Run Like a Business

For years, I have heard my colleagues alternately either yearn for the university to be run like a business or bemoan the fact that it already was.   And although the administrators at Enema U frequently claimed they “were going to run the university on sound business principles”, such claims were always just noise from people who had no idea how a business is run.

There are actually very few people in the university who have run businesses.  This is understandable when you remember that a state university is, despite claims to the contrary, a government agency run by bureaucrats who have little or no experience in the real world.  There are many ways to become a top bureaucrat, but few of them involve competency.

One portion of the university, however, is about to become part of the “business world”, and it appears that no one is noticing.  One element of college football and basketball are about to become semi-capitalist and this is going to drastically change the nature of college athletics:  Male college athletes are going to be paid, and that is going to change everything.

At this point, I’m sure that some readers are yelling, “No, they aren’t going to be paid, they can only profit by selling their likenesses to advertise products.”  True enough, but if you think that will not effectively mean the same thing as regular paychecks, you don’t understand the way college athletics work.  The NCAA already has a slew of rules to make sure that colleges can’t unfairly give benefits to players, and athletic programs have ignored and bypassed those regulations for years.  

Thirty-five years ago, the House of Representatives passed limits on how much a congressman could be paid to deliver a speech, ending a long system of legal bribery whereby a lobbying group could pay the congressman a small fortune to stand up at a rubber chicken dinner and publicly announce, “Thank you.”  Jim Wright, the Speaker of the House promptly wrote a very short book containing a few of his speeches, some attempts at prose, and a little corn-pone humor.  At only 117 pages—many of which contained only one word—it was more of a pamphlet than a book.  Nevertheless, lobbying groups and unions immediately bought the bribe…I mean, book, by the case. 

Booster clubs and donors could easily do the same thing with players, perhaps paying a large sum for the right to use the players' images on goods they never intend to produce in quantity.  Several universities (including Enema U) already have private foundations that quietly subsidize coaching salaries, never, ever releasing that information to the public.  Here in New Mexico, various groups have been fighting for decades to have these ‘secret' foundations open their books for public scrutiny, with little success.  Lawyers representing the players will work out many ways to twist the system into what will effectively be salaries.

Currently, the key to having a winning collegiate football team is to have a great coach.  Since the NCAA does not regulate coaching salaries, a handful of schools can offer million dollar contracts to the dozen or so top coaches capable of all but guaranteeing a winning season.  For every team like Texas A&M, Tennessee, Alabama, or Iowa, there were dozens of schools that couldn’t afford to bid on winning one of a dozen or so top coaches available.  The rules, however, have changed:  There are far more good players available than there were coaches, and there are many combinations of good players that can make up a winning team.

The race to recruit players based on salary will benefit those schools with deep pocket donors.  Top athletes, represented by agents, may well demand salaries competitive with players on NFL teams.  And under the new NCAA rules, students will be able to open negotiations with schools three separate times during four years of eligibility.  After a school spends a small fortune to attract a star player, you can imagine the pressure some faculty members may find themselves subjected to if that amazing quarterback reads at the third grade level.

While there are several public colleges that have the funds to allow them to spend a few million dollars to hire the best coaches, there are far fewer with the kind of uber-rich donors to enable a team to pay the top dollars necessary to build that winning team.  This will create a wider division between the top schools and those schools with more financially modest donors.

While no one knows exactly how and how much this change will shake up college football, there are two obvious questions.  First, how will colleges reconcile the new money spent on male players with Title IX, which mandates equal spending between sports for men and women?  There are no sports for women that can generate the type of high-dollar donations to pay an equivalent amount to female players, meaning that their ‘salaries’ will be much lower.  I’m not exactly sure what the basis of the lawsuits will be, but I’m confident that lawyers will be able to come up with something.

The second question is what to do about a donor who has unlimited resources.  What if a billionaire (say one of those new crypto currency gazillionaires) decides to build an unbeatable team at his alma mater?  We have recently seen just such a person spend billions on what appears to be a whim, so why not build a winning football program for far less money?  The NCAA allows each university 85 full ride scholarships, so if you spent a $1 million apiece to recruit the top players, throw in another $10 million for a coaching staff, you should be able to have an unbeatable team for about a quarter of what a new yacht would cost.

NFL teams recognized this problem years ago, instituting a cap on wages and locking players into multiyear contracts with strict collective bargaining agreements.  College athletics has no such protections, at least not yet.  I’m not sure what all the changes coming to college football will be, but we can be certain that athletic programs are going to spend more money than ever before…and be no more transparent about it than now.

What Really Causes Inflation?

Over the last three days, I have listened to politicians from both political parties spout the rankest nonsense about the causes of inflation.  Among the nuttier ideas were corporate greed, currency speculators, low taxes, high taxes, lack of stimulus, too much stimulus, Putin, Covid, the war in Ukraine, and supply chain issues.  Today, a lawmaker added to the list by saying that a woman’s lack of access to abortion causes inflation.

The late Milton Friedman is probably spinning in his grave.

About the only thing that everyone agrees on is that the Federal Reserve prints too much money, which forces me to point out a few facts:  We can start with the fact that while the Federal Reserve is very powerful and can, indeed, pump more money into—or out of—the economy, it is actually the Treasury Department that prints money.  That doesn’t really matter, since the vast majority of money in our economy does not exist as real paper currency. 

Note.  It might surprise you to learn that 60% of all U.S. currency is held overseas and the majority of that money is in the form of $100 bills.  If you are imagining dictators and drug lords with pallets of plastic wrapped bills….Well, yes. 

Let’s start with the basics:  Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods.  Consider the following overly tortured scenario:  As you are flying across the Pacific, a looming storm forces the pilot to land on a South Pacific Island to wait until the storm passes.  The islanders refuse to allow anyone to disembark, so you and the rest of the passengers are forced to wait on the plane for hours and hours.  Eventually, to help alleviate hunger, the stewardess gives every passenger the equivalent of $5 in the local currency, enabling each passenger to buy a hamburger from one of the locals who brings the food to the plane.  If there are a hundred passengers and the cook brings an equal number of hamburgers, as you can imagine, the native will realize that he can charge $5 apiece for the burgers.

