In 1957, there was still a railway through the village of Stanford-on-Avon on the cross-country line, now sadly vanished post-Beeching, which linked the West Coast Main Line at Rugby with the Midland Railway’s own main line north at Market Harborough. On our frequent Saturday afternoon cycle rides, Dad and I would often pause at the Stanford level crossing in the hope of seeing a train run past.
On one occasion, noticing us waiting by the gates, the signalman slid open his window and asked us if we’d like to come up and see inside the signal box. I was up those stairs almost before he’d finished his sentence and he treated us both to a conducted tour of a fascinating and beguiling little empire.
When bells started ringing, he explained about the bell code system and announced that there was a cross-country passenger train about to pass through Stanford, without stopping, on its way to Rugby. Suddenly, he asked me: “Would you like to signal this train through the station?”
“Gosh, yes! Of course I would!”
The sequence started by closing the gates on the level crossing. These were the traditional, heavy timber gates, rather than the comparatively minimal lifting-barriers seen today. They were opened and closed by turning a huge ship’s wheel-type contraption in the signal box and it took all my strength, plus more than a little help from the signalman, to turn it sufficiently to get the gates completely closed. This reliance on a direct mechanical linkage is the reason why the signal box had to be immediately adjacent to the gates.
Next, it was the signals, which were operated by a system of wires opposed by counterweights. The signalman showed me which levers to pull. I had to pull with all my might to get that red upper-quadrant signal to rise. Pulling the yellow distant signal “off” took even more effort, because its greater distance from the signal box meant that the wire was very long indeed. All these tasks were completed solely by manual devices without any mechanical assistance. It was a technology which hadn’t changed since Victorian times.
After what seemed like a long wait, the train eventually appeared in the distance and I felt so proud, hearing it whistling a greeting. Actually the whistle is a warning device, but I was only eight and I was convinced that the driver was saying “thank you” as he steamed through the station past the signal box, courtesy of my hard work.
And just as it had been with the farm horses, it would not be long before Dr Beeching would sweep away rural railways, together with the way of life which went with them and make such experiences as this impossible.
Whenever I see a railway these days, with everything surrounded by high steel fences, their vertical pales topped with barbarous triple-spikes and further surmounted with coils of barbed wire, together with notices threatening huge fines for trespass, I’m reminded of just how lucky I was to grow up in a time when a signalman could invite a child and his father to join him and give them a singular experience which they would both remember for the rest of their lives.
Brian Meredith, “A 1950s childhood, Part 2: ‘Down-line clear …'”, The Conservative Woman, 2026-05-31.
September 1, 2026
QotD: “Down-line clear …”
August 31, 2026
David Friedman on the racial IQ controversy
David Friedman responds to a question from one of his readers:
Lynn’s national IQ estimates (source)
It is never too much to remember how much ethnic cleansing was made in the past based on “scientific evidence” that some races were “not as intelligent as ours” … (Comment on my blog)
Claims of this sort, about genocide, slavery, or ethnic cleansing, are offered as a reason not to talk about group differences. The implicit argument is that even if the average IQ of Africans is lower than that of Europeans or fewer women than men are talented at mathematics it is better not to say so, better to pretend it isn’t true. People making the argument rarely put it that way but it is pretty clearly what they believe.
This raises three questions. One is whether group differences exist. My view is that they almost certainly do. Darwinian evolution implies that humans are “as if designed” for reproductive success. Male and female differ in their role in reproduction so it would be surprising if the same distribution of talents were optimal for both. Africans are optimized against different environments than Europeans; that is the reason for the differences in appearance by which we distinguish them. It would again be surprising if the same distribution of abilities were optimal for both. That does not tell us what the differences are but it makes me skeptical of claims that they do not exist.
That is not, however, the subject of this post.
A second question is whether, if the claim is true, it is a valid argument for concealing true facts about group differences. It might be. If something is true and the consequences of it being known are sufficiently bad that is a reason to conceal it. Consider, for example, accurate instructions for creating a plague virus.
Whether that is the case for the existence of group differences depends on the consequences of concealing or not concealing it; my guess is that if significant group differences exist the consequences of pretending they don’t are worse than of admitting that they do1 but that is also not the subject of this post.
The third question is whether the claim is true, whether the belief that some groups were less intelligent was the cause of terrible things in the past. As far as I can tell it was not. There were terrible things done in the past and the perpetrators often expressed a low opinion of the victims but I have found no case in which supposedly scientific evidence of their inferior intelligence was the cause. In the most plausible cases, mass killing of Jews, Slavs and Romani by the Nazis, prejudice and conflict long predated the purported scientific evidence.
Consider some examples of terrible things.
Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, so far as I can tell, had nothing to do with scientific evidence, real or bogus, about the relative intelligence of races. In some cases the cleansers and their victims differed only in whether their ancestors had or had not converted to Islam in the distant past. In others, the justification offered for the cleansing was “it’s historically our land, and they have taken it over by immigrating and having more babies than we did”.
