Institutions tend to only find data they want to find, so the City of Los Angeles last counted street deaths among the homeless — in their description, “Deaths of Unhoused People” — from 2023. There were 900. Sample detail: “Black people were 31% of deaths. Black people are only 8% of the City’s general population, but are 33% of the City’s unhoused population.”
The last numbers from Los Angeles County as a whole were for 2024, when 2,208 homeless people died on the streets. County officials celebrated, because that number was a sharp reduction, and a reflection of the success of programs like overdose intervention teams stationed around public parks.
Remember those numbers, and let’s talk about something else for a moment before we come back to them.
The Soviet writer Aleksandr Zinoviev told a joke that speaks fluent Californian: “In some institution a routine meeting was in progress. There were two points on the agenda: 1) the construction of a barn; 2) the creation of an abundance of consumer goods under communism. As they didn’t have enough planks to build the barn, they moved on at once to the second question.”
Maybe that joke doesn’t land if you don’t live in Los Angeles or Seattle, but from here it’s flawless. Take a quick look at the campaign page for María Elena Durazo, a state senator who just won a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Infrastructure and fire departments are in bad shape in the place where elected officials think that government exists to provide “economic justice” that restructures communities. When government exists to pay your rent, 911 response times soar.
They can’t fix a street, so they move on at once to managing all of society.
Here’s what Senator Durazo boasts about on her “Meet Maria” page: “Arrested over 13 times for leading non-violent Civil Rights and Worker Rights protests”. It’s the line that appears below “State Senator” on her list of accomplishments. Gentry socialists have high-status-marker arrest credentials, without the burden of low-status prosecution and jail terms.
Zinoviev gave us the term “Homo Sovieticus”, describing the human creature that shaped itself around the postures and predilections of Soviet culture. Humorless, a sanctimonious scold, a deeply selfish schemer while professing adoration for collectivism, comfortable reciting official slogans without feeling the need to believe them or examine them, reflexively conformist, not worried about truth. (X) has been advanced as party doctrine, so (X) is correct, and anyone suggesting (Not-X) is highly suspect. The official account is always correct.
We live among these people. We have Homo Sovieticus in America.
Chris Bray, “Homo Cosmopolitus Won’t Count the Costs”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-06-10.
September 14, 2026
QotD: “We have Homo Sovieticus in America”
September 13, 2026
QotD: Naming “Cathay”
You may think you’ve never heard of the Khitans (Chinese: 契丹 or “qidan“), but you probably have, albeit indirectly. “Khitan” is their ethnonym within their own proto-Mongolic branch of the Altaic languages. In the Turkic languages a little further West, the same people are called “Khitai“. A splinter group of the Khitans who settled in Dzhungaria and Transoxiana called themselves the “Kara-Khitai” (Black Khitans), a name that should be instantly recognizable to anybody who played Age of Empires II. If you prefer Paradox map-painting games to more traditional RTS, they do also show up in the Crusader Kings series, resulting in memes like this one. Oh dear, where was I? Right, the Khitans. The word “Khitai“, via a continent-wide game of Chinese whispers (get it?), became “Cathay”, which the confused Europeans took as the name of the Middle Kingdom itself, finally resulting in the birth of a wonderful airline.
Right, the Khitans. There they were, grazing their flocks on the Greater Khingan Mountains, just bein’ a horde, doing horde stuff. Suddenly, opportunity fell into their laps: the Tang empire was unravelling. The bustling cities and ports of Northeastern China were sitting right there, defenseless, full of gold, and skilled craftsmen, and all the soft and delicate sensuality of settled life. It was about to happen again, right? The nomadic horsemen riding in from the wild steppe, pillaging the effete townspeople and becoming their masters, only to succumb to pleasure and become effete in turn, the endless cycle of history? How could it be avoided? Here is how Mote (yes, we’ve finally gotten to the book) describes their Catch-22:
… the Khitans probably saw quite clearly that when a steppe people by degrees gave up its nomadic mobility in exchange for the more comfortable sedentary life, it ran great risks of having to compete with the Chinese on their ground. Losing in that way their comparative advantage inevitably cost the nomads their cultural integrity; they slowly became just “little Chinese” … no steppe people on China’s borders could become sinified and survive, except by migrating into China and being absorbed — another form of extinction … the warning to nomadic peoples was clear: they must master the art of drawing resources from China without sacrificing their steppe integrity … The wealth that could be wrung from it could give mastery over all Inner Asia.
