The most famous piece called "Sarabande" in the West is probably Händel's, although Bach did one as well.
The Jesuit priest Juan de Mariana thought it indecent, describing it in his Tratato contra los juegos públicos (Treatise Against Public Amusements, 1609) as "a dance and song so loose in its words and so ugly in its motions that it is enough to excite bad emotions in even very decent people". A character in an entremés by Cervantes alluded to the dance's notoriety by saying that hell was its "birthplace and breeding place" (in Spanish: origen y principio).It was banned in Spain in 1583 but was nevertheless still performed and frequently cited in literature of the period (for instance, by Lope de Vega).
So in other words, a very good dance. Festive, one imagines.
Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, 80 are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.
With nearly twice the personnel in the region than their enemies, the German forces could still counter the Allied forces in Reims, but French troops obliterated German forces in the area while taking little damage amongst their ranks. As this staged attack went on, German units were working their way up the Marne River, until they encountered the 3rd ID.A frenzied fight, known as the Second Battle of the Marne, ensued with 3rd ID holding their ground against an overwhelming German force. Despite throwing tremendous assets at the Allies in this region, the German Army’s only success was capturing the city of Mezy, which lies along the Marne River. However, by July 17, the Allied forces were able to seize back the city before the enemy could advance into Paris.... The 3rd ID proved to be a cornerstone of the defense of the Marne River and the entire region. The division’s valiant stand against a large German force marked a turning point in the war. This proved to be the last time the German Army was on the offensive during World War I. As a result of their heroics during this battle, 3rd ID troops came to be known as the “Rock of the Marne” and their motto “Nous Resterons Là” (We Shall Remain Here) were cemented.
Venezuela had a Russian-supplied integrated system focused on protecting Caracas and strategic sites. This included long-range, medium-range, short-range, and point-defense systems, supplemented by anti-aircraft guns and fighter interceptors.
They had around 12 batteries of S-300VM (approximately 1–2 divisions sapid effective against aircraft, cruise missiles, and some ballistic threats up to 200–250 km. Medium-range: Buk-M2E (SA-17 Grizzly) systems, with 9–12 batteries up to 45–50 km. Medium/short-range: S-125 Pechora-2M with dozens of units for low-to-medium altitude threats. Short-range/point defense: Tor-M1/Tor-M2E (up to 10 systems in some reports) and possible Pantsir systems. They had 5,000 MANPADS Russian Igla-S for low-flying threats like helicopters and cruise missiles.
Anti-aircraft artillery: Over 400 pieces, including 200+ ZU-23-2 23mm twins and 114+ 40mm Bofors L/70 (some modernized).
Aerial component: Su-30MK2 Flanker fighters (around 20–21 operational) for interception, with limited F-16s (few airworthy due to maintenance issues).
All that proved useless or was neutralized on January 3, 2026 practically instantaneously.
He is always worth reading.
Thomas Macaulay's account of the Revolution in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second exemplifies the "Whig history" narrative of the Revolution as a largely consensual and bloodless triumph of English common sense, confirming and strengthening its institutions of tempered popular liberty and limited monarchy. Edmund Burke set the tone for that interpretation when he proclaimed: "The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty."
Today's revolution was even less bloody than that, apparently; I haven't heard any casualty figures from the other side, but we seem to have lost no ships and no fighting men. That's shocking given that the raid was conducted with helicopters over a nation with many, many surface to air missiles. That, combined with the surprise and the lack of leaks from "government sources speaking anonymously because they lacked authority to talk to the press" suggests that some genuine progress has been made since the Afghan withdrawal in military leadership and coherence.
However, it also suggests a strong performance by the clandestine service. While of course I can't prove it, the striking likelihood is that our clandestine service under the present leadership is more capable both of penetration of a hostile regime and of keeping its own secrets.
Let us hope this all remains as bloodless as possible.
UPDATE: The NYT reports some 40 Venezuelans may have died in the action; they also confirm a successful and lengthy clandestine operation to map and prepare for the raid.
In August, a clandestine team of C.I.A. officers slipped into Venezuela with a plan to collect information on Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president, whom the Trump administration had labeled a narco-terrorist.
The C.I.A. team moved about Caracas, remaining undetected for months while it was in the country.... It was a highly dangerous mission. With the U.S. embassy closed, the C.I.A. officers could not operate under the cloak of diplomatic cover. But it was highly successful. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that because of the intelligence gathered by the team, the United States knew where Mr. Maduro moved, what he ate and even what pets he kept.
