Opus Dei means “God’s work”, and while I don’t expect everyone to go out and join, that’s THE principle — work! Everything, no matter how small, contributes to final victory. You are the message. You are the work. Everybody, no matter how old or infirm or weak or poor or whatever, can do something. Dress well. Stand up straight. Sit down in a public park and read a book, a real physical book, not some glowing screen. If you’re walking and you see trash, pick it up. Set some great art as your computer’s background at work. Listen to some classical music. Put a quote from a Dead White Male on your email auto-signature.
Something, anything. Why? Because fuck them, that’s why. They’re ugly and stupid and base, because all those things — ugliness and stupidity and baseness — are just a degraded version of contemptus mundi, contempt for the world. That’s what nihilism IS, at bottom — fake and gay contemptus mundi. “This world is all there is; this world is awful; therefore the only thing to do is wallow in awfulness. We choose ugliness and stupidity and baseness for their own sake, because we choose to wallow.”
The world isn’t awful. It’s beautiful. Even if you don’t believe your Creator made it just for you — and He did, but you can choose not to believe that — just listen to the “Ode to Joy”. There’s at least as much beauty as ugliness in the world, however it got here and whatever its purpose. Maybe it really IS all meaningless, just atoms and void. Even so, why wallow? Choose what’s beautiful while you can enjoy it. And even if you can’t enjoy it for its own sake, choose it because the Left will hate you for it.
Stick a thumb in their eye at every opportunity. Make that your number one scruple, because seriously: Fuck them, that’s why.
Severian, “The Way Ch. 10: Scruples”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-10.
October 30, 2026
QotD: Opus Dei
October 26, 2026
“Christofascism” seen as harmful
I must not hang out in the progressive cool kids’ areas of the internet, as I’d only occasionally heard the term “Christofascism” and I’d never encountered even a vague definition of what the pejorative might mean. Copernican to the rescue with an extended discussion on that very thing (it’s a long piece, these excerpts just skim the surface):
Image from Seeking Always the Horizon
Long has the progressive movement decried “ChristoFascism”, representing it as the greatest threat to Western civilization. The alphabet-soup squad has mostly moved on. Like most words uttered by the progressive mind, the term is used entirely for the reaction it elicits, and has nothing to do with describing the real world. Christofascism was just another word in their toolbox, like “nazism” or “racist” or (now) the ever-popular “if you date a girl two years younger than you, you’re a pedophile”.
All these are words uttered merely to enforce the progressive’s bizarre form of destructive totalitarian thought-control.1
While the [CURRENT THING] horde has moved on from accusations of Christofascism, I have not. There’s something archaically elegant in that formulation of words and the compound thought-form they represent. Hiding in the spiteful accusation is a memetic complex that deserves further investigation. Christofascism was a mere combination of “bad things” that the Left hates … but that doesn’t mean it should be taken as mere braindead progressive gurgling.
It may well be far more than that. There’s a new cultural theology hidden in there.
[…]
ChristoFascism
Individuals like Kulak identify modern (what I’d call “liberal”) Christianity as a fundamental inhibitor to the people of the West.2 That analysis is not entirely wrong. Christianity in its modern incarnation developed alongside the fall of Rome, the High Medieval Period, and then through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Christianity was a governance apparatus for regional tribal conflicts and the occasional crusade. It was the centerpiece of the Holy Roman Empire, but the theological framework has a great deal of trouble squaring with modernity.
Simultaneously, all of the alternatives, the materialist religions of the 20th century, have been absolute disasters ending in nihilism, hedonism, or cruelty. The human collective unconscious is not a static thing.3 It’s frothing with new ideas, particularly during times of great change and turmoil. The Hegelian dialectic.
Notably, the Hegelian dialectic ends in the creation of a new thesis. The original Thesis is the Universalist heritage of the West. That would be Christianity from 300 AD up until the 19th century. Then there is the antithesis, the materialist religions that seized the zeitgeist in the 20th.
[…]
A Christofascist cultural foundation must express:
- The moral recognition of a higher power and that it is the duty of the state to nurture a heroic righteousness in its own people, granting Duties, and Guidance in addition to liberty.4
- A masculine Will to Power in the development of its own practices, heritage, and promotion of its own cultural ideals to the exclusion of hostile, foreign, or corrosive ones.
- That the State, and the individuals who make up the State, are responsible for adhering to higher moral standards. One cannot simply blame “the voters” for the evil actions of the state. The leadership of the state holds personal responsibility for imposed policies.
- An intense sense of national exceptionalism, particularly in the eyes of God. As a spiritually exceptional state, the people of the nation uphold a higher scientific and spiritual ideal as individuals, families, and citizens.
- A recognition of other similar nations as being siblings seeking the same ultimate goals through alternative means, rather than pawns in a game of Great Powers.
- Paternalism with God as father to the nation’s people, and the nation’s people not beholden to the operational state but being the actuators of it. A father that expresses temperance in governance.
