Steve Hely's Blog, page 23

Caine

Clubs were trumps when Basing House was took

from Malcolm Gaskill’s 3164 word review of The Siege of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story by Jessie Childs in the 30 March 2023 LRB:

At the start of the civil war in 1642, Basing House’s aesthetic virtues were second to its strategic significance, namely its command of the main road heading west from London. To puritan polemicists, it was also tainted by Stuart moral corruption, a ‘limb of Babylon’ dripping with effeminate decadence and idolatrous popery.

Basing House seemed like easy pickins but it turned into a fierce siege or series of sieges. At last:

Basing House was ‘hobbled by religious factionalism, clashing egos and a weak king’. Cromwell arrived with the big guns (literally), and, murmuring scripture, blasted Basing House and its ‘nest of Romanists’ into submission. The New Model Army surged in, the ragged defenders crawled out of their holes and the game was up. The treasures of the house – its jewels, plate and tapestries – vanished in minutes; the quaking inhabitants had the clothes stripped from their backs. The marquess was carted off to the Tower of London, as church bells pealed through the city in gratitude that Babylon had finally fallen.

Found at Visually Impaired Person Awareness (terrific) Basing House page:

On the 13th, a last patrol was sent out and captured prisoners included Captain Robert Hammond, later the King’s gaoler at Carisbrooke Castle. Then, on the morning of the 14th October 1645, at dawn, the Ironsides launched a final attack and intaking of Basing House. The small garrison could never have stopped these fresh soldiers, but it is said they were surprised while playing cards. This story is unlikely, but a phrase has caught on and ‘Clubs are trumps, as when Basing House was taken’ is a, now little-known unfortunately, Hampshire saying. The final assault did not take long. Three thousand men were employed in the attack and a further four thousand ringed the house out. There was no escape. Yet men fought to the death at sword point. At the end, there were only two hundred prisoners, including women and children.

after it was taken its rubble was declared free for the taking and not much remains of Basing House except a gatehouse and a shape in the earth.

Cheers to John Clegg.

Clubs were trumps when Basing House was took. Adding that to my stable of phrases, be warned.

Hemingway, Men At War

once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

Went looking for the origin of that quote, because it seemed relevant to the current WGA strike.

The “internet of quotes” is a candy-colored jungle, where no one ever bothers to give the source or the context and half the time it’s wrong or on an inappropriate sunset backdrop. 

This quote can be found in the Introduction to Men At War, a literary anthology first published in 1942 edited for the 1955 edition. We find the whole essay reproduced here, and it’s worth a read. 

The writers who were established before the war had nearly all sold out to write propaganda during it and most of them never recovered their honesty afterwards. All of their reputations steadily slumped because a writer should be of as great probity and honest as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chase or note, and after on piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again. 

on some pitiful bravado compared to some solid magnificence:

it was like comparing the Brooklyn Dodger fan who jumps on the field and slugs and umpire with the beautiful professional austerity of Arky Vaughan, the Brooklyn third baseman.

on Tolstoy’s War And Peace:

his ponderous and Messianic thinking was no better than many another evangelical professor of history and I learned from him to distrust my own Thinking with a capital T and to try to write truly, as straightly, as objectively and as humbly as possible.

On cavalry:

A man with a horse is never as alone as a man on foot, for a horse will take you where you cannot make your own legs go. Just as a mechanized force, not by virtue of their armor, but by the fact that they move mechanically, will advance into situations where you could put neither men nor animals; neither get them up there nor hold them there. 

on fights:

At that moment it was perfectly clear that we would have to fight them.

When that moment arrives, whether it is in a barroom fight or in a war, the thing to do is to hit your opponent the first punch and hit him as hard as possible. 

A couple recommendations I’ve got to check out: a story called “The Wrong Road” by Marquis James and “The Stars in Their Courses” by Lt. Col. John W. Thomason, a chapter in a book called Lone Star Preacher (did Shelby Foote crib that title title for his book on Gettysburg?)

To live properly in war, the individual eliminates all such things as potential danger. Then a thing is only bad when it is bad. It is neither bad before nor after. Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. It, naturally, is the opposite of all those gifts a writer should have. That is what makes good writing by good soldiers such a rare thing and why it is so prized when we have it.

(is that what DFW was trying to say, but re athletes not soldiers, in his Tracy Austin review?)

I have seen much war in my lifetime and I hate it profoundly. But there are worse things than war: and all of them come with defeat. The more you hate war, the more you know that once you are forced into it, for whatever reason it may be, you have to win it. You have to win it and get rid of the people that made it and see that, this time, it never comes to us again. 

As for Arky:

After leaving the Seals, Vaughan bought a ranch in Eagleville, California, where he retired to fish, hunt and tend cattle. On August 30, 1952, Vaughan was fishing in nearby Lost Lake, with his friend Bill Wimer. According to a witness, Wimer stood up in the boat, causing it to capsize, and both men drowned.

Gordon Granger

Juneteenth is not about any one man but it was Gordon Granger who posted and enforced General Order #3 in Galveston, kicking off the day.

The historian’s eye was intrigued by this line in Granger’s Wikipedia page:

General Ulysses S. Grant disliked Granger[11] and prevented him from gaining more prominent commands in the West or in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War.

The citation there is for a bio of Granger, but why not get the word from Grant himself? We scanned Grant’s memoirs for mentions of Granger:

While the advance up Mission Ridge was going forward, General Thomas with staff, General Gordon Granger, commander of the corps making the assault, and myself and staff occupied Orchard Knob, from which the entire field could be observed. The moment the troops were seen going over the last line of rebel defences, I ordered Granger to join his command, and mounting my horse I rode to the front. General Thomas left about the same time. Sheridan on the extreme right was already in pursuit of the enemy east of the ridge. Wood, who commanded the division to the left of Sheridan, accompanied his men on horseback in the charge, but did not join Sheridan in the pursuit. To the left, in Baird’s front where Bragg’s troops had massed against Sherman, the resistance was more stubborn and the contest lasted longer. I ordered Granger to follow the enemy with Wood’s division, but he was so much excited, and kept up such a roar of musketry in the direction the enemy had taken, that by the time I could stop the firing the enemy had got well out of the way. The enemy confronting Sherman, now seeing everything to their left giving way, fled also. Sherman, however, was not aware of the extent of our success until after nightfall, when he received orders to pursue at daylight in the morning.

He got too excited. Later he’s grumpy:

Finding that Granger had not only not started but was very reluctant to go, he having decided for himself that it was a very bad move to make, I sent word to General Sherman of the situation and directed him to march to the relief of Knoxville. I also gave him the problem that we had to solve—that Burnside had now but four to six days supplies left, and that he must be relieved within that time.

More or less the last we hear of him:

All these movements were designed to be in support of Sherman’s march, the object being to keep the Confederate troops in the West from leaving there. But neither Canby nor Thomas could be got off in time. I had some time before depleted Thomas’s army to reinforce Canby, for the reason that Thomas had failed to start an expedition which he had been ordered to send out, and to have the troops where they might do something. Canby seemed to be equally deliberate in all of his movements. I ordered him to go in person; but he prepared to send a detachment under another officer. General Granger had got down to New Orleans, in some way or other, and I wrote Canby that he must not put him in command of troops. In spite of this he asked the War Department to assign Granger to the command of a corps.

Boy Grant is an efficient writer. Granger died of a stroke in Santa Fe in 1876 after chasing around Apaches for awhile.

Los Angeles: The Ultimate City

Picked up a used copy of this one, from the genre of New Yorker (the magazine) writers doing longform jobs on big topics. It’s not super insightful or vital in 2023 (“restaurants in L. A. must have plenty of parking space available”) but I appreciated this summary of the socialist history of California:

When Moscow smelled like chocolate

A Moscow memory:

Walking around Red Square in May, in a good mood. Six days of travel, six days on the train, from Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Now here I was, I’d made it to Moscow. Moscow! The dream of every Chekhov character. Soon I would meet a friend.

This was 2007, post Cold War, post post Cold War. Moscow boomed, exploding with wealth and energy. At least it seemed to me. Eurasian beauties stepping out of chaffeured cars and into Prada. Certainly Moscow seems to boom when you arrive from the east, where what you see out of the train windows is bleak. True log cabins, shells of abandoned buildings, stark forests, vast cold rivers.

Now here were the towers, the mazes of the ancient and modern city. The city that stopped Hitler and Napoleon! Deep intense people inside Café Pushkin eating smoked goose borscht (the waitress there, I can still picture her, like a movie star from a movie too intense to ever film). Soulful men sweating naked inside the the Sanduny Baths. Chandeliers in the metro stations.

That morning I’d waited in line to see the waxy candle mummy of Lenin. The wall of memorials to the revolutionary heroes (“German Jews,” I heard the tour guide say. “We have a joke that the Russian Revolution was started by German Jews”).

There were the spires of Saint Basil’s, the image most often used to represent Russia in video games. Here was Red Square, and then there was the Kremlin, right there, can you imagine? I was just strolling past the place that stood as symbol for the calculating minds of the Evil Empire. Now, walking towards the river, there was a smell I kept noticing, An alluring smell, a tempting smell. A sweet smell, a smell I recognized but it couldn’t be that. Is that… the smell of chocolate?

It can’t be.  Is that fantastical, enormous building just across the river, on the island… is that a chocolate factory?

Why did it seem surprising? I never thought of Russia as a great producer of sweets, but why not? There were massive constructions everywhere, products of enormous, empire-sized energy and direction. Take the giant Moscow State University building for example. Why wouldn’t they put some of that force and power into chocolate?

Sad to learn they’ve since closed the Krasny Oktyabr factory and turned into like mixed use condos. Too bad. I still feel my marvel. The idea that all this time, outside the Kremlin, Moscow smelled like chocolate.

(source on that photo, cheers to Hans-Jürgen Neubert)

the purpose of the beehive

COWEN: What do you think is the central insight you have about how to build that, that is otherwise under-emphasized?

GODIN: I think that Frederick Taylor’s demise is long overdue, that the purpose of a beehive is not to maximize the amount of honey we produce. The honey is a by-product of a successful beehive. That what we have is the chance to get what we want by connecting with people who have a choice about where they work, who choose to enroll with us, to avoid the false proxies of “You look like me” or “You sound like me” or “I want to have lunch with you” when we hire people, and instead dance with the people from whatever background that are going to make our project better.

When you lay it out that simply, people go, “Well, of course.” Then they go back to work in some place that demeans them and undermines them and asks them to phone it in. It just breaks my heart to see that gap.

Seth Godin talking to Tyler Cowen.

50 Cent on water

Just looking at things and not understanding why they’re the way they are sparked interest and ideas. I may walk down the grocery aisle, see a gallon of spring water for $2.69, and then I walk farther down, and there’s a gallon of spring water for 59 cents. And I’m like, So I wouldn’t know whether that was Poland Spring if it was in two different glasses. Yo. I want to sell water. This was before I knew Vitamin Water existed. But I knew I could charge $1.50 extra per piece and it wouldn’t even matter. I could get in the middle of that, come in at a dollar and change, and see what happens.

from this Vulture interview.

JAB III

James Baker signed memos JAB III but he was really James Baker IV. All the previous Jameses Baker had been powerful lawyers and fixers in Houston, Texas. They had nicknames, more like titles. The Judge, etc. The first James Baker, our James Baker’s great-grandfather, knew Sam Houston. The Bakers played a role in the opening of Houston’s ship channel, enabling the city to outflank and overtake Galveston. (A side benefit of this book is the early pages provide a pretty good history of Houston).

JAB III might’ve ended as another in this line, quiet, forceful, but not a national figure, had he not met a remarkable transplant to Texas named George Herbert Walker Bush. The two of them shared weighty lineages, prep and Ivy League backgrounds. They formed a brotherly relationship, they were doubles tennis partners (club champions, these guys play to win). The rise of one was linked to the rise of the other.

Baker was that way because of who he was and where he came from, and it was his strange luck, and the country’s, that he happened to be ready to leave his hometown and legal career behind at just the moment when the entire Republican elite had been decimated by Richard Nixon’s Watergate disaster.

Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Under Secretary of Commerce, White House chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan, failed candidate for Attorney General of Texas, Marine officer, Princeton guy, elk killer.

Brokaw told him the key was understanding that Baker was a patient and expert turkey hunter. He would rise before dawn, dress in camouflage, venture out into the Texas heat and then sit there not so much as blinking. “And he waits and waits until he gets the turkey right where he wants it,” Brokaw told Netanyahu, “and then he blows its ass off.”

JAB III’s last major act in American politics* was presiding over the legal team that won the battle that gave George Herbert Walker Bush’s son, W Bush, the presidency. Whether on reflection the outcome of that victory is exactly the future JAB III would’ve wanted we can discuss later.

Cheney was thirty-five years old and, following Donald Rumsfeld’s promotion to defense secretary, had become the youngest man ever to serve as White House chief of staff. With the demeanor of a cool cowboy from Wyoming, the fierce intellect of a Yale dropout-turned-doctoral-candidate, and the discipline of a recovering drinker, Cheney had established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the White House

In 1980 JAB III was Bush’s guy, but Ronald Reagan picked him as his chief of staff. Why? JAB III outmaneuvered people who’d been around Reagan for years. How? That’s why I wanted to read this book. It was written by Peter Baker (no relation) and Susan Glasser, two NY Times reporters who are married. The book is snappy and good, recommend. As an act of service and review we prepared this summary for the busy executive.

Baker was, deep down, neither very versed on matters of policy nor intensely interested in them. As long as it was directionally sound, he was satisfied.” …

It was a classic Baker solution to the problem. As a negotiator, he always looked for ways to satisfy his counterparts’ concerns—or more precisely, ways to let his counterparts publicly demonstrate that their concerns had been addressed—without giving up the substance of what he was trying to secure.

The answers to my questions about how he rose in the Reagan administration were that he was extremely hard working, practical, canny. Reagan advisors Stuart Spencer and Michael Deaver recognized his talent and needed someone to stop a potential civil war among the Reagan team. They convinced Nancy Reagan JAB III was the guy. JAB III would be quick to say Ronald Reagan made his own decisions, but it wouldn’t’ve gotten to Ronald Reagan without Nancy Reagan.

One of JAB III’s main goals as Reagan’s chief of staff was to stop the yahoos around Reagan from getting the US involved in a war in Central America. He succeeded (mostly). Iran-Contra might’ve been avoided if JAB III hadn’t switched jobs, and gone to run the Treasury Department. Iran-Contra was sloppy and JAB III did not tolerate that. He was a scary but admired boss.

He was rich, but not as rich as people thought. When on vacation, he could usually be found shooting quail in South Texas or fishing the Silver Creek near his ranch in Wyoming. He kept a bottle of Chivas Regal in a desk drawer for an afternoon drink when needed. He swore profusely and told dirty jokes. “Did you get laid last night?” he would ask his young advance man, Ed Rogers, each morning when they were on the road together during the Reagan years. It was not a throwaway line. “He’d look me in the eye and want an answer,” Rogers recalled.

When JAB III was a kid his dad (JAB II? Also JAB III?) took him elk hunting, deep in the woods. JAB III came back with the biggest elk as his trophy. You wonder if that’s the turning point. What if the boy JAB had flinched, or said “I don’t want to kill a mammal”?

JAB III had a way of not being present at the moment of blowup. When the 1987 stock crash hit he was on his way to hunt elk with the king of Sweden. He was out of Enron just at the right time. And out of the White House for Iran-Contra, maybe he saw it coming.

And so in his desire to move on and move up, Baker left Reagan with a partner manifestly ill-suited for the job, arguably a disservice to the president he had worked so hard to make successful.

He was a flop as a retail politician, losing the one statewide race he ran in. His power was tremendous. Out of spite for the Houston Chronicle for not endorsing him, he eliminated an exception to a law stopping a nonprofit institution from owning a newspaper, thus ruining Houston Chronicle’s structure (and maybe the newspaper?) More or less singlehandedly he arranged with his worldwide financial counterparts to weaken the US dollar (good for US exporters and making it easier to pay down US debt).

Baker had little interest in Asia, Africa, or South America, nor did he want to become embroiled in the turmoil in South Africa as its system of racial apartheid unraveled in the face of international protests and sanctions. He especially wanted to stay away from the Middle East and the endless failed quest for peace between Israel and the Arabs.

Actually sometimes he is interested in South America:

Sometimes, they would conjure up the other part of their life together, getting back on the tennis court or dreaming up a hunting trip. When they flew in a helicopter over Barranquilla, Colombia, in February for a summit, Baker looked out the window at the landscape below and said to Bush, “This is a place where you and I could shoot some quail.”

In 2000 Baker led W’s legal team in the recount battle. Baker is played (well) by Tom Wilkinson in the film Recount. Ted Cruz was the guy who read the final Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore and translated: we win. Brett Kavanaugh was also there.

Baker doesn’t talk down W to these biographers but the ultimate results cannot have been to his satisfaction. Perhaps he tells himself the alternative, a Gore presidency, would’ve been worse. I don’t know. The W administration cannot be said to have ended in US triumph. Not enough JAB III or his ilk? Too much? A lesser grade? JAB III’s patron Cheney was there. JAB III was considered to replace Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Didn’t happen: remember, he’s never there when it blows up.

As this book begins, Baker is considering Trump:

In the end, he voted for him.

A lesson here may be that forceful, smart people may have the illusion they can bend history but the consequences of both their ways and means are unpredictable.

