seangabb
Published 16 Feb 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
With Darius I, the Persian Empire reaches its greatest extent. This lecture explores how Darius reorganised the empire into satrapies, imposed taxation systems, and stabilised rule across vast territories. We examine Persian cultural policy, military discipline, and the integration of Greek communities within the imperial system.
But beneath the surface of order, tension grows. The Ionian Greek cities resent indirect rule through tyrants. Persian administrative logic collides with Greek political volatility. The peace is real — but unstable.
July 15, 2026
The Ancient Greeks 03 – Enter the Persians 3 – Darius, Ionia, and the Fragile Peace
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QotD: First up against the wall, come the revolution
An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder.
A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.
He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.
Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.
Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.
Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.
When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.
He had set forces in motion that he could not control.
He suffered a nervous breakdown and fell into depression. His doctors and family sent him to the French Riviera to recover. He checked into a hotel in Cannes. There, he apparently shot himself, though rumors persisted for years that he had been murdered and the suicide had been staged.
His wife Zinaida returned to Russia and continued living off the enormous fortune her husband had left behind. Then came 1917. The Bolsheviks seized everything. She survived by selling off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to keep.
The lavish country estate she and her husband owned later became the personal residence of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the communist revolution. Today it is a museum called Lenin’s Gorki, filled with the possessions and mementos of the first leader of the Soviet Union.
In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin points out that in most cases of societal collapse and state breakdown, “the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites … were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.”
Rob Henderson, “Dark Shadows Fall, One Upon The Other”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2026-03-22.
July 14, 2026
Orson Welles – the great failures
On his Substack, Ted Gioia looks at the up-and-down-and-up-and-down career of Orson Welles and selects, from a long list, his ten greatest failures:
Orson Welles in 1937.
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten via Wikimedia Commons.
It takes a lifetime of misses to create those hits (if they come at all). And those misses tell the real story of our passion, our resilience, our willingness to push our talent to the limit.
These speculations have led me to return to the work of filmmaker Orson Welles (1915-1985) — who I see as an inspiring role model for indie creators of the digital age. Welles is like many of us today. He lost institutional support from Hollywood studios while still in his twenties. And despite his reputation as the most innovative filmmaker of his generation — for many years his debut movie Citizen Kane won polls as the best film of all time — was forced into a precarious life as a perennial freelancer.
He spent most of his career working on projects that failed. And not because they weren’t good (see the list below) — but for other reasons. Some blame Welles’s prickly personality. Others will fault close-minded Hollywood execs. Or maybe Welles was just cursed with bad luck — problems did seem to follow him wherever he went.
You might say that even his hits were misses. His biggest early success came via a 1938 radio rendition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which convinced many listeners that extraterrestrials were actually invading America. Welles got plenty of publicity but was threatened with $12 million in lawsuits in the aftermath. He was lucky to escape without criminal charges.
His greatest triumph, Citizen Kane, was also anything but a conventional hit. The major theater chains refused to book it — fearing punishment from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the thinly-disguised model for Kane. So even at the peak of his career, Welles had a target on his back.
It got worse from there. He couldn’t finish the editing of his second film The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — because FDR prodded him into going to Brazil as a cultural ambassador during World War II. So Welles was out-of-touch as the studio butchered his remarkable film, and even added a saccharine new ending. It’s testimony to Welles’s greatness that The Magnificent Ambersons is still ranked among the best movies of the era despite the meddling.
After Brazil, everything fell apart for Welles. Hollywood never forgot him, but also never forgave him. He got occasional gigs (although more often as an actor). But this brilliant filmmaker never enjoyed job security or long-term institutional support. He was the permanent indie gadfly — always pitching projects and sometimes actually starting them. But rarely finishing them.
At his death in 1985, Welles left behind at least 19 unfinished projects. Add to that the many others he abandoned in earlier years. And then there are so many Welles concepts that hardly got started at all — but were promising ideas that deserved better. Finally, Welles suffers the added indignity of achieving some commercial successes (on radio or the stage) that are now lost to us — so even these must be counted among his misses, at least from the perspective of posterity.