- I think that John Carter wrote the best analysis of this phenomenon in his work on “Homo Umbrans“. The product of man willingly handing over sapience in exchange for the reprieve from intellectual rigor. To very roughly summarize one of the best articles on Substack: if you feel like you’re under psychic attack when trying to communicate with a progressive, it’s because you are. The Leftist attempts to annul the meaning of words required for thought to render sapient cognition and abstract reasoning impossible.
- Here’s a direct link to some of the work that Kulak has done. This one is of particular interest to those in the proverbial Pagan camp. Here’s an article that was written by Millennial Woes on the same topic. A great article that I would recommend regarding this perpetual confrontation within the Spiritual Right.
- Here’s my own article on how best to conceptualize the collective unconscious.
- We will assume a Christian higher power, it’s in the name after all.
October 23, 2026
Faint signs of civilizational hope: “The Great Un-Karening”
It’s become old hat for Generation Jones and Generation X grizzled grognards to moan on about the almost-unsupervised “come back when the streetlights come on” childhood they remember in comparison to the over-scheduled, over-organized, over-computerized, hyper-supervised situation too many children now find themselves in. But there’s an occasional glimmer that things are changing:
The Great Un-Karening has begun, and decades of cultural engineering have finally run into something their architects cannot fucking control: human nature.
A seven-year-old conquers El Capitan, breaking his older brother’s record, and some sanctimonious busybody responds by reporting his father to Child Protective Services. Apparently, raising children capable of extraordinary achievements now qualifies as suspicious parenting.
And that tells you everything about the suffocating bullshit we’ve allowed to masquerade as progress.
For years, the helicopter-parenting crowd, DEI bureaucrats, ideological school administrators, and professional grievance merchants have worked to remake childhood in their own miserable image. Courage became recklessness. Masculinity became toxic. Independence became neglect. Every hurt feeling became an emergency, and every whining control freak acquired a fresh excuse to interfere.
They built entire systems around rewarding fragility, policing behavior, and teaching children to view the world through the narrow lens of identity, victimhood, and institutional permission.
And now the machinery is encountering resistance.
Kids are reportedly refusing school Pride Day activities. Parents are defending their children’s right to adventure. Twenty to forty neighborhood kids organized their own nighttime pursuit game, complete with strategies, head starts, and a mile-long course. Some neighborhood hall monitor called security.
The kids kept playing.
Fucking beautiful.
There’s the nightmare for the self-appointed guardians of acceptable behavior: children discovering they can organize their own lives without a diversity consultant, a school psychologist, or some miserable asshole clutching a rulebook.
And every independent decision chips away at the authority these people spent years accumulating.
The Karens can scream. The bureaucrats can threaten. The ideological busybodies can keep issuing commandments from their increasingly ridiculous little thrones.
The generation they expected to mold into obedient, perpetually offended dependents is discovering the exhilarating pleasure of telling them to piss off.
They tried to rewrite normalcy.
Now they’re watching the next generation reclaim it without asking their fucking permission.
Quebec is to Canada as Scotland is to the United Kingdom
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Fortissax explores the idea that Quebec’s relationship to the rest of the Demented Dominion closely resembles the sometimes awkward relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK (but primarily England):
People have often compared the relationship between Anglo Canada and Quebec to that of England and Ireland, and while there are some similarities there particularly in the visceral emotions during the Cold War, I’d actually argue that Quebec is closer to Canada’s Scotland.
Scotland entered the British union in 1707 as an established kingdom with its own institutions and national consciousness. Québec entered Confederation in 1867 as the homeland of French Canadians, whose institutions and identity predated the Dominion.
Scotland and Quebec became elements of a larger political order while retaining separate identities. Both the English and Scottish can be British, both Anglo and French Canadians can be “Canadian”.
Scotland preserved its legal system and established church under the Union of 1707. Québec retained its civil law tradition, while the Quebec Act of 1774 protected Catholic religious practice and established important foundations for institutional continuity
Scottish identity has historically coexisted with British identity, just as French Canadian identity has coexisted with Canadian identity. In both cases, nationalists have disagreed over whether their distinctive peoplehood is best expressed through political independence or continued participation in a multinational union.
Scots were disproportionately involved in, and benefited enormously from, the British Empire, particularly through commerce, banking, industry, trade, colonial administration, and the military.
French Canadians likewise disproportionately participated in and benefited from the expansion of British North America and the Canadian economy, establishing banks, credit unions, grocery enterprises, factories, and steamship companies. They helped establish the Hudson’s Bay Company, the North West Company, explored vast swathes of the continent, contributed four Fathers of Confederation, and produced six prime ministers
Fast forward to 2026, certain Scottish and Québécois nationalists are suddenly smol wittle itty bitty decolonial Third World beans who dindu nuffin, possessed absolutely no historical agency, and were apparently dragged kicking and screaming into the imperial projects their ancestors helped build.
