Bidenomics and Free Trade

Since the founding of the first colonies, America has had a complicated, love-hate relationship with the concept of free trade—the legal right to import and export goods without restrictions or taxes being paid for the privilege.  

The history of how America has set, then reversed, trade policy is a complex and nuanced story that has evolved over centuries.  It's a narrative marked by periods of enthusiastic support for free trade, that have been interrupted by bouts of protectionism and trade restrictions.  This history reflects the interplay of economic, political, and social factors that have shaped the United States' approach to international trade.

In its infancy, the United States adopted a relatively open approach to trade.  The U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1789, granted Congress the authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations, emphasizing the importance of international trade for the new nation's economic growth.  This commitment to free trade was reinforced by policies such as the Embargo Act of 1807, which aimed to protect American interests on the high seas.  Since American manufacturing was just getting started, the fledgling country was eager to import foreign goods.

Throughout much of the 19th century, the United States generally adhered to a policy of free trade, with tariffs kept relatively low.  This era of free trade was driven by the belief in the benefits of laissez-faire economics and belief in "manifest destiny," which called for the westward expansion of the nation and access to international markets for American goods.  As the North became industrialized, Northerners wanted more tariffs on imports, while the South—where the economy was largely based on agriculture—desired the lower prices on manufactured goods that would come with free trade.  This North/South split over trade policy eventually became one of the causes of the Civil War.

Toward the end of the 19th century, the United States began to experiment with more protectionist policies.  After the Civil War, the South had lost political clout and was powerless to stop the North from enacting tariffs to protect Northern industry.  The McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 marked a shift toward even higher tariffs that were aimed at protecting domestic industries from foreign competition.  The protectionist sentiment intensified during the Great Depression of the 1930s, leading to the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, which raised tariffs to historic highs—an act that was quickly matched by other countries, creating a global financial crisis.

After World War II, the United States played a central role in the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a precursor to the World Trade Organization (WTO).  This marked a renewed commitment to free trade and the reduction of trade barriers.  The Bretton Woods Conference, in 1944, established a framework for post-war international economic cooperation, emphasizing trade liberalization.  

The 1970s and 1980s saw a resurgence of free trade policies.  The United States pursued trade liberalization, entering into bilateral and multilateral agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the United States-Canada Free Trade Agreement.  These agreements aimed to expand market access and promote economic growth.

In the 21st century, the United States has continued to navigate a complex trade landscape. The country has been party to various free trade agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—later known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)—and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).  However, trade tensions have also arisen, leading to trade disputes with major trading partners, particularly China.

Recent developments have posed challenges to the United States' love of free trade.  Growing concerns about job displacement and economic inequality have led to calls for a reevaluation of trade policies.  The Trump administration, for instance, pursued a more protectionist stance, characterized by measures such as tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

The COVID-19 pandemic further underscored the importance of domestic supply chains and self-sufficiency in critical industries, prompting discussions about the resilience of the nation's trade policies.

There have always been good reasons for America to pursue a policy of free trade, as it allows American consumers to buy goods at the lowest possible prices and it shifts domestic labor to where it will be most efficiently used while encouraging innovation.  And as the American economist Frédéric Bastiat said, "If goods don't cross borders, armies will." Bastiat argued that free trade and economic cooperation between nations could lead to greater harmony and reduce the likelihood of conflicts and wars.  It just might be even simpler than that, it may be that free trade promotes peace because before you can trade with anyone, you have to respect the other's right of ownership.  

Today, by contrast, it appears that one of the tenets of ‘Bidenomics’ is to move away from free trade.  A recent article in Politico (Biden’s Trade Experiment is Ticking People Off by Steven Overly and Doug Palmer, July 03, 2023) describes how Katherine Tai, the U.S. Trade Representative, is forming a new trade policy that moves from delivering the lowest price for consumers to one that protects American jobs.  This move, aimed at placating Labor, has alarmed members of both parties, and has drawn sharp criticism from our European allies.

Tai believes that traditional trade agreements such as Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) ultimately allowed American manufacturing to move jobs out of the United States in pursuit of the profits that would come from cheap labor.  Tai suggests, instead, that America should focus on “raising global labor and environmental standards” and on making more goods domestically.

I wish Ms. Tai luck but trying to protect domestic jobs in an increasingly global market seems akin to King Canute ordering the tide to recede.  But where Canute knew his act was futile and his humble act was an effort to teach his advisors the limits of power, no one is sure if Tai actually believes that her “worker-centered” trade initiatives will work or if those are simply pre-election assurances to the president’s pro-labor base.

As Politico reported:

“If we want different outcomes, we’ve got to be willing to try new things,” Tai said earlier this month following a speech outlining the administration’s new trade approach.  “I don’t know that every single one of them is going to work.”

This doesn’t sound like a thoughtfully reasoned economic policy—it sounds like the age-old, shady practice of politicians promising to protect jobs that are inevitably lost.  

Franklin and the Gulf Stream

Did you ever know something that you thought everyone knew, but it turned out that almost no one knew it? 

When I was growing up out in the middle of nowhere in Texas, we used to play tag football using an armadillo as the ball.   Naturally, the rules forbade kicking or passing the ball.  We never hurt the armor-plated varmints, just carried them around by the tail until someone tripped and the ball escaped.  Most of the charm of messin’ round with ‘dillos was that our parents had expressly forbidden us from having anything to with them since everyone knew that if an armadillo scratched you—as it most positively would do if you were foolish enough to let it—you could catch leprosy.

 

I knew about armadillos and leprosy from the time I was old enough to be able to pick one up by the tail, so I was surprised sometime in the late 1970’s to read in the newspaper that scientists had just discovered that humans could catch leprosy from armadillos.  Evidently, wherever those scientists had come from they didn’t play much armadillo football.  Their loss.

 

If you go back to the 18^th century, there were lots of sea captains who had noticed a strong southwest to northwest current in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but since the current couldn’t always be located and there was no generally recognized central depository of naval knowledge, it became one of those things that those sea captains thought everybody knew but was actually a secret.

 

Note.  I wonder if the internet, the great central clearing house of all known knowledge and cute cat photos will put an end to this knowledge vacuum.  Just think…For the rest of time, when someone googles ‘Texas armadillo football’ they will find this blog post.  Well, this and nine million articles about Texas State University’s Fighting Armadillos.  

 

Ben Franklin was one of those rare individuals who craved knowledge and just had to solve the unexplained.  In 1753, after successfully serving as postmaster for Pennsylvania, Franklin was appointed deputy postmaster for the British colonies.  As part of his job, Franklin oversaw the delivery of mail to and from England.  The mail from England generally came from London on speedy little packet ships that were specially built to transport passengers and mail quickly.  Mail sent to England might travel on the packet ship’s return there but might also travel on merchant ships traveling to a port in England.

