“It’s the same price, it’s just $55 extra this year for our corporate division.”
(Actual quote just now from a service provider for a required annual inspection.)
ABC: Anywhere But China
“Made in China” is a phrase that morally discerning consumers have grown to dislike. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to avoid goods made in Communist China. Even companies that tout “Made in the USA” (e.g., Carhartt) don’t make all of their products stateside. Furthermore, online retailers like Amazon often show only that a product is “imported” and you have to dig around to figure out whether it’s made in a (relatively) free country or in a communist dictatorship that forces ethnic minorities and dissidents to work in what are effectively concentration camps.
Although “Buy American” would be preferable, personally I don’t care where something is made as long as it’s not China (since other countries that I find deeply objectionable don’t produce anything in the first place). Perhaps it’s time for the ABC movement: “Anywhere But China.”
We’re all familiar with those idiotic Proposition 65 warnings reading “This product is known to the State of California to cause cancer.” Here’s something Governor DeSantis could do to decrease the flow of payments to the CCP: add a little warning reading “This product was made in a country known to the State of Florida to employ slave labor.”
Quote of the Day: Veterans Day 2022
Americans instinctively know that empires bring more wars, not fewer. Over the centuries, Europeans have had ample opportunity to learn the same lesson, and many still understand it. The surge of so-called “populism” in much of the world today, and not just the West, is largely about not being dragooned into empires, in which taxes and mandates on the people, and each generation’s fighting men, are devoted to the agendas of rulers at some level that can’t be held accountable.
[. . .]
We don’t fight for abstractions that may bring others unknown to us under the rule of emperors. We fight so that fighting will stop, and we will have homes to go home to when it does. We fight so that the vulnerable and beloved among us can live securely in peace. We fight so that empires cannot prey on us, whether attacking us in our cities and farms or denying us tradeways and travel and interaction with our fellow men. We fight so that self-organizing “tribes,” subject to ideological fits, cannot wage guerrilla war among us.
On the PBS News Hour today or yesterday two American think-tank people discussed the Biden administration’s new enthusiasm for promoting a negotiated settlement to the Ukraine war. (The Biden people now sound like Elon Musk, except that when Musk said it people who usually support Biden called Musk a Putin supporter. Perhaps Biden finds that he can be more flexible now that the elections are over.)
One of the think-tank people, agreeing with the Administration, said that an imperfect negotiated settlement in Ukraine is preferable to the risk of nuclear war. The other think tanker said that, on the contrary, the Ukrainians are winning, and since their cause is just we should help them to reclaim all of their land and win a complete victory. The obvious (unasked) question was, Why should we even consider taking such a risk? We may sympathize with Ukraine and supply them with weapons, but risk a major war? A possible perfect outcome isn’t worth additional fighting, death, unpredictability and geopolitical peril if a muddled-through deal that leaves everyone unhappy but puts a quick stop to the fighting is available.
The Biden people and too many members of Congress have been gratuitously bellicose towards Russia. And of course Biden pulled us out of Afghanistan in a way that could only have encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine. Our leaders have forgotten, or never knew, the first principles to which J.E. Dyer alludes.
Reprise Post; At the Tomb of Couperin – Thoughts on a Centenary
(For Veteran’s Day – a reprise post from 2018)
There is a lovely little classical piece by Maurice Ravel Le Tombeau de Couperin, composed shortly after the end of the war, five of the six movements dedicated to the memory of an individual, and one for a pair of brothers, all close friends of the composer, every one of them fallen in a war of such ghastliness that it not only put paid to a century of optimistic progress, but barely twenty years later it birthed another and hardly less ghastly war. Maurice Ravel himself was over-age, under-tall and not in the most robust of health, but such was the sense of national emergency that he volunteered for the military anyway, eventually serving as a driver frequently under fire and in danger. Not the usual place to find one of France’s contemporarily-famous composers, but they did things differently at the end of the 19th Century and heading all wide-eyed and optimistic into the 20th. Citizens of the intellectual and artistic ilk were not ashamed of their country, or feel obliged to apologize for a patriotic attachment, or make a show of sullen ingratitude for having been favored by the public in displaying their talents.
