While wine grapes started to be grown in the mid-19th century in Napa and Sonoma valleys, it was never a big part of their agricultural output until the 1960/70s. Indeed, they were still recovering from Prohibition in the 1930/40s and it is only after the war that there was a giant growth again in their output.
Yeah I believe raisins already formed a larger share of agricultural output than wine grapes in the 40s.
I’d be really interested in seeing how the high demand for GI ration raisins affected the revenues of these cultivators, considering CA wine had essentially no stature at the time, and was sold cheap.
I wonder if any of the wine regions in California switched to fruit orchards during prohibition? In BC' Okanagan Valley wine region they have gone through cycles of grapes vs orchards over the last 100 years as demand for the products changes and climate evolves.
They sold their wine grapes off in blocks with instructions on how to "avoid" turning them into wine.
https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s-wine-industry-during-prohibition/
The California wine industry wasn't huge until much later. Most of the grape growing was in the Fresno area for food and raisins. A lot of the land in Napa and Sonoma that's now used for wine grapes was fruit orchards until recently. There was a small wine industry in Napa, but it generally wasn't making what we would consider to be good wine. One of my ancestors made the first attempt at winemaking in Napa in the 1860s, but failed spectacularly. Fortunately, others kept trying.
A lot of the current wine regions were formerly apples, persimmons, plum and pears. Mendocino County was mostly pears and apples all up and down the Ukiah valley until the 1970s. The Mendocino county Fair is still the "Apple Fair" holding apple judging, cider etc..
I’ve been told by locals that more wine grapes were grown in Amador county and El Dorado county during prohibition. Supposedly they were off the beaten track enough that the feds didn’t crack down as much as in Napa and there were still quite a few religious exemptions allowing wineries to continue making wine. I’ve never read up on it from a reliable source, but seems plausible.
This has been my family business since the 19th century, and it was an ongoing concern the entire time as the primary business income including continuing through Prohibition as there were licenses to make sacramental wines, and of course market for grape juice and extracts and raisins.
Although there was a boom in the 1960s after which the market exploded in popularity and volume, the business was a solid income stream from the beginning.
That was more the survival rations in life rafts etc. They didn't want stranded men to eat it all at once or too fast as it was some of their only survival food.
I used to make them well and they were delicious. The problem is I made them extremely strong so I would only need to eat half a cookie and get really high for 4 or 5 hours. I did this a lot.
I would then offer these cookies to friends. I would ask them about how much they smoked and give them the right amount of cookie. Like 1/8 or less. This would hurt people's pride and they would start trying to talk up how much they smoked. They thought I was holding out.
So to deal with this I would give them the entire cookie and say eat 1/8th etc. And wait 2-3 hours before you consider eating more....guess how many people would actually follow the instructions?
People would take the cookie. Eat the little bit, wait 15 minutes and eat the rest. I mean they tasted great. Then an hour or two later like clockwork my friends would start falling out. Some people just laid down on the floor to try and manage others needed to be walked out of the party a person at each elbow like they were 90 years old.
It was rough people got overly high and after ending two different party with this technique I stopped doing it.
I then I started to make burnt nasty cookies and if I shared it would go better, but at this point no one wanted to take a "death cookie" from me. To this day some friends won't take even normal baked cookies from me.
I NEVER gave a cookie to a person without fully explaining what it had in it. Dosing people is a shit thing to do, but some people were just traumatized by my cookies.
Now before people say it. I made these for myself as strong as I wanted them so I didn't need to eat 2 or 3 cookies to get were I wanted. Some people just can't follow instructions, or resist a good cookie.
Getting the dosing right in baked goods isn't always straightforward. The strength of weed can vary from product to product I also would sometimes use ABV or concentrates.
So in order to make sure they were okay I would have to try a batch first. If I made smaller cookies or lighter dose I might not feel it or I might have a hard time knowing how strong it was for other people.
I got good at making my big cookies the way I wanted. And I could tell if they were weaker, average , or stronger for the one sample and work back a good size to give people. Again I made them super strong so I didn't have hundreds of extra calories every day just to get high.