October 20, 2026
Your Safety First (1956) – Automotive safety cartoon that inspired The Jetsons
PeriscopeFilm
Published 23 Jun 2026This animated film by John Sutherland Productions was commissioned by the National Association of Auto Manufacturers. Your Safety First is a promotional piece for 21st Century Cars, told from the perspective of a person in the year 2000 looking back on the history of automobile safety. The cartoon humorously compares the dangerous, early days of cars with the safety-focused, modern vehicles of its time. The cartoon was directed by George Gordon, and animated by Ken O’Brien, George Cannata, Fred Madison and Cal Dalton. The story was written by Norman Wright. Note: this cartoon has been noted as a precursor to the animated TV series The Jetsons, which borrowed heavily on the ideas presented in the cartoon including a three-hour work day, automated flying cars, and robotic arms performing most tasks.
0:00 Main titles. The film’s host, a man from the year 2000, introduces a segment on the history of the automobile, beginning with an early 20th-century car.
4:47 The film highlights the dangers of early cars, including a lack of doors, frequent flat tires due to poor tire retention rings, and a complete absence of shock absorbers, which made for a very bumpy and unsafe ride.
5:32 Early cars had poor acceleration and weak, unreliable gas or oil headlamps, making night driving hazardous.
5:47 The vehicles offered little protection from the elements, as they lacked tops and windshield wipers.
6:03 The film shows the danger of the hand crank starter, which often failed, and the unpredictable nature of the car’s individual parts, which could fail without warning, causing accidents.
6:35 The film transitions to the rapid improvements made to cars over the years.
6:42 It lists early safety innovations, such as stronger wheels, demountable rims, doors, tops, windshields, and wipers. The driver’s seat was moved to the left for safer passing, and the electric starter replaced the hand crank.
7:33 The film continues to show the development of safety features over the decades, including pressed steel wheels, stop lights, rearview mirrors, four-wheel hydraulic brakes, and rubber-covered pedals.
7:51 Safety glass and all-steel bodies and tops are presented as major improvements in passenger protection. Shock absorbers are highlighted for smoothing out bumpy roads.
8:30 The film states that, in addition to physical improvements, manufacturers developed research and testing techniques to build safer cars. It shows various “torture tests” designed to find weaknesses in parts.
9:31 Manufacturing processes also improved, with each car undergoing over 2,000 inspections before leaving the factory.
9:48 The film returns to “Grandpa” in the year 2000, showcasing his reliable, safe, and comfortable car. It lists a final set of advanced safety and convenience features, including safety door locks, automatic transmission, a low center of gravity for stability, and tubeless tires.
10:46 Modern features like wraparound windshields and larger rear windows increased visibility. Sealed-beam headlamps improved night driving, while power brakes and power steering made driving easier and safer.
11:27 The film concludes by asserting that the safety of the driver was and will continue to be the primary goal of automobile manufacturers. The host, Grandpa himself, states he is “going on 117” thanks to the easy, modern living made possible by safe cars.
(more…)
October 15, 2026
When your political establishment is controlled by globalists
On Substack Notes, Spiff responds to someone decrying the British media’s concerted efforts to ignore the political protests across the channel:
Britain’s traditional media have long since chosen their side on the culture wars. They have embraced the establishment and their disgust at patriotism and national loyalty. They are globalists.
That is why they are becoming more extreme over time. They have to. They are a crucial part of the establishment narrative machine along with nudge units, elaborately funded NGOs and charities, and the civil service.
A Nuremberg-style trial would likely convict them of treason given how anti-immigration the British public is. We may not know the details but all these institutions point in only one direction; more immigrants, more diversity, the managed decline of the country, the condemnation of its people.
We often have to step back and look at screenshots like the one below to remind ourselves the media class are making a series of conscious decisions to damage and diminish Britain and the British people. It is not an accident. They know what is happening in France and their choice has been to downplay the enormous social changes that were avoidable and are not working in favour of the French people. Mass immigration of North Africans is destroying France. These riots reflect the alliance between immigrant groups and the hard-left who hate the West.
A similar process is now destroying the UK. They have to keep that observation away from the public for as long as they can. But time is now running out.
Prime Minister Burnham will probably follow Mark Carney’s example and start subsidizing the non-state media to ensure that the propaganda is more closely co-ordinated to the establishment’s preferred narrative. After all, it’s working quite well to keep malinformed Canadian elbows up.
October 13, 2026
The Un-Coupling of Gen Z
One of the most obvious demographic shifts in recent years has been the ongoing decline in the birth rate in pretty much the entire western world. But it isn’t surprising in one respect: Gen Z people aren’t forming relationships at the rate of earlier generations and have fewer (if any) sexual partners:
Why are so many Americans not getting married — or not even dating, in the first place?
The share of 40-year-olds who have never been hitched has quadrupled since 1980, as Americans get married later, or not at all.
It’s not just marriage that’s declining but rather all forms of cohabitation. An analysis by John Burn-Murdoch found that “coupling” has declined steadily in both the UK and the U.S., especially for those without a college degree. The declining popularity of dating apps suggests that these trends are likely to continue.
