Napoleon III and the Impressionists

This blog, in general, stirs up a couple of recurring themes in my email.  The majority accuse me of being either a lefty academic socialist or of being a right-wing fascist, then a few mad people want to know how they can apply to Enema U, and most of the rest complain about the “too damn many stories about Napoleon Bonaparte.”

Please forgive me: I can understand why people might tire of French history—particularly if they have seen that recent horrible bio-pic about ‘the Little Corporal’.  I’ll try and tone it down for a while.

So, Napoleon III—a totally different guy—had successfully gotten himself elected President of the French Republic and, by skillful and underhanded use of his executive power, had managed to seize the country and (like his uncle, who shall remain nameless) make himself the emperor.  

Note.  I’m still thinking about that awful movie.  Of course, Josephine was worried about not bearing a certain Corsican an heir.  Despite the movie showing a middle-aged emperor with a young Josephine, it was actually the other way around with a post-menopausal Josephine terrified that she would be tossed out on her tired ass in favor of a fertile tart who could produce an heir.  So, Josephine came up with a plan to keep that ass on the throne by marrying off her daughter from an earlier marriage to the emperor’s favorite brother, Louis Bonaparte.  Josephine hoped that, if that union produced a baby boy, the emperor would be satisfied with a combination nephew and grandson for an heir.  The plan did produce a male child, but the emperor still divorced Josephine and remarried.  That male child eventually became Napoleon III, so while Josephine’s plan did not save her marriage, it did provide an heir.  Why didn’t that dreadful movie tell that story?

While Napoleon III initially came to power through a popular vote and was initially seen as a proponent of some liberal reforms, his rule gradually became more authoritarian.  As he consolidated power, curtailed freedoms, and limited political opposition, he faced criticism for suppressing democratic ideals.  An inept example of 19th century authoritarianism, the emperor might have been termed a fascist a century later.

Napoleon III's foreign policy involved military interventions, and he faced significant setbacks (“He chose…poorly.”).  One notable example was the French intervention in Mexico, which resulted in establishment of the short-lived, French-supported regime of Emperor Maximilian I.  The military venture faced resistance and it ultimately ended in failure for Napoleon III (It ended even worse for Maximilian, who was executed!).  The French Army, after losing in the Crimean War, suffered one setback after another, seriously eroding any sense of French national pride. 

Chief among Napoleon’s problems was the problem that plagues all bad leaders.  As James Carville once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  Economic issues, including financial crises and difficulties in managing the economy, contributed to public dissatisfaction.  The French economy experienced “challenges” and there were concerns about inflation and rising unemployment.

Napoleon III may have been a lousy emperor who ran France like a carnival on acid, but he wasn’t stupid and he knew that he was losing the support of the people, so he sided with a strange group in order to gain the support of the common people.  

In one of his more public roles, the Emperor supported the arts—he was a patron of the arts and supported various artists and cultural initiatives.  He sponsored the construction of grand public buildings and monuments, including the renovation of Paris under the direction of Georges-Eugène Haussmann.  The redesign of Paris included the creation of wide boulevards, public squares, and parks (in large part giving the city of Paris the look that we know today).  While the emperor supported the arts, this support was used to enhance the regime's legitimacy and present an image of prosperity and refinement.

During the mid-19th century in France, the annual official art exhibition, known as the Salon, was organized by the Académie des Beaux-Arts.  It was a prestigious event, mostly because of its exclusivity and was the venue where artists could showcase their works.  However, the selection process for inclusion in the Salon was highly competitive and many artists found their works rejected by the conservative jury of the Academy, a group that firmly believed that the pinnacle of artistic expression had already been reached and there was no need for either growth or change.

In 1863, a significant number of artists, including some who were trying to portray both light and color, had their works rejected from the official Salon.  The rejected artists, feeling that their innovative and non-traditional styles were not being given due recognition, loudly protested against the decisions of the staid Academy and appealed directly to their emperor.

Napoleon III, recognized the growing discontent among artists and saw an opportunity to align himself with public sentiment.  By authorizing a separate non-government exhibition, the Salon des Refusés, he could appeal to the public's appreciation for new and unconventional artistic expressions.  This move allowed Napoleon III to position himself as a supporter of artistic freedom and innovation a move far more calculated to curry public favor than an actual appreciation of a new art form.

The artists who participated in the Salon des Refusés included Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, and Paul Cézanne.  While the public was...intrigued…by the daring new art, the Academy and most art critics were appalled.  The new style was light, bright, and painted in a hurry, even appearing unfinished and scandalous.  The unconventional and daring nature of the artworks appealed to a segment of the public that was eager to see something new and different from the academic norms.

The art critic, Louis Leroy, reviewed a later exhibition in the satirical magazine "Le Charivari," and used the term "impressionists" to describe Claude Monet's work, Impression, Sunrise.  In his review, Leroy commented sarcastically that the painting looked more like an "impression" than a finished artwork. He used the term "impressionists" as a way of deriding the artists who painted in a style that he perceived as unfinished or sketch-like.  According to Leroy, it was not a real painting, only an impression of one.

Leroy's use of the term was not intended as a compliment, but the artists embraced it, and the term "Impressionism" became associated with a revolutionary and innovative approach to painting.  The Impressionist movement was a rebellion, a markedly radical change from the academic conventions of the time.  Impressionist painters sought to capture the effects of light, color, and atmosphere in their works, often employing loose brushstrokes and focusing on everyday scenes.

Over time, the term, "Impressionism", became widely accepted and is now used to describe one of the most influential art movements of the late 19th century.  The Impressionists played a crucial role in challenging traditional artistic norms and paved the way for new approaches to painting.

So, in an unintended consequence of his quest to curry public favor, it was Napoleon III who gave the world the art of the Impressionists.

Free Croissants for Everyone!

A couple of weeks ago at the bowling alley, my shirt did not cover the top of a long scar from my chest surgery.  “What’s that from?” someone from the other team asked.

“Autopsy scar,” I answered.

“Really?”

“Yes.  I’m the first living heart donor.”  I replied.

The strangest part of the story is that I think the guy believed me.  He's not alone, from the mail I get, more than a few of my readers fully believe that I’m heartless.  And after today, that number is likely to increase because I’m about to dump a lot of cold water on something we all wish was true.  Who doesn’t want to feed the hungry?

In 2016, France passed a law that made it illegal for any grocery store larger than 4000 square feet to throw away food that was reaching the end of its salable lifespan.  Instead of simply tossing this still useful and nutritious food, it would go to a charitable non-profit organization that would make sure that the food reached those in need.  Not only would this help reduce a ridiculous amount of food waste but would help clean up the environment since decomposing food releases carbon into the atmosphere.

Who could possibly be against that?  Well, me.  This seemingly kindhearted proposal costs more than it is worth.

Before going into why I think the program is misguided, I should point out that the program has two goals:  to feed the hungry and to eliminate food waste and its negative effects on the environment.  I don’t know anything about food waste, but since the French government says only 5% of the nation’s food waste comes from grocery stores, it doesn’t seem like this program will do much to solve the problem.  I will, however, comment about the program’s goal of feeding the hungry.

This is a misguided and economically unsound idea that, while it will feed some hungry people, will do so at an exaggerated price, creating relative shortages and higher prices for all consumers, which results in lower profits for both farmers and retail establishments while increasing the cost of government.  It would be far cheaper for the government simply to buy the food and give it away.  The program is inflationary, and it creates what economists call “dead weight loss”, meaning that resources could be more efficiently allocated.

That sounds unreasonably harsh, so let me explain.

