Quotulatiousness

September 11, 2023

The DOJ versus SpaceX

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was a bit boggled when the US Justice Department announced it was going after Elon Musk’s SpaceX for alleged discriminatory hiring practices:

Image from SpaceX website.

The Justice Department recently filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, the California-based spacecraft manufacturer and satellite communications company founded by Elon Musk.

In its lawsuit, the DOJ accused SpaceX of only hiring U.S. citizens and green-card holders, thereby discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring, an alleged violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Musk denied the allegations and accused the government of weaponizing “the DOJ for political purposes”.

“SpaceX was told repeatedly that hiring anyone who was not a permanent resident of the United States would violate international arms trafficking law, which would be a criminal offense,” Musk wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

It’s uncertain if the DOJ is actually targeting SpaceX (more on that in a minute), but George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok quickly found a problem with the DOJ’s allegations.

“Do you know who else advertises that only US citizens can apply for a job?” Tabarrok asked. “The DOJ.”

Tabarrok even brought the receipts: a screenshot of the DOJ job website that explicitly states, “U.S. Citizenship is Required.”

So, if Musk is discriminating against non-U.S. citizens in his hiring practices, so is the DOJ.

This makes the lawsuit prima facie absurd on one level. However, one could also argue that there could be good reasons to discriminate in hiring. And as is usually the case, for better or worse, the government gets to decide when it’s OK to discriminate and when it’s not OK.

And that’s where things get hazy.

Musk and others claim that companies such as SpaceX are legally required to hire U.S. citizens because of International Traffic in Arms Regulations, a federal regulatory framework designed to safeguard military-related technologies.

The DOJ disagrees. So who is right? It’s difficult to say, Tabarrok pointed out.

“The distinction, as I understand it, rests on the difference between US Persons and US Citizens,” he wrote on Marginal Revolution, “but [SpaceX is] 100% correct that the DoD frowns on non-citizens working for military related ventures.”

In other words, SpaceX appears to have been trying to comply with Department of Defense regulations by not using non-citizens in military-related work, and in doing so, it may have run afoul of the DOJ.

September 8, 2023

UN official denounces Canada’s migrant worker program as a “form of slavery”

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

That this scathing report made it to the CBC’s website must really hurt for the federal government, who have a collective “white saviour” complex about their immigration stance:

Temporary foreign workers picking fruit in a Canadian orchard.
Image from http://www.yorkfeed.com/apple-picking-urgently-canada/

A United Nations official on Wednesday denounced Canada’s temporary foreign worker program as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery”.

Tomoya Obokata, UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, made the comments in Ottawa after spending 14 days in Canada.

“I am disturbed by the fact that many migrant workers are exploited and abused in this country,” he said.

“Agricultural and low-wage streams of the temporary foreign workers program constitute a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

Obokata’s comments echo those of Jamaican migrant workers who, in an open letter to their country’s ministry of labour last month, described their working conditions in Ontario as “systematic slavery”.

The special rapporteur role was created by the UN in 2007. Its mandate includes investigating and advocating against forced or coerced labour.

Obokata said migrant workers face deportation if they lose their work permits, which also prevent them from changing employers if they face abuse.

“This creates a dependency relationship between employers and employees, making the latter vulnerable to exploitation,” he said, adding that many workers are reluctant to report abuse because they fear losing their permits.

Thousands of workers come to Canada each year to work through the program. Statistics Canada estimates that temporary foreign workers make up 15 per cent of Canada’s agricultural workforce.

The system came under scrutiny during the pandemic. Auditor General Karen Hogan reported in 2021 that the federal government did not do enough to ensure those workers were being protected.

Obokata said he spoke with a number of migrant workers who described having to work excessive hours with no access to overtime pay, being denied access to health care and being forced to live in cramped and unsanitary living conditions.

June 24, 2023

Official mythmaking about the Empire Windrush in 1948

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Armchair General unpacks some of the story-spinning being conducted by the British government and various charities to mark the 75th anniversary of the voyage of the Empire Windrush from Jamaica to Britain:

“The National Windrush Monument” by amandabhslater is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The Armchair General notes that there is much excitement about the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the ship called the Empire Windrush — which arrived on 22 June 1948 — and the contribution of the so-called Windrush Generation.

The myth currently being constructed is that those coming from Jamaica on the ship were invited, in order to rebuild a Britain struggling to recover from Word War II; we are told that, with so many young men killed in the fighting, Britain needed menial workers to selflessly come and rebuild our economy. Indeed, this view of events has been cemented in a much-lauded poem by Professor Laura Serrant.

    Remember … you called.
    Remember … you called
    YOU. Called.
    Remember, it was us, who came.

