Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: History

  • Irish Democracy – Not The AI Search Definition

    Looking for information online is getting a bit harder – a search for “Irish Democracy” yields this commentary from search assist: “Irish democracy refers to the system of government in the Republic of Ireland, which is a parliamentary representative democracy. This means that the government is elected by the people and is accountable to them, with powers divided among the legislature, executive, and judiciary to ensure checks and balances.” Artificial Intelligence at its finest – you have to scroll down to get to https://www.econlib.org/the-pros-and-cons-of-irish-democracy/ which begins with “If regular democracy isn’t doing so well, maybe it’s time to fall back on “Irish Democracy.’ That’s what Yale political scientist James Scott calls the passive resistance of a society that doesn’t like what its rulers are doing to it. In his book “Two Cheers for ­Anarchy,” he writes, “One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called ‘Irish Democracy,’ the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”

    Perhaps it was best phrased by Heinlein: “I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” Another of his reminders is: “Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.”

    Henlein died in 1988 – and still made the observation “Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth stupid fumbling.” The thought could describe my neighborhood in 2025.

    Still, when legislators reduce the choices we can make through voting – and our elected officials have done that, Irish Democracy becomes the only alternative. We do need to be careful that we do not accept Irish Handcuffs – the technical definition is a drink in each hand, but the hazard is holding on to something, refusing to set it down, and for that reason being compelled to inaction.

  • Thoughts On Tattoos

    I can’t claim to have a body free from tattoos. Mine came in 2009, when the radiation folks were zapping the body to kill off any remaining cancer cells. They added the tattoos to help sight in the radiation into the right areas. While my tattooing seems to have been successful, I still harbor some resentment – they should have at least given me a beer or two first.

    I’m reading of a politician in Maine who got an SS tattoo while drunk in eastern Europe. That is the sort of bad judgement I can understand. His excuse was being a young, drunk soldier. I learned differently as a kid – Dad was retired Navy, CWO4 (Chief Warrant Officer) and spent a career at sea without tattoos, and as a small boy I saw lots of tattoos, and heard stories of the problems associated with them.

    I think the petty officer with the big tattoo was named Carillo – but the story came to me at least 70 years ago, so their may be some factual flaws. Carillo’s story went back to 1941 – he was Guamanian, and had taken a month’s leave to visit his family on Guam. Yeah, that month – December, 1941. When World War II came to the US, he was an American sailor on Guam – and, lacking any other way of avoiding capture, ditched his dungarees for native apparel. Unfortunately, he had a tattoo showing the gunboat Panay on his chest.

    In the 21st Century, the Panay is a mostly forgotten little ship – but in December of 1941, she was remembered by Americans and Japanese alike. https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Panay_incident probably provides as good a link to the story as any:

    He had a picture of this little ship inked across his chest – and, as the article says “The USS Panay incident was a Japanese bombing attack on the U.S. Navy river gunboat Panay and three Standard Oil Company tankers on the Yangtze River near the Chinese capital of Nanjing on 12 December 1937. Japan and the United States were not at war at the time. The boats were part of an American naval operation called the Yangtze Patrol, which began following the joint British, French, and American victory in the Second Opium War.”

    The old petty officer spent the war as a POW, and credited the tattoo. The end of his tale was the simple admonition “Never get a tattoo.” There have been tattoos with some appeal – a pig and a rooster tattooed on your heal was said to prevent death by drowning. I knew older people with blue numbers tattooed on their arms – tattoos that spoke of their time in German camps. Still, the old man’s admonition “Never get a tattoo.” held for my first fifty-nine years. And I still think that common decency should have included a shot of rum or a beer before they tattooed sighting markers on my belly.

  • The Lady Wore Mink (or remodeling the gas station)

    As I unloaded material into the old service station, I had a visitor. A lady wearing a mink jacket – interested in what we’re doing there. I have a soft spot for ladies wearing mink, and it isn’t a common apparel in scenic downtown Trego, so I showed a bit of the unfinished project.

    Part of the deal with furs was my aunt Fay. Over half a century ago, she had examined yard sales and thrift stores for large women’s fur coats – which she would disassemble, and rebuild into vests for me. Afterall, it was the sixties. Later, after Renata and I married, I offered to get her a mink coat kit. She was less than impressed by a singe trap and a small skinning knife. The morning I drove to work and spotted a roadkill winter mink, I didn’t dare call her and ask her to pick it up for me. Sometimes discretion truly is valor’s better part.

    But back to the shop. We are remodeling it. The first step was replacing the leaking corrugated roofing – you can’t remodel when the roof leaks. The next stage is fixing the ceiling damage, and moving the stuff that has been stored there out of the way. I’ve built a 20 unit storage building, and one of those units is going to be full of stuff that is in the way when I work on remodeling. It’s easier to move boxes than to make a permanent decision about things we haven’t used in ten years.

    The service station was built to serve the population involved in building the tunnel. After that population changed, Retha McCully got the idea of changing it to a Convenience Store. When she died, Dad kept the store going – and took out the parts that made it a garage. I’m not remodeling the building for my ideas – at 75, my task is to remodel it into a building that fits with my daughter’s ideas. Today we brought a mini-split on line. Tomorrow, we bring back the wall that separated the gas and oil from the barber shop when it was built. By the time we finish, the building will include spaces for four small businesses.

    Then comes the other tasks – the southernmost building (that Dad put alongside the gas station) was originally a logging camp cook shack. If it can be restored, it will be moved another 20 feet south and be back looking like it did when it was part of a logging camp. The northernmost building was a logging camp bunkhouse. There is too much community history in those two logging camp buildings. The old service station is from the boom town days of the middle and late sixties, while those two portable buildings are from the logging camp days – two distinct times in Trego’s history.

    The center building looks like an old log building – but isn’t. Back when the railroad was relocated, and Libby Dam was built, a guy named Goldsberry bid in the task of salvaging railroad material from the area that was soon to be flooded. He figured that the cedar telegraph poles (installed in 1904) would still have value – but by 1970, they had spent their effective lifespans as telegraph poles. While the telegraph was high tech in 1904, by 1970 it was ho-hum. In the eighties, Dad set up a small mill and had Pat Eustace mill the telegraph poles and turn them into a small building – representing, in its own way, the first railroad relocation and Trego’s first initial boom. The first part of the remodel was taking off the handcrafted doors – unique, but so heavy that opening and closing them damaged the structure.

    As the new walls go up, it gets easier to see what’s coming in with the remodeling. You don’t need to wear a mink jacket to come by and see what’s going on – or to figure out if your dream business might fit into the old service station and downtown Trego’s future.

  • It Didn’t Start at Fort Sumter

    As I’ve been following posts about what’s happening, I keep encountering comments about a looming civil war. I think there are some crazy bastards out there that really want to see it happen. There may be as much disagreement politically as there was in 1860 – but it may be time to look at what occurred in the war between the states.

    It didn’t start in Charleston – the political violence started in Kansas. Sure, Robet E. Lee took John Brown out in Virginia – but the man began his career in Kansas. The fictional opening scenes from Eastwood’s “Josey Wales” provide a more realistic example than the courteous actual history at Charleston. The war between the states started in Kansas, and, as Eastwood showed, quickly spread to Missouri, then to most of the nation.

    By and large, the craziness didn’t make it to Montana. In 1863, our predecessors had better things to do – Union or Confederate, they had moved to Montana and left that war behind them. Definitely not cowards, the founding Montanans left a war they found unnecessary behind them and created a new state.

    Colorado almost did as well until a Methodist minister named Chivington took a group of volunteers to New Mexico, showed up at the wrong place, and for lack of anything worthwhile to do tackled a Confederate supply column, and became a hero for it. He got a star for his blunder, and his next action is known as the Sand Creek Massacre. A murderer in blue uniform that time. As the nation built up to the war between the states (and during that war) there was a similar emphasis on soft targets. We still remember William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson as murderous Confederates. Our historians are a bit more inclined to remember John Brown for his anti-slavery stance than for the Pottawatomie Massacre – but crazies on both sides of the issue selected soft targets. We forget that George Hoyt, the lawyer who defended John Brown after the Harpers Ferry raid was also a captain in the Red Legs. On both sides, generally awful people who chose to kill those who disagreed with them, and sought out soft targets.

    As I write this, I’m thinking of the shooting at an LDS church and the North Carolina shooting, and the various school shootings – we’re seeing crazies attacking soft targets. And I read folks predicting a civil war – right against left, liberal against conservative. And somehow, it looks to me as if our nation’s whackos will claim the moral high ground as they endorse politics as their grounds for murder. I’ve seen news of one young man using his grandfather’s re-barreled Mauser to kill another – then the next whacko left cartridges that appeared to be 303 Brit (developed in 1888) when he shot at ICE and killed some poor mojado who ha been brought in for deportation.

    Montana’s early settlers chose to ignore the path of the crazies, leave the war between the states to those who either wanted it or couldn’t get out of it, and proceed to an area where, Unionist or Confederate, they could work together to build better lives, first in the mines, then in ranches. It’s still a good technique.

  • Studying Capitalism

    Karl Marx spent about six weeks writing the Communist Manifesto, and his entire life writing Das Kapital, but we know him as the originator of Communism rather than a long-term student of capitalism.   The possible relevance of Joseph Tainter – Niskanen Center interfaces some Marx-like observations of modern Capitalism (things that were not readily observable during Marx’ lifetime) with Tainter’s theory of Complexity:

    “capitalism is currently suffering from chronic, degenerative conditions – namely, faltering dynamism and inclusion combined with increasingly dysfunctional politics.”

    “After all, contemporary postindustrial capitalism features a mass elite of entrepreneurs, managers, and professionals. Comprising some 20 to 30 percent of the population, this is the largest elite, both in absolute numbers and in size relative to society as a whole, that any social order in human history has yet produced, and – making due allowance for all the problems that bedevil life at the top today – its members are flourishing at a level that would stagger the imagination of aristocracies past. Thus, capitalism as a system for producing mass flourishing is overextended: It works for the top quarter or so of society, but not so well for everybody else.” 

    Karl Marx died in 1883 – before capitalism managed to pull most people up from abject poverty.  He chronicled the problems associated with capitalism – yet years before his death wrote “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.  Still now, 140 years after his death, the problem of Capitalism is that “capitalism as a system for producing mass flourishing is overextended.  It works for the top quarter . . . but not so well for everybody else.”  

    That phrase strikes me as today’s most legitimate criticism of capitalism.  It doesn’t lift everyone equally.

    I’ve worked and researched the most successful communist group in North America – the Hutterites.  Simply enough, their society functions for two reasons – first, the communal ownership they espouse has a strong religious component. The belief is that it is much easier to ascend to heaven from the communal society – which can be one heck of a motivator.  The second reason is that the folks who are born Hutterite but do not share the beliefs can easily move from the communal colony into the larger, mostly capitalistic society. I suspect that Karl Marx would have recanted his manifesto had he observed late twentieth century communism in all its forms.  

    So here’s the next quote from The possible relevance of Joseph Tainter – Niskanen Center

    “One fundamental reason for capitalism’s difficulties in promoting more widespread flourishing is the steadily diminishing nexus between economic growth and well-being. It’s not true that more money above a certain threshold has no effect on happiness: The most recent examination of this issue found that reported happiness, both in terms of positive affect and overall life satisfaction, continues to rise indefinitely. Importantly, though, happiness doesn’t increase in linear fashion as income rises; rather, it increases in linear fashion with every doubling of income.”

    And that brings us back to the chart that the Niskanen Center shows – demonstrating the decreasing returns to increasing complexity:

    Read the whole article.  I’ve seen the problems of communism on the small scale of the Hutterite Communes, the Soviet Union, and I owned a Yugo.  I don’t know how any economic system can make the lowest sixth flourish as well as any member of the top quarter.  Read the whole article,  The author does a lot better job at showing how Tainter’s theory applies to our own society than I can.   The possible relevance of Joseph Tainter – Niskanen Center

  • Complexity and Collapse

    The ending years of the 20th century saw three theorists developing hypotheses related to societal collapse of states.  George Cowgill (1988:263) saw internal economic reasons – societies that depend on taxation develop increasing numbers of people and organizations that are legally exempt from taxes . . . and increasing numbers of taxpayers find ways to avoid taxes illegally.  Bureaucracies – expensive bureaucracies – grow, with “increasing corruption, rigidity, incompetence, extravagance and inefficiency.”  Simultaneously, citizen expectations of state services increase.

    Jared Diamond looked at growing populations mandating agricultural intensification – and that intensification carries with it unanticipated consequences – soil erosion, problems with water management, deforestation, etc.

    Joseph Tainter looked at complexity – challenges in production are met with increasing complexity (1988:88-90) and listed 8 causes for the collapse of complex societies.

    1. Resource Depletion
    2. New Resources
    3. Catastrophes
    4. Insufficient response to circumstances
    5. Other complex societies
    6. Intruders
    7. Mismanagement
    8. Economics

    Economic factors and mismanagement kind of go together.  If we look at the bureaucracies that keep our nation state functioning, we find ( https://www.federalpay.org/employees ) 

    2,807,126

    EMPLOYEES

    732

    AGENCIES

    $76,667.77

    AVERAGE SALARY

    $215.22B

    TOTAL SALARY

    Now if these numbers seem large, the Census provides us with numbers for state and local governments: 19,768,685 employees, with $89,265,296,554 in total salary.  Frankly, I don’t trust my data – it comes from two sources, and the proportions look a little strange.  But questionable data isn’t the problem – we’re talking over 22 million government employees to manage.  Tainter’s 7th cause of collapse is mismanagement.  

    The total number of jobs listed for the US in February 2022 was 150,399,000 – and a little bit of rounding tells us that about 2/15, or 13% of US jobs are for one form of government or another.  On one hand, 13% of the nation’s jobs are to make government work – which is a large expense.  On the other hand, there is a tremendous opportunity for Murphy to get into a system this large and complex and arrange for things to go wrong.

    Under the heading of Mismanagement, Tainter’s explanation is “The elite in a civilization may so abuse their power and direct so much of the surplus wealth and labor of their society to their own benefit that not enough is left for the maintenance of the economic and political system, leading to collapse.”

    If you’re politically on the left, you can readily see where the fat cat right wing elite can do this.  If you’re politically on the right, the stories of Joe Biden and son that are available support Tainter’s explanation.  If you’re somewhere in between, Tainter makes even better sense.

    Simply enough, the more moving parts there are in a system, the more opportunities Murphy has for things to go wrong.  The less competent management is, the more opportunity there is for systemic failure.  It kind of goes back to Malthusian demographics – for a bit over 225 years, our society has developed increasingly complex systems that made Thomas Malthus wrong.  The thing is, Malthus only has to be right once.