The Book Factory

The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift were all the product of one man, Edward Stratemeyer, a New Jersey author who wrote more than 1300 books and eventually founded a syndicate of ghost writers who pounded out juvenile mysteries based on his instructions.

Stratemeyer conceived the syndicate when his Rover Boys series proved so popular that he could not keep up with the demand for more books.  He corralled a stable of hungry young writers, and in 1910 they were producing 10 new series annually. Each writer earned $50 to $250 for a manuscript he could produce in a month, working with characters and plot devised by Stratemeyer. Stratemeyer would review each completed manuscript for consistency and publish it under a pseudonym that he owned - Franklin W. Dixon, Carolyn Keene, Laura Lee Hope, Victor Appleton. Each book in a series mentioned the thrilling earlier volumes and foreshadowed the next book. The formula worked so well that when Stratemeyer died in 1930 the syndicate was selling more than 2 million books a year.

This sounds cynical, but it worked because Stratemeyer had a sympathetic understanding of what young readers wanted. "The trouble is that very few adults get next to the heart of a boy when choosing something for him to read," wrote Stratemeyer to a publisher in 1901. "A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby pamby, or that which he puts down as a 'study book' in disguise. He demands real flesh and blood heroes who do something."

Edward Stratemeyer            Edward Stratemeyer

9/11 Hero Rick Rescorla

https://biggeekdad.com/2011/09/911-hero-rick-rescorla/

Cyril Richard Rescorla was a British-American soldier, police officer, educator and private security specialist. He served as a British Army paratrooper during the Cyprus Emergency and a commissioned officer in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. Wikipedia
Born: May 27, 1939, Hayle, United Kingdom
Died: September 11, 2001, 2 World Trade Center
Movies: The Man Who Predicted 9/11
Spouse: Susan Rescorla (m. 1999–2001), Betsy Nathan (m. 1972–1997)
Parents: Ciss Rescorla
Awards: Silver Star, Bronze Star Medal (Oak leaf cluster), MORE
Unit: 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile); Parachute Regiment (UK)

The Latest From Gold Goats 'n Guns

Happy Labor Theory of Value Day

By Tom Luongo

Gold Goats 'n Guns

September 7, 2023

Y’all know how much I dislike commies.  Labor Day, in particular, is one of my biggest pet peeves.  It’s literally my least favorite holiday, right up there with Presidents’ Day.

By contrast, I’m a huge supporter of Thanksgiving.  We should spend our days of rest being thankful for what we’ve achieved and not feeling entitled to something we didn’t earn.  That’s the essence of Labor Day, a day designed to reinforce the cultural divide between the entrepreneur and the people he employs.

Labor Day is rooted in Karl Marx’s misbegotten Labor Theory of Value, which holds that Labor is the most important part of the production cycle and therefore should get the lion’s share of the profit from sales.

Of course this idea is nonsense because it deprecates the imagination and risk-taking of the entrepreneur to zero while elevating the laborer’s contribution far above its contribution.  At its heart is an unquenchable envy of those who don’t dream, organize and risk anything, to expropriate the rewards of those who do.

It’s nothing more than that.  Those that feel exploited ultimately have to look at the person in the mirror and decide to stop being a victim and change their state of being.

That said, these ideas flourish in an environment where the money is corrupt, ensuring that the entrepreneurs are offered the choice to become rent-seekers and steal unearned wealth from those that toil for them.

The problem today is that we have allowed both the rent-seekers and their proletariat water-carriers to join forces to squeeze out the middle class.  The fundamental problem of today’s leftists is that they cannot see this basic fact; that they have helped create the very economic divide they rail against by treating the local shop owner they work for who can barely make payroll every two weeks with the CEO of Raytheon.

Things have gotten so bad on the wealth inequality meter that we’re finally beginning to see proles understand that the bourgeoisie as victims as well.  This is why you’re seeing lip service given to bromides like buying local, farm-to-table, and fair-trade among the Millennials.

The problem with all of that is that, like it or not, Amazon’s economies of scale, for example, can bring you fair-trade coffee from plantation owners in Colombia cheaper than your local supermarket can.

Starbucks will happily sell you that latte made with almond milk to stick it to the ‘dairy mafia’ or whatever PETA’s talking point is du jour.  But they will conveniently ignore that those almonds likely came from expropriating water from the Colorado River to feed farms in California, at century-old rental fees.