Like almost any story constructed by governments and charities over at least the last thirty years, this narrative is dodgy at best and downright dishonest at worst. The simple fact is that the ship’s operator had expected to leave Jamaica under capacity and so offered passage at half price: many local men (and it was all men) took the opportunity.

Writing in The Spectator, in an article well worth reading in full, Ed West points out that the British government certainly did not encourage these immigrants at all.

    Far from calling them, the British government was alarmed by the news. A Privy Council memo sent to the Colonial Office on 15 June stated that the government should not help the migrants: “Otherwise there might be a real danger that successful efforts to secure adequate conditions of these men on arrival might actually encourage a further influx.”

    Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones replied: “These people have British passports and they must be allowed to land.” But, he added confidently: “They won’t last one winter in England.” Indeed, Britain had recently endured some very harsh winters.

    The Ministry of Labour was also unhappy about the arrival of the Jamaican men, minister George Isaacs warning that if they attempted to find work in areas of serious unemployment “there will be trouble eventually”. He said: “The arrival of these substantial numbers of men under no organised arrangement is bound to result in considerable difficulty and disappointment. I hope no encouragement will be given to others to follow their example.”

Nor was it the solely the evil Tories who were concerned:

    Soon afterwards, 11 concerned Labour MPs wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee stating that the government should “by legislation if necessary, control immigration in the political, social, economic and fiscal interests of our people … In our opinion such legislation or administration action would be almost universally approved by our people.” The letter was sent on 22 June; that same day the Windrush arrived at Tilbury.

One can hardly be surprised: after all, 75 years ago, the Labour Party at least strove to represent the working class of Britain and the simple fact is that there was, at the time, massive unemployment — so much so that the government was heavily subsidising tickets to Australia (at £10) in order to encourage British people to emigrate (over 2 million British people left between 1948 and 1960).

    There is a certain amount of well-intentioned inclusive myth-making in this story, and from a historical point of view the idea that “diversity built Britain”, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is bizarre. Until 1952 Britain was the richest country in Europe, after which we massively fell behind our continental rivals – so if diversity did “build” the country, it didn’t do a great job.

One can argue, I think, that the Windrush Generation made a great many contributions, in common with many immigrants; and if their contribution was not, in reality, as large as is claimed, then they share that with the EEC/EU’s Common Market which, again (and despite all the claims), brought no discernible benefit to the UK.

H/T to Tim Worstall for the link.

May 25, 2023

Victoria’s housing market is Canada’s housing market in microcosm

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

Elizabeth Nickson explains some of the driving factors for ever-rising housing prices in Canada:

“Victoria, BC” by abdallahh is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

A friend of mine is building four high-rise condo and rental towers in Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, where I live. It is a charming city, founded in the 1840s, its core an almost classic English village around which a modern city was slowly built. Not so slow now. It’s the warmest, prettiest city in Canada, surrounded on three sides by ocean, and retirees are flooding the place. Young families are choosing the city to raise their children because it is still small, relatively crime-free and filled with charming neighborhoods.

Here is a view from the marketplace by someone who borrowed $150 million to build housing for the newcomers:

    Green energy policies have added maybe $700 a month to the cost of a one bedroom rental unit. It takes over two years to get approval for a rental building in Victoria. Then, another year after initial approval to final approval. That adds another sum. Maybe $300? So rents in theory could be $1000 a month less. That is $1,000 that could go to piano lessons, hockey gear. Private school? And so on. Then Justin let in ONE MILLION people last year into Canada. All unvetted. Canada builds various amounts of housing each year. But 275,000 units is a reasonable average. One million people require 350,000 or so housing units. You want to see upward price pressure on rents? You have not seen anything yet

In fact, “we are two to three million houses short”, says Wendell Cox of Demographia, which has been tracking housing affordability for 25 years across the world. Canada’s two principal cities, Toronto and Vancouver, are among the top four most unaffordable cities in the world, Hong Kong and Sydney being the other two. In my region, everywhere you look, we have tent cities and trailers parked by the side of the road; our economy has been strangled by Covid, debt, inflation, and regulatory madness, so like nearly everywhere, we have a substantial complement of the desperate, despite living among a stunning abundance of resources and talent. Throw in the sharp rise in interest rates and the solution moves from difficult to impossible.

Despite the almost preposterous costs added by “green” energy, “green” land use is the greater reason housing is so constrained in every western democracy. Here’s the crux of the matter: construction costs are only 20 percent lower in a smaller city, but the land in a smaller city would run $90K, while in Toronto or Vancouver or San Francisco or Dublin, it would be upwards of one million dollars.

