The longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility

Friday, October 27th, 2023

Two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza:

Codenamed “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.

On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.

[…]

The $35.8 million U.S. troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 2 contract announcement by the Pentagon.

[…]

“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”

Since I recently read The Puzzle Palace, I can’t help but notice that this sounds like a SIGINT collection facility.

From a monetary perspective, World War I never really ended

Thursday, October 26th, 2023

From a monetary perspective, World War I never really ended once it began in 1914, Lyn Alden notes:

In prior wars throughout history, wars had to be funded with savings or taxes or very slow debasement of coinage. Physical coinage held by citizens could usually only be debased by their government gradually rather than diluted instantaneously, because a government couldn’t just magically change the properties of the coins that were held by households; it could only debase them over time by taxing purer coins, issuing various decrees to try to pull some of those purer coins in, and spending debased coins back out into the economy (and convincing initial recipients to accept them at the same prior value, despite the lesser precious metal content, which would only work for a time and might not even be noticed at first). However, with the widespread holding of centrally issued banknotes and bank deposits that were redeemable for specific amounts of gold, governments could change the redemptive value with the stroke of a pen or eliminate redemption all together.

This gave governments the power to instantaneously devalue a substantial part of their citizens’ savings, literally overnight, and funnel that purchasing power toward war or other government expenditures whenever they determine that the situation calls for it.

Borrowers are “locked-in” by the golden handcuffs of their cheap mortgages

Wednesday, October 25th, 2023

Construction and sales of new homes have soared, even as sales of existing homes have entered a deep freeze:

Between mid-2022 and earlier this year, existing home sales fell from an annualized rate of almost 7 million sales per month to just 4 million, a record pace of contraction and an overall drop in magnitude only slightly shy of the 2008 financial crisis. There are currently only about 600,000 homes on the market, compared to 1.5 million before the pandemic. Prices remain close to record highs, but given such thin liquidity, are virtually meaningless.

The freeze in transactions is a function of interest rates.

Homeowners borrowed and repriced about $3trn worth of mortgage debt (half of the entire outstanding amount) in 2002-22—either through purchases or refinancings—at emergency-level low interest rates. Today, one third of mortgage debt carries an interest rate below 3%.

Contrast that with the going rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage: at the time of writing, above 7%. Since existing homeowners can’t ‘port’ their mortgage to a new home, or sell it to the would-be buyers of their home (except in rare circumstances), moving houses entails losing a cheap mortgage and resetting at a much higher rate. Borrowers are “locked-in” by the golden handcuffs of their cheap mortgages.

This dynamic has always existed in the US housing market, but—given the swing from rock bottom rates to the highest borrowing costs in a generation, and in such a short amount of time—this mortgage lock-in effect has never been so strong.

A mortgage originated at a lower rate than prevailing rates is worth less than par—this is an unrealized loss to the lender and an unrealized gain to the borrower. Unsurprisingly, pandemic-era borrowers are unwilling to lose their collective $700 billion worth of these gains.

[…]

Mortgage lock-in prevents home prices from adjusting to the shock of higher financing costs. This is, in particular, a burden for the ~2 million Americans who are first time home buyers every year. Millennials are the biggest cohort of buyers these days, and in 2022, 70% of them were first time buyers.

The sprawling edifice of American intervention in the mortgage market—from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), to the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae, to Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs)—are premised on the goal of making home ownership more widely available. But amidst rising rates, mortgage lock-in is an impediment to achieving that goal.

If the stickiness of the asset is a problem for prospective first time buyers, the inflexibility of the liability is a problem for existing owners. Aside from locking owners into their current homes, the rigidity of mortgages in the face of rising interest rates means that an increasing number of borrowers are ‘underwater’ or very close to it—they hold a mortgage that is close to, or exceeds, the value of their equity in their home.

[…]

Mortgage lock-in also has less obvious but more harmful, widespread, and long-lived effects. Not least: it exacerbates declining levels of geographic mobility. Americans are staying in their homes longer. They are evincing a declining willingness to move neighborhoods, cities, or states in order to find work that better matches their skills. By giving Americans a powerful incentive not to move, mortgage lock-in contributes to a handful of modern-day macroeconomic problems, including anemic productivity growth and neo-feudal levels of income inequality.

[…]

Mortgage lock-in doesn’t exist in Denmark because borrowers can buy back their loans at market prices in the secondary market.

[…]

In the US, banks originate mortgages but then sell them onwards to GSEs for bundling into mortgage backed securities. But Danish mortgage finance operates on the ‘balance principle’: bank lending is funded by the issuance of bonds which precisely match the cash flows of the underlying mortgages. Danish banks retain ownership of mortgages, including their credit risk. These remain on their balance sheets within ring-fenced ‘cover pools’.

Securitization of these assets is not via mortgage backed securities but instead via ‘covered bonds’. Cash flows pass directly from borrowers to covered bond investors, with the mortgage bank acting as servicer.

Covered bond investors are highly secured: they have exclusive recourse to the segregated cover pool of assets on the issuing bank’s balance sheet, and (nonexclusive) recourse to the overall assets of the issuer.

Danish mortgage banks are specialized institutions that only issue and distribute mortgages without maturity transformation (a form of narrow banking). They are barred by law from taking deposits.

The balance principle and generally tight regulation ensure a very stable market—since its creation in 1797, the Danish covered bond market has not experienced a single default in a bond series.

The allowance for repurchases below par is facilitated by the fact that Danish mortgage-backed bonds are pure pass-through securities: each specific mortgage can be traced directly to a bond that is traded in the secondary market. This means that when a mortgagor wants to terminate the loan, it is possible to identify the bond it was financed through and buy back an equivalent portion at the prevailing market price.

The emphasis was more on secure communications and tradecraft

Tuesday, October 24th, 2023

Since 2015, the Washington Post reports, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed intelligence services:

The Post vetted key details with multiple sources including Western officials with access to independent streams of intelligence. The CIA declined to comment.

[…]

“We never involved our international partners in covert operations, especially behind the front lines,” a former senior Ukrainian security official said. SBU and GUR operatives were not accompanied by CIA counterparts. Ukraine avoided using weapons or equipment that could be traced to U.S. sources, and even covert funding streams were segregated.

“We had a lot of restrictions about working with the Ukrainians operationally,” said a former U.S. intelligence official. The emphasis was “more on secure communications and tradecraft,” and pursuing new streams of intelligence inside Russia “rather than ‘here’s how you blow up a mayor.’ I never got the sense that we were that involved in designing their ops.”

[…]

Ukraine’s spies developed their own lines about which operations to discuss and which to keep under wraps. “There were some things that maybe we wouldn’t talk about” with CIA counterparts, said a second Ukraine security official involved in such missions. He said crossing those boundaries would lead to a terse reply from Americans: “We don’t want any part of that.”

[…]

The initial phases of cooperation were tentative, officials said, given concerns on both sides that Ukraine’s services were still heavily penetrated by the FSB — the Russian agency that is the main successor to the KGB. To manage that security risk, the CIA worked with the SBU to create an entirely new directorate, officials said, one that would focus on so-called “active measures” operations against Russia and be insulated from other SBU departments.

The new unit was prosaically dubbed the “Fifth Directorate” to distinguish it from the four long-standing units of the SBU. A sixth directorate has since been added, officials said, to work with Britain’s MI6 spy agency.

Training sites were located outside Kyiv where handpicked recruits were instructed by CIA personnel, officials said. The plan was to form units “capable of operating behind front lines and working as covert groups,” said a Ukrainian official involved in the effort.

The agency provided secure communications gear, eavesdropping equipment that allowed Ukraine to intercept Russian phone calls and emails, and even furnished disguises and separatist uniforms enabling operatives to more easily slip into occupied towns.

The early missions focused on recruiting informants among Russia’s proxy forces as well as cyber and electronic eavesdropping measures, officials said. The SBU also began mounting sabotage operations and missions to capture separatist leaders and Ukrainian collaborators, some of whom were taken to secret detention sites.

But the operations soon took a lethal turn. Over one three-year stretch, at least half a dozen Russian operatives, high-ranking separatist commanders or collaborators were killed in violence that was often attributed to internal score-settling but in reality was the work of the SBU, Ukraine officials said.

[…]

Even while helping to build the SBU’s new directorate, the CIA embarked on a far more ambitious project with Ukraine’s military intelligence service.

With fewer than 5,000 employees, the GUR was a fraction of the size of the SBU and had a narrower focus on espionage and active measures operations against Russia. It also had a younger workforce with fewer holdovers from Soviet times, while the SBU was still perceived as penetrated by Russian intelligence.

“We calculated that GUR was a smaller and more nimble organization where we could have more impact,” said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Ukraine. “GUR was our little baby. We gave them all new equipment and training.” GUR officers “were young guys not Soviet-era KGB generals,” the official said, “while the SBU was too big to reform.”

Even recent developments have seemed to validate such concerns. Former SBU director Ivan Bakanov was forced out of the job last year amid criticism that the agency wasn’t moving aggressively enough against internal traitors. The SBU also discovered last year that Russian-made modems were still being used in the agency’s networks, prompting a scramble to unplug them.

From 2015 on, the CIA embarked on such an extensive transformation of the GUR that within several years “we had kind of rebuilt it from scratch,” the former U.S. intelligence official said. One of the main architects of the effort, who served as CIA station chief in Kyiv, now runs the Ukraine Task Force at CIA headquarters.

The GUR began recruiting operatives for its own new active measures department, officials said. At sites in Ukraine and, later, the United States, GUR operatives were trained on skills ranging from clandestine maneuvers behind enemy lines to weapons platforms and explosives. U.S. officials said the training was aimed at helping Ukrainian operatives protect themselves in dangerous Russian-controlled environments rather than inflicting harm on Russian targets.

Some of the GUR’s newest recruits were transfers from the SBU, officials said, drawn to a rival service flush with new authorities and resources. Among them was Vasyl Burba, who had managed SBU Fifth Directorate operations before joining the GUR and serving as agency director from 2016 to 2020. Burba became such a close ally of the CIA — and perceived Moscow target — that when he was forced from his job after President Volodymyr Zelensky’s election the agency provided him an armored vehicle, officials said. Burba declined to comment for this article.
The CIA helped the GUR acquire state-of-the-art surveillance and electronic eavesdropping systems, officials said. They included mobile equipment that could be placed along Russian-controlled lines in eastern Ukraine, but also software tools used to exploit the cellphones of Kremlin officials visiting occupied territory from Moscow. Ukrainian officers operated the systems, officials said, but everything gleaned was shared with the Americans.

Concerned that the GUR’s aging facilities were likely compromised by Russian intelligence, the CIA paid for new headquarters buildings for the GUR’s “spetsnaz” paramilitary division and a separate directorate responsible for electronic espionage.
The new capabilities were transformative, officials said.

“In one day we could intercept 250,000 to 300,000 separate communications” from Russian military and FSB units, said a former senior GUR official. “There was so much information that we couldn’t manage it ourselves.”

Troves of data were relayed through the new CIA-built facility back to Washington, where they were scrutinized by CIA and NSA analysts, officials said.

“We were giving them the ability — through us — to collect on” Russian targets, the former GUR official said. Asked about the magnitude of the CIA investments, the official said: “It was millions of dollars.”

In time, the GUR had also developed networks of sources in Russia’s security apparatus, including the FSB unit responsible for operations in Ukraine. In a measure of U.S.-Ukraine trust, officials said, the CIA was permitted to have direct contact with agents recruited and run by Ukrainian intelligence.

The resulting intelligence windfall was largely hidden from public view, with intermittent exceptions. The SBU began posting incriminating or embarrassing communications intercepts, including one in which Russian commanders were captured discussing their country’s culpability in the 2014 shoot-down of a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet.

Even so, officials said the intelligence obtained through the U.S.-Ukraine cooperation had its limits. The Biden administration’s prescient warnings about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s determination to topple the Kyiv government, for example, were based primarily on separate streams of intelligence Ukraine wasn’t privy to initially.

In some ways, officials said, Ukraine’s own collection efforts fed the skepticism that Zelensky and others had about Putin’s plans because they were eavesdropping on military and FSB units that themselves were not informed until the eve of the war. “They were getting an accurate picture from people who were also in the dark,” one U.S. official said.

To expose the Chinese Communist Party and to save the world in a supernatural war against communism

Friday, October 20th, 2023

The Epoch Times — launched by Falun Gong as a free propaganda newsletter more than two decades ago to oppose the Chinese Communist Party — now boasts to be the US’s fourth-largest newspaper by subscriber count:

The nonprofit has amassed a fortune, growing its revenue by a staggering 685% in two years, to $122 million in 2021, according to the group’s most recent tax records.

[…]

Epoch Times representatives also deny an affiliation with Falun Gong, despite the two groups’ clear financial and organizational ties: The Epoch Times board members and most staff are Falun Gong practitioners. The nonprofits behind The Epoch Times and Friends of Falun Gong, the movement’s advocacy organization, share executives and provide grants and services to each other, according to tax filings. And the newspaper, along with a digital production company and the heavily advertised dance troupe Shen Yun, make up a nonprofit network that the leader of the religious movement calls “our media.”

[…]

Started in Georgia in 2000 by John Tang, a Falun Gong practitioner who remains its CEO, in essence it was a Chinese-language public relations newsletter. The group’s long-term goals were ambitious: to expose the Chinese Communist Party and to save the world in a supernatural war against communism.

Through the early aughts, The Epoch Times grew from an online effort to a weekly physical newspaper, with a home base in New York and a TV production company, New Tang Dynasty Television. It raised money from followers and was staffed by unpaid volunteers. It ran aggregated articles on international issues from Voice of America next to Thanksgiving Day explainers, dispatches from Falun Gong parades, and exposés on atrocities alleged to have been committed by the Chinese Communist Party.

By 2019, it had gone mostly digital and was spending millions of dollars on creating a network of Facebook pages and groups and running aggressive pro-Trump ad campaigns. The move toward explicit support of Republicans, despite Li’s teachings to stay away from U.S. politics, was foreshadowed by Li’s comments at a Falun Gong conference a year before.

Li said that Falun Gong’s media ought to put a “constructive” spin on the news, to advance the group’s aims. It wasn’t wrong, he said, to favorably cover a politician who shared Falun Gong’s conservative values and whose goals aligned with their own.

“If someone comes along now who can help to halt the downward spiral that the world is in, then he is truly someone extraordinary!” Li said. “He would in effect be helping us! Wouldn’t he be helping us to save people?”

The majority of people on a trauma call just stare at the dying

Tuesday, October 17th, 2023

On X (formerly Twitter), Eric Hoel commented, most of the timeline consisted of short videos of war crimes. I find comments about X (formerly Twitter) interesting, because “the timeline” isn’t a thing. My timeline wasn’t full of gruesome imagery — and I didn’t have to play any videos that suggested sadistic violence.

But I will admit to getting drawn into a few violent videos, after seeing them referenced repeatedly:

In the past few days, it’s been clips from the incursion into Israel, but it is now common to see what is effectively a short snuff film every day online, even when there is no war, no invasion, and without looking for them.

Call them “snuff clips.” Someone stabbed on the street in New York. Or shot in the back of the head at a crosswalk in Chicago. Or a soldier pleading with a hovering drone in the Ukrainian war. If you log on, you will be shown. And consequently many of the political debates that have dominated our culture over the past years have been based on graphic videos, even just domestically.

So my question is: Just how familiar should a polity be with death?

That is an interesting question, because we don’t want a polity that’s naive about how violence works, demanding that police stop violent criminals without hurting them, etc., but we also don’t want a polity demanding immediate, thoughtless action, in response to the latest outrage.

Anyway, Hoel starts with the problematic and uncomfortable truth that bloodsport is the most entertaining of all sports:

We humans, we apes, are most interested in violence, in its drama and potential and stakes. Now-a-days it is common to think, because of our screens and our phones and our technology, that we have beaten boredom, and that we are the most entertained any civilization has ever been. Wrong. Imagine the setting sun over the colosseum as two men fight to the death in the sand. You and your friends are drinking wine and eating bread, candies, nuts. Every thrust, every exhausted recovery, is so filled with meaning you cannot look away. Spectating a football game is incomparable. It turns out sitting in the stands drunk watching people die was popular, and has always been popular, because it really is titillating, thrilling, dramatic, an infinite jest, to watch other people in life and death situations. Left to our own devices, bloodsport is a global minimum we humans fall into unless some specific ideology or religion acts as a barrier for our fall.

Regardless of what exactly the barrier was — maybe it was our liberal order, maybe the greater cultural relevancy of religion, maybe just the idea of America as representing historical progress — in the world I grew up in, by which I mean America in the 1990s and early 2000s, watching death openly was frowned upon. It was beneath us as a culture.

Make-believe violence has been big business for a long, long time, and the 1980s were the heyday of violent action movies.

Perhaps, he suggests, one could argue that the rise of the snuff clip genre is a visual corrective:

Maybe we shouldn’t think that violence unfolds like the movies where one guys beats up three, or where women regularly throw some big dude using judo, or whatever. Where you can do something, anything, against someone with a gun. The truth is none of that happens in real life. It all occurs really fast. The people most likely to react in such situations are usually aggressive young men, often to their own demise. But most people just stand there, and then they’re dead.

One time in college I shadowed on an ambulance, and the EMTs told me that the majority of people on a trauma call just stare at the dying. They don’t even call 911. “The stare of life” was their gallows humor term for it.

The stare of life.

He’s not comfortable with this informative facet of violent videos and sees them as more like the Roman gladiatorial games — but the problem with gladiatorial games is putting people to death for your own amusement, not being curious about violence.

He also enlisted in a movement called Technocracy

Monday, October 16th, 2023

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonI can’t say I knew much about Canadian political movements before reading Walter Isaacson’s description of Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather’s background (in his biography of Elon):

The loss of his farm [in the Great Depression] instilled in him a populism, and he became active in a movement known as the Social Credit Party, which advocated giving citizens free credit notes they could use like currency. The movement had a conservative fundamentalist streak tinged with anti-Semitism. Its first leader in Canada decried a “perversion of cultural ideals” because “a disproportionate number of Jews occupy positions of control.” Haldeman rose to become chair of the party’s national council.

He also enlisted in a movement called Technocracy, which believed that government should be run by technocrats rather than politicians. It was temporarily outlawed in Canada because of its opposition to the country’s entry into World War II. Haldeman defied the ban by taking out a newspaper ad supporting the movement.

Incidentally, Canada’s banking system weathered the Great Depression rather well:

The McFadden Act of 1927 specifically prohibited interstate branch banking in the U.S., and only allowed banks to open branches within the single state in which it was chartered. Therefore, U.S. banks were forced to be small and local, with an undiversified loan portfolio tied to the local economy of a single state, or a specific region of a single state. The strict regulatory framework of the McFadden Act created a delicate and fragile banking system that could not easily withstand the shock of the Great Depression. Exhibit A: 9,000 banks failed in the U.S. in the early 1930s.

[…]

In Canada, where not a single bank failed, branching was the rule; in fact, Canada had only ten large banks during the 1930s. The Canadian economy fared much better than did the United States economy, in large part because of its better diversified and integrated banking system.

I didn’t know anyone moved to South Africa in the 1950s:

So in 1950, he decided to move to South Africa, which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.

[…]

Haldeman decided he wanted to live inland, so they took off toward Johannesburg, where most of the white citizens spoke English rather than Afrikaans. But as they flew over nearby Pretoria, the lavender jacaranda flowers were in bloom, and Haldeman announced, “This is where we’ll stay.”

[…]

When Joshua and Winnifred were young, a charlatan named William Hunt, known (at least to himself) as “the Great Farini,” came to Moose Jaw and told tales of an ancient “lost city” he had seen when crossing the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. “This fabulist showed my grandfather pictures that were obviously fake, but he became a believer and decided it was his mission to rediscover it,” Musk says.

He was rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to

Friday, October 13th, 2023

Stanley Zhong, 18, is a 2023 graduate of Gunn High School in Palo Alto:

Despite earning 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scoring 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT’s and founding his own e-signing startup RabbitSign in sophomore year, he was rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to.

[…]

He was denied by: MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UC Davis, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Cornell University, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Caltech, University of Washington and University of Wisconsin.

His only acceptances: University of Texas and University of Maryland.

He won’t be going to either of those:

Zhong just started his Google job this week,

Gaza has no resources that make it worth living there

Thursday, October 12th, 2023

Back in 1980, Arnold Kling and his then-new wife spent some time in Israel near Gaza:

“You’re about to see the saddest sight of your entire life,” our host told us. My wife and I, recently married, were riding in a tractor that was pulling the accumulated week’s trash from our small farming village to a dumping area in the sand just outside the boundary of the village. The cart we were pulling was about 15 feet by 15 feet, piled high with what today would be composted by environmentally conscious elites: moldy bread, rotten fruit, scraps of vegetables.

As we approached the dumping area, we found ourselves surrounded by Arab residents of Gaza. They came running, competing to be the first to have access to what we were dumping. They were dressed in rags, which were torn, patched and ill-fitting. It was indeed the saddest sight I have ever seen.

Gaza has no resources that make it worth living there. It is hard to get historical demographic figures for the Gaza Strip, but it seems that at the end of World War I the area had fewer than 20,000 residents. It . As of 1948, according to Michael Oren, the population was just 80,000. He says that nearly 2 million people live there today.

[…]

Arab refugees, there and elsewhere, were kept in a state of dependence. No one ever made an attempt to create an actual economy in Gaza, with people working and producing. It was all handouts, and even those were inadequate.

The Israelis conquered Gaza in 1967. They, too, made no effort to develop it. They approved a handful of Jewish settlements there. From a strategic perspective, the strip is a buffer zone between Israel and the Sinai Peninsula. Israel captured the Sinai in 1967 and gave it back to Egypt under the Begin-Sadat peace agreement brokered by President Carter in 1979.

The fiscal pressures generated by the expansion of army sizes induces the creation of the bureaucratic tax state.

Wednesday, October 11th, 2023

To the ranks of Maurician infantry, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden appended two key innovations — a massive battery of field artillery and the cavalry charge — and he grew the Swedish army from 15,000 men in 1590 to a peak of 150,000 in 1639:

But larger armies, whether mercenary or conscript, were expensive. Paying for expansion and professionalization placed enormous demands on the primitive financial systems of European states. Rulers met these challenges by extending executive authority and increasing tax burdens (as well as corvees), which in turn required the creation of a new bureaucracy of administrative officials. The men had to be recruited, equipped, paid, and fed. They needed barracks, clothes, and roads — outside Italy, there weren’t enough roads capable of moving a large army, its supply train, and artillery.

[…]

In the military revolution model, the fiscal pressures generated by the expansion of army sizes induces the creation of the bureaucratic tax state.

[…]

Colonels were responsible for raising regiments through voluntary enlistment, selling captaincies to high bidders who then went around collecting men — some seigneurial lords rounding up their peasants, and other men raiding hospitals and prisons. These ‘military contractors’ were also charged with disbursing payments (which they reduced for their own profit), providing clothes and arms, and giving medical care to their troops. Faced with this perverse incentive, the commanders skimped on their responsibilities and flagrantly overcharged for what they did provide. Starvation and disease were rampant in the camps, from which desertion was equally common.

What held this motley crew together was not patriotism, but plunder—the opportunity to loot on campaign and thus replace what income the financially inept French state would provide. Richelieu encouraged plunder as an incentive for better performance. Towns could be nailed again under the ‘Contribution System’, pioneered by Portuguese pirates in the Indian Ocean, which allowed towns to pay cash in exchange for exemption from plunder. Beyond open loot and heavy taxes, citizens — in lieu of centralized barracks — were also forced to billet soldiers in their homes and provide them with food and bedding.

The increasing costs of raising large armies without adequate logistical systems induced state formation. As armies grew, they required larger foraging areas — effectively an invitation for foraging parties to desert. Desertion prevented the training essential to the function of a modern combat infantry and thus had to be stopped. The only remedy was improving systems of centralized taxation and supply.

[…]

By creating non-venal posts in the high command, Richelieu and the heads of the War Department gradually subordinated the officer class and introduced promotion by merit. Weapons production was standardized and centralized in state arms factories; magazines were established to supply the troops on home soil; French officers took responsibility for raising foreign troops; and in 1763 recruitment was made a royal monopoly.

Men want to engage in righteous combat

Friday, September 29th, 2023

Men want to engage in righteous combat:

They want it more than they want sex or VP titles. They fantasize about getting the casus belli to defend themselves against armed thugs that will never come, they spend billions of dollars on movies and TV about everymen in implausible circumstances where EA calculus demands they use supernatural powers for combat, they daydream about fantastical, spartan settings where war is omnipresent and fights are personal and dramatic and intellectually interesting, and they’re basically incapable of resisting the urge to glorify their nation and people’s past battles, even the ones they claim to disagree with intellectually. You cannot understand much of modern culture until you’ve recognized that the state’s blunt suppression of the male instinct for glory has caused widespread symptoms of pica that dominate our politics, media, and online interactions.

And make no mistake — our half-hearted policy of deeming all such tendencies “toxic masculinity”, and refusing men the option to engage in reciprocal or consensual violence against each other, has been a bigger failure than the war on drugs. Lots of ink has been spilled on sphere of influence conspiracy theories that attempt to interpret America’s foreign adventures as rational power-seeking behavior. But the real truth is that men naturally form gangs, political cliques, and military theologies that attempt to justify violence within their existing legal and moral landscapes independent of any external incentives to do so. What they really want from all this is not some policy outcome but the self-actualization that comes from fighting the enemy, and the dearth of opportunities for them to challenge their opponents’ honor on the battlefield in a rights-respecting way is a much more important misandrist failing than child custody bias or divorce law or anything I’ve seen red pill people argue on the internet about. Men who are down especially bad will take absurd pay cuts to join artificial and economically unmotivated criminal sects, solely so they get the opportunity to pick mortal battles with other people who’ve opted into the same social systems they have.

There is no true modern substitute for these ambitions, with all of their cultural and social significance.

This left federal bureaucrats with a lot of time on their hands

Friday, September 22nd, 2023

Steve Sailer reviews Richard Hanania’s “highly useful” new book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics:

For the ever-growing numbers of people paid to micromanage diversity and shut down potentially offensive free speech at work, it’s a living. It may not seem like a lot of money to Silicon Valley titans, but to many soft-major college grads it’s more than they could make doing anything else. To update Upton Sinclair’s famous quote, “It is not difficult to get a woman to believe something when her salary depends upon it.”

[…]

The Origins of Woke draws much from the work of law professor Gail Heriot of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, such as her article “The Roots of Wokeness: Title VII Damage Remedies as Potential Drivers of Attitudes Toward Identity Politics and Free Expression” on the malignant effects of specific provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

[…]

In the 1960s, the federal government geared up for a long twilight struggle with the forces of Jim Crow in the South, creating numerous bureaucracies to battle entrenched Southern segregation. But, it turned out, as soon as the federal government stopped allowing state-sanctioned or state-tolerated violence against firms that violated Jim Crow norms by no longer segregating their lunch counters and the like, overt discrimination almost immediately collapsed in the South. After all, Jim Crow with its persnickety caste rules was a drag on economic growth, so the Southern business class was happy to finally join modern, booming America.

This left federal bureaucrats with a lot of time on their hands.

Similarly, even though the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on sex discrimination in employment had been added as a joke by a segregationist senator trolling the bill, traditional sex discrimination in hiring largely evaporated in the 1970s. It turned out that capitalists loved having a law tell them to double their potential workforces. (That’s one reason 1973 shows up on so many graphs as the last really good year for male wage growth in American history.)

Rather than announce “Mission accomplished” and go find other work, the triumphant forces of the civil rights bureaucracy became instead the scourge of ever more esoteric forms of discrimination, such as disparate impact, hostile environment due to mean speech, sexual harassment, and disability access. They increasingly intervened in the American workplace in favor of complaining members of protected groups, which cultivated a culture of complaint.

[…]

Over time, Democrats figured out that it was in their interest for corporations to be uncertain what exactly the governments’ rules are regarding race and sex. This avoided making clear to voters, who, even in California remain strongly opposed to racial preferences, how much of a thumb the government was putting on the scale.

[…]

In response to the proliferation of government regulations (and the lawsuits that accompany them) banning discrimination against some people and encouraging discrimination against others, corporations vastly increased their human resources staff to cajole and mollify the bureaucrats.

Of course, corporate HR staffers are less the adversaries of the government and plaintiff attorneys than their codependents in a symbiotic relationship featuring slightly different career paths in the same business. Just as many of the environmental consultants hired by corporations to placate the Environmental Protection Agency are former EPA staffers (and thus are definitely not going to call for repealing environmental laws), corporate HR, federal civil rights bureaucrats, discrimination lawyers, sexual harassment trainers, and so forth have perfectly understandable mutual economic incentives to bring ever larger parts of American life under their purview to generate more business for people like themselves.

From 1968 to 2021, despite immense improvements in automation, the number of Americans working in Human Resources grew from 140,000 to 1,500,000.

How the US Army confronted its racial crisis in the Vietnam era

Monday, September 18th, 2023

Beth Bailey’s Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era opens with a litany of incidents that she presents as protests:

It is a stretch. Major Merritt, for example, was clearly a crank. The written statement he distributed to the press contained gratuitous sexual insults directed at the “seventy-five percent” of white officers who were raised by “mammy who was also his fathers [sic] mistress.” Subordinates told investigators that Merritt’s constant racial badgering included his claim that “once a white woman had a negro she would never go back to a white man.”

Bailey insists that the senseless death of Cpl. Bankston must be seen in the light of rising racial tensions at Camp Lejeune. She repeats, rather irresponsibly, a rumor than white Marines had beat a black man to death the year before and never been prosecuted. The source of this rumor is a LIFE magazine article from 1969 that says the author heard about it from black Marines, who gave no further details except that the man’s death was “attributed to natural causes” by authorities.

Searching Bailey’s book for verified incidents where white servicemen were the aggressors, one finds only a handful of cases. “In 1970, at Fort Carson, Colorado, a white soldier—working part-time as a filling station attendant—murdered the head of the local university’s Black studies program,” she writes. Bailey omits the relevant details: Roosevelt Hill Jr. was filling up his car with gas when Ellis L. Little of Kentucky called to check the validity of his credit card, which was a type Little did not recognize. A passenger in Hill’s car suggested Little might be calling the police, so Hill rushed into the station and attacked him, shouting obscenities. With Hill’s hands around his neck, Little drew a gun from a drawer and shot him in the chest. A grand jury declined to charge Little with any crime.