But what happens if the entrepreneur brings 150 burgers to the plane.  Since he’s unwilling to leave with unsold food, he will more than likely drop the price.  A few people won’t want a burger, a few more will want more than one, and the majority will only want one.  A few enterprising passengers will probably even pool their money and try to buy three burgers for $10.  However the bargaining goes, the price of a burger is likely to drop when more burgers are available.

Consider what would happen if the stewardess had given each passenger the equivalent of $10 in local currency and the burger man had brought only 70 burgers to the planet the price would probably rise rather quickly.  Passengers would pool their money and divide the available food, sending the price for each burger substantially higher than $5 apiece.  This is an example of too much money chasing too few goods.

As Milton Friedman famously said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” 

Sure, corporations are greedy—they are supposed to be greedy.  And if someone is speculating that a commodity will go up in price, someone else is speculating that it will go down and neither bet changes the resulting price.  These actions don’t cause inflation because neither corporations nor speculators are able to print money and increase the supply of money.

Think back to the start of 2020:  While we began the year with a roaring economy, the very real fear of Covid forced a widespread economic shutdown.  When businesses shuttered their doors and employees stayed home, our government began a liberal policy of subsidizing both consumers and businesses.  Calling the massive injection of money into society liberal is an understatement.  During the financial crisis of 2008, the government spent—depending on which numbers you choose to use—between $700 billion and an even $1 trillion.  By comparison, the direct stimulus checks of 2020 and 2021 alone cost more than $2 trillion—twice the amount spent to combat the 2008 financial crisis. 

A tremendous amount of new money was injected into the economy, yet at the same time, Americans were unable to spend it.  As restaurants and businesses shut their doors, the GDP of the United States contracted by 3.5%, in the first such contraction in decades.

Surprisingly, there is a relatively simple formula to figure out how much inflation is likely to occur in an economy:  the Quantity Theory of Money:

In this formula, M=the monetary supply, v=the velocity of money (how many times money changes hands during a year), P=the price level (inflation), and Y_R=the Gross Domestic Product (the value of all goods and services produced in the country during a year).  In the year and a half after the start of the pandemic in 2020, both the velocity of money and the GDP of the country contracted, while the amount of money in the economy increased dramatically.  It doesn’t take a slide rule to see that P (inflation) had to increase to keep pace with the increase in money.

At the same time that this new wave of money entered the economy, the amount of goods and services available to purchase diminished because factories were shut down, employees didn’t go to work, and the supply chain tied itself into knots while ports became jammed with unloaded ships and containers waiting for trucks to deliver the goods to your local stores.  Despite fewer people were working, the savings rate of Americans grew during this time.  Pent up demand for goods increased over time….and then the stores reopened and people began to satisfy their desire to purchase new goods.  If you go back to our analogy of the hungry passengers on the plane, it became a situation where each passenger was starving, had a basket full of money, and the vendor only showed up with two dozen burgers.

During times of inflation, it is the job of the Federal Reserve to adjust monetary policy to lower inflation while attempting to maintain high employment, a goal that is usually mutually exclusive.  Among the tools the Federal Reserve can use to accomplish this is raising the Federal Reserve Rate (the rate the Fed charges banks to borrow money).  Raising the Fed Rate triggers an increase in several interest rates—including home and car loans—resulting in fewer loans being made and effectively lowering the amount of cash circulating in our economy.  Accordingly, the Fed has increased the Fed rate twice in the last few months and predicts that inflation will begin to drop slowly over the next year.

The Federal Reserve always confidently predicts a return to normalcy.  And after every one of its policy failures, it tells us that it has learned from past mistakes and it is better equipped to handle future crises.  The Fed told us it had learned from the mistakes of the Great Depression, from the stagflationary period of the 1974-82, from the collapse of the tech market in 2000, and from the housing collapse of 2008.  This string of failures makes the Fed absolutely positive it can prevent the recession that normally follows periods of high inflation.  Personally, I plan to keep my kitchen pantry well stocked.

The government can do several things to decrease inflation:  It can spend less money, it can stop giving subsidies, and it can raise taxes as these are actions that will decrease the amount of money in the economy.  Forgiving student loans, extending unemployment benefits, increasing welfare programs, and giving cost of living adjustments to those on Social Security are all actions that will raise inflation.  I’m not saying that those aren’t good ideas, but they absolutely will raise inflation.

And what about all those other looney ideas about the cause of inflation that I listed in the first paragraph?  Crazy statements (like those from attention-seeking politicians) tell us nothing about our economy….but they do convey a great deal about the motivations of the speakers (and even more about their low opinion of their listeners’ intelligence).

Commencement Time

It is the end of the spring semester, and campuses everywhere are preparing for Commencement Day, a time when students are forced to spend money to rent a ugly bathrobe and sit in a crowded auditorium with inadequate air conditioning while someone the administration hopes will donate money delivers a boring speech giving advice to students who neither asked for it nor will listen to it.  Neither the proud parents in the stands, the assembled faculty, nor the administration will listen to the speech, either, as it is their job to just sit and smile and wonder who started this stupid tradition.

Over the years at Enema U, I sat through dozens of these ceremonies as I owed countless favors to my department head, a kind man who gave me my start in edjumacation.  The university had three commencement ceremonies a year, and I was invariably asked to attend.  I quickly learned the only way to survive the boredom was to take along a book.  After the faculty were seated at the front of the auditorium, I’d pull out my book, receiving strong looks of disapproval from my colleagues sitting close by.  Long before the speeches were over, however, these same colleagues would whisper, “Don’t turn the page yet!”

Having attended dozens of these ceremonies, I’m an expert on graduation advice.  I should qualify that statement with two caveats, however.  First, while I have been to way too many of these silly proceedings, I’ve never been to one of my own graduation ceremonies, though I had half a dozen opportunities, including one this year.  I finished a degree in art history last year, but the pandemic delayed the ceremony until just a few months ago.  I thought about attending, then I laughed and decided I could just read a book at home.

Secondly, I don’t have a lot of advice for students leaving college, as I haven’t done that yet, myself.  I have no idea what these students should do, personally, I’d suggest they don’t.  Just stay in school forever, it’s working for me.

While I have no idea what college graduates should do, I can offer some advice as to what incoming college students should do.  Let me give some advice, both unrequested and probably useless, to those high school students who intend to go to college this fall.  I was a student for a long time, then spent a couple of decades teaching, and now I’ve been a student again for several years.  Who could possibly know the system better than I?

