Those of you who have studied physics know that the laws of motion are usually introduced through the mechanics and dynamics of point particles, or of simple objects acting under the influence of discrete and coherent forces. The reason for this is straightforward: even a tiny bit more complexity, and the system’s behaviour quickly dissolves into a morass that’s analytically intractable and computationally infeasible. The fact that the mutual gravitational influences of just three celestial objects results in chaotic dynamics has entered into popular culture as the “three-body problem”. But even a simple double-pendulum is impossible to predict, even with all kinds of simplifying assumptions (massless rods, no friction, no air resistance, etc., etc.).
It’s not just physics. The central technique of modern science is that of boiling something down to its absolute simplest form, understanding the simplest non-trivial case as thoroughly as possible, and only then building back up to more familiar situations. In physics we start with contrived gedankenexperimenten: “what if two particles collided in a vacuum”, and build experimental apparatuses designed to mimic these ultra-simple cases. In economics we imagine markets with a single buyer and a single seller, both perfectly rational. In political philosophy we imagine human beings in a state of nature, or societies established by a primitive contract. In biology we try to understand the functions of organisms, organs, or other systems by recursively taking them apart and trying to figure out each part in isolation. In every case, what we’re engaging in is “analysis”, ἀνά-λυσις, literally a “thorough unravelling”, understanding the whole by first understanding its parts.
This approach is totally alien to the traditional Chinese understanding of reality, which held instead that no part of the world could be understood except in its relation to the rest of the universe. You can see this in the domains of science where they did maintain a lead. Is it really a coincidence that the Medieval Chinese got frighteningly far with the mathematics of wave mechanics? Or quickly deduced the causes of the tides? Or made great strides with magnetism? In each of these cases, the physical phenomenon in question was compatible with an “organicist conception in which every phenomenon was connected with every other according to a hierarchical order”. Indeed, in all of these cases real understanding was aided by the assumption that a universal harmony underlay all things and connected all things. The tides really are in harmony with the moon, and the lodestone with the earth.
This science, founded on holism rather than on analysis, made great strides in some fields but fell behind in others. It readily imbibed action at a distance, but it could not and would not tolerate the theory of atoms. In this way it serves as a strange mirror of Medieval European science, which also loved the theory of correspondences, also loved alchemy and disdained analysis. The difference is that the glorious intellectual synthesis of Neo-Confucianism was never seriously challenged, it survived the Mongol conquest, it survived the desolation of the civil wars that preceded the Ming founding, it survived everything until communism. In contrast, the eerily-similar Thomistic metaphysics of the High Middle Ages was broken apart by the Reformation, and sufficiently discredited that analytical methods could take their first tentative steps.
This is, to be clear, my own crazy theory, because Needham never really gave a solution to his own puzzle. I came up with it only as a sort of thought-experiment, because I wanted to see if I could find a solution to Needham’s puzzle that disdained material explanations in favour of intellectual tendencies, because I find such theories curiously underrated in our culture. I only half-believe this theory,1 but I find it interesting because twentieth-century Western science has in some ways come back around to the holistic view of things: from Lagrangian methods in theoretical physics, to category theory in mathematics, to systems biology and ecology. It wouldn’t be the first time that a way of viewing the world useful to one age became an impediment to reaching the next one. The question is: what are we missing today?
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.
- The thing about material conditions is they usually are dispositive!
April 22, 2026
QotD: Traditional Chinese approaches to science
April 21, 2026
The Royal Canadian Navy’s proposed Arctic Mobile Base
At True North Strategic Review, Noah tries to answer the obvious question “what the hell is an Arctic Mobile Base?”
RCN Arctic Mobile Base concept image
RCN via True North Strategic ReviewFor those that don’t know, the Arctic Mobile Base, as it is currently called, is officially on the books. Despite a few years of conceptualization, the project is still in its early stages.
I always feel the need to reiterate that to folks; it is very much still a concept. It is not funded, not approved, but despite that, we already have a fairly decent vision of what the RCN is sorta looking for as a platform.
[…]
When you hear a name like Arctic Mobile Base, I’m sure a lot of ideas go through your head. Indeed. What exactly is a base in this context? Who or what is it meant to support? What sort of gaps is it designed to fulfill?
