Less than 10 percent of the way into the book (to be fair, my edition weighs in at just under 900 pages), I’m liking In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak a great deal, and looking forward to the rest.
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Author Archives: Doug Merrill
City on Fire
On April 16, 1947, the SS Grandcamp exploded in the harbor of Texas City, Texas. The ship was carrying ammonium nitrate as part of Marshall Plan relief for post-war Europe. Ammonium nitrate is both an effective fertilizer and a potent explosive, and the Grandcamp was carrying more than 2300 tons of the substance when a fire below turned into an explosion that produced a mushroom cloud reminiscent of an atomic blast. The Texas City waterfront was also home to chemical plants, and storage facilities for numerous petrochemical products. Many of these also caught fire and exploded in part. Several hundred people died; the exact total is unknown because of the completeness of the destruction at the explosion’s center.
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Premature Evaluation: Sundown Towns
An important story, very badly told.
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Power and
Last week, some US-based bloggers were talking about their dissatisfaction with the term, “soft power.”
[C]an we retire the term “soft power†already? I always feel that it’s been popularized not so much by Professor Nye as by deranged warmongers who like the idea of terming every alternative to militarism as somehow “soft,†fluffy, and weak. Soft Power is a good book, but it’s a bad coinage for an era in which national security issues have returned as a partisan political topic, and I don’t think it’s an especially great label for what Nye’s talking about.
Here’s a suggestion cribbed from an adaptation of an old tabletop game: power and influence. Roughly speaking, power is the ability to make people do things (or suffer the consequences); influence is the ability to get people to do things on their own (to gain the benefits). NATO has lots of power (and a good bit of influence), while the EU has an enormous amount of influence, but less power. Pointy-haired bosses use their power; good businesspeople use their influence.
Influence is not a second-rate type of power (soft rather than hard); it’s a separate, if related, capacity. So: power and influence.
I wrote to some of the folks whose blogs I cited. Everyone who has replied has been positive about the suggestion. Now to see if they will actually use it, and whether we can change the usage ourselves or whether we need Joe Nye to write an article.
A Fistful of Diamonds
More like a bag, or indeed several.
Armed robbers pulled off one of the world’s biggest jewellery heists at a famed Paris store, making off with 85 million euros (107 million dollars) in diamonds and valuables, officials said Friday.
A gang of four thieves — two of them disguised as women — on Thursday stole nearly all the jewels on display at the Harry Winston boutique just off the Champs-Elysees avenue, which attracts a wealthy international clientele. …
Or maybe it’s an economic stimulus package?
Between Asia and America
James Fallows points out an interesting perspective on Tim Geithner, Obama’s pick to be US Secretary of the Treasury: experience with Asia and at the IMF. Both will be very useful in the current crisis.
When I was with a DC finance firm about a decade ago, my colleagues had fairly regular contacts with him. His reputation back then was every bit as solid as it is today.
Noted with Interest
The US state of New Hampshire now has more female senators than male in the upper house of state government.
After [the November 4] election, thirteen of the twenty-four state Senate seats in New Hampshire are now occupied by women. Peggy Gilmore (District 12), Bette Lasky (District 13) and Amanda Merrill (District 21) beat out their Republican opponents to join the eight Democratic female incumbents (and two Republican women) in the upper chamber.
Any comparable results out there in euro-land?
And Now for Two Things, Completely Different
Two productivity-enhancing additions to the internet that at least a couple of our readers may not have noticed in the last 24 hours.
Google is putting the image archive of the American magazine LIFE online. Over the next few months, this will mean access to some 10 million images, the vast majority of them never published. In the meantime, some of the best-known are already online. Add the text “source:life” to any search in Google Images to specify something from the archive. Browse pictures dating back to the 1750s, though searches max out at 200 results right now.
If you still haven’t whiled away the entire day, there’s an official Monty Python channel on YouTube. As if the site itself weren’t bad enough.
Odd Moments in Political Economy
I’m beginning to think that our neighborhood grocery store here in Tbilisi could be an interesting source of stories about the politics and economics in the Second World. The tastiest corn chips come from Turkey, the cooking oil brands are almost all Russian (though with relations being what they are, I don’t know if the products themselves come directly from the neighbor to the north), the peanut butter from China looks too suspect to buy, and a fair amount of the pasta is Italian Barilla. Stocks sometimes still seem a question of what the store can get, rather than what the customers want. There are a whole bunch of fancy-looking Dutch cheeses just now, but they seem to be going for about EUR 16 a kilo, which is an awful lot for here. Particularly as I think behind the nice packaging they’re probably pretty ordinary, rather than actual super-artisan stuff that might command the price. And some of the choices are just odd: of the main shelving (the display area in the middle of the store) fully one-twelfth is given over to nothing but ketchup. Ketchup is the perfect condiment, but still. Further, the 750-ml Heinz regular in a squeezable plastic bottle with a label in Dutch is about 7.50 lari, while the the 750-ml Heinz regular in a squeezable plastic bottle with a label in French is about 9.50 lari. This does not look like a rational market. Maybe someone in management speaks English and I can find out why.
One Hour, Four Minutes and Ninety Years Ago
The guns of Europe fell silent as the Armistice took hold.
Not everywhere, of course. Fighting continued in revolutionary Germany and Russia, in the remains of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and in other places whose history I don’t know well enough to cite here.
Death and destruction were meted out on a scale that is still difficult to fathom. On the columns of the memorial at Thiepval are carved the names of more than 70,000 Allied soldiers who fell in the area between July and November 1916, and who have no known grave. I was pointed to the photo by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, whose excellent posts on successive Armistice Days are moving, full of informative links and followed by astute commentary.
Though the events themselves are passing from living memory, the world shaped by the war is still all around us.