Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Jul 2022Colonial-era North America was a busy place, so let’s take a quick look through some of the major players from the perspective of the lands & cities they inhabited.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Lectures from The Great Courses: “1759 Quebec – Battle For North America” from The Decisive Battles of World History by Gregory Aldrete, “The American Revolution” from Foundations of Western Civilization II by Robert Bucholz, “North American Peoples and Tribes” from Big History of Civilizations by Craig Benjamin, “The Iroquois and Algonquians Before Contact” from Ancient Civilizations of North America by Edwin Barnhart, “Iroquoia and Wendake in the 1600s”, “Indian-European Encounters 1700-1750”, “The Seven Years War in Indian Country” and “The American Revolution Through Native Eyes” from Native Peoples of North America by Daniel M. Cobb, Britannica articles “New York” & “Boston” https://www.britannica.com/place/New-… & https://www.britannica.com/place/Bost…
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November 21, 2022
City Minutes: Colonial America
September 28, 2022
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Infrastructure
Kite & Key Media
Published 31 May 2021America is a land of constant progress. Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing we can’t accomplish. And then we try to build something…
In recent years, infrastructure projects have taken way too long and cost way more than they should. Boston’s “Big Dig”, for example, took 15 years and cost more than 5x as much as projected. California’s High-Speed Rail was supposed to run between L.A. and San Francisco by 2020. Instead, some track nowhere near either city might be ready by 2027.
Why can’t America build quickly or cost effectively anymore? A well-intentioned regulatory law from the 1970s has a lot to do with it…
When the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) first took effect in the 1970s, the environmental impact analysis it required from builders before a project could begin would often run less than 10 pages. Today, the average is more than 600 pages.
Maybe delays and ballooning costs are worth it to protect the planet, right? Here’s the crazy part: NEPA doesn’t even guarantee that. In some cases, it’s actually making us less green.
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May 6, 2022
“Canadians might not know their constitutional history or even the text of the Charter, but they know in their bones that these orders were unconstitutional”
Long before the Freedom Convoy protests earlier this year, I’d been somewhat skeptical of the value of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — not that I thought it was a bad thing to have a clear enumeration of Canadians’ rights, but in the degree to which those rights could be ignored or abrogated whenever the government found it convenient to do so. The invocation of the Emergencies Act proved that lacking strong and effective absolute rights, the Charter was merely a bit of tissue paper. In The Line, Josh Dehass shows he’s not as cynical as I am about the value of the Charter and provides some history predating the current document:
In a Boston courtroom in 1761, lawyer James Otis Jr. made one of the most consequential legal arguments of all time.
Otis was challenging the legality of “writs of assistance”, a form of general warrant giving unfettered discretion to customs agents to force their way into people’s homes to search for and seize smuggled goods, and to require the “assistance” of bystanders.
“It appears to me (may it please your honours) the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, and the fundamental principles of the constitution, that ever was found in an English law-book,” Otis inveighed.
John Adams later described that day in court as “the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the Arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the Child Independence was born. Every Man of an immense crowded Audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take Arms against Writs of Assistants.”
This hard-won right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, affirmed by Section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is the reason so many of us felt queasy about the Emergency Economic Measures ordered by the Liberal cabinet under the Emergencies Act in February to quell the trucker protests. Canadians might not know their constitutional history or even the text of the Charter, but they know in their bones that these orders were unconstitutional.
The emergency measures required financial institutions to search their records for customers suspected of “directly or indirectly” engaging in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace”, or “directly or indirectly” using their money to facilitate such protests, and then seize their accounts.
That’s a classic general warrant, a writ of assistance in fact, enlisting banks to help King Trudeau and Queen Freeland hunt down their political enemies without going before a judge to prove reasonable grounds that a specific offence had been committed by a specific person. Section 8 is designed to keep us secure against unreasonable searches and seizures by the executive, and the only way for individuals to maintain this security is by requiring specific warrants from an independent judiciary, barring exigent circumstances.
This profound assault on our section 8 right will hopefully be raised during Justice Paul Rouleau’s inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, despite Trudeau’s attempt to focus the inquiry on the truckers themselves. Even if section 8 doesn’t get examined during the inquiry, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association expects to raise it in Federal Court if they’re successful in convincing a judge to review the decision to declare the protests a national emergency.
I don’t expect anything useful to come out of this inquiry process, otherwise Trudeau wouldn’t have let it get started in the first place.