To understand the AMB (as I will call it from here on out), you need to understand exactly what the Navy is facing up in the Arctic; more specifically, the difficulty in building and maintaining infrastructure. With the failure of Nanisivik, the RCN is faced with a difficult position.
The first thing you need to know here is fundamental limitations. Canada, unlike our other allies, lacks an available ice-free port to utilize in the Arctic year-round. The closest available major ports that Canada has access to with year-round access are Saint John on the East Coast and Prince Rupert on the West Coast.
Iqaluit, Tuktoyaktuk, and Churchill, the major ports available in the Canadian Arctic, all freeze in the winter. Even Nome in Alaska freezes. The only port facility available year-round would be in Nuuk, where, while work is underway on the Danish side to expand current facilities, it is still not enough to provide ample support for Canadian vessels operating in the Archipelago.
[…]
That brings us to the vessels themselves, or at least the concept as I have been told. I guess one could say they are the true successors to the original Joint Support Ship concept; maybe even ALSC if you want to get deep into the philosophical.
They are an everything vessel. They will be Command and Control centres. They will have large, extensive medical facilities. They will be Replenishment Vessels, able to support the rest of the fleet at sea. They might have some submarine tender capabilities and forward repair capabilities built in. Those two are me speculating, though I’m sure someone is asking those questions.
They will be HADR platforms, able to operate independently of any existing infrastructure like ports. They will have an amphibious capability to support that, and if needed, support the Army in any endeavour they find themselves in. They will be able to reach any other vessel in the fleet, even the Polars if required.
That means that as of now, the Navy is looking at PC 2 for its potential rating, a monumental ask. It is likely to have similar range and endurance requirements to the existing Polar Icebreakers, so perhaps around a 25,000-30,000 Nautical Mile Range (as a general rough figure) and upwards of 270 days endurance.
That will allow for the AMB to maintain a persistent, on-station capability in the Archipelago for an extended period of time, similar to the future Arpatuuq and Imnaryuaq. Again, the AMBs are meant to be a semi-permanent capability in the Arctic, with the desire to have one up there or available to get up there at any given time and stay up there supporting both the fleet and local communities for an extended period of time.
As for what I know? Two are planned. Both will be based on the East Coast, where it is easiest to access the Arctic compared to going from Esquimalt, past the Bering Strait, and over Alaska. It is also the area of most activity for the Navy. So it makes sense, along with the typical desire to consolidate maintenance, crews, training, and additional infrastructure.
While I’m pleased to discover that the RCN seems to be taking the Arctic seriously and doing planning to that end, we should also keep in mind that the federal government is a big believer in the “ice free Arctic by 2050” predictions, they may not be willing to fund hulls built to PC 2 levels of ice-breaking capability. Which would be fine if the predictions come true, but very limiting to the planned ships if the Arctic fails to warm up as the climate models claim it will.
Hungary in the news
Theodore Dalrymple considers the recent change in government as Victor Orbán was replaced by Péter Magyar, who had been an Orbán supporter until the last few years:
Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar, on 15 March 2026 during a national day demonstration at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. Magyar is wearing a traditional bocskai jacket and a national cockade.
Photo by Norbert Banhalmi and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
It is perfectly normal and healthy that in an electoral democracy a government should be voted out of office after 16 years in power. One of the complaints often heard in such democracies is that “they are all the same”, they being members of the political class of whatever political party.
But there is benefit in a change of government personnel irrespective of all else, for those who remain too long in power come to think of that power as their right, and the citizenry as their servants rather than of themselves as servants of the citizenry.
The recent removal from power by election of Viktor Orbán in Hungary after so long as prime minister (and his full acceptance of the defeat, despite accusations that he was like an authoritarian dictator) was perfectly normal. He had been replaced by a man who is no fire-eating radical, Péter Magyar, a young man who was, until comparatively recently, a supporter of the leader he has replaced.
The electorate, according to polls, was concerned about the state of the economy and the level of corruption in the country. Governments that come into power promising to eradicate corruption often reveal themselves to be no different in this respect from the last: the fruits of corruption are distributed to different people, that is all.
