Quotulatiousness

January 20, 2021

QotD: Helping the homeless

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

I understand that the general media explanation of homelessness is to blame it on the cold heart of whoever was the last Republican President in office, but it is hard for me to correlate national policy with trends in homelessness. I am maybe 70% convinced that the closing of mental health facilities in the 70’s and 80’s across most cities and states was the main cause, a hypothesis born out by the high rates of mental illness recorded in most homeless populations. This is why I think so much government spending for the homeless is wasted — it all focuses on creating homes, I guess just because of our word choice of “homeless”. If we called them the mentally ill, or perhaps “helpless” rather than “homeless” we might investigate other approaches.

I see a number of sources nowadays trying to pin these closures entirely on tight-fisted Republican governors, and I am sure this is partly true. But this misses an important element — that civil libertarians had real issues with both the conduct of these institutions (e.g. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) and the fairness of the forced-institutionalization process. Also tied up in all this were Cold War stories of Soviet Russia using institutionalization in mental hospitals as a way to dispose of dissidents. After all, it is a short step from the totalitarian view of ideology (ie that everyone must believe, not just comply) to declaring that any deviation from the official orthodoxy constitutes mental illness.

Warren Meyer, “Why I Go Back and Forth On Issues of Forced Psychiatric Institutionalization”, Coyote Blog, 2018-09-20.

January 19, 2021

Milton Friedman’s “Shareholder Doctrine” is alive and well

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Satish Bapanapalli on why Friedman’s doctrine helps to explain why auto manufacturers spend so much money to crash-test their vehicles:

Ford Focus versus Ford Explorer crash test IIHS by Brady Holt is licensed under CC BY 3.0

Of all of Friedman’s great ideas, the Shareholder Doctrine is perhaps the most misunderstood by academics, in large part because many left-leaning intellectuals use the good old straw man argument to misleadingly caricature the doctrine as a “profit-at-all-cost system regardless of human toll.”

Case in point, the latest sermon by some reputed academics published in Fortune magazine: “50 years later, Milton Friedman’s shareholder doctrine is dead.”

This one has all the usual tropes, including the claim that “Friedman … urged business to use its muscle to reduce the effectiveness of unions, blunt environmental and consumer protection measures, and defang antitrust law. He sought to reduce consideration of human concerns [such as] treat[ing] workers, consumers, and society fairly.”

Friedman said no such things. Read it for yourselves. Friedman’s primary argument was that it is not the job of the officers of a corporation (corporate executives) to fight for social causes. The officers must only act in accordance with the shareholder’s wishes, “which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.”

Of course, in some cases, the shareholders may themselves encourage charitable spending and other corporate policies and activities deemed “socially responsible.” In which case, executives are tasked with finding the best ways to fulfill those objectives. In his article, Friedman clearly demonstrates why this is a logically precise position.

The scolds, who authored the Fortune article, put forth an alternative. Their “three pillars” proposal advocates for laws to be imposed on corporations with vague and fuzzy objectives (note the italicized words) such as “responsible corporate citizen[ship]”, “treating workers … fairly“, “avoiding externalities, such as carbon emissions, that cause unreasonable or disproportionate harm to others”, and corporations should make profits by “benefiting others.” To rub foolishness on the vagueness, the proposal calls for putting the onus on the corporations to measure and demonstrate progress on these fuzzy objectives! To put it in Friedman’s own words, such proposals “are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor.”

M3 and M3A1 Grease Gun SMGs

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Apr 2017

The US began looking for a cost-effective replacement for the Thompson submachine gun in 1942, and the “Grease Gun” was the result. Designed by George Hyde (a noted firearms designer at the time) and Frederick Sampson (GM/Inland chief engineer), it was a very simple and almost entirely stamped firearm. Chambered for the .45ACP cartridge, it is notable for its very low rate of fire — 350-400 rpm, which made it quite controllable and easy to shoot for relatively inexperienced troops.

The M3 was a quite reliable gun (and what problems it did have were mostly due to its single-feed magazine and not the gun itself), but a revision program was begun in April 1944. This would produce the M3A1, which further simplified the design by removing the charging handle (which had been the one mechanical trouble point of the M3 anyway) and replacing it simply with a notch in the bolt to cock the gun with a finger.

While the M3 and M3A1 were replaced in front-line service in 1957, they would remain in military inventory as armament for tank crews and truck drivers until 1992 — quite the legacy for such a crude looking weapon!

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QotD: British foods

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it is worth listing the foodstuffs, natural or prepared, which are especially good in Britain and which any foreign visitor should make sure of sampling.

First of all, British apples, one or other variety of which is obtainable for about seven months of the year. Nearly all British fruits and vegetables have a good natural flavour, but the apples are outstanding. The best are those that ripen late, from September onwards, and one should not be put off by the feat that most British varieties are dull in colour and irregular in size. The best are the Cox’s Orange pippin, the Blenheim Orange, the Charles Hoss, the James Grieve and the Russet. These are all eaten raw. The Bramley Seedling is a superlative cooking apple.

Secondly, salt fish, especially kippers and Scottish haddocks. Thirdly, oysters – very large and good, though artificially expensive. Fourthly, biscuits, both sweetened and unsweetened, especially those that come from the four or five great firms whose names are a trademark. Fifthly, jams and jellies of all kinds. These are usually best when home-made, with the exception of strawberry jam, which is nearly always better as a manufactured product. Some varieties not often seen outside Britain are blackcurrant jelly, bramble jelly (made of blackberries) marrow jam with ginger, and damson cheese, an especially stiff kind of jelly which can be cut in slabs. In addition, no one who has not sampled Devonshire cream, Stilton cheese, crumpets, potato cakes, saffron buns, Dublin prawns, apple dumplings, pickled walnuts, steak-and-kidney pudding and, of course, roast sirloin of beef with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and horseradish sauce, can be said to have given British cookery a fair trial.

The only alcoholic drinks which are native to Britain, and are all widely drunk, are beer, cider and whiskey. The cider is fairly good (that brewed in Herefordshire is the best), the beer very good. It is somewhat more alcoholic and very much bitterer then the beers of most other countries, all save the mildest and cheapest kinds being strongly flavoured with hop. Its flavour varies greatly from one part of the country to another. The whiskey exported from Britain is mostly Scottish, but the Irish kind, which is sweeter in taste and contains more rye, is also popular in Britain itself. One excellent liquor, sloe gin, is widely made in Britain, though not often exported. It is always better when home-made. It is of a beautiful purplish-red colour, and rather resembles cherry brandy, but is of a more delicate flavour.

Finally, a word in praise of British bread. In general it is close-grained, rather sweet-flavoured bread, which remains good for three or four days after being baked. It is seen at its best in the kind of double loaf. Rye bread and barley bread are hardly eaten in Britain, but the wholemeal wheat bread is extremely good. The great virtue of British bread is that it is baked in small batches, in a rather primitive way, and therefore is not at all standardised. The bread from one baker may be quite different from another down the street, and one can range about from shop to shop until one is suited. It is a good general rule that small, old-fashioned shops make the best-flavoured bread. Throughout a great deal of the North of England the women prefer to bake their bread for themselves.

George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)

January 18, 2021

QotD: Francis Bacon on what we now call “Confirmation Bias”

Man is a rational animal, as Aristotle put it. Not that he is always rational, but that he is capable of reason. Reason, trained, leads to happiness. Orwell wasn’t the first person to observe that this didn’t always work in practice.

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it” wrote Francis Bacon in his 1620 Novum Organum, one of the major early works of the European Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Today, we call this confirmation bias. We don’t form opinions based on the evidence — we often shape the evidence to suit our opinions. We attribute importance to facts which back our preferred theory and dismiss as unimportant those which do not. “It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed towards both alike,” Bacon added. We continue to cling to ideas which have been discredited, a phenomenon called belief perseverance. Or worse, our faith in discredited ideas becomes even stronger when we are presented with contrary evidence — the backfire effect. Or we focus on successes and ignore failures, a phenomenon called survivorship bias. Bacon reminds us of the story of Diagoras of Melos, who was shown a picture of those who had escaped shipwreck after making vows to the gods hanging in a temple. Diagoras asked where he could find a picture of those who made vows to the gods but drowned anyway.

