The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 3 Dec 2024On and around the frozen waters of the Chosin Reservoir, the US Marines and the Chinese Communist forces fight out a brutal battle. In the west, the Chinese offensive continues. For the UN forces, there is no chance of victory, but living to fight another day may yet be possible.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:48 Recap
01:11 Chosin Reservoir Prelude
03:58 Yudam-ni
06:32 Task Force Faith
08:25 Hagaru
12:58 The Aftermath of Chosin
14:49 The Tokyo Conference
15:56 Wawon and Kunu-ri
20:30 Summary
20:42 Conclusion
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December 4, 2024
The Korean War Week 024 – Marines Attacked at Chosin Reservoir – December 3, 1950
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Admirals belatedly realize it might be useful to be able to reload those fancy missiles at sea
CDR Salamander has been banging this drum for a long, long time, but it appears that the US Navy is finally acknowledging that being able to reload the (many) Vertical Launch System (VLS) missile cells on ships somewhere other than a fully functional naval base would be more than a nice-to-have capability:
Reloading a VLS cell on a US Navy ship in port.
Photo attributed to defunct website defense-aerospace.com.
If you have made the horrible error of not reading every post here, over at the OG Blog and listening to every Midrats, then you may be new to the issue of being able to reload our warships’ VLS cells forward.
Slowly … a bit too slowly … Big Navy has decided that those people in the 1970s (who still remembered fighting a contested war at sea) might have been right all along. With SECNAV Del Toro’s encouragement, we continue to try to find a way to get the surface force a capability to reload forward.
There is plenty of room on the bandwagon and we’re glad to hoist everyone onboard the reload/rearm party-bus. If you need to catch up, the issue continues to break above the background noise, and WSJ has a very well produced article on it that requires your attention.
However, I got a little bit of an eye twitch at this pull-quote:
Until recently, the Navy didn’t feel much need for speed in rearming its biggest missile-firing warships. They only occasionally launched large numbers of Tomahawk cruise missiles or other pricey projectiles.
Now, Pentagon strategists worry that if fighting broke out in the western Pacific — potentially 5,000 miles from a secure Navy base — destroyers, cruisers and other big warships would run out of vital ammunition within days, or maybe hours.
Seeking to plug that supply gap, Del Toro tasked commanders and engineers with finding ways to reload the fleet’s launch systems at remote ports or even on the high seas. Otherwise, U.S. ships might need to sail back to bases in Hawaii or California to do so — putting them out of action for weeks.
Yes, I am going to do this, and you’re coming along for the ride.
In the name of great Neptune’s trident … THIS IS NOT A NEW REQUIREMENT!!!
My first “… shit, we need to be able to do this …” was during the DESERT FOX strikes against Iraq in 1998. I cannot remember if it were USS Stout (DDG 55) or USS Gonzalez (DDG 66) that we put Winchester on TLAM by the third day … but except for the ships we left on the other side of the Suez (who we would put to good use later), the rest of our TLAM ships and submarines were about done.
The fact we threw away an ability to reload/rearm forward was an old story inside the surface Navy when I picked it up in the last years of the previous century. We had a clunky erector set like contraption that was hard to use and took up VLS cell space, but instead of finding a better way, we just chunked the whole idea, slid in our Jesus Jones CD, and figured we had ownership of the seas until the crack of doom.
There is nothing “until recently” about this. Not to get off topic, but the real story here is why time and again this century’s senior leadership decided it was “too hard” or “too dangerous” while they were in full knowledge not just of the operational experience demanding this capability, but what we discovered over and over again in wargames.
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The Disturbing Origins of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jul 30, 2024A bowl of the original Corn Flakes made with only corn.
City/Region: Battle Creek, Michigan
Time Period: 1895Dr. John Kellogg was all about health, and when his brother, William (the financial brains of the operation), wanted to add sugar to the very bland original Corn Flakes, he flat out refused. Eventually, William bought the rights to Corn Flakes, changed the recipe, and the rest is history.
I don’t have the industrial rollers that the original recipe for Corn Flakes used, so I made a dough. The flakes turned out nice and crispy, but they are very bland. I would recommend using stone-ground cornmeal and adding some sugar and salt to make the whole process easier and the end product tastier.
Excerpt from Patent No. 558,393 [for] Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same.
First. Soak the grain for some hours — say eight to twelve — in water at a temperature which is either between 40° and 60° Fahrenheit or 110° and 140° Fahrenheit, thus securing a preliminary digestion by aid of cerealin, a starch-digesting organic ferment contained in the hull of the grain or just beneath it. The temperature must be either so low or so high as to prevent actual fermentation while promoting the activity of the ferment. This digestion adds to the sweetness and flavor of the product.