The new prime minister differs greatly from the old in two attitudes: firstly, to the war in Ukraine and secondly to the European Union. Unlike Mr. Orbán, he is no friend of Vladimir Putin’s; and unlike Mr. Orbán, he is more likely to do the Union’s bidding in order to gain access to the latter’s funds. One important question is whether he will be forced to change Hungary’s attitude to mass immigration, opposition to which was a source not only of Mr. Orbán’s conflict with the Union, but of his long domestic popularity.
His policy was regarded as xenophobic, but this was an unjustified slur. Xenophobia is a hatred or fear of foreigners as such, ex officio, and on my visits to Hungary I found none of this. I met, for example, a Kurdish physiotherapist well integrated into Hungary, and a Moroccan academic likewise, who did not complain of personal antagonism to them. Other foreign residents whom I met did not complain of it either. A desire to protect a small country from the effects of mass immigration that have been seen in Sweden (a country of similar size of population), for example, is not xenophobia: it might on the contrary be regarded as both prudent and as a manifestation of love of one’s country. It is part of the malign legacy of Hitler and the Nazis that love of one’s country is now felt by many European intellectuals to be inherently vicious and aggressive. But love of one’s country is not the same as hatred of everyone else’s, though it is true that patriotism can sometimes degenerate into such hatred.
The European Union’s attitude to mass immigration is contradictory. It regards ethnic and cultural diversity as good in themselves, as if what existed before was lacking some important ingredient that such diversity will automatically bring.
Ivan the Terrible – Feeding the Evil Russian Tsar
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Oct 2025Soft buns filled with cabbage, onion and dill
City/Region: Russia
Time Period: 16th CenturyIn Russian, Ivan the Terrible is Ivan Grozny, and the translation of “terrible” was meant more in the way of “fearsome” or “formidable” rather than “cruel” or “awful”, though Ivan ended up being all of those. What started off as a good reign with military victories, building Saint Basil’s Cathedral, and restricting the boyars‘ (aristocracy) power over the people descended into a reign of terror with a secret police, the massacre of a city, and even killing his eldest son in a fit of rage.
While Ivan truly was terrible, these piroshki are not. They are absolutely delicious. The bread is soft, and the filling is savory and slightly sweet with the dill really coming through. These were made with all different kinds of fillings, so feel free to try out other ingredients, like meat, fish, fruit, or other vegetables, or put in a hard boiled egg for a modern touch.
Small pies filled with mushrooms, poppy seeds, kasha, turnips, cabbage, or whatever else God sends.
When the servants bake bread, order them to set some of the dough aside, to be stuffed for piroshki.— The Domostroi, 16th Century
QotD: “Bibliophiles are massive losers, why can’t we just admit that?”
I don’t buy it. I bet billionaires don’t read at all. Not only because they don’t have the time, but because every big reader I know is broke. Without exception, books have overloaded their minds, and their lives are in total disarray. When they’re not consumed by tortuous examinations of Socialist Realism in the shallower subsections of the Baltic Canal between late October 1933 and early March 1934, they’re deconstructing turgid translations of 9th Century Glagolitic poetry from the White Carpathian territories of Great Moravia. On weekends, for light relief, they dip into obscure anthologies of critically-acclaimed feminist speculative fiction championing unsung writers born in the shadow of the Chappal Waddi in the Mambilla Plateau. What should have been their office hours are spent haggling with elderly volunteers in Oxfam bookshops over worthless, dogeared volumes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s early letters or needlessly exhaustive histories of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in the Ganges-Brahmaputra basin. They own vast stacks of surplus, dust-magnet books, but they never own art, or cars, or houses. Bibliophiles are massive losers — why can’t we just admit that? There’s a clear correlation between reading and underachievement. There’s a reason homeless vagabonds line their coat pockets with paperbacks and newspapers. Our children must be warned, before it happens to them.
