All writers enjoying respect and popularity in their lifetimes entertain the hope that their work will outlive them. The true mark of a writer’s enduring influence is the adjectification of his (sorry, but it usually is “his”) name. An especially jolly Christmas scene is said to be “Dickensian”. A cryptically written story is “Hemingwayesque”. A corrupted legal process gives rise to a “Kafkaesque” nightmare for the falsely accused. A ruthless politician takes a “Machiavellian” approach to besting his rival.
But the greatest of these is “Orwellian”. This is a modifier that The New York Times has declared “the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a modern writer … It’s more common than ‘Kafkaesque’, ‘Hemingwayesque’ and ‘Dickensian’ put together. It even noses out the rival political reproach ‘Machiavellian’, which had a 500-year head start.”
Orwell changed the way we think about the world. For most of us, the word Orwellian is synonymous with either totalitarianism itself or the mindset that is eager to employ totalitarian methods — notably the bowdlerization or suppression of speech and freedoms — as a hedge against popular challenge to a politically correct vision of society dictated by a small cadre of elites.
Indeed, it was thanks to Orwell’s books — forbidden, acquired by stealth and owned at peril — that many freedom fighters suffering under repressive regimes, found the inspiration to carry on their struggle. In his memoir, Adiós Havana, for example, Cuban dissident Andrew J. Memoir wrote, “Books such as … George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 became clandestine bestsellers, for they depicted in minute detail the communist methodology of taking over a nation. These […] books did more to open the eyes of the blind, including mine, than any other form of expression.”
Barbara Kay, “The way they teach Orwell in Canada is Orwellian”, The Post Millennial, 2019-11-29.
July 17, 2024
QotD: “Orwellian”
July 16, 2024
Real world economic experiment to test Card & Krueger’s minimum wage theory
Tim Worstall points out that the California state government is — intentionally or not — running an interesting economic validation of the Card & Krueger study in New Jersey that seemed to show raising minimum wages didn’t have a negative impact on overall employment:
“Fast food” by Daniel Barcelona is licensed under CC BY 3.0 
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For think back to that New Jersey minimum wage study, Card and Krueger. That showed that acshully, employment in fast food joints rose when the minimum wage went up. Now, I’ve been saying for a long time now that I think there’s a fallacy of composition there.
“Fast food” isn’t “fast food”. There are — at least — two sectors here. There’re those big national chains, lots of advertising, franchisees, MaccyD’s and the like. Then there’s a vast hinterland of Mom and Pop places. The financial structures are entirely different. The chains are capital intensive. I think I’ve seen that buns for burgers come in pre-cut. Salad definitely arrives in bags, already shredded. There’s no prep – not even prep areas in those kitchens. Mom and Pop run differently. One reason I know is because I’ve owned and run one. There’s an awful lot of labour that goes into turning blocks of stuff into those sandwiches. Stuff is sliced, diced, soups are cooked on site, from identifiable ingredients, bread is sliced and on and on.
No, this isn’t to try and riff off The Bear. But there is a difference in economic structure between those who are large corporates vending fast food and not-large corporates vending fast food.
And I think — think, me, I do — that the problem with the Card and Krueger study was that it didn’t account for this. A change in the general labour rate might push people to the capital intensive end of this market. Certainly could do, it would be possible to model it that way. Which means that using only the data from the fast food chains, as C&K did, would pick up only part, perhaps half, of the reaction. The Mom and Pops shed labour, the capital intensive chains modestly pick it up, the net effect is — well, the net effect could be anywhere actually.
Which is what makes this CA minimum wage change so interesting. Because the $20 an hour applies only to those working for the big national chains — or their franchisees.
Mom and Pop have to pay the normal CA minimum wage, not the $20. So, the labour intensive part of the overall system has just been handed a competitive advantage against the capital intensive end of it. We would expect, could possibly measure, that the overall employment outcome is positive.
No, really. I’d be willing to defend the idea that it could be, certainly. Note that “could”. So, we’ve two sectors, capital intensive, labour intensive. We’ve just said that the capital using guys now have to pay more — much more — for their labour than the labour intensive guys. The capital intensive guys can only respond by higher prices or worse service (ie, fewer labour hours). The labour intensive sector might end up picking up so much of the traffic that they expand employment — expand employment so much as to actually increase overall fast food sector employment. By shifting from the capital to the labour intensive sectors.
This should be studied, right? Now, my actual economic skills — rather than ruminations — are zero so it’s not going to be me checking this out. But I recommend it as something for someone looking for a PhD subject to think about. Possibly even someone more senior than that looking for a point upon which to make their bones.
