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fischerry

Beer Hall Putsch - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com - 0 views

  • the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, a failed takeover of the government in Bavaria, a state in southern Germany.
  • Hitler was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in prison. He spent less than a year behind bars, during which time he dictated “Mein Kampf,” his political autobiography. The putsch and Hitler’s subsequent trial turned him into a national figure.
  • In 1923, Adolf Hitler was 34, an age when most people have finished school and settled into an occupation. He was a high-school dropout, however, and a failed artist whose military service during World War I (1914-18) had been the high point of his life.
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    This article is about the Beer Hall Putsch. I think that the Beer Hall Putsch is very important to the rise of Germany because it turned Hitler into a national figure.
malonema1

German political campaigns ramp up during beer-fueled Ash Wednesday rallies | News | DW... - 0 views

  • German political campaigns ramp up during beer-fueled Ash Wednesday rallies
  • The typical rhetorical restraint used by German politicians is thrown out of the window during the annual, beer-fueled rallies held by Germany's political parties. Instead, prominent German politicians rail against their opponents in cutting speeches rife with colorful insults.
  • beer-drinking crowd of 4,000 people.
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  • Although Seehofer renewed his call for a yearly cap on refugees - a position that Merkel strongly opposes - he voiced his support for the German chancellor during his Ash Wednesday speech.
  • Germany's business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) likewise bashed the social democrat candidate, painting him as their main opponen
fischerry

The History Place - Rise of Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch - 0 views

  • A series of financial events unfolded in the years 1921 through 1923 that would propel the Nazis to new heights of daring and would even prompt Hitler into attempting to take over Germany.
  • The German currency, the mark, slipped drastically in value. It had been four marks to the U.S. dollar until the war reparations were announced. Then it became 75 to the dollar and in 1922 sank to 400 to the dollar.
  • The National Revolution has begun!" Hitler shouted. "No one may leave the hall. Unless there is immediate quiet I shall have a machine gun posted in the gallery. The Bavarian and Reich governments have been removed and a provisional national government formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and police are occupied. The Army and the police are marching on the city under the swastika banner!" None of that was true, but those in the beer hall could not know otherwise.
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    Another article on the Beer Hall Putsch. It's interesting how this article emphasized inflation as a factor of the event, and it talked about how Hitler lied often.
Javier E

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Polymathic Cultural Historian, Dies at 81 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For four decades, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a polymathic cultural historian, feasted on those and other brainteasers as he explored mass transportation, spices and stimulants, commercial lighting and the legacy of defeat on society in about a dozen groundbreaking books.
  • “He was an extraordinary public intellectual, an independent largely unaffiliated wildly poly-curious and extravagantly gifted seeker after the patterns and idiosyncrasies of history,” the author Lawrence Wechsler wrote after Mr. Schivelbusch’s death
  • Die Zeit, the German national weekly, called Mr. Schivelbusch a “master of cultural-historical research.”
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  • Among his books are “The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century” (1977), “Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants” (1980), “Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century” (1983), “The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery” (2001) and “Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939” (2005).
  • Mr. Schivelbusch operated for most of his career as a private scholar, free from academic constraints but dependent on grants and book advances.
  • In Europe, beer soup (heat eggs, butter and salt, then add them to beer and pour over pieces of a roll or white bread) was the breakfast drink of choice before it was replaced by coffee in the 18th century.
  • Gas mains changed family life because they eliminated the hearth as the focus of family life by giving individuals personal light. They also helped replace private enterprise through the granting of municipal or regional gas monopolies.
Javier E

What Your Beer Says About Your Politics - Hotline On Call - 1 views

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    according to this chart, i would be a high-turnout democrat...
sarahbalick

DEATH VALLEY: Three suspects ID'd in death of rare Devil's Hole pupfish (UPDATE) - Pres... - 0 views