Not sure how actionable a book like this is:

“This is not a man who sat back and read Machiavelli or read the great books about influence and power,” noted David Gergen. “It just came naturally to him.”

But it gives you the feeling of a little more understanding of the workings of the world.

You can also read, for free, online, JAB III’s oral histories with the Miller Center. Even the way he lays out the ground rules in the 2004 interview shows you what you’re dealing with. And the role of Dick Cheney in the rise of JAB comes through too.

Knott

There were some reports—not to get back to Edmund Morris—that the President was never quite the same after this assassination attempt. Did you see any change?

Baker

No. No. President Reagan had a very private but very deep spiritual faith. Remember he said, “I decided after that, that whatever time I had left, I was going to devote to the man upstairs.” Or “He spared me.” I saw that. I saw that reflective spirituality component of his personality, but that’s all. In terms of being less vibrant, less vigorous, less effective? No, I didn’t see it. Ask Fritz Mondale if you think he was adversely affected. [laughter] He wasn’t. That was a blowout election.

* if there’s a flaw in this book, it could’ve used more about Baker’s work in Western Sahara, which apparently ended in frustration when Morocco refused to budge. Maybe that was still ongoing at press time.

Free samples

I was in See’s Candy the other day, as I am on many a weekend, and it dawned on me that two of the classic Buffett/Munger businesses, Costco and See’s Candy, are places that offer delicious free samples.

Go to a Costco and you’ll likely get a tasty snack or two, go to See’s and you’ll get whatever the day’s sample is (yesterday it was salted dark chocolate caramel).

Buffett and Munger are all about urging people to be rational, and managing their own emotions (“I can’t recall any time in the history of Berkshire that we made an emotional decision”) but a huge part of their success and what makes them interesting is their awareness that some businesses are sort of magical. They’ve got a grip on customers that’s beyond rational, that exists in the worlds of love and nostalgia and strong emotion. Buffett raving about the iphone, for instance:

If you’re an Apple user and somebody offers you $10,000, with the the only proviso [that] they’ll take away your iPhone and you’ll never be able to buy another, you’re not going to take it

If they tell you [that] if you buy another Ford motor car, they’ll give you $10,000 not to do that, [you’ll] take the $10,000 and buy a Chevy instead.

I mean, it’s a wonderful business. We can’t develop a business like that, and so we own a lot of it. And our ownership goes up over time.

Or See’s:

People had “taken a box on Valentine’s Day to some girl and she had kissed him … See’s Candies means getting kissed,” he told business-school students at the University of Florida in 1998. “If we can get that in the minds of people, we can raise prices.”

“If you give a box of See’s chocolates to your girlfriend on a first date and she kisses you … we own you,” the investor said in “Becoming Warren Buffett,” an HBO documentary.

(That U Florida interview is one of my favorite Buffett texts, you can see not just the sunny old grandpa but the rapacious capitalist).

There is an accounting term that attempts to quantify some of this, goodwill, but this quality is not measurable in any exact way. In Munger’s famous talk on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, he talks about how he didn’t learn about any of this at Caltech or Harvard Law School. Being rational is wise, even a moral duty as Munger often says, but you’ll miss out on human decisionmaking if you don’t look for and acknowledge the power of essentially magical forces at work.

The gap between rationality and the way people actually behave due to romantic attachments, sentimentality, brand loyalty, etc is a source of humor, as well as an opportunity for price increases. Buffett and Munger seem to see both.

One example I can think of where free samples didn’t work: the teriyaki place at the mall. Did you have these? At the mall food court the kid at the teriyaki place would often have a plate of free samples. Yet the one time I tried a full plate it was kind of repulsive. I didn’t finish. Too sweet or something, or just not good at scale.

Coke has no taste memory. You can drink one of these at 9 o’clock, 11 o’clock, 3 o’clock in the afternoon, 5 o’clock. The one at 5 o’clock will taste just as good to you as the one you drank early in the morning. You can’t do that with cream soda, root beer, orange, grape, you name it. All of those things accumulate on you. Most foods and beverages accumulate on you — you get sick of them after a while. There is no taste memory to cola.

, perhaps related to “the teriyaki problem.”

Maybe the free sample method only works with a quality product. Sometimes the samples at Costco are bad. Remember when they used to give a sample at Trader Joe’s? Covid has killed that I guess. It worked on me.

Giving out free samples, in both See’s and Costco’s case, represents a strong investment on serving customers. Giving out free samples is a pain in the butt. A business that has the abundance to consistently deliver is probably confident and well-managed. Is this blog a form of free samples?