Postblogging Technology, March 1946, I: Baking Alaska

By Kimberly Vardeman from Lubbock, TX, USA - Baked AlaskaUploaded by Willscrlt, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28575136

Mr. R_. C_.,

Chateau Laurier,

Ottawa, Canada.

Dear Father: 

I do not think that anyone imagined that, when you were called to Ottawa, you would be away so long! Well, now Mr. Gouzenko is in the news --although not, alas, due to my self-imposed limits, in this letter, and the fat is well in the fire. Or, the hot syrup is in the cold ice cream if you are cooking like Westinghouse. Hopefully, you will no longer be of use, and you can go  home and guard your gardens from teenagers looking for places to drink.

As you will know from the newspapers, the Russians have said that they received "offers of useless technical information." This might be taken as an admission that they know about the Americans' little "walk-in." Though I do not know if the FBI is conceding defeat yet. Not that anyone besides the Director is surprised! I suppose that now if the Americans want to know about the Presidents' aides who were allegedly involved, they will have to break the Russian one-time-pads, after all. I do not know if the Americans really want to do that, but, if they do, it's just as well that Wong Lee held on to a few of them. 

An innocent mistake, of course. He was distraught about domestic events, and became confused. We shall say. It will be very amusing. Some people are, of course, aware that the Soongs sent people to murder Great Uncle (and me, and my children) that night.

Your youngest is to report to Bikini for the summer; we have word that James' presence there is also expecteds. It will be very interesting, though it means he is not to get his full half-pay period. Your boy is down at mouth, somewhat, as I think he was hoping to spend his summer in a nice staff appointment in San Francisco or Honolulu. I had not the heart to disabuse him of the notion that he would get anything as nice in life as falls in Lieutenant A_'s lap. At least he is not exiled to Alaska, like Ensign Wong! 

As for Lieutenant A_ , he will be in Washington, "Miss V.C." tells us, and points contiguous, searching for hopefully imaginary (as leaving more time for jitterbugging) communists.  

"GRACE."

Smelting the World: Anderita

Today, we're on about Pevensey Castle. At least, once I get there. First, some brisket!

Source: pattiodaddiobbq.com

2.

 "You know what they're calling this bond drive? The Mighty Seventh. They might've called it the "We're Flat Fucking Broke And Can't Even Afford Bullets So We're Begging For Your Pennies" bond drive, but it didn't have quite the ring. They could've called it that, though, because the last four bond drives came up so short we just printed money instead. Ask any smart boy on Wall Street, he'll tell you our dollar is next to worthless, we've borrowed so much. And nobody is lending any more. Ships aren't being built, tanks aren't being built, machine guns, bazookas, hand grenades, zip. You think this is a farce? You want to go back to your buddies? Well stuff some rocks in your pockets before you get on the plane, because that's all we got left to throw at the Japanese. And don't be surprised if your plane doesn't make it off the runway, because the fuel dumps are empty. And our good friends, the Arabs, are only taking bullion. If we don't raise $14 billion, and that's million with a "B," this war is over by the end of the month. We make a deal with the Japanese, we give whatever they want and we come home, because you've seen them fight, and they sure as shit ain't giving up. $14 billion! The last three drives didn't make that much all together."

Saudi oil production, btw. 1945 is to the left of the start of the curve. You know, where the oil production is really, really low.

3.

Not to be too mysterious here. This is a follow-up. First, I don't want to risk misrepresenting the data on coal mining in Britain at the end of the World War, and neither do I want to sink time into understanding it right now --the winter of 1947 will come in its own time. So I am going to reproduce the original charts from last week at the bottom of this number. There is considerable additional data in them, make of what one will. 

For now, it can stand to be pointed out that British coal miners are an early and paradigmatic example of a story that I am familiar with as pure racism  --the example I remember from my childhood was Trinidadian banana pickers. "There is no point in increasing the wage of [those people], because they will just book off work and go do things I disapprove of." There's a technical term for it from economics, and I'd be interested in the intellectual history of it if I could just turn up the phrase. I am, however, a great deal more interested in it in the context of the rapidly approaching labour shortage apocalypse of the Vancouver retail trades. The reader may also see where today's musical interlude comes in.

Second, I have Stephen Pax Leonard's Language, Society and Identity in Early Iceland before me. As Lameen warned, it is not very useful on the history of the Icelandic settlement. On the contrary, Leonard's objective is to resolve the very interesting mystery of the lack of dialectical variation in Icelandic. For this historical linguistic inquiry, he needs some kind of historical context, and takes the received, saga-based version at face value. (Fortunately, it is not critical to his thesis, and I imagine that he knows that there is a revisionist interpretation of the sagas as historicallly unreliable.) 

Here is a frustrating case in which I want to task the historical linguist, not with being too much in love with the hypothesis, but as being insufficiently willing to fly free on the wings of theory! I know. I am a very inconsistent and frivolous consumer of this science. Nevertheless, it seems that the mystery requires us to see the early settlers as speakers of many languages or at least Norse dialects, in order that they will require a koine to communicate with each other. Second, he sees a later phase of dialectical levellling, in which a model of ideal Icelandic is propounded (through the law assemblies, specifically) and becomes a social norm as a means of achieving a collectively-agreed Icelandic identity. This self-fashioning of collective identity might look to the sagas; but to a large extent to emphasise that Icelanders are not British (English or Irish.). That is, Icelanders need to make it clear that they are not British, and so need a common language. 

Out with the Procrustean bed! Clearly, poor Dr. Leonard's hypothesis pertains to the Commercial Fishing Horizon. Icelanders hold property rights to the foreshores. Foreshore ownership is absolutely critical to a fishing economy, as you can't get process the fish without it. If one must know what an Icelander is, and if there is no other way to tell them, it will have to be by the way they talk. 

What does that allow me to hypothesise about the pre-Commercial Fishing Horizon settlement of Iceland? Not much, other than that it must have been a linguistically diverse community, and perhaps that some Irish (and more English) is allowable. This is not the only product of a week spent thinking around the issues, and more importantly, frankly, the first quarterly grocery inventory since our latest reinvention. What if the earliest settlement of Iceland was by charcoal burners? Where is the archaeological state of the art on charcoal burning?

First, there is an interesting convergence of the exciting new terra preta work with what is actually happening in Brazil right now. Did you know that there is a charcoal-burning, pig-iron industry in Brazil, now? Today? The whole thing might even have a bearing on where the world is right now, as the fact that it is being done by poor Third Worlders is perhaps provoking a bit of a revisiting of "bio-char." (Charcoal making is bad, proletarian, unenvironmental, unhealthy, and leads to deforestation. "Bio-char" is good, because it remediates the soil and creates a fossil-free and renewable fuel.)

It is interesting that terra preta was discovered, or at least formalised as an archaeological paradigm (bad as Kuehn, I am with that word) in response to the sub-Roman "dark earth" layer in British urban excavations. We are not likely to find this conception of dark earth in the Roman British iron fields, because they were not built on cities. That being said, terra preta has been tardy in coming back to its British origins to be fully rehabilitated and understood as evidence of a community light on its feet, making iron, conditioning soils, and, yes, barbecuing beef with the firestick. Scholars have been looking for charcoal in Roman and sub-Roman Britain, and this will be the main focus after the break. No big revelations, but there's been some interesting work, for those who care about these things.

The final issue, a little out of order, is that laboriously retyped speech from Clint Eastwood's 2006 Iwo Jima epic, Flags of Our Fathers. The speech is so utterly anachronistic that I'm almost incapable of coherent response. The addition of the "Saudi Oil Production" chart is recent, a product of my third re-reading, as the previous two had achieved full apoplectic collapse before I got to the part where America's war effort in the spring of 1945 depended on "Arab" oil, for which the "Arabs" would only take bullion. It has been brought to my attention that Mr. Eastwoord isn't necessarily the most sophisticated of political thinkers, but I'm a little discouraged that something so blazingly silly appears in a critically well-received movie. (Though the Rotton Tomato rating of 73% suggests that regular readers had their difficulties with the headline reviews.) 

The speech wouldn't matter much more than a certain address to an empty chair were it has an independent existence on the Internet. The "Movie" subheading of the "War Bons in Popular Culture" Wikipedia article consists entirely of someone's retyping of this speech from the transcript. Whoever they are, they are, this Wikipedia contributor thinks that the war was funded by war savings bonds, and that America was about to run out of money to pay for the war in the spring of 1945, and, had that happened, America would have abandoned the Pacific war. 