The Khitan response to this pickle was unlike any I’ve ever heard. Roughly half of the Khitan aristocracy, including the royal clan, immediately adopted Chinese customs,1 moved to the city, and began building a bureaucracy. The other half, including the clan that Khitan kings traditionally picked their wives from, stayed in the steppe and had nothing to do with any of this. They then established two governments, two sets of laws,2 two taxation regimes, two writing systems, two of everything. One was civilized, the other was barbarian. Two completely incompatible social structures living side-by-side, passing through each other, but never interacting. Like dark matter, or like life-forms with mirror chirality. As a Khitan subject, you belonged to just one of these systems (if you were low class, you were sometimes allowed to pick!), and only that system had any authority over you.
The only point of official contact between the two worlds was at the top, where the Khitan king spent half the year reigning as a Chinese-style emperor, and half of it touring around his nomadic subjects as Great Khan in a mobile court. The Khitans recognized that although the king was theoretically 50-50, extended exposure to civilization would tend to Sinify him over time, and his descendants even more so. This is why they mandated that every empress was a pure-strain barbarian from a wild clan. They expected these formidable women to wield influence over their sons and to ensure that as the years rolled past and the royal clan grew more and more Chinese, they would be replenished each generation with the barbarian perspective of their mothers. This totally worked, but also resulted in no end of conflict between the empresses and their palace retainers, who exemplified different worlds.3
Sometimes you read about a social or legal system, and you are just certain that it could not be stable. I had this reaction reading about the Spartan diarchy as a kid, and I had it again reading about the Khitans last year. But their system not only endured, it flourished, and eventually turned into the Liao Dynasty which ruled China for centuries. And it functioned basically as it said it would on the tin — the civilized parts of their empire keeping things efficient and organized, supporting craftsmen and tradespeople; while the Strategic Nomad Reserve was always there ready to be called on in times of war, and prevented the administration from getting too soft and decadent.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Imperial China, by F.W. Mote”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-02-24.
- The decisive thing they actually did was to adopt surnames, which as James C. Scott will tell you is about the most forceful possible way to reject your barbarian heritage.
- The differences in laws could be extreme. For instance, under Chinese law, as in most “civilized” places, treason was punished with ultimate severity and brutality. But in many “barbarian” cultures, treason isn’t actually a huge deal (almost akin to a playground fight) and defeated rebels are customarily forgiven. The Khitans, again, simply did both. Traitors were executed if they lived under city law, and received amnesty if they were under tribal law.
- One such an empress, upon the death of her husband, was asked by a Chinese courtier if she would follow ancient custom and be buried alongside him. She responded: “I of course do not refuse to join the Emperor underground, but my children are young and the country has no leader, so I am not free to do that”. Then she ordered that her right hand be severed at the wrist to represent her within her husband’s tomb.
September 12, 2026
QotD: The spiritual immune system
But first, keeping them totally away from anything is doing them a disservice. I think Escriva would strongly agree with this — we are commanded, after all, to be IN the world, not OF it. It’s a two-part command. The Poz is a disease, yes, and diseases can kill, but look at the aftermath of covid. Who are the unhealthiest people in society right now? The folks who got vaxxed and triple-boosted and spent two years hiding under their beds in a hazmat suit. Every minor sniffle hits them like a sledgehammer now, because they spent two years screwing up their own immune systems.
Second, and closely related, the fight is in the small things. People see you avoiding everything and you look like a wimp. Where I grew up, every high school had the Bible Camp Kids. They were their own little clique. They went everywhere together and tried to live as Amish-ly as possible. And everybody knew what happened to the Bible Camp Kids when they went off to college. You could set your watch by it: Two semesters in, and she’d have a tattoo and a face piercing and would either be knocked up or out of the closet.
They had no spiritual immune system.
Fighting and failing in the small things builds up your defenses for the big things. Not only that, people respect fighters. You failed, but you fought — you can hold your head high. As opposed to “You didn’t fail, but only because you tucked tail and ran”. Nobody respects those guys. It sucks to lose. But it’s far worse to “win” by never trying. Worst of all is to wallow in your defeat. Get up! Fight!
Severian, “The Way Ch. 10: Scruples”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-10.
September 11, 2026
QotD: Sherman on some military lessons learned during the American Civil War
Rarely did the opposing lines in compact order come into actual contact, but when, as at Peach-Tree Creek and Atlanta, the lines did become commingled, the men fought individually in every possible style, more frequently with the musket clubbed than with the bayonet, and in some instances the men clinched like wrestlers, and went to the ground together. Europeans frequently criticized our war, because we did not always take full advantage of a victory; the true reason was, that habitually the woods served as a screen, and we often did not realize the fact that our enemy had retreated till he was already miles away and was again intrenched, having left a mere shirmish-line to cover the movement, in turn to fall back to the new position.