Below I’ve listed Welles’s ten greatest failures. But I could have easily expanded it to twenty or thirty.
I do this as testimony to Welles’s greatness. From a mercenary perspective, these might be failures, but from an aesthetic standpoint they testify to a creative force that operated at the highest level of intensity for a full lifetime.
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Translating “virtù” in Machiavelli’s The Prince
At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman ponders the use of the Italian word “virtù” and how best to translate it into English without losing the essence of what Machiavelli was trying to communicate:
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.
I’d read Machiavelli’s The Prince many times. Pondered its fiendish teachings as I watched political events. Wondered how true, or at least universal, the suggestions really were. I’d even started translating the text myself a few months earlier, just for fun. Machiavelli’s Italian wasn’t all that different from Spanish, so I could get quite a bit of it. With a bit of study, I got the rest. Now, here I was, standing in the very room he’d written the book in, touching the very desk he might have used.
It was in that moment I remembered a letter Machiavelli had written once, to a friend, about writing in that very room:
When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine, and that I was born for. There, I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them … I have composed a little work (The Prince), where I delve as deeply as I can into reflections on this subject.
The book itself opens with a quick description of the different types of states, and then concludes the first paragraph with an important sentence. New dominions, says Machiavelli, are acquired o con le armi di altri o con le proprie, o per fortuna o per virtù — that is, they’re acquired “either with the arms of others or with one’s own, either by fortune or by” — drum roll — “virtù“. That’s the word in Italian. The question is how to best translate virtù into English.
You might say, “virtue”. And you wouldn’t entirely be wrong: of course the Italian virtù and the English virtue are cognates. The problem is that in the Tuscan Italian of 1513, virtù carried important connotations which no longer exist in contemporary Italian, and don’t exist in English. “Virtue” these days, in either language, refers to an ethical attribute; it describes something good or moral. But in Renaissance Italian, it still retained an older meaning — one unaligned with anything specifically ethical. That older meaning merely described a certain kind of manly excellence, skill, power, prowess, or virtuosity: the Latin root of virtù is vir, meaning man; virility, like virtuosity, traces back to the same root. (The only remaining echo of this meaning in English or Italian, that I know of, lies in the idiom “by virtue of” — which attributes some authoritative force to something: “The agreement remained binding by virtue of state law”, or “Dan became captain by virtue of his experience”.)
To make matters even more challenging for the conscientious translator, Machiavelli pushes this older meaning to its extreme end throughout The Prince. In fact, his use — or as some might have it, his abuse — of the word virtù drives the main theme of the book.
In brief, what Machiavelli argues is that the political realm has its own rules — its own sort of morality, if it can even be called that. This morality is entirely unlike Christian morality, Aristotelian morality, or commonsense folk morality. Thus, the meaning of “virtue” and “vice” in the political realm differs from the meaning in other contexts. Failure to understand this and act accordingly will bring ruin to any aspiring ruler.
So, according to Machiavelli, a “virtuous” ruler isn’t necessarily a good man. In fact, he can’t be a good man by any normal definition; if he were, he’d inevitably fail as a ruler. After listing off some admirable moral qualities, Machiavelli says this:
It is not necessary, then, for a prince to have in fact all of the qualities written above, but it is indeed necessary to seem to have them … when these qualities are possessed and always observed, they are harmful; but when they seem to be possessed, they are useful. So it is useful to seem compassionate, faithful, kind, honest, religious … a prince cannot observe all of those things for which men are believed good, since to maintain his state he is often required to act against faith, against charity, against kindness, and against religion.
A virtuous ruler, in other words, is simply a political virtuoso: a ruler who knows what it takes to acquire and use power effectively, and has the guts to do it.
