Quotulatiousness

June 20, 2024

The “Idiot Nephew Theory” of show business management

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

Ted Gioia recalls his hopes of getting into the entertainment industry after graduation:

The story of how I became a strategy consultant is shameful.

I was a student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and needed a job after graduation. I wanted to work in the music or entertainment industries — but I soon learned this was an impossible dream.

They didn’t want me. And they didn’t want my classmates either.

Hundreds of companies came to our business school to recruit talent, and they included most of the leading US corporations. So I talked with everybody — Coca Cola, Morgan Stanley, Atari, Procter & Gamble, you name it.

But no record label or movie studio ever showed up. They didn’t even send job listings.

Can you guess why?

I asked around on campus and was told the following (off the record):

    Come on, Ted. You will never see the entertainment business recruit here. Those folks are not looking for business talent.

    They give the choice jobs to their family members — the idiot nephew gets hired, not an MBA. Even better if it’s an idiot son.

    And if there are other openings? Well … You’ve heard about the casting couch, haven’t you? Let me give you a hint — that couch isn’t just for auditioning the cast.

    But you wouldn’t want a job there even if they gave you one. When time comes for a promotion, the drooling idiot nephew moves up — not you.

I’ve never shared that story before — because I know how people inside the music business hate hearing it.

And maybe it’s not a fair story.

All I can say is that I found this advice very helpful. I stopped planning on a career in the music business. And I also developed a very useful theory to explain why record labels are so bad at making strategic decisions.

I call it the “Idiot Nephew Theory”:

    THE IDIOT NEPHEW THEORY: Whenever a record label makes a strategic decision, it picks the option that the boss’s idiot nephew thinks is best.

And what does the idiot nephew decide? That’s easy — they always do whatever the company lawyer recommends.

Maybe this theory is wrong. All I can say is that it helps me predict events in the entertainment industry with a surprising degree of accuracy.

I always operate on the assumption that there’s no business strategy in the music or movie business — only legal maneuvering.

Years later, when the music business got totally reamed by tech companies — a phase we’re still living through, by the way — I wasn’t surprised in the least. The record labels respond to every new music technology by litigating, but whenever they encounter a company with more legal clout than them (Apple or Google/YouTube, for example), they simply gave up.

In the future, you can test this theory yourself. You will see that it possesses great explanatory power.

The birth of para-rescue

Filed under: Asia, Britain, China, History, India, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At The War Room, Dr. Robert Lyman discusses an air crash in 1943 and the innovative and daring rescue of the survivors using parachutes:

A United States Army Air Force (USAAF) C46 similar to that of Flight 12420.

The birth of para-rescue can be placed in operations across the Hump airlift in 1942 and 1943. The story of the crash of Flight 12420 was a central part of the story.

The story itself is extraordinary. In 1943 a Soviet spy inside the predecessor organization to the CIA and a proud descendant of the famous Southern leader General Robert E Lee, on his way to China to meet General Dai Li, the mysterious and secretive Kuomintang intelligence chief; a celebrated American journalist sent by President Roosevelt to ascertain the “truth about China”; and General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s political adviser; together with eighteen others — American and Chinese — survived a C46 air crash on the mountainous and remote border between India and Burma. It was, and remains, the largest evacuation of an aircraft by parachute, and, given the fact that even the crew had never been trained in the technique, it was a miracle that so many survived. But they fell with their crippled plane from the frying pan into the fire. On disentangling themselves from their parachutes, the twenty shocked survivors soon found that they had arrived in wild country dominated by a tribe that had an especial reason to hate white men. The Nagas of the Patkoi Hills on their remote and unsurveyed land were notorious headhunters, who continued — despite the feeble wrath of distant British imperial authority — to practice both slavery and human sacrifice. Their specialty was the removal of the heads of their enemies — often women and children — achieved with a swipe of ugly, razor-sharp daos. On two occasions in recent years their village, or parts of it, had been burned to the ground and their warriors killed in running battles with sepoys sent to teach the villagers a lesson and to exert the authority of the Raj.