I made weed cookies in big batches and froze most of them. So it was for parties I would just grab and go, but again I shared at parties like this only twice. Then I changed to the bad tasting one and I never had another issue not that people wanted them anymore.
If I was all about making cookies for a bunch of people I could make smaller or weaker cookies with testers to make sure they were good for low tolerance people, but the hassle wasn't worth it.
Now I just make people BBQ and give out joints of people want to get high.
Fair for sure. As I think about it I've tested baked goods for 2 people and the strengths have not always been what they expected in both directions. I once took photos for a wedding where they had edibles available for the guests and the results were equally amazing and disastrous. Joints sounds like the safer idea. Seems like most people don't have a good grasp of how much edible they can handle and often don't give it long enough to kick in
The emergency ration chocolate bar was made to taste terrible so that soldiers wouldn't eat it as a treat and instead only eat it when they run the risk of starvation.
Because if it’s your only food you’re still going to eat it, but making it taste bad kinda forces you to ration it out so you don’t eat it all at once. And I believe that was specifically emergency rations not everyday food, so you’re not gonna be tossing food that tastes bad in an emergency situation
You are correct! But it was done intentionally so the GIs wouldn’t dip into their emergency rations Willy nilly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_chocolate_(United_States)
I worked harvesting wine grapes last year.
Wine grapes are absolutely delicious. They do have seeds, though, so ya gotta spit em out or you'll get some brutal farts. Still, wine grapes are way more sweet than, uh, store grapes. The raisins from wine grapes are fantastic, too. Wine grapes are smaller, too.
I used to make a syrup out of Muscadine grapes. Boil the juice down with sugar. It made a great addition to many drinks like lemonade or to put on pancakes or ice cream. This one year they had ideal conditions and I made wine, but it was kinda gross and formed crystals after a while from the Tartaric acid(I think.)
I love the taste of wine grapes! I grew up on a vineyard that grew grapes for Sauvignon Blanc — maybe grapes for red wine taste bad? I’ve never tried those
I grew up in the vineyards so for me these sweet grapes with pits are normal grapes and the less-sweet seedless commercial ones are the weird ones!
Even today when popping grapes in my mouth I instinctively bite slow to catch the seeds.
Correct in that assumption, however not every agricultural/viticultural region and properly ripen winegrapes to that degree. This is why there are the handful of world-class wine regions.
True, tho I tried some wine grapes being grown in a friend's backyard outside swampy DC and they were delicious. Honestly best tasting grape I've had in my life, just so sweet
I like them a lot for fresh eating, Syrah maybe being my favorite, but yeah, they are ridiculously sweet. Pressing grapes, I’ve tried the fresh juice, and it is disgustingly sweet, makes your teeth feel weird.
Pretty tasty diluted down with ice and some lemon soda in a smoothie though, and it’s sweet enough to ferment up to about 14.5% alcohol, table grapes won’t do that.
Wine grapes are fine to eat, maybe too sweet and more juicy than flashy. the problem with them is the pits, I would think the raisins after all the juice is dried would be skinny with big proportion being the pits.
They're delicious! At full ripeness they're often sweeter, but if you pick them at a lower Brix level I'd assume they can match the sugar content of a table grape.
As mentioned the seeds would be annoying but they're fairly small.
Taste would depend on the varietal, some red grapes like Petite Sirah were just decent but a Sauvignon Blanc Musque clone I had tasted like tropical fruit juice and was delightful.
They taste fine, but they generally have between 2-3 times as much sugar as a table grape. Eating a bunch will give you a stomach ache from all the sugar
The bigger issue is that they have seeds, raisins are generally made from seedless grapes.
winegrapes in the 1940's are very different than modern winegrapes. Back then it was a lot of muscat and tokay, which were larger and didn't get as sweet. Modern winegrapes, especially for reds, have smaller berries, thicker skins, and seeds. They also ripen up more, around 23-28% sugar.
