In the Panopticon State, the Shadowlands are thriving: a state that presumes to tax and license Joe Schmoe for using the table in the corner of his basement as a home office apparently doesn’t spot the half-dozen additional dwellings that sprout in José Schmoe’s yard out on the edge of town. Do-it-yourself wiring stretches from bungalow to lean-to trailer to RV to rusting pick-up on bricks, as five, six, eight, twelve different housing units pitch up on one lot. The more Undocumented America secedes from the hyper-regulatory state, the more frenziedly Big Nanny documents you and yours.
This multicultural squeamishness is most instructive. Illegal immigrants are providing a model for survival in an impoverished statist America, and on the whole the state is happy to let them do so. In Undocumented America, the buildings have no building codes, the sales have no sales tax, your identity card gives no clue as to your real identity. In the years ahead, for many poor Overdocumented-Americans, living in the Shadowlands will offer if not the prospect of escape then at least temporary relief. As America loses its technological edge and the present Chinese cyber-probing gets disseminated to the Wikileaks types, the blips on the computer screen representing your checking and savings accounts will become more vulnerable. After yet another brutal attack, your local branch never reconnects to head office; it brings up from the vault the old First National Bank of Deadsville shingle and starts issuing fewer cards and more checkbooks. And then fewer checkbooks and more cash. In small bills.
The planet is dividing into two extremes: an advanced world — Europe, North America, Australia — in which privacy is vanishing and the state will soon be able to monitor you every second of the day; and a reprimitivizing world — Somalia, the Pakistani tribal lands — where no one has a clue what’s going on. Undocumented America is giving us a lesson in how Waziristan and CCTV London can inhabit the same real estate, like overlapping area codes. There will be many takers for that in the years ahead. As Documented America fails, poor whites, poor blacks, and many others will find it easier to assimilate with Undocumented America, and retreat into the shadows.
Mark Steyn, After America, 2011.
May 10, 2025
QotD: Undocumented America
May 9, 2025
They keep saying the quiet part out loud – democracy is a threat to the establishment
N.S. Lyons went to Barad-dûr Ottawa earlier this month to speak at the 2025 Civitas Canada Conference, and posted his remarks on his Substack:
The 2022 Freedom Convoy induced a state of panic in the Canadian federal government, yet the elected representatives proved completely unwilling to even talk to anyone from the protests. The government clearly persuaded itself that this was an actual insurrection, and waited for the violence to break out … and there was no violence, other than that provided by the police and a few paid actors.
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen! It’s a pleasure to visit the North and get a glimpse behind the new Iron Curtain …
As it happens, the official theme of this conference is “Freedom and its Discontents: Liberal Democracy at a Crossroads”. That is a timely theme indeed. Because I think it isn’t too extreme to say that, all around the Western world today, democracy is under assault — even that it risks extinction. It risks extinction because the authorities that run our societies seem to find the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy to be increasingly intolerable.
In France, where the ruling government maintains power despite being the most widely hated in decades, the most popular candidate of the most popular political party has been barred from challenging that government in upcoming elections, on legal grounds that are openly political.
In Romania, when the “wrong” outsider candidate appeared poised to win an election, authorities simply canceled the election outright and then had him arrested, the unelected national security state inventing entirely unsupported excuses about foreign meddling to justify their coup d’état against the democratic process.
In Germany, the state has now begun the process of banning the country’s most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of the voting population, in order to avoid facing any real political opposition. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary”, is how a former European Commissioner confidently foreshadowed events on live television a few months ago.
One gets the sense that the honest view of our exasperated political elites is as captured in a Bloomberg News headline from last year which read: “2024 is a year of elections, and that’s a threat to democracy”.
In country after country, governments are moving to desperately tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.
In the United Kingdom, more than 12,000 people per year (that’s 33 per day on average) — are now arrested for speech- and literal thought-crimes, including silent prayer. UK jails now hold hundreds of political prisoners, more than anywhere else in Europe outside of Russia and Belarus. These are people persecuted for, essentially, voicing dissent over their government’s catastrophic policies. Recently, for instance, a British woman with no criminal history was jailed for more than two years for a single Facebook post criticizing the state’s willful failure to stop illegal migration.
In Brazil, a single Supreme Court judge, in alliance with the country’s leftist president, has effectively established a judicial dictatorship, locking up political rivals by decree, silencing the speech of opposition figures, and utilizing state leverage over the financial system to punish political enemies by banishing them from public economic life.
