UnHerd: How we mythologise the Second World War

But this is not the whole story. The Finest Hour speech appealed to a fundamentally patriotic understanding of the war, noting with regard to the Battle of Britain that “upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire”. The “Fight Them On The Beaches” speech explicitly situated the danger from Hitler in the context of a long series of threats to British independence from Continental tyrants, and declared the Anglo-French intention to “defend to the death their native soil”.

And Britain had entered the war for old-fashioned strategic reasons; not to defeat a country with a wicked government that was oppressing its population, but to stand up to a continental power that threatened to dominate Europe and so undermine the British national interest. [...]

Something similar has been happening to the Second World War over the last few decades. Not only are the events of the war itself being repurposed to tell a simplistic tale about an idealistic war, but additionally the war is treated as an origin story for all that is considered good in the post-war world, from the NHS and the welfare state to our ability to rise above primitive notions like patriotism and national interest to the sunlit uplands of universal benevolence. [...]

There is another reason for this pivot to extreme deference to Second World War veterans, and it was neatly summed up by an astute Twitter correspondent of mine, who noted that the wartime generation have become less culturally threatening as they have aged. Discussing the recently-discovered footage of Captain Tom Moore on the TV show Blankety Blank in 1983, he suggested that at that time he was the right age (63) to be a resented authority figure, liable to tell you to get a haircut and turn that bloody racket down, rather than in the category of enormously ancient and hence admirable sage from times long past.

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City Beautiful: How to design a great street

This video is based primarily on the fantastic book "Great Streets" by Allan Jacobs. I highly recommend picking up a copy.

Social Europe: German court decision ends treaty pretences

In one relatively brief decision, the court struck a double blow. It asserted the power of itself, a national institution, to overrule the European Court of Justice on an EU-level issue, and it denied the political independence of the European Central Bank. [...]

The first was the conviction that there existed a coalition with the centre-right European Peoples’ Party for greater EU integration within a progressive framework. That conviction was closely related to a second—that concessions by the centre-left on fiscal rules would gain proportionate concessions from the centre-right on social protection. [....]

While the German constitutional court operates independently of the federal government, the recent decision by the former sets limits to the decisions the latter can make. These bind all the more because the decision affirms the longstanding opposition of the Bundesbank to ECB monetary-expansion programmes—the appropriateness of which the ruling explicitly mandates the Bundesbank to assess. [...]

Methods to confront this dilemma fall into three categories, increasingly radical in nature: 1) devise schemes to bypass treaty rules, 2) take measures which openly challenge the treaties or 3) break with the EU. I exclude the last, since it would create for any such government unmanageable short-term problems exactly when a solution is needed.

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Associated Press: Pandemic shows contrasts between US, European safety nets

That is a pattern seen in earlier economic downturns, particularly the global financial crisis and the Great Recession. Europe depends on existing programs kicking in that pump money into people’s pockets. The U.S., on the other hand, relies on Congress taking action by passing emergency stimulus programs, as it did in 2009 under President Barack Obama, and the recent rescue package under President Donald Trump. [...]

In downturns, U.S. employees can lose their health insurance if they lose their job and there’s also a greater risk of losing one’s home through foreclosure. On the other hand, Europeans typically pay higher taxes, meaning they earn less in the good times. [...]

The U.S. tends to rank below average on measures of social support among the 37 countries of the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, whose members are mostly developed democracies. The U.S. came last in people living in relative poverty, meaning living on half the median income or less, with 17.8%. Countries like Iceland, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Finland have less than 6%.

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99 Percent Invisible: The Natural Experiment

Usually, Fournet relies on quiet periods in an individual day to try and understand how ship noise changes whale behavior. If she’s lucky she’ll get 6-7 hours of silence, but now the ocean was about to experience months of quiet. Fournet is all set to record an entire summer of whale sounds in strangely quiet seas, “This is the first time in human history that we’ve been able to listen to truly quiet behavior,” she says. “We will finally get a baseline for what the ocean sounds like in the absence of human activity.” [...]

The shutdowns have also been incredible to researchers who study air pollution, researchers like Sarath Guttikunda. Guttikunda says that in their work they are always looking to understand the baseline air quality, like what a clean air scenario looks like. Usually, they use rainy days to do this, but the problem with rain is that it doesn’t last. “When it rains, it’s clean for one day and then the build-up starts again. But what we are seeing here is a sustained period of low numbers.” And so this shutdown feels like the entire country is running an experiment for him… a forced experiment that shows what happens if you turn many of the major sources of pollution down basically to zero.

Having this extended period of clean air is also allowing them to do more fine-tuned research experiments. Some of those experiments are chemistry experiments looking at particular pollutants like ozone. But they’re also trying to do a forensic accounting of where all this pollution is coming from because there’s actually a lot of confusion about that. And a big question people have is: is the pollution being generated inside the city, by things like cars, trash burning, and dirty cookstoves? Or is it floating in from outside sources, things like power plants and heavy industry outside the city, or farmers in the countryside who burn their fields before they replant? All of those sources are contributing to the problem but the uncertainty has allowed cities to throw up their hands and say this isn’t a problem we can solve. It allows people in power to pass the buck of responsibility. [...]

Westgate says that in the last two decades there has been a growing consensus that boredom is, in fact, a real emotion, like anger or sadness. And just like other emotions, it’s not intrinsically good or bad. Instead, it’s a signal telling you something is amiss with your situation that needs to be changed somehow. But when it comes to the question of “Why do we get bored?” — that’s where the scientific consensus ends. “When you get down to the nitty-gritty of what exactly is causing boredom, you’re going to start finding a lot of disagreement.”

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