A green belt is wrapped around every major and minor city. They are called Urban Containment Zones. Much of that land is conserved, in principle to save agricultural land, but in Canada, as elsewhere, urban areas only use 2.5 percent of arable land. World Economic Forum/U.N. rules concerning land use have been adopted by every western democracy, and these rules are disseminated across the world through planning associations. The planner cult is messianic. It hates sprawl, suburbs and cars and while the obvious solution is to build on green belts, the PR unleashed against the idea is vituperative in the extreme. Ontario premier Rob Ford has managed to swap out some green belt land, and is building 50,000 new houses. The press’s reaction against the plan has been vicious, accusing Ford of bribery and paying off his funders.

Yet, there is a ten-year waiting list for public housing in Toronto. British Columbia, like all regions run by the Left, is committed to subsidized housing. But there is a five-year waitlist for any current family housing, and rents for a one bedroom, are almost exactly $1,000 less than in the private sector, meaning that without the green-energy rules, which are ridiculous in such a cold country, private-sector housing could accommodate the less privileged without any cost to the taxpayer, who as it is now pays twice.

Further, the buildings assigned to low-income housing are built to lower standards. There is a happy dancing peasant communitarian aspect to these complexes, but that can degrade very quickly, as Chicago, Detroit, London, have proved. Almost all such complexes end in drug trafficking, single motherhood and kids running wild. The most recent B.C. government failed its promise to build more by 75 percent and its administering agency was found to be corrupt.

April 4, 2023

“We can at least appreciate the irony of an Indian and Pakistani coming to blows over the issue of partitioning Britain”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on the historical oddity of the three leaders of Eire, Scotland, and the United Kingdom all being of south Asian descent:

Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
Composite image from extra.ie

There’s a joke going around Irish WhatsApp that goes like this: “An Irishman, Englishman and Scotsman sit down for a historic summit regarding their ancient grievances.” The image shows the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Humza Yousaf, newly elected First Minister of Scotland.

That three men of South Asian ancestry now lead those three nations is something which even ten years ago would have seemed implausible; a generation further back simply bizarre. And that doesn’t take into account Britain’s most senior directly elected politician, London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

What makes it stranger is that Mr Yousaf, of Pakistani origin, and Sunak, of Indian descent – although both via British East Africa – will be engaged in deciding the future of the Union. As one wit put it, “We can at least appreciate the irony of an Indian and Pakistani coming to blows over the issue of partitioning Britain.”

Yet although both Scotland and England are now led by men with roots in the subcontinent, that is where the comparisons between the two countries end. Yousaf might like to mimic American race talking points, but he presides over a country which is overwhelmingly white and will remain so (although we’re still awaiting the latest census results); the southern kingdom is in contrast now very multiracial, and projected to get more so – a process accelerated by the Tory Government.

Britain has undergone a demographic revolution since the Second World War, a transformation into a multicultural society. Out of the ashes of the British Empire the country’s rules ended up creating a new empire at home, one where this time they could be the good guys. Just like the first British Empire, this one might be called Anglo-Indian, with the two leading parties partly aligning along old divisions between Hindu and Muslim. Like the first empire, this new diverse rainbow of nations entails strict new blasphemy codes, even if now dressed up as hate speech.

Yet this great change has hardly affected Scotland. The two countries have diverged along different paths, and this is perhaps one reason why it may prove hard to hold our multicultural empire together, although it’s a cause liberal defenders of Britishness are loath to admit. Where once the countries were brought together by Protestantism, the English language and empire, now the new “good” British Empire drives them apart, while the English language is a global source of division.

January 27, 2023

Canada’s worsening refugee problem

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Paul Wells discusses some of the frustrations being aired on the French-language Radio-Canada news channel about the increasing, possibly record-breaking flow of asylum seekers entering Canada at the Roxham Road pedestrian border crossing from Champlain, New York:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

The issue at hand is Roxham Road, a pedestrian border crossing between small-town Quebec and upstate New York, 45 minutes’ drive from Montreal City Hall. Thousands of people walk into Canada there every month and demand asylum. Caring for them and processing their claims takes money and work. Along comes [former Parti Québécois leader Jean-François] Lisée with a suggestion.

If Justin Trudeau can’t get changes to the bilateral Safe Third Country Agreement to slow this human traffic — and colleagues report that he can’t — then, Lisée says, Quebec should make the newcomers the rest of Canada’s problem.

Within 24 hours after somebody walks across Roxham Road, Lisée says, “We’ll sort them, we’ll keep all the francophones and those who have immediate family in Quebec. And the others, we’ll put them in a nice air-conditioned bus and we’ll take them to Immigration Canada in Ottawa.”

I should emphasize a few things here, to salvage any hope of a civil discussion.

(1) What Lisée is suggesting won’t happen. In particular, it won’t happen because the party he used to lead has three seats out of 125 in Quebec’s National Assembly.

(2) The very suggestion made the other panelists uncomfortable. They took turns criticizing Lisée.

