Category: Books

Apple in China book: what China can do with everything it has learned from Tesla and Apple

by philg

A third post about Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee… (see Apple in China book, Intro and Apple in China, the rise of iPod)

The book’s big theme is that Apple taught the Chinese everything that they now know about making high-end electronics. The author says that Tesla did something similar:

As The Economist later put it: “For all its manufacturing might, China never mastered internal-combustion engines, which have hundreds of moving parts and are tricky to assemble.” Electric vehicles changed the game. But more specifically, Tesla did. China’s ambition in electric vehicles goes back to around 2001, and with hefty government incentives, EVs became embedded in the public transportation system about a decade later. The sector had been so awash in incentives and subsidies that Shenzhen alone had 17,000 electric buses at a time when all of Europe and North America had practically none. Consumers who purchased EVs were often able to get a free license plate, which are otherwise tightly controlled and sold at auction. Despite all this support, EVs and plug-in hybrids together accounted for just 4.8 percent of the new car market in 2019. Tesla broke ground on the Shanghai Gigafactory in December 2018; by late 2019 China-made Model 3 vehicles were coming off the production line. Immediately they were a massive hit, and the Tesla Model 3 was China’s bestselling EV in 2020. Chinese consumers “didn’t want to buy anything being manufactured by Chinese brands; they all wanted Tesla,” says Parikh. “As soon as Tesla came, there was a paradigm shift from consumers, and that’s something the Chinese government saw. This was an opportunity to have the entire EV industry in China compete with, and learn from, Tesla.”

Tesla’s investment in China has worked out brilliantly for China’s EV sector, with quality improving across the board. The share of EVs and plug-ins soared from under 5 percent in 2019 to 38 percent in 2023. And the investment has certainly worked out well for Tesla: Shanghai now accounts for half of the company’s global production. But there are longer-term uncertainties and unanswered questions. “In this game, one American company—Tesla in cars and Apple in phones—gets to win,” says another former Tesla executive. “They don’t care if all their US competitors lose. It’s actually better for them. But on the other side, all the Chinese companies win. They all get to step up and create a massive market where none previously existed.”

What’s the potential downside?

Over the coming year, the onslaught from Huawei would be intense. China’s national champion increased its share of the local market from 20 percent in the first half of 2019 to 27 percent in the second half, and then to 29 percent in early 2020. It began outselling the iPhone three to one in China, particularly threatening because it was taking a bite out of Apple’s luxury dominance. In China’s “premium market”—phones priced between $600 and $800—Huawei share soared from 10 percent in early 2018 to 48 percent a year later, causing Apple’s share to fall from 82 percent to 37 percent. Apple’s hold in the “super premium” market—phones priced above $800—was still impressive, at 74 percent, but it had fallen from 90 percent a year earlier. If Huawei’s success had been confined to China, the damage would’ve been limited. But in 2019 the Chinese brand overtook Apple sales globally. It shipped 238.5 million phones—more phones than Apple had shipped even in its peak year of 2015. The student, as they say, had become the master.

Chinese brands had accounted for just 23 percent of global smartphone shipments in 2013, the year of Apple’s political awakening. But their share surpassed 50 percent in 2020. Brands led by Huawei, Xiaomi, and Vivo gave Chinese companies, in 2022, a cumulative market share in both China and Russia of 79 percent; in Indonesia, 73 percent; in India, 66 percent, per Counterpoint Research. In fact, Samsung and Apple were the only two sizable non-Chinese companies still making smartphones. Taiwan’s HTC, Korea’s LG, Canada’s BlackBerry, and Finland’s Nokia were all basically gone; Motorola was now owned by China’s Lenovo; and global sales of Google Pixel were so low as to be subsumed into the “other” category.

Who saved Apple and its 2SLGBTQQIA+ CEO? A purported threat to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community:

How Apple got out of this mess was a surprising twist, the stuff of novels. Donald Trump had ascended to the US presidency threatening Apple; instead, he saved it. In May 2019 the Trump administration alleged Huawei was a security threat, citing alleged ties with the Chinese government and the potential for its communications equipment to be used for espionage or cyberattacks. It soon imposed unprecedented sanctions, depriving Huawei of Google services, including the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, and other Android tools—a crippling blow for Huawei phones distributed outside of China. Washington also disallowed American companies from shipping fifth-generation cellular chips to the group.

Apple was suddenly the only game in town for premium 5G phones. Huawei’s share of the Chinese market plummeted from a peak of 29 percent to just 7 percent; Apple filled the void, its China share near doubling from 9 percent to 17 percent.

The book notes how helpful Apple has been to the Chinese government in maintaining the Great Firewall. It also describes how Tim Cook, a brave warrior in U.S. politics (see Guy with a “Whites Only” sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate from 2015, for example) knows when to say nothing:

Tim Cook’s mind in early December 2022 when he was confronted by a reporter on Capitol Hill, en route to meeting privately with senior lawmakers. “Do you support the Chinese people’s right to protest? Do you have any reaction to the factory workers that were beaten and detained for protesting COVID lockdowns?” asked Hillary Vaughn of Fox News as Cook walked through the building. “Do you think it’s problematic to do business with the Communist Chinese Party when they suppress human rights?” Cook ignored Vaughn, eyes cast downward as he changed direction to avoid her. One supply chain executive characterized the confrontation as “the worst forty-five seconds of Cook’s career.” But his biggest, most astute critic might have been… himself. In 2017, explaining why corporate executives should be more up-front about their values and “lead accordingly,” Cook had told journalist Megan Murphy that “silence is the ultimate consent.” He went on: “If you see something going on that’s not right, the most powerful form of consent is to say nothing. And I think that’s not acceptable to your company, to the team that works so hard for your company, for your customers, or for your country. Or for each country that you happen to be operating in.” The forty-five-second clip of Cook ignoring questions about China played repeatedly on US cable news. Cook’s silence—his ultimate consent—was highly indicative of just how beholden America’s most valuable company had become to an authoritarian state.

When in 2019 the company rolled out Apple TV+, its Netflix-style streaming service, software and services head Eddy Cue issued just two directives to Apple’s content partners: no hard-core nudity and “avoid portraying China in a poor light.” … Apple TV+ isn’t even available in China, but Cupertino understands the country well enough to know when and how to self-censor.

With Tim Cook and Apple doing whatever China wants, what risks remain for the company? According to the author, Huawei’s innovations in hardware and in building its own operating system (HarmonyOS) may enable Huawei to wipe out Apple in what is currently a huge and lucrative Chinese market.

This will be my last post about Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. I’ve left out a huge section regarding the rise of Apple’s business in China, e.g., the Apple Stores that it opened. It’s worth reading, but China is so different from the rest of the world that I can’t think of any practical value for knowing this history.

Full post, including comments

Apple in China, the rise of iPod

by philg

Second post regarding Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee. This one is about Apple’s shift from making computers to making handheld devices. (See Apple in China book, Intro if you missed Post #1 about this book.)

… just a month after the launch of iTunes [January 2001], hardware chief Jon Rubinstein—aka Ruby—and procurement head Jeff Williams were in Japan and stopped by Toshiba. The Japanese supplier showed them a new hard drive, just 1.8 inches in diameter, with a massive 5 gigabytes of capacity. Toshiba didn’t really know what to do with it, but to Ruby, the implications were “obvious” immediately: this thing could hold a thousand MP3s! It was the enabling technology they needed. “Jeff,” Ruby quietly said, “we need to get all of these.” Williams negotiated an exclusive supply agreement as Ruby made sure the $10 million check they drew up wouldn’t bounce.

