Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 2 Sept 2025Large, gingery loaf of bread
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1857In order to make expensive wheat flour go further, Victorian bakers added things to it of varying edibility. While potato, corn, and pea flour were used, so was ground up plaster of paris, chalk dust, and a powder called alum. Alum made the flour very white, but is also toxic in large quantities.
This loaf, made only with wholesome, edible ingredients, would have been on the fancier side of a bakery’s offerings with the addition of lots and lots of powdered ginger. This bread really surprised me, as it tastes like a normal loaf of bread at first, but then the heat and the flavor of the ginger comes through afterwards.
Ginger Loaf, or Rolls.
Mix intimately two ounces of good powdered ginger, — called in the shops prepared ginger, — and a little salt, with two pounds of flour, and make it into a firm but perfectly light dough with German or brewer’s yeast, [and 1 pint milk] in the usual manner; [to rise one hour or until quite light: to be kneaded down and left again to rise until light]. Bake it either in one loaf, or divide it into six or eight small ones.
The proportion of ginger can be much increased if desired; but the bread should not then be habitually eaten for a long continuance, as the excess of any stimulating condiment is often in many ways injurious.
— The English Bread-Book by Eliza Acton, 1857
March 3, 2026
The Deadly Job of a Victorian Baker
QotD: The rise of archives-based history in the late Middle Ages
Along with this, you see a growing respect for numbers [in the 15th century]. Medieval statistics are Rachel Maddowesque — whatever they felt they needed to say to get the job done. “We were opposed by fifty thousand Saracens” could mean anything from “bad guys as far as the eye could see” to “we were slightly outnumbered” to “it just wasn’t our day, so we ran”. 15th century numbers aren’t what you’d call real factually accurate, but they’re getting there. 16th century numbers are usually in the ballpark, and you can usually cross-check them in various ways. There’s just a hell of a lot more paper in general, and that paper is a lot more scrupulous.
All of this, I suggest, is because people increasingly thought factual accuracy was important. And that only comes with the increasing sense of linear time. The chronicles of the first two or three Crusades, for instance, are filled with wild exaggerations and impossible claims … but they’re not lies. They just serve a different purpose. They’re called “histories”, but that’s a misleading translation (of the word historia, I’ll admit). What they really are is much closer to exempla — saints’ lives, that kind of thing. Their point isn’t “This and that actually happened”; it’s more like “Let us all praise God, for the wondrous things he allowed us to do!”
Gesta Francorum means “deeds of the French”, but in the sense of “The wonders done in God’s name,” not “a list of battles and their outcomes”.
Severian, “The Ghosts (II)”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-18.
March 2, 2026
A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator
Forbrukerrådet – Norwegian Consumer Council
Published 27 Feb 2026Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide.
Read more on: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakin…
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Remember this when they tell you grocery prices are high because of greedy corporations
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison explains why the headline profits of grocery stores bear almost no relation to the far smaller actual profits in the grocery retail market:
“Leader IGA” by daryl_mitchell is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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The 32% Illusion: A Grocer’s View from Behind the Till
I used to own the IGA in Hamiota. Small town. Thin margins. Real bills. So when I hear that Loblaw Companies Limited is raking in “31–32% profit”, I don’t get angry. I get tired.
Here’s the move. Take a gross margin number. Call it profit. Add a dash of politics. Serve hot.
Gross margin is revenue minus cost of goods sold. That’s it. It doesn’t include payroll, hydro, insurance, property tax, refrigeration repairs at 2 a.m., shrink, theft, advertising, transport, interest, or the banker breathing down your neck. Net profit is what’s left after all of that. In grocery, that number floats around 2 to 3 percent in a good year. Some years less. Some years negative.
When I ran my store, payroll alone could swallow most of the gross margin. Then add freight. Then add utilities. Manitoba winters are not kind to freezers. Then add spoilage. Bananas do not care about your ideology. They rot on schedule.
People think grocers “set prices”. That’s half true at best. Suppliers raise costs. Fuel goes up. Wages rise. Carbon costs ripple through trucking and farming. You pass it on or you close. It’s arithmetic, not greed.
Now here’s the uncomfortable part. Food inflation hurts. It hurts seniors. It hurts young families. It hurts the clerk stocking shelves. But blaming a 30% “profit margin” is a shortcut. It feels good. It’s wrong.
