Quotulatiousness

April 20, 2020

“New York City subways were ‘a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection'”

Filed under: Government, Health, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Randal O’Toole wonders why the lone sacred cow of mass transit is still running, despite its potential role in spreading disease:

MTA NYC Subway 1 trains at 125th St., 14 May, 2018.
Photo by Mtattrain via Wikimedia Commons.

Sit‐​down restaurants and bars have been shut down. Public officials are discouraging or even forbidding people from doing “unnecessary travel,” even if it is to visit a second home where they might be able to socially distance themselves better than in their first, more urban home. All sorts of other rules are being passed, all supposedly for our own good.

So why are urban transit systems still running? A 2018 study found that “mass transportation systems offer an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases.” A 2011 study found that people who use mass transit were nearly six times more likely to have acute respiratory infections than those who don’t. Not surprisingly, a study published a few days ago found that New York City subways were “a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection.”

Transit agencies say they are helping “essential workers” go about their business. But if they are so essential, isn’t it important to find them a safe way of getting to work? If we truly cared about people’s safety, then transit services should have shut down at the same time we closed other non‐​essential businesses and asked people to stay at home.

[…]

Unfortunately, the transit lobby has successfully turned government‐​subsidized transit into a sacred cow. Transit is supposedly greener than driving when in fact it’s an energy hog. Transit is supposedly needed to help poor people get to work when in fact the people most likely to commute by transit are those earning more than $75,000 a year.

When the pandemic took away most of transit’s customers, instead of shutting down, which would have been the responsible thing to do, transit agencies demanded that Congress give them $25 billion, tripling federal support to transit this year. Thanks to transit’s sacred cow status, Congress agreed without any serious debate.

Effectively, Congress rewarded the agencies for spreading disease. It would have been better to use that money to help transit‐​dependent essential workers buy a car so they could have a safe way of getting to work.

New York City subway system.
Image by Jake Berman (maps.complutense.org) based on information from the MTA, via Wikimedia Commons.

Understanding the Lost Cause Myth

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Cynical Historian
Published 16 Apr 2020

The Lost Cause Myth has changed American history. Though it is a hateful ideology today, to ignore it is to give it power. We must understand the myth in order to defeat it.
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Wiki: The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the Lost Cause, is an American pseudo-historical, negationist ideology which holds the view that the cause of the Confederacy during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one. The ideology endorses the supposed virtues of the antebellum South, viewing the war as a struggle which was primarily waged in order to save the Southern way of life, or to defend “states’ rights”, in the face of overwhelming “Northern aggression.” At the same time, the Lost Cause minimizes or completely denies the central role of slavery in the buildup to and outbreak of the war.

Particularly intense periods of Lost Cause activity occurred around the time of World War I, as the last Confederate veterans began to die out and a push was made to preserve their memories, and they also occurred during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in reaction to growing public support for racial equality. Through activities such as building prominent Confederate monuments and writing school history textbooks, they sought to ensure that future generations of Southern whites would know about the South’s “true” reasons for fighting the war, and support white supremacist policies, such as Jim Crow laws. In this manner, white supremacy is a characteristic of the Lost Cause narrative.

The Lost Cause narratives typically portray the Confederacy’s cause as a noble one and they also portray its leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, who were defeated by the Union armies through numerical and industrial force that overwhelmed the South’s superior military skill and courage. Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to keep the South down. The Lost Cause theme has also evolved into a major element in defining gender roles in the white South, in terms of preserving family honor and chivalrous traditions. The Lost Cause has inspired numerous Southern memorials and religious attitudes.
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Hashtags: #history #LostCause #Mythology

The four distinct phases of the Great Depression in the United States

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

An older post from Lawrence W. Reed at the Foundation for Economic Education outlines the low points of the Great Depression and debunks a few widely held myths about that cataclysmic economic era:

Phase 1, the Federal Reserve and the end of the Roaring 20’s:

One of the most thorough and meticulously documented accounts of the Fed’s inflationary actions prior to 1929 is America’s Great Depression by the late Murray Rothbard. Using a broad measure that includes currency, demand and time deposits, and other ingredients, Rothbard estimated that the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by more than 60 percent from mid-1921 to mid-1929. The flood of easy money drove interest rates down, pushed the stock market to dizzy heights, and gave birth to the “Roaring Twenties.”

