His real name was Espera Oscar de Coti

November 21st, 2024

Jim Varney’s Ernest Goes to Camp has been locked away in the Disney vault alongside Song of the South:

If an out-of-touch portrayal of Native Americans was the only mark against Ernest Goes to Camp, it would be streaming today; after all, Ernest Goes to Africa, is on AppleTV. The problem isn’t how the film depicts Native Americans, it’s who is playing Chief St. Cloud that’s the problem. Iron Eyes Cody, a veteran of Hollywood Westerns going back to the 1940s, plays camp owner Chief St. Cloud, and the controversy over him has doomed the film to obscurity.

Crying Indian Ad

Ernest Goes to Camp was far from the first film to cast Iron Eyes Cody as a Native American, and chances are, you know him from the famous “Crying Indian” commercial about littering. A close friend of Walt Disney, Iron Eyes Cody was Hollywood’s go-to for Native American roles, but in 1996, it was revealed that his real name was Espera Oscar de Coti, and he was Italian. This was after he spent decades living as a Native American, wearing “traditional” outfits in his daily life, and fooling everyone, including Disney. Espera denied this claim until he passed away in 1999, despite his family producing a baptismal certificate with his real name.

Posted in Media | 5 Comments »

I feel like Geoffrey Boothroyd, compelled to write to Ian Fleming about Bond’s choice in firearms

November 20th, 2024

Fourth Protocol Audiobook by Frederick ForsythWhen I recently listened to the audiobook of Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol — primarily out of curiosity about the fictitious Manifesto for the British Revolution — I couldn’t help but notice that the Soviet operator in Britain, when finally cornered, reached for his Sako target pistol, which was set up to use the largest of the three calibers it could chamber.

What calibers were those? Certainly .22 Long Rifle has been the standard for international competition for a long, long time, so what other calibers would it be built for?

Between 1976 and 1988, Sako produced an autoloading match pistol, the “.22-32″, then “.22-32 New Model”, then “Triace”, three versions of the same handgun, slightly modified. It was chambered for .22 Short, .22 Long Rifle and .32 Smith & Wesson Wadcutter, with conversions (barrels, slides and magazines) for each caliber. It is suitable for ISSF (then “UIT”) sport pistol events (Rapid Fire Pistol, Standard Pistol, 25m Pistol, and Centerfire Pistol events).

The .32 is popular in Centerfire Pistol competition, which is not an Olympic event.

.22 Short is the original metallic cartridge, and it has its uses:

The .22 Short was popularly used in shooting galleries at fairs and arcades; several rifle makers produced “gallery” models for .22 Short exclusively. Due to its low recoil and good inherent accuracy, the .22 Short was used for the Olympic 25 meter rapid fire pistol event until 2004, and they were allowed in the shooting part of modern pentathlon competitions before they switched to air pistols.

So the bad guy relied on a huge, hard-to-conceal, crazy-looking, .32-caliber, low-capacity pistol?

I feel like Geoffrey Boothroyd, compelled to write to Ian Fleming about Bond’s choice in firearms.

Posted in Media, Weapons | No Comments »

Once, the majority of the population of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang were ethnically Manchurian, Mongolian, and Uighur

November 19th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallIf we look at China’s modern borders, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), we see a great power now confident that it is secured by its geographical features:

The population of Manchuria is 100 million and growing; in contrast, the Russian Far East has only seven million people and no indications of population growth.

[…]

Indeed, the recent Western sanctions against Russia due to the crisis in Ukraine have driven Russia into massive economic deals with China on terms that help keep Russia afloat, but are favorable to the Chinese. Russia is the junior partner in this relationship.

[…]

Vietnam is an irritation for China. For centuries the two have squabbled over territory and, unfortunately for both, this is the one area to the south that has a border an army can get across without too much trouble—which partially explains the thousand-year domination and occupation of Vietnam by China from 111 BCE to 938 CE and their brief cross-border war of 1979. However, as China’s military prowess grows, Vietnam will be less inclined to get drawn into a shooting match and will either cozy up even closer to the Americans for protection or quietly begin shifting diplomatically to become friends with Beijing.

[…]

The Himalayas run the length of the Chinese-Indian border before descending to become the Karakoram Range bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. This is nature’s version of a Great Wall of China, or—looking at it from New Delhi’s side—the Great Wall of India. It cuts the two most populous countries on the planet off from each other both militarily and economically.

[…]

China claims the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh, India says China is occupying Aksai Chin; but despite pointing their artillery at each other high up on this natural wall, both sides have better things to do than reignite the shooting match that broke out in 1962, when a series of violent border disputes culminated in vicious large-scale mountain fighting.

[…]

Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon.

[…]

If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as “China’s Water Tower.” China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the United States, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that.