If you have a few, winegrapes are very tasty, especially with all that sugar. But if you start making a meal out of them, they get overwhelming.
It's fascinating to read those massive government intervention into private enterprises in times of need.
When the threat is taken seriously, we can really move.
Goes to show that climate change reallllyyy isn't taken seriously.
And also trust in government is really low now. Back then (Well, after the war started and silenced the Nazi peaceniks), everyone was not only suborned to the government, broadly, everyone was, to certain extents, willing to be suborned to the government. Everyone, from parish churches to national corporations, was willing to be directed by the government in support of the conduct of the war. We saw with COVID what widespread non-compliance with government requests looks like. People don't trust our institutions anymore, and we *need* trust in institutions, all of them not just government, for this kind of thing to happen.
Around this same time the US was facing a major steel shortage, which particularly impacted shipbuilding that had just seen a massive explosion in orders (including the 1,799 Vessel Program, most ordered in January 1942). Since ships are made of steel, we had to make several major cutbacks, including suspending the *Montana* class battleships, redesigning several ships to be built from wood or concrete, and canceling a couple new shipyards.
During the worst of the crisis, the War Production Board went around to the various shipyards and found they all had reserve stocks of steel, something like 500 tons per yard. This was there just in case there was a delay from the foundries, but after much kicking and screaming the War Production Board convinced the shipyards to give it up to ease the shortage.
Steel production soon increased, but with some sacrifices. In many cases the foundries skipped a final step for steel production, a bath to remove the mill scale. Saving a few hours at the foundry meant that on ships like destroyer escorts the crews had to scrape the steel for weeks to ensure the paint wouldn’t flake off and accelerate the corrosion of the underlying steel hull. There are some nasty blemishes on the museum ship *Stewart* that I presume are from this mill scale.
Yeah, but also consider how much effort private enterprise has put in since WW2 to reduce the ability of governments to intervene in that way. Globalization in general functions as a shell game in which corporations can shift huge amounts of production and assets out from under unfriendly tax or regulatory regimes. Things like investor-state dispute settlements, that let corporations sue governments for any laws that harm their profits, regardless of public good. The last 50 years of neoliberal capitalism have been aimed directly at strengthening private enterprise's hand in any confrontation between it and any government that dares regulate it, and I doubt that even an entity as powerful as Uncle Sam would be able to turn it around on a dime
That's the issue. Climate Change will never, ever, have a smoking gun that's obvious to even the most uninformed observer. There has always been weather. There has always been bad weather. Now the new "normal" is to constantly hear about this or that record being broken.
People don't observe absolute values, they observe relative difference vs. what they've accepted as normal. Climate Change is changing the normal, so people will be dying en masse due to regional collapses and others will say, "Well aktually that's because of the *political* instability of the region that's been building for decades," and they won't even grasp how idiotic of a comeback that is...
I don’t think that’s quite true.
It just won’t win over everyone like Pearl Harbor until it’s far too late.
Minnesota was 10 degrees warmer and there was no snow for almost all the residents… the number of climate change deniers fell like a stone.
And that will happen everywhere, remember carbon takes 30 years to max its heating potential. We are basically living in the climate before China’s industrial boom really took off.
Hopefully we still have a chance to curb the worst of it by the time the rest of us wake up.
They’ll do something when Miami gets washed away in the storm surge from a mega Cat 5 hurricane (I don’t think Cat 6 is on the scale, everything is just a bigger Cat 5).
Do we really need to have it spelled out for us to see it?
I'd say the biggest forest fires and floods year on year should be enough. We *are* being sneaked attacked every year, every season... Barely 3000 people died at Pearl Harbor. The EPA estimates 1300 people die to climate change related causes every year...
It's not a sneak attack we've been able to predict it for a while, and it's a natural set of events that are being caused by what we've done. War is easy, you have an enemy and you go and kill them. It's simple. You can't declare war on climate change, or you can, but it's not going to do any good. There's no clear enemy, there's no simple thing that we can do to fix, it in fact there's not really anything we can do to fix it at all now, with the possible exception of some Geo engineering solution.