Big chains make money on scale, pharmacy, cosmetics, financial services. Those categories carry higher margins than milk and bread. That lifts the consolidated gross margin number. It does not mean grocery aisles are printing cash.
We should argue about competition. We should argue about supply management. We should argue about taxes embedded at every step of the chain. Good. Let’s do that. But at least use the right numbers.
I spent years watching pennies. Grocers survive on volume and efficiency. A few cents per dollar is the game. Always has been.
If you want lower food prices, focus on input costs, transport, energy, regulation, and competition. Start there.
And before sharing the next viral graphic, ask one question: gross or net?
That single distinction separates outrage from reality.
Ghostbusters: Ignore the Rules, Save the World
Feral Historian
Published 31 Oct 2025It’s a comedy classic, and even funnier when you realize that it’s about shady small-businessmen saving the world by ignoring government regulations.
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QotD: King Stephen and “the anarchy”
At this point, I ought to mention that the year is 1120; the young man is William Adelin, heir to the throne of England; and the “ferry” is the infamous White Ship.
Anyway, back to the story: the wine keeps flowing and, before long, the crew are drunk too. Not far out of port, the ship hits a submerged rock and rapidly sinks.
In all, hundreds are drowned — and yet that is just the start of the tragedy.
William’s father, King Henry I, had gone to great lengths to proclaim an heir. As the son of William the Conqueror, he knew just how messy succession could get. He had himself inherited the throne from his brother, William Rufus. This second William had died of a chest complaint — specifically, an arrow in the lungs (the result of a hunting “accident”). Henry was determined that his son would inherit the throne without mishap — and so carefully prepared the ground for a smooth transfer. Indeed, the name “Adelin” signified that the third William was the heir apparent.
The sinking of the White Ship left Henry with one remaining legitimate heir, his daughter Matilda. She was a formidable character, also known as Empress Maud (by virtue of her first marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor). She was, nevertheless, a woman — a big problem in an age when monarchs were expected to lead their men in battle. When Henry died in 1135, Maud’s cousin — Stephen of Blois — seized the throne. This was widely welcomed by the English nobility, but Maud wasn’t giving up easily, and she had powerful allies. Her second husband was Geoffrey, Count of Anjou; her illegitimate half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, was a wealthy baron; and her uncle was King David I of Scotland.
Stephen was assailed on all sides — by Geoffrey in Normandy, by Robert in England, by invading Scots and rebellious Welshmen. The civil war (if that’s what you can call this multi-sided free-for-all) dragged on for almost 20 years. There weren’t many set-piece battles, but there was lots of looting and pillaging in which countless nameless peasants perished.
In the end it was the death of another heir — Stephen’s son, Eustace — that opened the way to peace. The war-weary king agreed that Maud’s son (the future Henry II) would succeed him. And thus “The Anarchy” came to end: two decades of pointless devastation — and all because some young fool got pissed on a boat.
Peter Franklin, “Why Boris needs an heir apparent”, UnHerd, 2020-08-17.
March 1, 2026
The American Revolutionaries – when you don’t want a king, but you do want someone king-ish
On Substack Notes, John Carter shared this post by Theophilus Chilton, saying:
Fascinating. The American founders were explicitly trying to revive a stronger form of monarchical executive authority with the presidency, as a deliberate corrective to the relatively powerless Crown of the British Constitution, which had been effectively neutered by the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy.
Along similar lines, the American Bill of Rights was in most ways simply a restatement of the ancient rights of Englishmen.
So, of course, I had to go read the post:
Too “kingly” but also not “kingly” enough for America’s Founding Fathers.
King George III in his Coronation robes.
Oil painting by Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) circa 1761-1762. From the Royal Collection (RCIN 405307) via Wikimedia Commons.
Recently, I’ve been reading an interesting book about 18th century political philosophy entitled The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding. In this work the author, Eric Nelson, guides the reader through the various aspects of the great inter-whiggish debates that roiled the American colonies prior to independence, and which then continued afterwards. One of the main premises is that a major faction within this debate — and indeed the one which ended up prevailing in the end — understood the relationship between colonies and mother country to be founded upon the king of Britain’s personal proprietorship over the colonies. This Patriot position was opposed by the Loyalist position which saw the colonies as existing under the laws and rule of Parliament.
