TimeGhost History
Published on 2 Dec 2018When many of the fighting men of The Great War return home addicted to drugs and infected with venereal disease, their sweethearts have decided that it’s time for some serious changes! It’s time for women’s liberation!
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written and directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Edited by Wieke Kapteijns and Spartacus OlssonColorized picture of Greta Garbo in the thumbnail courtesy of Olga Shirnina aka Klimbim
Images of Canadian WWI troops courtesy of the Canadian War Museum.
Video Archive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
December 4, 2018
Sex, Drugs, and the Right to Vote I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1920 Part 4 of 4
December 3, 2018
QotD: Scottish dietary preferences
The Scots have a fondness for deep-fried foods. Everything from fish n’ chips to Mars bars. A survey of shops said customers also request deep fried sweets, pineapple rings, and even ice cream. The health authorities are naturally somewhat concerned about this diet, but Dr. David Morrison of the Greater Glasgow Health Service Board is encouraged by “evidence of the penetrance of the Mediterranean diet into Scotland, albeit in the form of deep-fried pizza.”
Billy Munnelly, “Journal”, Billy’s Best Bottles Volume 21, No. 4, Spring 2005.
December 1, 2018
QotD: Toxic self-esteem
For a number of years I have been fighting a lonely one-man (or should I say one-person?) battle against self-esteem — not my own, of course, because I have just the right amount, but as the master key to human happiness.
Of the many possible human qualities, self-esteem, far from being desirable, is one of the most odious. It is much more closely related to conceit and self-importance than it is to self-respect or even self-confidence. People who talk of self-esteem do so as if it were an inalienable human right rather than something to be earned. In other words, self-esteem is like a fair trial: It doesn’t matter what you are like or what you have done, you have a right to it, at all times and in all places.
Of course, people who speak of lack of self-esteem know in their hearts that they are talking bilge. Sometimes patients would come to me and tell me that they had low self-esteem and I would tell them that at least they had one thing right. Instead of growing angry, as perhaps you might have expected, they would laugh, as if they had been caught out in an outrageous prank — which in a sense they had. As old-fashioned burglars in England used to say when caught red-handed by a policeman, “It’s a fair cop, guv.”
“Suppose,” I would ask, “someone told you that he had allowed his children to starve to death because he preferred taking crack to feeding them and that he had stolen all his aged mother’s savings, but that at least he had no problems with his self-esteem, what would you say?”
In fact, this was only just a rhetorical question because I had met many such persons, bursting with self-esteem and quite without any discernible virtues. Indeed, one of the sources of their bad character may have been their self-esteem, insofar as nothing could dent it, not even the hatred or contempt of everyone around them. If I were younger and more energetic, I would found a Society for the Prevention and Suppression of Self-Esteem.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Lose Yourself”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-11-10.
November 29, 2018
QotD: Overprotecting children
While it’s hard to argue against safer playgrounds, it’s also true that by design the transparent playground offers kids no privacy. “As [playgrounds] were childproofed to improve safety, they inadvertently reduced the opportunities for the young to take part in forms of fantasy, sensory, and exploratory play, and construction activities apart from adults,” writes historian Mintz. “Unstructured, unsupervised free play outside the home drastically declined for middle-class children. As more mothers joined the labor force, parents arranged more structured, supervised activities for their children. Unstructured play and outdoor activities for children 3 to 11 declined nearly 40 percent between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. Because of parental fear of criminals and bad drivers, middle-class children rarely got the freedom to investigate and master their home turf in ways that once proved a rehearsal for the real world.”
So much for the roving pack of kids each block boasted during Mintz’s childhood, and my own. “The empty lot has disappeared,” he quips. “And we are so concerned with legal liability that if kids do find one, you’d better be sure you’ll get a call from the police.”
Beth Hawkins, “Safe Child Syndrome: Protecting kids to death”, City Pages, Volume 26 – Issue 1267.
November 27, 2018
Cutting back on ethanol makes financial and environmental sense
Craig Eyermann explains why President Trump’s push to expand the use of ethanol in cars is a bad call for many reasons:
For example, because ethanol packs less energy per gallon than gasoline does, vehicle owners can expect to get even lower fuel mileage from the expansion of E15 fuel (a blend of 15% ethanol with 85% gasoline) under the new mandate to include more ethanol in automotive fuels, which would be 4% to 5% less than they would achieve if they only filled their vehicles with 100% gasoline. Today’s vehicle owners already pay a fuel efficiency penalty of 3% to 4% lower gas mileage from the E10 ethanol-gasoline fuel blend mandated under the older ethanol content rules, where the new rules will require even more fill-ups.
Beyond that, to the extent that it diverts corn from food markets to fuel production, corn-based ethanol production also jacks up the price of food—the corn itself, plus everything that eats corn, like beef cattle. One review of multiple studies found that the U.S. government’s corn-based ethanol mandates added 14% to the cost of agricultural commodity prices from 2005 through 2015.
Last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency also found that burning increasing amounts of ethanol has made America’s air dirtier because it generates more ozone pollution, which contributes to smog formation. Worse, growing the additional corn to make more ethanol has also increased agricultural fertilizer runoff pollution in the nation’s rivers and waterways.
That runoff has been linked to the increased incidence of harmful algal blooms, which have been responsible for contaminating drinking water and contributing to red tide events in coastal regions, where fish and other aquatic organisms have been killed off.
There is a solution to these federal government-generated pollution problems: stop forcing corn-based ethanol to be used in the nation’s fuel supplies. There’s even a case study from Brazil, where the city of Sao Paulo found that its air became cleaner after it switched from ethanol-based fuels to gasoline in the years from 2009 to 2011.
November 26, 2018
You can make a strong case that “nutrition science is not just misguided but actually harmful”
Alex Berezow outlines the ferment and upheaval in modern nutrition science reporting:
One day, coffee causes cancer; the next, it cures cancer. One day, wine is good for you; the next it kills you. Given its self-contradictory wishy-washiness, can nutrition science be trusted?
Not at all, say Edward Archer and his co-authors, in a new paper published in Frontiers in Nutrition. They believe nutrition research is so bad that they call our current scientific discourse on the relationship between diet and disease to be “fictional.”
This isn’t the first time that Dr. Archer lobbed a grenade into the field of nutrition. In an article for RealClearScience, he (in)famously called the U.S. dietary guidelines a “scientific fraud” based on “implausible” data that “create[s] fear and uncertainty in American citizens.”
Clearly, Dr. Archer believes that nutrition science is not just misguided but actually harmful. That’s an extraordinary statement that requires extraordinary evidence.
Any nutrition study that’s based on self-reporting depends on the participants to be honest and fully revealing of their food and drink intake. At a time when we’re food-shamed on a daily basis by the government and the media for our “failings”. Even mostly honest reporters are likely to ever-so-slightly under-report their intake of whatever foods are the subject of this week’s “two-minute hate”. One of my favourite examples of blatant under-reporting is that — if you believe the reports — approximately half of all the booze sold in Britain is just poured down the drain:
The only real pitfall in this kind of research is the problem of people under-reporting how much they drink. The amount of alcohol sold in the UK is about twice the amount that people claim to drink, so unless we throw away a huge amount of booze, it is certain that people either forget about how much they drink or they deliberately lie to researchers. In either case, we can assume that the people who say they consume two drinks a day are probably consuming three or four drinks, in which case the amount that you have to drink to assume the same level of risk as a non-drinker is even more than this graph suggests.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
November 21, 2018
QotD: Occupations and sex differences
Sex differences are a distribution, not a hard, bright line. For example, the women’s world record in the hundred-meter dash is slower than the U.S. high school boys’ record. Men on average are faster than women. But the women at the top of the distribution — those Olympians — are still faster than most men. It would be absurd to say that a woman can’t run the hundred meter in 11 seconds, just because most women can’t. It would be equally absurd to say that men are not, on average, faster than women.
So it’s possible that the distribution of nurturing traits is skewed enough that fewer men will be good at the difficult and emotionally taxing job of providing intimate care for sick and needy people. While there are plenty of health care jobs that don’t require so much direct human interaction, they tend to require more training. And the ability to sit in a classroom and absorb material from a textbook is also a human trait that is unevenly and unfairly distributed. It’s not that no men can succeed in transitioning from old-style “manly” jobs to the pink-collar professions, but that fewer men may be able to do so than we’d like to think.
Megan McArdle, “Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-06.
November 20, 2018
QotD: Why do we drink?
Alcoholic beverages, like agriculture, were invented independently many different times, likely on every continent save Antarctica. Over the millennia nearly every plant with some sugar or starch has been pressed into service for fermentation: agave and apples, birch tree sap and bananas, cocoa and cassavas, corn and cacti, molle berries, rice, sweet potatoes, peach palms, pineapples, pumpkins, persimmons, and wild grapes. As if to prove that the desire for alcohol knows no bounds, the nomads of Central Asia make up for the lack of fruit and grain on their steppes by fermenting horse milk. The result, koumiss, is a tangy drink with the alcohol content of a weak beer.
Alcohol may afford psychic pleasures and spiritual insight, but that’s not enough to explain its universality in the ancient world. People drank the stuff for the same reason primates ate fermented fruit: because it was good for them. Yeasts produce ethanol as a form of chemical warfare — it’s toxic to other microbes that compete with them for sugar inside a fruit. That antimicrobial effect benefits the drinker. It explains why beer, wine, and other fermented beverages were, at least until the rise of modern sanitation, often healthier to drink than water.
What’s more, in fermenting sugar, yeasts make more than ethanol. They produce all kinds of nutrients, including such B vitamins as folic acid, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin. Those nutrients would have been more present in ancient brews than in our modern filtered and pasteurized varieties. In the ancient Near East at least, beer was a sort of enriched liquid bread, providing calories, hydration, and essential vitamins.
[…]
Indirectly, we may have the nutritional benefits of beer to thank for the invention of writing, and some of the world’s earliest cities — for the dawn of history, in other words. Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at Tall Bazi, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. “They had bread and barley porridge, plus maybe some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very bad,” she says. “But as soon as you have beer, you have everything you need to develop really well. I’m convinced this is why the first high culture arose in the Near East.”
Andrew Curry, “Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze”, National Geographic, 2017-02.
November 18, 2018
QotD: “Sexist” toys
As a female journalist who writes mostly about traditionally “male areas” such as economics and business, I should perhaps be expected to endorse a “blank slate” theory of male and female gender roles, where the preference for certain kinds of activities is driven by sexist socialization and discrimination, not innate ability. The problem is that this doesn’t necessarily match up with the evidence. Human children show gender-driven preferences for toys, as can be attested by those faultlessly progressive parents who have seen their boys turn their hands into a gun while their daughters make a doll out of an ear of corn. These preferences show up even in children too young to have gotten much socialization; they turn up even in rhesus monkeys, as males show a marked preference for wheeled toys over soft plush animals. I certainly believe that human society has a lot of sexist hangovers from its past. I draw the line at believing that this hangover is influencing rhesus monkey infants.
Megan McArdle, “Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-06.
November 6, 2018
An alternative explanation for the population explosion of the “land whales”
Tim Worstall suggests that the real reason for our collective expanding waistlines isn’t evil capitalist exploiters pushing us to eat unhealthy fast food:
We don’t, for example, eat more than our forefathers did. Sure, we can all play games with how much people lie on those self-reported surveys about calorie intake. True, to make sense of it being lies we’d have to assume that people lie more now than they used to. So, instead, let’s look at official guidance. In WW1 the aim was, for the Army, to stuff some 4,300 calories a day into each frontline soldier out there in the trenches. Something they largely achieved too. In WWII rationing peeps started to worry that diets of less than 2,900 calories a day would lead to weight loss. Today official guidance is that 2,500 a day for men, 2,000 for women. Well, that’s the last one I recall at least.
I suspect that people actually do lie more on self-reporting surveys of that kind than they once did, if only because we’ve had several decades of prissy lecturing about what we should consume … the temptation to shade the answers in the “right” direction I’m sure plays some part, but not enough to explain the obesity crisis. If you doubt that this happens, remember that a significant number of people vote for the party they expect to win rather than the party that best represents their interests or desires. Sucking up to teacher is a very common psychological trait.
However, back to the swelling obesity numbers:
Actually, 40 years ago is about when central heating became a commonplace in Britain. Anyone of my maturity in years – which includes G. Monbiot – and even those from thoroughly upper middle class backgrounds – both me and G. Monbiot – will recall ice on the inside of bedroom windows in winter. Houses simply were not fully heated throughout. Actually, pretty much the entire country was in what we’d now call fuel poverty. That fuel poverty that we have standards for these days, you should be able to heat the entire house to such and such a temperature on less than 10% of income. A standard which just about no one pre-1950 reached, few pre-1970 did.
America had that heating rather earlier than we did. Americans also became land whales that little bit earlier than we did. Anecdata I know but a move to the US in 1981 was marked with an observation of how warm Americans kept their houses in winter.
We do actually spend quite a lot on all this public health stuff these days. It might be worth someone doing a little study of correlations. Different nations became lardbuckets at different times. Different nations adopted central heating as a commonplace at different times. Why don’t we go see what the correlation between those two is?
After all, the idea that mammals use some significant portion of their energy intake for body temperature regulation isn’t exactly fringe science, is it?
October 27, 2018
The Progressive case for Americans to pay higher drug prices than the rest of the world
Tim Worstall carefully explains — in full compliance with Progressive philosophy and pointing out that Trump is wrong (which is extra bonus Progressive points) — why Americans should continue to pay more for drugs that are cheaper in other countries:
Working out which drugs work and how is expensive. There’s then another expensive in actually proving this well enough to gain a licence. All in costs are in the $1 to $2 billion range dependent upon who you want to listen to. Unfortunately, once you’ve done all that and paid all that anyone could just come along and copy your drug. Which means you don’t make your $2 billion back – that in turn meaning that no one does spend $2 billion, we don’t get new drugs and we all die in ditches.
This is a classic public goods problem and the solution we use – not the only one, not even the only viable one – is patents. You get about 10 years, the time between approval and patent expiry, to make your $2 billion back. Then anyone can copy it and we all get cheap copy drugs.
For this system to work it is not necessary that everyone pay these high patent protected prices. There’s no point in trying to charge some farm worker in S Africa $10,000 a year for HIV retrovirals anyway, they don’t have the cash and demanding it will gain nothing except their death. We just need some group to pay the high prices so that drug development still happens. Everyone else can get drugs at some margin above their manufacturing, not development, costs.
So, who is it who should be carrying this cost of producing this public good? Good progressive principles tell us that it should be the rich folk. Imagine that we used some other system of drug development, maybe taxpayers cough up for it all. It’ll still be the rich doing the paying, right? So, patents, where the rich pay full freight for drugs, the poor don’t, this meets our equity criterion.
And who are the rich in this global sense, for we’re talking about a global public good here? That would be the citizens of the richest large nation, the largest rich nation, the United States of America. So, yes, Americans should be paying high prices for drugs and the rest of us shouldn’t.
Do note that we’ve used impeccable redistributionist logic to reach this conclusion. It’s only if you think the rich shouldn’t be paying to benefit the poor that this is a bad idea. Which might be why Trump is agin it but it still puzzles as to why the progressives would be.
October 24, 2018
Temporal privilege
In the latest issue of Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt discusses reading a recent historical novel that she nearly threw at the wall:
What brought about this rant is that I just read a Pride and Prejudice Variation written by someone who swallowed Dickens hook line and barbed socialist sinker.
Dickens was an amazing writer. What he was not was an historian or an impartial observer. What he put in his books has tainted people’s perception of the past and encouraged the cardinal “socialist virtue” of envy. It causes people to think those richer than themselves are callous bastards. It teaches people to see the past through that lens.
This book was almost walled when the woman assured us that the middle and upper classes did not care about the disappearance of a serving-woman.
It wasn’t many years after that the murder of a series of prostitutes set Victorian England aflutter, and yes, that included the upper and middle classes.
In the same way she waxes pathetic about how death was common among the poor in the Regency. B*tch, death was common in the Regency, period. If your entitled, propagandized ass were plopped down in a society with no antibiotics and uncertain house-heating, you’d learn really quickly how common. Young ladies in the upper reaches of society routinely made two baby shrouds as part of their trousseau. They were expected to lose at least that many children. And while we’re talking of children, yeah, death in child birth was really common too. As was death in any of the male occupations which, as is true throughout history, took them outside the house. Even noblemen were around horses a lot, and spent quite a bit of time — if they were worth their salt — managing their own lands, fraught occupations in a time when any wound could turn “septic” and any cold could turn “putrid” and carry you off.
Yeah. The people in these close-to-the-bone societies didn’t give money to people who’d waste it. They sometimes set conditions on distributing largesse. And they had definite opinions on what behaviors were “good” and which “bad.”
They weren’t tight-ass moralists, as the left imagines. They were following precepts and behaviors proven to lead to success. Mostly success in staying alive.
They were poorer than us and in that measure they were a lot more realistic.
They had to be. The other way lay death.
Spitting on our ancestors for not obsessing about gender-fluid trilobites is in fact the ultimate expression of “temporal privilege.” The left is yelling at people poorer, unhealthier and less able than themselves.
And they’re proud of it.
How long can you go without sleep? | James May’s Q&A (Ep 14) | Head Squeeze
BBC Earth Lab
Published on 5 Apr 2013James May talks us through how long you can go for without any sleep.
October 23, 2018
Myers-Briggs Type Indicators as a “variety of psychobullshit rune-gazing”
In the latest issue of Reason, Katrina Gulliver reviews a new book on a pop psychology notion that escaped into the wild for a generation, wreaking havoc in corporate HR departments across the country:
The Myers-Briggs test and others like it were huge in the corporate world in the 1980s and ’90s. Individuals took them to see what kind of careers they should pursue; H.R. offices used them to decide who to hire or promote. In The Personality Brokers, Merve Emre explores how, precisely, this variety of psychobullshit rune-gazing was born.
Briggs and Myers were a mother and daughter who shared a personal fascination with psychology. Katharine Briggs, born in the last quarter of the 19th century, was one of the few women of her generation to gain a college degree. Like most female members of the upper-middle-class in her time, however, she didn’t pursue a career, instead marrying young and raising a family. Rather than the chemistry she had studied at college, children became her research subject.With an intensity that sounds frightening, Briggs believed she could develop a scientific approach to raising well-behaved, intelligent children. She seemed to do a good job with her daughter Isabel, and other parents soon sought her advice. Briggs was well-connected — her husband was a Washington bureaucrat, so of course she knew magazine editors. Soon she was writing columns for various publications about ideal parenting and child behavior.
As a devotee of psychology, she developed a correspondence with Carl Jung. She drew on his psychological theories to interpret the personalities of kids, the better to advise their parents on behavior management. The 16 “types” of the Myers-Briggs index directly relate to Jung’s thinking, and Jung’s approval of her ideas offered validation for her explorations.
But the commercial Myers-Briggs test came later, and it was far more her daughter’s achievement. Isabel Myers was also fascinated with psychological type. But being a generation younger, she was better placed to pursue this professionally. Again, she had the advantages of social connection: Her husband was an attorney, and she happened to know Edward Northup Hay, one of the first personality consultants in the United States.
In 1943, Hay allowed Briggs — despite her having no formal qualifications or experience — to offer her test to his clients. The takers were few: mostly small outfits, sometimes just a single test for a potential employee. She continued working to perfect the evaluation, trying it on friends and neighbors.
October 22, 2018
QotD: Aging gracefully
Last year, for the first time, a young girl, French, offered me her seat on a crowded bus. I was surprised at how deeply I resented her. Health looms over the elderly like a threatening monsoon. No ache is innocuous. No lump or discoloured, sagging patch of body is ignorable except our toenails, which become the most sordidly repellent things in all nature. We covertly examine ourselves and our effluvia for the premonition of the dark humour that will carry us away. There is no such thing as a routine checkup. They are all life-or-death appointments.
Doctors start all their sentences with “It’s only …” But we’re not fooled. This generation is also the one that lingers longest over its departure. Death came to our grandparents with a clutched chest and a searing pain. For us it’s a slow, humiliating series of it’s onlys. What we worry about is dementia, a condition that did not exist in the popular lexicon when I was a child. Mind you, we also thought cancer was as shaming as divorce. Now Alzheimer’s is our abiding fear, the thing we can’t forget.
My chats with contemporaries are like bridge games where we try to fill in the gaps in each other’s sentences to make one coherent conversation. My dad died of Alzheimer’s. I once asked him how he was feeling: “Oh, quite well, except you know I’ve got this terrible disease, what’s its name?” So we go to the gym, we have trainers, I do Pilates. But it’s only maintenance. I’m not looking for a beach body, there’s no New Me in the cupboard; I just want one that’s supple enough to put on my own socks.
After giving up drink and drugs, I continued to smoke about 60 a day until 12 years ago and then I stopped. And people said, “Well done! How did you manage it? What willpower!”
It didn’t feel like well done. It felt like a defeat — the capitulation to fear. When I started smoking at 14 I was golden, immortal. I smoked around the world; I took pride in my ability to smoke with elegance, panache and skill. Smoking was my talent and I gave it up because I lost my nerve.
I don’t miss the cigarettes, but I do miss the me that smoked so beautifully.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