[…]
As you read through The Prince, you can almost hear Machiavelli saying, hey — I didn’t create this world. I’m just explaining how it actually works. If that’s anyone’s fault, it’s God’s — except there’s no reason to believe God even exists. And so, the aspiring ruler can and must do whatever it takes to succeed, without fear of divine disapproval.
This is Machiavelli’s conception of, or redefinition of, virtù. It is the main theme of the book. Yet as Harvey Mansfield notes in his book Machiavelli’s Virtue, often “Machiavelli’s translators have difficulty in rendering virtù“. Indeed they do, and where they don’t get it right, the reader has no chance to grasp just how radical or disturbing Machiavelli’s morality-inverting argument is. Where they do get it right, we get the chance to engage with one of history’s subtlest and most challenging political thinkers. This raises the question of whether there’s some specific set of principles which ought to guide the translation of great books, and if so, what they might be.
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The problem is the state
Brivael Le Pogram explains that acceptance of mediocrity is key to the decline of most western societies … meek acceptance that we are lesser people living in the ruins of a just-passed but rapidly receding Golden Age:
An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m on a “air-conditioned” train where it’s 26 degrees. The WiFi doesn’t work. No one says a word.
And that’s what fascinates me the most: not the breakdown, but the collective acceptance.
The socialist state has pulled off a psychological feat. It’s made us internalize that a mediocre service, paid for at exorbitant cost, is normal. That it’s even what “public service” means.
The same service in a free market would cost a fraction of the price. And if the AC broke down, you’d be refunded within the hour, because a competitor is waiting right next door for you to switch shops.
Make a list of everything the state touches:
Education: plummeting standards, teachers burning out, PISA rankings in freefall.
Healthcare: months-long waits, hallways full of gurneys, caregivers fleeing.
Transport: delays, breakdowns, strikes, prices exploding.
Justice: years for a judgment.
Police: overwhelmed, demoralized.
Colossal budgets.
Record-high tax takes in Europe.
Result: everything’s rotten.Why?
Because two things are missing that only the market provides: skin in the game and prices.
Skin in the game first. An entrepreneur who delivers a lousy service goes bankrupt. He loses HIS money, HIS reputation, HIS years of work. A bureaucrat who mismanages a public service loses nothing. He’ll get promoted, transferred, or at worst he’ll coast to retirement. Failure has no personal consequences. So failure repeats, indefinitely.
Prices next. Hayek showed it: market prices are an information system. Every price aggregates millions of individual decisions and signals where to allocate resources. When the state sets prices or subsidizes at a loss, it destroys that signal. No one knows anymore what anything is worth. We sprinkle money at random, we waste, and we call it “public investment”.
That’s why the bureaucrat is the worst possible steward of your taxes: he spends other people’s money, on other people. No incentive to save, no incentive to serve well. Milton Friedman summed it up in one sentence: it’s the worst of the four ways to spend money.
The problem isn’t this minister, that government, this reform. The problem is structural. A monopoly without competition, without prices, without skin in the game, will ALWAYS produce mediocrity. No matter who’s running it. No matter the budget.
If you’ve grasped that, you’ve grasped 90% of political economy.
So do one simple thing: explain it to your loved ones. Next delayed train, next emergency room wait, ask the question: “Who loses money when this service sucks?” Answer: no one. That’s the problem.
The information will eventually spread. And one day, collectively, we’ll stop swallowing it.
The problem is the state. Always.
Auto-translated from the original French by X.
Update, 15 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
QotD: Subaltern Studies
You can come at this in a few different ways. In the History biz, a big buzzword used to be “agency”. Not as in “three letter”, but as in “ability to meaningfully affect your environment”. One has “agency” insofar as one is able to get one’s way. It’s a big deal in the ivory tower, because if the grand sweep of History since the Middle Ages tells us anything, it’s that White guys tend to get their way, while brown guys do not. There are entire continents (and Subcontinents) full of millions of people, run by a handful of honkies.