Bacon wrote that humans are afflicted with “idols of the mind,” and he identified four. The first are idols of the tribe, flaws in thinking common to all people that come from human nature itself. Second are idols of the cave, or den. All of us, Bacon argued, have a cave in our mind where the light of reason is dimmed, and this cave varies from person to person depending on his or her character, experiences, and environment. Third are idols of the marketplace, associated with the exchange of ideas. As language can never be perfectly precise, it’s possible for falsehoods to develop and spread as a concept as explained by one person to another. Finally come idols of the theatre, ideas which have been presented to us and taken root so deeply and firmly they’ve become hard to remove. In Bacon’s time, this was the philosophy of Aristotle, which had become so fundamental to Western thought that even parts of it which could easily be disproven remained unchallenged for centuries. To manage the effect of the idols, Bacon proposed “radical induction” — the forerunner to the modern scientific method.

Adam Wakeling, “George Orwell and the Struggle against Inevitable Bias”, Quillette, 2020-08-08.

January 17, 2021

Hector Drummond on Boris “Cane-Toad” Johnson

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Environment, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a teaser to attract new subscribers to his Patron and SubscribeStar pages, Hector Drummond shared this piece on the ecological disaster of Australia’s 1930s cane-toad importation and the similar political disaster of Boris Johnson in Britain:

In the 1930s Queensland farmers were facing trouble with large numbers of cane beetles eating the sugar crops that were an important part of the state’s economy. So the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations came up with a cunning plan. They would import some cane toads (a native of middle and south America), because cane toads ate cane beetles. This was sure to solve the problem in a trice. One-hundred and two cane toads were duly imported into the state, from Hawaii as it happened, to do the job.

Unfortunately this soon became a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. In fact it wasn’t any cure at all because the cane toads didn’t bother much with the cane beetles, and instead ate everything else they could wrap their tongues around. The other thing they did was multiply at an explosive rate. These days there are estimated to be 200 million cane toads in Australia, mainly in Queensland, and they cause havoc with the native fauna, not least because they have nasty poison-producing glands on the back of their head which the native animals have no naturally-evolved defence against. Curious pet dogs who mess about with a toad can die.

In 2019 Britain was facing its own crisis. It had become obvious to half the country that Theresa May’s Conservative government was deliberately trying to prevent Brexit from happening. As the other parties were even worse, the only hope for a real Brexit to take place was if a new pro-Brexit leadership in the Conservative party could be installed. After a titanic struggle, this finally happened, and Alexander “Boris” Johnson became the new leader, with Michael Gove and advisor Dominic Cummings at his side.

Unfortunately Johnson has proven to be Britain’s own version of the cane toad, a cure that is vastly worse than the disease. Johnson, at least, proved to be more able than his Australian counterpart at doing the job that was required of him. Whereas the Australian toad was about as interested in cane beetles as Olly Robbins was in getting the UK out of the EU, Johnson at least gave us a middling type of Brexit which, as fudged as it was, was at least far better than anything any of his fellow MPs could have got.

But in terms of being worse than the disease, Cane-Toad Johnson has proven to be far, far more destructive than the cane toad ever was. The cane toad, after all, is merely an ecological pest, whereas Johnson has proved to be a dangerous menace to the country’s liberty, prosperity and health. The poison from his glands has leached into our very life. We have become like domestic dogs who have been forced to lick them every day.

German U-Boats to Strike New York – WW2 – 125 – January 16, 1942

World War Two
Published 16 Jan 2021

Operation Pauchenslag, long-range German submarines operating just off the US Coast, kicks into action this week, as does the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies. They also take Kuala Lumpur. Meanwhile, the Soviet Red Army offensive all along the Eastern Front has its first full week of action, with the Soviets making some real territorial gains in the center, though a German offensive in the Crimea catches them off guard.