That information was critical to the ensuing military operation, a pre-dawn raid Saturday by elite Army Delta Force commandos, the riskiest U.S. military operation of its kind since members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in a safe house in Pakistan in 2011.
The result was a tactically precise and swiftly executed operation that extracted Mr. Maduro from his country with no loss of American life, a result heralded by President Trump amid larger questions about the legality and rationale for the U.S. actions in Venezuela.
Mr. Trump has justified what was named Operation Absolute Resolve as a strike against drug trafficking.
Although we usually talk about the Abbotobad raid as a military raid, officially the SEALs who carried it out were placed in the temporary command of the CIA for the purpose. This was to cover a legality: the legal authority to do it isn't military, but the Agency's. You may remember a similar plot device in the movie Sicario, where the Agency has to get a fig leaf of an FBI agent in order to establish a 'joint task force' that can operate inside the United States (normally, CIA employees aren't armed inside the United States except for training, and to provide security and such; and indeed, relatively few of them are armed even outside of the borders; in the movie, CIA SAD (now SAC) wanted to run an operation just a bit within the border, so they needed a fig leaf).
I keep expecting to learn that some similar legal fig leaf was deployed here -- there was an FBI agent along on the raid, apparently, which is being described as a law-enforcement matter in pursuit of indictments in US Federal Court. So far, however, I haven't read of that being the case; the NYT piece says the FBI HRT was there in case he was needed to negotiate a surrender. It would only be a fig leaf in any case, but I'm surprised if it were omitted because it's the kind of thing that is usually done by the lawyers.
Our research at the Institute for Family Studies routinely reveals that the women in America who are forging the most meaningful and happy lives are married mothers. In fact, married mothers are nearly twice as likely to be “very happy” with their lives as their single, childless peers.And while marriage rates increasingly fall along ideological lines, female happiness doesn’t: the newest data show that married liberal women with children are now a staggering 30 percentage points more likely to say they are “very happy” or “pretty happy” than liberal women who are single and childless. What’s even more striking is the trend among prime-aged women 25 to 55: happiness among single, childless liberal women has plummeted since “the Great Awokening” of the last decade while it remains high for their peers who have managed to marry and have a family. The tragic irony is that the very group of women who are most likely to think marriage and family are an obstacle to happiness—women on the left—are less happy than their peers on the right, in part, because they are less likely to be married with children.
They don't really consider the perspective of the young men, whom they chiefly describe in terms of the female complaints against them. They do add some context about how the same forces making young men less marriageable are also making young women so in other ways, which is an attempt at balance, but they don't entertain any of the expected perspectives about how marriage is a bad deal for men.
I realize that the advocates for that position are often bitter, angry, or otherwise unlikeable figures. However, there's an important aspect of the problem that they have identified, one that is persuasive to a lot of young men. The institution of marriage has inherited very high guardrails to protect the interests of the mothers and children that it is expected to produce. In an era in which women initiate most of the divorces, however, these guardrails have not been rebalanced to protect the interests of the men who join the institution. A man wagers his lifetime capacity to earn a decent living disproportionately, while the odds of him getting to retain access to the children the marriage produces is also greatly unbalanced. There's something like a 50/50 shot that he'll end up without his children while subjected to punishing alimony and child support payments to a woman who decided to cheat on him and leave him.
The zero-sum-game aspect of any rebalancing on that score means that making marriage more attractive to young men would make it less attractive to young women. That's a hard problem not tackled by the article.
Another serious problem is their treatment of the question in terms of the parents' happiness. Marriage's basic value as an institution is that it sets up an environment in which child rearing is more stable: marriage is not really about the good of the parents but about the good of the children, in other words. That it makes the women happier is well-studied and adequately demonstrated, but also beside the point. The point is that men and women who have sex are likely to produce children, and those children need to be supported, educated, and fitted out to join society over the course of decades. An enduring institution that achieves that most difficult of tasks is necessary for humanity's continuance.
Thus, this sort of commentary is entirely missing the point:
The nature and content of digital offerings are degrading men’s marriageability and women’s, especially liberal women’s, interest in putting a ring on it. Neither sex is developing the capacity to embrace self-sacrifice or long-suffering commitment, precisely the virtues which marriage requires. They’re also what makes marriage so life-giving, character building and personally gratifying. Psychologists have long documented this paradox: deep, lasting happiness is much more strongly tied to meaning than it is to pleasure.
No doubt, if you are selling marriage in terms of happiness, "self-sacrifice" and "long-suffering" as requirements are going to make the whole project seem like insanity. It may in fact actually produce happiness as well, but it doesn't seem likely to; and all of us who have been married a long time will attest that self-sacrifice and long-suffering are in fact highly accurate descriptions (both for ourselves and our spouses!).
