June 1940.
France has collapsed, Hitler is eating Europe alive, and Mussolini doesn’t want to miss out. He wants birthday cake without bringing a present.
Poor show
So he looks at a map and asks the Italian Air Force:
“Who can we bomb that’s really close?”
Answer: Malta, 49 miles away.
The Italians begin their great wartime contribution by flying at 14,000 feet and dropping bombs with the accuracy of a man throwing darts after fourteen pints. Half land in the sea, a few hit fields.
But accuracy wasn’t the point. They just wanted to show Berlin they were “in the war”.
For the Maltese, who had never seen modern bombing, even bad Italian bombing was terrifying.
And unfortunately for them, this was only the warm-up act.
Maynard’s Defence: Faith, Hope and Charity
Air Commodore Foster Maynard is given the job of defending Malta with basically nothing.
He had been promised four fighter squadrons.
Zero have arrived. Typical early war British brilliance.
His only aircraft were some slow, ancient Fairey Swordfish.
Great for torpedoing ships, hopeless for intercepting bombers.
These were the famous “Stringbags”. We will hear from them later on.
Then like an archaeologist opening a cursed tomb the British discover 18 Gloster Gladiators in crates on the island. They were meant for HMS Glorious and HMS Eagle.
What followed was peak British wartime admin:
- Maynard asks the Navy to release some Gladiators.
- He gets permission.
- The ground crew assemble several.
- THEN the Navy says “No actually, stop, pack them back up.”
- THEN the decision gets reversed again.
- So they unpack them, reassemble them … again.
After all this faffing, three Gladiators emerge ready to fight.
Next problem: no fighter pilots.
Big problem I feel, anyway …
Maynard asks for volunteers. Eight bomber men step forward, either heroic or mildly insane.
Problem solved.
A journalist on the island, Harry Kirk, watching these three lonely biplanes scramble day after day, nicknames them Faith, Hope and Charity after his mother’s brooch.
The names stick. The legend begins.
On 21 June 1940 Pilot Officer George Burges shoots down a Savoia-Marchetti bomber over Valletta, the island’s first air victory.
The Maltese take it as a sign from God.
(It wasn’t, but let them have the moment.)
“MALTA: PART 1, Foreboding”, WWII Matters, 2025-11-17.
February 23, 2026
QotD: Faith, Hope, and Charity defended Malta
February 22, 2026
How to Use a Tariff War to Disrupt the World – Death of Democracy 04 – Q4 1933
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 21 Feb 2026In Q4 1933 Hitler pivots Nazi Germany from internal takeover to outward defiance. The London Economic Conference collapses and the tariff truce unravels, Hitler withdraws from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations — then stages the November 12 plebiscite and one‑party Reichstag election to claim the nation stands behind him. As Goebbels tightens propaganda and press control through the Editors’ Law (Schriftleitergesetz) and daily directives, the Winter Relief campaign turns “charity” into social pressure and Volksgemeinschaft theater. In December, Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht hardens the transfer moratorium to conserve foreign currency for raw materials and rearmament. Using contemporary voices, this episode shows how isolation, manipulation, and “unity” accelerate Europe toward a pre‑war era.
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Britain’s recovery after a punishing existential war against a colossal European tyrant
The American Tribune considers how war-exhausted Britain staged a brilliant recovery after the decades of war against Republican and then Imperial France culminating in the exile of Napoleon to a remote island in the south Atlantic:
The grinding war is finally over after what feels like decades of bitter conflict on an inconceivably large scale. The entire world had become a battlefield in which the British had fought desperately to keep their imperial possessions secure in the face of vast hordes of enemies of all sorts, with the Navy and Army strained to the breaking point as battalions launched expeditionary raids and grinding, years-long campaigns everywhere from the steamy Orient to the Mediterranean, the bitter cold of the North to the coast and shores of Northern Africa.
Truth be told, victory, though it came in the end, had strained everything nearly to the breaking point. High taxes had driven the landed element to the breaking point. The necessity of convoys, of relying on domestic agriculture, of keeping the empire intact from an island the size of Michigan … had strained the British people and British society to the breaking point. Class tensions were high, taxes were already ruinously high, and to many elements, rich and poor alike, victory hardly seemed worth the immense cost in gold and blood.
And that was before considering the debt. The ruinous, mountainous, inconceivable debt. Well over 200% of GDP, it would later be calculated … and not at the negative interest rates of modernity either. Over 200% of GDP priced in real, somewhat gold-backed currency, with those who bought it demanding a real return. Ruinous, it was, ruinous! For this final conflict had been preceded not by many long years of peace, but by a similarly large, long conflict that had also involved campaigns across every corner of the earth, mutinous colonials, immense expense, and heavy taxation.
So victory had come. The war against an immense continental hegemon had been won, the international order was stabilized to the liking of and in accord with the ideology of the political elite, and the empire kept together in a hugely expanded state. But the cost had been high. Perhaps the cost had been ruinous …
I am, of course, describing Britain circa 1815, after its final victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. What followed was its century atop Olympus, the century where it ruled a quarter of the Earth’s surface, dominated all the sea lanes, was the world’s reserve currency, and became the world’s financial capital. Despite the expense, the defeat of Napoleon did not bring ruin, but success on an unimaginably immense scale.
What happened? Why did the Britain that defeated Napoleon become the hugely successful nation of the Victorian Age, but the Britain that followed the defeat of Hitler became a wrecked backwater, a miserable shell of its former self? The post-war debt load was similar. The human cost had been higher, but not remarkably so, particularly if the immigration outflows of the 19th century are considered.1 The logistical strains were similar, the social strains similar, and the fractious politics of the wars similar.
But the Britain of the 19th century became the hegemon of note, whereas that of the 20th century became essentially irrelevant. Mindset makes all the difference in the world, as I’ll show in this article, along with why this matters for Americans.