Does a higher minimum wage that only — only — applies to the capital intensive portion of an economic sector like fast food actually increase employment? By shifting the sector over to the more labour intensive sector not subject to that higher minimum wage?
Logically, it could, significant empirical work would be necessary to show it though.
Britain’s Tories – “It is hard to think of any political Party that has so relentlessly thrown away its political mandate”
Lorenzo Warby considers a few of the early lessons that can be drawn from the British general election results:
I dislike the term “the deep state”. It mystifies what is much more straightforward, even bland: how metastasising bureaucracy is undermining the resilience of Western societies and their political systems.
The British Labour Party has won a massive Parliamentary majority in the House of Commons even though its total votes fell: from 10,269,051 in 2019 — 32.1% of total votes — to 9,704,655 in 2024 — 33.7% of total votes. Labour’s massive Parliamentary majority is not a product of enthusiasm for Labour, but the fracturing of the votes of its opponents.
The Scottish National Party (SNP) vote fell dramatically — from 1,242,380 votes in 2019 to 724,758 in 2024. This was largely a casualty of the SNP embracing the genderwoo of Transactivism. Outside some narrow urban enclaves, no one votes for “woke” but, given a genuine opportunity, folk will vote against it. As Scots have.
The Liberal Democrats did very well, as they have a regionally concentrated vote — which, this time, they targeted properly — and disgruntled (posh) Shire Tories will protest vote Lib-Dem. Clearly, lots did.
The Tories did so badly because their already low vote was further reduced by the Reform vote surge. The Reform vote represented voters punishing the Tories for their failure to do anything they had promised. As political scientist Matt Goodwin puts it:
They failed to control our borders.
They failed to lower legal immigration.
They failed to cut taxes and the size of the state.
They failed to take on woke, exposing our children to ideas with no basis in science.
And they failed to level-up the left behind regions.
It is hard to think of any political Party that has so relentlessly thrown away its political mandate.
So, an angry, unhappy electorate (rightfully) punished two governing Parties (Tories and SNP) and has given Labour a massive majority, with little enthusiasm — almost two-thirds of voters voted for someone else — on a relatively low turnout.
There is, however, a deeper institutional issue underlying these results. Why are voters so disgruntled? Why did the Tories fail so spectacularly?
The answer to these questions is a mixture of how institutions have evolved, the development of media culture, the Anywhere-Somewhere divide and technocratic delusions.
Technocratic delusion
The technocratic delusion is multi-layered. It holds that governing is a managerial input-output problem, government bureaucracy simply implements policy, and that politics is not a motivation and coordination problem.
None of these presumptions are true, so technocratic politics fails. It does not connect to voters and does not understand, or grapple with, the actual institutional landscape.
The technocratic delusion is a way for clever people to be spectacularly clueless. Not the only such mechanism in the modern world.
This Jet Age – Farnborough Airshow, 1953
spottydog4477
Published Dec 25, 2009
QotD: Corruption and crony capitalism
Surely we have seen enough to know that large organisations like the government and their crony capitalists in the corporate sector are deeply resistant to independent investigations, whistleblowers and all other genuine threats to their status?
Whereas those that battle away in the competitive private sector don’t even get the chance to be that corrupt – they either treat their customers and employees well, or they crumble into dust like the costumed retards in the entertainment industry are doing so reliably these days, those beloved of progressive dunces the world over.
There are few cover-ups in the world of dogwalking and fishmongering – these people do a good job or they get told to piss off by their customers. But in the public sector and the corporate world that depend upon it …?
When we catch a corrupt civil servant or corporate lackey, we are seeing the Tip of An Iceberg. But when we catch a corrupt landscape gardener or carpenter, we are finding a Rotten Apple.
My claim is that terrible government officials and corrupt crony capitalists are the both the tips of icebergs, so the cries from Left and Right about rotten applies need to go away. Those that work in the public sector or depend upon their relationship with it, are routinely terrible and usually without consequence.
Alex Noble, “Corruption In The Coercive And Voluntary Sectors: Rotten Apples? Or The Tips of Icebergs?”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-12-02.
July 15, 2024
Assassins
Political assassination has been thankfully rare in recent decades (with a few exceptions), and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania is the first such attack on a US president or presidential candidate to make the news since Ronald Reagan survived John Hinckley’s attempt in 1981:
Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024. One spectator was killed and two others were reported to be in critical condition. The shooter was killed by Pennsylvania State Troopers, according to reports in the succeeding hours.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump is unfortunately far from the first against an American president. Four presidents have been assassinated (Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963), but our history has seen numerous other unsuccessful shootings targeting the nation’s chief executive: against Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford (twice), Ronald Reagan, and now Trump.
The first of these unsuccessful attempts came against Andrew Jackson in 1835. An unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence came at Jackson with a pistol while the president was in the U.S. Capitol attending the funeral of South Carolina representative Warren R. Davis. Lawrence pulled the trigger and attendees heard a crack, but the pistol misfired. Jackson turned on Joseph and swung his cane at the assailant, who took out another pistol, which also misfired. A melee ensued with Jackson screaming, “Let me alone! Let me alone! I know where this came from”, suggesting that Jackson’s Whig enemies had sent the assassin. Among those who tried to subdue Joseph was Davy Crockett, who later said of the incident, “I wanted to see the damndest villain in the world and now I have seen him”. Jackson was unharmed but became more paranoid as a result of the close call. It was a contentious period in American politics; the New York Evening Post deemed incident “a sign of the times.” Joseph spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.
The next three shootings of presidents were unfortunately successful ones; it’s remarkable to consider now that these three assassinations took place over just 36 years, from 1865 to 1901. (What must Americans have thought of “our democracy” then?) The next failed attempt did not come until Teddy Roosevelt’s ill-fated effort to reclaim the presidency in 1912 as a third party candidate. In October of that year, Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee — the site of this year’s Republican convention — when a man named Joseph Schrank shot the former president in the chest. Roosevelt was fortunate that his folded 50-page speech was in his chest pocket and slowed the bullet. The bullet did pierce Roosevelt’s chest but did not penetrate too deeply. The crowd attacked Schrank, but Roosevelt asked that they not harm him, which probably saved Schrank’s life. Roosevelt then went ahead with his speech, famously saying, “it takes more than that to kill a bull moose”. This event has perhaps the most similarities to the Trump shooting, as both Trump and TR were ex-presidents looking to return to the White House, and both Trump and Roosevelt showed defiance after being bloodied.
TR’s cousin Franklin was president-elect in February 1933 when an anarchist named Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at him and Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak in Miami. The would-be assassin missed Roosevelt but hit Cermak and four other people. Roosevelt was likely saved by Miami housewife Lillian Cross, who pushed Zangara’s arm as he was firing. A gravely wounded Cermak told Roosevelt, “I’m glad it was me instead of you”. He died on March 6, two days after hearing Roosevelt’s inaugural address over the radio. Zangara was executed by electric chair two weeks later.
[…]
Before the Trump attack, the most recent shooting of a president was John Hinckley’s attack on Ronald Reagan in 1981. Reagan was early in his first term and was leaving a speech at the Washington Hilton (now referred to as the Hinckley Hilton by Washingtonians), when Hinckley opened fire, hitting Reagan press secretary Jim Brady, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and DC police officer Thomas Delahanty. Reagan’s protective detail threw him to the floor of his limousine and, thinking he was unharmed, took off back for the White House. Like Ford, Reagan did not like being under a pile and thought the agents had broken his rib. When the president coughed up blood, agent Jerry Parr recognized that Reagan had been hit as well and immediately redirected the limo to George Washington Hospital. This decision saved the president’s life. Even so, it was a close call. A paramedic thought upon seeing a gray-colored Reagan, “My God, he’s code city”, ER lingo for someone who isn’t going to make it.
I have to admit to knowing a bit more than the average person about prior presidential assassination attempts thanks to Stephen Sondheim’s soundtrack to the musical Assassins, which I’ve enjoyed listening to many times over the years.
Niall Ferguson on the historical context of political assassinations (the rest of the article is behind the paywall:
“There was a reason why Rome of Julius Caesar and Florence of the Medici were such dangerous places. Assassination was a feature, not a bug, of republican political systems. However, modern American medicine and the overblown security provided to presidents and former presidents together make it quite likely that both candidates will make it to November 5.”
I wrote those words on July 2. Eleven days later, events proved me both right — assassination is part and parcel of republican political systems — and wrong: this has ceased to be true of the United States.
What happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, on the evening of July 13, is in equal measure shocking and baffling. An inch or two further to the left and the bullet that grazed Donald Trump’s ear would have penetrated his skull and very likely killed him. A slight gust of wind, a tremor of the assassin’s hand, an unexpected move by the former president — for whatever tiny reason, Trump lived to fight another day.
The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old man from nearby Bethel Park, was a registered Republican but had made a $15 donation to the liberal ActBlue political action committee on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, when he was 17. Even more puzzling, this young man (who was barely a teenager when Trump was elected in 2016) was able to take several clear shots at the 45th president from the roof of a factory 130 yards away from the stage of Trump’s rally.
