You think it's safe, then some idiot picks up a magic ring and it's Balrogs all over the place!

I know it's all pabulum, but I'm rather impressed in a cultural sense by how often Obama is referenced in advertising.  Before the inauguration, lots of big companies were using his slogans.  Now, the Internet abounds with stuff purporting to be tied to the stimulus - "Obama for Fair Insurance" titling an ad for car insurance, "Obama Wants Single Moms to Go Back to School" (possibly fronting for these frightful people), and so forth.  While not denying the fakeness of it all, when was the last time a president's image was so attractive that people used it like this?  All I can think of is the "Roosevelt Wants You to Join a Union" campaign back in the 30's.

It's not alive! It's a basket!

Wikipedia find of the day: how St. Paul stayed the capital of Minnesota.

The Minnesota Territory was formalized in 1849 and Saint Paul named as capital. In 1857, the territorial legislature voted to move the capital to Saint Peter. However, Joe Rolette, a territorial legislator, stole the physical text of the approved bill and went into hiding, thus preventing the move. On May 11, 1858, Minnesota was admitted to the union as the thirty-second state with Saint Paul as the capital.

A 10% chance is pretty unlikely, but everyone knows that a one-in-a-million chance is a sure thing.

Uncannily, just a few hours after I finished my previous post about the Portuguese banknote scandal, I met a Portuguese at a party, and got to pick his brain. Generally, he says, the story has little special salience in Portuguese memory - probably one of a number of memorable incidents in history - but there was a flurry of interest earlier this decade when a TV series was produced about Alves Reis.

He doesn't think that the incident led in any meaningful way to the fall of the Republic, but agrees that under Salazar there was a great academic incuriosity about the history of that era - in fact, incuriosity was fostered very broadly, he said, to keep people dumber and easier to rule.

Kindly vacate my pockets, Russian fiends!

I just finished the book The Man Who Stole Portugal, by Murray Teigh Bloom. It's an excellent book which I recommend highly; however, in keeping with my favored aspect of book reviews, this post will extract the pertinent facts for those who don't want to read it.

The subject of the book is arguably one of history's greatest con jobs. The plotter, Artur Virgilio Alves Reis, realized he could make counterfeit Portuguese banknotes that were not just passable, but perfect. In a way it wasn't even counterfeiting at all, because his bills were made with the same plates, the same paper, the same printer as the real ones. Even experts would conclude they were perfect, because they were.

Then as now, a number of smaller countries contracted out their banknote production to foreign printers. Alves Reis was a young businessman with a penchant for trickery*, who found in 1924 that the Bank of Portugal, while obligated by law to issue no more than twice its capital in paper money, in fact had put out more like a hundred times, to satisfy government demands. He realized that in this situation of rapid (though not hyper-) inflation, he could put out a great deal of his own money without affecting their policy.

The scale of his eventual crime was tremendous, but he wasn't super-competent like Hollywood con-men. In fact, his first idea wouldn't have worked: through intermediaries, he put out feelers to a Dutch printer, with the idea that they had the expertise to duplicate an existing bill. In fact, they could have, but it wouldn't have been perfect, nor would they have been comfortable with doing so. His intermediaries were passed on to a prestigious London firm, Waterlow and Sons, which had printed Portuguese bills in the past, and still held those plates in trust.

How did his intermediaries (who quickly became business partners if not accomplices) go about this business without being identified as would-be counterfeiters? Here was the real genius of the plan, the aspect which allowed it to go on for as long as it did. Alves Reis's story was that the governor of the Bank of Portugal, supported by some of its directors, wanted to issue more banknotes specifically for investment in the failing colony of Angola. Supposedly there was strong opposition from other bank directors, and therefore the governor wanted to print the money in secret from the rest of the country, including those directors. This was certainly shady, but the governor had the legal authority, so it was plausibly not criminal.