Here’s how to go to college:

First, don’t go to a college you can’t afford.  Every university, and every department within the university, will look you right in the eyes and tell you that if you graduate from their program, you can easily pay off those hideous student loans they want to saddle you with.  Notice, however, that none of those hucksters will offer to cosign the loan with you.  Ask either the recruiter or your prospective department head what the average starting pay is for their graduates that find work.  If your student loans require more than 10% of what you can reasonably expect to make, that is not a viable major.

Note:  I can just hear you asking, “But isn’t the government getting ready to pay off our student loans?” TANSTAAFL.  If you don’t know what that means, look it up.  (Better yet, improve your education and read Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.)  Eventually, even the bloated plutocrats in Washington will realize that if your education doesn’t have enough value for you to pay for it, it doesn’t have enough value for the taxpayers to foot the bill.

As a student, pick a major that with which you can reasonably expect to earn a living.  Those liberal arts degrees are a lot of fun—I should know, I have a handful of them—but there are no pressing needs for more people with degrees in Music Appreciation.  If your prospective department head doesn’t have employment data for recent graduates, that’s probably a good indicator that you should pick a different major. 

Here’s another way to evaluate a major:  How many math courses does your major require?  There is a direct link between future earnings and how much math is required to graduate.  If your major only requires you to take a math course titled “Hooray for Numbers!” and is taught in the Education Department, the average pigeon is far more likely to put a deposit on a new car than you are.

As a student, maybe you can take the required general education courses the first year, but as soon as possible and at least by the second year, you should have a plan that will take you through a degree and into your career.  If the only thing that will make you happy in life is that degree in English Literature, then go ahead and get one, but earn that degree at a university that you can afford and preferably while working to defray the cost.  If you think working while going to school is hard, just wait until you try to earn a living with a degree in Gender Studies.

Far too many bright and capable students have been told their whole lives that they should “do something good with their lives.”  These students come to college, do fairly well, and simply drift through the curriculum, usually winding up majoring in education, sociology, or one of the liberal arts.  These students have no real passion for these fields, they just either find them interesting or fairly easy to finish.  These are the students who end up with high cost degrees, large loans, and little desire to work in those fields.  I’ve lost track of the number of students who worked for a couple of years in either social work or public education, only to quit and look for something more rewarding.

Okay, you’ve picked a major.  Now what?

Pick the right professors.  Sad to say, not every professor in every department is worth a glass of warm spit.  Unless you have absolutely no choice, never take a class from a professor until you find out what the class is going to be like.  Make friends with other students in the department and ask them about their experiences.  Look up the professor’s class schedule and sit in on a class.  And always look up your professor in RateMyProfessors.Com.  The student evaluations at this site are generally far more honest than those done by the department, as the students believe, all too frequently correctly, that those evaluations are not as anonymous as the university claims. 

Upon taking the class, see who turns up to teach it.  If your professor doesn’t show up for the first two weeks, sending either a substitute or a teaching assistant for the first two weeks—drop the course and take it from someone else.  A professor who doesn’t respect the class is unlikely to respect a student, either.

Now, that we have a major and the right professor, what’s next?  Go to class.  Go to every damn class. 

You would not believe the number of students who regularly skip class.  Why students choose to pay for a class and then do not attend has always puzzled me.  I doubt that movie theaters have a problem with patrons buying a ticket and then not sitting down to watch the movie, yet a ticket to a movie is far cheaper than what every single class costs.  Needless to say, if for no other reason than the instructor will notice who regularly attends, students who are present for every class do much better in the course.

Do the required reading.  Most people would be surprised to learn that a significant portion of every class never buys a copy of the required reading.  Campus bookstores know this and usually only order enough copies of the required textbooks for a fraction of the class.  An even larger portion of the class evidently keeps those books under their bed, hoping to absorb magic vibrations from the pages while they sleep, since they certainly never open the books and actually read them.  Read the damn book before the relevant lecture and you will be more than halfway home.

And my last piece of advice is to learn how to take notes, which is a subject that most schools seem not to bother with.  Learn a good note taking system and use it.  I recommend the Cornell Note Taking System, but there are other good systems.   Take notes, then later that same day, type your notes into a computer, adding information from the professor’s PowerPoint slides.  Take a look at the two pages of notes to the right.  Which do you want to study the night before the exam.  Not only will this be easier to use, but by typing them the same day as the class, it reinforces your understanding of the material.  Try and find a study partner in the class who will do the same thing and exchange copies of your notes—sometimes another student will hear something or understand something you didn’t.

That’s it.  Want to go to college?  Pick a good school, a realistic major taught by good professors whose books you read while going to class and taking notes and you will graduate on time and have a decent career. 

Having done all that, if you feel like it, you can even go to that commencement ceremony and hear a boring speech.  I recommend taking a book.

The Shortest War in History

Among the myriad of reasons for the first world war, the mounting problems of imperialism rank high on the list.  The Western powers had effectively divided up the developing countries like a pizza at a frat house party, and some of the bigger boys had grabbed more than their share.

This was particularly true of Great Britain and Germany, each of whom was intent on grabbing as much of Africa as possible.  (If you are wondering, France was still recovering from the end of its last period of monarchy—at least so far—with the ouster of Napoleon III.  And yes, I managed to sneak Napoleon into another blog post.  In a few more paragraphs, I’ll do it again.)

In the 1880’s, ministers from both Great Britain and Germany had meetings to divide the remaining “unclaimed” territories.  Maps were redrawn, a few geographical locations swapped, and treaties were signed.  It is noteworthy that no Africans were invited to attend these meetings, and none would have been admitted had they shown the temerity to show up.  As a result, as World War I began, the only independent country on the African continent was Liberia, the country the United States had founded with repatriated former slaves.  Naturally, these divisions brought on numerous wars, not only between colonizers and the colonized, but between the European powers themselves.  All of Africa would have been far more peaceful if the various heads of Europe had just played a couple of hands of poker using the various African territories as poker chips.

One of those private treaties signed far from Africa and almost as far from any Africans was the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty, which gave Germany a few islands in the North Sea and access to the Zambezi River in Africa (not to be confused with the gray-green, greasy Limpopo River, which was already jointly held by the British and the Elephant’s Child).  The British gained territory in Africa including Zanzibar and a ten-mile strip of coastal land in present day Kenya that was referred to as the Zanz.  The new transferal of title was to come as a shock to the Sultan who ruled the area.

The Sultan was not removed, of course:  Britain just established Zanz as a Protectorate, sending advisors from the colonial office, along with enough ships from the British Navy to ensure that the advisors were listened to.  If you are unsure exactly what a Protectorate is, British Prime Minister Salisbury defined it for us:

The condition of a protected dependency is more acceptable to the half civilized races, and more suitable for them than direct dominion. It is cheaper, simpler, less wounding to their self-esteem, gives them more career as public officials, and spares them unnecessary contact with white men.

Exactly who was really in power became transparent when Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini died on 25 August 1896.  Wisely listening to his viziers who had counted the number of guns on the British warships in the harbor, the sultan had been pro-British, at least publicly.  His successor, Sultan Khalid bin Barghash, hated the British and was absolutely not acceptable to the British Foreign Office.

The British waited two whole days, then ordered Khalid to step down so that a more agreeable Sultan could take the throne.  Khalid refused, gathered together his palace guard, and hastily began erecting barricades at the wooden palace which was unfortunately located way too close to the harbor.  Eventually, the defenders numbered 2,800, including Khalid’s slaves and servants.  These troops were poorly armed with an aging Gatling gun, two Maxim machine guns (a gift from Germany), two 12” field guns, and a 17th century bronze cannon.

The entire Zanzibar Navy was also present:  one aging royal yacht, the wooden hulled sloop, the HHS Glasgow.  She was armed with seven ancient 9-inch cannon and a Gatling gun that ironically had been a present to the previous sultan from Queen Victoria.  This ship had already been retired, but was brought back into service for the looming battle.

Note.  The HHS stood for ‘His Highness’ Ship’.  If the varying prefixes in front of the names of ships are confusing, I suggest you read this.

The British had a force that included three cruisers, two gunboats, 150 Marines and the official Zanzibar Army (a force of 900 locals under the command of a British general).  If you believe, as I do, the old military maxim that God is always on the side of the heaviest artillery, Sultan Khalid was screwed.  

The British gave Sultan Khalid until 9:00 AM on August 27, 1896 to surrender and vacate the palace.  Starting about an hour before the deadline, a series of messages went back and forth between the British and the Sultan, and while I could quote them exactly, the gist of the messages was the Sultan saying, “I don’t think you will really do it” with the British responding with “Yes, we will.”

When no surrender was received, the British fleet began firing at 9:02, with the first volley destroying much of the Zanzibar defending artillery.  Wooden barricades on a wooden building proved to be no match for the high explosive rounds fired by the British warships.

At 9:05, the HHS Glasgow fired on the British cruiser, the HMS St. George.  The cruiser returned fire, immediately holing the Glasgow below the waterline.  The Glasgow immediately raised a Union Jack as a sign of surrender as the old ship settled to the bottom, her jutting masts still visible.  Lifeboats from the five British ships that were literally surrounding the doomed vessel, rescued all of the ship’s crew.  (Part of the ship is still in the harbor, occasionally visited by sport divers.)

The British ships also began firing on the Palace and its defenders, knocking out all of the defending artillery within a few minutes.  The shelling from the British ships continued until 9:40, by which point there was little left to fire on.  The Palace was in ruins—even the Sultan’s flag had been shot away.  Unfortunately, the Sultan’s nearby harem was also destroyed. 

While the Sultan managed to escape out the back door of the palace, over 500 of the defenders had been killed during the bombardment.  On the British side, one sailor was wounded but recovered.  The British ships and crews had fired around 500 shells, 4,100 machine gun rounds and 1,000 rifle rounds during the engagement.  Depending on whether you believe the war started when the deadline ran out or when the ships began their barrage, what became known as the Anglo-Zanzibar War lasted either 38 or 40 minutes, easily the shortest war in history.

The territory of Zanz remained a protectorate until 1963.  And what happened to Khalid, the deposed Sultan?  The British captured him during World War I and for a time kept him prisoner on St. Helena, once the island where the British had kept Napoleon prisoner.  Eventually, Winston Churchill allowed Khalid to return home.

Where Are the Seaplanes?

It is a commonly understood maxim of war that conflict accelerates the rate of change and innovation.  Military historians usually concentrate on the rapid rate of technical innovation and how the use of new weaponry dramatically changes the way wars are fought.

These fascinating technological changes are easy to see.  Aviation in World War II, for example, began with the military still using cloth-covered biplanes, but by the time the war was over, both rocket and jet planes were being flown.  Unfortunately, nowhere does mankind show more creativity and innovation than when improving the ways we can kill each other.  

Almost forgotten—at least by military historians—are the ways that war changes society, too.  In the twentieth century, America’s wars helped end segregation, boosted the status of women, founded new cities, and improved health care by promoting the use of antibiotics and streamlining the ways that health care was delivered.  The HMO, for example, was developed to provide medical care to the workers who built Liberty Ships at the Kaiser Shipyards.  Today, Kaiser Permanente serves 12 million members.

Among the forgotten social changes brought on by that war is one that has affected almost everyone alive today.  During the decade before the war, the most common method of transcontinental air travel was by using a flying boat.  Huge lumbering seaplanes connected America with Europe, island-hopped across the Pacific, and made regular trips to Central and South America.  

The flying public—what little there was of it—liked the idea of flying boats.  If something should happen to the plane, it could safely land in the middle of the ocean and await rescue (perhaps done quickly by another flying boat).  And these huge flying boats were comfortable, with large roomy seats that could be converted to full bunks, as well as lounges where passengers could relax, eating their luxurious meals in a dining room crewed by chefs hired away from four-star hotels.  This kind of luxury was a necessity to satisfy wealthy passengers who were paying the equivalent of today's $15,000 for a nineteen-hour flight from New York to London.  These luxurious planes were obviously the wave of the future, according to anyone who knew about them. 

Planes like the Boeing Flying Clippers were the standard of luxury.  These planes were 106 feet long and carried a crew of 11 that tended to the 36 passengers as the plane cruised at less that 200 mph across the Atlantic.  The only flying boat larger than the Clippers was the Spruce Goose, (actually officially called the H4 Hercules)—a plane that was designed to carry 750 men over 3000 miles at the incredible speed of 250 mph.  (Though Howard Hughes designed, built, and piloted the plane on its only flight, it was actually Henry Kaiser, the man who built the Liberty Boats and started the first HMO, who came up with the idea for the plane.)