So, fair trade for whom?

None of this virtue signaling helps workers.  None of this empowers small businesses.  It’s just more colonial wealth extraction abroad and ruinous generational wealth destroying taxation at home.

It’s all just feeding the same system because the underlying cause of the wealth transfer, ever-debased money, is never addressed.

The Bitcoin Maxis are just Millennial Gold Bugs with better manscaping.

But, again, I’m encouraged that we’re beginning to get through the haze and see things more clearly than ever in human history the mechanisms by which tyrants manipulate the lower economic strata into perpetual war over an economic pie they purposefully shrunk and took for themselves.

I don’t even blame Marx for seeing things the way he did.  In the time period of his analysis, backed by British aristocratic globalists according to Richard Poe, the switch from an agrarian to an industrial economy was so swift that the surplus of labor was shocking and the transition heart-breaking.

But, remember, as well, that it would have been far worse had there also not been the international gold standard at the same time.  The late 18th through early 20th century was a period of immense wealth generation for the lower and middle classes.

Wealth, particularly in the US, was compounding at a rate the oligarchs of old couldn’t set up toll booths fast enough to extract and slow back down to just above subsistence.

You could almost smell the real source of the envy during this period as gold democratized wealth in a way that had to gall the ‘kings of old.’

These “inevitable” clashes between labor and management that resulted in the Sherman Anti-Trust and Wagner Acts here in the US were premised on the Labor Theory of Value and unprovable economic theories of natural monopolies. The irony is that the only one that actually exists is government itself. And they have led to ‘labor’ becoming just another off-balance sheet line item for the military-industrial-banking complex.

The truth is that technology is always pushing labor’s skills down the depreciation curve, just like everything else. It doesn’t mean we have to be inhumane about this, but the law should be neutral and allow things to work themselves out, because people eventually will respond to proper incentives.

I have more than 20 years of experience in analytic techniques obviated by literally one invention… the ICP-MS atomic emission spectrometer.

And I knew it almost immediately. Once the prices on ICP-MS’s dropped to within the grasp of the mid-tier regional labs, atomic absorption guys like me (not that I couldn’t run an ICP or ICP-MS) would no longer be in demand.  Why?

First it did with one instrument what a lab used to need half a dozen pieces of equipment to do. And it would do it better, faster and more accurately with better limits of detection for nearly every metal in the nastiest solutions.

But the most important reason was that you could train a smart high school graduate to operate the thing and the degree-holding QC officer could just validate the data run.   No need for a guy like me who could do it all unless I wanted to be the QC officer.

It’s why I moved away from home in 2005 and went to work at a startup where all of my skills came to bear, while being applied to something I knew nothing about — electrochemistry and metallurgy. I was adding to my skillset and, I thought, staving off the end of my career as a chemist.

I also hoped that startup would pay bigger dividends but ultimately, it didn’t and I found myself at a crossroads which led me to where I am today.  Had I not gone through the complete reframing of my place in the world – I’m only a victim of my previous choices – I would have never survived that period or be the man I am today, capable of doing the things I currently do.

I could have sank into envy and self-destruction.  And that, sadly, is where a lot of people are today.  It’s dressed up in a lot of cheap rhetoric, some of which is fair, but most of it isn’t.

I keep coming back to the Millennials’ need for authenticity as one of the driver’s of much of today’s politics and economic decisions.  Slowly, as the oldest ones approach middle age, they are seeing the game for what it is and are getting really angry.

That’s good, because many of them are angry at the right people.  While they would never willingly associate themselves with “the right” when you present them with key insights into why they are feeling what they are feeling, it moves them away from the Marx and towards the Mises.

Neither one is a savior here.  As people , we’re clearly not built to overcome the trauma of living in this fallen world and the emotional abuse that it inflicted on all of us. We’re the children of the bottom of the cycle.

But, it is during these climaxes in history that great changes in perspective occur.  That’s what’s happening here. People only make real substantive change when the crisis is in front of them, not over the horizon.

So, we’ll have to suffer through this period and watch as many of us go through the agonizing process of the Kubler-Ross model of grief, while embracing bad ideas at times along the way.