Nevertheless, and against all the odds, all but one of the twenty-one passengers and crew on the doomed aircraft survived. The story of the extraordinary adventure of those men among the Nagas of Pangsha and of their rescue by the young representative of the distant imperial power, the British deputy commissioner who arrived wearing “Bombay bloomers” and stout leather walking shoes, carrying a bamboo cane, and leading an armed party of “friendly” Nagas, is told in my book Among the Headhunters. In their meeting in some of the world’s most inaccessible and previously unmapped terrain, three very different worlds collided. The young, exuberant apostles of the vast industrial democracy of the United States came face-to-face with members of an ancient mongoloid race, uncomprehending of the extent of modernity that existed beyond the remote hills in which they lived and determined to preserve their local power, based on ancient head-hunting and slaving prerogatives. Both groups met — not for the first time for the Nagas, whose village had been burned twice, in 1936 and 1939, because of persistent head-hunting — the vestiges of British authority in India, disintegrating as the Japanese tsunami washed up at its gate.

One of the reasons for the survival of the men whose aircraft fell to earth that tumultuous day was the quick thinking, rapid action and spontaneous sacrifice of a group of US servicemen at the airbase from whence the aircraft departed that morning, Chabua. One in particular needs calling out, thirty-six-year-old ATC wing surgeon Lieutenant Colonel Don Flickinger. He had been duty medical officer at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 and in 1943 found himself stationed in the upper reaches of Assam as part of the mammoth Hump airlift to China.

On the day the C46 went down over the rugged Paktoi ranges, the dividing line between astern India and Burma in the first leg of the journey to China, a C47 sent up to see if it could find the wreckage, and found the survivors waving from a remote village high in the hills. Using ground signalling panels the C47 dropped to the survivors they indicated that at least one of the party was badly injured. When the C47 returned to Chabua with the news that survivors were seen in the sprawling village and its location pinpointed on the map, the British deputy commissioner gave the Americans the grave news that the men were likely to be in grave danger. The villagers were, unknown to the survivors, the most practised headhunters of the region, a powerful and unruly tribe who were notorious for their violence. It was unlikely that the men would survive the encounter.

“Surely the only way to defeat racism and homophobia is to treat ethnic and sexual minorities as incapable of high achievement and in need of a leg up from their betters?”

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

Andrew Doyle on a radical new approach to hiring that might just catch on:

With the inexorable spread of DEI – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – across the western world, it’s refreshing to see at least one major company resist the decrees of this new religion. This is precisely what happened this week when Scale, an Artificial Intelligence company based in San Francisco, launched a new policy to ensure that its employees were hired on the basis of – wait for it – being the most talented and best qualified for the job.

This innovation, which sees race, gender and sexuality as irrelevant when it comes to hiring practices, should hardly be considered revolutionary. And yet in a world in which the content of one’s character is less important than the colour of one’s skin, to treat everyone equally irrespective of these immutable characteristics is suddenly deemed radical.

Scale’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, explained that rather than adopt DEI policies, the company would henceforth favour MEI, which stands for Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. He explained the thinking behind the new scheme in a post on X.

    There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the “right” or “wrong” race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal. Upholding meritocracy is good for business and is the right thing to do.

One can already hear the likes of Robin DiAngelo and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez screaming in fury at this blatant implementation of good old-fashioned liberal values. Surely the only way to defeat racism and homophobia is to treat ethnic and sexual minorities as incapable of high achievement and in need of a leg up from their betters?

It is instructive to compare reactions from the Twittersphere (now X) and Instagram, as one X user has done. If nothing else, the comparison reveals how the divide in the culture war is playing out on social media since Elon Musk’s takeover. On X, major figures in the corporate world such as Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify), Palmer Luckey (founder of Oculus VR) and Musk himself have congratulated Wang on his new initiative.

