Soviet consumers used to dread receiving a car or appliance produced by a Russian factory in the waning days of the month, when the workers, who had idled away their time day after day, suddenly sprang into action to meet the monthly production quota by “storm producing” everything. Production speed went up stratospherically and quality control went down precipitously.

I never knew the Russian word for “storm production,” but M.H. Forsyth supplies it.

[T]oday I discovered a word that is so useful that it describes most, if not all, of my futile life. The word is shturmovshchina, and it may even be worth learning how to spell it.

Shturmovshchina is the practice of working frantically just before a deadline, having not done anything for the last month. The first element means storm or assault, the second is a derogatory suffix.

Shturmovschina originated in the Soviet Union. Factories would be given targets and quotas and other such rot by the state. However, they often weren’t given any tools or raw materials. So they would sit around with their feet up and their tools down waiting until the necessaries arrived, and it was only when the deadline was knocking at the door and the gulag beckoned that they would panic, grab whatever was to hand, and do a really shoddy, half-arsed heap of work.

This too is my policy.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Brooks Brothers (who wants to sell you some) details the (alleged) history of the penny loafer.

The loafer itself was invented in the early 1930s; inspired by an Esquire Magazine photo series featuring Norwegian dairy farmers and their distinctive slip-on shoes. The Spaulding family of New Hampshire, purveyors of leather and lumber, began producing a leather slip-on they called a “loafer”; named after the area on a dairy farm cows “loaf” around in prior to milking.

In 1936 G.H. Bass Shoe Company began producing its famous Weejun, a name meant to give the flavor of the shoe’s NorWEGIAN roots. Mr. Bass’s wife, who sent her husband off each morning with a kiss on the cheek, inspired the distinctive strap detail. Shaped like a pair of lips or the perfect lipstick stain, the new design left just enough room to squeeze in something round and flat.

Two cents won’t get you much these days. There was a time, before the debit card and ATM, when cash payment required the correct dollars and cents. That time is now long gone and the copper penny (now 97.5% zinc), literally, costs more than it’s worth. Back in the 1930s the recently popularized outdoor payphone or “phone booth” cost a paltry two cents. The new loafer design allowed just enough space for a penny in each shoe, equaling the cost of an emergency phone call, thus the penny and the loafer were united, never to be torn asunder.

The penny loafer had its heyday in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties. The shoe became a pervasive trend on Ivy League campuses.

I wonder if the pennies-for-a-phone-call business is true. I’m awfully, horribly old, but I don’t remember pay phones costing less than a dime. My impression was that high school kids put pennies in the slot in the front of the shoe, simply because they would fit there.

We commonly wore penny loafers at Yale in my day, but nobody ever put any pennies in them.

Brooks Brothers is out of luck selling any to me. I still have several pair of so far unused penny loafers purchased from Barrie Ltd. in New Haven, the best purveyor of men’s shoes, now gone, put out of business by the evil Yale Administration in 2003.

Nice claws!

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Harpy Eagle (Harpia harpyja)

Josephine Livingstone certainly chose a hard boiled title for her review of Bran Nicol’s new book The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies.

Often responding to Philip or Sam, the private investigator (PI) may be identified by his coat and hat. His natural habitat: the wet street corner or, unauthorised, another person’s home. He is commonly accused of committing the very crime under his investigation. You will find him lit starkly, from the side. He is good at getting women into bed, but they often turn out to be malevolent villainesses. He is American.