First, this will lead to a higher cost for the grocery store.  No matter how simple the government program is made for the stores, it will be more expensive than simply throwing the food away.  Stores will not be able to sell remaindered produce to those who currently use the waste to feed farm animals or to make compost.  And while the people may be poor, they were buying food before the program was implemented and those sales, as small as they might have been, would have been sales that will be lost for the store.  

In addition, implementing the law requires supermarkets to establish mechanisms for the proper sorting, storage, and transport of unsold food.  While these measures contribute to the overall goal of reducing food waste, they also incur additional operational costs for businesses.

As profit from selling produce diminishes, stores will attempt to minimize their losses by buying less produce, which results in less unsold surplus.  Farmers faced with a decline in sales will produce less.  Since governments raise revenue through taxing sales, a decline in sales will reduce tax revenue even as the cost of enforcing the new program will increase government cost.  

It might be easier to visualize how this works if we consider the extra cost imposed upon the retail organizations as a sales tax.  Since the sales tax increases the cost of an item, it reduces the amount sought by consumers, moving the supply line left on the graph (right).  Since consumer demand (red line) stays constant, the intersection of the demand line with the new supply line shows that the price goes from P1 to P2 while the quantity sold drops from Q1 to Q2.  

There are two general rules about any government program:  1.  The program expands over time, and in only the seven years this program has been in place the punitive fines to stores in violation of the program have increased substantially.  2.  Anything you tax decreases while anything you subsidize increases.  Already in France, the number of people receiving the free food has increased.  Since more people are obviously in need of food assistance, there are calls to expand the program.

The bottom line for the program is simple.  The cost of “free” food has been shifted to food producers, retailers, and consumers.  The French government spends money regulating and enforcing the transfer of food, financed by taxpayers.  The availability of “free” food entices more people to use the program, and the increased number of people on the program serves to validate not only the initial need for the program but justifies the program’s expansion.

It would have been cheaper for the French people if the government had directly subsidized food programs for the poor.   This reminds me of the tariffs imposed a few years ago by the government to save jobs in manufacturing.  Ten years later, the Congressional Budget Office released data that showed that several thousand jobs that had an average payroll of $65,000 a year were saved at an overall cost of only $200,000 each.  It is a wonder the program wasn’t immediately expanded.

Now, seven years after the implementation of the French law, what has been the result?  If you search the web, all the charitable organizations love the new regulations—as do the climate activist groups.  If you do a Google search, the top dozen responding sites have names like FoodNOW.com and ZeroWasteEurope.eu and, predictably, these organizations think the new regulations are fantastic.  There are no organizations on the web representing the tired French economists who are weary of being called heartless for trying to explain macroeconomics. 

Currently, France is pressuring the European Union to adopt the law, and it is only a matter of time before California, Oregon, or one of the other liberal states that substitute ‘caring’ for ‘thinking’ adopts a similar law.

The Last Gasp of Bed, Bath, and Beyond

Two weeks ago I wrote about the causes of the corporate murder of Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  While the company is as dead as Julius Caesar and the remains have been thoroughly scavenged by jackals, there is still one last chapter about the demise of the company.  I need to tell you the other half of the story.

Wait!  Haven’t I seen numerous recent television commercials for BB&B offering me all sorts of remaindered junk for incredibly cheap prices?  Of course you have, but that company is actually Overstock.com who bought the name of the defunct company.  They own the name and they can call themselves Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but it is not the same company where you used to shop for towels.  When companies like Polaroid, Bell and Howell, or Sharper Image go bankrupt, marketing companies buy the name and use it for advertising purposes, hoping to milk any remaining goodwill and legitimacy the name still generates.   This is why no one tried to purchase the name “Enron”.

The defunct corporation, that we will now call Used-To-BB&B, is still going through the bankruptcy process and one of the last pieces of business is it’s $37.65 million lawsuit filed with the Federal Maritime Commission against Overseas Orient Container Line, the company that brings its merchandise from China to ports in California.

Think back just a few years to when we were all staying home for just a few days to “flatten the curve” of new Covid cases.  Those few days turned into quite a few months and all over the globe, factories shut down, dock workers neither loaded or unloaded ships, and with all the ships waiting their turn to be unloaded, the waters off the coast of California began to look like a seagoing used car lot.  

When a cargo container was unloaded, there were no trucks waiting to haul the container away, so those containers of merchandise took up most of the storage space in the dockyard.  Since there were no workers to load an empty container back on the ship, what little storage space left was overcrowded with empty containers.  Depending on your political party, this was either a mild kink in the supply line or a galloping clusterfuck.

Since freight companies don’t make any money while ships sit idling at anchor and both the banks holding the loans on the ships and the crews on the ships expect to be paid whether the ship moves or not….the shipping companies started to playing dirty.  They began charging extra for “expedited” shipping, which was basically nothing more than moving a ship up to the front of the line to be unloaded first, if and when both dock workers and trucks could be located.

Since the shipping companies were under contract to provide timely service at a set price, the extra fees do seem something that Used-To-BB&B might be able to sue about.  But the shipping companies added to the extra fees by charging both demurrage and detention fees.  Let me explain—no, that will take too long, let me sum up.

Demurrage refers to the extra charges incurred when the consignee (the party receiving the cargo) exceeds the allowed free time for the use of a shipping container at a port or container yard.  Since the filled containers couldn’t be removed from the shipping yard because of the congestion in the port and the shortage of trucks, this hardly seems fair.  Even if the congestion were magically removed, the ports were closed due to the need for social distancing.  Effectively, the shipping companies wouldn’t allow the containers to be picked up but were charging extra because they weren’t.

Detention charges, on the other hand, are incurred when the shipping container is retained by the consignee or shipper outside the port or container yard for longer than the allowed free time.  This charge by the shipping companies was really cute since the container couldn’t be returned because the ports were closed, and even if they were open, the containers could only be returned if you had an appointment and the shipping companies refused to give anyone an appointment.  And even if you had an appointment, and the port magically opened, there were no trucks to return the container.

So, Used-To-BB&B had merchandise sitting offshore that they had paid for but couldn’t get delivered unless they paid extra.  Then, they were charged extra because they couldn’t get a truck to pick up the freight because the trucks weren’t running and the port was closed.  When they finally did get the merchandise, they were charged extra because they couldn’t get an appointment to return the empty container with trucks that weren’t running to a port that was closed.

These extra fees and charges were not what bankrupted the company, though that is exactly what is being claimed by Used-To-BB&B in court.  In the long run, I’m not sure how interested the Federal Maritime Commission will be in finding for a company that no longer exists, and against the shipping companies that work daily with the commission.  Only time will tell, and even if Used-To-BB&B wins, the funds collected will not come close to paying off all of the outstanding debts.

I am sure about one thing, though.  The lawyers on both sides will make a fortune.

Another Napoleon Story

The movie Napoleon is out and The Doc and I went to see it.  Interesting.  Lavish sets, good music, and gory battles all combined to make a rather lackluster movie about one of the most exciting personalities in history.   I can’t really put my finger on what went wrong, but somehow the movie just missed the Mark.  (Pun intended.)

I wasn’t overly upset by the numerous historical mistakes.  He was too old, she was too young, he didn’t witness the execution of Marie Antoinette, and there was no need to invent a story about Napoleon’s army shooting a cannon ball into the side of a pyramid.  Nor was there any need to invent a totally bogus version of the Battle of Austerlitz, turning a minor incident that killed at most a few men into a catastrophe that wiped out the Allied army.  The technical advisor for the film was probably a sociologist.  

