Diagram of von Thünen’s model from The Isolated State, after Morley (1996), 62. The agriculture ring is subdivided by intensity (intensive, long-lay and three-field), but here I have merged them for simplicity. The agriculture zone is wider because it did, in fact, tend to cover a larger area. The fade in the pastoralism zone is meant to indicate shifts from ranching to transhumance.
Once out of the innermost zone of very high intensity usage, we reach the middle zones of von Thünen’s model, which are devoted primarily to agriculture, falling in degrees of intensity as we move away from the city. This is where you should expect to see rolling seas of wheat and barley, as well as large scale cultivation of things like olives and grapes, as the climate permits. This seems to be what, for instance, Tolkien has in mind when he describes the Pelennor as fair and fertile townlands running down to the Anduin.
(I should note this this zone is subdivided into three groups: intensive agriculture, long-lay agriculture and three-field agriculture. We might discuss those terms further if future posts bring us to discussing how pre-modern farms work, but for now, I don’t want to get too – pardon the pun – deep in the weeds.)
Now, I noted before that for small cities, the horticultural zone might be entirely contained inside the city walls. The reverse is true as well – the larger the city, the further out these zones can get pushed – and this is especially true of the middle zone. As it extends, it tends to create miniature population centers within it (villages) – usually along roads (we’ll get to them).
But for very large cities, the area of grain cultivation can be truly massive. As I’ve noted in an earlier post, a city of around 500,000 would need to pull cereal production from an area of arable land close to the size of the state of Massachusetts. Rome – at nearly a million – imported grain from up and down the entire Italian coast, North Africa and even Egypt. A middle zone that large could contain not merely villages, but other towns and even large cities, whose own land-use patterns would be substantially distorted by the “pull” of the mega-city at the center. […] as a rule of thumb, if the cereal cultivation zone extends more than 20 miles out from the center, you should expect to see smaller market towns within it (because people want a market within a day’s walk).
What does this kind of zone look like? That actually depends a lot on terrain – expect villages surrounded by fields on areas of good, arable land. In a fairly wet environment (like Northern Europe), those villages might radiate out from the city. In arid environments like Egypt or Mesopotamia, the farmland (and thus the peasant population) is densely concentrated along the rivers, because water availability becomes a strong determinant of arability.
One thing Americans specifically tend to get a bit off here is that the farms are not likely to be evenly spaced over the terrain. We are very used to the agricultural landscape created by things like the Homestead Acts (1862-1930), which offered very large chunks of land (often as many as 640 acres) for purchase, creating a lot of very spaced out farms. Peasant agriculture in the pre-modern period doesn’t tend to organize like this.
Instead, peasant agriculture tends to cluster in villages, with fields radiating out from the villages (which in turn, often have their own micro-garden zone and local forests for wood). Part of the reason for this is that farmland within the village is typically not held as big, standalone farmsteads. Instead, it is either held communally, or else each family owns several small plots spread over different ecological zones (the better to be protected from the risk of a year being wet or dry or cold or whatever – if you have a little land everywhere, then probably something will grow somewhere every year. I’ll talk more about subsistence survival strategies in a future post).
In some societies, these peasant villages may also be mixed in with large elite-held (often slave worked) estates, but there’s an important caveat here. The grand estates – like Roman villas and latifundia – generally do not completely displace the local peasantry (in part because they rely on that peasantry to supply surplus labor). The role of the “big man” and these sorts of large market-oriented estates is complex and worth its own post. But in terms of land-use patterns, such estates generally exist within a landscape of smaller farmers, not in a vast sea of other large estates.
The outermost zone in the model is dedicated to pastoralism (“ranching” technically, but I’d like to be a bit more broad). Pastoralism can take the form of enclosed ranching, but can also be mobile in various ways. I won’t describe ranching too much – this human terrain is still much in evidence and well documented. But mobile forms of pastoralism are more foreign, I suspect, to most of my readers. Transhumance – the moving of livestock between seasonal summer and winter pastures (often up the mountain in summer and down the mountain in winter, for instance – this is “vertical” transhumance) is a common form of limited pastoral mobility.
Transhumant pastoralists do tend to have permanent homes at one end of the route (typically the lower winter pastures for vertical transhumance). These may cluster in villages and are likely to plug into the infrastructure network spreading out from the city. I bring this up mostly because this is how you do get the “rolling hills of empty grassland” terrain so common in depictions of fantasy cities: these areas aren’t empty at all, but merely transhumant pastures not currently in use.
(Side note: This fact about pastoralism is especially worth noting: pastures which are regrowing in the “off” season often might look empty and unused to an outsider, but trespassing on such grounds can bring lethal retaliation. Because these pastures are not unused, but in fact engaged in the vital task of regrowing to support the herd in the following season. This is also the case for true nomads as well, by the by. The reason, of course, is that if those pastures are not grown when the herds are migrated back, the pastoralist’s entire pattern of subsistence is disrupted, endangering his survival. This is a not infrequent cause of friction between pastoralists and agricultural peoples who neighbor each other).