The PI’s bloodlines flow deeply into the tradition of masculine heroes. His characteristics loom so large over Western popular culture that it can be hard to make him out. This is the problem facing any book on the film noir detective: being a chap, in a movie, trying to solve a problem, he is as inscrutably general a cultural trope as the femme fatale. What makes a PI a PI, and not just some other kind of leading man? You can’t even really chalk him up to an era, since he has existed since the early days of film. …
[The] famous five film noir traits—oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel—were neither clear cut nor all strictly necessary in order for a film to be noir. This genre is yoked together by a general ambience—an aura of darkness—rather than any true collective character. If the film noir is about one particular thing, I’d say it was about bad people. It is therefore about crime, and the investigators of those crimes. Enter the PI.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Burgonet, Italy circa 1550

Jeffrey Lord describes how control of Academia, elite media, the entertainment industry, the foundations, and the mainstream Protestant denominations allows liberals to define the reality around them (most of the time) and to frame every debate in their own terms.

He uses as a metonymy the very apt comparison of the Downfall of Rush Limbaugh, perennially predicted by the liberals, with the recent sale of the (liberal) Washington Post. Rush continues to flourish, while pillars of the establishment MSM are failing everywhere, but none of this matters, because the MSM is able to define reality, at least within its own establishment bubble.

Let’s define… Liberal Privilege.

In four words?

“We make the rules.”

Is Rush Limbaugh in trouble?

Is the Tea Party extremist?

Was Ronald Reagan dumb, the Soviet Union eternal, did Bush lie, are conservatives racists? Is Sarah Palin stupid, Hillary Clinton brilliant, global warming a scientific fact, and abortion overwhelmingly popular?

The answers? Yes, yes, yes, yes, of course, it’s obvious, absolutely, and everybody knows it without question.

Why? Because liberals say so, that’s why.

This is the Doctrine of Liberal Privilege that finally forced the Graham family to sell the Washington Post.

Using Liberal Privilege liberals make the rules, establish the common assumptions, send them forth into American society through the liberal media, liberal academia, liberal Hollywood, liberal religion, and other liberal venues.

So let’s define the Doctrine of Liberal Privilege more specifically, academic-style (and note, sources will be provided at the end of this article):

• “Liberal Privilege defines the societal norm, often benefiting those in the privileged group. Second, privileged group members can rely on their privilege and avoid objecting to oppression. The result of this societal norm is that everyone is required to live by the attributes held by the privileged. In society liberals define and determine the terms of success and failure; they are the norm. Thus, achievements by members of the liberal privileged group are viewed as meritorious and the result of individual effort, rather than as privileged.”

• “Liberal Privilege is a form of racism that both underlies and is distinct from institutional and overt racism. It underlies them in that both are predicated on preserving the privileges of liberals (regardless of whether agents recognize this or not). But it is also distinct in terms of intentionality. It refers to the hegemonic structures, practices, and ideologies that reproduce liberals’ privileged status. In this scenario, liberals do not necessarily intend to hurt people of conservative or non-liberal belief, but because they are unaware of their liberal privilege, and because they accrue social and economic benefits by maintaining the liberal status quo, they inevitably do.”

• “Liberal Privilege is an invisible package of unearned assets which liberals can count on cashing in each day, but about which they are ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. Liberal Privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”

When understood in this fashion, understanding the “invisible weightless knapsack” concept, the essence of everything from the liberal media to academia, mainline Protestant churches, the bureaucracies of Washington, DC, the NAACP, La Raza, the AFL-CIO, and so much more comes into 20/20 focus. Everyone involved, social, cultural, and political liberals one and all, has the requisite “maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” of Liberal Privilege.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Ratak Monodosico:

It’s known as the Wow! signal. It was discovered during a SETI project—i.e., they were trying to find intelligent aliens. There have been a bunch of debates as to what the hell the Wow! signal actually is, but no real consensus.

There is a non-zero probability that the Wow! signal came from an extraterrestrial intelligence; however, given the strength of the signal and how far it must have traveled, whatever civilization sent it would have to be way, way more advanced than we are. Any messages we could send with the most powerful radio transmitters we have would degrade into static long before they would get to where the Wow! signal may have originated.

Wow! Signal

Even Maureen Dowd is getting sick of Barack Obama’s distinctive habit of striking poses of being holier-than-thou and more-intelligent-than-thou.

