DBTL α: Greeks Bearing Gifts

This is the latest installment of the Drowned Baby Timeline, an alternate history where Adolf Hitler drowned at birth. With no spellbinding demagogue to unite them, Germany's radical right remains divided among several mutually hostile groups. In October 1932, ex-Army Captain Ernst Röhm, the leader of Germany's right-wing street fighters, siezes power in a coup d'etat. The fall of democracy in Germany sends ripples spreading throughout Europe . . .

Today's post was written by Demetrios Rammos, who has kindly consented to bring his wealth of knowledge of modern Greek history to add some much-needed verisimilitude to this timeline. So, without further ado, the Johnny Pez blog proudly presents:


Greeks Bearing Gifts
by Demetrios Rammos



Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos.

 Athens, Greece
5 March 1933

The election results were still being announced, but it seemed clear to Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos that his Liberal Party and its allies were losing to Tsaldaris' Populist Party. As he glanced up from the telegrams littering his desk, memories of the catastrophes that had followed the Populist victory in 1920 were fresh in his mind, and he felt every day of his 69 years. Although the stakes were not as high now as they had been then, the situation was still serious. Since its establishment in 1924, Greece's Republic had been fragile one. Since his return to power in 1928, Venizelos had done what he could to bring stability to the country, and for a few years he had succeeded. Unfortunately, in the wake of the Great Depression, things were coming unraveled. A deadlocked election had led to months of uncertainty, with governments following each other in rapid succession. Now, a new set of elections looked likely to give the Populists undisputed control of the country.

Tsaldaris' victory wasn't so bad in itself; although a royalist, Tsaldaris was a moderate man. But with Tsaldaris would come his allies Metaxas and, ironically, George Kondylis, and Venizelos knew they represented a danger to the Republic. Now that war clouds were gathering over Europe again, Greece had to be prepared and the last thing it needed was to have a king forced upon it again.

There was a knock at the door of his office, and General Nikolaos Plastiras entered, his peaked cap under his arm. As was his habit, he saluted, then came right to the point. "Mr. Prime Minister, I come for your advice."

Venizelos suspected what was coming, but he simply answered, "Yes?"

"It appears the democratic parties are losing the election."

Venizelos nodded. "That is unfortunately true."

Already ramrod straight, Plastiras somehow managed to stand even straighter. "So I came to ask you about launching a coup, to safeguard the democratic institutions from a restoration."

"You shall not."

Plastiras blinked in confusion. "Prime Minister?"

"Look at what happened to Germany last year, General."

"I have, Prime Minister. That is what I hope to avoid."

The Prime Minister was shaking his head. "You won't avoid this by
overthrowing a government by force of arms. Even a narrowly elected one."

The General's tone was resolute. "I am afraid, Prime Minister, that neither Kondylis nor Metaxas will be as circumspect with democratic institutions as you want us to be. There will be a coup; the only question is who will be leading it."

"There, General, you are correct. But now is not the time. A coup now, especially a coup without the slightest preparation behind it, would be worse than useless. The chance of success would be small, and the cost of failure would be great. So I most strongly advise you to do nothing against the newly elected government."

Although the General's face revealed nothing, Venizelos could sense his disappointment. "Very well, Prime Minister."

"General, there is an expression you may be familiar with. 'Give a man enough rope to hang himself with.' We will let Mr. Tsaldaris and his allies have their rope. After that, what will happen, will happen."


Athens, Greece
31 December 1934

Nearly two years had passed under the Populists. And throughout those two years the royalists had steadily prepared for the restoration of the monarchy, removing republicans from key positions in the police and the army, and replacing them with their own men. The royalist press didn't even bothering to disguise their plans. As they put it, Tsaldaris' government was a regime that couldn't be overthrown by constitutional means.

However, while the royalist coup was being prepared in the open, the republican coup was being prepared in secret. It was only a question of which side would be faster. Venizelos, back in his native Crete, watched as the Brownshirt regime in Germany tore up the Versailles treaty and began re-arming while the Western powers did nothing. There was another European war coming closer with each day, and Greece had to be ready for it.

Kondylis was set to remove Generals Plastiras and Mannetas from their commands with the new year. This proved to be an inspired bit of timing, because nobody was expected a coup on New Year's Eve.