Rubinstein and Fadell would later dispute who the key figure was behind the hit MP3 player, but the truth is that its brilliance had multiple authors, reflecting how each domain in the pyramid structure (ID, PD, MD, and Ops) worked on their specialty simultaneously. Ruby had found Toshiba’s disk drive and realized its potential. Phil Schiller, of marketing, introduced the idea of the scroll wheel—probably the feature most loved by consumers, as it reacted to the velocity of each turn and enabled them to race through hundreds of songs in a matter of seconds. Fadell was the overall architect. He presented to Jobs a prototype made from foam core and stuffed with old fishing weights to give it some heft. Jony Ive’s team made it unapologetically white, with a polished, chrome-like stainless steel back, a remarkably sharp turn from the childlike colors of the iMac. It was an unusually high-end material for a mass-market product, giving it a feel unlike any other handheld device. It was also durable and could dissipate heat more effectively than plastic.

The MP3 player would remain nameless for months, until four people in branding tossed ideas back and forth with Jobs. Vinnie Chieco, a creative director, recalls how the team would write down every permutation and then sort them into three piles: the worst, the ones that suck, and the not horrible. He’d come up with one: Troubadour, named after French poets who went from town to town playing music. This thing, too, was mobile, could travel and play music. The metaphor worked. The name didn’t. Jobs had his own preferred moniker, which Chieco remembers but won’t share. Like MacMan—what Steve wanted to call the iMac—his idea wasn’t very good, and Chieco is hesitant to share something now that Jobs can’t defend. The other three people in the room told Jobs they loved his name for the device, perhaps trying to avoid his infamous wrath. But when Jobs asked Chieco for his opinion, the creative director said, “Well, I understand your name is novel, but…” Feeling as if he were putting his head in a guillotine, Chieco told Jobs the reasons he didn’t like it. Meanwhile, he kept thinking in metaphors. He was struck by the all-white design, which looked space-like. Riffing on Jobs’s idea that a Mac computer was the “hub for your digital life,” he considered how in the future, the ultimate hub would be the mother ship. The only way to escape would be in a pod that flies away for temporary adventures, returning to replenish and recharge. He got the idea from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and hey—now it was 2001! It felt serendipitous, like when the Macintosh emerged in the Orwellian year, 1984. He proposed Pod. Jobs didn’t hate it, and over a few meetings it grew on him until it became the obvious name. It just needed one tweak, one letter, and then it was perfect: iPod.

Why did Apple make a phone? It was obvious to everyone that consumers wouldn’t want an iPod once reasonably capable smartphones were ubiquitous. Profits from Apple computers were insignificant compared to profits from the mass market iPod.

Around mid-2005, another project began to gain traction internally. The interfaces team had been toying with multi-touch technology for roughly two years, aided by a start-up Apple had purchased called FingerWorks. Senior engineers from Project Purple knew about it, but the original concept was about rethinking the Mac’s interface. When Steve Jobs first showed Fadell the technology, asking if it might work for a phone, it was far from obvious that the enormous contraption Jobs pointed to was the future of something that would sit on your desk, let alone be shoved in your pocket. “It filled the room,” Fadell recalled. “There was a projector mounted on the ceiling, and it would project the Mac screen onto this surface that was maybe three or four feet square. Then you could touch the Mac screen and move things around and draw on it.”

Meanwhile, the fear that the iPod business would be cannibalized by the phone giants continued to fuel anxiety and innovation. “It was an existential crisis,” a senior engineer says. “[We were saying], ‘You realize what’s gonna happen here is this business we built on iPods is going to go away. We need to build a phone.’ ” Jobs eventually canceled the other phone ideas and declared multi-touch the future. He was adamant there’d be no keyboard, so the phone would be as full screen as possible. Apple’s engineers suddenly had to find suppliers that could build multi-touch displays at scale—something that didn’t exist at the time. There was no way Apple could send the specs to some factory and wait for the parts to be built; instead, it sent teams of engineers to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China to find hungry vendors it could work with to co-create the processes. “There were a few truly groundbreaking mass production processes we were involved with, where we really had to go around to find the best people in the entire world—the peak of what humans have developed for some of these technologies,” says a product manager. By early 2006, they had a full-screen prototype enclosed in brushed aluminum. Jobs and Ive “were exceedingly proud of it,” journalist Fred Vogelstein would later recount. “But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they’d created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well.”

(I don’t understand how “cannibalized by the phone giants” made it through the purported editing process of this book. In business, cannibalized refers to a reduction of sales of Product A after the company that makes Product A introduces Product B. In the context of Apple, the iPhone might cannibalize sales from the iPod or a notebook-format Macintosh might cut into sales of desktop Macs rather than take sales away from IBM PCs.)

The iPhone required a lot of new manufacturing techniques, mostly developed by vendors in China and Taiwan, often with significant help from Apple engineers who’d fly over from California.

Another important supplier was TPK, which placed a special coating on the Corning glass, enabling the user’s fingers to transmit electrical signals. The Taiwanese start-up had been founded just a few years earlier by Michael Chiang, an entrepreneur who in the PC era had reportedly made $30 million sourcing monitors and then lost it all on one strategic mistake. In 1997 he began working with resistive touch panels used by point-of-sale registers. When Palm was shipping PDAs that worked with a stylus, Chiang worked on improving the technology to enable finger-based touchscreens, even showing the technology to Nokia. But nobody was interested until 2004, when a glass supplier introduced TPK to Apple. An iPhone engineer calls Chiang “a classic Taiwanese cowboy [who] committed to moving heaven and earth” by turning fields into factories that could build touchscreens. The factory was in Xiamen, a coastal city directly across from Taiwan. “The first iPhones 100 percent would not have shipped without that vendor,” this person says. He recalls Chiang responding to Apple by saying, “ ‘We can totally do that!’—even though [what we were asking was something] nobody in the world had ever done before.” Among the techniques Apple codeveloped with suppliers was a way to pattern, or etch, two sides of a piece of glass to do the touch sensor, at a time when film lithography processes were being done on only one side. Another pioneering technique is called rigid-to-rigid lamination, a process for bonding two materials using heat and pressure, which Apple applied to tape a stack of LCD displays to touch sensors and cover elements to create one material. The process was performed in a clean-room environment with custom robotics.

Instead of selecting components off the shelf, Apple was designing custom parts, crafting the manufacturing behind them, and orchestrating their assembly into enormously complex systems at such scale and flexibility that it could respond to fluctuating customer demand with precision. Just half a decade earlier, these sorts of feats were not possible in China. The main thing that had changed, remarkably, was Apple’s presence itself. So many of its engineers were going into the factories to train workers that the suppliers were developing new forms of practical know-how. “All the tech competence China has now is not the product of Chinese tech leadership drawing in Apple,” O’Marah says. “It’s the product of Apple going in there and building the tech competence.”

