SHIFTING THE FOCUS

The world today is aghast at the cruelty of Islamic terrorism. The beheading of a French teacher and an old woman inside a church in french city of Nice has forced the French Government to take stern action against Islamic terrorism.

Today in pulp I look back at the world of Soviet women's fashion!

It's not all berets, but it mostly is...

Now you may think that fashion and the Soviet Union go together like Groucho Marx and Friedrich Engels. However that is to misunderstand the nature of the Commad Economy: if she commands it, you'd better buy it for her!

So there is a rich history of fashion and fun (along with the tractor factories and endless ballet performances) in the old USSR. Let's take a sashay along it...

At the start of the Soviet years women's fashion, let's face it, tended towards the functional. Red was popular, as were headscarves, hobnail boots and the ability to field strip a 3-line rifle.

But all that was about to change...

...because Russia had a new fashionista in charge: Stalin! He hated the peasant look of War Communism because it made socialism seem synonymous with poverty. He ordered Soviet Woman to spruce herself up.

Thread on Invisible China: Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell's illuminating and scary deep dive into rural China's ills and stark inequality. No matter how bad you think it is, it's worse there---more like a developing country than a global superpower. 1/n

2/Rozelle rolled up his sleeves to understand the CN most only see from plane or train windows. Issues in health and education, bringing down human capital of 300m rural Chinese, could trap it in middle income status.

Think future like Mexico/Turkey now, not Korea/Taiwan

3/Most focus on impressive elite universities and high schools topping int'l rankings, but CN average education levels are abysmal.

Only 30% of China's working age pop completed high school--last place for all middle income countries, worse than many poor countries!

4/TIL a startling fact: school in CN through grade 9 became free & mandatory only in 2006! Even today high school is not free in CN! Want to go through grade 12? Pay fees of 10-15x incomes for poor rural areas. Instead they drop out to work unskilled jobs. Xi has promised to fix

5/No country has escaped middle income trap below 50% HS grad rates, and avg for successful countries (now high income) is 76%. Why? HS skills not important for repetitive assembly jobs, but w/o ability to learn & basic skills in math and reading, can't do more productive jobs

(1/11) This term, I’ve taught a seminar @IslamicSt_UniFR called “Little Ice Ages and Mighty Microbes. What Environmental History Can Tell Us about the #MiddleEast”. These are some of the things that I’ve learned. A thread. #twitterstorians #environmentalhistory

(2/11) The Arab invasion of #Iran led to a cotton boom – until the 11th century. Then a “big chill” made agriculture detract. Leading Sunni scholars moved elsewhere &bimportant madrasas closed. This helped to eventually convert Iran into Shi’i-majority lands in the 16th century.

(3/11) The “golden age” of the Ottoman Empire saw the conquest of Egypt. With grain (incl. rats/fleas) now being shipped in huge quantities from Alexandria to #Istanbul, the capital became a constant “plague hub” (which, in turn, dramatically increased Ottoman medical knowledge).

(4/11) At the same time, several #Ottoman provinces were already operating at the ecological limit while still being forced to provide Istanbul with animals. When the Little Ice Age hit these semiarid areas in the late 16th century, significant rebellions & crises ensued.

(5/11) Not only humans suffered but animals, too. Epizootics killed livestock in 18th century #Egypt, which made peasants become more dependent on large landholders. Consequently, “changes in nature of rural labor degraded the lives of both beast and man.”

NEW:
BBC has seen the official internal management data for the new post Brexit freight border - roll on roll off lorry outbound flows to EU now at 98% of last February - though was 73% in January... officials say “back to normal”...

That is reference to lorry flow rates - which is what Cabinet Office key committees most concerned about post Brexit in terms of knock on social impact for supplies of everything. Government now confident its “reasonable worst case scenario” of 7k lorries in kent won’t happen...

That is not same as saying trade has normalised - drawing on multiple sources - ferry manifests, Kent checks, french official data - the level of empty lorries on the short straits is around 50%, and was normally around 30%... ...

traffic here was 67% normal in Jan - 82% in feb

Combining those and you get to around 2000 fewer laden export trucks a day in January, still notable fall now. Officials say much was displaced into last year by stockpilers. On other hand French transport sources suggest the higher value Tunnel export empties more like 50-60%

Officials have been tracking the commodity codes on the ferry manifests and have distinguished between freight flows hit so far in 2021 by general COVID downturn - eg clothing and apparel, and post Brexit transition - agriculture, food and groupage