Obviously that’s very very bad for them … but very very good for you if you want tenure, providing you can find some way to prove that the honkies weren’t really in charge. Subaltern Studies, for instance, is a field where, at its worst, literally anything a brown person does, or doesn’t do, is an example of “agency”, because it’s an example of “resistance” — doing exactly what Whitey says is really sticking it to Whitey, because extremely dense polysyllabic theory-laden reasons.
The stated goal of all this being, to give “agency” to the subaltern. But that’s the funny thing: While explaining at enormous length why “doing exactly what Whitey says” is somehow “resistance”, these folks were in fact acknowledging the massive agency — no quotation marks — of the British. They said “Jump, frog!” and seven hundred fifty million people asked “How high?” There’s only so much jargon can do to disguise that basic power dynamic, which is why “Subaltern Studies” isn’t the hot new thing anymore.
Severian, “Externalizing”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-14.
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July 13, 2026
Canada’s performative “grand strategic pivot away from the United States”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison provides the statistics to show that Prime Minister Carney’s big meeting with the Saudi Arabians is much more sizzle than steak:
Mark Carney wants Canadians to believe that courting Saudi Arabia represents some grand strategic pivot away from the United States.
The numbers expose the performance.
Saudi Arabia purchased roughly $1.3 billion in Canadian goods in 2025. Canada exported about $779 billion worldwide. That makes Saudi Arabia approximately 0.17 per cent of Canadian exports. It is a rounding error being marketed as an economic transformation.
Meanwhile, the real Canadian economy is voting with its money.
A new KPMG survey found that 57 percent of Canadian manufacturers have paused, reduced or cancelled capital investments. 42 percent have moved production to the United States or are considering doing so. Nearly one-third have already shifted at least some production south, and 61 percent say their businesses cannot survive without access to the American market.
That is the real Carney record: photo opportunities with Saudi royalty while Canadian factories, investment and future production quietly head for the border.
Ottawa keeps talking about “diversification”, but markets do not follow Liberal press releases. Capital goes where taxes are competitive, regulations are predictable, projects can be approved, energy is affordable and customers are close.
The latest trade figures make the point painfully clear. Canadian exports rose for the fourth consecutive month in May, driven by a 1.5 percent increase in exports to the United States. American-bound exports reached their highest level since February 2025 and still represented almost 70 percent of everything Canada shipped abroad. Exports to non-U.S. markets continued to shrink.
Canada should absolutely pursue new customers. But Saudi Arabia cannot replace an integrated continental market of more than 330 million people sitting directly beside us.
You do not reduce dependence on the United States by weakening Canadian competitiveness and watching manufacturers relocate there. You build Canadian strength first, then expand outward from a position of confidence.
Carney and the Liberals are doing the opposite.
They are allowing Canada’s productive base to erode while selling diplomatic tourism as economic strategy. They are chasing Saudi sovereign wealth while Canadian capital sits idle, scales back or leaves.
That is not diversification.
It is economic decline wearing a tailored suit and carrying a diplomatic passport. 🤡🌎
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Teddy Roosevelt versus the “Robber Barons” of the Gilded Age
In the Coolidge Review, Burton W. Folsom, Jr. outlines the way President Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressives tried to rein in the wealthy industrialists who had helped create the Gilded Age:
Theodore Roosevelt looks on with glee as his commerce secretary puts the screws to trusts.
(Puck magazine, Alamy Stock Photo, via The Coolidge Review)
The early twentieth century marked the height of the progressive movement, which sought to check the power of free markets and business. To understand what progressives did in the early 1900s, we need to understand what happened in the late 1800s, the period often called the Gilded Age.
After the Civil War, the United States experienced spectacular economic growth. The industries leading the way included railroads, oil, and steel. This expansion made the United States a global economic power. The profits of those businesses enriched the wealthiest — and the average American. That’s in part because bigger, more efficient businesses can offer cheaper prices. Between 1870 and 1880, for example, railroad freight prices fell by half. By 1890, they had fallen by half again. And by 1900, they had been cut nearly in half once more.
