World War II

I'm still down if you are."

are."I love the, on HBO Max, the synopsis is, "As Japan recovers from World War II, friendship grows between Umi and Shun, but a buried secret from their past casts a shadow on their future."

Well, that's actually quite-

In fact-

Hmm.

Over a million people lost their job in the United States, uh, during World War II and after because of the car industry.

How many people work in the car industry today, though? You see, you-- we create a new category of jobs.

We create a new product.

You lose your tax base.

You lose your ability to do what, of course, we did in, in World War II, which was convert every, uh, every car manufacturing factory into a weapons factory.

You lose all sorts of, of things when you lose your manufacturing base.

Have we got to a point when it is irrevocably lost, and it's hard to find anything in the maker world that the West might have a comparative advantage in? Super dangerous.

Um, and so we wouldn't really have had the car factories.

You wouldn't have Longbridge, you wouldn't have had Trafford Park, all these places.

If we didn't have those car factories in World War I and World War II, we probably wouldn't have had the wherewithal to very quickly build the, the planes and the artillery that we needed and the tanks that we needed to, to, to fight a war.

And one, one hopes that we're not going to have to go through the same process all over again.

People don't understand that.

But th- th- there are exceptions to the rule, and the one that springs to my mind, which I have to mention, it's historical, but you'll be amused by it, was that the British ambassador in Moscow towards the end of World War II was somebody called Sir Archibald Kerr, who had a phenomenally close relationship with Stalin.

And Stalin really liked him and invited him around for drinks, and the two guys used to get-

[laughs]

And one of the things that, um, w- that, that happened around that time is that we- there were all these interesting conversations in Britain around establishing, establishing the National Health Service, a, a, a national system that, uh, governs, uh, healthcare in Britain.

But this was, this, uh, this, uh, system would have a, a, a delayed starting point till the end of the Second World War.

But at that time, the end of the First World War, there were all these different interesting conversations about we need to have healthcare universal, health is a public good.

Uh, uh, and, and, and...

So in, in what you read, I try to, at least in this, in this, uh, uh, uh, iteration, is to define it around three key ideas.

One is the kind of the, the disappearance of the protection of the, of the clinic, uh, despite the fact that that might have been historically, um, not, uh, like the clinic was never protected in time.

You know, the, you know, historically colonial powers have always bombed clinics, and even during the First World War, Second World War, we saw that a lot.

But within the international law, what we always invoke about the destruction of healthcare, the attacks on hospitals, the destruction of hospitals, we've always invoked this idea that the clinic needs to be protected, the clinics should be a neutral space, the clinic should not, uh, be, uh, should be protected by international law.

And this started with the British system of industrialization of the process, where they wanted to have a tea with more cuppage.

This was between the wars, World War I and World War II.

There are so many, I know.

We're in the middle of one right now.

Murphy had just separated from his wife, and he and Stevenson had a well-publicized year-long affair while he was technically still married, although they were separated.

And, of course, Audie Murphy is the most decorated soldier from World War II who then had an acting career.

And my dad's a big fan of his films, anyway.

She later married Don Everly of the Everly Brothers.

Control freak.

And Ben is a bit freaked out.

Reed mentions, for a man who was one of the top fighter pilots of World War II, you're mighty jittery these days.

They are still placing Reed and Ben as having served in World War II at this point.

And part of this was motivated by two things.

One is that our World War II recruits at the time were kind of malnourished.

And actually, the other part of this is that there was a lot of surplus in commodities from US farming.

Now, sounds like a win-win.

Astonished, Truman did, suffering in public opinion polling when he banned discrimination in the federal government and desegregated the military.

Truman had been raised in Missouri, Klan territory, but when he read of a horrible lynching in Georgia of a Black World War II veteran, it so offended his sense of basic decency that he dedicated himself to the cause of overcoming such inhumanity.

Now, Truman was no saint, but time and time again, Holliday gives us portraits of complicated, flawed leaders who nonetheless strove for moral clarity.

The Stoic clarion call is to focus on what one can control and leave to God and the angels what one cannot.

And that's good advice for an elected leader prone to playing political games in service of rigid ideas rather than flesh and blood people.

Next, the book Churchill Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts.

Crazily enough, some progressives and right-wing extremists are lately finding common ground on the bizarre revisionism that it was Churchill and not Hitler who was World War II's aggressor.

In recent years, statues of Winston Churchill have been assaulted and defaced from London, England to Edmonton, Canada.