Quotulatiousness

August 27, 2026

“Welcome to Holiday Camp UK”

Filed under: Britain, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack Notes, Earl describes the horrific plight of refugees in the UK, specifically those housed under brutal conditions at a camp in Essex, the Wethersfield Airfield Asylum Accommodation:

Inside the asylum centre “holiday camp”: A gym, football pitch, snack bar — and 17 minibuses to ferry migrants into towns. Leader of Essex County Council was given access to Wethersfield former RAF base … this is what he found

Welcome to Holiday Camp UK. For the 800 guests enjoying the luxury sports facilities, this place is unbeatable.

As I saw for myself this week on a visit to the camp in Wethersfield, deep in the Essex countryside, residents want for practically nothing. There’s a fully equipped gymnasium, a fitness room, a full-sized football pitch and a substantial indoor sports hall with all the equipment for five-a-side soccer, basketball and cricket – all free.

For those who want to kick back and take it easy, there are recreation rooms with televisions and pool tables, and a snack bar.

Mobile phones are provided for all, with generous allowances for free calls.

The main restaurant, serving two dining halls, provides three meals a day with a wide choice of meals, including vegetarian options.

All the food is free. The only restriction is that all meat is halal – non-Muslims don’t get a choice about that.

Similarly, though the prayer rooms are described as a multi-faith area, most of the religious material is Islamic, with plenty of Korans and no Bibles. Prayer mats cover almost all the available floor space.

A squadron of free minibuses, 17 of them, are laid on three times a day, seven days a week – even on Christmas Day – to take the 800 camp residents into the nearby towns of Braintree, Chelmsford and Colchester.

And how much does it cost to stay here? For residents, that’s the best bit. Not only is everything free, but there’s a tenner a week extra in every pocket … or, to be absolutely accurate, an allowance of £9.95 per person, to cover any incidental costs, loaded onto a prepaid debit card.

The official name for this place is Wethersfield Airfield Asylum Accommodation.

And although it’s free for the hundreds of “happy campers”, the bill for Britain is eye-watering. According to a National Audit Office report last year, asylum accommodation contracts are estimated to cost the taxpayer £15.3billion over the next ten years.

So-called “dispersal sites”, mostly former military properties, are regarded as cheaper than the short-term solution of placing illegal migrants in hotels. But the impact on surrounding communities is immense and the sheer unfairness of the financial burden is shocking.

Not that all the illegal migrants here seem to appreciate it. The most frequent request posted in the suggestion boxes is not for educational resources, or even pleas for news of loved ones supposedly left behind in war zones and terror states. What irks them most, apparently, is the lack of a swimming pool.

As a Reform UK councillor and leader of Essex County Council, I have been deeply concerned about the impact of Wethersfield on local people for three years.

Britain’s Greatest Hero Never Existed!

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

The History Chap
Published 22 Apr 2026

The most celebrated British hero of the First Anglo-Afghan War was brave, resourceful, and utterly magnificent under fire. He was also completely fictional – Harry Flashman.

Chris Green is The History Chap; telling stories that brings the past to life.

August 26, 2026

Octavian “found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble”

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Octavian, if you’re new around here, is far better known as Augustus, the founder of the Principate. Over at SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his interesting series by touching on what the Roman Republic looked like to Octavian at the end of the civil wars:

Augustus of Prima Porta
Currently in the Chiaramonti Museum of the Vatican Museums (image from Wikimedia Commons).

So as Octavian thought about his grand plans for renewing Rome, he naturally thought of Virgil. He didn’t need anyone like Horace telling everyone to give up. He needed positivity. He needed the guy who might even have been prophesying about him as Rome’s savior (Octavian was only 23 when Virgil wrote about Rome’s boy-rescuer).

Besides, Virgil’s prophecy had so far proved quite correct: the oft-heralded imminent demise of Rome hadn’t arrived yet. Maybe it never would. In fact, for the first time in over a century, things were looking up. And they were looking up because of what had happened in the previous year and a half.

