Private Mars Rocket II

Posted here so I can find it later: "Anchor Babies", "Birth Tourism", and Most Americans' COMPLETE Ignorance of Immigration Law.. Highlights:

1) Illegal immigrants who have children born in the United States: "the truth is that a child’s citizenship status does nothing to improve her parents’ immigration status in the U.S. The parents remain subject to deportation and any other legal consequences of their illegal status despite having a citizen child."

2) The child has to wait until they are 21 in order to petition for their parents to be allowed back in the US legally.

I've said before that history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme. Comes today another article that I will mostly just point and and say "ditto:" Political Violence and the Great Disinhibition. Josh Marshall, the author, points out that America actually has a long history of violence.

Although he doesn't think we're in for another civil war, he does see a historical parallel - the Gilded Age (1870 - 1900). That era had a lot of violence, both political (from the Left and the Right) to include lynchings, assassinations and labor strife. There was also widespread economic drama and fear of immigration. Sound familiar?

I'll add to that one tidbit - the reason we call it the Gilded Age was because a group of wealthy Americans was trying (and frequently succeeding) in buying themselves political power which they used to further enrich themselves. Paging President Musk - President Musk please pick up a white courtesy phone.

Two articles I want to agree with and post here so I can find them later.

1) On Hunter Biden, and the unspoken value system that our media and political elites seek to defend. Two money quotes:

"Our political and media elites have made it clear through their actions that they value the appearance of order and propriety over anything else."

-and

"had Kamala Harris been elected President, Hunter Biden would not have been pardoned.
The appearance of propriety matters to the extent that it helps you to govern. It matters to the extent that it helps maintain public faith in the rule of law. If the Democratic Party was still in power, or if the incoming Republican administration was still bound by norms and precedents, then Biden-the-institutionalist would have been dissuaded from taking this step."

2) Huxley's Electorate. Not so much a money quote here as an idea that I am in strong agreement with. Specifically, democracy is a good system of government only in that it "produces a legitimate avenue for social dissent." You don't have to grab your gun - you can grab a ballot. As I said at a con once, societies with a permanent underclass don't last very long - just ask the French or Russian aristocracy. Of course, since they ended up dead, you'll need a Ouija board to do so.

Unless something unforeseen happens, Donald Trump will be the second man to be sworn in as President for two non-consecutive terms. A while back, I read and reviewed a biography of Grover Cleveland, the first such occurrence. I thought it was a good book about a not-very interesting man. In any event, this election got me thinking about the parallels.

Cleveland, a Democrat, was elected to his first term in 1884 to an open seat. His Republican opponent, James G. Blaine, was considered by his own party to be corrupt, ambitious and amoral. Cleveland was, unusually for politicians in that era, honest and notably not that ambitious. He won.

Trump first came to office in 2016, defeating Hilary Clinton. Rightly or wrongly, she was perceived by many to be corrupt, ambitious and amoral. Trump of course was not notably moral himself, but he was perceived as rich and therefore honest. (Perceived is doing a lot of work in that last sentence.) And much like Cleveland in 1884, Trump won by a very narrow margin.

Cleveland lost the election of 1888. His first term was marked by a lot of unpopular actions (he issued 414 vetoes, more than twice as many as all of his predecessors combined) and his 1888 campaign was ran on a platform of lower tariffs, unpopular in his base. Trump, of course, presided over and mismanaged COVID, clearly not a popular thing to do. Both men were defeated by what appeared to be fairly standard-issue politicians of their era. (I would argue that Biden's better-than-average, but that's not relevant for this post.)

Cleveland won the election of 1892. Harrison, his opponent, had greatly increased tariffs, increasing prices and creating general economic problems. Biden, of course, had a bunch of supply chain issues and inflation. To be fair, these were not his fault (it hit every major economy) and the US experience was much better than everybody else's, largely due to Biden's policies. In fact, the US economy is dragging the rest of the world up, although the higher interest rates resulting from those policies have their own negative impacts.

But clearly (to me at any rate) Harris was unable to effectively separate herself from "Bidenomics" as evidenced by the fact that she underperformed Biden in essentially all voter demographics. Trump, by being the only major-party alternative, was the beneficiary.

To close the loop, Cleveland presided over the Panic of 1893, "the most serious economic depression in history until the Great Depression of the 1930s." It was made worse by Cleveland's economic policies, specifically his tight money policies. Cleveland was eligible to run for re-election in 1896, but lost his party's nomination.

So, lessons and observations:

1) It's the economy, stupid. Low-propensity voters make a binary choice - economy good = re-elect incumbents, economy bad = vote for the other guy.

2) Not nearly enough Americans actually care about rule of law, equal rights, or related issues. I hope that if and when Trump tries to do some of his "dictator on day one" BS more people will, but hope is in short supply at the moment. I also think (and this may be more hope) that there's a "it won't happen here" mentality at work, especially among low-propensity voters.

3) Yes, there does appear to be a problem with young men but the graph in the linked article shows men and women shifting right. I think that higher interest rates are more painful to people just starting out in the economy then old fogies like me who already have a house and a car.

4) Yes, Joe Rogan, talk radio, Fox News are factors. But nobody is making people consume this stuff. They are filling a need. Address the need instead of focusing on the medium. In Cleveland's time, we had all sorts of populist third parties, formed because of economic problems.

None of the above is going to get fixed in one election, much though I wish it would. The Gilded Age didn't really start to end until Teddy Roosevelt's election in 1900 - almost a decade after the start of Cleveland's second term.

I occasionally see conservatives bemoan the loss of "strong minority icons" such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben from American foods. I find this historically illiterate.

First, "Aunt Jemima." Originally she was a painting of nobody. The name came from a minstrel show and the character was that fictional concept, the "happy slave." Then, in 1893, Nancy Green, a housekeeper in the employ of the Walker family in St. Joseph, Missouri, was hired to portray the character. She was an actor, got paid a minimal amount of money, and was fired in 1900. The company brought in another "negress" to portray the role. Nancy Green then got another housekeeping job and died penniless in Chicago in 1923. There's nothing strong in this story - rather somebody getting screwed over by a large corporation.

Second, "Uncle Ben." There never was an "Uncle Ben" and the character didn't appear until 1946. The face on the box was based on Frank Brown, a man who worked in a Chicago hotel. Again, pure fiction and exploitation.

Herewith comes an article discussing the meaning of the events of January 6, 2020. Money quote: "After all, [Trump's] just a crook and a conman, an idiot. But the phoniness, that bombast, and the ridiculousness was a part of the original thing, too. There has always been a deeply moronic side to fascism. Fascism is perhaps most fundamentally a moron putting on world-historical airs. “Morons trying to make history” — what better way to describe January 6? The second biggest mistake is to take it too seriously. But the first biggest mistake is to not take it seriously enough

Here's an interesting article from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: The Rise of the Global Oligarchs. I'd just like to violently agree with this:

A central feature of the Early Modern era was weak and underfunded states licensing private entities to exercise state-like powers and then later trying to claw back that license. All of the colonies of that would later become the fledgling United States were founded on this basis. The arc of colonial North American history saw the English and then British monarchies trying to assert directly monarchical control over these fledgling societies. A better known example is the British East India Company which conquered and administered large parts of South Asia before being brought under tighter and tighter state control until being finally extinguished in the 1850s.

I found an interesting article entitled Spartans Were Losers; The U.S. military’s admiration of a proto-fascist city-state is based on bad history. It's worth a read. I found especially interesting the bit about how Sparta was especially bad at logistics. Another slave society, the Confederacy, was also bad at logistics, which is why they lost the war.

Sparta was "all hat and no cattle" yet, thanks to good PR, they are remembered today.

On the occasion of having come back from a visit to one small town, here are my thoughts on rural American.

It’s fashionable in some circles to complain about the ongoing decline of small town America and to attempt to offer solutions. I think it helps to understand why small towns are in decline. Small town America has been in decline since the 1920s, and it was and is being killed by the internal combustion engine.

Most small towns existed as a place for farmers take their output to sell and to buy what they didn’t make themselves. As tractors became mechanized, it took a lot fewer people to produce a bushel of corn then it did when horses did the work. A horse is not a motorcycle with hair – it requires rest. So, farms slowly consolidated and fewer people were employed in farming.

The second effect of the internal combustion engine was that one could travel farther to get to a market. When going to the store involves looking at the south end of a northbound horse traveling at 5 miles an hour, you want the market to be close. When you jump in your Model T and go 20 miles an hour, that’s a different story.

The small town I’m most familiar with, Westville Illinois, was a coalmining town. It was built when the miners had to walk to work. Now they don’t – they drive. Also, the same factors that changed agriculture changed mining – it takes a lot fewer people to dig up a ton of coal.

Fewer people = fewer reasons for a market town. Although modern "work from anywhere" technology appears to offer hope for a reversal of this trend, I wouldn't bank on it. The typical tech worker wants amenities that aren't available in small towns. They can get all the advantages of small-town living in smaller cities of 50,000 to 100,000 people. In short, the decline of rural America is permanent.

The Navigation Case: Training, Flying and Fighting the 1942 to 1945 New Guinea War by John E. Happ

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I'm not sure how I heard of this unjustly obscure book, but I did, and I'm glad I did. It was a great read.

The author, John E. Happ, is a Chicago native, as was his father, Leonard "Len" Happ. John knew Len had served as a pilot in WWII, but like many veterans of that era, Len never talked about the war. In fact, John did not even know that his father had served in the Pacific, fighting against the Japanese.

That is, until his father died, and in the family house John found an Army-issue navigation case which Len had used to store correspondence from the war. John then undertook a decades-long effort to research his father's military service, which started when Len, a private pilot, volunteered for the US Army Air Corp in January 1942. It wasn't until mid-1943 that Len saw action, flying ground attack missions in New Guinea.

As it happens, I have a personal connection to this theater as well - a great uncle served there. All he ever said about his service was that the place was hot and wet and the natives ran around naked. Len never said even that much.

The book is a mixture of Len's personal story of training and combat, interspersed with a solid layman's history of a slog of a campaign, conducted by under-supplied US and Australian forces fighting in what was then literally an uncharted land. Len's service in New Guinea was exemplarily, and Len was rotated back to the US after over 60 combat missions. There he flew medical transport planes, until an unexplained medical issue grounded Len. A few months later, Len was discharged, and he returned to civilian life.

Overall, I found the book a very good read and an interesting story. It will shed a light on an underappreciated theater of WWII. My only complaint was that the maps in this book were hard to read, but that's a quibble. Overall, I recommend this book.



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