 

Franklin found that the slower merchant vessels sailing from Newport to London crossed the Atlantic faster than the packet ships traveling from Cornwall to New York, despite the fact that the faster packet ships took a shorter, direct route.  In 1768, as part of his duties, Franklin traveled to London and back.  On the journey, he recorded careful measurement of both air and water temperatures.  Initially, Franklin incorrectly attributed the differences in travel time to the Earth’s rotation, then he believed it might be due to prevailing winds.  It took years for Franklin to correctly attribute the current to temperature differentials.

 

After gathering information from numerous sea captains, Franklin became convinced that there was a strong and continuous “river” that started in the Gulf of Mexico, skirted along the coast of the colonies, then crossed the Atlantic.  Franklin believed that, if the limits and boundaries of the currents could be charted, then sea captains could purposely enter the current while eastbound and avoid the current as much as possible while westbound, thus cutting many days off the time it took to travel across the Atlantic.  

 

Franklin was correct, of course.  What he began documenting was a phenomenon first noticed by the Spanish Explorer, Ponce de León, in the sixteenth century.  It was León who called the current the "Gulf Stream" (in Spanish, "Corriente del Golfo") due to its origin in the Gulf of Mexico.                                                                                                                                         

 

The Gulf Stream is a powerful warm ocean current in the North Atlantic Ocean.  Originating in the Gulf of Mexico, it flows northward along the eastern coast of the United States.  As it moves northeastward, it transports warm waters from the tropics toward the North Atlantic.  The Gulf Stream is characterized by its swift and narrow core, which can reach speeds of up to 4 to 5 miles per hour (6.4 to 8 kilometers per hour).  The warm waters have a significant impact on the climate of the eastern United States and western Europe, moderating temperatures and influencing weather patterns.  The Gulf Stream also plays a vital role in marine ecosystems, affecting the distribution of marine species and serving as a critical migratory route for various marine life, including fish and sea turtles.  Its complex dynamics make it a subject of scientific study and a key element of global ocean circulation.

 

Franklin began writing scientists in Europe, describing his theory about a “Gulph Stream” and asking for both advice and additional data.  In particular, Franklin began a correspondence with his cousin, Timothy Folger, who was a Nantucket whaler and an  experienced mariner. This correspondence led to the production of a chart that depicted the Gulf Stream and its warm-water currents. Franklin's observations and discussions with Folger were significant in advancing the understanding of the Gulf Stream.  The 1768, the Franklin-Folger Chart of the Gulf Stream was printed and widely distributed.  Through the years, the charts have improved, but ships still make use of the Gulf Stream.

 

There is a oft-quoted story in several history books that during the American Revolution, Franklin kept the information about the Gulf Stream from the British, but furnished it to our allies, the French, so that their ships could defeat the British Navy.  It’s a great story, but nonsense, since the British had obtained copies of the chart almost a decade before the revolution started.  There is no telling how this idiotic story make its way into so many published accounts.  Sometimes, those stories tat everyone know to be true turn out to wrong after all.

 

Yet Another Gun That Won the War

I could write endlessly about this topic.  Which war?  And from whose point of view?  Both Colt and Winchester claimed they produced the gun that won the West.  Great Britain successfully invaded over half the countries of the world using the Brown Bess musket—the same gun that Mexico used when it lost the Mexican-American War.  And Teddy Roosevelt wrote glowing reports about the Krag-Jørgensen Rifle used in the Spanish-American War.

Even if we narrow it down to a single war (in this case, World War II), there are many claimants.  The British still sing the praises of the Lee-Enfield No. 4 rifle while the Russians are positive that their Mosin-Nagant 1891/30 bolt action rifle was the best weapon in the war.  Naturally, every American knows this is all nonsense, since the M1 Garand rifle was the best rifle of the war by any realistic measure.  (I’ve fired all three and there is no doubt in my mind that the Garand really is the best rifle of the war and the Nagant comes in second.  Rifles are not the only thing the Brits have strange ideas about.)

The U.S. Army Air Corp would argue that “Ma Deuce”, the .50 caliber machine gun, was the definitive weapon of the war, and since it is still being used by almost everyone, everywhere, there is merit to that argument.  The weapon is so reliable, that recently, the U.S. Army removed from its active inventory a machine gun with a three-digit serial number that was over 70 years old.  

Today, however, we are going to look at the Gun That Won the War—at least from the point of view of the US Navy.  According to naval historians, there is absolutely no doubt that the honor goes to the Mark 12 5-inch/38-caliber gun—no surprise if you consider that almost every naval combat ship built between 1934 and 1948 carried these guns.  To that number, you can add Coast Guard vessels, armed merchant vessels, and quite a few of the ships of our allies.  Altogether, almost 8,000 of these large guns were produced.

At the end of World War I, the Navy was reevaluating the need for multiple caliber guns.  Since the navy used 14-inch, 12-inch, 11-inch, 8-inch, and multiple different guns in both 6-inch and 5-inch, the logistics of supplying the ships was difficult.  Some ships, in particular the cruisers and battleships, carried as many as many as four different gun sizes, requiring multiple storage compartments for each.  And since the crews were normally only trained to operate one type of gun, crew training was difficult.

After the war, there was growing recognition that naval ships had to have more effective anti-aircraft guns.  Since the navy was currently using a low-angle 5-inch gun for surface-to-surface combat and a different 5-inch anti-aircraft gun, it was thought that a new 5-inch gun was needed—one that could combine the better qualities of both existing guns.  

Designed the Bureau of Ordnance of the U.S. Navy, the resulting 5-inch/38-caliber gun was a revolutionary design that became the most widely used naval gun of the war.  The Mark 12 was used for ship-to-ship action, it was a deadly anti-aircraft weapon, and it was even used effectively for shore bombardment.  It had a maximum range of almost 16 miles and was effective against aircraft up to 37,000 feet—a height that only the German Arado jet bomber that was introduced late in the war could exceed.  The resulting naval weapon was still being used as late as the Falklands War.

Note.  The caliber of firearms and rifles can be a little confusing, primarily because there was no set authority on determining definitions, and the popular names arose through traditions that varied not by the countries where the guns were developed, but sometimes to the branch of the service that developed them.  In general, for handguns and rifles, caliber is a measurement of the bore size of the weapon.  A .38 caliber revolver fires a pistol round measuring .357 inches wide, .38 inches is the width of the loaded brass case.  On naval cannons, the caliber is a reference to the length of the barrel, as measured by multiples of the muzzle bore.  So the 5” 38 caliber naval gun has a barrel that is 38 times as long as the 5” bore, or 190”. 

The gun, with the highly accurate Mark 37 fire control system to aim it, was a semi-automatic weapon.  When fired, a hydraulic system absorbed part of the recoil, and ejected the spent powder case, cocked the firing mechanism, and opened the breech.  The gun was then loaded by hand, and an electric/hydraulic ram closed the breech.  While the gun was rated to fire 15 times a minute, a well-trained crew of from 15 to 27 men could fire the weapon every three seconds.