Our war was fought with the muzzle-loading rifle. Toward the close I had one brigade (Walcutt’s) armed with breech-loading “Spencer’s”. The cavalry generally had breach-loading carbines: “Spencer’s” and “Sharp’s”, both of which were good arms.
The only change that breech-loading arms will probably make in the art and practice of war will be to increase the amount of ammunition to be expended, and necessarily to be carried along; to still further “thin out” the lines of attack, and to reduce battles to short, quick, decisive conflicts. It does not in the least affect the grand strategy, or the necessity for perfect organization, drill, and discipline. The companies and battalions will be more dispersed, and the men will be less under the immediate eye of their officers, and therefore a higher order of intelligence and courage on the part of the individual soldier will be an element of strength.
When a regiment is deployed as skirmishers, and crosses an open field or woods, under heavy fire, if each man runs forward from tree to tree, or stump to stump, and yet preserves a good general alignment, it gives great confidence to the men themselves, for they always keep their eyes well to the right and left, and watch their comrades; but when some few hold back, stick too close or too long to a comfortable log, it often stops the line and defeats the whole object. Therefore, the more we improve the fire-arm the more will be the necessity for good organization, good discipline and intelligence on the part of the individual soldier and officer.
There is, of course, such a thing as individual courage, which has a value in war, but familiarity with danger, experience in war and its common attendants, and personal habit, are equally valuable traits, and these are the qualities with which we usually have to deal in war. All men naturally shrink from pain and danger, and only incur their risk from some higher motive, or from habit; so that I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to incur it, rather than that insensibility to danger of which I have heard far more than I have seen.
The most courageous men are generally unconscious of possessing the quality; therefore, when one professes it too openly, by words or bearing, there is reason to mistrust it. I would further illustrate my meaning by describing a man of true courage to be one who possesses all his faculties and senses perfectly when serious danger is actually present.
Modern wars have not materially changed the relative values or proportions of the several arms of service: infantry, artillery, cavalry, and engineers. If any thing, the infantry has been increased in value. The danger of cavalry attempting to charge infantry armed with breech-loading rifles was fully illustrated at Sedan, and with us very frequently.
So improbable has such a thing become that we have omitted the infantry-square from our recent tactics. Still, cavalry against cavalry, and as auxiliary to infantry, will always be valuable, while all great wars will, as heretofore, depend chiefly on the infantry. Artillery is more valuable with new and inexperienced troops than with veterans. In the early stages of the war the field-guns often bore the proportion of six to a thousand men; but toward the close of the war one gun, or at most two, to a thousand men, was deemed enough.
[…]
It was one of Professor (Dennis Hart) Mahan’s maxims that the spade was as useful in war as the musket, and to this I will add the axe. The habit of intrenching certainly does have the effect of making new troops timid. When a line of battle is once covered by a good parapet, made by the engineers or by the labor of the men themselves, it does require an effort to make them leave it in the face of danger; but when the enemy is intrenched, it becomes absolutely necessary to permit each brigade and division of the troops immediately opposed to throw up a corresponding trench for their own protection in case of a sudden sally. We invariably did this in all our recent campaigns, and it had no ill effect, though sometimes our troops were a little too slow in leaving their well-covered lines to assail the enemy in position or on retreat.
Even our skirmishers were in the habit of rolling logs together, or of making a lunette of rails, with dirt in front, to cover their bodies; and, though it revealed their position, I cannot say that it worked a bad effect; so that, as a rule, it may safely be left to the men themselves. On the “defensive”, there is no doubt of the propriety of fortifying; but in the assailing army the general must watch closely to see that his men do not neglect an opportunity to drop his precautionary defenses, and act promptly on the “offensive” at every chance.
I have many a time crept forward to the skirmish line to avail myself of the cover of the pickets’ “little fort”, to observe more closely some expected result; and always talked familiarly with the men, and was astonished to see how well they comprehended the general object, and how accurately they were informed of the state of facts existing miles away from their particular corps. Soldiers are very quick to catch the general drift and purpose of a campaign, and are always sensible when they are well commanded or well cared for. Once impressed with this fact, and that they are making progress, they bear cheerfully any amount of labor and privation.
William Tecumseh Sherman, “Sherman on Tactics”, Tactical Notebook, 2026-06-10. (Selection from Memoirs of William T. Sherman (1875) by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, minus an observation that sieges were now unimportant which was disproved in 1914.)