Athens, Greece
20 July 1935

After the republicans seized power, Venizelos asked for 6 months to institute the reforms he considered necessary to stabilize the Republic. Afterward, he would retire, and a provisional government would hold elections three weeks later. He had kept his word. The amended constitution effectively turned Greece to a presidential republic similar to the American model. [1] With war looming ever larger in Europe, Venizelos had increased armaments production, which had had the happy side effect of pulling the Greek economy out of the Great Depression. Afterwards he had left Michalacopoulos, an acceptable figure for both the republicans and the royalists, to conduct the elections. The Liberals had won more narrowly than he'd have liked, but they won. Which now made the old Cretan President of the Republic.


Athens, Greece
1 June 1936

Sir Sydney Waterloo, His Majesty's ambassador to the Republic of Greece, looked at President Venizelos in surprise. "Let me see if I understand you, Mr. President. You're asking me to transmit to my government the offer of a declaration of war against Germany on the part of Greece?"

Venizelos smiled. "Exactly. Should your government accept, Greece is prepared to send a 3 division expeditionary force to Poland immediately, and dispatch the Greek light fleet in support of the Allied blockade of Germany. Of course, the Greek merchant marine, as well as the port of Thessaloniki, [1] will be placed at the service of the alliance as well. And I am hopeful that the other Balkan League members may well follow our lead. I certainly hope to persuade King Alexander and the Romanian government to do so."

Sir Sydney nodded. "And in exchange?"

"Twenty-four years ago, your government offered Greece a union with Cyprus in exchange for naval facilities. That offer was renewed in 1916. I feel that the time is ripe for another renewal of that offer. Back in 1864, your government allowed the Ionian Islands to join Greece. Extending the same generous gesture to the people of Cyprus would put the Greek nation in your debt."


Notes:

[1] A modern observer from our own timeline would consider the new Greek government to be closer to that of the Fifth French Republic than the United States of America, but of course that comparison would not occur to any of the participants.

[2] The latter was considered by the Little Entente to be one of their main supply routes in the 1920s.

Sobel Wiki: the road not taken

This week's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on the Global War, a worldwide conflict that consumed the Sobel Timeline from 1939 to 1948. The Global War was emphatically not a thinly-veiled retelling of our own timeline's Second World War. Rather than being started by a power-hungry dictator with dreams of global conquest, the Global War was sparked by a conflict between two imperial powers over control of natural resources in a peripheral area. In fact, as far as we can tell from Sobel's descriptions, all of the major powers that fought in the Global War had democratically-elected governments. Sobel even describes how three of the participating nations essentially voted for war by electing pro-war governments.

Of equal interest from an alternate-history viewpoint is the fact that the Confederation of North America, one of the Sobel Timeline's two analogues of our own U.S.A., remained neutral throughout the Global War. This is one of several instances where Sobel took an event from our world and had an analogous event in For Want of a Nail go the other way. Most obviously is the book's point-of-departure from our own history, when the American Revolution ends in a British victory and the thirteen colonies return to British rule. Next is 1789, when the incipient French Revolution is put down by the royalists, the French Revolutionary Wars never take place, and the ancien regime remains in power for another 90 years.

The Rocky Mountain War of the 1840s between the C.N.A. and Mexico does not end in a smashing victory for the C.N.A. Instead, Mexico succeeds in defeating a series of attacks by the North Americans, and suffers only a minor loss of territory in the subsequent peace negotiations. In the 1880s, Sobel's version of the Populist Party succeeds in displacing one of the two major parties in the C.N.A. And in 1914, a war between Mexico and France ends in a quick Mexican victory, and as far as we are told, no other nations are drawn into the war.

The Global War continues Sobel's habit of reversing the outcome of our world's events. Instead of a decisive victory for one side or the other, the Globel War ends in an exhausted stalemate, with hundreds of millions of people dead and most of the world in ruins.

Fuck the NRA

That is all.

Sobel Wiki: Maiden Taiwan

This week's featured article on the Sobel Wiki concerns the island nation of Taiwan.

When the Sobel Timeline branched off from our own in 1777, Taiwan was a province of the Chinese Empire. By the 1930s in both timelines, Taiwan had become a Japanese possession. In our world, Japan annexed Taiwan in 1895 after defeating the Chinese in the First Sino-Japanese War. Sobel does not say how Japan acquired Taiwan in For Want of a Nail, but it was presumably done the same way.

In our history, Taiwan was restored to Chinese control after the defeat of Japan in 1945, but in the Sobel Timeline, things aren't nearly so clear-cut. In the Sobel Timeline's analogue to World War II, Japan and China were allies, fighting off invasion attempts by the United States of Mexico and Siberia. Japan was also informally allied with Kramer Associates, the Sobel Timeline's One Big Zaibatsu. As Sobel records, K.A. spent £20 billion subsidizing China's war against the U.S.M. and Siberia, and an equivalent amount in the rest of the Pacific region (i.e. Japan and Australia). Sobel also states that K.A. President John Jackson "had taken Taiwan in 1948," though he doesn't explain how he took it, or who he took it from. It may be that Jackson pressured the Japanese to sell Taiwan to K.A. as compensation for the company's financial support. In any case, the following year, Jackson's successor made Taiwan the company's headquarters, and ordered its industrialization. By the late 1950s, according to published statistics, Taiwan's growth rate reached the twelve percent per annum level.

The price for this phenomenal economic growth is that Taiwan's government is under the control of a world-bestriding corporation. The alt-Sobel who wrote For Want of a Nail in the Sobel Timeline, who has become a Kramer Associates flack, thinks this is a good thing. Those of us who find ourselves living under the control of too-big-to-fail corporations in the real world have reason to know better.

Sobel Wiki: endless long hot summer

This week's featured article on the Sobel Wiki is on Howard Washburne, the founder of "Friends of Black Mexico" and the "League for Brotherhood". In For Want of a Nail, the slaves in the Southern states were freed almost painlessly in the early 1840s, and as they left the plantations many of them emigrated across the Mississippi to the southern half of OTL's Louisiana Purchase, known in the Sobel Timeline as the Confederation of Vandalia. The presence of so many black settlers into an area that until then had been almost uniformly white created a lot of friction, and even violence. The solution was to separate Vandalia into two states along the 40th parallel (the OTL border between Kansas and Nebraska) in 1877. The newly-created state had a population of about three million, two thirds of them black. By the turn of the 20th century, most of the white inhabitants had left, and a significant minority of Southern Vandalia's population was made up of runaway slaves from the Mexican state of Jefferson, which was just across the Arkansas River.

Needless to say, this was bound to create hostility between the Southern Vandalians and the Mexicans, and that only got worse when the Mexican government put some 8,000 slaves on trial for treason after they joined an invading French army in 1914. Howard Washburne was the Governor of Southern Vandalia at the time, and in February 1915 he publicly called for an end to the treason trials and the abolition of slavery in Mexico, and formed the Friends of Black Mexico to advance those aims. On January 4, 1916, the day before the verdict was due to be handed down, 2,000 F.B.M. members stormed the prison where the slaves were being held, and freed them, at a cost of over 1100 dead and 4000 injured.

Slavery was finally abolished in Mexico on May 14, 1920, and Washburne responded by transforming the F.B.M. into the League for Brotherhood, dedicated to ending racial discrimination in Washburne's own Confederation of North America. The L.B. attracted reformers and radicals who had other agendas, and in the summer of 1922 general dissatisfaction with society in the C.N.A. led to major riots and demonstrations, which Sobel called the worst since the 1880s.

Sobel wrote For Want of a Nail in the summer of 1971, towards the end of a period that had seen the United States wracked by race riots and mass demonstrations, and the book reflects this. Sobel's C.N.A. suffered periodic bouts of widespread political violence: during a severe economic crisis in the 1880s, the country was "plagued by looters, rioters, and the like"; in 1899 a two-week spasm of political violence known as the Starkist terror resulted in 436 deaths, 13,000 injuries, and almost a billion North American pounds in property damage; and, as mentioned above, the summer of 1922 saw "major riots and demonstrations . . . the worst since the 1880's" (i.e. worse than the hundreds killed and thousands injured in 1899).

The solution to the troubles of 1922, incidentally, was offered by a Sobel Timeline analogue of Henry Ford named Owen Galloway, who was able to calm the troubled waters by subsidizing mass emigration from the C.N.A.

Sobel Wiki: One Big Zaibatsu

It's a little like Japan. Japan, before World War Two, had four and only four large zaibatsus, enormous conglomerates of interlocked companies, banks, and what have you.

In the United States of Mexico, there was One Big Zaibatsu that has practically run the country. I use that word 'practically' exactly, since they can and do force out Mexican leaders in Sobel's account. . . .

Historically, it's as if one company got very lucky in the robber baron corporate sweepstakes: banking, railroads, oil, steel, tropical fruit, and so on, all originally funded with gold rush money.

Then, since the nation in which they were mainly based took exception to having One Big Zaibatsu run everything, they gradually shifted their center of operations: from San Francisco to Hawaii to Manila to Taiwan.

This is Carlos Yu's description of Kramer Associates, the One Big Zaibatsu of For Want of a Nail. As Sobel notes in the book's final chapter, by the early 1970s Kramer Associates has reached the point where it controls almost one-sixth of the world's resources. Yet, until recently, the Sobel Wiki article on this corporate behemoth was a mere stub.

But no more. A week's moderately diligent effort on my part has expanded that stub into a comprehensive account of the rise and, well, further rise of Kramer Associates, which has earned it a place on the main page as this week's featured article.

Impeachment poll update

Earlier in the month, I launched the Johnny Pez Obama impeachment poll, in which I asked this blog's multitudinous readers which alleged high crime and misdemeanor the House Republicans would cite when they impeached President Obama at some point during his second term. So far, the poll has garnered ten votes (which is about ten more than I thought it would get).

Reader solnushka pointed out that the poll ought to have an "all of the above" option, and I did promise to update the options as time went on, but, alas, it is not to be. It turns out that once people have started casting votes, Blogger won't let you change the options. So if the Republicans gin up some new scandal and impeach Obama for that, the "something else" option is going to get a workout.

Recent attempts by Republicans to block Susan Rice from becoming the next Secretary of State as part of their general Benghazi attack conspiracy theory indicate that Benghazi is still the frontrunning excuse for impeaching the president, and the Johnny Pez poll reflects that, with 40% of respondents choosing the Benghazi attack.

You don't have to go home

It's time for another embedded music video here at the Johnny Pez blog. Today it's Semisonic with their 1999 hit "Closing Time".

Sobel Wiki: USM! USM! USM!

Work on the Sobel Wiki continues apace. This week's featured article is on Miguel Huddleston, the second President of the United States of Mexico. You can tell that alt-Sobel likes Huddleston and wants to say nice things about him, but he's hindered by the fact that Huddleston didn't actually accomplish very much. The sections of For Want of a Nail dealing with Huddleston can be read as Sobel's satire on historians letting their own emotional reactions to historical figures color their accounts.

Also up are several new articles on the Mexican Congress, the city of Palenque, and Russia.

Sobel Vexillology 2: Electric Boogaloo

A couple months back, in a fit of Sobel Wiki-inspired madness, I created a blog post in which I speculated on what sort of national flags the United States of Mexico and the Confederation of North America might have wound up with. I came to the conclusion that after the American bid for independence failed, the British colonies would return to the pre-rebellion practice of flying the British Red Ensign:

This would continue until the drafting of the Second Britannic Design in 1842, at which time a wave of North American nationalism would lead to the adoption of a Coat of Arms for the C.N.A., and of a version of the Red Ensign incorporating that coat of arms, in much the way that Canada did in our own history after the confederation of 1867. In my original post, I didn't go to the trouble of creating a hypothetical C.N.A. Coat of Arms, since I was hoping one of my more vexillology-oriented readers would be inspired to do so. Two months later, that hasn't happened, so I've decided to take matters into my own hands. Hence, my own version of the C.N.A. flag:

The Coat of Arms consists, working clockwise from the upper left, of a bison representing Vandalia, a fleur-de-lis representing Quebec, a ship representing the Northern Confederation and Indiana, and two sheafs of wheat representing the Southern Confederation and Manitoba.

This raises the question of what happens to the North American flag and Coat of Arms after Quebec devolves to associated status in 1889. One answer is that the fleur-de-lis is replaced by a new symbol, like so:

In the upper right quadrant of the Coat of Arms are two plows representing Southern Vandalia, while the bison in the upper left quadrant now represents Northern Vandalia. But there's another possible answer.

The devolution of Quebec was the result of a plebiscite held by a radical new political party, the People's Coalition. Sobel indicates more than once the Coalition's ties with the rebellion of the 1770s: the original founders of the Coalition in the Southern Confederation had called their platform the Norfolk Resolves in a deliberate echo of the Suffolk Resolves of 1775; and the Coalition held its 1883 national convention in Boston, something Sobel suggests was meant to indicate their relationship with the rebels of the 1770s.

After gaining power in 1888, the Coalition under its leader Ezra Gallivan sought to distance the C.N.A. from Great Britain, and it might well be that part of that effort was the adoption of a new national flag omitting the Union Jack. What would such a Coalition-inspired flag look like? Well, given the new party's ties to the rebels of 1775, you might get something like this:

It's not the Stars and Stripes of the North American Rebellion, but the echoes are unmistakeable, which is what you would expect of Gallivan, a member of the Coalition's moderate wing, but a confirmed isolationist nonetheless.

Sobel Wiki: Siberian exile

Another area of the Sobel Timeline has come into focus at the Sobel Wiki, with articles on the Republic of Siberia, the three Siberian heads of government that Sobel mentions, and five Siberian cities. Also up on the main page is this week's featured article on the 1963 Grand Council elections.

Sofia Vergara is stalking me

She follows me everywhere I go, peering at me from above her can of Diet Pepsi.  She pretends to look away when I turn to face her, but I know that as soon as I turn away, she'll be watching me again.  Watching . . . always watching!  The woman is a menace!

The Johnny Pez Obama impeachment poll

Some time in the next few months, the members of the just-elected House Republican caucus will meet to decide a question: what should they charge Obama with when they impeach him?  Because this is the logical next step in the Republican thought process.  They've learned that their attempt to demonize Obama as unAmerican was unsuccessful, or at least not successful enough to cost Obama a second term.  As we learned during the Clinton administration, impeachment is the next step.  So, what will they charge him with?

The current favorite wingnut conspiracy theory says that Obama did something-or-other-that-was-scandalous involving the Libyan militia attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, and there are currently two groups of crazy House Republicans "investigating" it.  Right now, this looks like the best bet for an impeachment hearing.

Of course, there's also Solyndra Energy, a company that manufactured solar power panels that got a $535 million loan from the Department of Energy in 2009, then went bankrupt a year and a half later.  The GOP spent a couple of weeks in September 2011 trying to turn this into a scandal, but at the time it didn't gain any traction.  If the Benghazi attack investigations don't go anywhere, the GOP might try to revive this old nontroversy as a reason to impeach the President.

And of course, there's always one of the old Birther conspiracy theories available if nothing else will do.  Or maybe the GOP will manufacture a completely new scandal for impeachment purposes.

So at long last, the Johnny Pez blog is taking advantage of Blogger's poll widget, and the question for our hypothetical blogging audience is: what will the House Republicans charge Obama with when they vote to impeach him?  The poll is over on the right sidebar just below my iconic basenji, and voting will remain open until A) House Republicans actually hold their impeachment vote, or B) Obama leaves the White House.  If the GOP manufactures a new scandal in the meantime, the poll questions will change to reflect the fact.

UPDATE: an end-of-the-month update on the state of the poll is here.

UPDATE 2: an end-of-the-year update with extra added Benghazi is here.

Sobel Wiki: bells & whistles

For the last two years, I've been content to focus on adding content to the Sobel Wiki, because a wiki ultimately stands or falls on the quality and quantity of its content.  However, now that there are over 1900 pages, it's time to move beyond the basics and start trying to attract some notice.

Along with the standard introductory material, the main page of the Sobel Wiki now includes a Featured Article, links to the most important categories, a list of newly-created pages, and reciprocal links to four other alternate history wikis.  In addition, the Sobel Wiki has been added to Wikia's list of Promoted wikis, where it now joins the ranks of such illustrious popular entertainment wikis as Wookieepedia, Scoobypedia, and the Sailor Moon Wiki.  Of course, the price of Promotion is that the Sobel Wiki now has advertising embedded in it, but such is fame.

Dog walk: 11/4/12

The Basenjimobile was low on gas this morning, so I decided to go gas it up at the local Giant Eagle supermarket.  And since I have to take the dogs for their morning walk anyway, I decided to kill two orcs with one arrow and bring the dogs along.  Happily, there's a public park on the way to the Giant Eagle called Fairhaven Park in Kennedy Township, so I could stop there on the way to the supermarket and let the dogs have their walk.

During the early part of the walk, I heard the amplified sound someone singing off in the distance, and faint though it was, it didn't take me long to recognize the song as "The Star-Spangled Banner."  And it was like the past was reaching forward to tap me on the shoulder.

Back in Newport, I would usually get home from work around 7:15 in the morning, and then immediately take the dogs for a quick drive to the municipal dog park.  As it happens, the dog park is less than half a mile from the U.S. Naval War College, and my visits there would often coincide with morning reveille, which included an instrumental version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" played over the base's loudspeakers, and which were quite audible from the dog park.  So, for a brief moment, I was back in Newport, watching the sun rise over JT Connell Highway while the basenjis and I listened to the national anthem playing in the distance.