By contrast, here are some of the responses on Instagram:

    You’re ‘disrupting’ current hard-fought standards you don’t like, by reverting to a system rooted in bias and inequality that asks less of you as a hiring manager and as a leader
    – Dan Couch (He/Him)

    Curious to see how hiring processes can effectively (and objectively) measure one’s ‘merit’, ‘excellence’, and ‘intelligence’, all of which are very subjective terms
    – Cole Gawin (He/Him)

    What is merit and how do we measure it?
    – Rio Cruz Morales (They/Them)

    This sounds a lot like excuse making for casting off DEI principles
    – R.C. Rondero De Mosier (He/Him)

The pronouns, of course, signify membership of the cult, and so we should not be surprised to see the sentiments of its minions mirroring each other so closely. What Wang is proposing of course builds equality into the hiring system and, contrary to these complaints, it is entirely possible to measure merit objectively. This, after all, is the entire point of academic assessment. The arguments against merit can only be sustained if one presupposes that systemic inequalities are ingrained within society, that all of these relate to the concept of group identity, and that adjustments have to be made accordingly to guarantee equality of outcome.

June 19, 2024

Soviet America in decay

Filed under: China, History, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Free Press, Niall Ferguson invites us to consider that America, not China, has taken the place of the Soviet Union in the post-Soviet world:

The witty phrase “late Soviet America” was coined by the Princeton historian Harold James back in 2020. It has only become more apposite since then as the cold war we’re in — the second one — heats up.

I first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. In articles for The New York Times and National Review, I tried to show how the People’s Republic of China now occupies the space vacated by the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991.

This view is less controversial now than it was then. China is clearly not only an ideological rival, firmly committed to Marxism-Leninism and one-party rule. It’s also a technological competitor — the only one the U.S. confronts in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It’s a military rival, with a navy that is already larger than ours and a nuclear arsenal that is catching up fast. And it’s a geopolitical rival, asserting itself not only in the Indo-Pacific but also through proxies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we — and not the Chinese — might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?”

I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day — perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?

Yes, I know what you are going to say.

There is a world of difference between the dysfunctional planned economy that Stalin built and bequeathed his heirs, which collapsed as soon as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform it, and the dynamic market economy that we Americans take pride in.

The Soviet system squandered resources and all but guaranteed shortages of consumer goods. The Soviet healthcare system was crippled by dilapidated hospitals and chronic shortages of equipment. There was grinding poverty, hunger, and child labor.

In America today, such conditions exist only in the bottom quintile of the economic distribution — though the extent to which they do exist is truly appalling. Infant mortality in the late Soviet Union was around 25 per 1,000. The figure for the U.S. in 2021 was 5.4, but for single mothers in the Mississippi Delta or Appalachia it is 13 per 1,000.

The comparison to the Soviet Union, you might argue, is nevertheless risible.

Take a closer look.

Nazi Werwolves: Post War Terror – War Against Humanity 135

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

World War Two
Published 18 Jun 2024

The guns are silent in Germany but the Allied Forces continue to suffer a flurry of bombings, assassinations, and shootings. Who is to blame? Well, the press suspects the Nazi Werwolves – terroristic bands of men, women, and children determined to carry on Hitler’s war. But just how serious is this violence really, and how many of the attackers are true believing Nazi fanatics?
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Why the US Lost the Tet Offensive Despite Beating the NVA

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

Real Time History
Published Feb 16, 2024

After years of boots on the ground and bloody combat in Vietnam, US officials are publicly confident. The strategy of eliminating the Viet Cong is working. The North Vietnamese communist forces are on their last legs and victory is only a matter of time. Or so they say. But as 1968 and the traditional lunar new year festivities begin, US and South Vietnamese troops find themselves on the receiving end of a formidable North Vietnamese surprise attack: The Tet Offensive.
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June 18, 2024

Freddie deBoer contra J.J. McCullough on Conspiracy Theories

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

I saw JJ’s latest video pop up on my YouTube subscriptions page, read the headline and winced slightly. I generally like JJ’s videos even when I disagree with his presentation or interpretation and from the title, I thought “No, ‘many conspiracy theories’ did NOT ‘turn out to be true'” would require a fair bit of, uh, curation of the theories that get discussed. Freddie deBoer — who I disagree with much more than I do with McCullough — had a similar reaction:

The latest video from conservative Canadian YouTuber JJ McCullough displays many of the attributes that make his perspective unique — he’s genuinely a right-wing figure but an arch institutionalist, a gay Millennial with the kind of vague social libertinism common to a lot of libertarian-leaning conservatives but something of a scold, a Canadian patriot who relentlessly defends the United States from the kinds of criticism of Americanah that you might associate with Europe or, well, Canada — critiques of our provincialism, our consumerism, our boorish tendency to shove the rest of the world around. McCullough likes all of that stuff, more or less, while living a cosmopolitan and vaguely-arty lifestyle in groovy Vancouver. He’s perhaps best known for his war with Montreal, Francophone Canadians, and the entire province of Quebec, which fits his general esteem for a certain kind of capital-R Reasonable Anglophilia.

He reminds me, strangely, of a certain kind of secular anti-atheist, the type who still gets mad about the New Atheists despite the complete collapse of that subculture and whose own lack of belief doesn’t prevent them from waxing poetic about the glories of religion. I have a friend from grad school who grew up in an extremely repressive Christian community when she was young, and who describes leaving as an “escape”. (The kind of community where she and her sisters wore wrist-to-ankle dresses every day of their lives no matter the Oklahoma heat, weren’t allowed TV or radio, absorbed lots of corporal punishment, that sort of thing.) She has very, very little patience for people who are so annoyed by internet atheists that they become in effect advocates for religion; as she says, this kind of vague fondness for religion among the irreligious could only occur to someone who never had to live the way she did. I sort of see the same thing in McCullough — he idealizes certain aspects of America’s ethos because he has never had to live with the consequences of being surrounded by people who believe in it, who consciously or unconsciously demand that everyone else believe in it.

Anyhow, this new video is about conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are a good topic for understanding McCullough’s very particular ideological makeup. Conspiracy theories are famously a cross-ideological phenomenon, with both left conspiracy theories and right conspiracy theories but also conspiracy theories that don’t fit neatly into either, like 9/11 trutherism. As I said, McCullough is an institutionalist, a small-but-good government sort of guy (or so I take it) who places a great deal of value in official claims, institutions, and experts, and so he’s naturally distrustful of conspiracy theories. And he demonstrates that antipathy in this video through poking holes in a few clickbaity articles listing conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. This all amounts to feasting on a banquet of low-hanging fruit, but it’s not an illegitimate way to approach the question. I just don’t like his conclusions.

The key to McCullough’s bit here is that he doesn’t dispute that the named conspiracy theories (or “conspiracy theories”) that are asserted to be true are true. Rather, he operates by insisting that every identified conspiracy theory is in fact not a conspiracy theory according to his preferred definition. It’s not sufficient for a conspiracy theory to be broadly thought of as a conspiracy theory; it has to comport to specific rules he has devised for what a conspiracy theory entails. Effectively, that means that a conspiracy theory is only a conspiracy theory if it satisfies criteria endorsed by no one but JJ McCullough. I can’t decide if this is an isolated demand for rigor or a No True Scotsman, but either way, McCullough is here insisting on an unusually stringent definition of a conspiracy theory for the purpose of dismissing the idea that any conspiracy theories are true. And there’s a version of this that isn’t entirely wrong; there’s a tautological sense in which all conspiracy theories are false because being false is part of that definition of a conspiracy theory. But McCullough isn’t using that definition, just a particularly odd one that makes his task easier.

So the fact that cigarette manufacturers knew that cigarettes were very bad for your health but conspired to hide this fact from the public is not a conspiracy theory, according to McCullough, because other people of that era suspected that cigarettes caused lung cancer. (Actually proving that took a very long time, at least according to modern standards of causality.) I find this argument powerfully strange! You had a group of powerful people, they indisputably knew that cigarettes were very bad for your health, they indisputably conspired to suppress that information, they were fairly effective at that task. The fact that some early whistleblowers tried to raise the alarm is simply irrelevant. Check out my own proprietary formula.

Group of Powerful or Influential People + Nefarious Intent + Secrecy + Active Conspiring + Negative Consequences, Real or Potential = Conspiracy Theory

That’s a conspiracy, brother, and the tobacco company bad behavior fits. Long before information about their coverups became public knowledge, people were talking about the possibility that the tobacco companies were up to that exact bad behavior. Theorizing, you might say.

