More generally, though, do we have any historical evidence of groups whose alcohol consumption was documented with any confidence, to see how they fared?
Actually, we do, at least as a floor: we know the quantity of the Royal Navy’s spirit ration, which until 1823 was based on half a pint of rum (284 millilitres in foreign) per man per day. We also know its minimum strength, since it was tested by trying to ignite gunpowder soaked in it: it had to be over 57% alcohol by volume (“proof strength”) to pass. That’s sixteen units of alcohol – not per week, but per day – or north of a hundred units a week, just for the issued ration before sailors bought any extra from the purser. (No wonder Jack Tar was jolly back in those days!)
But clearly, we would expect a body of men consuming such suicidally destructive quantities of booze to be physical wrecks, raddled by cirrhosis and disease? As Dr James Lind (he of the discovery that citrus fruits were a sovereign remedy for scurvy) put it,
It is an observation, I think, worthy of record that fourteen thousand persons, pent up in ships, should continue, for six or seven months, to enjoy a better state of health upon the watery element, than it can well be imagined so great a number of people would enjoy, on the most healthful spot of ground in the world.
(For context, around this point the Navy won the battle of Quiberon Bay, with twenty ships – who had less than one man sick per ship).
The ration was halved in 1823, and again in 1850, but for a hundred and twenty years until Black Tot Day in 1970, the Navy still issued nearly thirty units of alcohol a week to everyone on the lower deck (junior rates got theirs diluted, seniors got neat rum). Either folk were hardier back then, or Britannia managed to rule the waves and keep her sailors reasonably healthy despite being a pack of hopelessly addicted alcoholics.
Jason Lynch, “How Much Is ‘Too Much’?”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-05-08.
July 29, 2020
QotD: Grog in the Royal Navy
July 28, 2020
How Matt Ridley stopped being an “Enviro-Pessimist”
It was human ingenuity that did it for him:
Spiti Valley in the Great Himalayan National Park. (The little blue speck in the middle of the photo is a truck, for scale.)
Photo by Sudhanshu Gupta via Wikimedia Commons.
If you had asked me in 1980 to predict what would happen to that bird and its forest ecosystem, I would have been very pessimistic. I could see the effect on the forests of growing human populations, with their guns and flocks of sheep. More generally, I was marinated in gloom by almost everything I read about the environment. The human population explosion was unstoppable; billions were going to die of famine; malaria and other diseases were going to increase; oil, gas, and metals would soon run out, forcing us to return to burning wood; most forests would then be felled; deserts were expanding; half of all species were heading for extinction; the great whales would soon be gone from the oil-stained oceans; sprawling cities and modern farms were going to swallow up the last wild places; and pollution of the air, rivers, sea, and earth was beginning to threaten a planetary ecological breakdown. I don’t remember reading anything remotely optimistic about the future of the planet.
Today, the valleys we worked in are part of the Great Himalayan National Park, a protected area that gained prestigious World Heritage status in 2014. The logo of the park is an image of the western tragopan, a bird you can now go on a trekking holiday specifically to watch. It has not gone extinct, and although it is still rare and hard to spot, the latest population estimate is considerably higher than anybody expected back then. The area remains mostly a wilderness accessible largely on foot, and the forests and alpine meadows have partly recovered from too much grazing, hunting, and logging. Ecotourism is flourishing.
This is just one small example of things going right in the environment. Let me give some bigger ones. Far from starving, the seven billion people who now inhabit the planet are far better fed than the four billion of 1980. Famine has pretty much gone extinct in recent decades. In the 1960s, about two million people died of famine; in the decade that just ended, tens of thousands died — and those were in countries run by callous tyrants. Paul Ehrlich, the ecologist and best-selling author who declared in 1968 that “[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over” and forecast that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” — and was given a genius award for it — proved to be very badly wrong.
Remarkably, this feeding of seven billion people has happened without taking much new land under the plow and the cow. Instead, in many places farmland has reverted to wilderness. In 2009, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculated that thanks to more farmers getting access to better fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, the area of land needed to produce a given quantity of food — averaged for all crops — was 65 percent less than in 1961. As a result, an area the size of India will be freed up by mid-century. That is an enormous boost for wildlife. National parks and other protected areas have expanded steadily as well.
Nor have these agricultural improvements on the whole brought new problems of pollution in their wake. Quite the reverse. The replacement of pesticides like DDT with much less harmful ones that do not persist in the environment and accumulate up the food chain, in addition to advances in biotechnology, has allowed wildlife to begin to recover. In the part of northern England where I live, otters have returned to the rivers, and hawks, kites, ospreys, and falcons to the skies, largely thanks to the elimination of organochlorine pesticides. Where genetically modified crops are grown — not in the European Union — there has been a 37 percent reduction in the use of insecticides, as shown by a recent study done at Gottingen University.
