In the winter of 1963, an American crossed into Canada travelling under a passport that was not his own.
His name was Lou Harris. He was John F. Kennedy’s personal pollster, one of the handful of men who had just put a president in the White House, and he was moving under a false identity because the job he had come north to do could never be seen to be done. He had come to take down the Government of Canada.
It worked. Within months, John Diefenbaker’s nationalist Conservative government was gone, and the Liberal campaign that replaced it had been quietly run on American polling, American media tactics, and American psychological warfare, with Harris directing from the shadows. No shots were fired. No tanks crossed the border. Most Canadians lived out their lives never knowing it happened at all.
That is not a theory. This is documented history, laid out in painstaking detail in John Boyko’s Cold Fire: Kennedy’s Northern Front, and once you know it, you cannot look at this country the same way again. Because here is the question nobody has had the nerve to ask in the sixty years since: if Washington toppled a Canadian government in 1963 and paid no price of any kind, why on earth would it have stopped?
It didn’t stop. That is the argument of this essay, and I intend to prove it with receipts. What began as a Kennedy operation against one stubborn prime minister became the permanent condition of Canadian politics. Blue America captured our governing party, its money, its methods, its personnel, and eventually its policy. Red America, more quietly, built our opposition, supplying the ideas, the operatives, and the reflexes of what now calls itself Canadian conservatism. Two parties, two foreign patrons, one country in between, and not one law against any of it. By the end, you will understand why every election feels like choosing between American factions. Because it is. And you will have, in plain terms, the only program that can end it.
Start where the occupation started: with the prime minister who said no.
Diefenbaker’s crime, in Washington’s eyes, was sovereignty. JFK despised him for defending Canadian autonomy, and teamed up with Lester B. Pearson’s Liberals to permanently rewire this country’s trajectory. Harris and his fake passport were only the covert half. The overt half played out in public, and it is somehow more shocking. The breaking point was Diefenbaker’s refusal to accept American nuclear warheads for the Bomarc missiles Washington had parked on our soil, and refusing to put our forces on alert on Washington’s schedule during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He insisted a Canadian government would decide these things in Ottawa. For this, on January 30, 1963, the United States State Department did something no ally had ever done to another: it issued a press release publicly calling the Prime Minister of Canada a liar about the state of defence negotiations. A foreign power’s foreign ministry, openly contradicting our head of government, in writing, to force his hand. Within a week, Diefenbaker’s government fell on a non-confidence vote. Within months, Kennedy’s friend Ben Bradlee put Diefenbaker on the cover of Newsweek in a hit piece so vicious it read like an obituary. The pollster in the shadows, the press release in the open, the friendly magazine on the newsstand. Every layer of American power, aimed at one Canadian who said no.
What happened to Canada was not an isolated incident. It was one front in a global campaign of regime change Washington ran throughout the 1960s. The same decade they were meddling in Ottawa, they were toppling governments worldwide to secure their sphere of influence. In 1960, the Eisenhower administration laid the groundwork for the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, finalized in Mobutu Sese Seko’s military coup. In 1961, the Kennedy administration financed race riots and engineered an electoral coup in British Guiana to depose the democratically elected Cheddi Jagan. By 1963, Washington was backing the violent coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. A year later, the Johnson administration ran Operation Brother Sam, providing military backing to the coup in Brazil that replaced President João Goulart with a military dictatorship.
By installing Pearson, Washington broke Canada’s nationalist resistance using the exact playbook it deployed on developing nations, locking us permanently into a continentalist framework.
And look at what the new management delivered, and how fast. Within two years of taking office, Pearson gave Washington the warheads Diefenbaker had refused. In 1965 he signed the Auto Pact, integrating the commanding heights of Canadian manufacturing into the American industrial system, the economic annexation the National Policy had been built to prevent, accomplished with a signature. And in the same year came the new flag. Understand what that meant to the men who fought it. The Red Ensign, the banner Canadians had carried up Vimy Ridge and across the beaches of Normandy, was struck, and with it the visible sign that this country belonged to a British inheritance rather than an American continent. Diefenbaker fought the flag change with everything he had left, and he was mocked for it as a relic, because the men mocking him understood exactly what he understood: a country’s symbols are its memory, and a country stripped of its memory will accept a new identity from whoever supplies one. The supplier was already chosen.
That 1963 intervention laid the structural tracks for Pierre Trudeau to dismantle our traditional British and Loyalist inheritance entirely, replacing it with official multiculturalism, a weaponized Charter, and a hyper-progressive legal order. The horrors you see today are not random accidents. They are the long-term realization of the colony Kennedy and Pearson engineered decades ago.
But here is what even the people who know the Diefenbaker story get wrong. They think 1963 was a coup against Canada’s right. It was bigger than that. It was a proof of concept. Washington learned that Canadian politics could be run from outside, cheaply, legally, and without consequence. And in the sixty years since, both American political tribes have taken the lesson. Blue America perfected the Pearson playbook and used it to capture our government. Red America ran a quieter operation and captured the opposition. Not two conspiracies. One condition. A satellite country whose entire political spectrum, left flank and right flank, answers to a foreign capital’s internal quarrels.
Upper Canadian Cavalier, “The Occupied Dominion”, Upper Canadian Cavalier, 2026-07-06.
October 10, 2026
QotD: JFK’s soft coup to destroy Diefenbaker and install Pearson
October 9, 2026
Conrad Black on Tucker Carlson
On his (new-ish) Substack, Conrad Black discusses Tucker Carlson’s media career before he unceremoniously left Fox News and what he has been doing since then:
Tucker Carlson talking to Mike Pence, July 2023.