Very likely the real problem is that the institution is failing because it no longer fits the civilization we've evolved into. I don't know how you sustain marriage in a civilization that treats the children as trivial non-considerations, and the 'happiness of the adults' as the only thing that matters.
Who gives a damn if the parents are happy? It turns out they will be, more likely than if they remain unmarried; but that's not the point at all. It's just a good thing that falls out of it, as the old virtue of chivalry -- the quality that allows a man to tame a horse and ride it to war -- happens to produce gentlemen who can treat women better than other men normally do. That's good, but the point wasn't the gentle treatment of women: the point was the cavalry.
By that token, if you don't have horses anymore you won't get much chivalry; and if you don't care about the children predominantly, marriage is going to fail. Slowly, as chivalry did, but surely, all the same.
[T]hroughout the American Revolution, Patriots exhibited a singular ability to create their own capable military forces ex nihilo. And they ingeniously supplied and equipped local militias in addition to their eventual establishment of a Europeanized and professional army.... [T}he spirited “army” that began the war at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill in 1775 bore little resemblance to the multifaceted and lethal military that defeated the British at Cowpens and at Yorktown in 1781 to end the war.
I've walked the battlefield at Cowpens, which isn't all that far from here.
Specifically, Morgan deployed the unblooded irregulars in two lines at the very front of his formation, and the hardened militia in two mutually-reinforcing lines closer to his command position. He did this between two rivers, which created a funnel that couldn't be avoided. As he anticipated, the first two lines quickly broke and withdrew in the appearance of a rout. Because they couldn't flee in any direction except towards his stiffer lines, they fled towards his hardened units. This drew the British cavalry into a charge against what they thought was a rout that separated them from the rest of their forces.
When they hit the hardened infantry, they were defeated in detail -- indeed, slaughtered so thoroughly that the unit couldn't be reconstituted, the few survivors having to be broken up and sent to other units. The Continental forces then charged with bayonets, capturing two cannons, forcing the surrender of a Highlander unit, and causing what remained of the British cavalry to flee and the rest to withdraw in the best order they could manage.
This followed the victory of the "Overmountain Men" at King's Mountain (the town of which is in North Carolina, also relatively nearby, but the battle a few miles south in South Carolina) and led to the ultimate victory at Yorktown, as this whole wing of the British Army in the South was crippled and had to withdraw to Cornwallis' forces. Quoting Wikipedia:
Along with the Loyalist defeat at Kings Mountain, Cowpens was a serious blow to Cornwallis, who might have defeated much of the remaining American troops in South Carolina had Tarleton won at Cowpens. Instead, the battle set in motion a series of events leading to the end of the war. Cornwallis abandoned his pacification efforts in South Carolina, stripped his army of its excess baggage, and pursued Greene's force into North Carolina. Skirmishes occurred at the Catawba River (including the Battle of Cowan's Ford on February 1, 1781) and other fords. Yet, after a long chase Cornwallis met Greene at the Battle of Guilford Court House, winning a victory but so weakening his army that he withdrew to Wilmington to rest and refit. Later, when Cornwallis went into Virginia, Washington and his French ally Rochambeau, seized this opportunity to trap and defeat him at the siege of Yorktown, which caused the British to seek peace terms with the Americans that would acknowledge the United States' independence.
In the opinion of John Marshall, "Seldom has a battle, in which greater numbers were not engaged, been so important in its consequences as that of Cowpens." It gave Greene his chance to conduct a campaign of "dazzling shiftiness" that led Cornwallis by "an unbroken chain of consequences to the catastrophe at Yorktown which finally separated America from the British crown".
Massive scandal:Fulton County admits they "violated" the rules in 2020 when they certified ≈315K early votes that lacked poll workers' signatures"We don't dispute the allegation."
“China supports Venezuela’s request to convene an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a news conference in Beijing.Guo said China “opposes all forms of unilateral bullying and supports countries in safeguarding their sovereignty and national dignity,” according to the Beijing-based daily Global Times.
If adopted, the plan would usher in some of the most significant changes at the military’s highest ranks in decades, in part following through on Hegseth’s promise to break the status quo and slash the number of four-star generals in the military. It would reduce in prominence the headquarters of U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command by placing them under the control of a new organization known as U.S. International Command, according to five people familiar with the matter....The plan also calls for realigning U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Northern Command, which oversee military operations throughout the Western Hemisphere, under a new headquarters to be known as U.S. Americas Command, or Americom, people familiar with the matter said... Combined, the moves would reduce the number of top military headquarters — known as combatant commands — from 11 to eight while cutting the number of four-star generals and admirals who report directly to Hegseth. Other remaining combatant commands would be U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Space Command, U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Transportation Command.