Reading is even less helpful to writers. If you write, you are incurably influenced by whatever garbage you happen to be reading at the time. For example, if I’m reading Hemingway, I finish this sentence here. Whereas, in the rare, transcending moments that I am reading, say, Henry James, I find, to my eternal chagrin, that I write — if, indeed, “write” is the morpheme, or mot juste, for which I rightly delve — in my lasting endeavours — my contention, if you will, against the ordained — in a spirit of refined demonstration, or braggadocio, as the case may be, that … Where was I?
Then, of course, there’s the snobbery associated with reading. “Read a book!” command the enlightened few, should you dare disagree with them on any trendy subject. It’s ridiculous, but if you read — or, better still, opine pretentiously about what you read — the chattering classes will clamber to pressgang you into their fanatical ranks. Nobody cares if you write anything, so long as you describe the latest high-status books as “vital”, “necessary”, “required”, or “essential”. Trust me, you can get away for years with pretending that you are “working on something big that I’d rather not talk about for fear of jinxing it” while freely enjoying all the wine and canapes you can stomach. But suggest you don’t read, and people quickly get suspicious.
Dominic Hilton, “All Booked Up”, The Critic, 2020-08-17.
April 20, 2026
Civilization-building is gendered, sorry ladies
On Substack, Janice Fiamengo explains why the very different strengths and weaknesses of men and women will always lead to what appear to be unequal results, and fighting against biology is always a bad idea:
Even if the numbers don’t back it up, women feel that this is so true.
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister explored the relevant research in Is There Anything Good About Men (2010), a cautiously non-feminist book in which the author readily asserted that he, like most everyone else, prefers women to men. Women are more lovable, he claimed, and more pleasant to be around.
But he was not quite willing to accept the now-mainstream thesis that women can replace men in all areas of society.
His thesis is summed up in the book’s sub-title: How Cultures Flourish By Exploiting Men. Men are the foot soldiers of civilization as well as its leaders. They are the ones who make things work or make new things.
Men are the ones who must prove their utility to society. Their drive to be useful has powered centuries of back-breaking work, risk-taking, tool-building, self-sacrifice, and outstanding performance of a sort that has never been expected of women (and still isn’t).
Women in the main tend not to work as hard as men to succeed because they don’t have to. Women developed different strengths and tendencies.
Women’s strength, for good and ill, is in the inter-personal arena: not only in caring for those who are weaker but also in being cared for by those who are stronger. Women are good at reading people’s emotions and desires, and at expressing their own.
Men are not rewarded for expressing emotions and desires; men are oriented to acting, often under pressure to perform competently, in large groups and systems.
“The female brain,” according to Baumeister, “tends to be geared toward empathy, which includes emotional sensitivity to other people and deep interest in understanding them and their feelings. In contrast, the male brain is oriented toward understanding systems, which means figuring out general principles of how things operate and function together, and this applies to inanimate objects as much as social systems” (p. 85).
Baumeister supports his argument in a book-length exploration of men’s system-building. He shows how men are driven to work with, and in competition with, other men to make it possible for large numbers of human beings to live together in complex, efficient networks. The large social institutions that have characterized western cultures, from the army to churches, from corporations to unions, and from market places to police forces, give evidence of men’s system-building.
Women can work well within the systems that men devise, but they rarely devise new systems on their own. This is not because women are, on average, less intelligent than men (except at the very highest levels). It is because women’s motivations and sources of satisfaction are generally different from men’s.
Women’s contribution to culture in nurturing children, providing companionship, and looking after the family home has been a crucial one. But it does not drive innovation or invent new technologies.
Even the most intelligent women are rarely compelled, as highly intelligent men often are, to pursue scientific and other breakthroughs with the single-minded focus necessary for greatness. Often, as in the case involving Matt Taylor discussed above, many women do not seem to value or understand the nature and importance of such breakthroughs.
Women’s main contribution in the male civilizational sphere has been to lobby for admission and then to complain about, and work to undermine, the male culture of competitive excellence.
“Hail, Caesar!” oops we meant “Hail, Carney!”
At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies discusses the unseemly media adulation1 for Caesar Prime Minister Mark Carney after more than a year in power:
Grok illustration of PM Carney as Caesar
Image from The Rewrite.
Thirteen months into his reign as prime minister, we still don’t know who Mark Carney is or how he engineered the removal of Justin Trudeau from office.
Nor do we know what really happened behind the scenes to convince five Members of Parliament to betray their constituents’ democratic decisions and, for the first time in the nation’s history, give Canadians a majority government they didn’t elect.
What we do know is that none of that seems of great interest to most of our media or, as they like to describe themselves when seeking federal subsidies, “defenders of democracy”.
As The Rewrite noted a year ago, the moves behind the scenes to effect the abrupt ouster of Trudeau remain a mystery. And, unlike with other PMs, there have been no Carney family magazine profiles. (Who can forget Justin and Sophie Trudeau‘s sexy Vogue cover?) Yes, there are the books, Values and The Hinge. We have learned he likes hockey, runs, won’t criticize China and is ruthless. But there is a tangible paucity of efforts within MSM to get beyond what is permitted to be known. We don’t even know if he watches Heated Rivalry or why the Brits called him “the unreliable boyfriend”. And yet, as Stephen Maher wrote for Time magazine last week, Canadians adore him.
As for how he has seized power in excess of that granted by the electorate 11 months ago, there wasn’t a hint of concern on the part of CTV News anchor Omar Sachedina when Carney’s majority was confirmed in a couple of “gimme” by-election victories.
The leading voice on Canada’s most-watched newscast, Sachedina appeared awestruck by the “historic” moment and “what the Liberals have been able to achieve in the past year”. When his sidekick, Vassy Kapelos, noted Carney was now out of excuses for not fulfilling the promises that won him a minority government in 2025, Sachedina suggested soothingly that Canadians remember “sometimes ambition does take time, sometimes several election cycles”.
Screencap of CTV News from The Rewrite
The message to Canadians? The Liberals have accomplished great things in the past year, the greatest of which was to do what no one in the nation’s history had ever done before — manufacture a majority without the public’s consent. Oh, and be patient. PMMC’s agenda could take a few more elections. Sit tight and trust.
The next morning, questions were not, as one might expect from defenders of democracy, about whether the PM felt a tad greasy for the way in which he had won unfettered power. Like, in some countries — many actually — that might be considered kind of scary. Here? If you watch the news, it’s dreamy.
The preferred line of inquiry was to ask Carney whether, if he was the Opposition Leader, Pierre Poilievre, he would quit. And so it went for the rest of the week. PMMC wasn’t asked if he worried that his majority would undermine the public’s faith in its institutions. Nor did the press corps pursue their sources to discover what inducements may have been offered to create his Judas Gang of Five.
- Yes, I know … the presstitutes will “love him long time” as long as the government subsidies keep rolling in.
Airline deregulation in the 1970s
The end result — democratizing air travel and enabling far more people to economically travel long distances — also meant that air travel became far more casual (people no longer dressed “properly” for flights) and economy flights began to more closely resemble long-distance buses, but overall it was a win:
The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 stands as one of the most spectacular vindications of free market principles in modern American history. Before deregulation, the Civil Aeronautics Board controlled every aspect of commercial aviation: routes, schedules, and most critically, prices. Flying remained a luxury reserved for the wealthy elite, with fares artificially inflated by regulatory capture and government-sanctioned cartels.
Within a decade of deregulation, average airfares plummeted by 50% in real terms. The number of passengers more than doubled from 250 million in 1978 to over 500 million by 1990. New airlines like Southwest and JetBlue emerged with innovative business models that prioritized efficiency over bureaucratic compliance. Routes previously deemed “unprofitable” by government planners suddenly thrived under competitive pressure.
The regulatory regime had created exactly what free-market theory predicts: artificial scarcity, price distortions, and a complete disconnection from consumer preferences. Airlines competed on amenities instead of price because the CAB fixed fares at monopoly levels. They served cocktails and full meals while ordinary Americans couldn’t afford tickets. The moment government stepped aside, entrepreneurs discovered countless ways to serve previously ignored market segments.
Critics warned that deregulation would compromise safety and create chaos. Instead, aviation safety improved dramatically as airlines faced real liability for accidents and insurance companies imposed rigorous standards. Competition forced operational excellence in ways bureaucratic oversight never could. Hub-and-spoke networks emerged organically, maximizing efficiency without central planning.