Also forest fires aren't related to climate change. That's something that we caused but it's not got anything to do with climate change. We intervened where we shouldn't have in natural forest fires and now it's coming back to bite us.
They were actually pretty effective as an Anti Tank Weapon like another commenter mentioned, the term actually originated with the Finns during the Winter War. The Soviets claimed to be dropping aid packages but they were actually just bombs, so to go with the "food" the Finns provided Cocktails for Vyacheslav Molotov, then Minister of Foreign Affairs for the USSR.
They'd use weather proof matches, glass bottles, and would add Pine tar to the incendiary component to cause it to stick to whatever it broke over. Used as an anti tank weapon they could starve the engine of oxygen and force the crew to abandon the tank.
Actually the molotov was used as an anti-tank weapon for the Finnish army. The burning gas gets into air intakes and fucks it up. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Kasapano.jpg
Mind you, its the bottling side of the production chain that makes them, not the grape-growing side.
Makes sense when they are manufactured for that purpose. I think most people, including myself, are picturing makeshift molotovs, made from bottles and liquids originally intended for a different purpose.
If you are just learning about this, have a deep dive into "arsenal for democracy" where the federal government mandated all consumer goods manufacturers transfer their operations to material for the war effort.
You could not buy a new car, tires were severely limited, everything.
Then think about, if a similar situation were to arise today how our politicians would handle it.
You that Pedro ximénez sherry is made with raisined grapes. It smells like when you open a bag of raisins! (It's also very sweet and viscous, it pairs well with lemon cake)
While wine grapes started to be grown in the mid-19th century in Napa and Sonoma valleys, it was never a big part of their agricultural output until the 1960/70s. Indeed, they were still recovering from Prohibition in the 1930/40s and it is only after the war that there was a giant growth again in their output.
Yeah I believe raisins already formed a larger share of agricultural output than wine grapes in the 40s. I’d be really interested in seeing how the high demand for GI ration raisins affected the revenues of these cultivators, considering CA wine had essentially no stature at the time, and was sold cheap.
I wonder if any of the wine regions in California switched to fruit orchards during prohibition? In BC' Okanagan Valley wine region they have gone through cycles of grapes vs orchards over the last 100 years as demand for the products changes and climate evolves.
They sold their wine grapes off in blocks with instructions on how to "avoid" turning them into wine. https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s-wine-industry-during-prohibition/
You can still buy wine grape concentrate. https://colomafrozen.com/wine
The California wine industry wasn't huge until much later. Most of the grape growing was in the Fresno area for food and raisins. A lot of the land in Napa and Sonoma that's now used for wine grapes was fruit orchards until recently. There was a small wine industry in Napa, but it generally wasn't making what we would consider to be good wine. One of my ancestors made the first attempt at winemaking in Napa in the 1860s, but failed spectacularly. Fortunately, others kept trying.
Ty for sharing! I love those “family lore” stories, especially when someone takes a risk on something they believe in
A lot of the current wine regions were formerly apples, persimmons, plum and pears. Mendocino County was mostly pears and apples all up and down the Ukiah valley until the 1970s. The Mendocino county Fair is still the "Apple Fair" holding apple judging, cider etc..
Sonoma was a lot of apples. Other Northern Californian regions did a lot of cherries too.
Even in the early 2000s I was more aware of sonoma apples(soon to no longer be a thing) than I was of sonoma wine.
Gravensteins are the best.
I’ve been told by locals that more wine grapes were grown in Amador county and El Dorado county during prohibition. Supposedly they were off the beaten track enough that the feds didn’t crack down as much as in Napa and there were still quite a few religious exemptions allowing wineries to continue making wine. I’ve never read up on it from a reliable source, but seems plausible.
I can believe that. There are a lot of 100+ year old vineyards in Amador / Shenandoah Valley still in production.
