One of the things that sort of rude to point out in our age of ‘Victim Impact Statements’ is that parents and loved ones don’t have a sort of monopoly on the murder of their loved one(s), they don’t get to dictate the response of the public, and they certainly don’t get to

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dictate the responses of the forces of authority.

Murder was and is an offense against ‘the King’s Peace,’ (or its American equivalent), and it’s punished as such. Our modern age of family members setting the pace of Don’t Look Back in Anger, and saying ‘Don’t you dare use

Finished this. Decent, but not at all Heather’s best, and after Charlemagne you can really tell that Heather—a Classicist whose focus is the late Roman Empire—is out of his area and leaning heavily on the work of others.

This isn’t at all the place to start if you’re new to Christian history and looking for an introductory general history, because it isn’t that sort of book at all. (I recommend Henry Chadwick and R.W. Southern’s books in the Penguin History of Christianity for that.)

The dates—“300-1300 AD”—and indeed the title itself get at

Peter Heather’s latest, on the Christian conversion of the Roman elite over the course of the 4th century.

“Throughout history, elites—who have the most to lose and gain—have been particularly vulnerable when major cultural change transforms the political processes governing the distribution of favour. Even if elements of the Roman elite were entirely genuine in their adoption of Christianity, the real point..is that—genuine or not—the vast majority felt that they had no choice but to come into line in some way with the new imperial cult..The emperor was

Excellent piece. On the female officers “deescalating” situations meme beloved by libs, May 1991 DC riots a good example.

Black female officer tries arresting a drunk Hispanic guy in front of his friends; he wasn’t gonna go meekly for a scrawny woman in front of his chums (let

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alone for a black chick, IMO); he brawls and, being a scrawny woman, she goes right for the gun and shoots and paralyzes him. Days of clashes between Salvadorans and blacks.

That quick lizard brain calculus is made just about every week in the US, on street corners and on the

Never really ‘got’ Kissinger Derangement Syndrome.

These are good; Ferguson very pro/‘authorized bio,’ Dallek a bit ‘long Wiki article.’ Hanhimäki especially level-headed (and a good example, like Pekka Hämäläinen, of a Finnish scholar bringing some much-needed distance to an American subject.)

Normally loath to play this card, but have never been able to shake the sense that Kissinger would not induce quite such rage if it weren’t for his ethnic origins; just wouldn’t get people so excited…Like breathless anti-Zionism from people

A good article on anti-aging stuff, but more about the who’s right/who’s wrong angle.

Would like an article that focuses on the more woo-woo stuff. Something deeply post-religious, even sordid to billionaires hooking themselves up to their blood boys in a desperate attempt to

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claw out an extra two or three decades from their allotted three score & ten. Rockefeller almost cracked a century, but to the extent such things are ever anything more than a genetic crapshoot he was a teetotal Baptist, so that sort of makes my point in a different way. With

NYTs obit for pilot-engineer Don Bateman, inventor of the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, which has saved untold lives since the 1970s.

In 1971 an Alaska Airlines flight that was using an early model of his system crashed with no survivors near Juneau. Weeks later Bateman and a pilot took a small aircraft and followed the flight path, Bateman monitoring his invention all the while. They pulled up with seconds to spare, Bateman realized his warnings didn’t give enough reaction time to large passenger jets, so he worked to raise the warning

Review of a new book on Malawi.

Author taught Classics there. Searching through the library of one of Dr. Banda’s Ozymandian abandoned palaces, finds a 1584 edition of Caesar’s ‘Gallic Wars,’ ‘Ex Libris H. Kamuzu Banda.’ The Classical curriculum of some Malawian schools.

“..the poems, plays, and epics of Virgil, Euripides, or Homer often speak with ‘robust directness’ to Malawian villagers about farming, witchcraft, war or death in a way they no longer can to Londoners or New Yorkers.”

It’s sort of illegal to notice but in the story of “tens of thousands of British and American citizens trying to get out of Sudan!!!” you see how every story has an immigration angle in the 21st century Anglosphere.

Yes, there are some adventuresome gap year and TEFL types, but they are not at all the majority of the 15-30,000 “Americans,” “Britons,” “Australians” etc etc. Majority are ‘paper citizens,’ whose British or American passport is mostly just a meal ticket and, on occasions like this, potentially a Get Out of Jail Free Card, and the news has

It’s especially funny with Prokofiev because like many great artists he had an almost Asperger’s level unawareness of the world beyond his art. When he left Russia for a tour of the US in early 1918 he was surprised to find that he would have to petition the Bolsheviks for

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permission, and that his leaving the country would be seen as a political act, a little thing called the Russian Revolution having started a few months previously, and that his journey to America would have to involve taking the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok for a passage across

Heather MacDonald’s new book, a must-read.

On most *whites on the Right* not wanting to hear hate facts, either:

“When I speak on policing, I have been told repeatedly by white listeners that hearing the data on disproportionate black crime makes them ‘uncomfortable.’” This is so true, BTW. You get this IRL, with GrillCon relatives etc. They’re pretty sound, they’ll joke about “fiery but mostly peaceful” and what not, but if you go into FBI stats and 60/13 it’s like pouring salt on a snail. ‘Whoa man, I don’t know about all that...’

Pretty good NYTs essay on micro-plastics. I thought he’d be able to get through it without the obligatory counter-signal against the Evil Right; sure enough..

Joe Rogan cares about this but he’s a “meathead” purveyor of “masculinity.” [Insert very insightful Joe Rogan quote] As with macro-level environmentalism, RWers looking to build bridges to the Left are looking for love in all the wrong places. He cares about the issue, but he spends the second half of the essay apologizing for caring about an issue that Bad People also care about. When they

Rather bland extract from a new book on Tocqueville’s travels in Algeria.

Abdelkader, hero of Algerian resistance to France in the 1830s-40s, was one of the great men of his era, widely admired. There is an Elkader, Iowa, named after him.

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Have often thought the widespread Western admiration for Emir Abdelkader and Imam Shamil, hero of Dagestani resistance to Russian conquest, is one of many small but telling points against Edward Said’s ahistorical nonsense. Both men were rightly

BTW none of this represents a contradiction RE the American Empire, which in many ways had a banner 2022. Think Brezhnev’s USSR; all the jokes about ‘Upper Volta with ICBMs’ were true; but if Gorbachev hadn’t been such a pussy, there’s no reason it wouldn’t still exist today.

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Ultimately This Sort of Thing *does* represent a threat to the American Empire—IMO, it’s what Bluecheck IR types really mean when they moan about long term ‘domestic challenges’ to ‘America’s global leadership’ or whatever, though they have to cloak it in concern-trolling

“New Orleans now has the eighth highest murder rate in the world..New Orleans is more dangerous than any city in Africa.”

Excellent on the post-2020 decline of American cities.

Reminder that George Floyd is the most important man of the 2020s, Putin a distant second.

https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1641372582233493505

“To put this in another context: life expectancy in Cuba and Thailand is higher than life expectancy in the USA, and if trends persist, life expectancy in America will soon be overtaken by Vietnam.”

Meant to say more about Nirad Chaudhuri. Will limit it to highly recommending ‘Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.’ NYRB has a nice edition; really wish they’d bring out ‘Thy Hand, Great Anarch!’, his second volume of autobiography/history. Worth tracking down second-hand.

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Wolpert was great at big, meat & three veg cradle to grave 1-volume scholarly biographies of great statesmen, which I love and think are an undervalued today. His Nehru, Jinnah, and Z.A. Bhutto bios are good.

Tidrick’s Gandhi bio is great in that it avoids the sentimentality

Christopher Caldwell in Claremont Review of Books on Modi and the BJP.

“Modi wins big because Indians see him as the embodiment of a different idea of India, a majoritarian one that, necessarily or not, was suppressed in the 20th century.” Yes. On the stupidity of bracketing Modi with Trump/Western populism.txt:

“Western populist leaders are all, in one way or another, trying to stem the decadence of their once-great countries. Modi’s India has plenty of problems, but decadence isn’t one of them.”

Helen Andrews on South Africa.

Author “tells of a [white] progressive politician who forged what he thought was a deep friendship with Thabo Mbeki [pre-1994.] After coming to power, Mbeki never spoke to him again. He no longer had any use for him.”

He drank himself to death. Book’s author—a white American woman—is robbed at gunpoint by black youths.

She “worried my reaction was irrational and racially biased.” There is literally nothing you can do for a certain (and ever-growing) kind of white person. Nothing.

NYTs on foreign volunteers in 🇺🇦:

“..one of the largest 🇺🇦 volunteer groups is embroiled in a power struggle involving an Ohio man who falsely claimed to have been both a US Marine and a Longhorn Steakhouse assistant manager.”

@paul_hundred Hundoist International Brigades when? “Mr. Vasquez, in fact, was never deployed to Kuwait, Iraq, or anywhere else..He specialized in fuel and electrical repairs [basically was a Reservist who got an OTH/Dishonorable discharge as a PFC, bigged himself up in CT as Rambo.]

Drawback of all-volunteer USM is that it’s

Credit Suisse collapse aside it’s madness for Switzerland to fudge a neutrality that survived the Kaiser, Hitler, and 40+ years of Cold War. As frustrating as a thing like Swiss neutrality can be, it’s very useful to have these sorts of Rick’s Bar in Casablanca countries, and, let’s be blunt, especially a European ‘Rick’s Bar,’ because the alternatives are the UAE, Singapore a bit, Oman for things Iranian, which are...well, not governed by Swiss. You this in 2010 when everyone smacked Israel on the knuckles after they smoked that Hamas heavy in Dubai;

Matt Crawford on what America’s long slide out of the First World means in practice.

“You, brainwashed to believe in the Weberian version of bureaucracy as impersonal rationality, are too naive to navigate a real one in most parts of the world. Too European.”

Careful, Matthew!

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This is more or less everything I believe, and why I have such hatred for the hollow men and women responsible for the last 40-odd years. We didn’t lick all our Nice Things off a tree, and barring a massive (and, IMO, unlikely) course correction, the rest of this century in the