Great to see my former employer, Bloomberg, admitting that it's being lying to its readers for well over a year now, with scare stories about unprecedented deportations.

Non-EU citizens who fled Ukraine and were under temporary protection at the end of August 2026

Frans van Mieris the Elder - Brothel Scene (1658)

The rise of Napoleon’s France.

"Power is mass multiplied by cohesion."

Ramesses II inherited the Egyptian throne while in his mid-20s. A physically active pharaoh, he first led a successful campaign against Mycenaean/Cretan pirates and raiders whom the Egyptians called Sherden, and then another into Canaan, during which he accumulated much plunder while laying down the law in front of the unruly local warlords. It may have come as a surprise when news reached his court that Qadesh had again been lost to the Hittites, and the young, warlike pharaoh certainly didn't appreciate that either, so he once again prepared an army and marched towards Palestine in just the fourth year of his reign. The Egyptians had limited intelligence on the forces, tactics and intentions of Hatti. There were no permanent ambassadors in the courts, only temporary envoys, and relations hadn't been smooth since the murder of Hittite prince Zannanza en route to Egypt, some 50 years before. The Hittites weren't much better prepared, but they have the advantage of frequent campaigning not against minor Palestinian, Libyan and Nubian warlords, but against the resolute Arzawans and other enemies they found in almost every corner of their empire. Ramesses II seems to have led an army numbering in the tens of thousands, with a mobile core of a few thousand two-man chariots and large infantry units armed with bronze-tipped spears and wicker shields. Canaanite mercenaries, or troops led by Egyptian vassals whose salary was paid by the pharaoh, were part of the contingent, as well as some Sherden from the northern Mediterranean basin. The Hittite army was similar in size and composition although Hittite soldiers, many of whom hailed from colder northern regions, may have been better protected with thick woollen garments that offer limited help against arrows and spears. Muwatalli II also had to contend with an even less homogenous army, including units from 19 separate Hittite allies that Ramesses II later had recorded for posterity. The battle, the first recorded in history, turned out to be extremely confusing. mankind.substack.com/p/qades…