Of more interest than the actual movie was the fact that the theater had only four people for the noon matinee, perhaps because the tickets were twice the normal price.  Even worse for the theater was that the screening room next door was showing a Beyoncé movie to a completely empty theater.  I’m studying economics, not marketing, but wouldn’t it make more sense to fill the theater with people who had purchased discounted tickets?  After all, people who aren’t in the theater can’t buy the overpriced popcorn.  Shouldn’t the people who run movie theaters being doing something different before their whole industry collapses?  According to the news, 3000 theaters have closed nationwide since the start of Covid.

Instead of wasting your time watching a three-hour movie in an empty theater, there is a far more interesting story about Napoleon out there, and it involves a painting by one of the best Spanish artists, Diego Velazquez.  If you are unfamiliar with his work, you can read about his most famous painting that is one of my favorites, here.

What art historians call spoliations napoléoniennes (and what everyone else calls “Napoleon stealing European art from every country he marched an army through”), started in 1794 and lasted for almost two decades.  Exactly how much art was looted is impossible to determine but it numbers in the thousands of pieces.  Most of it was sent to the newly established Musée du Louvre in Paris, with significant numbers ending up in the hands of various military officers, both French and British.  After Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo, the coalition of victors—calling themselves the Congress of Vienna—declared that all of the art had to be repatriated.  Surprisingly, some was.  Not very surprisingly at all, lots of it still hasn’t been.

The Spanish Royalty had amassed a fabulous collection of art, and when Napoleon invaded Spain and put his brother Joseph on the throne as a puppet king, Napoleon ordered his brother to send the best works north to Paris.  The Emperor intended to build a new museum, the Musée Napoléon that would outshine the Louvre.  Joseph loved the idea of a new museum so much that he decided he needed his own museum, a Museo Josefino.  As he looted the various royal residences of Madrid, Joseph kept what he thought were the best paintings for himself and sent 50 of the rest—still fabulous works of art by famous painters—across the Pyrenees to Paris.  

Most of the paintings that Joseph kept for his museum were eventually seized the British Army when Joseph was forced to flee.  Over sixty of those paintings are on display at Apsley House, the home of the Duke of Wellington, with various other paintings scattered in museums across England.

One of the paintings sent north was a full-length portrait (right) of Queen Isabel de Borbón, the wife of Spain’s King Philip IV.  Velazquez had done the painting in 1620, but after the Flemish artist Peter Rubens suggested that Velasquez study the work of the Italian masters, Velazquez decided to make some changes to the painting in 1631.  If you look closely, even a poor dumb ‘ol country boy like me can see where changes were made in the outline of the skirt.

The painting hung in the Buen Retiro palace, a royal residence in Madrid, next to another Velazquez masterpiece, a painting of her husband King Philip IV, one of the last good Spanish monarchs before the royal family took up the hobby of inbreeding.  Joseph wasn’t a great judge of art, so Philip’s painting remained in Spain, where it now hangs at the Prado Museum in Madrid while that of his wife was sent to France.  Since Napoleon’s private museum was never built, it was displayed in the Louvre and since it was already part of that museum’s collection before Napoleon was sent to St. Helena, it was never returned to Spain (in defiance of the Congress of Vienna).  Another reason it remained in France is that as soon as the exiled King Ferdinand of Spain finally regained his throne, he was too busy attacking his enemies to worry about art.

France went through a few political upheavals, too, and as the Bourbon family regained the throne, a French official did a little looting of his own and moved the painting from the museum to his own home.  When the monarchy fell and Napoleon III came to power, the family in possession of the painting sold it to a British art dealer.  In the next century, the painting was sold twice more, both times to private collectors.

Today, the anonymous private owner has decided to sell the painting through the Sotheby’s auction house.  Since the majority of works by Diego Velazquez are in large museums, it has been a few decades since a painting of this quality from one of the Spanish masters has changed hands.  While the auction is not until February, it is expected that the painting will go for at least $35 million.  It is certain to set a new record high price for a Velasquez painting.

If Enema U would cancel football for the next five years, it could add this painting to the university art museum.  

If I had to bet, I would guess that the painting will disappear, probably in the hands of a private collector in Dubai.  What I’m hoping for—besides the obscure chance that sanity will hit Enema U—is that the Spanish government will buy the painting and reunite Queen Isabel with King Philip.

The Untimely Death of Bed, Bath, and Beyond

To start with, I should probably admit that I never really liked this store.   With the partial exception of the kitchenware, the rest of the inventory might as well have been invisible.  If the assorted bedding, towels, and whatever else was in there had been free for the taking, I doubt that I would have left with anything.

Since I enjoy cooking, and live in a New Mexican desert where there is a shortage of stores that sell kitchenware, I would occasionally pick up a small item or two there.  And I might window shop there to compare items before I bought them more cheaply online.  Overall, this was just another store, like Hobby Lobby, Michael’s, and Best Buy, that holds absolutely no interest for me.  After all, it’s not like they sell books.

Still, B3 was a Fortune 500 company whose 1530 stores had an annual revenue of over $12 billion and its demise needs to be examined.  Unfortunately—particularly for its employees—an economic postmortem shows that B3 committed suicide.

The company started 52 years ago when two managers, Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg, lost their jobs when a New York regional department store folded.  Correctly predicting that the day of the department store was over, the two men opened a specialty store that sold only bedding and linen.  

Originally called Bed ‘n Bath, this was one of the first of the specialty stores that eventually came to be known as “Meme Stores” or “Category Killers” that rapidly spread across the country.  Chains like Best Buy, Ikea, OfficeMax, and Barnes and Noble built large superstores overstuffed with narrow lines of inventory that overwhelmed the competition since a department store that could only hold a narrow inventory in each category.  Shoppers that needed a widget naturally went to Widget World where they could select between numerous models of both left and right-handed widgets.

Bed ‘n Bath faced competition from similar stores, so Feinstein and Eisenberg came up with a marketing plan that made their fledgling company a success.  Changing the name to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, they added kitchenware and standardized an appealing store design.  The stores were very large, roughly 20,000 square feet, with high ceilings and inventory stocked so high that customers could easily discern the different departments.  Instead of the usual advertising, B3 mailed out discount coupons.  Hundreds of millions of coupons each year, with at least half of those damn little blue and white discount coupons being mailed to my house.  

Part of the marketing plan was pure genius.  Individual store managers were given the authority to vary the inventory in their stores to fit the needs of the customers who shopped there.  If the corporate chain running the local grocery store was smart enough to do that, then the shoppers wouldn’t be forced to choose among items that some idiot in Chicago erroneously believes are the ingredients for Mexican food.  

The marketing strategy worked for a long time.  The company expanded, opening new stores across the country, and the stock price grew dramatically.  But, just as the department stores declined over time due to new innovations, so too did the new specialty stores.  Slowly over time, e-commerce began to steal sales from traditional large box stores.

Most of the surviving box stores countered this with an online operation of their own.  A few companies, like Sears, B3, Circuit City, and Federated failed to do this properly and none of them are still in operation.  Sears in particular failed at this, though they had an online operation, it was impossible to use.  I tried to buy a Craftsman weed eater from them once and found it listed on their website multiple times with five different prices, all of which were higher than the same product on Amazon.  If you can buy a Sears product from Amazon cheaper than you can buy it from Sears…. Well, it doesn’t take a fortune teller to predict the chain’s demise.

Facing declining sales, the Board of Directors for Bedbugs, Battleaxes, and Boredom held a small revolution, the founding partners resigned, and a new Chief Financial Officer was hired.  Gustavo Arnal was brought in to save the company with a new marketing plan.  At the same time, Ryan Cohen was elected to the Board after buying ten percent of the outstanding stock.  Each of these men had an independent plan for the company.