The largest race killing in the post-war period may have been the Hutu/Tutsi conflicts in southern Africa.2 The victims were mostly Tutsi, an ethnic minority that before independence been the dominant group.3 It is hard to believe that any significant amount of it was motivated by evidence of their inferior IQ.
What about the Holocaust? Some Nazis made claims about Jewish inferiority of one sort or another but the basis for their antisemitism was the idea that Jews were race enemies, in which case the more intelligent they were, the more dangerous. One can see that pretty clearly in Henry Ford’s less malevolent version of antisemitism. The Nazis claimed that Slavs were an inferior race but their motive for killing or deporting them was to seize their land, a conflict that had been running, off and on, since medieval times. The Romani, the other major target of racial killing, were viewed as inferior but principally as criminals and vagabonds, again an issue that long predated the Nazis.
- Nathan Cofnas argues that the confident denial of group differences is responsible for the popularity of woke beliefs. If you know for certain that Africans and Europeans, men and women, have the same distribution of abilities it follows that any difference in group outcomes must be due to one group having a less favorable environment; if you cannot find evidence of racism, sexism, or something similar you must not be looking hard enough.
- The Nigerian Civil War may have killed more people but although the sides were racially different the conflict was over the attempt of the Ibo minority to secede from Nigeria.
- I somewhat oversimplify.
A Fighter to Make the European Skies Nazi – Nazi Rearmament 03 – Bf 109
World War Two
Published 30 Aug 2026The Messerschmitt Bf 109 was designed to solve one of the fundamental problems of modern warfare: how do you gain control of the air long enough for everything else to operate unhindered? Germany’s answer was a fast, heavily armed, highly advanced fighter that became the spearhead of the Luftwaffe‘s pursuit of air superiority.
In this German Rearmament special, we trace the Bf 109 from its origins in the clandestine development programs of the 1930s to its first combat missions over Spain and its emergence as one of the defining fighters of the Second World War. We examine its revolutionary design, its development and production, its role in the emerging doctrine of Bewegungskrieg, and its deployment from the opening campaigns in Poland and France to the Battle of Britain and the vast air war over the Eastern Front.
But the 109 also exposes the limits behind the image of an unstoppable German war machine. Its narrow-track landing gear made it notoriously unforgiving, its short range limited its effectiveness over Britain, and its ageing airframe became increasingly difficult to improve as the war progressed. By the later years of the war, Germany could still produce thousands of Bf 109s, but lacked the fuel, experienced pilots, industrial resources, and ultimately the air superiority needed to make those aircraft decisive.
The Bf 109 was an exceptionally advanced fighter for its time, and in the hands of an experienced pilot it remained lethal long after its first flight. But it also became a symbol of a deeper problem within the Nazi war economy: the growing inability to replace yesterday’s weapons with tomorrow’s.
This is the story of the fighter that made Blitzkrieg possible, and the machine that stayed in the sky long after Germany had lost control of it.
Never Forget.
The unerring predictions of climate doom
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Wright provides a useful timeline of climate catastrophism in response to someone posting “projected” sea rise in Florida due to global warming:
For those of you keeping track:
1. 1958 New York Times: Ice-free Arctic within 70 years.
2. 1967 Salt Lake City Tribute, quoting Paul Ehrlich: Global famine by AD 1975. Involuntary mass sterilization needed to curtail population growth.
3. 1970 Boston Globe, quoting James Lodge: Ice Age by the 21st Century.
4. 1971 Washington Post, quoting NASA: Ice Age within 50 years.
5. 1972 Brown University: Global climate deterioration due to Global Cooling.
6. 1974 Guardian: Ice Age coming fast.
7. 1974 Time Magazine: New Ice Age.
8. 1978 New York Times: No end in sight to cooling trend.
A year later, the same paper with the same somber urgency, was reporting the opposite.
9. 1979 New York Times: Global climate catastrophe. Ice-free Arctic within 70 years.
10. 1982 New York Times, quoting UN: Environmental catastrophe by AD 2000.
11. 1988 AP: Global Warming: Maldives drowned by rising sealevel within 30 years (AD 2019).
12. 1989 San Jose Mercury, quoting UN: Global Warming: nations drowned AD 2000.
13. 2000 Independent: Snowfalls a ‘thing of the past’ in England within ‘a few years’.
14. 2001 Albuquerque Journal, quoting George Hurt: Climate-change to kill New England maple syrup industry.
15. 2004 Guardian, quoting secret Pentagon report: Climate change will trigger nuclear war, submerge major European cities, Britain ‘Siberian’ by AD 2020.
16. 2006 AP, quoting Al Gore: Greenhouse gas. Point of no return in 10 years (AD 2016).
17. 2007 New York Times, quoting UN: Point of no return by 2012.
18. 2007 Canwest News: Ice-free Arctic by AD 2010 or 2015.