We might owe most of our current toys to Apple’s 2010 agreement with TSMC, motivated by a desire to reduce its dependence on Samsung:

In 2010, Apple operations chief Jeff Williams reached out to Morris Chang through his wife, Sophie Chang, a relative of Terry Gou. Dinner between them launched months of “intense” negotiations, according to Chang, as Williams pressed TSMC on prices and convinced the Taiwanese group to make a major investment. “The risk was very substantial,” Williams recalled at a gathering for TSMC’s thirtieth anniversary in 2017. “If we were to bet heavily on TSMC, there would be no backup plan. You cannot double-plan the kind of volumes that we do. We want leading-edge technology, but we want it at established technology… volumes.” Williams’s narrative leaves out some of the most interesting facts about the early partnership. One is that Chang wouldn’t commit to Apple’s demands. In a 2025 interview with the podcast Acquired, Chang said that TSMC would’ve had to raise substantial amounts of money, either by selling bonds or issuing more stock. Williams had another idea: “You can eliminate your dividend.” Morris balked at the aggressive suggestion. “If we do what Jeff Williams says, our stock to going to drop like hell,” he recounted. Chang agreed to take only half of Apple’s order. Even this partial commitment forced TSMC to borrow $7 billion, so it could invest $9 billion and devote 6,000 full-time employees working round the clock to bring up a new chips fab in eleven months, according to Williams. “In the end, the execution was flawless,” he said. The partial commitment forced Apple to toggle between Samsung and TSMC, which some in Cupertino saw as a plus—it meant that Apple wasn’t beholden to just one supplier for what serves as the brain within the iPhone. But Srouji’s team found it nightmarish to manage both suppliers. So Apple turned to TSMC on an exclusive basis, establishing over-the-top contract terms to protect itself. A person familiar with the contract characterized it as saying: “We need to make sure that you’re gonna go out of business—if you’re gonna put us at risk of going out of business.” It was a “mutually assured destruction” type of situation, this person says, because if TSMC didn’t perform in any given year, there’d be no iPhone. So the Apple decision was made: “We are going to put all of our eggs in one basket, and then we’re gonna guard the basket.” TSMC’s bet would prove critical for making it the world leader in semiconductor fabrication, with Apple as its

Full post, including comments

Apple in China book, Intro

by philg

I recently finished Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. What’s the scale of what Apple does in China?

The CHIPS and Science Act, which is designed to stimulate computer chip fabrication in America, will cost the US government $52 billion over four years—$3 billion shy of what Apple invested annually in China nearly a decade earlier. Let me underscore this point: Apple’s investments in China, every year for the past decade, are at least quadruple the amount the US commerce secretary considered a once-in-a-generation investment.

What’s the scale of Apple?

The number of Apple devices in active use surpassed 2.35 billion in 2025, led by 1.4 billion iPhone users who spend more than four hours a day immersed in their glowing screens. These users represent the richest quintile of people in the world, and Apple can advertise or promote features to them—wireless payment, television shows, music streaming, fitness offerings—for free. In fact, Google pays Apple close to $20 billion a year just to be the default search engine on the iPhone. The control Apple has over its ecosystem is extraordinary: When in 2021 Apple changed how third parties like Instagram and Facebook could “track users”—ostensibly a move to protect the privacy of iPhone owners—Meta estimated the new policy diminished its annual earnings by $10 billion. Meanwhile, revenue from Apple’s own privacy-first ad business was on a path to grow from $1 billion in 2020 to $30 billion by 2026. One advertising executive characterized the change as going “from playing in the minor leagues to winning the World Series in the span of half a year.” On average, Apple’s Services business earns margins north of 70 percent, double that of its hardware, and the business has been growing at nearly 20 percent a year for six years—all before potentially being supercharged by new artificial intelligence features. In short, the notion that Apple is at its peak is patent nonsense. But there is one Achilles’ heel: The fate of all the company’s hardware production relies on the good graces of America’s largest rival.

Don’t take the tech reporting here as gospel. The author has fallen in love with his subject:

The second force was the advanced nature of the Macintosh operating system (OS). It really was a decade ahead of its time when, in 1984, a boyish and handsome Steve Jobs, then just twenty-eight, unveiled the Mac with dramatic flair to a packed auditorium. When Jobs clicked the mouse—itself a novelty at the time—the computer took the air out of the room by speaking.

(The mouse, of course, was 16 years old in 1984. The graphical user interface, as embodied in the Xerox Alto, was 11 years old.)

The seeds of the App Store, in which Apple would take a cut of all sales, were sown circa 1980:

By the end of 1983, the Apple II “had the largest library of programs of any microcomputer on the market—just over two thousand—meaning that its users could interact with the fullest range of possibilities in the microcomputing world.” But Jobs resented third-party developers as freeloaders. In early 1980, he had a conversation with Mike Markkula, Apple’s chairman, where the two expressed their frustration at the rise of hardware and software groups building businesses around the Apple II. They asked each other: “Why should we allow people to make money off of us? Off of our innovations?” An attendee of the meeting would recount, years later, that Apple began to “fight” all third-party development.

The book is strong on recounting the rise of contract manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s and on the history of Foxconn:

Foxconn had the humblest of origins. In 1974, two years before Apple was started out of a garage, twenty-three-year-old Terry Gou founded Hon Hai Plastics out of a shed. Gou, who’d just completed his duty in the Taiwanese army, founded the company with $7,500.

As the PC revolution took off in the early 1980s, Gou got in on the ground floor and created a name for himself making reliable sockets and connectors—small components that facilitate communication between different parts of a computer. The conn in Foxconn—Hon Hai’s international name—refers to connectors. “Fox” is just an animal he likes.

Employees were given a Little Red Book featuring the sayings of Terry Gou, some of which were also plastered on the otherwise bare walls. The aphorisms ranged from inspirational to threatening. “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow,” said one.

In 1999, it was a company with $1.8 billion of revenue, far smaller than Solectron, SCI, or Flextronics, its US rivals. By 2010, Foxconn revenues were $98 billion, more than those of its five biggest competitors combined. And Foxconn’s extraordinary growth in those eleven years is the consequence of one client more than any other: Apple.

How much did China grow along with Foxconn?

By the time Mao died in 1976, China was poorer than sub-Saharan Africa. … In just twenty-five years, Shenzhen’s population grew a hundredfold.

Europe is poor compared to the U.S. Why not assemble stuff in Europe?

Once the Shenzhen line for iMacs was up and running, Foxconn established sites on two other continents. In Europe, Foxconn executive Jim Chang found a Soviet-era electronics site in Pardubice, a city of 100,000 people sixty miles east of Prague. The site had previously been run by a state-owned company called Tesla, whose specialty was radar systems and whose biggest client had been the government of Iran. The site had an eerie feel to it, like it had been hit by a neutron bomb. Forklifts stood motionless on the floor and cups of tea, their contents long gone cold, had been left on the tables. In May 2000, Foxconn was able to buy the plant for just 102 million CSK (2.9 million), a fire-sale price because it was bringing in jobs. Foxconn also won from the government a ten-year tax holiday.

The experience in the Czech Republic was an important proving ground for Foxconn and its hub model, but what it really demonstrated was that producing hardware in China was cheaper, more efficient, and less subject to media scrutiny. In China, assembly got done at incredible speed and with few complaints. Workers did twelve-hour shifts and lived nearby in dorms. At the Czech site, workers put in fewer hours and were represented by a trade union; they protested conditions and spoke to the press. Plans to build dormitories met local criticism and were abandoned. Over the course of a decade, Foxconn expanded its work in the Czech Republic, continuing to build for Apple, adding another location, and taking on production for Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and Cisco.

At one point, according to an ex-worker named Andrea, workers making Apple products didn’t receive an annual bonus as they were promised, so they threatened a “strike emergency” just before the ramp-up ahead of Christmas. “Afraid,” the Foxconn managers deposited the bonuses within a week. The incident triggered an audit by Apple, which interviewed workers about their experience. Apple, Andrea said, advocated for better conditions, but “instead Foxconn closed the division within half a year and 330 people were dismissed.” Around the same time, in August 2009, Foxconn shut its Fullerton site, too. How Foxconn laid the Czech workers off is worth highlighting. Mass dismissals—defined as laying off more than thirty people—need to be reported to the Labor Office, but it was important for Foxconn to avoid scrutiny. “What Foxconn did is they dismissed twenty-nine workers every month,” Andrea said. “Each month, regularly, they fired twenty-nine people.” The threat of a single strike ended all large-scale Apple assembly in Europe.