By early 1929, the Federal Reserve was taking the punch away from the party. It choked off the money supply, raised interest rates, and for the next three years presided over a money supply that shrank by 30 percent. This deflation following the inflation wrenched the economy from tremendous boom to colossal bust.

The “smart” money — the Bernard Baruchs and the Joseph Kennedys who watched things like money supply — saw that the party was coming to an end before most other Americans did. Baruch actually began selling stocks and buying bonds and gold as early as 1928; Kennedy did likewise, commenting, “only a fool holds out for the top dollar.”

Phase 2, Hoover’s interventions and the disaster of Smoot-Hawley:

Willis C. Hawley (left) and Reed Smoot in April 1929, shortly before the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act passed the House of Representatives.
Library of Congress photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Unemployment in 1930 averaged a mildly recessionary 8.9 percent, up from 3.2 percent in 1929. It shot up rapidly until peaking out at more than 25 percent in 1933. Until March 1933, these were the years of President Herbert Hoover — the man that anti-capitalists depict as a champion of noninterventionist, laissez-faire economics.

Did Hoover really subscribe to a “hands off the economy,” free-market philosophy? His opponent in the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt, didn’t think so. During the campaign, Roosevelt blasted Hoover for spending and taxing too much, boosting the national debt, choking off trade, and putting millions of people on the dole. He accused the president of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, charged that Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.” Contrary to the modern myth about Hoover, Roosevelt and Garner were absolutely right.

The crowning folly of the Hoover administration was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed in June 1930. It came on top of the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, which had already put American agriculture in a tailspin during the preceding decade. The most protectionist legislation in U.S. history, Smoot-Hawley virtually closed the borders to foreign goods and ignited a vicious international trade war. Professor Barry Poulson notes that not only were 887 tariffs sharply increased, but the act broadened the list of dutiable commodities to 3,218 items as well.

Officials in the administration and in Congress believed that raising trade barriers would force Americans to buy more goods made at home, which would solve the nagging unemployment problem. They ignored an important principle of international commerce: trade is ultimately a two-way street; if foreigners cannot sell their goods here, then they cannot earn the dollars they need to buy here.

Phase 3, FDR and the New Deal:

Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election in a landslide, collecting 472 electoral votes to just 59 for the incumbent Herbert Hoover. The platform of the Democratic Party whose ticket Roosevelt headed declared, “We believe that a party platform is a covenant with the people to be faithfully kept by the party entrusted with power.” It called for a 25 percent reduction in federal spending, a balanced federal budget, a sound gold currency “to be preserved at all hazards,” the removal of government from areas that belonged more appropriately to private enterprise, and an end to the “extravagance” of Hoover’s farm programs. This is what candidate Roosevelt promised, but it bears no resemblance to what President Roosevelt actually delivered.

In the first year of the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed spending $10 billion while revenues were only $3 billion. Between 1933 and 1936, government expenditures rose by more than 83 percent. Federal debt skyrocketed by 73 percent.

[…] in 1935 the Works Progress Administration came along. It is known today as the very government program that gave rise to the new term, “boondoggle,” because it “produced” a lot more than the 77,000 bridges and 116,000 buildings to which its advocates loved to point as evidence of its efficacy. The stupefying roster of wasteful spending generated by these jobs programs represented a diversion of valuable resources to politically motivated and economically counterproductive purposes.

The American economy was soon relieved of the burden of some of the New Deal’s excesses when the Supreme Court outlawed the NRA in 1935 and the AAA in 1936, earning Roosevelt’s eternal wrath and derision. Recognizing much of what Roosevelt did as unconstitutional, the “nine old men” of the Court also threw out other, more minor acts and programs which hindered recovery.

