Quotulatiousness

April 12, 2020

Nazis in the Balkans – The Invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia – WW2 – 085 – April 11, 1941

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 11 Apr 2020

This week, the German army invades Greece and Yugoslavia as it launches Operation Marita and Operation 25 respectively. They also take some remarkable captives in North Africa.

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From the comments:

World War Two
2 days ago
This is the second double-length episode, with the Invasion of the Benelux and France being the first one (May 18th 1940). Now, there are two things I want to point out in this comment. First of all, like our May 18th episode, this episode is packed with the amazing maps made by Eastory. If you haven’t already, subscribe to www.youtube.com/c/eastory. Furthermore, this week the final episode of our Between Two Wars series aired, covering the world on the brink of World War Two. The entire series of 58 episodes long, covering all the events leading up to WW2, can be watched in this playlist (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrG5J-K5AYAU1R-HeWSfY2D1jy_sEssNG) or simply by going to www.youtube.com/c/timeghost.
Cheers, Joram

Minimum alcohol pricing – a policy so good you have to lie about it

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Health, Wine — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Scotland has had legal minimum prices for alcoholic beverages since mid-2018. If you read a random selection of mainstream media coverage, you’d know that it’s been a huge success, with vastly improved public health results at a price to consumers measured in mere pennies. As with all propaganda efforts, if you tell the lies often enough, people may believe you:

There has been all sorts of rubbish written about minimum pricing since it was introduced in Scotland in May 2018. Nicola Sturgeon has lied about in the Scottish Parliament. The BBC has gone to extraordinary lengths to spin the policy as a success. The public have been told that alcohol-related hospital admissions have gone down when they have gone up. We have seen the media fall for blatant cherry-picking. We have been told that rates of problem drinking have gone down when we don’t have any evidence either way.

One of the few solid facts — that there were more alcohol-related deaths recorded in Scotland in 2018 than in 2017 — has been sidelined. Instead, the media have focused on a disputed, and relatively small, decline in alcohol sales as if that were an end in itself. Any port in a storm (fortified wine sales have definitely benefited from minimum pricing).

Figures from the calendar year of 2018 are of limited use because minimum pricing didn’t begin until May 1st. Today, for the first time, I can reveal the monthly mortality figures for Scotland, England and Wales. They show that there was no difference between the change in annual death rates from alcohol-related causes, regardless of whether the country had minimum pricing in place. Both England/Wales and Scotland saw a decline between May and December of seven per cent (compared to the previous year).

This graph is published in a new briefing paper I have written for the IEA. It summarises all the evidence gathered to date on deaths, hospitalisations and sales, plus exclusive new data.

Importantly, it contains estimates of the costs to consumers. Among the more outlandish claims made by the Sheffield modellers was the idea that moderate and low income consumers would be barely affected by minimum pricing. They predicted that a low income moderate drinker would only pay an extra 4p a year! This was never realistic, not least because it was based on the minimum price being set at 45p and they defined a moderate drinker as someone consuming the equivalent of just two pints of lager a week, but it worked from a PR perspective because it quelled politicians’ fears about the policy being regressive.

The Failed Start Of The League of Nations I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 10 Apr 2020

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The League of Nations was US President Woodrow Wilson’s tool for a new and peaceful world after the war of 1914-1918 — and the US should have been their most important member. But the United States never joined and today the League of Nations is often seen as a failure. Was it doomed from the start?

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» SOURCES
“The Treaty of Peace with Germany (The Treaty of Versailles),” June 28, 1919, United States Statutes at Large, art. 1-440.

Walters, F.P. A History of the League of Nations. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1952)

Link, Arthur et al., eds., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 45 (1984)

Ray S. Baker and William E. Dodd, eds, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: Authorized Edition, Vol. 1, (New York, 1924)

Matz, Nele, “Civilization and the Mandate System under the League of Nations as Origin of Trusteeship” in von Bogdandy, A and Wolfrum, R (eds.), Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, Volume 9, 2005

Braumoeller, Bear F. “The Myth of American Isolationism”, Foreign Policy Analysis Vol. 6, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2010), pp. 349-371

“March 19, 1920: Senate Rejects Treaty of Versailles for Second and Final Time” New York Times, https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/20… /march-19-1920-senate- rejects-treaty-of-versailles-for-second-and-final-time/

Egerton, George W, “The Lloyd George Government and the Creation of the League of Nations”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Apr., 1974), pp. 419-444