Similar advances occurred in many other industries. In the Gilded Age the United States saw perhaps the greatest burst of invention and economic development any country has ever experienced.
[…]
Progressives relied on three tools to restrain business.
The first was the Sherman Antitrust Act. Passed in 1890, this law was used sparingly for a decade. Government enforcement proved difficult in part because the act’s language was vague: the Sherman Act outlawed any contract or “combination” in “restraint of trade or commerce”. In 1895 the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the law narrowly. In a case involving a sugar-refining business, the Court held that the Sherman Act did not apply to manufacturing. Theodore Roosevelt later wrote in his autobiography that the ruling produced “governmental impotence”.
But soon after entering the White House in 1901, Roosevelt seized on the Sherman Act to engage in “trust busting”. He directed the Justice Department to dissolve the Northern Securities Company, a railroad holding company that Hill had created. This time, the Supreme Court upheld the government’s intervention. Referring to the 1895 ruling, Roosevelt crowed, “This decision I caused to be annulled by the court that had rendered it”, giving the federal government the power “to deal effectively with the trusts”. Roosevelt’s Justice Department soon targeted Standard Oil, which was eventually broken into thirty-four separate companies.
The second tool progressives used against business was the Interstate Commerce Commission. Although railroad rates had declined dramatically for decades, progressives objected to the way those rates were structured. Railroads tended to give the largest discounts to customers that transported the most goods. The railroads still profited from these volume discounts, and smaller customers still paid much lower rates than they had earlier. But progressives argued that it was unjust for smaller shippers to pay higher rates than larger businesses.
In his 1905 annual message to Congress, President Roosevelt demanded legislation to put “a complete stop to rebates in every shape and form”. The 1906 Hepburn Act accomplished that goal. The law was expanded to give the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to inspect railroads’ financial records, eliminate targeted rebates, and set “just and reasonable” rates. In other words, the federal government now had significant pricing power over railroads, America’s largest business sector.
The progressives’ third tool was the federal income tax. In 1909 Congress approved the resolution for a constitutional amendment to establish an income tax. The Sixteenth Amendment took effect in 1913, after three-quarters of the states had ratified it. That was the year Coolidge was elected president of the Massachusetts State Senate.
From the beginning, the tax system was progressive, imposing higher rates on larger incomes. In 1913 most Americans paid no federal income taxes, while the top marginal rate — for income exceeding the equivalent of $16 million in 2026 dollars — was only 7 percent. But within five years, tax rates had soared, with the top bracket paying 77 percent.
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A Fair Reading of The Camp of the Saints
Feral Historian
Published 10 Jul 2026Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints has gone from obscurity to infamy in recent years, drawing condemnation for its highly … unflattering depiction of third-worlders. Much of this condemnation comes from people who haven’t read it, or gave it only a shallow and cursory read. But if we let the book speak for itself it can be quite insightful at times, and the true target of its scorn becomes brutally evident.
Rather than use politically-charged b-roll, it’s all hiking shots this time. Mostly to cover some edits. This is a great one for those who listen to these on the commute. Or the commode as the case may be.
00:00 Intro
01:03 The Story
14:22 Escalation Curve
17:38 Hamadura and “Whiteness”
22:05 Culture and Ethnicity
26:33 Why so Serious?
30:09 The End of a World
34:14 Your Virtual Right-Wing Uncle
35:48 A “Martian” Perspective🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
🔹 and Merch! | feral-shop.fourthwall.com
🔹 Oh, and book 2 of Stellar Drift is out. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GTVXK4CN
Larry Correia’s trailer park elves
On X, Larry Correia explains the genesis of a group of characters he created in his Monster Hunter International series:
I’ve been talking to this pathetic, race obsessed loser, bitter failure of a wannabe writer for a while, but it did remind me of the fun story of where MHI‘s trailer park elves came from.