Phase 4, the Wagner Act:

The stage was set for the 1937–38 collapse with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 — better known as the Wagner Act and organized labor’s “Magna Carta.” […] Armed with these sweeping new powers, labor unions went on a militant organizing frenzy. Threats, boycotts, strikes, seizures of plants, and widespread violence pushed productivity down sharply and unemployment up dramatically. Membership in the nation’s labor unions soared; by 1941 there were two and a half times as many Americans in unions as in 1935.

[…]

Higgs draws a close connection between the level of private investment and the course of the American economy in the 1930s. The relentless assaults of the Roosevelt administration — in both word and deed — against business, property, and free enterprise guaranteed that the capital needed to jumpstart the economy was either taxed away or forced into hiding. When Roosevelt took America to war in 1941, he eased up on his antibusiness agenda, but a great deal of the nation’s capital was diverted into the war effort instead of into plant expansion or consumer goods. Not until both Roosevelt and the war were gone did investors feel confident enough to “set in motion the postwar investment boom that powered the economy’s return to sustained prosperity.”

April 16, 2020

QotD: Nietzsche’s ideas

Filed under: Books, Food, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… an accurate and intelligent account of Nietzsche’s ideas, by one who has studied them and understands them, is, as Mawruss Perlmutter would say, yet another thing again. Seek in What Nietzsche Taught, by Willard H. Wright, and you will find it. Here in the midst of the current obfuscation, are the plain facts, set down by one who knows them. Wright has simply taken the eighteen volumes of the Nietzsche canon and reduced each of them to a chapter. All of the steps in Nietzsche’s arguments are jumped; there is no report of his frequent disputing with himself; one gets only his conclusions. But Wright has arranged these conclusions so artfully and with so keen a comprehension of all that stands behind them that they fall into logical and ordered chains, and are thus easily intelligible, not only in themselves, but also in their interrelations. The book is incomparably more useful than any other Nietzsche summary that I know. It does not, of course, exhaust Nietzsche, for some of the philosopher’s most interesting work appears in his arguments rather than in his conclusions, but it at least gives a straightforward and coherent account of his principal ideas, and the reader who has gone through it carefully will be quite ready for the Nietzsche books themselves.

These principal ideas all go back to two, the which may be stated as follows:

  1. Every system of morality has its origin in an experience of utility. A race, finding that a certain action works for its security and betterment, calls that action good; and, finding that a certain other action works to its peril, it calls that other action bad. Once it has arrived at these valuations it seeks to make them permanent and inviolable by crediting them to its gods.
  2. The menace of every moral system lies in the fact that, by reason of the supernatural authority thus put behind it, it tends to remain substantially unchanged long after the conditions which gave rise to it have been supplanted by different, and often diametrically antagonistic conditions.

In other words, systems of morality almost always outlive their usefulness, simply because the gods upon whose authority they are grounded are hard to get rid of. Among gods, as among office-holders, few die and none resign. Thus it happens that the Jews of today, if they remain true to the faith of their fathers, are oppressed by a code of dietary and other sumptuary laws — i.e., a system of domestic morality — which has long since ceased to be of any appreciable value, or even of any appreciable meaning, to them. It was, perhaps, an actual as well as a statutory immorality for a Jew of ancient Palestine to eat shell-fish, for the shell-fish of the region he lived in were scarecly fit for human food, and so he endangered his own life and worked damage to the community of which he was a part when he ate them. But these considerations do not appear in the United Sates of today. It is no more imprudent for an American Jew to eat shell-fish than it is for him to eat süaut;ss-und-sauer. His law, however, remains unchanged, and his immemorial God of Hosts stands behind it, and so, if he would be counted a faithful Jew, he must obey it. It is not until he definitely abandons his old god for some modern and intelligible god that he ventures upon disobedience. Find me a Jew eating oyster fritters and I will show you a Jew who has begun to doubt very seriously that the Creator actually held the conversation with Moses described in the ninteenth and subsequent chapters of the Book of Exodus.

H.L. Mencken, “Transvaluation of Morals”, The Smart Set, 1915-03.