The current political landscape is a mess and as we “celebrate” labor’s contributions to the world, on the eve of the Presidential primary season, note how there is a concentration of major unions all on strike or threatening to, mostly against the wishes of best interests of their membership.

  • UPS narrowly avoided a Teamster’s led strike in July
    The Screen Actors Guild is on strike because they know deep fakes and AI are about to replace actors.
  • The Writer’s Guild is on strike because the suits have been over-paying actors for generations.
  • The UAW is fearing the job loss from EVs that is coming thanks to “Biden” and Davos mandating an end to individual travel.
  • Now, railroad workers in the northeast are threatening to strike over wages while state budgets are collapsing.

The rhetoric coming out of SAG, the Writers’ and the UAW is simple political insanity. These are attacks by organized labor on behalf of Davos to further weaken industries that are already in serious trouble thanks to the return of risk premia to the capital markets.

The auto industry can’t afford one-tenth of what UAW boss Shawn Fain is putting on the table:

“We have a lot of options that we’re looking at but extensions on the contract is not one of them,” Fain continued.

He said, “We’ve been clear” to Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis about “what our priorities are,” such as a 46% wage increase, reinstating traditional pensions, and trimming the workweek down from 40 to 32 hours. 

These are demands which cannot even be considered a ridiculous opening offer. They are far more a political gambit designed to blackmail both auto workers and producers into making a deal which will destroy both of them.

This is an industry that will never recover the sales losses from COVID, nor will it make the switch to EVs that no one really wants to drive. And yet, CAFE regulations from the “Biden” administration pretty much phase out ICEs (and complexity) in car manufacturing in the US in the next ten years.

UAW workers can have all of those things the Fain demands, but then he will control a UAW with 10% of its membership.

And guess what? In the minds of those who still believe in Marx, it will be management’s fault. Because in a Labor Theory of Value world only labor matters.

Management is the enemy because all profit is exploitation. It’s a distraction to shift the blame onto big corporations rather than the government that was in bed with those same corporations the entire time.

Look, management doesn’t hate labor, they hate paying more for it than the value that labor produces.

If you don’t believe me why are all the cool cars still produced outside the US market? The small pickups, the free-breathing diesels, etc. It’s because of CAFE and the immense regulatory burden placed on the entire auto industry here in the US.

So, there will be plenty of complicated internal combustion engines produced by these same companies making auto workers wealthy all over the BRICS+ space in the coming years. Meanwhile, they are using the Labor Theory of Value to tell US auto workers they are worth $50+/hour plus benefits to monitor robots doing the jobs they used to do.

These “labor negotiations” are just another attack vector by rapacious corporatists. And it will be insanity like this that will eventually break their stranglehold on the labor narrative. No one cares that the actors are on strike, or the writers.

The UAW has shaken down the “Big 3” so many times that most cars are produced in Right-to-Work states anyway. And guess what? Those places are all thriving, so much so, that CNBC released their list of the 10 worst states to live in the US.

If this isn’t just another pathetic attempt at gatekeeping and desperation to keep the ‘good people’ from leaving the shitholes of the Northeast and West Coast I don’t know anything about anything anymore.

In short, because people respond to incentives and because they have a memory of a better life they will not leave behind stories of the ‘bad old days’ of capitalism, even the tarnished and bastardized version we still practice for the next generations.

No, the anger and frustration embodied by what I recently called “The Oliver Anthony Gap” will end this nonsense sooner than we think.

This is just part of the cycle of history folks. And like good little Marxists they want you to believe that that cycle is horizontal, that things really don’t get better, just a different kind of worse.

But the reality is that the cycle of human liberty is upwardly sloping.

Marx has been in ascendance for over 150 years.  Interest rates are at historic lows. The idea that we can retrograde society and humanity to go forward is a lie, a lie that enriches them and maintains their power, while convincing us we don’t have any.

But the truth is the Rent-Seekers have no more wealth to extract from the world.  It’s all Death Star or bust for them now.  They will double down on saving the world from capitalism because that’s all they have and to do that they have to elevate everything we do to an ‘extinction-level event.’

But, we all know that’s a manufactured and a product of our own self-loathing, downstream of their abuse. Once you break that cycle, the only path is being #ungovernable.

So, no Truce with the Davos Furies folks.  Give no ground on COVID masks, health passports, Climate Change or ESG.  It’s all just Labor Theory of Value nonsense to separate you from your reason and ultimately your wealth.