China ended up being the only answer for Apple and pretty much everyone else in the electronics world.

… by 2005, Jobs grasped that there was no going back. That year, a subordinate suggested that a certain project be done in the United States, and Jobs responded curtly. “I tried it. It didn’t work.” The results—in volume, efficiency, and price—were unmatched.

I’ll write more about this book in subsequent posts (e.g., Apple in China, the rise of iPod).

Reminder of what was considered attractive at the time Apple moved manufacturing offshore (source):

Next: Apple in China, the rise of iPod

Full post, including comments

General MacArthur in Manila 1945 and Israel in Gaza today

by philg

I’m been reading The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War (Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College; published 2025 by Oxford University Press (i.e., a military work from a publisher in a country that can’t defend its own border)).

The loss of the Philippines in the first place was due to incompetence, similar to how Japanese success at Pearl Harbor was due to incompetence (failure to heed a radar warning of planes inbound from the NW). Having squeezed and provoked Japan, the U.S. expected attacks in Asia and yet the Japanese caught the Americans by surprise:

Recalled to active duty as the United States was on the verge of war, MacArthur wanted to defend the entire archipelago. “We are going to make it so very expensive for any nation to attack these islands that no one will try it,” he explained. On the first day of the war, the Japanese caught the air forces under his command on the ground and destroyed them. MacArthur then attempted to defend the entire island of Luzon. While his men did well tactically—fighting the Japanese to a standstill—their supplies were in the wrong positions, which sealed their fate as they retreated into the cul-de-sac that was the Bataan Peninsula.

The decision to fight in 1945 to take back the Philippines might also be said to have been an example of American military incompetence. Most of the senior officers wanted to ignore the Philippines and capture Formosa (present-day Taiwan) instead as a more useful base for bombing and invading Japan (USNI article). The Philippines would have been freed from Japanese rule in August 1945 when Japan unconditionally surrendered, though of course it was tough to know that in late 1944.

The book is about the fight for one city, Manila, and as such there are some parallels to the present-day fighting in Gaza. What the two battles have in common:

  • a mostly urban environment
  • the majority of people in the environment were/are not soldiers
  • the army trying to take the city (US in 1945; IDF today) was trying to minimize the number of non-soldiers killed
  • the army defending the city was indifferent to the number of non-soldiers killed and/or actually trying to increase the number of non-soldiers killed

The differences:

  • the non-soldiers of Manila were hostile to the defending army (Japan) and, in fact, was an organized guerilla force against the army whereas the non-soldiers of Gaza are fervent supporters of the defending army
  • the army attacking Manila (US) was trying to minimize damage to buildings and other infrastructure
  • the army attacking Manila (US) wasn’t trying to feed the army defending Manila (Japan) and, in many cases, defenders had to surrender or commit suicide because they’d run out of food and/or water

The book reminds us that war is most glorious when seen in the rearview mirror:

One of the great myths of World War II is that the American public immediately rallied to the cause after Pearl Harbor. The truth is that men had to be drafted, and they did not want to be in either the Army or the Philippines. Willard Higdon was honest about his motivations: “I was 27 yrs old, with a wife and a 5 yr. old dtr. I did not want to go.”

The Japanese actually weren’t that excited about owning the Philippines:

The main reason for their invasion in 1941 and 1942 was geopolitical. The Philippines had few natural resources that the Japanese economy required. What they wanted was to drive the Americans out of the western Pacific and, once that was done, they wanted to liquidate their commitment to the Philippines quickly. The Japanese had little interest in turning the archipelago into a Japanese colony.

The enemy doesn’t always cooperate with one’s plans…

Even as late as February 5 [the battle was February 3-March 3], MacArthur had no plan for an urban battle. “I do not believe anybody expected the Japs to make a house-to-house defense of Manila,” Eichelberger told his wife. The general belief—at MacArthur’s headquarters, at Krueger’s headquarters, and with the press—was that the Japanese would evacuate without a fight. Thirty years later, when he sat down to write his memoirs, Chase could not understand why anyone had made this assumption. “It was counter to everything the Nips had done in previous campaigns.”

The U.S. had almost no experience with the kind of fighting that was to ensue:

Other than some short operations in World War I and a few in the European theater, the last time Americans had fought in cities had been in 1864 and 1865 with the battles of Atlanta and Richmond. There are seven major characteristics of urban warfare. The first is that artificial terrain features constrain and channel movement. Buildings become significant geographical objectives. Roads direct advances in certain directions. Both can be barriers. Depending on the material used in their construction, they might be quite vulnerable to military action or quite impervious. Some weapons have better utility than others in the city, and these issues often influence tactics. Another feature is that ground operations are compressed and decentralized. Engagements are between small, tactical units—squads, platoons, companies—for small, geographic objects—a room, a building, or a city block. A third factor is that combat usually becomes three-dimensional. Soldiers fight ground operations as in any other form of ground combat, but they also advance and fight in sewers and blast holes through basement walls. They also have to fight an opponent that might control the floor of a building immediately above or below them, and they might move from rooftop to rooftop. City combat always consumes more time than other forms of fighting. This factor is relative, though. How slow is slow? The month-long fight for Manila was significant compared to other ground operations fought in the Pacific, but nothing compared to the eight-month-long struggle for Stalingrad or the twenty-eight-month-long siege of Leningrad. A fifth factor in urban warfare is the presence of civilians. There are always non-combatant deaths in urban operations and their presence requires some effort at stability operations afterward, but sometimes also during the period of active combat. Civilians can be assets or liabilities when it comes to intelligence gathering, as both the Americans and Japanese would learn. The ready influence of the media is another factor. Cities by their very nature are media centers and always have resident journalists. Since urban areas are also important population, political, economic, financial, cultural, religious, trade, and transportation centers, their fate attracts the interest of reporters. A final dynamic of urban warfare is the outsized ramification of its outcomes. Location matters, and cities are always more important than undeveloped countryside, and engagements for their control have more influence than engagements in isolated areas. Each of these would be in play in Manila.

As in the Gaza fighting, the army trying to take the city owns the airspace:

The US forces also had total air superiority, and piper cub observation planes loitered over the city looking for targets.

(Note failure to capitalize Piper Cub!)

A civilian population that does not support the defending army makes a city tough to defend:

The Japanese were well aware that the Filipinos on Luzon were welcoming the Americans enthusiastically. They resented this and they had orders—which they implemented willingly—to make the Manileños pay. The Battle of Manila was defined by the methodical targeting of the civilian population. The Japanese historian Hayashi Hirofumi has argued, given where most of the incidents took place, that the majority of these killings were done by the Imperial Japanese Army.1 Their orders, though, came from Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji. He made the determination that there was no difference between Filipino guerrillas and civilians. “When the enemy invaded Manila, the citizens were welcoming the enemy well and disrupted all of our fighting action,” he reported. “The number of citizens is estimated to be about seven hundred thousand, but on the front line north of the Pasig River between 3 and 5 February, the general public carried out the following guerrilla activities: communicate with U.S. troops before our attacks, shoot our soldiers, and report our locations to U.S. troops. As a result, our surprise attack was infeasible, and many of our troops were unable to achieve their objectives.”2 The attitude that all Filipinos were the enemy was widespread among the Japanese defenders. Taguchi Hiroshi, a Navy aviation mechanic who became a prisoner of war, explained to U.S. Army investigators in late March: “The enlisted men in the lower ranks, believed that, since the Filipinos indicated that they were cooperative toward Americans in their attitude and had ill feeling toward the Japanese, because prices of food and other articles during the period when we occupied the Philippines went very high . . . , higher officials ordered the destruction of Manila and the Filipinos.”