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss
– Spartacus Olsson
– Mikołaj Uchman

Sources:
– National Archives NARA
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe NAC
– Imperial War Museums: NYP 45042, A 6920, HU 90349, A 7371, C3881, E 9572, A 7376, E 9569,
– Library of Congress
– Bundesarchiv
– United States Signal Corps. source – Washington County Free Library Photo WCRH018
– FDR Presidential Library
– United States Holocaust Museum
– Yad Vashem: 4613-1055, 5138-98, 86FO2, 4220-3,

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Remembrance” – Fabien Tell
– “Dragon King” – Jo Wandrini
– “The Unexplored” – Philip Ayers
– “Maze Heist” – Max Anson
– “London” – Howard Harper-Barnes
– “Document This 1” – Peter Sandberg
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “The End Of The World 2” – Håkan Eriksson
– “Dark Beginning” – Johan Hynynen

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Las Vegas marks a significant loss

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

In Saturday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh notes the death of Siegfried Fischbacher, better known as half of the stage magic team Siegfried & Roy:

… Las Vegas, as we all know, is a special place in which ordinary moral writ and aesthetic judgment have greatly diminished force. Vegas is honouring Siegfried & Roy this week, and will recognize them forever, as city fathers. Even Penn Jillette, a fellow magician whose career has been a crusade against old-school schmaltz and glitz and other Teutonic concepts that Siegfried & Roy embraced, inscribed a small tribute to his colleague.

Siegfried & Roy were true pioneers in transforming Vegas into a full-spectrum entertainment capital. Their basic function was not to parade oppressed animals, or to do conjuring tricks. Considered as “magicians,” did they have a signature effect? Or is the truth that prop-heavy, mechanistic stage magic is just relatively easy to combine with a wildlife act that also travels poorly?

No, their mission was to extract money from the family members of degenerate gamblers and, gosh, were they good at it. When they started out at the New Frontier hotel in 1981, Las Vegas was still its postwar self — an anarchic watering hole and sybaritic paradise mostly for adult men, associated with a boozy, jocular style of entertainment that was rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror of the culture. (Siegfried & Roy were never trendy, exactly, but being unique was enough.)

Almost no one can have consciously envisioned a world in which gambling in various forms regained wide, post-Protestant social acceptance. That gambling would one day become legal everywhere at an astonishing pace would have been seen as a nuclear-grade threat to the literal existence of the city. The nightmare has arrived, but Vegas is bigger and more economically sound than ever. Siegfried & Roy helped reshape the industrial nucleus of a city you don’t even have to like gambling — or showgirls — to enjoy.

January 16, 2021

Inside the Neurotic Mind of Stonewall Jackson

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

Atun-Shei Films
Published 15 Jan 2021

Let’s gossip about a man who’s been dead for 158 years.

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~REFERENCES~

[1] Wallace Hettle. Inventing Stonewall Jackson: A Civil War Hero in History and Memory (2011). LSU Press, Page 3-9

[2] Hettle, Page 13-17

[3] Charles Royster. The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (1991). Vintage Books, Page 41-46

[4] Royster, Page 52-53

[5] Hettle, Page 20-21

[6] Royster, Page 65-67

[7] Chris Graham. “Myths and Misunderstandings: Stonewall Jackson’s Sunday School” (2017). The American Civil War Museum https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunders…

[8] Royster, Page 63-65

[9] Royster, Page 60

[10] Royster, Page 49-51

[11] Mary Anna Jackson. Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson by his Widow, Marry Anna Jackson (1895). Prentice Press, Page 108

[12] Jackson, Page 120-121

[13] Hettle, Page 13-15

[14] Royster, Page 202

Howard Anglin reviews The Riotous Passions of Robbie Burns

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Line now apparently also does book reviews:

I don’t know what I was expecting before I picked up John Ivison’s new book, The Riotous Passions of Robbie Burns, but it was not this. In my head, I’d already started composing the end of my review. Something round and pat and full of holiday hygge like: “So light the fire, pour yourself a dram of Annandale whisky, and enjoy …” Because Ivison grew up in Dumfries, where Burns spent the last years of his life, I suppose I expected a more personal narrative, not a work of historical fiction. One expects fiction from political journalists in their day jobs, not in a labour of love composed off the clock.