This dork thinks it is because I’m racist against white people or some shit, but it is actually a lot simpler. I was in the bedroom, typing on my laptop. I was working on the beginning of MHI and still figuring out this whole writing thing.
My wife was in bed reading a fantasy novel. She sighs and puts the book down. I ask what’s wrong, and she says “Elves are always the same. It’s so boring. Authors just keep rehashing Tolkien elves over and over. They’re all wise and beautiful and eternal and blah blah blah. Just once I’d love for them to do something different! Why can’t there be, I don’t know … redneck elves or something?”
And the light bulb went on because she said this to a guy who’d lived in some poor areas in Alabama and Mississippi and had a blast. And that night I wrote the Enchanted Forest Trailer Park scene.
The part where the dog pees on the outside couch, and they just flip the cushion over and tell you to have a seat, true story. 😀
Contrary to what this woke loser thinks, I love rednecks. I think they’re hilarious and awesome and I appreciate the culture of being rowdy and not giving a shit while being ready to fight at the drop of a hat. Anybody who has read the series knows MHI is filled with bad ass southerners. Just like the woke left appointed themselves “speakers for the marginalized” this asshole is the same. I never bent the knee to the woke left, and my answer is the same to the woke right. Fuck off.
Meanwhile I go to the south and people love this stuff. Only humorless dolts get butt hurt over the Enchanted Forest, because the rest of us have been there! We know those guys. That’s what makes it fun.
The elves gave me the idea, what if every mythological race from the old world adopted an American subculture once they got to the US? Which gave us orcs, gnomes, minotaurs, dragons, cyclops, all adopting some culture. I’ve had a lot of fun with that over the series.
And the culture has got to be a twist on what’s expected. That is what makes it interesting. It goes back to what my wife said back in 2007. This prick is crying how come the elves are WHITE?! Tolkien, that’s why. And why is one FAT?! Why are they POOR?!? Did you make the other races fat and poor and use them for comedy relief or just the WHITE ONES?
Well A. stupid obviously never got to the gnomes, and B. it is because, elves are supposed to be beautiful and immortal and awesome. If I wrote a dwarf as fat and drunk that’s not interesting because that’s NORMAL, and doesn’t fit the established nature of the setting where traditional stuff goes sideways when it gets here. Duh.
This explanation is for my fans. Not this dork. I don’t think he’s smart enough to explain anything to.
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The Tool That Changed Woodworking – the Stanley 42
Wood By Wright How To
Published 12 Mar 2026The Stanley 42 came before the 45 or 55, and it is a fascinating tool!
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QotD: They took away recess – and then wondered why boys struggled
But children do not learn best by being treated like machines.
And boys, especially, often do not thrive when movement, noise, spontaneity, and unstructured play are stripped from the school day.
One of the revealing things about modern education is how casually it has pushed recess aside. What was once understood as a normal and necessary part of childhood is now often treated as expendable — a frill, a reward, or a distraction from the “real work” of school. But the research points in the opposite direction. Recent reviews continue to find that recess is associated with academic and cognitive benefits, behavioral and emotional benefits, physical benefits, and social benefits. The strongest modern claim is not that recess is a magic cure for every school problem, but that it helps children function better and does so without harming academic achievement.
That matters for all children.
But it matters in a special way for boys.
Not because girls do not need recess. They do. But many boys are more movement-driven, more physically expressive, and more likely to regulate themselves through action. A school culture built around prolonged stillness can turn normal boyhood into a problem to be managed. Then, when boys struggle under those conditions, the system acts as though the flaw lies in the boy rather than in the environment. Recent research continues to find sex differences in recess physical activity, with boys on average being more physically active during recess than girls.
Tom Golden, “They Took Away Recess – And Then Wondered Why Boys Struggled”, Men Are Good, 2026-04-06.