April 15, 2020

When the Fed Does Too Much

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Marginal Revolution University
Published 22 Aug 2017

In the 2000s, the Fed kept interest rates low to stimulate aggregate demand. But the cheap credit also helped fuel the housing market bubbles. We’ll look at the case of the Great Recession as an example of where the Fed did too much in one area, and perhaps not enough in others.

April 14, 2020

Chauchat Field Testing vs Mock MG08/15 Nest

Filed under: France, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Dec 2019

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Out at the range today with the Chauchat, testing accuracy against a simulated MG08/15 nest at 150 yards. I’ll try out semiauto and full auto (in short bursts), and see how they compare. For reference, the US Army recommended never using the Chauchat beyond 400 yards, as it was not sufficiently accurate to be effective at greater distance.

To see a set of original WW1 American Expeditionary Force Chauchat manuals, check here:

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April 13, 2020

James J. Hill, US railroading’s premier “market entrepreneur”

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

Dane Stuhlsatz outlines the story of US federal government subsidies and other interventions into the 19th century railroad industry and the one tycoon who avoided the lure:

Postcard photo of the Great Northern Railway’s “Empire Builder” streamliner between Everett and Seattle, Washington, circa 1963.
Great Northern Railway postcard via Wikimedia Commons.

Burton W. Folsom, Jr. outlined this story in his book, The Myth of the Robber Barons, identifying two models of entrepreneurship; the “political entrepreneurism” of lines like the Union Pacific and Central Pacific versus the “market entrepreneurism” of James J. Hill and his Great Northern Railway.

Canadian-born James J. Hill (1838-1916) in 1914.
Photo from Famous Living Americans, edited by Mary Griffin Webb and Edna Lenore Webb via Wikimedia Commons.

As Folsom details, the former chased government largesse, ultimately in exchange for loss of control of their business, while the latter chased profits through prudent business decisions. Hill’s success juxtaposed with UP’s and CP’s failure is due in no small part to his steadfast refusal to accept any federal subsidies. In short, UP’s and CP’s government subsidized incentives were vastly different from Hill’s profit driven incentives, which lead to vastly different outcomes.

Federal subsidies incentivized speed, not efficiency. The subsidies were paid in the form of both land grants and direct payments. For each mile of track laid, the UP and CP would receive 20 acres of land and either $16,000 (for track on flat land), $32,000 (for track on hilly terrain), or $48,000 (on mountainous terrain). This incentive for speed resulted in winding, inefficient, routes built with inferior materials, ultimately culminating in a federal price tag of 44,000,000 acres and $61,000,000 (astronomical sums in the 1860s-70s). Despite all this federal assistance, shortly after the golden spike was driven on May 10, 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah, the UP and CP were nearly bankrupt and required further assistance to stay afloat.

The lines which were born and brought up on federal aid needed federal aid to continue. This led to the passage of the Thurman Law in 1874 which forced UP to pay 25% of its earnings a year to pay its federal debt.

UP’s profitability decisions were also subject to government approval. Branch lines — smaller lines off the main line into rural communities — which could have helped UP’s bottom line, were often not approved by federal bureaucrats. Additionally, the federal Bureau of Railroad Accounts required constant checking of UP’s books. All these measures stifled the ingenuity that UP so desperately needed to make its line profitable. UP quickly found out that the power to subsidize was the power to destroy.

Hill’s line on the other hand was methodically surveyed and built, on the shortest routes possible, with the least gradient possible, and using the best steel and other materials on the market at the time. Rather than political largess, Hill made his decisions based on profit and loss. But, for all the efficiency that Hill built into his line — he was able to transport across the country faster, cheaper, and with less maintenance costs than could the UP and CP — arguably the most important aspect for the viability of his business was the freedom to conduct business untethered by the strings that accompanied government subsidies.

While Hill was free to build when and where he wanted so long as he reached voluntary agreements with landowners, consumers, and employees, UP was tied up in red tape. As Hill’s line grew evermore profitable and reliable for customers, the UP and CP struggled along on federal aid, until they ultimately went bankrupt in 1893.