Now this might seem strange to generations of Americans who grew up learning in school that the American revolutionaries fought against the great tyrant King George III who was set upon grinding the American colonies under his bootheel of oppression. That view would be quite surprising to many of the participants on the Patriot side, many of whom actually appealed to King George, both publicly and in private correspondence, to exercise kingly prerogative and overturn the various duties, laws, and taxes which Parliament had laid upon the colonies. This, indeed, was the crux of the Patriot argument, which is that because the colonies were originally founded under the personal demesne of the British King, they remained so even despite the temporary abolishment of the monarchy after the execution of Charles I in 1649. In the interregnum between that and the Glorious Revolution and restoration of a stable monarchy that was accepted by all classes as legitimate in 1688, Parliament had illegitimately usurped authority over the colonies. Because it was Parliament which was laying the Intolerable Acts and all the other complaints which the Americans had, it was Parliament against whom they wished to be protected.
But these Patriots were pining after a situation which no longer existed. In point of fact, the British kings since the Glorious Revolution had left whatever prerogative powers they might still have had unused. So it was with George III, who rejected the American colonists’ calls for him to intervene, knowing that doing so would have provoked a constitutional crisis in Britain which he would not have won. As a result, the American colonists chose to make their final break with the British monarchy and throw in their lot for independence, buttressed by Thomas Paine’s fleetingly persuasive but ultimately ineffectual pamphlet Common Sense.
However, after independence, the colonists were faced with providing their own governance. Initially, this was attempted under the Articles of Confederation, as well as their state constitutions, all of which were very whiggish in principle. They were also inadequate to the task. As every student who took high school civics knows, the solution to this was the Constitution of 1789.
Typically, students are taught that the new Constitution was designed to strengthen the ability of the federal government to handle the various issues that applied to the confederation of states as a whole. What we don’t generally hear, however, is that much of this included strengthening the roles and powers of the president to include several areas of prerogative powers which exceeded even the powers then available to the kings of Britain. The stock view of the Constitution is that it “was created to prevent anyone from getting too much power!” The actuality is that the Constitution was crafted, in part, to expand presidential power and create what was viewed at the time as a literally monarchical chief executive. Opponents of this described the proposed executive as “the foetus of monarchy”. Supporters often defended it on the basis that parliaments and congresses, if left unchecked by a strong executive whose interest was drawn from the body of the whole people, would themselves become the greatest threats to the liberties of the people.
The Founders who proposed this enhancement of the executive didn’t do this in a vacuum. Indeed, they had a century and a half of history about this very subject to draw from first-hand. Fresh in the collective mind of every Englishmen, both in the home country and in the colonies, were the English Civil Wars of the previous century. Beginning with the revolt of the parliamentarian army in 1642 through the regicide of Charles I in 1649, the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the attempted restoration of the House of Stuart under James II, until the final deposition of James and his replacement with William, Prince of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Englishmen had a long series of examples from which to draw various conclusions.
So yes, they could see the parliamentarian excesses that took place during the Protectorate. Current in the collective national mind were the overreaches (whether real or imagined) of Parliament both during the interregnum and in the century since the acquisition of the throne by the House of Hanover. As noted above, among these overreaches, at least as viewed by many in the American colonies, was parliamentary interference in the affairs of the colonies, viewed as transgressions into the rightful domain of the king’s purview. Hence, by a strange twist, the Loyalists who opposed American independence before and during the Revolution were generally the more whiggish of the two sides, throwing in their lot with the parliamentary oligarchies. The Patriots, on the other hand, were desperately trying to get the king to reassert his royal prerogatives and intervene by reasserting his perceived rights to directly rule the colonies, something of a modified “high/low vs. the middle” type of scenario.
How to Serve the Oligarchs for Power – Death of Democracy 05 – Q1 1934
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 28 Feb 2026In Q1 1934, Nazi Germany reaches a breaking point. In this episode of Death of Democracy, Hitler codifies central control with the Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich, crushing what remains of federalism. Abroad, the German–Polish Non‑Aggression Pact (January 26, 1934) shocks Europe while rearmament continues behind a diplomatic mask.