January 5, 2022
QotD: Measurement hack that lives on
The geeks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are fond of merry japes, locally known as “hacks”. One of the more memorable happened one night in October 1958 when an MIT fraternity had the idea of initiating new members by making them measure a bridge over the Charles River connecting the Cambridge campus with Boston. Crossing the bridge was often a wet, windy and unpleasant business and it was thought that students returning at night from downtown would like to know, by visible marks and with some precision, how far they still had to go. The older fraternity brothers decided to use one of the new pledges as a rule, and selected Oliver R. Smoot, the shortest of the lot at 5ft 7in. The other pledges laid Smoot out at one end of the bridge, marked his extent with chalk and paint, then picked him up and laid him down again, spelling out the full measurement every ten lengths, and inscribing the mid-point of the bridge with the words “halfway to Hell”. In this way, it was determined that the span was 364.4 smoots long, “plus or minus one ear” (to indicate measurement uncertainty).
The hack was too good to let fade away, so every now and then the fraternity makes its pledges repaint the markings. You might think this isn’t the sort of vandalism the police would tolerate, but they do. The smoot markings soon became convenient in recording the exact location of traffic accidents, so (as the story goes) when the bridge walkways needed to be repaved in 1987, the Massachusetts Department of Public Works directed the construction company to lay out the concrete slabs on the walkway not in the customary six-foot lengths but in shorter smoot units. Fifty years after the original hack, the smoot markers have become part of civic tradition: the City of Cambridge declared 4 October 2008 “Smoot Day”. MIT students ran up a commemorative plaque on a precision milling machine and created an aluminium Smoot Stick which they deposited in the university’s museum as a durable reference standard: the unit-smoot is now detached from the person-Smoot. Through the legions of MIT graduates driving global high-tech culture, the smoot has travelled the world. If you use Google Earth, you can elect the units of length in which you’d like distances measured: miles, kilometres, yards, feet – and smoots.
Robert Crease, The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, 2011.
December 23, 2021
Halifax and the Boston Christmas Tree
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 22 Dec 2021One of America’s most famous Christmas trees is intimately linked to one of the most devastating explosions in human history. The story is one of great tragedy, great heroism, and human compassion, that goes to the heart of the true meaning of Christmas.
This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
You can purchase the bow tie worn in this episode at The Tie Bar:
https://www.thetiebar.com/?utm_campai…All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.
Find The History Guy at:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy
Please send suggestions for future episodes: Suggestions@TheHistoryGuy.netThe History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
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teespring.com/stores/the-history-guyScript by THG
#history #thehistoryguy #Halifax
Update: For more information on the explosion itself, I put together a post on that a few years back.
May 26, 2021
QotD: Modern architecture is ugly … or worse
Take the Tour Montparnasse, a black, slickly glass-panelled skyscraper, looming over the beautiful Paris cityscape like a giant domino waiting to fall. Parisians hated it so much that the city was subsequently forced to enact an ordinance forbidding any further skyscrapers higher than 36 meters.
Or take Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Downtown Boston is generally an attractive place, with old buildings and a waterfront and a beautiful public garden. But Boston’s City Hall is a hideous concrete edifice of mind-bogglingly inscrutable shape, like an ominous component found left over after you’ve painstakingly assembled a complicated household appliance. In the 1960s, before the first batch of concrete had even dried in the mold, people were already begging preemptively for the damn thing to be torn down. There’s a whole additional complex of equally unpleasant federal buildings attached to the same plaza, designed by Walter Gropius, an architect whose chuckle-inducing surname belies the utter cheerlessness of his designs. The John F. Kennedy Building, for example — featurelessly grim on the outside, infuriatingly unnavigable on the inside — is where, among other things, terrified immigrants attend their deportation hearings, and where traumatized veterans come to apply for benefits. Such an inhospitable building sends a very clear message, which is: the government wants its lowly supplicants to feel confused, alienated, and afraid.
Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson, “Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture”, Current Affairs, 2017-10-31.
April 12, 2021
Tom Longboat: The “Bronze Streak to a Wildfire”
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 6 May 2019Tom Longboat has been called Canada’s first professional athlete. But amid his setting records and gaining accolades, he served his country in the Great War and fought discrimination. His life is history that deserves to be remembered.
This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As images of actual events are sometimes not available, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
Awesome The History Guy merchandise is available at:
teespring.com/stores/the-history-guyScript by HCW
#wwi #thehistoryguy #canada
July 3, 2019
Summer Stupidity: BOSTON (City Review!)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 2 Jul 2019The summer stupidity continues with another city review! I hope you like seafood, tea shops, woodlands, college and twisty streets because boston has all this and… not much else!
PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
March 25, 2019
The Boston Massacre – Snow and Gunpowder – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 23 Mar 2019Boston, 1770. A frigid winter night. A British sentry strikes a local citizen. Civilians begins to gather. Reinforcements arrive to back up the young sentry. Insults and snowballs escalate. Then out of the darkness comes a shout: “FIRE!”
The Boston Massacre didn’t come out of nowhere — resentment between the early US colonies and the British army had been brewing for some time over the Stamp Act. A propaganda war ensued between the loyalists and the radicals. John Adams would get his revolutionary start as he worked to resolve this injustice…
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September 1, 2017
“Antifa looks increasingly like the militant wing of Safe Space fanaticism”
Brendan O’Neill posting to Facebook a few days back:
People are shocked by images of antifa activists beating up normal, peaceful right-wing protesters in Berkeley or physically shoving right-wing people off Boston Common. Why? This is what happens when you tell an entire generation that other people’s ideas are dangerous, that their speech is toxic, that their words can wound you and traumatise you: you invite that generation to shut people down, to use any means necessary to ensure “dangerous” ideas are not expressed and do not cause injury to people’s self-esteem or sense of safety. We are starting to see what happens when speech is talked about as a form of violence: it green-lights actual violence against certain forms of speech. If speech is violence, shouldn’t it be met with violence? Antifa looks increasingly like the militant wing of Safe Space fanaticism, the bastard offspring of a culture that elevates mental safety over intellectual liberty, and people’s feelings over public freedom.
December 27, 2014
Regulatory costs don’t scale to smaller businesses
Warren Meyer writes a letter to the dean of Harvard Business School after reading the story of a professor at HBS harassing a mom’n’pop restaurant over a $4 overcharge on a meal order:
… I was horrified to see an HBS professor (prof Edelman) in the news harassing a small business over a small mistake on its web site. I don’t typically get worked up about Harvard grads acting out, but in this particular case his actions are absolutely at the core of what is making the operation of a small business increasingly impossible in this country.
Small businesses face huge and growing compliance risks from almost every direction — labor law, safety rules, environmental rules, consumer protection laws, bounty programs like California prop 65, etc. What all these have in common is that they impose huge penalties for tiny mistakes, mistakes that can be avoided only by the application of enormous numbers of labor hours in compliance activities. These compliance costs are relatively easy for large companies to bear, but back-breaking for small companies.
So it is infuriating to see an HBS professor attempting to impose yet another large cost on a small business for a tiny mistake, particularly when the proprietor’s response was handled so well. Seriously, as an aside, I took service management from Ben Shapiro back in the day and I could easily see the restaurateur involved being featured positively in a case study. He does all the same things I learned at HBS — reading every customer comment personally, responding personally to complaints, bending over backwards to offer more than needed in order to save the relationship with the customer.
As for the restaurateur’s web site mistake — even in a larger, multi-site company, I as owner do all my own web work. Just as I do a million other things to keep things running. And it is hard, in fact virtually impossible, to keep all of our web sites up to date. Which is why Professor Edelman’s response just demonstrates to me that for all HBS talks about entrepreneurship, the faculty at HBS is still more attuned to large corporations and how they operate with their enormous staff resources rather than to small businesses.
Large corporations are crushing smaller ones in industry after industry because of the economy of scale they have in managing such compliance issues. If the HBS faculty were truly committed to entrepreneurship, it should be thinking about how technology and process can be harnessed by smaller businesses to reduce the relative costs of these activities. How, for example, can I keep up with 150+ locations that each need a web presence when my sales per site are so much less than that of a larger corporation? This is not impossible — I have learned some tools and techniques over time — and we should be teaching and expanding these, rather than spending time raising the cost of compliance for small business.
November 22, 2014
QotD: The first “American” college football game
… the first college-football contest was not played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, but in 1874 between McGill and Harvard. The game the two New Jersey schools played was something close to soccer, with players (25 per side) allowed to kick the ball or bat it with their hands, and points scored by kicking the ball into the opponents’ goal. This game spread to a handful of other northeastern colleges in the next few years, under varying rules.
Meanwhile, Harvard played a different, more rugbyish game that allowed the ball to be carried and thrown. In 1874 it agreed to a two-game series in Cambridge with McGill, which also played a rugby-type game. The first game, played on May 14 under Harvard’s rules, was an easy victory for the home team. The next day they played under McGill’s rules, which permitted more ball handling, used an oval ball (unlike Harvard’s round one), and scored points with a “try,” similar to the modern touchdown. The contest ended in a scoreless tie, but Harvard’s players decided they liked McGill’s rules better than their own.
The “Boston game” soon became more popular than the kicking-oriented variety, and when representatives from four American colleges met in November 1876 to standardize football rules, they largely adopted the McGill/Harvard version. So while the 1874 game was quite different from today’s football, it is at least recognizable as an ancestor, whereas the game Rutgers and Princeton played in 1869 was an evolutionary dead end.
Fred Schwarz, “Why American Football Is Canadian”, National Review Online, 2014-11-13.
November 21, 2013
A panopticon society, but only in one direction
For some reason, despite the recent revelations that Americans have almost literally no privacy thanks to government surveillance, some government employees think that they have a right to privacy that they actively push to deny to others:
From the ACLU of Massachusetts:
Boston Police Department bosses want to install GPS monitoring devices in every patrol car, to enable dispatch to more efficiently process 911 calls. But police officers and their union are outraged, saying that the ubiquitous tracking is too invasive of their personal privacy. Tracking the location of officers as they go about their days would reveal incredibly detailed information about their lives, the officers say.
It must be just awful to go about your daily life looking over your shoulder, conscious that your every movement and activity is being recorded and could be used against you. Oh, wait. That’s what the entire American public is already dealing with, in this age of mass electronic surveillance. But the way the police union is hissing’n’flapping about it, it’s almost as if there was something wrong with that. Don’t they know that you have nothing to fear, if you have nothing to hide?
The ACLU’s tack is that if the police don’t like the feeling of being followed, they shouldn’t be pushing for technologies like mass tracking of license plates or cellphone locations. That’s fair enough, but there’s a larger point here also.
November 12, 2013
Contacting the Boston Police public affairs office is now considered “intimidation”
At Popehat, Ken White discusses the fascinating case of the public affairs office of the Boston Police department as a “victim” of “intimidation” from callers:
The story begins typically for Photography Is Not A Crime with a story about a Boston Police Department sergeant thuggishly assaulting a photographer recording a traffic stop. A PINAC fan and journalism student named Taylor Hardy called the Boston PD’s Bureau of Public Information on its public line to ask about the story. Hardy spoke with Angelene Richardson, a spokesperson for the Boston Police Department who provides information to the media and public. When Hardy published a recording of that call, the Boston Police Department arranged for him to be charged with wiretapping. Hardy claims that he informed Richardson that he was recording the call (though he did not successfully record that part of the conversation), apparently Richardson claims that he did not.
Even assuming that Hardy didn’t disclose that he was recording (and it would be foolish to take the BPD’s word on that), it’s very dubious policy for the government to charge a citizen with a crime for recording a call with a police department’s public information officer on the phone line the department identifies as its public information line. Any such communication can’t possibly be regarded as private. There may be constitutional problems with a wiretapping statute that allows prosecution of a citizen under those circumstances. But the BPP wasn’t done doubling down yet.
When Carlos Miller wrote about the wiretapping charges against Hardy, he encouraged readers to contact Richardson at her BDP telephone number and email address, which the BPD published online:
Maybe we can call or email Richardson to persuade her to drop the charges against Hardy considering she should assume all her conversations with reporters are on the record unless otherwise stated.
In other words, Miller encouraged his readers to petition the government for a redress of grievances, as protected by the First Amendment.
The BPD has charged Miller with witness intimidation. The BPD also threatened any of Miller’s readers who contact the BPD:
Detective Nick Moore also assured me he would do the same to any PINAC readers if they continue to contact departmental spokeswoman Angelene Richardson as they have been doing since yesterday.
“I can go and get warrants for every person who called her,” he said during a telephone conversation earlier this evening. “It’s an annoyance. It’s an act of intimidation.”
Indeed — an act of intimidation is involved. But it’s an act of intimidation by the BPD, which is sending a clear message about how it will handle citizen dissent.
What a accomplishment: the Boston Police Department has discovered a way to make it a crime for citizens to contact the person it designates to talk to citizens.
April 30, 2013
Shikha Dalmia: This was not Rand Paul’s finest moment
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bomb attack, Republican politicians didn’t cover themselves in glory:
Remember the story about the drunk who loses his car keys in the forest but looks for them under a lamp post because that’s where the light is? Conservative calls to fight terrorism in the wake of the Boston attack by ditching immigration reform make just as much sense.
The difference is that the drunk’s efforts were merely futile. Conservative efforts are also dangerous because they ignore the security threat that Big Government poses.
No sooner was it revealed that the two bombers were Russian emigres of Chechen heritage than Iowa’s Sen. Charles Grassley declared that the attacks show that America needs to “beef up security checks,” not let more newcomers in. Rep. Steven King, also a committed restrictionist from Iowa, demanded we pause and look at “the big picture” on immigration, as if seven years since the last failed effort at reform is not enough.
Most disappointing was Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky’s switcheroo. Last month, he distanced himself from his party’s harsh anti-immigration rhetoric. This week he counseled that we rethink visas for foreign students, never mind that neither of the Brothers Tsarnaev ever obtained one.
None of this, however, would have prevented the attack given that the Tsarnaev brothers obtained asylum around 2002 at the ages of 8 and 15 along with their parents, fleeing persecution in Russia. Reportedly, the older brother Tamerlan, a boxing champion, became radicalized only eight years later, after his mother, not seriously religious then, reminded him of his Islamic faith’s strictures to wean him off alcohol and drugs. When he met his wife, Katherine Russell, at a nightclub, he was a nominally pious, somewhat confused young adult with few signs that he’d become a raving zealot.
