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I hear the British are complaining about the heat, claiming that 104 degrees is too hot for even an Englishman to go out in the hot sun (no word if mad dogs agree). Well, it is warm but a guy by the name of Willis Haviland Carrier solved that back on 17 July 1907.
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Ironically only a few years after we invented window screens to help eradicate yellow fever while we were building the Panama Canal. Which is one of the various reasons why the French failed in building it.
It took a while for the AC systems to catch on, mostly in the post World War II boom, combined with most farmers finally getting central station electric service, by doing it themselves. I can still remember one of these units
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Although in Bakelite brown rather than that lovely white. Image may be NSFW.
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It was installed in dad’s workshop, probably the 3d or 4th time it had been installed. That would have been in the 70s for a machine made in about 1950, A little better quality than the window unit that I just replaced after it failed in 3 years. It was also so quiet you couldn’t hear it run,
hattip: Evil Blogger Lady.
Ain’t progress great?
And that brings us to the central point today; David Foster’s article in Chicago Boyz titled: Starvation and Centralization. It begins:
It’s now well-known that the nation of Sri Lanka has been reduced to poverty, hunger, and chaos by top-down policies requiring organic farming and forbidding the use of artificial fertilizers. Western ‘experts’ who encouraged them onto this path are nowhere to be seen, and some of their historical posts/tweets have been deleted.
I’m reminded of a passage in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon. The protagonist, Rubashov, is an Old Bolshevik who has been arrested by the Stalinist regime, and the book represents his musings while awaiting trial and likely execution.
A short time ago, our leading agriculturalist, B., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be liquidated as saboteurs. In a nationally centralized agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of enormous importance : it can decide the issue of the next war. If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him … If he was wrong …
Note that phrase in a nationally centralized agriculture. When things are centralized, decisions become overwhelmingly important. There will be strong pressure against allowing dissidents to ‘interfere with’ what has been determined to be the One Best Way.
If you hadn’t figured it out, that is one reason (there are no doubt others) why the Democrats hate the repeal of Roe. Because it is now a state issue, and few of the American people agree with killing a baby during the mother’s labor, they now have to subvert 50 legislatures instead of 5 men.
That is one of the features of federalism, as written into our constitution that the Regressives have been trying to ignore since the turn of the 20th century. It is, in fact, why the 10th Amendment is both so important and so ignored. In reserving power to the states or the people, it takes those illicit powers away from the US government.
Sometimes we call the states ‘laboratories of liberty’ and we are correct. Is California correct or Florida? New York or Texas?
Move it north a few hundred miles, Alberta which supports the eastern provinces or Ontario which feeds parasitically on the western provinces? Of course, Canadians don’t have the protection from their government than Americans do. Something that goes back to the founding of our countries. Here we threw the Lobsterbacks out because they infringed our English rights, the Canadians went with them. Voting, even with your feet, has consequences.
And how likely is it that any significant number of our current experts in economics, social sciences, and various other sciences–and their political sponsors and makers of relevant decisions in various countries–are anywhere near as perceptive and forward thinking as Dr Bush was?…let alone more nearly infallible?
Want to bet your and your family’s food supply on it?
And remember this too. During World War Two just about every country had a centralized industrial plan, except one, the United States of America. Our people and businesses, alone in the world, became more, not less, free. The result is the world we live in has been coasting since 1945. And even so, America still has ~25% of Gross World Product, and it’s beginning to look like we just might bury the ChiComs just like we did the Sovs.
Now tell me again why socialism is so great.