This became a dangerous cycle because the more Tucker forayed into the fringe, the harder he struck a vein of malformed but popular sentiment. Meanwhile, censorship of his relatively tame views only handed him a bigger megaphone and more incentive to go further. His sensible opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters, and his wariness of another quagmire emerging in Ukraine, curdled into progressively more unhinged forms of isolationism. His legitimate concerns about demographic trends and failed immigration policy curdled into belief in a coordinated conspiracy to erase white people from Europe and North America. Reasonable criticism of Israel and the American role in the Middle East curdled into the quasi-antisemitic trope of AIPAC as the hidden hand controlling U.S. foreign policy. His well-earned distrust of government curdled into various conspiracies involving some mix of extra-terrestrials, the CIA, and the Jews.
The pattern has become so predictable that if there was an effort to block him from praising Brussels sprouts as his favourite vegetable, at least three of his next five interview guests would spend two hours apiece insisting the maligned little cabbage is the victim of a coordinated smear campaign bankrolled by Big Salad. The attempted prohibition becomes the proof.
As a free-speech and free-market advocate, I think Tucker is entitled to say what he wants, and I congratulate him on his commercial success, even while finding many of his views idiotic. What troubles me is not so much the outlandish claims, but the skill atrophy — the phenomenon whereby any skill sharpened by adversarial pressure dulls without resistance. In boxing, the term “ring rust” is sometimes used to describe the way a boxer who stops facing strong opponents loses their timing, power, and urgency, until nothing’s left but a shell of their former selves. Looking back over his podcast guest list, with the exception of this Rees-Mogg segment, Ted Cruz last year, and perhaps a handful of others, it has been a long procession of hundreds of people brought on to confirm his own worldview back to him, in their own words. And the ring rust has set in.
I first noticed it at an event in Edmonton in January 2024, where I sat on a panel with Tucker and Jordan Peterson. I found myself in the awkward position of feeling the need to defend then-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in front of a packed arena of anti-Liberal partisans (with whom I would have considered myself somewhat of a kindred spirit). I was booed by parts of the audience for pointing out the fact that while Freeland, whom I know slightly and like personally, was politically hopeless, she was not, as Tucker had claimed, a fascist. The typically leftist habit of reducing every political opponent to a Hitler or Mussolini analog is lazy and obnoxious — not adjectives I would have used to describe the old Tucker. His justification was that he had recently seen a video of reporter David Menzies being detained by the RCMP after a collision with an officer while trying to get his microphone close enough to pick up Freeland’s response (or lack thereof). It was an outrageous overreaction by the officer, but there was no suggestion that Freeland had ordered the arrest. Ironically, Menzies’ question that Freeland was trying to dodge had been about why the Liberal government had gone soft on Iran’s terrorist regime — a question one might well put to Tucker.
The signs of atrophy continued to show up and in ways that, as a former admirer of Tucker’s, became progressively more alarming. At the memorial following the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, Tucker gave an odd speech in which he claimed that the assassination was reminiscent of his “favourite story”, in which Jesus Christ was killed for telling the truth by a group of shadowy figures “in a lamp-lit room” in Jerusalem, “sitting around eating hummus”. When asked about it a few days later, Tucker employed a variation of the Jon Stewart technique of backing away from his own words to avoid serious scrutiny. With his characteristic forced laugh, he denied any implication that he had echoed the nascent conspiracy theory that Israel had murdered Charlie Kirk. His defense: hummus is a traditional Arab (rather than Jewish) food.
The evident decline grew even more pronounced in his May 2026 New York Times sit-down, when Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked why he had suggested that Donald Trump might be the Antichrist. Tucker insisted he had never said that, wasn’t even sure what the Antichrist was and insisted “those words never left my lips” — then, after he was shown a clip from his own show of the words leaving his lips, he apologized that his remarks from the clip implied “a precision I haven’t arrived at”. In other words, the jury is still out about whether Trump is the Antichrist, and he regretted jumping the gun on the verdict.
Which brings us to the latest instalment. After roughly 200 interviews, each amounting to hours-long sessions of Tucker and his guests regurgitating the same pablum into each other’s mouths, the transformation into a shell of his former self appears to be complete. In this conversation, moments after declaring that killing the innocent is “never justified under any circumstances”, he pivoted almost in the same breath into a full-throated defence of Hitler — history’s single greatest killer of innocents. He argued the invasion of Poland was understandable given that 15% of the country had been German before the Treaty of Versailles. While absurd, at least it is consistent with his position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But even if, for argument’s sake, that justified Poland, Hitler didn’t stop there. What justified the invasions of Belgium and France? After all, France was faithfully adhering to the Tuckerite foreign policy of reluctant rearmament, appeasement, and assuming an entirely defensive posture (behind the Maginot Line). Stretching the flimsy logic further one could argue (feebly) that France had it coming too, since 6% of France (Alsace-Lorraine) was also German before Versailles. But there’s still no justification for the invasions of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece, or the Soviet Union — with whom Hitler had a signed non-aggression pact. None of those countries were ever German, let alone Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt.
What’s clear is that Hitler used his early invasions to test whether anyone would stop him — and the feedback he got was a green light for more. History keeps teaching the same lesson: appeasement is just expansionism outsourced to your enemies.
Small wonder Tucker hasn’t learned this lesson from history, given that he called Darryl Cooper — a man with zero historical credentials — “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper spent two hours on Tucker’s show in September 2024, arguing Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of the war, and that the deaths of millions in Nazi camps owed more to German logistical incompetence than deliberate extermination.
British humour – “there is something unique about ‘taking the mickey'”
This post is from a few months ago, but still seems quite relevant to British society (admittedly, I’m not there and perhaps things are actually better than they appear from across the pond):
Image from Fish & Chips
Last week, the BBC announced it would be axing Live At the Apollo. Its viewing figures have halved since 2018. I turned on the TV to see what we’d be missing. It was compered by a guy whose idea of being droll was to shout. The comedians he introduced were “safe” — in the way that sticking a cork up your bottom is safe.
In order to get BBC Purity Vetting clearance, Apollo ceased to be Comedy.
Wooden jollity, enforced on us by puritans, is not the real Britain. Being sharply satirical, frivolously inane, or anywhere in between — that is who we are and what we want to watch. Rather like Baldrick, it’s all part of a cunning plan. Our humour is conduit for the House Rules of Britishness.
The self-deprecation. The puncturing of pomposity. The airing of societal concerns through a keenly observed joke. The tension-releasing giggle of the naughty-but-nice. The feel-good factor of unadulterated silliness — from Bob Mortimer right back to Saint Eric of Morecambe.
Yes, in its many forms, British humour is the window to our soul. And yet the Pigeons of Political Correctness have come and dropped their payload all over it.
What a mess they’ve made. On our screens and off, the fear of causing offence suppresses our greatest and most cohering natural instinct. In the mini survey I mentioned in Fish & Chips Portion One, we found that humour was by some distance thought to be the most quintessential British trait. Among things like chatting in the pub, walking the dog, respectfully disagreeing and helping a neighbour, “seeing the funny side” came top. It is our coping mechanism; our way of keeping calm and carrying on. It is what we are admired for. In the once noble pursuit of social justice; of balancing things up a bit – our humour police are creating a whole new imbalance. It is topsy turvy social engineering in which only the “weak” are “strong”. There must be a zany new Monty Python sketch in there somewhere.
A respondent in our survey was spot on when he said: “Sense of humour in the managerial/professional class has gone … not necessarily normal people“.
So it’s time that we “normal people” clean all that crap off the window. The pigeons won’t do it, will they? They”re too busy cooing about Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. It is up to us to make the penny drop for them. To see that what they are trying to do is unnatural. Because in Middle England, there will always be the surreal, the satirical, and the smutty innuendo.
CMAR – Canada’s Newest Service Rifle – 2026
Josh Bortolotti
Published 5 Jun 2026Connaught Range Primary Training Centre
The Canadian Army is in the final stages of testing for the C25 General Service Rifle, the first weapon being delivered by the Canadian Modular Assault Rifle project. Since awarding the contract to Colt Optics to provide the 1-6x LPVO, key stakeholders are brought out to Connaught Range to fire the weapon from differing distances and provide feedback. Some members of the Army Headquarters also got the opportunity afterwards to have a familiarization shoot with the C25 and C26.
C25 General Service:
Colt MRR 5.56x45mm (13.7″ barrel)
Colt Optics 1-6x Low Power Variable Optic (LPVO)
Millbrook Strategic Sciences Multi-Function Muzzle Device (MFMD)
Magpul Back Up Sights and FurnitureC26 Full Spectrum:
Colt MRR 5.56x45mm (15.7″ barrel)
Colt Optics 1-10x Low Power Variable Optic (LPVO)
Millbrook Strategic Sciences Multi-Function Muzzle Device (MFMD)
Magpul Back Up Sights and Furniture
QotD: Polis magistrates – Archons
Numbers however is the first key difference here. Most modern governments have a single magistrate – a president or prime minister – from whom flows all executive power, delegated down to subordinates who are often unelected and whose power thus derives from the one chief magistrate at the top. In some cases, that power is less vested in the person of a prime minister as it is in the collective cabinet (where the cabinet wields power and notionally takes responsibility collectively), but there is still one line of power, reaching from the people, through a single executive person or body, then down to many functionaries whose role is to implement the will of the single executive.
This is not how ancient Greek magistrates (or indeed, ancient magistrates generally) worked.
Instead, Greek magistrates were a product of efforts to weaken royal power by dividing it, which of course only works if executive power was truly divided, that is vested in different autonomous figures. Thus it is important to not to see these magistrates as organized into a “chain of command” or even engaged in collective decision-making. Instead, the best way to understand most magistrates is to imagine them as individual actors whose powers are restricted to a single sphere of action (that is, they have a specific job) and that a city might have many of them. Thus there isn’t one executive power in a polis, but many. Even in cases where magistrates function as a board, it is often the case that each member of that board carries the full power of the magistracy – it is a board of ten magistrates, not a board of ten acting as a magistrate, which means the individuals can act independent of the board.
So instead of one executive, what you have in a polis are many independent, little executives, each with a fragment of the overall executive power. And if you are thinking, “that sounds like an awkward system, since magistrates might be working at cross-purposes with each other”, well, yes. There’s a reason we don’t generally structure governments this way. But the Greeks did and they liked it that way, because this sort of structure keeps the powers of the magistrates in check.
So what might the high magistrates of a polis do exactly? Though there are many different configurations for high magistrates, they tend to do the same basic set of jobs (again, split up usually). You need magistrates to 1) lead the armies and fleets (not usually a distinct job; strategoi are generals and admirals), 2) manage and organize the law courts (which may or may not include making summary judgements in minor cases), and 3) conduct key religious rituals on behalf of the community. Those who have been here a while will note how this maps on neatly to the three roles of kingship (chief general, chief judge, chief priest), though the shift from royal law maker-enforcer-judge to “court scheduling specialist” is a meaningful one.
So at Athens, we have the initial three archons which slot neatly into these roles: the polemarch (πολέμαρχος, polemarchos, lit, “war-leader”) was in charge of the army, the archon basileus (ἄρχων βασιλεύς, lit, “king archon“) who filled in for the king in religious rituals which required his presence but had no broader non-religious powers, and finally the eponymous archon, who lent his name to the year (“in the year of the archonship of so-and-so” being a standard dating form) and ran the courts. It seems fairly clear that early on the eponymous archon often stood as judge and initially also presided over the meetings of the Athenian boule and ekklesia as its chief magistrate (and so supervising the law making process as well).
Over time these offices in Athens were weakened or supplanted, breaking power up further in order to buttress the democracy against both oligarchic power (remember: strong magistrates are a tool of “the few”) and tyranny (strong magistrates have a good position to overthrow the democracy and institute a tyranny). The eponymous archon slowly lost most of his power; the boule came to be a select council which ran the ekklesia and in turn there was an even smaller select council, the prytaneis who acted as a select of the boule and presided over it. Meanwhile, the polemarch became mostly an organizational, “managing the home front” figure, while the war leading role was replaced with a board of ten generals, the strategoi. The strategoi ended up being a pretty key office. As everyone understood you needed generals with expertise, it was an office where one could be elected multiple times in succession and was never determined by lot the way the archonships were; that meant a capable politician could secure a permanent role in the state by getting elected over and over again as strategos; this is for instance the position Pericles held.