Britain after Napoleon
It is important to note that Britain’s immense imperial and economic success after the defeat of Napoleon was no sure thing. Yes, unlike much of Europe, it hadn’t been ravaged by invading armies. But it had lost its best colonies in the disastrous rebellion that followed the immensely expensive Seven Years’ War, a world war in all but name. It was staggering under a ruinous mountain of debt that could scarcely have been imagined earlier in the century: the national debt stood at somewhere around 210% of GDP, after post-war deflation had been accounted for, with somewhere around 10% of national GDP going just toward paying the interest on that debt.
Perhaps, worse, the population was restive. During the war, farmers and landlords had been pushed into embarking on extremely expensive schemes to drain and enclose land, schemes costing millions of dollars per thousand acres in today’s money; while that worked tolerably well during the war itself, as grain prices remained high, the expense and the cost of the debt used to achieve it was a crushing burden after the end of the war meant renewed trade and a fall in grain prices. That expense and the pain caused by it meant that not only were the farmers and the landlords struggling to make ends meet, but they had little left to pay agricultural laborers, who had their wages cut as a result, putting that bottom rung of the social ladder in an immensely precarious and dire economic position.
Much the same situation played out in the nascent industrial sector, where the end of war meant falling prices for finished goods and thus both lower profits and lower wages, angering industrialists and workers alike. As food remained expensive compared to wages, this meant major unrest, too. Thus, other than perhaps some financiers who were doing well off the debt, particularly given post-war deflation, most segments of society were unhappy at how the government was being run.
A high debt load that could only be maintained with high taxes, a highly restive and discontented population, and an economy-punishing bout of deflation are not the stuff of which great empires are typically made.
But the British figured it out, and did so without massive inflation, government default, or authoritarian societal repression.
- This is noted by AJP Taylor in his The First World War and Its Aftermath
An Interesting Silenced Bulgarian Makarov
Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Sept 2025Today we are taking a look at an interesting silenced Bulgarian Makarov with a mechanism added to lock the slide. This sort of feature is usually thought of as a sneaky way to avoid ejecting brass and leaving it behind, but it actually serves a much more practical purpose. One of the loudest elements of a suppressed pistol firing subsonic ammunition is actually the noise of pressurized gas escaping when the empty case is extracted and then the slide chambering a new round. A slide lock eliminates these sources of noise by preventing the slide from opening. While this is not a factory-made variant of the Makarov, it is an interesting mechanism that I thought worth covering.
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QotD: The shift from “motte-and-bailey” construction to stone castles
To talk about how these designs work, we need to clear some terminology. The (typically thin) wall that runs the circuit of the castle and encloses the bailey is called a “curtain wall“. In stone castles, there may be multiple curtain walls, arranged concentrically (a design that seems to emerge in the Near East and makes its way to Europe in the 13th century via the crusades); the outermost complete circuit (the primary wall, as it were) is called the enceinte. Increasingly, the keep in stone castles is moved into the bailey (that is, it sits at the center of the castle rather than off to one side), although of course stone versions of motte and bailey designs exist. In some castle design systems, with stone the keep itself drops away, since the stone walls and towers often provided themselves enough space to house the necessary peacetime functions; in Germany there often was no keep (that is, no core structure that contained the core of the fortified house), but there often was a bergfriede, a smaller but still tall “fighting tower” to serve the tactical role of the keep (an elevated, core position of last-resort in a defense-in-depth arrangement) without the peacetime role.
While the wooden palisade curtain walls of earlier motte and bailey castles often lacked many defensive features (though sometimes you’d have towers and gatehouses to provide fighting positions around the gates), stone castles tend to have lots of projecting towers which stick out from the curtain wall. The value of projecting towers is that soldiers up on those towers have clear lines of fire running down the walls, allowing them to target enemies at the base of the curtain wall (the term for this sort of fire is “enfilade” fire – when you are being hit in the side). Clearly what is being envisaged here is the ability to engage enemies doing things like undermining the base of walls or setting up ladders or other scaling devices.
The curtain walls themselves also become fighting positions. Whether on a tower or on the wall itself, the term for the fighting position at the top is a “battlement”. Battlements often have a jagged “tooth” pattern of gaps to provide firing positions; the term for the overall system is crenellation; the areas which have stone are merlons, while the gaps to fire through are crenals. The walkway behind both atop the wall is the chemin de ronde, allure or “wall-walk”. One problem with using the walls themselves as fighting positions is that it is very hard to engage enemies directly beneath the wall or along it without leaning out beyond the protection of the wall and exposing yourself to enemy fire. The older solution to this were wooden, shed-like projections from the wall called “hoarding”; these were temporary, built when a siege was expected. During the crusades, European armies encountered Near Eastern fortification design which instead used stone overhangs (with the merlons on the outside) with gaps through which one might fire (or just drop things) directly down at the base of the wall; these are called machicolations and were swiftly adopted to replace hoardings, since machicolations were safer from both literal fire (wood burns, stone does not) and catapult fire, and also permanent. All of this work on the walls and the towers is designed to allow a small number of defenders to exchange fire effectively with a large number of attackers, and in so doing to keep those attackers from being able to “set up shop” beneath the walls.
[I]t is worth noting something about the amount of fire being developed by these projecting towers: the goal is to prevent the enemy operating safely at the wall’s base, not to prohibit approaches to the wall. These defenses simply aren’t designed to support that much fire, which makes sense: castle garrisons were generally quite small, often dozens or a few hundred men. While Hollywood loves sieges where all of the walls of the castle are lined with soldiers multiple ranks deep, more often the problem for the defender was having enough soldiers just to watch the whole perimeter around the clock (recall the example at Antioch: Bohemond only needs one traitor to access Antioch because one of its defensive towers was regularly defended by only one guy at night). It is actually not hard to see that merely by looking at the battlements: notice in the images here so far often how spaced out the merlons of the crenellation are. The idea here isn’t maximizing fire for a given length of wall but protecting a relatively small number of combatants on the wall. As we’ll see, that is a significant design choice: castle design assumes the enemy will reach the walls and aims to prevent escalade once they are there; later in this series we’ll see defenses designed to prohibit effective approach itself.
As with the simpler motte and bailey, stone castles often employ a system of defense in depth to raise the cost of an attack. At minimum, generally, that system consists of a moat (either wet or dry), the main curtain walls (with their towers and gatehouses) and then a central keep. Larger castles, especially in the 13th century and beyond, adopting cues from castle design in the Levant (via the crusades) employed multiple concentric rings of walls. Generally these were set up so that the central ring was taller, either by dint of terrain (as with a castle set on a hill) or by building taller walls, than the outer ring. The idea here seems not to be stacking fire on approaching enemies, but ensuring that the inner ring could dominate the outer ring if the latter fell to attackers; defenders could fire down on attackers who would lack cover (since the merlons of the outer ring would face the other way). As an aside, the concern to be firing down is less about the energy imparted by a falling arrow (though this is more meaningful with javelins or thrown rocks) and more about a firing position that denies enemies cover by shooting down at them (think about attackers, for instance, crossing a dry moat – if your wall is the right height and the edges of the moat are carefully angled, you can set up a situation where the ditch never actually offers the attackers any usable cover, but you need to be high up to do it!).
Speaking of the moat, this is a common defensive element (essentially just a big ditch!) which often gets left out of pop culture depictions of castles and siege warfare, but it accomplishes so many things at such a low cost premium. Even assuming the moat is “dry”! For attackers on foot (say, with ladders) looking to approach the wall, the moat is an obstacle that slows them down without potentially providing any additional cover (it is also likely to disorder an attack). For sappers (attackers looking to tunnel under the walls and then collapse the tunnel to generate a breach), the depth of the ditch forces them to dig deeper, which in turn raises the demands in both labor and engineering to dig their tunnel. For any attack with siege engines (towers, rams, or covered protective housings made so that the wall can be approached safely), the moat is an obstruction that has to be filled in before those engines can move forward – a task which in turn broadcasts the intended route well in advance, giving the defenders a lot of time to prepare.
Well-built stone castles of this sort were stunningly resistant to assault, even with relatively small garrisons (dozens or a few hundred, not thousands). That said, building them was very expensive; maintaining them wasn’t cheap either. For both castles and fortified cities, one ubiquitous element in warfare of the period (and in the ancient period too, by the by) was the rush when war was in the offing to repair castle and town walls, dig out the moat and to clear buildings that during peace had been built int he firing lines of the castle or city walls.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.
February 21, 2026
Oh Look, They Want a Mercenary Army
Akkad Daily
Published 20 Feb 2026Get a country worth fighting for. Join Restore: https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/joi…
The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell
Based on the few books of his I’d heard of, I wouldn’t have expected Malcolm Gladwell to dip into military history … and from what Secretary of Defense Rock says, it might have been better if Gladwell had steered clear of this particular topic anyway:
I recently received The Bomber Mafia as a gift for my birthday, and it was bad, so bad that I felt compelled to write this review. In so many ways, the book is everything that is wrong with the “pop history” genre: a bestselling author with a massive built-in audience, with a hit podcast to cross-promote the material, and a framing promise to reveal a supposedly “great untold story” about the strategic and moral struggles of American airmen in World War II. The problem in this case is that Gladwell’s narrative about Curtis LeMay, Haywood Hansell, and the evolution of strategic bombing repeatedly collides with the existing scholarship and often ignores it altogether. From his treatment of the raids of Münster and Schweinfurt–Regensburg to his use of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and his confident claims about what compelled Japan to surrender, The Bomber Mafia exemplifies the worst tendencies of popular history: sweeping pronouncements built on selective reading, caricatured context, and a startling indifference to both primary sources and a vast secondary literature.1
I was only vaguely familiar with Malcolm Gladwell and his work, but for those who don’t know (like me until recently), he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996, has written a bunch of New York Times bestselling books on sociology, psychology, and economics, and also hosts a very popular podcast called Revisionist History.2 This is all to say he is widely known and already has a big audience that is generally receptive to his projects. The book was originally based on four episodes he did on this topic in July 2020, and then turned into print, so it isn’t so much an actual book as it is a printed podcast.3
Unsurprisingly, both the audiobook and print editions were widely acclaimed upon release. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Yale professor Paul Kennedy praised the book as “a wonderful book”.4 The journalist Michael Lewis described it as “a riveting tale”, while the bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson called it “a wonderful narrative”.5 The book was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. It also enjoyed significant commercial success, reaching number two on The New York Times Best Sellers list.6 To promote the book, Gladwell made appearances on Jimmy Kimmel, MSNBC, and CBS’s Sunday Morning show. MSNBC even stated in the segment title that this is “A great untold story”, which is hilarious, given that I don’t know how much ink has been spilled on the strategic bombing campaigns.7
But it should be noted that the book has been criticized by virtually anyone who has seriously studied this topic. Much of the criticism of the book has come from the fact that it hardly focuses on the Japanese and German perspectives, misinterprets why members of the air tactical school focused on precision bombing, and the actual role strategic bombing played in the surrender of Japan.8 All of that is valid, but what was initially more startling to me was how little use was made of primary or secondary sources. So many important works are left out makes me wonder how much research Gladwell even put in.9 To write about strategic bombing in World War II and not include Michael Sherry’s The Rise of American Air Power, Richard Overy’s The Bombing War, Donald Miller’s Masters of the Air, Ken Werrell’s Blankets of Fire or Death From the Heavens, Geoffrey Perrett’s Winged Victory, and barely using any of the official histories is borderline negligence.10 Anyone doing research on strategic bombing and Air Power in World War II almost certainly would have come across these.