Inside the Reich, the real story is the power struggle: SA chief Ernst Röhm demands a “people’s militia”, forcing Hitler to choose the Reichswehr over the stormtroopers — setting the stage for the Night of the Long Knives. As Himmler expands SS power and Goebbels tightens the propaganda screws, even historic liberal papers like the Vossische Zeitung disappear. Meanwhile, unemployment falls toward three million amid manipulated statistics, wage freezes, shortages, and a looming foreign‑currency crisis.
Watch, then comment: what warning signs do you see when “order” is used to justify permanent power?
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Demythologizing the Windrush story
The Empire Windrush was a British ship that brought the first batch of many, many Caribbean people to Britain in 1948. This has been hailed as the foundation of a modern, multicultural Britain by many pop historians and, weirdly, also the moral equivalent of the Jim Crow era of US racial relations. It’s a Two-fer, allowing progressives to celebrate the multicultural aspects and also to declaim and performatively protest against the racist aspects. Celina101 discusses the Windrush myths:
HMT Empire Windrush in harbour. Originally launched as the Hamburg Süd line’s Monte Rosa in 1930, seized for use as a British troopship in 1947 after WW2. She was lost after an engine room explosion and catastrophic fire in 1954 and sank in the Mediterranean.
In June 1948 the HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury carrying over 800 Caribbean passengers. Today this moment is often hailed beginning of modern multicultural Britain, the founding “origin story” of a tolerant, diverse cosmopolitan nation. Yet a deep dive into the archives shows a very different picture. The British Nationality Act of 1948 (passed just weeks after Windrush set sail) did create a universal status (“Citizen of the UK and Colonies”) that legally allowed colonial subjects to live in Britain. But as one colonial minister emphasised, this was meant to reaffirm an older imperial principle, that a subject could declare Civis Britannicus sum (“I am a British citizen”) regardless of colour and was not expected to trigger mass non-white immigration.1 In fact, Attlee’s government and senior civil servants were privately anxious about non-white migration, seeing Windrush as an “incursion” to be managed. Contemporary cabinet papers and correspondence reveal that Windrush was essentially an accident of imperial law and circumstance.
Imperial Citizenship and the 1948 Act
The post-war British state’s conception of citizenship was still shaped by empire. In theory, as Lord Palmerston had put it, every British subject “in whatever land he may be” could count on England’s protection.2 The 1948 British Nationality Act (BNA) codified this idea by creating two categories: Citizens of the UK & Colonies (CUKC) for the “non white” Commonwealth and Citizens of Independent Commonwealth Countries (CICC) for the white Dominions. As a Home Office historian notes, the Act was largely a reaction to Canada’s new Citizenship Act and was intended to preserve loyalty to the Crown and the Commonwealth.3 In practice, BNA 1948 did not fundamentally alter migration rules: colonial subjects remained British subjects with the right to enter the UK, as they had before. Critics at the time even pointed out that this laid the groundwork for subjects of a newly independent non-white India, Pakistan and African colonies to become CUKCs, but that eventuality was not central to the legislators’ intent.4 As David Olusoga and others have observed, no one in 1948 “imagined that black and brown people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies would use their rights under this act to come and settle in Britain”. The law was conceived primarily for white Commonwealth citizens like the populations of Canada and Australia, with the assumption that the British Empire’s non-white subjects, without the resources or need would not make the journey.5 In short, the legal framework of imperial citizenship was nominally open, but the political expectation was that few colonials would exercise the right to relocate.
[…]
Inventing the Myth: Windrush in National Memory
How, then, did Windrush attain the status of a proud national genesis myth? Over the ensuing decades the episode was reimagined and commemorated in ways that the original participants surely did not anticipate. As historian Simon Peplow notes, “the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 has been cemented as a mythical central symbol for immigration in histories of modern Britain”.6 Newspaper narratives and politics in the 21st century cast the Windrush as the symbolic genesis of multicultural Britain. For example, literature and media (like Andrea Levy’s Small Island, 2004) linked the founding of a “shared history” to 1948, treating the Windrush landing as the first wave of a mass migration that made Britain what it is today.7 Over time this narrative was bolstered by public ceremonies: 50th- and 60th-anniversary events, the 1998 renaming of Brixton’s Windrush Square, and in 2018 the formal creation of a national Windrush Day (22 June) to “pay tribute” to the generation. Politicians and curriculum materials alike have repeated the line that Windrush marked the inception of modern Britain’s diversity.8
This retrospective framing treats the Windrush episode as a foundational myth, an origin story, and invoked to legitimise contemporary values of tolerance and diversity. In this constructed memory, loyal Caribbean war veterans returned to Mother Country to rebuild Britain, and British society (in hindsight) embraced them with open arms. Newsreel footage from 1948, often screened today, reinforces this sentimental image, the smiling Windrush passengers, calypso music, and patriotic commentary suggest an organised welcome.9 The reality was much, much more ambivalent.
- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-historical-roots-of-the-windrush-scandal/the-historical-roots-of-the-windrush-scandal-independent-research-report-accessible#about-this-report
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/24/the-unwanted-the-secret-windrush-files-review-who-could-feel-proud-of-britain-after-this
- https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/139720/1/WRAP-1997-Windrush-newspapers-Peplow-2020.pdf#:~:text=Abstract%3A%20The%20arrival%20of%20the,the%20manufactured%20centrality%20of%20this
- Ibid
- Ibid
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/22/windrush-story-not-a-rosy-one-even-before-ship-arrived
Generation Jones EXPLAINED: The Lost Generation Nobody Talks About
Wee Nips
Published 29 Jun 2025Born between 1954 and 1965? You might be part of the forgotten generation — Generation Jones — wedged awkwardly between Boomers and Gen X.
In this video, we break down what it means to be a Joneser, why we’re all still jonesing for something better, and how our weird hybrid powers (like remembering phone numbers and setting up Wi-Fi) just might save the world.
If you’ve ever used aluminum foil on rabbit ears or fixed a TV by smacking it, this one’s for you.
QotD: Even when you know the gun isn’t loaded … it might be loaded
At the first gun shop at which I worked, which was also a pawn shop, we had a relationship with a pawn shop owner down in the city. Every few months, he’d drive out to see us with a briefcase containing a few old Colt Police Positives and Smith .38/.32 Terriers and Browning Vest Pockets and suchlike and we would swap him a big box of Lorcins and Hi-Points and Jennings and cash to make up the difference.
One time he came up, the sticking point in the negotiations was a PPK, an early Interarms-marked stainless example. Initially he was thinking about keeping it. Then he wanted too much for it. Then he relented and we added it to our side of the pile.
He handed the Walther to me, and I locked the slide back and checked the chamber, and passed it to a coworker over at the computer. She printed a trigger tag out for it and handed it, slide still locked back, to one of the other salespeople, who put it in the showcase.
Then our buddy the pawn shop owner crawfished. I sighed and pulled the gun from the showcase, removed the trigger tag, and laid it on the counter between him and my boss. About the time pawn shop guy was leaving, I was walking out of the store to cross the street and get lunch for everybody.
When I came back, there was the PPK, sitting on the counter by the computer. “Arthur changed his mind again?” I asked, and was told that, indeed, he had sat in his car for a moment and then came back in and threw the Walther in on the deal at the last minute. Sweet! I still had the trigger tag handy, so I put it back on the gun and passed it to the salesman who put it back in the showcase with one hand while eating his hamburger with the other.
I wandered off to a far corner of the showroom where I could eat my burger in peace, back turned to the sales floor, when *KA-BAM!*
A customer is standing there with the PPK in his hand and an appalled look on his face, smoke wisping theatrically from the barrel and a divot in the linoleum at his feet containing a flattened Winchester Silvertip.
That’s right, Arthur had loaded the PPK back up in his car, and then brought it back in to add to the trade, and not one person who handled it from the time I picked it up and put the trigger tag on it to the time the customer made the loud noise had bothered to inspect the chamber because, hey, we had already done that when he brought it in the first time, right?
Lesson learned: I don’t care if I set the gun down and just look away for a second; that gun gets checked again when I pick it up. Period. Unless it has been in my field of vision the whole time, I don’t know what might have happened to it while I wasn’t paying attention.
Tamara Keel, “Formative experiences …”, view from the porch, 2011-08-16.
February 28, 2026
Corruption and red tape rise in lockstep
J.D. Tuccille notes that corruption — at least corruption being brought to our attention — is rising at the same rate as bureaucratic red tape. It’s almost as though there’s a correlation between making things harder to do and officials accepting “sweeteners” to make things easier to do …
At the moment, corruption investigations and trials of political figures are taking place in jurisdictions around the U.S. including Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C. These aren’t isolated scandals; the latest edition of an international corruption index finds corruption worsening globally, with the United States earning its worst score to date. Given that corruption involves government officials peddling favors for compensation, it shouldn’t be surprising that evidence suggests the solution lies in reducing the power and role of the state.
[…]
Regulation Breeds Corruption
“EU regulation is not only becoming more cumbersome but it is also pilling in”, Oscar Guinea and Oscar du Roy of the European Centre for Political Economy wrote in 2024. “The amount of new regulation accumulated during the last years has been staggering.”
That matters. In its advice for reducing corruption, Transparency International emphasizes, “there is a broad consensus that unnecessary and excessive administrative requirements for complying with regulations create both incentives and opportunities for bribery and corruption”.
The means by which this occurs is logical enough. Government-imposed permitting and licensing requirements, administrative procedures, prolonged decision-making, and contract awards create a temptation to shorten delays and reduce costs by padding officials’ pockets. In many cases, selling exceptions becomes the real reason for red tape. That phenomenon applies to the entire world, including the United States.
In the U.S., the More Regulations, the More Bribery
In a paper published in the European Journal of Political Economy in 2020, Oguzhan Dincer of the Department of Economics at Illinois State University and Burak Gunalp of the Department of Economics at Turkey’s Cankaya University looked at the relative effects of federal regulations on the corruption levels in U.S. states.
“Power to enforce the regulations gives government officials power to extort bribes”, they wrote. “Government officials have an opportunity to extort bribes from the firms trying to enter an industry because they have the power to issue the industry licenses. They also have an opportunity to extort bribes from the incumbent firms by simply colluding with them and keeping the regulations unchanged and/or strengthening the regulations to increase the costs of entry for new firms. Finally, regulations and the discretionary power given to government officials to extract bribes create incentives for firms to operate in the unofficial economy.”
Specific to the U.S., they examined two decades of data to see how red tape affected the honesty of public officials.
What they found shouldn’t be surprising: “Using the U.S. Justice Department’s data on the number of federal convictions for the crimes related to corruption, and controlling for several economic and demographic variables, we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between federal regulations and corruption.”
Just when you think Canada can’t get worse … it gets worse
Unlike most other Anglosphere countries, Canada does not have a resurgent right wing in domestic politics — we barely have a right wing at all — and the governing Liberal Party is constantly trying to steal sitting opposition MPs to achieve a majority of seats in Parliament. It’s no wonder that Alberta’s separatist movement has been active the last few years. In case you still have an optimistic view of Canada’s present and future, here’s a long “state of Canada” post from John Carter that will probably increase the numbers signing up for free euthanasia (“MAID” in Canadian):
The US is now leading Canada 3-0 in international hockey. If you count the Stanley Cup as an occasional international match, a Canadian team hasn’t won since 1993. For a country that has long practically defined itself as the Hockey Nation, this is especially humiliating. Given the continual year-round repetition of the Elbows Up mantra, this is the kind of thing a Roman augur would have interpreted as a portent of divine disfavour.
Months, you say? Oh dear.
Consistent with that interpretation, Canada’s recent humiliations have not been limited to sportspuck losses. What follows is a snapshot in time, headlines from a country beset by interlocking economic, demographic, spiritual, and political crises, a country which has not had good news in so long that it has forgotten what optimism even looks like.
Item: Canada recently watched the worst school shooting in Canadian history, and the second-worse mass shooting after the infamous 1989 Montreal Massacre in which “Mark Lepine”1 shot 14 female engineering students. The shooting took place in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, a small rural village in the country’s north, and claimed the lives of 10 people including the shooter, his mother, his brother, and several students. Dozens of others were injured. It soon turned out that the murderer was a trannie whose brain had been twisted into a psychotic pretzel by psychedelics, legal weed, SSRIs, and the gender woo he was force-fed at school, at home, and on Reddit. This has led to it being referred to as the Tumblr Shooting. Naturally, both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian media went out of their way to respect the shooter’s pronouns in all reporting and official communications. The media even made sure to give the shooter an AI filter glow-up, so that he could be remembered as the pretty girl we all know he really was deep down inside.
After a desultory and hilariously unsuccessful attempt at scolding the public that the problem wasn’t trannies, but guns or whiteness or something (blessedly, they couldn’t say “men” this time), the Canadian media just dropped it, though not before the government flew the flag at half mast.