  • DEATH VALLEY: Three suspects ID'd in death of rare Devil's Hole pupfish (UPDATE)
  • It only lives in one spot – the 93-degree waters of Devil’s Hole, part of a detached unit of Death Valley National Park in Nye County, Nevada.
  • Three men on a drunken spree killed one of the Devil’s Hole pupfish late last month. The men left behind beer cans, vomit and boxer shorts, according to National Parks Service surveillance footage.
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  • On Monday, May 9, the Center for Biological Diversity tripled the reward to $15,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.Initially, the parks service had offered a $5,000 reward
  • Authorities released surveillance video Monday showing the men climbing a fence guarding Devils Hole on April 30. They fired at least 10 rounds from a shotgun, shooting the locks off of two gates, and left beer cans and vomit
  • “The last thing they need are these idiots running amok in the last place on Earth where they still survive,” she said.
sgardner35

Police: No Proof That Rape in Article Occurred at UVa Frat - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Police said Monday that they've been unable to confirm that an alleged gang rape
  • occurred at a University of Virginia fraternity house as described in a Rolling Stone article
  • We are still investigating," Charlottesville Police Capt. Gary Pleasants said in an email to The Associated Press.
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  • The school temporarily suspended fraternities' and sororities' social activities while administrators vowed to take an extensive look at improving safety on campus.
  • Among them: Kegs of beer and pre-made mixes of liquor and punch will be banned; beer must be served in closed cans, and food and water must be made available.
Javier E

Ken Burns's 'Vietnam War' Episode 6 recap: Behind the most famous photo of Vietnam - Th... - 0 views

  • Adams’s photograph was on the front page of every newspaper, it seems, across the world as well as the country, and had profound influence on turning people’s opinions about the war, it is the footage that in some ways has the power to see the cavalierness with which Loan steps up to him and kills him. The drinking of the beer afterwards.
  • But more importantly, the way Lem falls. The way the blood gushes up 8 or 10 or 12 inches from his head for a moment. The way a pool of blood — and NBC, to their credit, insists that we only use exactly what was being shown. No more, and more importantly no less for those of us uncomfortable by that sort of stuff.
  • Q: I think for me, I mean you talked about the beer and the way he falls. But the thing that has always stayed with me is the looseness of the general’s wrist as he’s waving the revolver around.
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  • BURNS: That’s what I meant by cavalier. It’s just so run-of-the-mill, as if the extinguishing — and, look, you’re in the military, that’s your job. But just the cavalierness of a surrendered prisoner or a captured prisoner or whatever it is, it’s a spy and obviously he’s lost comrades in this. But there’s no justification for that moment in any rational scenario — any humane scenario, is probably the better way to describe it. And so what it becomes is an abhorrent mirror to the possibilities in ourselves.
  • This episode is called “Things Fall Apart” and it has to do with the William Butler Yeats poem that Robert Kennedy cites in an editorial that he writes that year opposing the war in no uncertain terms in the New York Times. But it’s also about what the title of the next episode is about: the veneer of civilization.
  • This is how close we are. I always feel that all of these images here are mirrors. They ask us — and I think one of the gifts of filmmaking is that it permits us to order and sequence images to remind us of not what happens but also what we are capable of ourselves.
  • And look, murder and war, they’re synonymous. But there’s something about that moment, that photograph and that footage, that are the — it’s the heart of darkness of the whole story.
Javier E

Green Beer and Rank Hypocrisy - The New York Times - 0 views

  • this year’s St. Patrick’s Day jamboree at the White House will be a breathtaking celebration of double standards and the willful forgetting of America’s recent past.
  • The president will salute the legacy of one wave of immigrants even as he deploys against other immigrants the same calumnies once heaped upon the Irish.
  • The Irish Catholic immigrants who washed up in the United States after the potato famine of the 1840s were, on the whole, the most destitute national group ever to arrive on American shores.
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  • The typical Irish Catholic arrival in New York or Boston was a peasant with little formal education and few material resources.
  • In the Trump era, there are only two ways to toast the achievements of the Irish in America. One of them is tacitly racist. It relies on a silent distinction, an assumption that the Irish are somehow different from, say, today’s migrants from Latin America. But what is that distinction? It is not that the Irish were wealthier or better educated by contemporary standards, or more highly skilled or harder working. It is simply that they were white and their whiteness gave them a right to be in the United States.
  • people of Irish descent must celebrate their heritage in a radically different way: as the ultimate rebuke to a paranoid frenzy about immigration. We Irish are not Know Nothings. We know something important: what it’s like to be feared, to be discriminated against, to be stereotyped. We know from our own family histories that anti-immigrant hysteria is founded on lies. And we know that, over time, those lies are exposed. Yesterday’s alien is today’s workmate; yesterday’s pariah is today’s patriot.
  • The Irish belong, not because they are better or worse than any other group of migrants, now or in the past. They belong because they are exactly the same: hopeful people doing their best to build dignified lives.
aidenborst