But of course Brazil’s authorities learned these tactics by observation. Observation of Canada, to be precise, where Justin Trudeau’s government first employed debanking — along with a little brute force — as a tool to crush peaceful protest of his draconian and disastrous pandemic lockdown policies.
Today, the Canadian government’s weaponization of the legal system and public institutions, including state-funded media, to impose a quasi-totalitarian progressive ideological regime, censor and jail dissenters, and effectively transform Canada into a one-party state, has, I’m afraid, won your country a real measure of global infamy. Many Canadians here may not be aware of just how your government appears from the outside, but I’m afraid it’s not a good look at all. Unfortunately I must report that when many of us look at Canada what we see is a global leader in progressive authoritarianism, out-of-control migration, growing anarcho-tyranny, foreign subversion, and ideologically-induced economic stagnation.
But then, what we might realistically call the liberal-authoritarian model is, sadly, the new normal in the West, where many hyphenated liberal-democracies seem to have concluded that they must now begin to cast off the democratic half of that historical compact.
It may seem that this hardening of control is a response to the rise of so-called populism, which has swept the Western world. Certainly many authoritarian measures have been justified, without any sense of irony, as necessary to defend “our democracy” (so-called) against the dissatisfaction of the actual demos. And it’s true that fear of populism — which is really fear of genuine democracy — does seem to consistently provoke a spiral of ham-fisted reactions by our increasingly authoritarian states. But the reality is that populism is itself a reaction, an organic immune response to the particularly unresponsive and anti-democratic new form of governance that has visibly overtaken the West in recent decades.
Nazi vs. Nazi – The Rebellion Within – Rise of Hitler 16, April 1931
World War Two
Published 8 May 2025April 1931 plunges Hitler’s Nazis into crisis as SA leader Walter Stennes leads a dramatic internal revolt, challenging Hitler’s oath to legality. Meanwhile the Nazis loose their only ministerial post and President Hindenburg’s emergency decree intensifies clashes with communists, leading to mass arrests during banned protests.
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The growing problem of antisemitism in Canada
In The Free Press, Casey Babb considers the growing risks to Jews on the streets of Canadian cities after the October 2024 terror attack and resulting Israeli military reaction:
“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Late last year I sat down to breakfast in Ottawa, Ontario, with Dr. Einat Wilf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She had come to Canada’s capital to speak about the war in Israel, what Palestinians really want, and the future of a possible two-state solution. Near the end of our chat, I asked if she had seen any of the “pro-Palestinian” rallies that had become a weekly occurrence in the city. “One of them went by my hotel last night,” Wilf said. “There’s a very dark energy to them. Serious pre-pogrom vibes.”
The word pogrom is the Yiddish word for “devastation” or “destruction”. What it refers to, historically, are the mob attacks that were a regular feature of life for Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries — attacks that most often were passively or openly supported by the state.
Wilf chose it deliberately.
In the roughly six months since we sat down together, the situation in Ottawa and across the country has only worsened. Canada has become one of the most antisemitic countries in the Western world.
If you doubt that assertion, it’s important to note that’s how others have described it, too.
In a report released on May 6 by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, it states that from October 7, 2023 through the end of 2024, antisemitism in Canada skyrocketed an astounding 670 percent. Further, between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2024, there were 1,500 pro-Palestinian rallies in Toronto alone. That’s over four a day — every day — for a year straight.
While the outbreak of antisemitism throughout the West has been precipitous in virtually every country — the tenor, violence, and extremist nature of Jew-hatred in Canada has ratcheted up in a way few other places on Earth have experienced.
Consider the following — much of which has gotten scant media attention.
Targeting Jews in Their Backyards
- In September 2024 protesters sympathetic to Hamas and the “resistance” jubilantly rallied outside a Jewish retirement facility in Ottawa where several Holocaust survivors live, and where 60 percent of the residents suffer from dementia. Chants of “Go back to Europe” and “We want bullets and missiles!” in Arabic could be heard from their bedrooms.
- On Remembrance Day in 2024 at Sir Robert Borden public school in Ottawa, where there is a large Jewish student body, a Palestinian protest song was the only song played during an event to honor Canadian soldiers. When pressed on the choice of music, Principal Aaron Hobbs said it was chosen to add some diversity and inclusion to a day usually about “a white guy who has done something related to the military”.
- There have been numerous instances where, in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, protesters have dressed up like Palestinian terrorists, including the October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar.
- Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protests surrounded the Holocaust Museum in Montreal in March 2024, where they shouted, “Death to Israel” and “Death to the Jews”.
- At a softball game for teenage girls between Canada and Israel as part of last year’s Canada Cup Women’s International Softball Championship in Surrey, British Columbia, protesters stood on the sidelines wearing keffiyehs, holding signs that read “Israel is a genocidal state”, with another equating Israel with Nazi Germany.
- In April, a pro-Hamas rally was staged in Winnipeg, just steps from a Jewish community center where children attend school and day care.
- During Israel’s official day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism on April 29, protesters stood in front of Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue in Toronto waving Palestinian flags. One man wore a sweater that read “Palestinian Holocaust: Never Again Is Now”.
- Earlier this month in Montreal, protesters were filmed chanting “All the Zionists are racists” through megaphones at a school for students ages 4 to 16 with intellectual disabilities and autism-spectrum disorders.
These activities aren’t normal protests. They aren’t in front of the Israeli embassy in Ottawa or the Israeli consulate in Toronto. They aren’t directed toward a specific Israeli policy, law, regulation, or act, and they certainly make no mention of Hamas, Hezbollah, or any other terrorist organization that has brought immense death and destruction upon the Palestinians. These are belligerent acts of aggression designed to intimidate Canada’s Jewish community, to coerce them into silence, and ultimately, to extinguish their public presence.
Steyr AUGs of the Falkland Islands Defense Force
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Jan 2025The Falkland Islands Defense Force is a small organization independent of the British military, run directly by the Falkland Islands government. When it decided to update its small arms form the L1A1 SLR (aka British FAL) in the early 1990s, the British assumed they would purchase the new L85A1 rifles. However, by that time the flaws in the L85 were pretty well known, and the Islanders exercised their independence and chose to adopt something different. After investigating a number of different options they chose to use the Steyr AUG. At this time the AUG was in service with a number of other nations including the Australians and New Zealanders, and Steyr offered good terms and good support for the FIDF.
The FIDF purchased about 160 AUG rifles in total, including a small number of carbines and heavy-barreled LMGs. The carbines were particularly useful in a maritime role, which was part of the FIDF mission at the time (fisheries patrol). The LMG version, fitted with an Elcan C79 4x optic, was intended to supplant the FN MAG as a support weapon, but was found unfit for that role. Instead, most of the LMGs were converted to standard rifles via simple barrel swap. In addition, the Elcan optics proved prone to breakage, and were eventually replaced with British SUSATs. Indeed, some of the standard AUGs had their factory scopes replaced with SUSATs as well.
The AUG remained the standard rifle for the FIDF until recently, when the service received L85A3 rifles from the British. The AUG was not configured to use the bullet-trap blank adapters that the British used, and the L85s were intended to allow better integrated training between the two forces. A formal replacement for the AUG has not yet been determined, as it remains a bit unclear what the British military will decide to do to replace the L85 in the coming years.
Many thanks to the FIDF for giving me access to their armory to dig out these rifles to film for you! They remain today a small but quite well-equipped all-volunteer force dedicated to maintaining the security of the Falkland Islands.
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QotD: Becoming a parent
Younger folks are no doubt shocked by that question, and if some BCG were ever to read this, she’d try to string me up, but it’s the only question that matters long term. The BCG would start sputtering some question about “what about her happiness?” — the only answer to which, if you want to maintain a stable society, must be: “Category error”. It’s like “staying together for the kids”, another phrase we oldsters recognize, but the younger generation can’t grok. But … but … but … whaddabout your feeeeeelings?
What about them?
Seriously: Who gives a shit? Viddy well, oh my brothers: When you decided to have kids, you didn’t hit the pause button on some video game RPG called “Your Career”; you ejected the disk, snapped that fucker in half, and smashed the Xbox Office Space-style for good measure. What’s good for you, personally, just got sent to the back of the line. Permanently. Yeah yeah, I know, you can’t fulfill your parental obligations if you’re completely miserable all the time, but you can find lots of joy and meaning and yes, even fulfillment (that most insidious of modern weasel words) doing stuff other than making partner down at the law firm.
Men used to understand this, because men were once trained to take the long view, to delay gratification, to suck it the fuck up for the greater good. It’s the same gene — and it IS genetic, 1,000,000+ years of evolution — that causes men to charge bullets or punch kangaroos or do whatever else needs to be done in the face of obvious threats, even at the risk, or even the near certainty, of his own injury or death.
