While fortifications obviously had existed a long time, when we talk about castles, what we really mean is a kind of fortified private residence which also served as a military base. This form of fortification really only becomes prominent (as distinct from older walled towns and cities) in 9th century, in part because the collapse of central authority (due in turn to the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire) led to local notables fortifying their private residences. This process was, unsurprisingly, particularly rapid and pronounced in the borderlands of the various Carolingian splinter kingdoms (where there were peer threats from the other splinters) and in areas substantially exposed to Scandinavian (read: Viking) raiding. And so functionally, a castle is a fortified house, though of course large castles could encompass many other functions. In particular, the breakdown of central authority meant that these local aristocrats also represented much of the local government and administration, which they ran not through a civil bureaucracy but through their own households and so in consequence their house (broadly construed) was also the local administrative center.
Now, we can engage here in a bit of a relatable thought experiment: how extensively do your fortify your house (or apartment)? I’ll bet the answer is actually not “none” – chances are your front door locks and your windows are designed to be difficult to open from the outside. But how extensive those protections are vary by a number of factors: homes in high crime areas might be made more resistant (multiple deadbolts, solid exterior doors rather than fancy glass-pane doors, possibly even barred windows at ground level). Lots of neighbors can lower the level of threat for a break-in, as can raw obscurity (as in a house well out into the country). Houses with lots of very valuable things in them might invest in fancy security systems, or at least thief deterring signs announcing fancy security systems. And of course the owner’s ability to actually afford more security is a factor. In short, home defenses respond to local conditions aiming not for absolute security, but for a balance of security and cost: in safe places, home owners “consume” that security by investing less heavily in it, while homeowners who feel less safety invest more in achieving that balance, in as much as their resources allow. And so the amount of security for a house is not a universal standard but a complicated function of the local danger, the resources available and the individual home owner’s risk tolerance. Crucially, almost no one aims for absolute home security.
And I go through this thought process because in their own way the same concerns dictate how castles – or indeed, any fortification – is constructed, albeit of course a fortified house that aims to hold off small armies rather than thieves is going to have quite a bit more in the way of defenses than your average house. No fortification is ever designed to be absolutely impenetrable (or perhaps most correctly put, no wise fortress designer ever aims at absolute impenetrability; surely some foolish ones have tried). This is a fundamental mistake in assessing fortifications that gets made very often: concluding that because no fortification can be built to withstand every assault, that fortification itself is useless; but withstanding every assault is not the goal. The goal is not to absolutely prohibit every attack but merely to raise the cost of an attack above either a potential enemy’s willingness to invest (so they don’t bother) or above their ability to afford (so the attack is attempted and fails) and because all of this is very expensive the aim is often a sort of minimum acceptable margin of security against an “expected threat” (which might, mind you, still be a lot of security, especially if the “expected threat” is very high). This is true of the castle itself, if for no other reason than that resources are scarce and there are always other concerns competing for them, but also for every component of its defenses: individual towers, gates and walls are not designed to be impenetrable, merely difficult enough.
This is particularly true in castle design because the individuals building these castles often faced fairly sharp limitations in the resources at their disposal. Castles as a style of fortification emerge in a context of political fragmentation, in particular the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, which left even the notional large kingdoms (like the kingdom of France) internally fragmented. Castles were largely being built not by kings but by counts and dukes who held substantial landholdings but nothing like the resources of Charlemagne or Louis the Pious, much less the Romans or Assyrians. Moreover, the long economic and demographic upswing of the Middle Ages was only just beginning to gain momentum; the great cities of the Roman world had shrunk away and the total level of economic production declined, so the sum resources available to these rulers were lower. Finally, the loss of the late Roman bureaucracy (replaced by these fragmented realms running on an economic system best termed “manorialism”) meant that the political authorities (the nobility) often couldn’t even get a hold of a very large portion of the available economic production they did have. Consequently, castle construction is all about producing what security you can with as little labor, money and resources as possible (this is always true of any fortification, mind you, merely that in this period the resource constraints are much tighter).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.
December 14, 2023
QotD: The rise of castles in early Medieval Europe
December 13, 2023
How Churchill Started the Cold War in Greece in 1944 – War Against Humanity 121
World War Two
Published 12 Dec 2023You might think that the Cold War starts after this war ends. But already, as the Germans withdraw from Greece, the ideologically opposed Greek resistance groups ELAS and EDES are at each others’ throats. It all culminates in Athens in December 1944; British troops fire some of the first shots of the Cold War as Greece descends into Civil War.
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December 12, 2023
La trahison des intellectuels modernes
Niall Ferguson explains why the situation in Europe in the late 1920s persuaded Julien Benda to publish the famous La trahison des clercs … and how similar the situation in western academia is to a century ago:
In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs — “The Treason of the Intellectuals” — which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics.
Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds”. And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence — with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.
A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction — leftward instead of rightward — but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we — unlike the Germans — can do something about it.
For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory”, and apologists for Islamist extremism.
Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?
Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.
I cannot stop thinking of the son of a Jewish friend of mine, who is a graduate student at one of the Ivy League colleges. Just this week, he went to the desk assigned to him to find, carefully placed under his computer keyboard, a note with the words “ZIONIST KIKE!!!” in red and green letters.
Just as disturbing as such incidents — and there are too many to recount — has been the dismally confused responses of university leaders.
On Machiavelli
Rob Henderson dips into the works of Niccolo Macchiavelli, not so you don’t have to, but perhaps in hopes you’ll do so as well:
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.
This is an overview of Niccolò Machiavelli — his backstory, his personal views, a summary of Machiavellian thought, and an explanation for why his ideas have been so despised throughout history.
Throughout his books, Machiavelli seems to take delight in demonstrating — much to his reader’s discomfort — the distance between our lofty intentions and the actual consequences of our deeds.
Writing in the sixteenth century, Machiavelli anticipated Nietzsche’s conception of master and slave morality by some three hundred years.
In Ch. 15 of The Prince he wrote:
Since it is my intent to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of things than to the imagination of it … many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth … he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.
This passage is often viewed as the essence of Machiavellianism. He had no intentions of disguising unpleasant realities. He wanted to describe the world as it is, and not as people wish it to be.
[…]
Machiavelli rejected the dominant utopian ideas of his day, including Platonic or Augustinian cities of God and the concept of Christian universalism (or its modern variant of Humanism).
Machiavelli warns rulers to be on guard against those who do not see men as they are, and see them through spectacles colored by their hopes and wishes, their loves and hatreds, in terms of an idealized image that they want men to be, and not as they are.
Some pieces of advice Machiavelli offers to rulers:
- Employ brutality or kindness, as the case requires. Brutality is usually more effective, but kindness, in some situations, bears more fruit
- It’s better to be feared than loved. Love is fickle, but fear is predictable. The worst is to be hated. Hatred will lead your subjects to destroy you
- It’s a good idea to keep your people in a state of poverty and always prepared for war. This helps to reduce both ambition and boredom — two qualities that can undermine obedience
- Fierce competition in a society is desirable, for it generates energy and ambition
- Religion must be promoted regardless of how truthful it is, because it supplies social solidarity
- When you confer benefits to the people, make sure to do so yourself. But let minions do the dirty work of inflicting punishments because then they, not you, will be blamed, and you can then gain the people’s favor by cutting off your minions’ heads
- Men prefer vengeance and security to liberty
- If you have to commit a crime, don’t advertise it beforehand. Otherwise your enemies may destroy you before you destroy them
- Punishment should be delivered in a swift and brutal manner, while rewards should be dispersed in small amounts over time
- Be wary of powerful advisors and servants — victorious generals should be purged after they have served their purpose, otherwise they may attempt to usurp you
- You can be violent and use your power to command obedience, but if you break your own laws you will undermine societal stability
- Men should either be caressed or annihilated; appeasement and neutralism always lead to ruin. Your adversaries can recover from minor injuries and setbacks to seek revenge. But if you crush them totally, you neutralize any threat.
- Rulers must live in the constant expectation of war
- Success inspires more devotion than friendliness and affability
- Men will lie to you unless you compel them to be truthful by creating circumstances in which deception will not pay
This list could continue but I’ll stop here.
Rolling a Reliant Robin | Top Gear | BBC
Top Gear
Published 26 Nov 2010Jeremy takes the extreme sport of Reliant Robin rolling to the streets of Barnsley, aided by a string of celebrities who just happen to be on hand to help keep the fabled three-wheeler upright.
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QotD: “Natural hierarchies” don’t work in distributed systems
Politics, being a distributed system, doesn’t work like that. Neither does the corporate world, which is why both invariably end up dominated by sociopathic, sexually deviant shitweasels. Whereas the social interaction in a bar, in a pickup basketball game, in a church group, whatever, naturally bends towards a baboon troop, “social” interaction in a distributed power structure bends towards whoever has the time, energy, and sheer Wille zur Macht, as our friend above would put it, to dominate it.
Example: Even at the height of his power, when he really could have liquidated everyone in the room with a wave of his hand, Joe Stalin didn’t win arguments with his nomenklatura by threatening to have them all shot. Rather, he outworked them. Even when he exercised the most raw power any one human being is capable of wielding, Stalin’s work ethic was legendary – he spent a minimum of fifteen hours a day at his desk, every day, 365 days a year. He simply ground down all lesser men with the sheer force of his leather ass and cast-iron bladder … and compared to Stalin, when it came to paperwork, all men were lesser men.
That’s a cast of mind, reinforced by the habits of a lifetime. Stalin was also a dominant personality by the end, of course, but he certainly didn’t start that way – he was cringingly servile to Lenin, for instance, and even once to Trotsky, which is probably the main reason Trotsky had to die when you come right down to it.
Hitler was the same way, in his own special, bizarre way. While no one would ever accuse Hitler of an overactive work ethic when it comes to government – those who study these things still can’t get their heads around it, the fact that for long, critical periods the Third Reich basically didn’t have a government – but he could wear you down with the best of them when it came to party speeches, organizing, propaganda. No one worked harder at that stuff than Corporal Hitler … and no one knuckled under to authority faster, which is why he remained Corporal Hitler despite four years on the Western Front.
Combine them, and you get the Big Man On Campus thoroughly dominated by the deviant sociopathic shitweasels. The BMOC dominates every personal interaction; therefore, he thinks it’s the rules which get him where he is. Society is set up, he thinks, to produce people such as himself. And since that society is also set up such that the deviant sociopathic shitweasels (we should probably acronymize that; hereafter, DSS) do the boring shit like student government, when the DSS pass some bizarre law the BMOC just rolls with it …
Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.
December 11, 2023
Roman glossary
As I continue to post QotD entries drawn from Bret Devereaux’s fascinating historical blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (with Dr. Devereaux’s kind permission, I hasten to add), the number of names and specialized terms from the Roman Republic and Empire also expands. As some of these terms pop up in my shorter excerpts without immediate context, I think that a glossary for Rome is called for (similar to the Spartan glossary, as there’s a lot more Roman content coming up, it being Dr. Devereaux’s area of academic specialization) to help explain the terms that I think may need expansion in these excerpts from his longer posts. As usual, most of the information is drawn directly from ACOUP (often from more than one original post) and where I’ve felt the need to interpolate any additional information it will be enclosed in square brackets. Errors and misinterpretations of his original work are purely mine.
This man built his office inside a lift
Tom Scott
Published 28 Aug 2023The Baťa Skyscraper, in Zlín, Czechia, is a landmark of architecture. And the office of Jan Antonín Baťa … is an elevator.
Thanks to the museum staff for fact-checking and translation!
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QotD: The Palace of Westminster
I worked for some years in this odd place. It is by law a Royal Palace, so nobody was ever officially allowed to die on the premises, in case the death had to be inquired into by some fearsome, forgotten tribunal, perhaps a branch of Star Chamber. Those who appeared to have deceased were deemed to be still alive and hurried to a nearby hospital where life could be pronounced extinct and an ordinary inquest held. We were also exempt from the alcohol laws that used in those days to keep most bars shut for a lot of the time, and if the drinks were not free they were certainly amazingly cheap.
In my years of wandering its corridors and lobbies, of hanging about for late-night votes and dozing in committee rooms, I came to loathe British politics and to mistrust the special regiment of journalists (far too close to their sources) who write about it. I had hoped for a kingdom of the mind and found a squalid pantry in which greasy, unprincipled deals were made by people who were no better than they ought to be.
But I came to love the building. Once you had got past the police sentinels, who knew who everyone was, you could go everywhere, even the thrilling ministerial corridor behind the Speaker’s chair, from which Prime Ministers emerged to face what was then the genuine ordeal of Parliamentary questions, twice a week. There was a rifle range beneath the House of Lords, set up during World War I to make sure honorable members of both Houses would be able to shoot Germans accurately if they ever met any. There was a room where they did nothing but prepare vast quantities of cut flowers, and which perfumed the flagstone corridor in which it lay. There was a convivial staff bar (known to few) where the beer was the best in the building and politicians in trouble would hide from their colleagues. The Lords had a whole half of the Palace, with lovely murals illustrating noble moments of our history, and the Chief Whip’s cosy, panelled office where reporters would be summoned once a week for dangerous gossip and perilously large glasses of whisky or very dry sherry, generously refilled. And high up in the roof, looking down over the murky Thames, was the room where the government briefed us, in meetings whose existence we were sworn never to reveal. Now they are pretty much public, so the real briefings must happen somewhere else, I suppose.
Peter Hitchens, “An Empty Parliament”, First Things, 2017-10-03.
December 10, 2023
Can the Americans Stop the Kamikazes? – WW2 – Week 276 – December 9, 1944
World War Two
Published 9 Dec 2023This is a very busy week of the war. In the west, the Americans manage to reach the Roer River in force, but haven’t taken any of its dams; in Italy, the Allies liberate Ravenna; the Soviet advance in Hungary continues, and the Soviets even set up a new Hungarian government; martial law is declared in Greece; the Japanese make a corridor to Indochina; the fighting on Leyte continues, and the kamikaze menace becomes ever more worrisome.
00:00 INTRO
01:10 British intelligence failure
01:55 Allies reach the Roer River
05:35 Problems with Devers’ 6th Army Group
07:41 Allies liberate Ravenna
08:50 Soviet advances in Hungary
12:10 Soviets set up a new Hungarian government
13:47 A deadly demonstration and martial law in Greece
18:33 Japanese establish a corridor to Indochina
19:59 Leyte and kamikaze attacks
23:45 CONCLUSION
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The history of the steam engine … but interactive
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes is pleased to announce the release of a new ongoing project to illustrate the steam engine in an interactive format:
I’m excited to announce something I’ve been quietly working on for a few months now behind the scenes. Some of you may be familiar with the explorable interactive articles of Bartosz Ciechanowski. They are so clearly written and so cleverly explorable, that they give an intuitive grasp of how many very complicated technologies work. My favourite is his article on mechanical watches. Be warned: if you’ve not seen these before, you’re about to lose a good few hours.
But his article on watches — which came out just as I was doing some research on the development of watches, and which proved an invaluable reference work — got me thinking about how great it would be to have something similar not just for how current technologies function, but to show how they changed over time. Wouldn’t it be great, I dreamed, to have a similarly intuitive way to explore and appreciate the process of improvement. And to correct lots of misapprehensions about the development of various technologies along the way.
As it turned out, my fellow inventions history fanatic Jason Crawford, who runs the non-profit The Roots of Progress, had been thinking along the same lines. (Drumroll starts softly.) So with the help of the Matt Brown we’ve been able to realise what is hopefully just the first small step of our vision. (Drumroll intensifies.) Based on my recent work re-writing the standard pre-history of the steam engine (drumroll crescendoes), allow me to present:
(Cue trumpets!)
The interactive, animated, **Origins of the Steam Engine**
Alongside contemporary illustrations of the many devices, you can play around with the animated models, dragging them to see them from different angles. It introduces what are so far the only interactive and animated models yet made of a great many devices — from Philo of Byzantium’s 3rd Century BC experiments, to Salomon de Caus’s 1610s solar-activated and self-replenishing fountains and musical instruments, and the 1606 steam engine of the Spanish engineer Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont:
It also contains the first depictions of the 1630s and 40s devices of Kaspar Kalthoff and William Petty. These are the experiments I discovered about a year ago, which I hope will now be given a place in the canon of the history of the steam engine. (You can read my discussion of the evidence I’d stumbled across about them here.)
Engines of War: How Wars Were Won and Lost on the Railways
WW2TV
Published 15 Jun 2023Engines of War: How Wars Were Won and Lost on the Railways With Christian Wolmar
Before the nineteenth century, armies had to rely on slow and unreliable methods of transportation to move soldiers and equipment during times of conflict. But with the birth of the railroad in the early 1830s, the way wars were fought would change forever. In this show renowned expert Christian Wolmar tells the story of that transformation with a focus on railways in WWII and especially the Normandy campaign.
Christian Wolmar is a British journalist, author, railway historian and Labour Party politician. He is known for his commentary on transport, especially as a pundit on Britain’s railway industry, and was named Transport Journalist of the Year in the National Transport Awards in 2007.
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QotD: Roman citizenship
The most common way to become a Roman citizen was by birth, though the Roman law on this question is more complex and centers on the Roman legal concept of conubium – the right to marry and produce legally recognized heirs under Roman law. Conubium wasn’t a right held by an individual, but a status between two individuals (though Roman citizens could always marry other Roman citizens). In the event that a marriage was lawfully contracted, the children followed the legal status of their father; if no lawfully contracted marriage existed, the child followed the status of their mother (with some quirks; Ulpian, Reg. 5.2; Gaius, Inst. 1.56-7 – on the quirks and applicability in the Republic and conubium in general, see S.T. Roselaar, “The Concept of Conubium in the Roman Republic” in New Frontiers: Law and Society in the Roman World, ed. P.J. du Plessis (2013)).
Consequently the children of a Roman citizen male in a legal marriage would be Roman citizens and the children of a Roman citizen female out of wedlock would (in most cases; again, there are some quirks) be Roman citizens. Since the most common way for the parentage of a child to be certain is for the child to be born in a legal marriage and the vast majority of legal marriages are going to involve a citizen male husband, the practical result of that system is something very close to, but not quite exactly the same as, a “one parent” rule (in contrast to Athens’ two-parent rule). Notably, the bastard children of Roman women inherited their mother’s citizenship (though in some cases, it would be necessarily, legally, to conceal the status of the father for this to happen, see Roselaar, op. cit., and also B. Rawson, “Spruii and the Roman View of Illegitimacy” in Antichthon 23 (1989)), where in Athens, such a child would have been born a nothos and thus a metic – resident non-citizen foreigner.
The Romans might extend the right of conubium with Roman citizens to friendly non-citizen populations; Roselaar (op. cit.) argues this wasn’t a blanket right, but rather made on a community-by-community basis, but on a fairly large scale – e.g. extended to all of the Campanians in 188 B.C. Importantly, Roman colonial settlements in Italy seem to pretty much have always had this right, making it possible for those families to marry back into the citizen body, even in cases where setting up their own community had caused them to lose all or part of their Roman citizenship (in exchange for citizenship in the new community).
The other long-standing way to become a Roman citizen was to be enslaved by one and then freed. An enslaved person held by a Roman citizen who was then freed (or manumitted) became a libertus (or liberta), by custom immediately the client of their former owner (this would be made into law during the empire) and by law a Roman citizen, although their status as a freed person barred them from public office. Since they were Roman citizens (albeit with some legal disability), their children – assuming a validly contracted marriage – would be full free-born Roman citizens, with no legal disability. And, since freedmen and freedwomen were citizens, they also could contract valid marriages with other Roman citizens, including freeborn ones […]. While most enslaved people in the Roman world had little to no hope of ever being manumitted (enslaved workers, for instance, on large estates far from their owners), Roman economic and social customs functionally required a significant number of freed persons and so a meaningful number of new Roman citizens were always being minted in the background this way. Rome’s apparent liberality with admission into citizenship seems to have been a real curiosity to the Greek world.
These processes thus churned in the background, minting new Romans on the edges of the populus Romanus who subsequently became full members of the Roman community and thus shared fully in the Roman legal identity.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.
December 9, 2023
All those (officially unexplained) “excess” mortalities
Mark Steyn discusses European and Antipodean statistical reports that echo what Maxime Bernier was talking about the other day on the as-yet officially unexplained huge rise in “excess mortality” since the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:
We are now three years into the administration of the Covid vaccines, and we have many startling statistical anomalies, including the most basic one of all: a huge mound of extra corpses. Per the EU’s official statistics agency:
Among the eighteen EU Member States that recorded excess deaths, the highest rates were in Cyprus (13.9%), Finland (13.4%), the Netherlands (12.7%) and Ireland (12.5%).
Those percentages are sufficiently high that in the Netherlands, formerly one of the healthiest nations on earth, they’re reducing life expectancy. The ongoing excess deaths are at odds with the normal post-pandemic pattern, such as the Spanish Flu a century ago. The intro to this new scientific paper sets out what’s meant to be happening:
Our approach takes into account age and gender, but also under-mortality that you would expect after a period of excess mortality.
“Under-mortality” occurs because, if the Spanish Flu killed you prematurely in 1920, you weren’t around to die when you otherwise would have done in 1924. Hence, excess mortality is followed by under-mortality. So:
If this under-mortality does not seem to be happening, it is actually hidden excess mortality.
That’s an important point. What Eurostat identifies as an excess mortality rate in Ireland of 12.5 per cent is, as a practical matter, actually higher – because it should be measured against not the pre-Covid baseline but the under-mortality one would have expected four years on. So persistent excess mortality is deeply weird, and, unlike those killed by the virus (where the median age of death by Covid is above most developed nations’ life expectancy), the extra deaths, as we have discussed on The Mark Steyn Show, are skewed towards the young and middle-aged:
We note that excess mortality in the Netherlands remains consistently high during 2020-2022 and has shifted from high to low age and towards men.
In other words, it’s not a general trend of excess deaths, but something more particular. Which, in a normal environment, would suggest something particular is causing it. Aside from excess deaths in “low age”, we also have excess deaths at no age – the babies who aren’t being born. The western world’s jabbed and re-jabbed citizenry has seen a catastrophic slump in newborns. Scandinavia:
The whole region reported sharp declines in fertility rates in 2022. Finland had the lowest fertility rate of all Nordic countries, 1.32 children. This is also the lowest Finnish rate since 1776 when monitoring of fertility rates first started.
Incidentally, that Finnish rate – of 1.3 children per woman – is what demographers call “lowest-low fertility”, from which no society has ever recovered.
Fortunately for officialdom, there was enough Covid circulating in Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, etc that the ever higher mountain of corpses can be shrugged off as most likely “Long Covid” or maybe, if necessary, “Extra-Long Covid”. In the Antipodes, they can’t get away with that. Australia and New Zealand enacted some of the most draconian public-health measures on the planet, and in effect quarantined their entire nations. As a result, pre-Omicron they had all but negligible accounts of Covid. But they obediently submitted themselves to the mass vaccination regime. And, whaddaya know, they too have extraordinary rates of excess death.
Clare Craig, a favourite guest of The Mark Steyn Show, has published a detailed analysis of the post-vaccination years Down Under. It makes for sober reading.
In 2021, for example, they had officially 1,224 deaths from Covid.
But also in 2021 – the first full year of the vaccines – they had 876 excess deaths from ischaemic heart disease alone. Plus another 583 excess deaths from other cardiac diseases.
Death by ischaemic heart disease had been in decline in Australia in the pre-vaccine years, but, having shot up in 2021, it went up even further in 2022. (Same trend with strokes.) So, having shut down the country for those 1,224 Covid deaths, you would think the public health bureaucracy might show a smidgeonette of interest in those 1,359 excess cardiac deaths.
But apparently not.
Now, across the Tasman Sea, we have a Kiwi whistleblower, Barry Young, who has released an avalanche of data with some quite disturbing takeaways that I referenced on Wednesday’s Clubland Q&A. I was careful to qualify my remarks with a lot of “ifs”, but our friend Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University, has taken a look and The Conservative Woman has published his findings. I see that on the Internet the kneejerk reaction was that Mr Young had simply leaked a lot of vaccination stuff from the old folks’ homes where the Covid centenarians would have died anyway. So it’s a biased sample.
In reality, it does not appear to be a “sample” at all:
[Steve Kirsch] says that there are widespread misunderstandings about the data and it is not biased. For a start he says that the dataset is the complete set of ‘pay-per-dose’ vaccination records and therefore there is no biased sampling at all. He says:
“The people within the group is representative of the total population. There are 2.2 million people in the group, and there are 4 million records. Each of those records is a Vaccination Record.”
2.2 million is over forty per cent of the population of New Zealand. That’s some “sample”. Nevertheless, Professor Fenton is being scrupulously cautious:
Even accounting for inevitable “survivor bias” (the more jabs a person gets, the quicker they are likely to die after their last jab) there was some evidence of increased risk the more doses a person gets. Moreover, given Steve’s comments about the datatset being the complete set of “pay-per-dose” vaccination records, this conclusion seems robust even if there were a biased proportion of vaccinee deaths in the dataset. Also (as per my above quote in Steve’s presentation) I felt that the data provided further support for the hypothesis that the vaccine was increasing the mortality rate in the older population (something which we had already concluded based on the most recent ONS data).
It’s interesting that such questions never come up at Britain’s official “Covid inquiry” which is increasingly risible in its palpable determination to find that the only mistake that was made was not to lock down harder and faster.
The other takeaway mentioned by Professor Fenton is the fatality rate of individual batches. Take a look at this handy graph:
I suppose it would be possible to argue that all 711 jabs of Batch #1 were administered to residents of the Shady Acres Retirement Home for Centenarians with Stage Four Ebola. But it’s difficult to make the same case with Batch #62 which went into the arms of 18,173 New Zealanders and killed 831 of them. Which, all by itself, is two hundred times the country’s official death toll from the vaccines. Which is to say, according to His Majesty’s Government in Wellington, precisely four Kiwis are dead of the vax.
Romanian ZB-30 LMG: Improving the Already-Excellent ZB-26
Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Aug 2023Brno’s ZB-26 was one of the best light machine guns of the 1920s, and it was widely adopted by countries that did not have domestic arms design and production capacity (and it would eventually become the British Bren gun as well). It was designed for the 8mm Mauser cartridge, and had a simple fixed gas system that ran very well — until countries began following the German lead in moving to standard use of s.S. (schweres Spitzgeschoß; heavy ball) ammunition. This put undue strain on the ZB-26 mechanism, and so an improvement was made to include an adjustable gas system that could be set to accommodate a variety of loadings. This experimental model was the ZB-27, and it was tested by Romania in the late 1920s.
Romania liked the design, and adopted it in 1930, purchasing guns from Brno and also buying a license to produce them at the Cugir factory complex in Romania. Today we are taking a look at two examples of Romanian ZB-30s, one Czech-made and one Romanian-made. They both incorporate a number of improvements over the ZB-26 (improved barrel latch security, rear monopod socket, bipod locking lever, etc) but also have a few minor differences from each other.
Thanks to the Southern Iceland Shooting Association for helping me film these and other cool guns in Iceland!
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