Biden announces 'National Month of Action' -- that could include free beer -- to get mo... - 0 views

  • President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced a "National Month of Action" and outlined additional steps his administration is taking to get 70% of US adults at least one Covid-19 shot by July 4.
  • "It's going to take everyone, everyone -- the federal government, the state governments, local, tribal and territorial governments, private sector, and most importantly the American people -- to get to this 70% mark so we can declare our independence from Covid-19 and free ourselves from the grip it has held over us, our lives, for the better part of a year," Biden said
  • "A summer of freedom, a summer of joy, a summer of get-togethers and celebrations. An all-American summer that this country deserves after a long, long dark winter that we've all endured," Biden said.
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  • In his speech, Biden will also announce new vaccination incentives, new outreach efforts to educate Americans about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines and new steps to make it easier for Americans to get the shot.
  • Four of the nation's largest childcare providers will offer free childcare from now until July 4 to Americans who are getting their Covid-19 vaccine or recovering from the shot, the White House announced Wednesday.
  • Starting next week, thousands of pharmacies, including Albertsons, CVS, Rite-Aid, and Walgreens will stay open late every Friday in June in order to allow more Americans to get vaccinated.
  • Thousands of employers and businesses have also offered incentives for Americans to get vaccinated this month. Nearly 51% of the total US population has received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine, and nearly 41% of the total population is fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.
  • CDC data shows 12 states have met the Biden administration's goal to have 70% of adults with at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. California and Maryland recently joined Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont in reaching that benchmark.
  • Three Covid-19 vaccines have emergency use authorization by the FDA -- the two-shot Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines and the one shot vaccine from Johnson & Johnson.
Javier E

How the West Got Covid So Wrong. Covid is a Test of Civilization, and… | by u... - 0 views

