From Sacrificing FOR Freedom to Choosing the Sacrifice OF Freedom
On June 6, 1944, thousands of young Americans went ashore or parachuted into enemy fire.
And in 2023, a survey found that 29% of young Americans (18-29) said they would favor the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.
Here is the survey detail. Note that the desire to exist in an Orwellian world is far stronger among those 18-40 than among those older. Interestingly, people who identify themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘moderate’ are more likely to desire perpetual surveillance than those who call themselves ‘conservative’, ‘very conservative, or ”very liberal.’
History Friday – A Visit to Fort Sam Houston
I had reason to visit Fort Sam Houston today to pick up a set of prescriptions, at the new and vastly expanded BX mall, going through that one back gate where Harry Wurzbach dead-ends, after wandering past the military cemetery, the golf course and the Towers at Park Lane. It’s been a familiar haunt to me for years, even if I was never assigned there, or had reason to go to any offices when I was active duty. It was an open post back then so wide-open that it was only embarrassment that kept the Fort Sam EM/NCO club from being listed as off-limits to Air Force personnel. (There was, according to scuttlebutt, a dissolute and faintly dangerous element which used to hang out at that club.) I used to take a short-cut through the post on North New Braunfels to circumvent traffic jams on the Pan-Am Highway, when I had to drive through to Lackland AFB from where I lived on the north-east side of town. I was basically familiar with the older part; the stately red-brick Victorian senior officer-housing mansions along the northern and western side of the monumental, L-shaped parade ground, and the series of enormous three-story neo-Spanish Colonial style tile-roofed administration buildings and barracks which lined the opposite side. The mansions along “colonel’s row” always looked well kept, but in the few years after I retired, some of the older buildings began looking pretty ragged, decrepit even. I sometimes wondered if the Army had given up on painting them altogether, trimming shrubbery and pulling up weeds in the lawns around. Part of the peace dividend, I guessed.
What Things Cost, Then and Now
When reading about earlier times, the costs of various items are often mentioned, as are wages for different kinds of work. To get any sense of meaning from these numbers, they need to be compared somehow with equivalent costs in our present currency. But the estimation of inflation is far from an exact science.
Here’s a site that looks at historical vs current costs from multiple angles: Measuring Worth. I haven’t studied it in any detail yet, but it looks interesting.
See also this: Prices and Wages by Decade, 1600s-2000s
Dumb Company Tricks
WSJ:
When General Motors began outlining plans in 2020 to fully switch to electric vehicles, it didn’t account for one critical factor: Many of the battery minerals needed to fulfill its plans were still in the ground.
“I remember seeing a report from our raw-materials team at the time saying, ‘There is plenty of lithium out there. There is plenty of nickel’,” said Sham Kunjur, an industrial engineer now in charge of securing the raw materials for GM’s batteries. “We will buy them from the open market.”
GM executives soon came to discover how off the mark those projections were, and now Mr. Kunjur’s 40-person team is scouring the globe for these minerals.
Of course, the Biden administration’s energy policy basically does the same kind of assuming, but in their case on the scale of the entire US energy infrastructure.