The contrast couldn’t be starker: decades of stagnation under regulatory control versus explosive innovation and democratization under market freedom.
Yet the same politicians who celebrate affordable air travel continue strangling other industries with identical regulatory schemes.
How to sharpen a Thin Scraper | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published 12 Dec 2025We try to cover every woodworking hand tool we can to pass along the knowledge we have to future generations.
We’ve been asked for this video a few times, so here it is. How to sharpen a thin scraper. It has many uses, and the art should not be lost.
It takes only a couple of minutes to do, and you can approach even the wildest grain with this single tool.
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(more…)
QotD: The quality of evidence problem for historians
And yet, you can’t entirely discount them, either. Crecy (along with of course Agincourt) is supposed to be the triumph of the English longbow, and that’s the thing: We’ve reconstructed English longbows, and put them through all kinds of trials. The results, as I understand it — which, again, ain’t much — were highly variable. A very strong, well-fed, highly trained longbowman, firing an ideally constructed and maintained bow under optimal conditions, really can put X number of arrows up a flea’s ass at Y range in Z time.
Or they could miss the broad side of a barn at twenty feet, depending.
So: What was the weather like in Northern France on 26 August 1346? That’s not an idle question. Rather, it’s the central question. Assume perfect shooting conditions, and you’ve got a far, far different picture of the battle than if you assume poor ones. And if that seems to be giving too much credit to the weather, watch a few baseball games — you’ll quickly discover that quite often, the difference between a home run and a long out is just a few percentage points of relative humidity.
Ultimately it comes down to judgment. More importantly, it’s a judgment on how any particular event fits into the larger argument you’re trying to make. In a way, then, the details really don’t matter very much on their own — the mechanics of how the English won are almost irrelevant, except insofar as they feed into an analysis of why they won. Why did the French king attack uphill, in the mud? Was he stupid? Overconfident? Did he feel he had to, because of political problems inside his host? Did he have faulty information? Did he have accurate information, but just made a bad call?
That’s the art of History, and why, despite what the Peter Turchin (and Karl Marx) crowd keeps insisting, it will always be an art, not a science. We can have a high degree of confidence, most times, in what happened — there really was a battle at Crecy, and the English really did win it. It’s the why that is susceptible to radical reinterpretation.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-17.
April 19, 2026
Simple rules for judging commentary on the Iran situation
You’ve probably noticed that I don’t include a lot of content on Iran or Ukraine these days. That’s largely because the fog of war propaganda is too dense for much reliable information to come to us and be subject to any kind of fair analysis. Lorenzo Warby has a few rules to suggest to those of you trying to sift real information out of the noise — both specifically on the Iran conflict and also more generally for these kinds of low-signal/high-noise conflicts:
There is a lot of poor quality commentary about on the current Iran War — or, as the Chinese call it, the War in West Asia. Fortunately, there are two simple tests that winnows out much of the noise so you can focus on signal.
Locations struck by:
– United States and Israel (blue)
– Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis, and PMF (red)First Easy Test
Would this commentator ever admit that Trump had done something positive?
If the answer is no, ignore them. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump. They are just providing anti-Trump talking points for this particular issue.
Second Easy Test
Does this commentator pay any attention to the record of the Islamic Regime? Its record of domestic repression, including various mass executions and mass killings of protesters? Its record in supporting and constructing proxies: in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria, in …? The record of those proxies and how they disrupt and degrade those countries? Its record in promoting terrorism across the globe? Its record in massive economic and environmental dysfunction …?
If the answer is no, ignore them. This is especially so if what they do comment on is Israel. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump and on Israel. They are just providing anti-Trump, anti-Israel talking points for this particular issue.
The more of a regime of internal exploitation the Islamic Regime has become, the more it has built up its proxy forces. The more it built up its proxy forces, the more disruptive and destructive it has become.
[…]
Third, More Subtle, Test
The third test is about how wars work. Does the commentator understand that good strategy in war is a decision-tree? If you do X and Y happens, then follow up with Z. If you do X and A happens, follow up with B.
If they do not understand that, if they treat successful war strategy as being able to operate according to some plan so what the opponent does in response to it does not matter, then they do not understand war, and you can ignore them.