(3) The panel show’s host, Sébastien Bovet, immediately drew the obvious parallel: This is what governors in the U.S. south do. “Ron DeSantis charters flights and buses to send migrants north”, Bovet said, and indeed it is true. We shall see whether there are legal repercussions for DeSantis’ lurid stunt.

(4) Finally, I don’t think asylum seekers should be sorted by language ability and sent packing if they fail either. What’s going on at Roxham Road is a policy crisis, but it’s also a human drama. Lisée spoke during the same week as the funeral for a Haitian man who died trying to cross back into the US after his claims in Canada got hung up in procedural limbo.

Having said all of that, perhaps we can notice the scale of what’s happening at Roxham Road, and ponder how it fits into a generalized sense of Canadian bewilderment.

If you’re wondering why so many in Quebec are freaking out about a single pedestrian border crossing, it may be because the numbers are a bit breathtaking. This chart shows that 39,171 asylum claimants were intercepted by the RCMP between regular ports of entry in Quebec in 2022, compared to 369 in the entire rest of the country combined. So if asylum claims are a problem — and whatever else they are, they’re at least an administrative challenge — then 99.1% of the challenge is in Quebec.

That figure of 39,171, or 107 people a day, is more than twice as many as in any previous year in the last decade and, I’d guess without having statistics dating back further, the most in any province in any year in Canada’s history. (Much of this statistical background was covered in a column by the Toronto Sun‘s Brian Lilley earlier this week.)

January 10, 2023

Catherine the Great & the Volga Germans

Filed under: Food, Germany, History, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 16 Aug 2022
(more…)

November 26, 2022

Britain’s experiment with mass immigration since 2014

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West considers the legacy media’s quick dismissal of conservative concerns about rising immigration from poorer European countries in 2014 with the reality only eight years later:

“Xenophobia” by malias is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It was a sort of mini-publicity stunt by Vaz, but all for a good cause: a response to fear mongering by the Right-wing press who warned that we’d be “flooded” by Romanians, and predictions by MigrationWatch that’d we have 50,000 new arrivals a year from the A2 countries (as Romania and Bulgaria were called).

Twitter that day was full of journalists and other public intellectuals laughing about how we were going to be “swamped”. Why would Romanians, after all, want to come here, to this miserable rainy island?

“We’ve seen no evidence of people who have rushed out and bought tickets in order to arrive because it’s the 1st of January,” Vaz concluded.

Various publications, with the ill-founded confidence so often found in the journalist trade, soon declared that the Romanian influx was a conservative fantasy.

“Eastern European invasion comes to nothing”, the Independent declared on the day, just a tad prematurely you might say.

A Guardian commentator suggested the year before that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians arriving might actually fall following accession, and that “all the ‘invasion’ predictions … have more in common with astrology than demography.”
[…]

As it turned out, in the year to September 2015, 206,000 Romanians and Bulgarians took out a National Insurance number, meaning they were registering to work here. By late 2017, there were 413,000 Romanian and Bulgarians living in Britain, suggesting 90,000 had arrived each year since January 2014, while just 6,200 Britons had made the opposite journey.

By mid-2018, there were more than 400,000 Romanians in Britain, making them one of the largest national minorities in England. The real figure is hard to tell, because the British state has lost the capacity or will to count the number of foreign residents, and it may be higher.

[…]

The scale of immigration in the 2000s and 2010s led to the rise of Ukip, the referendum and the political chaos that followed; what follows now we can’t yet say, but no one has seemed to have learned the lesson: that in the 21s century, because of easier travel, smartphones, smuggling networks and establishment communities in the West, the sheer scale of potential migration is astronomical. Yet people often have a very 20th or even 19th century understanding of how much people are able and willing to move, which makes them vastly underestimate the potential numbers arriving.

The Turkish Cypriots of north London are a case in point, the example Paul Collier used in Exodus to show the huge extent of potential migration between countries with different levels of wealth. 

Because of colonial links, North Cyprus had free movement with Britain and so provided a test case: as a result, there are now more Turkish Cypriots in Britain than in Cyprus. In fact, not only did the majority of Turkish Cypriots move, but back in their homeland they become outnumbered by arrivals from a third, even poorer country, mainland Turkey, who are permitted to settle there.

In a theoretical world of open borders, Britons would be outnumbered very quickly; infrastructure would start to buckle under the strain, and governments would find it difficult to increase the necessary number of houses, schools, hospitals and other services for this expanded population, because society would now lack the social capital and cohesion to make the personal sacrifices. People would begin to lose faith in the police, a difficult role in such a transient and diverse society, and politics would become increasingly unstable and aligned along ethnic lines.

July 15, 2022

QotD: Modern and historical multiculturalism

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For history’s rare multiracial and multiethnic republics, an “e pluribus unum” cohesion is essential. Each particular tribe must owe greater allegiance to the commonwealth than to those who superficially look or worship alike.