Some locals were more creative than others…

“The real heroines at San Agustin were the prostitutes, they were the ones that helped,” Gisbert declared. The Japanese had concentrated them in the Intramuros. Gisbert guessed that their numbers were in the hundreds. They were willing to serve as nurses. They were also quite good at scrounging. They could acquire clean linen, or whisky, which Gisbert used as anesthesia. All of which suggests that they had a way of influencing Japanese supply officers.

Even as American soldiers were getting killed, MacArthur refused to let them fight effectively (i.e., by using artillery) because he doesn’t want his former home trashed:

The general was genuinely horrified by what was unfolding in Manila, and seemingly unable to process it. “MacArthur was shattered by the holocaust,” Lieutenant Paul P. Rogers, the headquarters typist, observed. Everything he had done to spare Manila in 1941 was being undone by his own troops, and the major coup of taking the city intact with its port facilities undamaged was falling apart in front of him. Admitting to that kind of setback was not in him. Suddenly the general and his command had a vested interest in making sure there was as little coverage of Manila—positive or negative—as possible. A press report that declared, “Manila is dying” set him off. MacArthur ordered Diller to block any usage of that phrase. He also ordered the units under his command to refrain from using artillery in the city. “That was most unlike the General, who prided himself on winning victories with minimum loss of life,” Diller recalled.

Eventually the subordinate officers wear MacArthur down:

He appointed a three-man committee to talk with MacArthur about the artillery restrictions. After listening to the three, MacArthur, despite his vehement and emotional initial response changed course completely. His subordinates were making it clear that they were not only taking heavy losses, but at rates they could not sustain. With reporters now in the mix, he could ignore that consideration only so long. He removed all the limits on both the artillery and on the media. His public relations man was happy: “They did start using artillery, and it all worked out just exactly the way I wanted it to.” The removal of restrictions on artillery was the third major event that shaped the battle for Manila. Despite their reputation as being a bunch of “yes men,” the staff had pushed back against the general and gotten him to reverse himself. Robert S. Beightler was happy with this decision: “From this point on, we really went to town.” Beightler was advocating any means which he believed would speed up the tempo of combat and save both American and Filipino lives. After the battle ended, he reported to Krueger: “the fantastic defenses of small pockets of resistance which had been isolated required the employment of all available weapons.” Some of this argument is rather weak. The infantry used indirect fire as a crutch to avoid close combat. The problem: it resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Figuring the exact numbers killed in Manila is a tricky business. It seems

Full post, including comments

Book about a serial killer that is important for both pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers

by philg

I recently finished listening to American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century, a book about Israel Keyes. Mr. Keyes was born at home, one of 10 children, and was not only never vaccinated but didn’t interact with medical doctors for his first 18 years. He never even had a birth certificate. (The events of the book occur before the Sacrament of Fauci became available and, therefore, “never vaccinated” refers to the pre-2020 standard childhood vaccines.) From the perspective of those who are pro-vaccination, the fact that Mr. Keyes became a serial killer will be important (i.e., without the 57 shots recommended by the CDC through age 18, Mr. Keyes’s mental health was impaired, though the book describes him as “bisexual” and membership in the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is considered a sign of superior mental health, so maybe being Bi and being a serial killer cancel out?). From the perspective of those who are anti-vaccination, Mr. Keyes being extraordinarily robust, intelligent, and conscientious will be important (of course, he eventually makes one mistake that leads to his arrest).

According to the author, we didn’t learn as much as we could have about Mr. Keyes’s life of violent unprovoked crime due to the incompetence of the U.S. Attorney in Anchorage, Alaska, Kevin Feldis (now a partner at Perkins Coie). He allegedly refused to allow the FBI professionals interrogate the suspect and, instead, inserted himself.

The book might inspire you to develop or purchase a “panic ring” that can be pressed one-handed to summon the police. Keyes was usually able to tie up his victims before they were able to make any phone calls, but they generally would have had enough time to move a thumb on top of a forefinger ring. If the GPS location and mobile data connectivity services are handled by a Bluetooth-linked mobile phone, the ring shouldn’t need to be large even with a long battery life. It looks as though a phone-linked necklace/bracelet is available from invisaWear:

The victims weren’t immediately gagged so perhaps it would also work if the phone were just constantly listening for “I have an itch” or a similar phrase. If Hitler 2.0 can get Neuralink to work, perhaps it would be sufficient just to think “I need to be rescued”.

Full post, including comments

Trip to Barnes & Noble

by philg

A few photos from the Palm Beach Gardens (Florida) Barnes & Noble…

The secret to American female happiness is more focus on the self:

A book for ICE employees tasked with picking MS-13 members out of the crowd of 30+ million undocumented Americans:

A book by an Egyptian who wrote “a heartsick breakup letter with the West” but won’t leave the U.S. and return to Egypt (he says that he wants to help Gazans, bombarded for no reason and through no fault of their own (according to the book jacket), but won’t go back to his native Egypt and cut some holes in the border fence to help his Gazan brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters escape?).

Full post, including comments

Book review: The Siege

by philg

If you’re looking for a new book to read that provides some historical context for current events, The Siege (Ben Macintyre, 2024) might be a reasonable choice. It’s about a spring 1980 takeover of the Iranian embassy in London. Why did an Iranian Arab (more on that below) and his Palestinian friends decide that was rational to take hostages?

The plan was undoubtedly risky, but terrorist hostage-taking could yield spectacular results, and there was a precedent. Five years earlier, the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, led a group of pro-Palestinian militants, the Arm of the Arab Revolution, in an assault on a meeting of OPEC leaders in Vienna. They took more than sixty hostages and killed three people. Ramírez Sánchez threatened to kill a hostage every fifteen minutes unless the Austrian authorities read a communiqué on the radio and television networks every two hours. After complex negotiations and a two-day standoff, the authorities agreed to broadcast the terrorists’ statement, and allowed the gunmen to fly to sanctuary in Algeria and Libya, having secured a large ransom and global publicity for the Palestinian cause. All the terrorists and hostages walked away. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons subsequently forbade granting safe passage to anyone killing, kidnapping, or attacking a diplomatic official, but, in practice, governments were prepared to negotiate. The assault on the Iranian Embassy was directly modeled on the OPEC siege. For reasons both symbolic and practical, London was selected as the ideal target. Many Iranian Arabs held Britain responsible for their plight: the British government had supported the semi-independent sheikhdom of Arabistan before switching allegiance to Reza Shah in 1925. The group would pass unnoticed among London’s large Middle Eastern population. “British police are not armed,” the Fox assured Towfiq. “They will not attack you.” London was packed with journalists and other members of media organizations, domestic and international, who were not controlled by the government. News coverage would be huge. With his command of English, Towfiq would manage negotiations with the police and the press.

In other words, the West’s previous accommodation of hostage-takers led to additional hostage taking. (Towfiq and the Palestinians circa 1980 probably never imagined that hostage takers would become the most celebrated folks on Ivy League campuses, though!)

The root cause of the 1980 siege seems to be that much of Iran’s oil is underneath a part of a Iran that traditionally contained no Iranians.

The region abutting the Persian Gulf known to its Arab inhabitants as Arabistan, or Ahwaz (which is also the name of the region’s capital), was once the center of an ancient civilization. The majority of its inhabitants are Arabs, Shia Muslims, but they are ethnically distinct from the Aryans of Iran, or Persia, as it was traditionally known (“Iran” is the Farsi word for “Land of the Aryans”). By the mid-nineteenth century, the region had been absorbed into Persia, but its sheikhs enjoyed semi-independence from Tehran. When the shah’s father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, took power (with British backing) in 1925, he set about “Persianizing” the region, a policy his son intensified: Farsi replaced Arabic as the official language, Iranian nationalists settled in the thousands, and senior official positions were filled by Farsi-speaking Persian Iranians. The province was renamed Khuzestan, an Iranian name. Arab opposition was suppressed. This Persianizing policy was motivated by power politics and ethnic prejudice but mostly by greed: for beneath the region’s desert sands bubbled a vast ocean of oil. Had fate dealt differently with the region, it might have become another Gulf oil state, like Qatar or Kuwait, with a small Arab population, and a lot of money. Instead, its oil riches bankrolled the shahs, exploited in concert with the British, then with the Americans. The expensive rugs and chandeliers in Iran’s London embassy were paid for with Khuzestan’s oil. At the height of the shah’s power, some five million barrels were being exported from the province daily, about one-tenth of the world’s entire oil trade.

The Arabs of Arabistan supported the replacement of the Shah by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the establishment of an Islamic Republic, but ended up disappointed.

Most of his fellow Arabs were illiterate, Towfiq complained, workhorses made to toil for their Iranian bosses: “We are very rich in resources, but it is taken away from Arabistan.” Only a handful of Arabs worked in the Iranian civil service; no Arab rose above the rank of captain in the armed forces. Fascinated by foreign culture, hungry for learning, Towfiq won a place to study English language and literature at the University of Tehran. “I am a rare case,” he said. “Out of four million people, we are only four thousand university graduates.” There he eagerly joined the students demonstrating against the shah.

But the ayatollah was no more willing than the shah to countenance self-government for oil-rich Khuzestan. Arabs were not the only ethnic minority agitating for greater self-determination. Kurds, Turkmens, Azeris, and Baluchis all sought to loosen Tehran’s grip, some by democratic means, others through violence. If the Arabs won autonomy, other groups would demand the same, threatening the very integrity of the country. “The new leaders forgot all their promises,” said Towfiq. The ayatollah clamped down on the Arabs, just as the shah had done.

Saddam Hussein, de facto ruler of Iraq since 1968 and president since 1979, spotted an opportunity in the unrest. A secular nationalist with pretensions to lead the Arab world, Saddam saw Iran’s aggressive new theocracy as a threat to his power and ambitions. Inciting rebellion among the Arabs of neighboring Khuzestan was an easy and cheap way to undermine the ayatollah and destabilize Iran, while also demonstrating Saddam’s credentials as an Arab champion. Bands of Iranian Arabs were trained in Iraq, armed, and sent back across the border to attack police stations, military checkpoints, roads, bridges, and above all the oil pipelines carrying Iran’s economic lifeblood. These Arab guerrillas saw themselves as fighters for independence, but they were dependent on Saddam Hussein, pawns cynically manipulated by the Iraqi leader for his own ends.

The conflict was racial as well as political, an ethnic confrontation between indigenous Arabs and Farsi-speaking Iranians introduced by the shahs to Persianize the region. Iranian militiamen flown in from Tehran roamed the streets in search of insurgents. Some fought back. Armed Arabs attacked a naval base, the central police station, government buildings, and shops. Three days of street fighting left 220 people dead and 600 wounded. The ayatollah’s secret police, the successors to SAVAK and no less vicious, set about hunting down Arab activists, many of whom were tried in hastily convened Revolutionary Courts and summarily executed. Ayatollah Sheikh Muhammad-Taher al-Khaqani, spiritual leader of the region’s Arabs and Khomeini’s former teacher, was arrested, along with hundreds of others. Those who escaped fled to Iraq or went into hiding.

The British have to figure out what to do, difficult since they didn’t have a significant stake in the fight and the European track record of dealing with Arab/Muslim terrorists wasn’t great:

In 1972, Palestinian terrorists of the Black September group seized Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympic Games. The West German handling of that incident had been a disaster, ending in the deaths of all the hostages and most of the terrorists.

Looking at the UK today, it’s tough to imagine that Margaret Thatcher ever existed, but of course she did.

As always, Thatcher made her opinions abundantly clear: she had “no intention of allowing terrorists to succeed in their hostage-taking,” as she wrote in her memoirs. “This was no less an attempt to exploit perceived Western weakness than was the hostage-taking of the American Embassy personnel in Tehran.” The Iron Lady was not for turning, in this or any other way, and her mind was already made up. “My policy would be to do everything possible to resolve the crisis peacefully, without unnecessarily risking the lives of the hostages, but above all that terrorism should be—and should be seen to be—defeated.” In any case, the gunmen were demanding something she could not deliver: the release of political prisoners in another, hostile country. The terrorists, whoever they were and whatever the eventual outcome, had committed a crime on British soil, and would be tried under English law.

Thatcher is just the sort of person to call in the SAS (Special Air Service) and a lot of the book covers the glorious history, training, and capabilities of the SAS (tough to imagine today given that the UK has been conquered without a shot having been fired).

The book goes into a lot of detail about the evolution of the relationship among five groups of people (1) hostage takers, (2) Iranian diplomats, (3) Iranian employees of the embassy who weren’t necessarily passionate about the Islamic regime, (4) visitors to the embassy, e.g., from Syria and Pakistan, (5) a few white British people. Most of them can find common ground in shared hatred of Israel/Jews and the hostage takers begin to soften when they realize that, with a couple of exceptions, the hostages aren’t tightly coupled to the new Islamic government in Iran.

Without giving too much of the story away, let me highlight that at least one of the hostage takers survived and was imprisoned.

Nejad was finally released in 2008, having served twenty-seven years. In Iran, he still faced murder charges for the deaths of Lavasani and Samadzadeh. Tehran gave no assurances he would not be tortured and executed if repatriated. He was therefore allowed to remain in the UK, a decision described by Iran as “condemnable and indefensible.” Fowzi Nejad now lives in the UK.

In other words, British law requires that the British welcome as a neighbor a foreigner who was convicted of one of the most spectacular crimes in modern British history. Prior to the siege of the embassy, he had never been to the UK. He traveled to the UK only to commit the crime of taking hostages. He never claimed to have any affinity for British culture, other than its perceived softness on terrorists, or the British people.

More: Read The Siege.

Arabistan/Kuzestan:

Full post, including comments

Lionel Shriver imagines the next logical step in DEI

by philg

A report to friends after testifying at a trial:

Our team of 25+ included a fresh-from-law-school white guy who was suffused with progressive values. He tried to engage a Black paralegal who lives in California and is about 60 years old on the beautiful paradise that awaits when we elect Kamala Harris. The noble Black man responded, “I’m voting for Trump.” The young lawyer was incredulous. Why?!!? “Because Harris is an idiot.”

(If the government didn’t assure us that we live in an inflation-free economy it might be alarming to learn that this Big Law firm has recently raised its rates on first-year associates to $1,000 per hour.)

Lionel Shriver, the creative mind behind The Mandibles, imagines a world in which it would be career-ending to note that Kamala Harris appears to have a lower level of intelligence than some other person or group of persons. I wish that her new novel were titled Cognitive Equality, a phrase that occurs in the book, rather than Mania. But who am I to criticize the marketing folks at HarperCollins for being… “otherwise”.

