The Tank Museum
Published 29 May 2026Even though we call ourselves The Tank Museum, at heart we are the museum of the Royal Armoured Corps. That means we don’t just have tanks — we have a wide range of armoured fighting vehicles that tell the story of the Corps. Within that collection sits the armoured car.
On the surface it can seem redundant: tanks are better armoured, have superior cross-country mobility and usually carry bigger guns. So why do armoured cars — a concept that predates the tank — remain in service today? After all, a Ferret doesn’t sound nearly as intimidating when up against the likes of the Chieftain.
00:00 | Introduction
01:25 | Starting Small
02:49 | Speed Demons
09:40 | Going Global
13:13 | Only the Enemy in Front
19:28 | Go Big or Go Home
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September 30, 2026
What’s the Point of Armoured Cars?
September 26, 2026
SIG Manurhin 543 Semiauto: I Really Like This Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 May 2026SIG introduced the 540 series of rifles in 1973, which included the full-length 540 in 5.56mm, the 541 in a number of experimental calibers for the Swiss military, the 542 in 7.62mm NATO, and the 543 carbine with an 11.8″ (300mm) barrel in 5.56mm. In 1978 they licensed production of the 540, 542, and 543 to Manurhin in France, to sidestep Swiss export laws. The rifles were sold to a wide variety of small nations in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Middle East — including Lebanon, where this example came from. A batch of 542 and 543 kits came into the US from Lebanon recently, and Troy Ess at TTE Precision Metalwerks developed semiauto receivers for them.
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September 24, 2026
Making 200-Year-Old Mayonnaise – How has it changed?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 31 Mar 2026Thick, creamy mayonnaise made with tarragon vinegar and gelatin
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1828Mayonnaise (or magnonnaise, as Carême calls it in this recipe from 1828), didn’t really become popular until the early 19th century. First popular in France, by the 1850s, cookbooks in other countries were including recipes for it, sometimes with several variations. Earlier recipes commonly used gelatin, but by the end of the 19th century, the recipe looked very much like what we make today.
Homemade mayonnaise is vastly better than anything you can buy. There’s a nice zing from the vinegar in this one, and even if you don’t like store bought mayonnaise, I think you should give this a try; it’s really delicious. If you’re not worried about historical accuracy, you could make this without the gelatin.
White Magnonnaise Sauce
Place into a medium bowl two egg yolks (as pale as possible), a large pinch of white salt, the same of white pepper, and a quarter of a tablespoon of tarragon vinegar. You briskly stir this mixture with a wooden spoon; and as soon as it begins to thicken, you add half a tablespoon of oil from Aix. As soon as the sauce thickens, you add a few drops of vinegar, then oil, and so on, taking care to work it constantly … As it thickens, you add a little oil at a time, as well as vinegar and a small amount of aspic jelly … by adding the oil and vinegar little by little…you see it gradually come together, becoming firm and velvety like a well-set cream. Finally, after having incorporated two glass of oil, half a glass of aspic jelly, and the necessary vinegar to make it pleasantly tangy, you use it immediately.
— Le cuisinier parisien by Marie-Antoine Carême, 1828
September 20, 2026
What Caused the War of 1812?
Real Time History
Published 17 Apr 2026The War of 1812 broke out after a series of escalations between Great Britain and the still young United States. The impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy desperate to crew their ships in the ongoing war against Napoleon, the question if the US could trade with Britain and France at the same time and thus profit of the war, all came to a head after failed negotiations.
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September 18, 2026
Guatemalan Contract St Chamond 70mm Mountain Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 May 2026Despite the French Army adopting a 65mm mountain gun in 1906, several French companies — including St Chamond and Schneider — developed their own mountain gun designs in the years before World War One. These were popular guns for foreign export, being relatively small, light, and inexpensive. St Chamond’s 70mm gun was built on the same breech design as their previous 75mm field gun, at the request of the Mexican military and famous small arms designer Manuel Mondragon. Quantities were sold to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belgium (for use in the Belgian Congo). This example is a Guatemalan one, now in the United States as a live, registered, transferrable Destructive Device.
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September 13, 2026
The Devils by Ken Russell
On her Substack, kulak explains why The Devils is the “greatest film of all time”:
What if the 1990s Berserk anime, Warhammer 40k, A Man for All Seasons, The Wickerman (1972), Cromwell, 1984, The Gulag Archipelago, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the chronically underrated 2012 horror masterpiece Compliance … were all the same horrifying movie?
What if Mel Gibson made a film like Apocalypto, exploring the nightmarish depths of political/religious sacrifice rituals … But about Early-Modern Shakespeare-era Europe?
I’m constantly asked for my “Greatest Film of all Time” … A torturous question for someone who’s seen as many movies as me … And doubly torturous because maybe the best true answer is one its really hard to name:
Ken Russel’s The Devils might be it.
Certainly the best 30 Years War film ever made.
And the Greatest goth movie ever made.
And the Greatest witch hunt movie ever made.
And the Greatest “MeToo” movie ever made.
And the Greatest “insane asylum” movie ever made.
And CERTAINLY the Greatest Exorcist movie ever made.
Yes, I said that. And I mean it. Did I stutter?And maybe the Greatest “Dark Fantasy” film ever made … Except for the fact that the whole thing is true.
And its being rereleased, the full remastered director’s cut in 4K, this October in Cinemas.
(The strobe effect is only in the trailer)
Ken Russel’s The Devil, adapted from Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudon and the play The Devils by Dan Whiting, is one of my top five films of all time. And certainly one of the biggest films of all time in it’s own weird way. It does things as impressive for the spiritual, psychological horrifying, and historical on film as Sergei Bonderchuk’s Waterloo does for warfare or Akira for Scifi and Animation.
Indeed I think I might be the only one who could give that answer, given I might be one of like 10 people who know 17th Century History/Literature and obscure extreme Horror Cinema well enough to INSIST on its OVERWHELMING historical accuracy.
Indeed I’d struggle to think of a film which captures the Insane deadly hypersexual kaleidoscopic character of the 17th century better.
I’ve been doing this a lot recently … But I feel I need to lay out my qualifications here to talk about this … My two areas of focus in university were 17th and 18th century English Literature (Shakespeare through to Jane Austin), and 17th and 18th century Political theory (specifically the works of Hobbes, Locke, Hugo Grotius and other natural law theorists … Yes, I took the BoomerCons seriously when they said natural law was the basis of our society, Like an idiot) … I’m by no means an expert, but the broad flavor of this era: Culturally, religiously, politically, historically, militarily, theoretically, theologically, poetically … Was what I immersed myself in during the years when I should have been drinking and partying more and repeating nonsense to people in power, and other things that actually advance your career.
I need to establish that off the bat because I feel as if a huge part of the reason this film is not regarded as a contender for “Greatest film ever made” is the simply the fact that audiences and critics do not believe it, and certainly do not GET it.
That it is SO Bizarre, and SO weird, and SO horrifyingly violent, and SO hypersexual, and SO saturated in its colors, and SO religiously discordant … That it has to be a bizarre psychedelic hellscape of Ken Russel’s perverse drug-addled imagination …
They especially had to think this because if they accepted that it was indeed historically accurate, and not a bizarre sexual/psychedelic story of the American 1960s and 70s reading themselves back into history … Suddenly they’d have to accept that the same thing done to Loudon in 1634 was what was being done to America in the middle of the 20th century, and has been done to the west more or less ever since …
That the yo-yo between state-enforced debauchery one the one hand, and moral panic witch-hunts on the other, is not a schizophrenic attribute of mass media or “Moral Progress” or American Culture … But a highly historically precedented and calculated attack meant to destroy and enslave a people without fighting them.
That “Free Love”, “Feminist Criticism”, “Queer Theory”, “No Fault Divorce”, and “Hostile Work Environment lawsuits” rock society between the extremes of sexual license and socio-sexual moral-panic for the same reason one might rapidly rock a boat between it’s port and starboard sides … To capsize it into the devouring abyss.
That we are indeed living through Loudon at scale.
September 1, 2026
St. Chamond 75mm field gun: From Mondragon to WW1 tanks to Israel
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Apr 2026The design for the St Chamond 75mm field gun was initially created by Mexican small arms designer Manual Mondragon, who worked extensively in artillery as well as small arms. As Mexico had no domestic artillery production capability, he worked with the engineering team at St Chamond under Emile Rimailho to complete the design, and Mexico purchased 100 of these guns by 1910, forming the backbone of Mexican Army artillery during the period. The gun is a screw breech rapid fire piece, using fully self-contained ammunition (both shrapnel and HE projectiles). It fires a 12-16 pound shell at about 1650 fps, with a range of about 6500 meters.
In September 1914 the French government panic-ordered a batch of these guns, but then reconsidered and cancelled its order in favor of simplifying logistics with just the more common Mle 1897 75mm guns. That decision changed again in 1915, with an order for 200. These were not formally classified by the French Army, but St Chamond called them the Mle 1915. The gun was identical to the original Mexican pattern except revised to use the same ammunition as the Mle 1897 (the classic “French 75”) instead of its original slightly different cartridge. These guns were initially used for general field service, but pulled off the line when it became apparent that their recoil systems were not really able to handle the stresses of the constant firing required. Instead, they were used as the main armament for the initial 210 St Chamond heavy tanks (less the first 48 that did not receive main guns). After these were used up, the Mle 1897 was used instead.
One final element of combat service for the guns took place in 1948, when Mexico sold 32 of them to Israel, where they were used in Israel’s war of independence. Three examples remain on display in Israeli museums today, more than anywhere else. The one I am looking at today is a Mexican contract piece made in 1904, registered in the US as a live and transferrable Destructive Device.
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August 23, 2026
QotD: “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store”
It’s one of those numbers that sings so easily you’d have to be a total idiot to louse it up. I’ve always loved it because it’s pure Americana, a song that no other culture could have produced. As I mentioned last week, I’m often asked how I started writing, what got me interested, who were my influences, all the usual questions. And I don’t really have a ready answer. But, if I were to be semi-serious about it, it was songs like this that tickled my curiosity about language – not just the words and phrases and images, but the way the ideas were expressed so neatly. Compression is the essence of songwriting, and if you had to come up with a couplet that defines the genre, that encompasses a whole world and a whole point of view and an entire musical tradition, “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store” comes as close as any.
I once asked a friend in the French music biz how the song went over there. I hummed him the tune and he sang me the French lyrics and, although I can’t recall any of them, I remember they were entirely different from the English words. It’s not just the five-and-ten that’s hard to translate or the million dollar baby. But the concept of finding the latter inside the former is also very American. There are a ton of Mitteleuropean operettas in which the prince or duke or count wanders into the streets in disguise and falls in love with a serving wench, but the serving wench usually turns out to be a Countess or Margravine or some such also wandering around in disguise. Even the British are prone to this syndrome (Spring In Park Lane, etc). But in an American song the shop girl is a genuine shop girl, and she’s still a million dollar baby. That’s what makes it American.
In the Sixties, by the way, you could have found a future billion dollar baby in a five and ten cent store: Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, got his start in retail as a franchisee at a Ben Franklin’s, founded in 1920 by the Butler brothers, who’d been in the five-and-dime business since the 1870s. I’m not saying “I Found a Million Dollar Greeter in the Big Box Store at the Strip Mall on the Edge of Town” would be as big a hit, but there is an historical continuity from the Butlers to Wal-Mart.
Mark Steyn, “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)”, Steyn Online, 2020-10-25.
August 22, 2026
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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August 14, 2026
QotD: Postmodernism’s origins
Leading the way were the French intellectuals, who in the 1960s and 70s questioned the deepest of those assumptions, beginning with truth itself. Was there really such a thing as “objective truth”, or was it simply an invention of the powerful, something declared rather than discovered? Was “progress” a description of reality or just the story told by whoever won? These are serious questions from which they could make fair observations. They were right to point out that institutions serve their own interests, and grand narratives play a defining role in our understanding and interpretation of the world. The trouble is that the same intellectuals didn’t try to place the answers intelligibly within the larger story of our lives. Postmodernism made interrogating power the overriding intellectual move and the answer to its own question.
Postmodernism doesn’t lend itself to a simple explanation, which is appropriate, as we shall see. However, dig beneath the deliberately impenetrable jargon, and the core claims are as follows. There is no objective truth, only competing narratives. What we think of as “knowledge” is just something the powerful tell us is the case. Language doesn’t describe reality but constructs it. Science, reason, and universal liberalism are inventions of Western minds, specifically male ones, while the Enlightenment idea of the individual with supposed natural rights is just another concept made up by those most likely to benefit from it.
There’s an obvious paradox at the outset. In what sense is it true to say there’s no such thing as objective truth? The question is meaningless because the premise is nonsensical. As Roger Scruton put it, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”
Despite the obvious contradiction, it’s an idea that has been pushed aggressively by campus authoritarians for decades. No narrative deserves authority, they say, while demanding intellectual obedience to a narrative of their own.
Frederick Alexander, “Postmodernism: The Idea That Ate Itself”, The Gadfly, 2026-04-03.
August 9, 2026
How To Launch the Apocalypse – Death of Democracy 27 – Q3 1939
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 8 Aug 2026This is Step 27 in the Death of Democracy: LAUNCH A WORLD WAR — the moment when the collapse of democracy, diplomacy, and collective security culminated in an attack that would engulf the world.
In July and August 1939, Adolf Hitler turned the destruction of German democracy into the instrument for launching a European war.
While Nazi Germany armed Danzig, mobilized reservists, prepared its U-boats, introduced civilian rationing, and manufactured stories of Polish aggression, Britain, France, Poland, the United States, and the Soviet Union made a final series of increasingly desperate attempts to prevent catastrophe.
At the center of the crisis was the failed effort to construct an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance against Nazi aggression. Negotiations foundered on delay, mutual suspicion, the Baltic states, and the Soviet demand for military passage through Poland. Stalin then chose an agreement with Hitler: the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocol divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence and prepared the way for the destruction of Poland.
Inside Germany, there was little repetition of the supposed national enthusiasm of August 1914. Nazi leaders and Wehrmacht commanders ranged from confidence and opportunism to anxiety and fatalism, while many ordinary Germans feared that Hitler had finally pushed Europe beyond the point of no return. Yet propaganda, repression, and six years of dictatorship had stripped the population of any effective means of preventing the war.
The next episode will conclude the series with an epilogue examining what the destruction of the Weimar Republic teaches us about defending democracy today.
July 20, 2026
Eight Great Powers Invade China: the Boxer Uprising 1900-1901
Real Time History
Published 20 Feb 2026After the defeat in the 1st Sino-Japanese War, the Qing Dynasty is under pressure: Some are calling for domestic reforms and ousting Western influence, while the Great Powers want to further open up China for their businesses. Violence erupts when the so called Boxer movement kills several Westerners.
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July 18, 2026
The Top WW2 Spy Was a Disabled Woman
World War Two
Published 16 Jul 2026Virginia Hall was one of the most extraordinary spies of World War II. An American operative for Britain’s Special Operations Executive and later the OSS, Hall built resistance networks in occupied France, coordinated intelligence, organized safe houses, helped escaped prisoners and airmen, and supported maquis fighters who sabotaged German operations during the liberation of France.
Known to the Gestapo as “the Limping Lady”, Hall worked with a wooden prosthetic leg she nicknamed Cuthbert. After escaping over the Pyrenees, she returned to France in 1944 in disguise, operating a radio, arranging parachute drops, and helping organize resistance forces against the German occupation.
This is the true story of Virginia Hall: the disabled American spy who became one of the most feared Allied agents in Nazi-occupied Europe — and one of the most important women in WWII intelligence history.
July 14, 2026
The problem is the state
Brivael Le Pogram explains that acceptance of mediocrity is key to the decline of most western societies … meek acceptance that we are lesser people living in the ruins of a just-passed but rapidly receding Golden Age:
An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m on a “air-conditioned” train where it’s 26 degrees. The WiFi doesn’t work. No one says a word.
And that’s what fascinates me the most: not the breakdown, but the collective acceptance.
The socialist state has pulled off a psychological feat. It’s made us internalize that a mediocre service, paid for at exorbitant cost, is normal. That it’s even what “public service” means.
The same service in a free market would cost a fraction of the price. And if the AC broke down, you’d be refunded within the hour, because a competitor is waiting right next door for you to switch shops.
Make a list of everything the state touches:
Education: plummeting standards, teachers burning out, PISA rankings in freefall.
Healthcare: months-long waits, hallways full of gurneys, caregivers fleeing.
Transport: delays, breakdowns, strikes, prices exploding.
Justice: years for a judgment.
Police: overwhelmed, demoralized.
Colossal budgets.
Record-high tax takes in Europe.
Result: everything’s rotten.Why?
Because two things are missing that only the market provides: skin in the game and prices.
Skin in the game first. An entrepreneur who delivers a lousy service goes bankrupt. He loses HIS money, HIS reputation, HIS years of work. A bureaucrat who mismanages a public service loses nothing. He’ll get promoted, transferred, or at worst he’ll coast to retirement. Failure has no personal consequences. So failure repeats, indefinitely.
Prices next. Hayek showed it: market prices are an information system. Every price aggregates millions of individual decisions and signals where to allocate resources. When the state sets prices or subsidizes at a loss, it destroys that signal. No one knows anymore what anything is worth. We sprinkle money at random, we waste, and we call it “public investment”.
That’s why the bureaucrat is the worst possible steward of your taxes: he spends other people’s money, on other people. No incentive to save, no incentive to serve well. Milton Friedman summed it up in one sentence: it’s the worst of the four ways to spend money.
The problem isn’t this minister, that government, this reform. The problem is structural. A monopoly without competition, without prices, without skin in the game, will ALWAYS produce mediocrity. No matter who’s running it. No matter the budget.
If you’ve grasped that, you’ve grasped 90% of political economy.
So do one simple thing: explain it to your loved ones. Next delayed train, next emergency room wait, ask the question: “Who loses money when this service sucks?” Answer: no one. That’s the problem.
The information will eventually spread. And one day, collectively, we’ll stop swallowing it.
The problem is the state. Always.
Auto-translated from the original French by X.
Update, 15 July: 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.
