Quotulatiousness

February 11, 2023

Americans tend to think other countries are just like America, but with weird accents and quaint clothing

Filed under: Education, Europe, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on the common problem Americans (and to a lesser extent, Canadians) have in trying to understand other nations even if they’ve done some international travel:

I also see every country, regardless of their history making the assumption that the modus operandi and motives of other cultures and organizations is exactly the same as theirs. I’ve now mentioned about a million times the idiots who went over as Human Shields to Iraq because “they can’t even provide drinking water for their people, how would they have missiles” thereby completely missing the fact that other countries — dictatorships at that — have different priorities than say the US or England, even. In the same way, Portugal assumes that every country is as fraught as corruption as they are. Which works fine for other Latin countries, but fails them when it comes to other places, because as corrupt as we are … yeah. It’s nowhere near there yet. Russia assumes everyone moves, breathes and thinks only about them, and that everyone’s intention is to threaten them or conquer them, because they are obsessed with their dreams of national glory, and they think they should rule the world. And the US by and large goes around like a large vaguely autistic child who really, really, really doesn’t understand how different it is from other nations, or if it does assumes it’s worse.

Look, it’s part of the reason our intelligence services are so sucky. To completely understand what other countries are doing and why, you have to know they have very different cultures. They’re not you. Most countries can sort of extrapolate other countries, but America is so different we suck at it. This is why we tend to think places like the USSR (Russia’s party mask) were totes super powers. Because for America to do and say the things they did and said, we’d have to be very sure of our power. But other countries aren’t America. So we go through the world acting like gullible giants.

In fact Americans have one of the weirder cultures in the world. It’s just not in your face weird as China (whose history reads like they should be extra-terrestrials.) It’s subtle and more in the mental furniture.

Because of this, and because we’re a continent-sized nation, born and bred Americans (as opposed to imports like me) read not just the rest of the world but history hilariously wrong. (The history part is because at least when I went through school here — one year — American schools suck at teaching history. It’s all names and dates, not “Why did France do that?” Yeah, probably not worse than the rest of the world, now that all the books have just-so Marxist explanations, but still stupid.)

I had friends in my writers’ group back when who were writing, say, ancient Egyptian families and couldn’t understand in most of them the teens wouldn’t be/act the same as American teens now. Heck, my dad’s generation in Portugal, less than 100 years ago weren’t “teens” really. Their equivalent was under ten. Because by 12 most of the boys in the village were apprenticed in the job they’d have for life. (And dad was in school, yes, but it was way tougher than even I had.) They didn’t have time. And even I — and you guys know my basic disposition — didn’t sass my parents as American teens do, because there was a deep “fund” of “respect the elders” in the culture. I still have trouble calling people older than I — even colleagues — by their first name.

And then there’s the hilarious — or sad — misunderstandings like the Human Shields mentioned above. It’s sad, because they will buy other countries at face value, but are willing to entertain their own country might be evil. Which is why we have a large contingent of open-mouth guppies who think that the US invented slavery. Even though places around the world still have slavery. Including China, where everyone is a slave, it’s the degree that varies, of course.

The problem is made worse — not better — by idiotic travel abroad.

To understand the differences in a country, you need to live with them, as one of them, for a while. You need to speak the language well enough you understand overheard conversations. Etc.

My experience coming over as an exchange student for 12th grade was about ideal. I lived with an American family, as one of their kids, and attended a school nowhere USA (okay, a suburb of Akron, Ohio) and yeah, I had slight celebrity status in the school — being one of three foreign exchange students — but not that much. So I got to experience the normal life of normal people in normal circumstances, which was an eye-opener.

I always wanted my kids to follow me in this experience, but you know, things got complicated around the time they were of age to do it. So they didn’t. They still have experienced life as an every day foreigner when we visit my parents. In fact the issue there is that they never get past the irritation “What do you mean we can’t do that” and towards “oh, it’s just different. Still sucky, but different.”

