Meetings of the Senate were formal affairs, but unlike modern legislatures the Senate did not stay in session over long periods. Instead, it met in specific venues – they had to be inaugurated – when called by a magistrate with the power to do so.
We may begin with place: the Senate had no single fixed meeting spot, though the curia in the Forum was the most common location, however the place the Senate met had to be religiously prepared via inauguration (the taking of the auspices by the augurs) and by sacrifices in order to make sure the gods approved of the proceedings and its results. Consequently, the Senate always met in a templum in the sense of a consecrated space, but also it tended to meet literally in temples, with meetings in the temples of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the temple of Fides, the temple of Concord, and so on. Notably, two locations, the temple of Bellona and the temple of Apollo were also used and these sat outside the pomerium, enabling the Senate to meet with magistrates who, because of their active command of an army, could not cross the pomerium; they were also sometimes used to meet with foreign dignitaries the Senate did not wish to let into the city. Later added to this number of sites outside the pomerium was Pompey’s theater, which included a temple of Venus Victrix and a curia as part of the overall complex.
In order to meet, the Senate had to be called or more correctly “driven together” (cogere, often translated adequately as “summoned”, but as Lintott notes, it has an element of compulsion to it) by a magistrate. There were a few standard dates on which this would effectively always happen, particularly the first day of the consular year, but beyond that it was expected that magistrates in Rome could call the Senate at any time to discuss any issue on relatively short notice. There was initially no requirement that Senators live in the city of Rome, but it was clearly assumed. Early on in the second century, we get regulations requiring Senators to stay close to Rome unless they had an official reason to be elsewhere, though Senators might be permitted to leave if they needed to fulfill a vow. In the Late Republic it seems to have been common also for Senators to leave the city during the spring res prolatae, a sort of recess from public business (literally “the deferring of business”), but these informal breaks did not mean the Senate was truly “out of session” and it could still be summoned by a magistrate.
Generally, meetings of the Senate began at dawn, though they could begin later, and they proceeded either until the business was concluded or to dusk. Because of the ritual preparations required, no meeting of the Senate could last more than a day, much like the assemblies, so if the business was not finished, a new meeting would need to be called and the process begun from scratch. While it seems that magistrates generally tried to avoid calling the Senate during festival days, dies nefandi (days unsuited for public business) and meetings of the popular assemblies, there was no requirement to do so and the Senate might be called for any day for most of the Republic, with laws restricting the Senate’s meeting days only coming midway through the first century.
Beyond this, Senators were expected to show up and we hear of threats of fines or other censure for failure to show up, but it also seems like no meeting of the senate was ever very close to the full body and quorums for the Senate were fairly low, 100 or 150. For the Sullan Senate, notionally of 600 members, the highest attendances we know of, as noted by Lintott, are 415, 417 and 392. Of course some significant number of Senators will, at any time, have been active magistrates overseas, or serving as military tribunes, or as senatorial legati, but it seems clear that even beyond this attendance was not universal even if it was in theory supposed to be.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Part IV: The Senate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-09-22.
July 30, 2025
QotD: Meetings of the Roman Republican Senate
July 29, 2025
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen triumphantly announces EU capitulation to Trump’s demands
The EU and the United States are finalizing negotiations on bilateral trade issues that basically give Trump everything he wanted with very little in return for the EU’s concessions. It’s almost as if Trump has some kind of experience in negotiating lopsided agreements, isn’t it? I guess von der Leyen didn’t get Mark Carney’s memo on the importance of keeping your eLbOwS uP:
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “[learning] in real time that weakness and submission do not in fact invite conciliation”
Donald Trump has shown up the European Union. He’s revealed that the world’s largest single market is a paper tiger to be kicked around, with basically no leverage or strength to resist American demands.
All of these supposedly fierce backroom tariff negotiations have yielded an incredibly one-sided deal – really an unparalleled embarrassment. As announced yesterday, the EU promises to invest $600 billion in the U.S. economy and to make $750 billion worth of “strategic purchases” of oil, gas and the like over the next three years. We also promise to buy a bunch of American military equipment. In return for giving the Americans $1.35 trillion, we earn the privilege of a 15% baseline tariff on all of our exports to America and we drop our own tariffs to zero. At least we don’t have to pay the 30% tariffs Trump threatened!
[…]
While von der Leyen was trying weakly to put a happy face on her total failure, Trump gave her what we might call a softer Zelensky treatment. He twisted the knife in the wound, calling out the idiocy of EU wind energy in an extended soliloquy that will surely keep the fact-checkers and the regime deboonkers up late for weeks to come. I transcribe his remarks in full, because the whole moment was wonderful:
And the other thing I say to Europe, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. And I’m not talking about airplanes. I’m talking about beautiful plains, the beautiful areas in the United States. And you look up and you see windmills all over the place. It’s a horrible thing. It’s the most expensive form of energy. It’s no good.
They’re made in China, almost all of them. When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn them off. You can’t bury them. They won’t let you bury the propellers, you know, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land. That’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land. In other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil.
The whole thing is a con job. It’s very expensive. And in all fairness, Germany tried it and, wind doesn’t work. You need subsidy for wind and energy should not need subsidy. With energy, you make money. You don’t lose money.
But more important than that is it ruins the landscape. It kills the birds. They’re noisy. You know, you have a certain place in the Massachusetts area that over the last 20 years had one or two whales wash ashore and over the last short period of time they had 18, okay, because it’s driving them loco, it’s driving them crazy. Now, windmills will not come, it’s not going to happen in the United States, and it’s a very expensive …
I would love to see, I mean, today I’m playing the best course I think in the world, Turnberry, even though I own it, it’s probably the best course in the world, right? And I look over the horizon and I see nine windmills. It’s like right at the end of the 18. I said, “Isn’t that a shame? What a shame.” You have the same thing all over, all over Europe in particular. You have windmills all over the place.
Some of the countries prohibit it. But, people ought to know that these windmills are very destructive. They’re environmentally unsound. Just the exact opposite. Because the environmentalists, they’re not really environmentalists, they’re political hacks. These are people that, they almost want to harm the country. But you look at these beautiful landscapes all over all, over the the world. Many countries have gotten smart. They will not allow it. They will not. It’s the worst form of energy, the most expensive form of energy. But, windmills should not be allowed. Okay?
All the while von der Leyen had to sit there, absolutely frozen except for a curiously accelerated rate of blinking, as she learned in real time that weakness and submission do not in fact invite conciliation.
In Spiked, Jacob Reynolds agrees that the deal is a humiliation for the European Union:
So this is the famous “trade superpower”. After months of tough talk, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced a trade deal with Donald Trump this week which is nothing short of total capitulation. The Commission has accepted a 15 per cent baseline US tariff on most EU goods, agreed to purchase $750 billion worth of American gas and procure billions more of US military kit. What did Queen Ursula get in return? Nothing.
“VDL”, as she is known in the Brussels Bubble, tried desperately to spin this as a win. Sitting anxiously next to Trump in Scotland last weekend, she recited impressive-sounding numbers – such as the EU and US’s combined 800million consumers and the EU’s $1.7 trillion trade volume – like a nervous student. Trump cut through the spin by greeting the deal as fantastic for US cars and agriculture. He didn’t need to say much else – indeed, it was clear for all to see that there was only one winner in this deal.
For decades, even critics of the EU had to concede that whatever its many economic and democratic shortcomings, it still possessed enormous leverage when it came to trade. At the very least, it was more than capable of defending EU interests in trade deals. Evidently, this is no longer the case. When even the hapless government of Keir Starmer can negotiate a better trade deal with Trump, the problems with the EU should be clear to see. (Tariffs on most UK goods are just 10 per cent.)
Even the most ardent Europhiles have found it hard to put a positive spin on the deal. Manfred Weber, leader of the European People’s Party (a coalition of Europe’s legacy centre-right parties) described it as “damage control” and better than not reaching a deal at all. Guy Verhofstadt, former prime minister of Belgium and usually the most maniacal of EU fanboys, slammed the deal as not only “badly negotiated”, but also “scandalous” and a “disaster”, with “not one concession from the American side”. Member states, from Ireland to France, have been similarly unenthusiastic. Yet the brutal truth is that the deal reflects how America views the EU – as strategically weak and politically empty.
Trump has taught the EU a harsh lesson in statecraft. The EU has long relied on its neighbours for energy production. It has long underinvested in defence. And now it throttles its biggest industries with green dogma. This left it with little leverage for the negotiations with the US.
Of course, after Mark Carney being elected on a highly dubious platform of being “the right person to deal with Trump”, this is almost inevitable at this stage:
“The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK”
Britain, like Canada, has been moving toward a less free internet experience for ordinary users, the key bit of legislation in the UK being the Online Safety Act, which like Canada’s proposed Online Harms Act, provides tools to the government to clamp down on online activities they deem “unsafe”:
The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK. Since Friday, anyone in Britain logging on to social media will have been presented with a censored, restricted version – a “safe” internet, to borrow the UK government’s language. Vast swathes of even anodyne posts are now blocked for the overwhelming majority of users.
The Online Safety Act was passed by the last Conservative government and backed enthusiastically by Labour. Both parties insisted it is necessary to protect children. Supposedly, its aim is to shield them from pornography, violence, terrorist material and content promoting self-harm. Age-verification checks, we were assured, would ensure that children would not be exposed to inappropriate content, but adults could continue using the internet as they please. Yet as we have seen over the past few days, on many major tech platforms, UK-based adults are being treated as children by default, with supposedly “sensitive” content filtered from everyone’s view.
Predictably, what is deemed “sensitive” and therefore censored goes well beyond pornography and obviously illegal or adult material. Already UK users of X have been blocked from viewing footage of an anti-asylum protest, a tweet calling for single-sex spaces and a video of a speech in parliament on the grooming-gangs scandal. Historical trivia, such as a thread on Richard the Lionheart, and classic artworks like Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son have been shielded by the tech censors. A thread on X of examples of what has been censored under the Online Safety Act, collated by Benjamin Jones of the Free Speech Union, has itself been partially censored due to the Online Safety Act. Open, political debate online is now a thing of the past.
When the Online Safety Act was first put before parliament, supporters from all parties insisted that fears about its impact on free speech were overblown. “The worst misrepresentation I’ve heard is that the [Online Safety Act] will force tech companies to censor legal social-media posts”, insisted Chris Philp, the then minister for tech and digital economy, now the shadow home secretary, back in 2022. Anyone who warned that this vast new architecture of online speech regulation was obviously going to curtail free speech was presented as a friend of paedophiles, terrorists or the far right. This gaslighting was kept up right until the point the age filters were implemented. “The UK’s online safety regime is here. Will anybody notice?”, asked Politico the day before much of the internet disappeared. The Guardian, on the same day, pondered whether the new rules would be censorious enough.
Despite my financial plight, I’d been considering getting a VPN subscription in advance of the Canadian government getting some version of the Online Harms Act onto the books. Clearly many Brits had already gone that route, and the British government reacts with the care and subtlety one would expect:
Crimes less serious than “Mischief” according to Canadian courts
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper notes that the sentences being sought for Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber are more severe than prosecutors have asked for what appear to be far more serious crimes:
Chris Barber and Tamara Lich
Last week, Crown prosecutors announced they were seeking jail sentences of up to eight years for Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, two organizers of the Freedom Convoy protest.
Both were convicted of mischief, but the Crown is seeking a minimum sentence of seven years in jail for Lich, and eight for Barber, who was also found guilty of counselling others to disobey a court order.
The Crown has argued that the disruptiveness of the Freedom Convoy blockades warrants the harsh sentence, but in a statement this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said courts are throwing the book at Barber and Lich while simultaneously giving free reign to “rampant violent offenders” and “antisemitic rioters”.
It’s certainly the case that you can do an awful lot of heinous things in Canada before a prosecutor would ever think of asking for seven years. Below, a not-at-all comprehensive list of things you can do in Canada, and have the Crown seek a lighter sentence than the one they’re seeking for the organizers of the Freedom Convoy.
- Sexually assaulting a baby [5 to 6 years]
- Using a car filled with guns to ram into Justin Trudeau’s house [6 years]
- Killing multiple innocent people via drunk driving [5 years]
- Stabbing a man to death because he told you to stop abusing your girlfriend [5 years]
- Being a police officer who stalks and sexually harasses crime victims [6 months]
- Amassing enough child pornography to fill a video store [3 and a half years]
- Torturing a toddler to death [7 to 8 years]
- Intentionally ramming a car loaded with children and pregnant women [8 years]
- Beating a fellow homeless shelter resident to death [5 and a half years]
- Raping a minor and bragging about it online [4 to 5 years]
The Original Girl Scout Cookie Recipe from 1922
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 25 Feb 2025The original Girl Scout sugar cookies, some round, some cut with my 1950s Girl Scout cookie cutter (post-baking)
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1922During the early years of Girl Scout cookies, the girls would bake the cookies themselves. This recipe, from The American Girl, the magazine published by the Girl Scouts, is from the first year of the official cookie sales in 1922. The scouts would continue to bake the cookies they sold for 12 more years until the task was turned over to commercial bakeries in 1934.
These are fairly standard sugar cookies, but they are delicious. They bake up nice and crispy, and the sugar sprinkled on top is a lovely touch. I could easily see myself eating dozens of them without even noticing.
ATTENTION SCOUTS! FORWARD MARCH! BAKE! SELL!
This is your chance to show how much Scouting means to you.
GIRL SCOUT COOKIES
1 cup of Butter, or substitute
1 cup of sugar
2 tablespoons of milk
2 eggs
1 teaspoon of vanilla
2 cups of flour
2 teaspoons of baking powderCream butter and sugar, add well beaten eggs, then milk, flavoring, flour and baking powder. Roll thin and bake in quick oven. (Sprinkle sugar on top.) This amount makes six to seven dozen.
— The American Girl magazine, 1922.
QotD: Thucydides wasn’t articulating a deterministic law of geopolitics – he was writing a tragedy
These concerns were not limited to the fringes, they were real. So real were they that respected geopolitical analysts like George Friedman (later of Stratfor) wrote books like [The Coming War With Japan] The argument was that an upstart like Japan would crash head first into US economic and security interests, sparking another war between the two. This conflict was inevitable because challengers will always seek the crown, and the king will always fight to maintain possession of it.
Suffice it to say that this war did not come to pass. The Japanese threat was vastly overstated, and its economy has been in stagnation-mode for decades now (even though living standards remain very high in relative terms). What may seem inevitable need not be.
The next several years will see marked increase in tension between the USA and China, as the former completes its long awaited “Pivot to East Asia”. So anxious are the Americans to pivot that they have been threatening to “walk away” from Ukraine if they cannot hammer down a peace deal in the very near future. This indicates just how serious a threat they view China’s ascent to be to its economic and security interests. If they are willing to sacrifice more in Ukraine than originally intended, the implication is that China’s rise is a grave concern, and that a clash between the two looks very likely … some would argue that it is inevitable, appealing to a relatively new IR concept called the “Thucydides Trap“.
Andrew Latham explains the concept to us, arguing that Thucydides is misunderstood, making conflict between rising powers and hegemons not necessarily inevitable:
The so-called Thucydides Trap has become a staple of foreign policy commentary over the past decade or so, regularly invoked to frame the escalating rivalry between the United States and China.
Coined by political scientist Graham Allison — first in a 2012 Financial Times article and later developed in his 2017 book Destined for War — the phrase refers to a line from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote in his History of the Peloponnesian War, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
Distortion:
At first glance, this provides a compelling and conveniently packaged analogy: Rising powers provoke anxiety in established ones, leading to conflict. In today’s context, the implication seems clear – China’s rise is bound to provoke a collision with the United States, just as Athens once did with Sparta.
But this framing risks flattening the complexity of Thucydides’ work and distorting its deeper philosophical message. Thucydides wasn’t articulating a deterministic law of geopolitics. He was writing a tragedy.
This essay might be an exercise in historical sperging, but I think it has value:
Thucydides fought in the Peloponnesian War on the Athenian side. His world was steeped in the sensibilities of Greek tragedy, and his historical narrative carries that imprint throughout. His work is not a treatise on structural inevitability but an exploration of how human frailty, political misjudgment and moral decay can combine to unleash catastrophe.
That tragic sensibility matters. Where modern analysts often search for predictive patterns and system-level explanations, Thucydides drew attention to the role of choice, perception and emotion.
His history is filled with the corrosive effects of fear, the seductions of ambition, the failures of leadership and the tragic unraveling of judgment. This is a study in hubris and nemesis, not structural determinism.
Much of this is lost when the phrase “Thucydides Trap” is elevated into a kind of quasi-law of international politics. It becomes shorthand for inevitability: power rises, fear responds, war follows.
Therefore, more of a psychological study of characters rather than structural determinism.
Giving credit to Allison:
Even Allison, to his credit, never claimed the “trap” was inescapable. His core argument was that war is likely but not inevitable when a rising power challenges a dominant one. In fact, much of Allison’s writing serves as a warning to break from the pattern, not to resign oneself to it.
Misuse:
In that sense, the “Thucydides Trap” has been misused by commentators and policymakers alike. Some treat it as confirmation that war is baked into the structure of power transitions — an excuse to raise defense budgets or to talk tough with Beijing — when in fact, it ought to provoke reflection and restraint.
To read Thucydides carefully is to see that the Peloponnesian War was not solely about a shifting balance of power. It was also about pride, misjudgment and the failure to lead wisely.
Consider his famous observation, “Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved”. This isn’t a structural insight — it’s a human one. It’s aimed squarely at those who mistake impulse for strategy and swagger for strength.
Or take his chilling formulation, “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must”. That’s not an endorsement of realpolitik. It’s a tragic lament on what happens when power becomes unaccountable and justice is cast aside.
and
In today’s context, invoking the Thucydides Trap as a justification for confrontation with China may do more harm than good. It reinforces the notion that conflict is already on the rails and cannot be stopped.
But if there is a lesson in The History of the Peloponnesian War, it is not that war is inevitable but that it becomes likely when the space for prudence and reflection collapses under the weight of fear and pride.
Thucydides offers not a theory of international politics but a warning — an admonition to leaders who, gripped by their own narratives, drive their nations over a cliff.
Latham does have a point, but events have a momentum all their own, and they are often hard to stop. Inevitabilities do exist, such as Israel and Hezbollah entering into conflict with one another in 2022 after their 2006 war saw the latter come out with a tactical victory. Barring a black swan event, the USA and China are headed for a collision. The question is: in what form?
Niccolo Soldo, “Saturday Commentary and Review #188 (Easter Monday Edition)”, Fisted by Foucault, 2025-04-21.
July 28, 2025
The AI threat to the laptop classes
Warren at Coyote Blog responds to a recent Gato Malo post on the way artificial intelligence (however described) will continue to disrupt the workplace especially as it begins to threaten the “laptop class” workers:
I agree with Gato that AI has a huge potential to disrupt current work patterns, in the same way that the industrial revolution did. The 19th century disruptions were severe, and many people suffered as their experience and skill set no longer matched the new economy. But eventually everyone, from the poorest to the rich, were better off for letting the industrial revolution run its course.
But in the 19th century, the disrupted were essentially powerless. What happens this time around, though, when the disrupted are the ruling elite themselves? These potentially disrupted professions include lawyers and doctors who already have shown themselves very willing to organize to block innovation, squash competition, and protect their high pay. Just look at the history of the attempts by Congress to reduce Medicare reimbursements to doctors. And that was minor compared to the potential AI disruption. Let me give you another example of the powerful resisting a technological change that should have disrupted their businesses.
When TV first was being rolled out, the industry coalesced around a network of local broadcast stations, many of whom became affiliates of a network like NBC or CBS. Why this model? Mainly it was driven by technology — the farthest a TV signal could reasonably be broadcast was about 50-75 miles. Thus everyone by necessity got their TV through three or four TV stations in their metropolitan area, each its own small business.
Now fast forward to today. There are multiple ways to broadcast a TV signal nationwide — there are several satellite options and many streaming internet approaches. So now when we watch DirecTV or Youtube TV, we just watch the national NBC or ABC feed, right? Nope. Federal law requires that whatever service you use MUST serve up NBC, for example, via the local affiliate. That is why your streaming TV service harasses you when you travel, because it is worried about violating the law by showing you the Phoenix CBS affiliate when you are staying overnight in Atlanta (gasp).
This is hugely costly. In order to be able to provide NBC among its stations, Youtube TV must gather the feeds from 235 different stations. In the Internet streaming era this is costly but in the satellite era it was insane. DirecTV, with its limited bandwidth, had to simultaneously broadcast 235 stations, most showing identical content, just to legally provide you with NBC. So why this crazy, expensive, insane effort? I am sure you have guessed — pound for pound local TV stations are among the most powerful lobbyists in the country. First, they have money and a massive incentive to defend their local geographic monopoly — Car dealers and alcohol distributors are much the same, which is why every potential innovation is resisted in those markets. But TV stations have one extra card to play — nearly every Congressman in the House likely depends on the three or four TV stations in one major metropolitan area for a huge part of their publicity and coverage. No politician is going to screw with that. At the end of the day, local stations did not get disrupted, they actually became more valuable with this government-enforced distribution of their product.
This is a small example of the fight that is coming in AI. Congressmen will couch their arguments in fear-charged terminology as if their real fear is some Terminator-like AI apocalypse. But the real concern will be from the influential elite who are being disrupted. What would have happened to the Industrial Revolution if the hand-loom weavers were the children of the nobility? Would the government have allowed the revolution to proceed? We are about to find out.
On a cheerier note (if you’re an AI), here’s Ted Gioia‘s most recent concerns about AI getting more evil as it gets more capable:
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but AI doesn’t make ethical decisions like a human being. And none of the reasons why people avoid evil apply to AI.
Okay, I’m no software guru. But I did spend years studying moral philosophy at Oxford. That gave me useful tools in understanding how people choose good over evil.
And this is relevant expertise in the current moment.
So let’s look at the eight main reasons why people resist evil impulses. These cover a wide range — from fear of going to jail to religious faith to Darwinian natural selection.
You will see that none of them apply to AI.
Do you see what this means? You and I have plenty of reasons to choose good over evil. But an AI bot is like the honey badger in a famous meme — and just don’t care.
So sci-fi writers have good reason to fear AI. And so do we. The moral compass that drives human behavior has no influence over a bot. As it gets smarter, it will increasingly resemble a Bond villain. That’s what we should expect.
Anyone who tries to forecast the future of AI must take this into account. I certainly do.
And even though I’d like to think that I’m a fearless predictor, I must admit that what I see playing out over the next few years is very, very very troubling.
Here’s my hypothesis: Let’s call it Ted’s Unruly Rules of Robotics:
- Smart machines will have an inherent tendency to evil—because human moral or legal or religious or evolutionary tendencies to goodness don’t apply to them.
- The only way to stop this is through human intervention.
- But as the machines get smarter, this intervention will increasingly fail.
“According to elite theory our world is controlled by a ruling class”
Spaceman Spiff explores the notions of “elite theory”, which in one variant or another seems to be a bedrock belief of most dissidents in the west:
Elite theory is based on an important observation; small groups can more easily organize than large groups.
A modest number of wealthy individuals with common goals will easily run rings around a whole town, region or country because the masses cannot easily organize.
This infers enormous advantages, not the least of which is a small group can discuss and agree a strategy and then stick to it. Because of this some imagine elites as more able than they really are.
But power is tricky. All the money and all the clout in the world means nothing if you can’t project it far.
And our powerful, wealthy elites have one great weakness, they must work through others.
A hierarchy therefore exists which we occasionally glimpse adding to our confusion when we use words like “elites.”
Global rulers are ostensibly at the top. They sit above nation-states. They are truly post-national, controlling central banks and international finance. They are the closest thing we have to world controllers. Some seem to hold power over huge swathes of the globe, like gigantic economic zones.
In addition, all nations have visibly important people; kings, dictators, presidents and others. National elites are those whose power is largely confined to a territory. They lack the international reach of global elites.
The media represent power too. They are there to shape the narratives that govern our perceptions. Most traditional media outlets serve elite goals although some of their members wield tremendous power themselves.
The political class are the obvious lackeys of the powerful. Voters seem constantly amazed politicians never really improve anything once in power, but that is because they don’t serve those below them, only those above. Once you see this their behaviour makes much more sense. They dance to the tune of their paymasters. Their primary job is to pretend democracy works.
The corporate leaders are a less visible example of the same thing. They manage the commercial wing of elite interests while pretending to be businessmen.
Blackrock and others have almost completely abandoned anything resembling capitalism. They are gamers of systems, not the innovators of yesteryear. Just one reason our economies are struggling.
It is the major corporations who have helped establish diversity and climate goals, for instance, so they matter for furthering elite ambitions.
Local and regional elites exist too. Everything is replicated at ever smaller scales, including public sector employees and corporate managers.
These are the foot soldiers often oblivious to any elite goals. They just respond to the incentives and disincentives they are aware of at their level.
There is more, including academia and the major institutions. But the key idea is this is the hierarchy the powerful must work with to get anything done.
Projecting power downwards
At each stage there are numerous problems conveying information and taking action. Running the world is a demanding hobby. Power means nothing unless you can implement your schemes.
Communication is an ever-present issue. Things are misinterpreted. People misunderstand goals and aspirations.
There are probably no written plans. A lot of influence is achieved via think tanks and talking shops like the World Economic Forum, so is open to misinterpretation. It must be like herding cats as these grand ideas cascade down the hierarchy and are misunderstood or overlooked.
This process is further retarded by quotas and ideological capture. Woke brings many distortions; just ask the declining universities. Hiring for alignment does not select for the best. Elite need for control therefore leaves them with reduced options.
We’ve all seen some new appointee take over a position of authority and promptly run it into the ground. Imagine having to rely on that process to get anything done?
The lower down the totem pole we go the less able the people as a general rule. Specifically, in these benthic depths far from the centres of power, the minor lackeys run the grave risk of actually believing the claptrap used to control the masses which can be a real impediment to progress.
Those near the bottom generally lack the intellectual vigour to question anything which makes for obedient slaves, albeit dangerously detached from strategic awareness or understanding of the purpose of the narratives they uncritically embrace.
Such devotion is handy at first, it can provide real energy to make changes. Covid policies were established quickly thanks to this phenomenon. The implementation units were clearly unable to assess evidence or think for themselves; man on TV said wear mask and sit in back garden, so they did.
The price for such mindlessness is confusion and this is where control can be lost.
Anti-white animus gestated on university campuses was useful for the powerful to keep the most dangerous demographic down, and therefore less likely to form a counter-elite, but has now morphed into anti-Israel and pro-Palestine sentiment. It is evident many in academia, oblivious to the purpose of “decolonization,” have now misapplied this ethnic weapon to Israelis and Jews more generally to the horror of the powerful with plans of their own.
We see similar effects with climate zealots in positions of authority, especially in politics and media circles. It can be galling to realize some prominent person you once thought was capable actually thinks we only have twelve years to save the planet or wants to end cheeseburgers to help the coral reefs. Can they really be that impressionable?
What is frustrating for us must be maddening to the powerful as they watch brainwashed clowns misunderstand their goals. When your tools include the gullible things can get out of hand quickly.
That’s why many of the doom and gloom predictions based on some omniscient Illuminati are so off the mark despite their elevated position in society.
Projecting power is akin to shooting people in swimming pools. You can see them under the water, often very clearly, but it doesn’t necessarily help.
You fire off your rounds, but they quickly lose force as they enter some new medium of which you know very little, plus they can whizz away in unexpected directions, entirely missing their mark.
All that money and influence but you have to rely on dancing monkeys to get anything done. What use are trillions when Glenda in HR actually thinks her purpose in life is to root out systemic racism or heal the planet? Her initial zeal can quickly become a liability as ultimately happened during Covid when many began to wake up after the clownshow became too absurd to continue.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford – threat or menace?
In many ways, Ontario’s Doug Ford is a 21st century version of former Ontario Premier Bill Davis … a virtuoso performer of the “talk Conservative, govern Liberal” style that urban Ontario voters really seem to love. It works well for the Laurentian Elite to have a Liberal government in Ottawa and a “Conservative” government in Toronto, as they can argue in public about all sorts of marginal issues, but when it comes down to legislation and regulation, they’re almost indistinguishable from one another aside from party colours.
Last week, Ford announced a plan to hand out provincial work permits to a huge number of “asylum seekers” as the feds seem to be making motions to reduce their support of such irregular immigrants:
One step forward, two steps back? As a card-carrying, self-appointed board member of Team “Please stop making everything worse on purpose,” there are some hard-earned wins and faint movements back towards normal, and then there’s the ongoing screw-jobs that threaten any/all progress.
As we have bemoaned time, and time, and time again around these parts, Ontario has a premier problem. But now, all of Canada has a Doug Ford problem.
I’ve been part of an effort to drag urgent immigration reform into the spotlight, and even into a feature position in the waning days of that ‘first ministers’ meeting in Muskoka, but a certain conservative-in-name-only threatens to make historic problems of immigration and unemployment worse, rather than better.
Conservatives in Canada are about to find themselves in a tricky position with Ford, who has the unique potential to remain one of the last vestiges of the failed Trudeau years — even more so than Carney. And the latter may need defending.
Ford and his deeply conflicted and unethical inner circle may wish to grant provincial work permits to a supply of fake students turned fake asylum claimants, but ordinary folk, concerned parents, our proud immigrant communities who made the grade and never cut corners, and our abandoned workers have other ideas.
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @HOCStaffer tries to provide some context:
Asylum seekers, refugees, illegals, whatever you want to call them.
They are filling up hotels, getting money, & doing basically nothing, all the while waiting upwards of 2 years for their application to be approved/denied.
I mean, it’s better than where they came from, which is why they are here.
There’s a massive financial burden to the govt & a huge pool of labour doing nothing which could be serving you your coffee instead of a Temp Foreign Worker.
So Ford’s argument — which I have had made to me in person by hotel, tourism, & restaurant lobbyists — is that why don’t we use these people to do the shit jobs?
***** Especially if we are reducing TFWs.
There is a pretty good logic to it.
“May as well have them do something while they are here waiting.” Right?
But I still disagree with the idea.
Most of these people aren’t refugees. They are economic migrants from terrible places. They came here illegally, often under false pretences, & most should be deported.
The longer they stay the more likely they are to have kids here, to potentially marry a Canadian, and to establish links to the country.
Giving them a job furthers that connection.
The last thing we need is the local Tims owner arguing to keep Abdul in the country because he is the only one who will sling shit coffee on the night shift for shit wages.
Giving illegals jobs just rewards the business owners who take advantage of TFWs with a new pool of labour to exploit.
I get that these are businesses and real people have money and time invested in them.
But if you cannot operate without indentured servants then perhaps we don’t really need your business?
A bunch of Tims will close. McD’s too. Maybe some hotels & other businesses too. It’s sad. No one wants to see that.
But we also can’t keep importing people — and thereby affecting much of the rest of society — in order to keep these businesses open.
So yeah, there’s a sound argument to what Ford is saying.
But what he should be saying is that we need a stronger border, faster processing, less appeals and quicker deportations.
That would save his govt real money.
Claudius: The Disabled Emperor Who Conquered Britain
The Rest Is History
Published 27 January 2025This is part 4 of our series on Suetonius and the Emperors of Rome.
00:00 The rebirth of the republic?
10:05 Who is Claudius
15:18 The relationship between Augustus and Claudius
16:20 The scholar emperor
21:12 Claudius’ relationship with Caligula
28:53 Claudius’ rule as emperor
45:50 The problem he had with his wives
56:40 The rise of Nero
58:40 Was he poisoned?
59:51 The lack of sources in Ancient historyProducer: Theo Young-Smith
Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett
Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor
QotD: The technology ecosystem
Technology is also an ecosystem, not the way bluechecks talk about it, but in this more profound sense. A Boeing or a Google is like a tiger: the highly-visible culmination of a vast subterranean drama. Turn over a spade and you’ll find them — the suppliers and subcontractors, investor networks, tooling manufacturers, feeder universities, advisors, researchers, shipping and packaging experts, friendly bankers and government officials, producers of upstream technological inputs, and a vast collection of lower-tier companies in related markets that act like an economic flywheel, absorbing and releasing excess labor as the economy shudders through its fits and starts.
In nature, it’s energy and nutrients that move through the food webs. Here their analogues are capital and knowledge. It’s hard to miss the money sloshing back and forth — world-changing companies are nurtured through their awkward adolescence by sophisticated and patient pools of capital, and the high-flying champions of those companies become the next generation’s venture investors after cashing out. Harder to see but even more influential is the vast economic dark matter made up of professionals who struck it rich enough to live comfortably but not rich enough to fly private. These unobtrusive capitalists are the first to hear through professional whispernets that so-and-so has quit his job to work on such-and-such. Since they’re still in the rat-race, they can have an informed opinion on the caliber both of the idea and of the team around it, and are usually the early champions of the most unusual and speculative ventures. And finally, money sloshes around between the companies themselves through a complicated network of deals, joint ventures, and strategic investments.
The money is more visible, but the way knowledge moves is more important. Part of it is academic, propositional knowledge or technical data whose discovery is accelerated when a dozen different teams are on its scent, sometimes racing each other to the prize, sometimes egging each other on and celebrating each others’ victories. But the bulk of what makes this ecosystem hum, the true currency that drives nearly every barter or exchange, is practical, process knowledge of the sort that 莊子 first described and Michael Oakeshott later re-popularized for our benighted and ignorant age. What makes process knowledge unusual is that by its very nature it cannot be separated from people, cannot be digitized or divorced or attached to an email. It is at once the nous of a technological ecosystem and the thing that makes it fundamentally illegible — an immaterial, intangible essence that inheres only in individuals, like a mind or a soul.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.
July 27, 2025
“[T]he wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “‘hate has no home here'”
Chris Bray looks at the kind of people who supported the lockdowns during the pandemic and heartily condemned those lesser folks whose careers and livelihoods were threatened and how they hope for examples to be made of the “leaders” of the Freedom Convoy back in 2022:
Let’s start with a comparison to the good people in Canada, the wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “hate has no home here”. Cheri DiNovo is, let me put this very gently, an instantly recognizable social type, “one of Canada’s best-known and most ardent queer ministers and an Ontario politician who would help pass some of the province’s most integral LGBTQ2S+ policy”. You already know her by her facial expression:
slay, girlboss
As the leaders of the Freedom Convoy face sentencing in court, DiNovo has this to say about their monstrous cruelty:
The Freedom Convoy: white supremacist homophobes who harassed and brutalized LGBTQ+ people and immigrants and the disabled, lashing out in a stunning wave of public cruelty. It was like a NUREMBERG RALLY with trucks, obviously. Here, look at some of the monstrous acts of public brutality committed at this mass expression of hate and rage:
YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DANCED TOGETHER THINK ABOUT IT
Rupa Subramanya, a journalist who uses the old and mostly forgotten technique of talking to people, wandered the crowds in Ottawa (in her own neighborhood) and reported that Freedom Convoy protesters mostly talked about their desire to recover a sense of hope. Their grievances were clear, thoroughly explained, and entirely defensible. Here’s a sample paragraph, a discussion with one of the VICIOUS WHITE SUPREMACISTS:
Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200. “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”
See this clearly against Cheri DiNovo’s framing, and remember it:
The white supremacist protesters who hate immigrants; for example, Kamal Pannu, a Sikh immigrant and trucker.
In fact, Sikhs make up a substantial share of the trucking industry in Canada, and so had a significant presence at the Freedom Convoy:
See the WHITE SUPREMACISTS saying that they HATE IMMIGRANTS!?!?!? Because Cheri DiNovo does. She thinks categorically: good people who support the Liberal Party, Literally Adolf Hitler who doesn’t. She has no capacity for seeing the thing itself, as it was on the ground, in physical reality. Literally nothing, no evidence or substance of any kind, could ever have prevented her from saying that a protest against Justin Trudeau’s government was white supremacist and homophobic. She’s out of her fucking mind. She has no connection to any form of reality, at all, in any way, ever. She doesn’t see anything. She doesn’t know anything. She’s ignorant noise and infinite sanctimony, with a pair of legs to carry it around.
This is “left” politics in the Anglosphere. Symbol symbol symbol, you NAZI! It doesn’t connect. It’s all chanting and performance and status-signaling, and it never leaves the house. It left reality behind ten years ago, and now it’s out there sailing past Pluto. For adherents of the Manichean religion of wokeism, categorical thinking covers all bases. People who don’t get mRNA injections are misogynistic racist bigots, obviously.
Update: Fixed broken link.
Day Nine – Hitler’s Halt Order and Tragedy at La Ferté – Ten Days in Sedan
World War Two
Published 26 Jul 2025May 18, 1940. Our coverage of the German blitzkrieg in France continues. Today, we take a break from the panzers for a spot of old-fashioned siege warfare. At Ouvrage La Ferté, a small garrison of French troops makes a doomed last stand against overwhelming German firepower. We follow their final hours, the decisions that sealed their fate, and what their sacrifice meant for the collapsing French front.
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I’m sure I would never have heard of Sean Feucht until they tried to silence him
It’s hard to believe how Canadian municipal and provincial authorities deal so gently with disruptive pro-Hamas protests that regularly threaten the lives and property of Canadian Jews compared with the positively authoritarian way they are reacting to “MAGA” Christian performer Sean Feucht‘s concerts:
Shooting a .276 Pedersen PB Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Aug 2015Thanks to Alex C. at TheFirearmBlog, I recently had an opportunity to do some shooting with a .276 caliber Vickers-Pedersen model PB rifle. This was one of the very first rifles Vickers built when they thought the Pedersen would be adopted by the US military and could be further marketed worldwide — after only about 16 PB rifles they made some changes and started making the improved PA model instead (the two main improvements being the use of a reversible clip and the addition of a mechanism to allow ejection of a partially-full clip).
Anyway, in addition to Alex and myself, we were joined by Nathaniel F (a TFB writer) and Patrick R (from the TFBTV video channel). Between us we put about 60 rounds of original 1920s wax-lubricated Frankfort Arsenal .276 Pedersen ammo through the rifle.
