Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Hot weather encourages feelings of gratitude for the existence of air conditioning, the primary inventor of which (at least as far as a practical system goes) was Willis Carrier. His original motivation was not the improvement of human comfort, but rather solving air quality problems affecting the operations of a printing company. But A/C was quickly applied to the dehumidification and cooling of human was well as industrial environments.
Initially, systems were large and expensive and hence better-fitted to businesses and other environments serving a lot of people than to individual homes. One of the first industries that adopted air conditioning was the motion-picture theater industry, starting with an installation at Sid Grauman’s Metropolitan Theater in 1922.
It makes sense to believe, and seems to be generally accepted, that the introduction of A/C had much to do with the great success of the movie industry…if the theater was one of the few places in town where you could be cool, then it would be nice to have enough new movies constantly coming out to justify going the the theater as often as possible.
The same phenomenon applied with department stores…starting with a Hudson’s in Detroit in 1926…though I would think A/C was not quite as impactful in that case as in the case of the movies.
BUT, with the introduction and constant improvement of home air conditioners, the process would have likely gone into reverse: if you can be cool at home, there is less incentive to “go to the movies” unless there is something showing that you really want to see. Similarly with retail..although until the introduction of the consumer Internet, you still needed to go to a store for most things.
It is pretty common that a technology that helps a particular industry at one point will, later and with further development of that industry, harm that industry. Another example is the newspaper industry: one of the great enablers of the growth of the newspaper industry was the telegraph (along with the high-speed printing press and the Linotype machine.) But as digital communications (of which the telegraph was an early example) developed into data networks and ultimately the Internet, the ability to conveniently extend the information flow into the home was devastatingly harmful to that industry.
Returning to the air conditioner, another impact of this technology has been geographical: making areas that were previously not-so-desirable for reasons of climate much more generally inhabitable…as in the cases of the US south and southwest.
A/C is a significant consumer of energy in the form of electricity, and as it is more widely adopted in places such India, it will have a major impact on electricity consumption in those countries.
Back in January 2015 I wrote the column “Ukraine’s Viking Revival” on the shape of the emerging Ukrainian Nationalism caused by the Putin regime’s invasions of Crimea and the Donbas. It is a phenomena that will be seen in coming decades as one of the formative event of the 21st Century.
Ukraine’s “Viking Revival” complete with top knots, war cats and Tartar warriors.
For reasons best known to my writing muse, I revisited it Sunday for the lyrics and video of “100 BIYTSIV.” (100 Warriors)
Translated to English Lyrics:
Flowing / like blood from a blade across the steppe / in a fine line: left-handed battle / and the right fight, death awaits / in the distant blue . We go one family one hundred warriors and I. And day by day, over again, One hundred warriors and one order. . Day by day, who knows where orders take us and the hundred go. . Through the fire / and bullets flying through coal / and through granite . We go one family one hundred warriors and I. And every day, over and over again, One hundred warriors and one order. . With every turn / and crossroads every fork in the road / so far So far / your beloved is waiting back home / you with her . By chance / yesterday our destiny fell upon us / today, and tomorrow who knows / what will come … For the Fatherland / I give my life … . Tomorrow I, then you Who knows how, and when we go to battle we arm ourselves, death to the enemy! No rest for my feet … . We go one family one hundred warriors and I. And day by day, over again, One hundred warriors and one order. . My love, do listen, and do not cry! He did not die / for our homeland! Let the enemy die / for our Donbass, A long road / awaits us. . We go one family one hundred warriors and I. And day by day, over again, One hundred warriors and one order.
I ran down and updated the video link address in my old post:
…and from there spent time looking across the latest music video markers of Ukrainian Nationalism.
There is quite a bit with really good production values and story telling. Some are from the ATO & Right Sector, but many other artists are now drawing upon these same Viking/Vanagarian/Tartar national symbols, complete with sword dancing and shield maidens, to forge a unique Ukrainian National Identity apart from Russia.
The “Blood Lands” of Ukraine are rising. And the peoples of Ukraine are remaking themselves into a new, wild, Viking ethnic nationalist image, drawing on their past heritage, and their new hatreds, with all that entails.
Proud to be Ukrainian — This video starts with children in fields and flashes to Ukraine’s struggles in the past and with Putin’s Regime.
Ukrainian Army Anthem — This anthem is a repackaging of the OUN Anthem. The 1929 “March of Ukrainian Nationalists”, which is now the basis of the revised and rearranged “Mарш Hової Aрмії [March of the New Army]” Wikipedia has the English lyrics. Putin era Russians hate this song immensely.Ukrainian Army Anthem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgdANpB9PnY
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Марш нової українÑької армії – This has the same Ukrainian Army Anthem set to the visuals of the 2018 Ukraine military parade celebrating the centennial of the brief 1918 Ukraine National Republic. Ukraine‘s first independent state since it was dismembered after the Battle of Poltava in 1709. That Republic was conquered and incorporated into the Russian dominated Soviet Union. The men above wears the uniforms of that Republic.
Like an unkillable zombie, or Freddy Kruger returning for the umpteenth time, the matter of reparations for slavery shambles out of its’ crypt on a periodic basis. The whole concept has, I surmise, a catnip-like appeal for a certain kind of politician or intellectual, when catering to the never-to-be-satiated ‘gimme that!’ crowd. “Reparations for slavery!!!!!!!!Eleventy!” gets slapped down by practical considerations about as often as Freddy Kruger … and yet, it staggers out one more time. Never mind that current estimations are that maybe only 5 % of the current American population owned slaves pre-Civil War (and not all of that 5% were white, either). Never mind that a good chunk of the then-American population bitterly opposed the institution of chattel slavery of Africans, never mind that we fought a mind-bogglingly bloody war to end it. Never mind that that any surviving pre-1865 slave or slave-holder would have to be well over a century and a half old. Never mind the sheer obscenity of demanding that rich, successful, privileged PoC’s like Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, and Barack Obama deserve a check for ancestral pain and suffering from working class and poor whites (whose’ families may not even have arrived in the US until well after 1865).
In response to this demand, I put forth a modest counter-proposal, acknowledging that yes, IF there should be reparations paid in this day for the institution of chattel slavery, for the malignant practices of the Jim Crow laws, and local law-enforced racial segregation, and the depredations of the KKK, which cruelly impacted Black Americans, such reparations ought to and should be paid by the Democrat Party.
It’s become something of a regular occurrence for the American mainstream media to blow a foreign policy story because of their Trump Derangement Syndrome. Yet they seem to have greatly sunk to new lows in missing the real importance of events leading to the 19 June 2019 Iranian shoot down of an American drone.
RQ-4N BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator)
President Trump has ended the 1980 Carter Doctrine!
The free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf is no longer a “Vital Interest,” thanks to frac’ing, for a near energy independent USA.
BACKGROUND
CENTCOM confirmed Last Wednesday night of 19 June 2019, in international air space over the Strait of Hormuz, an Iranian surface to air missile (SAM) battery shot down a US Navy RQ-4N BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator) Global Hawk. The ~$120 million drone in question was a navalised version of the USAF Global Hawk, used as proof of concept for the production MQ-4C Triton. It was essentially an unarmed, jet powered, sail plane with the wing span of a 737 jet liner and several tons of sensors. The drone fills the mission of the U-2, at similar altitudes, without the risks of a human pilot in the event of a shoot down.
Pentagon RQ-4N Shoot Down Map with Drone and SAM launch battery location.
Iran has claimed it used it’s ‘Third of Khordad‘ domestically built SAM system, operated by the IRGC, to shoot down the drone. This SAM system is described as a copy or derivative of the Russian Buk M3 / SA-17 GRIZZLY that incorporates the Bavar 373 missile that, in turn, appears to be a derivative/copy of the Soviet 5V55/SA-10B with additional controls. If you think of it as a late model Raytheon MIM-23 Hawk medium-range surface-to-air missile battery firing an early version of the MIM-104 Patriot PAC 1 missile, you would not be far wrong.
Press TV Tweet of Iranian SAM
It was this lack of a human pilot, either as a death or a prisoner of war, that saw President Trump jump off Iran’s scripted “escalation ladder.” Instead of destroying a SAM battery and converting 150 odd IRGC missile operators into another “Martyr blood sacrifice” for the Mullah regime to celebrate. Pres. Trump responded with cyber-attacks on Iranian missile control systems to remind the Mullah’s of the West’s technological “Black Magic” and additional economic sanctions that will cause further payroll cuts to both the IRGC and it’s over seas terror networks. (Truth be told, the new economic sanctions threaten the Mullah’s power far more than any set of tit for tat military strikes.)
And in a move treated as an afterthought, if the MSM mentioned it at all, President Trump ended an era in American Middle Eastern Foreign Policy.
END OF AN ERA
It has been almost 39 & 1/2 years — 10 years before the Cold War ended — that President Carter pronounced access to Mid-East oil a “Vital Interest” that the United States would go to war to protect.
Our two wars in Iraq both have that date, and that policy, as their starting point.
Now that era is over.
Last week Pres. Trump forged a completely new Middle East Foreign policy for America. Specifically, Pres. Trump took the opportunity Iran’s military escalations leading to the shooting down of the RQ-4N to end the January 23, 1980 “Carter Doctrine” expressed as follows —
“…An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
This is how Vandana Hari at the Nikkei Asian Review put it:
“U.S. President Donald Trump says he might take military action against Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But he has indicated he won’t necessarily jump in to protect international oil supplies from the Middle East if they are under threat from the Islamic Republic.
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The position, articulated by Trump in an interview with Time magazine on June 17, should not come as a surprise, even if it appears to be at odds with the Pentagon beefing up aircraft carriers and troops in the Middle East in recent weeks, citing a threat from Iran.
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As Trump spelt out in the interview, the U.S. is no longer as dependent on oil from the Middle East as it was, thanks to burgeoning domestic production.
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Air Force General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, emphasized the message a day later, pointing out that China, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea were heavily dependent on supplies moving through the Strait of Hormuz, and needed to protect their interests. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made similar comments.”
The pronouncement above was the full “Bell, Book and Candle” exorcism of American foreign policy — President, Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State. And please carefully note that it happened two days beforethe RQ-4N was destroyed.
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While “freedom of navigation” on the high seas over all and the Persian Gulf in particular remains a “major interest” of the United State of America. It is no longer one which America will automatically go to war over.
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In ending the Carter Doctrine, President Trump has fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise of “No More Iraq’s.”
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By changing the cost benefit calculations of Middle-Eastern oil — no more free riding on American protection of Persian Gulf Sea lanes — the only way a nation can “win” internationally now is by “getting close” to the American hyperpower.
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If you are functionally anti-American. You get nothing but higher insurance rates included in your price of oil to cover the political risk premiumof lacking American protection. China is now paying -defacto- and additional American oil tariff via much higher insurance rate on the VLCC tankers moving Mid-East crude oil to the Far East.
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Japan and South Korea could get lower insurance rates if they send naval forces to the Gulf to work with the US Navy. Or they can replace Mid-Eastern oil with exported US oil.
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China, not so much.
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As a correspondent put it in an e-mail to me when I mentioned the above to the list he and I are in —
“You all need to defend YOUR oil shipments through those NASTY Straits of Hormuz. The U.S. don’t need that filthy Middle East blood-oil no more. In fact, if you don’t want to spend the money and lives pounding sand in Iraq, Kuwait and Iran, we have some FINE Texas frackin’ goodness to sell at a SPECIAL price, just for YOU, our friends and allies for SO many years!”
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Snicker, choke, GASP….”
The American Left has finally gotten what it always wanted…no more “Blood for Oil“ in the Middle East.
Somehow, I don’t think President Trump delivering that reality to them will make them very happy.
You are a politician and a government official, but without much in the way of real power. You are not a member of the country’s elite class, and out of sympathy with many of the government’s policies.
For the last four years, your country has been involved in a major war–a war that you initially supported. But at least a year ago, you came to the conclusion that the war cannot be won, and that a peace treaty must be negotiated. You have had no success, however, in convincing the parliament and the government of this view.
Now, however, the leading generals have become convinced that a total and disastrous defeat is impending, and peace must be made immediately. Your country’s negotiating position at this point is not strong, to put it mildly. And one of the small group selected to conduct the negotiations with the enemy is you.