One of the extraordinary features of the past 40 years has been the reappearance of wildlife that was once seemingly headed for extinction. Bald eagles have bounced back so spectacularly that they have been taken off the endangered list. Deer and beavers have spread into the suburbs of cities, followed by coyotes, bears, and even wolves. The wolf has now recolonized much of Germany, France, and even parts of the heavily populated Netherlands. Estuaries have been cleaned up so that fish and birds have recolonized rivers like the Thames.
July 27, 2020
The Bronze Age Collapse (approximately 1200 B.C.E.)
Historia Civilis
Published 25 Jul 2020Just casually thinkin bout the end of the world. No, no reason, why?
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From the comments:
ka v
1 day ago
I got Sea People Return in the December slot of my 2020 Apocalypse bingo card.
July 25, 2020
QotD: The real life implications of “positive” rights
[…] the moment all your necessities are furnished by someone else, someone else gets to make all the decisions for you. I mean, if your health is paid for by the taxes of your fellow citizens, and the government aka the nation looks after your every need: should they pay for your health if you insist on smoking or drinking? Or should those resources be husbanded for people who take better care of themselves? Okay, Sarah, but isn’t there a point to individual responsibility? Why shouldn’t you be required to take minimal care of yourself, so you get the benefits of the government’s care, which as you say someone else pays for.
Ah, but there’s the rub. See, ultimately, there’s always something some of us say or do that can be used to justify denying care or giving only palliative care. For instance, I’m overweight, which seems to be one of the remaining sins in the current lexicon. Sure, I gained tons of weight over 20 years of untreated hypothyroidism, even though I was starving myself for a long portion of those. But hey, I allowed myself to be overweight. So my prognosis is poor. Why spend money on me, when someone else could have better results?
Hell, even when it comes to my autoimmune. I’m a poor prospect, so why give me top of the line care?
If the government controlled other things, it would be exactly the same. Food? Sure, I break out in eczema all over when I eat a diet rich in carbs. But hey, flour and rice are cheap, and why should I get a specialized diet, since I’m only a writer who isn’t even a leftist or a supporter of the state, and besides my prospects of survival are poor?
College? Sure you want to be an economist, but your teachers say you’re cheeky and talk back, and the state doesn’t need that. What we need right now are pipe fitters. Here, you can take this six week course.
When the state is paying the bill, the state gets to decide what is better for you. The European constitution gives you the right to “death with dignity” because death with dignity is much cheaper than expensive treatments with a low chance of survival. After all this money is for everyone, you know?
And like the NHS, in Britain, they won’t even let you seek treatment outside their tender mercies. Why should they? They pay for you. That means in the end they decide what to spend on you. They own you. And if you went outside their system and your kid got cured? It would look pretty bad for them, wouldn’t it? Why should they allow you to do that? And besides, peasant, you have a bad attitude.
Sarah Hoyt, “Slouching Into Shackles”, According to Hoyt, 2018-04-27.
July 21, 2020
QotD: Burritos
This last item is probably why the Burrito (AKA “Tomorrow’s Turd Today”) remains popular with liberal medheads hooked on keeping human ethnic pets on their progressive political plantations. After all, if you can only afford to eat or to feed people once a day, the Burrito is your huckleberry. And if you can also reduce food scraps that would otherwise go straight to the landfill into human waste, you also have a food object that “walks lightly on the planet.”
Gerard VanderLeun, “GRINGO DE MAYO!: A Counter-Celebration for May 7”, American Digest, 2018-05-04.
July 20, 2020
History Hijinks: Plague
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 17 Jul 2020Escape the worries of our modern world by visiting the high middle ages and learning about something esoteric and irrelevant: Plague!
In this video, I attempt to actually teach you something about how the medieval world worked and how it responded to this existential threat, rather than dredging up 3rd grade plague facts for easy views. Oops, did I say that out loud?
SOURCES & Further Reading: The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague via The Great Courses by Dorsey Armstrong, “From Plague Doctor to PPE” by Bernadette Banner (https://youtu.be/ZniriC-jTHg), “Biological Warfare at the Siege of Caffa” from the CDC (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/9…)
This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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July 19, 2020
“Evolved cognition is a kludge – more properly, multiple stacks of kludges – developed under selection to be just barely adequate at coping”
ESR considers the role of programmers who need to document their software, after a brief trip into the kludginess of human cognition:
Maybe you’re one of the tiny minority of programmers that, like me, already enjoys writing documentation and works hard at doing it right. If so,the rest of this essay is not for you and you can skip it.