US “birthright citizenship”

Filed under: Government, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton argues against the legality of “birthright citizenship”:

“American Flag” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0

One of the benefits of Donald Trump’s involvement in politics over the last ten years has been that it opened up a robust national discussion about an issue that up until recently had been largely ignored by the political class. This discussion is about so-called “birthright citizenship”, the idea that whenever a foreign national (regardless of legal status and with a very few exceptions) has a child on American soil, this child automatically becomes an American citizen from birth. This approach to citizenship has been the de facto (though not de jure) approach to the issue of “anchor babies”, the children of illegal aliens who come to the United States so that they can have their children here, thus allowing the parents to remain as well, usually helping themselves to generous American benefit monies.

Defenders of unrestricted birthright citizenship – primarily found among liberals, establishment GOP types, and the more uninformed types of libertarians – adamantly argue from the 14th amendment’s Citizenship Clause that birthright citizenship is not only legal, but is in fact constitutionally protected, and is what the 14th amendment has meant all along. They often try to buttress their arguments by appealing to English common law with its historical provisions for birthright citizenship. However, is this sort of “swim a river, fill our quiver” approach really what the 14th amendment meant? Is it really what English common law, which forms the basis for much of our own law and constitutional interpretation, historically upheld? The answer to these questions is, “No”. Let’s look at some of the history behind this issue.

The crux about which the discussion revolves is the Citizenship Clause found in the 14th amendment, Section 1,

    All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

More specifically, what is at issue is the phrase, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. Clearly, the clause was not intended to convey American citizenship to an unlimited pool of children born to aliens on American soil. If this had been the case, then the phrase under discussion would not have been included. Obviously, some limits were intended, those circumscribed by the intent of being “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.

So what were these limits? Typically, it will be pointed out that the limits due to this jurisdictional issue were that citizenship was not being conveyed to children born of ambassadors and others aliens employed by their foreign governments, nor was it being conveyed to members of various Indian tribes which exercised sovereign powers within their own territories (this latter was rescinded by an act of 1924 which granted Indian tribes full American citizenship). Were these the only restrictions on birthright citizenship intended by the author and debaters of the 14th amendment?

No, actually. Let’s understand what the original intention of the 14th amendment was, which was to grant American citizenship to former black slaves and their children, and to prevent these newly freed citizens from being denied citizenship rights by certain of the southern states. That’s it. This was made clear by Sen. Jacob Howard, who authored the amendment in 1866, who clearly provided the intent for this section of the amendment,

    Every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is, by virtue of natural law and national law, a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. This has long been a great issue in the jurisprudence and legislation of this country.

Clearly, other classes of foreign citizens were intended besides the children of ambassadors and other diplomatic personnel. Indeed, Howard’s statement appears to be quite all-encompassing – if taken at face value, it would appear that he did not even intend the 14th amendment to grant citizenship to the children of foreign nationals here legally, much less to those here illegally.

June 17, 2024

Farm Camp for city slickers

Filed under: Business, Education, Food, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Larissa Phillips explains the kind of things city children (and their parents) learn when they stay at her family’s small farm for a week or a weekend:

Here are some things I have taught the kids who visit my farm: animals don’t care about your feelings, and sometimes we kill them to eat them. It doesn’t matter how desperately you want to find more eggs, the hens don’t lay on demand. Tomatoes aren’t ripe in June. The stalls aren’t going to clean themselves. Cuts, scrapes, and stings aren’t really a big deal. And there will always be poop.

I’m often struck by what city kids don’t know when they turn up at the education program I run for families on our 15-acre hobby farm — Honey Hollow Farm — in the Upper Hudson Valley. As a longtime urbanite, I get it. I lived in Brooklyn for 15 years before my husband and I moved upstate in 2010 with our two young children and one goal: start a farm. We kept horses and ponies for fun and raised poultry and sheep — and sometimes pigs — for food.