Chapter 1, set in 2011, will feel familiar to anyone who lived through the rise of BLM in Maskachusetts:

Last fall, this leafy neighborhood had signs planted in nearly every yard, “Morons” welcome here!—the same sign that businesses in strip malls all taped hastily to their windows. But overt usage of such terms of opprobrium even in quotation marks rapidly morphed from declassé to crude to deadly, so the current crop of yard signs was more sedate: We support cognitive neutrality.

Yet as the drive for intellectual leveling gathered steam, it was the sharpest tacks among that elect who jumped on the fashionable bandwagon first.

How did we get to Queers for Palestine and gender-affirming surgery on teenagers?

social hysterias do not stand still. If they are not yet losing steam, they are getting worse. And this one was getting worse. Radical movements keep ratcheting up their demands, because nothing enervates a cause more than success. Crusaders resent having their purpose stolen out from under them by the fulfillment of their quest; reaching the promised land leaves seekers bereft. There’s little to do in a utopian oasis but sip coconut water. So the journey must never be completed. The goal must remain out of reach. To preserve the perfect impossibility of getting there, the desired end point becomes ever more extreme.

In Shriver’s alternative 2012, the world’s best leader is shunned:

the Democratic Party’s apparatchiks had concurred by January that Barack Obama had become a liability. The president was aloof, snooty, and supercilious. Never having gotten the memo about suppressing that silver tongue, he still deliberately rubbed the popular nose in his own articulacy. Either he was failing to track the national mood or he just didn’t like the mood. Frantic advice from his press secretary notwithstanding, he continued to convey the impression that he thought he was smarter than the average bear.

Joe Biden is considered to be “was impressively unimpressive” and is put forward as the new candidate. He wins the election and proceeds to appoint cabinet members according to the new and improved version of DEI:

It was proudly shouted from the rafters by a fawning media and Biden’s own press secretary that the president was purposefully seeking out the “historically marginalized,” i.e., stupid people.

(Biden was eventually not considered dumb enough so the Democrats turned to someone even dumber, at least in the author’s mind, for 2016… Donald Trump.)

The protagonist’s friend catches the wave and rises to prominence on CNN:

As far as I could ascertain, she was making a name for herself as the intelligent face of idiocy. The formula seemed to be not form following content but form clashing wildly with content. She was smooth, alluring, and sexy, but most of all she came across as blatantly bright. Thus she flattered her viewers, who, if everyone was as smart as everyone else, were also as smart as this silver-tongued broadcaster.

A literature professor struggles to adapt:

“The point is,” David said, “in my courses, I’m now meant to celebrate all the historical figures we’ve customarily overlooked.” “You mean the people who never achieved dick,” Felicity said. “Now, that’s much too harsh a way of putting it,” David abjured with a shut up glare at his younger daughter. “Yes,” Kelly said. “And a more rounded version of the past, one that tries to include all those people who weren’t singled out as special—it’s much more equitable.” “But there are . . . logistical problems with following this rubric,” David said. “We simply don’t have records of all these otherwise folks who were callously dismissed in their time. I can explain to students why a host of erstwhile distinguished figures have been acclaimed unjustly, but I’ve no idea how to go about digging up biographies of, you know—” “Nineteenth-century knuckleheads,” Felicity filled in. “Honey, you know we don’t talk like that in this house,” Kelly said.

Doctors are admitted to medical school without discrimination according to cognitive ability and the result is that the elite fly to India for hip replacements. Another phrase for the turbocharged DEI bureaucracy in the book is “mental parity”. A conversation between two former friends:

But landing on opposite sides of Mental Parity is too fundamental. It is about character. I’m sorry to sound sappy or preachy, but it’s about primitive right and wrong. MP is about how we treat other people, and how we think about other people, and even how we regard ourselves—about what we think makes us valuable.

Followers of Fauci will be pleased to learn that Science is drafted into confirming the political hypothesis that all human brains are equally good. MRI images are cited. Speaking of coronapanic, that also happens in Mania‘s alternative history:

Unfortunately, the spread of a novel but, it turned out, not especially lethal virus for the vast majority of the healthy, non-elderly population prevented me from reuniting any time soon with D&Z, since the morons in control of the country had panicked and shut down the entire economy for an initial pause of three weeks that evolved grindingly into two years. Deer Abby was obliged to close. Like the rest of the citizenry, we all lived on government handouts of fabricated money whose overproduction, the more economically clued-up members of the hate group assured us, would in due course perilously devalue the dollar—as if the U.S. needed any more problems.

Sinovac and Sputnik weren’t very effective against Covid in the end, but at least they were relatively harmless. You could hardly say the same about the snake oil from Pfizer, which had long since jettisoned all the company’s skilled personnel like Felicity, who knew the difference between monobasic potassium phosphate and household drain cleaner. So this mR2D2 concoction was stirred up by trick-or-treaters in mad-scientist costumes waving beakers of dry ice, like twelve-year-old Darwin on Halloween. Me, I bought a fake vaccination certificate on the black market; I assume if you’re perky enough to read this, you did the same. But far too many of our compatriots were credulous. I’ve lost track of the underreported mortality count, but at the minimum it’s in the tens of millions. By the time all the long-term side effects have taken their toll, the international death count could come to hundreds of millions. I don’t care for hyperbole, but I don’t believe this is an overstatement: the Pfizer “miscalculation” marked the start of a full-blown emergency.

The global meritocracies are the big winners from the American push to take DEI to its logical conclusion:

Having fallen hypnotically in love with its own virtue, the West has ceded South and Central America, Africa, and the Middle East to the de facto control of the Chinese (thanks to whom the oceans are nearly dead; with no other nation willing to constrain the practice, their supertrawlers have raked the ocean beds bare, and a single eighteen-ounce bass can now sell for three hundred dollars).

(Europe, Canada, and Australia follow the American lead.)

If you’re wondering how the beliefs of the Democrats could be so different from what they’d expressed twenty years ago:

the public at large bought into this improbable ideology virtually overnight and in no time forgot that they had ever believed anything else.

The satire is too broad, in my opinion, compared to in The Mandibles and when the pendulum swings back the results also seem improbable:

Still whizzing through the last of our state legislatures, the constitutional amendment requiring all registered voters and all candidates for state and federal office to have a minimum IQ of 115 will eliminate 84 percent of the population from participating in the democratic process.

(I would just like to see eight years of W-2 or 1099 income before an American is eligible to vote, more or less the situation we had when the country was young. Men started to work at age 13 and started to vote at 21. Of course, in today’s environment of 74+ gender IDs it wouldn’t make sense to restrict voting to just one gender.)

The former friend who profited from the rise of mental parity tries to cash in on the pendulum swing back:

“Hold it,” I said to Emory. “You’re defending the Fitness Proviso? And all this singeing of IQ into everybody’s forehead with a branding iron?” “A tiny, tiny number on the inside of the wrist,” Emory brushed off. “Totally discreet. And conditioning enfranchisement on high IQ beats only letting people vote who own property. Or just men, or just white people. I only draw the line at nitwits.”

Conclusion: Not a great book, but kind of a fun book if you’re interested in how language evolves with political fashion.

Full post, including comments

Guilty Creatures: a book about how to have fun in Florida

by philg

For your Florida bookshelf: Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida by Mikita Brottman (British-born, resident in Manhattan, and a professor in Maryland so I’m not sure how she researched this book).

The characters in this true-crime drama have a Florida lifestyle that is 100 percent opposite mine. Instead of fighting with their HVAC equipment they’re out at clubs, concerts, fishing, hunting, mountain biking, etc. When there is nothing great to watch on TV, strippers and prostitutes can add zest to an evening. Things get a little complicated when a woman figures out that the best way to extend and enhance her lifestyle is for her husband to die. The author reminds us that fewer than half of murders in the U.S. are ever solved (about half of reported murders are “cleared” (state-sponsored NPR), but you have to consider that murders successfully disguised as accidents (“alligator involvement” in this case) aren’t part of the statistic).