The Navy quickly began using the Mark 12 in larger numbers than originally intended, with most large ships replacing all of the intermediary sizes of guns with the new Mark 12, simplifying the logistics of ammunition storage.  The USS Iowa, for example, famously had 9 massive 16-inch guns, but also had 20 Mark 12 5-inch guns.  These were the largest guns carried on aircraft carriers during the war.  The cruiser USS Atlanta, pictured at left, carried sixteen of the Mark 12 guns.

As effective as these weapons were, a major improvement was introduced in 1943.  When the 5-inch guns were used against enemy aircraft, the shells were not intended to actually hit the aircraft, but a timed fuse was set to explode at the altitude of the attacking plane and shrapnel from the exploding round was supposed to destroy the aircraft.  Naturally, with a ship frantically maneuvering during combat, a fast moving airplane, and a rocking ship….well, even with the superb Mark 37 fire control system, on average a thousand rounds were fired for every enemy plane destroyed.  No wonder then that the total number of rounds fired was in the millions!

What was needed was a smart fuse—one that would explode automatically when it got within range of the enemy plane.  Both the British and the Germans were working on a fuse that used a small radar transmitter and receiver that would detonate when the radar unit indicated that the speeding shell was in range.  Making the fuse was relatively easy (they could even be made relatively inexpensively), but making a fuse that could withstand the 20,000 G’s the fuse would experience when the gun fired was seen as impossible.  The best design the British had come up with could withstand 100 G’s, about what a baseball experiences when a major league pitcher burns one over home plate.

The United States has a standard solution for such problems:  Just keeping throwing money and men at the problem until you find a solution.  In this case, it was millions of dollars and 10,000 researchers working at and around John Hopkins.  Most of those involved were not even sure just what they were trying to build.  Take for example the men whose job it was to climb to the third floor of the Pratt Library and toss prototypes out the window to land on the concrete below.  

By 1943, the VT or Variable Timer fuse was ready.  It wasn’t actually a “variable” timer, that was a bit of espionage subterfuge to fool the enemy.  For the same reason, the fuse wasn’t allowed to be fired over land until very late in the war lest the enemy find a defective round and copy the design.  The one exception to this rule was in England where 120 V-1 “buzz bombs” were landing daily.  After the introduction of the VT fuse, 79% of incoming V-1 cruise missiles were destroyed.

In the Pacific Theater, the VT fuses and the Mark 12 gun were immediately effective and were largely responsible for the success at shooting down enemy planes, particularly during the Battle of the Philippine Sea—“The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.”  Anti-aircraft gunnery at night was improved 370% as soon as the new proximity fuse was delivered.  

As Admiral Forrestal said after the war:

The proximity fuze has helped blaze the trail to Japan. Without the protection this ingenious device has given the surface ships of the Fleet, our westward push could not have been so swift and the cost in men and ships would have been immeasurably greater.

Okay, maybe the 5-inch gun didn’t really win the war, maybe it was just a tremendous help in winning the naval war.  But consider what would have been the result of the war if both Germany and Japan had developed both the 5-inch gun and the proximity fuse early in the war.  It is doubtful that the Allies would have been able to secure air superiority, meaning no strategic bombing, no D-Day invasion, and a more protracted period of war.

I've changed my mind, maybe the Mark 12 5-inch gun did win the war, after all.

A Truckload of Chickenshit

Volkswagen makes a neat little pickup called the Amarok, but unless you travel to Europe, you’ll probably never see one.  In Australia, they have an interesting little pickup that combines the best qualities of an off-road vehicle and a hot little sports car.  But, you can’t buy one in the United States.  And the best-selling pickup in the world is the Toyota HiLux.  Even though you can buy a near cousin—the Toyota Tacoma—the rugged Hilux has never been available for American buyers, either.

Instead, Americans pay more for pickups than just about anyone else in the world.  

And if you want to know why, you can blame World War II, President Lyndon Johnson, and chickens.  Let me explain—no.  That will take too long, so let me sum up.

It started with World War II, when food production dropped dramatically while young men got out from the behind their plows and got into tanks.  Not only were there too few people working agriculture, but what little food was left after the needs of the military were met, could not be adequately distributed to civilians because of the lack of transport.  Coupled with this was the strict European system of food rationing that stifled innovation in food production.

In England, for example, you were encouraged to have a victory garden and raise a few rabbits or chickens for personal consumption, but if you raised enough to sell your neighbor a few potatoes and a spare pound of meat, that was considered illegal and selling on the black market.  Even if you tried to sell your goods legally, AND you managed to fill out the mountain of paperwork, AND you endured the endless inspections, you would discover that the price controls mandated that you must sell at a loss.

Remarkably, no one seemed to realize that the double whammy of price controls during a period of inflation and a restrictive rationing system severely stifled any entrepreneurial impulse to either expand production or to innovate.  Since the authorities would not reverse these policies until conditions improved, and conditions did not improve until the price controls and the rationing system were stopped…England was still rationing food 9 years after the end of the war.

England might still be clipping coupons to buy food had not Winston Churchill come out of retirement to lead the Conservative Party to victory on a platform of ending rationing.

Meanwhile, in the United States—just like in England—civilians were encouraged to plant a garden and raise a few chickens to supplement the rationing system.  But, there were two major differences.  The US rationing system did not care if someone sold a chicken or two to a neighbor, and the system here was slowly relaxed, encouraging businesses to innovate and expand food production.  All food rationing in America ceased in 1946.

By the end of the war, there were two major changes in the business of selling food to the United States.  First, meat preferences had changed for most Americans.  Before the war, most Americans rarely ate chicken—it was reserved for special occasions such as holidays or Sunday dinner.  Most Americans consumed more mutton or pork than chicken, but just five years after the end of the war, the annual sales of poultry surpassed the sales of mutton and was catching up with that of pork.  (That trend continued:  the average American today eats roughly 80 pounds of chicken a year compared to only 50 pounds of pork.)

The other major change took place in a rather obscure company that specialized in the importation of tea and animal hides—The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company had begun specializing in the production and sale of chicken meat.  Prior to this, most companies had thought of chickens as little more than life support systems for egg production.  

Just prior to World War I, the company had begun to expand, setting up tiny little tea shops across America to sell the tea they imported.  This was the start of what economists call vertical integration.  Slowly, the little tea shops added, first, cigarettes, then a few groceries.  After that, the company bought a fleet of trucks and built huge warehouses to handle the inventory for all the little tea shops… and just before the war started, the company rebranded itself as A&P and started opening up what were to become 16,000 supermarkets in 3,800 communities.