Going over for two weeks, with or without the guided tour, staying in nice hotels and associating only with people at your social level and not past the level of polite interaction does not enlarge the mind. Instead, it gives a false sense of knowing what the world is like. This is where we get the “socialists” who know it’s good, because look at all the magnificent buildings in Europe, and the fact everyone has time to sit in the coffee shop and socialize with friends. And look at all the amazing public transportation. And and and. If you lived there, or knew history, you’d know most of the buildings created by socialists in the 20th and 21st century are already crumbling. (Some start before being finished.) You’d know people sit around in coffee shops either because they are unemployed, they pretend to work and their boss pretends to pay them, or all of the above. And all of it is paid for in a significant reduction in lifestyle and just the general comfort of life. (Take it from me. Their lifestyle is two social economic levels down from us, for the same relative “income level.” So, you know, upper class is middle-middle class here.) And you’d know the frustration of waiting for the bus on a rainy, windy day, getting soaked, but the bus is late because all the bus drivers went out for a pint together. And suddenly there’s five of them in a row, but you’re already soaked and starting to cough. More importantly you’d know the public transport only works because everyone works in the city and lives in crowded suburbs, in stack-a-prole apartments, while the countryside is relatively empty. And the people who live there need to buy gas at ridiculous prices, so they can barely afford it.

As predicted, HarperCollins’ fit of irrational exuberism has come to an unprofitable end

Filed under: Books, Business, Economics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte refers back to HarperCollins and the predicted outcome of taking the one-off sales bonanza of peak pandemic and expecting those numbers to continue once the lockdowns eased:

Book sales spiked during the pandemic and no one enjoyed the ride more than HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray. In June 2021, with his revenue up 19% and his profits up 45 percent, Murray opened the taps:

    We are being aggressive in terms of buying books. We’ve seen the book pie grow maybe 15 percent and so our response, which is part opportunist, part defensive, is to be aggressive in buying right now. Because if that pie remains large, we want to make sure that we get a nice share of the larger pie. And if it happens to wane a little bit, we want to make sure that we have a lot of new, exciting books for the future that will maintain our revenues at the current levels. So we’ve been very aggressive over the last six to nine months in trying to sign up the best books that we see in the marketplace.

Murray not only bought more books than usual, he paid more than usual. I read his comments at the time and called my buddy, ECW founder Jack David, who, in his half century in the business, has seen everything. Jack’s response: “Don’t do it!”

Jack and I agreed (see SHuSH 103) that even if Murray acquired a lot of good titles, revenues would disappoint in 2022 and beyond. The publishing pie hadn’t grown. It was temporarily inflated by the unusual and temporary circumstances of the pandemic. Inevitably, life would return to some semblance of normal and aggregate demand for books would revert to the mean. “Twelve months from now,” wrote SHuSH, “Murray will be out of range of 2021’s windfall profits, and perhaps worried about losing money. That’s when the cutting begins.”

We promised at the time to check back to discuss “the great publishing contraction of 2022”.

It’s been eighteen months and the great publishing contraction is now upon us.

Here are the last six months of 2022 according to the Association of American Publishers: July, down 14.9 percent from the previous year; August, down 9 percent; September, down 4.5 percent; October, down 9.3 percent; November, down 6 percent. December should be reported in a week or two. It, too, will be down something.

Another data source is NPD BookScan, which estimates book sales were down 6.5 percent in 2022 compared to 2021.

Give Brian Murray credit for at least being first among his colleagues to react to these new circumstances. He announced last week that he will be cutting 5 percent of his North American work force because the sales surge enjoyed during the pandemic has “slowed significantly as of late.” His note to staff said “we must pause to recognize the depth of the core issues we currently face”. He pointed directly at “unprecedented supply chain and inflationary pressures … increasing paper, manufacturing, labor, and distribution costs”. The company has been raising prices and cutting costs since last fall (so maybe our timing wasn’t off), but “more needs to be done”.

More indeed. Unfortunately. Book sales in 2022 may have been down from 2021 levels but they’re still 11.8 percent above 2019, the pre-pandemic year, suggesting the correction is not finished. Meanwhile, economists say there’s a 70 percent chance of a recession this year. Let’s hope they’re wrong or, at minimum, that any downturn will be shallow and quick.

February 10, 2023

When “Taffy 3” kicked the ass of the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray isn’t a milblogger, but I thought his summary of the Battle of Leyte Gulf was pretty darned good:

In October of 1944, US troops landing on Leyte Island in the Philippines were menaced from the sea by an enormous Japanese naval fleet that was divided into three separate attack forces.

Detail of the West Point Military Atlas: World War II: Asia-Pacific Invasion of Leyte, October 1944 map.
https://www.westpoint.edu/sites/default/files/inline-images/academics/academic_departments/history/WWII%20Asia/ww2%2520asia%2520map%252029.jpg

Summarizing aggressively, the American ground forces were protected against an attack from the sea by the US Navy’s Third Fleet, commanded by Bull Halsey. But Halsey suddenly wasn’t there anymore, taking the bait of a decoy attack force [of de-planed Japanese carriers] and chasing it out into the sea. The Third Fleet’s departure uncovered Leyte Gulf, and the largest of the Japanese attack forces sailed in. Disaster became likely.

There were two American naval task forces in the path of the Japanese attack force, Taffy 2 and Taffy 3, but neither were meant for serious naval combat. They were supporting forces, designed to help the troops on the ground: a few escort carriers, a few lightly armed destroyer escorts, a very few destroyers. Aircraft on the American escort carriers were armed with 100-pound bombs to provide close air support to the infantry. The Japanese First Task Force had four battleships, eight cruisers, and eleven destroyers. One of the Japanese battleships was the Yamato, armed with 18-inch guns. The Japanese attack force sailed directly into contact with Taffy 3, which didn’t realize they were about to face the main Japanese attack force until they were already within range of its guns.

Imperial Japanese Navy ships at anchor in Brunei, Borneo shortly before the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Left to right, Musashi, Yamato, an unidentified cruiser, and Nagato.
Photo by Kazutoshi Hando from the US Naval History and Heritage Command collection.

The commander of Taffy 3, Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague, saw immediately that his task force couldn’t survive the engagement, so he tried to salvage what he could: He ordered his destroyers and destroyer escorts to attack, to cover the hoped-for withdrawal of the escort carriers. The resulting battle is one of the best-known in naval history — and one of the least plausible, because Taffy 3 kicked the everloving shit out of that much larger Japanese attack force, compelling the Japanese to withdraw in the panicked belief that they’d sailed into the bulk of Halsey’s Third Fleet.

If you haven’t read [the late] James Hornfischer’s magnificent book about the battle, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, you should read it. The details are far beyond anything that could be summarized in a single short piece. But the battle was won by a remarkable combination of disciplined obedience, independent audacity, and a paradoxically disciplined disobedience — by men aggressively refusing to obey orders that threatened their cause.

The Fletcher-class destroyer USS Johnston (DD-557), sunk in the Battle off Samar, 25 October, 1944.
US Navy photo with enhancement work by Wild Surmise via Wikimedia Commons.

The battle began with one of the US Navy’s most famous moments. Before Sprague had time to order anyone to do anything, the captain of the Johnston, one of Taffy 3’s few destroyers, turned to attack the Japanese fleet. We have confused and contradictory accounts of the orders given by Cmdr. Ernest Evans, because the man who gave them, and most of the men who heard them, died soon afterward, but he is supposed to have said something like this:

1.) We’re under the guns of a much larger Japanese fleet.

2.) Survival is not to be expected.

3.) Hard left rudder, all ahead flank.

We’re all going to die; attack. The Johnston sank, and Evans died, but his first torpedo run blew the bow off a Japanese cruiser — setting the tone of the fight.

Hitler’s Jazz Band – WW2 Documentary Special

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 9 Feb 2023

Does Adolf Hitler like Duke Ellington? No, and nor do many National Socialists. But the story of the music in the Third Reich is more complicated than you might think. What if we told you that Joseph Goebbels has tried to create a Nazi-approved swing band tasked with bringing the Jazz War to the Allies?
(more…)

“What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling”

Filed under: Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Free Press, Jamie Reed explains why she gave up her job as as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and is now speaking out against the early and aggressive therapeutic treatment of gender-confused children and teens:

Reed in her office. (Theo R. Welling).

Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.

At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as — who wanted to be — a girl.

Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.

I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.

This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.

The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.

Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).

The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist — usually one we recommended — who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.

That’s all it took.

When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.

Water-Cooled .50s: The US Navy Mk22 Pedestal Mount

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Oct 2022

In 1942, the US Navy adopted the Mk22 Pedestal mount, which fitted a pair of water-cooled Browning M2 machine guns (one left-hand feed and one right-hand). It was used for antiaircraft use primarily, and was also adopted by the Army as the M46 in 1943. The mount was an update to the previous single-gun MK21.

The gunner was protected by a 3/8″ (9.5mm) hardened steel shield, and the mount could rotate a full 360 degrees, with elevation from -10 degrees to 80 degrees. They were produced by the Heintz Manufacturing company (no relation to the Heinz company that makes ketchup) of Pittsburgh from 1942 until 1945.
(more…)

February 9, 2023

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” … but sometimes it’s almost prophetic

Filed under: Books, Business, Education, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Once again, Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker Substack has something interesting I’d like to share with you (I wouldn’t blame you at all for cutting out the middleman and just subscribing for yourself):

Today I want to focus on a single paragraph published in 1960.

You’re asking yourself: How much can a single paragraph matter — especially if it was written 63 years ago? But read it first and judge for yourself.

It’s a chilling paragraph.

[…]

By any measure, [Paul Goodman] was one of the most eccentric thinkers of the era. Yet he anticipated our current situation with more insight than any of his peers.

Let’s look at this one paragraph from the Preface to Growing Up Absurd. It’s a long paragraph — it takes up most of two pages. So we will break it down into pieces.

Goodman begins with a puzzle he needs to solve — society is stagnating everywhere, and we all can see it. But there’s no action plan to fix it. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing and finger-pointing everywhere, but nobody has even started on developing a practical agenda.

According to Goodman, this is because people “have ceased to be able to imagine alternatives”. Everybody accepts that the current system “is the only possibility of society, for nothing else is thinkable”.

Now comes his analysis, and — to my surprise — Goodman begins by talking about music. This was the last thing I expected in a social critique, but for Goodman the manufacturing of hit songs is a metaphor for everything else that’s wrong in a stagnant society.

He writes:

    Let me give a couple of examples of how this [inability to imagine healthy alternatives] works. Suppose (as is the case) that a group of radio and TV broadcasters, competing in the Pickwickian fashion of semi-monopolies, control all the stations and channels in an area, amassing the capital and variously bribing Communications Commissioners in order to get them; and the broadcasters tailor their programs to meet the requirements of their advertisers of the censorship, of their own slick and clique tastes, and of a broad common denominator of the audience, none of whom may be offended: they will then claim not only that the public wants the drivel that they give them, but indeed that nothing else is being created. Of course it is not! Not for these media; why should a serious artist bother?

When I first read this, I was dumbstruck. Goodman wrote this during the winter of 1959 and 1960, when radio stations were independent and freewheeling. Back in my teen years, a single business was only allowed to control one AM station and one FM station. In 1985 this was increased to 12 stations on each band. And in 1994 this was raised again, this time to 20 AM stations and 20 FM stations.

But then all hell broke lose when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed in the Senate by a 91 to 5 margin and was signed into law. Now the sky was the limit — and all the airwaves it contained.

Soon Clear Channel Communications owned more than 1,200 radio stations in some 300 cities. The company began the process of standardizing and homogenizing our musical culture. We still suffer from that today.

Even after radio started losing influence in the Internet Age, huge streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) ensured that access to the ears of America would be controlled by a tiny number of huge corporations. A musical culture that was once local, indie, and flexible has become centralized, corporatized, and stagnant.

How could Paul Goodman even dream of such a scenario back in 1960? That future was decades away at the time.

But we are only at the start of this visionary paragraph. Goodman now explains that the same thing will happen in universities.

Colleges and schools were small and non-bureaucratic back in 1960. Yet Goodman sees a crisis looming. On the next page Goodman warns against “the topsy-turvy situation that a teacher must devote himself to satisfying the administrator and financier rather than to doing his job, and a universally admired teacher is fired for disobeying an administrative order that would hinder teaching”.

Administration at US colleges has grown exponentially in the last two decades and has turned almost every academic institution into a plodding bureaucracy — but how in the world did Goodman anticipate this in 1960?

Now let’s return to our chilling paragraph. Immediately after discussing radio stations, Goodman adds a gargantuan sentence. It jumps all over the place but hits the target at every twist and turn:

    Or suppose again (as is not quite the case) that in a group of universities only faculties are chosen that are “safe” to the businessmen trustees or the politically appointed regents, and these faculties give out all the degrees and licenses and union cards to the new generation of students, and only such universities can get Foundation or government money for research, and research is incestuously staffed by the same sponsors and according to the same policy, and they allow no one but those they choose, to have access to either the classroom or expensive apparatus: it will then be claimed that there is no other learning or professional competence; that an inspired teacher is not “solid”; that the official projects are the direction of science; that progressive education is a failure; and finally, indeed — as in Dr. James Conant’s report on the high schools — that only 15 per cent of the youth are “academically talented” enough to be taught hard subjects.

Here in a nutshell is the credentialing crisis of our times. Learning is replaced by exclusionary certification programs that limit career opportunities — unless you take out loans and “purchase” the necessary credential from these academic gatekeepers.

This has become so destructive in our own time that many are crushed by student loans, and others seek ingenious ways of bypassing college entirely. There’s no way that Goodman could have grasped this in 1960 — when only 7.7 percent of Americans had college degrees.

Nor could he have known about the replicability crisis in science or the destructive games now played in awarding of scientific grants. Those are the problems of our times — not his.

But somehow Paul Goodman saw it coming.

February 7, 2023

Disney – An Empire In Collapse

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Critical Drinker
Published 6 Feb 2023

Disney isn’t looking too healthy these days, with massive financial losses, collapsing stock prices and internal power struggles threatening to tear the House of Mouse apart at the seams. How did this happen? Let’s find out.
(more…)

Big Sky fascism, according to the New York Times

Filed under: China, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Free Press, Walter Kirn expresses dismay to discover that he’s been living in a “quasi-fascist” state for 30 years and didn’t even notice until the Grey Lady informed him about it recently:

Just a few weeks back, I sat down with my morning coffee, opened up the paper and learned that I now live in a quasi-fascist state. It said so in the paper.

The paper wasn’t a local publication but one from a couple thousand miles away, the New York Times, whose glossy Sunday magazine included a lengthy, illustrated feature with the five-alarm headline How Montana Took a Hard Right Turn Toward Christian Nationalism. To illustrate the state’s alleged swerve toward neo-fascist theocratic rule — a dire development I’d somehow missed — the story included a scary gothic photo, heavily filtered to bring out its dark tones, of a ghostly white cross on a bare hillside reflected in a passing rearview mirror. It also included, of course, a Yellowstone reference and Kevin Costner’s name — right up top, where the search engines would see them.

Since moving to small-town Montana from New York City over 30 years ago, I’d lived through at least a couple of cycles of ominous national coverage of my state. Without going into the details, let me assure you that this article was bunk, as exaggerated as the photo.

But fiction is fact where Montana is concerned, particularly on the country’s coasts, where tales are told about the country’s interior that the country’s interior lacks the clout to counter, much as our guns lack the range to bring down aircraft. Despite our legendary swagger, Montanans are largely helpless against the country’s more powerful forces. The missiles on our prairies aren’t missiles we asked for, just missiles that formidable others wished to plant here. They make us a target, but we don’t control them.

Do I sound defensive? Perhaps I am.

I live in a state with zero big-league sports teams, not a single Fortune 500 corporation, and no national media influence to speak of — unless you count made-up shows about fake ranchers slugging it out in scripted brawls. I’m one of about a million residents, all of whom, no matter their circumstances, are up against the myth-making machines of cities and states of imperial wealth and numbers. And imperial attitudes, dare I say, which emerge in their basic, perennial story about us: those folks from the steppes and mountains are growing restless, including the ones who’ve just moved there to go skiing, who appear to be worse than the ones already living there, who we’ve always found unsettling enough.

When the spy balloon floated across America, the rest of the country got a taste, perhaps, of Montana’s stoic colonial impotence. For days, we could point, but we weren’t allowed to shoot — great-power diplomacy prevented it. Americans may think we’re tough, as Montanans may think they’re tough, but it seems that we’re tough in the way that actors in westerns are: only with the permission of the director, only symbolically. Down went the balloon on Saturday to much applause, but the spectacle was pure cinema by then, like a fistfight on Yellowstone that draws fake blood.

But at least we proud Montanans kept our honor. We spied the lurking villain, we called the sheriff, we warned our neighbors, we did what we could do. I suspect we’ll continue in this role, watchful vigilantes of the skies. There’s trouble afoot – you can feel it everywhere, particularly if you dwell near nuclear missiles, particularly if you live where there’s no cover — and someone has to stand lookout on the hill.

February 6, 2023

Food prices going up? Destroying “excess” production? That’s Canada’s Supply Management system working at peak efficiency!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Food, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jon Miltimore reports on recent comments about some of the weird requirements for quota-holding dairy farmers under the Canadian Supply Management system:

Canadian dairy farmer is speaking out after being forced to dump thousands of liters of milk after exceeding the government’s production quota.

In a video shared on TikTok by Travis Huigen, Ontario dairy farmer Jerry Huigen says he’s heartbroken to dump 30,000 liters of milk amid surging dairy prices.

“Right now we are over our quotum, um, it’s regulated by the government and by the DFO (Dairy Farmers of Ontario)”, says Huigen, as he stands beside a machine spewing fresh milk into a drain. “Look at this milk running away. Cause it’s the end of the month. I dump thirty thousand liters of milk, and it breaks my heart.”

Huigen says people ask him why milk prices are so high.

“This here Canadian milk is seven dollars a liter. When I go for my haircut people say, ‘Wow, seven dollars Jerry, for a little bit of milk'”, he says, as he fills a glass of the milk being dumped and drinks. “I say well, you have to go higher up. Cause we have no say anymore, as a dairy farmer on our own farm. They make us dump it.”

[…]

In the United States, the primary regulations are high-level price-fixing, bans on selling unpasteurized milk (which means farmers have to dump their product if dairy processors don’t buy it), and “price gouging” laws that prevent retailers from increasing prices when demand is low, which incentivizes hoarding.

In Canada, the regulations are even worse.

While the price-fixing scheme for milk in the US is incredibly complicated and leaves much to be desired — there’s an old industry adage that says “only five people in the world know how milk is priced in the US and four of them are dead” — in Canada the price is determined by a single bureaucracy: the Canadian Dairy Commission.

The Ottawa-based commission (technically a “Government of Canada Crown Corporation”), which oversees Canada’s entire dairy system (known as Supply Management), raised prices three times in 2022, citing “the rising cost of production”.

Food price inflation remains a serious issue in Canada, but the problem is particularly acute in regards to dairy products, which has seen their annual inflation rate triple over the past year, to almost 12 percent.

If the farmers were doing this sort of price-fixing themselves, it would be illegal. Instead, because it’s the government doing it, it’s mandatory. You aren’t allowed to produce any of the supply-managed products outside the system, and the government helpfully protects Canadians from being “victimized” by cheaper imports by high tariffs on anything competing with supply managed output.

As with any rigged market, the costs of “protecting” the market are diffused among all Canadian consumers, but the benefits are concentrated in the hands of the quota-holders (and the bureaucrats who oversee the system). My issues with the supply management system are one of the “hobby horses” I’ve ridden many times over my nearly 20 years of blogging.

QotD: US railroad land grants

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, History, Quotations, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In 1871, Kentucky Congressman J. Proctor Knott gave a humorous speech on the floor of the House of Representatives ridiculing the idea of giving land grants to western railroads. He focused on Duluth, which at the time had about 3,000 residents, and his basic argument was that U.S. taxpayers in general should not be required to subsidize projects that benefitted only a few.

The speech was widely reprinted by those skeptical of government pork barrel (a term that first became popular about the time Knott gave his speech). Sixteen years later, Northern Pacific, which received what was probably the largest land grant to a private company in American history, reprinted the speech in this brochure.

This might seem strange except that NP annotated the speech with recent facts in bright red letters, such as that Duluth had grown to house 26,000 people by 1886, that more wheat was delivered to Duluth each year than to any other American city, and that it also saw deliveries of millions of board feet of lumber and hundreds of thousands of tons of iron ore each year.

NP didn’t say so in so many words, but its point was clearly that the land grants, contrary to Knott’s predictions, were a good thing for most if not all Americans. However, the brochure also didn’t mention that James J. Hill was proving that a railroad that didn’t receive any land grants or subsidies could provide just as many benefits without going bankrupt, which would leave both investors and taxpayers in the lurch. (The St. Paul & Pacific did receive a small land grant, but Hill paid fair market value for that railroad and land after it went bankrupt, thus Hill didn’t particularly benefit from the subsidy.)

Train Lover (Randal O’Toole), “Debate Over Railroad Land Grants”, Streamliner Memories, 2022-11-01.

February 5, 2023

“[E]very story now assumes ‘white supremacy’ as the core truth of the world”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Sullivan on the state of the American legacy media in an age of young, woke reporters driving the narrative forward at the expense of any hint of objectivity:

Memphis police officers charged in the beating death of Tyre Nichols.

There are times when I actually feel some pity for the editors in mainstream media. In the last few years, pressured relentlessly by young, super-leftist staffers, they have slowly and then precipitously dropped the goal of objectivity and news in favor of subjectivity and narratives. The struggle against white supremacy has become too urgent for news that may not advance “social justice”. Here’s a glimpse of what the old guard is dealing with, in a leaked transcript of a NYT staff meeting in 2019. An early question from a NYT reporter was:

    I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.

And, as you can see every day, this is what the NYT subsequently did. Distilled that year with The 1619 Project (now airing on Hulu!), everything was and is parsed through the lens of critical race/gender/queer theory — from birdwatching to knitting to “literally abolishing the police”. It’s their foundation.

The same ideological fervor swept over the WaPo, of course — right down to the racist birds! And this week, the former executive editor, Len Downie, a near-icon of the old school, published a report on journalism and found a broad consensus among his colleagues that, in the words of one editor-in-chief, “Objectivity has got to go!” So every story now assumes “white supremacy” as the core truth of the world.

So what happens when stories arrive which, on the face of it, seem to refute that entirely? Take three recent events: two mass killings of Asian-Americans within two days in California by an Asian-American (in Monterey Park) and a Chinese national (in Half Moon Bay); five black police officers in a majority-black police force with a black police chief all but lynched and murdered an innocent black man; and a trans woman was convicted of the rape of two other women with the use of her penis.

How on earth do these fit into the pre-arranged “white supremacy” template?

They can’t of course. They reflect a reality far more complex than the crude racial hierarchies beloved of actual white supremacists and woke activists alike. They show individual actors, with a range of possible motives, in unique moments that will always escape predictable narratives. Maybe racial prejudice is present; maybe not; or maybe mixed into a range of other possible factors. You work empirically from the ground up.

But if the facts don’t fit the narrative, you move on quickly to a story that will. So with the Asian-American massacres, after some initial excitement, the MSM lost interest as soon as a white man could not be blamed. (Contrast that with the days-long feeding frenzy over the Atlanta spa massacre, despite zero evidence of any anti-Asian motive from the white killer.) Or they try to force it into their narrative anyway.

Leningrad: NO STEP BACK! – Week 232 – February 4, 1944

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 4 Feb 2023

The Allies begin a new operation in the Pacific this week: assaulting the Marshall Islands. They also make big attacks from their beachhead in Italy at Anzio, but these are called off after only a few days in the face of heavy enemy resistance. However, in the USSR there are several successes against the Axis, as they are pushed back both in the far north and the far south of the front, and still surrounded near Korsun.
(more…)

“We need to find a couple of big-fish donors who want to see a bunch of vets going out and collecting digital Nazi scalps”

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray examines the cutting edge of anti-Nazi crusading:

So here’s the most important political story to appear in Rolling Stone since Sabrina Rubin Erdely earned early retirement:

There’s a growing movement of American Nazis, you see, so military veterans are pulling on their boots to fight for their country again, hunting those Nazis and taking them out. But actually reading the story is, pardon me for a moment, a little like hammering a fucking spike into your brain. Every claim self-refutes; paragraph by paragraph, the story tells you X and Not X, side-by-side, with equal authority.

Start with the foundation of the claim. Goldsmith’s work, Rolling Stone explains, “centers on exposing the inner workings and public wrongdoing of neo-fascist groups through deep-dive intelligence reports that can give prosecutors the evidence they need go after the hatemongers in court.” Try to find a definition of “neo-fascist” in the story, though, and you fail. Fascism, it turns out, is being mean. It’s politics for the TikTok era: fascism is haters! Actual fascists thought they believed in the sacredness and centrality of the state, government as the highest form of human expression; the LARPers tracking fascists in 2023 think it means you didn’t contribute to WinBlue last month.

And so Goldsmith says he’s tracking “these people who would literally kill their fellow Americans to install a fascist dictator”, which would be a pretty dire confrontation. Then, making the claim concrete, Goldsmith gets to this description of the Patriot Front, his primary Nazi nemesis:

    I have come to understand them as a unique threat against the people of the United States. While they’re a small group — they may have 200, 220 members at any given time — the thing that makes them so dangerous is the cult like atmosphere.

So the headline is a life-and-death struggle between the rising tide of American fascists who are preparing to kill us all and install their Hitler; the story is 200 people — maybe 220! — “at any given time”. Here, by the way, is a leaked Patriot Front training video, so you can see just how terrifyingly dangerous they are:

The only thing the Patriot Front threatens is the retail availability of your favorite product at Dunkin’ Donuts, but let’s go on.

Standing across the battlefield from this terrifying group, the story reveals, Goldsmith & Co. now total a force of “two dozen volunteers”. Then comes this exchange, deep into the Q&A:

Rolling Stone has turned a cosplayers-on-cosplayers circle jerk into the Battle of the Bulge. Compare THE NAZI HUNTER NEXT DOOR to a living room’s worth of unpaid hobbyists who could really turn into something if someone would just, like, give us some money.

Now, the punchline: The NAZI HUNTER is very much having his big media moment, scoring a series of profiles since the start of the year. Here he is being interviewed by the New York Times (where his wife is an editor) in January, for example, under an intro that says he’s hunting “antigovernment” extremists who are fascist. We all remember how the original fascists were passionately anti-government, of course. Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini — big libertarians, all. Hardly wanted to have any government, so people could just hang loose and roll however they chose.

The tediousness of pumping all this sad-sackery into a big national story is exhausting, as is the news media in general. But we need the distraction of Nazis and insurrections, or we’d risk talking about things that are real.

February 4, 2023

Poland’s Descent into Civil War – War Against Humanity 097

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 2 Feb 2023

Poland, occupied, abandoned or even threatened by her allies is left to fight her own war. A war that under the influence of internal and external forces looks more and more like a full blown civil war inside the world war.
(more…)

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress