1. We’ve been having torrential rainstorms here in Arizona. I technically shouldn’t have tried to drive home on Friday, but I only noticed the “do not travel” warning after I arrived (I don’t check my phone all that often).

I made it home alive, in case you were wondering.

The last few months have been the wettest time I’ve experienced since I’ve been here. It’s been appreciated; I like changes in weather and the sound and smell of the rain, and the spectacle of a driving storm.

2. Saw clips from the 2018 Grinch adaptation, which looks absolutely abysmal. The strangest thing to me was that, having hired Benedict Cumberbatch – a great actor with richly powerful diction – they, for some reason ordered him to give the Grinch a weak, nasally ‘nerd’ voice that could have been done by almost literally anyone. This is the character previously voiced by Boris Karloff! Even Jim Carrey gave him an appropriately gravelly tone.

The modern film industry often feels like an experiment to see how bad they can make the films without losing any revenue. I’m not sure if that is a greater indictment on the filmmakers or the audience.

3. The great Apostolic Majesty has a typically-fascinating recent video on the life of Talleyrand. For those who don’t know, Talleyrand was a former Bishop turned revolutionary turned diplomat, who managed to serve every single French government between the 1780s and the 1830s. One of those brilliant, but utterly-immoral men who seem to make the best diplomats (the arts of peace being in many ways more repulsive than the arts of war).

The most interesting story, for my money, was of an incident where, following yet-another diplomatic disaster on Napoleon’s part, the Emperor called his ministers together and laid into them, wrapping it up with directing a non-stop stream of abuse at Talleyrand (who, at this time, had already secretly switched sides) for thirty-minutes straight. He probably would have wrapped up sooner, except that Talleyrand didn’t react at all during the entire tirade, even when Napoleon threw his wife’s infidelities in his face. The Emperor finally wound up by calling him “shit in a silk stocking!”

After leaving the room, Talleyrand mildly commented to another minister “It is a shame that such a great man should have been so badly brought up.”

4. That is a power in and of itself; the power to not react. Napoleon’s the greatest military mind of his age, but in that moment the foppish diplomat absolutely dominated him by not saying a word. Because Napoleon can hurly all the insults he likes at him, but if it doesn’t get a reaction, then it doesn’t mean anything. All he does is make himself look vulgar and petulant.

Writers, keep that in mind.

5. Something clicked for me the other day: one of those things that I suspect is obvious to many people, but which I hadn’t heard spelled out before.

If you ask most people what made slavery economically necessary to the South, they would probably say that it saved costs. Since you don’t have to pay the slaves, they’re cheaper than hiring workers for wages, obviously.

Except that’s not really true. Because in addition to the expensive one-time purchases of a slave, the owner then needs to feed him, clothe him, provide him with shelter, medical care, etc. Granted, he doesn’t need to get him good food, but there is bottom limit to how far he can take that: starving workers aren’t worth much.

In a wage-labor system, the worker assumes the financial risks: the employer offers him a fixed rate for his labor, and it is up to the worker to judge whether he can survive on this or whether he ought to risk holding out for more, knowing that doing so he risks having nothing. Out of that wage, he must pay for his own food, clothing, shelter, etc. and that of his family. If food prices go up (for instance), the worker is the one who has to deal with that.

In a slave-labor system, the owner assumes the financial risks: he must provide everything the slave and his family need to be productive workers. He is the one who has to estimate how much food his workforce will need and supply it for them. If food prices go up, the owner is the one who has to find a way to make that work.

So, while I don’t have any specific numbers, my suspicion is that a slave-labor system is actually more expensive that a wage-labor one (at least, under conditions of the time). And I have seen numbers indicating that slaves were on average better fed than their northern factory-working counterparts.

6. But if that is true, why was slavery so necessary to the south? Well, remember the South was a Plantation-based economy. A plantation will get you an enormous payoff, but only with a lot of hard labour. And here’s the crucial point: a plantation not only requires hard labour, but reliable labour. A labour force you know is still going to be there when the crunch time hits.

Say you own a steel mill and one day your entire workforce walks out to get a better job. Well, you still have your equipment and raw materials, so all you have to do is hire another workforce. You’ll eat a loss, but the steel doesn’t go bad.

But if you have a cotton plantation and your workforce walks off in quest of better wages at harvest time, then you could lose your entire investment. Which is to say, your one payment for the year. Which, if it’s a known possibility, would have a knock-down effect on credit, wage-competition, markets, and so on.

In short, slavery was not a cost-saving measure, but a risk-management measure.

Thinking you can own a man’s loyalty because you paid good money for it at an auction is still Simony, though (Simony Le Gree-y, if you will), so don’t mistake this for a defense of antebellum slavery. The point, as usual, is just that the situation was more complex that is usually allowed.

7. This week marked the one month anniversary of my mother’s death. It is a slow-burning grief that hasn’t really gotten any better in that time and forms a kind of constant low-level ache running through everything else. I also feel rather like someone who has sustained a head injury: I don’t always feel any definite pain, but I can sense that something has been damaged deep inside me, which manifests in ways I don’t always understand.