The Great War
Published Dec 8, 2023The modern Middle East is a region troubled by war, terrorism, weak and failed states, and civil unrest. But how did it get this way? The map of today’s Middle East was mostly drawn after the First World War, and the war that planted many of the seeds of conflict that still plague Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Syria and even Iran today.
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May 9, 2024
How the First World War Created the Middle East Conflicts
May 8, 2024
The nonsensical “right of return” debate
George Monastiriakos explains why he should have the right of return to his ancestral homeland:
My family hails from a small Greek village in Anatolia, in modern day Turkey, but I have unfortunately never been to my ancestral homeland because I was born a “refugee” in Montreal. Living in the “liberated zone” of Chomedey, Que., one of the biggest Greek communities in Canada, is the closest I’ve ever felt to my beloved Anatolia.
The Republic of Turkey does not have a legal right to exist. It is an illegitimate and temporary colonial project built by and for Turkish settlers from Central Asia. My ancestors resided on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor for thousands of years before the first Turks arrived on horseback from the barren plains of Mongolia. I will never relinquish my right to return to my ancestral homeland.
If you think these assertions are ridiculous, it’s because they are. I copied them from the shallow, even childish, anti-Israel discourse that’s prevalent on campuses in the United States and Canada, including the University of Ottawa, where I studied and now teach. I am a proud Canadian citizen, with no legal or personal connection to Anatolia. I have no intention, or right, to return to my so-called ancestral homeland. Except, perhaps, for a much-needed vacation. Even then, my stay would be limited to the extent permitted by Turkish law.
The Second Greco-Turkish War concluded with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Among other things, this agreement finalized the forced displacement of nearly one-million Ottoman Greeks to the Kingdom of Greece, and roughly 500,000 Greek Muslims to the newly formed Republic of Turkey. This ended the over 3,000 years of Greek history in Anatolia, and served as a model for the partition of British India, which saw the emergence of a Hindu majority state and a Muslim majority state some two decades later.
With their keys and property deeds in hand, my paternal grandmother’s family fled to the Greek island of Samos, on the opposite side of the Mycale Strait at a nearly swimmable distance from the Turkish coast. While they practised the Greek Orthodox religion and spoke a dialect of the Greek language, they were strangers in a foreign land with no legal or personal connection to the Kingdom of Greece.
The Great War channel produced an overview of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1923 that resulted in the vast human tragedy of the expulsion of ethnic Greek civilians from Anatolia and ethnic Turkish civilians from mainland Greece here.
May 5, 2024
The protests “will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972”
Andrew Sullivan, the very model of a never-Trumper, sees the ongoing student protests feeding into a repeat of the 1968 and 1972 US Presidential elections:

“Patriotic students hung up an American Flag at George Washington University after pro-Palestine protesters trashed the campus, defaced the statue of George Washington, and removed an American Flag.”
Twitter image posted by Chaya Raichik – https://twitter.com/ChayaRaichik10/status/1786504098746958103/photo/1
As readers know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the argument that Israel has over-reached, over-bombed, and over-reacted in its near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians, especially children, in the wake of 10/7’s horrors. It has been truly horrifying. I begrudge no one demonstrating passionately to protest this. But as I watch the rhetoric and tactics of many — but not all — of these students, I’m struck by how this humane concern is less prominent than the rank illiberalism and ideological extremism among many.
Preventing students from attending classes, taking exams, or even walking around their own campus freely is not a protest; it’s a crime. So is the destruction of property, and the use of physical intimidation and violence against dissenting students. The use of masks to conceal identity is reminiscent of the Klan, and antithetical to non-violent civil disobedience. It’s a way for outsiders to easily infiltrate and a way to escape responsibility for thuggishness. It’s menacing, ugly and cowardly.
It did not have to be this way. Imagine if students simply demonstrated peacefully for a cease-fire, placed the victims and hostages at the forefront of the narrative, and allowed themselves to be arrested proudly on camera and face legal consequences for their actions, as the civil rights movement did. Imagine if they were emphatically non-violent and always open to debate.
But they aren’t, because they are not the inheritors of the Christian, universalist civil rights movement but its illiberal, blood-and-soil nemesis, long curated in the Ivy League. The key group behind the protests, Students For Justice in Palestine, doesn’t mince words. It celebrated the explicitly genocidal murder of Jews on October 7:
National liberation is near — glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people! … Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.
The “our” is interesting. If you think these protests are only about Gaza — and not America — you’re missing the deeper context. Here’s a masked, keffiyeh-wearing spokeswoman for the UCLA protest:
Given the fact that the University of California is founded on colonialism, it’s inherently a violent institution. There needs to be an addressment of US imperialism and its ties to the UC system and how it perpetuates war and violence aboard — not only abroad, but also here, locally.
So violence is justified in response. Here’s a keffiyeh-clad spokesman at CUNY:
This revolution, which includes the mass demonstrations and encampments, are not just exclusively for students. It is for the masses. … It is for the free people of the world who are able to resist however you can — whether it be with a rock and other tools of liberation.
These are not fringe figures; they have been chosen to speak to the public. They believe in violence because there is nothing in their worldview that could prohibit it against certain “oppressor” races of people. As one of the “queer” leaders of the Columbia protest has said: “Zionists don’t deserve to live”, and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists”. He took his classes in decolonization seriously, even if he is now backtracking from their logical conclusion.
The illiberalism is deep and endemic. The civil rights movement was desperate for the press to show up; these thugs follow observers menacingly around, holding up barriers to prevent even fellow students from filming them. The civil rights movement ended physical borders between groups of human beings; these thugs create borders and police dissent. The civil rights movement asked America to live up to its ideals; the woke believe America is a source of evil in the world, and needs to be “decolonized”. “I love Osama [bin Laden]”, one pro-Palestinian demonstrator in New York City said. “I want to suck his dick”. That mix of evil and scatology is a woke trademark.
And these protests are clearly as much about the abolition of the Jewish state as they are the horror of Gaza. They are driven by the neoracist idea that “white-people-are-bad-but-black-and-brown-people-are-good”; they are about a blood-and-soil “anti-imperialism” that requires the abolition of any state not reflective of ancient indigenous populations. (The SJP refers to the US as “Turtle Island”, an allegedly indigenous name.) They are against “cultural appropriation” but prance around in keffiyehs. They glibly use the word “genocide” to trigger and re-traumatize Jews, while ignoring the genocidal goals of Hamas; and chants of “There Is Only One Solution: Intifada Revolution!” ring with echoes of Nazism.
And they will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972.
It tells you something when even Al Sharpton is rattled by these violent fanatics. “How do the Democrats — how do all of us on that side — say January 6th was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses?” he asked on MSNBC. It feels like 2020 again. Replacing Old Glory with the Palestinian flag or defacing a statue of George Washington (see above), is not how you win over the country. But the more you know about these fanatics the more you realize they don’t want to win over the country; they want to destroy it as mindlessly as the pro-Trump fringe. And they’d welcome the even deeper polarization he’d bring.
May 4, 2024
Shakespeare Summarized: Antony and Cleopatra
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published Dec 2, 2016Hey, remember almost exactly three years ago when I summarized Julius Caesar? Published on December 1st, even? A coincidence I totally planned when I spontaneously decided to do this video today?
May 3, 2024
QotD: Colonialism in the ancient Mediterranean
We should start with a basic understanding of who we are talking about here, where they are coming from and the areas they are settling in. First we have our Greeks, who I am sure that most of our readers are generally familiar with. They don’t call themselves Greeks – it is the Romans who do (Latin: graeci); by the classical period they call themselves Hellenes (Έλληνες), a term that appears in the Iliad but once (Homer prefers Ἀχαιοί and Δαναοί, “Achaeans” and “Danaans”). That’s relevant because a lot of the apparent awareness of the Greeks (or more correctly, the Hellenes) as a distinct group, united by language and culture against other groups, belongs to late Archaic and early Classical and the phenomenon we’re going to look at begins during the Greek Dark Age (1100-800) and crests in the Archaic (800-480).
Greek settlement in the late Bronze Age (c. 1500-1100) was focused on the Greek mainland, though we have Greek (“Mycenean”) settlements on the Aegean islands (and Crete) and footholds on the west coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Over the Dark Age – a period where our evidence is very poor indeed, so we cannot see very clearly – the area of Greek-speaking settlement in the Aegean expands and Greek settlements along that West coast of Asia Minor expand dramatically. Our ancient sources preserve legends about how these Greeks (particularly the Ionians, inhabiting the central part of that coastal strip) got there, having been supposedly expelled from Achaia on the northern side of the Peloponnese, but it’s unclear how seriously we should take those legends. But the key point here is that the outward motion of Greeks from mainland Greece proper begins quite early (c. 1100) and is initially local and probably not as organized as the subsequent second phase beginning in the 8th century, which is going to be our focus here.
Our other group are the Phoenicians. They did not call themselves that either; it derives from the Greeks who called them Phoinices (φοίνικες), which like the Roman Poeni may have had its roots in Egyptian fnḫw or perhaps Israelite Ponim.1 In any case, the word is old, as it appears in Linear B tablets dating to the Mycenean period (that 1500-1100 period). The Phoenicians themselves, if asked to call themselves something, would more likely have said Canaans, Kn’nm, though much like the Greeks tended to be Athenians, Spartans, Thebans and so on first, the Phoenicians tended to be Sidonians, Tyrians and so on first. They spoke a Semitic language which we call Phoenician (closely related to Biblical Hebrew) and they invented the alphabet to represent it; this alphabet was copied by the Greeks to represent their language, who were in turn copied by the Romans to represent their language, whose alphabet in turn was adopted by subsequent Europeans to represent their languages – which is the alphabet which I am writing with to you now.
Since at least the late bronze age, they lived in a series of city states on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean in Phoenicia in the Levant in what today would mostly be Lebanon. During the late bronze age, this was the great field of contested influence between the Hittite, (Middle) Assyrian and (New Kingdom) Egyptian Empires. The Late Bronze Age Collapse removed those external influences, leading to a quick recovery from the collapse and then efflorescence in the region. They had many cities, but the most important by this point are Sidon and Tyre; by the 9th century, Tyre emerged as chief over Sidon and may at times have controlled it directly, but this was short lived as the whole region came under the control of the (Neo)Assyrian Empire in 858. The Assyrians demanded heavy tribute (which may contribute to colonization, discussed below) but only vassalized rather than annexed Tyre, Byblos and Sidon, the three largest Phoenician cities.
Both the Greeks and the Phoenicians have one thing in common at the start, which is that these are societies oriented towards the sea. Their initial area of settlement is coastal and both groups were significant sea-faring societies even during the late Bronze Age and remained so by the Archaic period. Both regions, while not resource poor (Phoenicia was famous for its timber, Lebanese cedar), are not resource rich either, particularly in agricultural resources. Compared to the fertility of Mesopotamia, Egypt or even Italy, these were drier, more marginal places, which may go some distance to explaining why both societies ended up oriented towards the sea: it was there and they could use the opportunities.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Ancient Greek and Phoenician Colonization”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-10-13.
1. The former is what I’ve found in dictionary entries for etymologies, the latter is what Dexter Hoyos suggests, Carthaginians (2010), 1. I am not an expert on Semitic languages, linguistics or etymologies, so don’t ask me to decide between them.
April 29, 2024
Greek History and Civilization, Part 7 – Alexander
seangabb
Published Apr 28, 2024This seventh lecture in the course covers the career of Alexander the Great and its consequences for the world.
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April 18, 2024
What to do if Romans Sack your City
toldinstone
Published Jan 12, 2024Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:34 Progress of a siege
1:55 Looting and violence
3:42 Recorded atrocities
4:45 Captives
5:27 BetterHelp
6:36 Surviving a Roman sack
7:13 Where to hide
8:27 What to do if you’re captured
9:20 Advice for women
10:09 The fate of captives
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April 15, 2024
QotD: Cereal cultivation also helped grow the centralized state
Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; “as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year”. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.
Intensive cereal cultivation is miserable work requiring constant toil with little guarantee of a good harvest. Why would anyone leave this wilderness Eden for a 100% wheat diet?
Not because they were tired of wandering around; Scott presents evidence that permanent settlements began as early as 6000 BC, long before Uruk, the first true city-state, began in 3300. Sometimes these towns subsisted off of particularly rich local wildlife; other times they practiced some transitional form of agriculture, which also antedated states by millennia. Settled peoples would eat whatever plants they liked, then scatter the seeds in particularly promising-looking soil close to camp – reaping the benefits of agriculture without the back-breaking work.
And not because they needed to store food. Hunter-gatherers could store food just fine, from salting animal meat to burying fish and letting it ferment to just having grain in siloes like everyone else. There is ample archaeological evidence of all of these techniques. Also, when you are surrounded by so much bounty, storing things takes on secondary importance.
And not because the new lifestyle made this happy life even happier. While hunter-gatherers enjoyed a stable and varied diet, agriculturalists subsisted almost entirely on grain; their bones display signs of significant nutritional deficiency. While hunter-gatherers were well-fed, agriculturalists were famished; their skeletons were several inches shorter than contemporaneous foragers. While hunter-gatherers worked ten to twenty hour weeks, agriculturalists lived lives of backbreaking labor. While hunter-gatherers who survived childhood usually lived to old age, agriculturalists suffered from disease, warfare, and conscription into dangerous forced labor.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.
March 30, 2024
QotD: Multiculturalism, in theory and practice
The creed of contemporary multiculturalism sought to establish that all societies were roughly equal and that the “other” was but a crude Western fiction. But we were reminded that people like the Taliban who did not vote, treated women as chattel, and whipped and stoned to death dissenters of their primordial world were different folk from citizens of democracy. A chief corollary to such cultural relativism was that Americans have wrongly embraced a belief in the innate humanity of the West largely out of ethnocentric ignorance. But surely the opposite has been proven true: the more Americans after September 11 learned about the world of the madrassas, the six or seven varieties of Islamic female coverings, the Dickensian Pakistani street, and the murderous gangs in Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan, then the more not less, they are appalled by societies that are so anti-Western.
Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle, 2003.
March 28, 2024
Justin Trudeau never misses an opportunity to make a performative announcement, even if it harms Canadian interests
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an announcement last week that the Canadian government was cutting off military exports to Israel … except that Canada buys more military equipment from Israel than vice-versa:

Israeli Spike LR2 antitank missile launchers, similar to the ones delivered to the Canadian Army detachment in Latvia in February.
Wikimedia Commons.
When the Trudeau government publicly cut off military exports to Israel last week, the immediate reaction of the Israeli media was to point out that Canada’s military was far more dependent on Israeli tech than was ever the case in reverse.
“For some reason, (Foreign Minister Melanie Joly) forgot that in the last decade, the Canadian Defense Ministry purchased Israeli weapon systems worth more than a billion dollars,” read an analysis by the Jerusalem Post, which noted that Israeli military technology is “protecting Canadian pilots, fighters, and naval combatants around the world.”
According to Canada’s own records, meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces were only ever purchasing a fraction of that amount from Canadian military manufacturers.
In 2022 — the last year for which data is publicly available — Canada exported $21,329,783.93 in “military goods” to Israel.
This didn’t even place Israel among the top 10 buyers of Canadian military goods for that year. Saudi Arabia, notably, ranked as 2022’s biggest non-U.S. buyer of Canadian military goods at $1.15 billion — more than 50 times the Israeli figure.
What’s more — despite Joly adopting activist claims that Canada was selling “arms” to Israel — the Canadian exports were almost entirely non-lethal.
“Global Affairs Canada can confirm that Canada has not received any requests, and therefore not issued any permits, for full weapon systems for major conventional arms or light weapons to Israel for over 30 years,” Global Affairs said in a February statement to the Qatari-owned news outlet Al Jazeera.
The department added, “the permits which have been granted since October 7, 2023, are for the export of non-lethal equipment.”
Even Project Ploughshares — an Ontario non-profit that has been among the loudest advocates for Canada to shut off Israeli exports — acknowledged in a December report that recent Canadian exports mostly consisted of parts for the F-35 fighter jet.
“According to industry representatives and Canadian officials, all F-35s produced include Canadian-made parts and components,” wrote the group.
The History of Fish Sauce – Garum and Beyond!
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Dec 26, 2023Sweet frittata-like patina of pears with classic ancient Roman flavors and sprinkled with long pepper
City/Region: Rome
Time Period: 1st CenturyThis patina de piris is one of over a dozen recipes for similar dishes in Apicius’ De re coquinaria, a staple for ancient Roman recipes. It would have probably been part of mensa secunda, or second meal. Not a second breakfast, it was the final course in a larger meal and usually consisted of sweets, pastries, nuts, and egg dishes, kind of like a modern dessert course.
I finally made my own true ancient Roman garum in the summer of 2023, from chopped up fish pieces and salt to clear amber umami-laden liquid. There’s no fishiness in this surprisingly sweet dish, just a saltiness and savory umami notes that complements the other very ancient Roman flavors.
As with all ancient recipes, this is my interpretation and you can change things up how you like. I separated my eggs before beating them, but you could just whisk them up whole and add them like that.
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March 26, 2024
Why the USN isn’t using their “Littoral Combat Ships” in the Red Sea littoral zone
CDR Salamander explains why the US Navy has chosen not to deploy the ships specifically designed and built to operate in environments like the Red Sea:
On yesterday’s Midrats, my co-host mentioned that recently in the Red Sea our Navy has seen the most littoral combat it has in a very long time, but our Littoral Combat Ships are not to be seen. Why? Simple. They cannot conduct combat on the littorals.
This AM, fellow “First LCS Critic” Chapomatic sent me a link to an article from September of last year that I think at the time I made a passing comment on over at X, but did not bring here. Well, let’s fix that.
Why do we need to periodically drag LCS out of the gimp box and hoist her up for all to behold? Simple; as an example to others. We simply cannot afford another CG(X) or DDG-1000 situation with DDG(X) or any other ship we have in the design phase. We have already lost one generation of ship design due to the Age of Transformationalism.
With the Constellation Class FFG we now have building, we are at last taking the course I first suggested in 2006 to correct the error of LCS. That is our version of FREMM that was first commissioned by the French in 2012, a dozen years ago.
LCS was not a problem with our shipbuilding industry or even our design people – though there are areas to critique there. No, this was a people problem, a mindset problem, a culture problem.
It needs to be dragged up regularly. I last did a dedicated post on it back in August 2023. It is time.
As we dive into the details remember this; since the disaster of LCS no senior personnel have yet been held to public account. We have the same acquisition system. We have the same incentives and disincentives as before. Critics of LCS were pushed over to the off-ramp; its most NORK-like advocates promoted.
There is no guarantee this won’t happen again.
Joaquin Sapien at ProPublica and his extensive almost novella – not just an article – on LCS that even opens with a quote of the phrase that first came into the general conversation here on CDR Salamander; The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”.
Sadly, we did not even get a mention or link – though most of the arguments are the same ones we’ve been making here and on the OB Blog since 2004 – if you spot me six months or so, two decades ago.
Some people have critiques of ProPublica, especially from the right side of the spectrum, but I’m sorry – their critique here is spot on.
It starts right in center mass;
The USS Freedom had its own special place within the armada. It was one of a new class of vessels known as littoral combat ships. The U.S. Navy had billed them as technical marvels — small, fast and light, able to combat enemies at sea, hunt mines and sink submarines.
In reality, the LCS was well on the way to becoming one of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems. Two of the $500 million ships had suffered embarrassing breakdowns in previous months. The Freedom’s performance during the exercise, showing off its ability to destroy underwater mines, was meant to rejuvenate the ships’ record on the world stage. The ship was historically important too; it was the first LCS built, the first in the water, commissioned just eight years prior.
The summary of their findings in spot on, especially the last sentence;
Our examination revealed new details on why the LCS never delivered on its promises. Top Navy leaders repeatedly dismissed or ignored warnings about the ships’ flaws. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. Staunch advocates in the Navy circumvented checks meant to ensure that ships that cost billions can do what they are supposed to do.
Both inside and outside the Navy, LCS critics warned two decades ago that 2024 would find the Little Crappy Ship roughly where it wound up
Montreal’s La Presse issues apology for antisemitic editorial cartoon
Caroline Glick discusses the blood libel cartoon published by Montreal’s La Presse on 20 March, 2024:
According to Canada’s La Presse, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a vampire, and he is poised to suck the life out of the Palestinians in Rafah, Hamas’s final outpost in southern Gaza. The publication that was once a paper of record in Canada ran a political cartoon on March 20 portraying Netanyahu as a vampire, with a huge hooked nose, pointy ears and claws for fingers, dressed in Dracula’s overcoat while standing on the deck of a pirate ship.
The caption, written in blood-dripping red letters, read: “Nosfenyahou: En Route Vers Rafah.” Nosferatu, the Romanian word for vampire, was the title of a proto-Nazi German silent horror film from 1922 chock-full of anti-Semitic poison. The film, which became something of a cult flick, featured a vampire with a long Jewish nose. He arrived at an idyllic German town with a box full of plague-carrying rats that he released on the innocent villagers as he plotted to suck his realtor’s blood.
La Presse‘s cartoon didn’t leave any room for imagination. It wasn’t making a political or military argument against Israel’s planned ground operation in Rafah. Its goal wasn’t to persuade anyone of anything.
The Netanyahu-the-vampire cartoon asserted simply that Netanyahu is a Jewish bloodsucker and, more broadly, the Jewish state — and Jews worldwide — must be vigorously opposed by all right-thinking people who don’t want Jewish vampires to kill them.
As the paper no doubt anticipated, the cartoon provoked an outcry from Canadian Jews and some politicians. And after a few hours, the newspaper took it off its website and apologized. Anyone who thinks that means that the good guys won misses the point of the move. The Jewish outcry and pile-on by politicians and media coverage proved the point. Jews are evil and control everything, even what a private paper can publish. Like Nosferatu in its day, the cartoon will become a piece of folklore, additional proof that the Jews are the enemy of humanity.
In other words, the cartoon was a blood libel.
We’re seeing lots and lots of it these days. And so, it is worth recalling what a blood libel is.
In its original form, of course, the libel was specifically about blood. About 1,000 years ago, Christians in England began accusing Jews of performing ritual murders of Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzahs.
The accusation was inherently insane. Jewish law prohibits murder. It prohibits cannibalism. It prohibits child sacrifice. It prohibits eating food with blood. But none of that mattered. Like the cartoon in La Presse, the blood libel didn’t seek to persuade anyone. It presumed that its target audiences already hated Jews or had a latent tendency to hate Jews, which the blood libel aimed to unleash. The purpose of the blood libel was to scapegoat the Jews and to incite target audiences from London to Damascus to act on that hatred. Over the millennium, hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred in Europe and the Islamic world in response to blood libels.
March 23, 2024
The Roman Army’s Biggest Building Projects
toldinstone
Published Dec 15, 2023The greatest achievements of the Roman military engineers.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:38 Marching camps
1:36 Bridges
2:40 Siegeworks
3:26 PIA VPN
4:32 Permanent forts
5:49 Roads
6:24 Frontier defenses
7:41 Canals
8:21 Civilian projects
8:54 The aqueduct of Saldae
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March 19, 2024
QotD: “Not In Our Name”
Meanwhile, the Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism And War, which includes Susan Sarandon, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker and about 75 other sisters and is “Worldwide” mainly in the sense the World Series is, organized a petition called “Not In Our Name”. “We will not support the bombing,” they declared, and who can blame them? I dropped out of women’s studies in Grade Two, but, as I recall, a bombing campaign is a quintessential act of patriarchal oppression and sexual domination. The male pilot, looming over the curvy undulating form of the Third World hillside, unzips his bomb carriage and unleashes his phallic ordinance to penetrate his target. Needless to say, he explodes on contact, typical bloody men.
Mark Steyn, “Omar’s Girls”, National Post, 2001-11-29.