Women don’t roll like that, because they can’t — “that 1,000,000+ years of evolved behavior” thing again. They’re evolved to put the kids first — their kids, not some abstract ideal. Women can be, and often are, suicidally brave — for their own offspring. But absent those — absent the possibility of those — all those maternal instincts go septic, which is how you get the BCG. She knows she’s not cut out for this, no matter how successful she is academically — indeed, in my experience it’s precisely the most academically successful ones who sense it the clearest.
Alas, they are trained that feminism is the answer to those inner alarm bells, so they carry on like caricature cavemen — being as crude and offensive and obnoxious as possible, trying to treat sex like an itch to be scratched while beefing with that basic bitch Becky on the next dorm block.
Severian, “Gettin’ Jiggy in College Town”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-08.
May 8, 2025
Aftermath
I’ve read a few books on what happened in Europe after the surrender of Nazi Germany in May of 1945, but there is always more to learn about a continent-wide struggle to recover from a disaster of the magnitude of World War Two:
On a train journey earlier this year between Cologne and Berlin, I began to read Harald Jähner’s Aftermath, a fascinating account of the years when Germany emerged from the destruction and shame of the Third Reich.
The war ended 80 years ago today, and in the defeated nation the scenes were primeval and apocalyptic. In Berlin, journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, along with a doctor, actor and musical conductor, discovered a white ox wandering through the streets and, after finding a Russian soldier to shoot it, found themselves suddenly surrounded by a ravenous mob. She recalled: “Suddenly, as if the underworld had been spying on them, a noisy crowd gathered around the dead ox. They crept from a hundred basements. Women, men, children. Were they lured by the smell of blood? Within minutes they were scrambling for meat.” The bourgeois of Middle Europe reduced to an animal state.
Germany was a pile of rubble; the ruins in the Reich‘s capital amounted to 55 million cubic metres, enough for a wall 30 metres wide and 5 metres high stretching all the way to Cologne. In West Berlin, for the next 22 years, up to 800 lorries a day unloaded so much rubble on the former Factory of Armaments Technology that it became known as Teufelsberg, or Devil’s Mountain. The last “rubble brigade” in Dresden only finished work in 1977.
Although Nazi party members were made to clear rubble as a punishment, the Germans hardly needed encouragement; on 23 April, the war not yet over, the municipal building of Mannheim had already declared WE ARE REBUILDING.
The communal process of clearing away seemed to serve a psychological function for a hungry, defeated people, and was encouraged by the new authorities — all the “heroic cinematic rhetoric” employed by the UFA film company of the Nazi regime now used to get the country clearing up. There was even a cinema genre called Trümmerfilm, rubble films, one — And The Heavens Above Us — ending with the Lord’s Prayer being recited among the ruins of Germany.
German POWs, “dispirited, disciplined and dutiful to the point of submissiveness”, made life easy for occupying soldiers while their former victims were far more troublesome. (Russian POWs in France caused such anarchy that they called in a Soviet liaison officer who selected ten at random and shot them, bringing the mob under control.) This led to a bizarre alliance between Allied and German law enforcement working hand-in-hand from the early days of the occupation, with joint raids and weapons searches on displaced persons from Poland and the Soviet Union, which the Poles and Russians “of course saw as an intolerable provocation”.
London cheered on May 8, 1945. In Berlin they searched for food and cleared rubble
In a strange irony, there was now a large-scale migration of Jews from Poland to Germany, fleeing fresh persecution despite the horror they had endured. Even here in a camp system under Allied control, there were anti-Semitic attacks from other survivors, so that Jews were eventually separated altogether following the conclusions of the Harrison Report. The Americans, in a likely first in European history, now made Jews an explicitly privileged group, with superior camp conditions.
The Polish Jews set up their own camp in the Munich district of Bogenhausen where locals were confused and disorientated by the new arrivals. These eastern Jews actually looked like the alien caricatures Nazi propaganda had bombarded them with, dressed in oriental clothes from the shtetl, totally unlike the assimilated German Jews they had grown up with. One local complained that “the Jews from the old days were really, how can I put it, very intelligent, polite and unusually friendly and elegant people. And of course the ones who turned up after the war included all sorts.” The Jews “from the old days” were “the good Jews”, he lamented.