This story had great usefulness because it prompted those involved to take the same precautions appropriate for committing a crime, without knowing it actually was a crime. Throughout, Alves Reis was the only person definitively aware that the contracts and letters empowering him to order the banknotes from the plates held by Waterlow were all forged. His main partners, the Portuguese José Bandeira, the Dutch Karel Marang, and the German-Brazilian Adolf Hennies, certainly assumed his role was thanks to hefty bribes, but that was a normal part of business for them. Sir William Waterlow, head of Waterlow and Sons, was excited at the prospect of getting Portugal back as a client, and the instructed "precautions" included communicating only via Alves Reis's people, never getting direct confirmation from the Bank of Portugal.

Alves Reis was an excellent researcher, and highly resourceful, but not necessarily meticulous. Getting perfect banknotes didn't just require the plates: he needed to work out how the Bank of Portugal calculated serial numbers, which officials' signatures were needed, etc., and here he made mistakes; for example, he didn't know at first that the two letters in the serial number were never both vowels. What helped him through slipups like this - which happened more than once - was, I think, confirmation bias becoming almost an eagerness to be fooled. Sir William was so invested in the project, and the concomitant secrecy, that he ignored evidence of foul play: for example, he happily sent them information on serial numbers and signatures previously used, even though Bank representatives ought to have had access to this information themselves; and he ignored the advice of Waterlow's agent in Lisbon (who thought it was fishy).

It worked, though: Waterlow was to manufacture money worth over a hundred million dollars (1950's dollars, when Bloom's book was written), for a payment of a mere half-million. And the four partners - Alves Reis, Bandeira, Marang, and Hennies - split most of the profits between them, making it harder but still possible to sustain the belief that their enterprise was only normally corrupt. After all, they could have observed, a good amount was indeed funneled into investments in Angola (which was Alves Reis's hobbyhorse, where he had his first business success).

At first they converted the money into private assets in conventional ways: into foreign currency through the large black market; into genuine Portuguese money by depositing at outlying bank branches and withdrawing at central branches; etc. The money was all the same denomination and design, and there was a glut on the market sufficient to spark rumors of counterfeiting. The money being almost indistinguishable from genuine money, the rumor was quickly squelched by a public Bank of Portugal statement. But they had so much money that Alves Reis then tried something much greater in scope: taking over the Bank of Portugal itself. This was theoretically possible: the bank was a private entity, though special laws and obligations applied to it, and control could be gained by buying a majority of shares - and most crucially, with control, he could retroactively legalize his currency issue. A huge amount of money was required, but they had it, or could soon get it; harder was finding the requisite quantity of shares for sale. Over 10% of the bank's stock had been bought, when things finally turned sour.

Alves Reis and his partners had done many things with their money in Portugal - making investments, buying companies, mansions, public honors, and spreading it liberally to their friends. Alves Reis had even started his own bank, dedicated to investments in Angola as well as Portugal proper. In short, they had become public figures. The economy was picking up, and many credited Alves Reis as the dynamo of recovery (he may have indeed been so, ironically by his counterfeits working as a form of Keynesian stimulus). But there was also suspicion of this arriviste, with particular worry about whether the presence of Hennies, who had spied for Germany in the Great War, meant their investments were the camel's nose of Germany angling to take over Angola, something Portugal was extremely paranoid about.

At last, the idea arose that counterfeiting might be going on. It was originally based on a misinformed tip, by a teller who was convinced they were counterfeit but had no actual evidence for this belief. After some raids, which were quite embarrassing at first since they turned up nothing, the government had enough specimens in its hands for someone to notice a duplicated serial number (another of Alves Reis's mistakes). Soon, the facts came out, and Alves Reis was arrested.