Pastoralism exists on the outer edge of the model for two reasons. First, it is very low density. While the goods it produces (wool, milk, meat) are important, it produces them at a very low density. Agriculture can support massively greater population densities than pastoralism, so high population density tends to push the pastoralists out. There’s a political/military dimension to this as well: the concerns of the farmers tend to dominate political thinking in the city (where, you will recall, the political and military elite are), and the farmer’s greater population density tends to allow them to “push” the pastoralists further from the city and onto marginal lands – either economically (buy the land) or militarily (fight the pastoralists and shove them off).
Second, pastoralism has very low transportation costs. This is because the goods produced by pastoralists can, by and large, walk themselves to market. This is called transporting them “on the hoof”, a phrase my students continue to find funny and are surprised to learn is a real term. Major cattle and animal markets are often still located within city centers, but a shepherd can simply walk his animals to market for sale. That greatly reduces transportation costs, which also tends to push pastoralism out to the edges of the economic network.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Lonely City, Part I: The Ideal City”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-12.
October 27, 2026
QotD: The outer “zones” surrounding a typical pre-modern city
October 26, 2026
“Christofascism” seen as harmful
I must not hang out in the progressive cool kids’ areas of the internet, as I’d only occasionally heard the term “Christofascism” and I’d never encountered even a vague definition of what the pejorative might mean. Copernican to the rescue with an extended discussion on that very thing (it’s a long piece, these excerpts just skim the surface):
Image from Seeking Always the Horizon
Long has the progressive movement decried “ChristoFascism”, representing it as the greatest threat to Western civilization. The alphabet-soup squad has mostly moved on. Like most words uttered by the progressive mind, the term is used entirely for the reaction it elicits, and has nothing to do with describing the real world. Christofascism was just another word in their toolbox, like “nazism” or “racist” or (now) the ever-popular “if you date a girl two years younger than you, you’re a pedophile”.
All these are words uttered merely to enforce the progressive’s bizarre form of destructive totalitarian thought-control.1
While the [CURRENT THING] horde has moved on from accusations of Christofascism, I have not. There’s something archaically elegant in that formulation of words and the compound thought-form they represent. Hiding in the spiteful accusation is a memetic complex that deserves further investigation. Christofascism was a mere combination of “bad things” that the Left hates … but that doesn’t mean it should be taken as mere braindead progressive gurgling.
It may well be far more than that. There’s a new cultural theology hidden in there.
[…]
ChristoFascism
Individuals like Kulak identify modern (what I’d call “liberal”) Christianity as a fundamental inhibitor to the people of the West.2 That analysis is not entirely wrong. Christianity in its modern incarnation developed alongside the fall of Rome, the High Medieval Period, and then through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Christianity was a governance apparatus for regional tribal conflicts and the occasional crusade. It was the centerpiece of the Holy Roman Empire, but the theological framework has a great deal of trouble squaring with modernity.
Simultaneously, all of the alternatives, the materialist religions of the 20th century, have been absolute disasters ending in nihilism, hedonism, or cruelty. The human collective unconscious is not a static thing.3 It’s frothing with new ideas, particularly during times of great change and turmoil. The Hegelian dialectic.
Notably, the Hegelian dialectic ends in the creation of a new thesis. The original Thesis is the Universalist heritage of the West. That would be Christianity from 300 AD up until the 19th century. Then there is the antithesis, the materialist religions that seized the zeitgeist in the 20th.
[…]
A Christofascist cultural foundation must express:
- The moral recognition of a higher power and that it is the duty of the state to nurture a heroic righteousness in its own people, granting Duties, and Guidance in addition to liberty.4
- A masculine Will to Power in the development of its own practices, heritage, and promotion of its own cultural ideals to the exclusion of hostile, foreign, or corrosive ones.
- That the State, and the individuals who make up the State, are responsible for adhering to higher moral standards. One cannot simply blame “the voters” for the evil actions of the state. The leadership of the state holds personal responsibility for imposed policies.
- An intense sense of national exceptionalism, particularly in the eyes of God. As a spiritually exceptional state, the people of the nation uphold a higher scientific and spiritual ideal as individuals, families, and citizens.
- A recognition of other similar nations as being siblings seeking the same ultimate goals through alternative means, rather than pawns in a game of Great Powers.
- Paternalism with God as father to the nation’s people, and the nation’s people not beholden to the operational state but being the actuators of it. A father that expresses temperance in governance.
- I think that John Carter wrote the best analysis of this phenomenon in his work on “Homo Umbrans“. The product of man willingly handing over sapience in exchange for the reprieve from intellectual rigor. To very roughly summarize one of the best articles on Substack: if you feel like you’re under psychic attack when trying to communicate with a progressive, it’s because you are. The Leftist attempts to annul the meaning of words required for thought to render sapient cognition and abstract reasoning impossible.
- Here’s a direct link to some of the work that Kulak has done. This one is of particular interest to those in the proverbial Pagan camp. Here’s an article that was written by Millennial Woes on the same topic. A great article that I would recommend regarding this perpetual confrontation within the Spiritual Right.
- Here’s my own article on how best to conceptualize the collective unconscious.
- We will assume a Christian higher power, it’s in the name after all.
US Armament Reproduction DeLisle Commando Carbine (Silenced .45ACP)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Jun 2026The DeLisle Commando Carbine is one of the coolest special operation weapons of the Second World War — an SMLE rebuilt in .45ACP with a ginormous suppressor. It fed from slightly modified 1911 magazines, and thanks to .45ACP being subsonic in its normal loading, it is incredibly quiet. Because the gun is relatively easy to make (being based on a readily available receiver), one-off and limited-run reproductions have been around for a while, but always hard to find.
US Armament has begun making a serial-production new DeLisle, and they send me one on loan to film. It is very, VERY quiet, and runs more smoothly and reliably than I expected, as the originals have a reputation for being finicky. The reproduction elements are quite good, although not quite perfect in the details (like the muzzle assembly, sights, and handguard). However, I believe the price is quite high for the product.
(more…)
QotD: When Lester Pearson “invented” peacekeeping
… most Canadians neither know nor care much about either foreign or defence policy. They, the societal mainstream, were and are still being fed a load of codswallop in schools and universities about Canada’s military history. It begins with the lie about how Canada “invented” peacekeeping. Anyone who believes that “baby-blue-beret” style United Nations peacekeeping was Lester B. Pearson’s idea is too bloody stupid to walk around loose. In fact, Dr. Ralph Bunche, a distinguished American diplomat got the Nobel Prize (1950) for “inventing” peacekeeping in the late 1940s. The outcome of his negotiations was UNTSO, The United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization, the UN’s first ever peacekeeping mission. There was parallel work going on at the same time, involving Canadians like General Andrew McNaughton and Lester Pearson, to use military officers to supervise the India-Pakistan truce in Kashmir. The two original missions, UNTSO and UNMOGIP (the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan) are still working.
What Lester B. Pearson did was to use his diplomatic and political skills — and both were of a high order — to, almost literally save the Western alliance after Britain and France made a strategically stupid decision to capture the Suez Canal after Egyptian President Nasser nationalized it. That move infuriated US President Eisenhower because it upset his own Middle East strategy, and nearly destroyed the Western alliance. Mike Pearson, under orders from Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, repaired the damage before the USSR and its cronies could take strategic advantage of the rift that had opened in the US-led West. Mike Pearson moved peacekeeping from small observer and truce supervisory missions to major undertakings involving troops in a “trip-wire” role. He and UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld were able to stick handle a complex plan through President Eisenhower and around the Soviet bloc in just a few days. Some people said the pair “saved the world”; they certainly saved the Western Alliance.
If you don’t know that then you are a typical Canadian who has been failed by the education system.
Ted Campbell, “Being prepared”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2020-12-17.
October 25, 2026
The Little Panzers That Said I Think I Can – Panzer I & II – Rearmament 11
World War Two
Published 24 Oct 2026How did the Panzer I and Panzer II help Germany defeat armies equipped with more powerful tanks? Armed with machine guns or a 20mm cannon, these little panzers helped spearhead a very big, very ugly war.
In this episode of Nazi Rearmament, Spartacus Olsson follows Germany’s early light tanks from their interwar development and the Spanish Civil War to the invasions of Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. We examine their design, armament, armor, production, and battlefield performance, and how they helped build the Panzerwaffe before more capable tanks were available in sufficient numbers.
Against opponents such as the French Char B1 bis and British Matilda II, their limitations were severe. But tank battles alone did not decide campaigns. Training, communications, concentrated mobile formations, and cooperation with infantry, engineers, artillery, and aircraft helped turn these modest vehicles into effective instruments of conquest. In France in 1940, those advantages combined with a risky German operational plan and Allied command failures to produce a devastating victory.
Their story also exposes the growing gap between Hitler’s ambitions and Germany’s industrial resources. Early victories encouraged further aggression, bringing occupation, exploitation, and mass murder to millions while drawing Germany into a war against an increasingly powerful coalition.
October 24, 2026
Everyone has an opinion on Oliver Cromwell
On Substack, Charles Haywood reviews The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Ronald Hutton:
If you know anything about Oliver Cromwell — and few do nowadays — you probably have an opinion about the man. Some vilify him; “A curse upon you, Oliver Cromwell, you who raped our Motherland”, the Irish rock band The Pogues sang. Others praise him as an enemy of arbitrary rule and a proto-republican. Ronald Hutton’s new biography of Cromwell’s early life and his climb to prominence makes no final judgment on the man, but it does offer a nuanced view of this complex historical figure. From Hutton’s excellent book we get not just history but the realization, in this desiccated age, that men such as Cromwell always emerge during great turmoil, rising as if from sown dragon’s teeth.
Hutton wisely focuses on his subject, and makes no attempt to tease out the political and social complexities behind the Civil War. He expertly evokes the England of the mid-seventeenth century, both in politics and the natural world. As to the latter, quite often Hutton describes in detail the flora of the region and season, at the same time he narrates a particular historical event, which makes the reader feel more immersed in the story, as if he were there. It also makes the reader a little sad, though. Why? Because it brings to the mind’s eye a lost time and a lost country, before industrialization, liquid modernity, and alien invitees destroyed both the English landscape and England’s ancient culture.
The short version of Hutton’s biography is that Cromwell “was both godly and wily, and the two at times seem to jar with each other”. No doubt this is often true for a godly man called to be a temporal leader. Hutton believes that most Cromwell biographers focus too much on the godliness and too little on the wiliness. This is not really a popular history; it offers extensive notes, and Hutton often refers to controversies among Cromwell scholars of little interest to the casual reader. Nonetheless, it is very readable, so any reader who is willing to put in a little effort will be rewarded.
Until he was forty, Cromwell lived as an obscure provincial, a collateral descendant of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s minister who fell from grace. In his thirties, however, he became a devout Puritan, something about which we know very little. (He kept no archive of correspondence, and while he left voluminous public words, he left no record of his own private thoughts other than letters to others.) Hutton fleshes out what we can know about Cromwell’s life prior to 1640, in the East Midlands, in and near Huntingdon. There was no reason to expect great things from Cromwell; he was on the lower border of the gentry, a man of no importance. In fact, for a time until he inherited money from his uncle, he directly worked the land as a tenant farmer.
[…]
For the next two years, relations between Parliament and King deteriorated, and the countryside began to separate into armed factions. When Charles sought to fund himself by asking for donations from Cambridge colleges, Cromwell returned to Cambridge, apparently on his own initiative, and raised a militia, successfully preventing the dispatch of gold and silver to the King. Soon he was formally commissioned a cavalry officer in the army being raised by Parliament, and so he remained for the entire war, rising ever higher in rank.
From 1642 until 1646, the end of the period covered by Hutton’s book, Cromwell alternated vigorous military activity with political activity. He remained a member of Parliament. In 1645 Parliament, in order to resolve a dispute between the Lords and Commons, forbade members to also be military officers. Such a separation was part of creating the famous New Model Army—but Cromwell alone was given a dispensation. This was meant to be very temporary, meeting an immediate critical need, not an acclamation of Cromwell, who had made plenty of internal enemies. But as it happens, Cromwell’s greatest military successes immediately followed, at the most crucial period of this first phase of the Civil War, and so he continued to both lead soldiers and serve in Parliament. This lucky confluence of events was what ultimately made Cromwell.
The Winter War, 1939-40
After joining with Hitler’s Third Reich to dismember Poland, and occupying the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Stalin turned his attention to Finland. From the Soviet point of view, the Finnish border was uncomfortably close to Leningrad and the fortified defensive lines along the Karelian Isthmus were a reminder that the Finns could cause trouble if a war came. Stalin’s solution was to demand that the Finns give up the region northwest of Leningrad (including the defences), along with several islands in the Gulf of Finland and allow a Soviet naval base to be established on the Finnish coast near Helsinki. All this in exchange for a larger chunk of Soviet territory north of Lake Ladoga and the “firm friendship of the Soviet Union” for whatever that might be worth. The Soviets backed up their claim with an overwhelming military superiority in men, tanks, artillery and air power. The Finns declined the generous offer, which took Stalin aback:
Not actually much of an exaggeration: Finnish snipers were a constant threat to Soviet military operations in Finland during the Winter War and the Continuation War.
On 30 November 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland through an immensely samey, tree-covered morass. Across hundreds of miles of deep snow and borderland, the Red Army unleashed 450,000 men, roughly 1,100 tanks, and hundreds of combat aircraft, expecting to overwhelm its smaller neighbour through sheer weight of armour, heavy artillery, and manpower.
Joseph Stalin overturned the original campaign plan, discarding the slower but sounder 4-month plan for a lightning campaign in just two months. Beneath that rigid political deadline lay an atmosphere of terror. No senior Soviet commander dared challenge Stalin, correct his unrealistic timetables, or point out that the Red Army was unready for a winter invasion. Officers who raised logistical concerns risked being branded defeatists or traitors—a real possibility the purges proved.
This fear spread in the ranks.
Despite the low state of morale, the Red Army struck along three operational axes:
- The Southern Main Effort (Karelian Isthmus): The heavy Soviet 7th Army would drive toward Helsinki, intent on punching through the main Finnish defences: the Mannerheim Line.
- The High North (Lapland & Arctic Coast): The 14th Army would advance across the tundra to seize Finland’s ice-free Arctic port at Petsamo, to cut off fears of foreign supplies inbound to aid the Finns.
- The Central Thrust (the “Waist” of Finland): The Soviet 9th Army would strike west across the country’s narrowest stretch toward Oulu on the Gulf of Bothnia.
Soviet pressure in three main spots, excuse my art!
Image and caption from WW2 MattersIn the central sector, Soviet planners harboured an ambitious but possible objective: advance west toward Oulu, reach the Gulf of Bothnia, and slice Finland in two.
The plan looked reasonable on map overlays at Leningrad headquarters. The target was Suomussalmi — a quiet logging settlement enveloped by lakes, swamps, and primaeval pine. Its importance lay not in its economic value, but in its position on the regional dirt road network running west toward Oulu. A successful Soviet drive here would sever the rail network connecting northern and southern Finland, cutting the vital land artery to neutral Sweden through which western supplies flowed.
To execute this strategic cut, Soviet planners committed two heavily reinforced divisions under the 45th Rifle Corps — the 163rd Rifle Division and the 44th “Blue” Rifle Division. With their attached tank battalions, corps artillery, and massive logistical columns, this combined force brought nearly 50,000 men into the narrow forest corridors.
In the Suomussalmi sector, the Finns initially faced fewer than 1,000 local Civil Guardsmen, later reinforced into Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo’s 9th Division to total 11,000 to 17,000 men. Outnumbered more than four to one, the Finns had no tanks and only 11 outdated artillery pieces — some dating back to the 1904 Russo-Japanese War — and severely rationed shells.
The Soviet plan depended on numerical dominance. But in the dense taiga forests of northeastern Finland, it became a bloody lesson in the difference between possessing a large army and knowing how to use it.
QotD: Was Hitler stupid?
Hitler didn’t have that problem. It’s a mug’s game, trying to tie “measured IQ” to anything, much less to try to retroactively guess any given historical figure’s IQ. But it’s a useful-ish concept, so let’s call that “processor speed”. My buddy Jeremy was right at the apex of the bell curve re: processor speed. Hitler was clearly on the right hand side of that particular curve. Probably a fair ways out there, if the truth be known — no genius, Hitler, but pretty sharp nonetheless.
Unfortunately, that degree of smart makes one especially vulnerable to a certain kind of stupidity — let’s call it “the stupidity of misplaced self-esteem”. Snowflake stupid, maybe, for short. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of being the smartest guy in the room. I mean clearly, unquestionably the sharpest knife in that particular drawer. If you have too many experiences like that, you start thinking you’re the sharpest knife in every drawer; the smartest guy in any possible room. Which means you veer out of your lane on the regular.
It’s endemic in academia, so I’m particularly sensitive to that kind of stupidity. Most profs actually are fairly bright, processor speed-wise. […] If he’d used those brains to, say, open up a mechanic shop or something, he’d fall victim to Big Man Syndrome — every babymomma’s cousin’s sister’s former roommate would start coming around, expecting him to pimp her ride for free. Since academia produces nothing useful, the homies can’t freeride on you).
Throw in the fact that you control the grade book, and it’s really, really easy to convince yourself you’re the smartest guy in any room. With no one to hold you in check, and in the absence of reality testing — which the entire ivory tower ecosystem is designed to avoid — it’s sometimes a real battle not to let your freak flag fly. Indeed you frequently come to wonder why you bother …
… and that’s the kind of stupid Hitler was. Snowflake stupidity is, obviously, situational. There were lots of legit very smart guys in the Nazi party. I doubt Hitler was ever the processor-speed smartest guy in any room, but he was up there, and in the early days he knew it — both ways. Moreover, he had charisma. What the PUAs study like crazy to learn, he just naturally knew how to do. Even the people who were constitutionally immune to his charm could see how and why so many others fell for it.
That’s the most dangerous combo. He was smart enough to be right in there in most rooms … but he could dominate any room with his charisma. Which leads to another special kind of stupidity, what you might call “messianic stupidity”. Things just kind of work out for that kind of guy; have you noticed? I’m sure everyone has known someone like that — probably not to Hitler’s degree, but I’m sure there’s someone in your life that just seems to catch every possible break, all the time, and when something does start going south for him, he can just turn on those baby blues and it all kinda just … goes away.
That kind of person — and I had a buddy like this; I saw it at close range — “knows better”. In the sense that if you gave him a situation on paper, and had him dope it out Heuer-style, he’d come up with the “correct” choice. Nothing wrong with his decision making process in a vacuum, and of course he was smarter than the average bear, too. If you went to Ross with a problem and pitched it as something that might hypothetically happen to some guy, he’d give you solid to excellent advice.
If, however, you went to him with one of your problems, in a situation involving mutual acquaintances, his advice would be terrible. For instance, he was one of those guys who don’t look like anything special, but every girl in the room starts drooling when he walks in. So you ask him “Hey, what should I do about Jane?” and though he’ll try his best to help, it really just doesn’t compute. Because while whatever he advises would work out great for him — of course it would — for you it’ll be a big mess, even if you do your very best Ross impersonation, because you don’t have that thing he has, the one the Germans call je ne sais quoi.
Hitler did. His successes were due, in large part, to doing zany, completely off-the-wall shit, the kind no rational planner would ever even bother planning against. Which can work out spectacularly well — Joan of Arc had the same gift. Lenin did, too. Combine that with the devil’s own luck (at least initially) and you get the mystique of the messianic leader. He does zany stuff, and it just kinda works out … until it doesn’t.
Combine that with ideological stupidity and you’re bound to have tears before bedtime. The Nazis had absolutely no idea what they were going to do with Grossdeutschland. Not the first clue. There’s a wonderful book on this, by Mark Mazower, called Hitler’s Empire. To say “they had no clue” is actually an understatement. His thesis, which I agree with, is that Hitler — being a 19th century guy — thought of the conquered territories in terms of Germany’s lost colonies in Africa. Really. A kind of Bismarckian Weltpolitik, except in France instead of Tanzania.
That’s just dumb. It’s not processor-speed dumb; it’s a lifetime of mental habit dumb, combined with ideological enstupidation. Add to this Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, which is buried in my to-read pile somewhere, but you can find good reviews on it with a little googling. Is that IQ-dumb? No. Is it really fucking stupid? Oh yeah.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-12.
October 23, 2026
The Praetorian enforcer for Tiberius Caesar
In Quillette, an excerpt from Guy de la Bédoyère’s new book, Brief Lives of the Ancient World: Rulers, Rebels, and Robbers, on Sejanus, Praetorian Prefect for much of the reign of Tiberius Caesar:
The story of Sejanus is dependent on the accounts of Roman historians, in particular Tacitus, who indulged himself with an unforgettable tale of treachery and dissimulation. His main purpose was to portray Tiberius as a sinister and manipulative tyrant, but he also succeeded in creating an allegory of cynicism at the heart of power.
Shortly after Tiberius’ accession in AD 14, the son of praetorian prefect Seius Strabo — Lucius Aelius Sejanus (born Lucius Seius) — was appointed co-prefect. Like his father, he was an equestrian, Rome’s second aristocratic tier, but had been adopted into the senatorial Aelii clan, hence his name change.
The adoption entitled Sejanus to a senatorial career, but he must have decided that the prefecture of the Praetorian Guard offered him more real power and personal access to the emperor. It also allowed him to avoid the suspicion that surrounded ambitious senators. Tiberius chose a few trusted equestrians to form part of his most intimate circle.
Within a year, Sejanus held the position on his own when his father was promoted to the prefecture of Egypt. Enjoying a trusted pedigree, he quickly inveigled himself into Tiberius’ favour. Sejanus was the first of the praetorian prefects to experiment with the power and influence the position enjoyed, and thereby also with the potential power of the guard as a political force.
Detail from the Praetorian Relief, a Roman marble relief dated to c. 51–52 AD from the Arch of Claudius in Rome.
Sejanus was helped by chance, so often the principal agent in realising ambition. The huge theatre that had been built in Rome by Pompey Magnus in 55 BC burst into flames in the year AD 22. The fire was contained thanks to quick work by Sejanus, who used his position to tackle the emergency. Tiberius heaped praise on Sejanus for averting a catastrophe. The senate voted that a statue of Sejanus be erected on the grounds of the theatre.
In time, the career of Sejanus would expose how dangerous the commander of the guard could become. Tiberius ignored the signs, preferring to take as little interest as possible in the job of being emperor.
Sejanus made his first significant move in AD 23 when he installed all the praetorian cohorts in the Castra Praetoria, a fortified military camp in the northeastern part of the city. Under Augustus, they had been based at several locations in Italy, safely dispersed away from Rome, but may have already been brought into various barracks around the city under Tiberius. Their new dedicated fortress transformed the significance of the prefecture of the guard. The Castra Praetoria, which would remain a permanent feature until the guard’s disbandment under Constantine almost three centuries later, meant that the men were now directly and immediately under Sejanus’ control.
Quebec is to Canada as Scotland is to the United Kingdom
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Fortissax explores the idea that Quebec’s relationship to the rest of the Demented Dominion closely resembles the sometimes awkward relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK (but primarily England):
People have often compared the relationship between Anglo Canada and Quebec to that of England and Ireland, and while there are some similarities there particularly in the visceral emotions during the Cold War, I’d actually argue that Quebec is closer to Canada’s Scotland.
Scotland entered the British union in 1707 as an established kingdom with its own institutions and national consciousness. Québec entered Confederation in 1867 as the homeland of French Canadians, whose institutions and identity predated the Dominion.
Scotland and Quebec became elements of a larger political order while retaining separate identities. Both the English and Scottish can be British, both Anglo and French Canadians can be “Canadian”.
Scotland preserved its legal system and established church under the Union of 1707. Québec retained its civil law tradition, while the Quebec Act of 1774 protected Catholic religious practice and established important foundations for institutional continuity
Scottish identity has historically coexisted with British identity, just as French Canadian identity has coexisted with Canadian identity. In both cases, nationalists have disagreed over whether their distinctive peoplehood is best expressed through political independence or continued participation in a multinational union.
Scots were disproportionately involved in, and benefited enormously from, the British Empire, particularly through commerce, banking, industry, trade, colonial administration, and the military.
French Canadians likewise disproportionately participated in and benefited from the expansion of British North America and the Canadian economy, establishing banks, credit unions, grocery enterprises, factories, and steamship companies. They helped establish the Hudson’s Bay Company, the North West Company, explored vast swathes of the continent, contributed four Fathers of Confederation, and produced six prime ministers
Fast forward to 2026, certain Scottish and Québécois nationalists are suddenly smol wittle itty bitty decolonial Third World beans who dindu nuffin, possessed absolutely no historical agency, and were apparently dragged kicking and screaming into the imperial projects their ancestors helped build.
FN MAG Tactical with Long Rail Upgrade Kit
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Jun 2026The FN MAG is one of those guns that is so durable and well designed that it continues to be one of the best options in its field despite being nearly 70 years old. To meet the demand for mounting larger and heavier optics, particularly night-time clip on sorts, FN developed a long rail kit. This sounds like a pretty straight-forward thing, but adding lots of extra optics to the top cover has a number of second-order issues. To solve them all, the kit includes a strengthened hinge mechanism, overtravel stop, articulated barrel handle, and adjustable-length buttstock. The stock by itself is called the FN MAG Tactical, with the rest of the kit coming as a package. It is able to mount to any existing MAG, including all models of US M240 and British L7/GPMG.
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QotD: Peter Green on Epicureanism and Cynicism
Green picks neither of these interpretations, instead arguing that Epicureanism was totally a cult. Epicureans joined communes after swearing oaths to obey “the Leader”, whom they “flattered like a god”. “Act always”, they were told, “as though Epicurus is watching”. The Leader “seems to have enjoyed droit de seigneur with several of his followers’ wives and mistresses”. In Epicurus’s famous Garden outside Athens, nobody actually worked, with the commune instead sustained in “endowed leisure” by donations extracted from supporters across the Mediterranean. “Send us, for the care of our holy body, first fruits on behalf of yourself and your children”, Epicurus writes to one of his disciples. In Green’s telling, “Epicureanism was, in the last resort, the brainchild of an antisocial and anti-intellectual dogmatist, with a bee in his bonnet about providential gods, and more than a passing urge … to replace the deity himself”.
Quite the cynical attitude … except that Green is just as harsh on the literal Cynics. Being an ascetic who lives on the street in ostentatious poverty while engaging in public defecation and masturbation doesn’t make you a rebel, it just makes you a loser:
The lifestyle is strictly self-promoting; it has no real ulterior end in view. We adopt the lifestyle to be happy. Happiness is defined through the lifestyle, which becomes an end in itself. The manipulation of these social concepts, the “natural” and the “shameless”, simply gives the Cynic an excuse to thumb his nose at the society he is busy rejecting. … Worst of all, the so-called self-sufficiency is a patent sham. The Cynic, in the last resort, exists as a tolerated parasite on the society that he condemns. … The situation is not unfamiliar today.
Blake Neff, “GUEST REVIEW: Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-10-20.
October 22, 2026
The Oldest Recipe in History – Hammurabi’s Kanasu Stew
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 28 Apr 2026Lamb stew garnished with fresh leek and mint
City/Region: Babylon
Time Period: c. 1740 B.C.E.Since this recipe is one of the oldest in the world, it’s bound to have some parts that are a little unclear. For starters, what does “prepare water” mean? Did they have to purify it? Add salt or something else to it? Was it maybe a more complicated process that was commonplace back then, but a mystery to us now? No one knows. Also, the ingredients kanasu, samídu, and šuhutinnu haven’t been definitively translated, so for this recipe, I’m going with what most scholars agree on, and also what I think will taste best.
With recipes this old, I think it’s important to not take it too seriously. It’s impossible to get it 100% right because we just don’t know enough about the language and the exact cooking processes they used. So for me, it’s less important that this dish is exactly what they’d be eating in Hammurabi’s time, and more important that it’s delicious. The meat is super tender, the flavors are well balanced, and the fresh leek gives it a nice crunch. Make this dish into a thinner broth-like soup, a thick stew, or thickened even further so that it’s like meat with a sauce. Any way is as accurate (or not!) as the next.
Kanasu Stew
Leg of mutton is used. Prepare water, add fat. Samídu; coriander; cumin; and kanasu. Assemble all the ingredients in the cooking vessel, and sprinkle with crushed garlic. Then blend into the pot šuhutinnu and mint.
— Yale Babylonian Tablets, c. 1740 B.C.E.
QotD: The “numbers fallacy” in World War II
During the war the smaller campaigns tended to get less credit — though it is sometimes suspicious that numbers are valued in some circumstances, and area in others. The Mediterranean Front against the Axis was an extraordinarily long campaign over an extremely large area, yet many – particularly Americans who often fail to understand the Mediterranean’s importance to intercontinental strategy – discount its scale and significance. (A British general visiting the Soviets responded to toasts about the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow by offering a toast to El Alamein. The bemused Soviets asked how big the battle was, and then commented “we would call that a skirmish” – a point which emphasises the fact that the hundreds of Soviet divisions embraced by historians of the Eastern Front were rarely as big as a British brigade or American Regimental Combat Team. To get a real comparison western divisions should be compared to Soviet corps.)
Similarly the Burmese and New Guinea theatres are incredibly undervalued in their role against Japan. There were more Japanese divisions fighting longer and harder in either place than everywhere that American troops fought the Japanese put together. (The fact that in New Guinea it was Australians rather than Americans who did most of the successful fighting – the American troops first assigned disappointed their vainglorious Füaut;hrer MacArthur enormously at first – might have had an influence on this ranking.)
By contrast the Western Front against Germany in 1944 to 45 is overstated both in the area it covered, and in the number of troops involved (almost half the US troops listed for that campaign did not arrive until it was already almost over. A dozen divisions had barely landed in France before the Germans surrendered.) Which puts it in the same category as the Pacific campaign, which, if the allied troops are discounted – as they so often were by the Americans – rarely saw more than a couple of American divisions at a time engaged anywhere.
The confusion is added to by the enigma that remains China, which is simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. It is undervalued in that China and Manchuria occupied the attention of 80% of the Japanese army throughout the war. Which means that by the standards applied by some historians, China was the Soviet Union of the East, and deserves all the glory that was lavished on communist Russia by the trendy historians of the last generation. On the other hand it was overvalued, in that China achieved virtually nothing in the war against the Japanese apart from occupying large numbers of very low-grade garrison troops. In fact when the US Air Force in one of its fits of vainglory, attempted to bomb Japan into submission from bases in China: the Japanese garrison troops stirred themselves enough to sweep forward and conquer – without any trouble at all – the provinces being used as bases (Operation Ichi-Go).
Nigel Davies, “Oversimplification: The Numbers Fallacy in WWII”, rethinking history, 2009-03-08.
October 21, 2026
The first modern wine critic: Philip the Bold of Burgundy
In The Critic, Henry Jeffreys identifies the first post-Roman Empire wine critic in the noble person of Philip II, Duke of Burgundy, who, in 1395 …
Philip the Bold (Philip II, Duke of Burgundy), 1342-1404.
Unknown painter of the Flemish School via Wikimedia Commons.
… banished the Gamay grape from his lands, describing it as an “evil and disloyal” plant. The only grape for Philip was Noiriens, known today as Pinot Noir.
Peasants loved Gamay because it ripened early and produced lots of grapes but Philip wanted small quantities of high quality wine which Pinot Noir is better suited for.
And that’s how it’s been ever since: Gamay has been shunned in Burgundy, going only into the cheapest wines, whereas Pinot Noir is lionised around the world.
Wine 101 says that some grapes are better than others. It’s common for wine-lovers to have a favourite and often a least favourite grape. Philip the Bold was way ahead of his time here. Most wine drinkers didn’t catch up with grape varieties until much later.
We have an American, Frank Schoonmaker, to thank for this. In the 1940s he came up with the idea of labelling California wines by variety rather than giving them fake French names like Hearty Burgundy or Mountain Chablis.
It took a while, but this is now the established way of classifying wines. For Schoonmaker there was a hierarchy of varieties with the great French ones, naturally, at the top. He wrote in his book American Wines: “There are only about 30 or 40 superior grape varieties in the world and only about a dozen are capable of producing great wine. No really distinguished wine has ever been made from an inferior grape.”
Some grapes were good and some were bad. In the 1980s and 1990s the French government encouraged growers in the Languedoc to pull up their Carignan and Cinsault vines and replace them with so-called cépages améliorateurs, improving varieties, like Syrah or Cabernet Sauvignon. You can understand the logic. Syrah sells, whereas the traditional grapes have a Gamay-like tendency to produce lots of grapes of mediocre quality if overfertilised and not pruned severely.
In Chile, Cinsault is known as “cargadora” meaning the loaded one. Home gardeners will know exactly this tendency. When growing tomatoes, some strains produce massive quantities of fruit with very little flavour. In contrast, we had a plant last year that produced only one piece of fruit the whole summer — but it was exceptionally tasty. I am sure Philip the Bold would have approved.
In the 1970s, Canadian winemakers were selling beverages labelled as “Burgundy” and “Claret”, but after the French government and then the EU started getting pushy about wines named for the great French wine traditions, they eventually got onto the same naming pattern pioneered by Schoonmaker and other Californian winemakers. If “truth in advertising” laws had applied to wine, those 1970s Canadian wines would have had consumer-deterring names like “oversweetened alcoholic grape juice” and “made from randomly selected grapes of unknown provenance”.
Can you tell I don’t miss any of the Canadian wines I sampled in the 1970s?