It was hard. Slaughtering animals we’d raised since they were babies was wrenching. Breeding and birthing those babies was dicey, too. But these experiences toughened us up. Working with animals and the land and the seasons was grounding — and the best antidote to anxiety I’d ever found. And most of it was fun.

I wanted to share this outlook with other families, even if it was just for a weekend. So at the start of the pandemic, I opened our guest cottage — and set up an informal curriculum to teach escaping urbanites what I’d learned.

I called it farm camp.

We host one family at a time, all through the year, in a renovated barn apartment overlooking the pony pasture. Most come for a week, some for a weekend. Every morning I’ll take a handful of kids, sometimes as young as three, through a two-hour, hands-on class on animal care, life, death, poop. All of them have to do some real farmwork.

There is a lot to learn. I don’t expect a child to know how long it takes for a chick to hatch, or why the roosters are always jumping on top of the hens. But I am often surprised by some of the straightforward things they don’t know how to do. Like how to pull a wagon around a corner, hold a shovel, climb over a gate, make a braid, or tie a knot.

Don’t get me wrong — I love offering explicit instructions on the most mundane tasks, then standing back and cheering when a kid does it independently. But two generations ago, these skills would have been common knowledge. For most of human history, the proportion of the world’s population living in cities was below 5 percent. It’s at 56 percent now. By the time today’s toddlers reach adulthood, it is expected that 80 percent of humans will live in urban areas.

Overprotected as they are, a lot of city kids are missing out on so many important encounters with material reality: with death or danger or manual labor. These encounters can be unpleasant, even painful. It’s understandable that we want to save our children from them. But they lose something essential when we do.

Most urbanites have a very sanitized — in fact, Disneyfied — view of rural life and especially life on a farm. It can be traumatic to discover that all the animals aren’t like you saw in the cutesy cartoons as a preschooler …

5 Foods that Changed Fast Food Forever (ft. @mythicalkitchen)

Filed under: Food, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Mar 8, 2024

The Mythical Kitchen Cookbook by Josh Scherer: https://amzn.to/49Se1qZ

Recipe at https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes
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June 16, 2024

Mao Tightens His Grip – WW2 – Week 303 – June 15th, 1945

Filed under: Australia, China, Europe, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 15 Jun 2024

After several weeks of the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong’s power has consolidated to the point that it is absolute. All pledge loyalty Mao, and his infallibility shall not be questioned. Meanwhile the war goes on in the field with Australian landings on Brunei, continuing fighting on Okinawa, and the last part of Europe — in the Netherlands — liberated from Axis control.
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What People Ate on Ellis Island

Filed under: Europe, Food, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Mar 5, 2024

A complete Ellis Island meal: Tapioca Pudding, coffee, Beef and Barley Soup, and white bread.

City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1887

The food on Ellis Island could be pretty good or pretty terrible depending on when you were there. The quality went up and down a lot, but the food was always free to those who were staying on the island. A menu for the midday meal on Tuesday, January 20, 1920 lists English Beef Soup with Barley, Lamb Stew with Vegetables, Bread and butter substitute, Tapioca Pudding, Coffee. This recipe doesn’t use a lot of meat, but the marrow melts into the broth and there are plenty of vegetables and flavor, making for a hearty soup.

    Beef Soup

    Select a small shin of beef of moderate size, crack the bone in small pieces, wash and place it in a kettle to boil, with five or six quarts of cold water. Let it boil about two hours, or until it begins to get tender, then season it with tablespoonful of salt, and a teaspoonful of pepper; boil it one hour longer, then add to it one carrot, two turnips, two tablespoonfuls of rice or pearl barley, one head of celery and a teaspoonful of summer savory powdered fine; the vegetables to be minced up in small pieces like dice. After these ingredients have boiled a quarter of an hour, put in two potatoes cut up in small pieces; let it boil half an hour longer, take the meat from the soup, and if intended to be served with it, take out the bones and lay it closely and neatly on a dish, and garnish with sprigs of parsley.

    Serve made mustard and catsup with it. It is very nice pressed and eaten cold with mustard and vinegar, or catsup. Four hours are required for making this soup. Should any remain over the first day, it may be heated, with the addition of a little boiling water, and served again. Some fancy a glass of brown sherry added just before being served. Serve very hot.

    — The White House Cook Book, 1887.

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June 15, 2024

The Ford Foundation and the far left

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

N.S. Lyons looks at the vast amount of money the “philanthropic” Ford Foundation donates to organizations pushing far left agendas:

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution”. Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people”, she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city”, surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power”.

It’s May 2023, and protesters have stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to demand that lawmakers not accept spending cuts during negotiations to lift the debt ceiling. Many are so disruptive that the police arrest them and drag them out. These are activists of the Center for Popular Democracy, an extreme left-wing organization that has collected $35.2 million from the Ford Foundation since 2012. Four months later, they will be imitated by 150 youth activists from the “climate revolution” group the Sunrise Movement, 18 of whom will be arrested after occupying the Speaker of the House’s office. The Sunrise Movement also receives Ford Foundation money—$650,000 for “training and organizing”.

It’s April 2023, and, a world away, the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), a think tank set up and directed by the Chinese state, is hosting a conference in Beijing to discuss how to “promote the formation of an internationally accepted ESG system with Chinese characteristics”, including through China’s globe-spanning influence and infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative. But this effort by America’s top geopolitical adversary isn’t too far afield for the Ford Foundation to fund; it has given CDRF $600,000 to help realize its ambitions.

These examples from just the last year — collected via a semi-random tour of the Ford Foundation’s vast Grants Database — represent a tiny fraction of the nearly $1 billion that the foundation gives away yearly, on average. Almost a century old and sitting on a mountainous $16.4 billion endowment in 2022, the foundation is a “philanthropic” giant — one of the five largest in the U.S. If it were a for-profit firm, its market capitalization would rank it among the Fortune 500. Instead, “guided by a vision of social justice”, as its mission statement puts it, the Ford Foundation’s enormous flood of untaxed money flows annually to an immense ecosystem of overwhelmingly left-wing — and often outright revolutionary — causes.

Yet the foundation’s activities remain largely below the public’s radar, the extent of its malign history mostly unknown. This should change. America today faces a multitude of escalating sociopolitical crises that are rapidly tearing apart the body politic: a rapacious strain of tribal identity politics; spreading legal, cultural, and moral chaos; lawlessness in the streets; and the entrenchment of an oligarchic managerial elite, increasingly willing to cast aside any remaining shred of democratic or national sovereignty in its pursuit of top-down global “progress”. Behind every one of these fractures, one finds the ongoing work of the Ford Foundation.

In 2020, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a “racial reckoning” swept the United States, kindling fiery riots across the nation, abrupt moves by municipalities to defund police departments, and the near-wholesale capitulation of public institutions — from universities to government agencies to major corporations — to a culturally revolutionary ideology of identitarian grievance and racial separatism. To some, this came as a shock. To the Ford Foundation, it marked the fulfillment of decades of effort.

The foundation has long seen itself as uniquely dedicated to progress and social justice, its stated mission from as early as the 1950s being the “general purpose of advancing human welfare” and to “eradicate the causes of suffering” worldwide. But after current president Darren Walker took the helm in 2013, it began more fully to embrace a public identity as a “social justice foundation” and reoriented its mission to “disrupt the drivers of inequality” in every sphere of life and across the globe.

QotD: Is there more craziness these days or is it just the volume turned up to 11?

Filed under: Food, Health, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… Is there, in fact, more lunacy in the Current Year, or is it just louder? He argued that there’s more. I argue that there’s not. Victorians, for instance, were world-class eccentrics. Just to stick with the breakfast cereal theme, consider that Kellogg’s corn flakes were based on some weird theory of digestion that was designed to combat the scourge of masturbation. No, really — the Sylvester Graham referenced in that article is the guy behind graham crackers, which were designed for similar reasons. See also “Fletcherism”, which counted Thomas Edison among its adherents. And that’s just food! Water, electricity, magnetism, you name it, there’s some weird Victorian health fad attached to it. Throw in the peccadilloes, sexual and otherwise, of just the widespread missionary movements, and you’ve got all the crazy you can handle, and then some.

Contrast this to the Current Year, where, much like breakfast food, what seems to be a bewildering variety of lunacy can be boiled down to just a few basic types. “Wokeness” is a madlib with just two variables: ____ is either racist or sexist, pick one. (I suppose you can combine them, but you’ll notice that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d predict, because the blacks hate the gays and the feminists hate everyone, so going full retard ends up getting you in a lot of trouble with your coreligionists).

Severian, “Mail Bag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-11.

June 13, 2024

Debunking the “miraculous” Marshall Plan

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If you’ve read anything about the state of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, you’ll undoubtedly have heard of the way the Marshall Plan did wonders to get (western) Germany and the other battle-devastated nations back on their feet economically. At FEE, Christian Monson suggest that you’ve been provided with a very rosy scenario that doesn’t actually accord with the facts:

Konrad Adenauer in conversation with Ludwig Erhard.
KAS-ACDP/Peter Bouserath, CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE via Wikimedia Commons.

Unfortunately, the ubiquity of the myth that the Marshall Plan rebuilt Germany is proof that state-controlled education favors propaganda over economic literacy. Despite the fact that most modern historians don’t give the Marshall Plan much credit at all for rebuilding Germany and attribute to it less than 5 percent of Germany’s national income during its implementation, standard history textbooks still place it at the forefront of the discussion about post-war reconstruction.

Consider this section from McDougal Littell’s World History (p. 968), the textbook I was given in high school:

    This assistance program, called the Marshall Plan, would provide food, machinery, and other materials to rebuild Western Europe. As Congress debated the $12.5 billion program in 1948, the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia. Congress immediately voted approval. The plan was a spectacular success.

Of course, the textbook makes no mention of the actual cause of the Wirtschaftwunder: sound economic policy. That’s because, for the state, the Marshall Plan makes great statist mythology.

Not only is it frequently brought up to justify the United States getting involved in foreign conflicts, but it simply gives support for central planning. Just look at the economic miracle the government was able to create with easy credit, they say.

And of course, admitting that the billions of dollars pumped into Germany after WWII accomplished next to nothing, especially when compared to something as simple as sound money, would be tantamount to admitting that the government spends most of its time making itself needed when it isn’t and thereby doing little besides getting in the way.

The Inconvenient Truth of Currency Reform

You are unlikely to find the real cause of the Wirtschaftwunder mentioned in any high school history textbook, but here is what it was. In 1948, the economist and future Chancellor of West Germany Ludwig Erhard was chosen by the occupational Bizonal Economic Council as their Director of Economics. He went on to liberalize the West German economy with a number of good policies, the most important being currency reform.

The currency in Germany immediately after WWII was still the Reichsmark, and both the Nazis and then the occupying Soviet authorities had increased the amount in circulation significantly. As a result, by 1948 the Reichsmark was so worthless that people had turned to using cigarettes and coffee as money.

To give people a true store of value so that they could calculate economic costs accurately, assess risk and invest in the future, Erhard created the Deutsche Mark, West Germany’s new currency. Like ripping off a bandaid, he decreased the money supply by 93 percent overnight.

It’s also worth noting that while Erhard, following his school of Ordoliberalism, did form a central bank, it was at least designed independent from the government and followed a hard-money policy (preserving a stable amount of money) through the length of the Wirtschaftswunder. In fact, the original Bank Deutsche Länder was rather limited in scope until it was reorganized as the considerably more centralized Bundesbank in 1957, incidentally when Germany’s economic miracle began to lose steam.

Other notable liberal policies instituted by Erhard included removing all price controls and lowering taxes from the Nazis’ absurd 85 percent to 18 percent. The American occupational authorities opposed these reforms, but Erhard went through with them anyway. This liberalization had an immediate effect. The black market disappeared almost overnight, and in one year, industrial output almost doubled.

Perhaps most poignantly, unemployment dropped from more than 10 percent to around 1 percent by the end of the 1950s. Normally the government tries to justify currency manipulation as a means to eliminate unemployment, but the Wirtschaftwunder is evidence that sound money does the job far better.

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