The nailbiter that wasn't

Paul Krugman notes the misleading banner headline from Saturday's Financial Times: "US election hangs on a knife edge", when in fact, as Nate Silver and the other numbers wonks say, Obama is clearly ahead.  This is part of a larger trend within the American media establishment of insisting that the presidential race is closer than it is.  Krugman does not ask why this is happening, so I think I'll ask.  And then answer.

Why is the media establishment insisting that the race is a toss-up when it clearly isn't?  Because it's in their financial interest to do so.  After all, a media corporation is still a corporation, which means its only goal is to make a profit by any means necessary.  And a close presidential race is more profitable for the media than a not-so-close race, or even worse, a blowout, because, a close race attracts more eyeballs than a blowout, and more eyeballs means higher rates for advertising.  (There's also the fact that both campaigns will pay more money to the media to run their political ads if the race is close than they will if it's a foregone conclusion, but presumably the campaigns know perfectly well how close the race is, so they won't let their ad budgets be influenced by inaccurate reporting.)

"But," you say, "surely you don't think that the objective journalists would intentionally distort the nature of the race just because their bosses tell them to.  Surely they aren't that corrupt!"

What I think is that when you take someone's money, you have to do what they tell you to do, and that includes accepting a salary from a media conglomerate and reporting what they tell you to report.  In other words, yes, they are that corrupt.

And don't call me Shirley.

UPDATE 11/10/12: I'm going to have to revise part of my post above.  According to CBS News, the Romney campaign apparently didn't know how close the race was.  They deliberately skewed their own internal polls to make it look like they had a better chance of winning.  So, I stand corrected.  The media can make more money by convincing election campaigns that it's worthwhile spending more on campaign ads.  Good to know.

Dog walk: 10/30/12

As I've noted  before, the basenjis are not enthusiastic about being walked in the rain (and for that matter, I'm not enthusiastic about walking them in the rain).  So when it comes to walking them during a hurricane, unenthusiastic doesn't even begin to describe it.  I thought I was done dealing with hurricanes when I left Newport, Rhode Island, but that turns out not to be the case, because Hurrican Sandy is due to make landfall in New Jersey today and crash through the Allegheny Mountains to drench Pittsburgh.

The rain is already here, so I decided to take the dogs to the Riverview Park dog park, which is the most businesslike of our usual haunts.  Since my current assignment from the temp agency involves working the 8 AM to 4 PM shift at a candy factory, I get up at six in the morning to give the dogs their first walk of the day.  6:20 found the three of us walking through the still-dark grounds surrounding the Allegheny Observatory.  We had circumnavigated the observatory, and were on our way back to the car, with me carrying a plastic shopping bag weighted down slightly with Klea's poop, when Louis' rain-slick leash slipped out of my cold-numbed hand, and he was instantly racing downhill towards the line of trees that marked the really steep part of the hill.

Clutching Klea's leash in one hand and the plastic bag in the other, I raced down the hill after him.  Klea was even more anxious to race downhill than I was, and she pulled me off balance, resulting in me falling on my back.  I got up, and with Klea still tugging at her leash, I made my way more slowly to the line of trees.

I stood calling for Louis, scanning downhill through the trees for any sign of him.  I saw a couple of shapes moving in the night, and recognized them as deer, which explained why Louis had taken off in the first place.  One horrible possibility I imagined was Louis chasing the deer through the park all morning, and me missing hours of work while looking for him.  An even more horrible possibility was the leash getting caught around a tree and Louis being unable to move, lost from sight.

I slowly paced along the belt of trees, calling and calling, and after an unbearably anxious couple of minutes, I heard a faint jingling coming from my left.  I turned, and was just able to make out Louis standing just outside the belt of trees.  I walked over, and operating mostly by touch, was able to confirm that he was still in his collar, and that his leash was still attached to it, trailing along the ground underneath him.  I got ahold of the leash's handle, and started leading the two dogs back up the hill to the observatory's access road, as happy as a man can be whose feet and back are soaking wet, which turns out to be pretty happy.

"Louis", I said to the basenji, "I'm going to assume that you took care of your business while you were out there, and bring you straight to the car."  But I was wrong.  Halfway up the hill, Louis paused and did his Looking For Just The Right Place To Poop routine.  I still had the plastic shopping bag, and in moments I had cleaned up Louis' poop.  We continued up the hill, got into the car, and drove home.