The safety record for land-based planes surviving a ditching at sea is poor, even today.  There are a few surprising stories of planes forced to land in the ocean without casualties (the miraculous story of Pan Am Flight 943 comes to mind), but the public preferred the idea of a safe flying boat.

Flying boats had another advantage over land-based aircraft:  In the decades before the war, few metropolitan areas either in America or abroad had the large amount of open land required to locate an airport and the few towns that did have an airfield usually had muddy, grass-covered runways that were too short for all but the smallest of planes.  Large bodies of water, however, could be found close to almost every large city anywhere in the world.

Even today, over a third of the world’s population lives within an hour’s drive of an ocean.  Add in large rivers and lakes, and the number of sites at which seaplanes could be used goes up to serve over half the population of the world.  Even here in New Mexico, I live within just a few miles of the mighty Rio Grande.  (And while that river has water in it only about six months a year, the entire state will have beach front property as soon as the ‘Big One’ hits California.)

Even in pre-war America, with a population just over a third the size of today’s, the cost of buying and clearing enough land to build runways a mile and half long in already urbanized areas was too cost prohibitive for most cities to even contemplate.  Then, the war started and airports, with new long and wide concrete runways became a military priority in every country.  Within just a few years, it would become hard to find a large city in either America or Europe that lacked a decent airport.

During the war, flying boats were used successfully for reconnaissance and rescue, but large, land-based aircraft were being built by the tens of thousands and each new generation of planes was larger and faster than the previous models.  While seaplanes were used during the war, they were smaller, hardier work horses like the PBY Catalina, not the flying luxurious flying boats that carried rich passengers.

Years ago, I knew a retired doctor who had served in World War II as a navigator aboard B-17’s flying over Europe.  After his plane reached 25 missions, almost a miracle at the time, the crew was sent home.  Eventually, he was redeployed as a navigator on a PBY in the South Pacific.  According to him, his actual job on the plane was to keep track of a rubber hammer and a bag of golf tees.  After every water landing, he would race around the bottom hull of the plane looking for popped rivets, promptly hammering in a golf tee to stop the leak before the plane sank.  While I didn’t swallow this story whole, I’m pretty sure it is somewhere near the truth.

Those old flying boats, like the Boeing Clippers, were too slow to fly in a war zone and were grounded for the rest of the war.  Not a single example would survive the next decade.  If you want to see one today, the closest you will come is a non-flying replica in a museum in Ireland.

With the war’s end, land-based aircraft were easier to produce, safer to fly, cheaper to operate, and were much easier for pilots to learn how to fly.  The day of the flying boat, except for a few limited special operations, was over.  One company thought otherwise and tried one last grand experiment to revive the transatlantic use of seaplanes.

In 1943, the British aircraft manufacturer began designing a new generation of luxury flying boats, including a plane large enough to carry a hundred passengers and crew over 5,000 miles at the amazing speed of 360 mph.  Naturally, since 1943 was in the middle of the war, the company had to wait a few years to actually build this marvel, but the SR.45 Princess, was finally built after the war, taking flight in 1951.  Unfortunately, that was also the first year for a jet-powered transport plane, the de Havilland Comet, to become operational.  Though the Princess was built and actually flew, no airlines were interested in trying to turn back the aviation clock, preferring to buy jet aircraft instead of flying boats.  After years in storage, the Princess was scrapped.  There are still seaplanes, but the days of grand flying boats ae over.

Today, none of those grand old flying boats remain and traveling on airlines today has all the class and comfort of spending the weekend in the county jail.  If the war had never occurred, perhaps we would still be flying on luxurious seaplanes, enjoying fine meals in spacious dining rooms.  This is all something to think about the next time you are crammed into a small seat designed for children, hoping to score a miniature bag of peanuts from an overworked flight attendant.  

Buried Napoleons and Other Nonsense

Today is the Ides of April and my thoughts keep spinning around the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Lincoln, and (unfortunately) Napoleon.  I say “unfortunately” because every time I write about the little emperor, angry readers send email reminding me that I have written way, way too frequently about the diminutive Corsican whom the British monarchy referred to as the “Beast”.

I apologize in advance.  While many of the posts in this blog tell an orderly story, with a solid beginning, lots of details, and a solid conclusion…. too many others bounce along, jumping from topic to topic to topic, reminiscent of a ping-pong ball going down a long flight of stairs.  This is one of the latter.

Napoleon, of course, wrote his last will and testament on April 15, 1821, just three weeks before he died of stomach cancer,… or gallstones,… or pneumonia.  Or, maybe, he was assassinated by the British oligarchy, as Napoleon declared in his will.  Famously, the second line of his will states: “It is my wish that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have loved so well.”

The phrase “my ashes” has caused no end of confusion with historians for years.  Napoleon was not cremated nor did he wish to be, the word ashes refers to a French idiom, referring to the whole remains of deceased person, much like the phrase “dust to dust” in English.  The confusion also led to endless speculation that Napoleon was secretly smuggled off St. Helena to plan his triumphant return to Europe.  (Publicly, I can neither confirm nor deny that Napoleon is currently shacked up in a messy love triangle with Elvis and Amelia Earhart at Camp David.)

When the Emperor died in 1821, an autopsy was performed, discovering a stomach tumor that was attributed to gallstones.  His viscera were removed and placed in a large soup tureen until jars could be located.  The body, along with those jars, was placed in a tin coffin that was soldered shut, which in turn was placed in a mahogany coffin that was closed and fastened with screws.  This coffin was then placed inside a lead coffin with the seams soldered shut, then finally placed inside a larger mahogany enclosure, which was buried in a stone-lined crypt and covered with cement.  Evidently, the British were just a little afraid that the Beast might decide to wake up and raise another army.

Almost two decades later, King Louis Philippe of France decided that the emperor’s remains had to be brought back to Paris.  In the presence of both English and French officials who had been present at the 1821 funeral, the coffin was dug up, the outer wooden coffin demolished and the three inner coffins opened.  Napoleon was still recognizable to those present.  Then, the three coffins were resealed, with both the tin and lead coffins having their seams soldered shut again.  The body was then shipped to Paris and placed in the sarcophagus at Les Invalides where it still remains.  Despite the persistent rumors, there is no reason to believe that the coffins have been opened since 1840.

