The Great War
Published on 14 Apr 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
April 15, 2018
Stalin in WW1 – Quebec – Scottish Home Rule I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
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How to Use a Hand Plane
This Old House
Published on 5 Dec 2015This Old House general contractor Tom Silva demonstrates the proper way to use hand planes. (See below for a shopping list, tools, and steps.)
Shopping List for How to Use a Hand Plane:
– Machine oil, used to lubricate sharpening stone
– Wood block, used to prevent tear-out in end grainTools List for How to Use a Hand Plane:
– Bench planes
– Specialty planes
– Block planes
– Sharpening stone, for sharpening plane irons
– Clamp, used to secure wood block to workpieceSteps for How to Use a Hand Plane:
1. Bench planes are used to flatten and smooth broad wood surfaces and narrow edges.
2. Long bench planes are best suited for smoothing very long surfaces and edges.
3. Specialty planes, such as a shoulder plane or rabbet plane, have plane irons (blades) that come flush with the edges of the tool.
4. Block planes are compact, versatile, and ideally suited for smoothing edges, small surfaces, and end grain.
5. Rotate the adjusting nut to control the depth of cut.
6. Pivot the lateral adjustment lever to square up the iron to the plane body.
7. Release the iron cap and extract the plane iron from the plane.
8. Test the sharpness of an iron by standing it on your thumbnail. If the iron slides off, it needs sharpening.
9. To sharpen a plane iron, start by applying machine oil to the coarse side of a sharpening stone.
10. Set the iron against the oiled stone with its beveled end facing down.
11. Tilt up the iron until its bevel is flush with the stone. Maintain that exact angle as you slowly rub the iron across the stone in a circular motion.
12. After a minute or two, flip over the iron and place it flat against the stone. Rub the iron back and forth to remove any burr from the back surface.
13. Next, flip the stone over to reveal its smooth surface. Apply oil and repeat the sharpening process.
14. Then raise the iron just a fraction of an inch, and make two or three passes across the stone.
15. Repeat the thumbnail test of Step 8 to check the iron’s sharpness.
16. When planing the narrow edge of a board, inspect the direction of the wood grain on the side of the board.
17. Always plane in the direction of the up-angling wood grain. Don’t plane against it.
18. Adjust the throat (mouth) of the plane to increase or decrease the gap between the plane iron and the bed of the plane. The proper adjustment will help prevent tearing out the grain.
19. Decrease the gap when planing end grain, and increase it when planing edge grain or making deep cuts.
20. When planing end grain, prevent tear-out by planing in from both ends toward the middle.
21. Another technique is to clamp a sacrificial wood block to the end of the board prior to planing. Then, any tear-out will occur in the block, not the board.
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QotD: Political words
When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946.
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April 14, 2018
Andrew Coyne asks “Why do we need a Senate?”
And the answer for anyone who’s lived through previous constitutional mud-wrestling is almost certainly going to be a variant of “We don’t, but to change it in any way means re-opening the entire constitution for revision and re-negotiation … thanks, but no thanks … we’ll put up with the Red Chamber of Irrelevance”:
More than two years after the Trudeau government introduced its system of “independent, merit-based” appointments to the Senate, transforming — so it was said — the Other Place from a house of patronage and partisanship to a house of virtue, the government’s “representative” in the Senate has given some thought to how it will all work.
In a 51-page discussion paper, Peter Harder offers his views on what role the Senate should play, as one of the last remaining appointed legislatures among the world’s democracies — and the most powerful, on paper — particularly in light of its changed circumstances. It makes for a fascinating, not to say hallucinatory read.
In Harder’s estimation, the past two-and-a-bit years have been something of a golden age of Senate legitimacy, a period in which it has rebuilt its credibility after what he plainly views as the dark age of partisanship that preceded it: a dark age that precisely coincides with the period of Conservative government.
The expense scandals, the epic confusion that followed the government’s half-considered reforms, the repeated episodes of brinksmanship as the newly envirtued Senate threatened to defeat this or that bill, these rate barely a mention, in Harder’s account, beside the Senate’s “robust bicameralism,” its “positive track record” and contributions that have been “effective, policy-oriented and always respectful of the role of the representative House of Commons.”
Ah yes. About that: if the Senate were so “always respectful” of their respective roles, it’s curious Harder should feel the need to spend 51 pages explaining what those roles are. But then, that is because it is so exquisitely complicated, so delicately subtle, requiring such a delicate balance.
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The Danelaw – The Fall of Eric Bloodaxe – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 12 Apr 2018After peace was made between King Alfred and Guthrum, the Danelaw was born — a geographic area in England controlled by the Danes, but also extremely reliant on the cooperation by the Anglo-Saxons and the local Christian population.
Sponsored by Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia!
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Alcohol and health – if you torture the data long enough, it will give you the answer you want
Tim Worstall isn’t convinced that a recent study summarized in The Lancet is either honest or useful:
We have a new study out, in the Lancet no less, telling us that the new, lower, limits for reasonable alcohol consumption are just right. Well, of course the report says that, right? The problem being that it’s entirely contrary to the more general experience we’ve got of booze consumption. For, yes indeedy, there’s a level of drinking which will – as always, on average – shorten life. But our experience to date is that it’s several times what is the current measure of safe consumption. This basic understanding of ours being that no booze lowers lifespan, too much lowers it, a modicum increases it. The argument being the definition of modicum of course.
Observation of large populations being that modicum is anything from some up to perhaps 40 or even 50 units a week. This isn’t what the current study shows at all […]
I’m not in any manner a medical expert but that does look odd. 5 million observation years on half a million people, looks like 10 years on average per person. They’re using this to predict lifespan at age 40? When lifespan at 40 is, these days, a further 40 to 50 years or so? OK, maybe there’s some sekkrit decoder ring for epidemiologists here but anyone want to try and explain it?
Ah:
We focused our study on current alcohol drinkers
So the comparison doesn’t include those who don’t drink. We’re not therefore getting a baseline of no alcohol consumption to compare with. That is, by design, the study excludes the known to be higher death rates (or lower lifespans) of the temperance types. No, really:
Third, never-drinkers might differ systematically from drinkers in ways that are difficult to measure, but which might be relevant to disease causation.
Our more general stats do indeed say that heavy drinkers (that 40 to 50 unit level perhaps) and never drinkers have about the same lifespans. Quick, gotta exclude that information, eh?
As far as we’re concerned that’s probably enough. We’ll see what Snowdon has to say about it, shall we? Because this finding is contrary to pretty much everything else we know about booze consumption. Explaining why it is will be important.
Update, 15 April: It’s no wonder that people are confused about the benefits and/or drawbacks of drinking…
What you end up with when drawing strong conclusions based on non-experimental data with selection bias, lots of measurement error and dodgy comparison groups. (h/t: @RadaWilinofsky) pic.twitter.com/iUZQbTh6sB
— Amir Sariaslan (@AmirSariaslan) April 14, 2018
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The Solow Model and the Steady State
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 12 Apr 2016Remember our simplified Solow model? One end of it is input, and on the other end, we get output.
What do we do with that output?
Either we can consume it, or we can save it. This saved output can then be re-invested as physical capital, which grows the total capital stock of the economy.
There’s a problem with that, though: physical capital rusts.
Think about it. Yes, new roads can be nice and smooth, but then they get rough, as more cars travel over them. Before you know it, there are potholes that make your car jiggle each time you pass. Another example: remember the farmer from our last video? Well, unless he’s got some amazing maintenance powers, in the end, his tractors will break down.
Like we said: capital rusts. More formally, it depreciates.
And if it depreciates, then you have two choices. You either repair existing capital (i.e. road re-paving), or you just replace old capital with new. For example, you may buy a new tractor.
You pay for these repairs and replacements with an even greater investment of capital.
We call the point where investment = depreciation the steady state level of capital.
At the steady state level, there is zero economic growth. There’s just enough new capital to offset depreciation, meaning we get no additions to the overall capital stock.
A further examination of the steady state can help explain the growth tracks of Germany and Japan at the close of World War II.
In the beginning, their first few units of capital were extremely productive, creating massive output, and therefore, equally high amounts available to be saved and re-invested. As time passed, the growing capital stock created less and less output, as per the logic of diminishing returns.
Now, if economic growth really were just a function of capital, then the losers of World War II ought to have stopped growing once their capital levels returned to steady state.
But no, although their growth did slow, it didn’t stop. Why is this the case?
Remember, capital isn’t the only variable that affects growth. Recall that there are still other variables to tinker with. And in the next video, we’ll show two of those variables: education (e) and labor (L).
Together, they make up our next topic: human capital.
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QotD: Plato’s ideal society
This [controlling the poor to protect the wealthy] is a problem addressed by Plato in at least two of his works — The Republic and The Laws. The first is his description of an ideal state, the second of a state less than ideal but still worth working towards. I do not claim to be an expert on Plato, though am dubious of many of the claims made against him. However, his general solution to the problem was to stop the enlightenment and to reconstruct society as a totalitarian oligarchy.
His ideal society would be one in which democracy and any degree of accountability would have been abolished, together with married life and the family and private property. Poetry was to be abolished. All other art and music were to be controlled. There was to be a division of society into orders at the head of which was to be a class of guardians. These would strictly control all thought and action.
His workable society would be one in which some property and some accountability would be allowed to remain. Even so, there was to be the same attempt at controlling thought and action.
The stability of these systems was to be maintained by a new theology. A single divine being would take the place of the quarrelling, scandalous gods of mythology and the Homeric poems. The common people could be left with a purified version of the old cults. But these gods would be increasingly aligned with the secondary spirits through which the One God directed His Creation.
People were to be taught that the Platonic system was not a human construct, but that it reflected the Will of Heaven. Rebellion or disobedience would be punished by the direct intervention of God through His Secondary Spirits. Before then, though, it would be punished by the state as heresy. At the end of the fifth century, Anaxagoras had been exiled from Athens for claiming that the sun was a ball of glowing rock. This had been an occasional persecution — indeed, it is hard to think of other instances. In the Platonic system, there was to be a regular inquisition that would punish nonconformity with imprisonment or death.
Thus there is at the heart of the Platonic system a “noble lie” — though Plato may have believed much of it himself. This is of a religion that looks into the most secret places of the mind, and dispenses rewards and punishments according to what is found there. In the old theology, Poseidon had no power beyond on land. Apollo had none in the dark. Zeus had no idea who was thinking what. The Platonic God was just like ours. No sin against His Wishes could go undetected or unpunished.
And so the people were to be kept in line by fear of hellfire, or by fear of everything short of that.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Englightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
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April 13, 2018
The free speech views of “Gen Z”
Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt argue that despite many nay-sayers, there really is a freedom of speech crisis on university campuses:
In our first post responding to the skeptics, we showed that the skeptics support their skepticism primarily by relying on data about the Millennial generation (those born 1982-1994). The skeptics are correct that Millennials are not much different than previous generations when asked about free speech issues. We also argued that this debate has nothing to do with Millennials; it is about CURRENT college students, who are not Millennials. By the fall of 2015, most college students (especially at elite four year schools) were members of iGen, the “Internet generation” (sometimes called “Gen Z”), which begins around birth year 1995, and which first arrived at college around 2013.
We noted that the new attitudes about speech — including the idea that speech can be violence (even when it includes no threat), and corresponding requests for safe spaces and trigger warnings — only began to appear on select campuses around 2013 or 2014, and we noted that these ideas only became widely known after the wave of student protests that began at the tail end of 2015. Therefore, we pointed out, it is unlikely that nationally representative samples, drawing on students in America’s 4,700 institutions of higher education, could have picked up any changes before 2015, when colleges were still full of Millennials who had never heard of trigger warnings and microaggressions. We proposed that the best way to evaluate whether or not things have changed on campus is to examine data collected on current college students in 2016 or later, and compare it to data on current college students from 2014 and before.
When we performed such comparisons, we found some evidence that in fact things are changing. There is not yet much data available to make direct comparisons, but the GSS does show a change for the little bit of iGen data that it has (see figure 1 in post 1), and the larger Knight study showed a change just from 2016 to 2017. In this post we do a much deeper dive. We present far more data on current college students and we assess whether the campus climate has changed in the last few years with regard to speaking up and sharing one’s views.
The key question is this: are students and professors today more reluctant than they were a few years ago to share their views or to question dominant views? If so, then there is a climate or culture problem on campuses where that change has occurred. We note that the overall climate can change rapidly even if there has been no change in average attitudes about speech. All that needs to happen is that a small group of students begins imposing social costs on those who say things they don’t like, while at the same time college administrators do nothing to stop them. (For a fuller explanation, see this essay by Lee Jussim, or this one by Nassim Taleb, whose title explains the key point: The most intolerant wins: The dictatorship of the small minority.) If college students are more likely to report the feeling of “walking on eggshells” in the years after 2015 than they did in the years before 2015, then there has been a change in the campus culture, even if the average student’s support for free speech has not changed.
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India and the “Quad”
At Strategy Page, Austin Bay discusses India’s position, both geographically and militarily with respect to China:
As the Cold War faded, a cool aloofness continued to guide India’s defense and foreign policies. Indian military forces would occasionally exercise with Singaporean and Australian units — they’d been British colonies, too. Indian ultra-nationalists still rail about British colonialism, but the Aussies had fought shoulder to shoulder with Indians in North Africa, Italy, the Pacific and Southeast Asia, and suffered mistreatment by London toffs. Business deals with America and Japan? Sign the contracts. However, in defense agreements, New Delhi distanced itself from Washington and Tokyo.
The Nixon Administration’s decision to support Pakistan in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War [Wikipedia link] embittered India. Other issues hampered the U.S.-India relationship. Indian left-wing parties insisted their country was a “Third World leader” and America was hegemonic, et cetera.
However, in the last 12 to 15 years, India’s assessments of its security threats have changed demonstrably, and China’s expanding power and demonstrated willingness to use that power to acquire influence and territory are by far the biggest factors affecting India’s shift.
In 2007, The Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), at the behest of Japan, held its first informal meeting. The Quad’s membership roll sends a diplomatic message: Japan, Australia, America and India. Japan pointed out all four nations regarded China as disruptive actor in the Indo-Pacific; they had common interests. Delhi downplayed the meeting, attempting to avoid the appearance of actively “countering China.”
No more. The Quad nations now conduct naval exercises and sometimes include a quint, Singapore.
The 2016 Hague Arbitration Court decision provided the clearest indication of Chinese strategic belligerence. In 2012, Beijing claimed 85 percent of the South China Sea’s 3.5 million square kilometers. The Philippines went to court. The Hague tribunal, relying on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea treaty, supported the Filipino position that China had seized sea features and islets and stolen resources. Beijing ignored the verdict and still refuses to explain how its claims meet UNCLOS [Wikipedia link] requirements.
That is the maritime action. India and China also have mountain issues. In 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis diverted world attention, the two Asian giants fought the Indo-Chinese War [Wikipedia link] in the Himalayas. China won. The defeat still riles India.
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The Battle of La Lys – Operation Georgette I THE GREAT WAR Week 194
The Great War
Published on 12 Apr 2018A year after the US entry into the war, the German Spring Offensive 1918 continues with operations Archangel and Georgette. The Portuguese Expeditionary Corps has to pay the price while the British manage to orderly retreat.
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“…it is possible to complete an entire degree in anthropology without hearing any criticism of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa“
Margaret Mead’s reputation has run the gamut over the last nearly 100 years after her career-making visit to Samoa in the mid-1920s:
… my journey did leave me with a newfound and abiding respect for the anthropologist Margaret Mead. At the same young age of 23, Mead travelled to the Samoan Islands to the east of the Vanuatu in the South Pacific Ocean to study the islands’ Polynesian people. On a cloudy Samoan day in August of 1925, she stepped off the S.S. Sonoma in Pago Pago Bay, Tuttuila, and began her research. By the end of her career, she was celebrated as the mother of anthropology, both revered and despised for the image of humanity she presented to the world, and for her conclusions about the Samoan people, in particular.
At first, her conversations with the Samoans did not go especially well:
Mead: When a chief’s son is tattooed they build a special house, don’t they?
Asuegi: No, no special house.
Mead: Are you sure they never build a house?
Asuegi: Yes. Well, sometimes they build a small house of sticks and leaves.
Mead: Was that house sacred?
Asuegi: No, not sacred.
Mead: Could you take food into it?
Asuegi: Oh no. That was forbidden.
Mead: Smoke in there?
Asuegi: Oh no, very sacred.
Mead: Could anybody go into the house who wished?
Asuegi: Yes, anybody.
Mead: No one was forbidden to go in?
Asuegi: No.
Mead: Could the boy’s sister go in?
Asuegi: Oh no. That was forbidden.Mead later recalled that she could have “screamed with impatience.” To make matters worse, the native Samoans would often take her belongings and redistribute them according to ceremonial obligations. But, eventually, she began to make progress. Mead developed close friendships with a small and dedicated group of young girls who became her chief informants. She was made a taupou, a ceremonial virgin, despite having a husband back in the United States. Before long, Mead was considered a respected honorary member of the society, and her research project blossomed. A few months and a tropical hurricane later, Mead returned to the United States, and in 1928, she published the results of her research, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization.
Her work was widely accepted and praised but by the 1960s, there were some signs challenging her research and conclusions, especially the research of New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman. Although he held back the publication of his work until after her death, she was aware of his criticisms and received one of the chapters of his book in advance:
Countless readers had formed a romantic image of the Samoan people from Coming Of Age in Samoa, but now Freeman had broken the spell. The people most blindsided by Freeman’s book were those anthropologists who had stood in front of lecture audiences and fed students Mead’s image of Samoa. Some of them immediately attacked the book. Anthropologist Laura Nader, sister of independent US politician Ralph Nader, called Freeman’s book a “Right-wing political backlash” for questioning the influence of culture on human behavior, and a vote by American Anthropological Association condemned the book as unscientific.
Over the next few decades, Mead’s reputation hung precariously in the balance as anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists battled it out in the nature-nurture controversy. However, the cruelest blow to Mead would come from anthropologists themselves.
It turned out that the young girls Mead apparently depended upon for many of her concepts about Samoan life were far from truthful about their lives:
Unlike the American anthropologists who preached Mead’s findings, Samoans themselves tended to look upon Mead’s work negatively. Some of the Samoan elders burned copies of Coming of Age in Samoa when they realized what Mead had written, and for some time libraries in Samoa didn’t stock the book. Samoan anthropologist Unasa L. F. Va’a called it “one of the worst books of the twentieth century.”3 One of the questions that preoccupied Freeman was how Mead arrived at the erroneous conclusions she drew in her book. He decided that Mead’s own research came mostly from interviews with women, particularly young women, who are hardly the best informants when it comes to matters of historical warfare and violence. On the subject of promiscuity, Freeman conjectured that Mead was the victim of a hoax by her young female informants: “All the indications are that the young Margaret Mead was, as a kind of joke, deliberately misled by her adolescent informants.” In 1987, a few years after Margaret Mead and Samoa was published, it was discovered that one of Mead’s close informers in 1926, Fa’apua’a Fa’amu, was still alive, and wished to swear on the Bible to clear the record on what she had told Mead all those years ago about sexual relations among the Samoans:
We said that we were out all night with the boys; she failed to realize that we were just joking and must have been taken in by our pretenses… She must have taken it seriously but I was only joking. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped up stories as though they were true.…Yes, we just lied and lied to her.
But was she totally wrong? Doubts exist here, too:
Although Mead’s analysis is obviously highly questionable, the degree to which her work misrepresented Samoan society remains an open question. In 2009, the anthropologist Paul Shankman published his book The Trashing of Margaret Mead in which he reconsiders the evidence. Shankman describes Freeman as an unruly character marked by mental instability, a vindictive desire to ruin the careers of other anthropologists, and plain rudeness (Shankman recalled a nightmare experience when he gave a lecture at ANU and Freeman sat behind him opening and reading his mail so loudly that Shankman had to ask him to stop). This ad hominem attack on Freeman might seem like a desperate effort to evade his refutation of Mead, or to seek revenge on Freeman, but Shankman does succeed in raising some important questions. For example, although virginity is prized in Samoa, it is much more prized among the taupou, the ceremonial virgins of higher status who go on to marry the chiefs. Among the lower status girls, sexual mores were more relaxed and some of these girls did sleep with men before marriage as even Freeman’s data found. Other aspects of Shankman’s belated defense of Mead are more contentious. For example he dismisses Fa’apua’a Fa’amu’s testimony about lying to Mead as irrelevant due to her advanced age and sometimes contradictory statements. He also speculates that Fa’apua’a Fa’amu’s testimony was probably not influential on Mead’s wider conclusions because she was only one of 25 informants. These are important qualifications to what is often presented as Freeman’s decisive refutation of Mead’s work.
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From Billions to Zero in 50 Years – The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon
Today I Found Out
Published on 23 Aug 2017Book: A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction
In this video:
Martha was a very lonely bird. She had once been part of a pair, with her male counterpart George, but he had died several years before. So, for the final years of her life, Martha sat in her one-bird cage alone. The Cincinnati Zoo offered a thousand dollar reward (about $23,000 today) to anyone who could track down a mate for Martha. Unfortunately, there were no mates left for her.
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QotD: Reynolds’ Law
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com, 2010-09-23.
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