I care about the decline of coupling and marriage not because I consider myself a strict evangelist of matrimony — I think people should do what they can to enjoy themselves without hurting others — but rather because I think it bears on two of the most important questions about the future: (1) How many people exist, and (2) how happy are they? The relationship between romance and births is practically linear. Since 1990, Burn-Murdoch has shown, the decline of births traces the decline of relationship formation across many countries. Fewer relationships mean fewer people, and accelerating population declines around the world are, somewhat like climate change, a slowly accumulating phenomenon that will almost certainly shape the future of economics, technology, and the texture of human existence.
Then, there’s the mushy yet momentous question of whether people actually enjoy their existence. Self-reported happiness is declining in the west, and particularly in the U.S. Reviewing several decades of General Social Survey data, the economist Sam Peltzman came to the conclusion that “most of the overall downturn [in life satisfaction] is attributable to decline in marriage post-2000”. Reviewing Peltzman’s work, The Atlantic‘s Olga Khazan provided some useful context:
One paper alone might be easy enough to dismiss, but this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.
If the decline of coupling is upstream of both falling births and falling happiness, then the most important question is what’s happening at the source. In his new book Generation Uncoupled, Daniel Cox, a public opinion researcher and director of the Survey Center on American Life, considers a range of causes that span technology, culture, media, economics, and politics.
October 12, 2026
QotD: Blame the “Silent generation” for The Sixties™, not the Boomers
Further, what could they really do? The voting age was 21 until 1971, and as hard as this is to hear, voting was just as pointless back then as it is now. St. Kennedy only won through massive voter fraud, and that was 1960. As John Derbyshire used to say, if the American People had been consulted on anything of importance since then, the USA would still be a White Christian nation … and yet, here we are.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee put on a better show back in the days, but the Uniparty was still the Uniparty. America’s ruling caste caught religion back in the 1920s, and on the long view, you could make a pretty robust argument that Mustache Guy and the Anime Club actually did us a huge fucking favor — left to his own devices, President-for-Life Roosevelt would’ve ushered in the USSA by the late 1930s, with the enthusiastic support of all the Beautiful People on both sides of the Uniparty.
… hats off to you [Isoroku Yamamoto] — you and your dipshit friends bought us a few decades. Decades we squandered, of course, but that’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, unless you think the boys on the Higgins boats should’ve shot their officers, turned the ships around, and conducted a massive air, land, and sea invasion of every faculty lounge and radio station in America … and even if you do think that, what are you going to do about it?
As for Gen X, we were no better. I can’t blame the Boomers for running with it, any more than I can blame myself for running with our thing. I spent most of college, for instance, getting drunk and chasing tail. Chasing tail is bad, full stop — I should’ve been saving it for marriage, with all that implies — and while getting drunk isn’t bad every now and again, I didn’t do it every now and again. I lived a life as dissolute as any Boomer’s, and while I was equally powerless to change anything in the broader culture, I could’ve been a much better person … but I wasn’t.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-23.
October 7, 2026
QotD: The cultural dominance of “Yankeedom”
So there’s Tidewater, lost and forgotten except for some guys in Virginia who still put on red jackets to hunt foxes from horseback — and maybe in slightly different voting patterns. What about the nation that won, the one that’s everywhere?
I refer, of course, to Yankeedom.
“But Jane,” you say, “Yankeedom isn’t everywhere! Scroll back up to your own map — it’s in New England, sure, and, uh, northeastern Ohio and, wow, okay, the entire Upper Midwest. But that’s not everywhere.” But ignore the map for a moment: that’s Woodard’s idea, based on settlement patterns and voting behavior. What is Yankeedom, really? What are its fundamental beliefs, its vision of how life ought to be, and where do they show up today?
Of course you know the story of Yankeedom’s founding: radical Calvinists from East Anglia, settled around the Massachusetts Bay in the 1620s and 30s, funny hats? Maybe you made one of those hats for your construction paper turkey in first grade — or, if you’re a little younger, maybe you learned a nice poem about welcoming new immigrants for a glowing future of multiculturalism and prosperity. In fact the emphasis on “the Pilgrims” in American civic mythology — never mind the traditional Thanksgiving menu, heavy on quintessentially New England dishes like pie1 — is itself a product of Yankeedom’s cultural dominance, as is the insistence in that familiar story that they left England for religious freedom. It’s true! They did! But there’s a very important final bit that we somehow leave out of the version we teach to elementary schoolers: religious freedom for themselves.
The earliest Yankees imagined their new society as a Protestant utopia, a new Zion, in which they would work out their collective salvation. Any deviation from the straight-and-narrow could doom everyone, so enforcing moral and religious conformity — through banishing heretics or, if necessary, even executing them — was of paramount importance. Yankeedom was meant to be a “city on a hill”, a model for mankind: if only they could be good enough, pure enough, and holy enough, God would bless them abundantly — and then everyone else, seeing their manifest blessings, would naturally emulate them and become holy themselves! The important thing, then, was not merely to do right but to be seen to do right, as an example to neighbors and foreigners alike. Yankeedom also put a tremendous emphasis on education (literacy was necessary to read the Word of God), encouraged subordinating the interests of the individual to the greater good of the community, and saw government as an extension of the citizenry. Government, then, since it was run by and for the people, was naturally called to propagate God’s will in a corrupt and sinful world by prohibiting or regulating immoral activities.