  • In Britain, Covid now “exceeds the worst-case scenario.” In America, a thousand people die a day, and cases are skyrocketing. In Europe, the numbers are exploding. Covid is ripping savagely across the West. But in the East, meanwhile, life is slowly returning to some semblance of normality.
  • That’s a remarkable development — the West, after all, is made up of the world’s richest, most powerful societies. And yet it seems they couldn’t defeat something as tiny as a virus. The East is far poorer, less developed — and yet, it was able to defeat Covid, while the West is in the grip of the pandemic, all over again, worse than before.
  • So how did the West get Covid so wrong?
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  • Now, to the East, this behaviour is both jaw-dropping and bewildering. It goes beyond mere irresponsibility, and is considered something more like stupidity, ignorance, malice, deceit, or all four
  • That is what civilization is, and where it begins: the presence of the very first kind of enlightened mind, which can nourish, protect, and elevate another
  • What does Mead’s Femur have do with the West’s stunning failure that let Covid spiral out of control? As it turns out, everything.
  • These days, the tourists are gone, mostly. But — and here’s the point — the bars, restaurants, and clubs are still full. I pass by them on my daily walk to the park and wonder: what are these people doing? How are they sitting there so close to one another, with no social distancing in place, laughing, joking in the middle of a literal pandemic that’s exploding all around them? What the?
  • The people I pass by in the bars are made of two social groups, largely. Young people, and the working class. That’s the same group, in a sense, since most young people are working class, until they amass enough wealth to rise beyond it
  • They have made a choice. Their beer and burger or cocktail and steak matters more than stopping the spread of a deadly disease. What the?
  • This group is putting the most vulnerable in society at profound risk. Those who are already ill, and immunocompromised. Those even lower down the socioeconomic ladder than them — minorities, the underclass, and so forth, among whom death rates are astronomical. The elderly, the frail, the aged.
  • Certain groups in Western society have made the decision that the vulnerable’s lives matter less than their right to party, to have a beer and a burger, a cocktail and a steak, a laugh at the pub with friends. What the?
  • The groups who are now apparently completely indifferent to spreading Covid seem to have taken their cues from leaders. Young people and the working class seem to have no conscience or compunction left whatsoever about spreading Covid
  • To act in such a way as to put your elders, or the ill, especially, at risk, is something that is a grave violation of social norms. Easterners can’t understand why Westerners are behaving like…spoiled children. Are they right?
  • There is a kind of toxic indifference that seems to have spread through Western societies. Life itself is treated with a kind of shrugging fatalism — especially those of the vulnerable. It is literally valued less than a night out at the pub by much of society.
  • The attitude of toxic indifference is what the West seems to share in common now, and that is why it has been brought to its knees by Covid.
  • the West” is not monolithic. Certainly, toxic indifference is not at the same level across all of it
  • let me discuss the most extreme examples — America and Britain — to highlight where toxic indifference comes from: leadership.
  • In Britain and America, Covid cases have now exploded well past their first peak. America is approaching 100,000 cases per day — the point at which social breakdown will begin. Britain is hitting more than that, on a per capita basis. And yet neither of these societies has a national lockdown.
  • uccessful societies — New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and many more — deliberately crunched the curve. Their strategy was to eradicate Covid, through what’s now a global template of best practices — lock down, test, trace, quarantine, isolate, and so forth.
  • The approach of Western leaders, in other words, was reactive, hesitant, and cautious, not decisive, swift, and proactive:
  • Margaret Mead once said that the beginning of human civilisation was found in a healed femur. That that single, simple discovery meant that someone took the time to invest in healing someone else’s broken leg — without which they surely would have died
  • Western leaders, in other words, modelled toxic indifference for their societies. They gave people a license to be indifferent, by acting largely indifferent themselves.
  • Young people justify it by saying that “they need to have social lives” — as if they weren’t spending most of their social lives online before Covid, and the working class by saying they need to work. Both of those arguments are partially true. But it’s truer to say that these are groups which have become dangerously indifferent to preserving the value of the lives of the vulnerable.
  • The young and the working class are punching down, as American leftists would put it.
  • More formally, more accurately, Covid has made Western societies predatory ones. The young and working class are exploiting and abusing those more powerless than them
  • Neither group seems to consider the possibility much that society needs to come together to defeat the pandemic, once and for all, and the only way that can be done is to put the vulnerable first.
  • America treating Covid indifferently is no surprise, after all — it’s a nation where kids are gunned down in schools, diabetics are simply left to die, people beg strangers online for money to pay for crippling healthcare costs
  • But it’s more surprising to see Europe turning predatory due to Covid, or having Covid expose its vulnerability to becoming predatory
  • I don’t mean to single the young and working class out. That is missing my point. What I am saying is that toxic indifference is trickling down in the West. From elites, like leaders, to the bourgeois — that’s been the case for the last few decades
  • Indifference is trickling down from the elite and the bourgeois, to the working class and the young.
  • we know where a society of indifference ends. It ends in America. In stupidity, ignorance, violence, hate, racism, brutality, and the poverty and despair which underlies it all.
  • The indifferent cannot act collectively, therefore they cannot invest, transform, change, unite, come together, and therefore they cannot live in a modern, functioning society, with an expansive, sophisticated, supportive, generous social contract
  • So what about climate change? Mass extinction? Ecological collapse? The massive waves of depression and ruin those will unleash — in the next decade? How can societies that can’t unite, act wisely, behave responsibly to fight Covid come together to do much about even larger catastrophes?
  • Covid reveals the decivilizing of the West. As I mentioned, Margaret Mead said the fundamental test of civilization is the healed femur: that someone took the time and effort to heal someone else. It is the absence of indifference and the presence of care, in other words
  • What made the West special, once upon a time, was not its brutality, but its idea of civilization, as the elevation and nourishment of every life, with dignity, purpose, belonging, truth, justice, and, more crucially, the idea that freedom was a society that was able to act in a civilised way.
  • freedom became free-dumb: the idea that my right to be abusive, exploitative, ignorant, violent, selfish — to carry a gun to Starbucks or deny you healthcare and retirement — came to prevail
  • If the pattern of the West’s decaying attitudes, the spread of the foolish American idea of free-dumb as “freedom,” is what Covid has revealed — I punch down, on the person below me, I exploit and abuse the person even lower than me in the socioeconomic hierarchy, because that is what I must do to survive, or at least what I have been taught to do to feel good and worthy — then the simple fact is that the West has little future
  • Their failure teaches us something. Civilization matters. When a society gives up on the idea of being civilized, it collapses harder and faster than its most learned wise men often imagine. That is because no society can withstand a tidal wave of stupidity and violence. Is that where the West is headed?
  • In a simpler way, maybe the simplest, what I am talking about is a lack of simple human goodness. That is what Mead’s Femur points to — the presence of goodness — and it is what is missing in America and Britain. They are now societies with a massive, gaping, jaw-dropping lack of human goodness, and Covid is just the latest example. But that deficit spells real trouble — it isn’t some kind of abstract moral concern.
  • Covid is a cold wind, and it shows that the flame is flickering. If anything, it shows us the future of civilization — in Mead’s sense, as the absence of violence, and the presence of decency, dignity, care, nourishment, equality, of human goodness realized — may lie in the East.
Javier E

Campaigns Mine Personal Lives to Get Out Vote - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Strategists affiliated with the Obama and Romney campaigns say they have access to information about the personal lives of voters at a scale never before imagined. And they are using that data to try to influence voting habits — in effect, to train voters to go to the polls through subtle cues, rewards and threats in a manner akin to the marketing efforts of credit card companies and big-box retailers.
  • In the weeks before Election Day, millions of voters will hear from callers with surprisingly detailed knowledge of their lives. These callers — friends of friends or long-lost work colleagues — will identify themselves as volunteers for the campaigns or independent political groups. The callers will be guided by scripts and call lists compiled by people — or computers — with access to details like whether voters may have visited pornography Web sites, have homes in foreclosure, are more prone to drink Michelob Ultra than Corona or have gay friends or enjoy expensive vacations.
  • “You don’t want your analytical efforts to be obvious because voters get creeped out,” said a Romney campaign official who was not authorized to speak to a reporter. “A lot of what we’re doing is behind the scenes.”
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  • however, consultants to both campaigns said they had bought demographic data from companies that study details like voters’ shopping histories, gambling tendencies, interest in get-rich-quick schemes, dating preferences and financial problems. The campaigns themselves, according to campaign employees, have examined voters’ online exchanges and social networks to see what they care about and whom they know. They have also authorized tests to see if, say, a phone call from a distant cousin or a new friend would be more likely to prompt the urge to cast a ballot.
  • The campaigns have planted software known as cookies on voters’ computers to see if they frequent evangelical or erotic Web sites for clues to their moral perspectives. Voters who visit religious Web sites might be greeted with religion-friendly messages when they return to mittromney.com or barackobama.com. The campaigns’ consultants have run experiments to determine if embarrassing someone for not voting by sending letters to their neighbors or posting their voting histories online is effective.
  • “I’ve had half-a-dozen conversations with third parties who are wondering if this is the year to start shaming,” said one consultant who works closely with Democratic organizations. “Obama can’t do it. But the ‘super PACs’ are anonymous. They don’t have to put anything on the flier to let the voter know who to blame.”
  • Officials at both campaigns say the most insightful data remains the basics: a voter’s party affiliation, voting history, basic information like age and race, and preferences gleaned from one-on-one conversations with volunteers. But more subtle data mining has helped the Obama campaign learn that their supporters often eat at Red Lobster, shop at Burlington Coat Factory and listen to smooth jazz. Romney backers are more likely to drink Samuel Adams beer, eat at Olive Garden and watch college football.
Javier E