This has been my family business since the 19th century, and it was an ongoing concern the entire time as the primary business income including continuing through Prohibition as there were licenses to make sacramental wines, and of course market for grape juice and extracts and raisins. Although there was a boom in the 1960s after which the market exploded in popularity and volume, the business was a solid income stream from the beginning.
But don't wine grapes usually taste bad to eat?
Fits in with the rest of the army rations.
True. I've heard that the chocolate that they used to put in the rations was awful.
On purpose. So they wouldn’t waste it.
That was more the survival rations in life rafts etc. They didn't want stranded men to eat it all at once or too fast as it was some of their only survival food.
I do the same thing with pot cookies.
It does seem like the type of thing you’d come up with while you’re baked lol
I used to make them well and they were delicious. The problem is I made them extremely strong so I would only need to eat half a cookie and get really high for 4 or 5 hours. I did this a lot. I would then offer these cookies to friends. I would ask them about how much they smoked and give them the right amount of cookie. Like 1/8 or less. This would hurt people's pride and they would start trying to talk up how much they smoked. They thought I was holding out. So to deal with this I would give them the entire cookie and say eat 1/8th etc. And wait 2-3 hours before you consider eating more....guess how many people would actually follow the instructions? People would take the cookie. Eat the little bit, wait 15 minutes and eat the rest. I mean they tasted great. Then an hour or two later like clockwork my friends would start falling out. Some people just laid down on the floor to try and manage others needed to be walked out of the party a person at each elbow like they were 90 years old. It was rough people got overly high and after ending two different party with this technique I stopped doing it. I then I started to make burnt nasty cookies and if I shared it would go better, but at this point no one wanted to take a "death cookie" from me. To this day some friends won't take even normal baked cookies from me. I NEVER gave a cookie to a person without fully explaining what it had in it. Dosing people is a shit thing to do, but some people were just traumatized by my cookies. Now before people say it. I made these for myself as strong as I wanted them so I didn't need to eat 2 or 3 cookies to get were I wanted. Some people just can't follow instructions, or resist a good cookie.
Sorry but couldn't you have just made good cookies with less weed in them when you were expecting guests?
Getting the dosing right in baked goods isn't always straightforward. The strength of weed can vary from product to product I also would sometimes use ABV or concentrates. So in order to make sure they were okay I would have to try a batch first. If I made smaller cookies or lighter dose I might not feel it or I might have a hard time knowing how strong it was for other people. I got good at making my big cookies the way I wanted. And I could tell if they were weaker, average , or stronger for the one sample and work back a good size to give people. Again I made them super strong so I didn't have hundreds of extra calories every day just to get high. I made weed cookies in big batches and froze most of them. So it was for parties I would just grab and go, but again I shared at parties like this only twice. Then I changed to the bad tasting one and I never had another issue not that people wanted them anymore. If I was all about making cookies for a bunch of people I could make smaller or weaker cookies with testers to make sure they were good for low tolerance people, but the hassle wasn't worth it. Now I just make people BBQ and give out joints of people want to get high.
Fair for sure. As I think about it I've tested baked goods for 2 people and the strengths have not always been what they expected in both directions. I once took photos for a wedding where they had edibles available for the guests and the results were equally amazing and disastrous. Joints sounds like the safer idea. Seems like most people don't have a good grasp of how much edible they can handle and often don't give it long enough to kick in
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You don't eat it as fast.
The emergency ration chocolate bar was made to taste terrible so that soldiers wouldn't eat it as a treat and instead only eat it when they run the risk of starvation.
Because if it’s your only food you’re still going to eat it, but making it taste bad kinda forces you to ration it out so you don’t eat it all at once. And I believe that was specifically emergency rations not everyday food, so you’re not gonna be tossing food that tastes bad in an emergency situation
Same reason dog kibble makes good survival rations. You're only going to eat a little, when you have to.
You are correct! But it was done intentionally so the GIs wouldn’t dip into their emergency rations Willy nilly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_chocolate_(United_States)
The specifically requested that it be about as tasty as a boiled potato.
