Links - 11th March 2020 (1)

2608 Magic Weapons and Armour in the Middle Ages, part 2 | The History Network - "A Transylvanian folktale of a dragon slayer has the hero don a lambskin coat and jump into an icy river so that the frozen wool would grant him protection similar to Ragnar. These explanations might seem naive and unbelievable. But in 1977, John McPhee published an account of his travels in Alaska, coming into the country, New York 1977. He recounted the story that male grizzly bears venturing out in winter would find a patch of open water in an otherwise frozen river, would wet their fur and then roll in the snow. The fur would thus acquire a thick ice plant. Arrows broke against the armoring ice, and it can be heavy enough to stop a bullet. This, according to McPhee, was the feared winter bear of the Eskimo, and this story seems to give credence to the saga version. We therefore see a plausible practical armor which could quite easily be interpreted or recorded as magical"

2706 Franco-German Rivalry | The History Network - "[On World War II] After the German surrender, the same cycle of revenge seemed to be repeating again. An early plan was to remove all industry from the Ruhr, and Churchill looked forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastorall in its character. Secretary of the Treasury Henry J. Morgenthau wanted Germans to be fed three times a day with soup from army soup kitchens. Reparations were again to be paid to the victors, but in the form of industrial plant and labor. However, with the creation of the Communist Eastern Bloc, it seemed obvious that the West needed a strong West Germany on the border. Marshall Plan aid was extended to West Germany in 1948. In 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schumann proposed a radical new plan to stop the cycle of wars and revenge between France and Germany, forming a European Coal and Steel community to make war not only unthinkable, but materially impossible. For the first time in history, these two countries would be part of an alliance and the nations are finally at peace with each other"

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 243 - Bryan Caplan on "The Case for Open Borders" - "if you look at poor immigrants, they're much more likely to have successful kids than poor natives. Because it seems like a lot of the reason why first generation immigrants are poor is because they just start off with so many disadvantages of not being fluent in the language. Or they just didn't have the advantages that a native would have, of being able to arrange their career nicely and neatly.But then their kids wind up growing up in this country, and they do as well as their parents would have, if their parents had not had these disadvantages. Because they don't have them."

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, No Love Lost - "These days guarding any Korean facility in Japan is a nervous occupation. Live bullets are being sent to the Korean embassy in Tokyo with the message: I've got a rifle and I'm hunting Koreans. Meanwhile, outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, two people died after setting themselves on fire during anti Japanese protests. Inside the airline office, a row of empty seats would normally be filled with eager customers booking flights. But these are not normal times. The Japanese government has issued a travel warning to citizens: go to South Korea at your own risk. No, not North Korea. I really am talking about South Korea. Across the Japan Sea, of course known as the East Sea by Koreans, South Koreans are boycotting travel to Japan. Korean Air has experienced a 90% drop in customers flying between these two Asian neighbors and several air routes have been suspended… The feud started a year ago when South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled that big name Japanese companies should compensate the families of Koreans who'd been forced labourers during World War Two. Fed up with such demands, the right wing Abe government decided to get tough. In July, Tokyo started to impede the export of chemicals that are vital to South Korean semiconductor manufacturing. Not a ban exactly, but no one is as masterful at strangling trade with red tape as Japanese bureaucrats, South Koreans reacted with demonstrations and a boycott of Japanese products. Some petrol stations are refusing to fill up Japanese cars. The government in Seoul scrapped an intelligence sharing arrangement that's crucial for monitoring North Korea. There's never been much love lost between Japan and South Korea despite a formal alliance in the face of threats from North Korea and China. Up until the 1990s South Korea banned Japanese films, books and music under the wonderfully titled ‘Law for punishing anti national deeds’. Now relations have sunk to a new low. Some Japanese nationalist are demanding a complete severance of ties with South Korea. And this being Japan, where there's a word for everything, there's a word for that too. Dan Kan [sp?], which literally means sever Korea...
[On communist Poland] My theme back then was the gap between hope and experience in the state restaurants of the day. A menu might offer you pickled wild mushrooms, or caramelized sour cherries with your barbecued duck. When you ordered though, you'd find yourself working your way down a list of dishes which one by one, a bored looking waiter would tell you were unavailable. You would generally end up with a grizzly lump of meat and a portion of potatoes which looked as if they'd been boiled in motor oil, and then finished with a flame thrower. I cringe a bit when I look back, but there did seem to be an inexhaustible appetite then for dispatches exploring how hotels in communist countries never had bath plugs, or how Eastern European tour guides would furtively negotiate to buy your jeans off you. Anyway, 30 years old, I found myself back in the same hotel. Now very much under new management of course. And I can report for those who seek a symbol of how far Eastern Europe has changed that the pickled wild mushrooms and caramelized sour cherries have arrived. They are admittedly 30 years late, but they are here. And if you seek difficulty in capitalism to match the misery of communism, it is that they are available now, but only at a price that someone living on an average salary in Poland couldn't possibly afford."

Pope Francis Tells Christians Not to Try to Convert Nonbelievers - "Pope Francis told Christian high school students this weekend they should respect people of other faiths and not attempt to convert them to Christianity, insisting “we are not living in the times of the crusades.”Asked by one of the students Friday how a Christian should treat people of other faiths or no faith, the pope said that “we are all the same, all children of God” and that true disciples of Jesus do not proselytize... “The last thing I should do is to try to convince an unbeliever. Never,” he said. “The last thing I should do is speak. I should live my faith with consistency. And it will be my witness that will awaken the curiosity of the other who may then ask: ‘But why do you do this?’ And yes, then I can speak.”  “But listen, the gospel is never, ever advanced through proselytism,” he continued. “If someone says he is a disciple of Jesus and comes to you with proselytism, he is not a disciple of Jesus. Proselytism is not the way; the Church does not grow by proselytism.”"
Uhh
Apparently proselytism is the same as waging holy war

Girl with Rare Disease Invents Teddy Bears That Hide IV Bags so Kids Don't Get Scared - "Ella Casano is the inventor of “Medi Teddy” and we are not talking about an adult inventor, but of a 12-year-old girl. This was her school project with a sole purpose to make the time spent in hospitals more comfortable to other children."

China Only Has One Time Zone—and That's a Problem - The Atlantic - "China, a country that is of roughly similar size to the continental United States, has one time zone: Beijing Standard Time. This means that when it's 6 o’clock in the nation's capital, it’s 6 o’clock almost 3,000 miles further west, in Kashgar... the single time zone does present odd sights: In the summer, for instance, it isn’t uncommon in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, to see people enjoying a beautiful sunset ... at midnight. Or for the sun to rise there in the winter around 10 AM. In order to accommodate people inconvenienced by the time zone change, shops and restaurants in Xinjiang often adjust their hours—but the effect can still be disorienting for the unaccustomed traveler... much of the Uighur population prefers to use their own time. In Urumqi, a city in Xinjiang's east populated mostly by the Han, Beijing Standard Time suffices. But as you head further west, into areas further away from Beijing (and with a higher concentration of Uighurs), knowing “which time” to use becomes trickier. In Xinjiang's extreme west, near China’s border with Pakistan, Beijing Standard Time is so irrelevant that it isn't even used on bus timetables"

Men are banding together in class-action lawsuits against discrimination in Title IX cases (opinion) - "Miltenberg is a legal pioneer who has won groundbreaking victories before the Second and Seventh Circuit Courts of Appeals. The Second Circuit decision, Doe v. Columbia University, is significant for prohibiting institutions from engaging in discrimination against men even for a short period of time and even in the absence of overt malice. The precedent Miltenberg won before the Seventh Circuit, Doe v. Purdue University, is no less significant because it relies on a “sex stereotyping” theory under which most (if not all) institutions in the nation would fail to comply with Title IX. Specifically, the Seventh Circuit found it intolerable that Purdue University would “blame men as a class for the problem of campus sexual assault.”Is it a radical notion that most American colleges engage in rampant discrimination against men? Hardly so. The lack of due process in Title IX tribunals has received widespread and bipartisan criticism in recent years from legal and academic experts. Critics include the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the National Association of Scholars, former California governor Edmund Brown Jr., the NCHERM group, U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the American College of Trial Lawyers and others. Various coalition letters have also condemned the unfair application of Title IX to sexual harassment disputes, eliciting hundreds of signatures on multiple occasions... A general survey of colleges and their current Title IX practices reveals a grim picture. The overwhelming majority of people accused and sanctioned under Title IX are male, but research has found that men and women experience sexual victimization at nearly equivalent rates, and the majority of male victims report female perpetrators. Meanwhile, the majority of Title IX administrators nationwide are women. In addition, Title IX administrators can also often use biased and unscientific training materials."

Lessons for capitalism from the East India Company | Financial Times - "By the beginning of the 19th century, the East India Company had become, as one of its directors admitted, “an empire within an empire”, with the power to make war or peace anywhere in the east.The EIC had created a vast and sophisticated administration and civil service in India, and built much of London’s Docklands. Its annual spending in Britain — around £8.5m — equalled about a quarter of total British government annual expenditure. No wonder the Company now referred to itself as “the grandest society of merchants in the Universe”. Its private armies were larger than those of almost all nation-states and its power encircled the globe; indeed, its shares were a kind of global reserve currency. As the parliamentarian Edmund Burke wrote: “The Constitution of the Company began in commerce and ended in Empire.” Its private armies were larger than those of almost all nation-states and its power encircled the globe; indeed, its shares were a kind of global reserve currency... the EIC remains history’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power — and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders can seemingly become those of the state... The EIC, in other words, was not just the world’s first great multinational corporation, it was also the first to run amok and show how large companies can become more powerful, and sometimes more dangerous, than nations or even empires...      Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.     https://www.ft.com/content/0f1ec9da-c9a6-11e9-af46-b09e8bfe60c0      England was a relatively impoverished, largely agricultural country, which had spent almost a century at war with itself over the most divisive subject of the time: religion.  In the course of this, in what seemed to many of its wisest minds as an act of wilful self-harm, the English had unilaterally cut themselves off from the most powerful institution in Europe, so turning themselves in the eyes of many Europeans into something of a pariah nation. As a result, isolated from their baffled neighbours, the English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield"
Perhaps after Brexit the UK can similarly prosper

Boris Johnson's hard Brexit makes Scottish independence all but impossible, whatever the emotions - "If it is such a calamity for Britain to leave the EU customs union - as the Scottish National Party tells us - then it must logically be a greater calamity for Scotland to leave the UK union since the same problems exist and are greatly magnified. “The links between Scotland and the UK are much deeper, so the pain for Scotland would be commensurately larger,” says Sir Andrew Large, ex-deputy governor of the Bank of England. Over 60pc of Scottish exports go to the rest of this Kingdom. Just 18pc go to the EU. The imbalance is overwhelming and Scotland is not geographically close to Europe’s industrial core, stretching from the Ruhr valley to Lombardy. It would face the logistical distance of Italy’s Mezzogiorno. I leave it to others with fingers on the northern pulse to judge whether the Scottish people really would wish to go through the trauma of withdrawal having observed how difficult it is to break up a 44-year union, let alone a 400-year merger of the kingdoms, especially if Boris Johnson ensures that powers devolved from the EU over fisheries, farming, the environment, etc, go generously to Edinburgh and are not whittled down by ‘Section 12 regulations’ in Westminster as Theresa May seemed bent on doing. It is surely a unionist imperative at this juncture to endow Scotland with greater self-government as a nation within the UK than it would enjoy as a nominally-sovereign member of the EU, without a legal opt-out from the euro, at the mercy of the Fiscal Compact and the deflationary anti-Keynesian ideology of monetary union. From a strict economic point of view nothing has improved for the independence cause since 2014, and much is now worse. Gone are hopes of an oil and gas rentier endowment. Brent crude no longer trades in a range around $110 a barrel as it did from 2011 to 2014, creating the illusion of a permanent plateau and permanent subsidy... from a fiscal standpoint Scotland is currently a dependency state, in stark contrast to Catalonia, Flanders, or Alto Adige. It is not a net contributor to the central budget: it is a recipient of net transfers on a grand scale. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the implicit budget deficit was 7.9pc of GDP last year. Somehow the SNP is going to cut this to under 3pc over a decade, to placate EU inspectors and bond market vigilantes, and do this in the midst of a first order macroeconomic shock, with an ageing crisis for good measure. “It is a recipe for an almost never ending dose of austerity,” says Professor Ronald MacDonald from Glasgow University... The cuts cannot be squared with the SNP’s promise of a nordic social policy paradise. “Global investors should not worry about Scoxit any time soon,” is the acid verdict of Mike Gallagher from Continuum Economics... Were Scotland to go further and declare unilateral independence - like Catalonia, where regional leaders have been locked away in an Iberian Gulag -  it would start life in diplomatic as well as economic ostracism, a turbo-charged variant of the worst ‘no deal’. Spain would without question block EU accession in such circumstances. Scotland’s position would be catastrophic."
Plus the Scots will want to virtue signal about climate change so they wouldn't be able to use ridiculous oil price assumptions even if they wanted to. So bereft of equalisation payments, economic projections devoid of fossil fuel money would drive the putative country into a depression as the economy returned to being based on sheep

A Scottish independence weather warning: baby, it’s cold outside the Union - "No sensible Englishman should seek to bribe the Scots to stay in the Union, or make further constitutional concessions short of full independence. The reward for doing so in 2014 was 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats voting for the Nationalist party earlier this month, and thus declaring a ‘mandate’ for another plebiscite... Although the SNP’s share of the vote rose by eight per cent, the party attracted just 45 per cent of total support – exactly the proportion anti-Unionists recorded in 2014.  So, despite the allegedly traumatic effect the vote to leave the EU has had on Scotland, there is no net gain to the cause of separatism. And one says ‘allegedly’ because a poll in Scotland in 2016 showed that 36 per cent of Nationalists voted Leave in that year’s referendum – which, if you think about it, is an entirely logical position. Why, if you wish to end what you see as colonial oppression from London, would you willingly invite it from Brussels?... Scotland does not trade much with the rest of the EU. It trades with England... there is the question of what currency Scotland would use. This, readers will recall, was an issue in 2014. Then, Alex Salmond blithely said Scotland would go on using the pound, much as little islands in the Caribbean use the dollar.  Many such islands live in poverty extreme by our standards, largely as a result of having a currency that does not reflect the weakness of their economy. At least many of them are tourist destinations and entice people in to spend foreign currency; Scotland will have to develop itself considerably as a cold-weather theme park if it is to flourish in such circumstances. And, of course, if it adopts the pound, it will have a currency dependent on economic policies it can no longer affect in any way, and which will be formulated to help England, not Scotland... a condition of re-joining [the EU] would be the immediate adoption of the euro as the currency, and all that that entails. And if any Scot doesn’t know what it entails, ask Greece. Currently, the whole UK has a budget deficit of 1.1 per cent of GDP; Scotland’s alone is 7 per cent. And although the Scots deny being subsidised by the English, public spending is £1500 per capita higher in Scotland than it is in England; and the population of Scotland is estimated at 5.4million; and there is no money tree. In 2007 Mr Salmond rebuked me for doubting that the Scottish economy could not thrive alone. Oil (now $60 a barrel) was then around $135 a barrel. And I was implored not to forget the great Scottish financial services industry – RBS and HBOS. Within a year both banks were in intensive care, saved largely by the English taxpayer"

Refugees Can Now Vote In Scotland
Maybe the UK should let them go after all