Bronx Officer's Recording Suggests Race Is Factor in Stops - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “The problem was, what, male blacks,” Inspector McCormack said. “And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this, male blacks 14 to 20, 21.” The conversation was played on the fourth day of a class-action lawsuit covering several million stop-and-frisk encounters in the city, a police tactic that the Bloomberg administration has embraced, citing its effectiveness in driving down gun violence. But the tactic has proved divisive in many parts of the city and has become a major issue in the mayoral race.
  • Civil rights lawyers have long maintained that the term “right people” is police code for young black and Hispanic men, who make up an overwhelming share of those stopped. But the police, on the other hand, say that they use this phrase to describe habitual lawbreakers, and that by focusing on the “right people,” they are trying to avoid giving tickets to the construction worker drinking a beer on his way home or the couple strolling through a park that is closed for the night.
Javier E

Police Retreat in Istanbul as Protests Expand Through Turkey - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • While the protest began over plans to destroy a park, for many demonstrators it had moved beyond that to become a broad rebuke to the 10-year leadership of Mr. Erdogan and his government, which they say has adopted authoritarian tactics.
  • “It’s the first time in Turkey’s democratic history that an unplanned, peaceful protest movement succeeded in changing the government’s approach and policy,” said Sinan Ulgen, the chairman of the Center for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies, a research group in Istanbul. “It gave for the first time a strong sense of empowerment to ordinary citizens to demonstrate
  • The Interior Ministry said it had arrested 939 people at demonstrations across the country, and that 79 people were wounded, a number that was probably low. After Friday’s protests, which were smaller and less violent than those on Saturday, a Turkish doctors’ group reported nearly 1,000 injuries.
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  • Now Turkey is facing its own civil unrest, and the protesters presented a long list of grievances against Mr. Erdogan, including opposition to his policy of supporting Syria’s rebels against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, his crackdown on dissent and intimidation of the news media, and unchecked development in Istanbul.
  • people held beers in the air, a rebuke to the recently passed law banning alcohol in public spaces; young men smashed the windshields of the bulldozers that had begun razing Taksim Square; and a red flag bearing the face of modern Turkey’s secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was draped over a destroyed police vehicle.
  • The widening chaos here and the images it produced threaten to tarnish Turkey’s image, which Mr. Erdogan has carefully cultivated, as a regional power broker with the ability to shape the outcome of the Arab Spring revolutions by presenting itself as a model for the melding of Islam and democracy.
  • “He criticized Assad, but he’s the same,” said Murat Uludag, 32, who stood off to the side as protesters battled with police officers down an alleyway near the Pera Museum. “He’s crazy. No one knows what he’s doing or thinking. He’s completely crazy. Whatever he says today, he will say something different tomorrow.”
  • “When he first came to power, he was a good persuader and a good speaker,” said Serder Cilik, 32, who was sitting at a tea shop watching the chaos unfold. Mr. Cilik said he had voted for Mr. Erdogan but would never do so again
grayton downing

Angry Protests Grow in Turkey as Police Continue Crackdown - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • a plan to remake a city park in Taksim Square into a replica Ottoman-era army barracks and mall,
  • By evening, no police officers were in sight, and most of the protesters were gathered on the lawns of the square, some drinking beer, others chanting antigovernment slogans.
  • The widening chaos here and the images it produces threaten to tarnish Turkey’s image, which Mr. Erdogan has carefully cultivated
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  • “He’s crazy. No one knows what he’s doing or thinking. He’s completely crazy. Whatever he says today, he will say something different tomorrow.”
  • In Istanbul, the protests turned violent on Saturday as police forces tried to disperse people with tear gas and some protesters pelted them with rocks, calling them “murderers” and “fascists.”
  • An older man standing nearby, overhearing the conversation, yelled, “Dictator!”
  • When he first came to power, he was a good persuader and a good speaker
  • Many of the protesters complained about the lack of coverage on Turkish television, and said the silence of much of the local news media would help the protest movement grow because people, unable to see events on television, would want to see them for themselves. Some newspapers also were largely silent on the protests: on Saturday morning, the lead story in Sabah, a major pro-government newspaper
Javier E

Niall Ferguson: Will Europe Act to Avoid an Economic Cataclysm? - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • As last year’s Nobel economics laureate Thomas Sargent pointed out in his brilliant acceptance lecture, Europe is now roughly where the United States was between the Articles of Confederation of 1781 and the Constitution we know today, which replaced them in 1789. What is desperately needed is an Alexander Hamilton, prepared to take all or part of the debts of the individual states onto the federal balance sheet. What is desperately needed is a recognition that Europe’s present confederal structure is incompatible with monetary union created in 1999. The solution is available. Since November of last year the European Commission has been actively considering how to create “Stability Bonds” that would put the full faith and credit of the EU (i.e., Germany) behind at least part of the national debts of the member states. Taken individually, some of these debts are hopelessly high. Added together and compared with total euro-zone GDP, they are manageable. What stands in the way is not French socialism or Greek populism. It is quite simply German complacency. Life in Berlin is good. In Munich, the capital of the German manufacturing machine, it is even better. You should try explaining to the average Bavarian beer drinker at the Stammtisch why he needs to get ready to finance an annual transfer to the Mediterranean countries of up to 8 percent of German GDP. I never get very far. Here, then, is the twist in my tale of national character. For two generations, the Germans really did want to take over Europe—by force. But today, when they could do so peacefully, they can’t be bothered.
Javier E

Kohr Principles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Geographical size not only influences how countries view themselves; it also determines how they interact. The wrong mix of sizes can be disastrous for international equilibrium. One could argue, for example, that this was a factor in both world wars. Or as Henry Kissinger succinctly put it: “Poor old Germany. Too big for Europe, too small for the world.”
  • Leopold Kohr, a 20th-century Austrian academic whose work inspired both modern political anarchism and the Green movement.
  • “The Breakdown of Nations.” Published first in Britain, in 1957, the book develops his theory of the optimal size of polities: “There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness.” Size was the root of all evil: “Whenever something is wrong, it is too big.”
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  • Kohr’s guiding principle was anarchism, “the noblest of philosophies.” But its inherent nobility, he recognized, also made it utopian:
  • Kohr cleverly turned this utopianism upside down, from weakness to strength: any party, any leader, any ideology promising utopia is automatically wrong, or lying [7]. Acceptance of utopia’s unattainability, in other words, is the best insurance against totalitarianism.
  • The strength of the American federation, Kohr thought, rested in no small part on the genius of its division: into states of roughly equal size. How different American history could have coursed, if the Union had looked like this:
  • Kohr supported the independence movements of Puerto Rico, Wales and Anguilla [8], and opposed grand unification projects like the European Union. He appealed for the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, long before they happened
  • : “The absolute maximum to which a society can expand without having its basic functions degrade, is about 12 to 15 million people.”
  • One of his 10 basic laws is the so-called Beanstalk Principle: For every animal, object, institution or system, there is an optimal limit beyond which it ought not to grow. In other words: “too big to fail” is a contradiction in terms. The real solution is to make countries (and companies) too small to fai
  • in Kohr’s vision, smaller government should mean, first and foremost, a smaller area to govern.
  • In 1992, Freddy Heineken — yes, he of beer-brewing fame — devised Eurotopia, a Europe divided into 75 regions, based on Kohr’s ideas. And much earlier, revolutionary France produced a proposal for geometrically identical départements [12] prefiguring Kohr’s Europe map.
  • Some other Kohr principles: the Law of Peripheral Neglect (governmental concern, like marital fidelity or gravitational pull, diminishes with the square of distance); the Population Principle (as the size of a population doubles, its complexity quadruples); and the Self-Reliance Principle (self-reliant communities are less likely to get involved in war than those who depend on global trade systems).
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