Otherwise, you might want to re-read (or at least re-skim) Ground-Truth Documents before continuing. Because ground-truth documents are a special case of a more general reason why you might want to try to change your mindset about documentation.
In that earlier essay I used the term “knowledge capture” in passing. This is a term of art from AI; it refers to the process of extracting domain knowledge from the heads of human experts into a form that can be expressed as an algorithm executable by the literalistic logic of a computer.
What I invite you to think about now is how writing documentation for software you are working on can save you pain and effort by (a) capturing knowledge you have but don’t know you have, and (b) eliciting knowledge that you have not yet developed.
Humans, including me and you, are sloppy and analogical thinkers who tend to solve problems by pattern-matching against noisy data first and checking our intuitions with logic after the fact (if we actually get that far). There’s no point in protesting that it shouldn’t be that way, that we should use rigorous logic all the way down, because our brains simply aren’t wired for that. Evolved cognition is a kludge – more properly, multiple stacks of kludges – developed under selection to be just barely adequate at coping.
This kludginess is revealed by, for example, optical illusions. And by the famous 7±2 result about the very limited sized of the human working set. And the various well-documented ways that human beings are extremely bad at statistical reasoning. And in many other ways …
QotD: How to raise a God-Emperor son
Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018.
July 17, 2020
QotD: Gandhi’s views on chastity
Gandhi was a truly fanatical opponent of sex for pleasure, and worked it out carefully that a married couple should be allowed to have sex three or four times in a lifetime, merely to have children, and favored embodying this restriction in the law of the land. The sexual-gratification wing of the present-day feminist movement would find little to attract them in Gandhi’s doctrine, since in all his seventy-nine years it never crossed his mind once that there could be anything enjoyable in sex for women, and he was constantly enjoining Indian women to deny themselves to men, to refuse to let their husbands “abuse” them. Gandhi had been married at thirteen, and when he took his vow of chastity, after twenty-four years of sexual activity, he ordered his two oldest sons, both young men, to be totally chaste as well.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
July 9, 2020
QotD: Energy return on energy invested
To be valuable, any conversion technology must produce reliable, just-in-time power that greatly exceeds — by a factor of seven and upwards — the amount of energy that goes into its extraction, conversion and delivery to a consumer. It is this measure of productivity, EROEI (energy return on energy invested), that limits our choice.
By the EROEI criterion, biofuel is a disastrous choice, requiring about as much tractor fuel to grow as you get out in ethanol or biodiesel. Wind power has a low energy return, because its vast infrastructure is energetically costly and needs replacing every two decades or so (sooner in the case of the offshore turbines whose blades have just expensively failed), while backing up wind with batteries and other power stations reduces the whole system’s productivity. Geothermal too may struggle, because turning warm water into electricity entails waste. Solar power with battery storage also fails the EROEI test in most climates. In the deserts of Arabia, where land is nearly free, sunlight abundant and gas cheap, solar power backed up with gas at night may be cheap.
Fossil fuels have amply repaid their energy cost so far, but the margin is falling as we seek gas and oil from tighter rocks and more remote regions. Nuclear fission passes the EROEI test with flying colours but remains costly because of ornate regulation.
Matt Ridley, “Nuclear Fusion Could Provide Unlimited Energy”, HumanProgress, 2018-04-09.
July 8, 2020
QotD: Telecommuting in the post-Wuhan Coronavirus era
For two decades now, telecommuting and distance learning have been perfectly possible and even, frankly, beneficial. What has held it back is managers afraid they don’t know how to manage at a distance, corporations who think mega cubicle farms are a great way to be “important” and a general sense that only us, ne’er do wells, work in our pajamas on the sofa (I’ll have you know I’m wearing a sweatshirt and yoga pants. Never mind.)
If the panic lasts even two months (and the press will ensure it does before it collapses under its own weight) that reluctance to telecommute is going to be blown to hell. For one, once workers taste of THAT fruit, just anecdotally, 90% of them LOVE it. (The other 10% have very annoying children or spouses.)
And in the wake of the financial panic and wobbles, corporations are going to notice that they spend a lot less money when most of the workers work from home. At some point, they’ll also realize that they need much smaller facilities if they need facilities at all. And hey, money.
This will cause all sorts of other things, which I think will lead within two years to an exodus from the big cities everyone has crammed into because it’s where the jobs are. I think in turn this will lead to a world the social engineers really don’t like.
Sarah Hoyt, “Unintended Consequences”, According to Hoyt, 2020-03-12.
July 7, 2020
Taking stock after the worst of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic
David Warren discusses an intractable “problem”:
I do not suppose it makes any practical difference what I have to say about a public health problem that invades the lives of billions; nor that readers will take me for a reliable epidemiologist when I say that the worst danger of that Batflu has now passed. (Infection rates spike, but the power of the virus to torture and kill has relented. The death rates continue downward.)
Nevertheless, I think there is some value in stating, even restating, the obvious — when what is obvious is in conflict with sensational reports, and the aggressive distortions of mass media, profiting from panic.
This Batflu became — more than any previous epidemic — a political issue, instantaneously. This is evident in the way it was spread, quite intentionally, by the Communist Party of China. (They shut down everything in Wuhan, except flights to Europe and America.) In all countries with democratic institutions, the disease became the centre of political attention, and unprecedented lockdowns were ordered. Likewise, unprecedented schemes of surveillance have significantly changed the relation between governments and governed, entirely for the worse. By means of current technology, the former will be able to perpetuate these changes, leaving those who wish to recover old liberties nowhere to hide.
Moreover, this is done by public demand. “The peeple” are easy to manipulate, once they have been frightened. The great majority of men, now and through the past, never cared about freedom. It has always been a minority concern, “for the intellectuals.” The “silent majority” will take their freedom, but only after their comfort and safety have been assured. The right to choose among consumer products is enough for them.
There are revolutions, such as the one that is now being attempted by the Left, but these never last. Either they are extinguished, under the wet blanket of public apathy, or the revolutionists succeed in installing a truly monstrous regime. Only thus, can they prolong their evil. Two generations of half-educated, indoctrinated, university grads favour a doctrinal dictatorship. Those still young are full of malign energy.
QotD: The first invasion of Britain
Since then, 90 percent of subsequent skeletons in England reflect the DNA of the steppe invaders.
What happened to most of England’s earlier inhabitants? One of the less violent scenarios is that the steppe migrants introduced bubonic plague.
In general, “migration” and “mixture” tend in Reich’s book to serve as euphemisms for genocide of the native males and rape of the native females. Reich lists numerous examples from around the world where genetic data show that newcomers enslaved or murdered the local men and turned their women into concubines.
Fortunately, for the past 4,500 years, “ancient Britons harbored a blend of ancestries very similar to that of present-day Britons.” The Roman conquest didn’t leave much of a genetic mark, and the later Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman invaders were genetically similar enough to earlier Britons that geneticists have only recently begun to disentangle them.
After 1066, the island race enjoyed a long halcyon era without new invaders raping and pillaging. But all good things evidently have to come to an end. As Benjamin Schwarz has pointed out, “In fact, Britain today receives more immigrants in a single year than it did in the entire period from 1066 to 1950.”
Steve Sailer, “Reich’s Laboratory”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-03-28.
July 6, 2020
The Healthcare Crisis of 1941 – WW2 – On the Homefront 005
World War Two
Published 2 Jul 2020When WWII breaks out many parts of the world are still missing population-wide healthcare. The pressure of the war deteriorates healthcare services even further. By 1941, both the British Commonwealth and Germany are facing an outright healthcare crisis on the home front.
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Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Anna Deinhard
Written by: Fiona Rachel Fischer and Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Fiona Rachel Fischer
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Sources:
IWM D 2373, D 2318, B 14299, D 2315, D 2078, D 14318, D 2334
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
Bundesarchiv
Wellcome Images no. L0028759
From the Noun Project: london by Pablo Fernández Vallejo, Patient by Miho Suzuki-Robinson, Patient by Binpodo, Doctor by Wilson Joseph, Hospital by Hare Krishna, School by David, Apartment by Victoruler, Bus by Eucalyp
University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life SciencesSoundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Farrell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Skrya – “First Responders”
Gunnar Johnsen – “Not Safe Yet”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Jon Bjork – “For the Many”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 4”
Cobby Costa – “From the Past”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Cobby Costa – “Flight Path”
Andreas Jamsheree – “Guilty Shadows 4”
Jo Wandrini – “Puzzle of Complexity”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
2 days ago (edited)
It might be surprising that the global healthcare crisis of 2020 has an immediate relationship to WW2, but it does. Although, when you look at it, it’s logical — with every crisis humanity learns a little — it was still a little bit of a surprise to us how direct this relationship was when researching and writing this episode. Was it surprising to you too?On the topic of writing, this is the first episode by our new co-writer, Fiona Rachel Fischer, who will now be a regular contributor to the On the Homefront series — please give her a warm welcome.
Sober Sailors – Rum Rations In The Navy: Grog
Townsends
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