This is what really fuels all of my rants.  It was this insight connecting money, time and wealth extraction that set me on this path.  That’s what I celebrate on Labor Day, the opportunity to work at my highest capacity for those who value it.

Reprinted with permission from Gold Goats ‘n Guns.

The Best of Tom Luongo

Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris? No. Bomber Harris Goes To Hamburg.


Author: Dan Egan
Title: The Devil's Element
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Date: Copyright 2023 by Dan Egan
page(s): 6-10

Today's selection -- from The Devil's Element by Dan Egan. The week-long 1943 Hamburg attack code-named ‘Operation Gomorrah’: 


“On July 21, 1943, Hans Nossack, a coffee merchant and parttime writer, left his home in Hamburg for a two-week vacation from work, and from the war that had been raging for the previous four years. The cottage he rented was a good ten miles from Hamburg city limits, but three nights after arriving the couple was roused from their slumber by an air raid siren warning of an attack on the city. ‘I jumped out of bed and ran barefoot out of the house, into this sound that hovered like an oppressive weight between the clear constellations and the dark earth, not here and not there but everywhere in space; there was no escaping it …’  Nossack recalled just weeks later. ‘It was the sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height.’


“The plan to unleash the roaring swarm of bombers on Germany's northern industrial hub was seeded by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt at a secret meeting earlier in 1943 in North Africa. They directed their military leaders to basically hold nothing back in the future aerial bombardment of German cities. The first objective in the onepage Casablanca Directive: ‘The progressive destruction and dislocation of German military, industrial and economic systems, and the undermining of morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.’


“It might have been more honest to swap out the word ‘morale’ in the directive for ‘lives,’ because the bombs of that era dropped on cities thousands of feet below were anything but precise. ‘We believe the Nazis and Fascists have asked for it,’ Roosevelt explained to Congress. ‘And they are going to get it.’


“The British were even more graphic in their public statements of what they intended to do to the German population. ‘The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them,’ Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, head of the British Royal Air Force, proclaimed. ‘At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation.’ Then Harris used an Old Testament phrase to put fear in the minds of German civilians. ‘They sowed the wind,’ he said of the Nazi Luftwaffe raids, ‘and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.’ It was a proclamation that proved to be as literal as it was biblical. 

Lancaster over Hamburg, 30/31 January 1943


“The Royal Air Force used Britain's early air strikes on smaller cities, along with forensic analyses of Germany's raids on England's own cities at the war's outset, as laboratories and case studies for their engineers, mathematicians, and architects to develop a more devastating style of urban bombing. Rather than trying to destroy a city with concussive blasts and shrapnel from a relatively small number of large bombs, including for thousand-pound ‘blockbusters,’ the British researchers concluded it would be more effective to pack RAF bombers with loads of smaller explosives, some as little as four pounds. Those baton-shaped magnesium-fueled incendiaries weren't designed to blow things up. They were made to burn them down. 


“The fire sticks did their damage by igniting small blazes that set aflame the everyday stuff that a family might stash in an attic. Portraits. Love letters. Furniture. Baby clothes. Targeting civilians on this level might seem cruel and futile in a war being waged by millions of soldiers on three continents, but the British came to see that even a family's most intimate and mundane possessions as something militarily significant-fuel. 


“After a first wave of big bombs blew out an entire neighborhood's doors, roofs, and windows, subsequent waves of airplanes unleashed their loads of incendiary bombs upon the same area. The flames from these little firebombs, fanned by the drafts roaring through all the freshly ventilated homes and businesses, raged so ferociously they could quickly burn into a structure's timbers. This allowed the fires to intensify and spread down a block, the other end of which might already be on fire in a similar fashion. Harris believed if enough little fires were started on enough blocks fast enough-faster than fire crews on the ground could douse them-all the little fires could merge into a super blaze and a whole city might be reduced to ash. 


“Harris also liked to use a special class of thirty-pound torpedo-shaped firebombs because they could be better aimed than the smaller fire sticks that flitted from the sky with all the precision of falling oak leaves. And the flame these larger bombs made was a unique sort-once exploded, the bombs' contents splattered glowing globules that not only burned at steel-bending temperatures but also stuck like glue to anything they hit. People included. This, Harris concluded, had a ‘marked effect on morale of the enemy.’ The bombs were packed with phosphorus. 