Which brings us back to Napoleon’s will.  The emperor had not only been generous, he was a little overly generous, leaving more bequests than his estate could handle.  Worse, he left sums of money to people that the authorities—including King Louis Philippe—didn’t really like.  All of this meant lawsuits and court cases that lasted until 1860.  A significant part of the problem was that Napoleon’s principle heir, his son Napoleon II, died in 1832 at the age of 22, long before the estate was finalized.

Young Napoleon II died of pneumonia in Vienna.  As his mother was a Hapsburg, the family followed the royal tradition and carefully removed his heart and viscera.  Following the long-established Hapsburg tradition, his heart was stored in Urn 42 in the Herzgruff (Heart Crypt) and his other assorted viscera are stored in Urn 76 a couple of blocks away at the Kaisergruft (Ducal Crypt).  The rest of him was buried.  Over a century later, Adolf Hitler moved the body to Paris and buried him underground in his father’s tomb, but left the squishy parts in their jars in Vienna.

While it has been fairly common knowledge that removing the internal organs will aid in the preservation of a body—that’s why the ancient Egyptians stored the organs of the deceased in canopic jars—this doesn’t seem to be the reason for why the monarchs of Austria believed in home canning.  Why did the Hapsburgs decide to pickle intestines?  Well, compared to what the other branch of the Hapsburg family does with their deceased, it’s almost normal.  When thinking about any part of the Hapsburg dynasty, it’s useful to remember that the family is so inbred that if common sense were leather, the collected brains of the whole family couldn’t shoe a flea.

Which brings us to Napoleon III, the first president of the French Republic who later seized the throne and became the second Emperor of France.  Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was kind of a jack of all trades.  He was once a London constable, wrote a manual for artillery, was a friend of Charles Dickens, and after his abdication, spent his years in exile in England trying to develop an energy efficient stove.  Like his famous uncle, he developed gallstones and died from complications after the second surgery to correct the problem.

Napoleon III’s son, wasn’t officially Napoleon IV—though I’m going to call him that—he was Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, The Prince Imperial or just plain Lou-Lou to his friends.  He did what every Napoleon before him had done:  he went to a military school and joined the army.  In Lou-Lou’s case, it was the Royal Military Academy and the Royal Artillery.  Unlikely as it seems, Napoleon IV was a Lieutenant in the British Army.  Equally weird, Queen Victoria was planning on marrying her youngest daughter, Beatrice to the young man as soon as his military unit returned from fighting the Zulus in Africa.  

Note:  The Queen had a plan to homestead all of Europe by marrying eight of her nine children off to the heads of European countries.  The idea was that if the head of every European nation were a member of the same family, this would prevent war, right?  During the First World War, the Russian Czar, the German Kaiser, and the King of England were all first cousins, and despite sharing a royal grandmother, they still took the world to war.  

Unfortunately, from the picture at right, you can see that Lou-Lou did not live long enough to fulfill his destiny and reestablish French Monarchy.  After dying in a skirmish with the Zulu, his body was returned to his mother, who buried both her son and her husband in the Imperial Crypt at St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough, Hampshire, England.  I cannot find evidence of any other monument in England honoring a Napoleon.

One last thing about Napoleon IV.  All of the history books say he was killed by an assegai spear.  If you actually read the official report, he had eighteen separate stab wounds, including the fatal one that punctured his left eye and pierced his brain.  These wounds, however, weren’t from an assegai spear.

The original assegai spear is slightly more than six and a half feet long, with a metal double edge tip.  Shaka Zulu, the legendary Zulu leader, modified the weapon, shortening the wooden handle to just two feet while lengthening the sharp blade to a full foot, this giving the warrior a weapon that could be thrown, or used in close combat as a combination sword and ax.  This weapon, called the iklwa or ixwa, was the weapon that killed Napoleon IV.

The strangely named weapon is pronounced as E-KWA, which according to the Zulu, is the sound the weapon makes when you pull it out of your victim.

How to Pick a Vice-President

When Porfirio Diaz seized the presidency of Mexico in 1876, the country had been almost bypassed by the social and industrial revolutions that had changed most of the modern world in the nineteenth century.  Mexico was blessed with abundant natural resources but had, in the three decades prior, suffered through a violent civil war and two foreign invasions that had caused both the loss of half her territory and the destruction of the economy.

Though Diaz ruled as a dictator, who crushed political rivals and allowed editors personal freedoms only when it benefitted himself, he did modernize the country.  Where his predecessor, Benito Juarez, had felt that “there should be a desert between the rich and the poor”, Diaz immediately encouraged trade with the United States, having compared the shape of his country to a cornucopia that poured out her riches into her northern neighbor—who was eager to buy what Mexico could export.

As President, Diaz prospered during the rapid modernization of Mexico.  Within the span of twenty years, Mexico paid off the national debt, balanced its budget, laid thousands of miles of railroad lines, expanded the mining industry, and made the ruling elite truly rich.  

While the favored few became prosperous, the lives of ordinary peasants were little changed and arguably worse off than when Cortez had conquered the Aztecs four centuries earlier.   What Diaz actually did was create two societies within a single country.  If you were rich, you rode electric street cars down well-lighted boulevards to the new opera house.  If you were poor, you lived in squalor and watched your wife die during childbirth in a dirt-floored hovel.  While Mexican government bonds were highly sought after as a safe form of investment in London and New York, agricultural workers in Mexican fields needed the written permission of their hacienda owners to move and seek employment elsewhere.

Diaz learned political survival skills rapidly, eventually holding onto his office so long that the people of Mexico began referring to him as Don Perpetuo—no mean feat in a country previously noted for its frequent revolutions.  (In the previous 55 years following Mexico’s separation from Spain, the Mexican head of state had changed more than eighty times and the list of rulers included two monarchs.  One man, Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana appears on the list seven times.)

Diaz had a talent for co-opting the positions of his political opponents before they could gain sufficient prominence to be serious rivals.  If an opponent complained that Diaz wasn’t doing enough to provide housing for the poor, for example, Diaz would agree, hire the opponent as his new Minister of Housing, provide him with a big salary and an office, and give him just enough authority to keep him busy.  Diaz learned that it was better to keep his enemies inside the tent pissing out than outside it pissing in.

Diaz knew the power of the press, and knew that it was all but impossible to keep Mexican newspapers from printing the obvious truth that he was ruling as a dictator, rigging elections, buying off the opponents who were greedy and utilizing assassins to handle those who weren’t.  So Diaz bought the more prominent newspapers and closed their competition.  Since Diaz was smart enough to know there are always underground newspapers, Diaz secretly owned them, too, firing the good writers and keeping those less skilled and ineffectual.

Truly skilled at political survival, Diaz had the record for being the longest surviving Latin American dictator until the new high-water mark was set by Fidel Castro (who had studied Porfirio Diaz).  Almost the only political flaw in Diaz’s political armor was his age.  Aged 46 when he seized control, by the turn of the century he was…. well, my age.  No longer quite as flexible as in his early years (even his collection of crony ministers was aging), and now,  Diaz faced new pressures.

One frequent request to the Mexican president was that he appoint a Vice-President, something that the wily Diaz had always avoided.  Now in his seventies, Diaz agreed and began searching for a suitable politician to share a small measure of power.  Eventually, he settled on Ramon Corral, the governor of the Mexico City Federal District.  (The Mexican Distrito Federal or D.F. is roughly analogous with our Washington D.C.—the location of the capitol but not part of any state.)

Corral got his start in Sonora, where the post revolution chaos offered plenty of economic opportunities for a politician ruthless enough to seize the property of Yaquis, widows or anyone who had been displaced by the violence of war.  When dealing with the local Indians, Ramon Corral had a reputation for being harsh and unforgiving, allowing him to quickly prosper.   It didn’t take long for the politician to outgrow the opportunities that Sonora had to offer, so he accepted the new job in Mexico City.

Porfirio Diaz, once a general famous for defeating the French Army, was now desperately trying to remake most of upper Mexican society to resemble Paris.  Men dressed in the latest French fashion, spoke French, and drank imported champagne.  Corral was put in charge of an urban renewal project that would transform the capitol into the new French style Diaz craved.  To create the new wide boulevards and parks, the homes of the poor were torn down.  Streets were torn up to install the new electric lines the streetcars required.  And Corral spent a fortune building new sidewalks and installing electric lights in the richest part of town.  For the poorer parts of town, Corral did almost nothing.

Of all the men that Porfirio Diaz could have picked to be his vice-president, Ramon Corral was a baffling choice to many Mexicans.  Not only was Corral universally despised by the people, but Diaz had ignored several other politicians who were far more popular.  General Reyes of the Mexican Army, for example, was widely respected and would have gained popular support from the citizens, whereas Corral had few friends and many enemies.

For those more familiar with President Diaz, however, the choice of a universally despised politician for his second in command made perfect sense.  Insiders joked that with Ramon Corral as vice-president, all of Mexico went to bed every night earnestly praying for the continued good health of President Diaz.

The Strategic Oil Reserve

It started with the 1973 oil crisis.  The Middle Eastern oil exporting nations, led by Saudi Arabia, were angry about losing to Israel in the Yom Kippur War.  Since Israel had been supported both economically and militarily by Western Europe and the United States, the Saudis and their allies responded with a new weapon: oil.

Declaring an embargo, these countries stopped exporting oil to the western allies of Israel, creating shortages of gasoline and sending the price of petroleum products through the roof.  Before the embargo was stopped six months later,  price of oil rose from $3 a barrel to $12 a barrel.  The twin shocks of rising prices and market shortages triggered a tidal wave of political actions in the United States, almost none of which were based on economic reality (or even on common sense).

Cheap foreign oil had shut down a lot of US domestic oil production, slowing exploration for new fields.  While many of those older oil fields could begin production again, the lag between drilling for oil and pumping refined gasoline into the tank of your car meant that there were bound to be shortages and rapidly rising prices.  All of America panicked and rushed those huge American land yachts to the nearest gas station to fill up the tanks.

At least, they tried to:  At any given time in the next year, about 20% of the nation’s gas stations were shut down, sold out of gasoline.  And this is when the federal government stepped in and started being stupid.  Gasoline sales were limited to a maximum of 10 gallons and motorists could only pump that limited amount on alternating days, assigned by the last digit of their license plates.  Odd-numbered plates could wait in line to buy gas only on odd numbered days, alternating with those with even-numbered plates, who lined up on even dates.  The level of cooperation required of the public was slightly beyond its reach, so violence between angry drivers waiting in line was frequent.

I remember that at a hotel where I was working during what became known as the ‘Middle East Oil Crisis’, about once a month we caught someone stealing gas in the parking lot with an ‘Oklahoma Gas Tank’.  For those of you not lucky enough to be from Texas, that’s about six feet of rubber hose.

This rationing system, like almost all rationing historically, was completely backwards.  Consumers, fearing the day when they would be unable to start the family car, waited in line as often as they were allowed, buying tiny amounts of gasoline to ‘top off’ a tank.  A more logical system would have mandated a 10-gallon minimum sale, and allowed people to purchase every day of the week.  Most of the panic among consumers was perpetuated by—if not caused by—illogical government mandates. 

President Nixon also imposed wage and price controls for the second time during his presidency.  (Why not?—they had already failed spectacularly the first time.)  Oil producers were allowed to raise prices on production from new wells, but not on that from existing wells, despite rising inflation that made operating the old wells increasingly costly.  Naturally, the oil producers simply shut down the old wells completely, worsening the oil shortage.  Since increased regulations and price restrictions discouraged new production, there was also little incentive for new exploration or energy innovation.  

Suddenly faced with the reality of sudden oil shortages, Congress created the Energy Policy and Conservation Agency in 1975, tasked with the responsibility of safely stockpiling an emergency supply of petroleum.  The kinds of emergencies envisioned ranged from war, to another embargo, to a major hurricane striking the Gulf Coast.   Up to a billion barrels of oil was to be stored underground in salt domes.  (And no—the risk of contamination of the water table is very low since the salt domes are far below the water table.)

While the emergency reserves have never actually been filled to capacity, under presidential authority, the stockpiles have been tapped successfully several times to offset temporary shortages and forestall impending price increases.  During the Arab Spring uprisings that disrupted exports and following the shutdown of Gulf Coast refineries from Hurricane Katrina, millions of barrels of oil were auctioned off to nearby refineries to stabilize production.  Such releases from the reserves have generally been successful, keeping employment relatively high and forestalling short term shortages of gasoline and heating oil.