Yet over the last 20 years we have deprecated “unity” and championed “diversity”. Americans are being urged by popular culture, universities, schools and government to emphasize their innate differences rather than their common similarities.

Sometimes the strained effort turns comical. Some hyphenate or add accents or foreign pronunciations to their names. Others fabricate phony ethnic pedigrees in hopes of gaining an edge in job-seeking or admissions.

The common theme is to be anything other than just normal Americans for whom race, gender and ethnicity are incidental rather than essential to their character.

But unchecked tribalism historically leads to nihilism. Meritocracy is abandoned as bureaucrats select their own rather than the best-qualified. A Tower of Babel chaos ensues as the common language is replaced by myriad local tongues, in the fashion of fifth century imperial Rome. Class differences are subordinated to tribal animosities. Almost every contentious issue is distilled into racial or ethnic victims and victimizers.

History always offers guidance to the eventual end game when people are unwilling to give up their chauvinism. Vicious tribal war can break out as in contemporary Syria. The nation can fragment into ethnic enclaves as seen in the Balkans. Or factions can stake out regional no-go zones of power as we seen in Iraq and Libya.

In sum, the present identity-politics divisiveness is not a sustainable model for a multiracial nation, and it will soon reach its natural limits one way or another. On a number of fronts, if Americans do not address these growing crises, history will. And it won’t be pretty.

Victor Davis Hanson, “Things That Can’t Go on Forever Simply Don’t”, PJ Media, 2019-04-17.

April 24, 2022

Let us bid an unfond farewell to all the “cool city” initiatives

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on a few of the ways that governments’ and pan-national organizations’ love for urban intensification looks to be finally fading away:

A decade ago cool cities were all the rage and tax money was pouring into cultural events and buildings to “attract” and densify people because “climate change”. Richard Florida, drawing upon a dubious book about cultural creatives had started his ferocious PR drive towards the mega-city as the apex of modernist civilization, a mixed-race cauldron of creativity and more, an economic engine that would power the world and leave the countryside to the bees and trees. Smart Growth was insinuated into every regulatory structure in order to, just like Captain Picard, make it so.

There were a few oppositional voices. There was me, a very minor chord along with Randal O’Toole, Wendell Cox, Joel Kotkin who detailed the risks. But mostly it was all rah rah rah. If we build it they will come. Masses of public money poured in to attract “them”. Country infrastructure was starved, and if broken, left to rust.

And did they come. To all the glamorous cities came the genius thieves of the modern age, oligarchs creating bolt holes for their money and mistresses, looters from Communist regimes, ditto for Africans stealing aid money. Every crime syndicate facing looser immigration rules started branch-plants, laundering money, and seducing the marginal into lives of misery.

Increased levels of crime was one of our objections, but hell on wheels, the devastation in LA, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Vancouver sure wasn’t foreseen.

Housing affordability would collapse said Wendell Cox, and was he right. In Vancouver, which has been taken over by Chinese mega-crime-syndicates, is the third most expensive city in the world. People whose families founded the city, can’t afford a studio apartment.

Politicians did nothing but take the laundered cash earned by ruining the lives of their citizens, and used it to build casinos so laundering drug money from all over North America would be easier. We Canadians are so helpful. And nice. To everyone, Even child traffickers. Yeah, come here, the scenery is grand and we can take care of all the people you broke with our “free” health care.

I objected to the potential noise being noise sensitive. Also viruses. That was a big one. Courtesy of my ex-husband’s trips to Asia, I picked up a couple viruses which my immune system couldn’t suppress, since I had no built immunity. The indiscriminate mixing, flooding of people overwhelming resources would create health catastrophes I thought, and lo and behold, it looks like WHO is planning for world-wide pandemics as far as the eye can see.

So, like all the other bad ideas of the age, cool cities failed leaving massive massive debt. Everyone with a scrap of money and initiative is plotting to leave the mega cities for the distinctly uncool country these days. Out here we are bracing ourselves for your bad ideas, but we are also ready. We know what you are like. You are as dumb as rocks, and you would destroy the country just like you ruined the cities. You have zero humility. You are a nightmare coming to join the other nightmare visited on our home places, the mass confiscation of our land. The land that feeds you idiots.

February 7, 2022

American pizza

Filed under: Food, History, Italy, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At An Eccentric Culinary History, H.D. Miller makes a strong case for pizza being more an American dish than an Italian one:

“Pizza” by rdpeyton

Today, standing atop the sprawling edifice that is the American restaurant industry, it’s hard to imagine a time when pizza wasn’t popular. But, prior to World War Two, pizza was barely known in the United States outside of a few Italian enclaves in the Northeast. For all of the praise heaped upon Lombardi’s in New York City, until the war, few people north of Houston Street had heard of it, or the dish it served.

From the mid-19th century forward, there were plenty of Italians in America, in places like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. Most of those early Italian immigrants — around 75,000 before 1880 — were from northern Italy, not the South, and the restaurants they built were usually serving multi-course, table d’hôte meals of meat, bread, macaroni, wine and coffee at reasonable prices. The model was Caffe Moretti’s in Manhattan. Established in 1858 by Stefano Morretti, an ex-seminarian from the Veneto, Morretti’s offered diners generous portions and cheap prices. It did not, however, offer pizzas.

I have to emphasize this, you couldn’t order a pizza in the vast majority of Italian restaurants in America prior to 1945. And the reason you couldn’t order a pizza in Italian restaurants is because pizza isn’t Italian.

Let me repeat that: Pizza isn’t Italian.

Pizza is Neapolitan. It’s a distinct speciality of Naples, developed at at time when Italy didn’t even exist as a nation. Saying pizza is Italian is like saying haggis is British. It might be technically true, but not really.

As in America, prior to the 1950’s, pizza wasn’t something most Italians knew or cared about. In 1900, there were supposedly no pizzerias in Italy anywhere outside of the medieval walls of Napoli. You couldn’t even get pizza in the suburbs. Pizza was strictly street food for poor people in the crowded tangled alleys near the port. […]

In other words, pizza was not something the average Tuscan, Ligurian or Venetian would have thought suitable for a sit-down meal. Or, if they ever did think of it, it was to revile pizza as oily, unappetizing and a likely vector of cholera. This is because Naples was really famous at the time for being dirty and disease-ridden. (If you’re serious about early pizza history, one that strips away the just-so stories, then go read Inventing the Pizzeria by Antonio Mattozzi.)

What brought pizza to America was the mass immigration of southern Italians between 1880 and 1910, when more than 4 million people moved to the United States. That’s why Lombardi’s didn’t get going until 1905, when there were finally enough Neapolitans in Little Italy to keep the doors open.

The same dynamic played out in South America, in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. The first successful pizza restaurant in the world located outside of Naples was founded in Buenos Aires in 1882, when a Neapolitan immigrant baker named Nicolas Vaccarezza started selling the pies out of his shop in Boca. For reference purposes, a decade earlier, an attempt to open a pizzeria in Rome, Italy, had ended in bankruptcy, meaning, at the turn of the last century, you could get a pizza in Buenos Aries, São Paulo or New York, but not in Rome, Florence or Venice.

H/T to Ed Driscoll for the link.

December 12, 2021

“[T]oday’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself”

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

Andrew Sullivan on the racism of modern “anti-racist” movements and his hope that Hispanic Americans may provide a way out of the current political deadlock:

Of all the acronyms, euphemisms and sophisms pioneered by critical theory, one of the most revealing is the term “black and brown people”. You hear it all the time now. Whether it’s about “the lack of Black and brown representation in Hollywood”, vaccine hesitancy in “Black and brown neighborhoods in large cities”, the right to vote for “Black and brown people”, or “allyship between Black and brown people”, the “B&b” formula is now yet another ubiquitous media virtue-signal. It’s subtler than some others. It doesn’t shriek woke like “BIPOC”; it isn’t as instantly risible as “2SLGBTQIA+”; it gives “Black” a Capital Letter, and “brown” feels a bit like a lower-case add-on — but at least it uses actual English words, and doesn’t end in an X.

Still: what does it tell you that a staggering and brilliant array of totally different ethnicities, races, religions, histories and cultures can now routinely be reduced to just two drab colors?

I think it speaks to two things. The first is that today’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself. A whole kaleidoscope of immigrant difference — from Kurds and Mexicans and Somalis to Dominicans, Chileans, Nigerians, and Pakistanis — has now been turned into one monochrome racial “brown” — just to fit into an oppressor/oppressed, white/black narrative.

Equally, a diverse African diaspora — ranging from Nigerian immigrants to descendants of Southern slaves to biracial men and women with mainly European ancestry who go back to this country’s miscegenated origins — is now just “Black”. And this new racial unit has one politics: left-Democrat. Individuals disappear; diversity of opinion within groups evaporate; all that matters is a single skin color and oppression.

The second aspect of critical theory that “B&b” helps reveal is that the crude binary of “black” and “white” simply has less salience with every passing day, as more and more races, ethnicities and cultures complicate and enrich our society, and render it structurally, demographically and culturally unrecognizable from even the recent past. To give one example: 60 years ago, four percent of Americans approved of inter-racial marriage; today, it’s 94 percent. Or check out the rapid decline in the “white Christian” share of the population — from 80 percent in 1996 1976 to 44 percent today. Look around you and you’ll see how the crude rubric of “white supremacy” is, in fact, wildly out of date.

This is why so many of the most passionately woke are so obsessed with history in America, and the further back the better, as the 1619 Project shows. The past is a world they are much more comfortable in than the present, a place where the racial divide was infinitely simpler, and racial inequality both brutal and actively enforced by the government. Before the Civil Rights Act in 1964, before mass non-white immigration began in 1965, before mass non-white illegal immigration since the 1990s, the “white supremacy” rubric had some lingering traction.

But in the 21st Century, it’s been hopelessly compounded by layer upon layer of mass immigration from every conceivable corner of the planet. The Latino population in the US is now larger than the African-American one; and Asians, of many different varieties, are now immigrating in higher numbers than Latinos. Before too long, the black/white dynamic may disappear into the multi-colored, multi-hued background entirely.

December 8, 2021

What if the refugee flow was crossing the Channel the opposite way?

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Joel Rodrigues considers what the media narrative would say if the constant stream of migrants from the EU to Britain was reversed, as all the major media outlets predicted would happen if Brexit went through:

This map shows the location of the Strait of Dover between England and France, and part of the English Channel and the North Sea. It also shows nearby towns such as Dover, Calais, and Dunkirk.
Image created by NormanEinstein via Wikimedia Commons.

Imagine “tent” cities on the Kent coast, similar to “the Jungle” that existed in Calais up until 2016. These camps are the type of camps that the Remain campaign (wrongly) warned would spring up if Britain voted to leave the EU, as part of their Project Fear campaign. The tent cities are full of migrants, hoping to reach the French coast and the “sunlit uplands” of the European Union.

The camps are filthy, riddled with violent crime, and it is here that people traffickers sell spaces on dinghies to cross the channel for thousands of pounds a ticket. The British police and immigration services are aware of undocumented people living in squalor in the camps, but largely do nothing.

Occasionally a camp is cleared to placate the locals, but it quickly springs up somewhere else. The British government make no effort to document, accommodate or process the migrants living in appalling conditions on its territory. Instead, it blames the “pull factor of the EU’s single market”, saying that many of these migrants have family in France and want to live in a French or German speaking society. A junior British minister suggests that the black market economies in the EU are also a pull factor, and that there are a “lack of safe asylum routes” into the EU.

People smugglers continue operating from the British coast, and the migrant camps expand. Dinghies are now launched daily from the UK towards the continent. Police are aware of the launches, but do nothing. The RNLI and Royal Navy escort these flimsy boats until they are in EU waters, despite their not being seaworthy. Thousands succeed in making the crossing.

Then, tragedy strikes when a boat sinks. Statements are released from the British and French governments lamenting the loss of life. Trying to find a solution, Emmanuel Macron writes a letter to Boris Johnson urging increased collaboration, with joint patrols if necessary, to prevent a repeat of the tragedy.

The British government issue a response claiming that the perfectly conciliatory letter is in fact unacceptable, a “threat to British sovereignty”, and that France is uninvited from crisis talks. British media later reports that in a meeting with some of his advisors, Boris Johnson branded Emmanuel Macron as “a clown in charge of a circus”.

Imagine the media commentary and narrative in the UK surrounding such a situation, especially post-Brexit.

“Migrants die fleeing racist, Brexit-ridden, plague island,” says an op-ed in the Guardian. The comments are largely agreed that Boris Johnson is personally responsible for each of their deaths.

“UK condemned as using migrants to destabilise the EU’s single market,” reports the BBC. Parallels are also drawn in The Times between Boris Johnson and Belarus’ Lukashenko. There are mass demonstrations outside Parliament as the crisis worsens.
One can imagine the EU Commission swiftly and publicly denouncing the UK and drawing up sanctions. The Labour party would likely call it a national scandal, and demand resignations, as well as accusing the government of taking a hardline stance as cynical electioneering.

I searched for public domain or Creative Commons images of the English Channel migrant crisis, but came up surprisingly empty, hence the generic map to illustrate this post. I had expected to be inundated with lots of heart-rending images of desperate refugees, but not this time…

October 29, 2021

Ten years after After America, how are Mark Steyn’s predictions going?

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

Mark Steyn published his book After America ten years ago:

Speaking of which, we are marking the tenth anniversary of my bestselling book After America. The observances are muted because, from the underpass at Del Rio to the school board meetings of Loudoun County, it has proved too accurate. Nonetheless, I remind you of the book’s opening chapter:

    Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda or New Zealand or wherever on the planet they can buy a little time, and the rest trapped in the impoverished, violent, diseased ruins of utopian vanity.

    ‘After America’? Yes. It will linger awhile in a twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past. For a while, there may still be an entity called ‘the United States’, but it will have fewer stars in the flag, there will be nothing to ‘unite’ it, and it will bear no relation to the republic of limited government the first generation of Americans fought for. And life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be conspicuous by their absence.

    On the other hand:

    The United States is still different. In the wake of the economic meltdown, the decadent youth of France rioted over the most modest of proposals to increase the retirement age. Elderly ‘students’ in Britain attacked the heir to the throne’s car over footling attempts to constrain bloated, wasteful and pointless ‘university’ costs. Everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria angry mobs besieged their parliaments demanding the same thing: Why didn’t you the government do more for me? America was the only nation in the developed world where millions of people took to the streets to tell the state: I can do just fine if you control-freak statists would shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill and your multi-trillion-dollar porkathons, and just stay the hell out of my life, and my pocket.

On the world stage, Joe Biden is the literal embodiment of America’s “twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia”. The favelas are here in many American cities, and I see that the citizens of what only a quarter-century ago alleged conservative David Brooks hailed as the future — Burlington, Vermont, the chichi post-political latte town of do-gooder liberalism – is now getting used to routine stabbings on Main Street.

I miss the Tea Party because their grievances were mainly economic. Today’s dissatisfactions are more profound and primal: We are not arguing about socialized health care, but about the agreed meaning of America, and whether it will come to more blood than it’s already coming to.

September 30, 2021

Petrol shortages in the UK

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve seen several reports on the somewhat sudden rash of petrol (gasoline to US/Canadian readers) shortages in Britain, and most of those reports airily pin the blame for the situation on Brexit. To the media, Brexit seems to be an all-purpose explanation for anything that goes wrong (in the same way that previous administrations get the blame for current problems even many years after they left power). Sean Gabb says that despite the frequent glib blaming of Brexit, in this case it is part of the reason:

There is in the United Kingdom a shortage of lorry drivers. This means a dislocation of much economic activity. Because it cannot be delivered, there is no petrol in the filling stations. Because there are not enough drivers, and a shortage of fuel, we may soon have shortages of food in the shops. Christmas this year may not involve its usual material abundance.

These difficulties are wholly an effect of the new political economy that has emerged in England and in many other Western countries since about 1980. An army of managers, of agents, of administrators, of consultants and advisers and trainers, and of other middle class parasites has appropriated a growing share of the national income. This has happened with at least the active connivance of the rich and the powerful. Since, in the short term, the distribution of the national income is a zero-sum game, the necessary result is low and falling real wages for those who actually produce. So long as the productive classes can be kept up by immigration from countries where even lower wages are on offer, the system will remain stable. Because leaving the European Union has reduced the supply of cheap labour, the system is no longer stable in England.

There are two obvious solutions. The first is to rearrange the distribution of income, to make the productive classes more able and more willing to produce. Since this would mean reducing the numbers or incomes or both of the parasite classes, the second is the solution we mostly read about in the newspapers. This is to restore the flow of cheap foreign labour.

In summary, that is my explanation of what is happening. For those who are interested, I will now explain at greater length. According to the mainstream theory of wages, labour is a commodity. Though workers are human beings, the labour they supply to employers is of the same general nature as machine tools and copper wire and cash registers and whatever else is bought and sold in the markets for producer goods. A wage therefore is a price, and we can illustrate the formation of wage rates with the same supply and demand diagrams as we use for illustrating the formation of prices:

The supply curve slopes upwards because most work is a nuisance. Every hour of labour supplied is an hour that cannot be spent doing something more enjoyable. Beyond a certain level, workers can only be persuaded to supply more labour if more money is offered for each additional hour of labour. As with other producer goods, the shape of the demand curve is determined both by the price of what labour can be used to produce and by the law of diminishing returns.

[…]

Our problem in England is that large areas of economic activity have been rigged. There is an immensely large state sector, paid for by taxes on the productive. Most formally private activity is engrossed by large organisations that are able to be so large either because of limited liability laws or by regulations that only large organisations can obey. The result is that wages are often determined less by market forces than by administrative choice. In this kind of rigged market, we cannot explain the distribution of income as a matter of continual choice between marginal increments of competing inputs until the whole has been distributed. It may be better to look at a modified wages fund theory. A large organisation has a pot of money left over from the sale of whatever its product may be, minus payments to outside suppliers, and minus whatever the directors choose to classify as profit. This is then distributed according to the free choice of the directors, or how hard they can be pushed. Or we can keep the mainstream cross-diagrams, but accept that the demand curve is determined less by marginal productivity than by the overall prejudices of those in charge.

Therefore the growth of a large and unproductive middle class, and the screwing down of all other wages to pay for this. This is not inevitable in rigged markets, but is possible. It has come about since the 1980s for three reasons:

First, the otherwise unemployable products of an expanded higher education sector have used all possible means to get nice jobs for themselves and their friends;

Second, the rich and the powerful have accommodated this because higher wages and greater security for the productive might encourage them to become as assertive as they were before the 1980s;

Third, that these rich and powerful see the parasite classes as a useful transmitter of their own political and moral prejudices.

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