[…]

In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army began building roads into Tibet, and since then they have helped to bring the modern world to the ancient kingdom; but the roads, and now railways, also bring the Han.

It was long said to be impossible to build a railway through the permafrost, the mountains, and the valleys of Tibet. Europe’s best engineers, who had cut through the Alps, said it could not be done. As late as 1988 the travel writer Paul Theroux wrote in his book Riding the Iron Rooster: “The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa.” The Kunlun separated Xinjiang province from Tibet, for which Theroux gave thanks: “That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more.” But the Chinese built it. Which, perhaps, only they could have done. The line into the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, was opened in 2006 by the then Chinese president Hu Jintao. Now passenger and goods trains arrive from as far away as Shanghai and Beijing, four times a day, every day.

[…]

Once, the majority of the population of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang were ethnically Manchurian, Mongolian, and Uighur; now all three are majority Han Chinese, or approaching the majority. So it will be with Tibet.

[…]

Just as the Americans looked west, so do the Chinese, and just as the iron horse brought the European settlers to the lands of the Comanche and the Navajo, so the modern iron roosters are bringing the Han to the Tibetans.

[…]

Southeast of this Kazakh border is the restive “semiautonomous” Chinese province of Xinjiang and its native Muslim population of the Uighur people, who speak a language related to Turkish.

[…]

There was, is, and always will be trouble in Xinjiang. The Uighurs have twice declared an independent state of “East Turkestan,” in the 1930s and 1940s. They watched the collapse of the Russian Empire result in their former Soviet neighbors in the stans becoming sovereign states, were inspired by the Tibetan independence movement, and many are now again calling to break away from China.

Interethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to more than two hundred deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites. The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of “One Belt, One Road.” The road is, oddly enough, the sea route: the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods, the belt is the “Silk Road Economic Belt,” a land-based route based on the old Silk Route that goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southward to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar in Pakistan. In late 2015, China signed a forty-year lease on the port. This is part of the way in which “the belt and the road” will be connected.

Most of the new towns and cities springing up across Xinjiang are overwhelmingly populated by Han Chinese attracted by work in the new factories in which the central government invests. A classic example is the city of Shihezi, eighty-five miles northwest of the capital, Ürümqi. Of its population of 650,000, it is thought that at least 620,000 are Han. Overall, Xinjiang is reckoned to be 40 percent Han, at a conservative estimate—and even Ürümqi itself may now be majority Han, although official figures are difficult to obtain and not always reliable due to their political sensitivity.

[…]

In early 2016, local government officials said that deradicalization efforts had “markedly weakened” the nascent Islamist movement. However, given that the Turkish army said it had arrested 324 suspected jihadists from Xinjiang en route to Syria in 2015, that seems unlikely.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 4 Comments »

Gunpowder had been placed in a water-barrel on a seed-merchant’s cart

November 18th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsJust after 8 p.m. on Wednesday, December 24, 1800, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon and Josephine took separate carriages to the Opéra to listen to Haydn’s oratorio The Creation:

At the corner of Place du Carrousel and rue Saint-Niçaise, gunpowder had been placed in a water-barrel on a seed-merchant’s cart, drawn by a small dray horse, by Joseph Picot de Limoelan, a Chouan who had arrived from London just over a month earlier. The fuse was lit by a former naval officer, Robinault de Saint-Régant, an accomplice of the Chouan leader Georges Cadoudal, who gave the horse’s reins to a young girl to hold as he made off. A combination of the fuse being slightly too long and the speed with which Napoleon’s coachman César was driving, swerving past the cart in the street, saved Napoleon’s life.

‘Napoleon escaped by a singular chance,’ recorded his aide-de-camp Jean Rapp, who was in the following coach with Josephine at the time. ‘A grenadier of the escort had unwittingly driven one of the assassins away from standing in the middle of the rue Niçaise with the flat of his sabre and the cart was turned round from its intended position.’

Josephine’s carriage was far enough behind for all its occupants to survive the massive explosion too, although Hortense was lightly cut on her wrist by the flying glass of the carriage windows. The machine infernale, as it was dubbed, killed five people (including the young girl holding the horse) and injured twenty-six. It could have been far more, since no fewer than forty-six houses were damaged.

[…]

When Josephine was told that her husband was unharmed, and indeed insisted on continuing to the Opéra, she bravely followed and found ‘Napoleon was seated in his box, calm and composed, and looking at the audience through his opera-glass.’ ‘Josephine, those rascals wanted to blow me up,’ he said as she entered the box, and he asked for the oratorio’s programme.

[…]

On October 24 a dozen more people were arrested for a plot which involved throwing oeufs rouges (hand grenades) into Napoleon’s carriage on his way to Malmaison.

[…]

Two weeks after that, on November 7, the royalist Chevalier was finally arrested and a multi-firing gun was seized, along with plans for fireworks to frighten Napoleon’s horses and for iron spikes to be laid across the street to prevent the Consular Guard from coming to the rescue. A week later yet another plot, involving the blocking of a street down which Napoleon was to pass, was discovered by a hardworking Fouché. In an official report he listed no fewer than ten separate conspiracies against Napoleon’s life since he had come to power, including by accomplices of Chevalier who were still at large.

[…]

Of all these plots, the machine infernale came closest to success. Some excellent forensic work by Fouché’s detectives reassembled the horseshoes, harness and cart, and a grain merchant identified the man to whom he had sold it. As the net tightened, Limoelan escaped, perhaps to become a priest in America. Although everything pointed to the Chouan royalists, the incident was too good an opportunity for Napoleon to waste politically and he told the Conseil that he wanted to act against ‘the Terrorists’ — that is, the Jacobins who had supported the Terror and opposed Brumaire. Six years after his imprisonment in 1794 for his Jacobin loyalties Napoleon now believed them to be enemies of the state even more dangerous than the Chouan assassins, because of their ideology, familiarity with power and superior organization. ‘With one company of grenadiers I could send the whole Faubourg Saint-Germain flying,’ he said at this time of the royalist salons found there, ‘but the Jacobins are made of sterner stuff, they are not beaten so easily.’

When Fouché ventured to blame British-backed royalists such as Cadoudal, Napoleon demurred, referring to the September Massacres of 1792: ‘They are men of September [Septembriseurs], wretches stained with blood, ever conspiring in solid phalanx against every successive government. We must find a means of prompt redress,’ and adding that ‘France will be tranquil about the existence of its Government only when it’s freed from these scroundrels.’

[…]

On January 8, 130 Jacobins were arrested and deported — mainly to Guiana — by means of a sénatus-consulte passed three days earlier. (Although the sénatus-consulte was originally intended to be used only to alter the constitution, Napoleon found it increasingly useful as a way of bypassing the Legislative Body and Tribunate.) Guiana was nicknamed ‘the dry guillotine’ because its climate was almost as lethal as a death sentence.

[…]

In a bid to foil future plots, he never let it be publicly known where he meant to go until five minutes before his departure.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

The less you knew, the better

November 17th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenAt Groom Lake throughout the 1960s, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), at least once a month and always before dawn, base personnel would be shaken from their beds by a violent explosion:

When the rumbling first started happening, Ken Collins would leap from bed as a sensation that felt like a massive earthquake rolled by. A nuclear bomb was being exploded next door, underground, just a few miles west of Oxcart pilots’ quarters. Next, the blast wave would hit Collins’s Quonset hut and then roll on, heading across the Emigrant Mountain Range with a surreal and unnatural force that made the coyotes wail.

Early one morning, Collins woke not to a boom but to banging on his door:

Collins followed [Colonel] Slater in a run toward the hangar where the Oxcart lived. There he was quickly briefed on the situation: the Pentagon had called to say that a Russian reconnaissance balloon was flying across the United States, floating with the prevailing winds in a westerly direction. Collins was to find the Soviet balloon—fast. Normally, the flight surgeon would have spent two hours just getting Collins into his pressure suit. That morning Collins was suited up and sitting in the cockpit of the Oxcart in a little over thirty minutes. Up he went, blasting off the tarmac, north then east, on direct orders by the Pentagon to “hunt and find” the Soviet weather balloon visually and using radar.

Up in the air it dawned on Collins what a wild-goose chase he was on. What would a Russian reconnaissance balloon look like? What were the chances of making visual contact with such a thing? At speeds of more than 2,200 mph, he was traveling more than half a mile each second. Even if he saw the balloon, in just a fraction of a second it would be behind him. Even worse, what if he actually did get that close to the flying object? If the Oxcart hit anything while moving at Mach 3, the plane would break apart instantly and he’d be toast.

Flying somewhere over the middle of the continent, Collins briefly identified an object on radar about 350 miles away. As instructed, he flew around the object in the tightest circle he could perform at Mach 3, which meant his circle had a radius of about 400 miles. He never saw the balloon with his own eyes.

After Collins returned to base, engineers scrambled to read the information on the data recorder. The incident has never been declassified. Admitting that the Soviets invaded U.S. airspace—whether in a craft or by balloon—is not something any U.S. official has ever done. Collins never asked any follow-up questions. That’s how it was to be a pilot: the less you knew, the better. He knew too many fellow pilots from Korea who had come home from POW camps missing fingernails—if they came home at all. Now, ten years later, pilots shot down over North Vietnam were experiencing the same kinds of torture, maybe worse. The less you knew, the better. That was the pilots’ creed.

Posted in Technology, War | 1 Comment »

The mirage of conquest seemed attractive for sustaining overly large defense establishments without having to pay for them

November 16th, 2024

The apparent resilience of the Russian economy has confounded many strategists who expected Western sanctions to starve its war effort:

Russia continues to export vast quantities of oil, gas, and other commodities — the result of sanctions evasion and loopholes deliberately designed by Western policymakers to keep Russian resources on world markets. So far, clever macroeconomic management, particularly by Russian Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, has enabled the Kremlin to keep the Russian financial system in relative health.

At first glance, the numbers look surprisingly strong. In 2023, GDP grew by 3.6 percent and is expected to rise by 3.9 percent in 2024. Unemployment has fallen from around 4.4 percent before the war to 2.4 percent in September. Moscow has expanded its armed forces and defense production, adding more than 500,000 workers to the defense industry, approximately 180,000 to the armed forces, and many thousands more to paramilitary and private military organizations. Russia has reportedly tripled its production of artillery shells to 3 million per year and is manufacturing glide bombs and drones at scale.

On the other hand:

Already, about around half of all artillery shells used by Russia in Ukraine are from North Korean stocks. At some point in the second half of 2025, Russia will face severe shortages in several categories of weapons.

Perhaps foremost among Russia’s arms bottlenecks is its inability to replace large-caliber cannons. According to open-source researchers using video documentation, Russia has been losing more than 100 tanks and roughly 220 artillery pieces per month on average. Producing tank and artillery barrels requires rotary forges — massive pieces of engineering weighing 20 to 30 tons each — that can each produce only about 10 barrels a month. Russia only possesses two such forges.

In other words, Russia is losing around 320 tank and artillery cannon barrels a month and producing only 20.

[…]

Open-source researchers have counted the loss of at least 4,955 infantry fighting vehicles since the war’s onset, which comes out to an average of 155 per month. Russian defense contractors can produce an estimated 200 per year, or about 17 per month, to offset these losses. Likewise, even Russia’s expanded production of 3 million artillery shells per year pales in comparison to the various estimates for current consumption at the front. While those estimates are lower than the 12 million rounds Russian forces fired in 2022, they are much higher than what Russian industry can produce.

[…]

Defense spending has officially jumped to 7 percent of Russia’s GDP and is projected to consume more than 41 percent of the state budget next year. The true magnitude of military expenditures is significantly higher. Russia’s nearly 560,000 armed internal security troops, many of which have been deployed to occupied Ukraine, are funded outside the defense budget — as are the private military companies that have sprouted across Russia.

[…]

Rather than demobilizing or bankrupting themselves, Russian leaders could instead use their military to obtain the economic resources needed to sustain it — in other words, using conquest and the threat thereof to pay for the military.

Plenty of precedents exist. In 1803, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte ended 14 months of peace in Europe because he could not afford to fund his military based on French revenues alone — and he also refused to demobilize it. In 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein similarly invaded oil-rich Kuwait because he could not afford to pay the million-man army that he refused to downsize. In both cases, the mirage of conquest seemed attractive for sustaining overly large defense establishments without having to pay for them.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 9 Comments »

Live freaky, die freaky

November 15th, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’NeillPeter Bart, the longtime editor in chief of Variety, had been close to Polanski, and what he told Tom O’Neill (for what became Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) gave O’Neill some semblance of a lead:

“I must confess that that crowd was a little scary,” Bart said, referring to Polanski and Tate’s circle. “There was an aura of danger around them… there was an instinctive feeling that everyone was pushing it and things were getting out of control. My wife and I still talk about it,” he said. “Anybody who underestimates the impact of the event is full of shit.”

This was my first taste of the “live freaky, die freaky” view: the idea that Polanski’s circle, with its bacchanalian parties and flexible morals, had brought about their own murders.

[…]

I mentioned the rash of rejections to Peter Bart. His observation stayed with me, especially as the months wore on and I began to see that Manson might have been more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. “Just the fact that they’re all saying no,” he said, “is fascinating.”

[…]

I pulled a book from my bag: Barney Hoskyns’s Waiting for the Sun, a history of L.A.’ s music industry. I’d been reading it for research — what with all the rejections I’d gotten, I had a little more free time on my hands than I’d expected — and I wanted Bugliosi to look at a passage I’d highlighted. Hoskyns alleged that a few S&M movies had been filmed at the Tate house, and that a drug dealer had once been tied up and flogged against his will at a party there. Other sources, including Ed Sanders’s 1971 book The Family, had made the same claims, but Bugliosi had conspicuously omitted the anecdote from Helter Skelter.

Bugliosi seemed to be in the midst of some kind of internal debate. After what felt like a long silence, he told me to turn off my recorder. “This can never be attributed to me,” he began. “Just say it’s from a very reliable source.” (I’ll explain later in the book why I’m treating this as an on-the-record response.)

When he’d joined the case, the detectives told Bugliosi they’d recovered some videotape in the loft at the house on Cielo Drive. According to detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate being forced to have sex with two men. Bugliosi never saw the tape, but he told the detectives, “Put it back where you found it. Roman has suffered enough. There’s nothing to gain. All it’s going to do is hurt her memory and hurt him. They’re both victims.”

It was a tawdry aside, I thought, and anyway, Bugliosi had reported most of this episode before. In Helter Skelter, he wrote that the cops had recovered a tape of Roman and Sharon “making love,” and that it had been discreetly returned to their home. Polanski had found it not long after, on the same visit with Julian Wasser and the psychic. He “climbed the ladder to the loft,” Bugliosi writes, “found the videotape LAPD had returned, and slipped it into his pocket, according to one of the officers who was present.”

The more I thought about it, the more startled I was that the footage was so sordid. It gave yet more weight to the “live freaky, die freaky” motto. And soon after, it occurred to me: if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,” Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.” Was it rape? If Bugliosi was telling the truth — and that was a big if, I soon acknowledged — the tape seemed like something that could’ve raised Polanski’s profile as a suspect, and something, therefore, that the police should’ve retained as evidence.

I hoped that I could verify Bugliosi’s story. It was the first piece of new information I’d found so far. In my haste to keep reporting, I failed to see that the revelation came with a slipup on his part, one that would take me more than six years to recognize. He couldn’t have told the detectives to put the tape back in the loft. As a DA, he wasn’t assigned the Tate murder case until November 18, 1969, months after Polanski’s August 17 return visit to the house.

In the early phases of a case, police need to talk to DAs like Bugliosi to authorize search warrants. If he’d learned about the tape from the detectives back in August — if he’d been the one, as he claimed, who ordered its return to the house — then something in the police investigation had necessitated his involvement much earlier than he’d ever acknowledged. Maybe it was something trifling; maybe it was something he felt he’d had to cover up to protect some celebrities’ reputations. The point was, we’d never know, because it was something he’d hidden from his readers. Though I hadn’t caught this mistake, there were more variations to come. When I finally found them, it would change the whole tenor of our relationship.

Posted in Crime | 1 Comment »

This amused him enough that he agreed

November 14th, 2024

Dwarkesh recently interviewed the inimitable Gwern — who (a) wanted to remain anonymous and (b) isn’t comfortable speaking to an audience, because of the “deaf accent” he retains from growing up with impaired hearing: “In order to protect Gwern’s anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed.”

After the episode, Dwarkesh convinced Gwern to create a donation page where people can help sustain what he’s up to.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Manifesto for the British Revolution

November 13th, 2024

Fourth Protocol Audiobook by Frederick ForsythI mentioned recently that Larry Taunton had listened to the audiobook of Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol and then went to take a closer look at certain passages — about how British democracy might be subverted from within via a classic “march through the institutions” — and found, first, that the book was out of print, and then, second, that the used copy he could find was missing those passages entirely.

Naturally, I listened to the audiobook myself and recommend it. There’s no Kindle edition, and I assume the mass-market paperback is missing the “offending” passages — but you can find them by searching for the fictitious Manifesto for the British Revolution:

The twenty-point plan is known as the Manifesto for the British Revolution — or MBR for short. The first fifteen points concern mass nationalization of private enterprise, property, and wealth; abolition of all private landholding, medical care, and education; subordination of the teaching professions, police force, information media, and law courts to state control; and abolition of the House of Lords, which has the power to veto an act of self-perpetuation by an elected government. (Evidently, the British revolution could not be stopped or put into reverse at the whim of the electorate.)

But the final five points of the MBR vitally concern us here in the Soviet Union, so I will list them.

1. Britain’s immediate withdrawal, regardless of any treaty obligations, from the European Economic Community.

2. The downscaling without delay of all Britain’s conventional armed forces to one fifth of their present size.

3. The immediate abolition and destruction of all Britain’s nuclear weapons and weapon-delivery systems.

4. The expulsion from Britain without delay of all United States forces, nuclear and conventional, along with all their personnel and matériel.

5. Britain’s immediate withdrawal from, and repudiation of, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

I need hardly underline, Comrade General Secretary, that these last five proposals would wreck the defenses of the Western Alliance beyond any possible hope of repair in our lifetimes, if indeed ever. With Britain gone, the smaller NATO nations would probably follow suit, and NATO would wither on the vine, isolating the United States firmly on the other side of the Atlantic.

Obviously, everything I have outlined and described within this memorandum depends for its full implementation on a Labour Party victory, and for this the next election, expected in the spring of 1988, may well be the last opportunity.

All the above was, in fact, what I meant by my remark at General Kryuchkov’s dinner that the political stability of Britain is constantly overestimated in Moscow “and never more so than at the present time.”

Yours sincerely,

Harold Adrian Russell Philby

I purchased a used hardback copy of Dogs of War a decade ago and quite enjoyed it. It seemed to be completely out of print, aside from the audiobook — which may or may not include any excised passages — until I stumbled across it under the slightly different name of Dogs of War: A Spy Thriller.

Posted in Media, Policy | 5 Comments »

The terribly polluted river is now so clogged with toxic waste that it sometimes struggles even to reach the sea

November 12th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall The birthplace of Chinese civilization, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), is the region known as the North China Plain, which the Chinese refer to as the Central Plain:

A large, low-lying tract of nearly 160,000 square miles, it is situated below Inner Mongolia, south of Manchuria, in and around the Yellow River and down past the Yangtze River, which both run west to east. It is now one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

The Yellow River basin is subject to frequent and devastating floods, earning the river the unenviable sobriquet “scourge of the Sons of Han.” The industrialization of the region began in earnest in the 1950s and has been rapidly accelerating in the last three decades. The terribly polluted river is now so clogged with toxic waste that it sometimes struggles even to reach the sea. Nevertheless, the Yellow River is to China what the Nile is to Egypt — the cradle of its civilization, where its people learned to farm, and to make paper and gunpowder.

To the north of this proto-China were the harsh lands of the Gobi Desert in what is now Mongolia. To the west the land gradually rises until it becomes the Tibetan Plateau, reaching to the Himalayas. To the southeast and the south lies the sea.

[…]

The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic, and — crucially — the agricultural center of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite its being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 322 million. Because the terrain of the heartland lent itself to settlement and an agrarian lifestyle, the early dynasties felt threatened by the non-Han regions that surrounded them, especially Mongolia, with its nomadic bands of violent warriors.

China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defense, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers that — if the Han could reach them and establish control — would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, fully realized only with the annexation of Tibet six decades ago.

[…]

Between 605 and 609 CE, the Grand Canal, centuries in the making and today the world’s longest man-made waterway, was extended and finally linked the Yellow River to the Yangtze.

[…]

It took several million slaves five years to do the work, but the ancient problem of how to move supplies south to north had been solved — but not the problem that exists to this day, that of flooding.

[…]

The Chinese leaders were against any sort of permanent European presence, but increasingly opened up the coastal regions to trade. It remains a feature of China to this day that when China opens up, the coastland regions prosper but the inland areas are neglected. The prosperity engendered by trade has made coastal cities such as Shanghai wealthy, but that wealth has not been reaching the countryside. This has added to the massive influx of people into urban areas and accentuated regional differences.

In the eighteenth century, China reached into parts of Burma and Indochina to the south, and Xinjiang in the northwest was conquered, becoming the country’s biggest province.

[…]

But, in adding to its size, China also added to its problems. Xinjiang, a region populated by Muslims, was a perennial source of instability, indeed insurrection, as were other regions; but for the Han, the buffer was worth the trouble, even more so after the fate that befell the country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the coming of the Europeans.

[…]

A few outside observers thought the postwar years might bring liberal democracy to China. It was wishful thinking akin to the naive nonsense Westerners wrote during the early days of the recent Arab Spring, which, as with China, was based on a lack of understanding of the internal dynamics of the people, politics, and geography of the region.

[…]

By the end of the 1990s it had recovered from the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, regained Hong Kong and Macau from the British and Portuguese, respectively, and could look around its borders, assess its security, and plan for its great move out into the world.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

He was not at all embarrassed by the little knowledge he had about the details of general administration

November 11th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsThe greatest reforms of the Consulate were carried out between July 1800 and May 1803, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when Napoleon was in Paris in regular conclave with his Conseil d’État (Council of State), “which was mainly made up of moderate republicans and former royalists, although there were occasions when some councillors had to sit next to others who had sent their fathers or brothers to the guillotine”:

‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil État, ‘we must now commence its history.’

Napoleon gave the Conseil direction, purpose and the general lines of policy, which have been accurately summed up as ‘a love of authority, realism, contempt for privilege and abstract rights, scrupulous attention to detail and respect for an orderly social hierarchy’.

He was the youngest member of the Conseil and, as Chaptal recalled,

He was not at all embarrassed by the little knowledge he had about the details of general administration. He asked many questions, asked for the definition and meaning of the most common words; he provoked discussion and kept it going until his opinion was formed. In one debate this man, who is so often portrayed as a raging egomaniac, admitted to the aged and respected jurist François Tronchet ‘Sometimes in these discussions I have said things which a quarter of an hour later I have found were all wrong. I have no wish to pass for being worth more than I really am.’

[…]

When members were tired during all-night sessions he would say: ‘Come, sirs, we haven’t earned our salaries yet!’

(After they ended, sometimes at 5 a.m., he would take a bath, in the belief that ‘One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep to me.’)

Other than on the battlefield itself, it was here that Napoleon was at his most impressive. His councillors bear uniform witness — whether they later supported or abandoned him, whether they were writing contemporaneously or long after his fall — to his deliberative powers, his dynamism, the speed with which he grasped a subject, and the tenacity never to let it go until he had mastered its essentials and taken the necessary decision.

‘Still young and rather untutored in the different areas of administration,’ recalled one of them of the early days of the Consulate, ‘he brought to the discussions a clarity, a precision, a strength of reason and range of views that astonished us. A tireless worker with inexhaustible resources, he linked and co-ordinated the facts and opinions scattered throughout a large administration system with unparalleled wisdom.’

He quickly taught himself to ask short questions that demanded direct answers. Thus Conseil member Emmanuel Crétet, the minister of public works, would be asked ‘Where are we with the Arc de Triomphe?’ and ‘Will I walk on the Jena bridge on my return?’

[…]

Ambitious men preferred to take junior positions as auditeurs in the Conseil to grander ones elsewhere in the civil service, because it was a good place to catch Napoleon’s eye.

[…]

Many people rightly saw a place in the Conseil as being a faster route to promotion than a seat in the Senate.

[…]

‘Do you know why I allow so much discussion at the Conseil?’ he once boasted to Roederer. ‘It is because I am the strongest debater in the whole Conseil. I let myself be attacked, because I know how to defend myself.’

[…]

Napoleon made little effort to conceal his role-model as a lawgiver, civil engineer and nation-builder. ‘He reformed the calendar,’ he wrote of Julius Caesar, ‘he worked on the wording of the civil, criminal and penal codes. He set up projects to beautify Rome with many fine buildings. He worked on compiling a general map of the Empire and statistics for the provinces; he charged Varro with setting up an extensive public library; he announced the project to drain the Pontine marshes.’

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Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the aircraft

November 10th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenThe phenomenally low radar cross section on the Oxcart had to be lowered even further, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

In a hangar not far from the radar range, Edward Lovick got to work on a one-eighth-scale model of the Oxcart. In what became known as Project Kempster-Lacroix, Lovick designed a system straight out of Star Trek or James Bond. “Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the aircraft,” Lovick recalls. Remarkably, the purpose of the guns would be “to shoot out a twenty-five-foot-wide ion cloud of highly charged particles in front of the plane as it flew over denied territory.” That gaseous cloud, Lovick determined, would further absorb radar waves coming up from radar tracking stations on the ground.

Using the small-scale model, the scientists were able to prove the scheme worked, which meant it was time to build a full-scale mock-up of Kempster-Lacroix. Testing the system out on a full-size aircraft, the scientists discovered that the radiation emitted by the electron guns would be too dangerous for the pilots. So a separate team of engineers designed an X-ray shield that the pilots could wear over their pressure suits while flying an Oxcart outfitted with Kempster-Lacroix. When one of the pilots made a test run, he determined that the thickness of the shield was far too cumbersome to wear while trying to fly an airplane at Mach 3. Then, while Lovick was working on a solution, the Air Force changed its mind. The Oxcart’s low observables were low enough, the Pentagon said. Project Kempster-Lacroix was abandoned.

[…]

Finally satisfied with the radar cross section, the CIA decided to set up its own electronic countermeasures office at Area 51. In 1963, the first group consisted of two men from Sylvania, a company better known for making lightbulbs than for its top secret work for the CIA. “The first jamming system was called Red Dog; later it became Blue Dog,” explains Ken Swanson, the first official ECM officer at Area 51. The Red Dog system was designed to detect Russian surface-to-air missiles coming after Oxcart and then jam those missiles with an electronic pulse.

[…]

With Red Dog, the CIA wanted to see how the Oxcart would show up on Soviet radar, and so, at the southern tip of Groom Lake, on EG& G Road, Sylvania built two ECM systems, one to simulate Russian SA-2 radar and a second to simulate the Fan Song surface-to-air missile system that was showing up in North Vietnam. The goal was to see what Oxcart looked like, or hopefully did not look like, on these radars.

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Polanski had invited along a psychic

November 8th, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’Neill Julian Wasser, a photographer for Life magazine, was Tom O’Neill‘s first interview for what became Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties:

Days after the murders, as part of an editorial for Life, Wasser had accompanied Roman Polanski on his first return visit to the house on Cielo Drive. One of Wasser’s pictures from that day is a study in grief. Polanski, in a white T-shirt, sits slumped and devastated on the front porch of his home, his eyes carefully averted from the faded word “Pig” written in his wife’s blood on the front door.

“It was too soon,” Wasser told me. He’d shadowed Polanski as he moved through the bloodstained rooms. It wasn’t a home anymore; it was evidence. “There was fingerprint-dusting powder all over the bedroom and the phones, and there was blood in the carpet. It was thick like Jell-O.” And there was so much of it that it hadn’t even dried yet, Wasser said. “You could still smell it… Salty, carnal.” The odor reminded him of a slaughterhouse.

Right away, Wasser regretted the assignment. But Polanski wanted him there, even at his most vulnerable moment. It wasn’t an exercise in vanity, at least not entirely. Hoping to help solve the murders, Polanski had invited along a psychic, Peter Hurkos, whose alleged clairvoyance had made him a minor celebrity. Wasser was enlisted to provide duplicates of his photos to Hurkos, who could glean “psychic vibrations” from them.

Polanski led them to the nursery, which Tate had carefully furnished and decorated in anticipation of the baby. “Roman went over to the bassinet and just started crying. I said, ‘This is such a private moment, I shouldn’t be here,’ and he said, ‘Please, don’t take any more pictures right now.’ It was just the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole career. I’ve never seen anything, in my mind, so intrusive, even though he had invited me… The enormity of it,” Wasser added, “going into this pregnant woman’s bedroom and seeing her intimate area covered with fingerprint powder and realizing what happened there.”

Polanski at Cielo Drive

Hurkos, it turned out, didn’t share Wasser’s sense of solemnity. A week before the Life story ran, pirated reproductions of Wasser’s photos appeared on the front page of the tabloid the Hollywood Citizen News. The psychic had sold his copies, vibrations and all.

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Who’s Yehoodi?

November 6th, 2024

I stumbled across an old wartime Disney cartoon about camouflage, and I noticed that the soldiers kept calling their lizard mentor “old now you see him, now you don’t Jehudi”:

Apparently Who’s Yehoodi? was a popular catchphrase at the time:

The catchphrase “Who’s Yehoodi?” (or “Who’s Yehudi?”) originated when Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin was a guest on the popular radio program The Pepsodent Show hosted by Bob Hope, where sidekick Jerry Colonna, apparently finding the ethnic name inherently funny, repeatedly asked “Who’s Yehudi?” Colonna continued the gag on later shows even though Menuhin himself was not a guest, turning “Yehudi” into a widely understood late 1930s slang reference for a mysteriously absent person. The United States Navy chose the name “Project Yehudi” for an early 1940s precursor to stealth technology, also known as Yehudi lights.

A song with the title and catchphrase “Who’s Yehoodi?” was written in 1940 by Bill Seckler and Matt Dennis. It was covered by Kay Kyser and more famously by Cab Calloway. The final stanza of the song is:

The little man who wasn’t there
Said he heard him on the air
No one seems to know from where
But who’s Yehoodi?

Yehoodi makes an “appearance” in the 1941 Warner Bros. cartoon Hollywood Steps Out, sitting beside Jerry Colonna and watching exotic dancer Sally Rand. Yehoodi is depicted as an invisible man looking through a pair of binoculars. Colonna introduces himself by saying “Guess who?” then indicates his seat mate saying “Yehoodi”. 1942′s Crazy Cruise features the “S.S. Yehudi”, an invisible battleship.

Hollywood Steps Out is a great example of the kind of cartoon we watched as kids back in the day without getting any of the references:

Yehudi lights were a kind of diffused lighting camouflage.

Posted in Science, Technology, War | 3 Comments »

This was twenty-first-century reverse gunboat diplomacy

November 5th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallTim Marshall opens his chapter on China (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), with this anecdote:

In October 2006, a US Naval Super Carrier Group led by the thousand-foot USS Kitty Hawk was confidently sailing through the East China Sea between southern Japan and Taiwan, minding everyone’s business, when, without warning, a Chinese navy submarine surfaced in the middle of the group.

An American aircraft carrier of that size is surrounded by about twelve other warships, with air cover above and submarine cover below. The Chinese vessel, a Song-class attack submarine, may well be very quiet when running on electric power, but, still, this was the equivalent to Pepsi-Cola’s management popping up in a Coca-Cola board meeting after listening under the table for half an hour.

The Americans were amazed and angry in equal measure. Amazed because they had no idea a Chinese sub could do that without being noticed, angry because they hadn’t noticed and because they regarded the move as provocative, especially as the sub was within torpedo range of the Kitty Hawk itself. They protested, perhaps too much, and the Chinese said: “Oh! What a coincidence, us surfacing in the middle of your battle group that is off our coast, we had no idea.”

This was twenty-first-century reverse gunboat diplomacy; whereas the British used to heave a man-of-war off the coast of some minor power to signal intent, the Chinese heaved into view off their own coast with a clear message: “We are now a maritime power, this is our time, and this is our sea.” It has taken four thousand years, but the Chinese are coming to a port — and a shipping lane — near you.

Posted in Policy, War | 5 Comments »

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