Holocaust guilt was in the distant future for most, and newly re-established newspapers weren’t remotely shy about publishing anti-Semitic content. One printed a resident’s complaint about Polish Jews that “these were not people who had been persecuted” but “the sputum, the yeast and the scum of elements who were never deported but, to avoid regular work, came here from the eastern states, in many cases completely illegally, and are now spreading themselves raggedly about the place.”
Dambusters – Was It Worth It?
HardThrasher
Published 5 May 2025The third and final part in a series on the Dambusters Raid; looking at the attacks themselves and their aftermath
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Ted Gioia is apparently “the guy you consult about the total collapse of everything“
I’ve been reading Ted Gioia‘s work for a few years now, but I somehow failed to pick up on the fact that he’s some kind of Bond supervillain:
Many articles have been written about me over the years. But I’ve never been hit with an opening sentence like the one published on Monday by The Atlantic.
Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.
Whoa! That makes me feel like a Bond villain.
I need some henchmen — any volunteers?
Ted appears to like the classic goon uniforms for his to-be-recruited legion of minions.
What an unexpected turnabout! For many years, I was known as an expert on music, especially jazz and blues.
But now I’ve taken on a new guise. I’m the guy you consult about the total collapse of everything.
I don’t sing the blues. I don’t write about the blues. I now deliver the blues.
I originally declined the interview request from The Atlantic. But their staff writer Spencer Kornhaber pushed back, insisting that I was an essential source for his article.
The subject was, he explained, a “pervasive suspicion that we’re in an era of cultural decline, especially in arts and entertainment”.
He said that I needed to be part of the story — because everybody saw me as the decline-of-culture guy.
This caught me surprise. But I thought it over. maybe this is why I don’t get invited to many parties anymore.
Dammit, Ted, we’re trying to have some fun here — and you keep droning on about the collapse of the Roman empire.
I eventually agreed to a phone conversation with Spencer, and that went well. And this led to him getting on a plane, and visiting me at home here in Austin.
To help him in his research, I laid out more than 40 books on a countertop in my library — these were essential works, I explained, for anyone studying social or cultural decline.
[At a future date, I will provide more details about these books, and share a reading list on — to quote The Atlantic — the “death of civilization”.]
But this begs the question: Is our culture really collapsing?
I spoke with Spencer for many hours about this subject. But only a few of my comments found their way into the finished article.
So today I’ll offer a fuller diagnosis for your benefit.
Augustus and the creation of the Principate – The Conquered and the Proud 13
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 11 Dec 2024Continuing the series “The Conquered and the Proud”, this video looks at the political system created by Augustus — the Principate or rule of a princeps or “first”. We look at the twin elements of his formal power, the tribunician potestas and the maius imperium proconsulare. Next time we we look at Augustus, the provinces and imperial expansion.
QotD: Trade empires
So let us consider the motives of Empire in a few cases.
The Phoenicians had a magnificent trade empire, though with a few elements we find familiar from the more recent Viking version, or indeed the Venetian “Republic” — namely a bit of raiding, and quite a bit of slave trading. All three broadened into a bit of conquest — Carthage, Normandy and the sack of Constantinople in the 4th Crusade come to mind — but all those offshoots were by-products of the original cultures, and none of them became the norm for the ongoing home culture (each of which faded away as circumstances changed and they failed to adapt). So we could say that they were essentially trading empires.
Greece and Carthage and Rome were also trade empires, initially letting their security concerns drag them into a bit of conquest on the side. The difference in their cases was that the conquest element became dominant and completely changed the “homeland”. The city states of Greece becoming the world-conquering hordes of Alexander, and completely undermining the vibrant city state cultures that had proceeded them. The Phoenician trading city of Carthage becoming an expansionary conquest state that eventually pushed Rome too hard. And Rome’s overseas campaigns in Spain and North Africa completely undermining the independent farmer/citizen/soldier class of the Roman Republic, and replacing them with a system of professional troops whose loyalty could only be bought by ever increasing conquests by the emperors.
Naturally every expansion eventually reaches limits, and the concern reverts to trying to secure what you have, and hold the outsiders further away. Which is why, amusingly, people like the Romans and the Chinese came through their expansionary conquest phase, and then found themselves back in the position of having to protect the fringes through deals with tribes that can be traded with/employed by/or paid tribute. Cue Attila the Hun and his ilk.
So empires on the way down may also be considered trade and security empires I suppose, though many still had a conquest impulse (for fame or fortune or simply to pay the defenders off) built in, or tried to act as if they were still conquering hordes. Cue Constantinople and Belisarius.
