Isegoria

Time 2020-10-26 03:02:19

Web Name: Isegoria

WebSite: http://www.isegoria.net

ID:94512

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Lin Piao knew almost everything there was to know about American fighting men, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), including strengths and weaknesses: The coordinated action of mortars and tanks is an important factor…. Their firing instruments are highly powerful…. Their artillery is very active…. Aircraft strafing and bombing of our transportation have become a great hazard to us…. Their transport system is magnificent. Their rate of infantry fire is great, and the long range of that fire is even greater. [...] Cut off from the rear, they abandon all their heavy weapons…. Their infantrymen are weak, afraid to die, and have no courage to attack or defend. They depend always on their planes, tanks, artillery…. They specialize in day fighting. They are not familiar with night fighting or hand-to-hand combat. If defeated, they have no orderly formation. Without the use of their mortars, they become completely lost…. They become dazed and completely demoralized. They are afraid when the rear is cut off. When transportation comes to a standstill, the infantry loses the will to fight. [...]They would plan attacks to get in the enemy rear, to cut escape and supply roads, and then to flail the enemy with pressure from both front and rear. They would use what they called the Hachi-Shiki — a V-formation, which moved open and against the enemy, then closed about him, while other forces slashed through to his rear, engaging any unit that tried to relieve the trapped enemy. Simple tactics, they were suited to the violently broken Korean terrain — and they could be coordinated with flares and bugle calls, the only means of communication the Chinese possessed. As a main objective, one of our units must fight its way quickly around the enemy and cut off his rear…. Route of attack must avoid highways and flat terrain in order to keep tanks and artillery from hindering the attack operations. Night warfare in the mountains must have a definite plan and liaison between platoon groups. Small, leading patrols attack and then sound the bugle. A large number will at that time follow in column. The Chinese soldiers to whom the instructions were read were well fed, well clothed, and sturdy. They wore warm quilted jackets of white, mustard-brown, or blue; many had fur-lined boots. They were tough. They did not fear to leave their own lines; they carried their supply and food, even mortar rounds, with them, over hills, through valleys. Their minds were conditioned by the vast, flowing landscapes of China itself; they would move over the land as if it were the sea, caring little whether they were before the enemy or behind him, for on the sea all position is relative.[...]In open battle, openly arrived at, an American army might have slaughtered them. On the fields of Europe, or in the deserts of North Africa, they would have died under the machines and superior firepower of a mechanized host. But now, Lin Piao’s hosts were not going to engage in open battle, openly arrived at, with the West.They would fight, in their own way, in their own mountains, and they would inflict upon American arms the most decisive defeat they had suffered in the century. Americans were once accustomed to solving problems themselves, T. Greer notes — less as rugged individuals, than as rugged communitarians: When a novel problem occurred, they would gather together with others affected, and would together take action to resolve the problem before them. This lived experience of jointly solving novel problems has largely disappeared from American life. Americans have spent several generations the subject of bureaucratic management, and are rarely given real responsibility for their own affairs. The Karen like impulse of contemporary life is to defer to experts; when a vexing problem disturbs, the default solution is an appeal to management. The problem with all this: managers come from the same stultified society as the managed. Once they attain power they realize they have no more experience building problem-solving institutions than the rest of us. MacArthur felt he could not sit still, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), and let his troops be tied up for the winter: The CCF plan might be to make Korea a permanent running sore, and to tie up more than a hundred thousand U.S. ground troops indefinitely. With winter already howling down out of one of the coldest spots on earth, he had to retreat or attack. He attacked.[...]“I believe that with my air power, now unrestricted so far as Korea is concerned…I can deny reinforcements coming across the Yalu in sufficient strength to prevent the destruction of those forces now arrayed against me in North Korea.”[...]“The giant U.N. pincer moves according to schedule today. The air forces, in full strength, completely interdicted the rear areas, and an air reconnaissance behind the enemy line, and along the entire length of the Yalu River border, showed little sign of hostile military activity.”[...]Whatever the weaknesses of his ground forces, whatever their difficult and exposed positions, U.N. mastery of the skies was complete, and air would be the decisive arm. It was a typically American viewpoint. Bryan Caplan doesn’t expect policies to get too much worse:The same psychological force that thwarted the masses’ wishes before 2012 continues to shield us. What is that force? For want of a better term, ADHD — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Populist policy preferences go hand-in-hand with intellectual laziness and intellectual impatience. As a result, populist voters fail to hold their leaders’ feet to the proverbial fire — allowing wiser, elitist heads to prevail.Take protectionism. Keeping imports out of our country is perennially popular. Never mind centuries of economics classes on the wonders of comparative advantage; the masses are convinced that cheap foreign products make us poorer. Given public opinion, then, it’s amazing that trade barriers are as low as they are. What’s particularly striking is that presidential candidates routinely make protectionist noises to curry favor with the masses. Once elected, however, they get convenient amnesia.Why would vote-seeking politicians show so little follow-through? Because talking about foreign trade, titillating at first, gets old fast. And actually measuring the change in trade barriers bores the masses instantly. As a result, protectionist promises are cheap to break. The masses delight to hear politicians vow to get “tough on China,” but they don’t want to have to think about Chinese imports months after the election, much less monitor their leaders’ concrete efforts to cut China down to size.[...]Emotionally, I look down on the public’s ADHD. When I get an idea into my head, it stays there until someone (possibly myself) argues me out of it. I’m a puritan. Once convinced something is true, I tenaciously act on it. But I’m the first to admit that these are conditional virtues. If you’ve genuinely figured out the right thing to do, determination and follow-through are wonderful. Otherwise, though, they’re a menace.Mankind can and should shape up across the board, but it won’t. I’ll bet on it. And since mankind won’t discover a passion for rationality anytime soon, we should be thankful its ADHD isn’t going away either. In late October, 1950, the South Koreans started capturing enemy soldiers who didn t speak Korean, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), and assumed these were Chinese volunteers:Chinese troops were deliberately misschooled on their own order of battle, so that, captured, they might tell weird tales. There were clashes between Americans and Chinese “volunteers” in odd places — obviously to draw American attention from where the Chinese planned to strike.[...]Air patrolling over the mountains revealed what it had always revealed — nothing. Only heavy, aggressive ground patrolling into the hills could have revealed that the main bodies of two massive Chinese army groups lurked in those deep valleys and forlorn villages, and this action the U.N. never attempted.In the frightful terrain such patrolling was dangerous. It could not be supported by wheels, and where wheels could not go, neither could sizable units of Americans. And in such horrendous terrain a vast army could be — and was — hidden in a very small area, observing perfect camouflage discipline, waiting.[...]As the month progressed, however, FECOM came more and more to the conclusion that there were Chinese troops in Korea. Their numbers were placed at between 40,000 and 70,000. Whether “volunteers,” as the Chinese Government claimed, or otherwise, the big question remained as to what they were doing in Korea.There seemed to be three possibilities, all of which were suggested:The Chinese had come over in limited fashion to help the NKPA hold a base south of the Yalu;They had entered as a show of force to bluff the U.N. into halting south of the river;At the worst, they were a screening force to cover the advance of the main Chinese armies.No one, either in FECOM or the two commands in Korea, suggested that the CCF were already in Korea in massive force. One of the hardest questions a science commentator faces, Matt Ridley says, is when to take a heretic seriously: It’s tempting for established scientists to use arguments from authority to dismiss reasonable challenges, but not every maverick is a new Galileo. As the astronomer Carl Sagan once put it, “Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea and hypothesis—which is tantamount to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism—especially rejection of new ideas before they are adequately tested—and you’re not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also closed to the advance of science.” In other words, as some wit once put it, don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.Peer review is supposed to be the device that guides us away from unreliable heretics. A scientific result is only reliable when reputable scholars have given it their approval. Dr. Yan’s report has not been peer reviewed. But in recent years, peer review’s reputation has been tarnished by a series of scandals. The Surgisphere study was peer reviewed, as was the study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, hero of the anti-vaccine movement, claiming that the MMR vaccine (for measles, mumps and rubella) caused autism. Investigations show that peer review is often perfunctory rather than thorough; often exploited by chums to help each other; and frequently used by gatekeepers to exclude and extinguish legitimate minority scientific opinions in a field.Herbert Ayres, an expert in operations research, summarized the problem well several decades ago: “As a referee of a paper that threatens to disrupt his life, [a professor] is in a conflict-of-interest position, pure and simple. Unless we’re convinced that he, we, and all our friends who referee have integrity in the upper fifth percentile of those who have so far qualified for sainthood, it is beyond naive to believe that censorship does not occur.” Rosalyn Yalow, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, was fond of displaying the letter she received in 1955 from the Journal of Clinical Investigation noting that the reviewers were “particularly emphatic in rejecting” her paper.The health of science depends on tolerating, even encouraging, at least some disagreement. In practice, science is prevented from turning into religion not by asking scientists to challenge their own theories but by getting them to challenge each other, sometimes with gusto. Where science becomes political, as in climate change and Covid-19, this diversity of opinion is sometimes extinguished in the pursuit of a consensus to present to a politician or a press conference, and to deny the oxygen of publicity to cranks. This year has driven home as never before the message that there is no such thing as “the science”; there are different scientific views on how to suppress the virus. Half contemptuously, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), American military men spoke of the “elusive” Lin Piao and the poet Mao Tse-Tung: Mao Tse-tung, Premier of China, had already revealed to the world how his Communist armies operated — how they flowed from place to place, fighting when fighting was profitable, biding their time when it was not. What Mao Tse-tung had written was instructive, and intensely practical for a war in Asia — but because the Chinese wrote in poetic language, not in the military terminology popular in the West, no ambitious second-year ROTC cadet would have dared quote him seriously.After November 1950, many men would grudgingly learn that the thought behind words is more important than the phrases in which the thought is couched. The time would come when every leader in the world would read the writings of the Chinese Communists — for it was barely possible that the war they waged was not so anachronistic as Americans believed. Quite possibly, it was the pattern of all future land wars.In November 1950, then, one army, in open array, loudly proclaiming its every move to the world, marched against a phantom foe. For the CCF, all that month, was a ghost; now you saw it, now you didn’t. It marched by night, under a foggy moon; it sideslipped into the mountains in front of the advancing U.N., and lurked, biding its time.When he was ready, the “elusive” Lin Piao would let the Americans find him. Fortitude Ranch — prepare for the worst, enjoy the present — describes itself as a survival community equipped to survive any type of disaster and long-term loss of law and order, managed by full time staff, and plans to activate for the first time over fears of violence following the presidential election on Nov. 3:“This will be the first time we have opened for a collapse disaster, though it may end up not being so,” said Miller in an emailed statement. “We consider the risk of violence that could escalate in irrational, unpredictable ways into widespread loss of law and order is real.”Fortitude Ranch set up its first camp in West Virginia in 2015 and has two more in Colorado. For an annual fee of around $1,000, members can vacation at camps in good times, and use them as a refuge in the event of a societal collapse. Members are required to own either a rifle or shotgun to defend the communities. The company does not disclose membership numbers. By the middle of November, 1950, approximately 180,000 Chinese waited in front of the Eighth Army, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), while 120,000 lurked in the mountains surrounding Changjin Reservoir on X Corps’ flank:While China broadcast to the world that Chinese “volunteers” would enter the Korean fighting, under Kim Il Sung, the leaders of the CCF never relinquished control of their forces.And it would have been considerable news to the 300,000 Chinese soldiers massed in the cold valleys of Korea to learn that they had volunteered. Many of them did not even know in what part of the world they waited.Lin Piao, and the major leaders of the Chinese Communist Forces, were not simple peasant leaders. The vast majority of the CCF generals were graduates of Whampoa Military Academy or of Russian schools. They had studied Clausewitz and Jomini and the battles of Cannae and Tannenberg as thoroughly as any West Pointer, and they had been engaged in war for all their adult lives. But if they did not act upon the field of battle as Western generals did, it was because they did not command a Western army.The hordes of the Red Army were tough and battle-hardened, but they could not read or write. They had no radios, nor did they have much telephone equipment. They had no air force, or any massive artillery. They were weak in motor transport. Their arms were a miscellany of United States, Japanese, and Russian equipment. They had very few of the things a European or Western army required for war.[...]They had three immense advantages: their own minds, trained to war in the vast reaches of the Middle Kingdom, which instinctively thought in terms of fluid maneuver, without regard to battle lines: the hardihood and sturdy legs of their peasant troops, who could travel long miles on very little; and the enemy’s complete lack of belief in their own existence.[...]Americans believed it incredible that any army of significant size could cross the Yalu and deploy in Korea without observation by their air forces. Daily American aircraft flew over all North Korea; and no armies were ever sighted.Each night, between nine and three, the Chinese troops covered eighteen miles:When light came, every man, every gun, every animal, was hidden from sight. In the deep valleys, in the thick forests, in the miserable villages huddled on the forlorn plateaus, the Chinese rested by day.[...]It was not only cunning and hardihood, but this perfect march and bivouac discipline that caused U.N. aircraft to fly over the CCF hundreds of times without ever once seeing anything suspicious. Even aerial photography revealed nothing.It was a feat that Xenophon’s hoplites, marching back from Persia to the sea, could have performed. Julius Caesar’s hard legions could have done it, and more — the Roman manuals stated that the usual day’s march for a legion was twenty miles, to be covered in five hours.It is extremely doubtful if any modern Western army, bred to wheels, could have matched it. It was almost impossible for Western generals, even those who knew of Xenophon and Caesar, to credit it. When I heard that a team from the University of Rochester had synthesized a room-temperature superconductor, I was not expecting this footnote: The carbonaceous sulfur hydride exhibited superconductivity at about 58 degrees Fahrenheit and a pressure of about 39 million psi.Dias s lab at Rochester used hydrogen-rich materials that metalize at lower pressures than pure hydrogen, producing picoliters of superconductor in a diamond anvil cell: First the lab combined yttrium and hydrogen. The resulting yttrium superhydride exhibited superconductivity at what was then a record high temperature of about 12 degrees Fahrenheit and a pressure of about 26 million pounds per square inch.Next the lab explored covalent hydrogen-rich organic-derived materials.This work resulted in the carbonaceous sulfur hydride. This presence of carbon is of tantamount importance here, the researchers report. Further compositional tuning of this combination of elements may be the key to achieving superconductivity at even higher temperatures, they add. From the first, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), the Communists understood that in a nation almost wholly peasant, only peasants have any political importance: Within two years, they won not only the war but the peasants’ minds. For the peasants would not understand, until too late, that the Communists wanted not justice for them, but to overthrow the entire fabric of Chinese life.The popular morality of what the Communist Chinese have done will probably be judged only in the light of whether or not they made China a great power, and only the future will tell that. If they fail, history will condemn them for the enormous suffering they inflicted upon their land; if they succeed, their own history will largely regard them as heroes, even as Soviet history regards Peter the Great of Russia as a hero, or as the French revolutionists or the Irish Sinn Fein, who resorted to naked force and political murder, are looked upon favorably by millions of their countrymen. Two years ago, Handle reviewed Rod Dreher s The Benedict Option:Almost all Dreher’s critics accuse him of crying wolf or being a Chicken Little at best… Meanwhile, I’m saying that Dreher is underestimating his enemy, painting an overly rosy picture, and not being nearly alarmist enough.Now he reviews Dreher s Live Not By Lies:“Live Not By Lies” is a sequel of sorts to “The Benedict Option”, in what I’m sure will one day be called “Volume 2 of Dreher’s Benedict Option Trilogy.” It’s is a good book, you should read it, and Dreher is in general right about the soft totalitarianism, and if anything, not right enough.[...]As a friend of mine put it, “The single biggest problem is lag-seriousness. We are always just at best about grim enough for yesterday’s battle.”That is where “Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility” comes from. “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” If it were possible, despite denials, and by pointing out a clear logical implication of progressive ideology — and even going so far as to supplement with the early appearances of those explicit proposals — to scare conservatives enough, early enough, to do whatever it takes to avoid it, then the impossible wouldn’t keep happening to them, over and over again.[...]The anti-audience already believes Dreher is far more of a kook and Chicken Little than his Christian critics do, and just a continuation of “The Paranoid Style In American Politics.” To them, Dreher can get in the back of the line behind the McCarthyists, “Eisenhower was a Commie!” John Birchers, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and low-status judgment-day-is-just-around-the-corner-all-the-signs-are-actually-happening prepper types. They are once again proclaiming the first half of the law, “It will never happen.”And without the list of lies, their argument wins the day. It seems fully plausible and convincing. It sounds like this:Oh look at these idiots going off again. Here we are, just trying to make sure love wins and hate loses. Our ‘radical ideology’ amounts to “Don’t be a bigot, help your fellow man, and keep your toxic hatefulness to yourself.” Everybody should be included, and nobody ought to be unjustly discriminated against. Simple, self-evident, human universals, really, do real, loving Christians really disagree so much with any of those? And because the white supremacist homophobes can’t think of anything else to say in response, the hide behind ‘Christianity’ as a pathetic rationalization for their simple irrational animus, and resort to inventing fantasies like gulags and torture rooms and KGB agents. Like *they’re* the victims! Delusional! What kind of creepy psychological problems do they have to really imagine that with all their wealth, comfort, freedom, privilege, and petty first world problems, that they are remotely spiritual kin with people who endured the worst suffering possible? Crazy!Do you see the problem? It’s the ‘merited’ part of the law. Dreher wants to respond with the simple truth, “We’re not bigots, and we don’t deserve it.” The response would be, “Ok, let’s find out. What is it exactly that you are going to insist on believing or doing, that we would possibly think was worth throwing you into a gulag?”He can’t beat around the bush with something general and evasive, “For being devout Christians.”The response (at least from the rare one who knows anything about Christianity) would be as follows:Look, we just think your religion is mostly a collection of mythological fantasies and superstitious prohibitions, but combined with a salvageable core of a worthy moral perspective that, like almost all ancient and traditional lines of philosophy, represents an incomplete and imperfect grasping toward the same ethical framework we now hold dear. That’s why Jefferson rewrote the bible, removing all those superfluous distractions. Following the actual bible seems kind of nutty and backward to us, but now that it’s in clear political retreat in terms of numbers and influence, and since most self-identified Christians don’t really seem to live like they take most of it seriously, we regard it as mostly harmless. So long as you keep it to yourselves.So, nobody is going to throw you in the gulag for going to church. Or for believing Jesus is Lord, that he is the Savior of humanity and God’s only son, that he was born in Bethlehem of the Virgin Mary who in turn was immaculately conceived, that he performed miracles, made water into wine, multiplied bread and fishes, walked upon water, healed the sick, raised the dead, died for our sins, and was resurrected. That he saves his people by means of their repentance and confession to sin and commanded his followers to love each other and their neighbors and their enemies, and to spread his word and the gospel of the good news of their salvation to every soul.Seriously now, is that not Christian enough or you? Are these not the central claims of Christianity? Is that not enough freedom to be a Christian?And we aren’t going to do a single thing to anyone for any of that. Why would we even care? Maybe if proselytizing is done obnoxiously in an imposing manner and makes people feel unsafe and not included. But let’s face it, 99.99% of American Christians aren’t ever doing that anymore, so it’s kind of absurd to spook them, right? Now we will insist that you not discriminate against LGBTs, and not to teach people to hate them, and yes, you will indeed get merited punishment if you persist in doing so. But seriously, is Hate the hill you are choosing to die on?As another friend of mine put it, “We do not want you to subtract from your faith, only to add to it. Just don’t be a jerk and you’ll be just fine.” One reason why the U.N. didn t recognize that China would enter the war in Korea, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), is that China had had no success in war for a long, long time: For more generations than men could count, soldiers in the Middle Kingdom had ranked low in the orders of society, far down the scale from the scholar and the poet. And for more generations than men could count, China had had no skill or success in war. For more than a hundred years, Chinese military forces had…[...]On 1 August 1927 the newly formed Communist Party of China began the fight against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. This date is still carried on CCF battle flags as the date of the Communist Army s founding.For decades the battle raged across China. In 1934, when it seemed that the Nationalist Army had the CCF ringed, approximately 100,000 CCF soldiers retreated north for Kiangsi Province into Shensi, to far Yenan. It was a march without parallel in history, and one almost without parallel for hardships.One year later, after crossing 6,000 miles, eighteen mountain ranges, twenty-four rivers, and twelve provinces, 20,000 survivors under a general named Lin Piao made juncture with other Communist forces in Yenan.During the actual time of march, Lin Piao’s forces had averaged twenty-four miles per day, on foot.In Shensi Province, far removed from the Nationalists and the eyes of the world, the Communist Chinese began to rebuild their base of power. They began to wage guerrilla warfare against the Nationalists.They were led by men who were now hardened soldiers, men who wanted above all else for China to be again a great power, and who felt that Marxism held out the only hope for its accomplishment.The vast areas of China were still feudal; there had never been any true capitalism except that administered by foreigners in the coastal cities. And the pattern of Sinic culture had frozen five thousand years earlier.The new Communist military leaders understood clearly that the pattern of Chinese culture must be thoroughly broken before China could again assume authority in the world. With cunning, courage, and great skill, aided by a centuries-old tradition of corruption that lay across China like a gray shadow, they began to break it. In May, Matt Ridley notes, arguments on the link between Vitamin D deficiency and poor Covid outcomes started to gather speed:That month, the Health Secretary’s attention was drawn to two studies showing a strong association between the incidence and severity of Covid-19 with vitamin D deficiencies in the patients. Vadim Backman of Northwestern University, one of the authors of one of those studies, said about healthy levels of vitamin D that “Our analysis shows that it might be as high as cutting the mortality rate in half.”When asked to look at the evidence, Matt Hancock perfectly reasonably handed the question to Public Health England to answer. They attempted to analyse the statistical data and came up unconvinced. The problem is that a correlation is not a proof of cause and effect, and a correlation (albeit a very strong one) is all that we had at that point. Or almost all that we had.The gold standard of medical research is the randomised controlled trial. Back in May, we had no such test for vitamin D and Covid-19. Now we do. The world’s first randomised control trial on vitamin D and Covid has just been published. The results are clear-cut. The trial, which took place in Spain at the Reina Sofía University Hospital, involved 76 patients suffering from Covid-19. Fifty of those patients were given vitamin D. The remaining 26 were not. Half of those not given Vitamin D became so sick that they needed to be put on intensive care. By comparison, only one person who was given Vitamin D requiring ICU admission.Put another way, the use of Vitamin D reduced a patient’s risk of needing intensive care 25-fold. Early in September, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), Chinese forces began the long march from the south, where they had been deployed against Taiwan, to the mountains along the Yalu.Chou En-lai told the Indian ambassador, “If the United States, or United Nations forces cross the 38th parallel, the Chinese People’s Republic will send troops to aid the People’s Republic of Korea. We shall not take this action, however, if only South Korean troops cross the border.” This message was passed along but was seen as diplomatic blackmail:The Chinese had at least 38 divisions in 9 field armies garrisoned in Manchuria north of the Yalu. Of these, 24 divisions were disposed along the border in position to intervene. This estimate of CCF strength was reasonably accurate.[...]Willoughby’s analysis described the open failure of the North Koreans to rebuild their forces, and suggested that this indicated the CCF and Soviets had decided against further investment in a losing cause.[...]FECOM was at best a collective agency, not an evaluative one for matters of international policy; if Washington permitted FECOM both to collect and to make decisions, then whatever happened the fault was Washington’s.[...]And above all else, it was the terrain and a complete failure of Intelligence that brought disaster. Marching north, the U.N. trumpeted to the world its composition, its battle plan, and even the hour of its execution.Without effort, the enemy knew everything there was to know about the U.N. forces.The U.N., in turn, never knew the enemy existed — until it was much too late. Recent Comments Kirk: A lot of the problem in Korea was that we just didn t have the depth of experience that we needed, nor did we have the manpower possessed of the fieldcraft necessary to stay up in those hills and fight effectively. It was a very one-sided fight when the respective sides had things going their way The conflict was very asymmetrical in that regard. The Chinese/NORK forces were very manpower-intense, with highly skilled light infantry forces that could roam the hills around the UN forces... bomag: Meant to reference Sichelschnitt, the Manstein plan for an unexpected attack and push to the rear. Successful generals like to fill in the blanks of how they out-figured the opponent. bomag: Sounds like he s discussing the Schlieffen plan. Bomag: I found the article s example a bit curious: Sanitary Commission from the Civil War, where some strong-willed individuals created a new bureaucracy. I ve been told the Civil War turbocharged the shift of political power from local, individual control to consolidating such in the central federal capitol; thus empowering bureaucrats and technocrats over the local guy in the marketplace of ideas. RLVC: In our dreams … people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor... Harry Jones: The thing to note here is that productive collaborations assemble themselves from individuals that manage to connect with others of equal merit. The hard part is finding others worthy of working together with as peers. Harry Jones: Taiwan imports an awful lot of its food. Even seafood. And their young people are looking for jobs elsewhere. Self sufficiency collapses when the population density exceeds the land s carrying capacity. It s a lighter version of the Malthusian trap. Wang Wei Lin: Taiwan is a great recent example of economic success principles. When the Chinese Nationalists fled to Taiwan they built a modern economy from scratch by observing two basic fundamentals. A nation should be able to feed itself and make things whether you trade with the world or not. While the US can still feed itself the ability to manufacture all essentials is questionable. Bomag: I ve found hypocrisy plenty heavy among libertarians: we need a strong, authoritarian central gov t to implement our free market solutions; those not approving will get camps or beatings until moral improves. Academic libertarian economists like Caplan are the worst, lecturing us from positions maintained by gov t fiat and subsidy with scant input from markets. They ll even throw math equations at us where they ve found values that make everything work... Harry Jones: I m inclined to be more forgiving of Caplan. He s just saying out loud things I ve thought in my darker moments. Except I don t really believe in comparative advantage as much as he seems to. And I ve mostly outgrown my puritan tendencies. Albion: I may be missing something but I don t think I have read anything in a long while where the author is so full of himself. A puritan who argues with himself? Mankind won t be rational, though he has already pretty much suggested he is? I tenaciously act on it he praises himself. Goodness, such a saint. I am beginning to think I don t like Mr Caplan much. Sam J.: If you disagree with this you are evil and un-American. This is who we are. EFFICIENCY TRUMPS ALL!!! I think all the things you listed have already happened for all practical purposes. Szopen: Yeah! Absolutely! The best possible example is specialisation of 16-17th century Poland in the grain production, where every domestic industry was destroyed, because everything could be cheaply imported from Netherlands. It did us so much good in the long run! McChuck: Comparative advantage has been thoroughly debunked for over a century. If a country makes nothing, it can afford nothing. People need useful jobs to make an economy work. Import duties work. Gavin Longmuir: There are two related problems. The first is that anonymous peer review is a broken process. Anyone who has been closely involved in the process knows that most peer reviews are perfunctory wastes of time. They also know that peer reviewers are given impossibly tight deadlines to do a thorough review, even if they wanted to and had the required skills. The solution in these on-line days would be a fully-attributed public review system, probably analogous to Amazon book reviews. Publish... A Texan: The other issue is the huge glut of Phd s in all fields and that includes STEM. University enrollment will drop over within the decade since there are less young population. There is nothing for these people to do, yet more are created. I would guess there is more demand for trades/two year technical and maybe some vocational than a four year degree. RLVC: Sam, I protest. The full realization of the free market, specifically, and human liberty, generally, is achieved only when all food production is owned by three agricultural gigacorporations, all communications proceed only with the permission of five technological teracorporations, and all circulating dollars are owed ultimately to a council of thirteen banks in New York. If you disagree with this you are evil and un-American. This is who we are. We will deal with you and your opinions when the... RLVC: Sam, I protest. The full realization of the free market, specifically, and human liberty, generally, is achieved only when all food production is owned by three agricultural gigacorporations, all communications media proceed with the permission of five technological teracorporations, and all circulating dollars are owed ultimately to a council of thirteen banks in New York. If you disagree with this you are evil and un-American. This is who we are. We will deal with you and your opinions when the... Sam J.: The Nazis wanted to build a Thousand-Year Reich, but because they couldn’t even manage their economy for a decade’s worth of real growth This is not true and is a lie. While farmers in the US were hanging themselves in their barns German workers were going on vacations. The reason this is so is because Hitler took away the power of the Jew bankers who destroyed the whole entire nation. The banks under the Nazis served the country not the Jews. Using financialization... Dave: Lucky, Marxism works as a parasitic life-form. It can thrive, grow, and spread as long as it doesn t over-tax and kill its host organism. Marxism has grown over the last two centuries because man s ability to create wealth has grown. A fatter dog can feed more fleas. The natural world is swarming with parasites. 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