Second. Cook the grain thoroughly. For this purpose it should be boiled in water for about an hour, and if steamed a longer time will be required. My process is distinctive in this step—that is to say, that the cooking is carried to the stage when all the starch is hydrated. If not thus thoroughly cooked, the product is unfit for digestion and practically worthless for immediate consumption.
Third. After steaming the grain is cooled and partially dried, then passed through cold rollers, from which it is removed by means of carefully-adjusted scrapers. The purpose of this process of rolling is to flatten the grain into extremely thin flakes in the shape of translucent films, whereby the bran covering (or the cellulose portions thereof) is disintegrated or broken into small particles, and the constituents of the grain are made readily accessible to the cooking process to which it is to be subsequently subjected and to the action of the digestive fluids when eaten.
Fourth. After rolling the compressed grain or flakes having been received upon suitable trays is subjected to a steaming process, whereby it is thoroughly cooked and is then baked or roasted in an oven until dry and crisp.
— John Harvey Kellogg. United States Patent Office, 1895
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December 3, 2024
Evolution of Airborne Armour
The Tank Museum
Published Jul 19, 2024Lightly armed airborne troops are at a huge disadvantage when faced with regular troops with heavy weapons and armour. In World War II this led to huge losses for paratroops on Crete and at Arnhem. Since then, many attempts have been made to level the playing field, to give airborne soldiers a fighting chance.
From the Hamilcar gliders of World War II to the C17 Globemaster, we look at how to make a tank fly.
00:00 | Intro
00:47 | The Origins of Airbourne Operations
02:34 | Gliders
07:20 | A Tank Light Enough to Fly?
09:02 | Success & Failure
14:24 | Post-War Solutions
17:41 | Better Aircraft – Better Tanks?
20:15 | Strategic Deployment
21:39 | ConclusionThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé. This video features imagery courtesy of http://www.hamilcar.co.uk/
#tankmuseum
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December 2, 2024
“I think we’re moving out of the ‘FA’ stage into the ‘FO’ era on that one, friends”
In a rare sighting of a Matt Gurney column from The Line outside the paywall, he shares some of his thoughts after attending this year’s Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia:
For those who don’t know, the “Forum”, or HISF, is an annual gathering of military leaders, defence and intelligence experts, and others whose work relates to defence and security issues, from across NATO and the Western alliance broadly. Funded by NATO, the Canadian government and private-sector sponsors, it is something of a jewel in Canada’s defence crown, a chance to bring some very powerful and influential people to a gorgeous Canadian city to wine and dine them, in hopes that they don’t realize our military is a disaster that is largely incapable of contributing to our collective defence. The agenda is always divided into a mix of free time for social networking, off-the-record chats (which are generally the most interesting) and also a series of on-the-record events that can be quoted from, and which are broadcast live online.
[…]
In our latest episode of The Line Podcast, we discussed this at length, in the context of the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his now-former defence minister. I quipped on the pod that the “rules-based international order” is a lot like the “sanctity of marriage”. It’s something we talk about as if it exists, and we’d all like it to exist, but it really doesn’t. It just doesn’t. It’s an ideal worth striving for, but not actually a thing that exists and can be counted on. The Line had also previously written about our belief that there is no rules-based international order in a prior dispatch, and then ran a counterpoint to that perspective by a reader who disagreed. It was a good counterpoint! It didn’t change my mind.
Shearer tackled the question directly, and so perfectly that I think his answer has changed my view of the situation. It hasn’t changed my opinion, but it has changed how I’m going to describe it. Here’s what Shearer said (I’ve tidied up the quote a tiny bit for clarity, but you can watch the whole thing around the 39-minute mark of this video). For context, the panel was about the so-called “CRINKS” — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and the challenge they are posing to the Western alliance. I’ll include Coomarasamy’s question, and then show you what Shearer said that made me go “Huh”.
Coomarasamy: Are we in a world now where we can’t really talk about a rules-based international order, but two separate, competing ones?
Shearer: That’s a big question. I think the rules-based order, frankly, turns out to have been, in hindsight, a power-based order. It was unchallenged U.S. military power that made possible the liberal order of the last 50 years. With all its benefits for so many countries. Was the U.S. always a perfect hegemon within that system? Occasionally not. It would shift its weight around, and there were consequences from that. But overall, it worked because the United States was a relatively benign hegemon.