When the United States entered WW1 Woodrow Wilson demanded that “the spirit of ruthless brutality…enter into the very fibre of national life.” So he created the Committee on Public Information, which was inspired by an adviser who wrote, “Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms. The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false.” At Wilson’s urging, Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it punishable with 20 years in prison to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United State…or to urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things…necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war.” Government posters and advertisements urged people to report to the Justice Department anyone “who spreads pessimistic stories…cries for peace, or belittles our effort to win the war.” Against this background, while influenza bled into American life, public health officials, determined to keep morale up, began to lie. Early in September, a Navy ship from Boston carried influenza to Philadelphia, where the disease erupted in the Navy Yard. The city’s public health director, Wilmer Krusen, declared that he would “confine this disease to its present limits, and in this we are sure to be successful. No fatalities have been recorded. No concern whatever is felt.” The next day two sailors died of influenza. Krusen stated they died of “old-fashioned influenza or grip,” not Spanish flu. Another health official declared, “From now on the disease will decrease.” The next day 14 sailors died—and the first civilian. Each day the disease accelerated. Each day newspapers assured readers that influenza posed no danger. Krusen assured the city he would “nip the epidemic in the bud.” By September 26, influenza had spread across the country, and so many military training camps were beginning to look like Devens that the Army canceled its nationwide draft call. Philadelphia had scheduled a big Liberty Loan parade for September 28. Doctors urged Krusen to cancel it, fearful that hundreds of thousands jamming the route, crushing against each other for a better view, would spread disease. They convinced reporters to write stories about the danger. But editors refused to run them, and refused to print letters from doctors. The largest parade in Philadelphia’s history proceeded on schedule. The incubation period of influenza is two to three days. Two days after the parade, Krusen conceded that the epidemic “now present in the civilian population was…assuming the type found in” Army camps. Still, he cautioned not to be “panic stricken over exaggerated reports.” He needn’t have worried about exaggeration; the newspapers were on his side. “Scientific Nursing Halting Epidemic,” an Inquirer headline blared. In truth, nurses had no impact because none were available: Out of 3,100 urgent requests for nurses submitted to one dispatcher, only 193 were provided. Krusen finally and belatedly ordered all schools closed and banned all public gatherings—yet a newspaper nonsensically said the order was not “a public health measure” and “there is no cause for panic or alarm.” There was plenty of cause. At its worst, the epidemic in Philadelphia would kill 759 people in one day. Priests drove horse-drawn carts down city streets, calling upon residents to bring out their dead; many were buried in mass graves. More than 12,000 Philadelphians died—nearly all of them in six weeks. Across the country, public officials were lying. U.S. Surgeon General Rupert Blue said, “There is no cause for alarm if precautions are observed.” New York City’s public health director declared “other bronchial diseases and not the so-called Spanish influenza…[caused] the illness of the majority of persons who were reported ill with influenza.” The Los Angeles public health chief said, “If ordinary precautions are observed there is no cause for alarm.” For an example of the press’s failure, consider Arkansas. Over a four-day period in October, the hospital at Camp Pike admitted 8,000 soldiers. Francis Blake, a member of the Army’s special pneumonia unit, described the scene: “Every corridor and there are miles of them with double rows of cots …with influenza patients…There is only death and destruction.” Yet seven miles away in Little Rock, a headline in the Gazette pretended yawns: “Spanish influenza is plain la grippe—same old fever and chills.” People knew this was not the same old thing, though. They knew because the numbers were staggering—in San Antonio, 53 percent of the population got sick with influenza. They knew because victims could die within hours of the first symptoms—horrific symptoms, not just aches and cyanosis but also a foamy blood coughed up from the lungs, and bleeding from the nose, ears and even eyes. And people knew because towns and cities ran out of coffins. People could believe nothing they were being told, so they feared everything, particularly the unknown. How long would it last? How many would it kill? Who would it kill? With the truth buried, morale collapsed. Society itself began to disintegrate. In most disasters, people come together, help each other, as we saw recently with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. But in 1918, without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated. And people looked after only themselves. In Philadelphia, the head of Emergency Aid pleaded, “All who are free from the care of the sick at home… report as early as possible…on emergency work.” But volunteers did not come. The Bureau of Child Hygiene begged people to take in—just temporarily—children whose parents were dying or dead; few replied. Emergency Aid again pleaded, “We simply must have more volunteer helpers….These people are almost all at the point of death. Won’t you…come to our help?” Still nothing. Finally, Emergency Aid’s director turned bitter and contemptuous: “Hundreds of women…had delightful dreams of themselves in the roles of angels of mercy…Nothing seems to rouse them now…There are families in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food. The death rate is so high and they still hold back.” Philadelphia’s misery was not unique. In Luce County, Michigan, a couple and three children were all sick together, but, a Red Cross worker reported, “Not one of the neighbors would come in and help. I …telephoned the woman’s sister. She came and tapped on the window, but refused to talk to me until she had gotten a safe distance away.” In New Haven, Connecticut, John Delano recalled, “Normally when someone was sick in those days [people] would bring food over to other families but…Nobody was coming in, nobody would bring food in, nobody came to visit.” In Perry County, Kentucky, the Red Cross chapter chairman begged for help, pleaded that there were “hundreds of cases…[of] people starving to death not from lack of food but because the well were panic stricken and would not go near the sick.” John M. Barry, Smithsonian Magazine, 2017.

"You rarely come to be a judge without having been reasonably intelligent at one time. But like many others he has grown stupid on the bench, stupid and froward and overbearing and inordinately self-important." (Patrick O’Brian, “Master and Commander”)

As a correspondent, I had the chance to talk to about half of dozen of foreign volunteers fighting for the Russian side in the Ukraine (this well before the 2022 invasion) and I found them to be quite the mixed bag of motivations and characters.

Hans Holbein the Younger - Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1523)

Nicolaes Maes - The Account Keeper (1656)

"So, what about Finland's leader, Hitler's close friend who had long open-hearted chats with him?" "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!"

What is wrong with Finland?

"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials." (Lin Yutang)

Tutankhamun, a pharaoh who died at the age of seventeen, was the most irrelevant person ever to have become extremely famous, millennia after his death. The earliest record of nose picking in history comes from a papyrus scroll from his reign, and details the financial payment of three heads of cattle, food and lodging, to Tutankhamun's personal nose picker – which raises the question whether he was able to pick his own nose or, even more intriguingly, if nose-picker was an old profession in the luxury-loving Egyptian court. In any case, Tutankhamun died childless in 1325 BC, after a reign dominated by powerful courtiers such as Ay and Horemheb. It's at this moment that one of the greatest soap-opera-worthy turns of Egypt's history occurs. Tutankhamun's widow Ankhesenpaaten, who seems to have inherited the arrogance and grand visions of her mother Nefertiti, wrote a letter to the powerful Suppiluliuma of Hatti, asking him to send one of his sons to marry her and rule Egypt, so she wouldn't have to marry a “servant” or “subject,” meaning one of the Egyptian courtiers. Suppiluliuma received the letter while on his siege of Carchemish and, according to Hittite annals, couldn't hide his astonishment: Egypt, reputed as the most xenophobic country in the world, was asking for a foreign nobleman to become its ruler! After a Hittite ambassador to Egypt confirmed that the situation was as described by the widow, Suppiluliuma decided to take advantage of the offer and sent one of his sons, Zannanza, to marry Ankhesenpaaten. However, by the time he took this decision, Ankhesenpaaten had already been forced to marry the courtier Ay, who became pharaoh and almost certainly had Zannanza murdered on the way to Egypt. The whole affair had multiple consequences: Suppiluliuma exchanged angry letters with Ay, and unleashed his forces on the Egyptian border, adding new territory to the now Hittite empire – but Egyptian prisoners took the pandemic that killed Nefertiti's daughters to Hatti, and it later killed both Suppiluliuma and his picked successor and probably eldest son, Arnuwanda II. In the end, the throne fell to younger son Mursili II, who spent years fighting enemies who tried to take advantage of his father's passing but managed to keep the newfound Hittite empire alive and kicking — and poised to strike at Egypt. mankind.substack.com/p/akhen…

John Rawls on immigration. This is something that 99% of Rawlsians will refuse to quote or hear or even acknowledge as an existing text: “Concerning the second problem, immigration, in #4.3 I argue that an important role of government, however arbitrary a society's boundaries may appear from a historical point of view, is to be the effective agent of a people as they take responsibility for their territory and the size of their population, as well as for maintaining the land's environmental integrity. Unless a definite agent is given responsibility for maintaining an asset and bears the responsibility and loss for not doing so, that asset tends to deteriorate. On my account the role of the institution of property is to prevent this deterioration from occurring. In the present case, the asset is the people's territory and its potential capacity to support them in perpetuity; and the agent is the people itself as politically organized. The perpetuity condition is crucial. People must recognize that they cannot make up for failing to regulate their numbers or to care for their land by conquest in war, or by migrating into another people's territory without their consent.” (The Law of the Peoples, 1993)

Ira Einhorn was the master of ceremonies in the first Earth Day event in Philadelphia in 1970. He later claimed to have been instrumental in the creation of Earth Day and launching the event, but other event organizers disputed his account after he fled the US, accused of having murdered his girlfriend. He blamed the CIA, but was eventually convicted and sent to prison after decades on the lam in Europe.

Beyond Farage’s drive and political smarts, the key to Brexit lies in the fundamental legal difference regarding the concept of a constitution that exists between the United Kingdom and almost all other Western countries. Remarkably, the British are closer to the ancient Greco-Roman tradition than the Italians, Spaniards or French in that they lack a written constitution (as is also the case, for example, with Israel): in ancient Greco-Latin usage, “constitution” referred to a “regime” or the “political organization of the state.” This explains why Aristotle, for instance, compared the Spartan “constitution” with the Carthaginian one—neither of which was written down—and why Cicero discussed the Roman constitution, which likewise did not exist as a single written document. The British have been virtually unique in Europe in maintaining this ancient Indo-European idea of ​​a constitution as an outgrowth of a country’s political tradition, as a result of the local parliament’s rise to power earlier than in other nations. Thus, the nation’s primary constitutional authority is Parliament, whose acts and decisions create such underlying constitution. This is not, and has never been, the case in Spain, Italy or Germany, where parliament was never fully supreme over the monarchy or — in the French case — the President of the Republic, who became an elective French monarch from the late 19th century onwards. Countries like Spain maintain the “royal decree” as an actual legal precept and yet such a figure is absent from the British legal framework since the 17th century. All of this may seem irrelevant to the Brexit debate, but it is at the very center. Over the decades, the EU has been built through a series of straitjackets placed around member states’ institutions, gradually subjecting those bodies to EU courts and officials — a process that is considered perfectly acceptable within the legal systems of many countries. That is not the case in the United Kingdom, where Parliament is supreme: no judge can overturn a parliamentary decision on the grounds that it violates the constitution, simply because the constitution is created by Parliament itself. This contradiction generated tensions for decades and eventually created enough friction within the British political system for Farage to lead a movement demanding clarity regarding Parliament’s subordination to Brussels. The British people, as Farage had always suspected, rejected such subordination; that’s why any attempt at talking voters into a British return to the EU must obfuscate the central point. mankind.substack.com/p/brexi…

Always surprised by countries seeking to “commemorate” destructive and traumatic events. In Spain, for example, there are various statues to Islamic invaders and overlords including Abd al-Rahman III & Almanzor. Is there a need to commemorate their raids for loot & slaves and their multiple crimes and abuses?