The most important thing had been Octavian’s victory over the traitor Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium, September of 31 BC. (None other than Octavian’s best friend, Marcus Agrippa, had masterminded the victory as commander of the navy. Over the years of tumult and civil war since Caesar‘s assassination, Marcus had revealed himself to be as much of a natural military genius as Octavian was a political genius).

With his victory over Antony, Octavian had demolished the last of the traitorous military contingents threatening Rome. Less than a year later, Antony and his lover, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, committed suicide in Alexandria. Suddenly, after decades of bloodshed, the civil war had come to an end.

Or so it seemed. Octavian was too smart to count on that. After all, in politics, an end is never really an end; a beginning is never really a beginning. Each is only a connecting point in time between what has come before, and what will now come to pass. Above everything else, politics is the art of shaping those moments.

It was at just this sort of moment Octavian now stood. Finding himself the undisputed great man of Roman politics, he now controlled (in reality, if not always in law) Rome’s senate, all its provinces, its vast military, its vast resources, its bureaucracy and administration, its appointments, and the immensely valuable, recently-acquired grain powerhouse of Egypt. He also held great influence over the city’s religious activity as part of the sixteen member College of Pontiffs. Moreover, after Actium and Antony’s suicide, no internal or external threat remained. Octavian had spent years making war. Now, with every last foe vanquished, he needed to make — and preserve — peace. The question was how.

A full description of Octavian’s comprehensive answer to that question is beyond our scope here. But what we can explore briefly is how he pushed cultural, spiritual, religious, and even psychological renewal — particularly through Virgil’s Aeneid — and how translation can best communicate that to us.

On that note, it’s worth pointing out that Octavian’s intention wasn’t quite to Make Rome Great Again. It was far more ambitious: he wished to make Rome much greater than anyone had ever imagined it could be, and much greater than any other nation had ever been, or ever would be again. For this to happen, Rome, in a real way, had to start over.

For Octavian, starting over meant laying the right foundation in the right way. What was that foundation? Devout reconnection to the gods. Everything, he believed, would flow from this: peace, identity, cohesion, stability, lawful behavior, ethical behavior, contentment, prosperity, flourishing, valor, self-discipline, excellence, and more. Octavian would do what he could in politics to initiate this renewal; Virgil would do what he could in literature. Together with others in their circle, they would remind people what it meant to be truly Roman, starting with the very first Romans of all. They would tell, and re-tell, in a hundred different ways, the story of who they were, who they weren’t, where they’d come from, and what the gods wanted.

I’ve added links to my Roman Glossary for some of the names and events mentioned in the article.

Regulating away small company benefits in the EU

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Environment, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Cláudia Ascensão Nunes discusses yet another example of regulatory capture, as new European Union regulations will choke off business opportunities for small companies to the benefit of big companies and multinationals who can absorb the costs of the new environmental regulations:

Today, the European Commission estimates that the Single Market has increased the European Union’s GDP by 3–4% and created 3.6 million jobs since its creation. A study by Bertelsmann Stiftung estimated that integration increases European citizens’ incomes by an average of about €840 ($974) per person per year.

Yet the benefits created by this integration, and the freedom that made these benefits possible, began to come under threat on August 12, 2026, quietly and through an apparently harmless packaging regulation.

The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) will force sellers, both European and foreign, to comply with a complex set of rules that may be manageable for large brands but suffocating for small businesses.

The most problematic requirement is that sellers shipping packaged products to an EU country where they are not established must appoint a local authorized representative. That representative will act on behalf of the seller before that country’s recycling authorities. The representative must register the company in the national Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, system, file annual reports on the packaging the company places on that market, and charge a service fee of between €200 ($232) and €500 ($580).

The process of appointing a representative in one country is both bureaucratic and expensive. Doing so across several countries can become impractical for small sellers, who lack the scale to spread these fixed costs across a large volume of sales, especially since the PPWR does not provide a volume-based exemption.

Several businesses are already announcing the suspension of shipments to other EU countries or disabling shipping options to the EU altogether. The German company Copiaro, for example, suspended shipments to other EU member states while continuing to ship to European markets such as Switzerland, Norway, and the United Kingdom, which are outside the EU’s regulatory framework.