“Hamburg had been harassed but largely unharmed by smallscale English air raids beginning in 1940, but by 1943 even Nazi bosses knew it was only a matter of time before the ever-swelling fleet of Allied bombers struck en masse at Hamburg's oil refineries, shipyards, and U-boat installations-and the neighborhoods that supplied their workers.

 

“The Nazis prepared for the attack by creating a fire-fighting brigade of thousands and building more than one thousand fortified bunkers for Hamburg's 1.5 million residents. 


coffee dealer Nossack scrambled for safety with his wife behind their cottage's cellar door, but he eventually ventured outside and was stunned to see what looked like ‘glowing drops of metal’ falling from the sky ten miles north in Hamburg. By the time the bombs stopped dropping fifty minutes later, Nossack described the sky to the north as red and aglow as if it were a spectacular sunset. It was 1:30 a.m. 


“None of the raids were as devastating as the one launched on the third night of the attack, during which English bombers hit a handful of Hamburg's cramped working-class neighborhoods with some two thousand tons of explosives, more than half of them incendiary bombs. The thousands of fires lit on that unusually hot, dry night merged in a matter of minutes into something war planners had never seen-a two-mile-wide whirlwind firestorm that burned hot as a furnace. The winds that were sucked into the cyclone to feed the oxygen-starved flames were powerful enough to topple trees three feet in diameter, ferocious enough to tear children from their mothers' arms. 

 

“British pilots that night reported seeing nothing below but a swarm of roaring orange flame lashing from a vast bed of red coals, all of it fueling a tight column of smoke and superheated gases that mushroomed miles into the sky. On the ground, wine bottles melted. Fork tines glowed. Giant embers whipped through the city like tracer bullets on winds so loud one survivor described them as the sound of ‘an old organ in a church when someone is playing all the notes at once.’ 


“Civilians were hit by globs of phosphorus falling from the sky that caused their heads to burst into flames ‘like torches.’ Some jumped into canals to snuff the chemical fires but they inevitably had to come up for air, at which point the phosphorus flames flared back to life, like wicked versions of trick birthday candles. 


“The death toll of Operation Gomorrah was put at about thirty-eight thousand. But a precise body count was impossible, given that in many cases there were literally no bodies to count; in some instances physicians resorted to weighing piles of ash and estimating from there. 


“Central Hamburg today is a glassy metropolis peppered with stone and brick facades that survived the firebombing. On the streets there is little physical evidence of the horror that forced nearly one million residents to flee, but reminders do surface periodically. Literally. Some fire bombs missed their mark, and their globs of phosphorus landed in the Elbe River and its canals, where they cooled and congealed and persist on the riverbed today as harmless as a pebble, provided they stay submerged. But if one of these nubs is removed from the water and warmed to about eighty-five degrees, it will flare to life with all the ferocity it had when it hit the water in July 1943. Phosphorus pebbles also show up northeast of Hamburg on the Baltic Coast-Simanski's neighborhood-where a V-1 and V-2 rocket factory on the island of Usedom was similarly fire bombed in summer 1943,just two weeks after Hamburg. 


“As for formal memorials to Operation Gomorrah, a statue of a melted human form on its knees in a prayerful pose can be found today on a bustling Hamburg street. It marks the site where 370 civilians died of carbon monoxide poisoning when the fires raging above their bomb shelter consumed all the oxygen. There is also a cross-shaped patch of grass in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery near the Hamburg airport that holds the charred remains of the firestorm victims. The gravesite is marked with a statue called ‘Crossing the River Styx’ that depicts a mother on a boat comforting her child as they float the mythical current toward the underworld, along with a few other passengers, including a naked man sitting slouched in the stern, head hanging with hands clasped behind his neck. 


“And just north of the Elbe River in downtown there is a statue of a barefoot man in a similarly distraught pose, but with his face buried in his hands. It sits on the site of the old St. Nicholas church, a neo-Gothic masterpiece built in the 1800s, whose 483-foot-high spire was listed as the tallest building on Earth for a couple of years in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it was still tall enough in 1943 that the night-raiding English pilots used it as a bullseye to hit the neighborhoods below. The body of the church burned to the ground in the firebombing, though its underground crypt has been restored and functions today as a museum to the carnage."