In fact most empires will go through a variety of stages, though I think it fair to say that most empires have a core purpose and attitude, no matter how they tinker at the edges to deal with specific circumstances.
Nigel Davies, “Types of Empires: Security, Conquest, and Trade”, rethinking history, 2020-05-02.
May 7, 2025
The Korean War Week 46 – The MacArthur Senate Hearings Begin – May 6, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 6 May 2025The Senate Hearings digging into Douglas MacArthur’s dismissal as UN forces commander begin this week, though they’ll likely continue for some time. Meanwhile in the field, the Chinese Spring Offensive that raged all last week continues, although it cannot reach Seoul, and by the end of the week the enemy seems to be withdrawing on all fronts.
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Ontario versus the courts
In general terms, you would expect the government — in this case the Ontario provincial government — to pass the laws and the courts — when called upon — to rule on their legality. We don’t expect courts to act as if they can overrule legislation passed by the government unless it clearly contravenes the Charter or goes beyond the powers assigned to that level of government. But Canadian courts seem to be choosing to expand their powers to curtail the actions of elected government more and more these days:
Bike lanes on Yonge Street north of Bloor Street in downtown Toronto.
Image from Google Street View
In the weeks of the election period, Canadian courts were busy preventing any legislation of controversy from taking effect — and they went relatively unnoticed. On March 28, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice blocked the Ontario government from banning supervised consumption sites near schools and daycares. It struck again on April 22, halting the Ontario government from removing Toronto’s bike lanes.
Days later, on April 24, the Quebec Superior Court cancelled the province’s planned mega-tuition hike for out-of-province students.
In the case of Toronto’s major bike lanes — on Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue — Ontario Premier Doug Ford had, in theory, all the power he needed to remove them. Municipalities are creatures of the province, and traffic regulation is also a provincial domain; thus, provincial legislatures can override just about anything that a city council does, especially if related to roads. So, in November, Ford legislated the removal of the lanes, which were previously constructed by city authorities (he was later re-elected premier, so clearly bike lane preservation wasn’t a priority for voters).
In December, cycling advocates launched a court challenge that, really, should have been laughed out of the room. They argued that the removal of bike lanes amounted to a violation of their Charter rights, specifically the Section 7 catch-all right to life, liberty and security.
It remains to be seen whether there is a Charter right that guarantees two per cent of the population the right to have specialty lanes built for their commuting pleasure — the trial process is still underway. In the meantime, Ontario’s Judge Paul Schabas, a Liberal appointee, has granted the cycling advocates an injunction to keep the lanes in place, because allowing their dismantling to go forward would impose an injunction-worthy risk of “irreparable harm” to Toronto’s cyclists.
“There is no evidence that the government has engaged in any planning as to how the bike lanes will be removed or what will replace them,” Schabas wrote in the decision. “The demolition and reconstruction will create its own impacts on traffic — both for cyclists and motor vehicles — and will likely result in considerable disturbance and congestion while that is taking place. Cyclists who continue to use these routes will be at risk of irreparable physical harm for which … the government will not provide any compensation in damages.”
And, just like that, a judge overruled a decision of the elected legislature, opting instead to take, temporarily, the zero-risk-tolerance advice of unelected government consultants. It’s at least good that Ford is appealing Schabas’ decision.
Boldly Bombing Bugger All – The Bomber War Episode 1
HardThrasher
Published 13 Oct 2023To see more on the Fairey Battle go here – The Fairey Battle – Light Bomber, Hea… also subscribe to Rex’s channel, he’s ace
Selected Online Resources
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casab…
https://discovery.nationalarchives.go… – Western War Plan W5a and W6Selected Bibliography
America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing 1910-1945 – McFarland et al.
Dresden – Sinclair McKay
Dresden; Tuesday … – Fredrick Taylor
Absolute War – The Firebombing of Tokyo – Chris Bellamy
Black Snow –
Bomber Command – Max Hastings
Bomber Command’s War Against Germany, An Official History – Nobel Franklin et al.
The Bomber Mafia – Malcolm Gladwell
Undaunted and Through Adversity (Vol 1 &2) – Ben Kite
United States Strategic Bombing Survey (European War) (USSBS) Sept 1945 – Var. – https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catal…
America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing 1910-1945, McFarland
Big Week – James Holland
QotD: China’s millennia-long struggles between farmers and nomads
But this time it wasn’t just Chinese peasants moving around and changing the way they lived. For the first time in recorded history, the Chinese civilizational heartland of the Yellow River valley was invaded and occupied by a massive number of non-Chinese people. It’s an extremely sensitive and difficult to discuss topic in China, but there is genetic evidence of substantial steppe admixture in Northern Chinese lineages, and it seems likely that this is around when it kicked off. Meanwhile, remember that huge numbers of Northern Chinese were migrating to the South at around this time. Our best guess from both ancient DNA and linguistic2 evidence is that the modern Southern Chinese are pretty close to what the Northern Chinese were a couple thousand years ago, while the modern Northern Chinese have a good amount of Turkic and Mongolic ancestry.
The thing is you don’t even need to look at the genetics, it’s also quite apparent from the literary, artistic, and military record that over time a hybrid aristocracy emerged in the North with influences from both the old Chinese nobility and the invaders. The change is visible in everything from fighting style (suddenly Chinese armies are using cavalry), to fashion (pants!), to preferred hobbies (suddenly a lot more archery and falconry). It was this mixed-blood elite that finally reunified North and South China, and eventually gave rise to the glorious Tang dynasty.
This may have been the most shocking fact I learned from this book. I’d always thought of the Tang as the most quintessentially Chinese of all Chinese rulers (and moreover the real beginning of “modern” Chinese history). Chinese people tend to think that way too — “Tang” is a still-used archaic ethnonym for the Chinese ethnicity (the same way that it’s recently gotten trendy in the West to use a different archaic ethnonym, also the name of an ancient dynasty, “Han”).3 The idea that the Tang actually represented an intrusion of alien Turkic influences into Chinese society is not at all the mainstream view within China, but it’s pretty much the Western scholarly consensus, and Graff lays it out convincingly.
There’s a lot more to say about the great Tang, and this book has a lot of details on their expeditions past the Tarim Basin into Central Asia and their battles with Arab armies. But all of that is getting back into the well-covered part of Chinese history, the part that you can read about anywhere else. And I’ve gotten all the way to the end of this review while neglecting the most important part: were there preppers in the Jin dynasty, and if so how did they deal with the total breakdown of society followed by two centuries of anarchy?
Were there ever. While most of the country fell prey to bands of marauders and tribesmen who roamed the land committing unspeakable crimes, there were a few village headmen and petty aristocrats who constructed fortifications, stockpiled food and weaponry, and carved order out of chaos. There, in their redoubts, they kept the flame of civilization alive and sheltered their people against the long night. If you ever run into me at a party, there’s even odds I’ll quote this passage at you:
When his home was threatened by troops of one of the princely armies in 301, [Yu Gun, a minor official] led his kinsmen and other members of the community into the high country to the northwest. “In this high and dangerous defile, he blocked the footpaths, erected fortifications, planted [defensive] hedges, examined merit, made measurements, equalized labor and rest, shared possessions, repaired implements, measured strength and employed the able, making all things correspond to what they should.” On several occasions when bandits threatened his hilltop sanctuary, he was able to deter them simply by deploying his armed followers in orderly ranks.
There’s so much that’s beautiful in this passage, I feel like I could write an entire book about it. One thing I love is the way it embodies Joseph de Maistre’s aphorism that “contre-révolution ne sera point une révolution contraire, mais le contraire de la révolution.” Yu doesn’t just oppose strength with strength, he battles the insanity and entropic forces raging outside his walls by creating hierarchy, tranquility, and harmony within. His “armed followers in orderly ranks” are a military manifestation of the “making all things correspond to what they should” that preceded them. And there’s something very profound and very true in the image of the forces of disorder recoiling from his little island of civilization like a vampire faced with a crucifix.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 by David A. Graff”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-06-05.
1. Yes, alas, this means some of the death tolls parodied in the “Chinese history be like” meme are almost certainly exaggerations. When the census says 160 million one year and 120 million the next, it’s possible that a ton of people died, but it’s also possible that it just got a lot harder to take a census.
2. All the high mountains and sheltered valleys in Southern China mean it has massively greater linguistic diversity than the North, but many of those languages actually turn out on closer inspection to be snapshots of Northern Chinese languages at some much earlier point in history. It’s more evidence, consistent with the genetic evidence, that repeated waves of migrants have entered Southern China from the North, and then stayed fairly isolated.
3. The word in Chinese for overseas Chinatowns literally translates as something like “Tang people street”.
