Quotulatiousness

December 20, 2025

The “pursuit” of the Brown University shooter as a parable of incompetence

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Mark Steyn is supremely unimpressed with the quality of police work demonstrated by the “forty-seven genius law-enforcement agencies” apparently involved in investigating the murders at Brown University and the murder of an MIT nuclear fusion expert:

The Brown University shooter has been found dead by his own hand in a storage locker in southern New Hampshire. The entire officialdom of Providence, Rhode Island celebrated by throwing “the most worthless, uninformative, cover-your-ass press conference I have ever seen in my entire life“.

You’ll be glad to hear that the DEI Mayor of Providence has declared “we believe that you remain safe in our community“. He said this at 11pm last Sunday, but his statement was technically true because at that point the shooter was driving out of “our community” up to someone else’s community to kill an MIT professor, who would assuredly be alive today had not everybody in Providence bungled everything that could be bungled. The storage-locker guy and the Boston guy are both Portuguese nationals of the same age who are believed by the FBI to have attended the same university in Lisbon at the end of the last century. What that means, who knows? A random mass-shooting as prelude to something more personal and targeted? As is now traditional, I doubt we shall ever know, […] However, we do know how the forty-seven genius law-enforcement agencies “cracked the case”. An Internet user saw this post on Reddit, and brought it to the attention of one of the forty-seven agencies, who shortly thereafter swung into what passes for action. Here’s what the Redditor wrote:

    I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That was the car he was driving. It was parked in front of the little shack behind the Rhode Island Historical Society on the Cooke St side. I know because he used his key fob to open the car, approached it and then something prompted him to back away. When he backed away he relocked the car. I found that odd so when he circled the block I approached the car and that is when I saw the Florida plates. He was parked in the section between the gate of the RIHS and the corner of Cooke and George St.

That’s it. That’s the entire “investigation”. “He blew this case right open. He blew it open,” cooed the Rhode Island Attorney-General, Peter Neronha. “That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs of that individual renting the car, which matched the clothing of our shooter here in Providence, that matched the satchel which we see here in Providence.”

Great. His name is “John”, and he had multiple interactions with the killer on the day of the shooting — both in the bathroom of the building two hours beforehand and by the car to which the killer kept circling back to see if “John” had ended his apparent stakeout of the vehicle. He spoke to the man long enough to determine that he had an “Hispanic” accent. In fact, Portuguese. But close enough. Or closer than the forty-seven kick-ass agencies.

But here’s the thing: “John” only wrote his post on Reddit because nobody on the scene was interested in what he’d seen that day. “John” is apparently a homeless man who lives in the basement below the scene of the shooting.

Come again? Brown University lets the homeless live in its faculty buildings? You might want to bear that in mind if you’re thinking of taking on six-figure debt to be gunned down at the Ivy League.

Oh, wait, no, relax: “John” is not any old homeless man but a graduate of Brown. They’re not all working as baristas. So it’s some grandfathered-in alumni legacy racket.

Which brings us to the other thing: He was generally known to be living there. So, on Saturday or at the very latest Sunday, why did no-one from the forty-seven kick-ass agencies seek to interview him? His would surely have been a unique perspective: neither teacher nor pupil, but someone who knows the building after-hours and observes the comings and goings. One expects the three-mil-a-year DEI president’s “campus security” to totally suck, but how can you call in the FBI and then the elite best-of-the-best G-men not be aware that there’s a guy living in the basement under the scene of the crime who had multiple interactions with the perp?

As I have had cause to remark a thousand times, nothing works anymore. When I observe that of the UK, English readers get mildly peeved. When I observe it of the Fifth Republic, French readers start gabbling and waving their Gauloise-stained hands around so animatedly their strings of onions fall from their shoulders. And, when I observe it of the United States, American readers get particularly chippy. But I’m an equal-opportunity civilisational doom-monger: we’re all going over the falls, and arguing that the canoe of the Euro-pussies or the tight-assed Brits is a foot-and-a-half ahead isn’t really much consolation. Police-wise, the Aussie constabulary bollocksed Bondi Beach and the forty-seven Yank agencies bollocksed Brown and MIT.

Of course, with the revelation that the shooter may have been Portuguese, the race hustlers are busy re-sorting the hierarchies of victimhood:

November 1, 2025

EBTpocalypse imminent?

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

The US government’s extended “shutdown” may trigger the loss of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to around 10% of America as of Saturday. A few years ago, Nathan Mayo pointed out that despite the good intentions of the SNAP program, it isn’t actually doing the job it is meant to be performing:

A recent administrative action has permanently increased benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by 25 percent. Unfortunately, this historic boost fails to address the structural problems that plague this nearly 60-year-old program.

The official Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) webpage proudly proclaims that, “SNAP provides nutrition benefits to supplement the food budget of needy families so they can purchase healthy food …”

To that admirable end, the program formerly known as food stamps distributed $79 billion to 40 million people last year. Yet this desire to provide wholesome food to needy families conflicts with clear evidence that wholesome food is not what they think they need. Whether they play by the rules or not, people receiving SNAP benefits currently spend between 70-100 percent of that benefit on things other than healthy food.

Government researchers determined that average SNAP recipients increase their food expenditure by only 30 percent of the value of their benefits. In other words, a person previously spending $300 on food a month who qualifies for $100 of food stamp benefits will start spending $330 on food and shift the $70 from his existing budget to other purposes. This surprisingly low percentage suggests that food is not recipients’ top priority, as people who were in dire need of food would be expected to boost their food budget by the full value of the benefits.

What of the hope that needy families will buy nutritious food? According to a study of a major retailer, recipients spend about 20 percent of their total grocery budget on junk food, with soft drinks as the top purchase—enough to supply a family of four with 20 two-liters of soda per month. Given the marginal amount of SNAP spent on food and the typical benefits for a family, SNAP literally expands the grocery budget by the exact amount needed to cover the junk food. SNAP recipients also spend about 27 percent less on fruits and vegetables than non-SNAP households. This difference cannot be attributed to a lack of access because around 85 percent of SNAP purchases are made at large chain grocery stores with vast produce selections. However, one factor in these choices is likely smaller grocery budgets and the fact that fresh produce is more expensive.

A less savory contributor to this poor nutrition may be that SNAP encourages unhealthy purchases through the “house money” effect. When gamblers win money, they are less careful with their winnings since they view the “house money” as more disposable than their own cash. Similarly, when people receive SNAP dollars, they are sometimes less careful about their purchases than they would be with their hard-earned dollars.

On the one hand, the lack of SNAP benefits might be lower impact than expected, or it might mean most major American cities go “full Mad Max“:

There are 41.7 million Americans slurping up Supplemental Nachos And Porkrinds (SNAP) benefits. That’s an amazing number, and it shows just how far down the bread and circuses route that we’ve gone. I was surprised at the number, but I can now surmise that the only people voting for Democrats are single white women and freeloaders. But I repeat myself.

The federal government shutdown is, as I write this, dragging into its fourth week. I’m generally pretty happy about that since the impact to almost everyone I know is … zero. However, that may soon change. EBT cards, (EBT stands for Entitled Bums Treats) are about to have a zero balance.

The Democrats in the Senate have voted a dozen times as I write this to not fund the SNAP (Socialist Nourishment And Pampering) program. The reason? This is one of their key weapons against Trump. They want to blame Trump for not having a budget because it won’t fund the SNAP (Scam Network for Appetite Pandering) program. Since people who use EBT (Endless Bailout for Takers) aren’t generally the ones who pay attention to anything that takes longer than 17 seconds, they’ll buy it.

Some states (Virginia, for one) realize that the place will look like Mad Max in by Monday if the pizza rolls stop flowing, and have found some cash in the couch cushions to kick the can down the road. New Jersey doesn’t even own a couch, so they have no money, and Connecticut has mobilized their National Guard for emergency ramen drops.

No more swiping for that purple drank or Hot Pockets®. When the EBT (Everyone But Taxpayers) card goes dry, life may get … interesting.

What will happen? “Mostly peaceful” flash mobs looting grocery stores. These flash mobs will make the 2020 riots look like a church picnic gone wrong because someone demanded gluten-free tofu.

Because SNAP (Subsidized Nuggets for Apathetic Parasites) isn’t just a program: it’s the duct tape holding urban America’s powder keg together. As mentioned, there are 41.7 million people, about 12.3% of the U.S. population, who rely on those cards for daily food.

H/T to Clayton Barnett for that link.

Oh, but wait … yet another judge has issued a ruling directing the federal government to ignore the lack of congressional approval or funding:

An order today from a federal judge in Massachusetts requires the Trump administration to pay SNAP benefits even though Congress hasn’t funded the current operation of the program.

Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, concludes that people will be harmed if SNAP benefits are not provided, and Congress previously appropriated contingency funds for emergencies in the SNAP program, so there’s no need for current appropriations — the executive branch must use emergency and contingency funds to pay for current operations despite the absence of current appropriations.

[…]

Defendants — the Trump administration — are required to use contingency funds to pay for current operations, whether or not Congress has funded current operations. A court has just concluded that a federal program must operate in the absence of current appropriations. That’s … an interesting choice.

Update, 3 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

March 20, 2025

The REAL Cause of the Revolutionary War

Filed under: Britain, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 15 Mar 2025

What caused the American Revolution? Let’s dive beneath the surface-level understanding of British tyranny and unjust taxation and try to understand the long-term social, political, and economic forces which set the stage for our War of Independence.

00:00 Introduction
03:00 1. The World Turned Upside Down
13:50 2. The Paradox of American Liberalism
28:34 3. The Rage Militaire
38:12 Conclusion / Credits
(more…)

September 3, 2024

Second Amendment case involving switchblades in Massachusetts

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

J.D. Tuccille summarizes a (surprising) court decision in Massachusetts which struck down a state law banning switchblade knives:

“IMGA0174_tijuana” by gregor_y is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution undisputedly protects the individual right to own and carry firearms for self-defense, sport, and other uses. But the amendment actually says nothing about guns; it refers to “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms”, of which firearms are just one example of what dictionaries define as “a means (such as a weapon) of offense or defense”. In Massachusetts, last week, that resulted in a decision by the state’s highest court striking down a law against switchblade knives.

Protected by the Second Amendment

“We conclude switchblades are not ‘dangerous and unusual’ weapons falling outside the protection of the Second Amendment,” wrote Justice Serge Georges Jr. for the court in an opinion in Commonwealth v. Canjura that drew heavily on two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases: Bruen (2022) and Heller (2008). The decision found the state’s ban on switchblade knives unconstitutional and dismissed charges against the defendant.

The case involved a 2020 dispute between David E. Canjura and his girlfriend, during which Boston police officers found a switchblade knife on Canjura while searching him. As is often noted, “everything is illegal in Massachusetts” and “a switch knife, or any knife having an automatic spring release device” is only one of a long list of weapons proscribed under state law. Canjura was accordingly charged.

Such absolute prohibitions on arms aren’t permitted in the wake of the Heller decision, so Canjura and his public defender, Kaitlyn Gerber, challenged the ban on switchblades, citing the federal decisions. They also relied on Jorge Ramirez v. Commonwealth (2018) in which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned a similar prohibition on stun guns on Second Amendment grounds.

“We now conclude that stun guns are ‘arms’ within the protection of the Second Amendment. Therefore, under the Second Amendment, the possession of stun guns may be regulated, but not absolutely banned,” the court found in that case.

Canjura required similar analysis based on the same earlier decisions, this time with Ramirez in the mix.

The Second Amendment Protects All “Bearable Arms”

Citing Heller, Justice Georges pointed out, “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding”. Importantly, though, knives and other bladed weapons have a long history, extending back well before the birth of the country.

“A review of the history of the American colonies reveals that knives were ubiquitous among colonists, who used them to defend their lives, obtain or produce food, and fashion articles from raw materials,” commented Georges. Folding knives, in particular, grew in popularity to the point they became “almost universal”. The court saw no significant difference between the many types of folding knives used over the centuries and spring-assisted varieties developed somewhat more recently, finding “the most apt historical analogue of a modern-day switchblade is the folding pocketknife”.

March 13, 2024

The History of the Chocolate Chip Cookie – Depression vs WW2

Filed under: Food, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Dec 5, 2023

WWII ration-friendly chocolate chip cookies made with shortening, honey, and maple syrup

City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1940s

During WWII, everyone in the US wanted to send chocolate chip cookies to the boys at the front. With wartime rationing in effect, we get a recipe that doesn’t use butter or sugar, but shortening, honey, and maple syrup instead.

The dough is much softer than the original version, and the cookies spread out a lot more as they bake. They bake up softer than the crunchy originals, with a light pillowy texture. They aren’t as sweet, but still have a really lovely flavor. It kind of reminds me of Raisin Bran, but with chocolate. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised.

Check out the episode to see a side-by-side comparison with the original recipe.
(more…)

October 4, 2023

QotD: The Witchburning and the “Mandate of Heaven”

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

Turning to more familiar Western examples, look at Germany, especially in contrast to England. Germany was on the forefront of every big social and economic change in the late Middle Ages, but you couldn’t blame their rulers for not handling it, because they didn’t have any. The minor princely states, the Electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Emperor himself, the Hanseatic League, and what have you — what could any of them do in the face of plagues and economic dislocations and terminal papal corruption and the massive intellectual upheaval of the printing press, even if their authority extended more than a few miles in any given direction, which it didn’t?

So they burned witches. The “European Witch Craze” of the 15th century has been a feminist bugbear for a long time, and one must naturally assume that pretty much all modern scholarship on it is uber-politicized hooey1, but it’s clear that there really were a lot of witch burnings in Germany in the 1400s. All that free-floating anxiety has to land somewhere, and since it’s pointless to blame the Margrave — he of the one decrepit castle and three square miles of territory — “witches” are a prime target. See also “the Period of the Wars of Religion” — is it any surprise that the most famous witchcraft stuff came from Germany just before the Reformation, or France in the depths of the religious wars, or England around the Civil War?

Clearly something is wrong with the universe – the Mandate of Heaven has been lost, not by any individual ruler necessarily, but by society. “Purity spirals” are also characteristic of these periods, and they quickly spiral out of control — see e.g. the Anabaptist Commune at Munster, or of course the Puritans.

Speaking of, the most famous-to-Americans example is the Salem Trials, and here we see all the trends converge. Not that the Puritans of Plymouth Bay would be so hubristic as to claim the Mantle of Heaven for themselves — Puritans were nothing if not ostentatiously self-effacing — but claim it they did, in deed if not in word, since Plymouth Bay was the closest thing one will ever get to a theocracy this side of Calvin’s Geneva (they burned their “witches”, too). And they just as clearly lost the Mandate — economic dislocations, a devastating Indian war brought about largely by their own hubristic incompetence, even a plague.

The aftermath of all this is fascinating. COVID, of course, is our new witch panic, and feel free to prognosticate on our current situation based on the life of Cotton Mather. The colony’s hottest young intellectual superstar in 1693, he went all-in on “spectral evidence” and the like, and by 1700 he was a joke on both sides of the Atlantic. So, too, with “critical race theory” and all the rest. There’s a racial awakening happening, kameraden, no doubt about that, but it has nothing to do with the eggheads’ fantasies. Those are just witch panics, and while witch panics are devastating to those caught in them, the wheel always turns sooner than later …

Severian, “Witch Trial Syndrome”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-27.

    1. Which was also true of earlier scholarship, most famously Miss Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which is Marxist economics-level disproven, but still fervently believed by “Wiccans” everywhere.

January 26, 2023

Indigenous Weapons and Tactics of King Philip’s War

Filed under: Americas, History, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 20 Jan 2023

Native American living historians Drew Shuptar-Rayvis and Dylan Smith help me explore the military history of King Philip’s War from the indigenous perspective.
(more…)

November 22, 2022

The real story of the First Thanksgiving

Filed under: Americas, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 15 Nov 2022
(more…)

February 27, 2022

Who is Springfield Armory? A Tale of Two Entities

Filed under: Business, Government, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Feb 2018

Today we will take a look at the history of Springfield Armory – both the American national arsenal founded in the 1770s and the commercial entity founded in the 1970s.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

January 26, 2022

Three generations of the OG Puritans

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Founding Questions, Severian considers the New England Puritans and the world they inhabited:

Portrayal of the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s book The Meritous Price of Our Redemption by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy; it was the first-ever banned book in the New World and only 4 original copies are known to survive today.
Engraving by F.T. Merrill in The History of Springfield for the Young by Charles Barrows, 1921.

Total cultural and intellectual uniformity, constantly reinforced. If those Puritans were going to go crazy, in other words, they’d do it within very carefully circumscribed boundaries. The only thing close to that level of mental control is Twitter … and I suppose I must put the disclaimer out front, so that you can factor it in if you disagree with me: I hate the Puritans. They’re just SJWs with balls and a slightly less tedious prose style. When they’re not obsessing over the tiniest motions of their pwecious widdle selves, they’re screwing you over for the hellbound heathen you are.

Credit where it’s due, though: If you need to go sodbusting in an unexplored continent, the Puritans are your guys. The original Plymouth Bay colony was thoroughly militarized, and they didn’t fuck around — when the local Indian tribes were beginning to wonder if they shouldn’t do something about these White devils they’d let loose, the Puritans attacked the fiercest tribe and wiped them out, as a show of force. Life was hard in the OG Plymouth Colony, but it was about as good as you were going to get in that era.

But the typical inheritance pattern soon took over. “Regression to the mean” is a behavioral phenomenon, too, not just an IQ one. Puritanism is an obsessive, paranoid creed; it can only flourish in times of high stress and dire insecurity. But by the 1690s, Plymouth Colony was arguably the healthiest, wealthiest, safest place per capita in Christendom (not a high bar, obviously, but still). The OG settlers were all gone by that time, of course — the original settlement, you’ll recall, was 1620 — and so were most of their almost as hardcore kids. The third generation was coming up fast …

… but finding their way blocked by the old men of the previous generation, who were as tediously, dogmatically Puritan as the OGs, but without the stones. This made them — the 2nd generation — enormous hypocrites, but even without the hypocrisy, imagine living in a world where the ultra-wealthy who control everything in society tell you that they deserve it all, because they’re God’s Elect, while you, sinner, deserve to live in a rented box and eat bugs and own nothing, because God hates you.

History’s full of weird stuff like that, and that was the situation circa 1690. One example will have to do: Since we probably all got to experience Nathaniel Hawthorne’s existential angst back in high school, consider that the ancestor who caused him so much grief, Judge John Hathorne, was born in 1641. He would’ve been 51, then, during his trial service – a ripe old age by 17th century standards.

Not only that, but the 2nd generation — the one that stubbornly refused to move on and let the kids take their place in the sun — had spent the previous twenty years grievously fucking things up. King Philip’s War nearly ruined the colony, there’d been widespread plague, and oh yeah, that whole Restoration thing back in England — the hardest of hardcore Puritan thinkers in the run-up to the Civil War had been colonials; guys like Col. Rainsborough were closely associated with Massachusetts, etc. Lots of bad blood on the other side of the water, and while the third generation was willing to let bygones by bygones, the 2nd generation wasn’t.

So: Hypocritical old throwbacks and cavemen, with a decades-long track record of dumbfuckery, who just wouldn’t get out of the way. As they got older, they got more insular and inward-looking, as old people tend to do … and “more inward looking” for a Puritan is a near-BCG level of narcissism. Meanwhile, the new generation is eager to take their place in the burgeoning Atlantic world, especially after the Glorious Revolution (1688) … but can’t.

October 13, 2021

500 Year Old Apple & Cheese Pie

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 12 Oct 2021

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September 7, 2021

Fallen Flag — the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad

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

This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad by J.W. Swanberg. The New Haven was created in 1872 by a merger between the New York and New Haven Railroad (began operation in 1849) and the Hartford and New Haven Railroad (operations from 1844 onward). The combined entity owned main line track from New York City through its Connecticut namesake cities to Springfield Massachusetts. With its own trackage and lines leased from other New England railways along with steamship companies and local trolley lines, it largely monopolized freight and passenger traffic south of the competing Boston and Albany line. As the Wikipedia entry describes the company’s early growth:

Around the beginning of the 20th century, New York investors led by J. P. Morgan gained control, and in 1903 installed Charles S. Mellen as President. Charles Francis Murphy’s New York Contracting and Trucking company was awarded a $6 million contract in 1904 to build rail lines in the Bronx for the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. An executive at the railroad said the contract was awarded to avoid friction with New York City’s Tammany Hall political machine. In response to this contract, the New York State Legislature amended the city’s charter so that franchise-awarding power was removed from the city council and given to the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, which only recently became defunct in 1989. Morgan and Mellen achieved a complete monopoly of transportation in southern New England, purchasing other railroads and steamship and trolley lines. More than 100 independent railroads eventually became part of the system before and during these years, reaching 2,131 miles at its 1929 peak. Substantial improvements to the system were made during the Mellen years, including electrification between New York and New Haven. […] Morgan and Mellen went further and attempted to acquire or neutralize competition from other railroads in New England, including the New York Central’s Boston and Albany Railroad, the Rutland Railroad, the Maine Central Railroad, and the Boston and Maine Railroad. But the Morgan-Mellen expansion left the company overextended and financially weak.

In 1914, 21 directors and ex-directors of the railroad were indicted for “conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce by acquiring the control of practically all the transportation facilities of New England.”

J.W. Swanberg carries on the story of the railroad’s woes during and after the First World War:

The New Haven was a financial powerhouse at the start of the 20th century, but from 1903 to 1913, the road was driven to near bankruptcy under President Charles S. Mellen and financier J.P. Morgan. One gain in this period, though, was control of the Central New England Railway, which included the Hudson River bridge at Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and the link to Maybrook and nearby Campbell Hall. This was New Haven’s gateway to the west, also served by trunk lines Erie; New York, Ontario & Western; and bridge lines Lehigh & Hudson River and Lehigh & New England.

World War I government control and the Roaring 1920s boom times saved the New Haven, but not enough to survive the Great Depression, and bankruptcy came in 1935. World War II traffic allowed recovery and rebuilding, but soon all was lost by mismanagement and bankruptcy came again in 1961. The postwar New Haven faced not only highway and airline competition but also the almost total erosion of New England’s heavy industrial base. Just a shell of the once-mighty railroad was forced into a reluctant Penn Central on Jan. 1, 1969.

One of the line’s claim to fame was the early electrification program the New Haven embarked on in 1907:

“View of Typical Sectionalizing Bridge, Auto-Transformer Installation and Cable Runway May 2, 1914.”
Photo and original caption from Electric Railway Journal via Wikimedia Commons.

The New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad pioneered electrification of main line railroads using high-voltage, alternating current, single-phase overhead catenary. It electrified its mainline between Stamford, Connecticut, and Woodlawn, New York, in 1907, and extended the electrification to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1914. While single-phase AC railroad electrification has become commonplace, the New Haven’s system was unprecedented at the time of construction. The significance of this electrification was recognized in 1982 by its designation as a National Historic Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

[…]

The New Haven’s system was extended across the Hell Gate Bridge to the New York Connecting Railroad upon the line’s construction. The system of electrification was an extension of the New Haven’s revised 11/22 kV autotransformer architecture. The original electrification extended from the New Haven’s main line, across the Hell Gate Bridge, to the Bay Ridge yard. The line south of Bowery Bay Junction was de-electrified in the 1950s. The line between New Rochelle and the Harold Interlocking was transferred to Amtrak in 1976 upon dissolution of Penn Central. The electrification system continued to be controlled as a portion of the ex-New Haven system until the 1987 conversion to 60 Hz operation.

When the New Haven main line was converted by Metro-North to 60 Hz operation, the Amtrak Hell Gate line was also converted, but as an isolated system powered from the Van Nest substation. Control of the catenary system was transferred from Cos Cob to the Load Dispatcher at New York Penn Station. Although conversion occurred subsequent to the PRR-era electrification, Amtrak substation numbers 45-47 were assigned for consistency with the rest of the PRR numbering scheme.

New Haven dual-power diesel-electric FL9 locomotive 2011 with train #138, a NYC – Pittsfield train, at South Norwalk, CT on October 13, 1968. The stub of the former branch to the docks is in the foreground.
Photo by Roger Puta via Wikimedia Commons.

August 25, 2021

Louisa May Alcott’s childhood experiences in a utopian socialist commune

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

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed recounts the author’s family’s time in one of the many utopian settlements of the early United States:

The original farm house of Fruitlands farm community in Harvard, Massachusetts, founded by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane in 1843. Now a museum to the experiment.
Photo by Midnightdreary via Wikimedia Commons.

Alcott was just 11 when her father moved the family to the experimental village of Fruitlands in Massachusetts. It was not a promising place. Elizabeth Dunn at History.com writes,

    Fruitlands was founded in Harvard, Massachusetts, as a self-sufficient farming community by Charles Lane and Bronson Alcott, two men with no practical experience in either farming or self-sufficiency … Settlers were forbidden to eat meat, consume stimulants, use any form of animal labor, create artificial light, enjoy hot baths or drink anything but water. Lane’s ideas later evolved to include celibacy within marriage, which caused no small amount of friction between him and his most loyal disciple, Bronson Alcott, who had relocated his wife and four daughters [Louisa being one of them] to Fruitlands in a characteristic fit of enthusiasm.

At least 119 utopian, communal or socialist settlements were founded in the early 1800s in America. As most of the country reveled in newly won freedoms and a market economy that allowed the enterprising to create wealth, a few malcontents sought a different life. They spurned private property in favor of sharing material things in common. They preferred a “planned” community over the supposed “chaos” of the market’s spontaneous order. They thought if they just worked out on paper what their preferred society would look like, everything and everybody would just fall into place.

Like many idealists, Alcott’s father and many others believed that it was possible to “plan” everything successfully so that nothing was wasted and there was no economic inequality. Like many others since then, they quickly discovered that human nature does not work that way:

Lofty pledges of equality that fell far short of reality. Women, for instance, were promised they would have to work no harder or longer than men, but the Alcott girls were among the Fruitlands women who were stuck with most of the labor.

Goofy, fringe notions about life. At Fruitlands, these notions included a general abstinence not only from sex but from most of what its architects regarded as “worldly activities” — like most commerce and trade, the raising of livestock, and the planting of vegetables that grow down (like turnips and carrots) instead of up (like lettuce and tomatoes).

A weird disdain for private property. The mere desire to acquire property for oneself (even by serving others as customers) was regarded as repugnant. Lane and Alcott once visited a nearby settlement of Shakers and while admiring the Shakers’ practice of property held “in common”, they condemned them for engaging in commerce by selling their homemade furniture.

December 24, 2020

Why Christmas Should Be ILLEGAL

Filed under: History, Humour, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 23 Dec 2019

The Witchfinder General of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay in New-England preaches against the heathenry of the Pagan Carnival known as Christmas, and exhorts Good Christians to Ban it by Law; together with, a Testimony against the Authors of that most vile and deplorable Pamphlet, r/christmas, and irrefutable Judgments upon them, drawing from the Word of God, and the Puritan Laws of this fair Commonwealth.

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October 30, 2020

Halloween Special: H. P. Lovecraft

Filed under: Books, History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 31 Oct 2018

HAPPY HALLOWEEN IT’S TIME TO GET SPOOKY WITH HISTORY’S MOST PROBLEMATIC HORROR WRITER LET’S GOOOOO

While there’s something to be said for separating the art from the artist, I think there’s a lot of merit in CONTEXTUALIZING the art WITH the artist. Did Lovecraft write some pretty incredible horror? Sure! Was he also a raging xenophobe? Absolutely! Are his perspectives on life connected with the stories he felt compelled to tell? Duh! If you look at Lovecraft’s writing through the lens of his life, clear patterns emerge that allow us to pin down what exactly he built his horror cosmology out of. It’s an invaluable analytical tool that allows us to take apart his writings by getting inside his head. So before you yell at me for Not Separating The Artist From The Art, know that it was completely intentional and I’m not sorry.

3:20 – THE CALL OF CTHULHU
8:40 – COOL AIR
10:36 – THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE
14:38 – THE DUNWICH HORROR
19:32 – THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH

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From the comments:

Overly Sarcastic Productions
1 year ago
Hey gang! Can’t help but notice the comment section is a little bit on fire. That’s all good with me, but one recurring complaint I’ve noticed has started to get under my skin – namely that my explanation of non-euclidean geometry was insufficient, or even – dare I say – inaccurate. Now this is a fair complaint, because after a lifetime of experience finding that people’s eyes glaze over when I talk math at them, I concluded that interrupting a half-hour horror video with a long-winded explanation of a mathematical concept wouldn’t go over too well. I put it in layman’s terms and used a simple example to illustrate the point. However, since some of the more mathematically-inclined of you took offense, I now present in full a short (but comprehensive) explanation of what exactly non-euclidean geometry is.

First, we axiomatically establish euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry has five axioms:
1. We can draw a straight line between any two points.
2. We can infinitely extend a finite straight line.
3. We can draw a circle with any center and radius.
4. All right angles are equal to one another.
5. If two lines intersect with a third line, and the sum of the inner angles of those intersections is less than 180º, then those two lines must intersect if extended far enough.

Axiom #5 is known as the PARALLEL POSTULATE. It has many equivalent statements, including the Triangle Postulate (“the sum of the angles in every triangle is 180º”) and Playfair’s Axiom (“given a line and a point not on that line, there exists ONE line parallel to the given line that intersects the given point”).

Euclidean geometry is, broadly, how geometry works on a flat plane.

However, there are geometries where the parallel postulate DOES NOT hold. These geometries are called “non-euclidean geometries”. There are, in fact, an infinite number of these geometries, and because the only defining characteristic is “the parallel postulate does not hold”, they can be all kinds of crazy shapes. (As you can see, my explanation of “this is just how geometry works on a curved surface” is quite reductive, but at the same time serves to get the general impression across without going into too much detail.)

An example of a non-euclidean geometry is “Elliptic geometry”, geometry on n-dimensional ellipses, which includes “Spherical geometry” as a subset. Spherical geometry is, predictably enough, how geometry works on the two-dimensional surface of a three-dimensional sphere.

In spherical geometry, “points” are defined the same as in euclidean geometry, but “line” is redefined to be “the shortest distance between two points over the surface of the sphere”, since there is no such thing as a “straight line” on a curved surface. All “lines” in spherical geometry are segments of “great circles” (which is defined as the set of points that exist at the intersection between the sphere and a plane passing through the center of that sphere).

The axiom that separates spherical geometry from euclidean geometry and replaces the parallel postulate is “5. There are NO parallel lines”. In spherical geometry, every line is a segment of a great circle, and any two great circles intersect at exactly two points. If two lines intersect when extended, they cannot be parallel, and thus there are no parallel lines in spherical geometry.

Since the Parallel Postulate is equivalent to Playfair’s Axiom, the fact that no parallel lines exist in spherical geometry negates Playfair’s Axiom, which thus negates the Parallel Postulate and defines spherical geometry as a non-euclidean geometry. Also, since the Triangle Postulate is another equivalent property to the Parallel Postulate, it is thus negated in spherical geometry. Hence, my use in-video of an example of a triangle drawn on the surface of a sphere whose inner angles sum greater than 180º.

Hope that cleared things up (and helped explain why I didn’t want to say “see, non-euclidean geometry is just a geometry where Euclid’s Parallel Postulate doesn’t hold – hold on, let me get the chalkboard to explain what THAT is-” in the video)

Peace!

-R ✌️

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