President Obama proved himself a great segue artist Friday, as he smoothly glided from his previously unassailable position on the matter of surveillance to his new unassailable position on the matter of surveillance.

There is no moral high ground that he does not seek to occupy. As with drones and gay marriage, he seems peeved that we were insufficiently patient with his own private study of the matter. Why won’t the country agree to entrust itself to his fine mind?

Judging by MoDo, the reek of Obama-esque sanctimony and self-congratulation has put liberals off their feed and induced a yearning on the political left for a return to the naughtier-than-thou Clintons. Dowd is already wishfully addressing Hillary as “Madam President.”

Yet while Barry is in the thick of it, the air is thick with Hillary. From the sidelines, she is soaking up a disproportionate amount of attention and energy, as though she were already Madam President.

She is supposed to be resting and off making $200,000 speeches, but instead she’s around every political corner.

The cicadas never showed up. But we can’t hear ourselves think here this summer over the roar of the Clinton machine. …

Many Democrats are hungry to make history again, and they see the first woman president as the natural successor to the first black president.

But in other ways, Hillary is not such a natural successor. The Clintons are ends-justify-the-means types with flexible boundaries about right and wrong, while the Obama mystique is the opposite. His White House runs on the idea that if you are virtuous and true and honorable, people will ultimately come to you. (An ethos that sometimes collides with political success.)

It’s odd that Obama, who once talked about being a transformational president, did not want to ensure that his allies and his aims were imprinted on the capital. Instead, he has teed up the ball for Hillary. Some of the excitement about Barack Obama was the prospect of making a clean start, after years of getting dragged into the Clintons’ dubious ethics and personal messes. Yet Obama ushered in the return of Clinton Inc. and gave it his blessing.

What he doesn’t seem to realize yet is that Hillary’s first term will be seen, not as a continuation of Obama, but as Bill Clinton’s third term.

Ezra Klein explains that Princeton Professsor Doug Massey identifies the recent decades’ great influx of Hispanic illegal immigration as a classic case of unintended consequences. However, if you don’t like Hispanic immigration, Massey also points out, you can cheer up: that period of immigration is also basically over.

[T]he rise of America’s large undocumented population is a direct result of the militarization of the border. While undocumented workers once traveled back and forth from Mexico with relative ease, after the border was garrisoned, immigrants from Mexico crossed the border and stayed.

“Migrants quite rationally responded to the increased costs and risks by minimizing the number of times they crossed the border,” Massey wrote in his 2007 paper “Understanding America’s Immigration ‘Crisis.’” “But they achieved this goal not by remaining in Mexico and abandoning their intention to migrate to the U.S., but by hunkering down and staying once they had run the gauntlet at the border and made it to their final destination.”

The data support Massey’s thesis: In 1980, 46 percent of undocumented Mexican migrants returned to Mexico within 12 months. By 2007, that was down to 7 percent. As a result, the permanent undocumented population exploded.

The militarization also had another unintended consequence: It dispersed the undocumented population. Prior to 1986, about 85 percent of Mexicans who entered the U.S. settled in California, Texas or Illinois, and more than two-thirds entered through either the San Diego-Tijuana entry point or the El Paso-Juarez entry point. As the U.S. blockaded those areas, undocumented migrants found new ways in — and new places to settle. By 2002, two-thirds of undocumented migrants were entering at a non-San Diego/El Paso entry point and settling in a “nontraditional” state.

In recent years, the net inflow of new undocumented immigrants arriving from Mexico has fallen to zero. Some of the decline is due to the U.S. recession and a falloff in construction, which employed a lot of migrant workers. But some is due to an improving economy in Mexico, where unemployment is 5 percent and wages have been rising. “I personally think the huge boom in Mexican immigration is over,” Massey said.

Read the whole thing.

I think Massey is right.

Self-portrait of Juan Rulfo in the Nevado de Toluca, 1940.

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.