We are therefore returning to something resembling the old national markets, with barriers to entry.

The entire model of cross-border trade for small businesses risks being undermined in the name of environmental protection. Yet if larger companies, which produce far more packaging waste, are the ones best able to absorb these costs, we are facing a contradiction. Packaging regulations can shield large sellers from competition by smaller businesses, creating a more closed and concentrated market.

Europe may become greener by becoming poorer. European entrepreneurship is being strangled, and small business owners are paying the price.

August 25, 2026

The Halftrack That Made Blitzkrieg Possible

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 23 Aug, 2026

The tanks get the glory. But Blitzkrieg could not work on tanks alone.

The Sd.Kfz. 251 was designed to solve one of the fundamental problems of armored warfare: how do you keep infantry moving fast enough to fight alongside the Panzers? Germany’s answer was an armored half-track that helped turn infantry from a slow-moving follow-up force into an integral part of the Panzer division’s combined-arms assault.

In this German Rearmament special, we trace the Sd.Kfz. 251 from clandestine development under the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles to its first production runs on the eve of World War Two. We examine its design, its role in the emerging doctrine of Bewegungskrieg, its deployment in Poland and France, and the extraordinary range of variants that turned it into one of the Wehrmacht’s most versatile vehicles.

But the 251 also exposes the limits behind the image of a fully mechanized German war machine. It was complicated and expensive to manufacture, there were never enough of them, and most German infantry continued to march or rely on horses and trucks. Even as production soared later in the war, Germany’s shortages of fuel, materials, manpower, and industrial capacity increasingly overwhelmed the advantages its engineers and tacticians had created.

The Sd.Kfz. 251 helped make the early German style of armored warfare possible. It also became another example of a sophisticated weapon system serving a war of aggression that Nazi Germany ultimately lacked the resources to sustain.

This is the story of the half-track that made Blitzkrieg possible.

Never Forget.

Rome’s annona civilis

Filed under: Europe, Food, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the late Roman Republic, the rapid increase among the urban poor in Rome itself eventually led to the Senate introducing food relief for the very poorest Roman citizens, the Annona civilis. It should be no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that giving away free stuff attracts people happy to accept free stuff:

Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.

No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.

This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.

Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.

What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.

The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn’t weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.

The simple-but-not-easy-fix is to only allow people not accepting the free stuff to vote. You can imagine just how well that would go down in an election campaign at any level, can’t you?

QotD: “… and called it macaroni”

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

… this morning I was thinking about monasteries. Specifically, monasteries as the one place in the Middle Ages where you might could test my theories about Information Velocity and Caloric Surplus.

I don’t know whether you need much in the way of background, but since some of you seem to enjoy the “inside baseball” stuff … History, as an academic discipline, has always suffered from a “source base” problem. We deal with artifacts; more specifically with documents. If it ain’t written down … see what I mean? This is why whoever-it-was wasn’t wrong when he said that History is just the biographies of Great Men. It’s the biographies of the best-documented men, anyway. I’m exaggerating for effect, obviously, but you see what I mean.

So when, in the Seventies, we had the “cultural turn“, a whole new series of techniques had to be developed to expand the source base. Some of those were good and necessary. Others … well, Wiki quotes Frederic Jameson, one of the most prominent early-90s obfuscators (Indie band name?):

    The very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but it is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the image of culture.

Translated from the PoMo, it’s your standard, tiresome stuff about “critique”. Culture just IS Capitalism, which IS Consumerism, blah blah blah, you know the drill. It’s tedious, but it’s not entirely wrong — what people “consume” (in the egghead sense, not the biomechanical sense) can give us important clues about their world. So long as you avoid the teleological temptation (didn’t they tour with EVC?) of attributing everything to “Capitalism”, you can do good work.

