World War Two
Published 11 Jun 2022The Allies bomb Mediterranean islands in preparation for their invasion of Sicily next month; they also prepare a lot of deceptions to mislead the enemy as to where they will attack. The German plans for the summer offensive against the Kursk salient are ever more concrete, and in the field this week, the Chinese stop the Japanese offensive cold.
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June 12, 2022
Eisenhower Lays Out His Plans for Sicily – WW2 – 198 – June 11, 1943
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June 5, 2022
Banzai Charges in Alaska – WW2 – 197 – June 4, 1943
World War Two
Published 4 Jun 2022The Chinese defeat the Japanese at Shipai Fortress and the Americans maul the Japanese in the Aleutians. The Japanese are also worried about the possibility of the USSR joining the war against them. Meanwhile the Allies still plan to invade Sicily, but have no idea what they’ll do after that.
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May 29, 2022
Black May, Nazi Subs Defeated – WW2 – 196 – May 28, 1943
World War Two
Published 28 May 2021German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz orders the U-Boats to leave the Atlantic this week; the losses lately have just been too great for their patrols to continue there. There is active fighting in China, the Aleutians, and the Kuban, and there are special weapons tests in the skies over Germany.
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May 16, 2022
Heaviest Air Raid in Human History – WAH 060 – May 15, 1943
World War Two
Published 15 May 2022As the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is being quashed, there are renewed Japanese atrocities in China, and the RAF sets a world record by bombing German civilians.
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QotD: The difference between surface meaning and actual intent
A basic truism is that languages don’t map exactly over each other and that’s the most likely explanation for this database from China detailing “BreedReady” women. That languages don’t map exactly should be obvious even to the most monolingual of English speakers. We all know that “Let’s have lunch sometime” when said by an American means “Hope to see you never and definitely not while eating”. Similarly, “That’s lovely” when said by a Brit does not necessarily mean it is lovely and “How quaint” isn’t praise for the cuteness of the thing. A Californian invocation to meet Tuesday is in fact a rumination on the possible non-existence of Tuesday.
Tim Worstall, “That Chinese ‘BreedReady’ Database – Check The Translation”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-03-11.
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May 15, 2022
The End of the War in Africa – WW2 – 194 – May 14, 1943
World War Two
Published 14 May 2022With the end of the Tunisian Campaign, the Allies have won the war for the African Continent. What next? They meet at the Trident Conference in Washington DC to try and figure that out. Meanwhile, the fight in the field continues — in Burma, the Aleutians, China, and the Kuban.
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May 8, 2022
Kilroy was Here! The fall of Tunis – WW2 – 193 – May 7, 1943
World War Two
Published 7 May 2022Tunis falls to the Allies, but the Axis are still fighting back from their little corner of Tunisia. There is more of the seemingly endless fighting in the Kuban in the Caucasus, and the Chinese Theater comes to life with a new Japanese offensive.
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April 27, 2022
“We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.”
Chris Bray has a bit of fun at David French’s expense:
In the 1830s, British merchants with trade routes from India had forced open an enormous market for opium in China, and were pouring the product into the country, producing a lucrative addiction crisis. (Queen Victoria, the first Sackler.) But the Qing Dynasty had run China with a firm hand since the first half of the 17th century, and the emperors of the dynasty had long regarded themselves as, to use an academic term from the field of political science, The Shit. In 1839, Commissioner Lin Zexu sent a huffy letter to the British monarch, warning her that her tedious little pissant country over there in Nowhereville was trifling with a vast and dangerous power:
Our celestial empire rules over ten thousand kingdoms! Most surely do we possess a measure of godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom! Still we cannot bear to slay or exterminate without previous warning …
The British responded with naval artillery, and the limits of the Qing Dynasty’s power were revealed with the greatest possible clarity. Commissioner Lin had an image of himself, an understanding of his place in the world and the meaning of his nation’s power, that couldn’t survive an encounter with reality.
So: David French. In his own version of Commissioner Lin’s letter, French warns this week that American institutions most surely do possess a measure of godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom, yet ye weak and depraved subjects of these potent institutions offer not thine gratitude. It’s insane. He doesn’t see the world he’s describing, so his description doesn’t have anything to do with the people he’s talking to, and he has no idea.
Before I say anything else, though, I have to point out that I recently described the American crisis like this: “We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.” French does the opposite, describing institutions that are undermined by the dreadful human material beneath them: “Our government is imperfect, but if this republic fractures, its people will be to blame.” Wreckers and saboteurs have undermined the otherwise successful five year plan, you see. The problem is bottom-up.