All the forgeries Alves Reis had made were enough to cast suspicion on the Bank of Portugal's governor, as well as one director. Alves Reis's nimble tongue won over the prosecutor, who became convinced that the governor was the villain, and said so publicly and vehemently. Alves Reis, for his part, had decided to drag everyone down with him, and in jail (very comfortably thanks to the prosecutor) he churned out more and more forgeries to heap up guilt. But this was doomed; the bank officials had clout. The prosecutor was forced to resign, and the new prosecutor discovered the evidence of the original forging of contracts. Alves Reis confessed, wrote a tell-all memoir in 1927, and was eventually tried in 1930 by a special tribunal and given twenty years. Possibly the scandal contributed to loss of faith in the government - mere months after the arrests, a military coup ended the First Portuguese Republic, and Salazar rose to the top six years later - but causation is hard to pin down.

This kind of con worked partly because it had never been thought of before. Waterlow and Sons never got back its good name: despite slashing prices, its business shrunk yearly, and finally it was bought by a competitor in 1961. No banknote printer will fall for the same trick again. But it makes me think there's always some chain of events nobody's thought of before.

*He got his first good job, in Angola, by forging a degree from Oxford. As a businessman in Portugal, he got business capital by bouncing checks from an American bank, which spent eight days on a boat, letting him wire money to cover the seventh day. Some of his partners were similar: "Hennies" was actually a false identity, adopted around 1914, and to escape prosecution he readopted his real name (Döring) and returned to his native Germany.

Grant's memoirs, part XXXVIII

Grant's last message to General Buckner, the commander of Fort Donelson, is well-remembered, as it characterized Grant's philosophy of war and gave him his nickname:

GENERAL S. B. BUCKNER,

Confederate Army.

SIR: Yours of this date, proposing armistice and appointment of Commissioners to settle terms of capitulation, is just received. No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.

I am, sir, very respectfully,

Your ob't se'v't,

U. S. GRANT,

Brig. Gen.

But the response Buckner sent is also worth reading. It encapsulates the general Southern response to defeat, from 1862 to the present: a protracted, verbal whine.

TO BRIG. GEN'L U. S. GRANT,

U. S. Army.

SIR: The distribution of the forces under my command, incident to an unexpected change of commanders, and the overwhelming force under your command, compel me, notwithstanding the brilliant success of the Confederate arms yesterday, to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.

I am, sir,

Your very ob't se'v't,

S.B. BUCKNER,

Brig. Gen. C. S. A.

Quotable Quotes from the Blogotwittoweb, Part First-in-a-while

I’m not saying that forcing detainees to listen to that song would be a war crime, but the ACLU would probably see it that way. - Matt Yglesias

He who controls the Spice Girls controls the UNIVERSE! - Aaron Diaz

Slate magazine is part of The Washington Post-Newsweek International family, and so I love them like family. But it's hard to read this and avoid the conclusion that they should be burned to the ground. - Ezra Klein

Whoever invented the breakfast meeting should be roundly spanked. - Stephen Fry

Late-breaking appendation:

It makes a person wonder what Fox will air now that their hosts have lost their words. An hour of Glenn Beck sobbing uncontrollably while pointing at a chalkboard on which the links between ACORN and his muted mouth-hole have been arranged into a misspelled anagram? - Scott Eric Kaufman

You're alcohol, Kenny Rogers! Drunk with power, that is!

Etymology exploration of the day, prompted by this strip: where does the word "damsel" come from?

It's the product of a prolonged evolutionary crunching of the Latin dominicella, "little mistress" (diminutive of domina, "mistress"), by way of French, of course. In French it ended up as demoiselle, and thence mademoiselle.

Its first vowel in English is 'a' because in Old French it was dameisele. The middle syllable vowel was eventually elided in English, which is why antiquophiles like Sir Walter Scott popularized the throwback damosel.

It originally denoted gentle birth, but over time it became a general term of respect for a girl or young woman of any class. And soon after that transformation was complete, the 17th century or so, it drifted out of common use, becoming "archaic and literary or playful", to quote the OED - much like today. So if you happen to be writing Restoration/Georgian historical fiction, be careful!