For his part, Hill’s line was the only transcontinental railroad to never go bankrupt.

Route map from the Great Northern Railway, circa 1920. Red lines are the GN route; dotted lines are other railroads. Created from the Map Maker at nationalatlas.gov and routes drawn in, using a 1920 map as a reference.
Map by Elkman via Wikimedia Commons.

April 12, 2020

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

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

The Great War
Published 10 Apr 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Self-interest in the clothing of idealism

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

Last week, Esteban wrote at the Continental Telegraph:

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

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

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

QotD: The Gini coefficient

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 11, 2020

QotD: Zhou Enlai’s famous “too early to say” comment on the French Revolution

Filed under: China, France, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When Chinese premier Zhou Enlai famously said it was “too early” to assess the implications of the French revolution, he was referring to turmoil in France in 1968 and not — as is commonly thought — to the more distant political upheaval of 1789.

So says a retired American diplomat, Charles W. (Chas) Freeman Jr., who was present when Zhou made the comment during President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972.

Freeman, who was Nixon’s interpreter during the historic, weeklong trip, made the disclosure last week during a panel discussion in Washington about On China, the latest book by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The discussion was moderated by Richard McGregor, a journalist and China expert who wrote about Freeman’s comments for the Financial Times of London.

In an interview yesterday, Freeman elaborated on his recollection about Zhou’s comment, the conventional interpretation of which is frequently offered as evidence of China’s sage, patient, and far-sighted ways. Foreign Policy magazine, for example, referred last month to that interpretation, saying the comment was “a cautionary warning of the perils of judgments made in real time.”

The Washington Post‘s recent review of Kissinger’s book likewise referred to the conventional understanding of Zhou’s remark.

Freeman described Zhou’s misconstrued comment as “one of those convenient misunderstandings that never gets corrected.”

He said Zhou’s remark probably was made over lunch or dinner, during a discussion about revolutions that had succeeded and failed. They included, Freeman said, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, both of which the Soviet Union crushed.

He said it was clear from the context and content of Zhou’s comment that in saying it was “too early to say” the Chinese leader was speaking about the events in France in May 1968, not the years of upheaval that began in 1789.

Freeman acknowledged that the conventional interpretation makes for a better story but added that it was “absolutely clear” from the context of the discussion that Zhou was speaking about 1968.

W. Joseph Campbell, “‘Too early to say’: Zhou was speaking about 1968, not 1789”, Media Myth Alert, 2011-06-14.

April 10, 2020

M1 Carbine: A Whole New Class of Weapon

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 Apr 2020

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The United States developed the M1 carbine very quickly at the beginning of World War Two, once the German “blitzkrieg” made it clear that highly mobile enemy forces could threaten rear echelon troops in a modern war. The M1911 pistol was seen as a difficult weapon to use well, and a light carbine would offer much greater effectiveness with less training. It was estimated that 500,000 would be needed, and more than 6 million were eventually produced during the war. The M1 Carbine would equip drivers, artillery crews, mortar men, headquarters staff, paratroops, and many more.

The M1 Carbine was developed by Winchester, but they were not participants in the first round of trials, Instead, their design came about when Rene Studler (head of the Ordnance Department) saw Winchester’s “M2” rifle prototype, a lightweight .30-06 intended to compete with the M1 Garand. He urged them to scale it down for the light rifle trials then ongoing in 1941, and Winchester complied. The design used a Garand-like rotating bolt and a gas tappet system designed by David Marshall Williams for the .30-06 rifle. The new carbine was cobbled together in less than two weeks, and is a truly fantastic achievement.

Thanks to InterOrdnance / Royal Tiger Imports for providing this M1 Carbine for filming!

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April 9, 2020

The (former) captain of USS Theodore Roosevelt

Filed under: Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Another example of how civilians interpret an action in a radically different way than the military does (and must):

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) underway in the Persian Gulf, 3 December 2005.
U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Matthew Bash via Wikimedia Commons.

