in your head when someone says “British accent”, the one every villain in every movie has? That accent did not exist yet. It developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the upper classes in southern England started dropping their Rs as a prestige marker. A fashion statement. And then it spread downward through society and outward through the Empire.
The accent we associate with the British Empire is actually newer than the American Revolution.
I need to say that again because it didn’t land the first time I heard it either.
The accent that we think of as “British” is newer than the country that broke away from Britain. Americans didn’t lose the British accent. The British lost the British accent. Americans are the ones who kept it.
Emma, “The Plague That Broke English (And Why the Founding Fathers Didn’t Sound British)”, Past Life, Present Cleavage, 2026-04-03.
August 4, 2026
“Jason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times”
The Jason Arday affair has only just drifted into my view, but it seems utterly fascinating that a young man with such a … varied and colourful personal history … has risen to be the youngest black professor at Cambridge. His backstory is (probably) too perfectly aligned with progressive worldviews to be true:
Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew DoyleJason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times. As the youngest black person ever to be appointed a professor at the University of Cambridge, there are good reasons why those who have championed him are rushing to his defence. But with each passing day, new revelations of his slippery relationship with reality seem to be emerging.
As with many fabulists, it is difficult to know where the truth ends and the fiction begins. Some of Arday’s boasts are quite obviously false. For instance, nobody believes that he completed the last nine of thirty consecutive marathons with a fractured leg that had swollen “to twice its normal size”. Or that he appeared in the television series Seven Up! as a child, even though its participants were selected in 1963 and Arday was born two decades later.
Other claims might well be embellishments on kernels of reality. No doubt he has raised money for charity, but it seems highly unlikely that his vaunted sum of £5.5 million is accurate. We know that he played snooker, but his assertion that he did so professionally would carry more weight if someone on the circuit had heard of him. Few would dispute that Arday is a keen amateur athlete. But if his claim to have run six hundred miles in six days were true, that would place him among the world’s elite sportsmen.
Perhaps most serious of all are the accusations of plagiarism. Cambridge has been quick to dismiss the matter, stating that an investigation has already been conducted by Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his PhD thesis, and no evidence of plagiarism was found. Many readers who have compared the relevant passages side by side have reached a different conclusion. Numerous examples have been collated by Nathan Cofnas and can be seen here.
The refusal of the authorities at Cambridge to investigate the allegations properly has naturally raised suspicions that Arday is being protected because he is the poster boy for DEI. If it is true that he was raised on a council estate, diagnosed with autism at the age of three, first spoke at the age of eleven, and learned to read and write at eighteen, then his success story is unparalleled. Yet plagiarism is an extremely grave matter for an academic, and the evidence is difficult to dismiss.
The failure to hold Arday to the same standards as anyone else is, of course, a soft form of racism …
On Substack Notes, Michael Southron says he’s getting a strong Jussie Smollet vibe from this story:
The Jason Arday affair is beginning to remind me of Jussie Smollett.
Not because we know that Arday fabricated anything. We don’t. But because of the strange self-protecting logic that surrounds allegations of racism.
Smollett’s story was initially believed because it fitted so perfectly with what many people already believed about America: a black, gay actor attacked by racist, homophobic Trump supporters. The allegation seemed almost to validate itself.
Something similar is happening with Arday.
He says a severed pig’s head was sent to his family home. Yet police can reportedly find no record of the investigation he described. The butcher he said police visited says no officers ever came. There are apparently no photographs or contemporaneous messages.
He also says a masked man twice entered his Cambridge faculty building and threatened him, on one occasion with a knife. Yet the man was apparently captured by no CCTV, seen by no colleagues, and Arday reportedly warned nobody in the building at the time.
“To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” Arday told the Guardian. “Why would I lie?”
That sentence may be the most revealing part of the whole affair.
Because questioning Arday’s claims now risks being folded into the very narrative those claims are supposed to establish.
Arday says he has been targeted because of racism. Questions are raised about the evidence for his claims. Those questions are then portrayed as part of a “vile campaign” against him — which becomes further evidence that he is being targeted.
The allegation begins to protect itself.
He is a victim of racism, therefore questioning his account may itself be racist; and because questioning his account may be racist, his claim to be a victim of racism receives less scrutiny.
It is a perfect circle.
China attacked the sparrows, Britain will attack the cows
People make mistakes based on insufficient information, mistaken causes, biases, and many other distorted ways of reasoning. Governments do the same thing, but when governments screw up it’s a problem for everyone:
In 1958 the Chinese state worked out that sparrows were eating the grain, and organised six hundred million people to kill every one of them.