Which is how this happened.
Item: A former school board trustee in Chilliwack, British Columbia, was fined $750,000 for failure to respect pronouns. Shooting up a school is bad, but misgendering is unforgivable.
[…]
Item: A xeet went viral in which a leaflib tried to fact check an American poster making fun of 18-month MRI wait times by pointing out that she’d only had to wait six months, prompting widespread mockery from incredulous Yanks.
Pennsylvania, which has about 1/3 of Canada’s population, has more MRIs than all of Canada put together. The Canadian mind cannot comprehend, etc.
Item: Euthanasia via Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program now accounts for 1 death in 20 in Canada. The overwhelming majority, around 96%, of MAiD recipients are white, despite white Canadians comprising 86% of Canadians in the elderly demographic that dominates assisted suicide participants.
Since 2016 over 76,000 Canadians have been killed by MAiD. Moreover, the program is accelerating: the death toll in 2024 was the highest on record at 16,499. Annual death tolls have risen by around a few thousand every year since the program started, with no sign of stopping. Canada is expected to hit 100,000 MAiD deaths by summer.
Item: While most MAiD victims are elderly and infirm, this is not true in every case. Recently it came out that a 26-year-old man was euthanized, simply because he was depressed over his diabetes-induced blindness. His family allege that he doctor-shopped until he found one who would kill him (she has apparently killed several hundred others).
MAiD was originally billed as an easy, painless out for people with terminal illnesses, a dignified death that would spare them a few months of pointless agony. It’s now being extended to people whose imminent death is not reasonably foreseeable. Several Canadian Armed Forces veterans have been offered MAiD in lieu of treatment for injuries sustained in the course of their service.
The primary goal of MAiD is almost certainly to reduce pressure on Canada’s overstretched public health care system whilst simultaneously reducing the fiscal burden of pensioners on the federal budget. Someone looked at the financials, and concluded that unfunded liabilities were going to bankrupt the country when the boomers reached their 80s. Therefore the government is talking them into killing themselves. However, while they’re at it, they might as well expand the program to hasten demographic replacement within the younger sectors of the population pyramid.
- Née Gamil Gharbi, a detail the Canadian media successfully kept from us for decades as it didn’t fit their narrative that “men” are the problem, rather than men from … certain places.
The by-election in the British riding of Gorton and Denton
A few surprises in the outcome, although the expected winner — the Green Party — did manage to pick up the seat by pandering harder than anyone else for the Muslim vote (according to multiple sources). And, as Francis Turner points out, this may be a problem:
The Gorton and Denton by-election has happened, and as I predicted, Labour came third.
Though more people voted Labour than I expected (25% actual vs 10-15% prediction) and sadly not enough people were convinced to vote Reform so the Greens won. But, while turnout was lower than one might have hoped, there’s a real humdinger of an allegation that makes the Green victory very iffy.
Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10 year history of observing elections in the UK.
Family voting is not a term I’ve heard of before, but it is the situation where two voters either confer, collude or direct each other on voting. And obviously cases where one voter oversees the votes of more than one other person as well.
Democracy Volunteers, the organization making the allegation, is a reputable decade plus old organization and not a partisan one.
Democracy Volunteers is run by Dr John Ault, a former Liberal Democrat politician who has observed elections in countries including Britain, Sweden, Norway and Finland.
They give more detail on their webpage
2023 saw the enactment of the Ballot Secrecy Act, which made the practice of family voting more clearly a breach of the secret ballot, making it more enforceable by staff in polling stations. Signage is now available to discourage the practice. Signage was only seen in 45% of the polling stations observed.
The observer team saw family voting in 15 of the 22 polling stations observed, some 32 cases in total, nine cases in one polling station alone. The team observed a sample of 545 voters casting their vote – meaning 12% of those voters observed either caused or were affected by family voting.
Commenting John Ault, Director of Democracy Volunteers said;
“Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10 year history of observing elections in the UK.”
“We rarely issue a report on the night of an election, but the data we have collected today on family voting, when compared to other recent by-elections, is extremely high.”
“In the other recent Westminster parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby we saw family voting in 12% of polling stations, affecting 1% of voters. In Gorton and Denton, we observed family voting in 68% of polling stations, affecting 12% of those voters observed.”
[…]
The team also saw a number of voters taking photographs of their ballot papers and one voter being authorised to vote despite them already having been marked as voted earlier in the day.
What they do not say, unfortunately, is which polling stations they observed this in. We can guess. In fact the Torygraph reports that Reform has explicitly made the obvious accusation:
Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, said allegations of family voting raised “serious questions about the integrity of the democratic process in predominantly Muslim areas”.
I would imagine such things are happening all over the Anglosphere with the large increase in Muslim voters in recent years — many of whom may be voting for the first time, depending on their national origin. In the free-to-cheapskates portion of this post, Ed West considers the evolution of the UK Green Party from granola-eating no-nukes freaks into a consciously sectarian party aiming to leverage the rising Muslim vote:
A good pub quiz question in the year 2050 will go something like this: “True or false, the ‘green’ in the ‘Green Party’ originally referred to the environment”. By this point, the etymological origins of Britain’s sectional Islamic party will be as obscure as the relationship between British Conservatives and 17th century Irish bandits.
A key milestone, our mid-century quiz regular will inform his teammates, was the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election in which the Greens stood neck and neck in a three-way race with Labour and Reform.
Eagle-eyed observers these past weeks will have noted how the once environment-focused party have been pitching at particular sections of “the community”, with campaign leaflets featuring candidate Hannah Spencer wearing a red and black keffiyeh while posing in front of a mosque.
Written in Urdu, the pamphlet calls for voters to: “Push the falling walls one more time. Labour must be punished for Gaza. Reform must be defeated and Green must be voted for. Vote for the Green Party for a strong Muslims voice.” Then it adds, in English, “Stop Islamophobia. Stop Reform.”
There was also an Urdu-language video linking Reform Party candidate Matt Goodwin and leader Nigel Farage with Donald Trump and ICE deportation raids. The video then cuts to Gaza, before showing Keir Starmer beside India’s Narendra Modi. Subtle stuff.
The video states in Urdu: “A cruel politician can win if we don’t vote Green to stop the Reforms … Workers, cleaners, drivers, mothers – it’s us who keep this area running. But the politicians are not working for us … The Reforms want to break up our communities. They want to deport families who have lived here for years, and they want to tax people born abroad even more. They give air to Islamophobia, and they put our safety and dignity at risk.”
[…]
Britain’s Green Party has historically been a thing of amusement to many, a bunch of harmless hippies and Quakers with wacky beliefs; at the time of their first breakthrough in the early 1990s their most high-profile figure was David Icke, then seen as an amusing crank with interests in new age mysticism and alternative medicine.
As traditional politics fractured, the Greens came to fill the space inhabited by high-education, low-income graduates, the group who most favour redistributive economics and highly progressive social policies. Yet political parties have no souls, as such, being merely vote-seeking businesses, and they go where the market is — and now they find the lowest hanging fruit in appealing to sectarian interests.
If decades of generous immigration policies have created constituencies where people vote along religious lines, and are more comfortable with the national language of Pakistan than English, there is nothing to stop someone appealing to that market. It’s within the rules of democracy, if not the spirit.
Gorton and Denton is among the increasing number of constituencies in which a candidate can win by appealing overtly to the Islamic vote; “Gaza independents” won 5 seats in 2024 and could win 10 or 12 by 2029 and 20 or 30 by the election that follows; after that, the ceiling is limited by high levels of segregation. This could be good news for the Green Party, if that’s the path they want to go down, and they certainly don’t seem to shy away from the prospect.
Polanski has welcomed the endorsement of the Muslim Vote, an organisation which instructs people how to cast their ballot along religious lines, even if adding the caveat that people should vote as individuals. In February he told PoliticsHome that “I think any organisation that wants to back the Green Party because they align with our values is something that I applaud and welcome”.
Lauri Torni Biography Part 1: Soldier of Three Armies
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Oct 2025Today is the first of a two-part biography on Finnish legend Lauri Törni, later known as Larry Thorne. He fought in the Winter War and Continuation War, and was awarded the Mannerheim Cross for his actions in the Continuation War. He also travelled to Germany between the two (and again after the Continuation War), spending some time with the German army. In the early 1950s he emigrated to the United States, joining the US Army and eventually serving several tours in Vietnam.
My guest today is Finnish writer and researcher Kari Kallonen, who has written several books on Törni and was kind enough to join me to share the man’s story …
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