Quotulatiousness

December 30, 2018

Stalin’s Unexpected Bedfellows – WW2 – 018 – 29 December 1939

Filed under: China, Europe, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published on 29 Dec 2018

The Chinese Nationalists under command of Chiang Kai Shek is desperately looking to make new or restore old, allies to aid them in their fight against the Japanese. Meanwhile, the Soviets are still struggling to turn the Winter War against the Finnish in their favor.

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations by: Mikk Tali aka Eastory
Community Manager: Joram Appel

Colorizations by Spartacus Olsson and Norman Stewart.

Photos of the Winter War are mostly from the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive (SA-Kuva).

Eastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

From the comments:

IMPORTANT POST SCRIPT NOTE: YouTube age restricted this video, which we find appalling — they also turned off monetisation (but that happens all the time). One of our most important tasks is to reach younger people with deep knowledge about history. While we are aware that some people might find war stories and images of the dead offensive, we cannot bow to that sentiment as it is of utmost important that any story of WW2 also displays the horrors of war. While we are fascinated by military history it is never or goal to glorify armed conflicts, to the contrary. Please help us get this resolved by voicing your opinion in a reply to this comment — we will forward your comments to YouTube.

This is the last World War Two video of 2018! We are looking forward to 2019/1940, which will be filled with many improvements, lots and lots of new content, the start of multiple new series within this channel and maybe even our first roadtrips to the real-life battlegrounds of World War Two. We’re very grateful to have you all onboard and even more so to have over 2000 of you supporting us on Patreon and timeghost.tv. What we do would not be possible without you!

Have a happy and safe New Years Eve and we’ll see you in 2019!

Cheers, Joram on behalf of Indy, Spartacus, Astrid, myself and everyone else at TimeGhost!

Note: Indy refers to a ‘Christmas cribs episode’ on the TimeGhost channel at the end of this video, but at the time of shooting this we didn’t realize that we were going to do a livestream instead. You can check that out on the TimeGhost channel.

The US federal government “shutdown”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of the things you quickly notice when there’s a public service cutback is that the cutbacks are always directed to the parts of that organization that interact with the public. The idea being that if the public are seriously inconvenienced by lack of service — I mean more than they ordinarily are, anyway — they’ll raise an outcry and the politicians will be forced to rollback the cuts. This is standard practice because, as a rule, it works fairly well. The current US federal government “shutdown” is a bit of an outlier here, because very few members of the public interact with federal employees between Christmas and New Year, and the ones that they do encounter are (mostly) still on the job. Even those who are not on the job due to the shutdown will eventually be paid for the time they didn’t work, so there are few monetary savings happening: probably the reverse, as the government will be racking up charges for services they’ve contracted for but won’t use during the disruption, and there may well be penalty clauses written into the contracts.

Colby Cosh discusses the oddity of American government shutdown kabuki theatre:

As occasionally happens, the U.S. government is now “shut down” as a consequence of a conflict over budget appropriations between the president and the Congress. Except, of course, it isn’t anything of the sort. Otherwise we Canadians would be meeting with other functioning states to decide what pieces of the United States to break off for ourselves, the way European powers used to do with Poland from time to time. (Newspaper ethics forbid me from publishing a web address for my $29.95 “Make Maine Canada Again” hats.)

The “essential” parts of the U.S. federal government, including the bits that guarantee the territorial integrity of the country, always keep on trucking through these “shutdowns.” (The National Guard is sometimes affected, but on this occasion the Guard has been taken care of by a spending bill that passed in October.) Social Security and Medicare roll on unimpeded. The functions of government that get held up are the ones whose delay or abandonment cause inconvenience — albeit serious, economically harmful inconvenience — rather than anarchy.

If you grow curious about these American “shutdowns,” perhaps because they did not happen before 1981 and do not really happen anywhere else, you discover that this kabuki-like feature is not really a coincidence. As much as Congress and the president may fight very earnestly over things like border walls, they have a common interest in the overall health of the state.

The U.S. Constitution says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This is a shared element of America’s legal DNA and the British Empire’s: U.S. government shutdowns are, in a weird way, a distant echo of early-modern money struggles betwixt King and Parliament. Westminster-style governments, however, have evolved so as to minimize the possibility of ugly standoffs between the executive and the legislature. The U.S., not so much.

The Long-Run Aggregate Supply Curve

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Marginal Revolution University
Published on 25 Apr 2017

The long-run aggregate supply curve is actually pretty simple: it’s a vertical line showing an economy’s potential growth rates. Combining the long-run aggregate supply curve with the aggregate demand curve can help us understand business fluctuations.

For example, while the U.S. economy grows at about 3% per year on average, it does tend to fluctuate quite a bit. What causes these fluctuations? One cause is “real shocks” that affect the fundamental factors of production. Droughts, changes to the oil supply, hurricanes, wars, technological changes, etc. can all have big and potentially far-reaching consequences.

Next week, we’ll dig into why wages are considered “sticky,” or slow to change.

QotD: The national honour

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Greek historian Thucydides argued that countries go to war for three reasons: honor, fear and interest. He put honor first, and yet that is probably the least appreciated aspect of foreign policy today. Historian Donald Kagan, in his essay “Honor, Interest, Nation-State,” recounts how since antiquity, nations have put honor ahead of interest. “For the last 2,500 years, at least, states have usually conducted their affairs and have often gone to war for reasons that would not pass the test of ‘vital national interests’ posed by modern students of politics.”

“On countless occasions,” he continues, “states have acted to defend or foster a collection of beliefs and feelings that ran counter to their practical interests and have placed their security at risk, persisting in their course even when the costs were high and the danger was evident.”

Americans instinctively understand this when our own honor is at stake. The rallying cry during the Barbary Wars, “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,” has almost become part of the national creed. I am no fan of Karl Marx, but he was surely right when he observed that “shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.”

Both the first and second world wars cannot be properly understood without taking the role national honor plays in foreign affairs. Similarly, Vladimir Putin’s constant testing of the West only makes sense when you take into account the despot’s core conviction that the fall of the Soviet Union was a blow to Russian prestige and honor.

Jonah Goldberg, “Humiliating Mexico Over Border Wall Would Be a Big Mistake”, TownHall.com, 2017-01-27.

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