Germany was a hotbed of racial violence in the 1970s, with soldiers afraid to go out at night due to rampant attacks, but it is hard to determine exactly what were the grievances at issue. “White soldiers were being randomly attacked under cover of darkness,” Bailey writes. “Black soldiers had taken to carrying intimidating ‘soul sticks’ on base, cutting to the front of the mess hall line, blatantly ignoring regulations.” More than 1,000 crimes of violence by black soldiers against whites were reported in Germany in the first nine months of 1971. If this was a protest, what were they protesting?

Disparities in punishment was the complaint cited most frequently. Black soldiers were 14 percent of U.S. troops in Germany but received 80 percent of prosecutions for serious crimes, such as robbery, assault, and rape. One report found 2,984 crimes of violence by black soldiers during a period when white soldiers committed 740. Bailey does not consider the possibility that this reflected reality rather than prejudice.

His theory was that the body-snatching was happening through their phones

Friday, September 15th, 2023

All the sudden disruptions of long-running economic trends in America led people to wonder,What the heck happened in 1971? Now Erik Hoel looks at all the sudden disruptions of long-running social trends in America and wonders, What the heck happened in 2012?

Of course, we should expect it to be harder to measure cultural tipping-point years rather than economic ones, since what makes for healthy psychologies and cultures is often immeasurable. Still, if you look at charts about people’s psychology, or culture in general, like how people use language, you often consistently see a major shift around 2012 or shortly thereafter.

This isn’t just due to the definition of the word “depression” broadening. Teenagers legitimately try to commit suicide far more now, taking off right around 2012.

These changes haven’t affected just teenagers, although they are the most intense there, as if the youth, those most exposed and dependent on the current culture, those with nothing else to lean back on (no memories of the 90s to bask in) are operating like canaries in a coal mine—it is their little lungs which go first.

[…]

And yes, psychological changes are nebulous, but there are obvious downstream real-world ramifications. For 13-year-olds across America, both reading and mathematics peaked in 2012 and then rapidly began to decline.

Around 2012, birth rates fell off. They were low anyways, which should be expected after the Great Recession, but it is precisely around 2012 where they should have started climbing back up and instead they fell off a cliff.

[…]

It’s simply impossible to dance around it: what would now be called “wokeness” came onto the main stage of culture in 2012, and this in turn began to trigger anti-wokeness (e.g., while Jordan Peterson wouldn’t become famous until 2016, 2013 was when he created his YouTube channel and began uploading). This action/reaction dynamic explains the timing differences for when each political side felt the psychological effects.

[…]

At a personal level, I remember someone in graduate school, which I entered in 2010, confessing to me after a few beers that the rise in politicalization among our peers around 2012-2013 (as my fellow grad students either suddenly bought into wokeness and started using its reasoning and language or staked out controversial or secretively resistant anti-woke positions) reminded him of “the invasion of the body-snatchers.” His theory was that the body-snatching was happening through their phones.

[…]

In fact, in terms of market saturation, the transition from 2012 to 2013 is the exact year the majority of the US switched to finally owning a smartphone.

Which would certainly explain the massive spike in pedestrian fatalities from cars following a low in 2010.

The decision to turn to the Mediterranean aroused dark suspicions among American planners

Thursday, September 14th, 2023

American and British leaders knew they couldn’t defeat Germany without the Soviets, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), but Stalin kept complaining that they were leaving the fighting to the Red Army and started putting out peace feelers in Stockholm:

Western leaders didn’t think these feelers would amount to much if they attacked the Germans directly and took pressure off the Soviet Union, as Stalin had been demanding for months. But the British and Americans were virtually immobilized by an acrimonious dispute about what they should do.

The Americans, led by George C. Marshall, army chief of staff, wanted a direct advance by a five-division amphibious landing around Cherbourg in Normandy in 1942 (Operation Sledgehammer).

But the British pressed for an indirect or peripheral strategy, a combination of massive air attacks on German cities and smaller, less-dangerous invasions in the Mediterranean.

[…]

Torch at once gained the advantage Roosevelt was hoping for: when Stalin heard about it, he stopped complaining about a second front. But the decision to turn to the Mediterranean aroused dark suspicions among American planners that Churchill was maneuvering the United States into the “soft underbelly” strategy. They feared this would lead to the invasion of Italy, and perhaps Greece, and fatally undermine the plan to collide with the Germans on the beaches of France.

President Roosevelt was less worried, because he hoped “an air war plus the Russians” could defeat Hitler, and a cross-Channel assault might not be necessary.