As the war ended, the Justice Department brought suit against A&P for illegal trade practices.  It seems that the company would move into a location, lower its prices until the competition was bankrupt, then raise prices in a market it now controlled.  If this sounds like the tactic of  another company you know—it’s probably just a coincidence.

To distract the public from the government suit, A&P started a nationwide contest and advertising promotion called The Chicken of Tomorrow.  Farmers and breeders from across the country sent in fertilized eggs to be incubated, hatched, and carefully raised in a controlled environment with a standardized diet.  From over 50 finalists, prize breeds were selected in 1946, 1947, 1948, and 1951.  Over time, the winning birds were crossbred, eventually producing a huge, tasty bird that could damn near pluck its own feathers before jumping into a hot frying pan.

Companies like A&P expanded their vertical integration by building proprietary hatcheries, growers, feed mills and processors that all merged into larger and larger commercial farms.  It wasn’t long before the United States began exporting these large, tasty, and incredibly cheap chickens to foreign markets.  When American frozen chickens hit Europe, it all but bankrupted the small and struggling-to-emerge-from-the-war poultry industry.  And those European farmers all turned to their governments and screamed, “Fowl!” (Well, the French screamed, “Poule!” And the Germans cried, “Huhn!”)

The European Economic Community (EEC), the forerunner to today’s European Union, put tariffs on the importation of American frozen chicken in the early 1960’s.  Since the tariffs were high enough to protect the production of European chicken, the American imports slowed down to a trickle.  Predictably, American producers screamed at Washington to do something to protect American jobs in this flagrant abuse of free trade.  (“Fowl!”)

Washington and the EEC had many meetings at which notes were taken and time was wasted and absolutely nothing constructive was accomplished.  In December 1963, President Lyndon Johnson was tired of all the talk with no results, and since an election year was rapidly approaching, he placed a retaliatory tariff on the importation of foreign light trucks.  This was a clear signal for the Europeans to drop the chicken tariff and since no one had ever accused Lyndon Johnson of being subtle, the tariff was a massive 25% on the value of all imported foreign trucks.  

With the imposition of that tariff, the importation of foreign trucks screeched to a halt.  Shortly after that, Europe and Japan began importing small economy cars and the “Big Three” auto manufacturers took a real whipping in the market.  Today, the most profitable sector of the American automobile market for General Motors and Ford is their domestic sales of pickup trucks, each and every one of which sells for a higher price than if those automobile makers were facing competition from overseas.

For a country that constantly lectures the rest of the world about the benefits of free trade, this tariff (commonly called the “Chicken Tax” on competitively priced pickup trucks) is outrageous.  Oh, we can buy American-made Toyota trucks, but as consumers, we are entirely cut off from the free market for competitive pickups made in the rest of the world.

Do you remember the Subaru Brat, the small, lightweight, rugged, odd pickup with weird seats fastened in the bed?

To avoid the "chicken tax," Subaru made a clever modification to the Brat.  It installed two rear-facing seats, often referred to as "jump seats," in the cargo bed of the Brat. These seats were not conventional passenger seats but something akin to cheap plastic lawn chairs.   By adding these seats, Subaru was able to classify the Brat as a "passenger vehicle" rather than a light truck.  And that wasn’t a truck bed in the back:  it was a convertible passenger compartment.  Ludicrous!—but, legally, Subaru got away with it.

One more point:  Europe drastically lowered the tariff on imported chicken way back in the sixties.  Unfortunately, by then, Detroit had gotten rich from the chicken tax and could afford to make hefty campaign donations to the right politicians.  Those politicians are far more interested in being re-elected than insuring that you pay a fair price for your truck.

Did Schrödinger’s Cat Lick Lasers?

Full disclosure.  I’m a compulsive note taker.  Not just in class (though my class notes are so good that at the end of the semester I have them bound into a book to use as a reference volume), but I scribble little notes into a notebook at the oddest times.  Faculty meetings, funerals, weddings, dinner, and even in the middle of the night when I wake up from a strange dream.  (I’m at that age where I attend more funerals than weddings and should probably stop buying green bananas.). Many of those notes end up as blog posts sometime later.

I usually carry a Moleskin notebook and if I have a few minutes to spare—and I don’t have a book to read—I can happily sit, writing down nonsense, random thoughts, or something interesting that I just heard.  Occasionally, I discover that some of my notes (particularly those I write down in the middle of the night) are a little less than coherent.  I have a note from a couple of years ago, that I jotted down with several stars around it to indicate that it was important.  Unfortunately, I have never been able to remember just what was so important about the words “Laser Licker”.  Did I invent something in the middle of the night?  What did it do?  If it means something to you, go ahead and patent it—I hope it makes you rich.

Every year or so, I take the assorted writings from the current notebook and list them here.  I apologize.

Since at least the time when Andrew Carnegie was building libraries across the country, it was assumed that the reason for rampant stupidity was the lack of information.  Well, now that we all carry small portable devices that can access the accumulated knowledge of the entire world, what do we blame now?  Lite beer?

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had a pet cat named “Dixie”.

On his daily walk to school, the young Vincent van Gogh passed a grave where a tombstone bore his own name.  The grave was that of his own brother, who had died before the artist was born, and his parents gave their next child the same name.

Julia Child’s first successful recipe was for shark repellent.

Panama hats are made in Ecuador.  Camel hair brushes are made from squirrel fur.  The misnomer somehow originated from the brushes’ introduction into Europe back when the brushes were made from the fur of the Siberian Ibex.  If this makes any sense to you, perhaps you can explain why Boston Whalers are sturdy boats that were never made in Boston and never used in whaling? 

Evidently, Schrödinger never realized that everything outside of the box was equally unknowable, at least from the viewpoint of the cat.  If he had realized this, his entire world would have been immediately sucked down a Lovecraftian worm hole.

Fatherhood is the only time in a man’s life when he tells girls to put their clothes on.  

When cell phones first came out, every year they got smaller and more portable.  Now, every year they get bigger than the year before.  Why?

When President John F. Kennedy died, almost every American knew of the assassination within 40 minutes.  It took even less time for the majority of Americans to learn of the Challenger Disaster.  Yet somehow, there are people who believe that space aliens crashed in Roswell, New Mexico seven decades ago and and the news still hasn’t leaked out.

From 1953 to late 1954, the role of Senate Majority Leader switched back and forth from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party a total of 12 times due to the deaths of  senators.  Eventually, the Republican Party, despite having a majority, told the Democrats to just keep the position, as both parties were fairly non-partisan at the time.   Yes, these are the same names of the two major parties we have today.

If Professor Maleficent was any dumber, she’d have to be watered daily.  She teaches imaginary classes in which she pretends to teach while students pretend to learn.

When President Grant, as a young boy traveling to start his first term at West Point, rode on a train at the astonishing speed of 12 miles per hour, he wrote in his notebook that man had annihilated space and distance and that the perfection of rapid transit had been reached.