This is exactly the same beat patrolled by “real conservatives” like Max Boot and Tom Nichols, who endlessly warn that the fat dumb peasants lack the sense to lick the hands of their capable superiors. These are very strange men.
Here, watch French do his thing:
The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who’ve ever lived. They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.
It’s simply an astonishing level of discontent in the midst of astonishing wealth and power.
Tell me the comparison to Commissioner Lin isn’t perfect. Does not our wealth and power astonish you!?!?
As French writes about the privileged creatures who live “under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet,” the Taliban rules Afghanistan. A reminder: The Taliban controlled about half of that country in September of 2001; then the most powerful military in the history of the planet invaded, and fought the Taliban for two full decades, at the cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, the result of which is that the Taliban now controls … all of the country. The implosion of the American effort in Afghanistan happened last fucking year, and we’ve somehow already taken care to forget the details of that goat rodeo. What was the plan?
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April 25, 2022
The Jews Fight Back – WAH 057 – April 24, 1943
World War Two
Published 24 Apr 2022The war against Naziism is escalating on all fronts — in the War Against Humanity the main battleground is now the Warsaw Ghetto.
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April 9, 2022
It wasn’t the Wuhan Coronavirus that crippled the world economy — it was government reaction to the pandemic
Dan Sanchez points out the undeniable truth that most of the economic damage we’ve sustained over the last two years wasn’t due to the pandemic itself, but to the incredibly disruptive public health measures almost every western government implemented in response (with huge connivance on the part of the legacy media and the social media companies):
… it will not be the coronavirus making us poorer, but the fallacy, embraced by officials from Beijing to DC, that central planners can manage society-wide problems, like “healing” a global pandemic or “fixing” a global supply chain.
As the great economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek explained, societies and economies are inconceivably complex, and it is literally impossible for anyone to centrally plan something so far beyond their comprehension. To think otherwise is, as Hayek called it, a “fatal conceit”.
The fatal conceit of central planners is manifest in the very term “global supply chain”. The metaphor of a “chain” portrays the economy as something static and linear: something simple enough for a single mind to “fix”.
But, as Leonard Read vividly showed in his classic essay “I, Pencil”, even a seemingly simple good like a pencil is not the product of a single supply chain. Every good in the economy is descended from a vast “family tree” of innumerable factors of production. And all the family trees of all goods are intricately interconnected, making the economy, not a “chain”, but as economist Murray Rothbard depicted it, “a highly complex, interacting latticework of exchanges”.
This vast, dynamic latticework is self-healing and self-fixing: through the actions and interactions of its constituent individuals. Blundering, arrogant central planners only get in the way and make things worse.
That has been the lesson of free-market economists and social theorists going back to Adam Smith. The western world partly embraced that lesson, and it flourished as a result, becoming a beacon to the world. Starting in the 1970s, even Communist China emulated its example, opening up its markets. This was a humanitarian miracle for the Chinese people and a boon for us all. If not for Chinese manufacturing being integrated into the global division of labor, it is hard to imagine the west having the modern high-tech living standards and super-comfortable working conditions we enjoy (however precariously) today.
Whereas once China liberalized in emulation of the west, now the leaders of the “free world” are emulating (and, in the case of Canada’s prime minister, openly admiring) the authoritarianism of the CCP. As crises continue to mount, it is clear that this turn toward tyranny is putting our future at risk.
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April 8, 2022
The structure of the Chinese government
Scott Alexander reviews The Third Revolution, by Elizabeth Economy, although as he says up front, “It’s a look through recent Chinese history, with The Third Revolution as a very loose inspiration.”:
How Does China’s Government Work?
The traditional answer is a flowchart like this one (source):
But you could give a similarly convoluted flowchart for America, and it would tell people much less than words like “democracy” or “balance of powers”. What’s the Chinese equivalent?
I found it a little more helpful to see it diagrammed it as a series of nested squares:
The inner levels have real power, and the outer layers are theoretically overseers but actually rubber stamps. Things get more and more rubber-stampy as you go out, culminating in the National People’s Congress, which recently voted to re-elect Xi by a vote of 2,970 in favor, 0 against — it’s so irrelevant that it’s literally called “the NPC”.