It did not take bullets. Villages, schools and factory units turned out with pots, pans, drums and gongs and made continuous noise so that no bird could land anywhere. Nests were pulled down, eggs smashed, chicks killed. The sparrows flew until their hearts gave out and dropped into the streets, where children collected them and the totals were reported upward as achievements. The toll ran into the hundreds of millions.
The arithmetic was sound as far as it went. A sparrow eats grain. Fewer sparrows, more grain, more people fed. Nobody in the room was wrong about what the bird took.
They were wrong about what it did.
Sparrows eat insects, in enormous quantity, and most of all in the breeding season when the chicks need protein. Take them out of a farmed landscape and the locusts and grain borers they had been holding down are handed the whole country. Which is what happened. Crop losses to insects rose sharply, and by 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng had made the case well enough that Mao ordered sparrows struck from the list and replaced with bed bugs.
Far too late, and never the whole cause. The famine of 1959 to 1961 was principally a policy famine, driven by collectivisation, grain requisition and the diversion of farm labour to backyard steel furnaces, and the dead are counted in tens of millions.
But the sparrow campaign is the purest thing in the episode, because it is the reasoning stripped to bone. A committee looked at a living system, isolated the one animal it could measure as a cost, and calculated the gain from removing it without ever asking what that animal was holding up.
Now look at what is being proposed for grassland.
The ruminant is measured the same way, on one ledger line, the methane it emits and the land it stands on. What is left off the ledger is everything it does. The grazing that keeps grassland grassland instead of scrub. The dung that feeds the beetles that feed the birds. The hoof that breaks the surface so seed can take. The mouth that removes the standing dead matter which otherwise cures into wildfire fuel. The manure that returns phosphorus and nitrogen to the soil so nobody has to mine it and ship it in.
Grasslands and grazing animals co-evolved over tens of millions of years. Remove the animal and you do not get the same field minus some methane. You get a different system, and it will not be the one on the spreadsheet.
The men who ordered the sparrows killed were not stupid, and they were not cruel. They had a number, and the number was correct, and they were praised for acting on it decisively. It took two years for the second half of the equation to arrive, and by then nobody could put the birds back.
We are eighteen months into the herd reduction schemes.
The grass has not sent its invoice yet.
Update, 6 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
August 3, 2026
Invasion of Iraq, 2003
Real Time History
Published 6 Mar 2026In March 2003, a US-led coalition invades Iraq. US President George W. Bush claims he must disarm Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction and depose a brutal regime supporting global terror. But after a lightning capture of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities in the south, the war is far from over.
(more…)
August 2, 2026
The hubristic disaster of good intentions in Llantwit Major
On Substack, Mark Collett recounts the sad tale of good intentions leading to very unwelcome results in a little Welsh town that was determined to welcome in foreign refugees:
“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
This phrase does not have a single, definitive creator but it is instead a modern English phrasing of an ancient Greek concept that evolved over thousands of years. The core meaning of the phrase comes from the classical Greek concept of Atë, which is an infatuation or moral blindness sent by the gods to punish human hubris. The earliest recorded variation appears in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone (c. 441 BC), where a chorus remarks that evil eventually seems good to a man whose mind a god is leading to ruin. Sophocles noted even then that it was an old and famous maxim – possibly existing for hundreds of years before he used the term. However, the phrase finally took its exact, modern-day form in 19th-century American literature with the Reverend William Anderson Scott publishing the phrase exactly as it is written today in his book Daniel, a Model for Young Men, which was published in 1854, he called it a “heathen proverb”.
[…]
There is probably no better modern application for this “heathen proverb” than as a means to describe white liberals. These champions of social justice are so desperate to endorse a progressive ideology and to embrace people from other racial and cultural groups, that it often leads to their downfall. So convinced are white liberals not only of the nobility of their cause, but they are also totally sure that when their beliefs and theories are applied in the real world that they will result in the establishment of a rainbow utopia in which all people will live in blissful harmony. This is why the truth to these people is like garlic to a vampire. As such, no amount of facts, figures or even real-world examples of the potential pitfalls that could result from enacting the policies they support can dissuade the white liberal from their political path. And often, the hubris of white liberals can lead to their downfall, and sometimes, this affects more than a lone individual, sometimes, this hubris leads to the downfall of an entire community.
Photo from Mark Collett
And on the South Coast of Wales, in a small seaside town named Llantwit Major, it could be said that the residents became the living embodiment of this “heathen proverb”, that they went “mad” – however this madness was definitely not the work of the gods. The madness that had taken over the minds of the people of Llantwit Major was a form of suicidal hubris that sprang forth from their misplaced beliefs in tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism. And it was their faith in these beliefs that caused them to embrace their own demise in a desperate attempt to prove how progressive and open minded they were. This is the story of a small Welsh town of less than 10,000 people who willingly and enthusiastically welcomed a swamping number of migrants into their community and how their overwhelming arrogance resulted in a migrant camp being built in the very centre of their tiny, and previously homogenous, Welsh community.
But this wasn’t just a case of blind virtue signalling – it was possibly the most glaring example of liberal hubris on a group level that has been witnessed in recent years. The residents of Llantwit were warned of their impending fate, but not only did they ignore these warnings, but they besmirched and attacked those who they should have heeded. When it was announced that migrants would be headed to Llantwit, many nationalists were eager to help the town’s residents, and plans were made to arrange a demonstration in the area in order to assist the locals in pushing back against the proposals. But the hubris of the townsfolk caused them to reject this generous offer of help, and instead, those who wished to warn local residents of the dangers posed by such a scheme were met with resistance. This local resistance was so strong that the BBC ran a glowing article praising the people of Llantwit titled: “Patriotic Alternative: The town fighting the far-right with Welsh cakes”.
QotD: Churchill’s views on India
On the other hand, Churchill repeatedly voiced his admiration for the gallantry of Indian troops, noting in his war memoirs: “The unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine for ever in the annals of war. Upwards of two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the forces … The response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire.”
Despite his fears about Indian independence, Churchill’s views noticeably mellowed over the years. On 5 February 1942, Churchill proposed in cabinet to visit India to make its Congress leaders an offer of postwar independence, in return for their supporting the war effort. But instead the war cabinet sent its senior Labour minister, Sir Stafford Cripps, known for his friendship with Congress leaders. When the Cripps mission failed to meet their demand for immediate independence, Congress launched the Quit India movement of civil disobedience against the Raj and resolved to offer only passive resistance to the Japanese invasion.
On being informed of this in September 1942, an apoplectic Churchill exclaimed to Amery: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He was referring to Hinduism, rather than Islam, given loyal support for the war effort from the Muslim League. Churchill saw Gandhi’s decision to launch the Quit India movement in the middle of the war as a stab in the back when Britain most needed and deserved loyal support.
He also (like many Indian liberals and socialists) saw Gandhi’s political fasts as a form of emotional blackmail. And he was appalled, as were many Congressmen, by extreme nationalists such as the Bengali leader Subhas Chandra Bose joining hands with Hitler and the Japanese, a fact not calculated to endear Bengalis in general to Churchill.
Churchill’s abusive comments about Gandhi, Indians and Bengalis need to be seen in that context. They also need to be seen in the context of his penchant for making outrageous comments that he didn’t really mean in order to shock or tease.
Zareer Masani, “Churchill and the genocide myth”, The Critic, 2020-12-06.
August 1, 2026
Why UK crime victims’ families always sound so similar talking to the media
On Substack Notes, John Carter linked to an article about the British Home Office’s “nudge unit” who, among other things, coax and cajole the families of murder victims to avoid any hint that they blame the perpetrators for the loss of their loved ones:
This is incredible. I always wondered how family liaison officers from RICU or the CRS reliably got the families of victims murdered by political or racial terrorists to provide such anodyne, don’t look back in anger public statements. I figured in most cases it would be concern trolling, with legal threats held in reserve.
This lays the technique bare, using interviews conducted both with victim’s families and former police officers. Liaison officers serve as anesthetic patches that get slapped on the open wounds of the migration war. They apply therapeutic techniques to calm and reassure the families, establishing dependent relationships and using the trust they build to guide them away from saying anything inflammatory when the time comes to speak to the public. If families become noncompliant in this respect, they’re threatened with causing a mistrial should they speak too openly about their feelings.
That isn’t all RICU does, of course. “Communications” includes a huge propaganda arm, which uses every tool at its disposal, including battalions of fake social media profiles. You have to wonder how much of the culture war of the last decade or more was pure hallucination.
The article in question is by David Shipley for the Pimlico Journal:
RICU, the Home Office’s Research Information and Communications Unit, is often the subject of much attention online, particularly around its role in the consistently bland calls for “unity” after horrific acts of violence. Many people online suggest that either the Unit itself, or the “specially trained officers” (Victim Liaison Officers or Family Liaison Officers) must threaten victims and their families to ensure their compliance with approved messaging. This always struck me as unlikely — widespread coercion would surely have leaked by now. There was also good reason to be sceptical of the efficacy of behavioural science applications to government. And yet public statements by those victims and their families are remarkably consistent.
So I was delighted when, a couple of months ago, Pimlico Journal asked me to investigate RICU and victim liaison properly. In order to do so, I studied historic statements, publications and coverage of RICU and spoke with victims’ families, some of whom are named in this piece and former police officers, none of whom are named, with knowledge of the Victim and Family Liaison units. What I discovered is fascinating and far more insidious than the imagined coercion. This article provides an overview of RICU’s history, goals and methodology, followed by details from those interviews. I hope it sheds some light on this murky area of the state’s “communications management”.
RICU was established in 2007 “under the Prevent strand of [the UK government’s] CONTEST strategy” with its stated goal being to “understand and counter terrorist and extremist ideologies to reduce the risk to the UK, its citizens and its interests overseas”. Giving evidence to MPs in 2009, Charles Farr, a former SIS officer, and head of the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism, who set RICU up in 2007, said the unit is “responsible for advising the rest of government [and] officialdom, from a brigade commander in Helmand province through to a chief constable in Yorkshire, about how they wish to characterise the threat we face and describe the response that we are making and, secondly, rather different, they are responsible for challenging the propaganda which comes to us from al-Qaeda and associated groups — generally not from people in this country; usually from the incessant 4,500 websites that are in one way or another associated with radical Islamist terrorist organisations around the world”.
The unit embraced convenient lies from the start. Part of their strategy was to send advice to “local authorities, people working on community cohesion projects, local police, neighbourhood policing teams” and “the Chief Constable” that they should not “talk about Islamic terrorism, not because in certain circumstances that is an inaccurate description but because the language admits of a number of interpretations which are not always helpful to us“.
RICU was also always concerned with the whole of British society — while Farr said the unit decided to “start” with Muslim communities, he told MPs that he did “not want to give the impression that RICU’s sole purpose is to communicate with Muslim communities in this country. It is not.” So by 2009 a unit existed which had “about 35 people” working for it, “and a bit of the private sector in there to advise us on aspects of communications”, which was telling every arm of the state, along with much of civil society, that they should lie about the nature of the threats the country faced, to serve the state’s perceived interests. It was also already building wide and deep relationships within many parts of the state, including policing.
What has it become, in the 17 years since Charles Farr gave his evidence?
In 2011, when the government reviewed Prevent, it found that RICU’s communications sometimes “erred in seeking to make language acceptable to some in Muslim communities, at the expense of candour”. The unit was described as having “a central role in developing counter-ideological or counter-narrative work”, although its track record was described as “mixed”. It was directed to take “more care … to identify credible partners to develop powerful and specific narratives across a range of communications channels, especially on the internet“. Despite these criticisms, the state chose to “retain RICU, largely in its current form”, but with the expectation that it would produce “much sharper and more professional counter-narrative products” — there was also a commitment to “continue to work with social media enterprises” in the battle against “propagandists and radicalisers” including those whose “propaganda work” might be illegal under “race and religious hatred legislation”. The shift is notable — Farr’s commitment that RICU would work across the whole of British society is clearly underway, with Islamic terrorism and radicalisation no longer the main focus.
More recently, RICU has long been the subject of much discussion on social media, and of occasional interest in the mainstream press. It’s often accused of being behind the anodyne calls for unity and calm issued by public bodies, victims and their families after the latest “Yookay” Event in which a migrant has done something appallingly violent. Not unrelatedly, it is generally the right who are more vocal in their criticism of RICU, and it is regularly suggested that they threaten families into sticking to the regime-approved line.
July 31, 2026
Drinker’s Extra Shots – Clarkson’s Farm
Critical Drinker After Hours
Published 30 Jul 2026In the mood for an Amazon show that’s actually good, unlike Rings of Power? Then Clarkson’s Farm, arguably the best reality show on TV right now, has got you covered. Join me for a quick review of this absolute gem.
Nobody “designed” capitalism
One of Karl Marx’s cleverer notions was to come up with a label for the economic system that had slowly emerged from the feudal period in Europe. It wasn’t ever the result of some overarching plan or campaign, it was just the easiest way for producers and consumers to connect without coercion or force. It had no real name until its declared enemy named it:
Capitalism did not begin in a boardroom. Voluntary exchange, repeated across generations, built the fairs, the credit networks, the double-entry books that Luca Pacioli codified in 1494. Nobody planned this. That’s the whole point.
The story you learned in school runs backwards. You were taught that greedy factory owners exploited children until noble legislators rescued them in 1833. What actually happened: the Industrial Revolution dragged English living standards up so fast that population doubled between 1750 and 1850 because people stopped dying. Wages rose. Life expectancy rose. The factory that horrifies the modern reader was an upgrade from a life of starving on a tenant farm at the mercy of the harvest. Children worked because their families were poor, and the factory made those families less poor. The reformers arrived after the market had already done the heavy lifting, then took credit for the sunrise.
Real capitalism needs sound money, and here is where the tragedy sharpens. Between 1815 and 1914, under a classical gold standard, prices in Britain fell gently while output exploded. You could save a coin and expect it to buy more later. That world died in stages: 1914, when governments suspended gold to print [money for] war; 1933, when Roosevelt confiscated citizens’ gold at $20.67 an ounce then revalued it to $35; 1971, when Nixon closed the window entirely and handed us the pure fiat regime you live under now.
What followed was corporatism wearing capitalism’s coat. When the Federal Reserve can conjure trillions and hand them to the banks and firms closest to the spigot, you no longer have a market allocating capital. You have a cartel allocating privilege. The 2008 bailouts were a monetary system doing exactly what a monetary system built on the printing press does.
When someone blames “unfettered capitalism” for the mess around you, ask them to point to the fetters.
The answer is to let go. Less regulation, no central bank, less tax, less government. Not more!
A few days ago, Severian point out:
Title page of Das Kapital in the first German edition of Volume 1.
Wikimedia Commons.
At its broadest, “system” means something like “the appearance of rule-governed behavior”, and so yeah, “capitalism” is a “system” in that sense. The “law” of Supply and Demand is a “rule”, if you like, and we can start piling on the ACK-shullies from there. But it’s not particularly useful trying to analyze why and how it happens; the only thing we need to proceed is to acknowledge that it does.
“It” being “reification“, which you’ll recall means “treating an abstraction as if it were a real object”. Synonyms (per Wiki) include “concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, and while I personally dig “hypostatization” — it’s got that groovy Gnostic ring to it — “reification” is easier to type; plus it was very successfully repurposed by Marx and we might need that later, so “reification” it is. Calling “the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage” Capitalism is a reification. It’s useful rhetorical shorthand …
… but it carries with it a tendency to mistake the map for the territory, you dig? Instead of confining yourself to “the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage”, you inevitably start talking about the “rules” or “laws” of Capitalism. And from there, it’s just a short leap to our course title: the morality of Capitalism.
Because that’s what rules are for, no? To keep things fair — or equal, if you prefer. If we want to find out who’s better at tennis, let’s say, we set up a bunch of rules, to eliminate from the outcome every “inequality” but skill (and dumb luck). Both players have to agree on the scoring. Tennis, therefore, really is a system, strictly speaking. It really is a game, in the mathematical and linguistic senses.
Tennis is not a reification. When we talk about tennis, we are talking about the rules of the game, or the outcome of an individual match. That’s it.
But watch what happens when we start talking about the “rules” of Capitalism. The very word “rule” (or “law”) unavoidably contains the notion of fairness. The rule determining “out of bounds” in tennis is explicitly designed to make the game fair, because that’s what game rules are for — to make the players equal in every respect but skill. You couldn’t know who is the better tennis player if the rules were arbitrary; “out of bounds” has to be clearly defined, and universally applicable.
If you start talking about the “rules” of Capitalism, then, you might not think about “fairness”, but you can’t help but feel it.
Which the contrast with Communism makes worse. Because of course “Capitalism” and “Communism” are “dialectically constructed”. I don’t like throwing Marxist jargon around, but it’s useful in this case. Because Communism is a system, or a game, or whatever word you prefer. Communism does have rules, and they are explicitly designed — like the rules of all games — to ensure equality.
(And they do, comrades, they really do. As P.J. O’Rourke pointed out back when he was funny, Communism is as fair as it gets. We’re all equally broke, starving, and dead, but goddamn it, we’re equal).
I’m sure I don’t have to tell this crowd what a bad idea it is to let your enemies define things for you, but that’s what “Capitalism” does. Karl Marx his own self invented that term. Pick your famous “Capitalist” thinker — Adam Smith, David Ricardo, whoever. They didn’t call themselves “Capitalists”; they called themselves political economists. They weren’t devising rules for a game; they were describing phenomena they observed. It was only after Marx slapped the “Capitalism” tag on the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage, that we started seeing “Capitalists”.
QotD: Cuisine on campaign
Supposing, for a moment, a bit of imagination on the part of quartermasters and cooks, and a semi-intelligent rationing authority, a war might be conducted with a bit of style. There could be rivalry between regimental kitchens, or between the galleys in Her Majesty’s fleet. Food could be made a powerful inducement in the recruitment drives.
There are some little sparks like this, in history. In the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale, that extraordinary lantern-bearing angel, procured the voluntary help of Alexis Soyer, the leading London hotel chef of the day, to advise her on the organization of field hospital kitchens. These quickly became the place to eat — almost worth getting wounded. M. Soyer applied his very broad mind to analyzing the limitations of field cookery, then turning each limitation into a strength. (I recommend his Culinary Campaign in the Crimea, 1857.)
Morale is not a small thing in the conduct of war. A hot meal served in defiance of logistics in the cold wet of a hideous trench, comes to remind us of victory, in the very face of the enemy.
David Warren, “Non-idlers”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-11-11.
July 29, 2026
Britain’s new PM is yet another Net Zero fanatic
At The Daily Sceptic, Chris Morrison points out that moving from Manchester to Downing Street has not changed Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s devotion to the climate change agenda and Net Zero fanaticism:
Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s official MP portrait, July 2026.
© House of Commons via Wikimedia Commons.
Praise the Lord, a Saviour from the North walks amongst us. The UK’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has apparently hinted that a tad more oil and gas might be taken from Britain’s remaining treasure trove lying undisturbed in the North Sea. Is this a push back on fanatical Net Zero treason as some commentators have suggested? Probably not. As always there is no need for conspiracy theories – just look at what they supported and said in the past. The new Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh is a green blob-funded whack job straight out of central climate casting, while the new tee-shirt wearing top dog is all signed up to the evil, society-destroying Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill.
It didn’t take long for the bill promoter Zero Hour (ka-ching, Green Blob money) to list the new Prime Minister as one of 193 MPs who support the proposed private member’s CAN legislation that will cut the country’s entire use of hydrocarbons – domestic and overseas – to just 10% within 10 years. Zero Hour notes of Burnham: “In 2024, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he backed the Climate and Nature Bill because he recognised that Britain needed bold, science-led action to tackle the climate and nature crisis”.
Other more accurate interpretations are available along the lines that the bill is an abominable neo-Marxist Trojan horse that would lead to mass starvation, death and almost immediate industrial and societal collapse. With little or no hydrocarbons available from any source, food supplies would be cut in half due to a lack of fertiliser, while most medicines would be unavailable. In the regular periods of wind and solar drought, particularly in the winter, thousands would die in their blacked-out and unheated homes. Thankfully, the bill failed in the House of Commons when it was debated last year, but a terrifying 200 MPs agreed with its vile contents. Over 90 Labour MPs, all the Greens and LibDems plus two crackpot Tories said they supported the bill.
We can but pray that the two unhinged Tories, Sir Roger Gale and Simon Hoare, are currently receiving sympathetic re-education treatment as the Kemi Badenoch-led Conservative party now rushes towards the Net Zero exit. Similar classes of course are required for wayward Tories who believe that men can become women, and open borders lead to civilisation contentment.
Just three reasons come to mind to explain the heavy support for the House of Commons horror show.
- Rank stupidity: If the IQ score of any supporter was much lower, steps might have to be taken to ensure regular watering.
- Blinding ignorance: Five decades of dumbed-down education must take some blame, but the inability not to use at least one critical-thinking brain cell is worrying.
- Tunnel-vision zealotry: Overwhelming desire to re-order society along State-controlling communist lines – and if the majority kulaks get it, too bad. Inventing a climate crisis without a scintilla of conclusive proof is justified to create an equal, virtuous, brave new post-truth world.
Of course, allowing the two North Sea fields Rosebank and Jackdaw to open is little more than re-arranging the deckchairs on the Net Zero Ship of Fools. Thanks to the 2008 Climate Change Act and later amendments made by the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, Britain is legally committed to short-order Net Zero destruction. Unless the legislation is torn up, new drilling is likely to be challenged in the courts. As 2050 looms closer, lawfare will likely stop almost all new projects where emissions are likely to arise from using hydrocarbons.
The small Burnham North Sea relaxation, along with the removal of 5% VAT on electricity bills, is an obvious electoral ploy to disguise the fact that Britain now has some of the highest energy costs in the industrial world – and they are likely to get a great deal higher in the future.
1960s British Army Recruitment Film | Cold War Training & Life Inside the Army
Militaria Collectors Network
Published 23 Mar 2026Step back into the 1960s and experience how the British Army trained the soldiers of the Cold War era. This rare archival recruitment film offers a fascinating look at military life, basic training, and the wide range of technical and career opportunities available to new recruits during a time of global tension and rapid modernisation.
From infantry drills and weapons training to engineering, communications, and education programmes, this film highlights how the British Army prepared men for both combat and skilled professions. Whether you’re interested in Cold War history, military training, or vintage government films, this is a unique glimpse into a defining period of British military history.
📽️ In this film:
– 1960s British Army basic training
– Infantry tactics and weapons familiarisation
– Technical trades and career paths
– Cold War-era military strategy and preparation
– Life as a British Army recruit
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July 28, 2026
Adventures in Surplus! Type 38 Arisaka Carbine in World War One
Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Mar 2026In the fall of 1914 it became apparent that the minor fracas in Serbia was going to stretch a lot longer than anyone had expected, and governments began scrambling to secure weapons production. Japan was one source of small arms for the Entente powers, and Britain purchased about 150,000 Arisaka rifles and carbines from the Japanese in late 1914 and early 1915. These were used to equip Royal Navy crews and Army raining and reserve units, but by late 1915 Enfield production had caught up and the guns were no longer needed.
In the fall of 1915, the British sent most of their Arisakas (about 128,000) to Russia, which had also been purchasing large numbers from Japan. There they were again used to arm second-line units, including troops occupying the Grand Duchy of Finland. When Finland declared its independence in December 1917, most of the Russian soldiers went home and left their weapons in Finland. As a result, the Arisaka was the second most common type of rifle available at Finland’s independence, and was used by the Civil Guard until about 1927.
This particular Type 38 Carbine was made at the Tokyo Army Arsenal in 1910, then sold to the British where it was given a set of unit marks on the stock. It was subsequently transferred to Russia, where a metal clip was added to prevent accidental magazine release. It stayed in Finland through the Finnish Civil War and afterwards, only being imported into the US recently by Postrock of Garden City, Kansas.
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QotD: Projecting the effect of a maximum wage law
We cannot know exactly, because we would struggle to find a real-world example of it in a comparable country. But we could think of it as, effectively, a 100% marginal tax rate on incomes above £100,000. We could then look at the empirical literature on how responsive top earners are to tax incentives, and extrapolate from that.
We know from previous studies that the behaviour of top earners is quite sensitive to tax changes. Last year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) tried to model the impact of a proposal to increase the tax burden on the top 5% of earners. In this case, the proposal was to lower the threshold for the 45% additional rate of income tax from £150,000 to £80,000 per annum, and to introduce an “additional additional rate” of 50% for incomes above £125,000.
If nobody changed their behaviour, such a policy would increase tax revenue by just over £9 billion per annum. But people would, of course, change their behaviour. Some top earners would switch to less demanding positions, some would retire earlier, some would reduce working hours, some would engage in more proactive tax planning (i.e. legal tax avoidance), some would simply emigrate, and so on.
We know for certain that responses of that kind exist. But we cannot exactly quantify them. So the IFS came up with a range of plausible outcomes rather than one definite number. It turns out that at the most optimistic end of the spectrum, behavioural changes would still knock over a third off the potential additional tax revenue, reducing it from over £9 billion to under £6 billion. At the most pessimistic end of the spectrum, the policy would fail to raise any additional tax revenue – it would, in fact, reduce revenue by almost £1 billion. (Stop smirking, Dr Laffer.)
If a tax rate of 50% can be predicted to trigger such strong behavioural responses, you can guess how much damage an implicit rate of 100% would do.
Kristian Niemietz, “The public love it, so what’s wrong with the idea of a maximum wage?”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2020-10-14.