A classic way to fail in military affairs, is to not treat military action as a decision-tree, but to continue with the previous plan of action despite some crucial change in circumstances.
How to Tank the Economy for War – Death of Democracy 12 – Q4 1935
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 18 Apr 2026Nazi Germany in late 1935 was becoming more ruthless, more militarized, and more dangerous. In this episode, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin on the final months of 1935, when Hitler’s regime tightened its grip through food shortages, propaganda, rearmament, and the continued implementation of the Nuremberg Laws. As ordinary Germans faced rising prices, scarce meat and butter, and mounting pressure to sacrifice for the Reich, the Nazi state pushed its “guns before butter” economy even further. We examine the “fat gap”, Winter Relief, Eintopfsonntag, and the growing burden placed on German families while resources were diverted to war preparation.
At the same time, the First Supplementary Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law gave the regime a bureaucratic definition of who counted as a Jew, accelerating exclusion, dismissal, and persecution. Courts, police, and the Gestapo increasingly enforced the racist order, while Goebbels’ propaganda machine worked to normalize hardship, suppress criticism, and intensify antisemitism.
Against the backdrop of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and the paralysis of the League of Nations, Hitler found new room to maneuver internationally while consolidating dictatorship at home. This episode explores how the Third Reich turned scarcity into discipline, prejudice into law, and national pride into obedience — bringing Germany one step closer to catastrophe.
Never Forget.
AI’s missing economic impact
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Rational Aussie explains at least part of why the expected economic benefits of widespread adoption of artificial intelligence agents are … missing:
It’s funny how AI has made white collar work 10x faster already but there’s been basically no economic impact from it.
The reason is quite simple:
1. Most white collar work is bullshit, so speeding it up by 10x still equals a pile of bullshit at the end
2. Most white collar employees are using AI to do all their work for the week in 4 hours instead of 40, whilst telling their manager the deadline is still 40 hours away
We have been living in a fake economy for the better part of two decades. It is all a fugazi.
People who do real jobs in the real world get paid comparatively crap, and people who do fake jobs in the fiat Ponzi world get paid just enough fiat currency to pretend they are important. None of it amounts to anything productive nor valuable for the world though.
An entire generation doing fake email jobs, slide decks and excel sheets for corporations who ultimately produce nothing.
HMCS Magnificent – Canada’s Forgotten Carrier
Skynea History
Published 13 Nov 2025The Royal Canadian Navy is probably not the first one you think about for naval aviation. You’re more likely to think of lighter ships, like Haida.
However, the Canadians would operate three aircraft carriers during the Cold War. The short-lived (well, short-lived in Canadian service) Warrior. The more famous Bonaventure, that I’ve covered before. And, the topic of this video, HMCS Magnificent.
The middle child and probably the least famous of the three. But the one that is, largely, responsible for building Canadian carrier doctrine. It was Magnificent that built up the Canadian naval air arm. Magnificent trained the pilots that would go on to serve with Bonaventure.
And Magnificent is often overlooked for being the middle child. Hence why I chose to cover her today.
Further Reading:
https://forposterityssake.ca/Navy/HMC…
https://naval-museum.mb.ca/rcnships/c…
QotD: The (only?) man who didn’t fear Margaret Thatcher
Thatcher reacted with cold fury, but Hoskyns was unabashed. Another story tells of his arriving for a meeting with the PM only to be intercepted by Ian Gow, her personal secretary. “Our girl is tired,” said Gow, trying to bar his path. “I’m tired too,” muttered Hoskyns. “It goes with the bloody job. I’m going in.”
Such irreverence to the “Great She-Elephant”, “She who must be obeyed”, “Attila the Hen” is rare enough, but this isn’t the main thing to remember Hoskyns for. Far more interesting – and relevant to now – is the work he did with fellow conservative Norman Strauss in the mid-1970s to diagnose the exact sources of Britain’s economic malaise, and come up with clear policies about how the country could haul itself out of it.
Robin Ashenden, “Thatcher’s ‘Wiring Diagram’ and why we need it once again”, The Critic, 2020-08-25.