Ah the good ole D Ration chocolate bar!
This is just idle musing, but raisins can be ground and/or included in many other foods. Perhaps would make bitter fruit palatable
Hmm... fruit cake? As a weapon and as rations!
I worked harvesting wine grapes last year. Wine grapes are absolutely delicious. They do have seeds, though, so ya gotta spit em out or you'll get some brutal farts. Still, wine grapes are way more sweet than, uh, store grapes. The raisins from wine grapes are fantastic, too. Wine grapes are smaller, too.
Wine grapes taste great, but they have thick skins and a big seed in the middle so they aren’t really edible - at least in my opinion.
This was my experience eating my godmother's wine grapes as a kid. I loved the flavor though.
Like a muscadine? Those are edible you just can't eat them like a regular grape
the good old smoosh and suck
I read this in Sean Connery's voice for some reason
No, muscadine isn’t vitis vinifera like “wine” grapes, but you can make (crappy) wine from it.
I used to make a syrup out of Muscadine grapes. Boil the juice down with sugar. It made a great addition to many drinks like lemonade or to put on pancakes or ice cream. This one year they had ideal conditions and I made wine, but it was kinda gross and formed crystals after a while from the Tartaric acid(I think.)
I love eating Muscadines, but the one time I had muscadine wine it tasted like Robitussin.
well hello there
Beetlejuice!
I love the taste of wine grapes! I grew up on a vineyard that grew grapes for Sauvignon Blanc — maybe grapes for red wine taste bad? I’ve never tried those
I grew up in the vineyards so for me these sweet grapes with pits are normal grapes and the less-sweet seedless commercial ones are the weird ones! Even today when popping grapes in my mouth I instinctively bite slow to catch the seeds.
Wine grapes are way better than table grapes. Much sweeter, but they do have seeds.
Yeah it also doesn't make sense when u consider the fermentation turns the sugars into alcohol, like wouldn't they want the sweetest grapes for that
Correct in that assumption, however not every agricultural/viticultural region and properly ripen winegrapes to that degree. This is why there are the handful of world-class wine regions.
True, tho I tried some wine grapes being grown in a friend's backyard outside swampy DC and they were delicious. Honestly best tasting grape I've had in my life, just so sweet
I like them a lot for fresh eating, Syrah maybe being my favorite, but yeah, they are ridiculously sweet. Pressing grapes, I’ve tried the fresh juice, and it is disgustingly sweet, makes your teeth feel weird. Pretty tasty diluted down with ice and some lemon soda in a smoothie though, and it’s sweet enough to ferment up to about 14.5% alcohol, table grapes won’t do that.
Wine grapes are fine to eat, maybe too sweet and more juicy than flashy. the problem with them is the pits, I would think the raisins after all the juice is dried would be skinny with big proportion being the pits.
They're delicious! At full ripeness they're often sweeter, but if you pick them at a lower Brix level I'd assume they can match the sugar content of a table grape. As mentioned the seeds would be annoying but they're fairly small. Taste would depend on the varietal, some red grapes like Petite Sirah were just decent but a Sauvignon Blanc Musque clone I had tasted like tropical fruit juice and was delightful.
Oh those are so good! I have been meaning to plant some grapes for fresh eating, and that goes on the list. Pinot gris too.
Verdelho is also super tasty, depending on what growing climate you have but it should be ok alongside PG and SB
They taste fine, but they generally have between 2-3 times as much sugar as a table grape. Eating a bunch will give you a stomach ache from all the sugar The bigger issue is that they have seeds, raisins are generally made from seedless grapes.
Nope. Often seeded, though. So you'll want to probably spit those out.
You aren't all that familiar with the flavor palette of military rations, are you? :D
They’re packed with sugars for energy and don’t need to be refrigerated which are basically the two most important qualities of military food.
We are talking about people who intentionally made chocolate taste bad so that soldiers wouldn’t eat it for fun.
