Published on 21 Dec 2015
British Field Marshal John French was a soldier through and through and had a glorious career during the colonial era of the British Empire, but all the battles around the world couldn’t prepare him for modern war. His experience in the Boer Wars and in the Mahdist War made John French a rising star in the military. But when he was leading the British Army landing in Belgium in August 1914, neither he or the public were prepared for the new realities of World War 1 with huge casualties and trench warfare.
December 22, 2015
Colonial Glory And World War 1 Reality – British Field Marshal John French I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
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Monty’s thumbnail sketch of the economics of scarcity
Okay, it’s perhaps a bit more than just a thumbnail sketch, but it’s still a good introduction:
A basic definition of “economics” is given by Thomas Sowell (PBUH, may he live a thousand years), which I paraphrase here: “Economics is a system of allocating scarce resources which have alternate uses.” The key word I want to focus on here is scarce. It is not abundance but scarcity that lies at the heart of economics. Scarcity of resources is what makes economics a fundamental property of nature. Scarcity is an inherent, inseparable, eternal property of reality. It is not a problem that can be solved — it is bound up in the laws of physics that govern the cosmos.
The necessities of life — water, food, clothing, shelter — are drawn from scarce resources which have alternate uses and thus require a method of allocation. We generally think of systems like “capitalism” or “communism” when we think of economic systems, and there are others (feudalism, for example). But let’s boil down the allocation method to two basic kinds: market-based, where scarce resources are allocated according to supply-and-demand dynamics; and command-based, where a central authority divvies up resources according to some set of (usually arbitrary) rules.
Nearly every variant of market-based and command-based economies has been tried over the centuries, and the market-driven economy has emerged as the best solution we have found so far. It turns out that market-based economies work far better than command-based economies for one simple reason: because of what F. A. Hayek called “the knowledge problem”. Hayek’s insight was that allocating scarce resources is a very complex business in anything other than a trivially small economy, and there’s no way that a centrally-managed economy can hope to understand all the decisions and variables that go into making the production of goods and services possible. There is no way for a centralized body to determine how to allocate scarce resources efficiently across the hugely-complex landscape of a functioning economy. Mis-allocation of resources is almost always the near-term result, with the middle-to-long-term result being economic collapse.
Market-based economies use competition and pricing to guide the allocation of scarce resources. Supply and demand fluctuate, and the marketplace uses pricing of goods and services as a signaling device for both buyers and sellers. If supply is high but demand is low, prices drop and the resources that go into the low-demand item are diverted to a good or service where demand (thus price) is higher. If demand is high but supply is low, prices will rise and prompt competitors to enter the market at a lower price or (if the resource is inherently limited, as with beach-front property) drive more intense competition among buyers.
All of this is Economics 101, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a red diaper baby Communist or an Ayn-Randian hyper-capitalist, you have no choice but to work under these constraints. You live in a reality constrained by scarce resources that have alternate uses; there is no magical elixir or scientific discovery that will exempt you from it.
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Christmas movies
Rick McGinnis says they don’t make Christmas movies like they used to (but we probably deserve it):
Arguing about the best Christmas movies inevitably turns into a debate about the best version of A Christmas Carol, so I’m going to bluntly state that it’s Alistair Sim’s film, released in Britain as Scrooge.
I’m aware that other versions of the Dickens story have their followings, and while there are no doubt virtues in the Scrooges of Albert Finney, George C. Scott, Jim Carrey, Kelsey Grammar, Henry Winkler, Hoyt Axton, Patrick Stewart, Jack Palance, Susan Lucci, John Carradine, Fredric March, James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson and the very busy Bill Murray, they are merely streams and tributaries that flow in and out of the great grimacing Ebenezer that Sim embodied with almost unseemly relish in director Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1951 film, which looks like a Victorian lithograph brought to life and tugs even more deftly at the heartstrings thanks to Richard Addinsell’s score.
There was a time in my life when Christmas day only began after I’d had a chance to screen the film, alone in the early winter night, bracing myself for the sobs when Sim’s face collapses from fear to contrition as he finally meets his nephew Fred’s pretty young wife, and begs her forgiveness for being hard-hearted.
A bachelor for too many years, I watched the film aware of how Scrooge-like I was becoming with every Christmas; I needed to ride through Dickens’ story with Sim for the catharsis-by-proxy necessary to face family and friends the next day, marking time till my own redemption.
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Kate Bush – Christmas Special 1979 (Private Remaster)
Published on 5 Oct 2013
I know there’s a good few copies of this out on YouTube, but here it is, again! The other copies were either split up into individual tracks, the best complete one (from BBC Four’s rebroadcast in 2009) had the wrong aspect ratio, which annoyed the hell out of me! So, here this is…
Video and audio have been tidied up very slightly, not much was needed!
Kate Bush – Christmas Special
Tracklist:
(Intro) 00:00
Violin 00:29
(Gymnopédie No.1 – composed by Erik Satie) 03:44
Symphony In Blue 04:44
Them Heavy People 08:20
(Intro for Peter Gabriel) 12:52
Here Comes The Flood (Peter Gabriel) 13:22
Ran Tan Waltz 17:02
December Will Be Magic Again 19:43
The Wedding List 23:35
Another Day (with Peter Gabriel) 28:05
Egypt 31:41
The Man With The Child In His Eyes 36:21
Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbreak 39:24“I was recently asked about this BBC TV special and I thought I’d share my comments here. Kate: Kate Bush Christmas Special is a stage performance by Kate Bush with her special guest Peter Gabriel. Though most of the songs are not holiday ones, they come from Bush’s first three albums (Never for Ever her third album would be released in 1980 after this 1979 TV special was taped). The performances include costumes, choreographed dances and a wind machine, creating an eclectic music TV special to say the least.
This is one of the programs that makes my research quite difficult — because it calls itself a Christmas Special yet it contains only one performance of a Christmas song “December Will Be Magic Again” (a song that wouldn’t be released as a single by Bush until the following year, in 1980). TV programming that calls itself a Christmas Special and yet contains little to no Christmas entertainment is actually quite common — especially on the BBC.
Between the end of November and the end of December each year, there is quite a bit of special programming on television. Remember Elvis’ 1968 Comeback Special — it aired in December that year and includes only one holiday song, a performance of “Blue Christmas.” Is it considered a Christmas special? No, not really. And so, despite its title, the lack of holiday programming in Kate Bush’s 1979 TV special means it shouldn’t be considered a Christmas special either. But the Kate Bush Christmas Special is certainly worth watching!”
H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the link.
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QotD: Communes
The anthropologist Richard Sosis examined the history of two hundred communes founded in the United States in the nineteenth century. Which kind of commune survived longest? Sosis found that the difference was stark: just 6% of the secular communes were still functioning twenty years after their founding, compared to 39% of religious communes. He found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members. It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes. Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity.
Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Scott Alexander in “List Of The Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind“, Slate Star Codex, 2014-06-12.
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