Okay, about this USS Teddy Roosevelt captain …

No, he’s not some sort of rebel hero who fought the power for his sailors and stuff because only he gave a damn about them. That’s crap, and […] I am not happy to see him get canned. I was an O6 myself, and I would prefer O6s, as a rule, not end up fired. But that was the only course of action available to the SecNav. The guy screwed up, big time.

To believe this CAPT Crozier guy is a hero, you have to believe stupid and wrong things which you should not believe due to their stupidness and wrongness.

You have to believe that the Navy “didn’t care” about sick sailors. Libs take this further to imply that the Navy “didn’t care” about sick sailors because that would have made Trump angry.

This is, as I said, stupid and wrong.

The Navy brass has several things to think about, and there is an order of priority among those things. The priority order is 1) the mission and then 2) the sailors. Notice the order? One of the unique aspects of the military is that it is one of the very few institutions where the lives of its members are expressly and deliberately subordinated to the mission. An aircraft carrier is a major strategic asset, almost incalculably major. And this captain wanted to take it offline. Now, that could have been the decision. Command is about making tough decisions, but it was not his decision. Once he gave his input to his bosses, what he thought meant nothing.

Nothing.

We elect a commander-in-chief to make those decisions. He delegates them in a clear order of precedence to his subordinates. So, CAPT Crozier was not defying admirals or even Trump when he decided he should make the decision. He was defying you and me.

The chain of command is a thing, as he found out when he got his walking papers. And it did not stop being a thing when he did not like the orders it gave him.

If your sailors are your number one priority, you frankly have no business being in command. The mission is the number one priority. That’s hard, and no fun, but [it’s] true. And that’s not an excuse to abuse or neglect your men — far from it. But it is a recognition that you have a mission and that is your priority.

Corzier was the captain of the carrier. There was an admiral down the hall — literally — who was his boss as task force commander. Why did he not go to the admiral? Or maybe he did go to the admiral and didn’t like the answer he got. Your commander disagreed with you? Gee, welcome to military service. Salute and drive on.

There’s no scenario where he’s right on this.

April 8, 2020

If the Wuhan Coronavirus panic feels oddly familiar … there’s a good reason for it

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Warren Meyer explains why his skepticism about the dangers of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic kicked in quickly because it followed a very familiar pattern:

I have been skeptical about extreme global warming and climate change forecasts, but those were informed by my knowledge of physics and dynamic systems (e.g. feedback mechanics). I have been immensely skeptical of Elon Musk, but again that skepticism has been informed by domain knowledge (e.g. engineering in the case of the hyperloop and business strategy in the case of SolarCity and Tesla). But I have no domain knowledge that is at all relevant to disease transfer and pathology. So why was I immediately skeptical when, for example, the governor of Texas was told by “experts” that a million persons would die in Texas if a lock-down order was not issued?

I think the reason for my skepticism was pattern recognition — I saw a lot of elements in COVID-19 modelling and responses that appeared really similar to what I thought were the most questionable aspects of climate science. For example:

  • We seem to have a sorting process of “experts” that selects for only the most extreme. We start any such question, such as forecasting disease death rates or global temperature increases, with a wide range of opinion among people with domain knowledge. When presented with a range of possible outcomes, the media’s incentives generally push it to present the most extreme. So if five folks say 100,000 might die and one person says a million, the media will feature the latter person as their “expert” and tell the public “up to a million expected to die.” After this new “expert” is repetitively featured in the media, that person becomes the go-to expert for politicians, as politicians want to be seen by the public to be using “experts” the public recognizes as “experts.”
  • Computer models are converted from tools to project out the implications of a certain set of starting hypotheses and assumptions into “facts” in and of themselves. They are treated as having a reality, and a certainty, that actually exceeds that of their inputs (a scientific absurdity but a media reality I have observed so many times I gave it the name “data-washing”). Never are the key assumptions that drive the model’s behavior ever disclosed along with the model results. Rather than go on forever on this topic, I will refer you to my earlier article.
  • Defenders of alarmist projections cloak themselves in a mantle of being pro-science. Their discussions of the topic tend to by science-y without being scientific. They tend to understand one aspect of the science — exponential growth in viruses or tipping points in systems dominated by positive feedback. But they don’t really understand it — for example, what is interesting about exponential growth is not the math of its growth, but what stops the growth from being infinite. Why doesn’t a bacteria culture grow to the mass of the Earth, or nuclear fission continue until all the fuel is used up? We are going to have a lot of problem with this after COVID-19. People will want to attribute the end of the exponential growth to lock-downs and distancing, but it’s hard to really make this analysis without understanding at what point — and there is a point — the virus’s growth would have turned down anyway.
  • Alarmists who claim to be anti-science have a tendency to insist on “solutions” that have absolutely no basis in science, or even ones that science has proven to be utterly bankrupt. Ethanol and wind power likely do little to reduce CO2 emissions and may make them worse, yet we spend billions on them as taxpayers. And don’t get me started on plastic bag and straw bans. I am willing to cut COVID-19 responses a little more slack because we don’t have the time to do elaborate studies. But just don’t tell me lockdown orders are science — they are guesses as to the correct response. I live in Phoenix where it was sunny and 80F this weekend. We are on lockdown in our houses. I could argue that ordering everyone out into the natural disinfectant of heat and sunlight for 2 hours a day is as effective a response as forcing families into their houses (initial data, though it is sketchy, of limited transfer of the virus in summertime Australia is interesting — only a small portion of cases are from community transfer. By comparison less than a half percent of US cases from travel).

Debunking the claim that “80% of America’s drugs come from China”

Filed under: Business, China, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Eric Boehm tries to sort out where the startling claim came from … because it’s not true:

While reading about the COVID-19 outbreak, you’ve probably encountered this particularly shocking statistic at one time or another: 80 percent of America’s pharmaceutical drug supply comes from China.

It’s a statistic that has made the rounds in right-wing publications for a while — offered as proof that China-heavy global supply chains are putting Americans at risk — but it has also popped up in mainstream outlets, including in pieces published in Politico and The Atlantic. Wherever it is deployed, the stat carries an unstated implication: What if China decides to cut us off in the middle of a pandemic? Could America face a dramatic shortage of key pharmaceutical drugs at the moment when we are most in need? And that distorted claim that says America has been too reliant on China has been seized by politicians like Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) as evidence that globalization has undermined America’s pandemic response.

[…]

How much is a lot? “In all, 80 percent of the U.S. supply of antibiotics are made in China,” [Politico contributors Doug Palmer and Finbarr Bermingham] wrote, linking back to a press release from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa).

But that’s not what the press release says.

Grassley’s statement was publicizing a letter Grassley sent on August 9 to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the FDA, asking them to conduct more inspections of foreign drug manufacturing facilities to make sure they meet American standards.

“Unbeknownst to many consumers … 80 percent of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients are produced abroad, the majority in China and India,” Grassley wrote.

There’s the first bit of context collapse: the authors of the Politico piece merged Grassley’s “80 percent … are produced abroad” into “80 percent … are made in China.”

All of this also raises another question: Where is Grassley getting that information? His letter sources that claim to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report which itself cited FDA data on pharmaceutical manufacturers around the world. And that report makes it clear that the U.S. has a diverse supply chain for drugs that goes well beyond India and China.

“Nearly 40 percent of finished drugs and approximately 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) are manufactured in registered establishments in more than 150 countries,” is how the GAO summed up America’s pharmaceutical supply chain.

In two jumps, we’ve gone from “80 percent of American drugs are manufactured in more than 150 countries around the world” to “80 percent of drugs come from two countries” to “80 percent of drugs come from China.”

Now, a further complication. The FDA only tracks drug manufacturing facilities — not the supply chains of specific drugs.

That “lack of structural transparency and available supply chain data about drugs,” researchers at the University of Minnesota researchers wrote last month, is one of the reasons why making accurate assessments about potential drug shortages is difficult. Indeed, it was this same bit of missing information that Grassley was encouraging the FDA to address back in August.

Source: FDA; Safeguarding Pharmaceutical Supply Chains in a Global Economy, October 2019.

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