The “problem” with recent history is that the “centers of cultural production” do seem to be identifiable, and so are their motives. They are “Madison Avenue” and “to make money”, respectively, and so it’s easy — and profitable!! — to do the tiresome PoMo CultMarx thing. The further back into The Past you go, though … well, consider this:

As you can see from the caption, that style is called “macaroni” — like from the old song “Yankee Doodle,” which the Colonials appropriated in an early example of “owning the insult.” Wiki sez:

    Stereotypically, men in the macaroni subculture dressed, spoke, and behaved in an unusually epicene and androgynous manner. The term “macaroni” pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” in terms of high-end clothing, fastidious eating, and gambling. He mixed Continental affectations with his British nature …

    … The macaronis became seen in stereotyped terms in Britain, being seen as a symbol of inappropriate bourgeois excess, effeminacy, and possible homosexuality – which was then legally viewed as sodomy. At the time, homosexuality was frowned upon, and was even punishable by death. Many modern critics view the macaroni as representing a general change in 18th-century British society such as political change, class consciousness, new nationalisms, commodification, and consumer capitalism.

You see the typical “critical” blah blah blah there at the end, and it’s not wrong, just tedious, predictable, and tediously predictable. It’s also much harder to find a “purpose” for this behavior. It’s easy to do for the modern analogue of the macaroni, the hipster […] which Wiki documents extensively, because of course they do, it’s right there underneath “macaroni”. But the whole “culture industry” thing wasn’t there yet in the 18th century, so it might actually be down to an individual person. It’d be theoretically possible to find “the first macaroni” — it was the Marquis de Whatever, and he decided to dress like that because reasons, and all the best people decided to copy him, also because reasons, and that’s pretty much all your “cultural turn” can do, because that’s the only documentation we have.

Since we here are not bound by the canons of scholarship, however, we can speculate. I want to focus on this bit about macaronis:

    In the 18th century, wealthy young British men traditionally took a trip around Europe upon their coming of age, known as the Grand Tour. Italy was a key destination of these tours. During their trip, many developed a taste for maccaroni, a type of pasta little known in Britain then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club, founded in 1764 by those returning from the Grand Tour. They would refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as “very maccaroni”.

That’s Information Velocity, preindustrial-style. They had to go there personally — or, at the very least, have access to the in-house journals of those who did:

    The song “Yankee Doodle” from the time of the American Revolutionary War mentions a man who “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”. Dr. Richard Shuckburgh was a British surgeon and also the author of the song’s lyrics; the joke which he was making was that the Yankees were naive and unsophisticated enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a macaroni.

In America, only a select few persons would have access to that kind of thing, because only a few would move in those circles.

Go back a bit further, and cultural trends are far less traceable, but “centers of cultural production” are much easier to find, in one specific sense: They’re monasteries. And there you have a group which speaks a common language — extremely rare in the Middle Ages — is literate (ditto), and has something close to, if not caloric surplus, then at least “chronic caloric sufficiency”, I guess we’ll have to call it. Monks worked hard in the Middle Ages, by our standards, but not as hard as the peasantry. They were well-fed, or at least consistently fed, in a way the peasantry weren’t.

In other words, whatever Information Velocity existed in the Middle Ages, they had it. They made a virtue out of circulating books, and all those books were in a common tongue. Since they also produced books — indeed, were pretty much the only ones who did — they were also, by definition, au courant with whatever the high fashions were, because they illustrated the books that were such a crucial part of the aristocracy’s gift-giving culture.

Severian, “Monastic Vices”, Founding Questions, 2026-01-13.

August 24, 2026

It’s no wonder that people have lost trust in formerly prestigious institutions

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lorenzo Warby on the two cases that are currently front-and-centre with the terminally online left, one a recently deceased academic grifter and another a confessed multiple murderer (of her own children):

We are currently observing attempts to turn the late Jason Arday — a fabulist who produced nothing of intellectual merit — and Lindsay Clancy, a woman who murdered her three children, into moral heroes. The former is allegedly a martyr for the cause of anti-racism and care for the neurodivergent/autistic, the latter for motherhood — or at least postpartum depression and psychosis. Both are construed as victims.

There is a real push to put the truly awful into Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. It’s almost as if there are some issues with feminisation. On the other hand, a woman being an open supporter of Lindsay Clancy is an excellent negative signal for men.

Just when you think progressivist purity spirals can’t get any worse, they do. Thus, we not only get the above hagiographical elevations of the grotesquely unworthy, we also see the physical mutilations of trans-surgery used to rehabilitate female genital mutilation.

But, of course, any such surprise is having far too contemporary a focus. Left-progressivism has a long history of elevating some of history’s most appalling monsters, most tyrannical mass murderers — Lenin, Stalin, Mao — as heroes of world-history and human liberation.

The use and abuse of moral mascots

The worse a group or individual behaves, the more progressives like them. If a group is noted for high levels of violence or various social dysfunctions, left-progressives adopt them as moral mascots.

The concept of such mascots comes from economist Thomas Sowell. Mascots are people or individuals that “the Anointed” — those who see themselves as at forefront of human liberation — adopt to be extolled and defended. This is connected to Thomas Sowell’s analysis of Constrained and Unconstrained political visions.

The Constrained Vision says there are no complete solutions, there are just trade-offs, all the way down. Human nature is one of those constraints. Biologist E.O. Wilson‘s famous observation about Communism — great idea, wrong species — is a pithy expression of the Constrained Vision.

In the Constrained Vision, history is an enormous memory well where we learn about ourselves. This is because the humans who made history are just like us. Their experience, their triumphs and failures, even their mundanities, are lessons for us.

History is contingent, it has no particular direction. The Constrained Vision finds it easy to take people’s choices as having authority because there is no direction of historical travel to which they must conform.

The Unconstrained Vision denies that human nature is a constraint in that way, so it’s possible to create a society of transformative human liberation. History is not a source of lessons, but a record of failures to achieve that liberation — a record of corruption and sin.

Moreover, history has a proper direction — towards transformative human liberation or another, related telos. Hence, choices that support that direction are legitimate, those that go against it are not. The politics of the Unconstrained Vision turns elections into legitimating rituals: citizens’ votes are blocked from overturning any of the policies the Anointed have decided represent history’s proper direction.

The Anointed evince what writer Wesley Yang labels the non-electoral politics of institutional capture. If you want to see that in its most complete form among the Western democracies, PM Tony Blair’s debauching of Britain’s constitutional order through quangoes, human rights legislation that empowered judges over elected ministers, and devolving decision-making to the EU — thereby massively increasing the degree to which elections became legitimating rituals that change remarkably little — is the current gold standard case. However, all Western democracies face similar pressures, albeit to considerably differing degrees.

The commitment of The Anointed to this vision of human liberation gives them such a sense of trumping moral authority that they see themselves as owning morality. They have the right-to-decide what is moral and then to impose their decisions on everyone else.

“Communism is an ideology designed to liquidate nations”

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I nearly skipped this post by Celina, as it started off appearing to be pretty much of interest only to Australians, but that was just the opening sections:

The Bolsheviks were the first governing power of the modern era to write the suppression of “national enmity” into a systematic criminal code. The RSFSR Criminal Code of 1922 penalised agitation and propaganda arousing national enmity or dissension, its successor, the 1926 Code, carried the provision forward as Article 59-7, under the chapter dealing with especially dangerous crimes against the order of administration, punishing “propaganda or agitation directed towards arousing national or religious enmity or discord”, with sharply escalated penalties, up to and including death, where the offence occurred in wartime or amid mass disturbances. From the earliest years of the Soviet state, in other words, speech about nationality was not a civil-society problem to be argued out, but a category of state crime sometimes punishable by death.

To understand why, it is necessary to understand something about communism that conservatives and libertarians have largely obscured. If you ask the average conservative what communism is, he will most likely start discussing government ownership, five-year plans, bread queues etc.

Communism, from this point of view, is essentially capitalism with the economic settings reversed. The government “does and owns everything“. This is why so much conservative analysis eventually degenerates into horseshoe theory: fascists liked government intervention and communists liked government intervention, therefore fascism and communism were basically versions of the same thing.

But that completely misses the ideological conflict which defined twentieth-century Europe. Communism was not just some economic theory about who should own what. It was an internationalist theory about who you are.

Communism is an ideology designed to liquidate nations. Literally.

Marxism insisted that the fundamental political division of mankind was class. The worker was not ultimately supposed to understand himself principally as English, German, Italian, French or Russian. He belonged to the proletariat. His historical interests were shared with workers beyond the borders of his own country, while his supposed national solidarity with his own bourgeoisie concealed the class relationship upon which capitalism depended. Hence the language that runs through the entire communist tradition: Workers of the world, unite; The proletariat has no fatherland; No war but class war. You’re not Italian, you’re not German, you’re the proletariat, and all you have to lose is your chains.

The political logic here is blatantly obvious. Nationality competes with class consciousness, patriotism competes with proletarian internationalism. The nation tells a German worker that he shares something profound with another German who happens to own a factory. Marxism tells him that this solidarity is false and his real political brother is the French, Russian or Italian worker standing on the other side of the border.

That is why the nation became one of the great obstacles confronting revolutionary socialism. The theory said workers possessed common international class interests. Yet, history repeatedly demonstrated that workers continued to behave like members of nations.

In 1914, the workers of Europe did not unite against their governments and refuse the coming war. They rallied overwhelmingly to their respective countries. Socialist parties fractured along national lines. Men who Marxists expected to understand themselves as an international proletariat marched into battle as Germans, Frenchmen, Russians, Austrians and Britons. And the same problem returned after the Bolshevik Revolution.

That is why the great twentieth-century conflict between communism and nationalism was not accidental. It was ideological. Communism was internationalist not in the banal sense that communists in different countries cooperated with one another, but in its conception of history itself. The nation was something history would ultimately transcend. Lenin said this openly: socialism aimed not simply to bring nations closer together, but eventually to “merge them“. Elsewhere he described the centralised state as a historical step towards the future “socialist unity of the whole world“.

Stalin, grasping this principle, forged civic nationalism as the indispensable stepping-stone toward that communist universalism. Inside the borders of the revolutionary state the old nationalities were to be liquidated into a single Soviet identity: you are not Ukrainian, you are not Russian, you are not Jewish, you are not Georgian, you are a Soviet patriot, loyal only to the revolution. That state, once purged of national loyalties, would then project its universalist ideology outward, seeking global hegemony by liquidating, in turn, every nation that still dared to resist it.

Update, 25 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

The Ancient Greeks 04 – The Persian Invasion 4 – The Fall of Athens

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

seangabb
Published 26 Mar 2026

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

What happens when resistance fails?

In this lecture, we examine the dramatic collapse of Greek resistance after Thermopylae and the advance of the Persian army into central Greece. With the Spartan force destroyed, the road to Athens lay open.

We explore:

– The consequences of Thermopylae
– The evacuation of Athens under Themistocles
– The Persian capture and destruction of the city
– The psychological and strategic impact on the Greek world
– Why, at this moment, Persian victory seemed inevitable

This is the darkest point of the war for the Greeks — a moment when everything appears lost, and yet the story is far from over.

August 23, 2026

Julius Caesar’s will

Filed under: Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his study on “The Art of Translation”, this time touching on the unlikely and unlooked-for rise of Caesar’s grand-nephew and eventual successor Octavian — better known to history as Caesar Augustus, the founder of the Principate:

Augustus of Prima Porta
Currently in the Chiaramonti Museum of the Vatican Museums (image from Wikimedia Commons).

You’d think someone who’d just won as much power as the 32 year old Octavian would appreciate a best-selling epic poem in praise of himself. Only fourteen years earlier, in 44 BC, the then-obscure teenager still expected to live a quiet life in his hometown of Velitrae. True, he did have family connections to the political big leagues 25 miles up the road in Rome; but as things stood, a lower-key path looked a lot more likely for the frail, bookish student.

Alas, a quiet life was not to be. On Tuesday, March 15, his great-uncle, Julius Caesar — ruler of Rome — had just seated himself in the senate meeting hall when dozens of senators stabbed him to death. In the assassins’ minds, they’d done something noble: they’d protected the republic — the Roman people — from a future tyrant-king. Surely, they thought, ordinary Romans would now rise up and hail them as republican heroes.

