World War Two
Published 30 Nov 2024Today Indy and Spartacus sit down to answer all kinds of questions about the first year of WW2. How phony was the Phony War? How do you go around the Maginot Line? And much more! Also, Indy sings a song about Charles Huntziger.
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December 1, 2024
“Huntziger must be shot!” – WW2 Commentary 1939-1940
“Fellow Canadians, forget your dire financial plight … it’s only a ‘vibecession'”
Tristin Hopper imagines what Chrystia Freeland might be confiding to her diary after she blithely assured struggling Canadians that no, really, everything’s just fine and dandy and you’re being deceived by “bad vibes”:
Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking.
Monday
As a former journalist, I am fully aware of the awesome power of the press to distort and pervert reality. Here we all are in 2024 Canada. There is food. There is shelter. There is breathable air. The vast majority of us will go through the rest of the fiscal year without being stabbed on public transit.
And yet, to hear the misinformation and disinformation trafficked by the media, you would think we live in some kind of violent, economically depressed hellscape.
Well, this kind of mendacity has consequences: A nationwide hysteria of bad feelings and negative energy. A fanatical devotion to bad vibes in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I don’t purport to know how to cure such irrational malaise, but I will be very surprised if $250 each and some tax-free liquor and Christmas shopping doesn’t do it.
Tuesday
Donald Trump’s threat of 25 per cent tariffs is easily the most serious challenge I have faced as Canadian finance minister. The United States is our largest trading partner, and the suspension of free trade across our shared border would invite economic ruin the likes of which we’ve never seen.
Worse, Trump is immune to our usual strategies. We suggested sending his tariff threat to committee, or having it reviewed by a Crown inquiry, but neither offer was accepted. Rather, they want us to stem the tide of illegal migrants using Canada as a base to enter the United States. They are under the impression — let’s call it “bad vibes” — that this is a problem.
But let nobody say that the integrity of our trade flows are not my department’s top priority. As such, we are immediately introducing a one-time bursary of between $150 and $240 paid to any resident of Canada who can prove they have not attempted illegal entry of the United States within the past 12 months.
Retrofitting Aluminium Clamps | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published Jul 26, 2024Aluminium clamps are lightweight and ideal for 99% of woodworking.
I have tried almost all of them and been disappointed because they can look the same on the outside, but it’s the thickness of the walls of the box section that counts. This is how I retrofit all of my ‘U’ shaped rectangular bar sash clamps.
It takes only a few minutes to do each one, but what a difference it makes when you do. Lightweight but with great strength; once done, my clamps are up there with the best of the best.
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QotD: Recording and codifying the land that William conquered
I hesitate to recommend academic books to anyone, but I’ll make an exception for James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Subtitled “how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed”, it’s the best long-form exposition I know of, that explains how process and outcome first deform, then negate each other.
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In brief, Scott argues that the process of making a society “legible” to government officials obscures social reality, to the point where the government’s maps and charts and graphs take on a life of their own. It’s recursive, such that those well-intentioned schemes end up first measuring, then manipulating, the wrong thing in the wrong way, to the point that the social “problem” the process was supposed to address drops out entirely — all you have, at the end, is powerpoint girls critiquing spreadsheet boys because their spreadsheets don’t have enough animation, and vice versa.
Scott doesn’t use the Domesday Book as an example (IIRC from a graduate school class 20-odd years ago, anyway), but it’s one we’re probably all familiar with. The first thing William the Conqueror needed to know is: what, exactly, have I conquered? So he sent out the high-medieval version of spreadsheet boys to take a comprehensive survey of the kingdom. Turns out the Duke of Earl’s demense runs from this creek to that rock. He has five underlings, and their domains run from etc.
The point of all this, of course, was so that Billy C. could call the Duke of Earl on the carpet, point to the spreadsheet, and say “You owe me a cow, three chickens, and two months in the saddle as back taxes.” It worked great, except when — as, it seems, is inevitable — the high-medieval equivalent of the spreadsheet boys did the high-medieval version of “ctrl-c”; just copying and pasting the information over. Eventually the tax situation got way out of whack, as it did for most every pre-modern government running a similar system — one of the reasons declining Chinese dynasties had such fiscal problems, for instance, is that the tax surveys only got updated every two centuries or so, such that a major provincial lord was still only paying 20 silver pieces in taxes, when he should’ve been paying 20,000 (and his peasants were all paying 20 when all they could afford was 2).
In other words: unless the spreadsheet boys periodically go out and check that the numbers on their spreadsheets actually correspond in some systematic, more-or-less representative way to some underlying social reality, government policy is being set by make-believe.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
