Gangdom style

As long as there have been cities, there have been street gangs. In Shakespeare's day, London seethed and trembled at the prospect of rioting apprentices.

On the 1840s, Manhattan was regaled and repulsed by the violent attacks of gangs with  names like the Dead Rabbits.

Just 50 years ago, the fictional but lifelike Jets and Sharks rumbled with tire chains and knives.

Not much changes in the structure and habits of gangdom. But one thing has. Read this Los Angeles Times report of some gang attacks n Chicago yesterday and see if youcan guess what it is:

Two people were killed and eight others were wounded in an attack at the site of a memorial for a man who was slain earlier Sunday in the Brighton Park neighborhood, police said.

Firearms.

The arming of America has not made America safer.

Book Review 387: S.S. Great Eastern

S.S. GREAT EASTERN: The Greatest Iron Ship, by George S. Emmerson. 182 pages, illustrated. David & Charles

Great hardly begins to characterize the ship that was originally to have been named Leviathan.  In burthen, she was as big as a World War II aircraft carrier, though not so long. She was too big — no ship as big was built again for 50 years — but she was exactly the right size.

If ever life played a joke on technology, it was with the Great Eastern. The first captain of this huge ship proved unable to manage a dinghy while going to board her and was drowned. It cost more to launch her than the original estimate to build and launch her.

George Emmerson’s biography — claimed to be the first — reveals a more interesting story than the common image, which is of a jinx ship, built too big by self-deluded technocrats.

It turns out, the most interesting part is not the ship — though she is full of interest — but the finances.

I.K. Brunel’s design pushed to the limit of 1850s materials and understanding but was successful. It was capitalism that failed.

The projectors did not have enough capital, but worse yet, some of them had more or less secret designs to have the ship fail: think of “The Producers” set in a shipyard. Add to that financial shenanigans that today are, at least nominally, reprehended, and even without her repeated bad luck, Great Eastern was sailing for trouble.

To begin with, her size. The problem to be solved was similar to the problem of a trip to Mars and back today: how to get to Australia in good time, and back.

Steam, rather than sail, but there were scarcely any coaling stations in the Southern Hemisphere, so the ship had to carry fuel for a round trip. That accounts for her size. (Intermediate between the big steam ship and the Mars trip was the problem of airplane flights between England and Australia; the answer had to be flying boats because there were no landing fields.)

The ship had to be iron (this was before the advent of cheap steel) so Brunel designed a bridge that would float. He added features that are still not common in ships: complete compartmentation and a double bottom. The ship was almost impossible to sink, which — jinx alert — was proved when she ripped her hull on a poorly charted reef outside New York Harbor.

A similar accident sank the Titanic. One difference was that Brunel designed a genuine two-hulled-ship, with coal bunkers inboard of the inner hull. Titanic was, in theory, double-hulled, but the space between the hulls was not left void but used for coal. When it came time to close off the openings, coal dust in the rails for the sliding doors made that impossible.

Financial misadventures, including one of the unregulated market’s frequent crashes, meant that S.S. Great Eastern was not used to carry passengers and freight to Australia. Instead, she was sent between England and America, where she was too big to compete with smaller ships.

And here she did prove sinkable. A poorly thought-out heat exchanger (not Brunel’s design) blew out, setting off a series of failures that left the ship wallowing in a storm. The company’s chief engineer was aboard but incompetent.

Luckily, an American engineer sailing as a passenger stepped in with a jury repair of the broken rudder and saved the ship.

There are numerous other fascinating anecdotes in Emmerson’s short book, many reflecting poorly on Victorian manners and morals, but for this review one more will suffice.

When it came time to lay an Atlantic telegraph cable, the Great Eastern proved just right for the task, but some of her owners had interests in competing cables and apparently put saboteurs aboard to ruin the cable by spiking it with wires to cause shorts underwater. 

When one thinks of the competing private firms offering to send travelers into space, it might be worth remembering that.

Where Godwin's Law does not work

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1" The unstated premise is: this is a bad thing.

The flaw in Godwin's Law is that there really are nazis. If you are not a nazi and tend to avoid places where nazis congregate, it can be too easy to forget that.

I had not visited Wonkette.com lately so had missed Dok Zoom's curious post on April 11, "Oh Look, Nazi Flat Earthers. Aren’t You Surprised??"

Well, yes, I was; and yet I wasn't, due to the phenomenon of crank magnetism. Anyway, Dok linked to a site called We Hunted the Mammoth.com, which looks to be worth bookmarking.

A little bit of this goes a long way, but it is worth reminding yourself from time to time that there are people out there like that, and that they probably look harmless.

 

Cow College was never like this

I went to one frat rush party, over 50 years ago, and there was underage drinking going on. And I saw classmates pass out from booze and being dragged away at football games.

But I never heard of "back-packing" until now. Possibly that was because Moo U didn't offer any 15-foot flights of stairs to fall down.

In a group text message shortly before midnight, one of the fraternity members wrote: “Also, Tim Piazza might actually be a problem. He fell 15 feet down a flight of stairs, hair-first, going to need help.”

The brothers later returned Mr. Piazza to the couch, the indictment said, where they were seen “back-packing him” -– putting a backpack, stuffed with textbooks, on his back to weigh him down, so that he would not roll over and choke on his own vomit.

Or maybe we were just naive.

Low productivity

The session of the state Legislature that concluded today was the least productive in the 30 years I have lived here, or perhaps ever. The ouster of Joe Souki as speaker of the House suggests that the Legislature's fundamental problem  -- Oahucentricity -- will get worse, not better.

Maui has always punched far above its weight in the postwar Legislatures, starting with Elmer Cravalho and Mamoru Yamasaki. I covered both men at the tail ends of their careers, and while they were as different as they could be, they did each have clear ideas of what they wanted and knew how to get much of it. Roz Baker and Joe Souki had less success leading the House and Senate but some, and at least they saw to it that Neighbor Islands' issues were not swallowed in the goo of Oahu parochial concerns.

Now the leadership is all Oahu, and since they could not even come to a vote on Honolulu rail, I doubt next year will be productive. Today's story in The Maui News about the inability of the legislators to deal with the Front Street Affordable Apartments, which ought to have been simple despite the heavy breathing of the speculators' attorney, predicts the future. Don't expect any attention to Neighbor Islands issues from here on out.

There's a problem in the American system whenever one party dominates a legislature. Party maneuvering takes precedent over governance. We see it in the Congress now, but it afflicted John Adams and, even more, James Monroe. It's been an unforeseen flaw since the very beginning and is baked in.

Religious fantasies

Whiny Baby Donald continues probing the Constitution to see how much of it Americans will surrender without a fuss. (Mort Sahl said Nixon read the Constitution looking for loopholes.)

 That explains why his order on religion in politics is so much less antiAmerican than the draft leaked three months ago. Remember, though, that whoever wrote that draft is still working for Trump.

And filling the empty spaces in his head with ideas like this:

“For too long, the federal government has used the power of the state as a weapon against people of faith, bullying and even punishing Americans for following their religious beliefs. You are now in a position where you can say what you want to say.”

You laugh, but there are millions and millions of Christians who imagine they are being persecuted. Recall the undying alarm in the churches about the imaginary government move to suppress religious broadcasting.

As a relic of my days as a newspaper book reviewer, I get constant offers of strange books. Some are very strange.  Last week, I got this pitch:

 In a daring new political thriller, lawyer and author Richard T. Dolezal imagines a world where people of faith must strive to take their country back. In The Fourth Vow, a chance discovery gives the Catholic Church irrefutable proof that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is executing a decades-long strategy to destroy Christianity in America. Pope John Paul II retains famed trial lawyer Carson Elliott to confront the ACLU. The ACLU responds by having Elliott killed. And so it begins.

“And look at society today.  It is quite easy to observe how vulgar, uncaring, coarse, rude and sexually-explicit our culture has become, and how unpatriotic and poorly informed some people are," Dolezal says. "Those of us who have lived awhile can remember a better society. In my book, I suggest that an ‘incremental evil’ has slowly insinuated itself into our daily discourse and dulled our senses to its ugliness. Where are the Christians pushing back?”

In the Rose Garden.

Need it be said that you have to be stone crazy to imagine the ACLU as a hit squad? 

How far would Trump go?

He has already gone very far.

The administration’s hard line on the standard for criminalization has gone so far as to alarm several members of the Supreme Court, as demonstrated during an argument before the Court last week (Maslenjak v. United States), in which a Justice Department lawyer argued that, as The Times reported, “the government may revoke the citizenship of Americans who made even trivial misstatements in their naturalization proceedings,” including not disclosing a criminal offense of any kind, even if there was no arrest. To test the severity of that position, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., confessed to a crime — driving 60 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone many years ago without being caught. He then asked if a person who had not disclosed such an incident in his citizenship application could have his citizenship revoked. The lawyer answered, yes. There was “indignation and incredulity” expressed by the members of the Court. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy told the lawyer, “Your argument is demeaning the priceless value of citizenship.” Roberts put it simply. If the administration has its way, he said, “the government will have the opportunity to denaturalize anyone they want.”

Timothy Snyder, who I have written about before, says he believes Trump is ready to go much further.

 
Snyder writes in his book that Trump will likely have his own conflict that brings about the “massive reckoning” Bannon seeks. Something like Hitler’s Reichstag fire that is either a war with North Korea, Iran, China, Russia or any of the other countries he’s antagonized over the last 100 days. In fact, Snyder said that it was “inevitable” that Trump and his team would try such an obvious stunt.

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“Whether it works or not depends upon whether when something terrible happens to this country, we are aware that the main significance of it is whether or not we are going to be more or less free citizens in the future,” Snyder explained. “My gut feeling is that Trump and his administration will try and that it won’t work. Not so much because we are so great but because we have a little bit of time to prepare. I also think that there are enough people and enough agencies of the government who have also thought about this, and would not necessarily go along.”