We are being held hostage

Zack Kanter pins down the supply-chain crisis: longshoremen at Long Beach. I recall them from early in Dubya's Presidency when they were striking for... whatever. I recall that their union was very, very Left. And I say this as a mildly pro-union guy.

[NOTE 10/17: All keeping in mind that California and the EPA banned three-year-old trucks in 2020... meaning, effectively, nonunion and private trucking.]

And some of our Stuff That Sucks comes from other unions, or at least from employees in mutual collusion - as is happening with the airlines. Here it is the Right applauding the strike. (h/t from that law professor who helped get us the Iraq War, lately seen recommending you get jabbed with antibodies.)

It is, as I've illustrated, easy to "dunk" on one side - or on the other; but since I am not as good at this game as editor Michael Kinsley was, I'm done dunking for the night. Transportation Secretary Peter Buttigieg is proving himself not up to the job, but he is not the problem. He can hardly act without orders from his boss, nu?

It is clear to me that a lot of Americans are, simply, done with America. They don't want to work toward a common purpose. This is eminently the case on the Right; but it is also the case on the Left. Being a selfish cynic isn't something that is unique to Left or to Right. It's just selfish cynicism.

Ronald Reagan had a cure for Carter-era "malaise" when he faced PATCO. Maybe Donald Trump, never entirely at home on the Right or the Left, could have applied this cure; at least (some of) the Right would have kept shtum on the pilots (and I am absolutely implicating that law-professor here).

This is a problem with the people. In the meantime, my advice to my readers is to shun anyone who supports these frivolous walkouts.

Perelandra never existed

CS Lewis wrote a triad of novels about the planets in this Solar System, based on the knowledge he had. He already knew that Mars was mostly dead; hence why he sequestered its civilisation in the Marinaris. At the time, people wondered more about Venus. Well that got debunked in a decade or two. But maybe we can salvage Perelandra if the events took place after time travel!

Here's the latest: Venus never had water on its surface. It was steamworld until its dynamo died and then it became ... what it is. Unless you count supercritical carbondioxide as a fluid. By extension it never got tectonic plates either.

Next question: how about underground? There is recently posed a mantle-generation hypothesis of oxygen alchemy; although of course that doesn't create hydrogen.

OR NOT? 10/29: On poor constraints.

Tobacco: part of the Haskett package

It is reported that tobacco was cultivated (sorta) at the Wishbone camp in Nevada, 12,300 years ago.

That falls in the Younger Dryas snap. Back then I understand that the Bonneville complex of lakes were mostly still in the Basin, not yet the desert it would become 7500 BC on. Many of those lakes would have been brackish but still good for waterfowl and, yeah, the Wishbone campers dined well on duck soup.

The breed is Nicotiana attenuata: a frost-resistant species. Commercial baccy today is N. rustica and tabacum.

The (probably) “ANC-A” peoples at Wishbone at the time were Haskett: contemporary with Clovis but not yet Clovis. Of course Clovis could learn from others and vice-versa.

Swine flu, again

All the pigs are all lined up, before their time. As good a time as ever for other states to follow California and improve pigfarm conditions.

Personally I am fine with culling the population. In fact, for the New World: I encourage it. We have a severe feral hog problem and the genus is intrusive here. (Yeah, I know; so am I, along with most others who own a religious objection to such animals.)

Propose that farms for this sort of meat switch to peccary. My relatives still won't be allowed to eat it, but at least it belongs here.

So the unvaxxed want to strike

Many selfish pilots and flight-attendants are Making A Point and the PJMedia set are eager to make heroes of them.

My advice to Southwest Airlines and to others facing this extortion is: come clean with the citizenry on what's going on. Tell them that in these times, they have no choice but to limit flights over the holidays and to raise prices. Also to raise wages / benefits for those crew staying on.

Seriously: it's not the airlines' fault that they have workers who are selfish attention-whores. It's conservatives'.

The 1492 Project

15 October 2019, I posted about Admiral Colón of... Liguria, best I can tell. I'd left it that he was an incompetent overshadowed by Cortés, whom I'd read more about and have some admiration for. Anyway 'tis That Time Of Year, when the Wypipo Tribe be called to "celebrate" indigenous peoples. Preferably not by eating them like the Caribs had done to the Bajans . . .

The main hit I had against this guy was that I thought he was a slaver.

I don't blame Columbus for the diseases. I chuckle at his geography but that's not a hit against his morals or rulership; same goes for the man's apocalyptic Catholicism. Even on the slavery thing I generally have a "compare A to B in the context of A and B" ethos, as you can see from my stance on The Jab: we don't compare The Jab with "everything else being awesome", we compare The Jab with catching CoVID. (I mean, unless you are a PJMedia reader with a brain full of the HSV.) From the captive's perspective: if those fighting over his flesh are a slaver and a cannibal, he should root for the slaver. Especially if that one promises to enslave the cannibal! But maybe we can go without the slavery entirely...?

Enter Armando Simón who, as a Latin, has finally had enough. He hits the same points I just did, adding more.

He's following "Adam Mill" but seems a sight better-informed than that midwit srrvative ever was (if John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith loved each other very much...). For a start Simón goes to the primaries where "Mill" relied on nineteenth-century fanbois. It helps that Simón can actually read Spanish. I don't know about Nahua but, for Columbus, we don't need Nahua.

I'll nudge Simón that he might need [Yucatec] Maya. I recall that Colón's fleet skirted their peninsula, technically Norte'mericano. He could add that the Caribbean population was never high. Where he blames Native Americans for syphilis' entry into Spain I'd more blame the Portuguese fresh outta Kongo. And yeah, we all know that everyone in the AD 1490s knew our Earth ain't flat. What this Admiral actually thought about this planet's equatorial topology was arguably even more retarded.

Also: that Columbus enslaved people isn't about his first voyage with a couple of "Caravel" tugboats. Obviously that canard is ridiculous. If we're judging Columbus we're judging his tenure as the Viceroy of all the West.

Overall, Simón's takedown although ranty is far superior to "Adam Mill". Put him alongside Darío Fernández-Morera.

The second Suez

I have, after over a month, finished The House of Saud. (Which is more than David Holden and Richard Johns did . . .)

Along the way I read about the diplomatic mess around James Earl Carter's legacy, that Egypt / Israel peace hammered out at Camp David. Holden dislikes Israel's Likud and, frankly, seems not to approve Israel itself. The whole Arab world excoriated President-for-Life Anwar Sadat as a traitor for his Separate Peace. As for Carter, as with so much else Carter, he needn't have bothered. Let's concentrate on Sadat. Why'd he do it?

Sadat's side of the pie was the Sinai Peninsula but not Gaza, plus billions in US taxpayer aid. By that, Egypt no longer needed the aid she'd been getting before, which was mostly Saudi. Mind, now Egypt was an American client. And the Sinai is just more Negev: a massive desert good for little. National pride accounts for some of it. Ehh.

I wonder if at work was a glance at the map. Egypt owns the Gulf of Suez. But there's another gulf on the other side: Aqaba. Jordan owns the town Aqaba; Israel owns Eilat. Besides these strips, Egypt has the western shore and Saudi-controlled Hijaz, the east. Right next to Eilat to the southwest is the Arab town Taba. As an Egyptian-controlled town it is a sleepy little place with hotels and stuff like that. Before Camp David this whole shore was Israel's.

What happens absent Carter with a more Saudi-aligned Administration? Well, the Saudis might want in on a pipeline and highway from Taba up to the Med. Closest Med port-ish to Taba is Diqla, maybe Rafah. But really we are talking Gaza.

Imagine a treaty whereby Egypt is entirely ignored and Gaza, instead, gets Sinai, at least the eastern half of it with the Aqaba shore. Saudi money rushes northeast. North Africans on Hajj who aren't in flight give Port Said a miss and disembark at Diqla. The Med nations aren't (as) strangled by the Suez bottleneck. It would of course exist mostly to serve the Hijaz and Saudis and we'd expect it to be their outpost more than anyone's.

These days I doubt that Israel would mind much if there was a small Arab state between itself and Egypt, and if Gaza were offloaded upon that. Back in the middle 1970s, Israel maybe thought they could control this highway for however-long. Although that might just be Holden talking.

Over all it sounds like a wonderful opportunity for just about everybody except Egypt and (that generation of) Israel. You can see why Sadat and Begin would sign any deal to keep it from happening.