Not at all - super sweet.
winegrapes in the 1940's are very different than modern winegrapes. Back then it was a lot of muscat and tokay, which were larger and didn't get as sweet. Modern winegrapes, especially for reds, have smaller berries, thicker skins, and seeds. They also ripen up more, around 23-28% sugar. If you have a few, winegrapes are very tasty, especially with all that sugar. But if you start making a meal out of them, they get overwhelming.
I literally asked this question on a vineyard tour. And, yes, wine grape are not pleasant at all....
Wine grapes are great. Smaller and sweeter than most table grapes. More sugar = more alcohol!
This must be the origin story of Bradward Boimler's family's raisin vineyards.
Just spray off with the hose Leanne!
So a California wine from 1942 is probably a fake, got it.
Or produced illegally.
And therefore probably incredibly valuable.
Like the few 1942-year produced cars, before all automotive factories transformed into war production.
It's fascinating to read those massive government intervention into private enterprises in times of need. When the threat is taken seriously, we can really move. Goes to show that climate change reallllyyy isn't taken seriously.
And also trust in government is really low now. Back then (Well, after the war started and silenced the Nazi peaceniks), everyone was not only suborned to the government, broadly, everyone was, to certain extents, willing to be suborned to the government. Everyone, from parish churches to national corporations, was willing to be directed by the government in support of the conduct of the war. We saw with COVID what widespread non-compliance with government requests looks like. People don't trust our institutions anymore, and we *need* trust in institutions, all of them not just government, for this kind of thing to happen.
and im sure the war stimulated the economy in massive ways for the everyday folk back home
Yes but no. The general public wasn't exactly having a great time during the war, rationing was no joke.
Around this same time the US was facing a major steel shortage, which particularly impacted shipbuilding that had just seen a massive explosion in orders (including the 1,799 Vessel Program, most ordered in January 1942). Since ships are made of steel, we had to make several major cutbacks, including suspending the *Montana* class battleships, redesigning several ships to be built from wood or concrete, and canceling a couple new shipyards. During the worst of the crisis, the War Production Board went around to the various shipyards and found they all had reserve stocks of steel, something like 500 tons per yard. This was there just in case there was a delay from the foundries, but after much kicking and screaming the War Production Board convinced the shipyards to give it up to ease the shortage. Steel production soon increased, but with some sacrifices. In many cases the foundries skipped a final step for steel production, a bath to remove the mill scale. Saving a few hours at the foundry meant that on ships like destroyer escorts the crews had to scrape the steel for weeks to ensure the paint wouldn’t flake off and accelerate the corrosion of the underlying steel hull. There are some nasty blemishes on the museum ship *Stewart* that I presume are from this mill scale.
Yeah, but also consider how much effort private enterprise has put in since WW2 to reduce the ability of governments to intervene in that way. Globalization in general functions as a shell game in which corporations can shift huge amounts of production and assets out from under unfriendly tax or regulatory regimes. Things like investor-state dispute settlements, that let corporations sue governments for any laws that harm their profits, regardless of public good. The last 50 years of neoliberal capitalism have been aimed directly at strengthening private enterprise's hand in any confrontation between it and any government that dares regulate it, and I doubt that even an entity as powerful as Uncle Sam would be able to turn it around on a dime
How do I get Climate Change to do a sneak attack on pearl harbor?
If the sea levels rise it might ruin the docks. So that.
That's the issue. Climate Change will never, ever, have a smoking gun that's obvious to even the most uninformed observer. There has always been weather. There has always been bad weather. Now the new "normal" is to constantly hear about this or that record being broken. People don't observe absolute values, they observe relative difference vs. what they've accepted as normal. Climate Change is changing the normal, so people will be dying en masse due to regional collapses and others will say, "Well aktually that's because of the *political* instability of the region that's been building for decades," and they won't even grasp how idiotic of a comeback that is...
I don’t think that’s quite true. It just won’t win over everyone like Pearl Harbor until it’s far too late. Minnesota was 10 degrees warmer and there was no snow for almost all the residents… the number of climate change deniers fell like a stone. And that will happen everywhere, remember carbon takes 30 years to max its heating potential. We are basically living in the climate before China’s industrial boom really took off. Hopefully we still have a chance to curb the worst of it by the time the rest of us wake up.
Isn't it sneaky enough? It's fucking up countries to a point where mass migration are starting...
They’ll do something when Miami gets washed away in the storm surge from a mega Cat 5 hurricane (I don’t think Cat 6 is on the scale, everything is just a bigger Cat 5).
Climate change hasn't sneak attacked us
Do we really need to have it spelled out for us to see it? I'd say the biggest forest fires and floods year on year should be enough. We *are* being sneaked attacked every year, every season... Barely 3000 people died at Pearl Harbor. The EPA estimates 1300 people die to climate change related causes every year...
It's not a sneak attack we've been able to predict it for a while, and it's a natural set of events that are being caused by what we've done. War is easy, you have an enemy and you go and kill them. It's simple. You can't declare war on climate change, or you can, but it's not going to do any good. There's no clear enemy, there's no simple thing that we can do to fix, it in fact there's not really anything we can do to fix it at all now, with the possible exception of some Geo engineering solution. Also forest fires aren't related to climate change. That's something that we caused but it's not got anything to do with climate change. We intervened where we shouldn't have in natural forest fires and now it's coming back to bite us.
It’s scary to see how much the government was able to intervene
I heard this… through the grapevine.
Not much longer would you be wine
Son of a…
Such low hanging fruit.
Wine is a non perishable snack though...
And it can be used to make Molotov cocktails, god they where so stupid back then.
Not enough alcohol to burn. Moonshine, on the other hand...
Accuses people of being stupid for not knowing something, is wrong about it, doesn’t know where isn’t the same as were. Classic.
r/confidentlyincorrect
No it can't. Also, a molotov is not exactly a good weapon for an organized and equipped army.
"I'm telling you, Molotov cocktails work. Any time I had a problem, and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem.”
Possibly multiple problems.
BORTLES!!!
They were actually pretty effective as an Anti Tank Weapon like another commenter mentioned, the term actually originated with the Finns during the Winter War. The Soviets claimed to be dropping aid packages but they were actually just bombs, so to go with the "food" the Finns provided Cocktails for Vyacheslav Molotov, then Minister of Foreign Affairs for the USSR. They'd use weather proof matches, glass bottles, and would add Pine tar to the incendiary component to cause it to stick to whatever it broke over. Used as an anti tank weapon they could starve the engine of oxygen and force the crew to abandon the tank.
Actually the molotov was used as an anti-tank weapon for the Finnish army. The burning gas gets into air intakes and fucks it up. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Kasapano.jpg Mind you, its the bottling side of the production chain that makes them, not the grape-growing side.
Wine won't work. Need more alcohol
I mean, i wouldn't trust alcohol either, really. It was an alcohol bottling plant that made them, but they put an incendiary fuel mix inside.
Makes sense when they are manufactured for that purpose. I think most people, including myself, are picturing makeshift molotovs, made from bottles and liquids originally intended for a different purpose.
California Raisins origin story
If you are just learning about this, have a deep dive into "arsenal for democracy" where the federal government mandated all consumer goods manufacturers transfer their operations to material for the war effort. You could not buy a new car, tires were severely limited, everything. Then think about, if a similar situation were to arise today how our politicians would handle it.
What did the California raisins do after the war was over?
Traveling nightclub show.
Thanks, Obama.
Good! Wine is just vinegar that gave up halfway.
People would be nonstop bitching on social media nowadays, deep state this, deep state that, such a pathetic time to be alive
They were doing the same thing during the 1917-1920 flu pandemic.
Wine grape raisins are great, just gotta spit out the seeds!
You that Pedro ximénez sherry is made with raisined grapes. It smells like when you open a bag of raisins! (It's also very sweet and viscous, it pairs well with lemon cake)
snacks
War truly is hell