19. 2007 AP, quoting NASA: Ice-free Arctic by AD 2012.
20. 2007 BBC: Ice-free Arctic before AD 2013.
21. 2008 Xinhua (Chinese News), quoting Norwegian official: Ice-free Arctic.
22. 2008 New Scientist Magazine, quoting director National Snow and Ice Data Center: Ice-Free Arctic by AD 2008 (that year).
23. 2008 National Geographic, quoting scientist: Ice-Free Arctic by AD 2008 (that year).
24. 2008 AP, quoting NASA: Ice-Free Arctic by AD 2013 to 2018.
25. 2009 USA Today, quoting Al Gore: Ice-Free Arctic by AD 2014.
Note that on or about this time, circa 2010, the Glacier National Park erected signs warning that all glaciers would be melted entirely away by AD 2020
26. 2012 Australian: Snow gone by AD 2020.
27. 2013 Guardian: Ice-Free Arctic by 2015, will trigger methane catastrophe.
28. 2017 Sydney Morning Herald: Climate Changes to curtail Australia’s ski industry.
29. 2018 Forbes, quoting Harvard University: Ice-Free Arctic by AD 2022. Chance of any permanent ice remaining is “essentially zero”. (Despite these odds, 5.6 million square miles remain.)
30. 2018 Greta Thunberg, autistic schoolgirl, quoting ‘Top Climate Scientist’: Humans to go extinct if Climate Change not fixed by AD 2023. All humanity to perish unless fossil fuel use stopped within five years.
31. 2021 LA Times: No Snow in California by “sooner than you think”.
32. 2022 Bloomberg: End of Snow threatens to upend 76 million American lives.
Please note that in AD 2020, Glacier National Park (see above) removed the signs predicting the glaciers clearly looming above the sightseers were to have had vanished by now.
Terrible Naval Plans – Five of the worst ideas of naval history
Drachinifel
Published 22 Apr 2026Today we look at some of the worst thought out naval strategies and plans of all time, as selected by me.
00:00 – Intro
00:34 – Selection Criteria
02:17 – The 1914 Dardanelles Bombardment
11:38 – Britain’s post-WW2 Carrier Plan
29:01 – Germany’s High Seas Fleet Build-Up
38:43 – French attempts to invade Ireland
44:16 – The US “we don’t need a navy” plan
QotD: India, “coasting on inertia”?
Moreover, if I happened to witness a crime … well, that wasn’t going to happen. I’d make sure of it. Pro wrestling referees got nothing on me. But if somehow I did get roped into an investigation, I was going to flee to the nearest Western embassy and hole up like Julian Assange. As with the Tubmans-in-the-passport thing, this is not because I condone or encourage crime. I really hope they find the guy whodunit, and nail his balls to the wall … in the abstract. But in the concrete, my main concern is that Officer Friendly-ji will have much less paperwork, and far more business opportunities, by pinning it on the burra sahib, so sahib — that would be me — is making his pasty pale ass scarce.
This is not a blanket condemnation of the Indian police. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of reality. India is a huge country of over a billion people, in which there are at least 30 major languages (= “spoken by over a million people”) and a thousand minor ones. There are at least six major religions, the adherents of which are always bickering with each other. Even granting that every single national official in India has the wisdom of Solon, how the hell are they supposed to pass laws that mean anything under those conditions?
The administration of “justice”, then, devolves to the lowest common denominator in the localities. About which I know nothing, which makes me a nice fat target, so … yeah. How many dolla dolla bills to make this go away, Inspector?
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-22.
August 30, 2026
Why Machiavelli Matters Now by Stephen Bowd and Alexander Lee
In The Critic, Tom Jones reviews a new work on Niccolo Machiavelli by Stephen Bowd and Alexander Lee:
Machiavellian is rather a dirty idea in politics, conjuring tired images of scheming Wormtongues, smoke and mirrors, nights of long knives, Peter Mandelson.
But a new book hopes to change that, by offering us a more rounded view of this important figure, who has been sadly lost — like Sun Tzu and Marcus Aurelius, but thankfully not Edward Gibbon or Carl von Clausewitz — to business bros who buy their books in branches of TG Jones in regional airports.
The first chapter of Why Machiavelli Matters Now is dedicated to the closest thing to methodology the Italian ever laid out. Halfway through The Prince, he writes that “it has seemed only proper to go straight to the effectual truth of the matter [alla verità effettuale della cosa], rather than to how it is imagined”. This, authors Stephen Bowd and Alexander Lee claim, “is perhaps the most crucial sentence in the whole of Machiavelli’s writings”.
But it might be best summarised as wanting to understand things not as they were, but as they came to be — or, more precisely, what caused them to change. That wasn’t all; since he used the concept in relation to a prince’s relations to “his subjects and friends”, it means the specifics of how human behaviour produces political change. This, as the authors note, “was genuinely revolutionary. No one until then had thought of politics in such overtly dynamic terms.”
This, at least, was Strauss’ reading. But as with most of Machiavelli’s work, the thing is more subtle than it first appears. Informed by both Aristotle and Lucretius (it should be obvious at this point how heavily I am cribbing from this interesting, short and consumable book), it was:
a truth that had to be decided pragmatically, through experience, on the basis of what felt right, rather than what could be rigorously verified – and all too often shaded off into mere verisimilitude. It sought to explain changes of all kinds but was preoccupied above all with the causes of civil unrest and factional struggles, which undermined rulers and republican regimes more than anything else
Understanding the effectual truth was, for Machiavelli, essential if princes were to avoid being either baffled or frightened by political developments. Alas, were our own princes aiming for such lofty ideals of governance.
The short-term impact of widespread LLM usage
I haven’t used any of the latest tranche of LLM agents, although I’m assured by those who do use them that they’re significant improvements over the previous iterations, so I don’t really have an opinion about the state of the “AI Revolution”, but Freddie deBoer has a rare non-catastrophist yet also non-utopian take:
My LLM skepticism is really pretty simple: immense practical consequences have been predicted for them, essentially none of those consequences have come true or can be proven to be imminent, and because reality has a powerful status quo bias it’s not sensible to simply assume that they’re coming. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and no one has produced such evidence. My position is not a complicated one to understand and shouldn’t be controversial. I’m acting with no more skepticism towards AI claims than I regularly demonstrate towards claims about religion or astrology or New Age woowoo.
And, crucially, I’m not the one who has set the comically over-the-top expectations here; the AI maximalists and their enablers in the media have. Sundar Pichai, who as the CEO of Google is one of the ten most consequential figures in the business world, said that LLMs were a bigger deal than the discovery of fire or electricity. AI maximalists frequently insist that the LLM era is equivalent to or more important than the Industrial Revolution. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropoic, went on a podcast from The New York Times (the stentorian, buttoned-down New York Times) and talked about a future where AI colonizes Mars of its own volition. Reports out of Silicon Valley hold that many tech workers sincerely believe that they’re a few years from owning their own asteroid mines and will be so wealthy they essentially step outside of the human experience when it comes to material desire. (If you look, you can find concerning stories on Reddit and similar places of techies spending down all of their saving and taking out large loans, on the theory that in the next few years they will become trillionaires thanks to LLMs.) Scott Alexander seems increasingly unwilling even to countenance the possibility that “AI” is not all its cracked up to be. None of this is serious, let alone convincing. I keep using the example of indoor plumbing to establish a baseline of what actual civilization-altering technological change looks like because that’s what civilization is built on. Videos where AI Chuck Norris beats up AI Vladimir Putin are not on that level.
None of this means that I believe what I am frequently accused of believing, that LLMs have literally no consequences. I don’t think that. I think that the winners of the current AI war will end up with important enterprise software that meaningfully changes how administrative and clerical tasks are completed in the average American workplace. The winners of all of this will make a lot of revenue off of this technology. Certain tasks are going to be presumed to be automated from now on. You’ll ask computers to do things in natural language that you used to do with clicks and commands. And, as we’re already seeing, human culture is going to become even lonelier, less authentic, more crass, less creative, more artificial, and less fulfilling than before. Those are consequences. They’re just, you know, consequences in a fundamentally mundane and boring world. But, yeah. Somebody’s going to make a lot of money on this stuff — conventionally a lot, I mean, not these absurd hundreds of trillionaire dreams, but a lot of money.
The trouble is that, clearly, none of this is enough, precisely because of those outsized expectations. The problems with “LLMs are going to prove to be highly consequential and remunerative enterprise software in a more-or-less unchanged economy and world” are multiple:
- The amount of money and time and energy and attention and manpower that’s been invested in LLMs is so massive that nothing resembling an ordinary economic return can ever pay it off; with AI now essentially propping up the entire American economy, this is a dire circumstance even though specific firms will survive and eventually thrive.
- You can’t cure cancer because cancer is not one disease and also it evolves under natural selection pressures and sometimes when we reduce rates of one cancer rates of other cancers rise etc etc etc; interstellar travel is a fantasy thanks to basic rules of physics and physiology, not because we’re not smart enough; asteroid mines make absolutely zero sense in basic economic terms; you can’t upload your consciousness because consciousness is not software but embedded into the very cells of our bodies that inevitably die; we already experienced radical life extension thanks to immense reductions in infant mortality and smoking cessation, the add-another-25-years-to-the-average-lifespan stuff is just a slow unglamorous chipping away; limitless cheap energy is being kept from us by thermodynamics, not how advanced our microprocessors are; on and on, the things we’re demanding failing to materialize because they’re not sensible things to demand.
- It’s impossible that all of the major players in this field (OpenAI and Anthropic but also Meta and Google and Nvidia and Oracle and Caterpillar and Modine Manufacturing and Constellation Energy …) survive the next decade; some of them are going to fail, and they’re going to cause an immense amount of collateral damage on the way down.
- Some very informed people will tell you that the future is not LLMs but SLMs, small language models you run locally on your own computer, which would have potentially devastating downstream effects for chip manufacturers, model developers, construction firms, energy companies, etc.
- We have absolutely no idea about where the next big growth field might be if it isn’t this, and this period of permanently irrational stock market growth (which has underwritten all economic optimism) is dependent, more than anything, on that one organizing story.
- The emotional investment in AI is even less likely to pay off than the financial investment; a huge number of people, including a lot of people who spend their lives being too cool for this sort of thing, have staked their emotional health on the idea that the mundane world is imminently going to end, but the mundane world never ends and we will all spend the rest of our days downloading apps to pay for parking a single time and emptying the diaper pail and trying to figure out how to avoid the third round of small talk with the same coworker in a day.
Honestly, I think Google’s recent shakeup tells us a lot about where LLMs are going. Google, for a thousand reasons, is the “frontier” company most likely to make a ton of money off of AI in the next decade — and also, they’ve slipped far down the rankings in terms of the best model and they don’t appear to care very much. Google’s Gemini was briefly seen as the class of the field, but in the past year or more they’ve consistently underperformed OpenAI and Anthropic’s best models. (To say nothing of the rapidly-ascending Chinese competitors, which is a whole other thing.) Google’s top AI guys, Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean, have both moved on from active development of Gemini because they’re more interested in moonshot AI; the implicit concession is that Google doesn’t think that Gemini can ever be “AGI”, that utterly vague, non-falsifiable construct so many people are now chasing. Instead, Google seems to understand that its vast preexisting base of users allows the company to make a mint without any absurd sci-fi premises: when you ask an AI agent to do your grocery shopping, you’ll probably do it through Google in one way or another, and they can take a few cents off of each of those interactions to the tune of billions. It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t allow you to pretend that you’re going to live forever. But pragmatism of that kind is the soil in which modern day fortunes grow. Moonshot Google is long dead, and for a reason.
The unspoken dividing line between “BCE” and “CE”
I’m not a trained historian, so I don’t know if it’s a guild requirement for modern historians to ostentatiously avoid using traditional “BC” and “AD” to denote historical dates or if it’s just another sop to the easily offended like so many other things:
An Olmec head, By Marshall Astor (Life on the Edge), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19349056
Although I work primarily as a computer programmer, my college degree is in History. Over the years, I have retained a high level of interest in history, both recent and ancient.
A few months ago I listened to a Great Courses presentation about the Olmecs — one of the lesser known Central American civilizations — given by Dr. Ed Barnhart. The course lived up to its name and taught much about the history and society, as well as the giant heads, of the Olmecs. However, one thing bothered me about Dr. Barnhart’s presentation.
Dr. Barnhart generally uses CE and BCE for dates. CE stands for “common era” and BCE stands for “before common era”. Other than that fact, CE perfectly coincides with the previous AD and BCE perfectly coincides with BC.
Perhaps Dr. Barnhart should not be singled out. He is not alone in the use of these terms. In fact, the majority of historical presentations these days employ CE and BCE. And it may be that using these terms is not a personal decision; rather, it may be that a department-wide or even university-wide convention.
However, in my view, using CE and BCE instead of AD and BC is not okay. As an (amateur) historian, I believe that it’s bad for history. And as a Christian, I find it a bit offensive. I will probably never have the opportunity to tell Dr. Barnhart why he should not use CE/BCE, but if I did, here’s what I would tell him:
1) The prime commitment of a historian should be to history. A historian should be careful that the information presented is the most accurate, the most complete, and most contextually grounded. CE/BCE fails to be most accurate because it takes an obviously true historical fact — that the currently used Julian/Gregorian calendar is based on the birth of Christ — and obscures that fact. It is not the most complete because there is no way on its own to understand that CE/BCE means to present the same system as AD/BC. To truly understand the system, the AD/BC system would need to be explained. The AD/BC system can stand on its own, but the CE/BCE can only be understood along with AD/BC.
And it lacks context because the terms “common era” and “before common era” give no indication as to what exactly is the demarcation between the two eras. Since CE/BCE gives no referent, a student could reasonably conclude that the dating system is entirely arbitrary. For these reasons, using CE/BCE leaves students or listeners knowing less than they should and perhaps even having a wrong understanding of the dating system. AD/BC preserves important historical information. CE/BCE does not. On the basis of that alone, CE/BCE should not be used by historians who want to be as accurate and complete as possible.
2) Using AD/BC does not require anyone to profess Christianity. Some might say that AD/BC unfairly burdens non-Christians, but the terms Anno Domini and Before Christ are clearly not confessional statements. There is no serious historical dispute that Jesus Christ existed in approximately the time and place given in the Scriptures, and AD/BC merely recognizes that this is the basis for the year numbering system. Anno Domini, or year of the Lord, doesn’t require the user to say “my Lord” or otherwise confess Christianity, just to recognize that the calendar was created by people who did confess Christianity. That is an important fact, not something to be hidden.
