Utopia, you are standing in it!

Distinguished military historian Sir Michael Eliot Howard, OM, CH, CBE, MC, FBA published his definitive history of the Franco-Prussian War in 1961. In the foreword he apologises for adding to the enormous literature on the subject. This is ironic since nowadays it’s quite hard to find books about this conflict, compared with, say, the endless flood of books about the two world wars. While many of the other texts he refers to seem to have disappeared, his has emerged as the best one-volume history, even fifty years after publication.

Howard sets the tone on page 57:

Thus by a tragic combination of ill-luck, stupidity and ignorance France blundered into war with the greatest military power that Europe had yet seen, in a bad cause, with her army unready and without allies.

Background Otto von Bismarck, Prime Minister of Prussia, engineered wars with Denmark (1864) and Austria (1866) in order to unify…

I had no idea the French were behaving so tyrannically’ (Winston Churchill, when informed how the French were planning to rig the supposedly ‘free’ elections to be held in Syria in 1943, quoted page 249)

One should kill the British wherever one finds them. They are pathological liars and that is how they have ruled the whole world. (French policeman chatting with a released Jewish terrorist, quoted on page 342)

This is a really shocking book about the long-running rivalry between the British and French in the Middle East from the outbreak of the First World War through to Britain’s ignominious withdrawal from Palestine in 1947. It makes you really despise, and even hate, the French for their corruption, cowardice, brutality and pomposity.

The book’s last part is a detailed account of Jewish terrorist campaigns against the British, not only in Palestine but in London, where…

Editor’s note: this old essay by Dr Delacroix might be worth reading in tandem with this article. It’s titled “Sasquatch and Liberal Academe.”

I agreed in Part One of this essay that there may be a small average pay difference of five percentage points between employed American women and men. It’s possible that even after you take into account all the facts mentioned before, lower education, less seniority, lesser presence in well paid industries, women, on the average, earn 95 cents on men’s one dollar. (That’s also on the average.) I agreed that this may be evidence of discrimination against women in the work place. But is it the obvious explanation? Is it the only explanation? Is it even credible at all?

There is a reason this is an essay for women only. I want to help you evoke forbidden topics, topics never or rarely approached in the social sciences…

The next generation – U2502, a Type XXI with a smaller Type XXIII alongside. They would have been a formidable threat but unreliability delayed their entry into service.

German efforts to bring fast submarines into the Battle of the Atlantic. None of these newer boats was operational in the battle but it is worth considering what might have happened. The development is a fine example of the adage, ‘Requirements pull, technology pushes.’

The initial push came from Professor Hellmuth Walter, who, from about 1933, put forward a number of proposals for fast submarines using very concentrated hydrogen peroxide as the oxidant for the burning of fuel oil while submerged. This combination could be used either in a diesel engine, recycling the exhaust gases, or in a turbine. Walter wanted peroxide with a concentration of 80 per cent, when the strongest solution available was 45 per cent. This problem was overcome…

Judith Radner, a scholar who researches material culture looks at the dirty history of soap.

Soap is an essential part of our life. In modern day, it is a part of our daily hygiene routine. We use it everyday to bathe, wash hands and so on. Now, in time of COVID-19, it has become a life-saver, helping us to mitigate the risk of infection. But what do we know about the history of soap? When and where did soap originate? How did it evolve into its modern form? How did it become a part of our daily life?

Despite the fact that Social Security is an ever-increasing fiscal burden with a 75-year cash-flow deficit of nearly $45 trillion, many politicians in Washington have been trying to buy votes with proposals to expand the program (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, etc).

A new working paper from the European Central Bank gives us some insights on what will happen if they succeed.

Authored by Daniel Baksa, Zsuzsa Munkacsi, and Carolin Nerlich, the study look at the long-run impact of related policies in Europe, using Germany and Slovakia as examples.

Here’s their description of the study.

In view of the adverse macroeconomic and fiscal implications of ageing, many European countries have implemented significant pension reforms… More recently, however, the reform progress has stalled, and despite an unchanged demographic outlook, several European countries reversed, or plan to do so, parts of their previously adopted…

Guest Post by Shikha Dilawri

Recent calls to decolonise universities have engendered thoughtful interrogation of the colonial legacies of these institutions and reflection on how to address their material effects today. Taking its cue from these initiatives – including the recent inquiry into UCL’s role in legitimising eugenics – as part of the effort to encourage practices of decolonising at the LSE, this piece seeks to explore the entangled relationship between the LSE and the eugenics movement during the early 20^th century. This examination, which draws in part on archival material from the LSE library, takes as it starting point Beatrice and Sidney Webb, prominent members of the Fabian Society and celebrated founders of the LSE, to illuminate the school’s complicity in advancing an unjust racial hierarchy. In exploring how the Webbs, as well as subsequent figures and initiatives in which they were involved during the early years of…

After insisting for months that they were not guilty of bribing their daughters’ way into the University of Southern California by presenting fake resumes as athletes, actor Lori Laughlin and her husband, fashion designer Massimo Giannulli, have pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges. The details are in the article below from CNN (click on screenshot). The upshot: both of the privileged and wealthy parents are going to jail, though not for that long.

An excerpt: