Quotulatiousness

June 25, 2026

Coenders’ Bolt-Less Last Ditch Bolt Action Rifle

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Feb 2026

When the German Army tested last-ditch Volkssturm rifles late in World War Two, one of the particularly obscure submissions was August Coenders’ Coenders-Rochling Volkssturmkarabiner. This was a bolt-action rifle chambered for 8mm Mauser with a 5-round magazine. However, instead of using a traditional bolt action system it had a fixed breechblock and the handle was attached to the barrel. Cycling the action meant unlocking the barrel and sliding it forward, while the breechblock held the fired case in place. When the barrel was fully forward, the next round in the magazine would kick out the empty case, and pull the barrel rearward seated the next cartridge, ready to fire. In testing, the rifle was, frankly, terrible.

Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts: https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
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June 24, 2026

The Korean War Week 105 – Destroy Suiho Dam! – June 23, 1952

Filed under: Britain, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 23 Jun 2026

Since the beginning of the war UN air power has studiously avoided hitting North Korea’s hydro-electric complex, since the power the dams provide is mainly for civilian use, but that changes this week! Meanwhile on the ground, the focus has turned to capturing Communist POWs for information, but that task has suddenly proved impossible now that the UN POW camps are firmly back in UN control, and it seems the Communists now prefer even death to capture.

00:00 Intro
00:29 Recap
00:59 Taking Prisoners
03:18 The Shropshires
05:54 Ammunition Shortage
08:41 Targeting Power Plants
14:55 Summary
15:10 Conclusion
15:58 Call to Action

Feeding A Roman Centurion – Pork & Puls

Filed under: Europe, Food, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 30 Dec 2025

Farro cooked in wine sauce topped with stewed pork, leeks, and dill

City/Region: Rome
Time Period: 1st Century

While the common Roman foot soldier didn’t often have access to fresh meat, a Roman centurion did. A centurion was in charge of 80 fighting men and 20 servants, and holding such a rank meant that their meals were prepared for them and might include ingredients like garum, defrutum (reduced grape must), and fresh herbs and meat.

The dill and defrutum come through in the pork, and the wine isn’t overpowering. The puls, or wheat porridge, is wonderfully flavorful, and the whole dish is made up of lots of different textures (don’t skip the chopped leek garnish; it adds a wonderful crunch). If you like your puls to be thicker and more porridge-like in consistency, go ahead and crush the farro before cooking it.

    … small pieces of meat and fine wheat flour or cooked groats you also season with [oenococti], and serve with small morsels of pork prepared with the same sauce.

    Frontinian Piglet [oenococti sauce]:
    You bone it, brown, and truss. Put into a pot garum and wine, and tie together a bundle of leek and dill. Halfway through the cooking, add defrutum. When it is cooked, wash it and dry. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.
    Apicius de re coquinaria, 1st century

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June 23, 2026

They don’t do “democracy” in Europe for any important issue: the voters might get it wrong

It used to be a joke that voting never matters because the voters can’t be trusted with that kind of power. Over time, the joke stopped being at all funny, because that’s exactly what has happened in most western countries at the national level, but most blatantly in the European Union, where voters can express their will in a clear majority, yet see exactly the opposite policies implemented by Brussels:

EU delenda est

2005: the day they decided your “no” didn’t count

May 29, 2005. The French vote. Referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty.

Result: 54.68% NO.

Turnout: 69%.

Not a vote of abstainers, not a misunderstanding.

A people speaking out, massively, with full awareness.

Three years later, the same text — or nearly so — came into force. Without asking their opinion again.

Here’s how.

The context.

The Constitutional Treaty was the great federal leap: a text that gave the EU the attributes of a state. A flag, an anthem, a “constitution”, a foreign minister, supremacy written in black and white. Chirac, full of confidence, calls the French to the polls. The “yes” campaign mobilizes everything: the state, the major parties, the media, big business, the institutional unions.

And the French say no. For reasons the elite refused to hear: fear of social dumping (the infamous “Polish plumber”, the Bolkestein directive), a sense of a machine slipping out of their control, rejection of a project decided from on high and ratified by acclamation. Five days later, the Dutch say no in turn. 61%.

The treaty is dead. Officially, it’s called a “period of reflection”. In reality, it’s time to find a workaround.

The workaround has a name: Nicolas Sarkozy.

2007 campaign. Sarkozy proposes a “simplified treaty”. And above all, he lays out the adoption method: it will be the parliamentary route. No referendum. Parliament will vote in place of the people.

That’s his promise. He is elected.

And he keeps it against the people who had already decided.

The sleight of hand: the Lisbon Treaty.

Signed in December 2007.

They remove the symbols that scared people: no more “constitution”, no flag in the text, no “minister”.

They keep the essentials: permanent presidency of the Council, extension of qualified majority voting, retreat from unanimity, the Union’s legal personality, European diplomatic service. The institutional substance of the rejected text, repackaged.

The most cynical part is that they admitted it. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the architect of the Constitution, wrote it himself: the tools are the same, we’ve simply changed their order in the box. The stated goal: make the text unreadable so no government would be forced to submit it to a referendum. Technique replacing the popular verdict.

February 2008. Versailles.

Congress convenes to amend the French Constitution and allow ratification. Then Parliament ratifies Lisbon. The government left, which had campaigned for “no”, abstains and lets it pass. The French, they are never consulted again.

The “no” of 2005 has just been converted to “yes” by procedure.

And for those who might doubt the method: Ireland, for its part, was constitutionally required to vote. It says no in June 2008. They make it revote in 2009 until they get the right result. Vote until you get it right.

And that’s where it all connects.

This isn’t a procedural anecdote. It’s the founding act of a legitimacy problem that France has never settled.

Because the question of 2005 is exactly the one today. When Brussels signs 96 billion in development aid, when the NDICI directs billions to foreign “civil societies”, when the Global Gateway promises 300 billion the real question is never “should we do it?”.

It’s: who decided, and with what legitimacy?

The answer, we’ve known it since 2005: an administration that believes the people, when they answer wrong, must be circumvented, not heard. Hayek called it the fatal conceit.

The idea that a center knows better than the peoples what is good for them including against their explicit vote.

The French never accepted Lisbon. They were never asked.

And a structure built by going over the head of a lost referendum doesn’t carry a democratic deficit: it carries a birth defect.

The American Constitution starts with “We the People”.

Ours, the European version, started with a people who said no and an apparatus that decided it didn’t count.

Auto-translated by X from Brivael Le Pogam’s original French post.

June 22, 2026

Two-tier Keir resigns as UK Prime Minister

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

History will not be kind to Sir Keir Starmer’s time in office, both for his actions and his failures-to-act. The Labour Party will now select the next person to live at Number 10 Downing Street, as they still hold a majority in the House of Commons and are not required to go back to the people for a new mandate, regardless of who is their party leader.

Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, greeted the news on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

I reposted this on my other social media accounts, saying “Sadly, this is completely true. We belatedly ditched the clown prince of progressivism … only to install Mark Carney, who believes all the same progressive shibboleths that Trudeau did, but he’s far more capable of implementing them by hook or by crook.”

Starmer resigns — he has been a truly disgraceful Prime Minister.

I do not believe him to be a good man or a patriot.

He has deliberately and rapidly accelerated the destruction of our Britain, of our home.

History will not remember him kindly, nor should it.

I sat in Parliament, looking him in the eye, listening to him attempting to justify his decision to block a national inquiry into the mass rape of young British girls.

I will never forgive him. For that, and so much else.

What comes next, I do not know.

Whatever that is, Restore Britain will be ready to offer the British people a democratic route out — a better way, the only way.

But Starmer is gone.

And that is a good thing.

Enjoy it.

Former Manchester mayor and recently elected Member of Parliament for Makerfield Andy Burnham is the most likely successor to Starmer.

Then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visiting Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School in Manchester on 13 April 2026 with Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.

ADATS – Air Defense Anti-Tank System; Canada’s high tech cold warrior

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Polyus
Published 19 Jun 2026

While designed mainly in Switzerland, over the years its identity became distinctly Canadian. It was produced in Toronto by Oerlikon Aerospace Canada and was operated by Canadian forces from 1988 to 2011. This is the story of the Air Defense Anti-Tank System, or ADATS

ADATS was a very interesting and highly advanced air defense system designed to fight a cold war that never materialized. It was operated for a little over 20 years, so it was by no means a flash-in-the-pan. Unfortunately, Canada has since given up its short ranged air defense capability and all of the human expertise that was built up over the years. Hopefully in the future a new system can be acquired and Canada can again expand its sovereign air defense capabilities.

This video was made without the use of Artificial Intelligence (No AI). Long live people power!

0:00 Introduction
0:29 European Background
2:09 Technical Details
4:05 Engagement Sequence
5:38 Comparison to other Systems
6:06 Canadian Adoption
7:48 American Testing
8:32 Thai Adoption
8:57 Advanced Variants
10:23 Conclusion

Music:
“Denmark” – Portland Cello Project
“Your Suggestions” – Unicorn Heads

Sparta vs Athens – 2(b): Ostracism, Demagogues, and Why Athenian Democracy Worked (Until Rome)

Filed under: Government, Greece, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026

Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD

Athenian democracy is often dismissed as mob rule. This segment explains why that is too simple. Athens developed habits and structures that stabilised debate: frequent Assembly meetings, repeated exposure to the same issues and speakers, and a politically literate citizen body shaped by practical participation.

I also cover the darker logic: fear of tyranny, fear of dominance, and why Athens accepted instability and even injustice as the price of preventing permanent concentrations of power. Ostracism is discussed as a precautionary tool, and demagoguery as a permanent risk that the system managed rather than “solved”.

Finally, I explain how Athenian democracy ended — not because it decayed internally, but because Rome rendered the institutions meaningless. Empire does not tolerate participation.

June 21, 2026

Jean Rapail’s The Camp of the Saints, translated by Robert Laffont

Filed under: Books, France, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Copernican reviews Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints which was reprinted in an English translation by Robert Laffont earlier this year:

It is time that I throw my own hat into the ring regarding this particular piece of polemic fiction. It’s particularly topical given the recent events in the UK and the Western World. A look at toxic progressive empathy taken its natural conclusion.

Written by Jean Raspail and published in 1973, Camp of the Saints is a book infamous among those the media describes as “Far Right” and virtually unknown outside of that. Were history set upon an even keel, Camp of the Saints would sit on the bookshelf of every high school right next to the classic works of the same genre: notably 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.

This book was so dangerous that for decades, now, the English translation has been out of print, available only as an expensive antique, or through the Internet Archive, [as] a single shoddy .pdf. The corporate owners of the English translation rights have, despite considerable interest, refused to republish it. That was until September of 2025, when a new translation was created and distributed.1

As of now, what was once an antique book is now cheap and in-print. What’s more, it’s been converted to an audiobook available on Audible.2 It took the destruction of Western Culture for us to see published the one work of dystopian fiction that warned us of it.

Given its relevance, it makes sense that over ten percent of the run-time consists of various forwards from the author, translator, and the publisher, that describe the political and cultural push against its own publication. It’s worth it to read (or listen) through the numerous forwards to better understand the context and the author.

An Introduction to the Text

Among the dangerous books written in the late 20th century, Camp of the Saints takes the self-destructive anti-nativism of the neoliberal world order and draws it forward to its own natural conclusion. Like other works of fiction, it takes popular ideas and asks the question: “What if these beliefs are taken to their ultimate logical end?”

The book is written from the perspective of an omniscient historian who witnessed the events of the text; he knows that his work will be censored, silenced, or redacted. In the context of the book, the accurate recollection of the events described is inherently destructive to the (now) dominant anti-racist political regime. The force of political progressivism will destroy any such history on the basis that it may “incite racial hatred” or “create division”.

A fascinating bit of forethought in that those are the exact reasons why Camp of the Saints was itself banished from public view for the last half-century: Liberal cultural diversity transitioned smoothly to violent censure and virulent “anti-White” or “anti-Western” genocidal hatred.

The book is a dramatization of the Fall of the West. Not in pitched battle, but as it has lost its spiritual core to rampant idealism. The “other” is always to be given deference over our own people. The sympathy that is demanded for the “other” is also silenced and denied for our own. At what point do a people become so spiritually deracinated that they lose all legitimacy to exist? At what point do they become so deluded as to lack totally a theory-of-mind of the “other”, and at what point does sympathy for the foreigner overwhelm survival?

Camp of the Saints answers these questions in sometimes graphic detail. Some of the horrors written on those pages hadn’t happened to innocent Western children yet … but now, fifty years on, and they have happened. Many times over, in many places and nations, across the West.3 In comparison to the reality of the West in the 21st Century, Camp of the Saints is a tame warning.

The book begins with a great migrant fleet setting off from Calcutta, India. The poor, the starving, the diseased, and the malformed set out for the West- A land where milk and honey flow freely and where the rivers are rich with Fish. The people of India want a better life for themselves, even if they have to walk, unarmed, onto foreign lands to get it. They, like many peoples, believe that their land is simply poor and that Western nations are simply rich. Failing to understand that it is not some “magic dirt” that made France, England, Australia, and the United States rich, but rather it was the French, English, Australians, and Americans. The West doesn’t horde “magic dirt” but “magic people”, so to speak. Were the West to be flooded with Indians, it would become just like India, not magically make the invading Indians wealthy and intelligent.4

I doubt that it’s possible to explain that fact to third-world migrant retards.

To conclude a spoiler-free version of the review: You should read it. It should have been taught in high schools for the last 50 years. You should probably buy a copy before the beast of Progressivism finds a new way to censor it. If you buy the Audible copy, use a tool to convert it to an .mp3 file so that it can’t be deleted from your personal library after the fact.5 There’s a reason it’s been censored for the last 30 years or so. It’s dangerous, subversive, and intelligent in a way that modern dystopian authors wish they could be.


  1. Here is a direct link [https://www.amazon.com/Camp-Saints-Jean-Raspail/dp/B0FG4MJS8K] to where you can purchase the book on Amazon. A shoutout to Vauban Books for doing the work that every other publisher has been unable, or too scared, to do.
  2. I kind of enjoy audiobooks. Though Camp of the Saints can be particularly tricky to listen to over reading directly due to its complex cast and jumping around in the timeline.
  3. The Rape Gang Inquiry Report by Rupert Lowe is particularly poignant and well-timed here.
  4. A fact that is in stark relief as of 2026, with over 10% of their population (official sources say it’s close to 7%, but I don’t believe them) now being Skaven imports from India … and the wealth, safety, culture, and prosperity of Canada now vanishing at an alarming rate.
  5. The “Open Audible” tool is works for this, but it isn’t free.

How To Make War Inevitable – Death of Democracy 20 – Q4 1937

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 20 Jun 2026

By late 1937, Nazi Germany’s rearmament economy had trapped itself. Autarky was failing. Hjalmar Schacht was pushed aside. Göring’s Four-Year Plan dominated economic policy. And at the secret Hossbach meeting of November 5, Hitler turned economic impossibility into an argument for territorial conquest.

This episode covers Q4 1937: the Hossbach Memorandum, Schacht’s resignation, the Anti-Comintern alignment, Lord Halifax’s visit, Himmler’s police-state consolidation, the December “Preventive Crime Fighting” decree, and the antisemitic propaganda exhibition Der Ewige Jude.

The argument is not that war was metaphysically inevitable. It is that the Nazi regime built an ideological, economic, and police-state machine that made war look increasingly necessary to its own leadership. This is a historical analysis of Nazi dictatorship, antisemitic propaganda, and war planning. It condemns Nazism and uses extremist material only for educational and documentary context.

Chapters:
0:00 Q4 1937 Intro
0:53 The world at the end of 1937
1:36 Germany’s quarter of acceleration
3:30 Himmler Tightens Police Power
6:26 Der Ewige Jude and dehumanization
8:30 Hossbach: autarky fails
11:16 Halifax and diplomatic confidence
13:03 Mood inside Germany
15:09 Mein Kampf has become policy
17:16 Conclusion: the politics of beasts

How Britain Made the L1A1 SLR: archive film with intro by Jonathan Ferguson

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Royal Armouries
Published 21 Jan 2026

Following last week’s look at the very first L1A1 SLR ever produced (1957), we’re sharing a remarkable Royal Small Arms Factory (RSAF) Enfield archive film, shot in the 1960s, showing the key stages of L1A1 manufacture and a rare glimpse of the original Enfield pattern room.

Then we step back and let the film speak for itself, nearly an hour of pure production and engineering process.

0:00 Intro
3:05 Enfield + Pattern Room
3:57 Planning & Tooling
4:37 Rifle body: Heat treat → Machining → Inspection
18:16 Barrels: Drilling, Rifling, Plating & Production line
34:28 Housing/Trigger, Furniture & Magazines
50:16 Assembly → Proofing/Testing → Packing & Dispatch
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June 20, 2026

“Every system on display is an answer to a question the war in Ukraine asked out loud”

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Most wars are not significant drivers of technological change and military innovation. The Franco-Prussian War, the Boer Wars, World War 1, and World War 2 are some of the exceptions where the fighting accelerated innovation and adoption of new and untested technologies that were proven or discarded on the battlefield. The Russo-Ukraine war has been going on long enough and requiring new and improved weapons to such a degree that modern arms shows clearly reflect at least some of the technological changes in response to the ongoing combat:

Thales RapidStriker SHORAD, I think. Oddly, what struck me about this image was how much it reminded me of very early WW1 armoured cars, both in general outline and in its being a quick reaction development to a current combat situation.
Photo from Eyes Only with Wes O’Donnell

I was thinking recently about the good ole pandemic days; ah, what a simpler time …

At the time, I was writing for military and cybersecurity magazines about whether NASA spacesuits can be hacked and hypersonic tomfoolery.

Six years ago, a defense expo like this was mostly about better armored boxes. Things like thicker protection, a nicer turret, an upgraded engine, a fire-control system with a new acronym.

The headline acts were tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, things that go very high and very fast, and the unspoken assumption underneath all of it was that war would look roughly like it always had, just with more cowbell.

Then 2022 happened.

Then Operation Spiderweb.

Then a year of Russian glide bombs and Ukrainian refinery strikes and FPV drones turning hundred-dollar quadcopters into tank-killers.

Then the Gulf woke up to Iranian missiles in March. And the entire defense industry got the same text message at the same time, written in other people’s blood.

You can read that message on the Eurosatory floor this year.

Almost every serious system on display is an answer to a question the war in Ukraine asked out loud:

How do I shoot from farther away so I don’t die?

How do I kill cheap drones without going bankrupt?

How do I send a robot instead of a soldier?

How do I keep my tank’s roof from becoming a Thermador pizza oven set to “broil?”

Back then, I also used to write listicles, like “Top Ten Gifts for Veterans!” In that tradition, I’ve put together a hand-picked list of ten weapon systems emerging this year at Eurosatory in Paris, and every one of them is really a story about how much war has changed since 2020.

Lessons learned: “In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not”

The flare-up of anti-immigrant/anti-government violence in Belfast has drifted out of the headlines lately, as state-oriented media try to get their audiences back onto safer topics like footy and hissing at the Bad Orange Man. But the situation in Northern Ireland has not resolved itself in the preferred way — preferred, that is, by the British government. John Carter responds to some American social media users who loudly wonder why British men generally are not “doing something” now:

In response to the migroid atrocity du jour, one often hears Americans ask “why haven’t British men done anything?”, to which Americans will flatteringly reply to themselves, “It’s because those BRITCUCKS have gone SOFT, they gave up their GUNS like little BITCHES, but you won’t see anyone trying THAT in a SMALL TOWN”. Which conveniently elides the awkward detail that American men, armed to the teeth as no other people on Earth, have allowed themselves to be pushed around this way and that since the sleep of the good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior (PBUH) was disturbed by his little dream. “Just you wait”, Americans will promise when this is pointed out, “The electric boogaloo will come any day now, you’ll see!” Sure we will. In the meantime, all those guns have done precisely nothing to prevent the relentless incursions of Section 8 housing, disparate impact, affirmative action, DEI, anti-discrimination training, Title IX, human resources, and all the rest of the soft tyrannies that flew out of the Pandora’s box of America’s ersatz race communist constitution. There was no resistance to any of this. Heavily armed red state Americans abandoned the cities for the suburbs rather than standing and fighting for them, and then stolidly watched as their kids were sidelined in education and employment while being terrorized by black criminals.

American speech is protected by the first amendment and backstopped by the second, yet nevertheless you will not find many Americans daring to even so much as mutter the forbidden word of power. This is not because white Americans don’t understand the problems. They have developed an elaborate vocabulary of “bad neighbourhoods” and “good schools” and “urban crime” and “troubled youth” and so on and so forth with which to discuss, in whispers, after glancing twice over their shoulders, the realities of life in the USSA. There is no law against parrhesia [Wiki], technically an American citizen may say whatever he pleases without consequence, but of course frank speech in this Greek sense requires courage by definition, and there has been a great shortage of that. You can say whatever you please, yes, of course, fill your boots, but you will find yourself ostracized, divorced, unemployed, and homeless if you speak too directly, so you know, shut up. The unspoken strictures of the longhouse are a more effective prison than iron bars for those whose spirits have been cowed.

Meanwhile, last week there was a minor uprising in Belfast. Hadi Alodid, a gentlemen of Sudanese extraction, enriched the face of Stephen Ogilvie, a local bloke with special needs, providing him with extensive tribal scarring in a generous act of cross-cultural exchange, and only claiming two of his eyes in payment. The entire incident was caught on video. Ogilvie’s life, though not his sight (and he was already hard of hearing) was saved by three Irish men who rushed in to beat the innocent Sudanese rocket surgeon off with their hurling sticks. In the aftermath, it emerged that Ogilvie had helped Alodid move in to his new accommodations just a few days before. No good deed, etc.

[…]

The uprising was variously described as a protest and as a riot, but it was neither of these. A protest is when an angry crowd gathers to chant some slogans and wave around some signs, pretending that their numbers are a display of power, and deluding themselves that Power will redress their grievances because a noisy lump of quivering biomass is somehow intimidating to Power. A riot is an explosive release of emotional energy that results in some property destruction and futile confrontations with armoured riot police, typically ending with the rioters being rounded up and jailed. In some cases, it’s true, protests and riots appear to produce political change, but this is almost invariably because Power has orchestrated these little carnivals in order to sanctify the policies it’s already decided upon under the guise of “bowing” to “pressure” from the “public”. The Canadian government, by the way, has long since mastered a non-violent variant of this dark art: practically every “public policy research group” in the country is funded by the government to pressure the government to do what the government already wants to do. Show me what Our Democracy looks like; this is what Our Democracy looks like.

There were no signs being waved around in Belfast, no chanting of slogans. While there was a great deal of violence, it was not random and senseless, but methodical and carefully targeted. It unfolded with the tight discipline of a coordinated military operation.

The day before the uprising started, a communique was sent out to local businesses, instructing them to close before the fun started. At the appointed hour loose formations of young men, indistinguishable in black hoodies, fanned out across the city.

[…]

The uprising in Belfast was not nihilistic violence for the sake of violence, though I’ve no doubt the lads were enjoying the opportunity for mayhem. It was violence towards a specific political objective: driving the foreigners out. Migrants whose domiciles were destroyed were directly deprived of housing. Migrants who managed to avoid this were made to worry that they will be next. Landlords taking government money to house migrants, or even thinking about doing so, now need to worry about the immediate cost of repairs and the ongoing expense of higher insurance premiums, making the Home Office’s lucre a lot less attractive. Landlords also need to worry about escalation: reportedly, letters were circulated which heavily implied that bricks and petrol bombs were just the first step on the violence ladder, and that the paramilitaries would be quite happy to take more decisive measures against the landlords themselves should the message not be received.

All of this is very sad, and I don’t want to seem heartless. The immigrants whose houses were destroyed were probably innocent; there was one particularly touching video of a nurse from Ghana or somewhere. Unfortunately, that is the nature of these things. They were brought in by the government en masse as a form of biological warfare against the native population. The government wants them there, the people want them gone, and the government refuses to listen, so, this is what happens.

Only 27 migrants were actually made homeless by the arson, but reportedly, quite a few are already clearing out on their own. The British government quite naturally condemned the violence, organizing a rally against racism in the aftermath, but it also responded by instructing the media to emphasize that it would be cracking down on illegal immigration into Northern Ireland. Underneath the condemnation, there is a clear message to all of this: in this case, violence worked.

That message has been sent before in Northern Ireland. Exactly one year to the day before the uprising in Belfast, there were riots in the small town of Ballymena after the courts let two gypsy boys off with delicate wrist taps for raping an Irish girl. The rioting went on for two weeks, and resulted in two thirds of the gypsy population clearing out. Again: violence worked.

Contrast Ballymena with the other major British protest movement last summer: the anti-migrant hotel protest in Epping, a London exurb populated largely by Londoners driven out of their city by diversity, which started when one of the migrants diversified a teenage girl. In contrast to the eruption in Ballymena, the protest in Epping was explicitly non-violent: the only violence came at the hands of the cops arresting people for flying Union Jacks. The mothers of Epping spent months gathering outside the migrant hotel, holding signs and raising awareness. The council also fought the migrant hotel in the courts, and enjoyed early success when a judge found that the location was zoned as a hotel but not as a migrant dormitory, essentially telling the Home Office that they didn’t have a loicense for that. This legal victory was short-lived. The decision was overturned almost immediately by a higher court judge, who explicitly found that whatever the concerns of the people of Epping as to their children’s safety, these were outweighed by the human rights of the mystery meat that had washed up on Britain’s shores, and by the government’s interest in housing them. As a result, parallel lawsuits that had been launched by councils across the country were dropped. The migrant hotel in Epping was eventually shut down, but this likely had more to do with the government’s switch to “Operation Scatter” in which migrants were garrisoned in smaller houses all over the country, rather than concentrated in a few large centres, than it did with the government responding to the concerns of British subjects.

In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not.

Update, 22 June: 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 Substackhttps://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Caesar Augustus – The man and his story

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 28 Jan 2026

An overview of the career of the man who became Rome’s first princeps (or emperor as we would call him). Heir to Julius Caesar’s private estate, he somehow managed to make himself Caesar’s adopted son and political successor, plunging himself into Rome’s violent politics at the age of just nineteen and in turn beating all his rivals. Supreme master of the Roman empire in his early thirties, he then ruled for four decades, profoundly changing Rome, its empire — and by extension shaping the modern world.

My biography of the man — Augustus: First Emperor of Rome is being released as a new edition from Basic Books in the USA on 27th January 2026.

QotD: The word “alchemy”

Filed under: China, Europe, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

My favourite thing in this chapter is an etymological nugget that I suspect is too good to be true, but which I desperately want to believe. The word “alchemy” comes from the Arabic al-kīmiyāʾ (الكيمياء), which in turn comes from the Greek khēmeia (χημεία), but that’s where our knowledge of this word stops. χημεία has no known Indo-European origin, and no obvious cognates that would suggest a borrowing. There are some hand-wavy theories that it might derive from khēmet, the word for Egypt in ancient Egyptian, but it’s a stretch to put it mildly. Needham proposes the Chinese 金 meaning “gold” as the ultimate source. In modern Mandarin, this word is pronounced like jin, but the Classical Chinese pronunciation is better preserved by the Southern dialects, which variously render it as gum, gim, or, in Hakka and Southern Min, as kim. The list of English words with Chinese origins is short,1 and it would be nice to add this one.

But the Chinese alchemists by and large weren’t after gold, their goal was eternal life instead. In fact aurifaction originated as an instrumental “warm-up” exercise for the main event. Everybody knew that the reason gold was the most perfect metal was because it was a harmonious and balanced combination of the elements. So if the same harmoniousness and lack of internal contradiction could be achieved within a living organism, then the consequences would obviously be physical immortality and superhuman abilities. Elemental harmony, biological harmony, social harmony — in the light of Chinese metaphysics these goals were all reflections and intimations of one another. And the first two at least could be brought about by the same methods: the application of various potions and elixirs designed to increase or reduce the influence of a particular element. The same principle forms the cornerstone of Chinese medicine today.2

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.


  1. My favourite of these, since it seems so unlikely, is “ketchup” deriving from 茄汁 (“tomato sauce” in Cantonese), perhaps via the Malay kicap.
  2. Needham’s third lecture is about the most recognizable and well-traveled example of Chinese medicine — acupuncture — and contains the intriguing assertion that naloxone administration totally cancels acupuncture’s efficacy for pain relief. This suggests that acupuncture’s mechanism of action may have to do with stimulating the body’s production of naturally-occurring opioids. There’s some evidence the placebo effect could be related (fascinatingly, naloxone also appears to eliminate the placebo effect).

June 19, 2026

Sparta vs Athens – 2(a): Two Greek Worlds (Citizens, Helots, Power)

Filed under: Greece, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026

Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD

In this lecture segment I set out the fundamental contrast between Sparta and Athens as social and political systems. Sparta was a permanent military state built on coerced labour and internal discipline. Athens was a quarrelsome democracy that relied on participation, persuasion, and a wider civic culture of debate.

We begin with the basic structures: who counted, who did the work, and how each society organised its citizen body. This is not moral theatre. It is institutional reality. By the end, the students should see why Sparta could produce cohesion and battlefield reliability, while Athens produced instability, argument, and a public life that made intellectual achievement possible.

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