What I really expected was more of Burns’ poetry — the source of his enduring fame, after all — and less of his person, which was the source of his contemporary infamy. Instead, Ivison gives us something more interesting and unusual: the poetry of Burns’ non-poetic speech. Ivison has taken snippets, and sometimes cribbed whole paragraphs from, Burns’s copious surviving correspondence and woven them into dialogue that carries the story of the poet’s stay in Edinburgh between 1786 and 1788. By putting Burns’ actual words into his mouth, even if sometimes out of context, Ivison gives the reader a direct and plausible impression of Burns the man. We hear verbatim both the coarse tavern wit and the elemental passion that spilled into his prolific verse — sometimes into unprintable doggerel (literally: his poems later collected as The Merry Muses of Caledonia were banned as obscene in the U.K. until 1965), sometimes into achingly beautiful verses like “Flow gently, sweet Afton” or “Ae Fond Kiss.”

Ivison’s book sets us in Edinburgh at a time when, as he writes, “it was said if you stood at the Mercat Cross with a pistol, you could hit 50 geniuses, 50 bankers, 50 lawyers and 50 rogues at any given hour” (no doubt allowing for some overlap between latter two categories). Our narrator and guide is the newly-arrived and impressionable young lawyer’s apprentice, John Bruce, a composite and Zelig-like stand in for many young men of the poet’s acquaintance. (The only record of Burns meeting a John Bruce that I can find was a Rev. John Bruce, Minister of the Highland town of Forfar, whom the poet found “pleasant, agreeable and engaging.”) Through Burns, Bruce and the reader are introduced to the ways of women, drink, the printing business, drink, aristocratic libertinism, and a little more drink.

The two main plots, such as they are, link Bruce and Burns to the notorious escapades of Deacon Brodie, whom Burns met in real life, and to the poet’s long, futile, but apparently sincere courtship of the unhappily-married Agnes (sometimes Nancy) Maclehose. The real life letters between Burns and Maclehose, written under the pseudonyms “Sylvander” and “Clarinda,” make for moving reading and, in this telling, for surprisingly convincing dialogue between Burns and Maclehose and between Burns and Bruce. The text is especially affecting when the poet is in the grip of what he called his “low spirits & blue devils” and his usually florid speech turns fatalistic, brooding, and palpably human.

But the plots are not the point of this charming book; they are frames on which to hang Burns’s words and excuses to showcase Edinburgh as it was coming of age as an intellectual and commercial capital, with all the growing pains that entailed. Filling the city with historical characters, Ivison shows us the city as Burns found it, its population bursting out of the overbuilt medieval closes and wynds that lined the Royal Mile running down the hill from the castle and spreading across the North Bridge to New Town and down to the sea port at Leith.

M2 Carbine: Assault Rifle or Submachine Gun?

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Mar 2017

The M2 Carbine was a mechanically simple modification of the M1 Carbine to allow fully automatic fire. The fire prototypes of the M1 Carbine had actually been selective-fire guns, but that requirement had been dropped by the time the Winchester design was officially adopted as the M1. It was a feature quickly requested by troops once the Carbine entered active service, though.

In 1944 the US Army acknowledged this, and introduced the M2. A total of 217,000 were manufactured at the end of WW2, and did see limited service on Okinawa — and then extensive use in the Korean War and Vietnam War.

The M1 Carbine has long generated controversy among those attempting to rigidly define its role, as it falls awkwardly between the notion of submachine gun and assault rifle, firing a cartridge that is clearly more powerful than a pistol round but equally clearly less powerful than an intermediate rifle round. Its originally intended role was as a personal defense weapon more effective than the 1911 pistol, and in service it always scored high marks for handiness and poor marks for combat effectiveness. The opinion of soldiers using the Carbine in either its M1 or M2 form was very much dependent on what role they expected it to serve.