How did the Secret Service snipers stationed just 430 feet away not spot Crooks climbing into position on the roof, when at least one member of the public did see him and claimed that he had warned them? It is hard to think of a good explanation.
And what of the consequences? There are those who would have you believe that history is governed by vast impersonal cycles and that events such as this are mere epiphenomena, historical trivia. It is a claim as old as it is false.
The editors at The Line suspect the US Presidential election has now been decided months before any ballots are cast:
The prospect of someone deciding to take the rhetoric to its most extreme albeit logical conclusion — if Trump is a threat to life as we know it, the threat must be ended — cannot come as a surprise. At this time, we don’t know much about the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, beyond his name, the fact that he was a registered Republican but, also, a one-time donor to a progressive political action committee. We await more information, and hope there aren’t many more like him waiting to try again, or retaliate against a Democratic politician.
For now, we at The Line are pondering what’s next. July 13, 2024 is going to be one of those days that future historians look back upon with a certain wistfulness. If the wind was a little harder, a bullet lands a few inches in another direction, and Donald Trump is dead. In this timeline, though, the shooter missed, and now America is going to witness first hand the problems with relying on violence to secure political outcomes. Namely, it very often backfires.
Because we’ve taken the other fork in the road. We now exist in the other timeline of history — the one in which Donald Trump is now the far-and-away favourite to win a second term.
We could be wrong about this. No one can predict the future, and there are lots of scenarios still unplayed out. Does Biden step down in favour of Kamala Harris? Does the shooting turn out to be a hoax perpetrated by Trump or his supporters? Does Trump suffer a heart attack between now and November? Does someone else get shot? Any of these possibilities is still available, and any one could further change the outcome.
However, at this moment in time, it was hard for us to look at the picture of Trump standing up once the bullets had struck, demanding to be seen by the crowd even as his Secret Service detail tries to get him off the stage, pumping his fist in the air, all framed by an American flag, and think anything but “Well, that’s the ballgame.”
The Line is no fan of Trump, but we are also political observers, and Trump’s handling of the assassination attempt, as political showmanship, was absolutely perfect. Trump displayed an incredible presence of mind in the midst of mortal peril. While the echoes of the gunshots were still ringing, he understood that he needed to forgo some small degree of further protection in order to show his supporters — and the world — that he was fine. No one has to like the guy, or ignore the real risks he poses both to American and Canada, but we do have to respect how he handled that moment, if nothing else. It demonstrated calm nerves and competency under literal fire.
The response shored up Trump’s strengths in a way that highlighted Joe Biden’s comparative frailty. The shooting will absolutely supercharge Trump’s supporters, his base, his cult. There’s no coming back from it.
We don’t know what more to say here, folks. For the record, we at The Line rule out nothing at this early juncture. But if the momentum of history holds on its current track, there’s a very good chance that the next American election is over weeks before anyone bothers to cast a ballot.
Revisiting the “official” story of Srebrenica
Niccolo Soldo’s weekly roundup includes a look at the differences between the story the media told us about the Srebrenica massacre and what has come to light since then:
Map of military operations on July, 1995 against the town of Srebrenica.
Map 61 from Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict; Map Case (2002) via Wikimedia Commons.
29 years ago this week, Bosnian Serb forces of the VRS managed to seize the town of Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia, on the border with Serbia. A massacre of Bosnian Muslim males ensued shortly thereafter, and the narrative of genocide sprung forth quickly from it, giving cause to NATO’s intervention in that conflict.
Did a massacre occur? Certainly. Some 2,000 Bosnian Muslim males were summarily executed by Bosnian Serb forces around Srebrenica shortly after the UN-designated “safe haven” fell to the Serbs. Some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims lost their lives in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Srebrenica, but the narrative of “genocide” whereby all 8,000 were executed is simply not true as per John Schindler, the then-Technical Director for the Balkans Division of the NSA:
Twenty-nine years ago today, the Bosnian Serb Army captured Srebrenica, an isolated town in Bosnia’s east that was jam-packed with Bosnian Muslims, most of them refugees. This small offensive, involving only a couple of battalions of Bosnian Serb troops, soon became the biggest story in the world. What happened around Srebrenica in mid-July 1995 permanently changed the West’s approach to war-making and diplomacy.
The essential facts of the Srebrenica massacre are not in dispute. The town was a United Nations “safe area” but U.N. peacekeepers there, an understrength Dutch battalion, failed to protect anyone. Over the week following Srebrenica’s quick fall, some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, almost all male, a mix of civilians and military personnel, were killed by Bosnian Serb forces. About 2,000 disarmed Bosnian Muslim prisoners of war were executed soon after the town’s capture. The rest died in the days that followed, all over eastern Bosnia.
As the world learned the extent of the massacre, by far the biggest atrocity in the Bosnian War that had raged since the spring of 1992, Western anger mounted. Six weeks later, President Bill Clinton ordered the Pentagon to bomb the Bosnian Serbs in Operation Deliberate Force, the first major military action in NATO’s history. By the year’s end, the war was concluded by American-led diplomacy.
Here are Schindler’s conclusions:
That for three years, Srebrenica, supposedly a U.N. “safe area,” served as a staging base for Bosnian Muslim attacks into Serb territory. The Muslim military’s 28th Division regularly attacked out of Srebrenica. Bosnian Serbs claim they lost over 3,000 people, civilian and military, to those attacks.
That the Bosnian Muslim commander at Srebrenica, Naser Oric, was a thug who tortured and killed Serb civilians (he showed Western journalists footage of his troops decapitating Serb prisoners), as well as fellow Muslims he disliked. Mysteriously, Oric fled Srebrenica three months before the town’s fall, leaving his troops to die.
That most of the Bosnian Muslim dead, some three-quarters of them, died not at Srebrenica but during an attempted breakout by troops of the 28th Division to reach their own lines around Tuzla. They showed little communications discipline, and Bosnian Serb forces called down their artillery on them, columns of Muslim military and civilians together, slaughtering them. This doesn’t meet any standard definition of genocide.
That the Muslims were flying weapons into the “safe area” by helicopter in the months before the Bosnian Serb offensive. (Controversially, the Pentagon knew this was happening but pretended it didn’t.) The Serbs repeatedly protested to the U.N. about this violation, to no avail. This was the reason for the offensive to take the town.
There’s also convincing evidence that the Muslim leadership in Sarajevo knew Srebrenica would be attacked and allowed it to fall. Their leader, Alija Izetbegovic, stated that if Srebrenica fell, the Serbs would massacre Muslims as payback, and America would intervene on the Muslim side in the war. He was right.
Some of you may not like what John has to say here about Gaza and how it relates to Srebrenica:
This isn’t merely a historical matter. What happened in Bosnia is being repeated today in Gaza. Western journalists uncritically accept Muslim claims about war crimes and “genocide” to smear a Western state that’s at war with radical Islam.
Here the strange ideological affinity between jihadists and the Western Left plays a role, as it did during the Bosnian War as well. No claims of war crimes, which possess great political value on the world stage, should be accepted without independent confirmation. Srebrenica should have taught Western elites this essential truth, but it didn’t.
On a personal note, I like to bring up Srebrenica to Serbs as an example of how media shapes narratives that are often very remote from the truth in the hope that they understand what I am saying in a wider context.
Fun fact: Srebrenica translates into “Silverton”, as it was a significant silver mining town during the late Medieval era, with imported Saxons running the show.
From Utica to Chicago, then on to New Orleans
A.M. Hickman takes Amtrak on a pre-wedding rail tour of the United States. We pick up the narrative in Utica, New York, whose Amtrak station apparently gives off a North Korean/Potemkin village vibe:
The gargantuan marble-columned Utica train station sleeps like silver spoons in a dusty drawer of a great house. The bones of Utica have the smell and patina of old finery laid out at an estate sale in a great and crumbling chateau; its patrons long dead or doddering — if one walks quietly, they can hear their ghosts. I sip a porter at the trackside pub, staring out into the maze of empty streets as the pub’s speakers play the song “Allstar”, an upbeat tune released in 1999 by the one-hit-wonder band Smashmouth. And the barkeep looks as if the year 1999 never ended; cigarette smoke curling around his blonde frosted tip hairdo, leaning against the brick walls of the tavern’s courtyard in his sunglasses and FUBU-brand track jacket, kicking at the dirt in his stained white Reeboks.
No one else is at the bar — one wonders if Utica is being maintained in North Korean style, subsidized by the state to keep up appearances, spray-painted to the “uncanny valley” hue of sham vitality lest a train passenger should step off for a smoke break and start asking too many questions. I ponder this as the song continues — “Hey now, you’re an All-star, get your game on on, go play // hey now, you’re a rockstar, get the show on, get paid …” The barkeep ashes his cigarette and glowers, casting furtive glances toward the empty bar. I pay the tab, glad to be departing this weird, empty place in the heart of American Pyongyang — where one gets the disturbing sense that they may be being watched.