As Yankeedom moved west, out of the strict control of the Congregationalist ministers who dominated the New England colonies, they began to abandon their specific religious tenets. Sometimes this meant exciting new religious — the Yankee-settled western portions of New York State gave rise to such religious enthusiasms that people began to call it the “Burned-Over District“2 — but just as often it meant becoming a Methodist, Unitarian, or Baptist. Wherever they went, though, the Yankees clung to their belief that you could make earthly society resemble Heaven, or at least that there was no excuse for not trying as hard as you could. Yankees were at the heart of every push for social reform, from abolitionism and the temperance movement to Reconstruction, the minimum wage, women’s suffrage, and an end to child labor. For example, the members of New York City’s Committee of Fifteen, which militated against gambling and prostitution, were mostly Yankees or German-Jewish immigrants; none were culturally New Netherlanders.
By now this should all be sounding familiar. Heavy emphasis on education, embrace of the government regulation or prohibition of immoral behavior as the central bulwark of societal virtue, extremely visible adherence to highly specific rules and norms of behavior as proof of righteousness? Oh, look, it’s woke! It’s the ideology of the professional-managerial class, the meritocratic elite — it’s the same people with the same bumper stickers on the same Mercedes SUVs in the Whole Foods parking lot that you see in every major American city, regardless of which “nation” most of the other residents belong to.
There are two things going on here, I think: first, high-cultural capital Americans are far more mobile than they used to be. Plenty of people spend a few years in DC, then a few years in Austin, or maybe San Francisco or Boulder or Brooklyn, regardless of where they grew up. Second, and perhaps more important, is the role of education. Maintaining or improving your class position depends far more on a “good” college than it used to (witness the to-do when someone claims the distinction of Harvard on a night school degree!). The Yankee emphasis on education means that most of America’s prestigious colleges and universities are in Yankee-settled areas.3 Thus, membership in a higher stratum of society practically depends on four or eight years marinating in Yankeedom. What’s a kid from rural Nebraska to do?
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: American Nations, by Colin Woodard”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-19.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Oldtown Folks, as quoted in Albion’s Seed:
“The pie is an English institution, which, planted in American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum plies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies, — pies with top crusts, and pies without, — pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when let loose in a given direction.”
For more on the history of distinctly American pies, including why they’re so different from the English pies you may have seen on The Great British Bake-Off, I highly recommend BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, which is somehow both the best history of American sweets I’ve ever read and the best cookbook for them.
- Famous alumni of the Burned-Over District include the Seventh-Day Adventists, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community, and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. (Yes, Mormons are Yankees. Obviously.) But my favorite wacky Yankee religious enthusiasm — actually in Massachusetts, where they weren’t branding people with H for heretic any more — was John Murray Spear‘s “New Motive Power”, an attempt to build an electric perpetual motion machine Jesus.
- The exceptions are generally the flagship school of a large non-Yankee region or in California, the culture of which I’ve entirely elided for reasons of brevity. Sorry. The tl;dr is that Woodard argues the “Left Coast” is a hybrid of Yankees settling the cities and Greater Appalachia in the countryside, which leads to culture fairly similar to that of Yankeedom.
October 6, 2026
The Great Exhibition shows Victorians were anything but “stuffy”
That’s not to say they didn’t like accumulating “stuff”, however, as the Great Exhibition was in many ways a celebration of “stuff”:
The Crystal Palace from the northeast during the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Image from the 1852 book Dickinsons’ comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 via Wikimedia Commons.
One wonders whether enough time will ever elapse for our Victorian ancestors to break free from the prevailing stereotype that they were demure, dull, prudish, obsessed with death and weirdly repressed. Still, a full 125 years after the death of the eponymous Queen, “Victorian” remains a word synonymous with “stuffy”, “insular”, “puritanical” and “sanctimonious”.
Despite many attempts at historiographical rehabilitation, the popular conceptualisation of the Victorians sadly remains the same. The truth, however, as A.N. Wilson proves yet again with The Wise and Their Works — his latest foray into the age of Empire and top hats — is far more colourful.
Wilson’s subject is the Great Exhibition of 1851, which famously brought the whole world to Britain’s door for one giddy summer, to see the accumulated ingenuity of 19th-century manufacturers crammed under the vast glass roof of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. The east half of the building was given over to foreign exhibits, the west to British curiosities. That this was a quite coherent and acceptable division of spoils tells us something about Britain’s status as technological and political hegemon at the time.
The Exhibition was an epic testament to Victorian production and scientific experimentation. Within and without the exhibition hall, visitors could gawk at giant lumps of coal, pearls from Aberdeenshire and china clay from Cornwall. Glittering above all this raw material was the most valuable gem ever dug from the earth, the now controversial Koh-i-Noor diamond. Apparently, it wasn’t shiny enough or big enough for our supercilious Victorian brethren. Such valuable nuggets give us an insight into what eventually did for the Victorians: they were always wanting more.
Part of the point of the Great Exhibition was that the human ingenuity on display outdazzled even the wonders of the natural world. There were innumerable clocks, cameras and barometers, a printing machine capable of churning out five thousand copies of the Illustrated London News an hour, a steam hammer that could crack an egg on its lightest setting or forge a warship’s bearings on its heaviest, alongside such delightful curiosities as a collapsible piano built for yacht cabins.
Even Queen Victoria found the siamese piano with two players at each end a step too far, but I suspect it’s the sort of thing that would go viral overnight on TikTok today. It is perhaps by focusing on their obsession with the weird that we can learn that the Victorians were not so different to us after all.
There can be no better guide to the Exhibition and broader era than Wilson — a veritable time traveller and arch-Victorian himself, whose acclaimed biographies of Victoria, Albert and Dickens, as well as his more contentious life of Charles Darwin and his superb general histories, all point to a man for whom the 19th century remains a never-ending source of inspiration. This lively narrator is a boon in a history that can feel acute in scope at times.
And Wilson doesn’t beat around the bush: the Exhibition was in his words, “a monument to consumerism”. And 19th-century consumerism was not without its dark underbelly. On display, in a detail that wreaks havoc upon cosy nostalgia, were shackles and leg irons manufactured in Birmingham for export to the slave-owning American South.
As much fun as this time-travelling escapade proves to be, wandering the stalls, marvelling at taxidermied frogs, Wilson’s deeper concern lies in the bureaucratic machinery that made the whole enterprise possible. It’s easy to glaze over the grant values, leases, committee votes and acreage negotiations, but it is essential to show exactly how a project of this magnitude could ever come into being.
As Wilson puts it, in one of the book’s loveliest lines, “It is from small things … that some of the most remarkable achievements have grown”. Forget the history buffs, it’s today’s civil servants, project managers and bureaucratic naysayers who have most to learn from the Great Exhibition of 1851.
October 5, 2026
“The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a post about the need for middle class couples to budget excessive amounts of money before starting a family:
It’s not about the money.
Money has an effect, yes, but it’s a part of something bigger.
Women are genetically programmed to mate up. Not down. And not even across. Up. If she doesn’t regard a man as superior to her, she generally doesn’t want to have his babies.
What this means is that there is an extremely simple control dial on fertility.
More male power and status = more babies.
More female power and status = less babies.Yes, it really is that simple.
Why? Because every species has a mating ritual, and can only breed if they can carry it out. That’s why you can breed rats and chickens in cages, but not pandas. Different mating ritual.
And a critical element of the human mating ritual is “male impresses female”.
Not charms. Not bribes. Definitely not respects.
Impresses.
So, if you take power, wealth, and status away from men, and give it to women, you are just plain reaching for the controls and turning down the fertility dial.
If you let men keep power, wealth and status — you don’t have to give it to them because they’re the ones who create it — fertility goes up.
The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis.
This idea might horrify you. You might have been taught all your life that everyone is equal, or must be, and anything else is unfair.
Well, have you looked around you at universe? Unfairness is baked into the life cycle of every living organism, not mention the food chain. Evolutionary processes don’t care about fairness. They care what works.
Perhaps someday, we will be able to code DNA as easily as we code C++, and can decide what we want our instincts to be. But until that day, we are faced with a choice.
1. Stop using the political, legal, and mass media processes to force female equality, if not outright female supremacy, on the first world.
Or
2. Die out and be replaced by third world retards, who will stay on this planet fighting wars with increasingly rusty AK47s and then spears, until the next asteroid comes along.
October 2, 2026
QotD: Ketchup, US vs British
American tomato ketchup is unapologetically sweet – basically a tomato-flavored sugar delivery system that goes perfectly with everything from french fries to scrambled eggs (yes, we do that). It’s thick, rich, and designed to be squeezed with abandon.
British tomato ketchup, I discovered, has more of an edge. Less sweet, more vinegar-forward, with a thinner consistency that actually enhances rather than masks the food it touches.
Heinz may have started in America, but the British version tastes like its more sophisticated cousin who studied abroad and came back with refined tastes.
The real revelation? Many Brits find American tomato ketchup cloyingly sweet, while I initially found British tomato ketchup disappointingly tart. It took a few months of adjustment before I appreciated the more nuanced British approach – though I still secretly prefer the American version on certain foods.
Turns out it’s not just my imagination. American Heinz uses high fructose corn syrup while the British version uses regular sugar, which explains why my taste buds were a bit confused.
Marianne Jennings, “Beyond Ketchup & Ranch Dressing”, An American’s Guide to British Life, 2025-05-25.
September 28, 2026
“… if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison discusses the need for ceremonies or rites to signify the end of childhood and the entry into adult life … things that have almost completely disappeared in western culture over the last few decades:
I think modern society made a mistake when it assumed that getting rid of sacred rites would make people purely rational.
It didn’t.
Human beings still need thresholds, tests, stories, symbols and some clear sense that childhood has ended and adulthood has begun. We may no longer send young people into the wilderness for an initiation ordeal, but the psychological need to prove yourself, belong somewhere and become someone has not disappeared.