This probably isn't the place to talk about Pacific First and the China Lobby. It's a story that will get old long before the seventieth anniversary of the declaration of the People's Republic arrives, much less the Korean War. (March of the Volunteeers.) What matters is that I'm a little discouraged that it isn't more obvious that the mid-century War loan drives weren't to fund the war. They were intended to soak up elevated wartime wages and prevent inflation. Even the secondary goal of spreading wartime spending over into peacetime demand wasn't much emphasised in bond sale propaganda. Although a little trawl through a Google Image search of war bond posters turned up the point that the Mighty Seventh was so important precisely because the war was almost over, and inflation was expected to overheat with demobilisation. (Thank you, Jones and Lawson Machinery Company of Springfield, Vermont!) 

But we just can't leave it at that, can we? It's never possible to just print money and spend it on an existential crisis of the state (or the species) without worrying that just putting that money out there will have some awful result. You can probably guess that I've had that frustrating argument a number of times lately in connection with the fight against climate change, so it's probably as well to take a moment to push back. Whether it's worthwhile to reconstruct the fall of the Roman Empire as an extended exercise in dear money is another matter. 

Thirty-Eight Hours Versus Sixteen Tons: Recapping Government-Spending Driven Economic Growth in World War II

Source: Inspiration

This blog is not about public engagement. It made an exception for the Canadian election, because, well, it's a Canadian blog. American elections are American business, and, besides, it's almost certainly moot at this point.

However, this blog's cute-as-buttons niece was feeling the Bern hard when the blog had a birthday lunch with her three weeks ago -- three months late, but the blog can be that way, sometimes. So the blog feels some vicarious, avuncular enthusiasm. The Sanders campaign was in trouble --and this is also old news-- last week for taking all-too seriously Jerry Friedman's recent claim that a good dose of government spending, as promised by Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders would produce GDP growth rates which are deemed by others to be too high.

Obviously, the blog has no comment. The blog doesn't understand all the math-y bits in economics.The blog's "gentleman's D" in partial differential equations enjoins silence. That being said, economics also trades in facts, and facts happen in history, and history is the blog's wheelhouse. More specifically, the blog has done quite a bit about a period in history in which government spending had a pretty significant effect on the Anglo-American GDP, and the blog can certainly talk about that. And drop the fancy-pantsy third-person elocution while the blog is at it!

Also, something like that would be quick to write, and wouldn't require library time, which is the whole point of doing recapping posts. Who knows, it might even people who are not my bubbly, optimistic, 18-year-old niece with a bit of confidence in the future. It might give my niece a future where she can teach music theory and history instead of swotting her way through medical school.

An excuse for recycled images!

Postblogging Technology, January, II: Newer, Better Bombs

Mr. R_. C_.,

Chateau Laurier,

Ottawa, Canada.

Dearest Father:

First things first: you asked to hear at the earliest date, about my appointment with Dr. Rivers. Since we are sending this on, via yourself, with the courier carrying the material for the General, this is the earliest date. So, rest assured that I am quite fully recovered, and cleared to resume all my normal activities. I can climb hills, ride horse, and, of course, sit at my desk and write. I can also clean house, not that I wanted to be cleared for that, but there is no help for it, with my girl back in college, and Fanny and Judith with their hands full.

If you miss your son, you may jump to the bottom, where my husband attaches a personal note.

So, that urgent matter taken care of, let me be more conventional, and say that I hope this letter finds you well. Or more than conventional, since you have my most profound and solicitous concern over your cough. Please, please say that it is on the mend! Being called across the continent so, and on a fool's errand, at that, is, well, when King and Country calls . . But still! I had so hoped to have you through the Lunar New Year, and now instead you must be off in Ottawa holding the hands of nervous civil servants who do not understand radioactivity.

If it is any consolation, "Mrs. Chow" says that the FBI's own live lead seems to be falling apart in their hands. They have more than a hundred named Red agents to follow, a number of them named by multiple sources, and none have been caught out yet. The Bureau is still optimistic, but Mrs. Chow has flatly told her "handler" that there is a leak, somewhere. (She says that it reminds her of the hunt for "Lucy.") Please, please let it be Hoover!