July 12, 2026
The CBC is a conscious shaper of the narrative, not a news organization
The CBC recently published a highly misleading article based on a recent report on firearm use in intimate partner violence, omitting two key facts and massaging the rest to support their preferred narrative:
Tara Carman [@tarajcarman] is directly responsible for producing this deceptive piece of journalism that deliberately misleads the Canadian public on a critical public safety issue. As the sole author of the article published by CBC, she made the conscious decision to omit the most important data from the Statistics Canada report she herself references, leaving readers with a completely distorted picture of firearm-related intimate partner violence. Specifically, she buried or ignored the fact that, in solved firearm-related intimate partner homicides, only 25% involved an accused person who had a valid firearms licence and was in legal possession of the gun used, while a massive 58% involved individuals who had no valid licence, were not in legal possession, or both. For non-intimate partner cases, the figure for legal possession drops to a pathetic 9%. These numbers come straight from the official report, yet Carman chose not to include them, choosing instead to hype up rising rates, female victims, and lethality while pushing narratives around red flag laws and confiscating guns from legal owners.
This is shitty journalism at its worst because Carman actively shaped the story to imply that legally owned firearms, held by licensed, responsible citizens, are a primary driver of these tragedies, when the data she had access to proves the opposite is true in the majority of solved cases. By leaving out these crucial possession statistics, she misleads the public into believing that broader restrictions on law-abiding gun owners are the solution when, in reality, the problem is overwhelmingly tied to illegal guns, criminals, and repeat offenders who already slip through the system. Her selective framing ignores how small a slice of firearm-related incidents overall intimate partner violence represents and instead amplifies fear to fit a predetermined anti-gun narrative that CBC routinely peddles. Carman has failed in her basic duty as a reporter to present the full truth, choosing omission and emphasis that distort reality and erode public trust. This kind of dishonest reporting from Tara Carman harms informed debate on serious issues and deserves strong public condemnation for prioritizing agenda over accuracy.
Rod Giltaca has more on the omissions of the original CBC story:
IMPORTANT POST🚨
Additional point to the story below: less than 1% of intimate partner violence has a firearm present. It’s been this way for decades. Statcan tracks this.
This is how CBC describes this: “Most intimate partner violence crimes don’t involve firearms”.
“Most”? How about 99% doesn’t?
This is the type of manipulation you can expect from the CBC. It’s unconscionable.
Domestic violence is absolutely unacceptable. We should be looking for the people and situations involved in it and deal with it directly. We should be using the billions the gov’t has wasted on gun bans on services to support women escaping these situations. Stories like this merely serve as an opportunity to vilify people who legally and responsibly own firearms, full stop.
We need to start asking real questions about where these situations occur, who’s involved, and that includes demographic information of every kind; racial, cultural, economic, geographical, real information that demonstrates the will to (actually) solve these problems.
If you want to reduce this type of violence then you have to ask these questions whether they’re uncomfortable or not.
Do you really care, or is this just another opportunity to play politics or virtue signal? Clear thinking people are sick of this.
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How WW2 Really Started: Appeasement! – Death of Democracy 23 – Q3 1938
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 11 Jul 2026On September 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich promising “peace for our time”. Adolf Hitler returned to Berlin with the Sudetenland.
In this episode of “Death of Democracy”, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin as Nazi Germany escalates on two fronts: terror against Jewish citizens at home, and diplomatic blackmail against Czechoslovakia abroad.
While the Evian Conference fails to open the world’s doors to Jewish refugees, the Nazi regime tightens the trap with identity cards, forced names, professional bans, the opening of Mauthausen, and Eichmann’s machinery of forced emigration in Vienna.
At the same time, Hitler manufactures the Sudeten Crisis, threatens war, breaks Czechoslovakia’s defenses through the Munich Agreement, and convinces much of Europe that surrendering another country’s territory is the price of peace.
This is Germany in Q3 1938: the lie that Hitler would not start another war — and the world’s decision to believe him.
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