Arnal wanted to introduce store brands to the outlets.  A B3 labeled product would assure the customer of quality while simultaneously making the company more profits.  All the surviving big box chains do this, and it is usually a successful strategy.  In the case of B3, the new products were introduced too rapidly, and sales of the new line were sluggish—and when Covid hit they all but stopped.  To counter this, the company resorted to issuing even more little blue discount coupons.  While the strategy did continue to bring in shoppers, the discounted sales were not profitable.  For the last five years the chain was in operation, sales climbed each year even as profits steadily declined.

Still, the company would have survived if not for the actions of Ryan Cohen and the rest of the board of directors.  The Board began an aggressive campaign of buying back the company common stock.  As each share of stock is purchased, the value of the stock still issued rises on the market as the total value of the company is divided among a smaller number of stockholders.

Contrary to what numerous politicians scream about, there is nothing inherently wrong about a company repurchasing its own stock, just as there is nothing wrong when the company sells its stock.  As Warren Buffet once said, critics of stock buybacks are “either an economic illiterate or a silver-tongued demagogue” or both, and all investors benefit from them as long as they are made at the right prices.

In the case of B3, the price was horribly wrong as the company paid an average of $44 a share for a stock that should have been valued in the single digits.  Worse, the company was selling bonds to raise the cash to buy the stock, incurring an ever larger debt.  Altogether, the Board of Directors paid over $12 billion to purchase some of the stock of a company that was worth, in total, an estimated $500 million.

Now there is a tactic for selling stock that is called “pump and dump” where you artificially raise the price of a stock you own so you can sell at an inflated price.  This “pump and dump” tactic is illegal.  Far be it for me to insinuate that someone in the company was guilty of this—at least in print—but some people made a lot of profit by selling their B3 stock off for a lot more than they had paid for it.  For instance, Ryan Cohen made a profit of $68 million by selling his stock in the summer of 2022.

If the company hadn’t borrowed so much money by selling those bonds, there would have been no problem.  Even with the bonds, it was possible for the company to survive, perhaps by selling more stock or selling off all or part of the company to raise funds.  Instead, Gustavo Arnal jumped out a window and committed suicide.  The fact that Arnal committed suicide just days after a $1.2 billion lawsuit was filed against both Arnal and Cohen is probably an accident.

You can imagine what that did to the price of that stock.  It dropped like….well, a CFO falling from the 18th floor of his apartment building.

The company folded and all assets were sold.  One of those assets was the company name, which sold to Overstock.com for $21.5 million.  Overstock, now rebranded as Bed, Bath, and Beyond, is now selling goods exclusively online.

So, did Cohen deliberately kill B3 to make a profit off of the carcass?  It's a little confusing and the Feds are still investigating.  But remember that weird stock trading scandal a couple of years back involving Gamestop?  The one where the stock shot up 1500% and the company officers dumped their stock just before the price crashed?  Cohen was on the Board of Directors of that company, too.

Twain’s Favorite Painting

Without a doubt, my favorite book on Art History was written by Mark Twain.  It is a splendid reference book on the European Renaissance that covers artworks displayed from Spain to Italy.  Twain, a noted expert on Western Art, wrote a series of newspaper articles as he traveled across Europe and the Holy Lands and these were collected in 1869 in a single volume, The Innocents Abroad.

After weeks of travel and study, Twain was able to wisely comment, “Who is this Renaissance?  Where did they come from?  Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?”

This is the kind of deep insight that only travel to foreign lands provides.

Naturally, Twain didn’t intend to write a textbook on art history and I may be the only person who thinks he did. Twain’s real aim was to provide a great travel book—one that would correct the many mistakes and overwhelmingly sugary prose of a popular contemporary travel volume written by William Cowper Prime.  Technically, Twain lampooned Prime’s book, but a more accurate description would be that Twain ravaged his competition like a pack of hungry wolves descending on a daycare right about lunch time. 

In particular, Twain was somewhat contemptuous of the tour guides who attempted to elevate every piece of art into a masterpiece simply because it had been around for five centuries.  And Twain was deeply puzzled by the tourists who seemed to believe everything these tour guides said, no matter how ridiculous.  Eventually, Twain summed up his feelings about the staggering accumulation of exaggerations and outright lies of the region with a single statement:

"If all the poetry and nonsense that have been discharged upon the fountains and the bland scenery of this region were collected in a book, it would make a most valuable volume to burn."

Actually, Twain did appreciate some art, and he even had a favorite painting—one that you have probably never heard of.

Frederic Edwin Church was a mid-nineteenth century American landscape painter who was a part of the Hudson River School of painters.  The School’s members were known for their attention to detail and their realistic approach to portraying nature.  Their goal was to be as accurate as possible while emphasizing light as much as possible in their paintings.  Usually, their landscapes were very large and depicted a tranquil while majestic view of nature.  Or to put it more clearly, imagine one huge, highly-detailed painting with half of Yellowstone Park in it.

As the name of the school implies, the Hudson River Valley provided Church with scenes for his early works, but he soon expanded his source of inspiration to places that were “less civilized” than the Eastern United States.  Besides traveling across the United States, Church made two trips to South America, in particular, visiting the volcanoes of Ecuador.  He returned to the States with his sketchbooks filled with highly detailed drawings he later used as the basis for his paintings.

The Heart of the Andes was one of those paintings.  Roughly 5 ½ by 10 feet in size, the painting depicts a large plain in front of the volcano Mount Chimborazo, with a jungle in the foreground. Completed in 1859, the painting quickly became famous in the United States.  Church exhibited the painting in several cities, always carefully arranging the painting so that it was well lit from above.  

People stood in long lines to pay a quarter for the privilege of taking their turn to stand close to the painting.  Those people later said that they seemed to be absorbed by the painting, believing that they were entering the forest.  Many of the patrons said that the experience of viewing the landscape made them dizzy and that they seemed to forget where they were.

Twain went to one of those exhibitions while in St. Louis and wrote his brother about the experience:

“Pamela and I have just returned from a visit to the most wonderfully beautiful painting which this city has ever seen––Church’s “Heart of the Andes”––which represents a lovely valley with its rich vegetation in all the bloom and glory of a tropical summer––dotted with birds and flowers of all colors and shades of color, and sunny slopes, and shady corners, and twilight groves, and cool cascades––all grandly set off with a majestic mountain in the background with its gleaming summit clothed in everlasting ice and snow! I have seen it several times, but it is always a new picture––totally new––you seem to see nothing the second time which you saw the first… When you first see the tame, ordinary-looking picture, your first impulse is to turn your back upon it, and say “Humbug”––but your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in––and appreciate it in its fulness––and understand how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands. You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections––your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something––you hardly know what––will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief. You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture––It remains with you still. It is in my mind now––and the smallest feature could not be removed without my detecting it.”

Over the years, Twain visited the painting he said was the “most wonderfully beautiful painting” many times and even mentioned it a few time in his stories.  Today, you can judge the painting for yourself, as it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Twain never claimed to be an expert about art, and cheerfully admitted that none of the works by the ‘old masters’ impressed him.  But like everyone else, he knew what he liked and didn’t pretend otherwise.  Or, as he once said:

“It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.”

Banned Books

Boy, am I ever against censorship!  I’m willing to bet good money that I own—and have read—more banned books than anyone reading this post.  Part of the irony of that statement is that this blog is still banned in a few countries.  And the majority of my hate mail (including a few fatwahs) comes from countries that are the most active in banning access to certain books.