In my opinion, its light weight and stock design make it a sub-optimal submachine gun, and its light cartridge makes it a sub-optimal assault rifle. But if you need a light and handy carbine to carry a lot and only use in emergencies, it is hard to beat for its time.

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January 15, 2021

Germany Bankrupts Greece – Countless Die in Famine – War Against Humanity 026 – January 1942, pt. 1

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 14 Jan 2021

The early weeks of 1942 show how much of a global War Against Humanity this really is. People in occupied zones across the globe suffer under the boot of their tormentors. In Greece, thousands die in a famine, while repressive tactics claim the lives of many more in the Balkans. The Holocaust continues in cities and the extermination camp of Chełmno, while the Japanese army wreaks havoc in South-East Asia as they advance on Allied positions.

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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel and Valantis Athanasiou
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Daniel Weiss

Sources:
Yad Vashem 4147/72, 953, 4613/629, 85EO6
IWM KF 199, FE 255, SE 4819
Bundesarchiv
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
Museum of Yugoslavia
From the Noun Project: Skull by Muhamad Ulum

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
Peter Sandberg – “Document This 1”
Skrya – “First Responders”
Cobby Costa – “From the Past”
Farrell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Gunnar Johnsen – “Not Safe Yet”
Cobby Costa – “Flight Path”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

The Lady Juliana | The 18th-Century All-Women Prison Ship

Filed under: Australia, Britain, History, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Weird History
Published 13 Nov 2019

A tale as wild as the Seven Seas, the story of the Lady Juliana, a special convict ship full of prisoners sent to Australia, is one of the strangest in the continent’s history. The Lady Juliana had a specific mission: carrying a cargo of female prisoners the British government hoped would help reform the struggling convict colony in New South Wales. This motley crew of British women ultimately had a lasting impact on the history of Australia.

#prisonship #australia #weirdhistory

QotD: Capitalism and socialism, viewed from Harvard in 1942

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Joseph Schumpeter] suggested [that] capitalism’s greatest strength — its propensity for “creative destruction” — is also a source of weakness. Disruption may be the process that clears out the obsolescent and fosters the advent of the new, but precisely for that reason it can never be universally loved. Second, capitalism itself tends toward oligopoly, not perfect competition. The more concentrated economic power becomes, the harder it is to legitimize the system, especially in America, where “big business” tends to get confused with “monopoly.” Third, capitalism “creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest” — namely, intellectuals. (Here was the influence of Harvard; Schumpeter knew whereof he spoke.) Finally, Schumpeter noted, socialism is politically irresistible to bureaucrats and democratic politicians.

The idea that socialism would ultimately prevail over capitalism was quite a widespread view — especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It persisted throughout the Cold War. “The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive,” wrote Paul Samuelson, Schumpeter’s pupil, in the 1961 edition of his economics textbook — a sentence that still appeared in the 1989 edition. In successive editions, Samuelson’s hugely influential book carried a chart projecting that the gross national product of the Soviet Union would exceed that of the United States at some point between 1984 and 1997. The 1967 edition suggested that the great overtaking could happen as early as 1977. By the 1980 edition, the timeframe for this great overtaking had been moved forward to 2002–12. The graph was quietly dropped after the 1980 edition.

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.

January 14, 2021

Frankenstein and the Socialist Origins of Electronic Music | B2W: ZEITGEIST! | E.09 – Harvest 1920

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 13 Jan 2021

There is a surprising connection between sci-fi films and the technological policies of Soviet Russia. Watch to find out …

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…

Sources:
Some images from the Library of Congress

From the Noun Project:
– Mansion By Shane Stieben
– signal by Adrien Coquet
– cowboy man by Adrien Coquet
– signal by Adrien Coquet
– room By Batibull, ES

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “Dark Shadow” – Etienne Roussel
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “The Inspector” – David Celeste
– “Wind Chimes” – Farrell Wooten
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Puzzle Of Complexity” – Jo Wandrini
– “What Now” – Golden Age Radio
– “Out the Window” – Wendel Scherer
– “Symphony of the Cold-Blooded” – Christian Andersen

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

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