Mother's Little Ways.

Zach Neal

Mothers have their little ways.

With my mom, when we were little kids, it was desserts.

She would make pudding.

She had these beautiful champagne glasses, ground crystal with etching on them. She’d put the pudding in there, with a dollop of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top.

She had her ways all right.

If we were being bad, she would just look at us.

“You guys had better smarten up—or you won’t get any dessert.”

Yeah, she knew what she was doing.

What sticks out all these years later was the dinner table scene. God, we used to have some awful fights around the dinner table. My brother, my sister, mom and dad, it was all we could do to get through it. It was like everybody hated something different, but all at once. My brother hated squash, and my sister wouldn’t eat her meat. My old man wanted milk and we didn’t have any, I thought the chicken rather over-boiled and could really use some salt. It took forever for the five of us to eat dinner, when all us kids wanted to do was to get back outside and play.

Then came that moment.

The moment we had all been waiting for. The plates went in the sink, this took some time. Then mom went to the fridge.

First my dad would get his pudding, and then my sister. Mom would put the next one in front of her plate. 

That day I must have been good.

I got a pudding.

Oh, yes.

We all looked at my brother.

He sat there glowering at the rest of us. He was not being a good boy that day.

My mom tried psychology.

“Maybe if you apologized, nicely, and said you’re sorry. What do you think, Frank?” And she would look at my dad.

“Uh, humn.” No problem there.

But my younger brother was the stubborn sort.

What really sucked was when one or the other gave in, and the son of a gun got his stupid pudding after all.

I suppose I figured we could split it—between the four of us, or maybe Mom would recall that I had been an extra-good little blighter for much of the preceding afternoon, and who knew?

I might even get that thing all to myself, if I did the dishes and promised to do my homework.

But it was not to be.

My brother got his pudding. We would fight this battle another day…

Here’s a funny thing.

One day we were having ice-cream.

But we were also having steak that night, and there was a piece left over. Mom said I could have it.

I really hadn’t been such a good boy that day. I was also getting wise to the act.

I guess you could say I could see what was coming next.

“Oh, hey, everybody. Guess what?” That’s my Mom. “Who’s been good today?”

Ah, yes.

The Question.

Always so bright and cheerful. Possibly there was some defiance in there as well.

“We have ice-cream for dessert.”

And she looked me dead in the eye.

“That’s okay.” I was a study in calm. “I think I’ll just go up and do my homework.”

There was a lengthy quiet spell, as she moved around, and I could see her thinking it over. 

Finally she said it.

"Okay." She wasn't real happy with it, but she said it.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it?

If you don’t want the ice cream, they no longer have any power over you.

Mom was a bit stunned, I think. That one must have came right out of left field.

Dad, I think, was impressed. Which was a rare thing, for him.

But, he kept his head down in his bowl and kept on eating his ice cream. There was a bit of white around the rims of his eyes, but he seemed okay with it.

That ice cream looked pretty darned good, too.

Vanilla, all covered in butterscotch sauce, and with a few crushed peanuts on there just to make it look interesting. A little bit of salt goes good with the sweet, doesn’t it?

I have no real regrets. I got enough to eat and I learned a valuable lesson that day.

What more could a man ask for?

END

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...Earth Calling Adam Smith....hiss...

by Zach Neal

Earth calling Adam Smith. Earth calling Adam Smith…

Come in, please.

,,,,,hisss……………………………………………………………………….  …………     ……..    ….

***

He’s been called away or something. We’ll try again later.

So anyways, Wikipedia has a little article on Adam Smith.

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

And of course my interest lies in having dinner. I give the butcher money, he gives me some meat, the brewer gives me beer, (hey, this is fun) and so on and so forth.

As aphorisms go, that one seems fair enough.

I’m only going to discuss one of his points, just to show how it’s done:

“Agriculture is less amenable than industry to division of labour; hence, rich nations are not so far ahead of poor nations in agriculture as in industry.”

The last part of the sentence holds true. There are plenty of undeveloped parts of the world where agriculture is still conducted with a low level of technology, not much better than Smith’s time, with predictable results.

Things are a little different now.

The gulf between the developed nations and undeveloped nations in terms of agriculture is vast.

That spread, that ratio has changed since Smith’s time. Back then, the gap in technology between the developed and undeveloped world was much narrower. The world has changed, and to the nth degree.

Nothing written hundreds of years ago on the subject of economics is Gospel. Too much has changed. 

Another of his points supports this thesis by saying, ‘manufacturing lends itself to the division of labour more than agriculture.’

That’s probably still mostly true. Partially true…

That’s due to the complexity of the processes, for example making steel—and feeding raw materials, labour and some kind of motive power into the plant that makes it.

But in the 21^st century, agriculture is more than just lambs in a field and a wife drawing the iron plough with the baby in a bowl at the end of the furrow, which back then was divided up to approximately what a man and an oxen could plow in a day. The fields were common land, narrow strips that were rotated in terms of crops, fallow and pasture.

Now, agriculture includes a certain amount of high-technology industrial plant for producing corn starch. It includes a plant for making vegetable oil, and it includes the makers of combines, tractors, specialty tires and the chemical industry. It includes distribution warehouses, transportation systems by land, air and sea, and buyers scouring the world for new and marketable flavours. All of it is now connected digitally in a system that allows instantaneous communication globally, something that would have taken months, back in Smith’s time.

The visualization required by the modern commercial landscape is inconceivable to a man of Smith’s day. 

They didn’t have the electronic and digital terms of reference. They wouldn’t have known what we were talking about, and yet we have the advantage of knowing what they were talking about.

They are history and we are the future of their agricultural knowledge of the time—some of the speculative philosophers of Smith’s time might have theorized us, but only in the most limited fashion.

The division of labour would seem to be fairly complex, when you consider the GPS and the onboard computers, engine and brake and transmission control, and all the cell phones and hearing aids, spectacles on the farmer’s eyes and in the farmer’s pockets and the satellites in space needed to make such a vast information and communication system actually work.

In that sense, agriculture is totally integrated into the overall economy. It’s not that it wasn’t before, but now it is more complex and more far-reaching in the sense of global commerce. This might include a sixty-cent New Zealand apple, shipped and trucked 12,000 miles, ending up in your supermarket, (and how much of the food in there doesn’t have some kind of agricultural basis?)

Someone had to figure out how to make that happen, and surely it’s not a farmer, it’s a specialist.

We are so much more specialized now, and in that sense the system has evolved into something new.

Our food chain is un-recognizable to our ancestors.

That process, from start to finish, has mushroomed, and in a sense flourished, all based on some motives of enlightened self-interest and mutual benefit, all based on that simple notion of a division of labour. Division of labour causes efficiency in this great economic engine.

There is also such a thing as division of rewards, especially when labour is exchanged for money, as this isn’t exactly the same as an exchange of commodities.

Anything Adam Smith said, way back when, is only of historical note at this point in time. He set the art of formulating economic theories on a rational basis, a scientific basis, one using measurable quantities, and leaving out all supernatural and mystical elements.

Also, I doubt if he foresaw globalization, or if he could account for a sort of fungus-ring effect, like ripples going out in a pond from a rock being tossed in. The way industry and jobs were farmed out and outsourced and ultimately exported to less expensive labour markets, even in the face of growing prosperity for an ever-increasing number of people.

Maybe free trade is a good thing, but unregulated free trade might not be such a good thing. Unsupervised and uninspected free trade might not be such a good thing.

According to Thomas Hobbes (or somebody) ancient men led lives that were ‘nasty, brutish, poor and short.’

Their lives were pretty simple back then. The human condition has improved by all statistical measures, and with the increase in population we can take a better sample even.

You have to be able to measure things, even such things as progress.

Are we making progress?

Are we backsliding, or is this just a temporary glitch in a system that works?

What causes such glitches?

When all this has worked itself out, what comes next?

***

Back then, Smith knew virtually nothing of ‘entitlements,’ everything from the GST rebate here in Canada to pensions, home heating grants, student grants, all kinds of government largesse. Although he would have recognized patronage, even corruption, as some of the Prime Ministers of the time (back then, when the whole notion of party was coming into being) governed by patronage, handing out key appointments, and they somehow kept a government going. Some would forget that that’s what a government is for—to manage and run a country. As to whether Smith had any great philosophical notions about social questions, such as the rise of social capital or the welfare state, or secular humanism, or social democracy, that is unknown to me. These entitlements are a tool of government fiscal policy, make no mistake. The government has a social agenda, and well it should have.

“A monarch’s greatest glory lies in the health and happiness of the people,” still holds true today although I forget who said it—probably some monarchist somewhere.

However, the point I am trying to make is that a marketplace, which is what Smith was talking about in his book, is certainly social, but it is not a government in any sense of the world.

These are two different things, no matter how closely intertwined in mutually dependent self-interest.

It is a dichotomy, and a struggle at times to see which system will rule the other.

It is cause and effect, supply and demand, but it is up to the government to manage the equitable redistribution of excess wealth—and the wealth of nations was the subject of his book after all—for the market seems incapable of doing that fairly and equitably.

Surpluses and excesses that are not reinvested into the marketplace end up being hoarded and essentially dead to the economy when its reinjection would do much social good. Cash flow trumps bullion held in reserve any day of the week.

A nation’s wealth consists not in its visible wealth, the result of seven or ten years output, but in its actual output at any given moment in the instantaneous digital world we now inhabit.

As for pensions and the like, which tend to stimulate local economies, (and everything is politics, and all politics is local politics,) rather than the government develop an infrastructure of arbitrary redistribution (strictly merit-based) they have delegated the supervision of aforesaid monies to me.

Maintaining the health and welfare of the people, and without people a state has little or no reason (or right) to exist, creates its own commerce. Adam Smith, I think, would have, or at least should have, been opposed to austerity. To him, the ideal marketplace was a model of rationality, but of course real life isn’t like that all of the time.

I choose to redistribute the funds to a local grocer. They are the most efficient local grocer—hence their prices are lower and I get more bang for my buck. They have merit. Some folks patronize other stores—based on their relative perceived merits.

The citizen subsists, commerce flows, the progress of civilization continues, and the state is perpetuated in a symbolic dance.

The interconnection between commerce for all, and prosperity for all, is easy enough to see.

END

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Hearts and Minds.

Secl. (Wiki.)

by Zach Neal

Community journalists have always faced the challenge of objectivity.

There’s no real litmus test for it and we should probably always assume that we ourselves have some kind of bias or prejudice towards one point of view or another.

There are two sides to every question. It’s an unfortunate truism because there is a third side, an uncommitted side.

On the question of global climate change, there are believers and disbelievers. There are also the uncommitted.

This helps to explain all the time, money and effort in the quest to sway public opinion, always the surest guide to changes in the political, social, and economic landscape.

It is nothing less than a battle for the hearts and minds of the people.

We all have a stake in its outcome.

I, personally, do not have a string of thermometers all over the globe, reporting back in real-time to some heavy duty algorithm-crunching hardware, in order to determine if global warming is real or not. And I’m smart enough to know that I can never really find out the truth for myself. And there is no good reason for any other person to take my word for it, even if I could do so.

Unless I was prepared to present my evidence, one way or another and they were prepared to accept the data.

That works both ways.

I don’t necessarily have to take someone else’s word for it, either. I don’t have to accept someone else’s data.

I could just shrug my shoulders and roll my eyes and say I don’t know.

I can remain uncommitted.

Interestingly, the uncommitted hold the balance of power. This is why both sides court, educate, attempt to persuade, or even just intimidate the uncommitted into a state of apathy.

Sometimes just muddying the waters helps, especially if one side or the other isn’t clearly winning the battle.

If the water is muddy, it must also be deep, or something.

No matter who you are talking to, no matter what the subject matter, no matter what the time and place, you will never, ever be getting more than half the story.

If the person doing the talking is lying or mistaken, then you are not even getting that much—you’re getting a lot less than half a story.

That’s why a good journalist listens to both sides—and this requires a certain amount of objectivity. It’s a good skill to have, because it works as a full-time bull-shit meter.

Little warning bells go off when things don’t add up and you recognize that maybe someone has an interest.

And when you figure out whose interest is best served by facts and truth, and whose interest is best served by lies, half-truths, uncertainties and smoke-screens, then basically you just need to ask more questions.

The more specific the questions, the more specific the answers should be, and if a speech full of rhetoric ensues then you are onto something.

One side has facts, figures, measurable statistics, long-term studies and the other side has a smoke-screen and a lot of rhetoric.

What you do next is your call as a journalist, but if you’re any kind of a writer at all, you’ll get your point across in a professional manner.

Other than that, brevity is king.

END

The Wolves of Kioshkokwi.

Wild and beautiful.

Kioshkokwi Lake lies on the Amable Du Fond River, one of half a dozen major watersheds draining the Algonquin dome. The river goes north to the Mattawa River, and hence to the Ottawa. This part of the Du Fond is navigable by canoes and kayaks.

The Du Fond brothers, Francis and Ignace, operated a depot farm at the east end of Manitou Lake in the 1880’s. Now it’s just a grassy clearing, with a few clumps of trees, and the trail going through. It is historic country, in the ancient homeland of the Nipissings, a nation of the Algonquian linguistic stock.

Kioshkokwi means “Lake of many gulls.” The plaintive cries of the birds, glowing white dots on the calm glassy expanse of the water, can be haunting indeed. They can be seen and heard for miles. My brother and I set out at dawn on a foggy morning. The dark pines became ghostly shapes in the mist. They rapidly disappeared, yet up is up and down is down, in the weird half-light of early morning. With the compass to guide us, it was windless, the water dark and quiet. It was the start of another warm and humid summer’s day. In the centre of the lake, the sky cleared. Looking back, a billowing mass of white cotton shrouded the shore, a blanket of trees hugging the soft curves of the earth mother.

It looked like the nap of an old, much washed sweater; and it was good.

After an unsuccessful search for the ruins of an old ranger cabin on Wolfe Bay, we turned our prow southeast, rounding the west end of the lake, setting up for the southwest run to the river mouth. We hiked up and looked at the waterfall, and talked for a while with some people up there.

We found a campsite back on Wolfe Bay. Next morning, we set out for the northeast corner of the lake. That little bay has a couple of islands. We grabbed the southernmost one. This island was not large, but shallows dotted with sandy patches and clumps of grass, and the nearby shoreline; meant firewood was nearby. A short, easy canoe ride after dinner usually takes care of all our firewood needs. On the “front” of the island, a nice sandy beach, probably fifty metres long.

A holiday, we watched canoe parties go by as the day wore on. They were coming from two directions—some people came out of Lauder Lake, and parties were obviously coming up from the portage at Mink Lake, going home after the long weekend.

They headed for the boat launch and store on Kioshkokwi’s north side. By ten o’clock on that August night, it became very quiet. In the old days, we used to sit with our rum-laced coffee and listen. The tracks are gone now, but it was quite a thrill to hear a train coming up the valley. In the distance, the vague suggestion of a noise, more felt than heard.

A faint glimmer on a hillside, then another hillside lit up. As the train made its way, the blast of its horn, the rumble of its wheels were amplified, reflected by sheer rock faces and the parabolic curves of the cuttings it ran in. You could hear it fifteen kilometres away. And then as the ground quivered and shook under your butts, the pounding, shuffling monster would light up half the lake as it went by, thudding and roaring and making sparks fly from its wheels.

It gets real quiet after the train goes by, then the forest lets out its breath and the normal routine begins anew. We heard something die out there that night. We had no idea what it was. Perhaps a rabbit caught by a skulking, silent flying owl, maybe a beaver surprised in the act of tree-cutting by a bobcat, who knows? It sure makes the hair stand up on the back of the neck, sure makes the old goose pimples rise on arms and legs.

Makes you think. Animals are truly innocent of any guilt or sin. Life is such a fragile, and therefore precious thing. It is always a tragedy to die.

At some point the wolves began to howl.

“Holy crap! What the heck is that?” asked my brother, round-eyed in wonder.

The weirdest, un-holiest, loneliest, most mournful sound you ever want to hear. 

Mariomassone, Denali NPS.

“That’s just the moose,” I told him. “They get a little uptight. Another month or so and the rut begins. They call out to each other, let each other know whose turf it is.”

He accepted my explanation, and after swallowing the dregs of his coffee, went to bed. I like the sound of wolves, and have no real fear of them. Bears are so much more silent, don’t you agree? Much more unpredictable. A wolf won’t eat out of a garbage dump. It doesn’t smell good, to a wolf. Bears are omnivorous, the wolf is a pure carnivore. They might nibble grass, the vegetable portion of their diet comes exclusively from the stomach contents of their quarry. An animal of the chase, creatures of the pack.

Letting the fire die down, I laid there quietly on my little tarp. A clear, starry night.

I listened for a long time to the snoring of my brother, and the calls of the wolves of Kioshkokw, for they are also our brothers.

End

History, my ass.

Young Isoroku Yamamoto chillin' with Secretary of the Navy Curtis E. Wilbur.

History my ass.

One of the oft-quoted fallacies of history is that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, December 7, 1941, was ‘inspired’ by the successful night attack by Swordfish torpedo planes on the Italian fleet at Taranto. This took place in November 1940. The British used a handful of planes, at night, whereas the attack on Pearl Harbour used 363 aircraft, timed for dawn or thereabouts on a Sunday morning.

While the Japanese decision to attack might have been encouraged by the success of the British attack, it was clearly not solely inspired by it. There are too many facts that speak otherwise.

This idea, and this might surprise the reader, has been largely promulgated by British historians.

The story is so much more complex than that, and while writers can be excused for national pride, the highlights of the full story are worth the re-telling.

U.S. Army Air Force General Billy Mitchell demonstrated bombing techniques against ships at anchor, (high-level, precision bomb-aiming) and his crews sank the Ostfriesland with 2,000-lb. bombs in 1921. This was under ideal conditions, with no air cover and the ship at anchor. There were no time constraints in the sense of a scramble of defensive machines or anti-aircraft gunfire.

In WW I, British cruisers engaged, out of sight of the enemy, using naval guns, German raiders hidden in creeks in East Africa, with the help of naval reconnaissance aircraft. I can’t find a specific link for this, but a friend’s dad served in light cruisers and escort carriers in WW II. He had a lot of books on the shelf, one of which was about British light cruisers. All the navies of the world were experimenting with the use and coordination of aircraft and fleet units.

The Bremen, a commerce raider of WW I.

In WW I, the British launched Sopwith Camels off of towed barges, as well as capital ships, to attack German dirigibles.

LZ 66 was destroyed on August 21, 1917. The British aircraft was launched from a platform on the cruiser H.M.S. Yarmouth.

There was no shortage of naval strategists between the wars. Japanese naval staff had read all the books, all the newspapers, all that was to be known about modern warfare when they began to have Imperial aspirations, and built up both a strong Army and a strong Navy. They knew all about Billy Mitchell, in fact Yamamoto spent time in the U.S. as a naval attache if memory serves.

Hans Ulrich Rudel, Stuka pilot and the Eagle of the Eastern Front in the German press, sank the Russian battleship Marat in September 1941.

In 1940, the German cruiser Konigsberg, damaged by coastal guns during the battle of Norway, was sunk in harbour by British bombers. They were light bombers at that.

Bombers were an important component of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, as shallow water and constricted space meant torpedoes were only of limited effectiveness, although deadly when the planes could drop them and running time was sufficient to arm the warhead. The Japaneses took special pains to modify the torpedoes for the conditions of the attack. They were really meant to attack ships at sea in the context of a classic naval battle, if such a thing can be said to exist. The Battle of the Coral Sea demonstrates this. (Described as the first battle in history when the fleets never saw each other.) That’s because the tactics of the previous war envisaged long lines of battleships and cruisers, engaging at extreme range (visually, hence the high observation towers on the vessels) with naval artillery, with destroyers laying smoke screens and racing in to launch torpedo attacks. In such an engagement, numbers and weights of ammunition delivered would be the deciding factor. Jellicoe crossing the ‘T’ at Jutland does nothing to contradict this notion. The weight of broadsides would always be superior to frontal guns only. In WW II, battleship engagements, with the exception of the Bismarck, (and to be fair, the sinking of the Hood,) were actually rare exceptions. The range of a battleship without refueling was limited, the range of the guns was limited, and the cost of a mistake was very high. The whole history of German commerce raiders bears this out. Sooner or later, a bigger ship, with bigger guns, would come along, or the raider would be swamped by force of numbers vectored onto a point of reference: last-seen here.

Aircraft, more specifically, aircraft carriers, would be decisive on the oceans in the same way as the massed panzer formations would be decisive on land. (Massed panzer formations were used against dispersed armour reinforcing classic infantry dispositions.) Their force could be concentrated when the enemy’s was dispersed, unprotected by strong and vigilant air cover of its own, on land as in the Maginot Line, or at sea and better yet, at anchor in harbour on a sleepy Sunday morning Japan’s doctrine at sea was one of mobility, just as the Germans’ doctine on land was one of mobility.

The Val dive-bomber was designed in 1936.

The Kate torpedo-bomber was designed in 1935.

These, along with the Zero fighter, were the principal aircraft used at Pearl Harbour. The great tragedy from the Japanese standpoint was the fact that the U.S. carriers were absent when the raid occurred. The Japanese were sobered by this realization at the time.

Long before the raid on Taranto, the whole Japanese Navy was predicated on aerial attack from the sea—Japan’s six large carriers, concentrated into one strike group, make this simple fact undeniable. These strike groups were not designed for a defensive war. They were designed for attack. Their only enemies of consequence could be the U.S., whose Pacific Fleet was anchored at Pearl Harbour, and the British Asiatic Fleet, based on Hong Kong and Singapore. The French and the Dutch, the other colonial powers in the region, had substantially smaller naval presences in the Pacific.

What is surprising is that the Japanese Navy did not go on to smash San Diego or disrupt (or even capture) the Panama Canal, surely logical objectives in any navy man’s book of strategy. A dozen large tankers in waiting positions would have sufficed to have achieved this objective.

General Isoroku Yamamoto was responsible for a number of innovations in Japanese Military Aviation.

‘In January 1941, Yamamoto went even further and proposed a radical revision of Japanese naval strategy. For two decades, in keeping with the doctrine of Captain Alfred T. Mahan, (an American) the Naval General Staff had planned in terms of Japanese light surface forces, submarines and land-based air units whittling down the American Fleet as it advanced across the Pacific until the Japanese Navy engaged it in a climactic ‘Decisive Battle’ in the northern Philippine Sea (between the Ryukyu Islands and the Marianas Islands), with battleships meeting in the traditional exchange between battle lines.

Correctly pointing out this plan had never worked even in Japanese war games, and painfully aware of American strategic advantages in military productive capacity, Yamamoto proposed instead to seek a decision with the Americans by first reducing their forces with a preventive strike, and following it with a ‘Decisive Battle’ fought offensively, rather than defensively. Yamamoto hoped, but probably did not believe, if the Americans could be dealt such terrific blows early in the war, they might be willing to negotiate an end to the conflict. As it turned out, however, the note officially breaking diplomatic relations with the United States was delivered late, and he correctly perceived the Americans would be resolved upon revenge and unwilling to negotiate. At the end of the attack upon Pearl Harbor, upon hearing of the mis-timing of the communique breaking diplomatic relations with the United States earlier that day, it is reputed Yamamoto said, ‘I fear all we have done today is to awaken a great, sleeping giant,’ however, there is no documented evidence the statement was made.
.

The Naval General Staff proved reluctant to go along and Yamamoto was eventually driven to capitalize on his popularity in the fleet by threatening to resign to get his way. Admiral Osami Nagano and the Naval General Staff eventually caved in to this pressure, but only insofar as approving the attack on Pearl Harbor.’ > (Wikipedia.)
On December 10, 1941, the British battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese naval aircraft using bombs and torpedoes. The ships were at full steam and underway at the time of the engagement. The Japanese needed little or no inspiration from the British, and this writer can state with some accuracy that their tactics, their strategy, and their doctrine had been a long time in the development.
.

By the end of WW II, off the coast of Japan were over a hundred U.S. aircraft carriers. The tactics were by no means superior, the skill and bravery of the men by no means any more superlative than that of the Japanese pilot, sailor or soldier.
.

What won WW II was industrial capacity—and the wealth to fuel it, and to sustain it, over a long war when the enemy was counting on a short one.
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Let us not forget the lessons of history, otherwise we are doomed to repeat them.