Burkman, Thomas W. “Japan and the League of Nations: AN ASIAN POWER ENCOUNTERS THE ‘EUROPEAN CLUB'”, World Affairs, Vol. 158, No. 1, Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations: Part Two (SUMMER 1995), pp. 45-57

Rappart, William E. “Small States in the League of Nations”, Political Science Quarterly Vol. 49, No. 4 (Dec., 1934), pp. 544-575

Cox, James Middleston, Journey Through My Years, (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1946)

“THE BRITISH EMPIRE, THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, AND THE UNITED STATES”, Advocate of Peace through Justice, Vol. 82, No. 7 (JULY, 1920), pp. 229-231

Dorsey, Leeroy G, “Woodrow Wilson’s Fight for the League of Nations: A Reexamination”, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 107-135

“The Covenant of the League of Nations” AVALON PROJECT, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_cent…

“Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points”, AVALON PROJECT, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_cent…

Riddell, George Allardice, The Riddell diaries, 1908-1923, (London ; Dover, N.H. : Athlone Press, 1986)

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Self-interest in the clothing of idealism

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Esteban wrote at the Continental Telegraph:

Much has been made over the past year of the fact that young people in America approve of Socialism in rather large numbers, and quite a lot more than their elders. Some explain that this is because they are more idealistic than the older crowd, who have become corrupted and “sold out” now that they have a mortgage and expensive lifestyle. Others argue that this supposed idealism is actually naivete.

It seems fair to point out that if you are 24 with negative net worth, a modest paying job and no reasonable expectation on the horizon to make serious cash, it isn’t idealistic to support redistribution, it’s self-interest. And you don’t change this fact by saying “Well, if I made that much money, I’d be happy to pay a lot in taxes”. If you ever get to that point we’ll see, until then this statement doesn’t fly.

Likewise, if you’re 55 with a couple of million dollars in your 401(k), a big home and an income well into six figures your view may be biased against “sharing the wealth” based on your wallet, not principles.

Tank Chats #67 Covenanter | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 22 Feb 2019

Historian David Fletcher MBE talks through the Second World War British Cruiser tank, the Covenanter. Otherwise known as Tank Cruiser Mark V** A13.

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QotD: The Gini coefficient

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

At least for now, most progressives acknowledge that markets and economic growth are necessary. But progressives in academia contend that growth has proved itself secondary to equality efforts — something to be exploited, rather than appreciated. Not just nationally, but worldwide, policymakers and the press regard the subordination of growth to equality to be a benign practice, as in the recent line in the Indian periodical Mint: a policy aimed at “reducing inequality need not hurt growth.”

The redistributionist impulse has brought to the fore metrics such as the Gini coefficient, named after the ur-redistributor, Corrado Gini, an Italian social scientist who developed an early statistical measure of income distribution a century ago. A society where a single plutocrat earns all the income ranks a pure “1” on the Gini scale; one in which all earnings are perfectly equally distributed, the old Scandinavian ideal, scores a “0” by the Gini test. The Gini Index has been renamed or updated numerous times, but the principle remains the same. Income distribution and redistribution seem so crucial to progressives that French economist Thomas Piketty built an international bestseller around it, the wildly lauded Capital.

Through Gini’s lens, we now rank past eras. Decades in which policy endeavored or managed to even out and equalize earnings — the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt, the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson — score high. Decades where policymakers focused on growth before equality, such as the 1920s, fare poorly. Decades about which social-justice advocates aren’t sure what to say — the 1970s, say — simply drop from the discussion. In the same hierarchy, federal debt moves down as a concern because austerity to reduce debt could hinder redistribution. Lately, advocates of economically progressive history have made taking any position other than theirs a dangerous practice. Academic culture longs to topple the idols of markets, just as it longs to topple statutes of Robert E. Lee.

But progressives have their metrics wrong and their story backward. The geeky Gini metric fails to capture the American economic dynamic: in our country, innovative bursts lead to great wealth, which then moves to the rest of the population. Equality campaigns don’t lead automatically to prosperity; instead, prosperity leads to a higher standard of living and, eventually, in democracies, to greater equality. The late Simon Kuznets, who posited that societies that grow economically eventually become more equal, was right: growth cannot be assumed. Prioritizing equality over markets and growth hurts markets and growth and, most important, the low earners for whom social-justice advocates claim to fight. Government debt matters as well. Those who ring the equality theme so loudly deprive their own constituents, whose goals are usually much more concrete: educational opportunity, homes, better electronics, and, most of all, jobs. Translated into policy, the equality impulse takes our future hostage.

Amity Shlaes, “Growth, Not Equality”, City Journal, 2018-01-21.

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