I couldn't help giggling at this tweet yesterday from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation.
I can't help wondering what happened to prompt that tweet. Can any of our readers in Oklahoma enlighten us? If so, please leave a comment. The possibilities appear endless!
Peter
If you haven't already got a backup emergency generator, now might be a very good time to invest in one. Hot Air reports:
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has released its latest reliability assessment for the summer of 2022 and, to put it mildly, the news is not good. In far too many states, the power grid is already nearly at full capacity, and in the next few months, that capacity will be exceeded. This isn’t a question of “if” or really even “when.” It’s just a fact ... When demand for electricity exceeds supply, the utility companies will either have to begin a series of rolling blackouts in all of the affected states or the grid will suffer crippling damage and be down for months.
. . .
A minimum of 14 states will be hit by this in a rolling sequence. As water levels fall, you eventually reach the point where your ability to produce hydroelectric electricity from dams diminishes. Meanwhile, there are 40 coal-fired power plants scheduled to be taken offline in the name of fighting climate change. No replacement sources for all of that juice have been proposed, to say nothing of having them come online.
There's more at the link, including possible fixes for the problem. Sadly, all those fixes will take time - at least a year or more - to improve the situation; and until they're in place (if they're even started, under this feckless administration), the problems will get worse. If you rely on freezers to preserve your food, or if you're in a climate zone that requires air-conditioning in summer and/or electrically powered heat in the winter to be livable, you will almost certainly be impacted.
A generator isn't a solution on its own. You need to plan for how often, and how long, you intend to run it. Calculate the amount of fuel your generator uses per hour, figure out the maximum time you'll need to run it, and that's how much fuel you need to store (in a secure place outside your home, such as a garden shed, due to the fire hazard) to run it. Given today's fuel prices, that's a not insignificant expense - perhaps as much as, or more than, the cost of the generator itself. Smaller, more economical generators have a big advantage here compared to large, whole-house units; but the smaller ones won't provide enough power to run every appliance or system in your home. It's a trade-off. I've chosen to run a smaller, dual-fuel inverter generator, and rely on a free-standing air-conditioning unit to cool just one room in our home, rather than buy a generator big enough to run the main HVAC system during a power outage. That's not an ideal solution, but it's one we can afford. YMMV, of course.
You also need to secure your generator against theft. My gunsmith bought a powerful generator last year during the big Texas power outage. Within a week it had been stolen from his porch, where he'd chained it to a big upright to keep it "secure". The thieves simply cut the chain with bolt-cutters and made off with the generator while he and his family were asleep. I'm working on a plan to run our generator inside our garage - and before you scream, it can be done safely and securely, provided you know what you're doing (and provided your local building and safety codes allow it). See:
I know several people who've bought an RV generator exhaust venting system and installed it on the exterior wall of their garage, boring a hole through the wall to connect it to their generator. In every case, it's worked well, and keeps their costly equipment securely locked away from light-fingered passers-by.
Forewarned is forearmed. We know these problems are coming. Let's address them as best we can while we have time to do so.
Peter
Peter Zeihan, whom we've met in these pages on several occasions, is a geopolitical and demographic analyst who has controversial but well-supported views on the current and future state of the world.
Earlier this month Mr. Zeihan gave a two-and-a-half-hour presentation at the Naval Postgraduate School titled "Energy at the End of the World". The whole thing is very interesting, and I highly recommend that you watch it if you can make the time. Be warned, however: it's packed with solid information, and will require careful attention and analysis if you want to get the most out of it.
Here's a twelve-minute segment from that presentation, dealing with the situation in China. Mr. Zeihan makes several radical and controversial proposals, including (but not limited to) the following:
I'm not entirely in agreement with Mr. Zeihan on this, even though I cheerfully acknowledge that his command of the data, facts and figures on this subject is vastly superior to mine. I think he discounts the human element in favor of the statistical evidence. I've seen (too often for comfort) how an individual or group can be so determined to accomplish something, even though the odds are against them and it might actually be deleterious to their situation, that they do it anyway, regardless of the facts on the ground. I suspect that's what's driving the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and will probably drive Chinese actions concerning Taiwan. As for China's future, there are a whole lot of different factors intertwining right now. Which will emerge as dominant? I don't know that anyone can say for sure as of right now.
Suffice it to say that the short video above is intensely interesting, and worth watching. I hope it whets your appetite to make time for the whole two-and-a-half-hour presentation linked above. Highly recommended viewing.
Peter
Gathered from around the Internet over the past week. Click any image for a larger view.
The marimba is a fascinating instrument, similar to the xylophone but with a deeper, richer sound. It's come a long way from its primitive tribal origins. It was developed in Africa, being found in many sub-Saharan tribes and cultures in one form or another. From there, African slaves brought it to South America, where it was further developed into new forms; and from there, it "migrated" to the USA, where it was commercialized and standardized for mass production as an orchestral and band instrument. However, it's still played throughout Africa in its primitive form: I grew up knowing its music.
There's so much marimba music available that I can't possibly do justice to it in a brief blog article. I'll try to put up more of it in a few future posts. This morning, I'd like to highlight The Wave Quartet, which specializes in the marimba and plays it both solo and with orchestra. Let's begin with the quartet's rendition of "Tamacun", a well-known tune by Rodrigo y Gabriela.
Here they are with "Oblivion" by Astor Piazzolla, a slower, more meditative piece.
Finally, here's Christoph Sietzen, a member of the quartet, playing Bach's Gigue in E minor, the sixth movement of the composer's Lute Suite in the same key, BWV 996.
Bach would not have known the marimba at all, but I daresay he'd have approved of the transcription of his work for it.
You'll find more of The Wave Quartet's music at their Web site and on their YouTube channel.
Peter
We hear a lot of discussion today about "equity" of outcomes, equality and inequality, and so on. Much of it is very ill-informed; a great deal of it is nothing more than political propaganda, with the speaker spouting dogma and theory from his or her perspective but not basing it in historical or current reality. Such terms have become buzzwords, slogans, in popular discourse, rather than something concrete. What's more, they're often used to whip up emotions, even violence, against the "haves" by the "have-nots". You can see the pernicious influence of such incitement in the statements of leaders of Black Lives Matter (who are, by their own admission, "trained Marxists"), Antifa, etc.
What's the reality behind the polemics? In his book "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century", historian Walter Scheidel argues that violence has been the principal contributor to declines in inequality throughout human history.
That's a very uncomfortable theory for modern First World societies, but Prof. Scheidel defends it with a great deal of historical data. However, he doesn't become pedantic about it. He presents his case, and the supporting evidence, then invites us to make up our own mind. I'm not entirely sure I agree with him upon first reading of his book: but, based on what I've seen and experienced over decades in Third World environments, I can't say he's wrong, either. My personal jury is still out on that. In particular, current trends and influences such as what Michael Yon terms PANFAWAR - Pandemic, Famine, War - are already exerting an inexorable influence on every nation on the planet, not least our own; and they're likely to get much worse before we see any improvement. Are they merely the latest manifestation of the historical reality Prof. Scheidel identifies?
Here are some excerpts from the book's opening chapter. I've highlighted certain passages that I think are key. Read them in the light of our recent discussion of the global influences at work all around us. Whether or not you see those influences as deliberate or coincidental, Prof. Scheidel's conclusions aren't comforting.
”A DANGEROUS AND GROWING INEQUALITY”
How many billionaires does it take to match the net worth of half of the world’s population? In 2015, the richest sixty-two persons on the planet owned as much private net wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion people. If they decided to go on a field trip together, they would comfortably fit into a large coach. The previous year, eighty-five billionaires were needed to clear that threshold, calling perhaps for a more commodious double-decker bus. And not so long ago, in 2010, no fewer [than] 388 of them had to pool their resources to offset the assets of the global other half, a turnout that would have required a small convoy of vehicles or filled up a typical Boeing 777 or Airbus A340.
But inequality is not created just by multibillionaires. The richest 1 percent of the world’s households now hold a little more than half of global private net wealth. Inclusion of the assets that some of them conceal in offshore accounts would skew the distribution even further. These disparities are not simply caused by the huge differences in average income between advanced and developing economies. Similar imbalances exist within societies. The wealthiest twenty Americans currently own as much as the bottom half of their country’s households taken together, and the top 1 percent of incomes account for about a fifth of the national total. Inequality has been growing in much of the world. In recent decades, income and wealth have become more unevenly distributed in Europe and North America, in the former Soviet bloc, and in China, India, and elsewhere. And to the one who has, more will be given: in the United States, the best-earning 1 percent of the top 1 percent (those in the highest 0.01 percent income bracket) raised their share to almost six times what it had been in the 1970s even as the top tenth of that group (the top 0.1 percent) quadrupled it. The remainder averaged gains of about three-quarters—nothing to frown at, but a far cry from the advances in higher tiers.
The “1 percent” may be a convenient moniker that smoothly rolls off the tongue, and one that I repeatedly use in this book, but it also serves to obscure the degree of wealth concentration in even fewer hands. In the 1850s, Nathaniel Parker Willis coined the term “Upper Ten Thousand” to describe New York high society. We may now be in need of a variant, the “Upper Ten-Thousandth,” to do justice to those who contribute the most to widening inequality. And even within this rarefied group, those at the very top continue to outdistance all others. The largest American fortune currently equals about 1 million times the average annual household income, a multiple twenty times larger than it was in 1982. Even so, the United States may be losing out to China, now said to be home to an even larger number of dollar billionaires despite its considerably smaller nominal GDP.All this has been greeted with growing anxiety. In 2013, President Barack Obama elevated rising inequality to a “defining challenge”:
And that is a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain—that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead. I believe this is the defining challenge of our time: Making sure our economy works for every working American.Two years earlier, multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett had complained that he and his “mega-rich friends” did not pay enough taxes. These sentiments are widely shared. Within eighteen months of its publication in 2013, a 700-page academic tome on capitalist inequality had sold 1.5 million copies and risen to the top of the New York Times nonfiction hardcover bestseller list. In the Democratic Party primaries for the 2016 presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders’s relentless denunciation of the “billionaire class” roused large crowds and elicited millions of small donations from grassroots supporters. Even the leadership of the People’s Republic of China has publicly acknowledged the issue by endorsing a report on how to “reform the system of income distribution.” Any lingering doubts are dispelled by Google, one of the great money-spinning disequalizers in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, which allows us to track the growing prominence of income inequality in the public consciousness.
So have the rich simply kept getting richer? Not quite. For all the much-maligned rapacity of the “billionaire class” or, more broadly, the “1 percent,” American top income shares only very recently caught up with those reached back in 1929, and assets are less heavily concentrated now than they were then. In England on the eve of the First World War, the richest tenth of households held a staggering 92 percent of all private wealth, crowding out pretty much everybody else; today their share is a little more than half. High inequality has an extremely long pedigree. Two thousand years ago, the largest Roman private fortunes equaled about 1.5 million times the average annual per capita income in the empire, roughly the same ratio as for Bill Gates and the average American today. For all we can tell, even the overall degree of Roman income inequality was not very different from that in the United States. Yet by the time of Pope Gregory the Great, around 600 CE, great estates had disappeared, and what little was left of the Roman aristocracy relied on papal handouts to keep them afloat. Sometimes, as on that occasion, inequality declined because although many became poorer, the rich simply had more to lose. In other cases, workers became better off while returns on capital fell: western Europe after the Black Death, where real wages doubled or tripled and laborers dined on meat and beer while landlords struggled to keep up appearances, is a famous example.
How has the distribution of income and wealth developed over time, and why has it sometimes changed so much? Considering the enormous amount of attention that inequality has received in recent years, we still know much less about this than might be expected. A large and steadily growing body of often highly technical scholarship attends to the most pressing question: why income has frequently become more concentrated over the course of the last generation. Less has been written about the forces that caused inequality to fall across much of the world earlier in the twentieth century—and far less still about the distribution of material resources in the more distant past. To be sure, concerns about growing income gaps in the world today have given momentum to the study of inequality in the longer run, just as contemporary climate change has encouraged analysis of pertinent historical data. But we still lack a proper sense of the big picture, a global survey that covers the broad sweep of observable history. A cross-cultural, comparative, and long-term perspective is essential for our understanding of the mechanisms that have shaped the distribution of income and wealth.
THE FOUR HORSEMEN
Material inequality requires access to resources beyond the minimum that is needed to keep us all alive. Surpluses already existed tens of thousands of years ago, and so did humans who were prepared to share them unevenly. Back in the last Ice Age, hunter-gatherers found the time and means to bury some individuals much more lavishly than others. But it was food production—farming and herding—that created wealth on an entirely novel scale. Growing and persistent inequality became a defining feature of the Holocene. The domestication of plants and animals made it possible to accumulate and preserve productive resources. Social norms evolved to define rights to these assets, including the ability to pass them on to future generations. Under these conditions, the distribution of income and wealth came to be shaped by a variety of experiences: health, marital strategies and reproductive success, consumption and investment choices, bumper harvests, and plagues of locusts and rinderpest determined fortunes from one generation to the next. Adding up over time, the consequences of luck and effort favored unequal outcomes in the long term.
In principle, institutions could have flattened emerging disparities through interventions designed to rebalance the distribution of material resources and the fruits from labor, as some premodern societies are indeed reputed to have done. In practice, however, social evolution commonly had the opposite effect. Domestication of food sources also domesticated people. The formation of states as a highly competitive form of organization established steep hierarchies of power and coercive force that skewed access to income and wealth. Political inequality reinforced and amplified economic inequality. For most of the agrarian period, the state enriched the few at the expense of the many: gains from pay and benefactions for public service often paled next to those from corruption, extortion, and plunder. As a result, many premodern societies grew to be as unequal as they could possibly be, probing the limits of surplus appropriation by small elites under conditions of low per capita output and minimal growth. And when more benign institutions promoted more vigorous economic development, most notably in the emergent West, they continued to sustain high inequality. Urbanization, commercialization, financial sector innovation, trade on an increasingly global scale, and, finally, industrialization generated rich returns for holders of capital. As rents from the naked exercise of power declined, choking off a traditional source of elite enrichment, more secure property rights and state commitments strengthened the protection of hereditary private wealth. Even as economic structures, social norms, and political systems changed, income and wealth inequality remained high or found new ways to grow.
For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality. This was as true of Pharaonic Egypt as it was of Victorian England, as true of the Roman Empire as of the United States. Violent shocks were of paramount importance in disrupting the established order, in compressing the distribution of income and wealth, in narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Throughout recorded history, the most powerful leveling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. I call these the Four Horsemen of Leveling. Just like their biblical counterparts, they went forth to “take peace from the earth” and “kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” Sometimes acting individually and sometimes in concert with one another, they produced outcomes that to contemporaries often seemed nothing short of apocalyptic. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake. And by the time the dust had settled, the gap between the haves and the have-nots had shrunk, sometimes dramatically.
Only specific types of violence have consistently forced down inequality. Most wars did not have any systematic effect on the distribution of resources: although archaic forms of conflict that thrived on conquest and plunder were likely to enrich victorious elites and impoverish those on the losing side, less clear-cut endings failed to have predictable consequences. For war to level disparities in income and wealth, it needed to penetrate society as a whole, to mobilize people and resources on a scale that was often only feasible in modern nation-states. This explains why the two world wars were among the greatest levelers in history. The physical destruction wrought by industrial-scale warfare, confiscatory taxation, government intervention in the economy, inflation, disruption to global flows of goods and capital, and other factors all combined to wipe out elites’ wealth and redistribute resources. They also served as a uniquely powerful catalyst for equalizing policy change, providing powerful impetus to franchise extensions, unionization, and the expansion of the welfare state. The shocks of the world wars led to what is known as the “Great Compression,” massive attenuation of inequalities in income and wealth across developed countries. Mostly concentrated in the period from 1914 to 1945, it generally took several more decades fully to run its course. Earlier mass mobilization warfare had lacked similar pervasive repercussions. The wars of the Napoleonic era or the American Civil War had produced mixed distributional outcomes, and the farther we go back in time, the less pertinent evidence there is. The ancient Greek city-state culture, represented by Athens and Sparta, arguably provides us with earliest examples of how intense popular military mobilization and egalitarian institutions helped constrain material inequality, albeit with mixed success.
The world wars spawned the second major leveling force, transformative revolution. Internal conflicts have not normally reduced inequality: peasant revolts and urban risings were common in premodern history but usually failed, and civil war in developing countries tends to render the income distribution more unequal rather than less. Violent societal restructuring needs to be exceptionally intense if it is to reconfigure access to material resources. Similarly to equalizing mass mobilization warfare, this was primarily a phenomenon of the twentieth century. Communists who expropriated, redistributed, and then often collectivized leveled inequality on a dramatic scale. The most transformative of these revolutions were accompanied by extraordinary violence, in the end matching the world wars in terms of body count and human misery. Far less bloody ruptures such as the French Revolution leveled on a correspondingly smaller scale.
Violence might destroy states altogether. State failure or systems collapse used to be a particularly reliable means of leveling. For most of history, the rich were positioned either at or near the top of the political power hierarchy or were connected to those who were. Moreover, states provided a measure of protection, however modest by modern standards, for economic activity beyond the subsistence level. When states unraveled, these positions, connections, and protections came under pressure or were altogether lost. Although everybody might suffer when states unraveled, the rich simply had much more to lose: declining or collapsing elite income and wealth compressed the overall distribution of resources. This has happened for as long as there have been states. The earliest known examples reach back 4,000 years to the end of Old Kingdom Egypt and the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia. Even today, the experience of Somalia suggests that this once potent equalizing force has not completely disappeared.
State failure takes the principle of leveling by violent means to its logical extremes: instead of achieving redistribution and rebalancing by reforming and restructuring existing polities, it wipes the slate clean in a more comprehensive manner. The first three horsemen represent different stages, not in the sense that they are likely to appear in sequence—whereas the biggest revolutions were triggered by the biggest wars, state collapse does not normally require similarly strong pressures—but in terms of intensity. What they all have in common is that they rely on violence to remake the distribution of income and wealth alongside the political and social order.
Human-caused violence has long had competition. In the past, plague, smallpox, and measles ravaged whole continents more forcefully than even the largest armies or most fervent revolutionaries could hope to do. In agrarian societies, the loss of a sizeable share of the population to microbes, sometimes a third or even more, made labor scarce and raised its price relative to that of fixed assets and other nonhuman capital, which generally remained intact. As a result, workers gained and landlords and employers lost as real wages rose and rents fell. Institutions mediated the scale of these shifts: elites commonly attempted to preserve existing arrangements through fiat and force but often failed to hold equalizing market forces in check.
Pandemics complete the quartet of horsemen of violent leveling. But were there also other, more peaceful mechanisms of lowering inequality? If we think of leveling on a large scale, the answer must be no. Across the full sweep of history, every single one of the major compressions of material inequality we can observe in the record was driven by one or more of these four levelers. Moreover, mass wars and revolutions did not merely act on those societies that were directly involved in these events: the world wars and exposure to communist challengers also influenced economic conditions, social expectations, and policymaking among bystanders. These ripple effects further broadened the effects of leveling rooted in violent conflict. This makes it difficult to disentangle developments after 1945 in much of the world from the preceding shocks and their continuing reverberations. Although falling income inequality in Latin America in the early 2000s might be the most promising candidate for nonviolent equalization, this trend has remained relatively modest in scope, and its sustainability is uncertain.
Other factors have a mixed record. From antiquity to the associated with violence or the threat of violence—and least when not. Macroeconomic crises have only short-lived effects on the distribution of income and wealth. Democracy does not of itself mitigate inequality. Although the interplay of education and technological change undoubtedly influences dispersion of incomes, returns on education and skills have historically proven highly sensitive to violent shocks. Finally, there is no compelling empirical evidence to support the view that modern economic development, as such, narrows inequalities. There is no repertoire of benign means of compression that has ever achieved results that are even remotely comparable to those produced by the Four Horsemen.
Yet shocks abate. When states failed, others sooner or later took their place. Demographic contractions were reversed after plagues subsided, and renewed population growth gradually returned the balance of labor and capital to previous levels. The world wars were relatively short, and their aftereffects have faded over time: top tax rates and union density are down, globalization is up, communism is gone, the Cold War is over, and the risk of World War III has receded. All of this makes the recent resurgence of inequality easier to understand. The traditional violent levelers currently lie dormant and are unlikely to return in the foreseeable future. No similarly potent alternative mechanisms of equalization have emerged.
Even in the most progressive advanced economies, redistribution and education are already unable fully to absorb the pressure of widening income inequality before taxes and transfers. Lower-hanging fruits beckon in developing countries, but fiscal constraints remain strong. There does not seem to be an easy way to vote, regulate, or teach our way to significantly greater equality. From a global historical perspective, this should not come as a surprise. So far as we can tell, environments that were free from major violent shocks and their broader repercussions hardly ever witnessed major compressions of inequality. Will the future be different?
. . .
Inequality either grew or held fairly steady for much of recorded history, and significant reductions have been rare. Yet policy proposals designed to stem or reverse the rising tide of inequality tend to show little awareness or appreciation of this historical background. Is that as it should be? Perhaps our age has become so fundamentally different, so completely untethered from its agrarian and undemocratic foundations, that history has nothing left to teach us. And indeed, there is no question that much has changed: low-income groups in rich economies are generally better off than most people were in the past, and even the most disadvantaged residents of the least developed countries live longer than their ancestors lived. The experience of life at the receiving end of inequality is in many ways very different from what it used to be.
But it is not economic or more broadly human development that concerns us here—rather how the fruits of civilization are distributed, what causes them to be distributed the way they are, and what it would take to change these outcomes. I wrote this book to show that the forces that used to shape inequality have not in fact changed beyond recognition. If we seek to rebalance the current distribution of income and wealth in favor of greater equality, we cannot simply close our eyes to what it took to accomplish this goal in the past. We need to ask whether great inequality has ever been alleviated without great violence, how more benign influences compare to the power of this Great Leveler, and whether the future is likely to be very different—even if we may not like the answers.
Makes you think . . . doesn't it?
Peter
As regular readers will know, I'm permanently partially disabled due to an on-the-job injury almost two decades ago, and my wife has had some fairly serious injuries in the past. I'm permanently in some degree of pain, and she gets hit by it if she over-exerts herself, or if the weather (heat, humidity, pressure, etc.) affects her particularly badly.
The other night we both woke up, in pain, shortly before 2 a.m. I got up and fetched pain-killers for both of us, which helped: but neither of us could understand why we were both being affected at that time. There was no thunderstorm going on (something that usually makes both of us go "Ouch!" simultaneously), and there seemed no other obvious reason.
Looking around the Internet the following morning, my eye happened upon a sidebar heading "Local Arthritis Forecast" at Accuweather. You won't see it on their main page; you have to enter your location (we use our Zip code) to get your local forecast, whereupon it pops up. For example, here's the location-specific weather forecast for Hermitage, TN, zip code 37076. Read down the sidebar to find the arthritis link.
I followed the link for our area and found a very useful bar graph, with more information below it. Here's what the next week's arthritis forecast looks like for our area (clickit to biggit):
The morning we woke up in pain, the arthritis forecast for that day was "Very High". We both confirmed that from personal experience!
The arthritis forecast appears to indicate accurately when any sort of bone issue, including past injury and/or surgery sites, will be affected by that set of weather conditions. If you fall into that category, you might want to bookmark the Accuweather page for your Zip code, and check the arthritis forecast regularly. It may help you plan your activities better - and your need for pain-killers! Kudos to Accuweather for providing it.
Peter
In discussion with a group of friends, the question came up: "What is the best, most realistic, historically accurate sword fight in the movies?" We weren't interested in made-for-the-camera montages that have little or nothing to do with accurate depictions of real fighting (although we all laughed at the comic duel in Zorro, The Gay Blade, where George Hamilton was at his over-the-top best).
There were a number of suggestions, but most of us agreed that the duel between Colonel Wołodyjowski and the young nobleman Andrzej Kmicic was one of the best of its kind, if not the best. It's described in Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel "The Deluge", the second book in his "Trilogy". Jerzy Hoffman adapted the novel for the film of the same name in 1974.
Here's the famous duel scene, fought according to the Sarmatian dueling code (i.e. immediately, not needing seconds or a separation in time from the incident that sparked it) using period-correct Polish cavalry sabers known as Szablas. It's gritty and realistic.
(Kmicic survives his injury, and goes on to become a hero in his own right, while the Colonel dies in a later battle.). I've seldom seen a sword fight more realistic than that. It's also very faithful to the tone and mood of the original work - something few movies can claim.
So, readers, what's your nomination? What sword fight or duel scene, in your opinion, is the most realistic and historically accurate portrayal of the genre? Please let us know in Comments, and provide a link (if possible) to the scene on a video channel.
Peter
I have to admit, I boggled when I saw this auction posted on MeWe (courtesy of novelist and friend Michael Z. Williamson).
LOT #36RUSH: ALEX LIFESON "WHITEY" STAGE- AND STUDIO-PLAYED PHOTO- AND VIDEO-MATCHED 1976 GIBSON ES-355TD CUSTOM ELECTRIC GUITAR (WITH UK WORK PERMIT, ORIGINAL BACKSTAGE PASSES, BOOKS, AND BLU-RAYS) - WITH NFT
CURRENT BID: $200,000(4 bids)
ESTIMATE: $200,000 - $300,000
STARTING: $50,000
There's more at the link.
I'm not a musician, just a music lover: but for the life of me, I can't understand why someone would pay so vast a sum for a guitar that just happens to have been played by a skilled and well-known musician. If the instrument itself had some particular value (like, for example, a very rare Stradivarius violin, or an instrument used on a particularly famous occasion and therefore having historical importance), I could understand the price. However, this one, while customized for Lifeson, is basically a standard unit like thousands of others, with only a few special features to distinguish it. Anyone could have built a guitar just like it, and still can by retrofitting others from the same production line. I just don't get it. (On the other hand, I also don't get people who pay a premium for a house that's been lived in by a famous person, or the car that they drove, or the clothes that they wore. I mean - a pair of shoes worn [and signed] by actor Michael Douglas while he played the role of Liberace sold for over $1,500. Are you kidding me? That price for used shoes???)
Clearly, I'm out of touch with the consumer society . . . for which my wife is doubtless very thankful!
Peter
From Victor Davis Hanson:
When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous—as we shall see over the next few months.
Go read his thoughts on the matter. I don't think he's wrong.
Peter
As a pastor, I ran into several cases of SIDS - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Every one was tragic. The parents sometimes went to pieces emotionally, blaming themselves, blaming God, unable to accept that their otherwise perfectly normal, healthy baby had gone to sleep and never woken up again. Some were able to recover their mental and emotional balance, and have more children. Some never did. Even worse, sometimes law enforcement entered the situation, particularly if a family had more than one episode of SIDS among their offspring. That appeared to automatically trigger official suspicion that foul play might have been involved. Sometimes it was very hard to prove the negative - that it wasn't foul play at all, but simply a medical/health tragedy.
For decades the cause of SIDS has been unknown. Now an Australian hospital has claimed to have identified a biochemical marker that appears to indicate heightened risk of SIDS among babies.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) may soon be a thing of the past thanks to a world-first breakthrough at The Children's Hospital at Westmead.
. . .
Researchers have identified Butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) as the first biochemical marker that could help detect babies more at risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) while they are alive.
. . .
The study found that BChE levels were significantly lower in babies who subsequently died of SIDS compared to living controls and other infant deaths.
BChE plays a major role in the brain’s arousal pathway and researchers believe its deficiency likely indicates an arousal deficit, which reduces an infant’s ability to wake or respond to the external environment, causing vulnerability to SIDS.
. . .
The next step for researchers is to begin looking at introducing the BChE biomarker into newborn screening and developing specific interventions to address the enzyme deficiency. It is expected this will take around five years to complete.
There's more at the link.
Of course, we don't yet know whether there are additional "markers" that may be involved. Research will be ongoing, I'm sure. Nevertheless, if this claim can be proved and a treatment devised, it offers hope for countless families going forward. At-risk babies can be speedily identified and treated prophylactically, hopefully preventing SIDS from occuring.
Faster, please! I've never forgotten the heartbreak of parents who've lost a child to SIDS. I hope and pray this will end that tragedy forever.
Peter
Courtesy of Kevin at The Smallest Minority:
Religious Fanatic (n): “A person who does what God would do if only He understood the situation.”
That'll work!
Peter
Novelist Ian Fleming had his James Bond character opine, "Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action". That's a yardstick that's been used by many organizations to assess what's going on in the world, whether at war (as Fleming did when he worked for a British military intelligence organization during World War II) or at peace.
There are so many signs of organization behind the current chaos and disorder in the world that I'm forced to the conclusion it's not actually chaos and disorder at all. It's enemy action: organized, planned, and being carried out on a scale so vast it's almost unthinkable. Yet, when one examines the evidence, it's extremely difficult to come to any other conclusion. Let me lay it out, and see what you think.
I'm going to take several seemingly unrelated issues, examine each of them, then see whether they make more sense in isolation, or as part of an interwoven whole. Let's start on a smaller scale, with mass shootings in the USA - particularly the Buffalo shooting last weekend. The shooter's alleged manifesto or proclamation was initially scrubbed from the Internet whenever and wherever it appeared. However, enough copies were cached that eventually whoever was behind that gave up the attempt, and it's now available from multiple sources. (See, for example, here, if you're interested.)
The manifesto reads like a wish list from the ATF and other anti-gun campaigners. Everything they're trying to ban or limit or restrict is listed in laborious, exhaustive detail - far more so than in other shooter manifestos I've read. It's as if someone carefully prepared this manifesto as the foundation for legislative or regulatory action against those things, as soon as possible after it was made public. The document also contains large sections of text basically lifted word-for-word from the manifesto of a mass shooting in New Zealand, as if the author couldn't be bothered to come up with his own justification in his own words and did it the lazy way. Finally, the tone and language and grammar of the document changes multiple times, as though it had been written by multiple persons. Anyone with linguistic education will pick up on that right away.
There are many more problems with the manifesto that others have uncovered: see, for example, The Intrepid Reporter's (rather profane) analysis here, or a much shorter comment here. Suffice it to say that I'm far from convinced that the manifesto is the work of the alleged shooter. Rather, it looks to have been tailor-made as a springboard for anti-gun, anti-Second-Amendment proceedings. It's tailored to the needs of its proposed audience, those who support the Biden administration and liberal anti-gun sentiments. Go read it for yourself, look into the factors I've mentioned, and tell me I'm wrong. (While you're doing that, consider the FBI's involvement in so many recent "extremist" cases such as the alleged plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. I'm hard pressed to think of any such case where the FBI wasn't involved in organizing, aiding or abetting it before it went down. The Buffalo shooting appears to display similar fingerprints.)
Also, while you're at it, tell me why so many other recent mass shootings perpetrated by non-white criminals have simply dropped out of sight in the mainstream media. It's as if they aren't newsworthy because their perpetrators aren't of a politically incorrect race. However, the Buffalo shooting, where a white shooter targeted black victims, is suddenly everywhere in the news. Yes, I find that suspicious. It's almost as if it were deliberately being used as a casus belli to whip up minority outrage against other races. What if there are a couple more such shootings? Will we see BLM and Antifa lead mobs of rioters and looters on our streets again? I won't be surprised if we do.
Putting all those factors together, I believe that the powers that be are deliberately cherry-picking incidents and orchestrating the response to them, both in the mainstream media and among minority groups. They want to use them to foment unrest and violence.
Next, let's look at the impending famine worldwide. I've written about it often enough in recent weeks (most recently here) that I'm sure you don't need me to recap all the details. Michael Yon, who's as bearish on the subject as I am (if not more so) - after all, he and I have both seen famine at work at first hand in the Third World, and we know what we're talking about - said last week:
Famine creates famine, as war creates more war, fire creates fire. Famine collapses economies and destroys — physically destroys — critical infrastructure and social order required to produce food. Starvation feedback loop.
For the first time in generations, USA, Japan, and Europe will be unable to help without neglecting their own people. OGUS already is leaving American babies crying in hunger while feeding US-Russia war.
Global genocide is unfolding. Among the educated, only the blind and true conspiracy theorists will miss it. Until it eats them.
There's more at the link. This morning, he added:
If you study famine now — and there is no time to waste, cancel vacation — you will have a vital roadmap to getting through this. Most famines are amazingly survivable for those who saw it coming and ducked.
There is great value in finding experienced preppers and listening closely. There is also a great value that few talk about — just study history for the patterns.
Be not Afraid — those who study and prepare will talk about this for the rest of their lives.
Again, more at the link.
Mr. Yon speaks of the famine as genocide: "the deliberate murder of a whole community or race". Is he wrong? I'm not so sure he is. After all, when one looks at the growing worldwide famine, one of the things one can't help but notice is the coordination behind official responses to it.
For example, Kit Knightly sees that coordination in the sudden boosting of genetically modified foods by all and sundry.
The proposed [Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill] ... follows on from DEFRA’s announced “loosened regulation” of genetic research back in January.
To quote the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), the legislation would “take certain precision breeding techniques out of the scope of restrictive GMO rules”.
Essentially, this would see new “gene-edited” foods as distinct from old-fashioned “genetically modified” foods, and therefore not subject to the same rules and oversight.
. . .
What’s noteworthy is – by pure happenstance, I’m sure – it appears to coincide with a renewed push on the GM food front in other countries all over the world.
In December 2021, Switzerland added an amendment to its moratorium on GMO crops, permitting the use of certain “gene editing” techniques.
Last month, Egypt announced their new strain of GM wheat. Just two days ago, Ethiopia’s National Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center announced they had researched, and the country will now be growing, genetically modified cotton and maize.
Despite Russia’s sweeping ban on the cultivation and/or importing of genetically modified crops, they have nonetheless created a 111 billion Ruble project to create up to 30 varieties of genetically edited plants and farm animals.
Britain’s deregulation of GM food is always described as a “post-Brexit” move – with the EU chided around the world for its “precautionary principle” on GM crops – and yet as long ago as last April, the EU was calling for a “rethink” on GM crops.
In fact, just today, European Biotechnology Magazine reports:
The EU Commission has launched its final consultation on the deregulation of new breeding techniques in agricultureSo, we’re seeing a sudden increase in the variety of GM crops available and a simultaneous push for deregulation of the industry in Western nations.
Why would they be doing this now?
Well, there is a food crisis.
Or, more accurately, they have just created a food crisis. And as the cliched Hegelian dialectic inevitably goes, their manufactured “problem” is now in need of their contrived “solution”.
We should expect to see genetic engineering pitched as a solution to our food crisis in the very near future…like yesterday. Or indeed, two months ago.
That’s how fast they work now, with barely a pretence at concealing the plan. Spitting out the answer so fast they make it obvious they knew the question beforehand.
More at the link. Do, please, follow the link at "just created a food crisis" and read that article carefully. The author makes a strong case that what we're seeing today is not accidental, but planned. If you read further in the article above, you'll find that a coordinated campaign appears to be ongoing in international mainstream media to promote the use of GM seeds and foods, as if to support the new laws and regulations and new strains of seed that are "suddenly" being announced. Left unspoken is that those who hold the patents on the new GM foods (and who own the farms that grow them) will make yet another fortune, while those who don't use them will be marginalized - perhaps left without food altogether. It's more than enough to make you think very hard. The author goes so far as to call it "the next stage of the Great Reset?"
In the second article, Knightly sums up:
In summary…
1. A war which did not need to happen is driving up food and oil prices.
2. Sanctions which did not need to be put in place are also driving up food and oil prices.
3. Western allies are intentionally raising their oil prices.
4. Despite warning of a food crisis, US and UK are paying farmers not to farm.
5. A “bird flu epidemic” very much like the fake Covid “pandemic” is driving up the price of poultry and eggs.
6. Western companies are actively making the fertiliser shortages worse.
7. Bizarre fires are crippling large sections of the US food industry.
Taken individually maybe these points could all be seen as mistakes or coincidences, but when you put them all together it’s not hard to spot the pattern. The press may claim we are “sleepwalking” into a food crisis, but it looks more like they’re running head-first into it.
After years of saying there’s a food shortage on the way, it looks like they might be about to finally actually create one.
I'm looking at the same evidence from the other side of the Atlantic, and I can't dispute Mr. Knightly's analysis at all. Mr. Yon's allegation that what we're seeing is preparation for genocide looks more and more convincing when you put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together.
Let's look at the COVID-19 pandemic as another example of an internationally planned conspiracy. From its obscure origins (which are still being deliberately obfuscated by China and the World Health Organization), to vaccines that have proven anything but effective (but have made billions for those creating and selling them) and have had side-effects that may kill or cripple millions of people, to attempts to cover up the whole mess . . . we all know what's been going on. Yet, despite their failures, official bodies like the CDC are still trying to reimpose mask mandates that have been proven not to work. The complete disappearance of influenza cases from world health statistics during 2021-2022 is yet more evidence that an ordinary illness was misdiagnosed as a pandemic - yet few people ever talk about it. There's so much evidence of conspiracy behind COVID-19 that it's overwhelming, yet the mainstream media resolutely refuse to discuss it.
COVID-19 provided a live experiment in real time of how a manufactured health crisis could be used to control people, to force them to conform to official dictates. That's why the WHO and numerous governments are currently trying to impose new health care mandates that will override national laws and constitutions, as we discussed a couple of days ago. Pandemics offer a way to bypass all restrictions on control, destroy individual and national rights and freedoms, and impose a dictatorship of science and health (although in reality they'll just be fronts for the oligarchs and others who are pulling their strings). We've talked about this before, so I won't bother to go into details again.
(Oh - an interesting twist, in the light of the discussion above on genetically edited, or engineered, or modified foods. Remember that scientists are trying to add COVID-19 and other vaccines to edible plants. As you eat your salad, you'll be vaccinated whether you like it or not. Interesting combination of interests, isn't it? Scary, too, given the disastrous side-effects of some COVID-19 vaccines . . .)
Let's turn to the policies of the Biden administration - or, at least, what we call the Biden administration. In reality, of course, it's not his administration at all. He's senile. He's not capable of thinking of anything much, let alone policies and governing the country. He's being manipulated as a "front man" by much more sinister forces behind him. Elon Musk was absolutely correct when, a couple of days ago, he said that “The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter ... The path to power is the path to the teleprompter.” Biden's no more than a figurehead.
The policies of the administration are clearly designed to disrupt, if not destroy, the US economy as it's presently structured. Just look at fuel. Its price has more than doubled since the administration took office; vital pipelines have not been approved; vital drilling permits have not been issued and some existing permits have been canceled. If they wanted to make fuel more expensive and harder to get, they couldn't possibly have done a better job.
Look at employment. Unemployment benefits are still so high that it's more cost-effective for blue-collar workers to be unemployed than to find work - but businesses are desperate for workers, and are scrambling to fill vacancies at great cost to themselves. I'm seeing this at first hand as I struggle to complete renovations and upgrades to our home. Contractor after contractor has had to postpone coming out here because their staff is so overworked, they have to give priority to bigger and more important customers. Some have actually turned down my request for a quotation, saying they can't take on any new business because they don't have the staff to do so. Yet, the administration continues policies that make it more difficult for businesses to employ the people they need.
Look at inflation. It's not just the current administration that's laid the foundation for what we're currently experiencing: it's been going on under both Democratic and Republican administrations for years. However, the past year and a half has seen enormous additional expenditures and outlays that have made the situation much, much worse. The current administration is responsible for that, and its fiscal recklessness has doubled down on inflation to the point that it's become stagflation. The economy and the fiscus are being totally, and in my opinion deliberately, mismanaged. We're all feeling the pain - and it's going to get worse.
I could go on and on about the fecklessness and misguided policies of the administration, except that I no longer believe they're either feckless or misguided. They're deliberate, IMHO, and what we're seeing in our economy is nothing less than a deliberate attempt to collapse it. The powers that be appear to believe that they can impose their brutal agenda on this country if they smash it first - and, at least in the "blue" parts of the country, they appear to be succeeding.
Look, too, at the invasion of our country by illegal aliens, aided and abetted by the administration. Literally millions have swarmed into the USA since the administration took office, and millions more will be coming. We spoke about the worldwide refugee crisis earlier this week. It's getting worse by the day, and will continue to do so. Michael Yon, yesterday:
My estimate: Panama migration corridor will explode in December/January far beyond any historical volumes.
1) Darien area dry season normally begins late December. Migration volume increases annually at this time.
2) Global famines/collapses creating massive HOP — Human Osmotic Pressure.
3) USG is facilitating smooth flows through Darien up to Costa Rica.
Literally millions could come through Panama 2023, and even more in 2024. Especially by bypassing Darien by using boats from Colombia. This thought already is being floated here.
Mr. Yon has already pointed out how the US government and left-wing aid agencies (take a bow, George Soros!) are actively aiding and abetting the flow of illegal aliens through the Darien Gap and Panama to our border with Mexico. IMHO, it's little less than treason.
A few days ago, Mr. Yon proceeded to link famine to the Darien Gap situation. Some people (perhaps many) will find his conclusions far-fetched. I've had all too much experience in the Third World, including real famine. I don't.
OGUS [Occupying Government of the USA] is setting stage for e-rationing.
Attacking babies with a contrived shortage [of baby formula] evokes emotional anchor to force people into emotional corner.
. . .
Can’t make an omelet without cracking some babies.
Psaki blames ‘hoarders’ for lack of baby formula as she pushes the narrative to send 40 billion more dollars in American labors into the US-Russia war in Ukraine. Accelerating the global famine. A famine on schedule to begin this year and devastate much of the world in 2023-24 and beyond. After that 40 billion, they will demand another harvest of American wealth and blood to defend Ukraine, the country that paid off crack-addict Biden and “The Big Guy.”
Note: All governments always blame hoarders for the food shortages during famine. All. Always. They cause the events. Then blame the victims. They institute price controls, rationing systems, and start raiding homes and others for ‘hoarding.’ Expect raids in the future. Remember they did same with PPE (Personal Protective Equipment like masks and gloves) at outset of pandemic. AFTER the government had depleted strategic inventories Before the pandemic).
This is an attack. We are under attack.
Meanwhile, here in Panama, the Darien Gap is being prepared for a fantastic surge in ‘migration’ later this year. Dry season begins December/January and will coincide with serious onset of famine in areas around the world. Famine will create increased HOP — Human Osmotic Pressure — that will pump massive invasion into United States as our coffers are bled dry, American babies have no formula, and our own food supply thins by the hour.
Predictably, there already are proposals to send American food inventories abroad to assuage famine. This is a fool’s game. At best. At worst this is another form of direct attack. After all, we simply do not have enough food. Period. They will still starve to death a little later, or be energized to move somewhere else such as to America to help Americans starve to death.
The United States is creating condition for actual famine in United States. Famine as in not just food shortages but people eating people and people being eaten by birds.
I could go on, and on, and on, picking on events and trends and incidents and using them to support my case: but what's the point? If I haven't given enough evidence already to convince you, you won't change your mind if I provide more. To my mind, the accumulation of evidence in all these separate areas is utterly convincing when you put them all together. We are not facing a series of accidents, or coincidences, or unrelated trends. We're seeing multiple facets of the same threat to our independence, our constitution, our human rights. We're seeing a totalitarian onslaught against freedom on a worldwide scale.
The USA has always been a beacon of freedom. Unless we wake up, and do something about this, that will end Real. Soon. Now.
In the light of everything I've discussed, I challenge anyone to tell me I'm wrong, and make a convincing case. I'm listening.
Peter
Last week I posted "Doofus Of The Day #1,092", about a municipality in Japan that mistakenly transferred a large sum of money to a recipient who - mirabile dictu! - "could not" return it.
Well, now we know why he couldn't.
The blunder happened when ... 463 low-income households were meant to receive 100,000 yen ($770; £620) each as part of a government scheme to ease financial strain caused by the pandemic.
But on 8 April, all of the funding - 46.3m yen - was accidentally deposited into the man's personal bank account.
An investigation has since found that he withdrew 600,000 yen every day for about two weeks, local media reports.
When authorities finally contacted him, he said he no longer had the money.
"I've already moved the money. It can't be returned," he is quoted as saying. "It cannot be undone any more. I will not run. I will pay for my crime."
However he has now disappeared.
Speaking to media on Tuesday, the man's lawyer said ... [he] had used his smartphone to gamble away all of the money through online casino sites ... "I don't currently have the money and I don't have anything with property value at hand. It's actually difficult to return it," the lawyer quoted him as saying, according to The Asahi Shimbun.
There's more at the link.
One can only shake one's head at his financial fecklessness and incompetence. If I'd received that money and been minded to steal it, I'd have least have put a big chunk of it into something of lasting value, like gold coins or jewelry. To throw it all away on gambling . . . that's compounding the theft, with stupidity as the cherry on top.
Oh, well. Now he has the fun choice of either paying it back, or spending a few years in the rather unsympathetic Japanese prison system.
Peter
Fellow author Brian Niemeier has written an article on his blog titled "Jaimie’s Island". It's an interesting read. Here's an excerpt.
Boomers left parenting up to TV, and Millennials are leaving parenting up to tablets and phones.
As a result, young adults today have little contact with the highs and lows of the real world. Instead, their lives are defined by screens that act as windows into false realities where nothing really happens. These electronic illusions sap Millennials’ and Zoomers’ motivation by giving them dopamine hits for simulated achievement.
Jaimie’s solution?
Cut the screens cold turkey.
And not just electronic devices. To cure false reality addiction, Jaimie advises his viewers to reset their lives. That means throwing out the iPhone, laptop, tablet, game console, booze, drugs, and TV.
In fact, he suggests picking one room in the house and clearing everything out of it except for a mattress.
This done, our young NEET must commit to following one rule: Don’t do anything that makes you go backwards.
Jaimie wagers that viewers who take these drastic steps will soon get so tired of sitting alone without any stimulation, they’ll venture outside to relieve the tedium.
And that impetus to get up and go will be the first spark of their rekindling motivation.
What will Millennial NEETs find beyond their doorsteps? In time, they will have real-life experiences with real stakes. They’ll meet people, get exercise, and gain experience.
But most important of all, they’ll try new things and fail.
Because failure is a great teacher. And persistence is invincible.
There's more at the link, including a video of Jaimie talking about his perspective.
Sounds excessive, you say? Impractical, what with the demands of everyday communication? I'm not so sure. I see entire families at restaurants, every head - father, mother and every child - bowed over a smartphone, not communicating with or paying attention to each other at all. Even when their food arrives, they lay their phones down next to their plates and continue to look at them between every mouthful of food. Where's the family life in that? Is the smartphone a blessing or a curse when it comes to community, to being truly aware of each other? Can people brought up - if you can call it that - in that fashion ever establish a meaningful relationship with a spouse or partner in their turn - let alone with their children, if they bother to have any?
Jaimie's ideas offer serious food for thought. Recommended reading.
Peter
City Journal has published an article titled "Confessions of a Loan Shark: One of the last survivors of Boston’s Gangland War of the 1960s opens up about his notorious past". It reminded me of a number of hardline convicts I met during my service as a prison chaplain. I'll cite an excerpt from the article, then talk about what such people were like behind bars.
Boston police said he was marked for death. He was caught up in a gangland quarrel that quickly degenerated into a war, pitting the McLaughlin brothers of Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood against Buddy McLean and his friends from the neighboring city of Somerville. Each side was trying to eradicate the other, and by the time Maxie was transported north, they were well on their way to doing exactly that. Bodies were left slumped in cars, dumped in Boston Harbor, sprawled on the street, and left in patches of woods for critters to eat. Number of cases solved? Zero.
Maxie was one of the reasons why. Questioned by police as a matter of routine in those days, his answer was always the same—“I have no idea.” Maxie, those guns we know you got, where are they? “What guns? I have no idea.” Who was with you in the car that got shot up? “What car? I have no idea.” Gangsters dying like dogs in the street after an ambush were more likely to spit in the eye of their interrogator than spill the beans, even as God’s judgment barreled toward them.
. . .
Maxie is a rarity: a survivor who kept his mouth shut.
. . .
It was Labor Day weekend, 1961. Georgie McLaughlin, stewed to the gills, insulted and likely assaulted the girlfriend of one of McLean’s many friends. What happened next was the mandatory minimum for that kind of conduct in that kind of crowd. Georgie was beaten senseless and ended up in a hospital. Predictably, his two brothers sought vengeance—they crossed the border into Somerville and demanded that McLean hand over those responsible. McLean knew what that meant. He refused.
Eight weeks later, Georgie was out of the hospital and among those attaching dynamite under the McLean family car. “Buddy was up in the window having a drink,” Georgie told Maxie the next day. “He heard us in the dark and started shooting.” They ran like jackrabbits. The dynamite wasn’t attached properly and never blew up. Buddy did; he blew his top.
Two days later, he and two accomplices crossed the border into Charlestown and headed for City Square. They knew that Bernie McLaughlin would be in his usual spot out front of Richard’s Liquor Mart collecting loan-shark debts. The sun was high in the sky when McLean stepped out from behind a steel abutment under the Mystic River Bridge and shot him dead—and then shot him a few more times. More than a hundred longshoremen on lunch break watched—but no one saw a thing.
. . .
To a townie like Maxie, being on the lam was like seeing the world. “Me and Georgie traveled all over the country,” he told me ... they swung down to California and then to Mexico. They headed straight for a cantina, and Georgie grabbed a house girl and headed straight for the stairs. When he refused to pay, the bartender pulled a gun. Georgie and his bad eye didn’t blink. He turned on all the gas jets and stood there with a lighter and said, “Lemme know when.”
“I thought that was really it,” said Maxie.
. . .
Between March and Thanksgiving of 1964, there were 15 unsolved gangland murders—two more than the 13 that ended the era of unlocked doors in Boston. Newspaper editors had a field day coming up with headlines: “GANG WAR DEATHS REPLACE STRANGLINGS AS HUB TERROR,” said one. “ORIGINAL BOSTON MASSACRE LOOKS LIKE CHURCH PICNIC,” said another. “MURDER-A-MONTH IN BEAN TOWN,” said the New York Daily News. “Not even Chicago’s Prohibition killings can match staid Boston’s corpse-of-the-month club.” Citizens started referring to the Boston Herald’s obituary section as “the Irish sports pages.”
“I got caught up in the war,” Maxie said.
There's more at the link - and very interesting reading it is too.
In my memoir of prison chaplaincy, "Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls", I described a man I called "Adam", a pseudonym given to protect his privacy. (Yes, even prison inmates have a legal right to privacy - and besides, to irritate them by violating it might lead to unpleasant consequences.) He, too, was part of the "Gangland War" several decades ago. I daresay he'd recognize most of the names mentioned by "Maxie". He probably helped to kill some of them.
Adam’s another murderer, but in an entirely different class. He was an enforcer for the Mob in a major city. He was convicted of several murders, and collected a life sentence for each of them (the judge ruling that they were to run consecutively, apparently to make sure he’ll never get out of prison). He contemptuously rejects any notion of feeling guilty over his crimes. Those he killed were ‘crooks’ who were trying to steal from their criminal bosses. They deserved what they got. He was merely the instrument of ‘street justice’. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Adam, trying to get him to at least acknowledge an intellectual and moral responsibility for what he’s done… but without success. The best I’ve been able to achieve is that Adam has said he’s “sorry for not feeling sorry”. I hope God will accept that as a first step. (Sigh.)
Adam’s a very hard man indeed. No-one with any sense messes with him… but then, not everyone has sense.
A year or so back a new convict arrived, a cocky young man ‘full of p*** and vinegar’ as they say in the classics. He wanted to build ‘street cred’ in the prison, and decided that beating up a Mob killer would get him a reputation. It did — as an idiot. He came up behind Adam while he was sitting with a group watching television, and hit him over the head with a chair. Adam sprang to his feet, bleeding from a cut on his scalp, and proceeded to take this thug apart at the seams. He ended up in hospital with several broken bones and serious internal injuries (not to mention speaking in a dulcet and henceforth permanent soprano). The guards broke it up (although they probably found it difficult to restrain themselves from cheering Adam on — they’ve had to deal with too many young thugs to have any sympathy for them). Adam did a spell in the Hole for fighting, but by all accounts was treated well by the staff there (who doubtless felt that Adam had done them a favor by dealing with the punk before they had to). He’s back in general population now, his reputation not merely intact but significantly enhanced. The thug was transferred to another prison a long way away, with a note in his records to the effect that he and Adam were never again to be assigned to the same institution. If they were, the consequences (for the thug) would probably be lethal.
I quoted Adam in one of my "Convict to Chaplain" vignettes in the same book.
There ain’t many in here wanna mess with me. In the early days, I had to fight for my place. I did, and the hassle stopped. Nowadays the old cons leave me alone, and I leave them alone. We know where we stand. We respect each other. Still, every now and then a new guy arrives. He’s eager, he’s pushy, he wants to make a name for himself. To him someone like me is a path to an instant rep. He reckons I’m older and slower, and he figures he can take me.
I watch ’em. You can tell they’re screwin’ themselves up to it, getting psyched and set to take me. I want ’em about two-thirds of the way there, far enough that they’ve bragged about what they’re gonna do to me, so it’s real hard for them to back down, but they’re not quite ready for me yet.
Me, I’m always ready. That’s how I got my rep in here. They all know, man: if you **** with me, you got nothin’ coming but pain. I’m gonna hurt you real bad. No other way. I don’t fight fair. I’m older now, and I don’t have the strength and speed I used to have, so I fight hard and I fight dirty and I know all the tricks. I fight for keeps. I also got my buddies, an’ they got my back. If the guy’s got friends, they’ll keep ’em off me while I take him.
So, when the guy’s just about where I want him, I call him out, right in front of the convicts and the guards and God and the Devil and the whole ****ing world. I do it on the yard. I tell him straight, “I hear you got a big mouth. I hear you think I’m an old **** and you reckon you can take me. Well, here I am. Do it now, or shut the **** up, because this is the one and only chance you get. Take me now, or stay outta my face forever. I see you within twenty feet of me ever again, I’m gonna rip your **** off and make you eat it.”
They freeze. They know everybody’s watching ’em. They want me so bad they can taste it, but man, they just ain’t ready. I am. That’s my edge. They know I’m ready.
Nine times outta ten they crawfish. That’s the end of it — and of their rep. Everyone’s seen it. From then on they sing real low around me, ’cause they know what’s gonna happen if they don’t. The tenth time, the dumb **** will try to take me, and I’ll put him down hard and fast and mean. He’s bleeding and screaming on the ground and he’s got some broken bones and he’s missing some teeth and maybe an eye or an ear or something else, and I’m on my way to the Hole for a stretch — but every damn convict and every ****ing guard on this yard knows which one of us two’s the boss. I am, mother******. You ain’t ****. Ever. I’m top dog. Live with it.
Same goes for the guards. They treat me with respect, ’cause they know that if they don’t, they got nothing coming on this yard. I pass the word, their lives are a living hell. Same goes for you, Chaplain. I got nothing against you, y’know? So far you seem an OK kind of guy… but you want to remember that.
I found a lot in City Journal's article to remind me of Adam. Those were hard, hard men. There was no give-up in them at all . . . and old age hasn't changed that. I'd still hate to meet one of them in a dark alley.
Peter