Sobel Wiki: we are from France

You may have thought that you were done hearing about the Sobel Wiki after I finished posting the last of the For All Nails vignettes.  If so, then you thought wrong, because there's still plenty of work to be done on the wiki, and I mean to do it (alone if necessary), and what's more, I mean to inflict news of my progress on my hypothetical blogging audience.

This weekend has been a busy one, with a total of eight new articles now up at the Sobel Wiki.  First and foremost is an article on France, which has had a rather unhappy history in the Sobel Timeline.  I personally think this was Robert Sobel's way of getting back at Charles de Gaulle for being uppity in the 1960s.  There are also brief articles on 19th century French businessman Maurice Duforge and his Jeffersonian partner Jethro Baker,* and more substantial articles on King Louis XVI and his son and successor Louis XVII.  Finally, there are articles on the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, on the Viceroyalty of New Spain's Province of Tejas, and a brief article on the brief existence of the United States of America.

*Did Sobel name him after Jethro Bodine?  It would be irresponsible not to speculate!

The conservative moral inversion

The conservative moral inversion can be summed up very simply:

1. Helping people is bad.
2. Making people suffer is good.

The roots of the conservative moral inversion go back to the 1960s, when white racists found their tax dollars being spent helping to lift black people out of poverty.  In order to prevent this from continuing, conservatives invented the "culture of dependency", the idea that helping people was actually bad for them.  It stood to reason, then, that if helping people was bad, then making people suffer, for instance by cutting social programs, was good.  And if cutting social programs was a good thing, then there was no need to pay taxes to support them, which was the whole point of the exercise.

The conservative moral inversion is no longer an excuse for white people to allow black people to remain poor.  It has expanded from its racist origins, and is now the conventional wisdom among political and media elites pretty much throughout the entire industrialized world, where its proponents are known as the Pain Caucus, or the austerians.  Reducing help for the needy (or, as Saint Ronald of Santa Barbara memorably put it, the "truly needy") has become an end in itself.  That's why the Europeans are determined to reduce countries like Greece and Spain to economic basket cases, and why President Obama has been determined to cut Social Security benefits pretty much from the day he entered office.

FAN #305: "The King's Justice" by Johnny Pez

Up today at the Sobel Wiki, the last remaining For All Nails vignettes have been posted.* First is #298: "Love Story" by Jonathan Edelstein, his last FAN vignette before posting #306: "Domestic Scene" on 16 January 2011.  "Love Story" is, well, a love story set in Numidia, a majority-Jewish state occupying the site of our own world's Libya.  Sobel briefly mentions that hundreds of thousands of Russian peasants, many of them Jews, crossed into the Ottoman Empire in the chaos of the 1880s, and that some eventually found their way to North Africa, where a large Russian community was formed by the turn of the century.  Jonathan turned this odd reference in Sobel, and an even briefer throwaway reference in M.G. Alderman's #21B: "... And Met With My Downfall", into the nation of Numidia.

Next is my own #305: "The King's Justice", a sequel to #303: "Buque Nights", that resolved the latter's cliffhanger ending and (possibly) the most important hanging plot thread from the For All Nails narrative: the fate of former Mexican Secretary of War Vincent Mercator.

"Love Story" was first posted to the soc.history.what-if newsgroup on 7 February 2005.  "The King's Justice" was never posted to shw-i, but was posted to this blog on 10 January 2011.  At the blog post, you will also find the vignette's original ending, and the comment by Noel Maurer that persuaded me to change it.

And thus concludes my quixotic project to create a complete online For All Nails archive after, good heavens, five months of steady work.  If anyone out there has actually been following this fit of madness, you have in equal measure my thanks and my pity.  Just in case anyone is worried about suffering from Sobel withdrawal, I remind you that the larger Sobel Wiki remains a work-in-progress, and will continue to be so, I daresay, for the indefinite future.  Meanwhile, the Johnny Pez blog will resume its former status as a repository for basenji anecdotes, prophetic utterances, left-wing rants, and the occasional embedded music video.

*Sharp-eyed observers of the For All Nails archive page will notice that there are still two dead links in the archive.  These are #125: "I, Mercator (Part 4)" and #242: "Brothers", both by Carlos Yu, both unfinished and likely to remain so.