- Popular history is a form of historical writing aimed at broad audiences that usually prioritizes storytelling over real scholarship. See Gerald Strauss, “The Dilemma of Popular History,” Past & Present, no. 132 (1991): 130–49, and more recently, Ben Alpers, “The Promise and Perils of Popular History,” Society for U.S. Intellectual History, August 17, 2021.
- The show itself isn’t really a conversation with experts and historians (though they do appear) so much as storytelling.
- I would also preface that I generally don’t have a problem with this premise. There is definitely a segment of the historical profession that dislikes pop history for reasons tied as much to credentials as to content. Much “popular history” is produced by journalists, independent writers, or commentators rather than credentialed academic historians, and that fact alone generates suspicion. In some cases, this skepticism is warranted: weak sourcing, thin engagement with the scholarship, and overconfident claims do real damage. But the problem is not who writes history so much as how it is written. Plenty of non-historians have produced outstanding historical works by taking the craft seriously — immersing themselves in primary sources, engaging honestly with existing scholarship, and resisting the temptation to oversimplify for the sake of narrative punch. Conversely, academic credentials have never been a guarantee for insight or even accuracy. If a writer does the work, respects the evidence, and treats complexity as something to be explained rather than avoided, there is no real reason to dismiss the result simply because of the writer’s background.
- Paul Kennedy, “The Bomber Mafia’ Review: Architects of a Firestorm”, The Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2021.
- Summary of reviews in paperback.
- “Hardcover Nonfiction – May 16, 2021”. The New York Times.
- Malcolm Gladwell: ‘Bomber Mafia’ Looks At A Great Untold Story From WWII.
- Some critical reviews include David Fedman and Cary Karacas, “When Pop History Bombs: A Response to Malcolm Gladwell’s Love Letter to American Air Power”, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 12, 2021; Saul David, “Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia is misleading history-lite”, The Daily Telegraph, April 25, 2021, and Steve Agoratus, Air & Space Power History 68, no. 4 (2021): 52–53.
- This is also coming from a guy who famously wrote that achieving world-class expertise in any field is, to a large extent, a function of accumulating roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, as described in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.
- Gladwell doesn’t really deal with British strategic bombing; there’s just a brief chapter on Arthur Harris. If interested, see Noble Frankland, Bomber Offensive, the Devastation of Europe (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971) Max Hastings, Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive, 1939-45 (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1979), and Norman Longmate, The Bombers: The RAF Air Offensive against Germany, 1939-1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1983).
February 20, 2026
Reform UK falters, but Restore Britain rises to challenge it
Since the last general election in Britain, the rising power has been Reform UK under the unsteady leadership of Nigel Farage. A right-wing alternative to the horrifically incompetent Conservative Party, led by the man who kept the fires burning for Brexit? Seems like an obvious winner over the sagging Labour Party under Keir Starmer who just had to be less incompetent than the Conservatives but couldn’t manage even that low bar. But all was not well with Reform UK, despite being likely winners of the next election, and a lot of it comes down to Nigel Farage’s weaknesses. He seems incapable of dealing with strong personalities in his own party and seems to see any disagreement as a form of betrayal. One of the men he exiled from the party has now raised his own banner to much acclaim from the people who once were strong Farage supporters:
On Friday, Rupert Lowe, the independent Member of Parliament formerly of Reform UK, launched his own political party named Restore Britain. At the time of writing, the announcement video has amassed upwards of 30 million views on X, with many of the Western world’s most popular right-wing social media accounts — from Raw Egg Nationalist to Wall Street Mav — cheering him on.
Critics of Lowe argue that few outside of the culture war circles on X have heard of him, but these claims don’t track — Lowe has over 250,000 followers more on Facebook than he does on X, and has stated that he reaches “far more people on Facebook than X”. Still, while Lowe’s popularity has dramatically increased in the short year-and-a-half following his election to Parliament, he does not carry the same name recognition as Nigel Farage, let alone the latter’s proven experience of winning elections, as recent Reform victories have demonstrated, and contentious campaigns, being a key figure in the pro-Brexit campaign.
Restore Britain has the potential to be both very positive and hugely detrimental to Britain’s political future. Lowe’s announcement video was a masterclass in giving his admirers exactly what they want: decisive language promising a rebirth of a pre-Blair Britain, with fewer foreign nationals, fewer people on benefits, and more money to go round. The sober nature of the message was appealing — Lowe made it clear that the challenge facing the party, and the country, is not an easy one, but nor is it insurmountable. With stronger language than we have heard from Reform, Lowe promised to remove all people who arrived in Britain illegally, along with legal foreign nationals who do not meaningfully contribute to society.
Policy proposals like this — from a brand-new party with very little in the way of a party infrastructure as yet — do not have to be fully fleshed out to grab hold of the public imagination. What is likely is that it pushes the Overton window even farther rightward, and we begin hearing traditional centre-right figures like Kemi Badenoch (as she is centre-right in the political landscape of 2026) parroting some of the same points. With much of the online right rallying behind Lowe, we may begin to see a surge in the early stages of the posting to policy pipeline, whereby anonymous meme accounts — the modern politician’s crowdsourced spin doctor — churns out a large volume of pro-Lowe content, driving the narrative as others strive to keep up.
Lowe’s party may inadvertently help Reform, though, this by helping solve one of the main problems it has faced: attracting too many nutcases. Restore is positioning itself further to the right than Reform — and while this is no bad thing in and of itself, it will likely mean that those who believe in the most extreme solutions see Restore as the closest party to what they believe.
In UnHerd, Rob Lownie calls the movement “Lowe’s Powellite revolution”:
Rupert Lowe’s official portrait by Laurie Noble, 10 July, 2024 via Wikimedia Commons
Rupert Lowe deals in the politics of return: illegal immigrants are going back, and so is Britain. The Great Yarmouth MP, formerly of Reform UK, has now launched Restore Britain as a new political party, and on Wednesday evening claimed that it had passed 70,000 members. The launch announcement was marked with a stirring video of Lowe in his farmer’s get-up, as well as a series of semi-ironic nationalist compilations presumably made by Restore’s Zoomer footsoldiers. In one of these, among nostalgic nods to Geoff Hurst and Zulu, 1997 is invoked as the year when everything started to go wrong. Speaking over grainy images of a lost Britain, Lowe sums up his political outlook: “I think the state is bad, and I think the individual is good.
One area where the state has undoubtedly failed, in Lowe’s eyes, is on the matter of immigration. While Reform has pledged to deport all illegal immigrants, Restore wants to go further. Lowe has promised to scrap the asylum system entirely, also stating last week that “legal immigration will almost come to a complete halt”. The goal is not just to halt migrant influxes but to reverse them. “Net zero immigration is weak, weak, weak. It is insufficient and it is too late,” he said in the speech with which he launched the party. “The barbarians are already in the gates.”
The remedy, Lowe warns, will be “incredibly painful”: a characteristically abrasive verdict. It is one thing to criticise quangos, and quite another to say that “we must crush parasitic Britain”. And as for the dissonance between government and individual? “The state has definitively become the enemy of the people.”
In his doom-laden pronouncements, Lowe resembles no British political figure so closely as Enoch Powell, whose 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech has led a radioactive afterlife in the national consciousness. For Powell, Britain’s willingness to take in tens of thousands of immigrants rendered it “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. And compare Lowe’s talk of necessary pain to that 1968 call for an “extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take”. For better or worse, Powell presaged contemporary debates over migration and nationhood. The challenge, as Keir Starmer found out with his more milquetoast “island of strangers” line, is to acknowledge voters’ frustrations without sounding like him.
Powell has been a political lodestar of sorts for Nigel Farage, Lowe’s bête noire and former boss who suspended him last year over dubious accusations of bullying. The Reform leader recalled being “dazzled”, as a schoolboy in the Eighties, listening to the former Tory MP speak. Last year, he insisted that Powell was fundamentally right about the scale of “community change” in the country.
On The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, Carl Benjamin interviews Rupert Lowe:
The Canadian Patrol Submarine Project
The Royal Canadian Navy is planning to replace its four current conventional submarines, the British-built Victoria class with a dozen new conventional submarines from either South Korea or Germany (a joint German-Norwegian design). Michael J. Lalonde, a former Canadian intelligence officer, goes through the requirements for the new submarines, the two contending designs’ strengths and weaknesses, and makes his own recommendation for the RCN’s next submarine class:
Rough transit routes to Canada’s Arctic from Esquimalt BC and Halifax NS
The first step is to assess what the Government of Canada wants out of its new submarine fleet and what capabilities it will need to achieve its objectives. I’m starting here because there is a common misconception that Canada needs submarines exclusively for Arctic patrol and surveillance, which is false. While it’s true that Arctic sovereignty and security are quite rightfully a preoccupation for the government, patrolling Canada’s Arctic is not the only capability Canada needs out of its new fleet. However, it is the most common argument in favour of a submarine fleet since Arctic sovereignty remains popular within Liberal and Conservative circles alike, along with mainstream media.
Unfortunately, this narrative forces a lopsided conversation about the role these new boats will be expected to play over the coming decades. In addition to Arctic operations, these subs will be expected to deploy far into the North Atlantic with NATO and push across the Pacific to support the Indo-Pacific Strategy. Ottawa’s own defence policy update ties submarine recapitalization to contributions with allies in both theatres.
This implies a blue-water capability, which means these conventionally powered submarines must be able to deploy and fight in the open ocean, far from home ports and daily logistics, for extended periods. This requires long range and endurance for transoceanic transits, sustained submerged persistence through air independent propulsion (AIP) and high-capacity batteries to minimize snorkelling, and habitability and maintenance margins that keep the crew and systems effective past the 30- to 60-day mark. Simply put, the new boats must be able to cross an ocean, remain covert and lethal on station, and deliver effects.
The government further stipulated specific capabilities that the new submarines must have in one of its press releases stating “Through the Canadian Patrol Submarine Project (CPSP), Canada will acquire a larger, modernized submarine fleet to enable the Royal Canadian Navy to covertly detect and deter maritime threats, control our maritime approaches, project power and striking capability further from our shores, and project a persistent deterrent on all three coasts.”
What caught my attention here is the ability to project power and striking capability further from our shores. Power projection is synonymous with a blue-water capability; however, a striking capability, which I take to mean a land strike capability, is not typical for a conventionally powered SSK, which are typically armed only with torpedoes to take out other submarines or surface vessels.
To sum up, Canada’s new subs must be able to:
- Patrol the Arctic with under-ice capability year-round
- Deploy with NATO in the North Atlantic and support Canada’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific Strategy – A blue-water capability
- Remain submerged for three weeks or more at a time
- Covertly detect and deter maritime threats
- Control Canada’s maritime approaches
- A range of 7000 + nautical miles
- Project power far from home ports
- Anti-surface and subsurface warfare
- Land-attack capability via cruise and/or non-nuclear ballistic missiles
- Insert Tier-1 special operators on coastal infiltration missions
- Conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in Canadian maritime approaches and abroad.
With that out of the way, let’s look at what each submarine can do.
He outlines the two competing designs and how they could meet the RCN’s needs and then plumps for the South Korean KSS-III for its stronger case for meeting those needs in the wider ocean environments than the German/Norwegian Type 212CD:
ROKS Shin Chae-ho, a KSS-III submarine at sea on 4 April, 2024.
Photo from the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) via Wikimedia Commons.
The KSS-III is the only conventional submarine that can meet all of Canada’s requirements. It combines the blue-water reach and endurance demanded by transoceanic tasking with a vertical launch system that enables credible land-attack and complex anti-surface strike options, supported by lithium-ion batteries that lengthen quiet submerged persistence and improve sortie tempo on distant stations. Its larger hull and higher automation provide the habitability and crew margin needed for 30 to 60 day deployments from Halifax and Esquimalt to the North Atlantic, the Indo-Pacific, and the Arctic ice edge, while remaining within the conventional, non-nuclear profile Canada has set. The design’s modern combat system and sensor suite can be integrated with Canadian and allied command, control, and targeting architectures, and the bilateral sustainment framework required with South Korea can be structured by contract to include full technical data access, in-country training pipelines, and an industrial workshare that anchors through-life support domestically. The delivery cadence proposed for a 2026 award would shorten Canada’s reliance on the Victoria class and reduce associated sustainment exposure during transition, while an initial Canadian order of up to twelve boats would give Ottawa a controlling voice over configuration management, growth paths, and export-variant standards for the life of the class.
QotD: The burden of “emotional labour”
Researchers at Stanford have finally given a name to something many women have been dealing with for years. It’s called mankeeping. And it’s helping explain why so many women are stepping away from dating altogether.
Yes, from the pages of Vice, it’s a men-are-the-problem-and-therefore-unnecessary article. Because we haven’t had one of those in weeks.
Mankeeping describes the emotional labour women end up doing in heterosexual relationships.
Lesbian relationships being entirely free of aggravation and disappointment, you see. With rates of failure and divorce twice that of heterosexuals, more than double that of gay male couples, and with high rates of alcoholism and spousal abuse. What one might infer from that, I leave to others.
[Mankeeping] goes beyond remembering birthdays or coordinating social plans. It means being your partner’s one-man support system. Managing his stress.
And,
Interpreting his moods.
At which point, readers may wish to share their favourite joke about female indirectness and the two dozen possible meanings of the words “I’m fine” when uttered by a woman, depending on the precise intonation and the current alignment of the planets.
Readers may also note the replacement of a once common but now seemingly unfashionable grievance – “Men don’t express their feelings” – with one of a much more modish kind – “Men are expressing their feelings and it’s exhausting and unfair”.
Holding his hand through feelings he won’t share with anyone else. All of it unpaid, unacknowledged, and often unreciprocated.
One more time:
All of it unpaid,
It occurs to me that there’s something a little dissonant about the framing of affection and basic consideration – say, remembering your partner’s birthday – as “unpaid”. As “emotional labour”. As if being in a relationship or having any concern for those you supposedly care about were some onerous, crushing chore. As if you should be applauded – and financially compensated – for the thirty-second task of adding a birthday to the calendar on your phone.
The attitude implied by the above would, I think, explain many failures on the progressive partner-finding front and the consequent “stepping away from dating altogether”. Though possibly not in ways the author intended.
Before we go further, it’s perhaps worth pondering how the conceit of “emotional labour” is typically deployed by a certain type of woman. Say, the kind who complains, in print and at great length, about the “emotional labour” of hiring a servant to clean her multiple bathrooms. Or writing a shopping list. Or brushing her daughter’s hair.
And for whom explaining to her husband the concept of “emotional labour” is itself bemoaned as “emotional labour”. The final indignity.
The kind of woman who bitches in tremendous detail about her husband and his shortcomings – among which, an inability to receive instructions sent via telepathy – in the pages of a national magazine, where friends and colleagues of said husband, and perhaps his own children, can read on with amusement. The kind of woman who tells the world about how hiring servants is just so “exhausting”, while professing some heroic reluctance to complain.
As I said, worth pondering.
But back to the pages of Vice, where Ms Ashley Fike is telling us how it is:
According to Pew Research, only 38 percent of single women in the US are currently looking for a relationship. Among single men, that number jumps to 61 percent. The gap says a lot. Women aren’t opting out of love. They’re opting out of being someone’s therapist with benefits.
Stoic, heroic women burdened by needy, emotional men. It’s a bold take.
And I can’t help but wonder what all of those single women, cited above, are doing instead of finding a suitable mate and building a happy life, perhaps even a family. Are they searching for a sense of purpose in causes, protests and political fashion, fuelled at least in part by envy and resentment? Just speculation, of course. But it would, I think, explain the tone and emotional convulsions of so many single, progressive women.
The Guardian calls mankeeping a modern extension of emotional labour, one that turns a partner into a life coach. This isn’t about avoiding vulnerability. It’s about refusing to carry someone else’s emotional weight while getting little to nothing in return. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling that way.
Again, the term “emotional labour” and its connotations of calculation, antagonism, and something vaguely inhuman. As if the concept of wanting to care, to help, to remember those birthdays, were somehow alien or offensive.
The reliance on this conceit – as the basis for an article, perhaps an entire worldview – doesn’t strike me as an obvious recipe for contentment, or indeed love. What with the endless cataloguing of shortcomings. All those reasons to resent.
Some men have started opening up more, which is good.
Ah, a glimmer of hope.
But too often, that openness lands in the lap of the person they’re sleeping with instead of a friend or a therapist. Vulnerability without boundaries can feel more like a burden than a breakthrough.
So, don’t bore your wife with your troubles, gentlemen. No, search out a therapist. Or, “Be vulnerable, like we asked, but somewhere else”.
David Thompson, “Let’s Be Alone And Unhappy”, Thompson, blog, 2025-11-16.
February 19, 2026
Too many “conservatives” today are just slower-speed liberals
Most self-described conservatives in politics are not particularly inclined to “conserve” anything, as Spaceman Spiff points out, they’re pretty much onboard with the liberal vision they just want it to be fractionally slower or infinitesimally not-quite-as-liberal as the liberals. They are the ineffectual, neutered, tame opposition:
Modern conservatism is not conserving our world. Mainstream conservatives seem to have no interest in the real issues affecting us.
At best they merely wish to slow down our decline. At worst, they are fully on board with the destruction.
When they do act or speak they often pick a safe version of a sensitive issue.
In Britain there is lots of talk of illegal immigration and how the state mishandles it. None about ruinous volumes of legal immigration, almost one million per year, and what it is doing to the country.
Pushback against climate policy falters on the speed of changes, not the underlying fraud of climate science itself.
No conservative will honestly discuss the plummeting happiness of women recorded across the West and yet there it is, writ large in antidepressant prescriptions and social media videos. It may have multiple causes, but feminism cannot be challenged so they say nothing lest they are reprimanded by the sisterhood.
Everything real is forbidden. It is all an act.
Like the left, those on the right are increasingly unable to face reality which means they can never course correct. They are trapped within a self-referencing culdesac designed to maintain their position in someone else’s hierarchy. That is why they have become so ineffective and appear to do very little except moan about the pace of change while they say nothing about the changes themselves.
We sense the conservatives do wish to conserve things but they are inexplicably mesmerized by the opinion of their enemies. They seek reassurance and applause from people who view them as evil.
This makes no sense to ordinary people.
Thinking like the enemy
The problem with modern conservatives is they are animated by underlying drives that cannot create a conservative or traditional society. They have adopted the thinking patterns associated with the progressive left while still using the language of conservatism.
The left is traditionally defined by a series of interrelated traits that manifest in much of what they agitate for.
- A desire for centralization;
- A notable external locus of control;
- Seeking approval from the group.
Central control systems feature prominently in all left-wing schemes. From local councils to national governments, those who gravitate to the left often want to create centralized decision-making bodies to manage society. Institutions, government departments, NGOs and even charities all feature, but only when they act as the controlling authority in some field of interest.
Related to this is a clear external locus of control visible in individuals and their decisions. There is a relief others make the key decisions, so people actively seek out direction from an established authority. This ensures minimal resistance to the many centralized schemes we see emerge.
Acting solo creates discomfort. An older formulation understood this as the rejection of responsibility. Today it often manifests as an obsession with experts making key decisions for us all, partly to mask individual cowardice. People making their own decisions in life are derided as naive or dangerous.
During Covid decision makers became hysterical at the very idea we would reject the advice of experts and perform our own research despite the issue being medical and therefore dangerous.
A related phenomenon characteristic of many leftists is the need for approval, often from a group. Not just others making decisions but a dependency on confirmation and endorsement to ensure thinking and behaviour follows an established norm. This is the antithesis of original thinking or bold action; it is how adolescents often behave.
In today’s world this deep urge is reflected most in the social media landscape of harvesting attention and likes. Every fledgling narcissistic applause-seeking trait is given full expression in the endless search for approval from strangers. Whole sections of society seem lost to impulses we once understood as immature and dysfunctional.
Update: Not long after I queued this item for publication, a Canadian example popped up in the news, as yet another rock-ribbed “conservative” suddenly realized that electing a Liberal was what his constituents actually wanted when they inexplicably voted for him as a Conservative candidate in the last federal election.
Edmonton Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux has crossed the floor to the governing Liberals.
“I am honoured to welcome Matt Jeneroux to our caucus as the newest member of Canada’s new government,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney, in a post on X.
“I am grateful to Matt and his family that he will continue his service as a strong voice for Edmonton Riverbend in Parliament.”
Carney said Jeneroux, who has represented the riding of Edmonton Riverbend since 2015, will take on a new role as special advisor on economic and security partnership for the Liberals.
Jeneroux is the third Conservative to join the Liberals, after colleagues Michael Ma and Chris d’Entremont crossed the floor late last year.
A Liberal source says Jeneroux first met Carney back in November, which was the first of at least two conversations, with talks between Carney’s office and Jeneroux continuing since. That source added that it has been a “long journey” to Wednesday’s announcement.
d’Entremont crossed the floor to join the Liberals in November, which unleashed a wave of speculation as to who might be next, with Jeneroux’s name heavily floated. Jeneroux then announced his plans to resign from the Conservative caucus, citing family reasons. Since then, he has not voted with the Conservatives and did not attend the party’s recent convention in Calgary in late January.
After Carney’s announcement, the prime minister updated his daily itinerary, adding a stop in Edmonton to meet with Jeneroux before attending events in British Columbia.
“Matt brings a wealth of experience in Parliament, despite his young demeanor,” said Carney, while sitting next to Jeneroux.
The MP from Edmonton welcomed the prime minister and laid out the reasons for why he had reversed his decision to resign.
“I had announced my resignation back in November, largely due to family reasons, but quite simply, couldn’t sit on the sidelines after seeing what the prime minister’s ambitious agenda he was undertaking across the country and across the world,” he said.
“Quite honestly, it was the speech in Davos where you took everything head on,” he added.
Jeneroux said it felt disingenuous and “quite simply wrong” to sit on the sidelines.
Hotchkiss Model 1886 3-pounder Quick Firing Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 26 Sept 2025Small fast boats with torpedos (or other explosives) have always been a threat to large warships. One of the weapons the British Royal Navy adopted to counter that threat was the Hotchkiss Model 1886 “Quick Fire” gun. This meant that it was a breech-loaded gun that used self-contained cartridge ammunition, instead of separate powder bags and projectiles. Mounted on a recoil-adsorbing soft mount with a wide range of movement and steep depression angle, guns like this could fire at small mobile torpedo boats that a capital ship’s main armament couldn’t handle.
This particular model is a 47mm bore, or 3-pounder as described in British service. It uses a vertically-traveling breech block, and more than 3,000 or them were acquired by the British. Two of them were employed as part of the Falkland Islands coastal defenses at one time. This example is one of two brought down from Gibraltar fairly recently and refurbished for ceremonial use on the Islands. Thanks to the FIDF for setting it up on its mount so I could film it for you!
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QotD: The Donation of Constantine
I love it because it’s clearly a watershed moment in human thought. I don’t mean the rediscovery of the classical past; I mean the shift between a more cyclical orientation towards life, versus an orientation around linear time. Time as the regular procession of the seasons, vs. time as a stream or river.
Some examples will help. The 15th century saw not just the creation of archives-based history, but the techniques in various fields that make archival work possible. For instance, the Donation of Constantine was definitively proved to be a forgery in the 15th century, on the basis of philological evidence. Before that point, the people using the Donation – both ways — wouldn’t have cared too much if they knew it was a fake. Not because they were opportunists (although they were), but because “factual accuracy”, to use one of my favorite of the Media’s many Freudian slips, just didn’t matter much back then.
When they said “the Donation of Constantine” they meant “hallowed by tradition”, and if you’d proved to them that the Donation was fake, they’d just keep on keepin’ on — ok, then, “hallowed by tradition” it is, everyone update your style books accordingly.
Severian, “The Ghosts (II)”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-18.
February 18, 2026
QotD: Defending the borders of the Roman Empire
The thing is, approximately none of this logic applied in the Roman situation. First of all, as we’ve already noted, a huge fraction of the threats the Romans faced were “low-intensity”: border skirmishes, slave raids, pirates and brigands, that sort of thing. Static fortifications, walls and towers, are often more than sufficient for dealing with these problems. Paradoxically, that actually increases the mobility and responsiveness of the main forces. If they aren’t constantly running back and forth along the border dealing with bandits, that means they can respond with short notice to “high-intensity” threats (like major invasions and rebellions) that pop up, and are probably better rested and better provisioned when the emergency arrives. So, far from diluting their strength, a lightly-manned series of linear fortifications actually enabled the Romans to concentrate it.
Secondly, those linear fortifications can also be very useful when that major invasion shows up, even if they are overrun. A defense system doesn’t have to be impenetrable in order to still be very, very useful. One thing it can do is buy time, either for the main army to arrive or for some other strategic purpose. The defenses can also act to channel opposing forces into particular well-scouted avenues of attack, or change the calculus of which invasion routes are more and less appealing. Finally, in the process of setting up those defenses, you probably got to know the terrain extremely well, such that when the battle comes you have a tactical advantage.
[…]
The third, and perhaps most important, reason why the Roman frontier fortifications were actually very smart is that they were carefully designed to double as a springboard for invasions into enemy territory. Luttwak coins the term “preclusive defense” to describe this approach. The basic idea is that an army can take bigger risks — pursue a retreating foe, seize a strategic opportunity that might be an ambush, etc. — if it knows that there are strong, prepared defensive lines that it can retreat to nearby. Roman armies were constantly taking advantage of this, and moreover taking advantage of the fact that the system of border fortifications was also a system of roads, supply lines, food and equipment storage depots, and so on. The limes were not a wall that the Romans huddled behind, they were a weapon pointed outwards, magnifying the power that the legions could project, helping them to do more with less.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.
- I, an ignoramus, assumed this was all downstream of the Maginot line’s bad reputation, but Luttwak says it’s actually the fault of Clausewitz.
February 17, 2026
QotD: Britain treats asylum seekers significantly better than their own citizens
The page continues: “You’ll get extra money to buy healthy food if you’re pregnant or a mother of a child aged three or under”. The payment is £5.25 per week for pregnancy, £9.50 for a baby under one, £5.25 for children aged one to three, plus a one-off £300 maternity grant for anyone expecting a child or with a baby under six months. Even when asylum is refused, support continues: “You’ll be given somewhere to live and £49.18 per person on a payment card for food, clothing and toiletries”. Only those who decline the accommodation lose the card.
Medical care is covered in full. “You may get free National Health Service healthcare,” the Government states, including “free prescriptions for medicine, free dental care, free eyesight tests and help paying for glasses”. Children are guaranteed a place in a state school and “may be able to get free school meals”. The terms are so generous that the NHS issues a dedicated HC2 certificate for people on asylum support, giving them automatic exemption from all prescription and dental charges, free eye tests and optical vouchers, and even help with wigs and fabric supports.
Compare this to the treatment of the people who pay for it. A British worker who loses his job must apply for Universal Credit, then wait at least five weeks before receiving a payment. Any advance must be repaid out of later instalments. He must show that he is seeking work, accept appointments and interviews, and risk sanctions if he misses them. He is scrutinised as a potential cheat. An asylum claimant is treated as a recipient of moral debt, requiring no proof of worthiness.
When the native taxpayer falls ill, he must pay £9.90 per prescription unless he qualifies for a limited exemption. He may buy a “pre-payment certificate” to spread the cost, but the charge remains. Dental treatment on the NHS costs £27.40 for a check-up, £75.30 for a filling, £326.70 for a crown or denture, and many cannot find an NHS dentist at all. Asylum seekers, by contrast, present their HC2 certificate and pay nothing. If the citizen asks the council for housing, he is told that the waiting list is full, that he is not a “priority case”, and that the private rental market is his problem. The asylum applicant, by the State’s own words, is “given somewhere to live if you need it”.
None of this is accidental. The cost of asylum support in 2023–24 was about £4.7 billion, according to the Home Office’s own figures, of which £3 billion went on hotel accommodation. In 2024–25, the bill fell slightly to £4 billion, but £2.1 billion of this was still for hotels — an average of £5.7 million every day. The National Audit Office has found that the ten-year accommodation contracts, first priced at £4.5 billion, are now projected to cost £15.3 billion. Between April and October 2024 alone, £1.7 billion was spent on housing and managing asylum seekers. The Financial Times has estimated the total annual cost of the asylum system at roughly £4.8 billion. The number of people receiving asylum support — housing, cash or both — now stands at over 100,000.
The figures expose a transfer of resources on a colossal scale. What is presented as “humanitarian duty” has become a domestic welfare state for foreigners, sustained by British workers who receive less support in return for greater taxation. The British State can house every migrant but not every nurse, find free dental care for the undocumented but not for the elderly, provide optical help for those who have just arrived but not for those who have paid into the system all their lives.
Marian Halcombe, “Britain’s Welfare Empire: A State that Feeds Strangers and Starves Its Own”, The Libertarian Alliance, 2025-11-05.