Ordinary Romans, it turned out, thought much more highly of their favorite war-hero than the treacherous senators who’d killed him. Whatever his flaws, Caesar had at least imposed some long-overdue order on Roman life. Now that he was gone, the terrible troubles of former times would return, and probably in a form far worse than before. Shock, anger, despair, and fear filled the city.

It didn’t help that as the hours bled into the next day, it became clear the senator-assassins had no plan for what to do next. They’d eliminated the energetic, enterprising man who’d led Rome the previous five years, but the senate itself was deeply fractured, with a number of the assassins now second-guessing what they’d done. The senate wasn’t stepping up. No one was. As a result, in that moment, the city and empire had no functioning government.

Sensing the possibility of violent conflict, Caesar’s colleague Lepidus quickly ordered troops into the city to keep things stable. It worked. But a possible trigger appeared the next day in the form of Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Piso, who stepped forward as the custodian of Caesar’s will and informed the senate he was ready to settle Caesar’s affairs as duty demanded. The senate panicked. Not knowing what the will contained, the now-rattled group begged Piso to keep it confidential for fear its contents would provoke riots. Piso refused: Caesar was a public official, and the public deserved to know, come what may. He demanded a day be set for revealing the will.

Surveying the precarious situation, Caesar’s right-hand man, Mark Antony, called a senate meeting to figure out what to do next. In that Friday meeting, the senate and Antony agreed to let the assassins escape punishment, while still enforcing all of Caesar’s policies. This compromise, they hoped, would appease both the pro- and anti-Caesar factions, and keep Rome from convulsing in violence.

This, and much more, all happened within three days of the assassination. But what happened on the fourth day — Saturday, March 19 — would prove just about as shocking as anything else: it was on that day that Lucius Piso appeared before the senate to open up, and read aloud, the will left by his murdered son-in-law.

To put that moment in perspective, I note that by the time of his death at age 55, Julius Caesar was one of the richest men on earth. Moreover, he had no legal descendants: his daughter, Julia, had passed away at the age of 22 during childbirth, along with her child. The Egyptian queen Cleopatra claimed Caesar had fathered her son, but Caesar never felt certain the child was his, and never acknowledged him under Roman law.

In addition to all this, Caesar commanded the loyalty of tens of thousands of Roman soldiers, active and retired, along with the admiration of tens of millions of residents and citizens around the Mediterranean. Among these were many of Rome’s most influential movers and shakers.

In short, Caesar had a lot to bequeath. (This was especially true in a world in which the lifelong loyalty of others easily transferred from a deceased person to his named heir.) Surely, in the senate meeting hall that Saturday sat a number of figures who expected to receive extraordinary gifts from the man they’d served—Mark Antony in particular. Antony, after all, had fought with Caesar for years, worked side by side with him in government, and been his closest confidante and colleague.

So you can imagine the humiliation, shock, and indignation around the room as the bereaved father-in-law Lucius Piso stood reading a will which named not Antony, not Lepidus, not any of Caesar’s other comrades, but Caesar’s eighteen-year-old grand-nephew, Octavian, as his adopted legal son and heir to nearly everything he had. Octavian—whose biological father had died when he was five—would receive Caesar’s name, most of his incalculable fortune, his lands, the benefit of his status and loyalties, and the automatic approval of all those who trusted the judgment of the great-uncle who’d adopted him.

By all accounts, Octavian had no idea about any of this. Yes, he’d spent some time with his great-uncle, even visiting him during his Spanish military campaign the year before. But Caesar had kept his will entirely secret.

When Octavian — away studying in Apollonia, in present-day Albania — heard about the assassination and will a couple of weeks later, he found himself facing The Mother of All Crossroads. He could either travel to the now violent, dangerous, nearly-anarchic Rome, risking his own assassination in demanding all Caesar had left him (and accepting all the attendant obligations), or he could decline and pursue the safe, quiet life he’d always imagined for himself.

The End of the Battleship Era – Force Z

Filed under: Britain, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost Cartographic and World War Two
Published 22 Aug 2026

In December 1941, Britain is fighting a global war on multiple fronts when Japan enters the conflict in Southeast Asia. At the centre of Britain’s strategy is Singapore, and the arrival of two powerful warships is meant to demonstrate that the Royal Navy can still project its power across the region.

HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, accompanied by a small destroyer force, form Force Z and sail into increasingly dangerous waters. But without the aircraft carrier originally intended to accompany them, the squadron is operating under a serious disadvantage.

As Japanese forces begin their invasion of Malaya, Force Z sets out to disrupt the landings. What follows becomes one of the most dramatic naval actions of the early Pacific War, as British battleships find themselves facing a threat they were never designed to fight alone.

Why This “Foreign” Commonwealth Truck Was Built In 800,000 Units And Supplied Every Front

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BritishWarLegends and BritishWarArmory
Published 31 Mar 2026

The Canadian Military Pattern truck was built by two rival factories in Ontario for a nation of eleven million people. It ended up supplying the British Eighth Army across North Africa, Italy, Normandy, and Burma — and Canada built more of them than Germany, Italy, and Japan built trucks combined.

Almost nobody knows it existed.

When Rommel captured two thousand of them at Tobruk in 1942, he didn’t scrap them. The Afrika Korps pressed them straight into active German service. An enemy with his own purpose-built military trucks chose to keep using captured Canadian vehicles instead.

The full forgotten story.

Update: I generally try to avoid watching or re-posting clearly AI-generated slop, but this was the first video I’d encountered discussing the hundreds of thousands of CMP trucks that Canada built during WW2. At some point between me scheduling the video and today, the channel has been banned. You’ve undoubtedly seen CMP vehicles in WW2 stills or movie footage, as they’re pretty distinctive – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Military_Pattern_truck

From The British Army in North-west Europe 1944-45,
CMP lorries passing through Uedem, 2 March 1945.
Photo by Carpenter (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Photograph B 14966 from the Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons.

QotD: “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store”

Filed under: Business, France, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

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

“No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-Super-Mare”

Filed under: Britain, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Christopher Gage discusses how to shorten your life (but not for the usual reasons):

St George’s Nursing Home in Weston-Super-Mare. I’m sure the staff are fine, but this reminds me strongly of the hospice my grandmother ended her days in.

My Dharma or reason for being is devilishly simple: to maximise pleasure and to shuffle off this mortal coil before the nursing home beckons.

Fatally, at least for those with a yen for acronyms and self-hatred, my ultimate goal corrupts their hallowed SMART strictures. It is not quite specific. It is measurable. It is attainable. It is relevant. It is not time-based. I’m not resolved to stubbing out the fags, abandoning the booze, or chasing around Soho the doomed affections of neurotic artists. I refuse to wake at 5 a.m., invest in crypto, or bore my tastebuds with rainbow carrots.

I’ll take my cue from the great novelist, ardent womaniser, and prodigious piss artist, Kingsley Amis: “No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-Super-Mare”.

In an age which toggles between grind-culture puritanism and brain-rot hedonism, we must chart a more amenable path. So, the pursuit of pleasure, it is. I resolve to pursue pleasure deliberately, intelligently, doggedly, ethically and without apology — not to escape but to evolve.

Pleasure gets a bad name. What, with all our competing isms and illities. Those journeys of immiseration and self-loathing. One cannot move for ice baths and magnesium supplements and alcohol-free and protein-rich and wellness retreats and fucking motivational podcasts. Antisocial tech billionaires inject the blood of teenagers in a demented bid to live forever. It is a new secular puritanism. These longevity bros trade the profound depth of life for its mere length. They are terrified of death, yet terrified to actually live. It must stop.

For myself, I’m not at all eager to die, but I don’t view the mechanical prolongation of life as a worthwhile end in itself. Living a bit longer, but at the cost of giving up some or all of the things that make life worth living seems a particularly bad bargain. I’ve never smoked, so that quick’n’easy “stay healthy” recommendation doesn’t apply, but I enjoy drinking wine and beer. Not to excess, as I don’t enjoy being drunk, but as a social relaxant, a pleasure in its own right, something to look forward to at the end of a long day. Matching the right wine to the food on your plate is a worthwhile skill to develop, as it increases two pleasurable things at the same time.

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