That’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly what I have intuitively felt in the last few years, and haven’t done a good enough job explaining. I grasped it in a big-picture intellectual sense, but I hadn’t been able to shrink it down into a single sentence like that. When Shearer said that the rules-based order was, actually, a U.S. military power-based order, it clicked in my brain. That’s the way to articulate it.
For the last few decades, we thought we were living in a rules-based-international order, and planned our lives around that. But what we were actually living in was a global order led by a relatively benign global superpower and preserved by its astonishing military power.
And that world is ending.
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The question of our era
At PJ Media, Athena Thorne asks the most pertinent, relevant question of our times:
Is Donald Trump the Long-Awaited Messiah of the Band ‘Rush’ Era?
Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons
Greetings, PJ readers! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are still feeling lazy and slovenly. In that vein, here is a tasty morsel of a column from a friend and fellow reader, Kato the Elder. He makes an excellent argument — one with which I heartily agree — that President-elect Donald Trump is the small-L libertarian hero of our time. Enjoy!
In a particular moment during my precocious, autodidact pre-teen years, I stumbled upon a copy of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged at an estate sale in an old New England barn. There, in a hay-covered stall, I found that dense brick of a book that seemed, in a creepy sort of way, to be waiting for me to pick it up and take it home — consequences be damned. It was like Guy Clark’s song about a haunted guitar, found in a pawn shop, with the name of the next victim to pick it up already written on the case. And, like Guy Clark’s guitar, Atlas Shrugged is one of those cultural objects that once picked up cannot be put down. Who could ever forget, on page 455, where it is asked, “What advice would you give Atlas if he became weary of holding up the world? Shrug.” A libertarian is born. I quickly worked my way through the remainder of Rand’s parables and then the essays.
Rand’s novella “Anthem” led to my discovery of the Canadian rock band Rush, which had adapted “Anthem” as the rock opera entitled 2112. It’s the story of a man who suffers under the autocratic rule of the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx, progressives who use computers to create a scientific, expert-driven utopia that does not recognize the value of the individual or the right to think and create and dissent. In “Anthem”, it is the protagonist’s discovery of an ancient incandescent light bulb that leads to the discovery of an earlier and freer society and puts the hero on a collision course with the collectivists. In the Rush version, the long-lost incandescent light bulb is replaced with a guitar, but of course it would be, because what kind of crazy government would take away someone’s light bulbs?
A very strong Randian libertarianism runs through Rush’s music; the heroes of many Rush songs are those individuals struggling, of course, against a government that is determined to pound the individualism and free thought out of its subjects, whether that individual is Tom Sawyer or teenagers living in subdivisions or the teen boy awaiting the world’s applause or the community suffering from mob violence and witch hunts. But Rush, and Rand, are not rejecting the Eisenhower-era type of corporate conformity, but rather the conformity of counter-culture which has taken power and proven the deficiency of the government-expert-knows-best mindset. The epitome of that strain of Randian libertarianism comes in the song “Red Barchetta”, a power ballad about a boy who, in conspiracy with his uncle, escapes to the countryside to race a classic, gas-powered Ferrari against a bland EV car of some kind that has supplanted the freedom and adrenalin rush of gas-powered freedom. Because what kind of crazy government would take away someone’s choice of car?
I saw Rush in concert at least 12 times, and every concert was full of people who looked like me, dressed like me, and sounded like me. We sang along with Rush at the top of our lungs about the freedom of music and the individualism which is closer to the heart. As we all grew older and grayer and our American society became less tolerant of dissent and more dependent on corporate/government cronyism, we could only wonder whether we would find our Howard Rourke, the nonconformist New York developer and architect of Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, who would lead us to the promised land.
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USS Constitution – “Old Ironsides” – 1950’s newsreel
Charlie Dean Archives
Published Jan 1, 2014USS Constitution is a wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate of the United States Navy. Named by President George Washington after the Constitution of the United States of America, she is the world’s oldest floating commissioned naval vessel. Launched in 1797, Constitution was one of six original frigates authorized for construction by the Naval Act of 1794. Joshua Humphreys designed the frigates to be the young Navy’s capital ships, and so Constitution and her sisters were larger and more heavily armed and built than standard frigates of the period. Built in Boston, Massachusetts at Edmund Hartt’s shipyard, her first duties with the newly formed United States Navy were to provide protection for American merchant shipping during the Quasi-War with France and to defeat the Barbary pirates in the First Barbary War.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cons…
CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!
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QotD: Intersectionality on campus
… intersectionality’s intellectual flaws translate into moral shortcomings. Importantly, it is blind to forms of harm that occur within identity groups. For a black woman facing discrimination from a white man, intersectionality is great. But a gay woman sexually assaulted by another gay woman, or a black boy teased by another black boy for “acting white”, or a Muslim girl whose mother has forced her to wear the hijab will find that intersectionality has no space for their experiences. It certainly does not recognize instances in which the arrow of harm runs in the “wrong” direction — a black man committing an antisemitic hate crime, for instance. The more popular intersectionality becomes, the less we should expect to hear these sorts of issues discussed in public.
Perhaps the most pernicious consequence of intersectionality, however, is its effect on the culture of elite college campuses. Some claims about “campuses-gone-crazy” are surely overblown. For instance, judging from my experience at Columbia, nobody believes there are 63 genders, and hardly anyone loves Soviet-style communism. (That said, the few communists on campus tend to despise intersectionality with an unusual passion.) But one thing is certainly not exaggerated: intersectionality dominates the day-to-day culture. It operates as a master formula by which social status is doled out. Being black and queer is better than just being black or queer, being Muslim and gender non-binary is better than being either one on its own, and so forth. By “better”, I mean that people are more excited to meet you, you’re spoken of more highly behind your back, and your friends enjoy an elevated social status for being associated with you.
In this way, intersectionality creates a perverse social incentive structure. If you’re cis, straight, and white, you start at the bottom of the social hierarchy — especially if you’re a man, but also if you’re a woman. For such students, there is a strong incentive to create an identity that will help them attain a modicum of status. Some do this by becoming gender non-binary; others do it by experimenting with their sexuality under the catch-all label “queer”. In part, this is healthy college-aged exploration — finding oneself, as it were. But much of it amounts to needless confusion and pain imposed on hapless young people by the bizarre tenets of a new faith.
Coleman Hughes, “Reflections on Intersectionality”, Quillette, 2020-01-13.
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November 30, 2024
Forgotten War Ep 5 – Chindits 2 – The Empire Strikes
HardThrasher
Published 29 Nov 202402:00 – Here We Go Again
06:36 – Perfect Planning
13:16 – Death of a Prophet
14:51 – The Fly In
18:56 – Dazed and Confused (in the Monsoon)
20:40 – Can’t Fly in This
31:54 – Survivor’s ClubPlease consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
(more…)
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The mission of DOGE
One of Donald Trump’s more interesting announcements shortly after winning the federal election early in November was that he was going to give Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy a formal position to do to the US government’s vast array of bureaucratic organizations what Javier Milei did to Argentina’s bloated national government. Here, scraped from the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, is Devon Eriksen‘s thoughts on how to go about pruning back the “fourth branch” of government:
Since the framers of the Constitution created a federal government with three branches, not four, there are no Constitutional checks on the emergent fourth branch.
Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.
– It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.
– It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a “ruling”.
– The only recourse against a “ruling” is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.
– But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
– Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.
– But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.
– Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.
– And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.
All of this creates a Red Queen Effect.
Citizens must establish their own organizations, and raise donations to engage in constant lawfare, just to retain the rights they haven’t lost yet. And they must win every time to maintain the status quo.
Bureaucrats, on the other hand, can fight endless legal battles using money taken from their victims by the IRS, at no cost to themselves. Any victory they claim, they may keep permanently, while any loss may be refought endlessly simply by a slight variance of the attack.
Obviously, if this system is not changed, all power will accrue to the bureaucracy over time. They will constitute a totalitarian authority over every aspect of the life of every citizen.
This is why the name “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) is a serious mistake.
Look, Elon, I like a joke as much as the next guy, and I do think irreverence is a load-bearing component of checking the bureaucracy, because a false aura of gravitas is one of their defenses against public outrage.
But words mean things.
When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people’s lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.
But the name isn’t my decision. The power of the vote isn’t that granular. I can only elect an administration, not protect it from tactical errors by weighing in on individual policy decisions.
Unless someone with direct power happens to read this.
So, regardless of the name, here’s how an organization might be set up to effectively check federal bureaucracies.
1. DOGE must be responsive, not merely proactive.
Being proactive sounds better in the abstract, but it is much easier for a federal agency to gin up some numbers to fight a periodic overall audit, than it is to fight an investigation of a specific case.
2. DOGE must have direct oversight.
If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.
Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.
Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.
Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).
3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.
“You have to stop that now” is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.
DOGE must follow Saul Alinsky’s 11th rule: target individuals, not institutions.