No, too much to hope for. Unless the Russians do not keep track of their cipher clerks, they  must be aware that their North American networks are compromised, and who knows who might be connected with whom?

On the matter of radioactivity, I pass on some information from Ensign Wong. The Americans have found more isotopes in New Mexico and Japan, and are increasingly confident that they may be able to reconstruct any Russian atom bomb from the isotope ratios --at least after the imminent trials in the South Seas. Just tell the Canadians to make sure that Chalk River doesn't vent into the air. It seems as though it would be good atomic hygiene, atomic spying or no.  

"Mrs. Chow" is resisting some pressure to move to Virginia. She is enjoying teaching, and is not sure that her connections would pass a background check. Besides, does the Bureau, or the Army and Navy really want to admit that they are taking pointers from the old enemy, no matter how well sanitised? And besides some more, with Queenie's translation work still coming in, there is the hope that whatever combined military intelligence bureau emerges in Washington, it will operate West Coast intercept stations. It would help if the Russians take up with the Chinese communists, though. 

We have a letter from your youngest, who reports that he is lonely at MIT. I am not quite sure what to make of it --I know that you will take it as a secret message to "Miss V.C.," but I remain unconvinced. She, for her part, has thrown herself into the archives. I had her along to lunch with the Fathers the other day, and she put searching questions to the old men about the Oregon Scandal. I wonder what she has in mind? I could ask her, of course, but it is more fun, for now, to speculate. 

Your son has an invitation to L.A. to show Uncle George's friend the finished product, again. Our show for the network went amazingly well --a full hour-and-a-half of recorded material, as good as from a disc. Whether it had any effect on the outcome or not, the friend has settled with Columbia. He will come back to his show for the last half of the season, and then be shut of his contract and free to move on. The new show will be pre-recorded. That being settled, the means of recording it counts for less, although he has insisted on taking a financial interest. Now he has money in tape-recorders and frozen orange juice. It is like he truly is a family friend! The point is, you can now assure the Earl that we will get the money sunk into magnetic tape recorders back, with every chance of good profits on top. Better than if we had invested in Fontana!

"GRACE."

Postblogging Technology, January 1946, I: No Pessimism, Please. We're British

A fortunate 1946 to all!

My Lord:

The seasons have come  around again, at least insofar as they do in Santa Clara. (It is not hot, so it must be winter!) Now it is orange harvest. As I sit in the study, overlooking the guest house and the back, Michael yells hoarse orders in Spanish, the smell of boiling  marmalade is everywhere, and the sound of hammers on packing crates makes it very hard to read dry, boring technical journals. Fortunately, as I have learned from the Luce press, when you are not in a mood to produce serious copy, you can write a rambly introduction full of purple prose and references to the turning seasons. (If you are wondering, and care, your allotment of marmalade is coming by sea, via Montreal, in March.) 

With orange boxes rattling away to Chinese groceries on bare-tired Model Ts. one's mind turns to preparations for Lunar New Year, and the sad moment when we must say goodbye to my step-mother. Father has been called away to Ottawa to explain once again that nothing the Russians can detect from their embassy there will tell them anything about what is going on at Chalk River. Everyone is archly mysterious about it all, but I gather that a secretary from the embassy has sought protection from the Canadians, and has passed on some information to the effect of nefarious Red spies ferreting out secrets entrusted to Canada by London and Washington. We are informed that a parallel case is progressing in Washington, and there is a fever in Virginia to have the sense wrung out of the Russian ciphers. 

We will be celebrating with Uncle Henry this year. Aunt Beth's condition is progressing rapidly, and her doctors will not be able to keep her comfortable for much longer. She had a heart attack in October, which, I am told, is a common symptom if her condition, as is her increasing confusion. So her son is bringing his wife, and his little daughter. This means that we will celebrate it as a "Late Robbie Burns Day," in tribute to Great-Grandfather's little joke.  What Mrs. Edgar will make of it all, I can scarcely guess. She is aware that she is not to talk about Aunt Beth's side of the family, but, hopefully, supposes it to be about the touch of the sagebrush and, behind it, the hint of assorted land scandals.  A family bound in secrets is a family united. One hopes. 