As for the courts, these got bigger even as the eponymous archon got smaller and so the Athenians created six lesser archons, the thesmothetai (θεσμοθέται, sing. θεσμοθέτης; “law-giver”) who operated the courts (but did not dispense justice; these are jury courts). Still the eponymous archon kept some vestigial legal powers, like a supervisory role over the epikleroi, sometimes translated as “heiresses” (although that’s not quite right – they weren’t and indeed under Athenian law couldn’t inherit, but rather property was passing through them to legally valid inheritors – they were required to marry into their paternal line in order to generate a husband who could be such a valid inheritor – which in most poleis had to be male.).
At Sparta, the ephors and the two hereditary Spartan kings filled the role of high magistrates; the existence of the two hereditary kings is, we know, quite unusual but the board of ephors is not. We know that several other poleis had ephors and evidently on Crete they had kosmoi (described by Aristotle but epigraphically attested at Eleutherna, Eltynia, Gortyn, Knosos, Lyktos, etc.; Inventory 1159, 1160, 1164, 1169, 1175) whose powers were apparently much like the ephors. Ephors and kosmoi appear invariably as boards of officials with a wide range of executive powers: the Spartan ephors (of whom we are best informed) handled most foreign policy, served as a high court and could propose legislation to the assembly. At Sparta the ephors had the job of making sure the kings did their job, including their religious role, but also had some of their own ritual functions, like the ritual declaring of war on the helots (Plut. Lyc. 28.4). As you might imagine, a board of magistrates with such wide-ranging powers tended to be tools of “the few” and indeed Aristotle notes that the Spartan ephors were easy to bribe (Arist. Pol. 2.1271a) while the Cretan kosmoi monopolized power to produce an effectively hereditary oligarchy (Arist. Pol. 2.1272b). Also notably it seems like one of the ephors or kosmoi was always eponymous, giving their name to the year just like the Athenian eponymous archon.
Athens and Sparta weren’t the only poleis with these kinds of high officials, of course, but as noted the magistrates of other poleis are often very poorly attested. Thebes had an eponymous archon (of unclear powers) and at least two polemarchs by 382 (Inventory, 455); the Boeotian confederation, of which Thebes was the leading power, also had seven Boiotarchs (Βοιωτάρχης, a fusion of βοιωτία (the name of the region) and that ἀρχ- root meaning “leader”), elected for a term of one year who led the combined armies of the Boeotian poleis. Argos’ assembly had a presiding magistrate attested in inscriptions, who was assisted by a secretary with a six month term of office; they also had board of five strategoi who commanded the army reported by Thucydides as well as a board of treasurers (ἀρτῦναι, artunai; Inventory, 604).
Demiourgoi (“public workers”) appear in a number of poleis, often as a board or group of magistrates (Larissa had these, Arist. Pol. 1275b; Inventory 696), though the role of demiourgoi seems to vary from polis to polis as you might expect with so general a name (at Larissa they were apparently able to make new citizens, but the title was also used for the officials of the Hellenistic-era Achaean League (a federal alliance of poleis) and the representatives of the Peloponnesian League (Dem. 18.157) among quite a few others.) That said, demiourgos is a word with a wide range of meanings, to include magistrates but also skilled workers in public employ as well as being used in a philosophical sense to mean a kind of “creator god”, so it’s a tricky word.
All told then what should you expect in terms of the high magistrates of a polis? Well, first that the key jobs here are leading the army, organizing the courts (and/or acting as a court as a board) and filling religious roles; you should expect these jobs to split over multiple magistrates. In democracies, offices that don’t require a lot of technical know-how may be selected by lot, but the rest tend to be elected (in oligarchies often from a subset of the polis, defined by wealth). In either case, magistrates serve relatively short terms, usually just one year (but sometimes a little longer or shorter). It is generally only the “specialist” offices (read: generals) that can be held multiple times consecutively. The more powerful the magistracy, the more likely it is to be organized as a board of magistrates.
Now those are the most important and central magistrates, but a large polis with thousands of politai (and even more non-citizens) is going to need a slew of other state officers to handle a lot of the day to day matters. That brings us neatly to minor magistrates …
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101, Part IIb: Archons“, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-24.
October 8, 2026
Singapore’s journey from British colony to independent economic star
At The Wrong Side of History, Ed West reviews the autobiography of Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of an independent Singapore and the man most responsible for its amazing economic success:
There are few political memoirs as readable as Lee Kuan Yew’s From Third World to First, but then there were few politicians like him. Arguably the greatest statesman of the post-war era, Lee led Singapore out of a failed federation with Malaysia, turning a poor and precarious little nation into a dazzling success story, now twice as rich as Britain, its former colonial ruler.
While many things have been written about Lee, the most interesting are by the man himself, with his early years covered in The Singapore Story, published in 1998. The sequel mixes memoir, analysis on international affairs, his own personal philosophy and a how-to guide to statecraft. As he puts it: “There are books to teach you how to build a house, how to repair engineers, how to write a book. But I have not seen a book on how to build a nation out of a disparate collection of immigrants from China, British India, and the Dutch East Indies …” It’s safe to say that he’s cornered that particular market.
It is a strangely cinematic story, almost fit for Hollywood: a man battling to save his small nation against the odds, who must feel that all is lost but struggles on and ultimately wins. Singapore’s identity, unlike that of most young countries, was not forged on the battlefield with swords and guns, but by markets, driven by a determined belief in economic growth, social order and hard work. Only these goals would allow it to overcome its severe demographic challenges, and avoid the violent fate of many post-colonial societies. Defying what experts thought was the direction of history, it became the most successful, and significant, city-state since the Renaissance.
The situation to start with was desperate, and Lee can be seen crying in black and white video footage from August 1965, when he announces that his city has been kicked out of Malaysia, a rare case of a state achieving independence against its will. As he puts it: “Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it.”
Singapore was poor and cursed by its combustible demography. Twice the size of the Isle of Wight — and roughly the same shape — it nestles at the bottom of the Malay peninsula and to its south, just an hour’s ferry ride, is the giant of Indonesia. Neither neighbour was friendly, and Indonesia’s declared regional policy of Konfrontasi – Confrontation – was not reassuring.
Under Stamford Raffles in 1819, the British had founded Singapore as a trading post out of a collection of villages inhabited by Malays and a long-established community of overseas Chinese. Its position at a choke point was crucial for control of the sea lanes between the Far East and Indian Ocean, and under British rule it flourished as an entrepôt. Free trade was its foundational belief, and its hands-off rulers allowed the Chinese in particular to express their entrepreneurial skills; as its economy grew, Chinese migration increased, and by the time of independence they constituted about three-quarters of the population, with Malays accounting for 15 per cent and Indians the remainder.
Born in 1923 as the eldest of five, Lee was something of a father figure to his three brothers and sister, their actual father being a somewhat irresponsible and distant figure, and he certainly exemplified Adler’s birth-order theory, becoming the conscientious elder sibling to an entire nation.
The great-grandson of Hakka-speaking immigrants, Lee came from the somewhat Anglicised Straits Chinese elite. Often British in their mindset, Lee describes himself as “the last Victorian” and this worldview would shape Singapore’s history. He attended the English-speaking Raffles College, where he met his future wife, Kwa Geok Choo, another lawyer and a formidable individual in her own right; the two often finished first and second in exams.
Lee would have gone on to great things in any case, but he happened to come of age in a notably turbulent period. If worldviews are indeed shaped by the events of an individual’s twentieth year, for the budding young law student it was the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the British Empire’s greatest defeat and humiliation. Lee noted at the time that, whatever happened next, this was the end of European rule.
Utah’s VPN rules don’t fare well in court
Like many other jurisdictions, Utah wanted to apply age restrictions to online sites “to protect the children”. It didn’t go well in court:
“Virtual Private Network (VPN)” by Infosec Images is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
As I write, I have my virtual private network (VPN) set to show me as surfing the internet from Berlin, Germany, despite my location in Arizona, for no good reason other than that I can. Given that Germany has rather tight restrictions on speech, this is probably the reverse of how a VPN is usually used between the two countries, but it illustrates the utility of technology that anonymizes internet traffic and lets users pick their points of origin to bypass censorship and surveillance. Germans can bypass controls on “hate speech” and insults directed at politicians, the Chinese can work around restrictions on Winnie the Pooh memes, and people in places like Utah can ignore intrusive age-verification rules.
That’s why it’s important that a federal court just paused enforcement of Utah’s effort to regulate VPNs.
Utah Pushes Age Verification and Targets VPNs
“Signed into law earlier this year, SB 73 attempted to regulate adult websites by requiring them to block VPN users or to identify the physical location of visitors using them or similar tools that mask their network traffic,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Rindala Alajaji details in a response to the case. “It even went so far as to prohibit websites from offering instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass these checks. This made Utah, to EFF’s knowledge, the first state in the nation to target the use of VPNs to avoid legally mandated age-verification gates.”
Utah was sued over the law by Aylo Freesites Ltd. and Aylo Group Ltd., the owners of Pornhub. The plaintiffs didn’t challenge the law’s age-verification requirements but went after its insistence that the law applies if a user is “actually located” in Utah without regard to the use of “a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual’s geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state”.
Utah’s focus on VPNs and similar tools comes after decades of technological innovation intended to allow internet users to bypass censorship, firewalls, and surveillance imposed by authoritarian regimes that want to monitor and muzzle dissidents. VPNs, perhaps the most popular of the tools, route internet traffic through intermediary servers, encrypting data in the process and concealing users’ locations. That’s extremely handy for people suffering under oppressive rule. In recent years, though, speech restrictions have been increasingly imposed by nominally liberal democratic governments.
VPNs are a good thing, and any government attempting to crack down on their use “to protect the children” is up to no good.
Central planning also centralizes the importance of “who you know”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre points out the other thing that socialized economies share with one another: the overwhelming importance of “friends”, “connections”, and “family” in generating unearned wealth and power.
AI-generated image from @Handre on X
Socialism concentrates power, and concentrated power concentrates wealth. Hugo Chavez spent two decades screaming about imperialist oligarchs while his own daughters accumulated the kind of fortune that would embarrass a Rockefeller.
Maria Gabriela Chavez holds assets estimated at $4.2 billion, making her Venezuela’s wealthiest individual by a comfortable margin. Her father nationalized over 1,200 private companies between 2002 and 2012.
The mechanism is straightforward: When the state controls production, distribution, currency, and courts, political proximity becomes the only productive investment. You don’t build a business; you cultivate a minister. Chavez’s inner circle stole through socialism, using currency controls, preferential exchange rates, and state contracts as the instruments.
Meanwhile, the Venezuelan poverty rate crossed 80 percent in 2024. Infant mortality climbed. The bolivar collapsed so completely that Venezuelans began pricing transactions in dollars just to preserve basic calculation.
Ludwig von Mises proved mathematically in 1920 that socialist planners cannot rationally allocate resources without prices generated by voluntary exchange. No prices, no signal. No signal, no coordination. Shortages follow as surely as math follows addition.
This while Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Poverty there is entirely manufactured. Chavez’s family lives in Caracas and Miami on wealth extracted from people who cannot buy protein. The ideology that promised to eat the rich ended with the people eating the zoo animals.