Without a doubt my favorite banned book is Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.  Ever since the book was published 137 years ago, it is routine that some idiot, somewhere, has come out of his mother’s basement into the sunlight just long enough to scream that the book is harmful to children.  Most of the opposition comes in two forms:  First, that "the novel contains racist language and slurs (that were reflective of the time and setting in which it was written."  To which I answer, “Right.”

Secondly, the novel addresses issues related to slavery, racism, and the institution of slavery in the United States.  Once again, my answer is “Correct—Twain is openly ridiculing the White, stereotypically negative view of Blacks in society.”  (I wonder if this idiotic criticism of the book would be different if Twain had, as he originally planned, named the book after Jim?)  

It does seem that the controversy over banned books has changed its emphasis from race to sex recently.  With the exception of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (which some teachers in the Pacific Northwest want to eliminate), most of the yammering about banning books seems to be over depictions of gay or trans young people in various books.  

My initial reaction to this controversy was to ignore it.  There is not much need to ban any book these days since it becomes increasingly and painfully apparent that the youth of today won’t read anything not operated by their thumbs.  According to the NEA, the average child today reads only about half as many books a year as children did in 1992—which was 30% less than those in the sixties read.  Perhaps the solution to the problem is to pretend to ban books so that rebellious children will discover what the inside of a library looks like.

To be honest, I’ve changed my mind about the above paragraph.  I routinely gift books to my grandchildren (including, of course, both Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird) and I try to keep up with some of the current authors of children’s books, including the current Newberry Award recipients.  While researching some recent publications, I was shocked to discover that there really are some books that schools might want to reconsider before putting them in elementary school libraries.  Remember that the average elementary school library has children ranging in age from 6 to 13 freely roaming all of the shelves.  I was reading several years above my age level by age 9 and several of the books I have discovered recently would have been profoundly confusing to me at that age.  (Hell, one of the books is still a little confusing.)

Before you rashly proclaim that all books are appropriate for anyone, consider that, from where I sit as I type this, I can spot copies of both Mein Kampf and a book containing horribly graphic photographs documenting the Rape of Nanking.  No library policy should be so rigid as to overrule a good librarian’s common sense, but it is just our unfortunate luck that common sense is not all that common.

Still, there is a great deal of press about groups banning books—particularly in Florida—so I decided to do a little quick research on my own.  In this pursuit, I relied heavily on the folks at Marshall University, who maintain an excellent website listing the most commonly banned books and the school districts in which groups have attempted to ban books.  I should point out that Marshall University absolutely does not ban any book, nor should it.  You can find its website here.  All of the books in the top ten are there because of sexual material or material  related to portrayals of LGBTQ lifestyle.

Allow me explain how I did my admittedly sloppy research.  For the ten most commonly banned books, I tabulated the states in which school districts considered banning a book last year.  I also made a list of the states in which school districts considered banning a book the year that it was published.  I must make two big warnings about the data:  First, a great many of the school districts turned down requests to ban the book.  Secondly, some of the books have been in publication for years and I did not tabulate the states in those years.  I would encourage some student in need of a major research paper to do a more thorough job of examining the data available.  

So, what patterns/fascinating facts did I find?  Florida, which has been made the poster child for being the nation’s greatest threat to literary freedom, showed up on the list for book banning last year only once, and it showed up only once on the list of states attempting to ban a book the year it was published.  A great many other states showed up on one or both lists several times, including Texas, California, New York, Virginia, Missouri, and Kansas.  States that showed up at least once included Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, and Oregon.  Despite my expectations, the only Southern state in the “Bible Belt” that showed up was Texas (five occurrences) and in many cases, those attempts to ban books were unsuccessful.  

The bottom line?  I suspect that attempts by well-meaning people to ban books show up wherever people live and if one state is garnering more news coverage about book banning than others, it probably tells us more about how the news is packaged and sold than about what the people in that state are doing or thinking.

Most people are against such obvious forms of censorship and almost everyone agrees that banning a book for high school students and above is wrong and should not be tolerated.  But, there are more subtle ways to censor books.  Are you against them, too?

Recently, I accompanied a colleague of mine to the campus bookstore.  As we passed a display of recent publications, my friend moved a random book over to cover a book written by a conservative talking head—one who writes highly inaccurate ‘history’ books that I despise.  Obviously, my friend didn’t want anyone to buy any of those books, so they were “censored” from view.  Yes, that’s censorship, too.

Do you follow the New York Times Bestseller List?  Are you aware that the number of books sold has absolutely nothing to with the ranking of books on that list?  Publishers, authors, other newspapers, and almost all of the digital media have complained about that for decades and there has been no change.  Want to know how the books on the list are selected?  So does everyone else and the Times isn’t saying.  But if you read the list for a couple of months, you can see a trend that suggests placement is highly influenced by politics.  That the Times does this is perfectly okay—it’s their newspaper.  But, it’s still censorship.

Ever heard of algorithmic censorship?  This involves the use of algorithms to filter out certain content from online platforms.  For example, social media companies may use algorithms to suppress certain posts.  They don’t have to tell you why or when they censor you.  They just shut you down.  When we use those social media platforms, we’re condoning their censorship.

Then there is corporate censorship:  This occurs when businesses use their power and influence to silence dissenting voices or to restrict access to information.  For instance, a media conglomerate might pressure its journalists to avoid reporting on certain topics, or it might use its financial clout to suppress unfavorable coverage of its business practices.  When we do business with those companies, we become their partners.

Censorship is all around us.  Perhaps we should stop worrying about a few parents who are a little overzealous about trying to protect their children until we have examined how much censorship we, ourselves, are partners in.

The Greater Fire

The devastating fire started on October 8, 1871.  Though there were several ludicrous theories about how the fire started—including a cow kicking over a lantern and a theory about flaming meteorites caused by a passing comet—the probable cause of the fire was simply high winds fanning a small fire during a year’s long drought that had turned the entire Midwest into a tinderbox that was just waiting for the smallest spark to ignite.

Whatever the cause, the flames spread and the fire quickly became uncontrollable, forcing people to flee.  While firefighters tried valiantly to extinguish the blaze, their task was complicated by lack of communications, by lack of professional training and by a shortage of equipment for those fighting the fire.  Even when firefighters raced to help other, distant neighbor firemen, they found their hoses would not connect to the hydrants or even to other hoses.

The unusually dry year, the high winds, the almost total lack of preparedness by civil authorities to be unable to fight all but the smallest of fires.  This fire, however it started, was the largest and most deadly fire in American history.  The really surprising aspect of the fire was that almost no one even noticed that it happened.  The New York Times didn’t even report the fire for three days, and even then, it was such a small story that few people even paid attention.

Oh!  You thought I was talking about that fire in Chicago?  That’s an understandable, innocent mistake, since both fires started on the same day—October 8, 1871–but I was referring to the big fire, the Peshtigo Fire, in northeastern Wisconsin…The fire you’ve probably never heard of.

In the 1870’s, upper Wisconsin was still being settled and most of the new farmers pouring into the virgin forests were poor immigrants.  The fastest way to clear the land was to fell the trees, burn them, then plow the ashes back under the soil.  This slash and burn agriculture was probably the source of the flames, but no one will ever be sure.  

Yes, some excitable people have actually theorized that both this fire and the one that torched Chicago were caused by meteorites.  We can probably ignore this theory since not only is there no evidence that such a thing happened in the Midwest in 1871, but there is not one case of meteorites ever starting a fire in history.

That night, a cold front hit the upper Midwest, bringing a temperature drop and very strong winds that  caught a small fire and turned it into a raging inferno that quickly developed into a fire storm.  When a firestorm rages through a forest, the diameter can be anywhere from 1000 feet wide up to two miles across.  With temperatures hitting 2000 degrees and traveling 110 mph across Wisconsin, this one destroyed everything in its path.  One of the reasons it took so long for the rest of the United States to learn of the fire was that it cut communications by destroying telegraph lines.  The few survivors described the swirling air rising, forming a giant flaming tornado that threw railway cars off their tracks and easily jumped rivers.

The other reason that it took so long for news of the inferno to reach the rest of the country was that there were very few survivors.  Due to the drought, there were so many fires across the Northern United States that residents had grown used to smelling smoke, waiting until they actually saw flames before responding.  The fire traveled twice as fast as the speediest locomotive and when the fire arrived at small towns and villages, it was if the little communities had been hit by nuclear blast.

The fire destroyed 1.2 million acres and 17 communities, killing somewhere between 1500 and 2500 people.

The exact number of dead will never be known.  While the state carefully prepared a list of the known casualties, along with the names of those missing, no one believes that the list is complete.  On a fairly regular basis, new mass graves have been discovered, containing unknown victims.  The hardest hit community was Peshtigo, where a mass grave contained over 350 bodies.  The primary reason that the deceased could not be identified was that there was no one left alive who could connect names with the corpses.  The town of Peshtigo was completely destroyed in an hour, with the loss of 800 souls.

It wasn't until days (or even weeks) later, when survivors and witnesses were able to reach larger cities and telegraph offices, that news of the Peshtigo Fire began to spread more widely.  The scale of the disaster and the high death toll gradually became known, but the Peshtigo fire never became a news sensation like the “Great” Chicago Fire, that had claimed 300 lives and destroyed 2100 acres.

The Chicago fire was far smaller and caused many fewer casualties than the Peshtigo fire, but it had made the news first, with graphic stories from the numerous survivors who gave detailed interviews.  Since it was an urban fire, there were lots of photos of whole streets with destroyed buildings.  By comparison, photos of burned trees—regardless of the number—just didn’t seem important.  By the time some of the horrific stories of the human losses made their way out of the Wisconsin forest, people were already bored with fires or they simply thought the new stories were about part of the Chicago Fire.  Some news sources didn’t even bother reporting the story.

Far worse, by the time the needs of the victims of the Peshtigo Fire were tallied, all of the charitable relief had gone to Chicago.  This was long before disaster relief was government-financed, so when the charitable organizations sought contributions from donors a second time, the results fell far short of need.  According to the Dictionary of Wisconsin History, there were an additional 1500 severely injured and 3000 made homeless.   

The Great Chicago Fire received widespread media attention and became a symbol of urban destruction, leading to significant changes in urban planning and firefighting practices. The Peshtigo Fire, despite being even deadlier, received less national and international attention at the time.  It is ironic that the fire that was larger and had a higher death toll—and remains the deadliest wildfire in US history—was less publicized and its victims were less provided for.

An Apology

For most of my adult life, I have believed that the reports of American antisemitism were probably overstated, a natural and justifiable reaction by American Jews to memories of the Holocaust.  Of course, antisemitism still existed, but surely such warped thinking was dying out, a lingering evil that was present only in the warped minds of people so ignorant they couldn’t spell the word.

Not being Jewish, I only rarely came into contact with that form of prejudice, and when I did, it was easy to shut it down, secure in my belief that such stupidity was an isolated and rare occurrence.  Growing up in the South, I occasionally ran across a few morons that still yearned for the South to rise again, but only among either the feeble-minded or those who resided on the political fringes.

Over the years, I saw prejudice and injustice against Blacks and Hispanics, and while I took a stand against such bigotry, in hindsight, I certainly didn’t do nearly enough.  Only rarely, however, did I actually witness any overt antisemitism, and when I did, I believed it was a rare example of aberrant behavior.  

When a friend told me that he had actually met people that believed he had horns, I thought he had found the last Nazis that weren’t hiding in caves in Argentina.  Surely such ignorance was extremely limited.

A business partner of mine from a few decades’ past didn’t want to do business with a certain company because of the ethnicity of the owner.  I laughed at my partner and said his thinking was a relic from an ancient past that never really existed.  My partner acquiesced and our two companies went on to have a profitable relationship for several years.  Today, I wonder if I should have done more or said more to my partner.  Why did I treat his prejudice as a joke?  That conversation still haunts me.

When I taught American History, I tried to the very best of my ability to portray the cruelty of slavery, the injustices of the Jim Crow period, and the struggles of the Civil Rights era (much of the last of which I had lived through with far too little self-awareness).  I still have my notes from those lectures and the points that I stressed were that I was embarrassed by the past injustices I had casually ignored, that there was still injustice in our society, and that I predicted that in the decades to come, many of my students would be made equally uncomfortable by their own lack of awareness.

That my students may have ignored what I was saying is forgivable.  What is far worse is that I wasn’t even listening to myself.  There was injustice all around me and, once again, I was ignoring it.

Of course, I lectured about the Holocaust.  I even showed my classes films so horrific that, when I was not using them, I kept them locked in the back of my gun safe because I was afraid that my own children might watch them before they were old enough to understand the documented pure evil in them.  

That locked safe may be the perfect metaphor for how I reacted to the antisemitism around me:  if I locked it away, I wouldn’t have to deal with it until I wanted to.  As soon as the worrisome details were shoved to the back of the safe, I could slam the door, spin the tumblers, and then ignore it because those injustices were not aimed at me.  

And that is how prejudice and hatred survive:  they live in the darkest recesses of society because there are not enough people who are willing to directly confront them and drag them  out into the light and demand an end to the stupidity.  Racial injustice must be actively sought out and confronted, for otherwise, it will always find another dark corner of society in which to fester.

It is not enough to simply confront prejudice when you are the target—that is as senseless as trying to stop a flood by only sweeping back the water that tries to enter your property.  Racial prejudice is something that must be confronted regardless of where it is happening, and who it is happening to.  It is not nearly enough to confront prejudice when it is aimed at you—it must be confronted when it is aimed at anyone, anywhere, anytime.

For years, I did not really believe that antisemitism in America was really a problem.  The events of the last few weeks have convinced me that not only was I horribly naïve, but that my naïveté was a real danger to my friends. It really shouldn't have taken people screaming in American streets for the death of my friends for me to see the obvious.

 In many ways, I failed my friends—Jamie, Carlos, Rachel, Victor, Andrea, and the rest of my friends—who face very real dangers that I have ignored.  I apologize.  I will do better.

Grimmer Fairy Tales

Few things are as comforting as an old familiar favorite book.  For me, that book is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.  I’ve read the book so many times that I can recite whole pages from memory, yet after a few months, I’m invariably drawn back to read the book again.  I guess everyone has a favorite book.

For my wife, The Doc, it is an ancient copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, that collection of harmless stories that Disney has been strip mining fo public domain and royalty-free content for decades.  Evidently, The Doc and her sister used to read the stories as children from a now lost book.  So, when she found a duplicate copy at an estate sale, she had to have it.  

The auction sold the vintage copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales along with another book, Billy Whiskers: the Autobiography of a Goat, by Frances Trego Montgomery.  Though I had never heard of either the book or the author, it turns out that after the book was published in 1902, several million copies of the book and the 24 sequels were published, making the author the J.K. Rowling of the 1920’s.  According to Rose Kennedy, her son Jack read them all.  If you are interested, you can read the book online here.

Like everyone else, I kind of knew about Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  Well, to be honest, most of what I knew came from watching Fractured Fairy Tales on the Rocky and Bullwinkle television show, but that counts, right?  So, I read a few of the stories, spent at least ten minutes researching the brothers Grimm online, looking at most of the pretty pictures and discovered that I knew absolutely nothing about these stories.  While my research was a little spotty, it was way better than what Disney had ever done.

First off, the Grimm brothers were sort of the prototype of the orphans who despite being poor, still worked their little Hessian asses off, studying law and anthropology after their parents died while the brothers were off at school.  The brothers collected old folk stories from books and transcribed stories told to them by friends and family members.  In 1812, the first volume of 86 stories was published, followed 3 years later by the second volume containing 70 more.  Interestingly, the volumes were published with the title we all know so well, Children’s and Household Tales. 

The stories are dark—dark even for Germans—and are the kind of stories you would only tell children if their parents were Lizzie Borden and the Son of Sam.  By the second printing of the stories, the Grimm brothers had already been forced to make certain revisions…take the story of Rapunzel, for example.  

Rapunzel’s parents lived next door to an evil witch who had a vegetable garden protected by a high wall.  I have no idea why anyone would think living next to a witch was a good idea; perhaps the obvious risk made the rent lower? The wife, having pregnancy cravings, sees rapunzel growing in the garden and refuses to eat anything else.  We never actually learn just what kind of vegetable rapunzel is, but since the wife is growing weak with hunger, the husband climbs over the wall to steal some for his beloved wife and is immediately confronted by the evil witch.  Desperate, the husband works out a deal wherein he trades the future infant for an unlimited supply of the unknown veggie.  (In all of the stories, the lives of children aren’t worth much more than a fistful of root vegetables.). 

In time, the witch takes the beautiful infant and locks her in a doorless room atop a tall tower.  Access to the room is only available by Rapunzel—named after the vegetable—letting down her long, beautiful golden hair.  (Presumably, the tower grew about as fast as the child’s hair).  The witch brought food to the girl daily, and on one of those visits a passing prince learned the secret of getting Rapunzel to lower her hair.  Intrigued, the prince began visiting Rapunzel daily.  After a few weeks, Rapunzel mentioned to the witch that her dress was getting tight in the belly.

What?  Rapunzel is R rated???  From there, the witch cuts off the girl’s hair and blinds the prince, then he and Rapunzel wander the dark forest for years, destitute and miserable until they finally discover each other and live happily ever after.  The story doesn’t mention it, but presumably the witch goes unpunished, and Rapunzel’s mother remained a vegan.

Most of the original stories are far different than the versions you think you know.  Cinderella went to the ball several nights in a row, wearing luxurious mouse fur slippers.  Her evil mother, changed later into an evil stepmother, had her sisters mutilate their feet with a knife in an effort to fit their huge feet into the small furry slipper.  Little Red Riding Hood is eaten by the wolf, Rumpelstiltskin is torn into two pieces, and in Hansel and Gretel, the villain is the children’s mother.  The Frog Prince is not transformed back into his human form by a kiss, but by the princess smashing him against a wall in sexual frustration.

Reading the original stories is a little alarming at first, but after a while, you start to enjoy the dark humor and the lack of the sugar sweetness of the animated versions.  If the Grimm brothers had included Bambi, it would probably end with a recipe for venison jerky.  (Though if you think of it, even Disney’s version of Bambi starts with a murder.)

I’m not the only one who thinks these stories should be read by adults:  many contemporary authors have suggested that you should give the fairy tales a second chance.

Someday, you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.  – C. S. Lewis

Fantasy is a recurring ingredient in living. – Dr. Seuss

There wouldn’t be so many stories about vampires and zombies and other such creatures if they didn’t really exist.  – R. L. Stine

"Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. – C. K. Chesterton

Besides, if you don’t read the stories for yourself, how will you learn about Snow White’s sister, Rose Red?

Back to the Future

Two years ago, I wrote about the Grain de Sail—a small cargo ship powered exclusively by its sails, that makes two voyages a year bringing 1,500 cases of wine from France to New York, then takes a load of humanitarian supplies to Dominican Republic, then returns to France with a load of cocoa and green coffee.  The ship’s owners maintain that the gentle rocking of the cargo sailboat helps the wine age and produces a superior flavor.  I’ll have to take their word for it since the price for a bottle is a little above my comfort zone.

As much as I like the idea of cargo ships returning to the Age of Sail, I don’t think the Grain de Sail, an 80’ schooner, is likely to be financially competitive against massive container ships.  Thankfully, there are positive signs that even the largest cargo ships may be making limited use of sail in the near future.

Berge Bulk, one of the world’s largest dry bulk shipping companies, has just announced the relaunching of one of its newcastlemax ships, the M/V Berg Olympus, that has been retrofitted with four WindWings.  Yeah, I know that is a lot of jargon, so let me decode it all.

A dry bulk shipping company is one that ships the type of cargo that does not use those metal containers—primarily loose goods.  Think of it this way:  if you had a pile of this kind of cargo in your front yard and wanted to move it to your backyard, you’d use a wheelbarrow (think coal, iron ore, timber, wheat, and barley).  Since Newcastle, Australia shipped massive amounts of wheat and coal to Europe aboard large (or maximum) cargo ships, those types of ships became known as newcastlemax.  

And those WindWings?  Well, the days of wooden masts with miles of ropes and flapping canvas sails started to end in the 19th century because steam-driven ships were faster and didn’t require as many men to crew them.  That doesn’t mean that the days of ships taking advantage of all that free air were over, however:  it just meant that the nature of sails had to change.  Today, many ship designers are using modern, high-tech versions of all that flapping canvas.  

Take those WindWings for example.  These massive, tall steel and composite-glass, rigid rectangular sails can rotate to catch the best angle of the wind.  Controlled by computer, they have adjustable flaps on their leading edges to maximize the amount of thrust the wind can provide the ship.  Ships that use this technology do not rely solely on wind for propulsion, but each sail on the ship cuts down the amount of bunker oil the ship needs to burn.  The Berg Olympus (right), for example, uses four WindWings that together will reduce fuel usage by 20%.

There is an alternative version of those metal and glass sails, called rotor sails, that use large vertical rotating columns to catch the wind.  When the wind flows over the surface of the rotor, it creates a pressure difference between the windward (front) and leeward (back) sides of the rotor. This pressure difference generates a force known as lift.  The rotor is mounted on a vertical axis…. Well, from there it gets technical.  So, just trust me—those massive rotating columns effectively work as sails.

Sails are coming back.

It really hasn’t been that long since there were true square-rigged windjammers carrying trade to Europe.  There even used to be an annual event, called The Great Grain Race, that people followed and even bet massive amounts of money on.  Every year, when the wheat crop was harvested in Australia, it was loaded into large, steel-hulled, square-rigged sailing ships that sailed west, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the Atlantic to England.  

Since there was little profit to be gained by the shipping companies if the transit time was made shorter, they had little reason to use steamships instead of the venerable windjammers.  The only drawback to using the old-style ships was that it became increasingly difficult to find experienced able-bodied seamen.  While in port, sailors applying for a position were told to climb one of the four tall masts to the top, then imagine having to perform that task at sea with the mast swaying violently in a storm.  Most applicants quickly vanished.

While they certainly weren’t supposed to, the captains of the twenty-odd ships raced to see who could make the crossing in the shortest time.  There was no financial incentive for the captains and crews of these ships to race (actually there was quite the opposite).  The passage was rough and hazardous, with ships routinely losing as much as half their rigging on a single voyage.  Pushing their ships to the maximum meant that such losses could dramatically increase, costing the shipping company large sums of money, resulting in the officers responsible being fired.  Still, the owners of the ships didn’t mind when their vessels won and the results of the races were reported in newspapers around the world.  Sometimes, the amount of money bet on the outcome of the races was more than the value of the cargoes the ships carried.