Traditional initiation rites were often harsh, sometimes brutally so, but they carried a clear message: your childhood identity is finished. You are now expected to accept duty, restraint, courage and responsibility.
Modern society is much less clear about that transition.
You can become legally adult at 18 while remaining psychologically dependent for years. There is often no agreed moment when society says: you are responsible now. Stop waiting to be rescued. Carry your own weight. Become useful to other people.
The danger is that the need for initiation does not disappear just because formal rituals disappear.
Young people invent substitutes.
Sometimes that becomes fraternity hazing, gangs, reckless behaviour, extreme risk-taking or ideological movements that offer belonging, enemies, heroes, rituals and moral certainty. Popular culture does something similar in a safer form. Star Wars, superhero stories, horror films and countless other myths repeat the ancient pattern: leave safety, enter chaos, face the monster, sacrifice something, return changed.
We keep telling these stories because they describe something real about human development.
The part I find most useful is that modern adulthood probably has to become more voluntary.
Nobody is going to drag most of us through a ceremonial rite and announce that childhood is over.
We have to do it ourselves.
Take responsibility before you feel completely ready. Accept obligations. Learn to tolerate discomfort. Become financially and emotionally useful. Care for somebody besides yourself. Face failure without retreating into nihilism. Test your beliefs against reality. Give up childish expectations that life should always be fair, comfortable or safe.
That is initiation stripped of superstition.
You enter difficulty voluntarily and come out carrying more responsibility than you carried before.
A mature society should probably find better ways of teaching that lesson, because if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own.
And some of those substitutes will be far worse than the rituals we thought we had outgrown.
September 26, 2026
Social media seems to be antithetical to the ability to concentrate
I took over doing the cooking in our household a couple of years ago, so I’ve been paying more attention to cooking channels on YouTube and recipe-oriented blogs than I did before. Substack‘s algorithm suggested that I might enjoy reading this post by Romilla Arber, making the case that “Mirepoix is the antithesis of Instagram, as it values what cannot be seen in the final result over what is superficial and false”:
Photo from Stirring Thoughts
This article is about mirepoix, soffritto, social media, and the secret to a happy life. A lot to cover, but as I often say, everything is interconnected.
I dislike social media, in particular Instagram. I left X many months ago, as did my business. We use Facebook for local connection and, obviously, Substack, which currently I view differently. Instagram is ridiculous. It is a waste of time to be on it, and it is populated with so many lies and misrepresentations that it is difficult to work out what is fact and what is not.
I recently read a Substack article called “Meet All The Middle Aged Women Who Don’t Exist” by Robin Levine Shobin. It exposes the accounts on Instagram supposedly belonging to women in their fifties and sixties who look fabulous but who actually do not exist: an army of AI wellness women, manufactured to make women like me feel we need what they have.
The other tranche of accounts I have noticed multiplying on Instagram, like a terrifying science-fiction virus, are those owned by “successful” entrepreneurs. Most of these are fake, and are being used to sell overpriced masterclasses and mentorships to people who lack confidence and need money. The more our brains see of the same thing, the more likely we are to believe it. This used to be called brainwashing. There is probably another techie term for it now.
These accounts don’t surprise me. But they represent one of the reasons why Instagram is a monumental waste of time.
This feeling was further compounded today when I spent a few minutes watching a video made by someone, the central thesis of which was to make the most of the precious time we have on this planet, and to value those simple experiences that we take for granted at the time. The whole premise of Instagram is to make us envious of others, the way they look and the lives they have, and by consequence not to value the lives we live. It involves endlessly scrolling through videos and images, wasting precious time.
I have also noticed that if I spend time scrolling through short-form content, I find it harder to concentrate on something that requires longer attention, like reading a book. Sad, but true. I am now retraining my brain to concentrate on reading uninterrupted for longer periods. I was surprised at how tough this would be.
This sorry state of affairs brings me to soffritto and mirepoix: the same thing really, the former being Italian and the latter French. Both are the art of chopping aromatic vegetables finely and frying them slowly, in olive oil if you are Italian and butter if you are French. These aromatic vegetables are usually onion, celery and carrot, and the ratio varies country to country. The magic is in the simplicity. They are the flavour foundation for many stocks, sauces, soups and stews all over the world. Other countries may substitute white onion for spring onion, or carrot for peppers, but the point of the process remains the same: to create beauty through time and effort.
Mirepoix is the antithesis of Instagram, as it values what cannot be seen in the final result over what is superficial and false. The preparation of the vegetables takes care and time, and it is the investment in this preparation, the foundational substance, that creates the beauty and taste of the final dish. Instagram is about superficiality. What is not obvious is worthless.
Given how late I started doing serious cooking, I doubt that I even knew what mirepoix was two years ago … but I’ve pretty much always thought of Instagram as a total waste of time among all the various social media sites people use.