Dining on the Supersonic Concorde
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Apr 2026Roasted lobster tails with creamy beurre blanc served with smoked salmon roses with caviar
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1970sThe luxury dining experience that came with the exorbitant price tag of a ticket aboard the supersonic airliner Concorde (about $9,000 in 2026 money for a one-way ticket from New York to London) included an exclusive lounge experience at the airport and continued with a multi-course meal in the air.
Here I’m recreating a dish from a photo aboard Concorde of smoked salmon shaped into roses, garnished with crème fraîche and caviar. The caviar served aboard Concorde would have been beluga, of course, but feel free to opt for a more reasonably priced alternative. I used white sturgeon caviar, which was still a bit of a splurge.
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QotD: Headlines for modern audiences
Popcorn: you’re making it wrong. This is a classic formulation that produces both anger and curiosity. It’s confrontational and contemptuous, but you think hey, once I learn the secret, I can smirk at other people who don’t know the true way.
We talked to popcorn experts. Here’s why they say you should smear butter on your chest. This style has become the norm, and appeals to people who regard themselves as the sort of people who respect the experts. They trust the popcorn science.
The FDA has banned this poison from popcorn: here’s what we know. Then you discover there’s some 1964 rule that forbids using DDT on corn.
Gut doctor begs: stop doing this with popcorn (Picture of a doctor pointing at a cadaver with its chest blown out from the inside)
Sorry. The closest I can come is this:
If you stop eating popcorn on a regular basis, an unexpected thing happens: it becomes unappetizing. It ceases to be something you consider as “food”. It’s stuff you’d put in a box of plates to keep them from chipping.
But, you say, I make absolutely delightful popcorn with butter and salt! I don’t doubt it. Everything is better with butter and salt. You could say that popcorn is just a delivery mechanism for butter and salt. Golden, rich butter, seeping into the tiny caverns of the detonated kernel, salt falling like snow on Christmas Eve –
Hold on, be right back; I really want some popcorn now.
James Lileks, “Experts say these are the most overrated headlines; number 4 is scary”, LILEKS (James), 2026-07-06.
October 7, 2026
Lessons from Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander
As a child, I was a very early fan of C.S. Forester’s series of novels on the career of Horatio Hornblower, so I was a bit wary about reading Patrick O’Brian’s new-to-me stories set in the same period. A friend from Halifax practically forced Master and Commander on me during my first visit to Nova Scotia and I quickly picked up Post Captain, HMS Surprise and a few more in the series. At Athena’s Bridge, Mike Hennelly makes the case that there are valuable leadership lessons that can be learned from O’Brian’s work:
Cover from a later printing than the one I read in 1982.
In the study of leadership, there are many who say that there is nothing to be gained from novels or movies. Their argument is that only the study of reality (real CEOs, real generals, real political leaders) will yield insights of value for the study and practice of leadership. The purpose of this essay is to argue the opposite case. One of the most remarkable literary achievements of the 20th century was Patrick O’Brian’s multi-volume depiction of British naval life during the Napoleonic Wars. Eventually stretching to twenty books, O’Brian gives us the lives of Captain Jack Aubrey and his great friend, Doctor Stephen Maturin. A reviewer from the New York Times stated (rather categorically) that O’Brian’s books are “the best historical novels ever written”. O’Brian’s characters finally appeared in a movie entitled Master & Commander and the film faithfully captures much of the atmosphere and spirit of this maritime world.
O’Brian’s world, both in the books and the movie, is surprisingly faithful to the world of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. He brings to life the nature of the great naval leaders of the time, the victories they achieved and the hardships they endured. As O’Brian himself notes, “I have gone straight to the source for the fighting in this book. I have log-books, official letters, contemporary accounts or the participants’ own memoirs“. What follows is not a review of the movie nor a synopsis of the plot. This is an essay that uses one particular movie to frame a discussion of leadership in realistic, uncertain and risky circumstances. Our focus is the character of Jack Aubrey – created by Patrick O’Brian, visualized by director Peter Weir and brought to life by actor Russell Crowe. An examination of Aubrey’s behavior and attitudes throughout the movie provides a wealth of insight into the mystery that is called leadership.
To begin at the beginning, a consideration of the term “master and commander” brings two curious facts to light. First of all, in the early days of the Royal Navy, this term applied to two people – not one. When English warships fought the Spanish Armada, for example, they had a “master” who was a life-long mariner with the nautical experience to sail the ship and a “commander” (frequently a noble) who was entrusted with the combat performance of the ship. Over time, this phrase was combined and came to describe the responsibilities of a warship’s captain. The second curious fact is that this term (as a job description) is incomplete. When Patrick O’Brian brought the character of Captain Jack Aubrey to life, he did so in a way that clearly shows that the term “master and commander” was an incomplete description of a captain’s responsibilities. HMS Surprise might be a ship (that needed a master to sail her) and she might be a weapon of war (that needed a commander to fight her) but she was also a collection of almost two hundred sailors of all sorts (who needed a leader to direct and influence their actions). To carry out all the responsibilities of a ship’s captain, Jack Aubrey needed to be a “master, commander and leader”. Without the ability to take a random set of landsmen and mold them into a cohesive, disciplined and skilled crew, he would not have been able to sail the ship safely nor would he have been able to exert any combat power.
“She’s a vastly heavier ship. She’s out of our class” (or, how leaders get others to face existential risk)
As the movie begins, it is the spring of 1805 and we are aboard HMS Surprise, a small Royal Navy frigate of 28 guns with a crew of 197 souls. The Surprise is under orders to find the French frigate Acheron and “sink, burn or take her as a prize”. The Surprise is off the coast of Brazil and approaching a fogbank when she is ambushed by the Acheron. Captain Aubrey is energized by the prospect of combat (“straight at ’em, Mr. Mowatt!“) but events soon take a turn for the worse as Surprise‘s rudder is shot away and the British barely escape safely into the fog.