Would you care to guess the average age of the members of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the British House of Lords?  Which do you think is the oldest?  Considering that membership in the House of Lords is both inherited and for life, you might guess that the Brits hold the honor of the oldest group of public servants.  Unfortunately, the honor falls to the US Supreme Court at 71 years.  The House of Lords and the Senate jockey for second place regularly, but currently, the average age of our Senators is slightly less at a spry 64 years, while the British Lords average 69.

There are only two types of people early in the morning.  I hate both of them.

Reintarnaton is coming back to life as a hillbilly.  

“Critics are people who watch a battle from a high place and then come down and shoot the survivors.”  --Ernest Hemingway

Adam Smith is the father of the study of Economics.  Buried in Edinburgh, if you want to pay your respects, admission to his grave is free.  Karl Marx, the philosopher whose publications supported socialism, is buried in London.  Admission to his gravesite will cost you $6.

Charlie Chaplin frequently gets credit for lampooning Hitler in the 1940 movie, The Great Dictator.  Usually forgotten however is that earlier that same year, the Three Stooges made You Nazty Spy.  The Stooges’ movie was the first Hollywood movie to ridicule Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Roses are red, roses are blue, depending on their speed, relative to you.

The Model 1860 Boarding Cutlass remained an official weapon of the US Navy until World War II.  Then, in the early days of the war when space on transport ships was at a premium, some idiot supply clerk shipped thousands of them to Australia.  After the cutlasses had sat in a warehouse for months, some enterprising soul had their hilts ground off and had their blades shortened and resharpened.  The resulting mini-cutlasses were then issued as jungle machetes.

After spying a model in Edison’s Laboratory, J. P. Morgan had Edison build the first electric toy train as a birthday present to the financier’s daughter.

Clementine Churchill, the long suffering wife of Winston Churchill, used to joke about an epitaph she wanted on her gravestone:  “Here lies a woman who was always tired, for she lived in world where too much was required.”  Though she outlived her husband by more than a decade, her gravestone lists only her name and the dates of her birth and death.

During the Napoleonic War, mess cooks aboard English sailing ships were required to whistle while fixing meals to prove to the men they were not eating the crew’s rations.

The US Navy maintains a forest of white oak trees in Indiana exclusively to provide the wood necessary to keep the USS Constitution in working condition.

The Institute of Unfinished Research has discovered that six out of ten American adults.

Both the Christian Bible and the Islamic Quran teach us to love one another.  The Indian Kama Sutra is more specific.

People who decry toxic masculinity should remember it is the reason their ancestors weren’t eaten by wolves.

Why exactly should universities be ‘safe places’?  Safe denotes complacency, calm, and rest.  Universities should be exciting places of discovery, where students confront challenging ideas, violently reject long held prejudices and wrestle with cherished opinions.  Walking into a library should elevate your blood pressure as much as an African safari.

That's enough.  My hope is that by revealing a little of the contents of my notebooks periodically, it will lessen their shock value at my commitment hearing.  

YAWB (Yet Another Weird Boat)

Yes, I’m writing yet another post about a strange boat.  But, as usual, you have to go around three sides of the barn to get to the horse at the end of the rope in your hand.  Unless you are Quentin Tarantino, the only way to start a story is at the beginning.

The Douglas DC-3 airplane, introduced in 1935, revolutionized the aviation industry.  This was an almost perfect airplane, that was so rugged and reliable that many of them are still in use, despite being more than old enough to qualify for Social Security.  They were ruggedly dependable and reliable, they were easy to fly, and most importantly, they could carry enough passengers and freight to be profitable without being subsidized for carrying the mail.  This just may be the best airplane ever designed, and will certainly be the first plane to still be working despite being a hundred years old.

Almost immediately other aircraft manufacturers raced to produce competing planes—usually with four engines, longer fuselages, and a longer range.  None of the planes proved to be as versatile and capable as the DC-3.  Even today, after 88 years, the only thing that can replace a DC-3 is another DC-3.  One of the newer designs, however, deserves to be mentioned.

Boeing was already developing the B-17 Flying Fortress for the American military when it took the B-17 design, keeping the wings, tail, rudder, undercarriage, and engines but substituting a new, much larger, pressurized and circular cross-section fuselage.  In other words, it was a civilian transport version of the B-17, with a pressurized cabin that would enable the plane to carry more passengers and ascend above turbulent weather, while going faster and farther than the DC-3.  This was, for its time, the perfect plane for airlines.  And a few of them actually bought several of the new Boeing 307 Stratoliners.

In 1940, you could pay TWA $150 for a ticket to fly from New York to Burbank California in only 15 hours.  Amazingly, the plane had to stop only three times (in Chicago, Kansas City, and Albuquerque) for gas.  The overnight flight would even provide a sleeping berth for an additional $120.

Unfortunately, after only ten of these planes were built, the world plunged into World War II and Boeing stopped production of the Stratoliner to concentrate on building bombers for the military.  The few airlines that had already taken delivery of the aircraft turned them over to the military who removed the plush passenger seats and carpet and converted the planes to C-75 transport planes.  After the war, these planes found their way into various militaries around the world. 

Four of them were shot down by either the Pathet Lao or North Viet Nam.

One of the Stratoliners, however, had been sold to Howard Hughes for $315,000 before the war.  In 1938, Hughes had set the world record for a round-the-world flight in a Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra in 91 hours and 14 minutes.  Since the Boeing plane was both faster and had a longer range than the Lockheed, Hughes had planned to break his own record.  Normally, Boeing would not have sold a much sought after plane to a civilian, particularly with a war looming on the horizon, but since Hughes owned the majority of the stock of Trans World Airways and Boeing hoped to sell a lot of planes to TWA, Hughes got the fourth plane off the assembly line.

Hughes took possession of his Stratoliner in July, 1939 and was in the process of having long range tanks installed when Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939.  The new record attempt was canceled and Hughes had the plane stored at Hughes Aircraft in Glendale, California for the duration of the war.  If you are wondering how Hughes managed to keep the government from taking the plane for military use, Hughes kept them at bay by dismantling his airplane.

Following the war, Hughes had the plane extensively remodeled for his own person use, intending to use the plane as sort of a flying Winnebago. At a cost of over $250,000, renovation of the plane (that Hughes named The Flying Penthouse) included removal of the long range tanks and installation of a bedroom, two restrooms, a galley, and a large living room (sporting a large wet bar).  At the same time, Hughes replaced the engines with larger and more powerful models.  

A lot of the life of Howard Hughes is surrounded in mystery and that includes his use of his Stratoliner.  We will probably never know how often he used it, who else flew on it, and where it went, but we do know that, just before 1949, Hughes spent $100,000 to remodel the interior in preparation for selling the plane to Glenn McCarthy, the Texas oil millionaire.

“Diamond Glenn” McCarthy was the king of the wildcatters—a man who made and lost fortunes on a regular basis.  In 1949, he opened the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, that was the largest and most luxurious hotel in the world at the time.  If you have ever seen the movie, Giant, McCarthy was the model for Jett Rink.  Just as in the movie, McCarthy used his Boeing 307–now renamed the Shamrock—to fly in Ava Gardner, Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers, Jack Benny, Betty Grable, and other Hollywood stars to his hotel.

Note.  Many years later, I worked at the Shamrock Hotel while I went to college and have written about the hotel several times.  Though it had been decades since McCarthy had owned the hotel, I saw the hoofprints from McCarthy’s horse on the parquet floor of the private elevator that went from the underground parking garage to his penthouse.  The stories of a drunken McCarthy riding his horse up and down the halls of the hotel are true.  

Glenn always had several business plans in the works simultaneously, and he gambled a fortune on each.  Take, for example, his idea to build a massive enclosed baseball and football stadium on land he owned on the south side of Houston.  Other projects included KXYZ radio station in Houston, two banks, a bar, a brand of bourbon called "Wildcatter", the McCarthy Chemical Company, a magazine, 14 "throwaway" newspapers and a movie production company known as Glenn McCarthy Productions.  Glenn’s wells hit oil 38 times, and he won and lost fortunes throughout his life.  In one of those losses, the Shamrock Hotel went to the Hilton Corporation and Howard Hughes repossessed the Stratoliner.

By this point, Hughes was no longer interested in using the plane for personal transportation nor was he interested in selling it.  Though the airframe had less than 500 hours of flying time, it just sat at an airport for years, until Hurricane Cleo severely damaged the plane.  Eventually, the wreck was sold to Kenneth W. London for $69.

It was not feasible to make the plane airworthy again, so London cut the wings and tail off, fastened a hull under the fuselage and converted the plane into a houseboat called the Londonaire.  Powered by two V8 engines that were linked to the original flight controls, steering the unusual but speedy houseboat has been described as: “driving it is like driving a school bus. On ice. Backwards. Downhill. Blindfolded, and occasionally a little drunk.”

The 56-foot-long planeboat was then sold to Dave Drimmer for $7500, who finished the conversion for a measly $200,000.  Sometime during the conversion, Jimmy Buffet saw the former Boeing floating in a Florida harbor and became enchanted with it.  When he described the unique houseboat in his book, he called it the Cosmic Muffin.  While only Buffet knows what the term means, Drimmer renamed the boat and it remains the Cosmic Muffin to this day.  Most of the interior remains as Howard Hughes last saw it, including the wet bar and cockpit.

Drimmer lived on the planeboat for years until the cost of maintaining the craft became too heavy and he donated the vessel to the Florida Air Museum, where it has been restored (as a houseboat not a plane) and is on permanent display.

If you are interested in seeing the last airworthy Boeing 307, it is at the National Air and Space  Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

College Highs

The new semester has started, and if all goes well, I’ll graduate—again—in the spring.  I’m only taking two courses this semester, but my tuition for this semester at Enema U, a state cow college in Southern New Mexico is slightly over two grand.  To that, you can add a lot of other miscellaneous charges, bringing the total bill for my two classes to roughly $2500.

I’m not complaining, since as a retired faculty member, my tuition (but not those miscellaneous fees), is waived.   There were other incentives promised to retirees, such as free golf and a special parking permit, but the university has reneged on those benefits.  The tuition waiver has so far been honored—at least until some jackass in Abattoir Hall reads this.

The steadily rising cost of going to college is not just caused by the ever-escalating cost of tuition:  increases can be found in almost every sector of the university.  I’ll start with the obscene cost of textbooks.  For one of my courses, a five-year-old book (in fact, a rather small book that is cheaply bound), the cost is $360.  An alternate option is to rent the book for a semester for only $120.  This is not a rare textbook in an obscure field, but a standard in a subject where there is intense competition.  Seeking an additional reference text, it cost me under $30 to buy a similar book, written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author.  

Why does the required textbook cost so much?  Because the book publisher also offers online quizzes, supplemental educational videos, PowerPoint slides and lecture materials to the professor.  The professor is being offered an entire course in a box, so that very little personal effort on his part is required…And in some cases, the publishing company has a financial arrangement with the university (or in layman’s terms, a kickback).   One of the other benefits for the university is that there will be dramatically less need to hire tenured professors to deliver the course.  The university can hire an adjunct professor to deliver the TV-dinner course, saving money since adjuncts are paid far less, rarely receive benefits, and can be fired at will, long before they retire—at which point they may start writing an irritating blog and take advantage of those tuition-free classes.    

One of the strange side effects of this arrangement is that, because of the higher cost of buying textbooks, the majority of the students are forced to use online E-books or rent the few textbooks that come on paper, returning them at the end of the semester.  My house is overflowing with books on history, anthropology, art history, and Latin American Studies because I acquired a lot of books while I was studying those fields—books that went from being required for a current course to later being useful reference tools.  Since the Economics Department has all but become a subsidiary of the British company, Pearson Group, I will not have a single leftover economics textbook for reference after graduation.  

Despite the widespread use of E-books and proprietary textbooks that the university can rent year after year, the cost of textbooks has risen faster than any other expense associated with university education.  Since the late 1970’s, the average cost of textbooks has risen by more than 1000%—an increase five times higher than the cost of other books.

It is hard to find something at the university that hasn’t become more expensive.  The students pay dearly in the dining halls to be served Purina College Chow.  My free retiree parking permit went up 10% this year, alone.  I may be mistaken, but the parking fee seems to go up every single year while the number of parking spaces available seems to dwindle.  Of course, every single time the subject of parking comes up, some nitwit will claim that when they were at the University of Who Cares, the parking fee was a fresh kidney and a bucket of unicorn blood.  For some reason, this is never comforting to cash-strapped students or a university employee who is forced to kick back the equivalent of a day’s pay just to park at work.

And then there is the high cost of tuition.  Universities do not waste money like drunken sailors because when sailors run out of money, they stop spending.  Universities spend money like the Federal Government:  state universities, in particular, can sell bonds to continually borrow more and more money.  Just about anybody could sit down with a university budget and cut out millions of dollars of wasteful spending (and could do it without any of the students—and most of the faculty—noticing any ill effects from the cuts).  

Here's a quick way to save millions:  eliminate all of the upper-level administrative positions created in the last thirty years.  If the university didn’t need an Executive Vice-President of Student Articulation and its accompanying staff in 1993, it could probably get along without one now.  (That’s a “real” position at Enema U and I have never been able to find out what responsibilities come with the job).

There are a lot of other, simple things that would lower the cost of university education.  Post-tenure review would remove some of the non-productive dead weight in some departments.  Or requiring every administrator to teach at least one class a semester, which would allow the university to offer more classes without additional payroll expense and simultaneously remind the administration of the real purpose of the university.  And while universities do need new buildings periodically, every new university president immediately develops an Edifice Complex, knowing that the best way to be hired away by a bigger and more prestigious university is to build a new stadium or athletic facility.  Since I have been at Enema U, I’ve lost track of how many times the coaching staff has moved into new offices.  

Which, of course, brings up the subject of the monstrously high cost of collegiate sports.  Did you know that the highest paid state employee in 43 states is a coach?  Did you know that, while the average state employee’s salary is $63,000 a year, the average college football coach brings down $3.4 million annually?  It is also sometimes a little hard to discover just how much that coach actually receives, since their pay is frequently hidden among multiple accounts such as shoe contracts, summer camps, Foundation subsides, Alumni Association speaking fees and multiple other accounting tricks.  There are nuclear secrets that aren’t as carefully hidden as the salaries of university coaching staff.  Isn’t it strange that they don’t have to pull the same bookkeeping stunts for a really good math professor?  Why don’t we ever hear about recruiting scandals in the English Department?

If you want to cut the cost of a college education, you have to address the incredible amount of money spent on collegiate athletics.  At some state universities, this can amount up to 20% of the university’s total budget.  That’s an incredible amount of money to spend on something that has nothing to do with the core mission of education and, more often than not, lends itself to corruption, scandals, and lawsuits.  

As a nation, we need to stop the conversation about who should pay for college and instead focus on why we have allowed these costs to rise to the level where government assistance is being seriously considered.  Nor should we expect that the solution will come from within the university system itself:  it has to be an initiative led by the state legislatures.  

Expecting the universities to solve their own budget problems is like expecting the drug cartels to develop a better version of Narcan.

Goodbye Flip

While I was growing up, we lived in a small Texas town so remote that we had cable radio…Well, almost.  We certainly didn’t have a local newspaper, so I grew up reading the Fort Worth Star-Telegram—the paper from the mighty metropolis to the east of us and a good newspaper that I still occasionally read.  But as good as the paper is (and was), the paper I first loved was the Weekly Reader.

If you’re reading this, you probably know all about the Weekly Reader, since it started weekly publication in 1928, providing age-appropriate news and public interest stories for school children across America.  I can’t remember exactly but I think it cost about a dollar a year, which cost was probably partially subsidized by the school.  Since my family didn’t have a television yet and about the only thing that I remember hearing on the radio back then was the farm report or Porter Wagoner, the Weekly Reader was a major source of news for me.  

For a poor, dumb ol’ country boy, the stories in the Weekly Reader were real eye openers—particularly the frequent stories about science, NASA, and exploration.  I can still remember some of those news stories practically verbatim, such as the article about Sealab and the aquanauts exploring the ocean floor.  Another one of those stories was about an amazing “ship” that was designed to partially sink on purpose.  Called the Flip Ship, the aft 300 feet of the vessel would flood with water and sink, flipping the forward 55 feet upward and aft 90°, creating a research laboratory.

Technically, Flip wasn’t actually a ship at all, since the vessel had no propulsion and it had to be towed to its destination, so it was a FLoating Instrument Platform, but probably no one referred to the vessel as such except for the U.S. Navy, who owned the platform.  The Scripps Institute of Oceanography, a part of the University of California system, used the unique platform as a research laboratory, for over 1000 experiments, because the deep vertical ballast made the portion of the platform above the water extremely stable and almost immune to wave action.  When the experiments were finished, compressed air would be pumped into the vessel, expelling the seawater, and returning it back to its horizontal floating position, ready to be towed to the next research location.  

The inspiration for such a novel vessel came from an unusual source:  A scientist was conducting experiments on sonar improvements while aboard a US Navy submarine, but found that while the sub was surfaced, the natural wave action of the ocean rocked the ship, interfering with his experiments.  One day, while the sub was in port, his eye was caught by an ordinary mop floating next to the pier.  He observed that the mop floated with the mop head below the surface and with just the top foot of the handle sticking straight up out of the water.  More important, he noticed that the mop stayed stationary as the waves hit, neither rising nor sinking as the waves passed, and he reasoned that a vertically oriented, partially submerged ship might behave the same way and be similarly unaffected by wave action.  In 1962, the Flip Ship, technically the RP FLIP, was launched in Portland, Oregon.

With a crew of five, whose jobs were mainly to care for the generators, compressors, and water purification system, the vessel would be towed into position, then the forward ballast tanks would be flooded with 600 tons of seawater to rotate it.  The process that took thirty minutes, with the last two minutes said to be the most exciting for the eleven scientists on board.  Once in place, the extremely stable platform could remain in position for up to a month.  

As you have probably guessed, the interior of the Flip was a special design with some fixtures meant to be rotated, while others had to be duplicated on either the wall/floor or the wall/ceiling.  All of the counters and kitchen appliances in the galley were mounted on gimbals.  The main living area was located in the "cradle" end of the vessel, and included a galley, a mess hall, a lounge, and a recreation room. The crew's quarters were in the "handle" end, with some as much as 150 feet underwater, and they included individual cabins, a shower room, and a laundry room.  Overall, those working on Flip said it was an enjoyable duty, but after days of living in horizontal rooms, it took several days for the crew to become accustomed to living in the ‘new’ vertical rooms.

Flip, unfortunately, has become a casualty of COVID.  After fifty years of scientific service, the research platform was to be partially dismantled and added to a museum collection, but after it sat idle during the Pandemic, the Scripps officials decided it would cost too much to prepare the vessel for display and sent the platform to a breaker for dismantling.  As I write this, Skip is being towed to her final destination.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hear the latest news about Skip from the Weekly Reader, though I would be happy to have a subscription.  (For my grandchildren, of course.). The Weekly Reader—like so  many other newspapers and magazines—was killed off by the internet and ceased publication in 2012.

Bogus Armies

A fake army is a force that does not exist—a military force that actually is not capable of delivering a strike against any opponent.  It exists only because of an act of deception or because of a misinterpretation of military intelligence.  There have been more of them throughout history than most people realize.

Though fake armies usually rely on deception, deception alone does not create a fake army.  There have been countless confrontations in which one side or the other used dummy soldiers to create the illusion of a larger force than was actually on the field.  This tactic has been a common practice in warfare for millennia and was used extensively by the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Mongols.  In many battles of the American Civil War, both sides enlisted the aid of “Quaker Guns”, bogus artillery that consisted of black painted logs set up either to intimidate the opposing side or to create a target at which the enemy would waste artillery fire.  

It was during World War II that fake armies really came of age.  During the North Africa Campaign, the British, in “Operation Bertram”, camouflaged real vehicles, created fake units out of baling wire and calico, constructed artillery out of bundles of palm fronds, and generated so much fake radio chatter that Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was convinced that the attack at El Alamein would be farther to the south than the actual offensive was.

Similarly, the Germans kept a careful eye on the First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) that was commanded by General Patton since they knew that this army would lead the advance for the D-Day invasion in 1944.  In reality, FUSAG’s tanks were Goodyear inflatables, the massive collection of troop tents were empty and the radio traffic was a deception invented by radio operators on one side of the tent to operators on the other side of the tent.  FUSAG worked so well that on the actual day of the invasion, Rommel was on vacation, certain that the invasion could not happen because Patton’s army was still in camp.

At least one of these deceptions had tragic results, however.  Through carefully conducted Japanese deceptions, the Allies in early 1945 were convinced that the Japanese Army in Manchuko was at least a million men stronger than reality.  One of the reasons that Allied strategy relied on atomic warfare in lieu of an invasion of the Japan was was the belief that Japan could swiftly move its forces back across the Sea of Japan to defend the homeland.  

These armies were fake, though at the time, they had very real military uses.  There have been other military forces that actually existed, but were nevertheless totally fake and were a military threat to absolutely no one.

Take, for example, the strategic bombing force so large that it was one of the top ten aviation forces in the world, all under the control of movie director Mike Nichols.  In 1969, Nichols wanted to bring to the screen Joseph Heller’s best-selling novel, Catch-22, that was based on Heller’s own experiences as a bombardier on North American B-25 Mitchells of the 488th Bombardment Squadron (Medium) in the Mediterranean.

This is a great book and I’m not saying that just because my high school confiscated my copy of the book due to its frequent use of profanity.  (I stole the book back from the principal’s office, and finished reading it during my three day suspension.). 

For Nichols to make the movie in those days (long before CGI), he had to actually acquire the aging airplanes.  At the time, the “go-to” aviation source in Hollywood was Tallman Aviation, the company started by stunt pilots Frank Tallman and Paul Mantz.  Mantz had been killed while flying the Tallman P-1 for the movie Flight of the Phoenix.  Tallman Aviation continued under Frank Tallman.

Luckily for Nichols, who produced the movie with a budget of only a $18 million dollars, Tallman already owned four B-25 bombers and was able to acquire fourteen additional aircraft.  Most of these could no longer fly, but Tallman was looking for planes with good hydraulics and wiring, intending to install serviceable engines in all of the planes.   

Since they were no longer airworthy when purchased, the planes were purchased at bargain prices (one costing only $1,500).  All of the planes were brought to flying condition, with working bomb bay doors, and repainted to resemble World War II aircraft.

In addition, Tallman spent a million dollars building a replica airfield including a barracks, a control tower, and a 6,000-foot runway.  To fly the aircraft, Tallman trained 32 pilots and had them licensed for the twin engine B-25 aircraft.  By this time, Nichols controlled one of the largest strategic air forces in the world.

The planes flew for a total of 1,500 hours with no accidents in order to create the 12 minutes of film needed in the movie.  One of the planes was intentionally crashed for the movie, and the remains were buried next to the runway.  Fifteen of the aircraft remain today, eight are still flying (including the Berlin Express above), and the remainder are in museums around the world, including the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Nichols Air Force consisted of only 18 bombers, a handful of trucks, and a small fleet of jeeps.  Pepsi, on the other hand, once controlled an entire naval force, including a modern cruiser, a frigate, a destroyer, and 17 submarines.  

Yes, I’m talking about Pepsi Cola.  No:  I’m not talking about boats at an amusement park.

We have to start with President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon.  In 1959, Eisenhower convinced that the Soviets to allow a American Exhibition of Products in Moscow.  Among the array of American products were huge cars from Detroit, American-made televisions, and Pepsi.  A Pepsi executive named Kendall had convinced his company to be part of the exhibition.

When the exhibit opened, Vice President Nixon skillfully steered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over to the Pepsi exhibit to sample the wares.  While the Russians are fond of sweet drinks, Khrushchev was not overly impressed with the soft drink.  But the photo of the premier drinking Pepsi created the stereotype of Pepsi being part of the decadent goodies that were being denied to the Russian people.

While Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, Kendall had better luck, becoming the President of Pepsi—in part due to his product placement coup in Russia.  Kendall threw Nixon a bone, making it clear that whichever prominent law firm made Richard Nixon a partner, would be assured of becoming the house law firm for Pepsi.  The New York law firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, & Todd eagerly accepted the deal.

Nixon, who became rich from the deal, spent some of his new-found wealth to orchestrate a political comeback and he traveled the world as a Pepsi spokesman.  When Nixon won the presidency in 1968, he was in a position to return the favor to Kendall.  Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, began working on a deal for a select few American corporations to enter the Soviet market.

In 1972, Pepsi announced that a deal had been reached with the Soviet Union in which $500 million worth of Pepsi would be exchanged for $500 million worth of Stolichnaya Vodka, which the company could sell in the West.  In a small codicil of the agreement, Coca-Cola was banned from the Soviet Union.

Pepsi became very popular in Russia, while for a spell, everybody in the US seemed to be drinking Stoli.  Russians clamored for more American products and it wasn’t long before the people of Moscow were standing in long lines at Pizza Hut, which was a division of PepsiCo.

By 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was having a hard time supplying enough vodka to pay for all the soda and pizzas being consumed by the Russian people.  Surely, there was something else Pepsi would accept in trade?

Look around your house for any products you own that were made in Russia.  Except for vodka and perhaps caviar, you are not likely to find anything.  No one I know owns a Russian-made computer or a pair of shoes produced in a peasant sweatshop.  I do own a box of matches that someone brought me from Russia, that are very pretty in a rugged sort of way, but they are impossible to light.  What else does Russia make?

Russia is basically a large gas station with a military and with the collapse of the evil empire, Russia could no longer afford to maintain a huge and aging navy, so Russian officials worked out a deal to trade old naval vessels to Pepsi.  These vessels weren’t to be used, as they were rusting hulks, badly maintained, and since Coca Cola did not have any ships that Pepsi could attack on the high seas….The ships were to be sold for scrap metal.

At the time, the deal was big news.  Pepsi had a navy, albeit a somewhat fake navy.  At least for a little while.  Turning warships into soda and pizza was a better deal than beating a sword into a plowshare.  

The ships weren’t really worth having, the cost of moving them was very high and they were so full of asbestos that it is doubtful that Pepsi broke even on the deal.  What did not make the popular news was that Pepsi received a total of 85 ships and that the other 67 ships were valuable commercial vessels that included two oil tankers and an ice breaker, all of which were sold at a sizable profit.  The ships for soda trade stopped after Russia began to sell oil in Western market and could afford to pay cash for its imports.

If you are wondering, in 2021, Pepsi had its most profitable year in Russia ever.  The next year, Pepsi stopped doing business in Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine.