Quotulatiousness

April 18, 2019

Chiang Kai-shek Plays it Like Stalin | Between 2 Wars | 1926 Part 3 of 3

Filed under: China, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 17 Apr 2019

In 1926 Chiang Kai-shek manages to turn the Kuomintang into his own private army, and the events are befuddling…

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson supported by Gabriel Matsakis

Colorized Pictures by Olga Shirnina
https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com

Video Archive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
15 hours ago (edited)
First of all, many thanks to Gabriel Matsakis for helping out with the research for this episode! While writing about China and Chiang Kai-shek, Spartacus realised that he needed to make more than one script to explain The Northern Expedition (crucial to the developments that eventually lead to the World War in China), so we threw in another episode in 1926 to explain Chiang Kai-shek’s rise to power. In the next episode (1927 part 1) we will return to the United States and look at the economic boom and the Roaring Twenties. We will also return to China and the actual Northern Expedition in a 1927 episode after that. Enjoy the confusion that is China in the 1920s!?!

Holiday Tales: Easter!

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 30 Mar 2018

Happy Good Friday, everyone! Easter’s in two days, so let’s take a hot minute to see if we can figure out what exactly we’re celebrating when we pull out our egg baskets and chocolate bunnies, and why exactly we do it the way we do. Will we be able to unravel the mysteries of Easter before Jesus’s death timer hits zero? (Spoiler: no!)

PATREON: www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797

Shakespeare’s work is merely used to highlight the brilliance and originality of modern theatrical directors

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Anthony Daniels reports for Quadrant Online of how he recently attended a performance of a play by some unimportant dead English white guy:

The precise date of the discovery by theatre directors that they are greater than Shakespeare cannot be specified: the discovery was more a process than an event. But by the time I saw a production of Richard II at the Almeida Theatre a few weeks ago, the superior genius of any director over that of Shakespeare was an established principle and indisputable fact.

[…]

But if I had an elevated conception of Shakespeare, how naive and mistaken I was! I knew nothing of Richard II — the play, that is, not the king — until I saw the production by Joe Hill-Gibbins. How narrow had been my previous conception of it! I discovered, among other things, that Richard was a short, fat fifty-eight-year-old in a black T-shirt, with a crown of the kind that is awarded to the person who finds the fève in the galette des rois that the French eat on the sixth of January, that the Duke of Norfolk was a woman dressed like a cleaning lady, and that all the action of the play takes place in what looks like a large biscuit tin, without exit or entrance. All this, of course, means something far deeper than anything that a mere Shakespeare could convey, being deeply symbolic, and therefore required real inventive genius on the part of the director to bring forth.

While the same actress took the parts of the Duke of Norfolk, Bushy and Green (all of them looking like cleaning ladies and each indistinguishable from the other because they could not leave the stage even to change costume), and the parts of both the Earl of Northumberland and the Bishop of Carlisle by other actresses, actual women’s roles such as that of Richard’s Queen were expunged entirely from the text. Between them, three actresses played five male parts and only one female. There is a profound lesson in this somewhere, no doubt in enlightened gender fluidity.

Most of the lines were delivered as if they were a religious incantation in a dead language that both the celebrants and the congregation desired to get over with as quickly as possible, clear diction being one of the many tools by which class hegemony is so unjustly exercised. The actor who took the part of Richard, it is true, was comprehensible, but made the acting of Sir Henry Irving appear taciturn by comparison. If emphasis is good, overemphasis must be better: no more stiff upper lip, we are all hysterics now, and can understand nothing that is not accompanied by gesticulation.

The director fortunately realised that Shakespeare got the order of his play wrong: Richard’s great speech in Act V scene 5 (“I have been studying how I may compare / This prison unto the world …”) was actually a prologue. The director is not the interpreter of Shakespeare, but rather Shakespeare is, and ought to be, the occasion, the opportunity, for the director to place his own immortal (and highly original) genius before the world.

British Ration Week Episode 1: Introduction

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Food, History, WW2 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

InRangeTV
Published on 20 Jan 2018

Did you know that under World War II rationing, the health of the British public improved by virtually every objective measure? Caloric intake increased, lifespan increased, and infant mortality decreased. Despite being an island nation under severe submarine blockade, the United Kingdom managed to not just provide food for its millions of inhabitants, but actually build and maintain the public trust in government rationing. How did this happen? We will explore the question all week, while Ian eats a diet of only what a typical British family would have eaten during the dark days of the Blitz.

Day 1 Menu:

Breakfast: Oatmeal Porridge, tea
Lunch: Leek & Potato Soup, bread & margarine, water
Tea: Vanilla Depression Cake, tea
Dinner: Cottage Pie, ale

For the recipes for today’s dishes – and lots of other details about the experiment – please see our data page at InRange.tv:
http://www.inrange.tv/british-rationi…
InRange is entirely viewer supported:
https://www.patreon.com/InRangeTV

QotD: Roadblocks to deregulating the US healthcare market

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

One problem America has is simply that our government administration isn’t very good. That’s not true across the board — our government statistics are, IMHO, the finest in the world. But there’s stuff that other countries can do that we can’t, either because our government is more decentralized, or because our civil service just isn’t as prestigious (and therefore as full of competent, motivated people) as those in other countries. And our regulatory approach — rules rather than principles based, and highly adversarial — is also suboptimal, and hard to change.

Given how much the government now interferes in health care, that’s a big problem. Given our lack of administrative competency, our first step should be pulling back where we can — trying to push more ordinary expenses onto consumers, for example, who can manage those the same way they manage their aspirin and antacid purchases now. And eliminating the tax deduction for employer sponsored health care would be major. But I fear, politically impossible.

Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.

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