We learn more about Aubrey as he faces a serious leadership challenge after this disastrous encounter with the French. The ship’s officers, somewhat in shock, are discussing the engagement and they observe that Acheron was “more like a ship of the line than a frigate” and “our shots couldn’t penetrate“. Their misgivings are understandable. HMS Surprise, with twenty-eight guns, is about as small as a ship can be and still be called a frigate. The forty-four guns of the Acheron make it far larger and more heavily armed than the Surprise and what this means in combat is that every broadside fired by the Acheron is almost four times the weight of a broadside from the Surprise. Aubrey’s command team assumes that the clear superiority of the French ship means the Surprise will have to abandon her mission and head home. But their misgivings are not in line with the attitudes of a) the British Admiralty, b) the British public and c) their captain. At this point in the war, most Britons and the Admiralty operate under the assumption that their navy should always project an aura of invincibility. This has been a British naval characteristic since the great British sea-victories at Camperdown (1797) and the Nile (1798). Furthermore, we find out that Jack Aubrey’s mental model of an ideal officer is Lord Nelson who was famous for his relentlessly aggressive behavior at sea. One of Nelson’s most famous sayings was “no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy” and that is exactly what Aubrey intends to do to the Acheron. Aubrey quickly disabuses his officers of the idea of abandoning their mission. Positively radiating with decisiveness, he tells them there is not a moment to lose if they are to carry out repairs and catch up with the French.
Aubrey faces two challenges as he attempts to lead his ship into a situation of existential risk. First, he must gain the support of his officers and secondly, he must ensure the willingness of his crew. He addresses these concerns in turn. To gain the support of his officers and bolster their morale, he addresses their concerns with a discussion of battle tactics in a way that provides reassurance. Although the French ship has far more guns, Aubrey explains that the Surprise possesses intangible advantages that level the killing field. He is convinced that the Surprise is more maneuverable than the Acheron and he intends that his gun crews be better-trained and more effective than their French counterparts. Without any further dissent from his officers, the Surprise carries on with its pursuit of the bigger and more powerful enemy ship – which is a testament to the effectiveness of Aubrey’s leadership.
Aubrey’s approach to the crew about the threat of the Acheron is intensely practical in nature. The crew spend much of their time engaged in gunnery drill. Captain Aubrey has very high standards for the ship’s gunnery because he expects his gun crews to be both fast and accurate. Accuracy in naval gunfire is always a challenge because ships are inherently unstable firing platforms, but, in addition, the faster the rate of fire, the sooner a gun crew is exhausted with a corresponding reduction in accuracy. Aubrey’s standards, while achievable, are higher than the standard in naval fleets of the time. His standards require intensive, dangerous training which is the only way to produce highly disciplined and effective gun crews. To keep his crew motivated while they are training so hard, Aubrey gives them a rousing talk (Do you want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? NO!, they roar back. Do you want your children to have to sing “La Marseillaise”? NO!). He also states his expectations in terms that every sailor can grasp – the gun crews of the Surprise must be able to fire two broadsides for every broadside fired by the Acheron. Over time, the crew of the Surprise is welded into a cohesive and effective fighting force; they take pride in their achievements and their confidence grows as they face the prospect of future combat.
The Korean War Week 120 – The Battle of White Horse Hill begins – October 6, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 6 Oct 2026The Chinese are busy this week; they open the floodgates of a reservoir and attack Arrowhead Hill, but it turns out these are diversions from their main attack, which begins the Battle of White Horse Hill. It does not at all begin well for the Chinese, although the ROK take pretty heavy casualties too. There are also plans afoot for a new UN offensive operation, and a naval exercise begins off the east coast.
00:00 Phone Call
00:50 Recap
01:21 Reinforcing ROK 9th Division
03:01 Diversions
07:02 Operation Showdown
08:47 Naval Exercise
10:38 Increasing the ROK
13:17 Commonwealth Division
15:43 Warsaw and Seattle
17:29 Summary
17:45 Conclusion
USAF re-evaluating the risks of stationing aircraft in Al Biriṭāniyā
The US military leadership got an unwelcome security wake-up call after a reported incident adjacent to a Royal Air Force base used by USAF B-1 bombers:
USAF B-1B Lancer takes off on a routine mission from Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota. Carrying the largest payload of both guided and unguided weapons in the Air Force inventory, the multi-mission Lancer is the backbone of America’s long-range bomber force.
USAF photo by Senior Airman Michael B. Keller via Wikimedia Commons.
To say that the reporting of the last few days about the sudden departure of our B-1B bombers from RAF Fairford has been frustrating — for me at least — is an understatement.
Airfield security has been a pebble in my shoe for a very long time. I assume everyone is familiar with my post from 11 months ago a bout the wake-up call at Whitman AFB? If not, give it a read, then come back.
Let’s all get our reference point first from last week.
Five men who were arrested on suspicion of explosive and terrorism offences after a major incident was declared at an RAF airbase in the west of England have been released on police bail.
Three vans were spotted near RAF Fairford in the early hours of Sunday morning and the police were called. A major incident was declared, and everyone in the small village of Whelford was evacuated.
The head of Counter Terrorism Policing has stressed that the five men remain under investigation and must adhere to strict bail conditions. It has since come to light that the first of two 999 calls was made by one of the arrested men.
A dual UK-Iranian national, aged 25, has also since been arrested on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts.
Investigators are exploring “multiple lines of enquiry”, Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor said on Monday, including whether proxies or individuals were working on behalf of a foreign state — knowingly or not.
Like all professionals do, let’s go to the map room.
This is what the geometry looks like.
OK. Soak that in a bit. Whelford is one of the few little residential areas around this base where our literally irreplaceable heavy bombers were operating from. The parking apron they are using? There it is, right around where the “RAF Fairford” label is.
Now, let’s give you some scale. The smaller circle is 500 yards from where the vans and “fellas” were. The larger circle is 1,000 yards.
Put on your force protection hat. Remember Operation Spider Web from over a year ago and what it was warning us about?