The fact is that every calendar starts dating from something, generally from an important event. Some examples are:
- Roman dating: years counted from the traditional founding of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, conventionally placed in 753 BC.
- Hebrew calendar: years are traditionally counted from a calculated date for the creation of the world.
- Islamic calendar: years are counted from the Hijra, Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina in AD 622.
- French Republican calendar: years were counted from the establishment of the French Republic in AD 1792.
To use a particular calendar says nothing about one’s religious beliefs.
The Ancient Greeks 05 – The Greeks Fight Back 1 – The Way to Salamis
seangabb
Published 29 Mar 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
How did the Greeks recover from what looked like total defeat? In this lecture, we pick up the story at the darkest moment of the Persian invasion. Athens has fallen. The Acropolis has been burned. Xerxes appears on the verge of total victory. And yet, the Greek resistance does not collapse.
We examine the extraordinary political and strategic crisis of 480 BC, including:
– The evacuation of Athens and the transformation of the city into a “nation at sea”
– The internal divisions within the Greek alliance
– Spartan reluctance to defend central Greece
– The decisive leadership of Themistocles
– The strategic importance of naval powerAt the centre of this lecture is the question of strategy: should the Greeks abandon the north and defend the Peloponnese, or risk everything in a naval battle at Salamis?
This is the turning point of the war — not yet a victory, but the moment at which survival becomes possible.
QotD: Cant
Without hypocrisy, there would be no gossip; without gossip, there would be no literature and precious little conversation. The dose of hypocrisy necessary to maintain social intercourse is a matter of judgment, for while many individual instances of hypocrisy are reprehensible and properly the subject of adverse comment, and some instances are beyond the pale, hypocrisy is as necessary to human existence as love or laughter. We should never forget La Rochefoucauld’s dictum that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue: but at least he knows that there is a difference. The only effective way to eliminate hypocrisy entirely from human affairs is to have no moral standards.
Cant is more destructive than hypocrisy because it is harder to expose and because a humbug deceives himself as well as others, while a mere hypocrite retains some awareness; he is a rogue rather than a villain. Cant is the vehement public expression of concern for others, or of anger at an opinion casting doubt on some moral orthodoxy that is not, and cannot be, genuinely felt, its vehemence being a shield for insincerity and lack of confidence in the orthodox opinion. Doctor Johnson defined cant as “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” Cant is contagious, and, when widespread, it creates an atmosphere in which people are afraid to call it by its name. Arguments then go by default; and if arguments go by default, ludicrous, bad, or even wicked policies result.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Age of Cant”, City Journal, 2020-11-27.
August 29, 2026
On the scenic shores of “Lake America”
One thing Trump does better than any other politician is finding ways to send his opponents crazy. It’s not a skill I’d want to have myself, but it’s amazing how Trump can do or say something outrageous … and pretty much every time his opponents take the bait and make themselves even more ridiculous in trying to react to his provocations. Like randomly renaming Lake Ontario by executive order:
I don’t think Carney has Trump Derangement Syndrome, the citizens who vote for him do. Carney knows this, he counted on it to win the election. Elbows up was about preparing Canadians for a breakdown in relations with the U.S. – A breakdown that Carney and the other Laurentian elites who run things in Canada saw as inevitable. To anyone paying close enough attention, Carney is the de facto new leader of the globalists (the WEF mob). He ascended to that position at the moment he became the Canadian prime minister. Trump and the MAGA movement, on the other hand, are the singular force in the world effectively opposing globalism as it has emerged in the post-WWII “rules based order”.
This effectively places Canada at the center of an existential global struggle. However, we are not only at the center, but oppositionally set against the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, locked in a “trade war” with the largest economy in the history of humanity. Pardon my use of acronymic French as I blurt out an unruly “WTF!”
I am sure Carney has read The Art Of The Deal and knows how to win diplomatically with Trump – which is all one needs to read to gain the key insights prerequisite to mutually successful negotiations with the orange one. But Carney is not interested in mutually beneficial trade relations with the U.S. because that would mean tacit support for the American led reset of global political economy (which of course follows from America’s new economic policy, because yes absolutely America is that powerful), or put another way, it would mean Carney supporting the thing which is opposing the thing that he actually supports.
Elbows up Canadians have been manipulated by the most cynical government in the history of Canada. Carney is a smooth operator but a cunning wirepuller. He has essentially pulled the wool over the eyes of a malinformed citizenry who have been fed an endless diet of state-sponsored anti-American, Anti-Trump, and Anti-Poilievre propaganda since at least the final scenes of the Trudeau premiership set the stage for Carney the globalist show closer.
[…]
And at last we come unceremoniously to the supreme troller who has cast his line in the newly anointed Lake America. He is fishing for a major catch of Canadian TDS, and he is bound to fill his nets. Indeed, Trump has signed an executive order officially changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. Canadians are of course triggered and are whining insufferably. I think it is funny, and I like that for once an Indian name is being changed to a European one. Trump is the greatest troller in the history of trolling. However, the move is a serious one, in twenty years the world will be flooded with maps and globes that label the former Lake Ontario as Lake America, in spite of the impotent protestations of butt hurt Canadians. America has vastly more power in this world, if they want our lake known as Lake America it will be so. Canadians who have a hard time accepting this simply have no clue about the dynamics of power.
Carney’s response to Trump’s redesignation of the lake was replete with a self-own only one as invested in a globalist “new world order”, and oblivious to actual domestic concerns could muster. He posted the following to X:
The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.
The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.
Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.
A hilarious response to this which appeared on X was posted by Miranda Veracruz de la Jolla Cardinal, which I am assuming is a parody account since Miranda was a recurring character in the 1980s sitcom Married With Children. MVdlJC wrote:
“How dare Trump rename Lake Ontario!”
“Anyways, here I am at Sankofa Square …”
If that is not the cat’s pajamas then I have no idea what type of a response to Carney’s boundless smugness would adequately compliment a feline’s slumber. Carney says that Canadians know about “naming reality”, yet how many unpronounceable aboriginal terms have been grafted over the real names of Canadian places in the past decade or so.
Amnesty International
Frederick Alexander wonders “what the hell happened to Amnesty International”?
I’m firmly in middle age, and the signs are all there. I can’t have a lie-in any more; I just wake up early, feeling unrested, and have to mainline caffeine for the first hour before I can get anything done. My lower back aches constantly and now works like a barometer, the pain increasing with an approaching cold front. And I’m old enough to remember when Amnesty International was an admirable organisation that defended the oppressed – back when that word described people suffering in the real world rather than grievances the sociology department workshopped into existence. Such are some of the complaints of a middle-aged Englishman, but it’s the third that vexes me most today.
Amnesty really was something special once. It stood for dissidents and prisoners of conscience: the Chinese journalist tortured for saying something that embarrassed the CCP; writers like Václav Havel, imprisoned by communist Czechoslovakia before later becoming the country’s president. I loved The Secret Policeman’s Ball, the Amnesty benefit shows associated with John Cleese. My record collection was full of Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman and the like, who helped carry the cause into stadiums around the world. Who could not admire an organisation devoted to freedom – that most contested of political ideals, and the one closest to my heart?
Today Amnesty International is a case study in everything that has gone wrong with our institutions.
Consider the latest episode, one entry in a long and growing list of absurdities. In July, Amnesty International UK published a list of organisations it said belonged to an “anti-rights ecosystem”, including Beira’s Place, the female-only support service for victims of sexual violence founded by JK Rowling. Other names among the 117 supposedly malign bodies were For Women Scotland and Sex Matters – whose great offence is essentially to insist that women exist as a biological category.
Compiling lists of ideological offenders is a bit … what’s the word? Totalitarian? Fascistic? The organisation that once existed to defend prisoners of conscience decided it would be a good idea to draw up a register of thought-criminals, a rape-crisis centre among them. I can’t imagine Tracy Chapman strumming a guitar for that. I don’t know what Peter Gabriel makes of it either. If either of them is still sane (I’m too afraid to check), they’ll likely frown on the direction of travel.
Rowling, who once worked for Amnesty back when it defended people with the “wrong” beliefs rather than compiling lists of them, threatened legal action and offered to help other organisations on the list do the same. Amnesty first expressed regret – the standard move while they work out how much trouble they’re in – and then issued an apology when they realised she was not mucking about, saying the briefing should never have been published.
Amnesty said, “We regret that this briefing was uploaded to our website without going through the established internal review processes”, which is the institutional equivalent of “the dog ate the homework”. But I’ve worked in this kind of outfit. Things like this don’t go up by accident. This wasn’t a pocket tweet. Reports go through layer after layer of review before sign-off – after which everyone holds a little drinks party to congratulate themselves on a job well done, and someone gives a small speech while another has a bit of a cry.
The Origins of Aldo Uberti and Reproduction Cowboy Guns
Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Apr 2026In 1958, Val Forgett of Navy Arms contracted with Beretta engineer Aldo Uberti to produce 1,000 reproductions of the Colt 1851 Navy revolver. That turned into the beginning of many decades of production of a wide variety of revolvers and rifles, from the LeMat to a line of Winchester lever actions. Fueled by both organized Cowboy Action competition and general widespread interest in these guns, Navy Arms grew very successful in the market, attracting many other companies who continue to exist to this day. Today I’m talking with Val Forgett’s son (also Val Forgett) about some of the interesting details of the business.
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QotD: Peter Green’s vengeance against the Hellenistic Age
But telling the actual narrative of the Hellenistic world, however bizarre and entertaining it gets, is really only the superficial purpose of Alexander to Actium. No, the real point of the book, and the real reason to stick around for all 700 pages, is to witness Peter Green’s incredible, almost maniacal act of vengeance against an era he despises.
Whether it’s playwrights …
The poet-playwright Menander … has always struck me as a classic example of a growth industry created by papyrological accident.
… poets …
Callimachus, like Ben Jonson, has always had a rather better press than he deserves, and for much the same reason: his academic ideals and credentials can hardly fail to appeal to those other academics … I cannot help finding him at once pretentious and faintly distasteful, a literary exhibitionist with an unpleasant groveling streak about him, a sycophant implacable in his attacks on rival sycophants[.]
… philosophy …
Popular philosophies — and Stoicism must be accounted one of the most popular ever — almost always tend to have an intellectually suspect quality about them.
… coin portraits …
Prusias I of Bithynia is porcine, crass, and self-satisfied. The early kings of Pontus resemble nothing so much as a family of escaped convicts: Pharnaces I has the profile of a Neanderthaler, and Mithridates IV that of a skid-row alcoholic.
… or academia itself …
Museum faculty developed a reputation for symposia, frivolous research topics, and alcoholism: to anyone in the same profession there cannot fail to be a certain sense of deja vu.
… Green knows how to write a burn. It’s not simply that he’s a hater: his book about the Battle of Salamis overflows with love and admiration for the golden age Greeks who defeated the Persians. No, Green specifically has a bone to pick with the Hellenistic era and its rulers, its people, its art, and its ideas. For those who read for entertainment, the best part of Alexander to Actium isn’t the battles, the George R.R. Martin-esque politics, or the even more Martin-esque incest — it’s tagging along as Peter Green gets revenge on the Hellenistic Age by writing a definitive textbook about it, so that all students of history who come after him will read of his scorn and contempt.
Green’s harsh attitude is clear right from the preface, when he sets the book’s scope.
[I will not] devote specific sections either to law or to school education, on the grounds that during our period the first … was little more than an elaborate sham masking the realities of power, while the second offered nothing, in essence, but literary rote learning, elementary mathematics, music, athletics, and — most important — a rhetorical grab bag that would enable men at the top to talk their way into, or out of, anything.
Hellenistic historiography fares just as badly:
Polybius remains the only worthwhile historian of the Hellenistic period whose work substantially survives. Diodorus, as we are too often reminded, is a third-rate compiler … I have no wish to burden an already overlong book with yet another imaginative analysis of his chronological inconsistencies and synthetic rhetoric. Like Plutarch, he believed that one virtue of history lay in “recording the nobility of distinguished men, publicizing the vileness of the wicked, and in general promoting the good of mankind”. Successful statesmen, he thought, were righteous, while evil ones met with frustration: nothing, in short, succeeds like success. None of this inspires confidence.
From there the savagery continues almost non-stop, right down to the last page when Green ridicules imperial Roman literature for “guttering out” by the mid-2nd century. Virtually nothing escapes.1
Take philosophy, that most noble of ancient endeavors. The Hellenistic world’s biggest philosophical contribution was Stoicism. Today, Stoicism enjoys a good reputation for encouraging adherents to be stolid and uncomplaining in the face of difficulties. Green, though, puts the spotlight on Stoicism’s lesser-known traits like its determinism and pantheism, then singles it out as a shallow ideology perfect for helping elites rationalize their own hypocrisies.
Sandbach correctly notes that “the belief that the world was entirely ruled by Providence would have an appeal to the ruling class of a ruling people”. What Stoicism offered, in fact, was a built-in justification — moral, theological, semantic — for the social and political fixed order: it was the most powerful and subtle instrument of self-perpetuation that the Hellenistic ruling class ever conceived. The mere fact of anything happening meant that it had been fated to happen; and since nature was providentially disposed toward mankind, what was fated could not fail to be all for the best. This interesting version of determinism is most often presented as a source of comfort when things seemingly went wrong; but of course, as I have suggested, it would be of even greater benefit to those who were anxious to have some moral principles to offer the world in justification of ruthless self-interest. If it was bound to happen, it had to be right.
People have always wanted to learn the future, but Stoicism’s belief in a deterministic yet providential cosmos drove a tremendous increase in the popularity of astrology, divination, and other woowoo, often egged on by the philosophers themselves.2 Green even hypothesizes that Stoicism’s popularity directly sabotaged whatever nascent scientific progress there was in the late Hellenistic age.
Blake Neff, “GUEST REVIEW: Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-10-20.
- Don’t assume that you, the reader, will be free from Green’s scorn. Green studied the classics at Cambridge back when standards were standards. The preface alone includes untranslated phrases in Greek, Latin, French, and even German, a norm that continues throughout the book for the first three languages (and for the fourth in the highly-entertaining footnotes). Green has no patience for the puny monolinguists of today.
- Posidonius of Apamea, one of the most famed Stoic writers of the ancient world, was also one of its most famed astrologers.