I want to read some more books by Professor Dr. Brottman, D. Phil. Maybe I should start with this one:

Full post, including comments

The Coast Guard helicopter pilot lifestyle

by philg

Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival by Tristram Korten offers us a window into an unusual lifestyle.

Ben Cournia, aviation survival technician (“rescue swimmer”), flight mechanic Joshua Andrews, and pilots Rick Post and Dave McCarthy show up to mosquito-infested Great Inagua Island (Bahamas) in September 2015 to be ready with a MH-60 Jayhawk in case undocumented importers need to be followed or people need to be pulled off ships or out of the water. They work two weeks on and two weeks off.

Here’s the machine, parked on the ramp in Portland, Maine in fall 2020 (see Maine/NH coast video)

This won’t be a story about diversity being our strength:

The four men made up a pretty good snapshot of the Coast Guard in terms of demographics (the service is overwhelmingly white) and disposition.

If there’s no racial diversity, maybe there is gender ID diversity?

Today there are 360 rescue swimmers spread out among twenty-six Coast Guard air stations. Three of them are women.

It also won’t be a story about the depredations of climate change. The deadliest hurricane season on record was almost 250 years ago:

Three back-to-back hurricanes in October 1780 killed tens of thousands of people and sank dozens of ships throughout the Caribbean and United States. The storms severely weakened the British Navy as it fought the American revolutionaries. The first storm struck Jamaica and then tore through Cuba, sinking British warships and collapsing whole towns, killing an estimated 3,000 people, half of them sailors. The second storm sped from Barbados to Bermuda, claiming roughly 4,300 lives. On the island of St. Vincent, a twenty-foot storm surge washed villages out to sea. On St. Lucia, the storm killed 6,000 people. About 9,000 more died in Martinique. Fifteen Dutch ships sank off Grenada. All told, this was the deadliest storm on record in the Western Hemisphere. Incredibly, another storm picked up within days and ripped through the region, smashing sixty-four Spanish warships sailing to take back the Florida panhandle from the British. Nearly 2,000 men died.

The Coast Guard was an early adopter of the helicopter, despite having missed out on Hanna Reitsch’s pioneering flights:

As soon as Coast Guard brass saw the public flight of Russian-born Igor Sikorsky’s prototype in 1940, they put in an order. In 1944, the Coast Guard conducted the first helicopter landings on a ship. The service’s first helicopter pilot, Frank Erickson, conducted the first helo rescue mission later that same year. Erickson and the Coast Guard’s helicopter detachment were stationed at the Sikorsky Aircraft plant in Connecticut to get trained by and work with the famed helicopter designer. Erickson collaborated with Sikorsky to develop power hoists for helicopter rescue missions and pioneered the idea of using stretchers to evacuate the injured.

Let’s leave the El Faro story and look at another ship, the Minouche. This one was also old (35 years), but not because of American protectionism. The Minouche went back and forth to Haiti with low-value cargo. She had a crew of 11 Haitians and a Filipino captain, Renelo Gelera. They didn’t make any obvious mistakes, according to the author, but Hurricane Joaquin still snuck up on them and sunk their ship from a distance of more than 100 miles (moderate winds, big waves, and an old engine that couldn’t be restarted after an automatic shutdown when the screw lifted out of the water).

The eye was now about one hundred miles north of Great Inagua. Tropical storm–force winds easily stretched over the rescue site. McCarthy mustered the helicopter and ground crews in the big hangar for a briefing. He explained the mission: cargo ship down, forty miles southeast, crew abandoning ship. He ran down a list of known risks. The main one, of course, was the weather—driving rain, high winds, extensive cloud cover. Then he asked if anyone had reservations. Silence. They may have assessed themselves as ready, but the truth was, this was virgin territory for the helicopter crew. None had flown in conditions this extreme before, except maybe Cournia during his tour in Alaska, much less conducted a search and rescue operation in a hurricane—at night. Most civilian helicopters won’t take off in 20-knot winds. The MH-60 has a wind limitation of 60 knots off the nose and 45 from any other direction for takeoff. The Coasties were heading out in 35-to-40-knot winds with gusts up to 60.

(Tech correction: 20 knots was our wind limit for doing sightseeing tours over Boston in the Robinson R44. A good practical limit for lessons at the flight school was 30 knots (not for a beginner student, though). I remember a successful photo mission with winds of 35 knots. We landed with surface winds gusting to about 30 knots on the last leg of the helicopter trip from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts. There is no wind limitation for the R44, but I would say that you’d need a good reason to operate with surface winds over 30 knots if there were any nearby hills (a formula for turbulence). The Jayhawk is 10X heavier than an R44 and should be much more stable.)

Not to spoil the suspense, but Ben Cournia was able to get the sailors out of their life raft and into the basket for hoisting. He was in the water for hours. The first trip to the stricken vessel involved about four hours of hovering over the raft. The second trip involves some ugliness and a save by a technology:

Post, who couldn’t see anything out the windshield, was flying almost entirely by his instrument panel. His altitude was good, but his hover bar showed him moving even though he felt as if the aircraft was stationary. His mind couldn’t reconcile how his body felt with what the instruments said. This was a dangerous sensation for a pilot. Vertigo could set in and the pilot could think up was down, and try to fly accordingly. He needed to reestablish some frame of reference. Post alerted his crewmates that he was having trouble staying oriented. He hit the “auto depart” button, which takes control of the Jayhawk and lifts it three hundred feet in the air, then reestablishes an even longitudinal hover. It’s a reset, a way for the pilot to start over and try again. From there, Post knew which way was up.

I’m not sure what the author means by a “hover bar” instrument and I haven’t heard of an “auto depart” button, though I know that the various versions of the Blackhawk have some advanced automation, e.g., to approach to a point in space or fly a predefined search pattern.

After some instability combined with a big wave grabbing the basket, the winch cable gets damaged and they return to base to check out a second helicopter and make a third visit to the life raft. There was a whole second crew available to fly that second helicopter, so I don’t understand why the exhausted first crew went out yet again (“you have to go out, but you don’t have to come back” surely doesn’t mean that one crew relaxes in the ready room while the first crew goes out three times, does it?). Obviously there was some learning that had happened on the first two trips, but a member of the first crew could have gone out with the fresh/rested second crew as an advisor.

Just when you think that the weather and waves are bad, Katherine Clerk Maxwell’s equations zap you:

As the basket was hoisted, Cournia hung on to minimize swing, and as he was lifted out of the water he felt a sudden jolt pass through his entire body. It was so strong that it locked his arms in a spasm of convulsed muscle. He tried to free his grip but couldn’t. Eventually the jolt passed and Cournia was able to drop back into the water. A special static discharge cable—which had been attached to the basket to siphon excess electricity generated by the helicopter’s blades cutting through the air—had somehow ripped off, and a current of electricity had passed from the helicopter’s metal frame down the cable to the basket. This meant Cournia had to be extra careful to make sure the basket was in contact with the water whenever he touched it, in order to provide a ground for the electricity.

In case you were wondering, I love Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival almost as much as I love the Coast Guard (and who doesn’t love the Coast Guard?). Just don’t start reading it before bedtime because it’s tough to put down.

Related:

  • the book will inspire you to carry a PLB or EPIRB even if you’re just heading out to the grocery store!
Full post, including comments