Speaking of old secrets, I have now made my rather sticky visit to the "Junior College." Donald was down-at-mouth at the idea of owing us a favour, but our condition was met, and "Miss V.C." will be permitted unrestricted access to the library and university archives, ostensibly to get a headstart on her senior thesis. Donald tells me that much of the money will be used as an investment, to support a "West Coast research institute," which will in turn support the university with its profits. I tried to talk him out of the idea --he frankly sounds like a confidence artist's dupe on the subject-- and the conversation ended in some heat. 

Forties tie!

Still, we have what we came for. Hopefully it will not all be rendered moot when we are allowed to buy the entire archives as scrap paper in the liquidation sale! As to what, exactly, "Miss V.C." is to find, that is another matter. Whatever dark secrets might have been suppressed, as between Bancroft's agents and Great-Grandfather's, they are hardly actionable today! But Grace is convinced that there would not have been so much effort spent on keeping them secret if they did not still matter. 

I did not task Donald with keeping the arrangement secret from the Engineer, as I did not expect him to honour the agreement even before harsh words were uttered on the chances of the university making good on something Lockheed has already given up on. Consequently, while I expect difficult moments with him when I see him next, at least he will not be under the impression that I was trying to keep secrets from him. (Just trying to implicate him in the Oregon Land Scanndal. That is so much better!) 

Ah, well. The Engineer is hardly happy anyway unless he is in a state of priggish outrage. At least with respect to his bastard, how far the apple falls from the tree! What I fear  is that he will throw over punctiliousness and secure the assistance of Koumintang assassins. I hope we have protected ourselves enough that I do not have to worry about a White Russian psychopath dismembering "Miss V.C." in the bath. The poor girl has been down-at-mouth enough since my brother left  (could it be?), and I do not want to be the one telling her that Wong Lee must accompany her to campus. Not to mention that Wong Lee has quite enough to do keeping up his business and his family life, especially with a granddaughter under foot, and now another child on the way. 

Pardon me, I do not wish to be indiscreet, but I thought, after dire talk of torso murders, that it would be better to end on a positive note, of new beginnings and good fortune at the turn of the Year of the Dog. I wish you and yours, therefore, luck and prosperity in the year to come.

Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant,

James.

The Bishop's Sea: Valhalla

Samosas --from Lovely's Kitchen

Deep-fried nuggets of joy. The historian of the Columbian Exchange chooses to emphasise the potatoes which often fill a samosa, and the sunflower or peanut oil in which they might be fried. If you go to the linked video, though, it will be the spicing that gets the priority. Because it's Indian cooking, and I thought I should mention what the actual cook thinks is important.  

You know, in the way of a little pause before I resume diving down my own navel.

A Cosmically Aware Technical Appendix

I honestly don't know how I came to the idea that cosmic rays were boring. It's a tribute to an undergraduate education, maybe? High energy photons are emitted from your mundane spinning galactic cores, supernovas, and the odd black hole, impact the Earth's atmosphere, lock free some subatomic particles, including a few with goofy names like "muon" and "meson," which kind of have to be fake, considering that there are guns in Traveller that shoot them, and that, anyway, you don't need to know about for chemistry class. (Or Physics 420, come to that.)

And then there's this:

 I don't know if you're following Agent Carter  or not. I mean, Bench Grass obviously isn't. Like the back pages of Whittaker Chamber's Time, we may seem unusually interested in physical culturalists and Gypsy Rose Lee, but, in fact, we concern ourselves with Great Art and Fine Literature. However, we hear that it is a fun television show. 

More importantly, the premise is that, in the summer of 1947, defence contractor Isodyne has done its own run of atomic bomb testing (as if), and, unexpectedly, discovered a goopy, black stuff that recalls episodes of Agents of Shield and characters such as Darkstar and Cloak and Dagger. Instead of calling it "the dark force," though, because that would be silly, they're calling it "zero matter," and it is something with enormous potential to blah blah. Cloak, notably, uses his dark stuff to teleport, which could be a link with Agents of Shield. Someone who watches that show might find out. And have age-inappropriate reactions to Chloe Bennett. 

And now for a completely irrelevant thumbnail photo to illustrate the post before the jump.