Devon Eriksen stakes out the anti-Feminist position
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, science fiction author Devon Eriksen discusses the “worst and most prolonged psychological torture you can inflict on a woman”:
The worst and most prolonged psychological torture you can inflict on a woman is to convince her she’s as good as any man.
This torture is lifelong, unendurable, and once you set up the initial conditions, the pain becomes self-inflicted.
You see, women are genetically programmed for two things. First, to raise children. Second, to select a man who is superior to her to bear those children for.
Not equal.
Certainly not lesser.
Superior.
There is no point in arguing about this. It is obviously true to anyone who looks around himself without blinders made of wishful thinking.
There is no point in becoming angry at me or anyone else about this. It is true whether I wish it to be or not, and whether you wish it to be or not.
There is no point in trying to talk women out of this. It is not a part of their culture or education. It is not an individual character flaw in them. It is part of their genetic recipe.
Therefore, if you convince a woman she is equal to most men, she will only be willing to bear children to a small percentage of exceptional men.
If you convince her that she is the equal of any man, she will be unwilling to start a family with anyone.
And she will remain genetically programmed to do so.
When I was a child, and again when I was a young man, in high school and college, I noticed that the older adults who staffed the education system seemed to think “girls’ self-esteem” was our most precious resource, perhaps because it’s good for stable nuclear fusion containment, or as a growth medium for cancer-curing fruit trees.
Well, I sure hope they’re making good progress on that nuclear fusion thing, because it sure is hard on the women they grow up into.
Perhaps they thought having a high self-esteem is the same as feeling good.
Perhaps they thought half of humanity’s potential Newtons, Einsteins, and Da Vincis were hidden among the ranks of the fair sex, waiting to be unlocked by “Project Self Esteem”, and no, I did not make that name up.
Perhaps they were retarded.
They did, after all, work for the government.
Self-esteem is not being happy. Self-esteem is not even feeling good. Self-esteem is how awesome you think you are.
And if you think you’re awesome, when you’re mediocre, then you’re miserable, because everyone around you treats you a whole lot worse than you think you deserve.
High self-esteem is great for young men. It makes them take risks. And to thrive men need to take risks, and achieve things, for many reasons, one of which is that women only mate up.
High self-esteem is not so good for young women. It doesn’t get them anything they wouldn’t have already had. It just makes them less happy with it.
Sure, there’s such a thing as self-esteem too low, but if a woman can look you in the eye, instead of in the shoes, when she talks to you, she’s pretty much good to go.
Anything more than that is superfluous at best, and at worst … well, eyeball the video for a moment and you’ll see what I mean.
But the misery isn’t just personal.
This is the fertility crisis in a nutshell. We, Western civilization, have spent the past five or six decades telling little boys that they are worthless sacks of protoplasm, and telling little girls that the sun shines out of their collective girl parts.
And look what’s happened.
The fertility crisis is stupidly simple. When you elevate the status of women by giving them a greater share of respect, and of society’s wealth, which is created by men, they refuse to have children.
You can reverse this by allowing men to keep the wealth they create, instead of giving it to women.
Then they will give it to women themselves, but the women will look up to them, and there will be children again.
During the Trump administration so far, 94% of new job went to women. This is not natural or organic. This doesn’t happen on its own. This is not happening because women are “crushing it”.
Women are the same women they have always been, risk averse, clustered around average intelligence, prone to wait for others to lead.
This is not an accident. This is spin on the ball. Women vote. And pandering is an easy way to get those votes.
But give a moderately pretty one a single email job at a Silicon Valley startup, and pretty soon she thinks that the father of her children should be a “post-economic” jet-setter with the body of a professional athlete who ticks all the boxes her therapist thinks are important.
And she thinks she can pick him off a shelf at age 35.
This is a vote, conscious or not, willing or not, for the extinction of humanity.
Throughout the genetic history of humanity, approximately 80% of women had children, as opposed to 37% of men. Those numbers don’t lie. Most men either weren’t exceptional enough to breed, or died trying to become exceptional enough to breed.
Women just had to not be in the bottom quintile. Not to be horrible, or horribly unlucky.
This bears out what we already know.
And this is why Western civilization told women they were the weaker sex, the dumber sex, the more fragile sex. Why Eve was said to made to serve Adam.
Because this preserved civilization and the species.
Women were actually happier that way, because women don’t want to win. They want a winner.
But even if it didn’t, what choice would we have?
The only nations and tribes in the world which are still breeding are the ones where women are still of low status. And if you try to replace Westerners with them, try to make them into Westerners, not only will you fail, but even if you succeed, they’ll stop breeding, too.
And we know now why there are no matriarchies. Its not because men have superior strength, and enslaved women with violence. It’s because matriarchies don’t breed.
Humans are an animal, like any other animal. Every animal has mating rituals, and if those rituals can’t be conducted, there will be no next generation. This is why some animals can be bred in zoos, and others cannot.
We know what’s wrong.
We just lack the political will to fix it.
Because it’s “not fair”.
Well, of course it’s not fair. But look around you. Look at the universe. Look at history.
Whatever made you expect that things would be fair?
Or, as someone posted in the replies to this:
