Month: June 2026

The De Witt brothers offer a fierce Dutch warning, but not the cheap folkloric version. Johan and Cornelis de Witt were not dictators toppled by a purified people. They were leading republican officeholders in a decentralized republic, destroyed in August 1672 by a convergence of military panic, pamphlet warfare, Orangist factionalism, rumor, and militia-backed street…

I did not choose the term ORDOS lightly. It is meant to carry a faintly sinister resonance: foreign, cold, administrative, remote, suggestive of infiltration and sabotage without needing to name any particular enemy. The association is deliberate, but it should not be mistaken for the subject. This is not an essay advocating foreign interference, corporate…

To understand the Boers of Mercury, you have to begin with the insult of arrival. Not the romance of arrival. Not the heroic silver capsule descending on a new world while music swells and children point upward from Earth, sticky-faced and proud of their species. No. Mercury has no patience for that kind of theater….

INTRODUCTION Later in 2026, the war in the Middle East was no longer going especially well for Israel. One may argue, until one is as blue in the face as a minister at a failed press conference, about proportionality, provocation, historic grievance, legal theory, moral arithmetic, divine title deeds, and which particular idiot first placed…

They released him for humanitarian reasons since he was finally dying. This phrase was repeated three times in the document, as if repetition made mercy more plausible. Humanitarian reasons. Humanitarian grounds. In view of advanced age and terminal decline, the Committee for Penal Review of the Moscow Republic had determined that Sergei Viktorovich Lavrov, ninety-eight…