Far less successful have been the times that presidents have ordered releases in an attempt to lower the market price of gasoline.  In total, the United States has the capacity to store slightly more than a billion barrels of oil, and has the theoretical ability to transfer that oil back to refineries at the rate of 4 million barrels of oil a day.  These numbers sound staggeringly high, but in reality, it is nowhere near the amount of oil the world uses daily.  Our entire reserves, if stocked to capacity, would supply the petroleum the world currently uses for about one day.  Technically, this is a flea fart in a hurricane.  And America has slightly more than half the reserves currently being stockpiled globally.  

Today, with rising inflation and skyrocketing energy prices, there are once again calls for governments to impose price controls.  Mexico is close to putting limits on the price of food, almost guaranteeing shortages and starvation.  Albania is drafting legislation to curb price hikes on oil and gas.  Some politicians in Washington are proposing that the price of heating oil and gasoline be determined by the Department of Energy.  And President Biden has just authorized the release of a million barrels of oil per day from the strategic reserves for the next six months in an attempt to lower the price of gas at the pump.

There are three big reasons why this is a bad idea.

First, there are currently only 585 million barrels of oil in the reserve (roughly half of the capacity of what those salt domes will hold).  If we release the oil as planned, there will be roughly 450 million barrels remaining as we enter hurricane season.  Should a major hurricane cripple production and refining along the Gulf Coast, we might see gas prices even higher than we have now.

Second, Congress is a bunch of cheap bastards and when it comes time to buy oil to fill those reserves, they always opt for the cheapest grades of petroleum on the market.  Our reserves are not filled with West Texas Intermediate.  No—our government fills those reserves with ‘sour’ crude, oil with very high sulfur content that is relatively more expensive to refine into gasoline.  While none of that oil has been purchased yet, it is far more likely that this dirty oil will be used to produce heating oil rather than gasoline.  And don’t forget that oil has to be replaced, so, when the government finally gets around to refilling the reserve, it will end up buying more crap oil but paying a higher price for it.

And third, price fixing by Washington never works.  America uses about 100 million barrels of oil a day and suddenly adding an extra 1% of dirty oil to the supply on the market.... will do nothing pricewise.  And I can prove it.  Do you remember how much the price of gasoline dropped last November when the government released 30 million barrels of oil to help lower prices?

No, and neither does anyone else.

A Very Fine Cat Indeed

There are great books that for reasons that escape me, people have simply stopped reading.  I am talking about classics that anyone with a liberal education always read a half century ago.  Books that were frequently discussed, referenced in magazine articles and movies….and then just stopped being read by all but a few academics specializing in a narrow field.  

The Education of Henry Adams, Don Quixote, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Flowers in the Attic, Oliver Twist, and on and on and on.  If you find someone who has actually read one of these books, the reader invariably sighs, “because we had to in school”, followed with the obligatory “hated it”.  (I could have added The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the list, but I refuse to believe that anyone who has not read Twain’s opus is either literate or an adult.)

Something is killing literacy in adults.  Can we blame movies?  Online media?  Processed cheese?  Rap Music?  I have no idea, but the trend seems to be both universal and irreversible.  How many people do you know who have bookshelves bigger than their television?  Or even a comfortable chair with a good lamp for reading?

The apparently forgotten book that prompted this rant is The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell—the book that set the standard for future biographies.   One of the great joys of owning this book is the opportunity to open to a random page and read a stirring passage.  Without fail, every time I leaf through the book, I end up reading several chapters.  And without a doubt, my favorite part of the book is Chapter 14, in which Boswell describes Johnson playing with his cats, Lily and Hodge.  Hodge, as Boswell infamously recorded, was “a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”  (And if you want to read the book, you can find it for free here.)

Boswell admits to being far from an ailurophile (someone who completely understands the joys of befriending a harmless, necessary cat).  Still, he marveled that Dr. Johnson would venture out daily to buy fresh oysters for Hodge, afraid to give the task to his servants lest they begin to resent his favorite cat.  (And before you think this was an extravagant meal for a cat, oysters were so plentiful along the shores of Great Britain at that time that they were considered standard fare for the poor.)

The love affair between Dr. Johnson and his cats was so famous that it is fairly hard to find a reference to the famous writer and lexicographer that does not mention Hodge, his favorite feline.  Johnson himself referenced the cat frequently in his writings.  When Hodge passed away at home, lovingly cared for by Dr. Johnson, two different poets and friends of the famous writer, wrote elegies in the cat’s honor.

When Marion Chesney wrote the Agatha Raisin mystery books, she gifted her heroine with two cats, named Hodge and Boswell, without bothering to explain the origin of the names.  I guess the author believed anyone smart enough to read her books was probably well read enough not to need an explanation, which also explains why the television show with the same name did not originally include the felines in the cast.

Over the centuries, Hodge has become famous in his own right as writers have written poetry about him, have included him in stories, and in one case, featured him in a work of science fiction in which the cat is catnapped from 18th century London by a time traveler.  A google search for “bookstore and Hodge” shows that there are dozens of bookstores worldwide that have cats named in honor of Hodge.  Even the Church of England has been smitten:  the new mouser adopted by Southwark Cathedral in London has been christened Hodge. Supposedly, more visitors come to see the cat than the cathedral’s architecture.

As I have noted in the last couple of weeks, London has so many statues and monuments that it is not surprising that even Hodge has one.   In 1997, the Lord Mayor of London unveiled a bronze statue of Hodge in front of Gough House, the home that Dr. Johnson, Lily, and Hodge shared.  The cat is seen sitting atop a copy of Johnson’s dictionary, with a pile of empty oyster shells in front of him.  The statue’s inscription, of course, says “a very fine cat indeed”.

What the monument does not say, however, is that no one has a clue what the original Hodge looked like.  Boswell’s notes for his biography span 18 volumes, but he never wrote a single work describing the cat’s appearance.  And while Dr. Johnson had his own portrait painted several times, he was wise enough not to try to pose with Hodge in his lap.  (Boswell did record that Hodge preferred sitting on his shoulder.)

When the sculptor, Jon Bickley, created the work, he took a little artistic license.  Bickley used his own cat, Thomas Henry, as the model.  Still, no one can prove that the statue doesn’t look like Hodge.