Military History not Visualized
Published on 17 Aug 2018There some over-blown claims out there that the “Blitzkriege” were mainly achieved due to the use of Meth (Pervitin) and that historians had ignored this issue. Is it true or false? In this video we take a look at Pervitin, the Wehrmacht, the early German victories aka “Blitzkriege” and various aspects. Was Pervitin a Wunderwaffe? Was the Wehrmacht on Meth? How long was it used? And some aspects.
September 17, 2018
“Nazis on Drugs” – Wehrmacht & Meth – Wunderwaffe?
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QotD: Parents and drug use
Any parent who has ever smoked a joint has a moral duty to give up all hope of achieving good things in life, give him- or herself permanent brain damage, and get a career working on an assembly line, wearing a hairnet and stamping packages of irradiated food. Only in this way will kids realize drugs always lead to a bad end.
Tim Cavanaugh, “Don’t try this at home, kids; you might end up becoming President”, Reason Hit and Run, 2005-02-20.
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August 20, 2018
The Opium War
In Quillette, Jeffrey Chen reviews Song-Chuan Chen’s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War:
The war had a name even before its first shot. The first recorded use of the moniker, the ‘Opium War,’ was in an 1839 piece in the London Morning Herald; within months it would be echoed across the benches of Parliament and across the carronades of the fleet sent to punish the Chinese crackdown on British trade.
The war’s nomenclature revealed from the beginning the multivalent views the British public held towards the war: it was at once the “unjust and iniquitous” Opium War — to use Gladstone’s well-known phrase — as well as the patriotic ‘China War,’ as its proponents wanted it to be called. The historiography of the war is similarly divided among varied lines. Some see the war as reflective of China’s failure to catch up to Western technologies; others emphasize the British desire to avenge their slighted national honour as the prime motive for the conflict. A wide array of scholars have placed a central focus on the role of opium, while some prefer to see the war in the context of imperial and economic expansion. Song-Chuan Chen’s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War is a worthy addition to these voices.
Chen’s portrait of the Opium War places the role of British traders and their lobbying efforts in the foreground by arguing that it was British knowledge of China, as transmitted via the merchant class, that contributed to the ‘making’ (in the sense of both manufacture and execution) of the war. Chen asserts that it was the decade-long campaign of bellicose editorials and pamphlets on the part of the Canton merchant intelligentsia, as well as an accumulation of knowledge on the details of China’s coastal defences and overall military strength, that made it possible for Britain to both conceive of and win the war. The book casts, as its main actors, the ‘Warlike Party,’ a group of British merchants in Canton who lobbied for military intervention to expand the Canton System of trade, and the ‘Pacific Party,’ who opposed the war and criticised the diffusion of opium as an illicit and immoral drug. By narrowing his focus towards the production of knowledge, Chen also elevates the importance of language. A chapter of the book is devoted to a summary of the ‘Barbarian’ controversy – the disagreements and narratives spun around the British choice in translating the Chinese character 夷 (Yí) as ‘Barbarian,’ rather than ‘Foreigner.’
Chen’s account is thus of a battle as much between China and Britain as an internal conflict within the British public sphere. Though Chen is careful to nuance his depiction of the war by overlaying the many causal factors detailed by existing scholarship, his book makes two main arguments, which, in the words of the author, are new to the field: firstly, that the decisive factor in the war’s escalation was due to the machinations of the Warlike Party; and secondly, that the Canton System represented a ‘soft border’ through which the British were able to secure intelligence on the Qing state, without a reciprocal exchange of knowledge.
Written in engaging, lucid prose that presents its ideas clearly, if repetitively, Chen’s monograph is studded with riveting selections of his primary source research, drawn from the National Archives, UK, the First Historical Archives of China, the National Palace Museum, the British Library, SOAS Library, and Cambridge’s Jardine & Matheson archive. These quotations are often reproduced at generous length from the Warlike Party’s Canton Register and the Pacific Party’s Canton Press, and they provide a revealing account of the vigorous rhetorical strategies employed by the two camps.
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July 12, 2018
“And that is how the Flat Century dies. Upstairs, downstairs isn’t just our past, it’s our future”
ESR looks in his crystal ball and finds a much less egalitarian future lurking just ahead of us:
I think we all better hope we get germ-line genetic engineering and really effective nootropics real soon now. Because I think I have seen what the future looks like without these technologies, and it sucks.
A hundred years ago, 1918, marked the approximate end of the period when even middle-class families in the U.S. and Great Britain routinely had servants. During the inter-war years availability of domestic servants became an acute problem further and further up the SES scale, nearly highlighted by the National Council on Household Employment’s 1928 report on the problem. The institution of the servant class was in collapse; would-be masters were priced out of the market by rising wages for factory jobs and wider working opportunities for women (notably as typists).
But there was a supply-side factor as well; potential hires were unwilling to be servants and have masters – increasingly reluctant to be in service even when such jobs were still the best return they could get on their labor. The economic collapse of personal service coincided with an increasing rejection of the social stratification that had gone with it. Society as a whole became flatter and much more meritocratic.
There are unwelcome but powerful reasons to expect that this trend has already begun to reverse.
[…]
But now it’s 2018. Poverty cultures are reaching down to unprecedented levels of self-degradation; indicators of this are out-of-wedlock births, rates of drug abuse, and levels of interpersonal violence and suicide. Even as American society as a whole is getting steadily richer, more peaceful and less crime-ridden, its lowest SES tiers are going to hell in a handbasket. And not just the usual urban minority suspects, either, but poor whites as well; this is the burden of books like Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and the opioid-abuse statistics.
It’s hard not to look at this and not see the prophecies of The Bell Curve, a quarter century ago, coming hideously true. We have assorted ourselves into increasing cognitive inequality by class. and the poor are paying an ever heavier price for this. Furthermore, the natural outcome of the process is average IQ and other class differentiating abilities abilities are on their way to becoming genetically locked in.
The last jaw of the trap is the implosion of jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Retail, a traditional entry ramp into the workforce, has been badly hit by e-commerce, and that’s going to get worse. Fast-food chains are automating as fast as political morons pass “living wage” laws; that’s going to have an especially hard impact on minorities.
But we ain’t seen nothing yet; there’s a huge disruption coming when driverless cars and trucks wipe out an entire tier of the economy related to commercial transport. That’s 1 in 15 workers in the U.S., overwhelmingly from lower SES tiers. What are they going to do in the brave new world? What are their increasingly genetically disadvantaged children going to do?
Here’s where we jump into science fiction, because the only answer I can see is: become servants. And that is how the Flat Century dies. Upstairs, downstairs isn’t just our past, it’s our future. Because in a world where production of goods and routinized service is increasingly dominated by robots and AI, the social role of servant as a person who takes orders will increasingly be the only thing that an unskilled person has left to offer above the economic level of digging ditches or picking fruit.
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July 2, 2018
QotD: Perverse incentives, death penalty edition
People cheered when, in the 1990s, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich advocated mandatory executions for drug dealers. But economists wondered why Gingrich wanted to decrease the penalty for murder. How does the death penalty for drug dealers decrease the penalty for murder? Think about it this way: Suppose that Gingrich’s bill becomes law and the police bust into an apartment where three drug dealers have hidden their stash. What happens? The drug dealers know that if they give up, they will be put to death. So why not try to kill the police? If the dealers are lucky, they get away. If the dealers are unlucky, they are no worse off than if they didn’t fight because when drug dealing is a capital offense, drug dealers face no additional penalty for murder.
Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles: Microeconomics (3rd Edition), 2015.
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May 29, 2018
“[T]here’s just no way that we’re going to get to fentanyl harm reduction without [legalization]”
Tim Worstall reports on a recent Nebraska drug bust involving enough fentanyl “to kill 26 million people” (that is, about 120 lbs of the stuff) and explains why the current enforcement regime is going to have to change:
Now, I’m in favour of all of these drugs being legalised anyway. It’s the idiot’s body, up to them what they ingest in whatever manner. If it kills them, well, their choice. The argument that they shouldn’t therefore we must prevent them doesn’t cut much ice with me.
But put that aside and think in a utilitarian manner. If we can prevent overdoses and wasted lives then we should. But only if how we’re going to do it is better than the results of either not doing so or even using some other manner of dealing with the problem.
It’s arguable that clamping down on certain illegal drugs does at least limit their penetration of the market. I don’t think this is true of heroin but perhaps it is potentially true. It’s absolutely not true of fentanyl. For that’s a synthetic opioid. A decent chemist can synthesise it – a good one can make the precursors as well. There is no need to get opium, morphine or any other poppy related product that we already control.
It’s also, as we can see, alarmingly cheap already. Easy to smuggle in vast quantities of doses.
There’s another problem with it. The difference between a dose that gives a high and one that kills is pretty narrow. And it’s an extremely potent drug as well. Quantities for either are small – smaller than can generally be measured by users with candles and teaspoons.
It’s cheap, easy enough to make, has no precursors we can control, kills easily enough and dosage is alarmingly difficult to get right. So, what do we do?
We’re not going to get rid of it for all of the above reasons. So, we need to do damage limitation. Stopping people from dying from it sounds like a pretty good idea actually. And that means that we need it to be pure and in known dosages. That is, we need it to be legal.
I think all drugs should be legal, hey, your body and all that. But even if you think that harm reduction is a more important goal there’s just no way that we’re going to get to fentanyl harm reduction without legality of it. For that’s the only way we will get it in known doses which don’t kill people. And we’re most assuredly going to keep getting it even if we don’t legalise it. Our choices are people tooting on illegal fentanyl and dying or people tooting on legal fentayl and not dying. Not such a toughie that question, is it?
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May 24, 2018
QotD: Hunter S. Thompson on the importance of breakfast
It is not going to be easy for those poor bastards out in San Francisco who have been waiting all day in a condition of extreme fear and anxiety for my long and finely reasoned analysis of “The Meaning of Jimmy Carter” to come roaring out of my faithful mojo wire and across 2,000 miles of telephone line to understand why I am sitting here in a Texas motel full of hookers and writing at length on The Meaning of Breakfast……. But like almost everything else worth understanding, the explanation for this is deceptively quick and basic.
After more than ten years of trying to deal with politics and politicians in a professional manner, I have finally come to the harsh understanding that there is no way at all – not even for a doctor of chemotherapy with total access to the whole spectrum of legal and illegal drugs, the physical constitution of a mule shark and a brain as rare and sharp and original as the Sloat diamond – to function as a political journalist without abandoning the whole concept of a decent breakfast. I have worked like 12 bastards for more than a decade to be able to have it both ways, but the conflict is too basic and too deeply rooted in the nature of both politics and breakfast to ever be reconciled. It is one of those very few Great Forks in The Road of Life that cannot be avoided: like a Jesuit priest who is also a practicing nudist with a $200-a-day smack habit wanting to be the first Naked Pope (or Pope Naked the First, if we want to use the language of the church)….… Or a vegetarian pacifist with a .44 magnum fetish who wants to run for president without giving up his membership in the National Rifle Association or his New York City pistol permit that allows him to wear twin six-guns on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and all of his press conferences.
There are some combinations that nobody can handle: shooting bats on the wing with a double-barreled .410 and a head full of jimson weed is one of them, and another is the idea that it is possible for a freelance writer with at least four close friends named Jones to cover a hopelessly scrambled presidential campaign better than any six-man team of career political journalists on the New York Times or the Washington Post and still eat a three-hour breakfast in the sun every morning.
Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.
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May 22, 2018
Feature History – Opium Wars
Feature History
Published on 19 Oct 2016Welcome to Feature History, featuring the Opium Wars, western imperialism, and this fancy new intro and vignette.
The super sexy stuff like animation, voice, and script are all by the super sexy me.
The music is Anamalie and Clash Defiant, both by Kevin MacLeod
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Feature_History
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March 9, 2018
DicKtionary – G is for Gangster – Arnold Rothstein
TimeGhost
Published on 7 Mar 2018G is for Gambler, relying on luck,
Or insider knowledge, to make a quick buck
G’s also for Gangster, you know what I mean?
And combining the two was Arnold Rothstein.Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Like TimeGhost on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TimeGhostHistory/
Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Based on a concept by Astrid Deinhard and Indy Neidell
Produced by: Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Camera by: Ryan Tebo
Edited by: Bastian BeißwengerA TimeGhost format produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
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Bad news about the Peltzman Effect and opiate use
Megan McArdle recounts the US federal government’s attempt to improve automobile safety in the 1960s and the surprisingly mixed results of those efforts on overall safety for drivers (better), pedestrians (worse) and the frequency of non-fatal accidents (higher). Those results were summarized by Sam Peltzman as indicating that most of us have an innate tendency to take more risks when we’re less likely to suffer the costs of those risks (hence, the “Peltzman Effect”). She then talks about a tragic new instance of this in the opiate crisis:
A chemical called naloxone acts as an “opioid antagonist” — which is to say, it reverses the drug’s effects on the body. It can thus save people who have overdosed.
As opioid usage has worsened in the United States, more and more jurisdictions have acted to increase access to naloxone. Not only first responders but also friends, family and even librarians have started to administer it. These state laws were passed at different times, giving researchers Jennifer Doleac and Anita Mukherjee a sort of a natural experiment: They could look at what happened to overdoses in areas that liberalized naloxone access and compare the trends there to places that hadn’t changed their laws.
Their results are grim, to say the least: “We find that broadening Naloxone access led to more opioid-related emergency room visits and more opioid-related theft, with no reduction in opioid-related mortality.”
You can never assume that the results of one study, however well done, are correct. But these results look pretty robust. If they hold up, they would mean that naloxone is not saving lives; all we’re doing is spending a lot of money on naloxone to generate some increase in crime.
It makes a certain amount of sense that the Peltzman Effect would show up particularly strongly in drug users; after all, drugs hijack the brain’s reward system, redirecting it toward drug-seeking even at high personal risk. Drug users, one would think, would be highly likely to recalibrate their risk-taking so that the risk of death remains constant, while the frequency and potency of drug use increases.
The coldly logical response to this would seem to be to discontinue naloxone use. But there’s something repulsive about that conclusion, and Doleac and Mukherjee can’t bring themselves to go there. “Our findings do not necessarily imply that we should stop making Naloxone available to individuals suffering from opioid addiction,” they write, “or those who are at risk of overdose. They do imply that the public health community should acknowledge and prepare for the behavioral effects we find here.”
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February 18, 2018
The legal loophole that allows profiteering scumbags like Martin Shkreli to gouge the public
The US pharmaceutical market is a long way from a freely competitive environment, largely due to the amount of regulatory oversight required by lawmakers and enforced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Among all the regulatory checks and balances, there’s one weird trick that allows predatory companies to reap excess profits legally — the “restricted distribution” loophole:
For immunocompromised adult patients who have the toxoplasmosis parasite, the FDA recommends taking 50 to 75 milligrams of Daraprim a day for up to three weeks, followed by half that dosage for an additional four to five weeks. So at the high end, an adult course of Daraprim therapy for a U.S. patient used to cost around $1,350 total.
While that might not seem cheap, it was a drop in the bucket compared to the cost after Turing Pharmaceuticals, Shkreli’s company, bought the rights to Daraprim and jacked the price up to $750 per pill in 2015. That move increased the cost of one course of treatment to around $75,000.
At that point you might have expected another company to jump in and start offering a generic version of the drug. But Shkreli used a regulatory loophole to keep that from happening.
You see, when a generic manufacturer wants to create a cheap version of a branded drug, it has to buy thousands of doses from the manufacturer in order to run comparison tests. Generic manufacturers use the results of these tests to prove to the FDA that their version is identical to the branded drug that the agency has already approved.
More often than not, the company that holds the marketing and distribution rights to a branded drug will sell those comparison doses to the generic manufacturer without being obstructionist, because that’s the trade-off for receiving a 20-year monopoly by way of a drug patent: The branded manufacturer gets to charge whatever they want for years and years without facing competition, and in exchange for that government-backed monopoly, it’s supposed to sell equivalency samples to generic companies.
But what if the company is run by an unscrupulous asshole like Martin Shkreli? Then it might opt to put the drug into what’s called “restricted distribution,” which means no distributor anywhere can sell comparison samples to a generic manufacturer.
The FDA originally created the concept of restricted distribution to limit the availability of drugs that might be dangerous. Methadone, for instance, was first approved in the 1940s as a painkiller. In the 1970s, the FDA restricted its availability because regulators didn’t want the opioid used for anything other than the treatment of opioid dependence. Even today, methadone can be dispensed only in highly regulated settings and only for one approved reason.
In 2007, Congress empowered the FDA to create an entire system of safety controls beyond restricted distribution, and the agency now requires the manufacturers of certain substances to develop Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) to prevent misuse and abuse of potentially problematic compounds.
The list of approved drugs that the FDA says must have an REMS is here. Daraprim is not on that list. You can’t get high off it. It’s not habit forming. Yes, the FDA label says it can be carcinogenic after long periods of use, and that it might cause birth defects if used in high doses by pregnant women. These potential effects are serious, but there is no post-market data suggesting that Daraprim is causing more harm than benefit in the intended patient population. Shkreli’s company put Daraprim into restricted distribution to boost their profits, not protect patients.
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January 13, 2018
Everyone You Love Did Drugs
ReasonTV
Published on 12 Jan 2018It turns out that a lot of accomplished, well-respected historical figures did drugs. From Winston Churchill taking amphetamines to Thomas Edison lacing his wine with cocaine, not everyone who uses narcotics is a hopeless basket case living in a dumpster. While some drug users spiral into addiction and crime, others go on to become president. It’s time to debunk the age old stereotypes of the back alley dangerous dealer or the lazy stoner when, according to the National Survey on Drug Use, roughly half of all Americans have tried an illegal drug.
In the latest “Mostly Weekly” host Andrew Heaton breaks down the cartoonish Drug Warrior portrayal of drugs by showing some of the beloved historical figures who used them.
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January 1, 2018
QotD: Edmonton in winter
Winter [in Edmonton] appeals to the (decidedly narrow) ascetic side of my temperament, but right now this place is pretty Dantean — empty, forlorn, and still, all sound half-absorbed by the snow. On the days when there’s no cloud, the sunlight hits the street with a blinding chemical whiteness that makes you wonder if God is screwing around with Photoshop filters. Most days, the sun is obscured by a gray-pink gauze that leaves you uncertain what planet you’re on. Heroin has never been a popular drug here: we all already know what it’s like to be dead.
Colby Cosh, “White City”, ColbyCosh.com, 2004-10-26.
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November 24, 2017
Not Guided by Policy: Hunter S. Thompson and the Birth of Gonzo Journalism
Today I Found Out
Published on 6 Nov 2017In this video:
“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” This is the opening line from the highly acclaimed roman à clef Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream written by Hunter S. Thompson, one of America’s most countercultural and anti-authoritarian writers. The untamed master of his own self-titled genre, “gonzo journalism,” Thompson set ablaze the American standards for journalism during the 1960s and 70s with a cornucopia of drugs, alcohol, gun toting, and most notably, his exemplary writing.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/07/not-guided-policy-act-gonzo/
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October 6, 2017
Are Branded Drugs Better? – Earth Lab
BBC Earth Lab
Published on 22 Jun 2017When you’ve got a cold and need some medicine, do you ever wonder if there’s a difference between branded and non-branded drugs? Greg Foot explains the world of pharmaceuticals, backed up with some stonking examples and unexpected findings!
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