Who chooses the members of the inner groups? In theory, the outer groups; for example, the Central Committee is supposed to elect the Politburo Standing Committee. In practice, these selections tend to be of the “2,970 in favor, 0 against” variety, so they must be taking marching orders from someone. Who? The Chinese government doesn’t talk about it much, but probably the members of the Politburo Standing Committee hand-pick everyone, including the Paramount Leader and their own successors.
How do they pick? Mostly patron-client relationships. Every leading politician cultivates a network of loyal supporters; if he takes power, he tries to put as many of his people into top posts as he can. The seven Politburo members wheel and deal with each other about whose clients should get which positions, including any unoccupied Politburo seats.
If the two word description of US politics is “democracy, checks-and-balances”, then the two word description of Chinese politics is “oligarchy, patrons-and-clients”. If this seems exotic, it shouldn’t: it’s not much different from how the US fills unelected posts like “ambassador” and “White House staffer”. The Trump presidency put this into especially sharp relief, either because Trump did it more blatantly than usual or just because Trump’s clients were so obviously different from the normal Washington crowd. Consider eg the appointment of Jeff Sessions (among the first Congressmen to endorse Trump) as Attorney General.
In the US, this is a peripheral part of the system, checked by democracy. In China, it’s the whole game.
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Chinese C96 “Wauser” Broomhandle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Nov 2016Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
The C96 Mauser was a very popular handgun in China in the 1920s and 30s, which naturally led to a substantial number of domestically-produced copies of it. These ran the full range of quality, from dangerous to excellent. This particular example falls into the middle, appearing to be a pretty fair mechanical copy of the C96 action. However, it does exhibit classic Chinese misspelled markings — the workers who made these guns often did not actually read English (or German), and made best-guess attempts at copying the markings on authentic firearms. The result was sometimes something like the Wauser.
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April 2, 2022
QotD: The pre-modern farming household
At the same time that households were large (by modern standards), the farms they tilled were, by modern standards, very small. The normal size of a Roman household small farm is generally estimated between 5 and 8 iugera (a Roman measurement of land, roughly 3 to 5 acres); in pre-Han Northern China (where wheat and millet, not rice, were the staple crops), the figure was “one hundred mu (4.764 acres)” – essentially the same. In Languedoc, a study of Saint-Thibery in 1460 showed 118 households (out of 189) on farms of less than 20 setérée (12 acres or so; the setérée appears to be an inexact unit of measurement); 96 of them were on less than 10 setérée (about 6 acres). So while there is a lot of variation, by and large it seems like the largest cluster of household farms tend to be around 3 to 8 acres or so; 5 acre farms are a good “average” small farm.
This coincidence of normal farm size and family size is not an accident, but essentially represents multi-generational family units occupying the smallest possible farms which could support them. The pressures that produce this result are not hard to grasp: families with multiple children and a farm large enough to split between them might do so, while families without enough land to split are likely to cluster around the farm they have. Pre-modern societies typically have only limited opportunities for wage labor (which are often lower status and worse in conditions than peasant farming!), so if the extended family unit can cluster on a single farm too small to split up, it will (with exception for the occasional adventurous type who sets off for high-risk occupations like soldier or bandit).
Now to be clear that doesn’t mean the farm sizes are uniform, because they aren’t. There is tremendous variation and obviously the difference between a 10 acre small farm and a 5 acre small farm is half of the farm. Moreover, in most of the communities you will have significant gaps between the poor peasants (whose farms are often very small, even by these measures), the average peasant farmer, and “rich peasants” who might have a somewhat (but often not massively so) larger farm and access to more farming capital (particularly draft animals). […] Nevertheless, what I want to stress is that these fairly small – 3-8 acres of so – farms with an extended family unit on it make up the vast majority of farming households and most of the rural population, even if they do not control most of the land (for instance in that Languedoc village, more than half of the land was held by households with more than 20 setérée a piece, so a handful of those “rich peasants” with larger accumulations effectively dominated the village’s landholding […]).
This is our workforce and we’re going to spend this entire essay talking about them. Why? Because these folks – these farmers – make up the majority of the population of basically all agrarian societies in the pre-modern period. And when I say “the majority” I mean the vast majority, on the order of 80-90% in many cases.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
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March 23, 2022
What did Genghis Khan eat?
Tasting History with Max Miller
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March 14, 2022
Legends Summarized: Journey To The West (Part IX)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 26 Nov 2021Journey to the West Kai, episode 6: Two Weddings And An Asskicking
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