I know for a fact that there has been a rather heated argument over whether we are simply taking too many risks with some of our “There’s nothing dangerous about this airfield! Why, four generations of my family have been flying out of here“. attitude. Habits, inertia, etc.
We Americans make some assumptions about distance that is simply not a reality overseas, especially in Europe.
Why do British trains still rely on century-old levers?
Tom Scott
Published 8 Jun 2026At National Rail’s Manchester classroom, I learn why it’s very rare for trains to collide … and try out signalling for real.
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QotD: The cultural dominance of “Yankeedom”
So there’s Tidewater, lost and forgotten except for some guys in Virginia who still put on red jackets to hunt foxes from horseback — and maybe in slightly different voting patterns. What about the nation that won, the one that’s everywhere?
I refer, of course, to Yankeedom.
“But Jane,” you say, “Yankeedom isn’t everywhere! Scroll back up to your own map — it’s in New England, sure, and, uh, northeastern Ohio and, wow, okay, the entire Upper Midwest. But that’s not everywhere.” But ignore the map for a moment: that’s Woodard’s idea, based on settlement patterns and voting behavior. What is Yankeedom, really? What are its fundamental beliefs, its vision of how life ought to be, and where do they show up today?
Of course you know the story of Yankeedom’s founding: radical Calvinists from East Anglia, settled around the Massachusetts Bay in the 1620s and 30s, funny hats? Maybe you made one of those hats for your construction paper turkey in first grade — or, if you’re a little younger, maybe you learned a nice poem about welcoming new immigrants for a glowing future of multiculturalism and prosperity. In fact the emphasis on “the Pilgrims” in American civic mythology — never mind the traditional Thanksgiving menu, heavy on quintessentially New England dishes like pie1 — is itself a product of Yankeedom’s cultural dominance, as is the insistence in that familiar story that they left England for religious freedom. It’s true! They did! But there’s a very important final bit that we somehow leave out of the version we teach to elementary schoolers: religious freedom for themselves.
The earliest Yankees imagined their new society as a Protestant utopia, a new Zion, in which they would work out their collective salvation. Any deviation from the straight-and-narrow could doom everyone, so enforcing moral and religious conformity — through banishing heretics or, if necessary, even executing them — was of paramount importance. Yankeedom was meant to be a “city on a hill”, a model for mankind: if only they could be good enough, pure enough, and holy enough, God would bless them abundantly — and then everyone else, seeing their manifest blessings, would naturally emulate them and become holy themselves! The important thing, then, was not merely to do right but to be seen to do right, as an example to neighbors and foreigners alike. Yankeedom also put a tremendous emphasis on education (literacy was necessary to read the Word of God), encouraged subordinating the interests of the individual to the greater good of the community, and saw government as an extension of the citizenry. Government, then, since it was run by and for the people, was naturally called to propagate God’s will in a corrupt and sinful world by prohibiting or regulating immoral activities.
As Yankeedom moved west, out of the strict control of the Congregationalist ministers who dominated the New England colonies, they began to abandon their specific religious tenets. Sometimes this meant exciting new religious — the Yankee-settled western portions of New York State gave rise to such religious enthusiasms that people began to call it the “Burned-Over District“2 — but just as often it meant becoming a Methodist, Unitarian, or Baptist. Wherever they went, though, the Yankees clung to their belief that you could make earthly society resemble Heaven, or at least that there was no excuse for not trying as hard as you could. Yankees were at the heart of every push for social reform, from abolitionism and the temperance movement to Reconstruction, the minimum wage, women’s suffrage, and an end to child labor. For example, the members of New York City’s Committee of Fifteen, which militated against gambling and prostitution, were mostly Yankees or German-Jewish immigrants; none were culturally New Netherlanders.
By now this should all be sounding familiar. Heavy emphasis on education, embrace of the government regulation or prohibition of immoral behavior as the central bulwark of societal virtue, extremely visible adherence to highly specific rules and norms of behavior as proof of righteousness? Oh, look, it’s woke! It’s the ideology of the professional-managerial class, the meritocratic elite — it’s the same people with the same bumper stickers on the same Mercedes SUVs in the Whole Foods parking lot that you see in every major American city, regardless of which “nation” most of the other residents belong to.
There are two things going on here, I think: first, high-cultural capital Americans are far more mobile than they used to be. Plenty of people spend a few years in DC, then a few years in Austin, or maybe San Francisco or Boulder or Brooklyn, regardless of where they grew up. Second, and perhaps more important, is the role of education. Maintaining or improving your class position depends far more on a “good” college than it used to (witness the to-do when someone claims the distinction of Harvard on a night school degree!). The Yankee emphasis on education means that most of America’s prestigious colleges and universities are in Yankee-settled areas.3 Thus, membership in a higher stratum of society practically depends on four or eight years marinating in Yankeedom. What’s a kid from rural Nebraska to do?
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: American Nations, by Colin Woodard”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-19.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Oldtown Folks, as quoted in Albion’s Seed:
“The pie is an English institution, which, planted in American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum plies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies, — pies with top crusts, and pies without, — pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when let loose in a given direction.”
For more on the history of distinctly American pies, including why they’re so different from the English pies you may have seen on The Great British Bake-Off, I highly recommend BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, which is somehow both the best history of American sweets I’ve ever read and the best cookbook for them.
- Famous alumni of the Burned-Over District include the Seventh-Day Adventists, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community, and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. (Yes, Mormons are Yankees. Obviously.) But my favorite wacky Yankee religious enthusiasm — actually in Massachusetts, where they weren’t branding people with H for heretic any more — was John Murray Spear‘s “New Motive Power”, an attempt to build an electric perpetual motion machine Jesus.
- The exceptions are generally the flagship school of a large non-Yankee region or in California, the culture of which I’ve entirely elided for reasons of brevity. Sorry. The tl;dr is that Woodard argues the “Left Coast” is a hybrid of Yankees settling the cities and Greater Appalachia in the countryside, which leads to culture fairly similar to that of Yankeedom.