The train arrives, and Keturah is with me. If Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited were one’s first introduction to the Amtrak system they might get the impression that it’s a long, metal, track-bound Greyhound bus. The passengers are sullen and bored with earbuds universally donned. Cheerio dust covers our seat, and a heavy-set hustler-looking character in an Eminem t-shirt is sawing wood, snoring deeply, displaying all of the textbook symptoms of undiagnosed sleep apnea. Worst of all, the train’s bright white lights — the sorts of fluorescent lights one sees inside of hospitals and Wal-Marts — stay on all night, angled directly into our eyes, and we fitfully sleep as the train rattles at 110mph all the way to Chicago. The trip takes fifteen hours.
For Keturah and I, this ride is our last bit of time together before separating for a month. We’d both been taken with the romantic idea of parting ways for a few weeks before our wedding — and at Chicago, she’d head to southern Illinois to see her great-grandmother, and I’d jump aboard the City of New Orleans train to soak in the sinful humidity of the Crescent City. From there, I’d run a nearly 8,000-mile circuit around the United States — and if the trains ran on time, I’d arrive at our wedding in Upstate New York on time. Sleepy-eyed and rueing our separation, I saw her off onto her train.
I wandered Chicago’s Union Station alone, rattled by the gravity of her absence already, and several hours later, I hopped onto my own southbound train, dreaming of the woman who would become my wife.
A “vibe shift” takes place as I step aboard The City of New Orleans. The workers are a jazzy bunch, obviously natives of the city below sea level, all of them jocular and energetic; smooth Louisiana tones drip from their smiling craws — “good evening baby, we don’t mind you playing music in the cafe car — but if it’s the nighttime hours it had bettuh be smooth!”
Unlike the Lake Shore Limited, this train is equipped with a “Superliner” viewer car with domed glass windows that afford passengers views of the scenery. Most long-distance routes are equipped with these — except the routes that go in and out of New York City, as the train tunnels there don’t have the clearance for these tall double-decker cars. But the view of the scenery doesn’t matter much on the ride south through Illinois and Mississippi. This stretch of track is, in the colorful words of one especially talkative train attendant, “a damned old tunnel of green trees and shit“. Nonetheless this “tunnel” had a soothing effect as we sped southward, and I crawled down under the Superliner’s benches to sleep.
In New Orleans, I had the great pleasure of staying with one C. Sandbatch, a native son of New Orleans, and Covington, and Mississippi, and Kentucky, and, well — practically every location in the American South but Alabama or Georgia. A polymath of Southern geography, history, and literature, Mr. Sandbatch quite naturally opened his home to me, offering the air mattress in his high-ceilinged back room as organically as the forest offers its glens and creek-beds to a transient jackrabbit or wren. And quite naturally, he stationed himself upon the porch of his sparsely-decorated shotgun shack house, musing on his weirder years, relating tales of corrupt Parish Presidents and bayou dramas, and offering reflections on the more nuanced elements of Deep South race relations, New Orleans musical genre-bending, and Southern ecology.
Leaning back onto the wood of the old porch — which had been under some eleven feet of water during Hurricane Katrina — I listened to him speak in slow, eloquent tones as the breeze rustled the palms on the street. His cigarette smoke hung above the sleepy-eyed cats, and the wine in my cup was lukewarm in the humidity. We drove all over the city in his ailing old jeep, a vehicle whose transmission had the habit of “burping” in traffic, and we flitted in and out of cafes and bars, each of which seemed to be a sort of checkpoint in Mr. Sandbatch’s memory. Wistfully he drank as he spoke, and I felt myself slipping into the ease one knows only when wandering a city with one of its own sons.
What Pioneers ate on the Oregon Trail
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Apr 2, 2024Cornmeal cakes and the bacon in whose fat they were fried
City/Region: Oregon Trail
Time Period: 1856The Oregon Trail was tough. It was gruelling, food could become scarce, and even the drinking water was mostly unpalatable (not to mention the threat of dysentery). Emigrants packed well over 1,000 pounds of food into their wagons, staples like flour, bacon, coffee, sugar, rice, and hardtack (clack clack). They also relied on finding food like edible plants, fish, and game along the way.
These cornmeal cakes went by many names, including johnny cakes and hoe cakes. The ingredients are simple, but they’re surprisingly delicious. Without anything to leaven them, they’re a bit dense, but they taste great. The flavor is a combination of cornbread, sweet molasses, and bacon, kind of like a 19th century McGriddle. This is a great recipe to play around with. You could add some spices for a fancier version, swap out some of the water for milk, or use other fats or sweeteners.
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QotD: Sticking it to “the Man” in Collegetown, USA
But it made a certain type of college kid, and of course xzhyr professors, feel good about themselves, sticking it to The Man like that, so they kept on keepin’ on. In the grand tradition of puerile student protest, they’d routinely chalk up the parking lot and sidewalk in front of the building with catchy slogans like “this sidewalk brought to you by socialism!” Yes, they really thought that, and if you’ve followed my “inside the ivory gulag” posts, you can easily suss out why: Sidewalks are public services; public services are paid for by taxes; “conservatives” are against taxes; “conservatives” are also against socialism; therefore sidewalks are socialist.
No, really — I’ve heard more than one professor make a version of that “argument”. If it’s a public service of any kind — police, trash pickup, whatever — it’s by definition “socialist”, because it’s paid for by taxes, and “conservatives” think all taxes, everywhere, are totally illegitimate.
College these days runs about $20K per year on average, by the way. What a deal, huh?
Severian, “Caveat Emptor”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-16.
July 14, 2024
Japan’s New Defense plan, 100 million dead – WW2 – Week 307 – July 13, 1945
World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2024Japan is aware that soon enough the Allies will invade the Home Islands, and they will mobilize absolutely everything and everyone they can for their defense plan, “The Glorious Death of the 100 Million”. In the meantime, Allied carrier forces keep hitting them, the Australian advance on Borneo continues, the Chinese advance on Guilin continues, the Allied rebuilding of Okinawa continues, and American preparations are nearly complete for a test detonation of an atomic bomb.
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When the Ontario Progressive Conservatives backed away from LCBO privatization
In the National Post, Terence Corcoran posts an excerpt from last year’s The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier edited by Alister Campbell:
“LCBO at Parkway Mall” by Xander Wu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
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Almost 30 years ago, in 1995, the Ontario Progressive Conservative government led by Mike Harris promised to privatize the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). “We will sell off some assets, such as the LCBO,” said the party’s famed election document, the Common Sense Revolution (CSR). The LCBO could have been a true privatization — a full-fledged divestiture of a government monopoly into a new open and competitive market, but it never happened.
The failure to privatize the LCBO, lamentable from a consumer and economic perspective, remains a significant lost opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of privatization. If Harris had successfully de-monopolized the alcohol market, the whole concept of privatization would have been given a major boost. Instead, the government backed away from privatization of the alcohol market, preferring instead to allow the corporation to substitute modern marketing and retail razzle-dazzle to give the false impression it was offering the public the best of all worlds.
The LCBO failure is also a demonstration of the degree to which the Common Sense Revolution’s starting principles fell short in grasping the essential benefits of private versus public ownership and control. Neo-liberalism isn’t exactly a fine science. The Wikipedia entry on “Neo-liberalism” is a 30-page effort (including 400 footnote links to hundreds of warring academic papers), reflecting an economic and ideological scramble that dates back more than a century. But when the Harris government came to power, major elements of the free-market model were often overshadowed by fiscal policy objectives. With the LCBO, the Harris government veered off the neo-liberal course in pursuit of standard political objectives.
In 1995, the LCBO was a government owned and operated province-wide corporation that controlled liquor and wine wholesale and retail markets. Another private monopoly player, the Beer Store chain, while owned and operated by the brewing industry, was also essentially a government-sanctioned beer monopoly. The CSR neo-liberal objective should have been to privatize the alcohol market by selling the LCBO, deregulating the Beer Store monopoly and allowing beer sales through supermarkets and even corner stores. More importantly, dismantling the LCBO would allow other corporations to enter the alcohol retail business and provide consumers much more choice, which has been the Alberta experience. Notably, Alberta achieved a successful and deregulated approach without sacrificing provincial revenues.
The neo-liberal objective of privatization is to benefit consumers and enhance economic productivity through competition. Instead, the Harris government fell into the fiscal policy trap that routinely captures politicians, bureaucrats and corporate insiders. Instead of aiming to benefit consumers, the objective soon became how to maximize the fiscal return to government. Never mind the consumer and the market. The objective became preserving — and enhancing — government revenues.
At the time, anti-privatization advocates frantically pointed at the Alberta experience of privatization of their provincial liquor monopoly, which (briefly) generated a lot of retail horror stories that Ontario newspapers gleefully republished (and, likely, emphasized out of proportion to the actual Alberta market). You can still hear Ontarians casting aspersions on the Alberta market as if nothing at all had changed after the initial rough patch. From what I’ve heard from Albertans, they have far wider choices of alcoholic beverages in stores much more conveniently sited with better open hours than anyone in Ontario enjoys. The Alberta government still gets at least as much in tax revenues from alcohol sales without needing to be in the distribution or retail business. It doesn’t seem to be the utter disaster that Ontario media portrays it to be … rather the contrary.
Britain’s First Naval Defeat in 100 years – Coronel 1914
Historigraph
Published Sep 26, 2020
QotD: Method acting
Mark Steyn, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, The Spectator, 2005-07-30.
July 13, 2024
“Canada has disclosure issues”
The recent revelations about Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro’s family have certainly roiled the turgid waters of Canada’s tiny literati community, but was the scandal actually all that well hidden beforehand?
Alice Munro accepting the 2006 Edward MacDowell Medal, 13 August 2006.
Screenshot from a video of the event via Wikimedia Commons.
The Toronto Star ran two articles last weekend revealing that Andrea Skinner, third and youngest daughter of Nobel-prize-winning author Alice Munro, was sexually assaulted as a nine-year-old by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, Alice’s second husband.
The assaults occurred in the 1970s. Alice learned of them in 1992 when Andrea, then twenty-five, wrote her a letter detailing the abuse. After briefly leaving Fremlin, Alice returned to him. Andrea, feeling her mother had chosen her abuser over her, eventually cut ties with Alice and went to the police. Fremlin was convicted of indecent assault in 2005.
I’m not going to dwell on the abuse. It’s all here, and it’s distressing to read. One can only hope that recognition of what she suffered as a child and the pain she’s carried throughout her life brings some solace to Andrea.
I wish that had been my first reaction to the stories, but I was too long a journalist. My first thought was sordid. Good on the Star for getting the scoop.
My second thought was, how was this not reported earlier? It’s obviously a big story, and it all played out in open court. It’s surprising that it didn’t make headlines.
In yesterday’s Star, the always interesting Stephen Marche put the blame on “a specifically Canadian conspiracy of silence” amounting to “a national pathology”. He recalls that CBC radio star Peter Gzowski’s dirty laundry wasn’t aired until he’d passed; that CBC radio star Jian Ghomeshi’s outrageous behavior was not immediately called out; that author Joseph Boyden and singer Buffy Sainte-Marie both passed as Indigenous for a long time (Boyden does, in fact, have Indigenous blood). “Everybody knew but nobody knew,” Marche writes of each of these cases, adding that the Canadian arts and entertainment community “has been a breeding ground for monsters”.
I think Stephen has a low bar for monstrosity, but I am susceptible to his broader argument. Part of the reason I was happy that the Star got the scoop (and sincere congratulations to editor Deborah Dundas and reporter Betsy Powell on landing it) was that we sometimes first read of our biggest scandals in the international press. Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s crack scandal was revealed by Gawker, Justin Trudeau’s blackface habit by Time. Canada has disclosure issues.
The more I think about those issues, however, the less it seems we’re alone with them. How long did it take Harvey Weinstein’s crimes to make headlines? Bill Cosby’s? The US has had its share of long-running identity hoaxes: Elizabeth Warren, Hilaria Baldwin, Rachel Dolezal, and Jessica Krug. We didn’t learn that Kerouac was a thug and Salinger a creep until after they were gone. And it’s especially hard to sustain Marche’s argument that Canada is an outlier when the White House has been playing Weekend at Bernie’s for the last couple of years.
Certain stories are just slow to break. People keep secrets. Others abet them. Not many journalists frequent courtrooms way out there in Goderich, Ontario, and Fremlin’s name on the docket would not have sent off flares. Most people I’ve spoken to this week couldn’t have named Mr. Alice Munro last week.
There was no conspiracy, or at least not a broad one. I’m confident that any newsroom I was a part of would have run with the Munro story had we caught a whiff of Fremlin’s conviction. It’s not impossible to imagine other newsrooms making different editorial choices, perhaps arguing that Fremlin’s assaults didn’t merit coverage: he was a nobody apart from his association with Alice Munro; the offence was minor in a criminal sense (he served no time); Alice was not a party to the assaults; publishing the story would only serve to smear her by association. But I’ve not seen any evidence that any news outlet had a whiff of this story.
Only a small circle of people knew of Fremlin’s crime, most of them in the Munro family, and they weren’t talking. I contacted a few of the best Canadian literary gossips I know and they had heard nothing until last weekend. It’s not true that “everybody knew”.
Two who did know were Alice’s publisher, Douglas Gibson, and her biographer, Robert Thacker.