Why?
Because agencies are agencies. They consist of agents.
An agent is someone who acts on behalf of a principal — someone whose interests the agent is supposed to represent.
When the agent is incentivized so that his interests diverge from those of the principal, he will be increasingly likely to act in his own interest, not the principal’s.
This is the Principal-Agent Problem.
An agency is a construct, a theoretical entity. What Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon”.
Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.
Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.
Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.
For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.
This doesn’t just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.
Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies’ staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.
4. DOGE investigations must be triggerable by citizen complaints.
This is self-explanatory. It gives DOGE the practical capability to redress individual injustices, and it crowdsources your discovery problem.
Establish a hotline.
5. DOGE must have sufficient power to protect and reward whistleblowers, and punish those who retaliate against them.
6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.
Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.
7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.
This eliminates the phenomenon of “we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing”.
Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.
The point is not for DOGE to address every instance of waste or wrongdoing, it is to make bureaucrats act responsibly because they fear an investigation.
In essence, I am imagining DOGE (or some superior name that better reflects the mission) as an entity with a license to treat bureaucrats the way bureaucrats currently treat citizens.
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QotD: Unrealized promises of a “Great Society”
Amity Shlaes, Great Society: A New History, 2020.
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November 29, 2024
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya nominated as Director of the US National Institutes of Health
From the point of view of the establishment, the barbarians are well and truly inside the gates, as President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee as Director of the National Health Institutes.
Photo by Taleed Brown, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons.
Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists”.
Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom — and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again”.
As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.
Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but whether or not he does so in his next term, the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.
“For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,” says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. “Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?” Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he became an early and outspoken critic of pandemic policies. In 2020, he joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.
Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)
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Trump is a deals guy … and Canadian politicians need to negotiate with him on that basis
In what has turned out to be his final column for TVO, Matt Gurney says that Canadian views on Trump need to evolve if we hope to preserve the overall amicable relationship between the two countries. Trump made his career on making deals … but not many of our political leaders seem to have clued in that this means we need to approach all our post-Biden American affairs with that in mind:
Justin Trudeau meets with President Donald Trump at the White House, 13 February, 2017.
Photo from the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.
Ever since the re-election of Donald Trump earlier this month, the most interesting question in Canadian politics has been “Who gets it?” That’s the main thing I’ve been looking for, and I think some of our leaders get it — or are starting to, at least.
Doug Ford doesn’t get it. Or didn’t, anyway, up until Tuesday afternoon.
On Monday night, president-elect Trump announced via a post on his Truth Social app that, as one of his first acts upon retaking the Oval Office in January, he would levy a 25 per cent tariff against all goods coming in from Canada and Mexico until those two countries fix the problems Trump says exist along the border. That’s a careful bit of phrasing on my part, so let me explain: I don’t disagree that there are issues for the United States along both borders. I don’t necessarily accept that the issues are the same on both borders or that Trump has accurately characterized the overall situation. But, in any case, Canada now has less than two months to figure out what it can do, assuming it can do anything, to satisfy the president-elect’s demands.
It’s very possible that we can do enough. Trump is a negotiator and a dealmaker, and we have to see his social-media post through that lens. He is establishing a strong opening position, and we’ll negotiate him down from there. That’s the good news, such as it is. The bad news, though, is that there’s no reason to assume Trump is going to do this only once. After we meet his demands on the border, he could demand that Canada take on more of the burden of the military defence of North America and the Western alliance. After we’ve drafted a bunch of people and launched a fleet of new warships and sent a heavily armed stabilization force to Haiti, he could come after us for our dairy subsidies. Once we give way on that, it’ll be getting tough on white-collar crime or telecom access or airline access. And so on and so on and so on. It’ll be one damned thing after another.
The broad contours of this were clear to me by about 1:30 in the morning on the day after (or night of, if you prefer) the U.S. election. As I keep saying, the party is over. Some of Trump’s demands will be basically utterly bogus, and others may be arguably unreasonable, but some of them are absolutely going to be fair, and Canada has, to my enormous frustration, left itself very, very vulnerable to his brand of pressure. We have utterly failed as a country to adapt to a changing world order by getting this country onto a more serious footing on any number of fronts, especially trade and defence. We were warned by friendlier U.S. administrations, including by presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. We didn’t listen. That was idiotic, and I can only hope not suicidal on our parts. Trump is going to get his way.
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QotD: Why nothing gets done in the Current Year
Having pumped billions of dollars into building the next generation of computer chip factories in the US, the Biden administration is facing new pressure over the health and safety risks those facilities could pose. Environmental reviews for the new projects need to be more thorough, advocates say. They lack transparency around what kinds of toxic substances factory workers might handle, and plans to keep hazardous waste like forever chemicals from leaching into the environment have been vague.
A coalition of influential labor unions and environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have since submitted comments to the Department of Commerce on draft environmental assessments, saying that the assessments fall short. The coalition’s comments flag lists of potential issues at several projects in Arizona and Idaho, including how opaque the safety measures that manufacturers will take to protect both workers and nearby residents are.
This is not a serious complaint. This is actually the national association of environmental studies writers spotting a gravy train passing by and desiring to dip their ladle in. And that’s all it is too. But it’s also that excellent example of why fuck all ever gets built. We’ve an entire — and politically powerful — class that makes their living producing the hundred tonne reports that accompany building anything. And they’re not going to allow anything to be built unless they get paid for writing hundred tonne reports. And, to complete the circle, if every activity requires a hundred tonne report then fuck all will ever get done.
There was, back a time, a law passed about blood minerals. The law said anyone who might use them must write to all suppliers to ask if they do. Then those said anyones must tell consumers whether they do. This cost $4 billion just in the first year. From what I’ve heard — and might take the trouble to prove one day — the bloke who led the campaign for the law requiring the letters now runs a very profitable consultancy advising large corporates on how to write the letters. $4 billion spent by society so that one bloke can gain a minor summer place in the Hamptons. This doesn’t make us richer as a whole, it’s pissing the wealth of the nation up the wall.
Carthage, it’s the only solution. The biggest problem who is who the hell would buy our nice new stock of enslaved environmental bureaucrats? Razing, salt, ploughs, these are easy but who’s mad enough to offer a positive price for the last part of the process?
Tim Worstall, “Why Fuck All Ever Gets Done In This Modern World”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-08-28.
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November 28, 2024
A thought about “Second Thanksgiving”
Real Thanksgiving happened over a month ago, but our American friends constantly mis-read the calendar and schedule their event near the end of November instead. Just another one of those minor differences between the two countries, I guess. One thing that is similar, regardless of the month the holiday is celebrated, is the eternal Thanksgiving dilemma: is it best to be a host or a guest?
I don’t know what’s better: hosting Thanksgiving, or being a guest. And I don’t know which is worst, either. Each has its perils and pleasures.
Hosting: it’s so draining, so exhausting. I mean, watching your wife work so hard, it just takes it right out of you. Kidding: I help as best as I can, but it’s with the non-food jobs. My Thanksgiving culinary skills are limited to spanking the cranberry cylinder out of its can. I do the Cleaning. I make sure the wine glasses out, and the right ones — can’t have people drinking red out of white glasses, or the world as we know it would come to an end. I get the water pitcher down from the top shelf. No, not that one, the good one. The other good one. I vacuum and dust, in case guests want to push the piano away from the wall and check out our housekeeping.
[…]
Being a guest is hard because you just sit and wait and talk, and periodically say “anything I can do?” No. There is nothing you can do. So you drift to the living room where the kids are playing – all these small children, where did they come from? Just a few years ago their Mom or Dad was at your house at the kid’s table. And now they’ve reproduced. Hey, there’s football! You sit with the other guys and share the overhanging cloud of guilt — the womenfolk are doing everything, and you’re in here watching the Lions (why is it always the Lions). Occasionally one of the sisters or daughters who’s not doing anything at the moment wanders in and requests that someone explain football to her, and then she picks a team and gets excited when a player makes a great catch. Then she goes back to the kitchen and will not think about football for another year.
If I had to choose, I’d host, rather than be a guest. For some odd reason my wife at this point in life probably thinks the obverse. But I’ve noted over the years that even if you’re a guest at a family member’s thanksgiving, all the women end up in the kitchen anyway, talking amongst themselves about mysteries no man will ever know.
There’s a third option between guesting and hosting. For a few years we drove up to Fargo and had Thanksgiving Buffet at the Holiday Inn. Nothing to clean up. Turkey galore and unstinting stuffing. The hall was loud with communal consumption, and that somehow felt marvelously America. When you were done you just … got up and walked away and left the dishes where they were. Nothing more to do but digest, which brings an entirely new quality to the idea of gratitude.
Anyway: Happy Thanksgiving, be you guest or host. Here’s to lumpy potatoes and slabs of noble fowl. Gratitude is one of those things we figure we’ll get around to, and it’s marvelous to have a day where it’s absolutely required.
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