September 10, 2026
QotD: The Victorian Workhouse diet and the modern “wellness” diet
The principle behind the New Poor Law of 1834 was “less eligibility”. Life inside the workhouse had to be made worse than the life of the poorest labourer surviving outside, or people might actually choose it. Misery was the policy, and the food was central to it.
The diet was built around gruel, bread, and watery broth. Thin oatmeal porridge. Pease soup. A little cheese. Meat, where it appeared at all, appeared in quantities a working man would have laughed at, carefully weighed out on a handful of days a year. Strip a population of meat and feed it on cheap starch, and you get people who are weak, compliant, and grateful for very little. The men with the ledgers understood that completely. They wrote the smallness down, in ounces, and signed it.
Now read that menu back slowly.
Porridge to start the day. Wholegrain bread as the base of every plate. Beans and pulses for protein. Broth-based soups. Dairy in moderation. Red meat cut right back, if you have it at all.
That is the workhouse diet, almost line for line. The gruel that was once the punishment for being poor is now the breakfast of the health-conscious. The near-absence of meat, once an economy forced on people who had no say in it, is now sold to you as the enlightened, heart-healthy choice you are making of your own free will.
They worked out the cheapest way to keep a body upright and dependent, and wrote it down in ounces.
A century and a half later the same menu comes back with a wellness label on it, and this time people pay extra for the privilege.
Sama Hoole, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-06-04.
September 9, 2026
QotD: Subordinate officers in pre-modern armies
One of the key divides that shows up repeatedly is the division between commoners elevated to positions of minor authority and aristocrats in positions of command. Indeed, we have this in our modern armies: this is the distinction between non-commissioned officers (NCOs) which are generally soldiers promoted from the lower ranks and commissioned officers who enter the military typically at the rank of lieutenant (or its equivalent). That system is a hold-over from the origins of modern military structure in Europe’s early-modern gunpowder armies: the commissioned officers (whose commission, to be clear, came from the king) were drawn from the aristocracy and often the nobility, while their non-comissioned subordinates were drawn from the common soldiery who were in turn recruited from the peasantry. Because no peasant could become a knight or noble (under normal circumstances) so too no sergeant could (under normal circumstances) become a lieutenant; the social orders were thus kept separate, civilian mirroring military.
But exactly where that divide occurs and its significance varies wildly. In the modern military structure, a second lieutenant, the lowest commissioned officer, typically commands a platoon of c. 40 soldiers while a sergeant typically leads a squad or section (around 10 soldiers). By contrast in the Roman army, the centurion – a senior NCO like the sergeant promoted from the common soldiers – led a century of 60-80 soldiers; more senior centurions (the primi ordines) commanded an entire cohort (480 soldiers). So the line between NCO and commissioned officer can be drawn in very different places in different societies.
Likewise an important distinction is often made around the emergence of a professional officer class (following on the emphasis made on this point by Samuel P. Huntington in The Soldier and the State (1957)) and the officers who came before which Huntington describes as “amateurs”. This is, I’d argue, a mistaken understanding of the role of military aristocrats in their societies; they were no more amateurs at war than a person born into serfdom is am amateur farmer. Neither the serf nor his military aristocrat overlord is a professional, but neither of them is an amateur either; the categories are not exclusive. Nevertheless there is a difference between truly “amateur” officers (which certainly existed), military aristocrats for whom war is a born-calling, and professional officers.
For this discussion, however, much of this complexity is beside the point. That isn’t to say it is unimportant generally (it is very important generally) but that for this topic here, we can define “officer” very broadly and so avoid having to untangle the particular social context of each military in question. Consequently we’re going to just define officer here as anyone who has command over other combatants, effectively lumping NCOs and commissioned officers (and their ancient equivalents) together. That isn’t because those distinctions are unimportant (they are important!) but because they aren’t quite relevant here, since we are really focused on how command structures enable armies to respond with ability and execute complex plans. It is command, not social status per se that we’re focused on.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIb: Officers”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-24.
September 8, 2026
QotD: Why the revolution envisioned by Marx didn’t happen
The prescriptions of The Communist Manifesto were in any case singularly unappealing to the industrial workers they were aimed at. Marx and Engels called for the abolition of private property; the abolition of inheritance; the centralization of credit and communications; the state ownership of all factories and instruments of production; the creation of “industrial armies for agriculture”; the abolition of the distinction between town and country; the abolition of the family; “community of women” (wife-swapping); and the abolition of all nationalities. By contrast, mid-nineteenth-century liberals wanted constitutional government, the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, wider political representation through electoral reform, free trade, and, where it was lacking, national self-determination (“home rule”). In the half-century after the upheaval of 1848 they got a great many of these things — enough, at any rate, to make the desperate remedies of Marx and Engels seem de trop. In 1850 only France, Greece, and Switzerland had franchises in which more than a fifth of the population got to vote. By 1900 ten European countries did and Britain and Sweden were not far below that threshold. Broader representation led to legislation that benefited lower-income groups. Free trade in Britain meant cheap bread, and cheap bread plus rising nominal wages thanks to union pressure meant a significant gain in real terms for workers. Building laborers’ day wages in London doubled in real terms between 1848 and 1913. Broader representation also led to more progressive taxation. Britain led the way in 1842 when Sir Robert Peel introduced a peacetime income tax; by 1913 the standard rate was 14 pence in the pound. Prior to 1842 nearly all British tax revenue had come from the indirect taxation of consumption via customs and excise duties, regressive taxes that take a proportionately smaller amount of your income the richer you are. By 1913 a third of revenue was coming from direct taxes on the relatively rich. In 1842 the central government had spent virtually nothing on education and the arts and sciences. In 1913 those items accounted for 10 percent of expenditures. By that time, Britain had followed Germany in introducing a state pension for the elderly.
Marx and Engels were wrong on two scores, then. First, their iron law of wages did not exist. Wealth did indeed become highly concentrated under capitalism, and it stayed that way into the second quarter of the twentieth century, but income differentials began to narrow as real wages rose and taxation became less regressive. Capitalists understood what Marx missed: that workers were also consumers. It therefore made no sense to try to grind their wages down to subsistence levels. On the contrary, as the case of the United States was making increasingly clear, there was no bigger potential market for capitalist enterprises than their own employees. Far from condemning the masses to immiseration, the mechanization of textile production created growing employment opportunities for Western workers — albeit at the expense of Indian spinners and weavers — and the decline in the prices of cotton and other goods meant that Western workers could buy more with their weekly wages. The impact is best captured by the exploding differential between Western and non-Western wages and living standards in this period. Even within the West the gap between the industrialized vanguard and the rural laggards widened dramatically. In early seventeenth-century London, an unskilled worker’s real wages were not so different from what his counterpart earned in Milan. From the 1750s until the 1850s, however, Londoners pulled far ahead. At the peak of the great divergence within Europe, London real wages were six times those in Milan. With the industrialization of northern Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century, the gap began to close, so that by the eve of the First World War it was closer to a ratio of 3:1. German and Dutch workers also benefited from industrialization, though even in 1913 they still lagged behind their English counterparts.
Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.
September 7, 2026
QotD: “Knackered”, “shattered”, and other useful Britishisms
The surprised expressions caught me off guard at first. “Blimey!” and “Crikey!” initially felt theatrical coming out of my mouth, as if I were performing in a period drama. But they’ve grown on me. There’s something deeply satisfying about a good “blimey” when you’ve just discovered the cost of your heating bill (although, if I’m honest, my partner would be far more expletive about it).
Then there are the words that capture concepts and objects I didn’t even know I needed:
Faff — The act of fussing around with something, whether it’s organizing (like a “bag faff” when you’re rearranging everything in your bag) or just messing about when you should be just getting on with it. [NR: “Faffing about” is a regular bit of my vocabulary — I picked it up from my wife’s uncle on our first trip back after we got married.]
Cheeky — That delightful word for something (or someone) playfully impudent. A cheeky pint. A cheeky biscuit. A cheeky comment from a cheeky child. Americans don’t have an equivalent that carries the same affectionate mischief. [NR: I use the word occasionally, but only in the “cheeky comment” sense. I suspect the other usages developed after we came to Canada.]
Chinwag — A chat or conversation, usually informal and friendly. “Having a chinwag over tea.”
Wheelie bin — A bin with wheels, which is exactly how I explained it to my sister-in-law when she asked what one was. Somehow it sounds less depressing than “trash can” when you’re dragging it to the kerb in the rain, though I can’t explain why. [NR: My cousin in Edinburgh used this term and we laughed ourselves silly … but it’s a useful phrase as wheelie bins are much more common here now.]
Bits and bobs — Covers all those miscellaneous things better than any American phrase. “I need to pick up some bits and bobs” is so much more charming than “I need to run errands”. [NR: I use this phrase all the time, also referring to accessories, jigs or associated “bits”.]
Picky bits — Those yummy nibbles you put out before a meal or during drinks. Americans would say “appetizers” or “snacks”, but “picky bits” is somehow more fun and less formal.
Lashings — A generous amount of something, usually used with food. “Lashings of butter” sounds so much more indulgent than just “a lot of butter”.
A lie in — Sleeping in, staying in bed late. “I had a lovely lie in this morning” sounds so much more luxurious than “I slept in”.
When I’m pleased about something, I’m chuffed to bits. It’s the British equivalent of my American “tickled pink”, though somehow “chuffed” sounds a bit less old-fashioned. When something’s gone wrong, I’m gutted — which is just more emotionally accurate than “disappointed” when your team loses or your train’s been cancelled. When someone’s being ridiculous, they’re a pillock (an insult that somehow sounds almost friendly).
Daft has replaced “stupid” in most contexts because it’s softer, more affectionate, somehow. Posh carries weight that “fancy” just doesn’t. And I’ve learned that “taking the mick” means teasing someone, though I’m still not entirely confident I’m using it right.
Pants can mean trousers, underwear, or that something’s rubbish (as in “that film was pants”) — that was a confusing first month trying to figure out which meaning applied when.
Speaking of films — it’s always a film, never a movie, and you see them at the cinema, not a movie theater. I still slip up on this one regularly. Pro tip: when browsing Netflix or BBC iPlayer in the UK, search for “films”, not “movies”, or you’ll come up empty-handed.
Dodgy covers everything from suspicious strangers to questionable leftovers. When something’s sorted, it’s all taken care of. My spouse uses “lovely” for everything from a cup of tea to a sunset to the bins being collected on time.
When it’s cold outside, it’s not just chilly — it’s parky. When I mentioned it was “a bit parky” on a call with my family, they immediately asked, “So that means you wear a parka when it’s parky?” Fair question, honestly.
When it’s very windy, it’s blowing a hoolie — which sounds far more dramatic than “blustery”, and right now with Storm Amy hitting the UK, it’s particularly relevant (I hope my readers in Scotland are all ok).
When a place is packed, it’s chocker. The pub’s chocker. The motorway’s chocker. It works for everything, where Americans would say “packed” for a pub or “bumper to bumper” for traffic. These words just have more personality than their American equivalents.
The car vocabulary is starting to creep in, and I have to think about it more now. The boot sometimes wants to replace “trunk”. The bonnet makes sense when I hear it instead of “hood”.
And then there’s reckon, which occasionally slips out instead of “think”. I’m trying to hang onto my Americanisms for as long as I can, but it’s getting harder to resist.
Marianne Jennings, “Squeaky Bum Time and Other British Phrases I Never Knew I Needed”, An American’s Guide to British Life, 2025-10-05.
September 6, 2026
QotD: 90s music
[Not to be confused with Disintegration, which as we all know is the greatest album ever].
Nirvana’s genre-defining hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a deconstruction of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”. Pearl Jam were the deconstructed Doors (though this is more because of Eddie Vedder’s “kinder, more sensitive Jim Morrison” act than for the music). The Counting Crows were deconstructed Sixties folk, the Smashing Pumpkins were deconstructed Pink Floyd (I like Smashing Pumpkins), the Gin Blossoms were the deconstructed Eagles, and so on, finally reaching its nadir with Oasis, the “deconstructed” Beatles who were so deconstructed, McCartney et al could’ve sued them for plagiarism and probably won.
Severian, “Alt Music Thread”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-06.
September 5, 2026
QotD: The first (of many) near-death experiences of William Marshal, the greatest knight
He would have been far from the first child to die on Stephen’s account, because at this point England was fourteen years into a civil war so brutal that the Peterborough Chronicle recorded that men “said openly that Christ slept” (þa sæden openlice ðæt Crist slep. ⁊ his halechen),1 but this time was different. This time, the king had to order the boy’s death himself.
The medieval English royal succession was never as neat as Crusader Kings mechanics would have you believe, but even so Stephen I (and only) was an unlikely king. His mother Adela was the youngest child of William the Conqueror. She had four older brothers, three of whom survived their father, and Stephen himself was the third of her sons. But the Conqueror’s eldest son, Robert Curthose, mortgaged his duchy of Normandy to fund his participation in the First Crusade and would go on to spend the decades after his return in comfortable captivity. His second son, Richard, was killed as a teenager in a hunting accident in the New Forest in 1070, and his third son, William Rufus, succeeded him as king, never married, and was also killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest (this time in 1100). If this seems suspiciously convenient, it was: the youngest brother, Henry, was also on the fatal hunting trip. He immediately rode hard for Winchester, where he was crowned three days later.
Henry I promptly married Matilda, whose father was the king of Scotland and whose mother Margaret (later canonized by Innocent IV) was the sister of Edgar Ætheling: Henry and Matilda’s son William, born in 1103, united the blood of the Norman conquerors and the old Anglo-Saxon House of Wessex. Their daughter, another Matilda, was sent off to Germany at the age of eight to marry the twenty four-year-old Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. And that was it: Henry I also fathered at least twenty-two attested bastards, but William and Matilda were his only legitimate children. Which meant that when a drunken helmsman wrecked the ship carrying William and at least three hundred other flowers of the Anglo-Norman nobility across the Channel, Henry was in deep trouble. Luckily for him, his daughter soon returned from Germany a childless widow and once he had remarried her to Geoffrey of Anjou he was able to browbeat his barons into accepting her as his heir. Unluckily for him, they didn’t mean it: Empress Matilda was deeply unpopular even beyond the fact that she was a woman, and as soon as Henry died they were happy to crown his nephew Stephen instead.
The ensuing civil war, known to history as “the Anarchy,” was exciting and dramatic and featured such moments as a king captured on the battlefield, a queen climbing out the window of a besieged castle and escaping through a snowstorm, and a teenage boy invading England with a mercenary army he couldn’t afford to pay. For our purposes, though, all you really need to know is that in 1152 Stephen laid siege to a castle in Berkshire that John Marshal, a supporter of Matilda, had built without royal authorization. (These are apparently called “adulterine castles“, which I think is delightful.) Marshal asked for a truce to consult with his constable and organize the garrison’s surrender and offered his youngest son William as a hostage for his good behavior. Stephen accepted, took the boy into his camp, and withdrew to let Marshal enter with his men.
And then John Marshal stayed in the newly-reinforced castle instead.
Using your children as diplomatic hostages was standard practice in this era. Abandoning them to be executed as punishment for your bad faith was definitely not. But when Stephen’s men told John Marshal that his son’s life would be forfeit for his treachery, Marshal is said to have replied that he didn’t care, because he still had “the anvils and the hammers to forge even finer ones”. Stephen was not, in the end, able to bring himself to kill young William: the story has it that he lost his nerve when the boy asked on his way to the gallows whether he could play with a guard’s spear “afterwards”, and then again when William happily climbed into the catapult they planned to use to send him over the walls to his father (he thought it was a swing). He did, however, remain a hostage in Stephen’s camp until the end of the war a year later.2
Our only source for this story of William’s childhood, and for most of the truly excellent stories medievalist Thomas Asbridge recounts in The Greatest Knight, is a 19,215 line rhyming poem in medieval French. Probably composed a few years after William Marshal’s death at the behest of his friends or children, and pretty well corroborated by other sources where other sources exist, the poem is our only surviving example of a medieval biography of a “normal” person. (Relatively speaking; that little boy grew up to be an incredibly accomplished man but neither a king nor a saint, which is who usually got written about.) Moreover, it seems to have been compiled from stories told by people who actually knew him — which probably means that he was the one who told them about the child who thought the catapult was a swing. The poem exists in only one manuscript,3 discovered by Paul Meyer in the late 19th century and published with partial translations into modern French as L’histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal. (You can find Meyer’s version here or here.) More recently, Nigel Bryant published a full English translation, the text of which isn’t available online, though I’ll point out that even Claude Sonnet does a pretty decent job with screencaps of the original.4
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Greatest Knight by Thomas Asbridge”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2026-04-27.
- As a measure of the degradation of the times, the chroniclers’ English no longer employed grammatical gender.
The ⁊ is a Tironian note for “and”, incidentally, and halechen is obviously cognate with “hallowed”. Like and subscribe for more Old English in the least expected places.
- Stephen’s son and heir Eustace having died by this point, it was agreed that he would keep the English throne but be succeeded by Matilda’s son, the future Henry II, who had already conquered Stephen’s duchy of Normandy.
- Yes, like Beowulf. It’s depressing to realize how many incredible medieval texts survive in only one manuscript. Thank a Benedictine today!
- Claim not verified by anyone who actually reads medieval French, but I didn’t see any obvious errors.
September 4, 2026
QotD: My generation
That’s why one of the weirdest things about getting older is realizing just how much of what you took for granted as part of the permanent furniture of the world was actually highly transient: The Iron Curtain. Guitar rock. Your own hopes and dreams and ambitions. Sometimes they all come wrapped together like a package deal, and failing at one makes it seem like you’ve failed at it all.
Andrew Potter, “Eddie Van Halen, Bill and Ted, and mourning a generation”, The Line, 2020-10-14.
September 3, 2026
QotD: Combined arms
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
September 2, 2026
QotD: The great natural experiment in plant-based eating
It is the most vegetarian large country on earth, hundreds of millions of people, many vegetarian from birth. Grain at the base, pulses, vegetables, all cooked in vegetable oil: the government Eat Well plate, run as a national experiment for thousands of years.
The result. Around a third of its children are stunted, the largest share of the world’s stunted children of any nation. The Indian Dietetic Association reports 84% of the country’s vegetarians are protein deficient, against 65% of its meat eaters. And the nation that eats the least meat is the diabetes capital of the world, with over 100 million diabetics.
Before anyone blames poverty, a Journal of Nutrition study found a vegetarian mother predicted stunting across every wealth bracket, rich families included. The diet was carrying its own weight.
Bioavailable iron, zinc, B12 and complete protein build a child’s skeleton. Strip them out and it comes out smaller. The animal fat, meanwhile, got swapped for refined grain, sugar and seed oil. India is now the world’s biggest vegetable oil importer, per-person intake tripled since 2001.
The diet sold to the West as optimal human nutrition has been run here, at the scale of a billion people, for longer than the West has existed. It did not produce optimal humans. It produced the largest population of stunted, diabetic, protein-starved people on earth.
Sama Hoole, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-31.
September 1, 2026
QotD: “Down-line clear …”
On one occasion, noticing us waiting by the gates, the signalman slid open his window and asked us if we’d like to come up and see inside the signal box. I was up those stairs almost before he’d finished his sentence and he treated us both to a conducted tour of a fascinating and beguiling little empire.
When bells started ringing, he explained about the bell code system and announced that there was a cross-country passenger train about to pass through Stanford, without stopping, on its way to Rugby. Suddenly, he asked me: “Would you like to signal this train through the station?”
“Gosh, yes! Of course I would!”
The sequence started by closing the gates on the level crossing. These were the traditional, heavy timber gates, rather than the comparatively minimal lifting-barriers seen today. They were opened and closed by turning a huge ship’s wheel-type contraption in the signal box and it took all my strength, plus more than a little help from the signalman, to turn it sufficiently to get the gates completely closed. This reliance on a direct mechanical linkage is the reason why the signal box had to be immediately adjacent to the gates.
Next, it was the signals, which were operated by a system of wires opposed by counterweights. The signalman showed me which levers to pull. I had to pull with all my might to get that red upper-quadrant signal to rise. Pulling the yellow distant signal “off” took even more effort, because its greater distance from the signal box meant that the wire was very long indeed. All these tasks were completed solely by manual devices without any mechanical assistance. It was a technology which hadn’t changed since Victorian times.
After what seemed like a long wait, the train eventually appeared in the distance and I felt so proud, hearing it whistling a greeting. Actually the whistle is a warning device, but I was only eight and I was convinced that the driver was saying “thank you” as he steamed through the station past the signal box, courtesy of my hard work.
And just as it had been with the farm horses, it would not be long before Dr Beeching would sweep away rural railways, together with the way of life which went with them and make such experiences as this impossible.
Whenever I see a railway these days, with everything surrounded by high steel fences, their vertical pales topped with barbarous triple-spikes and further surmounted with coils of barbed wire, together with notices threatening huge fines for trespass, I’m reminded of just how lucky I was to grow up in a time when a signalman could invite a child and his father to join him and give them a singular experience which they would both remember for the rest of their lives.
Brian Meredith, “A 1950s childhood, Part 2: ‘Down-line clear …'”, The Conservative Woman, 2026-05-31.
August 31, 2026
QotD: India, “coasting on inertia”?
Moreover, if I happened to witness a crime … well, that wasn’t going to happen. I’d make sure of it. Pro wrestling referees got nothing on me. But if somehow I did get roped into an investigation, I was going to flee to the nearest Western embassy and hole up like Julian Assange. As with the Tubmans-in-the-passport thing, this is not because I condone or encourage crime. I really hope they find the guy whodunit, and nail his balls to the wall … in the abstract. But in the concrete, my main concern is that Officer Friendly-ji will have much less paperwork, and far more business opportunities, by pinning it on the burra sahib, so sahib — that would be me — is making his pasty pale ass scarce.
This is not a blanket condemnation of the Indian police. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of reality. India is a huge country of over a billion people, in which there are at least 30 major languages (= “spoken by over a million people”) and a thousand minor ones. There are at least six major religions, the adherents of which are always bickering with each other. Even granting that every single national official in India has the wisdom of Solon, how the hell are they supposed to pass laws that mean anything under those conditions?
The administration of “justice”, then, devolves to the lowest common denominator in the localities. About which I know nothing, which makes me a nice fat target, so … yeah. How many dolla dolla bills to make this go away, Inspector?
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-22.