A normal passage took roughly 100 days, with the fastest time of 83 days set by the Parma in 1933.  While, technically, the grain races stopped in 1949, the races really came to an end with World War II.  As you can imagine, employing a large, slow, steel-hulled sailboat wasn’t practical while there were submarines plying the North Atlantic.  And while a few of the old windjammers were laid up during the war and made a few voyages after the war, the large number of surplus military transport vessels sold to private shipping companies cut shipping rates and made the old sailing windjammers impractical.

The old grain races are fascinating, and there is a great book that describes them in detail.  In 1938, 18-year-old Eric Newby, who was destined to later become a great travel writer, signed on board the Moshulu, a 396 foot four-masted windjammer.  Newby was on board the Moshulu as it left Ireland bound for Australia, where it picked up a load of barley bound for the distilleries in Scotland.  On the return voyage, though, the ship was hit by a tornado, but still managed to win that year’s grain race by making the transit in 91 days, docking at Falmouth just before the start of the war.

Newby went on to write The Last Grain Race in 1956—a book that I heartily recommend.  The Moshulu was…. I’ll bet a dollar that, by now, you’re wondering where the hell that stupid name came from.  The ship was originally part of a German shipping company and named the Kurt.  When World War I started in 1914, the ship sailed to Oregon to avoid British warships, where it was interned for the duration of the war.  When the United States entered the war, the ship was seized by the government and renamed Dreadnought by the First Lady, Edith Wilson.  Since there was already a registered ship with that name, the definition of dreadnought or “one who fears nothing,” was translated into the Seneca language, resulting in Moshulu.  Blame Edith.

During the war, the Moshulu transported wool between the United States and Australia.  After the war, the ship was sold and resold and sold again until World War II effectively ended her sailing career.  For a time, she was a floating grain warehouse, but today, she is a floating restaurant in Philadelphia.  If you have a good eye, you can see Sylvester Stallone run by it in Rocky.  (The first one, not one of the eight or nine sequels.)

There are going to be a lot more ships with sails carrying grain and lumber across the oceans.  They’ll probably look more like the Berg Olympus than the Moshulu, they’ll probably have more solar panels than sails, but that’s okay.  Let me know when we can start betting on the races again.

My Quasar Microwave

Overall, the new microwave is wonderful.  It is powerful enough to incinerate food in just a few seconds, big enough to cook a turkey (does anyone actually do that?) and even connects wirelessly to one of the household gods, Ahexonya.  Until now, I hadn’t known I needed to control my microwave with voice commands, but it was available and I bought it.  (In case you are wondering, all of the other household gods are feline.)

To be fair, that voice feature turned out to be more useful than I thought.  Without having to remember which button does what, you can simply say, “Ahexonya, defrost at 30% for two minutes, then cook for 3 minutes.”  Or “Ahexonya, reheat my coffee cup.”  This turns out to be as handy as a pocket on a shirt.

As wonderful as all the features were, it had one small drawback—the first unit delivered by UPS turned out not to work, as it was missing a small piece of plastic that turned the glass turntable.  The piece probably cost about the same as those cheap ballpoint pens the banks give away, but without it the microwave wouldn’t work right.  So, the whole microwave had to be re-boxed and shipped back to California while we were forced to wait for a replacement.

Somewhere in China, someone had spent a few minutes looking at a spreadsheet and announced, “In the long run, it will be cheaper to reship units than to implement quality control checks.”  Nowhere in the box was a tiny piece of paper that said, “Inspected by Inspector #8.”

This may change in the future.  Currently, the White House is reexamining the tariff rates on imported goods from China.  Back in 2000, the United States granted “permanent normal trade relations” (PNTR) to China after the country joined the World Trade Organization.  PNTR is almost the same as “most favored nation” (MFN) status, meaning that the U.S. agreed to drop all tariffs on a wide variety of imported goods, including my microwave. 

For most of the Twentieth Century, particularly following World War II, it has been the policy of the United States to promote free trade between countries.  This policy slowed during the Trump and Biden administrations, with Biden stressing the importance of saving American jobs by extending tariffs.

This is a bad mistake.  For the moment, forget that free trade fosters peace among nations.  You can even forget that, in today’s globalized economy, it is almost impossible to protect domestic jobs by erecting tariffs, since tariffs erected against a particular nation will just mean that the foreign goods will be imported through a third nation with higher prices.  You can even forget that the immediate and direct result of protective tariffs is always retaliatory tariffs from the targeted country, something every politician should have learned from the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act of more than 90 years ago.  (Hell, even Ferris Bueller’s history class knew that.)

Note.  The only real qualification placed on candidates for federal office is age.  Speaking from experience, it doesn’t take any brains to grow old, it just takes a long time.  Perhaps it is time for more stringent standards to be required of potential candidates than for a good bottle of wine or a block of vintage cheese.  Let’s require all candidates to pass a simple test on the Constitution and on American history that includes an essay question on Smoot-Hawley.  This simple test would cancel the eligibility of quite a few current congressmen and at least two recent presidents.

Cancelling PNTR for China will result in American consumers paying an additional $31 billion dollars a year, or roughly $240 a year per household, for the goods we currently purchase.  And that will NOT result in large numbers of local industry suddenly springing up to manufacture American made televisions and microwaves.  It will result in Americans buying fewer goods at higher prices and it will result in American companies selling fewer goods abroad.  And—far worse—it will result in American capital and labor being reallocated to inefficient production, because somewhere, some company will attempt—probably ineffectively—to manufacture an inferior product to attempt to compete with an imported good in the hopes that they can sell their product due to the protective tariff.

Falsely promising to protect domestic jobs has been a mainstay of politicians for more than a century, but by now even the most dedicated isolationist should realize that no matter how many catchy jingles are sung in television commercials, the garment industry is not coming back to the United States and no matter how high the tariff, Quasar and Magnavox are not going to start making American television sets again.  (Ironically, about 40 years ago Quasar was sold to the same Japanese company that made my microwave.)  What these empty promises fail to disclose is that such tariffs will not only be inflationary but most of the burden will hit families with lowest incomes who spend a higher portion of their income on such products compared to families with higher incomes.

America should focus instead on the goods in which we are globally competitive.  American is one of the leaders in production of high quality and high-tech goods where highly productive labor is important.  We lead the world in innovation, research, and development.  And these are the areas where we are likely to be the most successful in the future.  

My new microwave was built in China for a company based in Japan.  The technology, however, was developed in the United States.  A Raytheon engineer named Percy Spenser invented the microwave oven back in 1945 and for years, Raytheon licensed the technology to other companies.   I don’t know what the next generation of appliances will be, but I hope whatever replaces my new microwave is based on technology that came from American laboratories.

There really isn’t any choice since raising tariffs simply won’t work.  America needs global markets to sell our surplus goods meaning we will always have some favored nation trading partners who can sell goods here without tariffs.  Foreign companies that can sell to a global market will have huge advantages in economies of scale that will spread the fixed costs of manufacturing across larger numbers of products, lowering the price per unit.  Domestic companies that seek to produce smaller quantities of goods will have to base those sales on either unique features or significantly higher quality than their mass market competitors.  Those kinds of companies don’t need to hide behind the false protection of a tariff and would suffer from the inevitable retaliatory tariff imposed by foreign countries.

Personally, I’m ready to support a presidential candidate who is willing to admit that we are in the 21st century and that America is not going to go back to ineffective trade policies from the Gilded Age.  I just wish such a candidate was running.