USEUCOM and USAFRICOM used to be one command, and are both still co-located in Stuttgart, Germany. AFRICOM remains small, and won't be a particular problem to re-integrate.
That's not true for USCENTCOM. I used to work at Central Command years ago. It is a huge headquarters, really a whole compound of various buildings and trailers on MacDill AFB near Tampa. They also have a forward deployed headquarters at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Trying to integrate that monster into an even larger command with massive responsibilities is going to be a fun exercise.
I wonder if this is the latest version of the 'pivot to Asia' we've been hearing about since the Obama terms, which the military has found difficult to actualize. I notice that USINDOPACOM is not on the chopping block; if the idea is to radically shrink our commitments in the Middle East and Europe, we could focus on the Western hemisphere and on keeping China hemmed in behind the first island chain.
Separately, another article that came to my attention was a significant re-thinking of information warfare by the US Army. It was published in Small Wars Journal. Very long-time readers will remember that I wrote for SWJ in 2007, as an embedded correspondent with Special Operations forces conducting combat operations against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu Sayyaf. Since then SWJ joined the Foundation for Defense of Democracies for a long stint, but now is no longer there: they've moved out to Arizona State University since the death of their founder, Dave Dillege (another name that long-timer readers will recognize). It's good to see the US Army is using them to release major publications; clearly the move out of the Swamp hasn't hurt their influence in the community.
The problem they're talking about is one I wrote about extensively during the Security Studies Group era; it's a problem that is bigger than the Army, too. If this latest reshuffle solves every problem the Army has (which is likely won't, though it may improve things), the USG will still have significant issues coordinating its information warfare efforts. If you want a brief introduction to the problem, this panel on Russian disinformation efforts opens with a short talk on that topic.
Here is a poem that occurred to me this morning as I awoke from a dream. I don't recall the dream, as I usually do not, but I assume someone was annoying me with whining in it given the content of the verse I woke up with today.
I’m tired of whiny people
No matter how many there be;
It doesn’t matter if one or two
A half a dozen or quite a slew;
It doesn’t matter if there’s only three
Their whining does not interest me.
The reformulated pizza is only slightly different in appearance and virtually identical in taste to the original pizza recipe, and is still prepared using traditional Italian baking methods....The pizza was rated very highly for both appearance and taste by both children and adult tasters... Among the children, 46 % rated the pizza as good as their usual one and 35 % rated it better (i.e. 81 % at least as good as), moreover 41 % would eat the pizza instead of their usual one. Most adults (57 %) rated the pizza as good as their usual one, with 20 % better (i.e. 77 % found it at least as good as their usual pizza); 69 % of the adults would buy it instead of their usual one. Most would be willing to pay an extra 50 pence for a nutritionally balanced pizza....
Our study therefore shows that, perhaps contrary to popular opinion, it is perfectly possible to have an attractive, nutritionally balanced meal as a single-item pizza meal.
"An extra 50 pence" is, if I understand correctly, about sixty-seven cents.
In a disturbing return to the dark days of the Taliban's first rule, tens of thousands of Afghan spectators flocked to a sports stadium to witness a 13-year-old boy carry out a public execution.... The incident brings to 12 the number of men publicly put to death since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, in the wake of the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces.The alarming spike in public executions comes as Western travel influencers post glowing videos on Instagram about their adventures in Afghanistan, even as the UN warns of a rapid human rights deterioration.The 13-year-old boy shot his family's killer three times in front of 80,000 Afghan sports stadium spectators, after his relatives refused the Taliban's offer to pardon the convicted criminal.
The country's supreme court said the victim, identified as Mangal, was guilty of having slaughtered 13 members of the teenager's family, including several children and three women....The executions are carried out as part of the Taliban’s implementation of 'Qisas', which translates as 'retaliation in kind' – effectively an eye for an eye.... The execution was ordered after a death sentence was passed down by a court, an appeals court and the top court itself, and approved by Afghanistan's supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada.The man had been convicted along with others of entering a family home in Khost province and shooting to death an extended family in January 2025.He had been sentenced to 'retaliatory punishment' for murder after his case was 'examined very precisely and repeatedly', the court said.'The families of the victims were offered amnesty and peace, but they refused,' it added.
